About This Episode

We haven’t done a lot of account executive focused podcast episodes on The Sales Engagement podcast yet.

But we want to change that.

Rebecca Feiten is Senior Enterprise Account Executive at Outreach. In her role, she’s selling to accounts with 2000 people or more. And a lot of them involve a complicated array of internal stakeholders, large teams, or selling a multitude of products.

Nevertheless, Rebecca is one of our top performers, executing well on a daily basis.

How does she do it?

Well, that’s what I invited her to talk about on a recent episode of The Sales Engagement podcast. Rebecca shared the three things she credits with her daily success.

Here’s what she said about managing follow-up, account planning, and building a coalition of internal advocates.

Managing the Consistency of Follow-up

As an enterprise buyer, the worst feeling is wrapping up a call and walking away wondering who’s supposed to initiate the next action.

So, always follow-up with a recap.

Strive to be really prescriptive about the process to make it easier on your clients.

How do you create a great recap?

Well, start with a solid agenda at the beginning of a meeting. Ensure everyone’s on the same page with what they want to cover. If they’re not, now’s the time to level that.

At the end of the meeting, do a verbal recap. Make sure everyone feels good and that you’ve covered everything on the agenda. Repeat what you’ve heard to be the follow-up actions and who will take ownership of doing those, just to make sure everyone has clarity on these items.

Finally, send a recap email outlining what was covered, what needs to happen next, and who’s responsible for those action items.

The goal is to ensure everyone’s clear on what’s next and who’s doing it.

Building Executive Presence Through Account Planning

In the enterprise, you’ve got to be able to command a room, make decisions, and add value — you’ve got to develop an executive presence.

And that starts with account planning.

When you do the research ahead of time, you understand who you’re talking to, the space they’re in, and the challenges they’re facing.

That allows you to be confident, to make quick decisions, and add value.

Rebecca does account planning in tandem with her SDR.

She covers everything from the company’s products or services to organizational mapping. Here are a few other issues she likes to address:

• What does this company do?
• What types of products do they sell?
• Who are their competitors?
• Where is their market being constructed?
• What kind of challenges companies like them might be facing?
• Do we have any good stories of existing customers that might resonate with them?

When you get on a call you should know who’s who in that meeting, who they report to, what their role is, what they care about, and what is their desired outcome.

And keep in mind account plans aren’t static — they’re a dynamic document that’s constantly growing as you learn more information.

Building Internal Advocates

Sales reps tend to do a great job of understanding their client’s problems and how they can add value.

But we often forget to do the same for our internal stakeholders.

The sales reps that are most successful are usually the ones who have developed phenomenal internal relationships.

There’s a common chant heard throughout the B2B tech space: you win as a team.

In order to really succeed, you need your teammates.

Maybe you’re trying to demonstrate value for marketers in your account, and you need your marketing team members to jump on the call.

Or maybe you rely on your sales engineers to support you on a daily basis.

Whether marketing, executive alignment, or post-sales, you need your team.

Be respectful with your coworkers.

Strive to understand what motivates them. And make sure they’re seen for the work they do and the value they add.  

So, take care of the people who take care of you.

That’s how you’ll be successful, executing well on a daily basis.

This post is based on a podcast interview with Rebecca Feiten from Outreach. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast.

If you don’t use iTunes, you can listen to every episode here.

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