🧑🔬 Data is king. Master your pivot tables.
Amy took a huge risk setting her sights on a massive deal in the legal sector.
The multi-quarter deal consisted of 10+ cross-country meetings with multiple buyer types.
Hear how she closed this one using every bit of her green belt in process management!
Guest Feature
Amy climbed through the sales world as a frontline seller for 9-years.
Then made the transition to building two Sales Enablement departments from scratch.
She’s currently a podcast host and show-runner for the Revenue Real Hotline. Helping sales leaders launch their internal sales enablement podcast.
Deal details
What are you selling?
- Information & data into the legal sector
Where did the prospect come from?
- Amy’s territory list. This prospect was brought to her by a primary sales exec.
Company type
- Fortune 3 law firm. 50,000 employees
Prospecting method
- Storyboarded the data she researched from a single location & brought it the champion.
- Asked if she found this at one location, would they be open to her looking into others.
Barriers to Overcome
- Internal: A nationwide deal that cost a lot of money to close. Hard to get signoff without assurances.
- External: the firm was comfortable with what they were already doing. Fear of change.
Buyer type
- Users: lawyers
- Champion: an executive sponsor who was affected the most by data
- Decision Maker: buying team at multiple locations
Episode Highlights
Note: timestamps correlate with the full conversation
Account Research: We underestimate what’s possible as sellers (9:33)
Prospecting: Creating a narrative from data before reaching out (10:59)
Objections: Selling to defensive vs. offensive-minded leaders (29:18)
3 Tips for Account Executives
1. It takes a village to help a sales pro.
Landing any deal is a true team sport.
2. Preparation, preparation, preparation.
That's the tweet.
3. Take risks & lean into discomfort.
Not failing = not learning.
Watch the full conversation
Full transcript
Taylor Dahlem
Welcome back to How I Deal, where we discuss past closed one and lost deals, how they played out that way, and hopefully provide useful sales tips that you can use in your deals today. My name is Taylor Dahlem, full cycle account executive, turned content guy, and as always, I'm joined by my partner in crime, Junior Lartey, the real sales engine here at Pickle. June, what do you got for us.
Junior Lartey
Today onto episode thirteen. So really excited for the conversation today. I'm always energized to get selling after we wrap up the podcast, so I'm looking forward to that as well. But we're also on the lookout for fellow Account Executives to come and chat with us, share their sales stories. So please continue to hit me up.
Taylor Dahlem
On LinkedIn, a quick refresher on every conversation we have throughout how I deal. Our goal is to chat through obviously a past deal. We want to keep all names. Places and characters involved in the story as fictionalized as possible or as anonymous as possible because that allows us to dive a lot deeper from the first time you saw that prospect on LinkedIn or on your Target account list. Your CRM. Wherever that might be. All the way to getting that deal signed through DocuSign. Through Fax. Through Pony Express. Even as you'll hear soon. But yeah, we're excited for it.
Junior Lartey
So today on the podcast, we've got superstar Amy Hrehovcik. She climbs through the sales world as a frontline seller for nine years. She made the transition to building two sales enablement departments from scratch. She's currently running a podcast of her own. She's a showrunner. She helps sales leaders launch their internal sales enablement podcast. Amy, we're super stoked to have you give us some insight into your role, your podcast and what you're about.
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so one, thank you for having me. New friends and listeners appreciate you checking out the episode. So I'm a revenue human for life, right? Just if we want to sum it up, I was actually raised by a sales leader and sold for a long time and I think that this is the greatest profession in the world when done properly. I have a specialization in enterprise selling. That was something I was always full cycle right from the very beginning. And there were map quest directions involved when I started selling. So if we just want to put that little time stamp on, there no judgment. But anyway, I'm excited to run through this one. We're going to be talking about, I think, my favorite, obviously my biggest and favorite deal at my last place where I sold at Thompson Reuters. So this is circa, I don't know, two thousand and fourteen ish.
Junior Lartey
Yeah, let's map quest through this thing. Give us the specs, the insights. What deal are you walking us through today?
Amy Hrehovcik
Okay, so listeners, just not bury the lead. This deal actually won me at Thompson Reuters. I don't know, it's like fifty thousand employees. It won me the spot award for Exquisite Champion building. And I made my annual quota that year, my last year selling in February, so it was massive. So I sold information and I was selling into the legal sector. So working with big law, this would be the equivalent of the Fortune Three law firm in the world at the time. It was a massive firm and I was responsible for all things court data. Just quick context the org structure. At the time there was a full like, account management and sales team, two hundred and fifty strong for West Law, which has been publishing completed decisions since the Pony Express, which is why we're laughing about that since the eighteen hundred and so it's a very established company. It's very prevalent inside all firms and their average contract size. In New York City, which is where I was headquartered. I was in the millions. Right. For big law specifically. That said, this is a crazy idea that started and it had never been done before and it was one of our first for a really new product set. Yeah. And with that, I'm going to pause here, gentlemen. Did I answer all the pieces that we need to get us started?
Junior Lartey
And there's a lot of reasons to be talking about this deal. You named a few of them. I'm going to ask a question that I think sales leaders will probably hate me for. And Amy, now that you no longer work there and it's been so long down the road, you can just answer full transparency, you hit your quota in February, what do you do for the rest of the year?
Amy Hrehovcik
That's a great question. It was the least stressful year I've ever had in my entire life, but it also was the last year where I sold and I think frankly, I really struggled with the lack of challenge in boredom, if I'm being quite frank, but I was pulled into like a design team. Thompson Reuters was rolling out the Alert Center, so I learned a ton about product and we were able to roll out like, I don't know, I think four new core data products that year as well. At least it had been in the past twelve months. And so I was really able to focus on the beta experiences for our clients and then turning around and training my own team with what we learned and also my peers as well, which is kind of when I fell in love with sales enablement.
Junior Lartey
Love it. Okay, so for all of you, like annual quota carrying, sandbagger, end-of-year people, you're going to be bored. So just close that deal before the end of the year.
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah.
Junior Lartey
Okay. So we're trying to help reps identify the difference between awareness research and prospecting. Awareness is where you hear about this company, where you initially recognize them. Research is what info you're able to collect, and research are able to find before reaching out. And then prospect is the method as to which you try to tackle and get the conversation going. So where did the awareness and where did the awareness come from and what research was conducted here?
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah, okay, great question. I don't think I said this, listeners. I had carried a bag, it was mixed bag net, new clients I was responsible for as far and as well as existing clients. And there was no SDRs, right? So I was opening my own opportunities. I've got a green belt in process design and there's a thing called like an IPO map, right? Inputs, process outputs, which is all to say that when I think about my territory and when I think about the resources available to me, that's going to be different in each job and each opportunity. For me, I had an existing account team and existing like sales or whatever that had relationships with the market. And I was new to legal really when I started. And so for me, part of my job of prospecting was to make sure that I was winning those relationships with my peers and I was bringing value. And so this deal was actually brought to my attention by let's call him the Kingpin in New York City. He like oversaw, he was the primary sales exec, all the account managers and all of them, we call them Ars, right? Account relationship managers. And they were like backup account managers, which is customer success these days. Same thing, friends, same thing. But anyway, the idea was brought to me by our kingpin and it was so crazy and it was so out there and it had never been done and I don't know if I would have had the confidence to try it without him, but he convinced me that if I could sell it, then he could get it pushed through. So that was the first seed for me. The research though, at that point required digging into their system, right? So their usage the equivalent, like think salesforce listeners, right? You've got Salesforce Classic and then you've got the current salesforce. At that time, Westlaw was switching from West Law Classic to Westlaw Next and it was more money, right? Obviously all those things that go along with that. But I needed to do a lot of research on how they were currently using West Law Classic. And so with that, I'm going to pause, but my research was digging into their own systems and then looking at what types of cases they filed, where they filed frequency case type, all that kind of stuff, just to make sure there wasn't any things that we couldn't do in our beta version of West Law Next.
Junior Lartey
So it's a little bit unique here because you are able to tap into this data that maybe our traditional SAS seller can't find. But there's a lot to be said about directly looking at specific data that apply to your sell cycle, to whatever it is that you're selling and really understanding the metrics behind whatever it is you're trying to impact.
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah, I think, Junior, if I may add one thing to that. So as someone that sold information. Which I believe changes you as a person or most of the time. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time when I'm having conversations with a sales boss or sales leader. And I differentiate between the two. And we're talking about data or even reps. And we're talking about data and what data is and is not in existence. There's a tendency to underestimate what is possible. What we can find. Including. Like. Extracting some qualitative data from people's minds or asking the question to. Hey. Would you mind if we run an export for your current system right now and see what kind of usage you got going across the organization? Nine times out of ten, these are questions that are not asked, and that, I think, is a massive mistake.
Taylor Dahlem
So, Amy, you walked us through the awareness part of it, the King fence, so to speak, brought you this crazy idea. You started this road, this ball rolling. The research ridiculous, right? You're selling into the legal world. There's probably a ton of inputs, process outputs, things that you have to understand raw data-wise, and then pull that narrative together. Now, putting that into action, right. The prospecting part, the initial outreach. Hey, here's what I've learned, here's what I understand. There's an entire sales podcast dedicated to the subject, but we just want to get a sliver, just really understand what was your outreach like, maybe what methods did you use? And what was that ultimate messaging that got you into that foot in the door, that first meeting?
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah. Okay, so the research, it literally took five hours to extract this data, and then I storyboarded it. And so my outreach with the Queen, let's say we were selling into the information services department, and there were, I think, like ten locations, twelve locations around the country. So this is the queen. She oversaw a team of about five hundred people. And I took this storyboarded data that I had gathered and packaged, and I brought it to her, and I shared a couple of things. My hypothesis right here's what I'm seeing here's what's coming down the pike with West Lawn next with the new product launch. It's already here, frankly, and I think that this would work, right. I think that we could save you a ton of time and energy, like all the normal things. But I've only been able to extract the data from this one location. And so my objective with that meeting was to one form, the relationship, because I'm always trying to win the relationship as well as the deal. But it was also to get the buy-in to go investigate further. And the way that I framed it was twofold. Right. It was, here's my plan. I didn't come into this meeting without a plan. Like, oh, I found a problem. I don't have any solutions for you. Good luck with that. Let me know how it works out. So I showed her what I found and then I gave her my plan. And the plan was, I got to go talk to all of your other executive sponsors and all these other locations. I need to see what they're doing currently, and I need to see what kind of data I can gather from how they're using the system. And then executive sponsor Queen, I will come back and I will present my findings. And so we talked about one thing, listeners. This is going to be a tremendous amount of time and energy and outside of the scope of my normal role. And so I wanted to make sure that I had a crystal clear buy-in, that if we can do X, then you will buy, then you will purchase. And so that was the other thing that I got out of that meeting, was that buy-in and of course, permission to use her name when I go and hit up all of her people and demand time.
Junior Lartey
One aspect that I want to talk about is the data, the hypothesis, and the plan. That's something that we kind of chatted before we started recording. And that was a piece that I missed early on in my sales career, was I would do the research aspect. But then in the actual meeting, I didn't think about how to present the research that I had. So I had this hypothesis like, oh, they're probably facing these problems, or I can kind of recognize areas of concern. But what you did is you took the actual data and you presented the data very cleanly and very plainly. This is what I hypothesize is going on, and this is the plan that we have to fix it. Is that something that you've always just done? Like you've always recognized the research and knowing how to present it? How did you learn to do that?
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think the context of this role is a little bit different because it wasn't in some ways an existing client, right? And so I not only was able to tap into their usage, but also that historic knowledge from the kingpin and from their customer success rate, their account manager. Right. I had tons of data and then, of course, the external data and research I had done. To your question, June, this was my last year selling, and I sold for a decade, so I wasn't always as good at doing that. But from that point and moving on, I was exquisite. Like, even in sales enablement land, I've templatized client reports that's my go-to move, and I will send a clean version of a report to prospects to set meetings. Right. Because it's my way of getting the buy-in to do a really thorough discovery period. And who doesn't want a free report of what's going on in their own organization? And so it works really well. As far as the skills, actually, it's an interesting question that you ask, because I didn't realize how I was doing it at the time. It wasn't until when I left Thompson Reuters that I got the green belt in Junior or excuse me, in Process Design. And what I realized was that in many ways, I had just been doing the math in my head. I tested out of math in college. I studied math communication. So it was a little bit neat. And so coming back to statistics, that was a big piece for me. But there was a beautiful website that I would anybody that's interested in, like, beefing up their data skills, I think it's called Data Depicts Studios. Now. It used to be called the Am Emory blog. And that was my go-to spot. I studied, I read, I took courses, I learned excel. You're not sure where to start. Listeners start with pivot tables. Like, you wouldn't believe what you can learn when you figure out how to get your physicians going. And it's not that difficult. But, yeah, there was a lot of work put into learning how to do that, for sure.
Junior Lartey
Not to keep talking about the same thing. I just want to draw one additional parallel to this whole data hypothesis plan. So I was trying to sell into this account, and they had eight account executives. This is the research I conducted, right? Pulled up all of their LinkedIn, and about six of them were SDRs. Like, what was it, five months before Account Executive? So to me, I saw that, and what it said to me was they tried the SDR model and it wasn't working. It failed. So then I had to hypothesize, like, what was going on that caused this to fail. And then when I went into my discovery, I kicked it off with, hey, this is what I understand. I understand that there are eight sellers today, but six of them used to be Account Executive, used to be SDRs. So something happened in there. What happened? And also part of what I hypothesized was that the sale was heavily relationship-based selling, and the whole cold call out of the blue doesn't work there. And I know for you, in this deal, you had mentioned, too, like, this was not an area for you to just cold prospect. You had too many connections to just do that.
Amy Hrehovcik
It's still to this day, don't get me wrong, I would do cold drops like it's my job. Like go knocking on door, make a joke, whatever. There's a lot of fun stories there. I'm meticulous with my outbound strategy and my list creations and looking for my triggers and my times and all that, and I will iterate until I've got an obscenely high conversion rate on that first touch point. The campaign I'm running right now. My first email is I'm getting and I just got here, right? So I'm very excited and so please forgive the humbrag, but my reply rate on this first email is like sixty seven percent right now. Cold. And so that's just how I roll. And another thing though, that is important about what you said, Judy, I'm going to pull it out, is that there's another place where people really miss the mark when using data to either set meetings or to wow someone during the beginning or at any point during discovery is the external data. Like, think about it this way, I think we are all familiar, hopefully we're familiar with Repu at this point. Rep UE com the glass door for sales teams doing the Lord's work over there. But Repu has the stats on the average. Let's say you're selling the sales teams, right? Average quota attainment, which average win rate. You can use an industry benchmark and compare it against, okay, here's what's happening in the industry. Where is your team's win rate at right now? And kind of use that to help that person understand their current state at a deeper and richer level, which I think is what it's all about. And of course it would be remiss to not call out. The purpose of Data Friends is to help us make better business decisions and so we can gather data until we're blue in the face. But if nobody does anything with it, it's just a walk in the park.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes, I think just to process all of this information that's going into this deal and having these conversations. I am curious, we talked about it a little bit before this, but you had to be super creative in how you position the value props, right? You had to really understand, one, the pain that they're going through, the hypothesis that you piece together and then the plan moving forward. But you're talking to a giant legal firm, a bunch of people that are trained in how to avoid risk, and you said avoided from a ten thousand mile radius, and I said ultimately avoiding that risk, but at the same time peaking their interest enough to take that leap of faith at this point. So big priority, a big main reason for prospecting is to have that conversation, to start that ball rolling. But at this point, I imagine a lot went into the several meetings that went after this, so a lot can get lost along the way. Like, how did you piece one the initial conversations, but also the demo at that point. Like, how did you piece all that together? How did you traverse all these different buyer types?
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah. Okay, so listeners, what's talking about thinking about law firms. Think about why most of us, when we have a legal need that we notice and we like, oh shit, how much is this going to cost? The reason that that is a thing is because it's the business model. It's the billable hour. And so literally everyone inside these law firms are incentivized to take as long as humanly possible to do every task. And so there's no easy falling back on the value process of saving time or money because people will avoid that and fight that, because that just means they have to come up with those hours elsewhere, right? That said, the way that I worked, it was I went one or one location at a time, one executive sponsor at the time. I did not try to boil the ocean, and I just did one location. I went to Chicago. I went to La. Those are two that stuck out. And I was just focused on winning that relationship and winning the buy-in one person at a time. And that's what I did. And it's not just them, but it's their team around them because I'm going to be switching the way that you're doing something, fundamentally doing something. And so there were two things that helped me to make that happen, maybe three. But the first is that I extracted data from their location. So I was coming in with facts, number one. Number two, I took the time to observe their process. Listen, I don't know anything about what you're doing. I will say it's probably unique and different than what I've seen. And so let's just walk me through. Just do your job. I'm just going to sit here, take note on how you're doing it. And people respect that. They respect that you're not some outsider coming in with all the answers or like a spy for their boss that's like their mean boss in New York City. And I'm taking the time to get to know them. And plus, I'm learning their process. I need to understand their process so that I can make sure that the new system will work for them. I also, I'm sure, brought like, bagels or some kind of lunch for their entire team, right? Because we all know how those relationships work inside organizations. And some people are really invested in the old way of doing things mostly out of fear. And for this process in particular, they were right to be afraid. You miss a client alert, you miss a motion that's due at a certain date or some kind of deliverable on a case, an active case, like you're getting fired, right, your head will roll. And so that fear was really real. And so I wanted to make sure that they had a name and a face and a person that they could fall back on if they needed to. And then the last one is I did not offer to do demos for everyone, right? It's like I didn't even open up that can of worms because I was going to show the demo to the New York City team, but I was more interested in getting the results in their process and understanding that it would work for them. Because if there was something that was critical to them that our system couldn't do, then I at the very least, want to be aware of that. And if it gets to a point where there's too much that they can't do, I'm not in good faith going to encourage them to change. But because I withheld that, I saved the demo piece just for the New York City team. And so that also kind of helped with keeping the deal moving along. Not the same strategy that I would play in all instances. In fact, it's a very different one. But in this instance, this is what I went with.
Junior Lartey
Yeah. Typically you're trying to build a whole ship of people. I'll demo anybody at this point is what we typically would do. But here you're having meaningful conversations, building real relationships, using data and information, and observing.
Amy Hrehovcik
Their process, gathering their process steps. Like anybody that's doing this, listeners, when you're listing out the steps to a process, one piece of advice that really was a game changer for me. The first word that you capture is an action verb. Right. And then you got your ten steps for each person that's doing the same process, and then you can compare them against one another. And those make great slides for when you're storyboarding it for your version of the queen.
Junior Lartey
Yes. And then when you meet the queen, you have a demo, and it's so detailed. It's like, you know the process. You're part of the team. Everybody loves you. At this point, you've bought lunches and smooth, which is great.
Amy Hrehovcik
I do want to say I'm sure there were a couple exec sponsors that I met that struck me as like, really strong champions, and I used to call it with pool power. Like they had influence. And so I'm sure I did go back once the queen saw I helped build up that and just one-off, like, okay, remember that thing that you said your life would be just exponentially better if I could do this one thing. Okay, here, let me show you how that's going to play out.
Taylor Dahlem
Like a top-down, like building value from the top and then just kind of reinserting that.
Amy Hrehovcik
Right. But very strategically. Right. I'm not going to go I'm not going to expose myself unnecessarily to like, some naysay or whatever.
Junior Lartey
Yeah. Okay. So I've lost on cold calls, like on objections during cold calls that I just couldn't overcome or maybe gave up, I don't know, lack of talent, skill. But at these stages, the objections here are much more complex than just a really focused oneliner. Right. So were there any barriers or objections through this process that you had to overcome?
Amy Hrehovcik
Internal or external?
Junior Lartey
Both. I think you just exposed something we don't talk about is internal barriers. Usually it's just external. So hit us with both.
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah. So I was a rep in the Northeast, right? And so we were talking about traveling all over the country, which obviously was excited about doing let's be serious about that. But that was not something that my sales manager was excited about. This type of deal had never been done before. There was zero guarantee. I was highly confident I could get it done, but I was still, like, I was still shitting my pants. Like, let's be serious. So that was hard, right? I think that was the biggest and hardest part about this deal. And then, of course, calming your nerves near the end. Like, I honestly thought that my heart was going to just drop through into my stomach and then that would be the end of it. But anyway, so that was hard. And then externally, like I said, there was just so much there's so much comfort in what someone is already doing. Nobody is really excited about change, especially when the risk is there. And I don't remember anyone in particular that struck me as a risk factor, but I'm sure there were. Sure there were. And I'm sure that I was very communicative with my champions. And it's the buying team, really, that sells deals, right? And so, you know, making sure that those things were neutralized. But, yeah.
Taylor Dahlem
We talked about it before on a previous podcast. But the concept of a lot of times the hardest objection or the hardest barrier to overcome is just that I don't have to change, right? Like, I could just keep doing what I'm doing, and you're coming in and saying, no, here's why that's wrong. And you have to build up that case, which, as we've prefaced the industry, you're selling into, legally into the legal industry, it's very much a slow changing.
Amy Hrehovcik
Environment based on everything is precedent.
Taylor Dahlem
And if there's no press that's set, all these risk flags go off, and that's where they go. Run. But love to hear that concept of everything was smooth sailing in terms of the meetings and the conversations, where you're not running into a ton of objections other than, oddly enough, the internal one, which can be one of the harder.
Amy Hrehovcik
Ones to get over, I think. There's one more thing I want to add to this. So this was a book. It's a couple of years old now. It's called the wolf in CIO's clothing. And it's a Gartner book, okay? And realize it draws heavily from Machiavelli. So, like but anyway, you can literally take the word CIO out of the title and put in, like, CMO or Chief Sales Officer, Chief Revenue Officer. And it essentially says that there are two types of people inside organizations. Like, people. One is a defensive-minded leader, right? Let's just say. And these defensive-minded leaders, they think that their path to preserving relevance is to put up walls and create silos and make it really difficult for anybody. That they perceive as threatening or whatever. And that's who they are. Right? And then the other type of people or leaders inside organizations are much more offensive-minded. And they rightly understand that their way to preserving relevance is to keep changing and to keep learning and growing and investing in themselves and their people. And for me, I have ADHD, I am meticulous on how much time and energy it's taking to do things because one, it's harder to manage for me, but also this is the most precious nonrenewable asset that each and every one of us has. And so I always chose to work with offensive-minded leaders right, and work on deals where I had enough buyers on the buying team that were offensive-minded. Because this way I can spend the entire deal on how we're going to execute differently. Right. And addressing some of those fears and whatever, as opposed to, okay, why should we change like fifty percent of the time and then the other fifty percent on how to execute? And so that, I think is a big piece of when I'm multi-threading through organizations, I'm looking for those that are like those offensive-minded questions, and I'll ask these questions in discovery. Who's the most innovative person on your team? Who's the one that's been the squeakiest wheel about this particular problem? That is who I'm going to go try to find and talk to and recruit.
Junior Lartey
So, okay, we haven't talked too much. It's just been recent podcasts where we start talking about like deal management. And this is how one sales rep who is collecting all the information, trying to string along internally and externally, everyone involved, all the stakeholders. There's an aspect of managing the actual deal and the flow of it. So talk to us, your timeline, what it looked like behind the scenes, and give us some perspective there.
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah, so this was like four or five months process. It ended up closing in February. I remember that listeners because it was like right as our ASM was going on our annual sales meeting and we were all down in Florida. So it was extra special that year. It didn't close in Q four, but who's counting? But anyway, the communication. So there were two teams involved. It was my team, the core data team, and then it was the traditional, like the regular main Wesley account team with the core team that worked this particular account, the Kingpin, and then our customer success rep extraordinaire, her name is Kristen. We all worked in the same office and we would go out regularly. And so there are updates that were coming through with the three of us that was very organic and natural and fun. They took care of reporting up through their team and I took care of my pipeline conversations with my boss for my team, and of course any of the product or sales engineers that we needed. I was on all that, the functionality, making sure that we could do what we were trying to do, the communication with the queen at the company. So there were two things that are worth talking about. The first is that when I set the plan, I was like, this is not going to be an overnight thing, right? It's going to take some time, but I'm going to come, whatever. And we got the buy in. And I documented that if this happens, then that will happen. Knowing that time impacts memory and the way that it does. But that said, I would imagine that I'm sure Kristin was very communicative and giving updates as needed, or even our Kingpin too over there. So, yeah, that's what I remember about that. But we talk about root causes and symptoms. One of the things that one of the reasons why so many tech purchases don't work right, like seventy percent, there's a lot of buyers remorse is because people are trying to solve like a symptom with an easy button. We're going to make a tech purchase. But ninety nine point nine percent of the time, the root cause problem is communication or skill gap. And so this is what my degree is in mass communications. And I got it from inside the beltway. Like I learned one of my professors was new media, past press secretary at the White House, which is just a fancy way of saying that I've got a degree in propaganda and I learned it from the masters. And so like, I'm never going to be taken out because of miscommunication.
Taylor Dahlem
So let's take this thing home. Amy, I know, kind of like you said, at the end of the day, and maybe this will roll into some of these tips here, but like you said, the root cause, if you don't address that and you're just addressing symptoms, my main takeaway at least is imagine like a dragon, right? And you're given a sword, display it, but I don't know how to use the sword. I'm not solving the root cause of the problem. Dragon is still there. But with that being said, on top of that tip, what are three other things that any sales pro can take away from our conversation today? To inch closer to a closed one deal on their end where they can celebrate at their ASM.
Amy Hrehovcik
Yeah, I think I'm going to reverse it from when we talked about this earlier. The top one is selling is a team sport. Right now with what's going on in the world and in the remote, we're seeing studies that the trust that's been impacted within relationships, within families, within peers, within neighborhoods like it is, it's a lot. And so I think we need to all be better and work a little bit harder to rely on our team and show up first and give a little bit of grace to how hard this moment in time is. Just across the board and so that's a big one. This would have never happened without the relationships with my peers and the trust there was exquisite. And so that's the first one. Selling is a team sport and for new sellers, right? If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes two villages to onboard a strong, incompetent and consistent sales rep. The second thing is preparation. Preparation, preparation, preparation. Right? Like, we're not winging it. And we are going to take that time to do the research, to come up with the plan to work through with our team and even with the buyers in a very transparent parent fashion. That's the second one. And then the third one is aim for the stars, friends. Aim for the stars. If you're only trying to hit a single, you're going to miss with a strikeout. But if you're aiming for the Bleachers, you'll miss with a double. And so sorry, everybody, to do stupid sports analogy. I know we're trying to move away from that, but I haven't figured out a better one for this one. But just like, think if you're always right and if you're not making any mistakes, you're not stretching. And so lean into the discomfort, lean into the hard. And I understand and empathize with those that don't have a lot of psychological safety around them, right? I'm on a pip. Or I could be on a pip. I totally get it. But that's what makes this job so special. And that's what makes you so special. So aim for the stars.
Junior Lartey
Amy, this has been a really great conversation. An incredible deal to walk through fortune five hundred company, huge contract, landed a ton of information exchange, not just in that deal, but in this podcast. Like, let's see. Your three tips are great, but I think this one will require a relisten, right? We talked inputs, process, outputs, we talked data, hypothesis, plan, a lot of great sound bites to further understand and implement into our own selling. So go connect with Amy. Rough check on LinkedIn and Amy again.
Amy Hrehovcik
It was great on my show, too. I'm doing a show, listeners. I got a show. It's called the Revenue. Real Hotline. It's all about uncomfortable conversations. So leveling up our skills into how to create and facilitate these hard conversations, which really is what selling is all about.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes. Thank you very much again, Amy. And just like that, another episode of How I Deal is in the books. Thanks for tuning in. If you're you enjoy this conversation, this type of content, please let us know in the comments of Spotify, Apple, LinkedIn, wherever you connect with us. And until then, we will see you next time.
