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Elle Perez is Kaseya’s Account Manager of the Year and now leads a team of strategic account managers there. She has been selling and running teams since 1997, starting in marketing at Anheuser-Busch before the company told her that moving up meant carrying a quota. She joined Kaseya five years ago as an individual contributor in the strategic accounts division and reached the top of the leaderboard by refusing to sell transactionally.
This conversation gets specific about the parts of account management that rarely get taught: treating customers as partners rather than accounts, leading with business outcomes instead of product features, and using executive alignment between two C-suites as a door-opener when a relationship has stalled. Elle also walks through prioritizing a book of business without defaulting to the 80/20 rule, the real difference between hunting and growing, why she believes presence and body language are underrated skills, and the habit she wants every seller to adopt this week.
This episode was sponsored by: Nooks
Nooks – The agent workspace for intelligent outbound. Boost pipeline with AI agents that engage prospects across calls, email, social and more.
What We Covered:
[01:00] Her top three: being genuine, being confident in your product, and having a presence
[01:41] Twenty-eight years in sales and marketing, and five years at Kaseya
[02:21] Why she calls them partners, and never lets them see her as a vendor
[03:05] The mistake most sellers make: regurgitating the product instead of the business outcome
[03:52] Speaking the C-suite’s language and reading what actually drives them
[04:34] Who Kaseya serves, and what an MSP really is
[05:11] Origin story: marketing at Anheuser-Busch, then being told to go sell
[09:32] Why sales beat marketing for her: the customer directs the narrative
[10:47] Individual contributor versus manager, and the pull of sculpting someone else’s journey
[11:52] If she started over today, she would focus on being genuine and likable
[14:12] The deal: displacing a competitor inside a $60M company moving into managed services
[18:25] The result, two years on, and what it feels like to have built it
[18:59] What she is most proud of, and it is not a number
[19:57] The hardest part of account management: inheriting a customer who was burned
[22:36] Hunter versus account manager, transactional speed versus compounding relationships
[23:40] How she prioritizes a book of business, and why she is not loyal to 80/20
[27:44] How she structures an onsite that goes deeper than a demo
[29:20] Her day: up at 5, trainer at 5:45, standup at 8:40, stand-down at 5
[30:56] Forecasting the day, the week, the month and the quarter, every single day
[31:50] Golf, and why competing with yourself is the point
[34:24] The stack: Salesforce all day, plus ChatGPT and Claude
[35:59] Using AI to turn a rambling update into a recap a CEO will read
[37:18] Why she dropped sales methodologies in favor of presence
[38:39] Being proactive, and how to bring an Eeyore back up
[40:16] Motivation: money, her children, and the group home she plans to open
[41:37] The belief other sellers think is crazy: any account can be turned around
[42:29] The sales dogma she rejects outright
[44:44] Catching an error that was in her favor, and why sales karma is real
[45:34] Her advice for new sellers, and almost nobody says this one
[46:17] Good to great: define your own mediocrity, then beat it
[49:05] Her door-opener: putting her C-suite in front of their C-suite
[51:34] Watching her own Zoom calls back, and what she looks for
[52:52] The challenge: watch your sales calls back this week
Quotes:
“It’s being genuine. It’s being confident in your product and having a good presence.” (00:01:15)
“I don’t look at them as customers. I don’t want them to look at me as a vendor.” (00:02:33)
“It’s not an I thing, it’s a we thing.” (00:04:17)
“People buy things from people they like.” (00:12:22)
“Account management is really relationship management.” (00:24:04)
“You always have to do the right thing.” (00:44:52)
“What’s your definition of mediocrity? And whatever that definition is, be greater than that.” (00:46:22)
“Watching yourself back on a sales call, a Zoom sales call, is epic. It’s epic to your growth.” (00:51:56)
Resources Mentioned:
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Salesforce
ChatGPT
Claude
Kaseya
Connect with Elle Perez on LinkedIn
Sales Success Stories is part of the Sales Success Media family hosted by Scott Ingram