Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

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 you know 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 that C-suite executive. The approach that I take is what I 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 I said you know the first thing I said to him is you know I think you have a problem on your business side. And he said well what do you mean. And he was a I think he was expecting me to tell them how. Know 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 acquisitions strategy is flawed and he was totally taken aback. And he said well what do you mean. I said Well here’s 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 I.T. 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 your aid 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 earn 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 that’s how I approach the C-suite.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

One it takes time but two it just takes a lot of kind of hand-holding talking to your customers. So what I end up doing is you know I’ll start at the lowest levels and I’ll talk to 100 different people and you know I’ll get nuggets of data from them and then I triangulate that data and then what I do is then I kind of parlay that data to the next level. So then I’ll go with the at the director level and say hey you know I’ve been talking to these 10 20 different people. Here are some of the consistent themes that I’ve heard. And here’s my perspective on that. What do you think? And then I’ll have that conversation with another 20-30 different directors and get their thoughts and perspectives on that. And it’s amazing because you’ll get so much more insights because you’re providing a level of information that they don’t they didn’t necessarily have and you kind of correlate it to a level that they necessarily didn’t see before. And then from there after I have those conversations with the VPs sorry the directors then I kind of correlate that data together and triangulate it and then I bring that up to the VPs Right. Do that again to the VPs and then you get to the c-level folks. And when you get to the c-level suite and you have that conversation now you’ve actually hit gold because no one has ever done that for them. Right. With that kind of thought or depth before cause a lot of folks what they do is they go into the A C level suite CFO CIO whatever and they have the same generic conversation which is tell me about your business problem. Right. And that conversation dies pretty quickly.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

I do a couple of things and I think all road warriors will probably tell you the same thing. You can make use of your Smartphone phone so I can pretty much write War and Peace on my smartphone on my iPhone. I do a lot of things through that that the deep proposal stuff I reserve for the PCs. It sounds kind of funny but I’m a big believer in voice as well. So where I can I just call up people and get things ironed out quickly versus kind of spending a lot of time hashing things back and forth through email. So voice is my kind of preferred method to go to. And then the other thing that I find really really productive is you need time to kind of just shut down. So I purposely block certain times where I can take a breather or go do something and not think about work and come back fully charged to do so.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

The one thing that I would say is look if you’re going to be in high end sales like we are here you have to know your customers business better than they do right because that’s the only way that I’ve found you can truly add value. When you start to dive deep dive into your customers business in you know way better than they do then you become the trusted advisor and then they come to you for advice on what they should do. And the times when I’ve done that which is a lot I’ve seen VPs, SVPs, EVPs, c-level suites all wanting to set up one on ones with me so that they can kind of bounce my brain and get ideas and stuff.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

Usually up by 5:00 in the morning and I’ve got this routine now down pat I make my coffee. I turn on my Bose noise canceling headset turn on my tunes and I start working away at that deep thought for a good two two and a half hours or so and then from there I start planning my day. I’ll do prep for all of my meetings for the whole day and what I want to accomplish and then from there I just start it and it usually probably I’m in meetings from 9:00 in the morning right through till 5 or so. And then if I have dinner meetings I go to those.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

What I found is like when you work in a big big company you know take the Oracles the IBMs the Ciscos the Microsoft’s of the world. Right. And you’re dealing with a really really complex deal complex offering that you’ve got that’s going to cost customers a hundred million dollars. I would say half the time that you spend your time trying to sell this internally to kind of get everyone in the same direction. The other half is with the customer.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

I’ll give you an example. This is one of my biggest and complex deals with a large Canadian bank. And if anyone’s ever worked in banking before you’ll know this right. So picture a large global bank. They have so many different lines of businesses they have so many different CIOs they have so many different constituents. So when you’re going to try to sell to them it’s actually just not one person it’s a whole committee and group of people that you actually have to influence. And they all have different needs and requirements and what they want to do as a part of the business. So you’ve got to convince all of them to want to go to this deal with you. And then you’ve got to get through procurement you’ve got to get through legally you got to get through compliance. There’s so much regulatory compliance that’s involved here. But not only in one country like Canada but you actually have to go through European regulatory and compliance as well as American regulatory compliance because they are global in nature. Right. So you have to do all of that with the customer and then you actually have to do the exact same thing internally at Microsoft in your company that you work for because Microsoft is organized the exact same way. And so that level of complexity inside and outside of the customer it was really really challenging.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

I’ll say this I mean I’ve made a lot of money at Microsoft I’ve ranged anywhere from 125 to 300 percent of plan I’ve run a 50 million dollar business and won numerous individual contributor awards so I’m ecstatic about my performance in years at Microsoft.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

I bought in to this whole notion about work life balance. I think like a lot of other people which is you know you want it all. And what I’ve realized is that I don’t think that’s actually the case. You can have it all but you just can’t have it at the same time. And what I found out is that you know there’s going to be ebbs and flows. So at certain points in your life your personal life is going to be very very important to you so you put that on the front burner at certain points your business life is going to be really important you’re closing a major deal you’re doing something game changing. And then that becomes the priority and focus for that kind of period of time. And you know if you want to win there price to be paid for it and there’s just no way around that you know when you look at the true champions the people who actually won it like Michael Jordan who’s won it multiple times at the highest levels. He paid the price for that. Right. He practices every day he works his butt off to get to that level and it’s no different than what we do in sales right. If you want to win you’re going to have to put the time and the effort into it. And I think it’s every one individual decision whether they decide it’s worth it or not. But winning costs.

Continue Reading …

Clip from Episode 25: Trong Nguyen – Enterprise Sales Success at Microsoft & “Winning the Cloud”:

You know it’s funny when I started in sales and I had a lot of different coaching from different people and they all said to me listen you can’t be honest with the customer just tell them what they want to hear. Go close your deal and then move on. And what I found out was that wasn’t necessarily the best advice. And as kind of went through my career and journey and started dealing with the higher level executives the C-suite and a lot bigger companies what I realized is that honesty is the best policy. You know I’ll give you an example. When you deal with the top c-level executives at their level I mean there’s probably six or seven levels of management below them. There’s so much that gets filtered when it gets up to them that you know a big problem at the beginning. By the time it reaches them you know they’ve solved world hunger and world peace. At the same time and so when I go in there I’m just completely honest and transparent with them about it. And I tell them what I think the real issues are. And I tell them you know don’t take my word for it check it out for yourself. And invariably they do check it out and they find out that hey you know what it is actually pretty right on spot on in my assessment of it. So that’s why I honestly think today being honest is your best approach to sales.

Continue Reading …