“Focus on being of service to other people in your life, be it personal, be of service to your family or mentees that you take on.” – Ian Koniak in today’s Tip 620
What is your main focus?
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Ian Koniak on LinkedIn
Ian’s YouTube Channel
Ian Koniak on Sales Success Stories Interview
Salesforce Website
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from the newest episode on the Sales Success Stories podcast that we released this week featuring Ian Koniak. Ian is one of the topmost consistent enterprise sellers at Salesforce and I honestly struggled to narrow it down to just a couple of clips for you because there is so much good stuff in this conversation. Here’s one:
Ian Koniak: Well in sales lens, what that means is really taking the biggest challenges that a client has and truly helping inspire them to take on those challenges. Helping inspire activating change agents within a company that are full of reasons why they can’t do something and saying, “You know what, that’s all just rhetoric. That’s all just limiting beliefs.” Right?
If I know in my personal life that, you know, you can break through any ceiling possible, you better believe that I’m going to take that same energy and show my clients, you know what? I had other clients that thought the same thing and we helped them overcome these challenges. And so from a sales perspective, it’s really about helping clients, take their most ambitious goals and being an aid in support and a resource for them to achieve those. And what that takes is really putting on your client hat and almost feeling like you’re an employee of the client. Like,” Hey, if I worked for this customer, what would I do?”
And frankly, the only way you can do that is from experience. You cannot, I mean, you’ve been in the marketing automation space for a long time, Scott, I know you worked at Oracle and you know, you work for a partner who helps set that up.
I guarantee you when you first started selling, you know, a lot more now sitting on the implementation side about what it really takes to be successful with software, and it’s not buying the software. There’s news for everyone. It’s actually the resources that they’re going to allocate to make the program successful. It’s also having the right partner that can implement it. It’s also having the right leaders that are sponsoring this, that have support. It’s putting the right team in place.
So there’s so many components that make clients successful. So in a sales perspective, you kind of have to say, “Look, I can sell you the software, but I don’t want to, until I get the right partner in there with you until you have the right focus on this. Until I understand why you really want this, because the worst thing that can happen is that you have shelf or sitting or that you’re, you know, you overspent and you’re not using the feature. So let’s do the diligence upfront and really understand what challenges you have, what the current situation looks like. So that we can focus on what is going to move the needle in your business and make this successful from day one.”
So it means prolonging sales cycles. It means spending a lot more time on discovery, and it really means putting your client on hat on versus your sales hat of trying to slam something. So it’s great. And a lot of times the client will tell me, you know, you know more about my business that I do myself and that’s the best compliment I can get from a client is that I’m that deeply ingrained.
I remember with one of my clients, Berkshire Hathaway home services, they had an office for me set up in their headquarters and they gave me a key card that I can go in because I was there literally three or four days a week. And I was there because I wanted to make sure they were successful and it requires being in front of them. And so that’s really how that translates to sales is if you’re focused on being of service to other people in your life, be it personal, be of service to your family or mentees that you take on. You’re also going to be focusing on being of service to your clients.
And so that was really the biggest shift that I made is I kinda told myself, “Hey, you know, what would you do if you worked for this client?” And when I did that, I came up with a lot of different answers than, you know, “Hey, I need to go sell this so I can hit my quota.” And so that’s been the real, you know, helping clients get what they want has enabled me to get what I want in spaces. And that’s been the biggest way that philosophy and that congruence is translated to client success in sales success. For me, quite frankly, over the past few years, that’s how I’ve done it.
Scott Ingram: The rest of this conversation with Ian is in episode 104 of the Sales Success Stories podcast. You can jump over in your podcast player right now, and I hope you’ll hit subscribe in the process, or click over to top1.fm/104 and you’ll find both the audio and the complete show notes there as well.
Once you’ve checked that out, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip!