What makes your approach to selling unique?
I would work really hard to get hard to find market insights and leverage them to get attention. In this case it meant looking at a lot of data specific to credit unions.
Then, once I was talking to prospects I used these insights again in discovery to help me get to the root cause to their problems and better align they pain with our vision for the solution.
What was happening when you decided to start exploring the idea of building business cases?
I had been searching for the best way to clearly articulate our values props so that they were easy to understand and always front and center.
So, I tried a few tools including salesrooms like Aligned and Flola. Those didn’t really land, my champions would have issues logging in, or they couldn’t figure out how to use the tool as a buyer and consumer.
When I found Fluint I thought “This exactly what I needed, a written business case so there's always document for my champions to go to and look at the current narrative.”
How would you describe the workflow that Fluint helps enable for you?
How I sell and the role Fluint plays in the process has evolved. I now use Fluint in my prospecting, and starting to use it early in the deal is the catalyst in our process.
Because our deals now are a more complex than before it requires us to do a lot of research to find the targeted accounts.
Now when I reach out I always have a hypothesized business case on how we're a good fit. This is meant to get the executive’s attention early and communicate that we understand their business, what their company is going through, pain points, and a recommended approach.
Sometimes I generate the first draft of the business case so early it becomes a sort of lead magnet. Then, we start adjusting the narrative to find what gets us highest above the pain threshold.
How were you doing these things before us?
Before Fluint we had a more manual process. We used some tools like Google Docs and some spreadsheets to keep track of pain points and how we should talk about them with prospects.
It was quite unstructured compared to what we have now with Fluint. It’s really incredible what I can do now with Fluint just by feeding it a few research notes and then generating a full-on business case in one click.
The first draft of the business case is already good enough to present to executives and use it to guide them though the buying journey.
What challenges were you trying to solve by signing up for Fluint?
I was mostly trying to add structure to my sales process.
When it came to content needs it used to be very chaotic across stages. With Fluint it’s immediately clear what content to write and when to write it. This means I can easily have nuanced conversations across all the deals I’m working on.
Why’d you choose us vs. other options you explored or considered?
This goes back to those salesrooms I was talking about earlier. The deeper I got into trying them the more I found they looked cool and they’re a cool concept but did not produce.
I feel like Fluint actually gets the job done and that’s why I chose to sign up.
Is there anything you do with Fluint that otherwise wouldn’t be happening day-to-day?
Our whole sales process is built around this way of selling now. I took the concepts of selling with Fluint and created a deal dashboard in our CRM.
With this dashboard and the 60-second deal review framework I can review the information from the business case and decide what needs to happen next to move the deal forward.
It’s all based on the ‘selling with’ principles and some of Nate’s technical advice.
If Fluint went away, what would you miss most?
Hitting quota.
If it went away I hope I’d have all the frameworks saved. They’ve taught me so much in terms of how to enable buyers and how to simplify the buying process and get alignment with them.
Most of our effort is focused on figuring out what the right narrative and getting to the right people, because once we have the right narrative it’s scary how fast we close the deal.
The other day we closed a $40,000 deal on just the second call. The prospect was like “you solution is perfect for us, we’re just waiting on legal now to get it approved”.
What would you say to someone who is considering Sales Process 2.0, selling with business cases, selling with their buyers, etc… but isn’t sure?
Take it to the bank, it’s not just a hypothesized approach, it actually works.
The data is there to look at but more than that it has changed my career.
It’s changed our view of what the role of a sales rep should be and opens up a round of new possibilities in sales. Try it out and see how much better and more effective your sales process can be.
