Clip from Episode 39: Microsoft’s #1 Inside Sales Corporate Account Manager – Phil Terrill:
And my upbringing my you know my mom and my step dad have a business. And so I was able to you know take the learning I had at that company where I you know I used to sit you know every week with our CFO. And I actually went through you know our PNL statements our earnings reports and things like that. And so then that helped me really learn how to go look at a business you know because at the end of the day a lot of people make decisions of data off and especially on their financials and the financials tell the story. And so once I got really comfortable learning how to look how businesses manage their money and how they make decisions off of you know their financial decisions. You know I became like what I would call like close to dangerous. Like I wasn’t enough because I didn’t study finance or any of these things. But this combination of entrepreneurialism like going to actually work in corporate you know then smashing those together in a sales role like this one inside sales actually you know really helped me just go to town in a different way than people normally anticipated and it helped me have some of those even broader business conversations just given the background.
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- Managing leadership expectations around admin work and sales forecasting
- Having a business conversation based on earnings calls
- Building relationships in inside sales “I humanized everything”
- “I’m going to do whatever it takes for my customer to be successful”
- Business acumen and financial acumen are more important than sales skills especially at the c-level
- “At the end of the day a great seller doesn’t always sell”
- Building trust and influence by telling a customer “No”
- “#1 comes with a price”
- Getting out of the data and just having conversations to build pipeline
- “I would spend about 4-5 hours a day just talking to customers”
- Effectively introducing yourself to existing customers as their new account manager
- Phil’s toolkit for managing a territory of 168 accounts
- Using gratitude to stay sane “given the stress that sellers have”
- Keeping a clean email inbox
- Staying focused on the results and on selling time
- After a call, when the information is freshest, go document it
- “I had one day every week where I didn’t talk to existing customers” Going after all new customers
- The mentality that it takes to get to #1
- Having a quarterback mentality “I wanted to put in 150% so that way at least I hit quota”
- Leading the team as an individual contributor
- From Top Account Manager to Sales Enablement at Microsoft
- Sales: Do you really want to do this?
- How are you going to differentiate yourself from the millions of other sellers?
- “Think about that territory or book of business as your own business”
- You should enjoy it with a passion or you should do something else because you won’t be successful