Pattie gave this presentation, titled ‘Transforming your sales methodology from the inside out’, at the Future of Sales Festival in June 2022. You can catch the replay here with an SEC membership.

I’m Pattie Grimm and I’m the Senior Director of Worldwide Sales Enablement and the Center of Excellence for VMware’s sales teams globally. I have teams in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas, along with several other teams.

A couple of years ago, we started a business transformation at VMware. We had act one, act two, and now act three which is the sales transformation enablement. It's a work in progress but things are going really well.

This article covers the following topics:

Over the past few years, I’ve constantly heard leaders talk about trying to find the new normal.

Well, there is no new normal, there's only new.

The pandemic, zoom fatigue, increased customer demands, higher competition, multi-generational workforces, digital evolution and explosion - all these things are happening in our world and are impacting our ability to do business and our jobs as sales professionals.

We're living in a world of permanent white water. I don't know if you've been white water rafting before, but I love it. It’s a combination of pure excitement and pure fear.

The first time I went rafting, I remember sitting on the side of the Merced River in California on a beautiful day with about 10 or 12 friends. And when the instructor said, “When you fall out of the boat…” I raised my hand and said, “Excuse me, what do you mean when I fall out of the boat? I paid good money to stay in the boat.”

The instructor said, “You will fall out of the boat, but let me tell you how you’ll survive and have an amazing ride and a great trip.” This is so important because we live in a world of permanent white water. There's one rapid change after another. It's constant, and it's not going to stop.

So here's the advice he gave me.

“Keep your head up. Look downriver to the future. Don't try and look back because if you do you will drown and most likely die. Keep your head up, keep your eyes forward, and look to the future.

"Kick your feet off the rocks and all the other things coming at you in this constant white water until you get to a calm place, and we will come and get you.”

Now that's great advice for sales professionals today.

Keep your head up, look to the future, kick off the rocks as long as you can, get to a calm place where you can collect your breath, and get ready for the next rapid.

The 4 Rs every sales leader needs to know

These are critical, especially when you’re implementing a new sales methodology or process - but they should always be front of mind.

Reimagine your customer experience

You need to think about how to reimagine your customers' experiences starting from the inside out, or more importantly, from the outside in. It's about reshaping your leadership. You can't just change your sales methodology without addressing this.

We need to re-energize our workforce, and more importantly, we need to reinvent our sales processes. We can’t take a process we've had for three or four years and put it in the cloud and expect it to work magic.

You need to think about how to reinvent your workplace and work processes based on your customer experiences and how you re-engage your employees.

Being company-centric vs. customer-centric

Here's an interesting thought.

How many people have struggled with the traditional ketchup bottle for years, the glass bottle that wasn't designed from an engineering perspective to be very effective?

It's a glass bottle that gets narrower at the top, so you've got a heavy liquid with a narrow neck, and a little top on it.

What happens when you’re company-centric, is you're building a ketchup bottle that you've built for hundreds of years at say Heinz, for example. And it really takes some innovative person to think about this from a customer perspective.

Have you ever sat in a restaurant with a ketchup bottle and stuck the knife inside, or tried to tap the bottom to get the ketchup to come out? And either it doesn't come out or it splats all over your food and your clothes?

Some brilliant person at Heinz said, “Why don't we turn it upside down and make it plastic so it always flows to the bottom?” And now it's so much easier to get the ketchup out of the bottle.

So what’s your ketchup bottle?

The importance of customer centricity

At VMware, we have a very complicated business. We sell SaaS and cloud software to large companies to help them run things like CRM systems and ERP systems.

We're now making this huge leap from being a traditional software company that sells a license every year to big companies like Ford, the Bank of England, or DBS Bank for 18 to 36 months.

In a SaaS world, we're selling subscriptions. Most people probably have a subscription through their company to Office 365. We had to reinvent our work processes starting from the outside in with our customers and partners.

We had to think about what our customers are going through in terms of understanding when they have a business problem they need to solve.

  • How do they go about evaluating what they want to buy?
  • How do they then land, discover and go through the process?

Our teams usually consist of an account manager or an inside sales rep. They're going to be a technical account person and somebody with professional services.

There's going to be a specialist because how you sell workplace services is different from how you sell a CRM system. It's all going to be slightly different, but we realigned our sales process to our customers' buying cycle.