Fireside Chat: Multithreaded Selling with Susan McGovern (Legion Technologies) | Full Video | Eng CC

hey folks I'm Joe parlet thank you for joining I am with feature wve which is an AI powerered sales co-pilot that delivers just in time intelligent guidance to the selling team wherever they are in their deal site but we are not here today to talk about feature wave today we're here to talk about multithreaded selling we're hosting a series of fireside chats with thought leaders like Susan McGovern here and today we're going to talk about multi-threaded selling Susan is currently the VP of goto Market strategy and operations at Legion Susan thank you for joining why don't you tell us a little bit about Legion and your role at the company and we'll jump in great thank you for having me um I'm with Legion Technologies we're workforce management solution and uh focus on the hourly employees our mission is to make uh hourly jobs good jobs great and oh and my role right so what do we do um so my role with the company as you mentioned uh go to market strategy and operation so basically a lot of the revenue operations functions I'm responsible for sales Ops or sales enablement um pre sales team as well as customer success renewals and growth yep fantastic and I know you're very accomplished in those areas so I'm looking forward to having this conversation so multi-threaded selling I know that's something that's very important to you and and it's a practice that you instill in in your sales teams um it's being single threaded in an account is a great way to put the the whole deal at risk and get into hot water with your boss as well think you can only make that mistake once um but why don't you tell the audience a little bit about what multi-threaded selling is yeah actually it's funny only make the mistake one you would think only make the mistake once I've been guilty of it too by the way it's um it's one of those things where you get caught up in the sale and sometimes you get the ear of the the executive sponsor or the exact buyer and you think you're golden and you can rely on just that and get the deal done and and unfortunately you sometimes learn that that's not always the case so um so the way that I look at it most people Define multi being multi-threaded or single-threaded if you're multi-threaded you typically have contacts established contacts with multiple stakeholders within the buying process um whereas single-threaded as it implies you are typically just engaging with one person it might be just your Champion or it might just be your champion and that exact uh sponsor who is the potentially the signer so single threaded could mean just one or two people multi-threaded typically is is when when I'm talking about it referring to a much broader set of stakehold holders that you're connected with yeah okay and so what are some of the benefits of being multi-threaded versus single-threaded I think it um probably seems obvious although as much as it sounds obvious there's still many many times even now that we find ourselves in situations we're not as multi-threaded as we think we should be or we think that we are um I think there's benefits not only for the seller but also for the buyer so real quick as it as it relates to the seller um being multi-threaded means you will likely get input and buy in hopefully from multiple stakeholders so I think if anybody's familiar with practices or sales methodologies like Miller Heyman some of the older ones that are out there the idea is you want to understand who your Champion is who are your coaches what are the potential threats in the deal do you know your it buyer do you know your user buyer do you know your executive buyer um all of those represent sometimes you know one person for each group sometimes it's multiple people across all of those groups uh would say that there's if depending on what you're reading some of the more recent research um from CB and from others will say that the buying decision today is done by consensus and oftentimes it can take anywhere between it's silly sometimes you'll find numbers like 6.4 all the way up to 12 point something buyers part of that decision-making process and so um making sure that you are taking into consideration all of the needs and all of the potential objections that every single one of those buyers may have um will really help you to better position yourself in the deal to make sure that there are no last minute uh OB objections that might come up um so really it's preparing yourself and positioning yourself to to have a better chance of winning the deal from the the buyer perspective the benefit that they have oftentimes is they're getting a chance to build trust and get to learn you more and ultimately if it's if it's a mutual relationship if they feel like they're getting getting to know you and you are getting to know all these different stakeholders you're actually hopefully sharing information and teaching them things that they don't even know about themselves or things that they don't even know about other parts of their business that you are helping to kind of provide or shed light on for them so um it's it's good and healthy for the sales process but also good and healthy for the customer post buying process yeah it definitely is the old saying you don't want to you don't want to lose a loan that's the internally like don't don't be in the deal and not utilize your internal resources and the same thing goes for the for the buyer as well like they don't want to make a decision in a vacuum where they didn't get input from various stakeholders and like you pointed out they are very few and very few instances is somebody making an Enterprise purchase decision without input from many people and so yeah there's a lot of risk with being just single-threaded working with through one person as a as a a seller working through one person you need consensus like and to really understand the needs of the company you need to go broadly and you you really want to build a village of Advocates if you will so you need to understand I believe you need to understand their challenges their problems and how you can help them solve them those those challenges but yeah it it it takes a village and you got to go wide otherwise there's just too much risk if you're depend on a single thread or just a couple of of points of contact in a deal and you're alien alienating some it just introduces all sorts of risk now it although in some of these deals a lot of times especially when they're run by procurement if there's an RFP run by procurement they they like to try and enforce some pretty strict rules you're going to work through one point of contact if you have a question don't try and go to anybody else but that does introduce a lot of risk if you are forced to just work through one person that person may be a detractor they may not be a supporter everyone around them sees the value in your solution but this person that you're being forced to work with they they may or may not understand the needs of of all of the adjacent business functions and their peers um and so but you're being asked as a seller to work through one point of contact do you comply with that or do you take the chance and try and you know still build relationships directly with others maybe use your network and have folks you know do we do we share board members does somebody on our board know somebody on their board or the executive team do they know each other what do you do do you comply or do you still try and build this Village of Advocates and have multiple threads you know it's so funny I always feel like no one wants to be the person that goes against against what they were told to do by the customer if you're the rep you don't want to be the one that's been told like do not talk we will not respond to you we will not talk because you you're afraid of burning that bridge and that relationship but and it's and and you don't want to be the one to if you lose the deal to have to answer answer to your leadership and say like you know we lost or we have a major setback because I went around I was told not to and I went around and so it really takes the support of your leadership and an aligned sales strategy um to to go around I I I don't know that there's a single sales leader rep out there that would say like hey it's not worth a shot trying like going and you know talking to board members or anyone else in your network I think it's so different today compared to 10 20 years ago when you didn't have as many tools as we do now to have visibility to where the potential connections exist right LinkedIn sales Navigator I mean a amazing way to just go dig and find the connections you may not even had been aware of um and so there's lots of ways to go around it without necessarily violating the you know the process that the customer sets out I think you know the other thing is you you can be getting amazing traction you can follow the entire sales process perfectly and you can talk to you know 12 different people they're all on board they're all super excited it's that one own unknown person that can blow up the entire deal you can get all the way to the signature process and the exact sponsor or the person who's paying for it can say yep I'm on board and it just takes one person who's like out in The Ether that voices some concern or objection and can completely tank your deal and so it's when I think about the multi-threading and staying true to the process or following the direction of procurement if you're not thinking about those things then your deal is always at risk yep yeah I agree and there is that that one person you you can go through part of the risk being single threaded or close to is that there could be somebody who's not even part of the evaluation or that you were compliant or it just wasn't part of your strategy to be multi-threaded now you didn't get to that person who may not have been highly visible but they've got the lightning rod your your single point of contact says okay yeah I I like Joe's solution I like Susan's solution but this person's got the lightning rod they say that's nice but we're going this other direction because probably somebody got to them and competitor has a relationship and through the back door they're like oh by the way you know they're gonna yeah yeah um it's funny and so and I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of throw a wild card out there for you because we didn't really discuss this part of it but like how do you how do you know you're doing it the right way how do you know the reps are doing it the right way um I've been thinking about that a lot lately because this this almost sounds like I'm sure we're stating the obvious be multi-threaded there's all these great benefits but then why do people not do it or how do we get to the end of a sales cycle and realize oh we weren't so successfully multi-threaded um I do think that we have to find new ways to make sure and hold people accountable to being multi-threaded and sometimes it's in one-onone conversations right I'm sure you've had conversations with other AES and it feels like you know all the right people I like to go back to the old like tried and- true influence mapping like put all the people you could possibly know down on the board even the ones you haven't met with yet what's the title and and identifying what are those red flags so you can like ticking off you know mitigating some of that risk um I think there's lots of lots of great ways out there that you can track how many contacts have you made how many contacts are you engaging with um and then I would say the next hardest part is what do you what do you say to them I think that's part of the the hardest thing about now that they're knowing there's 12 potential different stakeholders in a deal those are 12 different conversations and people that care about very different things how do I as a rep get educated enough to know exactly what to say to each one of those different personas at the right time and I think it's getting more and more complic at in sales right now to figure that out yeah it is but it's it's so necessary and I do think it's it's critical that you violate that law if they say hey you just got to work through this one point of contact there's just too much risk and uh the as the company they wna they want to make the best decision for themselves as well and if if getting more exposure exposure to more people help them to make the better decision I think it's better for everybody some people might be upset that the the the the law was broken to only speak with one person but in the end they need to make a a a decision that's best for the company and it's going to involve input from a lot of people so it sounds like you're you're of the opinion I definitely am that when you put together you you put together a map of who are all the people in this deal the influencers and who who have we gotten to how do they feel are they a supporter are they a detractor who on the executive team do we know or does our Network know who do we need to get to and we've got to get to those people so sounds like you're of the opinion that you still got to do that even even if asked uh just work through this one person yeah well so I'm also you heard me talk about Miller Heyman I'm also a big fan of the Challenger um sales approach or go to market approach and one of one of the things I particularly like about that is understanding the buyer personas meaning are is this person a somebody that is motivated by self-promotion is this person motivated by um challenging people um when you understand what what motivates that buyer you know how to appeal to them and so even if you are stuck with just a single person what um I'm going to paraphrase but with you know the Challenger approach really coaches you to do is to arm that person your coach with the right material to help train or speak to the other people internally that you may not have access to but get them to help teach or get them to help address the Skeptics and make sure that you're arming them with the right kind of information and if you understand that they're talking to or you're you're one of the stakeholders is somebody who is a skeptic what is the type of information they need that's someone you probably want to present some testimonials or some some case studies to or some Roi to if the person is somebody that is more interested in their own self-promotion case studies and Roi may not speak to them instead you might want to talk about how they can be a part of your maybe your Advisory board or how they can participate in speaking events so just figuring out what those different personas and the different stakeholders really care about so that single person that you are stuck with you can arm them with what they need to get those others on board yep yep they they I think they really do want somebody who's gonna put their arm around them and make them feel like they're going to make them successful this project and help me because we all have an agenda and the person who's the the main point of contact on that project on that evaluation they've got their own agenda as well make a good decision for the company but what what does this lead to for me what if we do make the right decision and this project is successful how do I benefit do I move up you know how does how does it help me so understanding that yeah certainly very important um uh multi- selling multi-threaded as a practice who's responsible for insuring if if that's and I I don't think there's any approach or methodology methodology that would suggest OB be single threaded so let let's assume that selling multi-threaded is a sound strategy um every company should probably uh teach their reps to be multi-threaded and make sure that that is their approach who's responsible for enforcing that and making sure that happens I think it's everybody in this involved internally on your end at the company like in the sales cycle it's not just the AE because there are some people I'm sure you know this there's some people on the customer side of the table that just trust maybe the solution consultant or the sales engineer more than they would trust the AE or somebody in your Professional Services Group has a little more credibility with another person on the on the other side of the table so I think using your internal resources to help build those relationships and credibility is key and I I think the most successful reps are the ones that know how to use those resources I think it starts in the very beginning with marketing and sdrs I also think that the stakeholders or the different people that that you should be engaging with is also evolving I think I think we need to start thinking about going lower um in terms of who we're trying to connect with I I think just five years ago I can remember still trying to prioritize executive sponsor or director VP level and higher and today it's really hard to get the attention of anybody that is just there there's so much noise with phone calls and emails you know I certainly don't pay attention to half the stuff that more than half the stuff that I get but if I have one of my team members or if there's another individual contributor in the company that is saying hey I happen to you know talk to somebody or hey I'm kind of interested in this thing I think you should take a look I will absolutely listen to what one of my direct reports one of the other team members in the business wants me to take a look at and so I do think that there are there sdrs should consider you know starting lower getting to those getting to that that that individual contributor level and trying to Network and and get Buy in from them so that they can use them to get referrals internally so multi-threading is becoming so much more than just knowing all the different stakeholders in different functions it's also going pretty deep and Broad and wide within the account yeah yeah great Point yep bu building that that support and helping you like if if somebody like yourself or me I'm with you I disregard a lot of the um the Outreach that I receive because you just don't have time and like you said we're all being flooded with emails and texts and phone calls um but if you can build support from Individual contributors if that's if that's who you can potentially help you get to the champion the sponsor the person that's responsible for solving this problem that's a great sound approach I'll tell you a really quick story because one of the best sales reps I've worked with she she called on she had been trying to call on me for probably six months plus and uh in that time had a call with SDR AE pre-sales person uh an RVP we're talking about seven different roles across the company that then LED every single one individual contributors people that I never interact with in the business all of a sudden I'm hearing from six seven different people in the business of oh I think you should look at this or oh and every one of them was saying oh this solution can do XYZ for me and every single person it was a different aspect of the solution that they cared about and so I was like wait a minute this could be something that can actually solve problems for like seven different teams I think I'll take a listen now right everybody is asking for it and ultimately at the end of the day we bought yeah it was successful and I no interest in taking a call from her but it was because of seven different people in the company coming to me saying I really think we should take a look at this she built up a ground swell of support smart yeah there's not a single playbook for how to do it sometimes you just got to be creative yeah so thank you Susan this is great um multi-threaded selling folks you have to do it don't lose a loan don't try and sell to one person you're putting everything at at risk um and I think you'll definitely get cooperation from thean that you're selling to they want to make the right decision they want to have and it is a group decision like Susan said earlier so Susan thank you very much I do have one more question before we go uh we want to make a a charitable donation on your behalf is there an organization that or what's one of your favorite organizations that you would like us to make a donation to on your behalf one that I do try to to give to St Jude St Jude for cancer research for children yes great love that I'm actually part of a of a group called rooms for Hope where we do um transformations of of rooms for kids who are have cancer or some other terminal illness it may not be terminal sometimes it is but we'll do um transformations of their room sometimes their their house or their siblings rooms and get it to be like their their dream room or Sanctuary so they feel happy and safe in that environment so great cause we'll make that uh donation on your behalf thank you for joining thank or folks thank you for tuning in and stay tuned for the next uh podcast thank you Susan thank you

2023-09-02 14:32

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