This episode, runZero’s VP of Worldwide Sales Jay Wallace talks about how to approach complex sales cycles with long lead times, the techniques for relationship-based selling, and how to build credibility in your relationships.
Jay Wallace has been working in sales for almost a decade and has built successful sales teams from the ground up. Jay is currently the VP of Worldwide Sales for runZero where he leads all things revenue creation and retention. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- The benefits of working as one of the first employees for a startup.
- How to approach sales cycles with long lead times.
- The danger of being too reliant on one employee.
- How to start a relationship-based selling model.
- Ways to build credibility in relationships.
- How to warm up your leads.
Resources:
Connecting with Jay Wallace:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 3:30 – “I love cyber security I think that it’s a community, for me it’s a calling I love being involved, I love hearing all the crazy stories you hear out in the world about people doing crazy things on the internet and that’s always drawn me into the cyber security space.”
- 5:10 – “It wasn’t so much sales that caught my attention it was business and I was really interested in the inner workings in how businesses work and what they care about but I think if you’re really truly interested in business you’ve got to be interested in sales because that’s the lifeblood of any business that’s what makes the operations run keeps the lights on.”
- 5:49 – “You’re cold calling my first fully commissioned gig had no base salary really putting it all on the line, knocking in doors asking strangers can I refinance your mortgage that was the short of it or selling financial products like life insurance or financial plans not to mention not the easiest thing to do in a global recession so 2008 2009 were not my best years in terms of earnings but they were certainly my best year in terms of learnings, I learned a lot about myself and how much I loved sales and I loved meeting somebody completely brand new they don’t have any idea about what you have most of the time their standoffish and they don’t want to talk to you anyway so there’s something masterful and artful about being able to get someone to warm up to you have them open their eyes to the solution that your selling and eventually say yes this will actually help me out.”
- 9:02 – “The worst thing that can happen to you as a seller is you’ve got a mid 6 figure or low seven-figure deal on the line and you’re single-threaded, so your champion decides to leave the company, your champion decides to take a 3-week vacation, we sell to about 50 countries today so varying degrees of everybodys not like Americans where we live to work and it’s like hey I’m going on vacation but here’s my cell here’s a hair follicle in case you need to trace me by DNA, here’s how you can find me at any waking moment don’t worry a lot of people actually take vacation out there in the world.