Business
Stacking your sales pipeline is a key topic for management teams and sales profs alike and Steve is no stranger to building pipeline... More often than not sales profs and management are too focused on what is already in the quarter to even think about the most important part of selling:- "Stacking Your Sales Pipeline". In this no holds barred interview Steven Dickens shares insight from 20+ years in Technology sales. He oversees a team of 50+ sales representatives for IBM. We discuss the all famous Glengarry Glen Ross movie which would probably be banned in most sales meetings these days. Steven helps people to understand where they should be spending their time to create the best results. His close link with the marketing department is very refreshing, we are all on the same team after all! WARNING — AI Transcriptions Below May Cause Grammatically Correct People Serious Stress and Lack of Sleep! Nathaniel Schooler 0:23 In this episode, I'm interviewing Steven Dickens. And he's a trusted advisor for clients focused on protecting digital assets, blockchain and building private clouds. He's actually worked for over 20 years in hardware and software across multiple industries. And now he actually works for IBM, where he leads a global sales and pre sales team of over 50 people. He shares some really great information. And I think you will certainly enjoy this episode. Thanks for tuning in. It's nice to speak again, Steven. Steven Dickens 1:04 Yes. And you, definitely looking forward to this today. Nathaniel Schooler 1:10 I think should we talk about pricing first. I know it's a bit of a painful topic. But it's important to get your pricing right when you're in business? Steven Dickens 1:22 Yeah, for sure. I've just come from a session actually in the last couple of minutes, before we jumped on this call together. We were talking about how we define pricing for one of the offerings that we've got in development, which come out later on in the year, and they have me join these teams, where we are coming up with pricing strategy. What I'm always amazed with is the amount of guesswork and assumptions that go into how organizations define a price for their solution. People will go out and build a competitive few, they'll go out and interview clients, they'll go out and kind of get this view from the market and take a tiny sample size, and then try and extrapolate that out for how they're going to approach a market with 10,000 clients. In seven different geographies around the world. So it's really interesting to spend time with our teams on this. And then much of that guesswork comes into our list price set for a product. And then it's handed over to sales who then have to go and live with it out in the field. Nathaniel Schooler 2:36 Yeah, that must be really, really hard. I mean, with lots of different markets as well. And so will the price actually be the same or different in each of those markets? Steven Dickens 2:49 Oh, IBM operates on seven major geographies. And then there'll be countries within each one of those geographical areas. We could probably have as many as 50 different prices for the same IBM components. So it's really interesting. You've both got a price to the market, and then price to the local GEO. So there's a whole complexity that comes through, which then obviously becomes a sales challenge, once the the offering management team have thrown that offering across and into generally available status so that we can then go and sell it. So there's just challenges through the entire process, how you define that price, a manager for global deployment for that price, and then how sales goes and executes and lives with that challenge, as they're tasked with taking that price out into the marketplace, ultimately. Nathaniel Schooler 3:48 So are sales people over there actually, given any autonomy over, you know, being able to sort of reduce that price, for like volume and that kind of stuff.