Upgrade the Wine, Sell the Desserts

This week I met with a leader from one of the more interesting AI companies.  He is building out his sales organization and he reached out to Shine Talent for help. We talked quite a bit about what it takes to be a great salesperson and how this generation of enterprise salespeople have not learned the ART of selling.  Most have been trained leveraging data, technology, and a script.  This works incredibly well for SaaS companies that have found product market fit and are scaling.  The shortcoming with this type of salesperson, when bringing a new technology to market, is they don’t have the creative thinking and experience to pivot their pitch when the questions go off script.  The challenge enterprise sales leaders are facing right now is that the pool of outstanding salespeople has shrunk.  The last fifteen years were a bull market where we raised a generation of “robot sellers” who have not been trained on how to creatively sell through objections or who have the skills to get inside the mind of the buyer, to eliminate their fears, and excite them about what the technology can do for their business. I first learned the art of selling as a 16-year-old waitress, working at Denny’s, convincing people to order up and get the Grand Slam. By the time I was 18, I moved to more expensive restaurants, where I learned that getting customers to buy bottles of wine and order desserts was the secret to getting big tips.  I quickly figured out how to read the table and cater my pitch to each person at it. Waiting tables was the foundation of my sales career and the lessons I learned still hold true today. When we are interviewing sales candidates at Shine Talent, we are incredibly quantitative in our work and run our candidates through a rigorous interview process that goes deep to determine what drove their success. We also interview against the personal traits below, that we believe make a great seller, which all goes back to those waitressing years:

• Hustle:  Flipping my tables mattered.  Two seatings a night meant double the tips.  A great salesperson responds immediately, is always anticipating a client’s needs before they do, and delivers what is promised, in a timely manner.
• Intuitiveness:  When there are two sips left in a drink, it is time to offer another.  A great salesperson is always anticipating their client’s needs.  They can read the room and they know where the conversation is going to go before it gets there.
• A great connector:  A great salesperson is authentic and works to find the common link.  You know when a customer asks to sit in your section, you’ve won them over.
• An outstanding storyteller:  Don’t just share the specials, tell how the chef shops for the ingredients or what inspired the recipe.  Nobody cares about a product, what they care about is how the product will impact their business.  A great storyteller will be able to design and share product use cases that matter to the individual business or person they are selling to.
• Listening is everything: It is hard to sell the prime rib special to a vegan.  Always launching your sales pitch with smart questions, so you know how to craft your story and solve for your customer's needs, is table stakes for great sellers.  Although, somehow, when the pressure is on, we see even the best sellers revert to their robot pitch, thinking they can accelerate a deal.  It doesn’t happen.  It is a well-known fact that great selling starts with great listening, but it is a fact that will always warrant a call-out.

The applications for AI are endless and exciting.  I’m seeing new companies surface with all different use cases, and I am a true believer in what AI can do for a business. But the technology is still nascent and confusing to many and to be a seller of any new technology, you need to be creative and inventive through the sales process. You are selling a vision, not a proven product, and people have a hard time buying a vision.  Great sellers are a rarity these days and as we enter into a new era of tech, during a financial downturn, it is the great salespeople that will set your company apart.