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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