💰Never Forget The ‘Old Gold’
Melanie LaCombe (AKA Mel) takes Taylor & Junior through a rollercoaster enterprise deal.
With multiple stakeholders, a fast timeline, & a huge roadblock; re-live how this deal went from "old gold" to her largest "closed-won" sale in just 4 months.
Have a prior closed-lost deal on your target account list?
Deploy Mel's tips from this episode today to bring it back to life & turn that opportunity into closed-won!
Guest Feature
Melanie LaCombe is an Account Executive at Twilio (was a Senior AE at AirDeck during our conversation). Her early life & career centered around academics; specifically speech & debate, then became a teacher. Her education background became an ideal launching pad for a sales journey.
Mel landed a BDR role at BombBomb in 2016 & never looked back. Jumping into sales development management roles & now into full-cycle closing roles as an Account Executive.
What problem Does AirDeck Solve?
Most eyes glaze over when any presentation, PDF, slide deck, etc. is shared. AirDeck breathes new life to these crucial, but dry B2B communication mediums.
They made it incredibly easy to add video & voice narration over ANY document or presentation.
Don’t just send a proposal & hope they understand it. Send an AirDeck & guarantee they do.
Deal Details
Where did the prospect come from?
- Cold outbound into them. They had met with a rep a year prior, but it didn’t go anywhere.
Company type
- A market leader in the social content platform space
- Company is ~1,700 employees. Mel sold into the content marketing team (200+ people).
- Reps were a mix of brand new hires & very tenured pros.
Deal Length
- 4 months. The buyers needed to make a decision fast, Mel had to be faster.
Barriers to Overcome
- A VP-level leader in her org decided to expand the deal last second. Overwhelming the buyers & almost losing the deal.
Buyer types
- Users: content marketing team
- Champion: seasoned content marketer who evaluated them in the past. Other priorities pushed the convo to the back-burner; but her new project brought it back.
- Decision Maker: Chief Revenue Officer
Episode Highlights
*Note: timestamps correlate with full conversation
Research: Old Gold is the difference of hitting quota & President’s Club
(6:21) Sometimes the best path forward is going backwards first.
In sales this translates to researching past closed-lost prospects who met with you, but didn’t move forward.
At Pickle we call these prospect types “Old Gold”.
Need a quick win before the quarter ends? Or searching for a quota-busting whale deal?
Start mining for this precious resource in your CRM.
That’s exactly how Melanie found this massive enterprise prospect & opened the door to closing her biggest sale yet.
Here’s how she describes her account research process:
Prospecting: Using Spears: Clustering prospect touch points overtime.
(9:49) Thanks to Justin Michael’s Method, Co-founder of HYPCCCYCL, Mel adopted Spears.
She booked a ton of demos (including this one) since implementing her version of this cluster approach to her prospecting strategy.
Here’s her general outline:
Proposals: Land first...then expand the deal
(24:21) We’ve all been there as Account Executives & full-cycle sellers.
Leadership demands higher average contract values. Looking to expand any deal in the pipeline.
But you’ve already built a strong relationship with the buyers & can solve their immediate problem. Putting you in an awkward spot.
When Melanie brought her VP into a late-stage meeting, he pitched solving EVERY problem they had with add-ons and packages. This complication stressed the buyer out & led to them almost walking away.
Here’s how quickly a deal can fall apart (Melanie saved it though):
3 Tips to Fellow Account Executives
1. Creativity goes a long way. Utilize personalization & humor.
While sales is a science, it is certainly an art as well.
The best sellers find creative ways to stand out amongst all the inbox noise buyers deal with.
Some way to stand out:
- Create a personalized meme around a problem you know they’re dealing with
- Send them some gift that they would appreciate
- Personalize demos or slide decks with GIFs from their website
It doesn’t have to be crazy complex. Sometimes a simple touch is the difference in a deal.
2. Build a strong internal champion relationship.
Internal champions are what get any competitive deal across the line for you. Period.
If you haven’t built a strong relationship with multiple buyer-types in a deal…you’re behind.
When identifying a champion you should always understand:
- What exactly is their role in the company?
- How much influence do they tell you they have vs. what they actually have?
Ex. if you’re trying to champion an account executive at the prospective company, you need to know if they are a top performer with some sway over buying new tools for them. Ask how they approach the sales process, what deals they recently closed, etc.
Ensure you continue to loop in your champion every step of the way.
3. You know your deal in & out: stick to your guns
If you’ve built a strong enough relationship with your buyers & understand the urgent problem you can solve immediately for them…sell to that first. Expand after you land.
Sometimes your leadership will push you to expand the deal before the signature. Push back on this.
It’s incredibly tough to do. But you risk losing the deal when trying to pile on too much at once.
Be confident & provide your perspective. If you’re told to keep pushing & you wind up losing. You can put stock in the fact that you tried and now have more credibility the next time it happens.
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 we want to give you some solid sales tips you can steal from us and use in any deal today. My name is Taylor Dahlem. I'm a full-cycle account executive, turned content guy, and I'm joined by my partner-in-crime, Junior Lartey, our superstar seller here at Pickle. How are we doing, June?
Junior Lartey
Great. I actually can't believe it's. Episode three, we're moving super quick. Today is going to be awesome. No spoilers, but this deal had a major iceberg and still turned into a full-blown partnership. So stay tuned.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes. Excited to talk about this when we'll get to that, just to remind everyone how this works each conversation. We want to chat through a past deal, but try to keep names, places as fictionalized as possible for obvious reasons. But we want to dive deep here. We want to know from the first time you saw that prospect, whether on LinkedIn anywhere, really just the first moment you saw them. All the way to completing that DocuSign, what's the nitty gritty? What's the details of how we got to that point A to point B?
Junior Lartey
So today we're chatting with Melanie LaCombe, a great friend and senior account executive from AirDeck. Melanie, thanks for joining us.
Melanie LaCombe
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm so excited.
Taylor Dahlem
Absolutely Melanie. Give us some insight into your role and maybe what problems AirDeck solves.
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah, absolutely awesome. Yeah. Well, I'm the senior account executive here at AirDeck. We are a young startup, so there's only two sales reps, so we're doing full sales cycle. We are super busy testing potential ICP. We are pre-market fit, I would say, kind of on that cusp where we're starting to see a lot of momentum in certain groups. So there's a fair amount of actually selling, but there's also a fair amount of testing everything. And that goes for any job, I would say, but especially for early-stage startups. So, yeah, that's what I do and what we solve. AirDeck is the easiest way to add video and voice narration to any document. So imagine yourself in whatever role it may be, customer success, marketing or sales, where you might be sending a PDF document or a download here or a contract, right, where you're attaching a file to an email and you're able to take that file and upload it into the platform. And then you can add video on top of it, voice on top of individual slides. You can put laser pointers to point things out. You can actually add interactive content by asking questions throughout. And of course, you're getting all the tracking on the back end. So it makes it really simple to be there in person when you can't actually explain yourself. Right. You're now in the room with them while they're experiencing your content. So we help people be there when they can't be there, and it's an exciting time. We see a lot of use on the CS side. Onboarding and training makes a ton of sense internally or externally with your customers and then followed closely as sales teams, just like myself, of course, we're using it daily to send out content and follow-ups from calls, et cetera.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes, and some inside baseball for everybody. Pickle does use AirDeck as well. We believe in their mission and they're always excited to be partners with other fellow startups who know the grind is kind of Melanie, just walk us through. But yeah, let's just dive right in. Melanie, I guess. What deal are you walking us through today? Maybe give us the scope, the details, the stats, whatever you want to give to us, and then we'll kind of go from there.
Melanie LaCombe
Awesome. Yeah, I'm so excited. So today I'm actually going to talk about a previous role where I was selling to marketing teams, and primarily because AirDeck cycle is a little bit shorter. So it's pretty straightforward. And we're still in such early days that I'd rather kind of talk about one that was a bit more complex of a sale as well as has some very clear steps from start to finish. I would say the company that I was working for sells to marketing teams, and they sell content marketing software, as well as some services to help build. So you can buy the software itself and build on it yourself, and then it hosts the material interactive content. So Hover overs engagement on the platform, anything that can help stand out on that page, as well as all sorts of tracking on the back end. Or you can have us do it for you, essentially, so you can pay the services team to get into that software, which you're paying a subscription on. We can then build the content you're asking for for whatever the cost might be, depending on the complexity of your project. We work with marketing teams, and I have to be honest, one of my favorite people to sell to, I've sold to real estate investors, brokers, real estate agents. I've sold to attorneys. That's one of the least favorite. Sorry, attorneys, but I wanted to be an attorney at one point, and that solidified my decision. But it was still good times and I pulled the dance and gymnastics Studios. So very broad, but marketers, they're really fun and they're very unique. They're open to sharing what's going wrong. A lot of other groups are pretty closed off. Sales teams at work. Great. We just need some more ROI, right? Or we need a little more revenue or something. And they're not as open because they don't want to look bad. I feel like marketers don't care. They're like, Here are all of our problems. Help us solve them. At least that was my experience. So it was a fun group to work with.
Taylor Dahlem
It's a humbling experience. It's all on fire. How do we just test it to make sure we fire out.
Junior Lartey
Sold it into a lot of different verticals and spaces there. I'm sure with all of that, you're learning different techniques, learning about different areas of how to prospect, how to research. So what bit of research did you do in the deal that we're talking about today? Before you started the conversation, what did you learn about this organization and how?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah, great question. So obviously starting off with the very basic of who is this? And I have to be honest, they're an incredibly well known company. So it wasn't oh, I don't even know who this is. Let me go look. But of course, you need to still do your due diligence. They're very well known in the social content platform space, so the name is well known. But that doesn't mean that you know everything about the organization or the group you're selling into. There are about one thousand seven hundred employees. The group I was selling into, specifically the content marketing vertical. But of course, marketing as a whole is a couple of hundred people. So it's actually pretty large in comparison to other organizations, but it makes sense based on what they do, that they have a pretty strong marketing presence. And so just kind of dug into that. Who are the people that I'm looking out for? And it's important to note that in this role it was full cold outbounding. But this particular case, they had looked at the company and a product several I think it was almost a year prior, and so they had been interested. It didn't go anywhere. I don't even know if there was ever a real demo, but it was part of my prospect list when I joined the organization. So it was still cold in that they hadn't actually made a decision to move forward at any point, but they had at least some information about who we were on an organizational level, the people I was connecting with. One of them, our champion, was who had originally looked at us several months prior. But other than that, nobody in the company had heard about us. She had just kind of done a little digging in the past.
Junior Lartey
Okay, so you've got a prospecting list, and this might be a little unique. Some companies you go to and your handed prospect list of one hundred prospects. And it's like, take these accounts, see if you can generate meetings, generate demos, and then other times it's more of like, see what you can find. There's no list, and you're just going out. So in your case, you had a list of prospects, you were working through it. And this particular company, a term that we use here at Pickle, is like old gold. They've had a conversation with the company. It didn't necessarily turn into anything big, but there was a little bit of a conversation there. So you can kind of tap into you've previously talked to us. Let's start that conversation again and see you can uncover what it was in the past and then what it looks like moving forward. So really cool. You've got this prospecting list, you worked through it, you found this company. I think that's really great.
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah. And of course, as I mentioned, it's a well known company, at least in the SAS space. So right or wrong, when I go to a new company and they give me a list of, hey, here's a whole bunch of companies, maybe not contacts, but a bunch of companies that are yours. I tend to look for kind of the shiny object of who do I know that I could at least have some sort of educated conversation with initially? And so that's kind of where I started. And they popped up and I thought, oh, this would be a cool one to reach out to. That's kind of how it started for sure.
Taylor Dahlem
Like you've got the list, you've got the players at least maybe some initial understanding of who you want to talk to. But what did that initial outreach look like? Maybe talk walk us through that sequence. Ultimately, what piqued their interest enough to kind of get the ball rolling here?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah, absolutely. And so it's interesting, the other account executive here at AirDeck, Andrea Bowers, fantastic rep. Also one of my best friends. We've worked at three companies together now, and the last company was one of them as well.
Taylor Dahlem
That's awesome.
Melanie LaCombe
Everyone jokes that we are the dynamic duo, which we are. But at the time, she was starting to investigate some outreach methods that I would say that I've probably done something similar in the past but hadn't really had a framework around per se. And the method that she was learning was from Justin Michaels, who is the co founder of Hype Cycle. And he's just a big sales presence in the software space. He has a Spear method where you reach out three times in a cluster, you give it a few days, you reach out another three times in a cluster, and you do that sequence three times, and you can look that up on his page and dig into more of what that would look like. So we were doing a version of that. We do that very well here at AirDeck. We've really leaned into it and that has helped us a lot. We've gotten actually some really fantastic demos from it. But at this previous role, it was very early for us kind of learning it. So it was probably version one for us of what that looks like. And then when we both joined AirDeck, we were like, you know what, let's really dig into this and make it a thing here. So that's kind of how we did it. So you start off by looking for your ICP, who are you targeting? And you write your email sequence, either social proof where you're saying hey, this is what we do. And this is why you should care. You can do a reconnect sequence where you say, hey, someone in your company has looked at us in the past. And of course to every time executive listening only do this. If someone actually has this is the company. Let's just throw that out there now. And something to note is if it was someone low level, like an account executive, by all means, and then just stand by it. If you're willing to stand by. That when they say who was looking like, oh, your sales team, it was Junior Lardy, like he was looking at you, that's fine, as long as you're willing to stand behind it. Do not lie and just say someone was looking to trick people because they're going to ask inevitably. So that's actually a sequence that we were using. So obviously I started with our champion, and she had obviously seen us in the past. So her messaging was very direct. Hey, you looked at us in the past. You guys have X, Y, and Z going on. We'd love to rekindle the conversation. And then to everybody else who I had in the account list who would be in that role, which is people from content marketers. So that could be senior manager of content marketing, global director of content marketing. They have a lot of people with the content marketing title. So that group started getting those emails. Hey, someone and I would just say one of your colleagues looked at us in the past and people are reaching back out to us because we help solve XYZ problems. Is this something you'd be open to learning? And sometimes you'll get a response saying, yeah, you guys look interesting, or you'll get the who are you talking to? And sometimes that's just them testing the waters of like, wait, what was the project? Because if I know it was Joe, then I'll know what he was probably thinking. So, yeah, so that's how we rekindled the conversation. And she was very interested because she was like, I really liked you guys in the past. We just ended up having other priorities and no budget. So I just kind of let it go. It wasn't a top priority, but surprise, surprise, we have a really important priority coming up right now that is very much on my plate to blow out of the water. And I would be interested to hear how you guys can help us do that.
Junior Lartey
I love that because I've done the hey, so and so you reached out in the past, but I haven't done the reaching out to somebody else and saying so and so reached out in the past as well as saying there's a lot of interest here from your organization. If you can build that social proof, I imagine it works really well. And obviously it worked for you here, Melanie. As you know, discovery can make or break the deal. We're trying to figure out why would you buy this? Why would you not buy this? What's going on? So how did you organize it? How did you get all the Discovery meetings? And then what did you learn in Discovery that you feel really helped the deal move forward?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah, absolutely. So the great thing was and this isn't always going to be the case, but our champion was very excited to have a conversation again. I of course don't know what project she's potentially working on, what her budget would be, all the questions you need to ask, but at least there were some initial interest. So I like to throw it out there just in case any reps like, wow, they were already interested. So that's an easy sell. Not always, but there was at least some level of I'll take this call and tell you what's going on. And like I said, marketing as well. They're very open about, hey, this is what's going on. In my experience, they've been very open to say these are the issues that we're having. This is the project we're working on. This is what we want to do. So at the previous company, at the company I was selling for, they do quite a few Discovery calls before ever demoing a product or showing even packages that we offer. There are some little Nuggets that we throw through out of like we can help with this or what we've seen other companies do. There was very few product demos, especially in this sort of situation where it was pretty clear very quickly with some questions that we would need to build this for them. Their time crunch and the learning curve on the software is not going to line up for them to be able to execute this project well. So we're going to need to step in and it's going to be a much higher cost and we're going to get in there. So the questions kind of around that were where I started. So hey, you're interested? You mentioned you wanted to chat again. Talk to me. So I'd say we had two or three Discovery calls. The first two were with just me and the champion. The second one was myself and a couple of other teammates. And then I believe it was like the third call was myself and our CRO and the CRO. It was a new Department moving into North America. So it may seem odd. Oh my gosh, your CRO is on a call. We were a really small team. He was the CRO over eighty to one hundred reps globally. But in North America it was like fifteen. So he was very hands on and involved in the deals, especially when a logo that they want is involved. So throughout those calls, just asking lots of questions around. Okay, what's the current project? Why are you thinking about coming back? And as I mentioned, it became very clear that their deadline was within four months to launch, which is very short in the world of building an entire basically website experience. So what's the budget? Who's in charge? What group do we need to get involved? So there was probably three or four Discovery calls just like that. And then from there, we moved into some discovery, not negotiation, but almost less discovery, more getting buy in from their Dev team and how much they would need to be involved in this project. And there's some twists and turns in those conversations, including them forgetting I was on the Zoom call and me hearing everything they said and then me jumping back in, which I'm happy to share that story. It was honestly really funny. Their faces were shocked. I mean, my face was on the screen, but they must have just forgot I wasn't an internal employee. But it was actually great because I heard very direct feedback, and I almost wish every call would be like that. Just throw it on me. Like, what is the direct feedback and your concerns? But yeah. So we had probably five to six before the contract was an actual motion to getting to close. And then uniquely, there was some approval to start the build prior to the final signature. We'd agreed on price. There was just some procurement redlining. Yeah. A lot of calls to just determine what was going to work. So not only do we have that internal call where I heard the developers, we also had the final pitch call right after that where we almost lost the deal. And then I had to come back in and kind of revive it with our champion again, which ended up working out. So, yeah, that's kind of the lay of the land with the Discovery call.
Taylor Dahlem
Got you. Good Lord.
Melanie LaCombe
Large enterprise deals, man. There's so many steps.
Taylor Dahlem
So many steps, and it's insane. Just the concept of, yes, you're technically full cycle, at least in a similar role you are today, but just how different the deal size is and what that affects in your lifestyle, your day to day. It's just really cool to hear and awesome to see you navigate that, I guess. All right, you've had these three Discovery calls. You talk with the Champion, you've talked with the team at large, or as many high level reps as you could. Decision makers are there CRO, it sounds like probably the economic buyer, right?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah.
Taylor Dahlem
What happens after that? So how do you ultimately got to show the product or demo in some way or show what you're capable of seeing these conversations? How did you kind of tailor that experience from the Discovery conversation into actually showing off what you all did and how you're going to solve whatever problem?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah, absolutely. So as Junior alluded to earlier, there was the Iceberg moment, which is coming up here. So you're on the Titanic. You're getting a warning if you didn't get. So here it is. So basically we would do a lot of Google slide presentations where we'd put together the actual, hey, this is what we think we should do for you. And in this case, because it was an interactive content company, we have lots of partners who would share here's this interactive content experience that we built for them. And it was just a use case. So we didn't actually in this case because we knew there's no way that they're going to get in and learn this product. We're going to be building it for them. We didn't actually demo the back end and say, this is how you do this and this is how you do that. It was more you can learn that in six months. Once we've launched this, you'll have access to the platform, you can build more experiences, but we'll train you later. Let's table that and let's talk about how we're going to build this for you. So we had shown them some examples of other ebooks or white papers or other sort of interactive experiences that would be similar to theirs should look or would look. And we went ahead and they were interested in several. They kind of pulled, hey, this one from that is intriguing to us. This other article, we like how that's formatted. And we start kind of formulating what it could look like. And so from there internally, we had to go propose all of that to our team and say, what would the breakdown of cost be while that's going on on our internal side? As I mentioned, I was in the early conversations and then followed up with our CRO. Right or wrong, he had been around for the conversations a year prior where they were looking more at the build your own right. We want this tool to build all of our experiences and we want to train our team on it. And we want to have as many interactive content pieces as you want can be built with the platform. There's no limit. And so that's kind of the mindset he came in. And so I was very focused on this one project in this one short timeline. So after he had the last conversation, I said, all right, I'm very comfortable going into the proposal, kind of, hey, this is what we want to do with you with a plan that is specific to this project. And another little fun tidbit is they had shared the actual outline of the project and everything they were posting, and it was an internal document. We have an NDA. And there was a line that said exactly how much they could spend on this project, whether or not they remember it was there. I don't know, but it was one of those things. I think they realized it pretty quickly and they were pretty forthright about it. But they eventually tried to negotiate and we just came back and said no. And they said, okay, sorry about that. I guess you already know that we have exactly that much, which we were still actually cutting them a deal at the end of the day just because of how short the timeline was. So really just the truncated time. But anyway, so we have all this back end information. And I'm thinking, man, you can look at this list of internal things they're doing and we are line A, and there's like seven or eight other projects. And I'm thinking, hell yes, we are going to be able to crush this first one and then just blow these other projects out of the water for them. And that's continued revenue. And there were rules internally about upselling and working with your CS team and all of that. So I was excited. We're going to land and expand this bad boy. The Crow's perspective was a bit more aggressive. Let's land and all of these, right? We know that they have the budget for this one. Why don't we propose what we can do for these other six items they have listed, they've got white papers listed, they've got ebooks. We can do that. And I just said, let's take a breath though, because they're very focused on one thing and it's pretty clear in the conversations there is a high sense of urgency to get this done to be better than any other previous year. They do this annual report very consistently and they wanted this particular one just to blow everything else out of the water. And so it was like we don't have the development time. And that's one of the things I had kind of heard on the back end, which I jumped in and answered for them. They said, this feels like a lot of time. And I said, hey guys, the one developer's eyes just shot open like, oh my gosh, there's a rep from another company listening to me talk crap right now. But I just told him that's the benefit of what we're doing is we're going to build it all for you so the tool can be learned later. You just need to integrate this small portion. It should take you less than ten development hours or something like that. So anyways, I was like, we're super laser focused. Her team is already kind of against it because they're like, we have no time to do anything. So even the tiny ten hours that we're asking in their world is too much. So proposing all these other things that will require more time, albeit it would be delayed time. They're not going to like that. Nobody is going to want to listen to that right now. And his response was, come on, go big or go home. Let's make it happen. And so I was a little bit newer. So I went ahead and just said, you know what, you're the guy, right? You are the guy. So I'm going to listen to you. And I have built this Google slide PowerPoint presentation that was super custom to them. I put gifts in mine. I want it to be as engaging and as personalized as they are. And we're selling interactive content. So I like it to be interactive in some way. Actually, I spent all this time looks fantastic in my mind. I'm like, oh, it's blowing out of the water. It's so great. Next morning, I logged in, we're about to sit down, and the whole presentation is like, all out of order. Everything's been changed. There's like six new slides that have all these other proposals. So I knew he was going to mention it. I didn't know he was going to make it, like the focal point of what we were doing so quickly. I tried to customize the slides, at least to look on brand with everything else I had done, but it kind of was what it was. And I just said, all right, well, I'm going to take a backseat. You go in, present this, and we'll see how it goes. So that's kind of how we got to that part.
Junior Lartey
And he's presenting. This is like the moment, right? This is the final meeting of like, we're going to win this project. Even though things are already, like, in motion, they could at this point say, hey, we're done things, stop being in motion, you lose the deal. There's no contract signed. So that's the meaning that the CRO is stepping into.
Melanie LaCombe
Yes, he did in one previous conversation. So he at least had heard about this project. It was just in his mind that we should also present the full scope of what we've seen in their internal document. Like, why not? And there's a good reason why not.
Junior Lartey
Okay, so tell us what happened and then give us a little more perspective on why you think it could have gone a different direction.
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah. So we started getting into it kind of the classic recapping everything we've learned in Discovery, talking about the timeline, the urgency that both of us have to get started on this project for them, the internal conversations that the project manager knew. Of course, at the end of the day that I had been on that call, what we've heard and the concerns they have. So we start there. They're like, yes, sounds great. We present the one project where they're signing up for the software subscription, but we are managing it and building this content for them. Loving it, loving it. He goes. And also there's all this other stuff that we've seen that you guys have upcoming that we can help you crush. And he starts going slide after slide after slide with all these other projects which are all valid, and they are going to do them based on their internal document, but not what we're here to talk about. And very quickly, our champion actually wasn't on this call. She was on vacation. So it was the project manager, one of the developers, and then the decision maker, the marketing director who's marketing director of global campaigns. So she was the big boss. And she's like, wait, this is way too much. Now, keep in mind, she'd been involved in several conversations because she is the final decision maker. But it was very clear from the project manager and our champion that we are going to build all of this first presented to her. So she's hurt a little bit. Our CRO has heard a little bit. And this is like everyone's coming together to see it all first hand for the first time. And so now she's thinking, we have no time. I have literally no time. The champion who's interested in this isn't even here right now. She's on vacation. Like, no, this is way too much. So she just cuts the meeting and she's like, listen, if you guys want to go redo this, that's fine. But this is way too much. And it was just kind of over. It was so uncomfortable. And I was so stressed out thinking, we just are about to lose this giant logo. And I think we both did a good job of ending the conversation with, hey, so no problem. Let's take the scope back. Let's remove things that are outside of your scope right now and just focus on this. But the conversation still ended with no decision with you're coming back to fix what you've done wrong, which is a very awkward position to now have to crawl out of in front of your prospect.
Junior Lartey
Yeah, that's a huge barrier to overcome, especially it's usually right. It's never the prospect's fault. It's always your fault. Even if it's like they're using the tech incorrectly or whatever it may be, it's always your fault. So as you mentioned, now you're crawling back into it and you're like, please don't do anything else. Please don't just, like, totally kill this. What did you do? I'm assuming you've got this champion that's on vacation. So what happens to bring this thing full circle to try and close it out with a nice, pretty bow?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah. So the next thing that happens is the following day, we receive an email from the decision maker saying, hey, thanks, but don't even worry about it. We don't have time. Our developers are not interested in doing all this extra work. So the answer is no.
Junior Lartey
Yeah.
Melanie LaCombe
And heart sinks. Just absolute stress, panic just, oh, my gosh, we did all this work, right? So I reached out via LinkedIn to our champion and said, hey, I know you're on vacation. Is there any way you could chat with me? And I only did this because I knew she was a staycation. She was just taking some time off to hike or something.
Taylor Dahlem
Not hitting the Cayman Island region.
Melanie LaCombe
Right. I would not actually recommend this to most people, but because the time crunch was so tight and she kept joking, like, if anything really goes wrong, and I'm like, so remember that thing you said about things going wrong?
Taylor Dahlem
It's the best champion ever. This is what they're for. And that's what this relationship is all about.
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah. So nice, so wonderful. So she was like, yes, I'm actually in town. Let's just jump on a Zoom call. So we get on the call. My Sierra is there and she's like, what happened? And he was like, well, we saw that you guys had all these other projects and we wanted to present that we could do them all. And she goes, oh, yeah. Like she immediately knew, no, we're not doing that. That's going to stress everyone out. She goes, but she goes, even though the big boss does make the decision at the end of the day, like this is my choice because it's my project and she's just the budget kind of person who will run it at the end of the day. So let me go back to her, send me the updated one, aka my original. I'm going back to Google Docs, like remove all this old stuff. So we send her the proposal and say, hey, this is what we think we should do now with this sub line of we can also help with these other projects down the road. Do not think of them now, like table that. It's not something we have to do now. And frankly, it wasn't even something that he was saying should be done now. But I knew it would overwhelm them because they're already so stressed about this one thing. So she took it back to the team and within two days we had, okay, we're going to move forward with you guys if you can get it done in this timeframe, like you're saying. And at this cost, which is when they tried to negotiate and we replied basically, hey, we can get it done in the time frame, but the cost is the cost. And they were like, okay, great, let's just do it. Our development team has no time to do any of this for us because you can build interactive content with developers. But the reason that there's a software, there are several software products for it is it's very challenging, right? It takes so much development hours to build one page, that's unnecessary time. Better to spend the money with a tool that can do the majority of that heavy lift for you. So long story short, comes back around that's when we actually internally started working on it immediately, we got the yes, sent the contract. It's going back and forth, redlining procurement, this and that. But the team internally was already working on it. And I do have to give them just huge kudos. Everybody was on it just really quickly getting the ball rolling. And the company didn't actually know that we were doing this, probably even prior because we already had their creative brief. So we were already getting started just to have some of the framework so we could really execute well. So that was the other heartbreak, right. Knowing that this team is already doing stuff which is totally against our internal protocol before any sort of signature. But it was, hey, we're going to really knock it out of the water for these guys. So then we got the yes. And then there was bazillion meetings in between that we were all involved in to make sure it was go live and everything. And I actually left that company and came over here to AirDeck right as the project was launching. And I was able to share it on my platform and just say, I'm so excited for you guys and I'm still in good standing with everybody over at that company. It's really great. So, yeah, it was a really exciting experience, a lot of ups and downs, so a lot of learning. And at the end of the day, it's still the largest deal I've ever sold. And it was really exciting.
Taylor Dahlem
You earned it, that's for sure. My gosh, yeah, that is a roller coaster. Well, I feel like a lot of enterprise deals, you're going to have the ups and downs.
Melanie LaCombe
Totally.
Taylor Dahlem
But what always doesn't happen is your own leadership kind of steps in and almost throws that deal off. Thankfully, you had that awesome relationship with the champion. I guess that leads us into the wrap up here, right? Like, what are three things that an Ae could use or at least utilize today that you learned throughout this process or some takeaways that we can kind of put a bow on this thing?
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah. And I know I sent you guys three before this chat, but I'm actually going to go in reverse order because I think the first one that I was going to say is actually the most important. So we'll leave it for the very end. So number one is just creativity. Right. So as I mentioned, I built this Google slide that was interactive and had all these pieces to it just spending. It doesn't have to be a ton of time. You do have to time manage well as the rep. You can't go so crazy. You need to know which deals to do this on, which would be high value deals, big logos, things that you know are going to be game changers for your career, but also for the company putting that little bit of extra work in to customize, even if it's as simple as like a little gift from their website. And trust me, go to Google and just search company named GIF. And randomly you're probably going to find something like they've probably generated a GIF at some point that you can use. There's so much creativity that you can kind of pull from. And if you're not a naturally really creative or design oriented person, you can also find lots of help online. So anything you can do to stand out to engage people with your presentation that shows that you know them and that you're also just going a little bit. They know you're going the extra mile if they see that, because people normally don't. So subliminally, they're going, oh, wow, this person, either the sales rep really wants this or they really care. They really know us, and I love it. I'm a super kind of creative artsy person. So that's my little bit of creativity on the sales side. Making the slides a little bit custom.
Taylor Dahlem
June and I are huge fans of the custom gifts. Custom memes move the needle.
Melanie LaCombe
Yeah. That's kind of number one. Number two falls right in line with everything I mentioned about the champion. And there's two parts to this. So number one, having that good relationship with your champion is really important. And there's going to be times where they can't respond. Right. They're not just on a stake and they're gone. And so my first point is having a great relationship with the champion, really understanding their role, how much influence they have, and they may be overestimating their own influence. You need to be a good judge of that. If they're for example, you're selling to sales teams, and it's an Ae, and they love your tool. And man, they're telling their bosses that they want it and they want you to go get after it. Just understand that either that rep is their top rep performing, and they might listen to them. Right. Ask those questions. How are you doing? How is the sales process? Whatever you can do to kind of fish out? Does this person have influence? So I knew that our champion had a lot of influence over this project. Not the final yes, but definitely a very big part of the decision. So knowing that's really important. And then the second thing is, if it is a big enterprise deal and there are several stakeholders, there was also a project manager running this entire deal, and she and I became very close as well. So she was very dissociated from the result. She was like, I want the best result, but I'm just here to hurt cats. That's why she kept saying, I'm here to hurt cats. I'm here to get if we say yes to this, I'm getting the Dev team on board. We say no. I'm getting the Dev team to do the next thing. So she cared, but she didn't care in the sense of, I want this tool. She just wants the project completed well. So having her though there and bringing her into the fold and making sure that she felt part of this process as well. And frankly, her work was insane. She and I ended up working together throughout this whole thing several months. And she actually congratulated me. When I moved over here to AirDeck, she reached out to me just to ask a question. And my email had bounced to the old company. She's like, where are you? Where'd you go? So that's having the right stakeholders in place and just being genuine and authentic with them is really helpful. Right? Avoid the sales stink. The sales breath. You don't have to lie and be like, oh, I'm not a pushy sales rep. I don't even care about this. Of course you do. Everyone cares about their job and making the sale. But I'm here to help you, right? You're hurting cats. How can I help you do that? Who do I need to talk to? You tell me who I should win over. And she's like, okay, X, Y, and Z, you got to get a yes or it's game over. So when you have a good relationship, you can ask those pretty poignant and pointed questions, and people will respect that. And it helps you so much throughout the whole process. And honestly, those two people helped us save this deal. At the end of the day, when the big boss said, I don't see the value. You're confusing me. Too much going on. No, thanks to finally saying, okay. Actually, yes. So having those people support is super important. Yeah. So the last and final, which, as I mentioned, is kind of the biggest one here. And I will caveat this by saying the CRO of his company and I are still on amazing terms. He is one of the best sales reps I have ever met. Absolutely phenomenal. My friend Andrea and I coined the term blurting, which is business flirting. He has this way about him with men or women. It doesn't matter. He just makes people feel seen, heard, understood, funny. They are the best person in the room. He has a way of just engaging people that gets them chatting. And we finally told him about it months after we started, and he goes, what the heck? And then he would go, oh, man, I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again. He'd hear himself and blurting. Yes, but it's one of those things where I learned a ton from him. But in this scenario, and I was still new. So I think it was important to kind of take a back seat to someone who's been in the role and especially high up in the role. But my advice, my third thing, the takeaway, if anything, is if you know the process, if you have been very involved as a rep and you are firmly feeling like your plan is the right plan, stick to your guns. Tell your leadership team, tell them this is why we need to do it this way. And I mean, I probably said something along the lines of, oh, well, they're kind of busy. Maybe we should just do this one. No, Melanie, no. What you should have said is they have a lot of objectives. They have four months to complete this huge project that is their big yearly thing that gets them the most leads, that has the most visibility for their company. We are doing just this. And we will expand later. Going strong. You have to have your facts right. And if you have your facts lined up and you know that you have the best plan for them, stick to that. Your leadership team will eventually either say yes or no. And then you can kind of lean back on what you said at the end of the day, which is what ended up helping us win the deal, coming back and saying, here was actually the original plan, let's go with that. So it was fully formulated. There was evidence and proof and reasoning behind what I had to say in this case, it ended up all working out really well. But there are cases where either leadership or sometimes rep. So if you're one of the reps who says, what if I could just squeeze in another ten, twenty K, thirty K. And if I could just get it in there. If you know solidly, you're solving their problem and you're helping them in this moment, focus on that, build that relationship, win that deal, and then go on for you or your CS team. And here's a little bonus tip, if I shall. Sales Karma is real. I tell people this all the time. So if you're sitting there going, I'm going to force this extra thirty K, because if I don't, then I get less five percent, because CS gets it when they upsell. If that's the case and you're thinking, I don't want that to happen, trust me, sales Karma is real. It will all come back around. And if you're going to land that deal now and CS gets a win later, you are building a great partnership internally. You're doing the best thing for your client. The opportunity will come around again. So don't push things, have that sales breath, the Commission breath, whatever you want to call it. Avoid all of that and just be a team player for not only your internal team, but also the company you're working with. And it's going to come across so much more genuine. And trust me, I'm chasing a bag. I get it. We all want to make the most money that we can and hit the biggest deals. But sometimes you have to set that part of you aside and say what is best for everyone involved, including the company I'm with. Yeah. So that would be my three plus one, I guess. Four tips.
Junior Lartey
That's awesome. And Melanie, I think this was such a great deal, one where you hit a major iceberg and we're able to find every possible lifeboat, which is great. So it was great to have you. Amazing deal to learn about. If you tuned in today, go connect with Melanie LaCombe on LinkedIn and AEs. Don't be afraid to leave room for upsell.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes. Incredible story. Awesome to have you, Melanie. And just like that, we've got another episode in the books of how I deal. Not bad, number three, but yes if you enjoyed listening to this, please subscribe we try to crank this out pretty consistently. If you want leave us for maybe five stars and then we'll see you next time. Thank you very much for tuning in.
