There are a million and one moments in business in which you want to motivate a certain behavior. Maybe you need your boss to countersign a contract by EOD. Or a key prospect to attend a local event you’ll be at. Or something as small as getting your co-workers to sign up to bring desserts to your annual cookie swap.
Whether in business or your personal life, the energy you put in is the energy you get out.
When reciprocity is established, it’s amazing how much easier achieving your desired outcomes become. In this post, I’ll share my experience around leveraging Alyce for deal acceleration, and how continually investing in the other person has helped progress my business goals and left a trail of feel-good moments in its wake.
Life Before Alyce
Prior to Alyce I worked at a different software company selling to IT professionals, and my outbound motion looked pretty different. As I was progressing deals through the funnel I found success building a champion most similar to me. Starting at the bottom of org, I’d work my way person to person, until I found the right one I could leverage to help me figure out how to map the account and who to talk to next. That relationship would then be called upon again when nearing closing stages if the deal needed a push. It was very time-intensive and often times impersonal because I’d move person to person having sometimes irrelevant conversations just so they’d be in my back pocket should I ever need it down the road.
Now, I still use a similar methodology of creating additional champions and developing meaningful conversations and connections with them along the way, but Alyce has condensed the time it takes to make those connections and exponentially improved the quality of interaction once I make them.
Your Personal Assistant
The intel Alyce provides on a person is especially helpful with deal acceleration when various stakeholders are involved to gain their personal buy-in. For me, it’s common practice before I speak with anybody to go into their Salesforce contact record, flip through their Alyce interest tags and see if there is overlap with my interests anywhere.
HOW DO YOU ADD PERSONAL EXPERIENCE TO YOUR BUSINESS PRACTICES? WE BREAK IT DOWN HERE.
I’ve known BDRs and AEs who have literally kept notebooks filled with personal intel on their prospects and referenced it prior to hopping on a call, but with Alyce it’s all digitally at my fingertips. Icebreakers are so cliché at this point (does anyone actually care how the weather is there??); being able to ask someone a meaningful question that plays off their personal interests often leads to a more honest and real dialogue.
Using Alyce for Midcycle Deal Acceleration
Most folks look forward to the holiday season or their birthday because it’s a moment when people take the time to demonstrate a gesture of altruistic kindness toward you. It’s human instinct to respond positively to people demonstrating a level of care and consideration for you, and even more so in a business setting which is usually reserved for transactional behavior.
Now in modern selling, especially as feature sets blur and pricing becomes competitive, more times than not deals are being won with who you trust the most.
In my experience, Alyce helps expedite the gaining of that trust.
When I’m writing emails, I’m not signing off with “best” and when I’m on call, I’m not hopping on and asking about their weekend plans. I’m actually saying, “How was that trip? Did you go on any fun hikes?” Building authentic trust day in and day out not only allows deals to move faster but it ensures people are more confident spending money with you and the rapport you’ve built lasts long after the deal is done.
You could have a fantastic first conversation with someone, but oftentimes, especially in enterprise sales, it’s a full committee of decision-makers. Sometimes things stall along the way and need a little nudge by something more effective than an email saying, “Hey! It’s been a while since we talked. Everything okay?” Therefore, I typically gift between 2-5 additional people during the sales cycle which leads to office chatter and keeping your deal top of mind for the team.
In other scenarios, the timing just isn’t right and initiatives or budgets don’t align. I find that whenever I do reenergize those deals down the road, there’s still that immediate bond because of Alyce’s intel and I don’t have to start from ground zero.
HOW DO YOU ADD PERSONAL EXPERIENCE TO YOUR BUSINESS PRACTICES? WE BREAK IT DOWN HERE.
I’d love to hear about other ways you’ve found success driving personal connections and building trust with your champions to move deals along. Leave me a comment below!
Read other posts in our Alyce 360 series here!
