Sales Tip 1864: Building Relationships at the C-Level – Trong Nguyen

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today we’ve got another Throwback Thursday clip. This one is a game changing idea from my interview with Trong Nguyen in episode 25 of the Sales Success Stories podcast. Listen to this:

Trong Nguyen: The standard approach that I see out there is, you know, sales reps will get a meeting with a cio, cfo, cmo, C level suite executive, and they go in there and they’ll say, tell me about your problem, Tell me how we can help, right? Let me tell you a bit about my company and usually it’s their first and last conversation with the C suite executive. The approach that I take is what I’d said before, which is triangulating data at the lowest levels and then eventually raising it up to their level. And then from there just be completely honest and transparent with them. I remember one time I met with the CFO at this company and the first thing I said to him is, I think you have a problem on your business side. And he said, well, what do you mean? I think he was expecting me to tell him how the software package or the technology they’d chosen wasn’t really good and that they should actually buy Microsoft’s. And what I told him was I said, I think your mergers and acquisition strategy is flawed. And he was totally taken aback. And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, here is how you do it, right? So basically what your company does is they go out there, acquire a company and they let the company kind of run as is for the next five years.

And then in year six, you go in and you tell everyone, hey, listen, you know, you’re a part of this company, you need to kind of change your processes, business processes, it processes to align to the company. And, you know, then you spend the next year fighting them because they’re like, wait a minute, we’ve been here for the last five years, what’s changed? Why do we have to change now? And you know, by year eight, you win the battle, now you’ve lost eight years. What I would have done is, you know, when you buy the company, integrate them from day one, right, so that there is no issue and you fix it immediately, right? So he was completely taken aback by that. And at that point I’d actually earned his kind of respect, right? I earned a bit of trust. But I parlayed that first meeting into another series of meetings where I earned so much more trust from him. So that’s how I approach the C Suite

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Trong and to this full original interview, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1864. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!