What are the secrets of successful salespeople?
In today’s fast-moving tech landscape, representatives are expected to showcase exceptional marketing skills and data savvy, while also wielding deep technical knowledge of the product they’re selling. But that’s not all.
Active listening, curiosity, conflict resolution — these soft skills are all equally invaluable when it comes to building genuine relationships with customers. Just ask Robbie Hassett, an account executive focused on midmarket sales at Yext. Though the AI search company offers a suite of innovative products, understanding the inner workings of its search platform is only one step in the process of selling it.
“Don’t get me wrong: Knowing the product inside and out is important,” said Hassett. “But if you aren’t able to dig deep to understand your prospect’s challenges at a level that they might not even understand, you will end up losing the deal.”
Built In NYC sat down with reps at eight local tech companies and asked them to explain what stands out to customers about their products — as well as which skills are most critical in order to get potential sales across the finish line.
Asana is a project management platform that helps teams orchestrate their work, from daily tasks to strategic initiatives.
What about your company’s product makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Since I joined Asana, I can count the number of internal emails I’ve received on one hand. That’s because we don’t use email — all of our work is managed using our product. We collaborate across teams, run nearly all of our processes out of Asana and rely on it to increase clarity while minimizing “work about work” — namely: communicating about work, searching for information, switching between apps, managing shifting priorities and chasing status updates. I truly believe our product, design and engineering teams have built a platform that can materially improve the way nearly any organization accomplishes and tracks its work, resulting in a happier and more productive workforce.
Managing my time effectively is an ever-present challenge.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product?
Three things stand out for me: Value selling, prioritization of time and energy, and adaptability.
While Asana continues to top G2’s Enterprise and Project Management Grids, it takes curiosity and empathy to explain how Asana can move organizations forward and bring clarity to their most complex cross-team collaboration needs. Our prospects are placing trust in us as partners, so the best sellers spend effort on communicating why Asana can make an impact — and are good at showing how it does so.
We are constantly solving more challenges and identifying more opportunities to help our customers. That comes with a certain amount of rigor in terms of prospecting appropriately and consistently, being creative with outbound efforts, and working with cross-functional partners on aligning our capability to specific customer needs. Managing my time effectively is an ever-present challenge.
Finally, we are hyper-focused on bringing Asana to more customers around the world. Our business is at an inflection point of enablement, where process improvements are constantly evolving. We are writing our playbook as we learn and grow, leaning on core values such as patience, resilience and co-creation.
Pumpkin is a pet insurance provider.
What about your company’s product makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Pumpkin pet insurance plans were created to drive more pet-owner visits to veterinary clinics and help remove economic barriers. The numerous benefits of Pumpkin for the veterinary industry make pitching it a very rewarding experience. We help with clinic profitability, reducing compassion fatigue and allowing veterinarians to get back to the main reason why they got into this industry: to practice the best medicine and help as many pets as possible.
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product?
The number one skill required to be successful selling Pumpkin is a passion for animals and veterinary professionals. Presentation skills are also key in our role because our main responsibility is educating veterinarians in person and virtually on the benefits of pet insurance and how Pumpkin stands out from our competition. The ability to independently and collaboratively provide compassion and solutions that benefit pets, their owners and veterinary hospitals is also critical. Lastly, a strong belief in our mission — “to make the best pet care pawsible fur all” — is impurrative.
Yext is a search experience cloud company that guides brands in building user experiences.
What about your company’s service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
As a comprehensive search platform that touches the entire customer journey, our focus at Yext includes fixing many of the pain points that a customer might encounter with a prospect, from a third-party search platform all the way to a prospect’s own website. Because so many of these pain points are public-facing, we can slip into the shoes of a prospect’s potential customer and document the obstacles we run into.
Does the prospect see a bunch of negative reviews that have gone unanswered? Is their name, address and phone number information inconsistent across platforms? Do they fail to provide answers to customers’ popular questions through their own site search experience? Our research into these kinds of questions allows us to make an educated hypothesis about the prospect’s priorities and tailor our pitch to more powerfully demonstrate how Yext can support those goals.
I am a firm believer in the idea that we are selling to the people, not the company.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s service?
One of the most common misconceptions about being in tech sales is that you have to be a technology expert. But I am a firm believer in the idea that we are selling to the people, not the company, and that means it’s far more important to have a deep understanding of people and master the art of conversation and active listening than it is to understand the most intricate technical aspects of the software development kit.
Outside of communication, adapting or learning quickly is one of the most important skills to being successful — and that in itself is one of the undeniable truths about sales in any industry. We must evolve and optimize our sales strategy, continuously honing our craft to be ahead of the curve of an ever-changing list of customer challenges. It’s worth remembering that, if you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re most likely not.
MaestroQA builds software that helps customer service managers coach their teams.
What about your company’s product makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Customer support teams are increasingly seen as departments that can provide a wealth of knowledge for customer experience. Traditionally, quality assurance for support teams has been focused on what agent behaviors can be improved, though more companies are recognizing the need for a more holistic view into internal processes, policies and product gaps that hurt the customer experience. MaestroQA uniquely helps our customers have better insights into their specific friction points, so they can better accomplish their goals while supporting larger company initiatives around customer retention, lifetime value and brand image.
Curiosity, empathy and listening skills are huge for our team.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product?
Curiosity, empathy and listening skills are huge for our team. MaestroQA’s platform is customizable at a self-service level, so understanding the challenges our customers face is crucial to showcasing the differentiators we have that will help that customer. Additionally, curiosity as to why a specific feature is required, or around the reasons a process is in place, plays a huge role for best presenting how MaestroQA will be uniquely able to help in a customer’s environment. Empathy is also essential, since solutions in the market have not historically been focused on QA’s needs. Recognizing the frustrations our prospects have, and showing a better path forward, helps forge long-lasting partnerships with our customers.
Worksome is building a global enterprise platform that connects companies to independent workers in an on-demand way.
What about your company’s service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
The old ways aren’t working, and the future of work is now. Worksome helps companies find, manage, pay and optimize their processes with flexible workers. Many organizational leaders have realized they can be more efficient with contractors, freelancers and consultants, but they need a platform to help manage speed, cost risk and experience as those variables relate to both internal workers and the external workforce. Companies have been using clunky vendor management systems and managed service providers with little to no oversight on spending across teams and clients. With Worksome, you can easily see and pull reports across many filters.
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s service?
Curiosity! Since Worksome solves so many problems, it’s so important to be able to learn about a company’s current process and see how it can be improved and optimized. In addition, it’s quite important to be able to speak to stakeholders in different teams, such as HR, operations and finance, and see what is most important to them. Also, stories and numbers around how we’ve been able to help current customers are extremely helpful when building a business case to implement Worksome.
DigitalOcean is a cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service platform built for developers.
What about your company’s product makes it great for pitching to prospects?
DigitalOcean enables entrepreneurs globally to do what previously wouldn’t have been possible. We simplify cloud computing so those developers and businesses can focus on creating software, applications and products that change the world. Generally, people enjoy discussing their goals. Our obligation is to help make those visions a reality. When you couple that with the fact that 14 million new businesses are born every year, the small and medium-sized cloud market and builders make pitching DigitalOcean a natural, fun process.
Most importantly, listen to your customer.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product?
Understanding customers and business outcomes is critical to identifying the value drivers or what’s important to the customer. Wrap your customers’ priorities into prior experiences and use cases to maximize efficiency across commercial and technical conversations. Prospects want to know how other customers have been successful and that they aren’t in a unique situation. Balancing that with keeping things simple and flexible is paramount. Most importantly, listen to your customer.
Publishers Clearing House, or PCH, is a multiplatform entertainment and commerce publisher focused on first-party data and identity solutions for advertisers.
What about your company’s service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
As the industry moves toward cookie deprecation, the reliance and demand for authenticated first-party data will be a major focus for marketers. Publishers Clearing House is primed to play a key role. We have a 100 percent registered user base and are attempting to align with identity-first buyers on their strategies for cookieless targeting.
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s service?
We are looking for creative and flexible thinkers who are able to hit the ground running. The ability to sell across platforms and products — mobile, data, desktop — to high-level marketers will be the key to success at PCH. You must be able to effectively communicate the value proposition around first-party and zero-party data to clients and build programs that meet the needs of marketers in this data-first, privacy-centric environment.
As we look to scale our business and grow our product set, PCH offers the ideal opportunity to join a startup within a legacy organization. You’ll contribute to a high-caliber team in a business that is experiencing rapid and dramatic growth. Ideal candidates will have experience and measurable success in an advertising sales environment, as well as experience selling cross-network marketing solutions such as integrated sponsorships and display advertising. It also helps to have experience succeeding while mobile in a data-first environment.
Describing its product as “a business-in-a-box for dentists,” Dandy is a healthcare startup that offers fully digital dental lab service.
What about your company’s service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Dandy is on a mission to disrupt and revolutionize the dental industry, which historically has been very tech-resistant. We are building out an elite operating system for dentistry, where technology will play a key part in saving dental practices time and money, leading to an overall better patient experience. We set dentists up to seamlessly transition to a fully digital product workflow. We provide them with the hardware to take 3D scans, a software platform that gives them a direct line-of-sight into the lab process with a live support feature, and — on the back end — best-in-class lab services and products they can rely on.
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s service?
Here at Dandy, we are selling innovation and change. Our goal is to show our prospects the true value of our product and how it can impact their day-to-day operations. We need people with a proven track record of successful discovery processes and the ability to influence both gatekeepers and decision-makers. Our team is made up of hungry, driven, dedicated and fearless hunters who are always looking for their next opportunity and win. Although we seek out competitive individuals, we also pride ourselves on a collaborative process and environment, wherein we continually seek to level up our skills.
