“Use this list to your advantage depending on how old and successful the company you work for is.” – Evan Kelsay in today’s Tip 843
What’s your thought about this?
Join the conversation below and check out the links!
Sales Success Summit
Evan Kelsey on Linkedin
Demystifying the 10K for Sales Professionals
56: Evan Kelsay of Seismic – 800% Achievement with a Massive Deal
74: Let Sellers Sell with Evan Kelsay (Round 2)
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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 is an excerpt from a bonus episode that we just released on the Sales Success Stories podcast today featuring Evan Kelsay’s full Sales Success Summit presentation titled: Demystifying the 10K for Sales Professionals. Check this out:
Evan Kelsay: Now, I know this session was supposed to be all about the 10K’s, but frankly, I find the conference presentations, the proxy statements, and the annual reports to be full of just as much, if not more gold to help me sell into an account. Let’s start with a proxy statement. In addition to the annual report that an account publishes every year, you should be able to find what’s called a proxy statement. Its main purpose is to tell the SEC that their Board of Directors is legit and outline the method of compensating key executives at the company.
There’s two nuggets of immediate gold in a proxy statement.
Number one is what makes up the compensation structure for executives at that account. Let’s face it, people are motivated by what they’re incentivized with money to do. What you’re looking for is a section that says something like annual incentives, award calculations, or how the account is breaking down the measurements for executive pay for that next year for specific executives. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and the account will name specific strategic initiatives a particular executive has to show progress in to get their bonus. Likely, one of the executives listed is at the top of the food chain for your world. So aligning what you solve for to what the executive is getting paid on is a really good recipe for getting them to give you your day in court as it directly aligns with their biggest interest, their bank account.
The other section I find particularly valuable is the section where the account tells you who on the board benchmarks the executive compensation against. You’re looking for a section with the phrase peer group in it and a list of companies. I just had control f and search for the phrase. The companies listed in this section are the companies the Board of Directors at the account think are the most similar to your account. They factor in a bunch of things like complexity and size of the account, geography, industry they sell into, number of products, centralized versus federated control, et cetera.
Some of these companies will be direct competitors of your account, which is helpful to know who’s on the shortlist in terms of its perceived competition. However, it will likely be a bunch of other companies on the list that don’t compete directly with your account. But the board things are similar types of companies on many fronts. I call them, “The brother from another mother companies.”
Use this list to your advantage depending on how old and successful the company you work for is, you may not be able to go to that target account and say, “Look at all your competitors who are using us,” but you may have a bunch of peer companies as clients to point to and say “Your board thinks these companies are like you and we’ve made those companies successful. So you should give us a look.”
Let’s move on to my personal favorite, the conference presentation…
Scott Ingram: I left that little tease at the end there, because the full presentation is about 24 minutes long and is full of gold nuggets like these. We’ll have a link for you at DailySales.Tips/843. We’ll also include links to Evan Kelsay’s LinkedIn profile, the Sales Success Summit, and the two other interview episodes that Evan’s been featured in.
Once you’ve checked out all of that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!