#214 Gal Aga - Secrets of the Top 1% in Sales

Gal Aga: 0:00

All good enterprise sellers have been creating mutual action plans and spreadsheets and they're really good at creating tailored business case decks and things like that. Now all sellers get templates that are standardised for them. Here's the business case template in the room. Here's the mutual action plan template with much better UI and capabilities to actually make mutual action plans work, so everyone really becomes good collaborators in this space. So Gartner says that 5% of the buying journey is spent with you as a single vendor. They also share that 43% of buyers prefer to self-serve and not speak with a seller. So they've gotten used to the self-service tools, the self-service journeys and a lot of them. Don't take your word for it. We can just go and sell to everyone. You have to build committed champions. Most of the sales happen actually when you're not there. So really, when you realise that your role is to help that champion go and do most of the selling when you're not there, then, beyond that environment, that's how you should look at the sales process.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 1:10

Welcome to the How To Sell podcast. I'm your host, Luigi Prestinenzi, and as always, I'm pumped on it and excited that you have joined us for what will be a very, very engaging conversation today. Because today we're talking a bit about how do you get consensus, how do you bring the buying committee onto the journey so that you can get consensus and you can help move them down that buying funnel to a point of decision. Because, as we know, a lot of enterprise deals, even on enterprise, even those smaller to mid-market opportunities. Now there are more buyers getting involved in the decision-making process and some of the data shows us that 40 to 60% of those deals, the decision that they end up with, is a no-decision. They can't get consensus. So I'm really excited to talk to our guest today and I'm not going to steal his thunder. I'll allow him to introduce himself. But why? This is the sort of the start of our series, because all of our series episodes that we've got coming up around how to sell to the way that our buyers buy, and over the coming weeks and months we've got interviews with different buyers, with CFOs, heads of enablement, chief marketing officers, and we're going to be asking them how do they get to a point of decision, and so this is a real great way for us to get started, to get you thinking about how to shift the way that you sell. So, before I bore the hell out of our guests who are sitting there in the green room, I just want to say welcome all the way from Israel Gal to the How to Sell podcast.

Gal Aga: 2:43

Thanks so much, luigi. Really excited to be here. Hi everyone, yeah, a really fun topic, my best favourite topic, so looking forward to our chat.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 2:54

Yeah, awesome. And I just want to say, ever since I heard you on the Donald C Kelly the sales evangelist podcast, mate, I fell in love. I loved what you were talking about. I loved the concepts that you shared in the digital sales room, gaining consensus, the challenges when it comes to getting people across the line, the change journey. So I'm really pumped to bring this content to life. But before we get started, we'd love for you to share with our audience how you started in this world of selling?

Gal Aga: 3:28

Yeah, absolutely so. Today I'm a co-founder and CEO of a company in the sales tech space. Basically really so stayed in the passion, actually started, found my passion early on and started in sales 20 years ago and have kind of got into tech real quick. So last 15, 16 years in a tech SaaS B2B sales and just found the passion just selling telco at a telco company, b2b and finding my way up from there and I think it was in the early days I kind of pre SaaS was a thing. I actually researched SaaS and decided, okay, that's interesting, that's where I want to build a career. And yeah, long story short, last 15, 16 years I've been building, doing the AE, enterprise AE roles, building three sales organisations from scratch as a head of sales VP, sales CRO helped companies such as Sysense, Sight and Anagog scale from one to 10 and did 20 to 100 million in ARR half and that continued in sales tech. See how we found it there.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 4:43

Yeah well, that's huge, just huge. You know, with some of the numbers that you talk about, there's only a small amount of, you know, a small percentage of companies that are able to grow to that level of ARR. So that's pretty impressive. And you went from sort of running sales divisions to founding your own company. What inspired you to start your own SaaS platform?

Gal Aga: 5:05

So, like for me, it's always, it's always been about, you know, challenging myself, finding new things, working my way into new challenges, loved leading, loved building and always had, you know, passion for that, and I knew that at some point I'm going to build something, I'm going to run a company. Going to, you know, when scaling, growing into the CRO role, you see that you're more about strategy, more about building, more about leadership, and so I knew it's going to come, but basically not that fast. So really, the path to Aligned yeah, so the path just was an opportunity. So my former co-founder, my former colleague and current core founder, Gal, also named Gal, we worked together at yeah, two girls, a lot of girls, which you know in the US is like yeah has a different meaning. So we worked together at a company called Sight and he basically wanted to build something. And over there we're all always asking ourselves, like, how do the top 1%, like the best, best sellers, do it every time? And there's such a big gap between some sellers and others? And kind of, we, you know, we were constantly thinking about this and discussing this and we realised at some point that really what the top sellers do that others don't, they just don't sell right In the old way of, in the old meaning of selling. They don't go and push and they don't just go and throw information at you and they're just really damn good at curating a buying experience, a buying journey. They're working with champions, they're building consensus, they're making sure they're reducing friction all the time. They're really project managers for the champion, for the buying group, and that's what they were doing very differently, and this is where the idea came from. We really wanted to really go and build something there. I initially was an advisor at the company when Wala was CRO. So, gal, with your time, my other co-founder really started building the company and then they say, okay, you have to come in and join in full time. Yeah, yeah. Awesome.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 7:33

So, and I can see so, obviously, you're in the seat, you're in the sales seat, you were constructing deals and I love what you've shared, right, because you've shared the great. The top sellers aren't necessarily selling, they're guiding, they're facilitating, they're helping bring consensus, et cetera. And again, I would love to really touch on this. And now that you've been able to sit in the seat as a founder and you're seeing this platform and you're seeing multiple people use your platform with love, could you share with us again, if you you know the things that you said that you see great salespeople do, how is that from the buyer's side of things? So, with your platform, you're able to bring different stakeholders from the buying committee into a digital world, right? Or into a digital platform where they can all collaborate on a business case together, right? Could you maybe share with us how, bringing them into the same environment, that committee, what it does to the sales process?

Gal Aga: 8:41

Yeah, absolutely so. I think, even taking a step back right before, beyond bringing them to a same environment, I think what it does is working with them. Right Is understanding that right now the world is changing. You're no longer we can just go and sell to everyone. You have to build committed champions. Most of the sales happen actually when you're not there. There's a lot of stats around it. When we can, we can touch on that a bit more, and so really, when you realise that your role is to help that champion go and do most of the selling when you're not there, then, beyond that environment, that's how you should look at the sales process. You're really working with someone and you need to think about what are all of their buying steps, what are the things that they're doing internally and how everything that I'm going to provide that champion or potential champion right. There could be multiple champions today also, in many deals it's important to try to get a few. How we're supporting these people to go and bring the deal. What do they need to do? Do they need to go and go into revops, going to sales enablement right in our world? What do these people typically need? Where are they involved? How do they go through budgeting decisions, a requirement building, guiding them through how to test and evaluate how others have tested and evaluated. So, really, that is the mindset, and thinking all the time about how to support the internal processes that are taking place. I think this is. This is what it's all about.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 10:37

Okay, and that's really interesting, right, and I love this where you're going with this. So, again from that buyer's side, you mentioned the champions often do their work without the salesperson, right, they're in there trying to sponsor, get engagement and they're trying to get other people to help bring them on that journey. When you're looking from because you get to see things that a lot of people don't know how many people are using your platform, how many stakeholders are involved in that buying process.

Gal Aga: 11:20

Yeah, so we actually recently published research around this, which basically we look at how many stakeholders people think that are involved in their deals. We interviewed a lot of sellers and then we analysed more than a thousand digital sales rooms and we saw that on average, there are 68% more than what people are aware of, more stakeholders involved than what people are aware of. Yeah, essentially, a big part of it is just there are a lot of people that are typically behind the scenes you may be here about, you may not be here about. They get forwarded information and when there's a single space where all of the materials the buying supporting decision materials, decision supporting materials reside, then it's really it's the only place where everyone can come in. So we see, on enterprise deals, we see sometimes 20 or even 30 stakeholders in a room all entering into that space, and our platform enriches this and then you can see who these people are, enriches the data and then on average it's around 10, 11, 12, something like that in enterprise deals and a bit less on SMB, and I think today even SMB is what we're seeing is that SMB is like a lot of sales leaders tell us we have a pre transactional process and two or three people are involved, but then the reality SMB deals have six, sometimes eight people involved or even more.

Dave Fastuca: 13:02

Pardon the interruption, but I have to let you know about this free resource. The Grow Forum newsletter has over 10,000 subscribers that are learning how to sell. Each and every week we send you tips, strategies and also some tools and tech on how to achieve the most out of your sales pipeline. If you're ready to level up, sign up for free at growth forumias forward slash newsletter and get the first issue this week.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 13:28

That's really interesting. Out of curiosity, you mentioned that you interviewed sellers to ask them how many stakeholders they thought were getting involved in the process. What was that number? What did they think?

Gal Aga: 13:42

So they thought of SMB deals. They thought I was around three or four people.

Dave Fastuca: 13:48

Yeah.

Gal Aga: 13:48

And the enterprise thought that six people were involved, but it's actually double. Yeah, almost double exactly.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 14:00

Look, I've got my perspective on what the risks would be. But what are the risks with a deal when the salesperson only thinks that there's three or four people, when there's actually six to eight people? What risks does that create in the deal?

Gal Aga: 14:18

Essentially, of course, ideally you want to be multi-threaded, right? We all a lot of. That's a very well-known sales. It's not methodology like a tactic or right To get to as many stakeholders as possible to influence. You can't really get to everyone, it doesn't happen all the time and you don't want to build too many stakeholders and give too many people power in conversations. It could also derail processes. But if you don't know who they are, at the very least okay, you're not able to understand what is important to these different people and address that or help your champion address that. So you don't in a perfect world, right, you speak with everyone and you convince them and everything is all set, but it doesn't happen. But so at least you need to know who they are and know that this person really cares about that integration to the CRM and this person really cares about how easy it is and how much time it will take to go live, all right. So that's the risk. Really not figuring out who these people are and how that can affect your deals means that you're going to get surprises and your champion is going to fail doing the selling internally for you.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 15:42

Yeah, so obviously the scope, your ability to get a very clear scope that brings everybody aligned, everybody's views, because people have different perspectives, right, people have different drivers, both the motive and logical drivers that impact the decision-making process. So, and just for our audience, who might not be familiar, can you just talk us through? I know we've spoken about aligned and I probably should have brought that up earlier, but you talk about digital sales rooms. What is a digital sales room? For those that are not familiar with it, yeah, absolutely so.

Gal Aga: 16:21

Digital sales room, if you think about it essentially it's a space, new space for the deal, where you work with your champion, with the buyers, one place to go and bring all of the content, conversations, key conversations, align, the next steps, real action plan takes there, you can sign agreements, you can have internal notes, all of the sales tax comes in into that single space. So a lot of people think about it, hear this and they say, okay, why would my buyer want to enter a platform? But basically, the good digital sales room or the ones that exist right now. There were a few years ago a few companies trying to do this but really didn't work. And now really the world has moved. Post COVID, everything is digital and the technology has changed. We have Miro and the workspaces like Slack and Miro and Notion and Figma a lot of these different tools available for a lot of different other tasks that we use internally. So, really, how do digital sales rooms work today? The good ones, and I would say one of them, is you just share a simple URL, a simple link, magic link, where you think about, typically in the sales process, you share a link to a Google Drive presentation that you have or a case study. Then you move from that being multiple links or multiple attachments or a lot of different emails that are failing your champion or buying group, because people are being looped in later on and they just have a lot of these decision supporting materials spread across a lot of different email threads or channels. You're just moving from that single link to multiple links to a single link, and that single link is a URL that your buyer enters At the beginning. It can be without a lot of permissions. Everyone can enter and you can level up permissions of who can enter and just everything is hosted there. That really what it allows you to do as a seller just allows you to better enable and influence champions and buying teams, allows you to access more stakeholders, identify hidden stakeholders and really better multi thread and control the deal with mutual action plans and insights and what people are looking at. So you're at the decision point to see if a fo enters into the room and then starts going through a competitive comparison PDF that you shared six months ago, that's a red flag. You can now make and move and make better decisions based on buyer engagement in the room.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 19:04

You know, this is really interesting and obviously I love the concept of a digital sales room because I've historically used documents, whether it's a Google Drive link and you send them a link with a collaborative document, and again, I think it's important for our audience. The concepts that you're talking about, yes, in a digital world they might be new, but the concept of collaboration in the sales process is not new. Like if you look back at Miller, hyman, wilson, learning, these books are very old. I mean, I read it early in my 20s. They had the situation or appraisal summaries, they had the blue sheets. They have tools to allow you to get on the same page with the champion and really understand well who is a user, who is the technical contributor, the potential anti-sponsor, and then bringing them on the same journey. So I think for me what I love about the concept of a digital sales room is you're taking what was and what a lot of enterprise sellers practice, which was getting collaboration because, like you said, great sellers aren't selling, they're guiding, they're nurturing, they're uncovering the hidden objectives that might exist in the buying committee and helping the champion work on a strategy that, when they come out, how can they work through that. What I love about the digital sales room is you're allowing the champion to really go into the business and bring people, make it easier for them to access the business case, what the scope of work could be, what is that action plan, what is the risk profile for the project, what is the cost of inaction? Whatever document you want them to review, you're giving them real time coverage, which I absolutely love. Given that you've now seen thousands of digital sales rooms in motion, can you talk us through what you are seeing from a time to close? What impact is the digital sales room having on that time, from discovery to close, as a result of being able to use this digital sales room?

Gal Aga: 21:14

Yeah, so we're seeing an average 45% reduction in sales cycles. So we've seen by now so a thousand were the ones that we analyse. We've basically have by now hundreds of thousands of rooms that are running. So there's a lot of interviews that we've done with the customers also to understand the results and what's going on in these spaces. So essentially, the sales cycle gets shortened, as if you enter. What we're preaching a lot of time is that sales has gotten more complex and we're just used to thinking about ourselves as, okay, we have budget scrutiny right now, we have more stakeholders to manage, we have longer sales cycles and we're used to think about how do we tackle this, how do we make every all sellers better? But what we're failing to see is that really the key is in the buyer. They're struggling even more and they're going through a very complex, long process internally and really the solution is to go and enable them, to make this easier for them, to give them the tools to succeed, because a buyer right now looking at buying software, buying a solution, is thinking to themselves I need to now go and speak with this vendor and that vendor and that first, do a lot of offline research, then find the vendors do a short list. Each vendor can be. Think about an enterprise deal. If you're selling a few dozens of hours worth of time spent within meetings and preparing decks, they're doing the same thing three or four times with four vendors. In addition, they have decision committees, internal research, internal buying meetings, internal processes, okay. So they're thinking about all of these things and in their mind, why would I speak with a seller more than the minimum that I have to write? That's what goes on in their mind. If that seller now can transition from a place of the average experience and they're also thinking about that average experience, yeah, some of the just demos just sends the generic materials, just throws all the features at me, Ask questions Okay, but then doesn't tie value into the information that I'm giving him or her, doesn't? And then you know it's some kind of person that I go to when I need something and just provide me some generic information, and then I need to do a lot of work. They're thinking about it this way. Right, then no buyer will want to speak with that seller, okay, and a lot of them come with this idea in mind and this is how it's gonna be. Let's see if someone convinced me otherwise. So, if you bring them a space, right and I'm now sorry for the long answer, but I'm hey, try trying to be bring some context and and and you know, share of how we're seeing this if now there's a place where you immediately send the message that, hey, I'm here to enable you, yeah, okay, this, this space, and this is the message at the top of that space this space exists really to help you right now, let's collaborate better. Or you go through this decision process looping other people. I'm gonna organise all the old materials throughout this process, you can ask questions, others can ask questions Immediately. That sends the message of hey, I'm here as a partner. I'm not here to just go and pitch you a buyer, also I'm able to get everything organised. So, yeah, that's, that's faster. Third point is the seller. Okay, now exactly to your last point. What all enterprise sellers have been doing really well, every, all good enterprise sellers have been creating mutual action plans and spreadsheets, and they're really good at creating tailored Business case decks and things like that. Now all sellers get templates that the sales leader Standardizes, standardised for them. Here's the business case template in the room. Here's the mutual action plan template with much better UI and capabilities to actually make mutual action plans work, so everyone really becomes good collaborators in this space. Yeah, and last but not least, the actual mutual action plan methodology is just known and proven to reduce sales cycles. So when you leverage that, then these are the results that you see.

Dave Fastuca: 26:00

Do you have a great product but are struggling to reach more customers? Are you spending hours on sales activities that aren't generating results, leaving you feeling frustrated and discouraged? The sales OF program is a step-by-step operating system. They will help you slash your selling hours in half while rapidly growing your revenue. In under just two weeks, you can be well on your way to creating predictable revenue in sales. I will show you how to build a predictable sales pipeline, build lasting relationships with your customers and sell more in less time. The art of negotiation and Motivating and leading a successful sales team. If this sounds like something that you need in your business, visit the grow forum. Dot IO for slash sales and apply to see if you have the right mindset to achieve Predictable revenue. The sales OF program is your ticket to predictable revenue. Don't want any more.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 26:54

Apply today and you've covered off so many important things right, and I think, because you are absolutely right when you're going through, I think the most important part of any Sales process or buying process, depending on how you look at it right for me is the scoping phase, because that's scoping phase Allows you to get real clarity over the problem statements and what is the problem that we are trying to solve as an organisation and what is the outcome that we are seeking to achieve? Right? So if we are going to go through a process of change because often change can be quite painful right, if we are going to go through a process of change, will the pain of change be given us a reward that is more significant than the pain of the same right? And often, sometimes they look at a scenario and say you know what? This is going to be really painful for us. We'll just put this on the back burner for now and we'll address it in 12 months, right? And that's why, for me, that scoping and I love the concept of that digital sales room because it allows you to go Well, hang on a second before we even think about moving to a proposal which is meeting my need as a salesperson of Having to force this to a point of decision. Let's actually get the right people around the table to get an understanding of their perspective. How this problem is impacting them doesn't even matter to them, because that's another thing. There's something that I heard from a CFO recently Was really clear. They said just because a problem matters for one of my team members, it doesn't necessarily mean it's important to us at the executive team. Right, it might impact them and we're sorry for it, but in the scheme of all the other projects that we've got running, it's not even in the top five, top ten of our list of projects that we need to worry about, right, mm-hmm. So that was a real bit of an a hammer and something I wanted to share with you actually as well, because when I did attend this conference and there was over a thousand CFOs there, there was a really great image they put up on the screen of how they looked at the cost of inaction and how they made decisions. They had the four quadrants. The top left was why change, really simple, why we're looking to change. Then next to it was what is the impact, what's the impact of the path forward? Then, what is the cost of inaction and what are we actually going to do, right? So they look at the change Initiative with that lens. They actually see we're looking at our projects with a certain lens. These are the questions that we're asking and we need to be clear on asking to get the answers in each quadrant, because if we can't, then it doesn't make sense for us to make that investment. Because they were talking about the economies taking a bit of a nasty turn. They're worried about the future. It doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna stop spending, but they are just becoming more diligent in the way that they look at spending their money, right? So, yeah, yeah, I think some of the things you touched on really, really brings that home for anyone listening. It's about really thinking about yourself as an enablement professional In that business, helping them get to that point of consensus before even considering putting a table.

Gal Aga: 30:03

I Love that look most. It's. It's not easy, right, it's, it's challenging to get. To get to that level of understanding you need experience, you need to always try to get there, you need the methodologies. But so many sellers really think about the Surface level pain, the challenges that are in front of them, or something that interests just one person and and you know the more that we go and and realise how real buying decisions are made, what it's, what's important to the executive team, as he said, the better has. Really, where you know we're, we're all of this budget scrutiny and all this you know, tightening of of, you know making moves or not making changes is it's just, there's no, there's no other way to go and address this. And where we're heading right now is really into an error, the way that we see it, where Sellers just don't close deals anymore, okay, buyers are in the front, most of the. So Gartner says that 5% of the buying journey is spent with you as a single vendor. Yeah, okay. They also share that 43% of buyers prefer to self-serve and not speak with a seller. They've gotten used to, yeah, so they've gotten used to the self-service tools, the self-service journeys, and a lot of them don't take your word for it and so they just, you know, as much as they possibly can. They prefer to, if there's an enterprise process, to be asynchronously behind the scenes and get some information. So it means that you really need to go and help a champion control that internal narrative that the CFO and you have to understand. Okay, you won't speak with that CFO or executives, yeah, and they'll have the chance to go and tell you hey, but we're thinking about what's the cost of inaction. They won't tell you that you won't get to that point.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 32:13

No, that's, and you're right and you know what's really interesting. I know I wanna add a bit of a different perspective as well to this, because I asked and this is the whole premise of us building this podcast of asking buyers We've got a whole bunch of incredible people coming on that are in the buyer's seat right, and we're doing this because we're trying to get the different perspective. But I asked a whole bunch of CFOs and I was really encouraged, agar, by the responses. I said you know, like would you take a meeting with a salesperson? And they said you know, we will if they can teach us something, if they can share something that we don't know, if they can, because we don't have all the answers. We might be tightening our budget, but we are still gonna spend money, right, they said but we don't have time, and it was really great to hear this. Like I said, I was really encouraged. They said we just don't have time to waste with vendors who are just pitching their products, but we absolutely will meet with people that can teach us, they can share insight, they can tell us about how other people are solving certain problems that we are encountering. So, even though Gartner might say, hey, yes, only a small portion of that time is spent with a vendor. This is where I think the mindset shift for sellers needs to occur that if we are pitching product yet, we're gonna be put into that really small percentage that 5% but when we're shifting our focus to enablement, educating, providing insight, collaborating, we are gonna get more of the time with that buying committee. And you know, I actually tried to validate this as well and I did a couple of cold calls yesterday. And because I just went to this conference, I learned some great things. And I called one of the biggest universities in Australia. I spoke to their executive director last night and I led with a very simple narrative. I went to X. I learned some great stuff. This is what they were talking about. I'm not sure if this is a challenge for you, but if it is, I could have you share this insight. And they're like great, let me get some of the key people around and let's organise the time. There was no resistance or tension, yeah, and I didn't come with any. Hey, this is a cold call, I'm just gonna have 30 seconds of your time. It was purely an insight-driven narrative and it worked quite well. So, mate, I'm absolutely. I've loved this conversation. We could probably talk for hours on end, but I know that we're almost out of time. But just before we go and we will make sure, we put in our show notes a link because you can sign up free to your platform to start building a digital sales room, and I encourage all of our listeners to take advantage of that opportunity, because using technology in your sales process is your competitive advantage, right With everything else that we've spoken about today. But where can our listeners go to find you Agal? What's the best place for them to engage with you?

Gal Aga: 35:15

Yeah, so I'm quite active on LinkedIn. So, yeah, just feel free to go and look for Agal Aga G-A-L-A-G-A on LinkedIn, connect with me, send me a DM and yeah, that's basically the main place.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 35:30

Awesome. Well, mate, I've really enjoyed this episode. We're gonna and, for our audience, we're gonna take this episode, we're gonna deconstruct it, and one of our other episodes we're gonna talk a bit about how we can now flip the process and start to position some of the strategies that Agal's talked about on how do you get consensus, how do you get commitment from different stakeholders and start to get engagement in your digital sales room. So, thank you very much, agal, for coming on the podcast and we look forward to having you on again soon.

Gal Aga: 36:04

Absolutely thanks, so much, it was fun.