⚾️ Sometimes you gotta try, try again
Cam takes us on a 20-month sales redemption story.
After crashing & burning one of his first opportunities at Clozd, he learned from past mistakes.
Taking more at-bats & returning to the deal to ultimately close it in the end.
Guest Feature
He dabbled between sales and recruiting for a couple of years before joining Clozd in 2018.
But didn’t initially step into a sales role.
They got to a point where they needed to hire a salesperson & Cam stepped up to the plate.
He is quite literally known as The Win-Loss Guy; it’s an area he completely owns.
Deal details
What are you selling?
- Win-loss analysis for sales teams
Where did the prospect come from?
- Found them through LinkedIn Sales Navigator research
Company type
- A software company that sells to DevOps teams
Prospecting method
- Cold email cadence. Got a response on the 2nd email.
Barriers to Overcome
- Another buyer at the company had used a competing vendor before
- Pushed for a proof of concept before the competitor could get in.
Buyer types
- Chief Marketing Officer
- VP of Sales
Deal length
- 2-year deal cycle. 2nd time around was 50 days.
Episode Highlights
Note: timestamps correlate with the full conversation
Discovery: Bombed the 1st discovery? Get more at-bats & try again (17:09)
3 Tips for Account Executives
1. Persistence is everything. Value-add follow-up until the deal closes.
2. Quantifying pain in discovery is the foundation of every sale.**
3. Always be learning personally & professionally**
Watch the full conversation
Full transcript
Taylor Dahlem
Welcome back to How I Deal, where we examine a single past close deal, how it played out that way, and provide hopefully some helpful sales tips that NEA or any professional salesperson can use in their deals today. My name is Taylor Dahlem, full cycle account executive, turned content guy, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Junior Lartey, the sales maverick as we coined last week here at Pickle. June, what's up, man?
Junior Lartey
Yo, it's episode eighteen, but I think it's time to talk about a special project that we've been working on. So we are building a landing page for all podcast episodes. That means if there's an episode you've heard that you want to dive even deeper into, we're pulling clips from the recordings, we're writing out more content based on the concepts that we're discussing. Those episodes we've got I mean, today it's episode eighteen. We're up to episode five, but we're cranking them out like crazy between Taylor and I. So you can navigate to that page via Pickle AI and then go to resources. We'll also put the link in the show notes as well.
Taylor Dahlem
Yeah, surprising amount of work recapping a lot of these awesome conversations, but we want to give them the justice they deserve because there is so much good stuff in there, we thought we'd be wrong not to put it on multiple different platforms and different styles. So exciting project that we're working on. But in case you haven't listened before and this is the first time you're tuning in, a quick explainer. Essentially we walk through every conversation is a single deal. We want to chat through all the from start to finish, from prospecting all the way to close one. What happened? Dive really deep and start to understand, hey, where did this deal kind of come together or where did it start falling apart at some points? And like I said, hopefully provide some tips there. We want to keep all names and places as fictionalized and anonymized as possible, essentially because we want to dive deep and that is what we're going to do today.
Junior Lartey
Our guest today is Cam England. He dabbled between sales and recruiting for a couple of years before joining Clozd in two thousand and eighteen. At that time, he didn't initially step into a sales role. They got to a point where they eventually needed to hire a salesperson. Cam stepped up to the plate. He's quite literally known as the win-loss guy. It's an area that he completely owns. So Cam, we're super happy to have you give us an overview of your role today and what problems Clozd solves.
Cam England
Yeah, so right now it Clozd. I'm a team lead, so I'm a player-coach. I have a little bit of my own quota and then I'm also responsible for my team quota. But like you mentioned, I've been at Clozd for about four and a half years. Started out as what we call as an associate which is a grunt employee. So a lot of the back end work of the programs that we sell, a lot of the dirty work and did that for about fourteen months and stayed on after graduation to move into more of an SDR role here at Clozd. And then as that continued to go well, started taking more of my own calls and demos, transitioned into an Ae for some time and now a team lead, but it Clozd. Kind of the quick elevator pitch. What we do is win-loss analysis. So a lot of times when companies are trying to figure out why they win and lose deals, they're limited to CRM data sales rep feedback, which is helpful, but isn't necessarily the perspective that you care about when you're trying to understand why you're winning and losing deals. And so Clozd sales, both a service and technology to go and interview buyers from one and lost opportunities to understand their perspective of why they made the decision that they did, what factored into that decision. And then we package that up and deliver back to clients to give them some actionable feedback about what they're doing well and what they can improve upon from the buyer's perspective.
Taylor Dahlem
Incredible backstory. Obviously you didn't start in sales or fall in love with it until later, but we're super happy you made it to where you're at today. And let's analyze a past deal today, at least one side of it. I think close will be proud of how this conversation is going to go, but we would like to understand what deal are you walking us through today?
Cam England
Yeah, so the deal I'm going to walk through today was with a DevOps tool or platform which is primarily sold to engineers, to developers, gives them a suite of tools and different technologies to help them build applications, build software, so basically gives engineers the tools that they then need to go and build tools and platforms and different things. But this deal was particularly sweet because I originally lost the deal. So when I transitioned from an SDR to an Ae, this was probably the second or third deal that I was going at relatively on my own that I was working myself. And that was about twenty months ago. I had two initial calls with this prospect, got ghosted, was really persistent with my periodic follow up. And then about four or five months ago we re engaged. Timing was right a little bit better than before and was able to close the deal the second time around. So not necessarily the biggest deal that I Clozd, but was one of the sweetest because it was one that I've been working on in my mind for about two years.
Junior Lartey
So brought to you live from the podcast booth, a Clozd lost deal as promised. Of course. Then close one. But Cam, you're the first dedicated SCR and then the first dedicated Ae at Clozd at this point, anyone that you see is pretty much a prospect, I'm assuming, right? Like you've got an idea of who to sell to and who to buy to, but the floodgates are open, the territory is anyone. So I've got three questions. Where did you start, how did you become aware of the company that we're going to talk about? And then before you reached out, what research did you conduct before doing?
Cam England
So yeah, so you're right, it's a little bit less so now, but especially early on it was the wild, wild west in terms of companies I could go after roles that I was going after. And so it started fairly broad. So I'm a big proponent of Sales Navigator, LinkedIn, Sales NAV, that's one of the probably the tool that I use the most. So it started there, Clozd historically, had a pretty good track record with SaaS companies, with enterprise software companies. And so from a filtering perspective, computer software is kind of the go to within Sales NAV. Beyond that there's kind of a certain threshold of company where it makes sense to work with close, you need enough pipeline volume for a program to make sense. And so there's kind of some general filters that all input around employee size. So typically I'll do like companies that are above one hundred and fifty, two hundred employees, but that's really my starting point as far as finding an account is kind of that industry computer software, which is massive, and computer software companies that are above one hundred and fifty employees, which is massive as well. So from that point on, it's kind of whittling things down by title. For this particular deal, it was ahead of competitive intelligence that I was working with, which competitive intelligence is one of the primary titles or roles that I'll put into sales navigation to kind of whittle things down. And so I came across this company by working through my list. It was one of the days it was up and I was doing my company research and it was one of those logos that kind of spoke to me and I felt like I had a good talk track, or what I thought was a good talk track to kind of get my foot in the door. But yeah, that's kind of how they originally got on my radar. So what was the next question?
Junior Lartey
No, I love that. Let's touch on the Sales NAV aspect, Sales Navigator aspect, because if you have to build your own list, even if it is by territory, there are so many filters that you can go through two hundred employees, title Head of Competitive Intelligence Industry computer Software you can even go down to team size, right? So you would go and it would be like department sales, department sell the size of the department. Then you would say like salespeople ten to twenty, whatever it may be, right? You've got a strike zone and you can put those filters in to make that strike zone almost perfect. And in particular, when I do that, and then when I reach out and they say, hey, we're using your competitor or another vendor, I know that, okay, these sales NAVs are working, right? I'm hitting the right people. I'm building the right target list. So I think you might be the first that's, like, talked about how to build your own targeted list, which I think is great.
Cam England
Yes, it's hugely powerful. And at Close, it's a little bit less of the Wild West. Now. We have named accounts, we have account books. But even then, I can go and run a report in salesforce for all of my named accounts. I can download a CSV and I can upload that CSV into sales now. So then I can further filter and say, okay, of all my named accounts. Let me just look at accounts that are in this industry. Let me just look at accounts that are in this industry in North America. Let me just look at heads of sales or heads of competitive intelligence in North America in this industry, from my name to account. So pretty quickly, with honestly, not a ton of effort, I can get pretty dialed into who is most likely going to be a really good fit for kind of Clozd and at least my prospecting efforts.
Junior Lartey
Let's make sure we share this episode with the Close team. It is no longer the Wild West, guys.
Cam England
We reigned it in a little bit.
Junior Lartey
Yes, we've reined it in.
Taylor Dahlem
Cam wind loss analysis itself is a pretty old concept, right? Understanding why we won or why we lost. As we talked about, sports teams have been doing it forever. But the way Close is automating that analysis is a fairly new concept. It's not something companies have typically outsourced before. So your pitch isn't just a normal email they've seen a thousand times or a concept that they typically approach and think about, like, how did you go about actually getting in front of this prospect?
Cam England
Yeah, so that's one of the challenges. But also one of the, in my personal opinion, kind of exciting parts about Clozd is it's such an educational sell. It hasn't been commoditized. And so a lot of times when I'm trying to get in front of a prospect, and even, like, during the sales cycle, there's such an educational component of just making them aware of this type of approach to win loss is available. It's possible. And if you have that opportunity, the light goes on in their head fairly quickly and they kind of grasp the value. But to get that at that, at first, at least with this particular contact, again, looking at his LinkedIn page, he was relatively new to the company, so he'd been there about two or three months. I saw that in some of his previous job descriptions, he's highlighted how he had stood up or implemented competitive intelligence programs at some of those previous companies. And so kind of looking at that information, I made a little bit of a hypothesis or an educated guess that he was going to be doing more of the same at the current company. And so I referenced that in my first email over to him that, hey, saw some of your previous experience standing up competitive intelligence programs. Now here at this new company. Am I off base thinking that that's kind of on the agenda, where's your head at? Or what are you thinking about when it comes to how you're going to tackle wind loss as part of your overall competitive intelligence program and then a very simple conversation or a simple call to action? Hey, would you be open to a brief conversation later this week and we can kind of flush this out a little bit, but didn't get a response. So he didn't respond to that email. It was my follow up email a couple days later where I gave a little bit more information, kind of a couple, probably two or three quick bullet points around. Hey, this is how other competitive intelligence specialists individuals have found this approach helpful. Would you be open to discussing this more? And that was the email that got a response and quick. Yeah, let's put some time on the calendar next week. So that was the first round. That was twenty months ago. Whenever that was, that kind of kicked off the whole long process.
Junior Lartey
So one of the things in this prospecting sequence that you found is the event, right? It's like the trigger, I guess would be a better way to phrase it. And that is the transition within the last three months. And then the research that you found from their LinkedIn page is that they've implemented this type of tool in the past. So it's like, okay, I know this person. They were probably brought on to do this specific thing. One of my favorite people to prospect are those that have their tech stack and like previous companies just in their job titles or whatever. Exactly. I'm like, oh, beautiful, or it's either like, I know that you're probably going to try and implement the previous one you had or I don't see my competitors on there. And it's an opportunity to be that education, which is great. I will say my go ahead.
Cam England
I was going to say that's even like going back to Sales, NAV and some of the capabilities there, I don't remember the exact statistic, and there's probably different variations, but people's propensity to buy as high as the first ninety days of a new job. And that's one of the filters that you can apply on LinkedIn is like, has been in this role. I think the shortest one you can do is like less than a year. But even that filter, if you're looking for prospects that have a higher propensity to buy, looking at individuals that have recently joined a company, which was kind of the case here and was obviously a fortunate occurrence that I made the right guest, that he was standing up a new program and looking to make some waves in his first ninety days.
Junior Lartey
Let's just go ahead and make this the gold standard. If you close a deal with a specific contact, go to sales NAV, set up triggers to know when that contact moves companies because you can set that up and then you'll get a notification. Hey, Cam at Clozd has left. I slide into Cam's DMs and I say, when do we need to chat? I will say my all-time favorite subject line is new job. Anyway, not that we beat it with a dead horse because it's great to understand how you prospected them. The research that you conducted obviously sells NAV. Like they should take this episode and run with it and get every team to buy just based off of what we talked about. But I'm super curious to know about discovery from an outsider's perspective. It really seems like you are teaching a new concept on top of trying to uncover pain, because it's not good to just teach someone something, but then you don't get anything out of it. You're like, I still don't know where this helps them. So what did discovery look like for this deal? What did you learn?
Cam England
Yeah, so the first time around, not much. Or not nearly enough at least. So in preparation for my second shot at this deal four or five months ago, I actually went back and looked at my Clozd, lost notes from the attempt I had months prior and very shallow discovery. And honestly, if I'm trying to identify where that deal went wrong, why they went dark on me, I would fully attribute it to my lack of discovery and my lack of ability to dig in, to understand his pain, to quantify his pain, but also start to paint that picture of what that future state could be. I'm a huge fan of gap selling, so I'm a fanboy of Keenan. I'm always sharing out his videos and rereading his book, but that was training and education that I didn't have that first go around. And so in terms of the discovery and where that deal went wrong, it was just a lack that was not to be punny, but that was a gap. Like my discovery was a gap. And as a result, what that led to was very much of a feature dump on the subsequent call where I actually demoed our tool in our platform. And it was after that call where he went dark and he went silent. And I fully attribute that to my demo was probably all over the place. It wasn't tailored, it wasn't honed in on what he specifically cared about, problems he was trying to solve. And as a result. I was probably showing him a lot of stuff that he frankly didn't care.
Junior Lartey
About before we move on to the second time we're kind of like multi-versing this thing fairly where it's like.
Cam England
We're talking a little bit about two.
Junior Lartey
Deals but it's the same deal so before we move on to the second time maybe just talk about the learning curve what was the difference in that twenty-month period so the first time you say generic discovery feature tom what happened between that time and the next?
Cam England
Yeah I would say a huge piece is just at bats like that's one thing as a sales rep that you just can't replace is like opportunities at the plate to improve and so that improvement probably came across the board a huge piece as well was just an even better understanding of if we think about this prospect in particular and his world of competitive intelligence just getting a better understanding of what those individuals care about problems they're trying to solve and then again when it comes back to the discovery and coming back to gap selling specifically what I had a hard time doing early on in my sales career was quantifying pain because there's a ton of power that you get when you can actually start to put numbers to the issues that prospects and buyers are facing like well how much revenue are you losing because of this problem or how much are you missing out on because of this problem and then being able to tie that to then your solution and showing how you can remedy that and save them money or make them more money and so if I had to summarize it it's at bats it's a practice being able to do that both a combination of live calls. Live opportunities that I was working role plays with my team and then my own education reading books. Listening to podcasts. Learning from people that were one or two steps ahead of me doing what I was trying to do if you.
Junior Lartey
Feel like you've been losing anyone that's listening go back two minutes in this podcast and we listen to everything Kevin said. That's great.
Taylor Dahlem
Cam you've run obviously a few discoveries at this point the first time around didn't go so well pretty generic surface-level questions, start learning, start getting more at-bats. You mentioned gap selling and we'll talk about a little bit more here but I really want to understand that second try the second go around you've gotten through that discovery it's much more focused. Much more pain centric and you've built that need or that use case how did that translate to a more improved demo or more improved kind of product tour if you will of what you're going to provide and how did you keep it more personalized and focused and ultimately without having to lose that prospect again.
Cam England
And things changed yeah so I mean even going back to fill in that probably eighteen month gap between when our conversations were taking place. There was a lot of like follow up on my part, trying to be very tactful letting him know as we had different webinars come up or different case studies that we put out or just different things that I could touch base. Every couple of months I shoot him an email, I just want to let you know we have this going on. Never heard from him. So I was just for all I knew, emails were going to spam. Had no idea what was going on on his end, but finally got an email back after one of those attempts and said, hey, timing might be better, let's catch up. And I'd love to kind of hear what's new at Close, but I think one of the biggest things in that second round of discovery was honestly slowing down. Knowing at least early on my approach to sales and I'm sure nerves had a huge factor in there. But slowing down and making sure I was asking follow up question after follow up question after follow up questions to make sure I understood at a very granular level. Okay. What's the status quo when it comes to competitive intelligence and when lost. How are you guys going about it? What implications does that have? Okay, let's start to talk about maybe some of the gaps or pieces that you would like to have that are missing. If we could have that ideal solution, what kind of output would that create for the company? What kind of problems would that solve? And so I probably took that discovery call was probably one hundred percent longer than the first discovery call in terms of like minutes. And then in the subsequent demo I probably showed him ten percent of what I showed him on the first demo twenty months prior and that's after twenty minutes of product enhancements at Clozd. So there was a lot more that I could have showed him the second time around and I showed him probably a tenth of what I showed him the first time because I was able to very concisely identify. Okay, he's going to care about these three things that I can go show on the platform. If I can nail that, everything else is going to be a nice to have, a great to have that we can cover at a later date. I need to know these three points and then we're rolling.
Junior Lartey
The way that you talk about all this, it's like he really is the win-loss guy. He just knows this stuff.
Cam England
Trial and error. Trial and error. Yeah.
Junior Lartey
Okay, so post demo you start getting to make it or break the stages like, hey, do we have a deal or not? This is the most common stage where deals hit roadblocks. So were there any major barriers that you had to overcome through this deal?
Cam England
What's the right way to phrase it? Kind of a looming barrier or problem that was quickly emerging, which was ahead of competitive intelligence, at least at this particular company. Rolled up to marketing, there was a new hire over on the product. I believe his title was head of Product, who had experience with another winloss vendor and started about the same time as my point of contact. So both relatively new coming in, trying to make waves, implement new tools and solutions. Unfortunately, I was able to hear fairly early on that this head of product had familiarity with this other vendor. But by knowing that I had a good understanding of kind of the competitive landscape and what other vendors do and don't offer, and one thing that I knew was their speed of delivery was an area that they tend to fall short on and an area where we tend to excel on. And so I came up with a game plan with my champion of let us go do a couple of free interviews for you and your team to showcase what Clozd could go and do it scale. So when I mean, when lost interview a huge piece of what we sell it, Clozd is that service component where we go and interview buyers from one and lost opportunities. So I basically said, let's go put the rubber to the road. Can you get me I think I asked him for probably ten or fifteen close lost opportunities. I said, can you get those to me by tomorrow? And I'll get those over to our Ops team, to our scheduling team, and we'll just go see how many interviews we can go and schedule for you. We'll get those back in your hands and we can start evangelizing those and hopefully just completely box out that other vendor. We have an awesome Ops team on our side. They crush it at their job. And fortunately everyone was on the same page. Things went according to plan really well, where that next day he got me a really good list of recently Clozd opportunities, walked right over to the Ops team, kind of told them the situation, they jumped right on it, and over the next couple of days, we were able to get him back three or four interviews from Clozd lost buyers. He was then able to show them to the CMO and start to circulate that to the leadership team. And then it was really, frankly, smooth sailing after that part or from after that point where it was, all right, close has proved it out. They've proved out their value. We want more of this. Let's put some dollars to it.
Junior Lartey
I feel like that's like, such a strategic play, what you did there, that's like, where strategy and sales becomes real. How do we box out the competitors? And for you, it was this game plan with your champion to quickly let's deploy fast and make sure there's no conversation that happens between you and other vendors. I love that aspect. Really strategic.
Taylor Dahlem
So, Cam, let's wrap this thing up. You had two cracks at the back. First one didn't go so well. You learned a ton. And the second time you hit the home run. Would love for you to kind of give our audience three tips that you learned at the beginning all the way to the end of this odyssey, if you will, that they can use in their deals today.
Cam England
Yeah. The first one would be persistent. For whatever reason, this company, this logo is one that jumped out at me and I was come hell or high water, I was going to win this deal. It was crushed when I didn't win it the first time. But I had that persistence to kind of take a step back, reassess and tactfully figure out classic sales representative, I didn't lose the deal. It was just a not now, I'm going to win it in the future. And so Tactfully following up, making sure that I was staying persistent. I was staying on this individual's radar with those periodic follow ups, kind of trying to have very value add touch points. I think persistence when it comes to sales and maybe it's a fairly generic response, but persistence, a lot of time is the name of the game. Whoever wins is the last person to give up. So I think persistence is a big one there. The value of discovery, I think is as well. In my opinion, discovery is the foundation of every deal. If you don't have good discovery, it's a shot in the dark. If you're going to win that deal, the better you are at discovery and again, shout out to Kenan, send me an autograph copy of the book or something. But the better you are at discovery and being able to quantify someone's pain and tie that back to how you can solve that provides so many advantages. And then maybe the third one is just always be learning. I think it's easy to get complacent, especially once you have some momentum and get into a rhythm. But in sales, with every profession, every aspect of life, there's so much that you can improve upon, like webinars, podcasts, books, networking with other individuals. Over the last three years that I've been selling, that maybe has been the biggest reason I would attribute my success to is like just a desire and the hunger to go and learn and kind of improve myself. There's three.
Junior Lartey
Cam, it's been great chatting with you. This whole episode is like such a great episode to review and just recognize the growth that can happen in anyone else's career, I'm very confident in saying that you are the win-loss guy. Like, that title is yours. You've earned it. You've owned it. Go connect with Cam on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for joining us.
Cam England
Absolutely. Thanks, guys.
Taylor Dahlem
And just like that, another episode of How I Deal is in the books. Thanks again for tuning in and we will see you next time.
