Making the Glengarry and Glen Ross of the World

Selling in the tech space can get a tad bit noisy with jargon and sophisticated ideologies. It is perfectly natural for someone to get intimidated when they enter the space without much tech background. But in reality, it is not that different from selling in any other industry. You might just feel that we are oversimplifying this, but stay with us! We are going to take this down a step further :)

If we approach selling as a subject, the context is what is going to pilot that ship. This is exactly the reason why at Hevo, we ensure our onboarding process for sales professionals is constructed in a way where anyone could learn the technology involved, understand the industry landscape, apply the subject, get to the field, solve customer problems, and have fun along the way.

At a high-level summary, our onboarding process covers the following:

• Technology and Product landscape and understanding buyer/user persona
• Sales Tools
• Customer Conversation

Since we are talking oversimplification let us rephrase the above:

• What problem does our product solve?
• What tools does one need to track customer activity so they can effectively sell it to them?
• What kind of conversations are going to happen with customers?

Read that again — Voila! See! selling in the tech space is not that different from selling a pen.

By the time an employee goes through our onboarding process, he or she is well equipped with the technical knowledge that they need to have in order to have meaningful conversations with customers so they can understand their pain areas. Our on-boarding program is constructed to ready our sales professionals for success whether they have a tech background or not.

Let’s look at things a little closer now.

Technology and Product Landscape and Understanding buyer/user personas:

At the core, we are a technology company and there is no shying away from that. The ground reality is that we solve a simple problem, which in reality may not be so simple for our customers. So the first part of onboarding which lasts around 2 to 3 weeks exposes one to the technology and industry landscape which gives a foundational understanding of why we exist as a company. This whole module is constructed in such a simple way that a kid would pick this one over a nursery rhyme. Oversimplification again? We know! But it is the truth. We wanted this curriculum to be easy to understand. As part of this module one also learns about the personas to whom we sell our products. Our sales professionals need to understand who the key stakeholders and decision-makers in our space are, how they think about our product, their problems, and how we could help them. Scenarios such as what a Data engineer looks for, what a CTO wants, and how a data scientist can have accessible unified data to create models and analytics are all part of the puzzle our sales team need to know, and we make sure they know it.

For the next trick, we take our sales team through the actual product itself. If you can’t taste the ice cream, you can’t sell the ice cream, right? So our team spends a good amount of time tasting ice creams- exploring our product and its features (although some accompanying ice creams would be nice), different types of use cases and of course, interacting with our sales excellence team who are waiting to clarify their queries. A hands-on boot camp exercise opens up the doors to provide a 360-degree view of Hevo’s ETL platform and gives one a strong understanding of its usage. Usually, around this time the new member of the sales team is roaring with confidence and excitement to get to the field but we usually contain that excitement for a few more weeks because there is still more to learn.

Sales Tools:

A chef is only as sharp as his knife. Actually, that’s for a sous-chef but you get the point. During this part of the training, we expose our sales team to the various tools that we have for them to track and understand their customer activity better. They take a good journey through the CRM platforms and understand their nuances and usages. By this time the hands start itching to make customer phone calls. But well — hold on chief! We have a little bit more ground to cover.

Customer conversations:

Well, here comes the whole orchestra. This is where we take our now ready to jive Hevo sales rockstar through a detailed understanding of the type of conversations that they will have with customers. We walk them through various mock demo calls, playing different roles and covering so many possible circumstances that even Christopher Nolan would feel empty that he missed out on a few suns and stars in the interstellar journey.

At every stage of the onboarding, we have our sales excellence team reviewing assignments, presentations and providing constructive feedback which enables our new members to get better and have a deeper understanding of our sales cycle. We create a safe non-judgemental space for our new members where ideas are challenged and limits are questioned. Our team gets cut like a diamond so it can shine like a diamond. It’s good to be thorough, but it’s great to be natural; and when our sales team members walk out of the onboarding program, they become naturals.

We at Hevo, have people from all different walks of life, though we are still looking for that sous-chef who loves tech and is looking to make a career switch. Not everyone has a tech background at Hevo, but one thing that is common though is the desire to learn, passion for technology, and an idea that they can thrive as sales professionals in any industry and ideas are bulletproof.

If you can resonate with this blog, it looks like you are the sous-chef we are looking for. Reach out to us and explore possible open positions in our sales team.