Go-to-market mavericks: Eleanor Dorfman on account planning, inbox zero, and more [video]

We recently talked to Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Sales at Retool, about navigating complicated sales cycles as part of our recent event: Mastering the puzzle of the complex deal.

Here are three of the top takeaways from that conversation (check out the full recording above).

1. Planning makes perfect

The bigger the deal, the bigger the buying committee.

Reps selling more complex or horizontal products—especially to the enterprise—have to put a lot of work into triangulating end users, champions, and economic buyers (not to mention sussing out potential detractors or blockers).

With so many stakeholders, deal dynamics can change on a dime. That’s why Eleanor swears by comprehensive—and continual—account planning.

“You have to have an org chart for everything,” Eleanor said. “We'll do a lot of weekly, biweekly account team reviews for the most complex ones where we've just got a deck we'll maintain of current engagements, future engagements, status of current activation, status of current adoptions, status of active POCs, key stakeholders.”

With the right tools in place, a lot of this work can be done programmatically. But the more complicated a deal is, the more hands-on management it requires.

“For the really complex ones, you have to have a lot of structure and organization and project management around it,” Eleanor said. “Because at any given time, you could be managing multiple POCs, multiple deployments, multiple teams, multiple champions, but then have your head on, ‘Okay, in 18 months, am I going to consolidate these?’ You still have to always have a very clear North Star that you're building toward.”

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2. Stay alert (and alerted)

With so many moving pieces in the sales process, it’s easy for reps to lose sight of all the latest activity.

That’s partly why Eleanor has an inbox-zero philosophy.

“We have a training we use and we talk about inbox zero in that,” Eleanor said. “So you're up to date every single day on your intent signals so you know who's been looking at the website, you know where champions have been moving in and out, you're looking at your trial sign-ups, you're looking at who's attended webinars, you're keeping track of all of that day in and day out.”

The goal is total visibility. With a clear picture of what’s happening within an account, reps can more easily tailor their approach, take action, and avoid blockers.

“Folks really are very disciplined and build a really complete picture of what's going on in their account, so they'll know that a new [buying unit] is kicking the tires over here,” Eleanor said. “They'll triangulate between power over here and practitioner over here, and sometimes our reps will know a lot more about what's going on inside of an organization than our buyers will because they're able to see across all the different BUs that are kicking the tires.”

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3. Identify the intent behind buying signals

Retool buckets the intent behind buying signals in three ways:

1. Active intent (think explicit hand raising, like a demo request)
2. Passive intent (think behaviors that indicate interest without clicking a button, like webinar attendance)
3. Latent intent (think actions or attributes that identify a problem to be solved, like job listings or insights extracted from news events)

From here, teams will sit down and map out their plans for accounts based on the signals at their disposal.

“There're patterns and different plays that exist within those three buckets that the reps have built very repeatable playbooks around,” Eleanor said.

While these signals have always existed in one form or another, it used to be next to impossible for sales teams to capture them, centralize them in one place, and act on them quickly. Modern technology has changed that.

“You can have so much access to information now,” Eleanor said. “It used to be very Arctic outbound and you'd hit the phones and you'd have to send 18 emails and do 18 touches in front of five different people over the course of six months in order to get a response. Whereas now it's way more about this inbound-outbound motion, which is why instead of thinking about it purely as inbound and outbound, we're thinking about it more as active, passive, and latent. Because that passive bucket used to be one that you couldn't attack in the way that you can now, and now that's such an incredible source of pipeline.”

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These are just some of the takeaways from our conversation with Eleanor Dorfman.

Watch the recording for the full story.

And stay tuned for the next edition of Go-to-market mavericks!

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