Coaching for Success with Mor Assouline

[00:00:00] Brad Seaman: You know, telling us your background, kind of how you got to where you’re at.

[00:00:03] Mor Assouline: Yeah. I, I mean, when I was younger, I, I studied marketing. I wanted to do, the classic, like Don Draper advertising. So I wanted to do copywriting. I thought I was good at it. I was good at it and good at it. And then, long story short didn’t go.

The marketing route stayed. I got into real estate, like everybody else in south Florida. That’s what people do. When you don’t know what to do. And then from there Well right out of college, actually, my first job out of college was a sales job, cold calling legit company. I quit the first day within the first hour.

I was scared out of my mind. And I’ve done sales before I’ve done like retail sales. I’ve done like door knocking when I was a kid trying to sell like tickets to go to the Washington DC trip. I D I did that, but when you’re older, you’re more aware of your anxiety. And so I quit first day and then I avoided sales for like three years.

Pete, the crazy sales PTSD has sales anxiety. yeah, and then when I was 25, 26 oh, sorry. A little bit before that I joined a color Williams brokerage and they were very bullish on cold calling and door knocking. And so that’s what I did. I did cold calling and door knocking for a year.

Got a part-time job at Allstate insurance, doing cold calling. And so after 12 months I did over 70,000 cold calls. I, I know I was able to track it because we had a phone tracker for both real estate and Allstate’s, I was able to attract the numbers, but, that got me over my fear of sales.

[00:01:25] Brad Seaman: W so real quick, I want to, I want to tap on the idea of having sales PTSD.

Cause I think a lot of people have that, right? So you sort of fall into a sales role. And it’s not what you expected and you have a little bit of trauma. So talk about kind of what was going on. W what created the traumatic experience, and then how did you get

[00:01:46] Mor Assouline: over that? Yeah, I think the issue was me. It wasn’t the company, so for me, when I, when I walked into the company, so the interview went really well.

The founder was like, you know what? We had another person we’re going to hire, but we love how you presented the interview. So we’re going to hire you. We’re going to order your business cards. So founder was really cool. Came in the first day, he introduced me to my colleagues. Everything was great.

And then he’s like, here’s a computer, here’s a laptop. here’s a, the phone, you know, you start making calls. And the first thoughts I popped into my head was like, Oh, I got to make calls in front of them. Like they’re, they’re working, but I, I was just barely aware that while I’m making calls, they’re going to be just like listening.

They’re not going to necessarily say anything, but they’re going to maybe think, oh, he sounds like an idiot or he doesn’t sound like he thought what he’s talking about. Or I just started like getting to where of my surrounding. And not in the moment. So I was just, I was, had a fear of being judged. and then you either stop there or you go into a rabbit hole and I went into a rabbit hole and I was like, oh shit.

And then I, first thing I did was open the computer and I checked my, I was just going through my Hotmail emails back in the day and I was archiving emails. I was like, I’m just trying to kill time. And then tire time, I’m like, oh my God, I got to make the calls. I gotta make the calls. I can’t, I can’t do this.

I can’t archive emails all day. I can’t knock. They’re going to know. Oh no, they know that I’m not, I’m not good at sales. And then I was like, okay, I gotta get outta here. I gotta, like, I think I’m gonna blow my cover. And so I quit. I just left. Yeah.

[00:03:11] Brad Seaman: So, so I think the fear of big judged is something that a lot of people, you know, it’s kinda like going to the gym the first time.

Right. I think a lot of people are super worried about going to the gym while people are gonna think about you, but, you know, the reality is. Most people aren’t going to pay attention to what you say you may feel differently. So I want to hear that. And the people that do are probably going to be trying to help.

[00:03:31] Mor Assouline: Yeah. I mean, I mean, I saw, I remember I started working out. I stopped since I got married, but when, when I started working out, like, I didn’t care so much about the gym. Like I never got anxiety in the gym. but it was definitely more well, if I were hired for a particular job and now I had to like show up to it.

Even I remember even when I was like, so I mean like fast forward, I became a VP of sales, got over my fear of selling, but I remember at one point at one company, I was a VP of sales and I was, it was a store. And I had to build out a bunch of departments. I got lost in the other departments and I stopped being front-facing in the sales side.

And at one point I went back to the sell side, coaching my team, and I wasn’t confident to get on the call and show them how it’s done and call the prospect just cause I was like, oh, I’ve been out of the game for a bit. Probably some month or two. And I’m like, if I screw up, they’re going to know, oh shit, how’s more VP of sales.

So I think the only way somebody asked me the other day or the other, it was like last month, like, how do I get over my anxiety of sales? How do I get over my fever? You’re not supposed to get over it. You’re supposed to get you’re supposed to just like the way I described it. The metaphor analogy I gave was when you buy a leather shoe for the first time, even if it’s a $600 shoe, it’s going to be really stiff.

It’s true. Mr. Leather is just really stiff until you break it in. And the first day you’re going to where it’s not going to feel comfortable. And so if you let the uncomfort decide whether it’s the right shoe or not, and you take it off, you should never going to wear the shouldn’t. If you’re down $600, the only way to make sure that the shoe is actually comfortable and get your money’s worth is to wear it every day, break it in, and then the leather ends up softening up and molds.

And so you’re not, not wearing the shoe you’re wearing the shoe, you’ve broken, you’re broken through it. And so I think sales, anxiety, and fear of sales or any, any fear at all is the exact same thing. But the more you avoid it, the more the fear compounds. And so the way to fix that is you got to get more at-bats so if you’re doing cold calling and you’re calling, let’s just say 10 calls per day, just cause you have a crazy fear.

Triple that call 30 phone numbers a day. If you’re doing demos, try to get more demos. If you’re, if you’re getting rejected, get rejected 30 times, 10 times more than what you’re currently getting rejected. You just gotta break your.

[00:05:49] Brad Seaman: So, so how do you make the transition from kind of BDR to VP of sales?

And then it looks like you guys had, at some point you’re part of a business that gets acquired, right? Tom, I’d love to hear about, I’d love to hear about that. You know, what the, what the process was like, getting the role, what it was like to have an acquisition.

[00:06:06] Mor Assouline: Yeah. So yeah, so I kind of went all over the place.

So quit, quit my job. My first still shot at college avoided sales for like three years. Then I got a marketing job. Then I switched into real estate, real estate, got me comfortable doing sales. Then I joined two startups that failed the third one practice Panther. I joined in as a first employee employee.

Number one I became a VP of sales within six months. And that was, I mean, the, the roles that I’ve I’ve had was, is an early stage B2B SAS startups. So within four months it went from just, I mean, sorry, within four years, I was the only employee with two founders. Four years later, we had 50 plus employees got acquired by Alpine software group.

Yeah, I mean the acquisition wasn’t like, you know, night and day, you felt the difference of, of of the culture, but it happened over time, yeah, I mean, that was an interesting, interesting journey. I got my PhD in, in startups and go to market and sales in that, in that job.

[00:07:02] Brad Seaman: Now, what would you say the big difference was?

So the first two companies that faced. Could you tell a difference in the company that succeeded versus the two that failed or was it just a different you could okay. You’re not in your head.

[00:07:16] Mor Assouline: Yeah. Yeah, you could. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So the first company I joined as the first employee it was a really cool.

It was called . It was sort of like orbits or kayak, but for booking movers. So you as a consumer are moving, so you would search and compare different movers and then you can book them. Pretty cool idea. Really pretty cool concept. So cool concept. They had very little money in, in what they raised.

They raised only $185,000. So that money ran out very fast. And so beyond starting out very fast, you can’t use that money for so much. You can’t spend crazy amounts of money on advertising. So. We had to do a lot of guerrilla marketing. And that takes time. It’s a branding play, guerrilla marketing.

So the failure in that company was lack of funding and we didn’t have enough. We didn’t have enough of a runway. And so after five months, the company shut down. The second company I joined a company called Sasha. It doesn’t exist anymore, obviously. they had funding. The owner of that company has a very successful commercial insurance company.

She loves technology. So she started this app where you can take photos or videos of anything that looks suspicious on the, you know, a white minivan that says free candy on it. Like that was our ad that we had. And she spent over a million dollars in India. Hired me as like marketing sales and then the way we went to market for the consumer side, the user end was we We did some Facebook ads and it was just a disaster.

And, and then there was another side to the business where it was like the police and law enforcement would have access to the cloud of all the photos of videos, but they didn’t buy into it so much. Nobody wanted it and they had the funding. So the third company practice Panther. One of the questions I asked was, do you have funding?

And the answer was yes. And the other question was is there an MVP? The answer was yes. And I was like, you have any, is there a proof of concept now? Also could people, are people using it, are people paying for it? So they weren’t, people weren’t paying for it, but people were using the software when I joined practice Panther.

So now when I, when I left my expense to go to any other company, How much funding do you have? What’s the runway and are people using it? If so, how much? And or do you have any paying customers? And is there a product market fit? If there isn’t a product market fit, then that’s a little bit more of a risky, risky move.

Cause you’re, you’re just figuring it out as you go and it’s, and if there is no product market fit and you’re going into a company that has forecast and quotas. That’s extremely risky and dangerous.

What did you feel like the biggest lesson you learned from the two failed startups was like as a sales

person or

[00:09:45] Brad Seaman: executive?

[00:09:46] Mor Assouline: Yeah. So as a sales person, But he that’s looking, or even an STR that’s looking for a startup, like a SAS company to join in, make sure there’s a product market fit. That’s for damn certain make sure there’s a runway also. And would you say like, Hey, if you’re looking at a company and you know, it’s bootstrap that has money it’s growing, it’s got cash.

That’s the same as having

runway. Well, no, you can have cash, but how long will that cash last year, last four. If it’s five months, that’s pretty risky. If it’s 12 months, it’s less risky if it’s more than 12 months. So it all depends. So you can ask like, Hey, I saw that you raised a seed round of 4 million or 5 million or whatever it is, you know, what’s the runway in that company?

What are we looking at? And I think somebody that’s going into an STR or a E role at a company may not feel. Entitled to ask that question, but they should ask that.

No, I think they definitely should. No, I think it’s super important. I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of of my friends that have entered markets have this same, same problem.

Right. They come in, they come in as a VP of sales or they come in as an executive and they don’t ask the right question. And then they get disheartened. And I think those are important, right? Cause if, if the company doesn’t have enough cash, it’s going to affect everybody around it. And if it doesn’t have product market, I mean, all three of those things that you listed out have great impacts in how people

[00:11:06] Brad Seaman: buy.

[00:11:08] Mor Assouline: Yeah. And then one thing I’ve been noticing, and I think it’s something to look for as an aid. Cause I’m talking to a bunch of A’s now on like LinkedIn and my, my Facebook community. But a lot of them tell me, I feel like I’m on an island by myself in terms of mentorship and coaching. And so a lot of these companies are hiring.

And if you look at their job description, it’s like surpass quota, achie, you know crush quota. Skill the company do all these things. And then you, you find out that they don’t offer any coaching. And their coaching is really only for the first 90 days of onboarding. And after that, it’s like, Hey, you’re on your own.

And I, and I made a poll on LinkedIn about this, and most reps aren’t getting coached from at least in my poll. Aren’t getting coached from their managers either because the managers or VPs of sales don’t have time. They just, at least for startups, that is I don’t know how it is for like an an Oracle or a Salesforce, but they don’t have time because they’re juggling too much because it’s a startup.

Or like one person just Yemen this morning. Like yeah, every time I. Schedule something on my manager’s calendar to do a coaching session. He rescheduled it for another time and then that keeps getting rescheduled. And so what happens is AEs are going into these camps. Because they’re promised equity and all this crap, they’re not getting coached.

And so their numbers suffer and then their numbers suffer and then they either get fired or they leave because they’re just disheartened and they don’t have any confidence anymore.

[00:12:26] Brad Seaman: So you’re seeing from your, from your community, from S from AEs and STRs, there’s a real desire to want to be coach.

[00:12:33] Mor Assouline: Yeah, I think so.

I think for like senior level AEs that are. They’ve been at a company for, you know, five plus years or so there’s less interest of coaching. They they’re sort of set in their ways. Like I know what I’m doing, don’t bother me for, it’s more for like the newer AEs that are a year old into their role or brand new to the role or two years into the role.

Or maybe you have AEs that are three years into the role, but they’re not, not hitting quota, but yeah, I’m, I’m seeing it more for newer age.

[00:13:02] Brad Seaman: And do you think, you know, there’s all kinds of stats going around the internet about people not hitting their quota. Do you think this is a signal? Like you think this is a significant piece of that?

[00:13:12] Mor Assouline: Yeah, I think this is one. So I think there’s a few reasons. One lack of coaching that’s for sure. That’s 1000% true. There’s plenty of studies beyond my poll that, that points to. Lack of coaching yields, lack of quota attainment and more coaching yields, more quota attainment. The other thing is if we’re talking about BD or if we’re talking about startups like really early state startups the forecast and the quota that said is sort of arbitrary depending on the startup.

If there’s not, if the startup is less than two years old, then what sort of history. Numbers, do they have to go off of, to show, Hey, based on historic data, we’ve hit this amount. And so we expect the AEs to hit this amount. There is none. And so it’s very arbitrary and they’re throwing numbers on the board.

And may times the founders are rerunning the numbers. So the forecasts are new they’re rerunning quota. And that just sets up the age for failure, even though it sets even up the VP of sales for failure. Cause he’s going after a quota for his team that is based on an arbitrary. Arbitrary decision-making.

And, and if he falls short of it, then it’s like, Hey, you see that VP of sales doesn’t work. But if you look at the numbers, maybe the numbers don’t, aren’t making sense. It’s it’s on. I forgot if a gazy forgot gassy, it’s a Waze woozy. Right? So, so I think that’s one lack of coaching, I think over inflated numbers.

And I think some companies they over hire so they go to these investors and they, and I’ll tell you firsthand. Founders are not necessarily are pitching the story and the vision. That’s what, if you look at Adam Newman that at, at, for rework and you watch the documentary investors bought into a story, they didn’t really care much about the numbers.

And so tell a good story and you could probably raise some money. And then a lot of, a lot of founders, and it’s a fact I’ve seen it there. They inflate their numbers to the FA to the investors so they can get the money. And so now. The company has been infused with new money and not to have a ton of pressure to live up to that.

And so they put they, they onboard or offload that pressure onto the VP of sales, which offers that pressure to the AEs and so on and so forth and the trickles down from the top. And so one of the things that they do in order to like hit the numbers that they presented to investors is we need a higher, we need manpower.

And so they hire a bunch of people. They don’t have the number of leads to support all those new reps. And so the whatever leads there are currently hitting, it’s being spread thin.

[00:15:33] Brad Seaman: So, okay. So all this money’s being raised, there’s a S everywhere. You know, we got to assume that a lot of these CEO’s are overinflated, you know, now, do you think that happens in second?

It’s not happening in the second, third round, right. Because we’ve already established.

[00:15:49] Mor Assouline: Yeah. I think it’s happening more in like the seed, the seed, the seed round. I’m sure it’s happening across the board honestly, but at least I’ve seen it in seed rounds series A’s but mostly a lot in C. Okay.

[00:16:00] Brad Seaman: And you think there was a case where I was going with this was, do you think there’s some kind of like retribution or kickback? Is this going to recoil? Like, are we going to see a recoiling of all these companies not being able to hit their number?

[00:16:12] Mor Assouline: So I was thinking about that today. I was like, W like some companies are hunting like 40 plus AEs for 2022, and some companies are hiring a hundred plus and it’s actually insane.

I’m thinking to myself. Yeah, they definitely don’t have the number of inbound leads to support this volume of new hires. So they’re probably, so my guess is these new hires are spending a good chunk of their time doing outbound territory base. It has to be. And I just think outbound activity takes longer to ramp up.

So I think if a company is doing up on, they should have a realistic. For the new reps. Like if a company is looking to scale fast, I think the way to do it, my opinion is to put more money into ads. Capterra software advice, because you just can’t compete with an ad that you please tonight where you get a lead overnight versus sending out an ad by an email, follow up a cold call, and then you get on the call with them.

It just takes time.

[00:17:02] Brad Seaman: Yeah. W so I guess it was, we could go all over the place. There’s two things that you threw out that I would love to talk about one I’d like to continue to talk about. Coaching and training at the startup level. And then the other thing I’d like to talk about is, you know, strategy, you know, you mentioned I pay G2 crowd Capterra so what’s, let’s spend the next, you know, 10, 15 minutes talking about those two subjects.

So let’s talk, let’s go back to talking about coaching because I think that’s super important. And so, you know, just open a open conversation. Give me all your thoughts about coaching and like, what do you think startups should be doing that they’re not?

[00:17:41] Mor Assouline: Yeah. So I think let’s talk about like a demo coaching.

There’s I think there’s plenty of outbound coaching out there, but let’s, you know, talk about both whatever. I think startups should have a, an internal th th the sales leader should have Minimum 15, 20% of their time spent on consistently coaching the reps after onboarding even it just doesn’t happen.

And so if, and it doesn’t happen because the sales leader has a ton of other stuff that they have to hit other initiatives, hiring, interviewing, onboarding, et cetera, et cetera. So if that’s the case, then I think that startup where that sales leader should bring in a copilot to help. And that copilot could be a contractor.

It could be a company, it could be whatever it is. And they should have that to supplement and the sales manager or the VP of sales. So that’s what they should do for coaching. Another thing they should have for coaching is they need to have some sort of software to be able to coach at scale.

So either a VOMA gong, chorus refract, one of them, they need to have that.

[00:18:45] Brad Seaman: Now what’s the first one that you

mentioned

[00:18:47] Mor Assouline: AVOMA

A-V-O-M-A.

Yeah. The reason why I mentioned it is cause they’re month to month versus everybody else. That’s a yearly they’re month to month. And I think for startups, if they’re like strapped for cash, or they’re not comfortable paying upfront for a year and do two months a month and is a, is a good one for that one, you got to have the tech stack and you gotta have the.

It’s just like Marcus, Limonus the profit people process, process technology,

right?

It’s a three piece. So people process product.

[00:19:17] Brad Seaman: I was, I was trying to like, say it with you, but then I got all the words. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your business. So talk to us about what you’re doing now.

[00:19:28] Mor Assouline: Yeah, FETC it started off as just like a standalone product.

But after our launch, I got some success. I noticed that, and I did additional market research. The problem with just having a course as it’s standalone is that it’s the responsible responsibility of either the sales leader or the AA to take that and then make it their own based on their buyer, persona ICP, et cetera.

So what I did was I did a slight pivot where FTC now is a coaching program, a training program, or I would work with companies that have AEs and I would specifically work on their demos, improving their demos. I don’t talk about outbound. I don’t pitch up, like I know outbound. It’s just not something that I, I saw that

on the demo site.

[00:20:09] Brad Seaman: And what do you feel like the biggest mistakes people make on demos

are?

[00:20:12] Mor Assouline: Yeah, lack of discovery is usually they, they, they treat discovery as if it’s a luxury and not a need to have. And so what happens is they, they stay too much on the surface on the discovery. So if they ask a prospect. Hey what’s what do you, you know, what’s the reason we’re on a call today, whatever it is, they’ll say something like prospect gold spot.

Yeah. We’re looking for more robust system. Alright. And that’s enough for the rep to take down a note and move on and that’s a problem. What does robust system even mean? You know, what is, we’re looking for a true partner technology. What does that even mean? And so they don’t spend enough time on discovery.

[00:20:44] Brad Seaman: So I think

it’s a, so we’re going to get into a little bit of, maybe you may be the challenger sale if you read that book. Yeah. I loved that book. I had Jen Allen on the podcast. We just go great. We had a great, but, but yeah. So why do you think people don’t like, it’s natural for me to be like, Like, what, what, what robust, like what does that, like, what do you mean by robust, but it’s not natural for everybody, for everybody else.

So, so why do you think that is? Why is it not natural for, for everybody to throw the brakes up when they hear were words like this?

[00:21:15] Mor Assouline: I think couple reasons. I think lack of confidence, they just don’t feel confident enough to control the conversation. And in order to do, in order to dig on discovery, you need to have a level of control of the conference.

And take the reins. And I think you have a newer III that is talking to a VP or a CEO or founder, and they’re intimidated because they’re intimidated. They’re like I got to rush through this. I know because I’ve been there, I’ve done it before. So lack of confidence. Another, another reason is. And I think that’s really a big one.

Another reason is to have, they have a quota that they have to attain and they know in order to have that quota, they have to close the deal and they completely skip the part of discovery. And they’re like, all right, I need to get on demo in order to close the deal. I need to do discovery in order to do the demo in order to close the deal.

And so I think their money, like they’re driven by this need for. And so they’re trying to take a shortcut, but I still think the default is it goes back to lack of confidence or a lack of a lack of understanding of, of why discovery soil crucial. And that could come from a lack of training from their sales leader.

The sales center is, is not, is not pushing the discovery on them.

[00:22:21] Brad Seaman: Yeah. Now what’s your opinion on should software sales reps be doing discovery demos in the same. Same, same, same meeting. Yeah.

[00:22:33] Mor Assouline: Short answer is it depends. I think if you’re dealing with a larger type of deal where, you know, it’s going to, it’s going to be an enterprise, it’s not going to be a one call close or even a two demo close.

And you’re going to have to speak to the head of this, the head of that, the head of that then in that case there’s no point rushing. During, I mean, there’s no point doing the disco end demo at the same time, because you know, it’s going to go through different rounds and sometimes if you’re dealing with an SMB mid-market you could definitely do the disco.

In the SMB mid-market space that I’ve been in, it was disco demo most of the time. And then at the same, at the same time. And then there were some times where we’re doing discovery as part of the demo, but the discovery was so deep. And so there was just so much vibe happening between me and the prospect that I don’t want to give up.

I don’t want to like stop that. I wanna, I wanna get as much Intel as I can. I want the prospect to open up as much as I can with some source. We’ll do the demo. Later on in the day, or if we have time, we’ll just do the dumb right then and there, or we’ll schedule the demo out later in the week. But so I think it depends.

I usually default to disco demo.

[00:23:35] Brad Seaman: Now, when you say disco demo, disc

discovery, call space, then you do a demo or?

[00:23:42] Mor Assouline: Yeah, it’s all on the same call. So let’s do a 45 minute 60 minute blocked out on my calendar that first 10 or 15 minutes will be. And then based on the discovery, I can quickly go into the demo.

Now, part of that is, well, hold on. Don’t you need to customize the demo. That’s where reprise comes in or demos that comes in or Walnut it. That’s what I’m saying. It depends on the type of software you’re selling.

[00:24:02] Brad Seaman: If you threw out a word there.

[00:24:06] Mor Assouline: Walnut. Yeah, they’re a competitor to reprise and a demo stack.

[00:24:10] Brad Seaman: Okay. And that’s just a product you use on the demo to make sure it goes smooth.

[00:24:14] Mor Assouline: No, that’s sort of, it allows you to create a demo environment that that you can use specific to whoever you’re talking to. I’ve never used any of those softwares. Cause I w in the world that I, I come from, I don’t need it.

It’s not an overly complex software. Create that has like very buggy and I don’t need it, but for big enterprise complex solutions, I can see the use for those softwares,

[00:24:36] Brad Seaman: Insurance. Yeah. I, you know, I think about, see, I’ve seen, I think it depends, right? I think it depends on your sales cycle. Depends on your sales guys.

I’ve seen some of our clients do or partners as a partner specifically go straight to that. We work with, it goes straight to it. And I think it really hurts him that they don’t do a discovery call. You know, they’re so focused on the demo. It’s like, how do you sell, if you don’t understand what the person’s trying to solve

for?

[00:24:59] Mor Assouline: Yeah. Even now, like, right. Like I’m like speaking to like company, like founders for like FTC my company. And like like in order for me to know, like, I don’t, it’s not a software, so it’s, I’m not demoing anything. My demo is my pitch of what I do, but even then I’ll spend majority of the call doing.

Hey w how many demos you doing per month? What’s the conversion rate? How many reps you have and it’s all discovery. And then if we have time, then I’ll go into my pitch. If we don’t have time, we’ll do a follow up based on the notes that I had in my previous call. But that’s just my that’s sort of my business model for my product that I’m selling.

But like practice Panther, for example we could do a disco demo on the same call. It was if, if you know the product really, really, really well, and you know, your buyer persona really well, you can quickly pivot from disco. Going to the demo and knowing exactly what features to show and how to talk about those

features.

[00:25:46] Brad Seaman: Yeah. I think as a buyer, I think the biggest mistakes. So I take a lot of sales calls. Cause I like to hear, I just regularly take calls because I like to stay current with how people are selling and it helps me be a better seller. And so I would say, and I encourage my salespeople to do the same thing.

Cause I think the best way to learn is to learn from other people. So what I have found. And some of this has maybe personality is that you know, questions are super important in the sales process, but you also have to be really like, you gotta be genuine. So if you’ve come out of a sales training and you come out of Sandler and you’re just fresh out of sales school, you can be really intaglio mystic like Sandler with the wrong young rep can be just, just tons of damage.

I think, to the sale. Because it’s aggressive. It’s not, you know, you gotta be empathetic and curious, which I don’t know how you sell without curiosity, but there is a whole lot of people that aren’t very curious. And I think the other thing in the, in the demo that I people get, I get, I watched this show in features that are important, you know, like just, just getting on stuff that, you know, going through the process.

And I can respect as a sales person, like I respect the. Like, Hey, you got a process and a flow that you want to go through. So it’s like, I don’t want to mess that up. But at the same time, I think you gotta be cognizant of like being able as a seller, you gotta be able to adapt and change to your buyers person.

Like how your buyer bought your person and the personality of the person you’re selling to make super important.

[00:27:22] Mor Assouline: I think every. Should have part of their playbook should have a area there that talks about the ICP and the buyer persona. And then let’s go a little bit more granular that buyer persona should contain.

Let’s just say one of your buyer persona is a CEO or let’s call it a VP of marketing. That section of VP of marketing should contain sort of like a. A matrix of like, Hey, what is this VP of marketing? Like, what do they like, what do they dislike? What are the day look like? What is, what is the role, the responsibilities, what keeps him up?

And I’m like, oh, all this stuff.

[00:27:55] Brad Seaman: I think that’s great.

[00:27:56] Mor Assouline: And so when you study the, your buyer persona really well, and you know it by heart, when you’re on a call with the VP of marketing, you already know how they’re thinking, what they like, what they need to see, and then you do the discovery and they find out and you find out that they’re trying to accomplish XYZ.

This type of challenge, then you can quickly pivot onto the demo and say, Hey, based on what you’re telling me, this is exactly what you like, because when you know your buyer, you know, your industry and you know your product, you can quickly do the demo. You don’t need to schedule a demo. And then you only show them if you have like 20 features, but based on the discovery, there’s only one feature that’s going to like hit there, you know, really drive home what they need.

Then only show that one. Yeah.

[00:28:34] Brad Seaman: And I can say, as a buyer, I’ve definitely seen people throw, like I’ve been in demos where they’ve thrown out something that I didn’t know the product did. And I’m like, oh, that’s really interesting. Yeah. You know but I would have liked to experienced it, like, Hey, I’m going to run through, I’m going to do like a quick run through a features.

And if you, if I ping something. That’s really exciting to you. You just say, you, you say I hit a nerve and let’s, let’s talk about it. That’s personally how I would like to, you know, to do it. Cause I think one of the, one of the downsides to all the visibility and transparency that we have is sellers now are buyers.

So as a buyer, I can go and I can, I can think I’m learning everything about your product, right? I can go on your website and go to your blog posts. I can go to your GG. The, the, I think the danger to that is that you get a buyer that thinks they know more about your product than they do. And that could be reality.

And that could also be not reality. In the sense that I did a bunch of research, one time on a product, I was annoyed. I felt like I knew more about the product than the salesperson. And he actually he actually school, he actually got me, like, he actually threw a feature out of me that I didn’t know.

Like, I felt like. You know, I had a couple of hours into research on the business and I thought I knew better than he knew. And he actually, he actually got me and he’s like, boom, what about this? You knew about this. I’m like, I didn’t know about that.

[00:29:49] Mor Assouline: Yeah. I had the complete opposite. I had, I did a demo with a an email service provider type of vendor.

And this is a few weeks ago and I was like, do you have, so they, one of the features that it was sort of like a competitor to outplay or outreach. And I wanted to know if I could embed loom video. And for it to show up as a, as a Jif. And he’s said, no, we can’t do that, but I can find out if that’s a feature request or whatever it is.

Long story short, I’ll be off the demo. And I was like messing around with, and I was like, holy shit, you can do it. Actually. There’s, there’s a function. And I emailed them back. I was like, you see, you could, you could use like, oh wow, you learn something new. And it was a very basic functionality. It wasn’t, that’s his

response.

He should know that. Right. I mean, that’s pissed me off that

[00:30:30] Brad Seaman: salespeople need to know. I think they need, or they don’t think, but they need to know about the product.

[00:30:35] Mor Assouline: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s why I, that’s why I believe that an IE will have more success in working at a software company that they have used or.

Like, right. Like, it’s just easy. Like I can’t relate to accounting software cause I’m never going to be a CPA and I’ve no interest in being a CPA. So I probably won’t ever want to sell an accounting software. But selling e-commerce software, selling a sales or marketing type of software, I can relate to that.

And it’s gonna be a lot easier for me to. So I think that’s

[00:31:07] Brad Seaman: now, obviously you weren’t an attorney, but you were able, you were able to find something there that you felt like you could. Yeah,

[00:31:12] Mor Assouline: well, I was definitely not an attorney, so I was successful at it. And I think a natural born sales person or have like the natural DNA could probably be successful at selling something they can’t fully relate to.

And that was. One of my F I call it the third attempt or my first roles as a VP of sales at a software company at a B2B. And so like, for me, it was just exciting selling software. And so, yeah, I got lucky. Right. And I, I, even if you give me an accounting software, so I could probably do it really well, but But it’s just, long-term, you’ll get burnt out for selling a software you can’t relate to.

And I know, cause I talked to somebody, I was selling an accounting software. They’re like, this is boring. I’m like, you sound more.

[00:31:50] Brad Seaman: Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. I totally, I get, I get it. Yeah. I don’t know.

[00:31:53] Mor Assouline: And I think it’s, yeah, I think it’s worth mentioning even a VP of sales or even an ag. That’s going into a, a software company that they can relate to, that they love.

Your first few demos are going to suck. They just won’t be good. I know if I go into a company now, And sorry, I joined full-time and they gave me their software to sell. And I spend, you know, a couple of weeks like learning the product and I go sell for the first time. I won’t do as good as the top sales rep there.

I just won’t. Cause if there’s a learning curve, I’ll need to know the softer, like the back of my hand in order for me to sell it, like it’s, you know, like it’s nothing. And so I think reps are joining. Don’t beat yourself up for not, not sounding like a product expert or an expert in what you’re selling at the beginning.

It’s just.

[00:32:34] Brad Seaman: It does take time. Yeah. And I think there anyway, we’re getting, we’re getting towards the end here. So what’s the one thing you’re super passionate about right now. It can be business. It could be

[00:32:41] Mor Assouline: personal. I mean, I’m definitely passionate about business. B2B sat. It’s like when I, when I get on a call, a coaching call with a, with a rep and I give them, you know, we’re coaching their demo.

And they S they have like that Eureka moment, like, oh, shit, I, I see what you mean now. And like, we’ll do like a tonality workshop or whatever it is, and we’ll do like a role-play and they see how they sound based on our practice. That’s really fun. But businesses, the big passion one