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

Selling in a complex environment is a team sport. Right. You can’t do it alone. I know in sales there’s a lot of lone wolves out there. There’s a lot of heroes out there where hey I’m going to go do this I’m going to go hunt the whale on my own and you know one or two times out of ten they may be able to do it. But our solutions today in our environment’s so complex that you can’t do it by yourself. You can’t be the expert in everything. And it’s really a team sport and it’s about kind of getting the best out of your teams in every which way that you can. The second we touched on earlier which is communications. You just have to really really there is no such thing as over communicating whether it’s internally with your teams or externally with your customers and clients when you’re leading a big big project. So many things can kind of derail it and get it off the hinges. So really really communicate communicate communicate. And the last thing is always keep a long term perspective. Right. You know some of these big game changing deals take a year or two to go do. Right. It’s not going to be quick. It’s not going to be three four months and you’re in and out and keep the long term perspective with the customers because you build the customer relationships today and they’re happy. They’ll be around with you for the next 20 years. And I’ve seen it happen to me multiple times where customers I’ve dealt with had a great experience great relationship with them. I’m dealing with them. Ten years after.

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

I start with what do I actually need to improve on. Like what do I need to do differently. And I find either a skill set that I don’t have and then I go find out you know who are the best mentors potential mentors for those. And I put a list together of three four or five people and then I’d just go ask them. Scott like I’m completely transparent and honest with them and I’ll say hey I have this issue that I really want to try and address. I want to develop this skill set and you are one of the best people I’ve ever seen do this type of stuff. Could you help and coach me through this. Right. And I’d tell you Scott nine out of 10 times when you come to people for help and ask them for help. I’ve not seen them turn me down. Right. Like people in general are really more very willing to help you if you’re honest and you ask for it. And so you know I approach that the same way. When people come to me for help and I’m in a position where I can actually help them I do so because you need to pay it forward.

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

Mentors have been tremendously impactful to my success and I would tell you without them I would not be here today. And when I say mentors I think you need to kind of look at it in two different perspectives. One is you know around you in terms of you know in your company or outside of your company I actually have a whole bunch of different mentors that help me out with a whole bunch of different areas that I want to improve on. And then the other thing that’s just as important is mentors and coaches at your customers. So I actually all my customers that I’ve ever dealt with and worked with I make sure to develop a network of mentors there to help me kind of think through complex issues in terms of how we kind of relationship how we work different issues that come up between our two companies. And I would tell you without their mentorship and guidance we would have never experienced the success we’ve had with all of my clients. So that’s the view that I kind of take to mentoring in terms of how you kind of build it out. I would say mentorship relationships are like any other relationship right. There’s got to be give and take in so it’s great that you’re getting something from these mentors but also think about how you can actually help and impact them as well. What can you give back to them to kind of enrich their life in some way it whether it be business or personal and then it becomes a two way street. And I think those are the best type of mentor mentoring relationships I’ve seen.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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