A decade ago, Samathana (“Sam”) quit her 9-5 office job on a whim, and became a kayak guide in San Diego. She wanted to find a career she was passionate about — but she didn’t yet know what that would be. So she traded spreadsheets for swimming with gray whales in the Pacific.
Years later, after she jumped back into the workforce, she found her way into selling climate tech at Persefoni. Today, she helps Fortune 500 companies with their decarbonization and sustainability strategy.
It’s a highly-competitive space, and one that’s likely somewhat similar to your industry:
Sustainability professionals just aren’t used to buying software.
Which means running a buying process is completely new for them. Key steps like securing budget, selling executives, and aligning a wide group of people doesn’t always come naturally.
So after enabling her buyers inside Fortune 500’s for the last few years, Samantha’s biggest ‘‘aha moment” was realizing that is her biggest competitive differentiator.
It’s not just her software, or its AI features.
It’s how she guides her prospects throughout their buying journey, while helping them navigate their own company, to successfully get deals done.
In the rest of this write-up, we’ll unpack her approach to simplifying complex deals — and how you can do the same.
How Sam sells with her buyers.
There’s one thought Sam’s constantly thinking about:
“How can I make this easier?”
Which means she works hard to cut out friction from the buying process for her buyers. Practically, this looks like asking herself two things:
- What does my buyer need to take their next step?
- How can I write that out in its simplest form, so it’s easy for them to share and understand?
Which is how we first got connected.
When Sam first read about the concept of selling with buyers, by enabling them to share a written business case internally, it resonated:
“I’m at my best when I’m helping my buyers to sell their own vision to their team, and I saw that approach mirrored in Nate’s book ‘Selling With.’ It’s the perfect way to say it, so I just felt this spark, like I knew where I wanted to focus my attention and skillset.”
Getting everyone on the same page with executive summaries.
Here’s how Sam recently did what most sellers can spend a career working toward:
Landing a 6-figure deal, with a Fortune 500 brand.
During her early discovery conversations, Sam heard one buying team contact say what most buyers feel while looking at carbon accounting platforms:
‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’
He was pragmatic, and craving guidance, which opened up an opportunity for Sam:
She started to guide him through the buying process by creating a shared executive summary. Which she started to build before the buying team even had a clear project definition, or budget approved.
Since Sam had a good understanding of what was important to them—the real ‘why’ for buying carbon accounting software, outside of compliance—she added her notes and call transcripts into Fluint, to generate a written summary for them.
Crafting that shared summary helped her champion lock down an official budget for the project. And even though Persefoni wasn’t a “vendor of choice” just yet, doing this meant:
- Persefoni was already at the top of the list during the buying team’s evaluation.
- Multiple different buying team members were already familiar with Sam — including the sustainability executive, who she was able to multithread with.
- Sam’s own team at Persefoni used the exact same executive summary internally. It served as a briefing document to drive demo’s, deal reviews, and rollout planning.
Sam’s main takeaway?
“Creating that executive summary early in the deal opened up three use cases:
- It was an internal briefing document for my own team.
- My champion attached it to meeting invites while socializing us internally.
- It helped align both my executive team and theirs, in multithreaded conversations.”
In short, her executive summary made sure everyone was on the same page. Very literally.
Enjoying the journey:
Finally, here’s what Sam had to say if this practice of crafting executive summaries is new for you:
“What I love about sales is that it's a journey.
It’s a personal journey as I’m always refining my skills, and learning new ways to stand out from the masses and our competition.
It’s also a journey for each buying team I work with, so writing out a shared executive summary early in the process is the best way I’ve found to capture where they are, to guide where they’re going, and discover together what the deal is really about.”
Where are you on your sales journey?
Working to land your first or next Fortune 500 brand? Crafting your first or next executive summary?
In either case, check out the platform Sam’s using, grab the same frameworks she’s using, and take the next step in your own career.
