183: The Subtle Art of Selling with Dealfront's Carolina Braeuninger: Insights from Germany

0:08 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Carolina I'll have her say, pronounce properly, pronounce her last name in just a minute. Carolina is the top senior account executive at Dealfront out of Stuttgart, Germany. Welcome to the show, Carolina. Say your last name for us.

0:41 Carolina Braeuninger: Thank you, Scott, for this lovely intro. It's Carolina Braeuninger. And if you couldn't tell by my slightly German accent coming through, you at least know now that I'm a German potato because Braeuninger is not a name that you have in the US or anywhere else internationally.

0:59 Scott Ingram: No. And we just had a quick preview on all of the ways that I could have mispronounced her name. Fortunately, I decided just not to step in that at all and have her name correctly. And now, so that I cannot offend you, you will be Carolina B in my world and we'll go from there. But let's kick things off. We have had so much fun chatting leading into this. Carolina actually had her own podcast for a period, a German podcast. So for those that are local for her and listening to this, maybe that's something we'll want to go back to. That is the Girl in Sales Podcast, right?

1:34 Carolina Braeuninger: Exactly. And actually, this one was one of my first sales hustles, first proper side hustle, actually, because when I was starting, and I think we'll also come to that later, in sales, I was told by all my colleagues, you gotta listen to podcasts. Just, you know, reading books is great, but listening to podcasts is greater. And every single German sales podcast that was on the market was led and held by old white men. Who were like twice or thrice my age. And they just sold things, especially software, like they did back in the '80s. And selling like we did in the '80s doesn't work anymore. And especially because they were old white men, it didn't resonate with me being an SDR in the beginning of her 20s, a woman. I saw a niche in the market that nobody was owning and I owned it. And I was the first woman in the DACH region, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So the German spoken region in the world who set up a sales podcast.

2:33 Scott Ingram: Amazing. Amazing. Well, I know you like the show. You shared with me that this is your favorite English-speaking sales podcast. So, let's do the thing we always do and start with that immediate value and talk about the 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales.

2:51 Carolina Braeuninger: I actually had a hard time compiling everything only to 3 bullet points or 3 major things, but I think that The thing that helped me be on top of the leaderboard for 4 years now, especially in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, is subtle selling. Because the craft of sales has a very, or rather negative view in our society here. So whenever you tell people that you start a career in sales, they immediately think that you want to either sell them an insurance or a car, massively overpriced or massively undervalued. You can choose. And the thing that, or how I first learned about sales was actually in the insurance industry when I was in a brokerage and they sold me an insurance and they somehow saw that I had some sales potential and they tried to get me into their training program. And all the tactics that I learned there were not resonating with how I wanted to be sold to. And after just turning down their trainee program offer, I decided that if I was going back to sales, I never wanted to do it that way. And as I just told you, all these podcasts that are still sticking around from these old white men selling like in the '80s, you have these very blunt sales tactics where people just try to push you into something, talk you into a decision, a buying decision. And Subtle selling for me is not only the complete opposite of doing this old way kind of sales, but for me, subtle selling is more being an advisor from the get-go, from the very first cold call until the very last email that I send over when I just hand over my one client to customer success, because just also based or rooted from the fact that sales is not a proficiency that people admire here in Germany. When you try to oversell or overly sell people, they'll just block you from the get-go and you will never have the chance to spark a conversation, even if you change your employers and you're selling a completely different product and they're in a completely different situation, but you will have lost this opportunity for the rest of your life. And especially in Germany, it's better to pitch people way less than slightly too much. And I had to learn this the hard way because in networking events, nobody wants to know what you're selling until they're actively asking for a pitch. Nobody wants that. If I just would have to sum up the first thing about subtle selling in one sentence, it's be a business partner and on equal footing for your prospect from the very beginning until the very end. For example, by doing a well-founded COI or ROI analysis, which is a thing in the US, but not in the EU. And I think we also come to that later. And just coming to the second point, oh wait, Do you have any questions?

5:55 Scott Ingram: I love that. I have an observation, which is one of the things that I'm working on with the show right now is just more diversity. Just by nature of my network, there's so much straight down the middle tech sellers. It's a lot of the same stories and really trying to cover more industries, maybe some more nontraditional industries. And I think your perspective selling in the DACH region, I think there's value in thinking about this from an American perspective. Where it's certainly much more aggressive than what you described. But I think this approach, or elements of this approach, could work very, very well and really resonate. Because when you ask the question, how do you like to be sold to? Do you really like, come at me, please just pitch me? Nobody wants that.

6:41 Carolina Braeuninger: Nah. Well, actually, sometimes when I'm at these networking events and it's like 99% men around me, I am a unicorn in these situations just because I'm not a man. And all these men are just like observing you and they're like, yeah, are you actually a business partner? I don't think so. You're just an assistant. You're just in a CR. So just go away. I'm like, pitch me. You have 30 seconds. Pitch me. And most of the times, these founders that have never been taught how to properly pitch or sell anything, they're just relying on the fact that they're a founder and that they can just do this founder-led sales thing until the end of their lives. Well, wake up. But no, that's not how it works. So I always like interacting with international sellers, especially from the UK and the US, because you guys have so much knowledge about sales. Because over 95% of the very great sales books and podcasts come from the non-DACH region. And learning from these professionals and also learning their stories that actually people think of applauding them when they just hear, hey, I just started a career in sales. It just blows my mind because that's nothing that you would expect in Germany.

7:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I've certainly heard that. It is not a highly respected profession.

8:02 Carolina Braeuninger: Nah, but even though if you are a good salesperson who does subtle selling and who is not eyeballing and having commission breath all the time, people value you for the rest of their lives actually, and they will climb mountains for you if you just tell them, hey, I know that I'm critical about my product. I'll come to that later as well. And I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm just trying to see if I can provide real value. And being the daughter of an entrepreneur myself, I would never talk you into making a buying decision just for my own profit. And that's what people value, actually.

8:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And again, that's the same thing. I think to be a truly professional salesperson, the bar is really low to step over that because even in the US, I mean, I think the profession is more respected. I don't know that it's super respected. It's more respected. It's a respectable kind of role. But again, people don't like to be sold to. That's not the experience we want. And when you can deliver that really great experience, I think you have the kind of the same thing like, okay, this is somebody I can actually trust.

9:10 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My second thing that helped me stay on top of the leaderboard, and I actually only discovered this like 2 years ago, all by a sudden by accident is every single time when I'm on a discovery call with my prospects, I ask them the question, if you had 5 minutes to onboard me to your team for this specific project, what would you like me to know? Because it's not only telling you the hierarchy and the team structure, but also slightly underlying issues or things that they might be uncomfortable telling you in the first place, just considering you're a salesperson. But all of a sudden, if you come up with this roleplay situation, people are way more open to actually give you the information that you might need later on in the sales process. For example, the buying process. Is there like this purchasing manager who turns down every single request that gets handed in just because they think they can just get a few more percents of discount, for example? Or is there this head of marketing who might leave to their maternal leave any second because their wife is about to give birth every minute, for example, just as an example. But these are normally things that people are hesitant to share. And once you just give them the atmosphere, also taking into consideration the subtle selling thing, but being like open, being curious, and telling them, I'm not using this information against you, I'm just trying to use this information for process. To help you the best way I can. And it helps you to really understand your prospect as an organization, because as we all know from gap selling, most of the times it's not one specific problem that your prospect is trying to solve, but it's an underlying issue that is getting influenced by different teams or different other projects. And your role as a salesperson being an advisor is not to only solve this problem, but to make it easier to fix the underlying issue.

11:16 Scott Ingram: I love this so much. I've never heard this question. And as I think about it, to me, it's a level above an open-ended question. To me, it's an open-ended story.

11:26 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah.

11:26 Scott Ingram: Because you're giving them sort of a timeframe, like, I'm expecting you to monologue. I'm expecting you to talk for several minutes.

11:33 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah.

11:33 Scott Ingram: And they're going to talk about what's important to them. What I really think that this would likely uncover is something that you might never discover Which is just some of the weird internal politics, which if you're onboarding your teammate, it's one of the first things you're going to call out is, yeah, one of the biggest issues we're going to have is working around this person or this department or this particular issue. Again, if you don't ever know that or ever find that out, you're stuck. But if you're now their partner and okay, great, how do we figure out together how to kind of work around that particular challenge? Now you really are their partner.

12:07 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah. And the nice thing is, of course, we never stop discovering. We never do. But every single time when you uncover a new thing or when they just give you this new bits and pieces of information, you can always recycle back to this initial onboarding thing, onboarding scheme and be like, okay, you just told me that the wife of your head of marketing is just about to give birth anytime. You were just mentioning that you were on this team fit call. Was this actually for the interim? Head of marketing position, or just curious? It's another thing because if they tell you, yeah, this actually was the team call for the new interim head of marketing, you know that there will be a new persona stepping into the process, especially for me. Yeah, because I'm selling to sales and marketing professionals. I know there will be this new player in my buyers committee at some point in time. And if I could just ask them questions, poke a little bit, be like, okay, how are they? Just tell me. Do you think that they will love where we're going with this project? Or do you think that I just have Do we also hop on a team fit call with them to properly present us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I love this metric. And actually, I just uncovered it by accident because we were just having a team call and one of my colleagues was thinking out loud and she was like, every single time when I have these weird people that I work with on projects, and that happens in sales, it's just like, you get reminded so much of your own team. With these people that you work with that are not on your team, but your prospects every single day, why not make use out of this?

13:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

13:41 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah.

13:41 Scott Ingram: Amazing. Have you found any other questions like this that are kind of the open story type of questions?

13:49 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, actually, I don't know if this is too negative for a discovery, but sometimes you have these very… so if you have the DISC analysis in mind with the 4 colors, You might just encounter a green bluish, so very hesitant, very security-oriented buyer or decision maker. And you ask them an open question and you get the shortest closed answer possible. Like, how's your weekend been? Great. Thanks. Can we just go on now? Like these type of guys. And when I have these people in my calls, I'm always like, okay, just tell me the worst possible scenario that can happen. Just tell me, but please go into detail because I know that it's your job having all these worst-case scenarios at hand because I know that for every single one of those 101 scenarios, you already came up with a backup plan. So please tell me what is the worst thing that can happen here. Another side of the story, it's a negative one, but still it's a story and you can massively profit from the information that you're given.

14:57 Scott Ingram: That's so good because it's the way that they're wired. That's their default thinking is super negative anyway. So like, okay, just lay it out there for me. I know that's where your head is.

15:07 Carolina Braeuninger: And the thing is, it's not only the project managers or the head of buying department, but most people, like it's in human nature to be negatively wired than positively wired, just because we're all our lives we've been in fight or flight and just being a mammal ourselves, it's easier for us to focus on the negative things because if we encounter anything negative, it just triggers this fight or flight mode and we can just run away. It's more natural to focus on the negative things. Of course, it's not that good for mental health, but still, sometimes it helps just to break the ice with these more hesitant buyers.

15:47 Scott Ingram: I love it, right? Because part of our job is to de-risk the deal.

15:51 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah.

15:51 Scott Ingram: Let's pull out what do you see as the risks? And especially if you're the Debbie Downer on the team and you're going to think about all the negative, well, lay it out there for me. Yeah.

16:01 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah. And the thing is, in Germany, I'm just coming up with all these weird German things, but in Germany, there are a couple of sales trainers that have this spell. I'm firstly going to say it in German and then I'm just going to translate it into English. Nein. So, the German word for no is nein. N-E-I-N. And German sales trainers coming from the '80s are mostly like, noch eine Information notwendig. So yet another info that you need as a seller. And that's also, I don't know, the maxim of what they're selling to. So whenever you hear a no, you just aggressively push into them, just turning this no around to yes. But actually what you can use or how you can use a no when you just get it as an objection in your sales process is like, okay, we just uncovered all these different problems. We just came up with a solution that has worked for hundreds of clients, especially like 3 or 4 industry heroes from your industry that are actually already working with us. Why do you think it wouldn't work for you?

17:05 Scott Ingram: Excellent. Excellent. How funny is it that we turn no into an objection handling acronym?

17:12 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, that's just Germans, but that's everybody, right?

17:15 Scott Ingram: We're going to take a word and we're going to turn it into make it stand for something. What's your third piece? Because I think this maybe kind of ties some things together.

17:23 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, I think the third piece actually ties number one and number two together is know your limits and sell accordingly. I've never been a salesperson who was just selling things that we as an organization or my product as a tool was never able to accomplish or solve for my prospect. Whenever I encounter hurdles or limits, I'm very aggressively pointing them out to my prospect because most salespeople won't do this. They will just like run over the question or fumble around it to make the prospect somewhat happy with the wadi dadi da answer they just gave them. But I'm like, okay, for example, in my case, we just launched our US and rest of world data. I'm just coming to that in a few minutes, but this is not our strongest suit. We launched it just because we have a handful of international bigger corporations that use us that want to use use our solution there as well. But I would never actually point out to a company, you have to use this. This is like world-class things that you're getting there for your money. It would just be not the real deal. And by knowing the weaknesses and the strengths of your products and being honest with yourself and with your prospect as well, it's not about making fun of your product. But it's just being open-minded and being open towards the people that you're talking to and working with. And you will uncover that you're more likely to win a deal and win their business and their trust than if you were just the one who does it all, just because no product in the world will do this and no product in the world will be able to solve all your problems. So why should I be the one selling a unicorn. Yeah.

19:11 Scott Ingram: I mean, nobody is going to trust you if the answer to every question they ask is yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. If you want to set somebody's BS detector off, that's the way to do it.

19:22 Carolina Braeuninger: Exactly. And the thing is, why shouldn't we stay realistic? Because it always comes down to being realistic when you're, for example, in your pipe forecast. Why shouldn't we be realistic with the people that we work with? As well, because if we aren't, how can we be realistic when adding their deal to our pipeline? Doesn't work for me.

19:42 Scott Ingram: I think a lot about… I mean, I'm a very long-time horizon seller. A successful sale is, to me, the first contract. That's just a step in the journey. Yeah, hopefully they're buying more, they're buying again, they're going to introduce me to somebody. The only way that happens is if I've set their expectations properly and we're delivering on what we expected. If I set those expectations high, even if we do a great job, but they expected more, they're disappointed. And I don't get that next deal. And they're not going to introduce me to their friend that just moved on and got promoted into a new executive role.

20:19 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the thing is, another thing that also ties into this is I never try to blow up a deal when it's firstly getting signed, because in my role, my job basically ends with the… if I send the order confirmation, and then I just hand over the clients to AM and CS or account management and customer success. And the thing is, if I just try to start with a rather small POC, maybe with only 2 handfuls of users, the company is way more likely to just expand their contract in the first 6 months than just buying like 100 seats of our product and actually figuring out after 3 months that 70% of these 100 seats they will never be able to use, just because I sold them into doing this bigger deal with us because they they might get a slightly higher discount in the first place, which only is ourselves as a provider selling long-term setting us up for churn. And we don't like churn.

21:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I'm a huge believer in if you do it right, so many people are afraid of the POC. And again, this might be just wrongly structured sales teams. If I don't get the opportunity to benefit from the account growth, well, I'm going to do unnatural things. But if we take our time, and we have success in the POC and we develop that trust. Now they go, oh, actually we want to roll this out worldwide. It's even better than we thought. Carolina, let's contextualize all of this. Talk about your role and how you got to number 1.

21:52 Carolina Braeuninger: I am a senior account executive for strategic and enterprise customers at Dealfront. To all the Americans or non-EU people that are listening to this podcast here, if you know ZoomInfo, you know what Dealfront does. The thing is that especially being or working for a European-based company, there are a couple of regulations that one has to follow when they're doing business. And the most prominent one being the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, limiting how you're able to obtain and use data in a business-related way. And for example, ZoomInfo is our biggest competitor. And they're also selling a platform for sales and marketing professionals for lead generation, lead qualification, sales enablement, and everything around that. And most of these international providers, for example, are having a hard time selling into the EU because most of their data that they gather and obtain and crawl is by using so-called community data. So by just signing up with their platform, their prospects or their customers are giving the providers access to their inboxes and their CRM system and just giving them a carte blanche of crawling the information from their systems and just selling it. And that's fine as long as you're not in the EU. So whenever you enter the EU, there must be at least one reliable and publicly available source of where you, for example, got a mobile number from or an email address. And my job is it to be an advisor for mostly also international sales and marketing teams to not only decide for a platform provider like ourselves who just matches their needs just because they can provide the data that the prospect needs, but also to advise them on how they are able and allowed to use the information. Because in some countries in the EU, it's okay to do cold mailings, but in most of the countries, it's okay to do cold mailings in a postal way only. So snail mail. Cold calling is allowed in most of the countries of the EU, but not every single one of them. So just having this federal system here, it's very critical for international companies to follow the rules and regulations in every single country where they want to be making revenue. So it's not only selling, but it's also advising and doing geopolitics and stuff. I've been with the company for 7 years now. Started there as their first SDR alongside my time at university. And I actually never finished my 2 bachelor degrees that I started. I ended them abruptly after 2 years because I just learned that I love sales. And I've stuck with sales ever since. I've never been a junior AE. I just started as an SDR, then, or first, like, working student SDR, full-time SDR, sales and market development manager, and then senior AE for 2 years now. Amazing. I love it.

25:00 Scott Ingram: How did that happen initially? How did you get kind of thrust into this? And then I'll follow up with my next question.

25:05 Carolina Braeuninger: Actually, I never wanted to go back to sales because as I just told you, my first, the first encounter that I had with sales was in the insurance industry. And after that, I was like, I will never do this again. And then I just started at a very big marketplace in Germany in their e-commerce support center. And as they were shutting down the team that I was working for as a working student, and your working rights are quite limited when you're a working student, I just had to look for another job. And then this SDR opportunity at Ecobot popped up. I didn't know what an SDR was doing, and I went there and the day went quite nicely. And all of a sudden I found myself sitting on a desk, having a phone in my hand. And my head of sales being like, yeah, let's just do some cold calls now. And I was the first SDR for our sales and marketing platform. We didn't know what pitch really worked out. We didn't know the ICP. We didn't know the persona. We only knew that we had a product that was working and we wanted to sell it. And he was like, you will get there. I will try to help you, but you will get there. And at the end of the day, all of my cold calls It was like hell. It was like one of the worst days of my life. But actually, at the end of the day, he was like, yeah, let's just go sign your working contract, shouldn't we? And I just stopped him on the floor and it was like, Michael, you gotta promise me something before I sign this contract. And he was like, yeah, everything. Well, at least if I can. And I was like, please promise me that selling is not only talking people into buying an insurance. And he did. So, I stuck with it, and I think it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

26:54 Scott Ingram: Oh my gosh. At what point, where was this realization that this is it? I love sales. I don't even need to finish the college path. I'm good.

27:02 Carolina Braeuninger: I think it was my boyfriend at the time who, I think we were on a weekend trip or so, and he just looked me in the eye and he was like, you know what I just realized? The way how you're talking about your side job is the way how you should be talking about your studies because you hate your time at university. You hate your bachelor's degree. You hate your professors. You hate everybody that's with you there. Every time when I pick you up after your office time, it's just like you're blooming. You're just shining bright like a diamond. You're so happy. You're full of life. I don't think that this university path is your thing. And it was a very tough realization because I am the firstborn. I'm the only girl. We are 4 children. I have 3 younger brothers. And I think at the time when my mother learned that I will be her firstborn daughter, she just pictured me being at the management board of Siemens or Bosch, like age 25. I don't know, Fortune 500. And I think that it was also a bit of her dream dying at that very day when I told her, Mom, I'm not gonna continue my bachelor's degree, but I will just try to follow what feels right for me. I'm just trying to follow my gut feeling. We also talked about the gut feeling nerve, I think 4 or 5 episodes ago. That just would help me in this very situation because I felt if I'm just continuing doing what others want me to do, I will never be able to take out my full potential and do something what I will be most likely doing until I start my retirement. So, why not have fun along the time?

28:54 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that. Well, speaking of fun along the way, put your results in perspective for us because you've done quite well.

29:03 Carolina Braeuninger: I have, actually. So, for the last 4 years, I've been part of the leaderboard. I've been leading the leaderboard for the last 3 years. And most of this time, my quota attainment was around 200% year over year. And in general, I'm not gonna talk numbers here, but I think I was at the right place at the right time because we were starting to sell this online lead generation thing in 2018 and 2020, Corona hit and especially in the EU and especially in Germany, people were heavily relying on door-to-door sales or field sales, as well as trade fairs. And all of a sudden, from one day to another, nothing of this was possible anymore. You just had to be open-minded. You just also had to be very, how am I going to say this? It's just me searching for words, but you have to be able to adapt to different use cases in different industries in the blink of an eye, just because you have so many different bigger corporations here. One sells steel, the others sell like paper, the third sell the super specialized machinery, and you just have to be able to serve every single different use case. And if you're somebody who's curious by nature, and I'd say At least the people that are listening to this podcast are. I think the chances were quite high for me to outperform my peers, and I think my work-life balance was a bit off 2020 to 2023. So of course, this also played a very important role for me. But I don't think that I will ever sacrifice my mental health and my private life for being on top of the leaderboard just because it's simply not worth it. I know being in the leaderboard is nice. Being on President's Club is nice. Nice, but nobody will ask you at the end of your life, like, how often have you led the leaderboard? Nobody will.

31:08 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. How have you found that balance now?

31:11 Carolina Braeuninger: I actually moved closer to my family last year. I was living in Karlsruhe where Dealfront is based for 7 years. And I just also with my grandparents getting older, I just wanted to have this closeness to my family. That's one thing. So being a remote worker from one day to another, one day, everyday office goer, one, and the next day, 100% remote really helped me just have this actual balance in my life because in the morning I log on and in the evening I log off and I just have my own private life going on. And of course, embracing what you're interested in, no matter if it's building Legos, reading books, I don't know, painting or going for hour-long walks, I don't care, but just to do something that helps you balance out all this stress because sales is one of the most stressful professions in the world. And I think just also coming to the realization that it's only a job and you can make this job or you can excel at this job as long as you have this professional balance of your work life and your private life, because otherwise you will be burnt out at some point in time. We are the only tool that we can use is ourselves as salespeople. And if we can't utilize this tool anymore, well, we can't be sellers anymore.

32:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. This was maybe the overwhelming theme at the summit this year was really talking about sustainable success. And I love the way you put it, right? If you are the tool and you break the tool, it's not going to do anything. I'm curious about your perspective because you've been there roughly 7 years.

32:57 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah.

32:57 Scott Ingram: Do you think, or how would you think about really going hard in the beginning to accelerate yourself to the top of the leaderboard? And then I think through the… because I'm currently experiencing this, I've been in my current role almost 9 years. I don't mean to have a big ego about it, but it's not hard for me to maintain that number one spot because I've done the work and because I have all of the depth of relationships that I need. Both inside my organization and with my clients and all of these things. So, have you found that kind of a sweet spot? Let me ask this, because I didn't ask it earlier, and I like this new kind of context. If you were starting this role over again, and you wanted to find that right balance between your performance and your life balance, does the approach that you took actually work? Or would you have approached it differently?

33:49 Carolina Braeuninger: I think even if I tried to approach it differently, I would still end up doing it the same way that I did it already, because I'm a very ambitious person. And if there is like a list of 10 people and just by good results, you will be in the top of this list. Well, that's my spot and I'm just going to go there and own it for as long as I can. So, I've also been raised by my parents and I'm on the one hand, very thankful for this, to always try to be the best one in the room, no matter what craft. And I I just learned this the hard way on the weekend when we were just playing video games. And pardon my lingo, but I sucked at every single one of them. And my partner was like, well, it's not a big deal. You just have to try and you will get better eventually. And I was like, but I just want to be the best one right now. I nearly had a meltdown just because I couldn't be better than him who played this game for over 10 years. Of course he's going to be better than me. I think when I started in sales, I was signing myself up for this ambitious lifestyle because once in a while you hit your first 6-digit deal. Well, the only thing to outperform yourself at one point in time is to do a 7-digit deal. It's just natural. But the thing is, when you have been in the leaderboard for 1 year, for 2 years, for 3 years, it's hard to also be realistic about your own performance and be like, Like being in the leaderboard repetitively over several years is not normal as a sales professional. Because if I'm not mistaken, I just once in a while read one report from Salesforce that stated that 86% of sellers worldwide just miss target month after month after month. That's almost every salesperson missing target every single month. So hitting target at one thing makes you a unicorn and being on the leaderboard It makes you unicorn even more. And I think the hard thing that people have to learn that have been top 1, top 2, top 3 over a longer period of time is there will be days where you will not be number 1 and you gotta be okay with it. Just because if you're staying on top of everybody for too long time, you will burn out or you will just lose sight of the things that are important in life, having a partner, having hobbies, having friends, going on vacation, logging off properly, taking time to spend with your parents and your family just because they will not be around you for all of your life. So, yeah, I think working in sales pushed me and grounded me at the same time, and I'm very thankful for it.

36:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah, in so many ways, that was my last year. I mean, I'm still top of the leaderboard, but took my foot off the gas in a lot of ways just to spend the last year that I had with my oldest daughter. Right? She was finishing up high school. We're launching her on her college adventure, and that was just really important to me. And then I didn't want to sacrifice that. That was the most important thing, not, oh, another few hundred thousand dollars or whatever it was.

37:03 Carolina Braeuninger: And let me guess, even though you took the foot off the gas, it still worked and you're still part of the leaderboard. So if you're a great skilled salesperson, you can always make work of PBRIDO. Like 80/20. It's just the thing. If you're good at your craft, if you're good at what you do, nobody will come at you if you just sacrifice 2 or 3 more hours a week not working, but your children remember their dad being there for them.

37:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I don't think that there's a way that you get to start like that. I think there's a recognition of the first number of years and probably more years than you want, It's going to be really hard work and you're going to have to do that. But then you kind of earn the opportunity to, oh, I can take my foot off the gas, but my skill set is strong enough that in that lesser time I can actually still perform at a fairly comparable level.

37:59 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

38:02 Scott Ingram: The show's called Sales Success Stories. I would love to hear what's your favorite sales story? Good or bad? Maybe there's a good lesson from a falling on the face.

38:14 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, I think there is one where I actually just lost a very big deal and I did everything I could in the very beginning when I just had this. It's one of the biggest insurances in mid-Europe. Of course, I can't say their name because they signed an NDA with us, but still. So, everybody living in the EU knows them if I just say their name. And from the very beginning in the discovery phase where I just had this gut feeling, oh, this might blow up to a 1,000-user deal, which is quite massive, I was immediately pulling everybody from the leaderboard together in a Slack channel. I was trying to utilize every single point of intel that we have internally to support me. I was crafting a digital sales room, which is also something that nobody is doing in Germany. I know it's a thing in the US, but nobody does it here. Year. I was trying everything I could. We had a demo phase, which is doing great. We had a Q&A, everything was going fine. And I was like, well, this is way too smooth. There must be something just around the corner, which was the trial. And we had a trial with, I think, 25 people. And this trial should be representative for the user experience of over 1,000 people. The balance It's just not there, but still they wanted it like that. So I had to accommodate them and accept that. And there was one feature that was not working for this 3-week trial period. And this was the feature that was most crucial for them to make their buying decision. And nobody from us internally knew that this feature was not working. And we just had our test cooldown meeting. We just had different checkups along the way and nobody was raising their voice. Everything seemed to be just fine. And after the 3 weeks, we had this test cooldown with our head of data excellence and our CEO as well. 1 hour. And they just roasted us for 1 hour straight and everything. I could just see this deal fumble and break down in pieces. And I was like, you know, and the thing is, of course it was a video conference. So you just can't, you have to keep a smiling face.

40:38 Scott Ingram: This isn't going to look right if there's tears running down my face.

40:42 Carolina Braeuninger: Right. Thank you for just ripping me apart. Thank you for just killing all these dreams that I just had. Thank you for being so mean to me. I really appreciate it. This was like my whole day afterwards. I'd learned so much from it because of course I had these talks, this death analysis and stuff like that. And every single one of my colleagues was like, it's not your fault if your product is not working how it's intended to work. It's not your fault. Of course, salespeople, or at least the ones that I know, used to blame themselves if they lose a deal. They seem to be overly critical. They seem to overanalyze everything that they're doing along the sales process because of course, you're gonna lose some deals. Nobody has a 100% win rate. Nobody. Because it's basically, it's not possible. Not even the coffee shop around you has a 100% win rate because there will always be people coming into the coffee shop and deciding that $2 for an espresso is too much for them. Okay, then please go to McDonald's or anywhere else. I don't care. I'm allowed to name McDonald's on this podcast, or will we have like copyright infringement now?

41:52 Scott Ingram: I was gonna say, where are you getting a $2 espresso? Apparently, I need to visit Germany.

41:57 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, actually, I'm working part-time just as a hobby in a very small coffee shop around my house, and they sell very good Italian espresso for €1.50, so it's apparently $2.

42:07 Scott Ingram: All right. Yeah, but still, we already talked about… I have lots of reasons to come visit you.

42:13 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, just coming down to this: whenever you're losing a deal, it's great to criticize yourself, and it's great to listen to your recordings in Gong and just going over the correspondence that you had. With your prospect, but still getting a true reality check. Was it really me or was it anything else? Without advising people to always blame it on others, but also don't be too harsh on yourself because just a feature not working and nobody knowing that it's not working is out of my control. I couldn't have done anything else or anything in another way. To secure this deal.

42:54 Scott Ingram: Yeah. One of the things I think about a lot is controlling the controllables. And to your point, some things are just not in your control. The other thing that I think helps from a psychological perspective is don't cash checks in your head because we all do it, right? It's like, oh my gosh, when I close this deal, this is what my commission looks like. And you're spending that money in your head and it kills you.

43:23 Carolina Braeuninger: Add to cart, add to cart, add to cart. Mm-hmm.

43:26 Scott Ingram: For years, I don't remember the last time I did math on a deal before it was closed. I do not run numbers until that thing is signed and the commission is going to be on its way. At that point, I'll go, oh, I wonder what that's actually worth. And then I might think about it a little bit. But that is one of those things. I mean, you talked about the challenge. This is a hard, stressful role. And that is a really great way to mess with your head. Carolina, what are you most proud of?

43:56 Carolina Braeuninger: Good one. I think that I just found something that I'm good at and that brings joy to my life. I think that I can stick with this profession for quite some time, and I might just decide to go to, I don't know, RevOps, operations. I don't know. Not accounting, not HR, maybe marketing. I don't know. Customer success, account management, but I can sell things.

44:20 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

44:21 Carolina Braeuninger: And I cannot only sell software, I can sell the produce that my father's companies are selling. I can sell many things. And I think that's just a skill. If you can sell stuff, you're massively ahead everybody else around you, presumably.

44:37 Scott Ingram: Love that. Love that. What do you struggle with the most? What's the hardest part?

44:41 Carolina Braeuninger: My imposter is Same one. Imposter syndrome. Whenever I'm in a room full of people in a networking conference, or also I was just announced one of the 100 most influential women in sales, and I didn't even know that. And I just see my name on this list of professionals who've been in sales for years, who've been in the industries for decades, who are TED speakers and Ford X under X winners and stuff like that. And I'm like, okay, one day they will all wake up and they will see that I was just a scam from the get-go. So just by surrounding yourself with people that are excellent in what they're doing, the level of self-critique just rises to the moon. And a very big struggle for myself has been over the last few years to properly ground myself whenever the intrusive thoughts win over and I'm sitting at my desk waiting like 5 minutes before the month closes. I will never be good enough. Every single of my customers will churn, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just trying to remind myself and be like, the numbers speak different. The numbers speak completely different real-world perspective. So just focus on the things that you can control, focus on the things that are actually true, and don't let the intrusive thoughts win over because as soon as they win over, you lose. And you lose in every single aspect of your life.

46:17 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like the numbers for you can be an interesting reality check. I had this experience yesterday. I'm like, just without getting into the specifics of the issue, this felt really bad. This seemed like it was awful. And then we looked at the numbers and it was like, on paper, this is like an A-. This is not awful at all. And again, sometimes that's expectation. Sometimes that is, yeah, but I just expected so much more of myself. Or if you're expecting perfection, you're always going to fall short. Or again, just unbelievable numbers. But let me ask you this, because we're, I mean, you're not too far away from starting a new year. When you start the year, Where do you set your targets?

47:01 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, talking of quota attainment, over the last couple of years, I always had a very easy time of hitting my annual target in like Q3. This year is the first year where I will hit target next month. So, in Q4, just one month short of the end of the year. So, it actually has been quite a struggle to accept this reality, but it's been the first year where I only sold to enterprise customers and they just take a bit more time and it will happen that the deal slips on the very last day of the month to the next month, just because they had this one person from, I don't know, purchasing come in and it just had a question and this stopped the buyer from signing the contract. It will happen. So I think when you have this reality check, well, you have to be open for reality checks. That's the first thing. And just having these numbers talk to you and talk a realistic perspective, it's easier to convince myself that I'm actually doing fine just because I'm a very analytic person. I love maths. So whenever I see, okay, my overall quota attainment last year was like 250%, it's realistic that I might do 225% this year just because my target rose. So it's very unlikely that I will hit 250% this year as well. But still, my goal is to hit target every single month and to outperform my target on a quarterly measure. So we have quarterly goals, not semiannual goals or annual goals. And the thing that I needed to realize the hard way was It's just like a roller coaster. There will be growth, but it will not be 500% month after month after month because you will have an empty pipeline at some time and you need to rebuild pipeline.

49:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

49:07 Carolina Braeuninger: It's not working otherwise.

49:09 Scott Ingram: Up and to the right is never a straight line. Hopefully the dot at the end is higher. But my thought there was one of the things I see super consistently on this show is The top performers are typically setting their personal goals. 200% is a very common number. Sometimes that's 300%. And then we beat ourselves up. We're like, oh my gosh, I only did 180% of my number. Beating ourselves up because we didn't get to our number. But from an expectation standpoint, from what we actually did, you're fine. You did really well.

49:45 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah. The thing is, just have a look around you. Yeah, just have a look around you and look at your peers and look at their performance and just take your performance in perspective to that. And you're doing great. Most of us are doing great, but it's imposters. It's being perfectionists. It's having very high expectations of ourselves. And if you don't ground yourself regularly, of course you're gonna fail big time just because you can't keep up with your own expectations. Most of the time.

50:16 Scott Ingram: Let's get in and I want to pull your whole day and week apart. So, yeah, your alarm clock goes off. Tell me what time that happens and walk us through just the details of your day.

50:27 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, now that we have wintertime, I don't know why, but I found myself to be way more productive in wintertime than in summertime. I don't know why, but now having this interview on November 1st, my alarm clock clock mostly goes off at 5:45 in the morning. I get ready and go to the gym every second day for like around 1.5 hours, come back and start work at 8. And then most of the times I'm done at 5, and then I have my spare time to spend with my loved ones, with my friends, with my partner. Every second week I visit the office. It's a 1-hour commute, so I have to get up at 4:30 in the morning. Which is why I just limited this down to like all 2 or 3 weeks, just because I hate that my whole schedule, my whole routine is just ripped apart by commuting to the office. And on weekends, I actually try to spend time with my family, especially with my grandparents. My grandfather was just diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Last year. So he was the one who ingrained this love for physics and mathematics to me. And I just want to take the time and spend it as long as I have it with him to get some quality time. And actually, whenever I'm in the gym, I listen to podcasts, or I think that this is also a thing in the US. It's called Blinkist, where you have these professional books where you just have the summaries. So whenever I have, or I'm about to read a new book or sales book, especially sales book, I just listen to the Blinks, for example, when I'm, I don't know, on stepper stuff for 15 minutes. So I try to educate myself for at least 15 minutes every single day. But as I got very obsessed with that in 2022, 2023, I also just found a very big love for history and true crime podcasts. So that's, for example, what I listen to when I'm in the bed and I'm trying to fall asleep at night.

52:41 Scott Ingram: Awesome. What's your favorite true crime podcast?

52:44 Carolina Braeuninger: It's actually a German one. It got discontinued in August. Bit heartbreak. At the moment, I'm looking for a new one, but it was called Weird Crimes. And it was just a collection of the weirdest crimes all over the world of the last 250-ish years. Very many cases from the US.

53:05 Scott Ingram: Well, we are weird.

53:07 Carolina Braeuninger: And Germany, of course, and the UK. But yeah, I might be able to find an equivalent from the US and we can just share it in the show notes.

53:16 Scott Ingram: There you go. There you go. Too fun. Walk us through kind of the… well, I'm curious. In the US, I would assume that your commute is in a car. Do you drive or do you take a train or something else?

53:26 Carolina Braeuninger: It's public transportation.

53:27 Scott Ingram: See, like, this works in the rest of the world.

53:30 Carolina Braeuninger: Because the parties that are in power at the moment, they decided 3 years ago that they will give everybody in Germany access to the €49 ticket, meaning that you pay €49 a month and you can just basically use every single public transportation of your choice. Unlimitedly often.

53:52 Scott Ingram: Wow.

53:52 Carolina Braeuninger: And it's just such a good deal. So whenever I commute anywhere, I try at least to go by train because Germany is very small compared to the US. So it's easier to go by train or by tram, for example, than to use the plane or the car because it just makes no sense. And for example, when I just go by train, I write LinkedIn posts, answer emails, interact with people on LinkedIn, for example. And it just feels a bit more productive than driving around because most of my meetings are held by phone on Teams or Zoom. And holding Teams meetings in the car is just not the best idea.

54:36 Scott Ingram: Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. What's your structure within that workday? And is it different when you're in the office versus at home?

54:45 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, when I'm in the office, of course, there's way many more coffee machine chats than at home because it's a bit weird to do a coffee machine chat with yourself, but it works as well. Works perfectly fine. No, just kidding. So whenever I have a normal workday remotely, my first hour of the day is just like taking down my daily tasks, like tasks that I have scheduled in Salesforce and Salesloft. Get this over, get all the admin work that has to be done over the line, and then I focus on my projects and my clients, on internal stuff, also market analysis for my prospects and stuff. 1 hour lunchtime. Most of the times I try to just get a breath of fresh air, take a walk outside, 20 minutes, 25 minutes maybe. And if it's just only for picking up the shawarma that you just ordered online, don't have it delivered. Just pick it up yourself and you will just be thankful for it. And at the end of the workday at 4:30, it's another 30 minutes for me to do admin stuff. So I try to focus my focus that I have along the day on my prospects. And I try to do this admin stuff that nobody wants to do on the beginning and the end of the day where most of my prospects are not working anymore. So there's nobody who's interrupting me and there's nobody getting on my nerves. And I can just focus on the stuff that needs to be done in order to do the fun things. And this actually helps because I just have blockers in my calendar and nobody can book anything in with me.

56:20 Scott Ingram: I'm noting a cultural difference. When you say you have an hour commute, that's 1 hour round trip. In the US, when we say we have an hour commute, that's one way. Isn't that wild?

56:32 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah. Yeah. But you guys are also using miles and not kilometers. So, well, yeah.

56:41 Scott Ingram: We won't get into that. Your system is way more logical in so many ways.

56:46 Carolina Braeuninger: I wouldn't say that it's way more logical. It's just different. Because once you understand this inches and feet and miles thing, you get it. Also Celsius and Fahrenheit. Oh my God, there's so many good cookie recipes from the US. But you always have to just translate them first before you can start doing them. Because we don't have ounces in the EU. We don't have cups. We don't use cups as a measure. Okay, 1 cup is 223 grams. So 2, 2/3, and 1/4 of a cup.

57:16 Scott Ingram: Wow.

57:17 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, but it's 1 hour round trip. And still, public transportation in Germany is not the most reliable. So mostly it's 1 hour one way.

57:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, unless you're in a major city in the US, it's not even really an option. So it's a different thing. It's a different thing. Let's finish up on… I'm curious about maybe some of the specifics of your information diet. So you're listening to a lot of podcasts while you work out. I mean, this is an English show, so what are some of your English favorites?

57:47 Carolina Braeuninger: Actually, of course, it's the show that I'm on. So Sales Success Stories, of course.

57:53 Scott Ingram: Okay, wait, pause, pause. I have a question because I found you on this top 100 women's list. I reached out to Alexine and said, hey, I need some more women on the podcast. Way too many dudes lately. And she said, well, I got this whole list. I'm like, oh, this is absolutely perfect. It drives me crazy that folks who are in your position, you've never reached out to me. You're absolutely qualified to be on the show. Why have you not reached out to me?

58:20 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, I think it's imposters, actually, because I'm like, as I just told you, I'm one of these 100 very talented women that excel in their field every single day. And I'm like, what the heck am I doing alongside them on this What have I done to have the honor to own this place up there? It's just overly critical of myself, but I'm very happy that Alexine just sent you this list and that you reached out to me because it's a little dream come true, especially being one of the very few handpicked non-US or non-international sellers, one of the very handpicked German people that are actually getting invited on international sales podcasts, also being able to educate you guys a bit on how we function here in good old potato land, because there's so many things that I try to incorporate in my day-to-day sales life. But most of these things that you guys practice over in the US just simply don't work because the mentality of people is just like flip side in the US than it is in Germany. Or also tools that you guys are using. Sales Enablement wasn't a thing 5 years ago in Germany. Digital sales rooms now just on the rise in the EU. 1% of sales professionals use them here in Germany. And it's just a non-negotiable. It's just base thing in the US. Most of the things that you guys are doing are like 5 years ahead of our German sales time. And it's just having the opportunity to listen to all these stories and be like, okay, this might just be something that I can just note down on my list to try out at some point in time. It might be a bit too early now, but there definitely will be the right place and right time to maybe ask a question that I just overheard in one of your interviews with a sales professional from the US that might just help me close a deal just in another way because it shifted my perspective.

1:00:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you are good enough. You absolutely deserve to be here. If you're listening to this and you are sitting at the top of your annual leaderboard and you haven't, just celebrate yourself. Send me an email. You don't even have to come on the podcast, but I would love to give you the opportunity. I'd love to invite you. Would you please send me a note and just say, hey, I'm doing it. I listened to the show. It makes me insane that I I reach out to people cold and find out, oh yeah, I'm a total fan of the podcast. We were going to talk about specific US podcasts. I'm also curious about how you use Blinkist. Do you only do the Blinks or do you find, oh, this is really interesting, and then do kind of a deep dive on the book as well?

1:01:13 Carolina Braeuninger: There are not many German sales books. There are a couple of translations from the true English thing to German, but most of the books that I, or Blinks that I listen to regarding sales books are in English. So whenever I have this massive list of, I think, 130-ish books, Blinkist, all sales and marketing related, and whenever I just listen to a Blink, I also listen to it twice or thrice just because it's not my mother's tongue. So I always try to understand it the best way I can. And whenever there's something that sparks my interest, I just try to dig deeper into it. So I not only listen to the Blink, but I also read the Blinkist. I don't know if anybody of you knew it, but you can not only listen to the summary of a book on Blinkist, but you can also read a summary of the book on Blinkist, which is most of the times 15 to 25 minutes. If you're an experienced reader, might be 30 minutes if you don't read that often. I actually just also try to educate myself on psychology or how human brains function, because storytelling, how to break down very complex things in a very easy manner, It's just one thing that I need to be excellent in working in a sales job because most of the times I'm just gonna tell people things that I never heard of, that they never ever considered, and I just need to be able to break it down to them as they were five. And there's actually a book, and I don't know if it's available in English, but the German title is Erklär es mir, als wäre ich fünf. So basically in English, this is Tell me as if I was five. So taking very complex things from politics, from science, from business, and breaking things down to be able to explain it to a 5-year-old and they will understand it. And that's what I am thriving for. And Blinkist just helps because most of the times very complex things in these books need to be shortened and need to be put in a very simple way. Otherwise, wouldn't spark interest with the listeners to actually buy the audiobook or buy the book to read at home as paperback.

1:03:25 Scott Ingram: I haven't used Blinkist in years, but I actually thought of it the other way. I didn't know there was audio versions of them. I've only ever read the written summaries. So, that's fascinating that you're like, I don't know if you knew, but there's written. I was like, wait a minute, I didn't know there was audio.

1:03:40 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, yeah, there was audio. And I actually, my head of sales, or now VP sales, Michael, who just promised me to show me that sales is more than insurance selling, he introduced me Blinkist, like, I think a week before I quit my studies, because he was like, you've learned so much just by using the intelligence in our corporation, but there's way more beyond that. And he just introduced me to Blinkist when we were on the way to a conference. And ever since, I've used it at least on a weekly basis.

1:04:09 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. I'm going to offend Michael. I've never even met him. Is Michael the duck guy?

1:04:14 Carolina Braeuninger: No.

1:04:15 Scott Ingram: Okay. So we had this really fun conversation. Carolina said, she said, Hey, when you emailed me, and one of the things I always ask my guests for, I usually have a preview of kind of those top three things. That's about all I have. I kind of like to know well directionally where is this going to go, and it kind of forces people to think about it before we come on because as you said, it can be hard to kind of boil it down. And Carolina said, "We can talk about selling in the." I'd actually never heard the word. I'm like, "You need to help me understand how to pronounce this." But selling in the what I thought was the DACH region, DACH, and Carolina says, "Oh, it's actually." But you've been acquired and they've said duck. Is that… what's the story there? And then maybe let's talk about the differences.

1:04:56 Carolina Braeuninger: The thing is, so maybe just a couple of sentences on the background of the company I'm working for. Dealfront was or is the product of a merger of 2 companies from the EU. And we just got a $280 million investment 3 years ago now from GHP, Great Hill Partners from Boston, who also are responsible for the growth of ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo, actually. And what they just thought of, let's just duplicate ZoomInfo but make it GDPR compliant in the EU. And here we are. And one of our leadership members, Kevin McIntyre, he's also been working at ZoomInfo previously. And whenever Kevin is talking about the dark region, on the one hand, it's funny. And I'm sorry, Kevin, for, I don't know, putting word into the world, but it's is so lovely to see people from anywhere else in the world heavily struggling with the German language. And on the other hand, Germans are not even better when it comes to talking English because like 95% of the Germans… and I'm just gonna overplay it on purpose… you can just hear that we are from Germany because the accent that we have is so, so very, very hard that everybody will immediately knows that you are from Germany if you talk like this. So, it's just like the same thing. So, we shouldn't criticize anybody for not being able to properly pronounce dag if most of the Germans are just struggling with a basic th.

1:06:25 Scott Ingram: That's amazing. I shared with Carolina before the show, I was actually born in Stuttgart, but that has not helped me at all. You said one word that I knew. I knew the word nein.

1:06:35 Carolina Braeuninger: That's about all I I know the word nine. Well, that's lovely. So you know the word for no. That's a starting point, isn't it?

1:06:44 Scott Ingram: Da. Did that not come through? I said da.

1:06:49 Carolina Braeuninger: Oh my god!

1:06:51 Scott Ingram: That's pretty much my entire vocabulary.

1:06:54 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, also is also a great word because every time when a German doesn't want to interrupt anybody when they're in a social gathering, but they. Want to go home, you just clap your hands on your legs like this and you say, also. And this is like the non-outspoken rule in Germany that everybody is just now deciding that they're gonna leave this social gathering. It's just like German coded as hell.

1:07:22 Scott Ingram: Wow, I love that. And we're done.

1:07:24 Carolina Braeuninger: We're done. We're done. Also, now we're done.

1:07:28 Scott Ingram: Excellent. Excellent. All right, I'm gonna use that one. Let's talk about those things though. So talk about what are some of the subtleties? I mean, you've consumed a fair amount of US-based kind of sales content and talked about we may be a number of years ahead. What is it like selling? What are some of the regional differences that you're dealing with selling in that region? And DACH is kind of the German-speaking countries.

1:07:51 Carolina Braeuninger: Hmm. Hmm. I'd say the first thing is in the US, at least it seems like this. People are leaning into sugarcoating things. So whenever I have a written correspondence, for example, with an international decision maker who's based in the US, you just have to dance around the things that you really want to ask them, but you have to sugarcoat them to not get on their nerves and not tip on their feet and stuff like that. And me being a German, I just want to know when the heck will we move forward with this project? But if you just write down this email and you conceptualize this email with your international colleagues and they're like, no, we just got to circle back to this last paragraph because if you write it like that, they will never ever answer your email. So this is one thing, but on the other hand, people in Germany, we like when you're honest, but we don't like you to be too honest. And Americans tend to be too honest when they tell you things. We like honesty, but please don't be in your face. Please don't be in our face.

1:08:56 Scott Ingram: What's an example of that? Because that seemed like a very complicated gray line.

1:09:00 Carolina Braeuninger: For example, when a salesperson in the US, at least that's how I perceive it, when a salesperson in the US, for example, is working with a marketing agency and they just see a process that might be a bit off or not that efficient, they just propose another solution and the agency will be like, well, we actually never thought of that. We'll consider it. Thank you for just sharing your thoughts with us. In Germany, when you have the same agency, the exactly same setup, and you as a salesperson just propose a new solution, a new way of thinking, the chances are very high that the decision maker will never ever talk to you again, just because the proposed solution that you just shared with them came off as massive critique against their very person, at least in their head. So openness and honesty are very valued in this country, but please don't be in your face because otherwise you will lose things. So it's another way of sugarcoating stuff that we, for example, in direct communication don't like.

1:10:09 Scott Ingram: You like the sugar in a different part of your communications.

1:10:12 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this is, for example, one thing that's not working. Or also, just, I just talked about that very briefly in the very beginning, cost of inaction and return on investment analysis is one thing that you guys in the US have been doing for decades, just because it gives the problem a proper business value. And it just highlights how much more efficient your buyer might be if they just decide to go with you, just because they can like save $250,000 every single Very basic math. We love that. In Germany, when you're doing these types of things, German buyers tend to think that you're again criticizing them and you know it better than they do. Just because you're highlighting something that they've done like this all the time, might be a company that's over 150 years old and they've never changed ever since. And all of a sudden, this mid-20 software seller lady comes around the corner and is like, well, let's just do things a little different here. This is a great tool, but still you need to catch the perfect timing to use this in your sales process. And you can also not use it in every single sales process, just also depending on the buyer once again. And things that are just like a no-brainer in the US might not even work here just based on the mentality of the buyers and the people in general. And that's what makes it hard sometimes because of course I would love to do a coin ROI or COI and ROI analysis every time. And I would love to propose other solutions on a day-to-day basis. It's just a 50/50 chance if it will work or not. And that's just gambling at one point in time.

1:11:59 Scott Ingram: Interesting. Is there a way to sugarcoat those things or can you say, hey, would you be open to some feedback? Do you get there or like, nope, I can't do that because they'll never speak to me again?

1:12:11 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, I think if you just pack it like a value piece and be like, you know, we've had some other companies that we worked with that had a very comparable setup to yours. Would you be open if I just share how we did it with them or what they might have changed after the implementation of our software? It might help. And with the cost of inaction ROI, most of the times it helps if you have a very restrictive buyers committee. And if you just want to enable your champion to, you know, build the business case best way possible, especially now And we also just discussed that in our brief chat before you hit the record button. With economy just being not that easy, especially for SaaS sales, as it was like for the last 5 to 10 years, you just need to be prepared and you need to enable your champions to properly also sell your software and your solution, even if you're not in the room with them. And just having these numbers on hand might be a great tool, but again, it heavily depends on the buyer's committee.

1:13:15 Scott Ingram: Actually, what you said, and this is what I'm so interested in, is, is taking these different perspectives and, oh, your nuance, the way you're having to think about that might actually improve our process. What I think I heard you say was, if you help your champion develop their own business case, and they're the ones coming up with it, then that can work. It's not you coming in and offending them. That's actually brilliant here too. Because if you go to a company, you're like, well, here's your ROI, they have to believe those numbers. And if any one of those numbers is wrong, sort of the whole thing gets thrown out. And the way to really make it work is for them to own it. Like, these are your numbers, you did this math equation to determine what your ROI is going to be. I didn't do it. I just helped you develop it.

1:14:04 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, people love when they just have the feeling that they know it all, and that they've Yeah, had this one brilliant idea. So if I need to enable you to think that my idea was yours to secure my deal, I'm here for it.

1:14:19 Scott Ingram: That's universal. Carolina, do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

1:14:31 Carolina Braeuninger: Controversial one.

1:14:33 Scott Ingram: Oh good.

1:14:34 Carolina Braeuninger: I think that most sales methodologies don't work these days just because they were developed in most of the times another century. So what I really like is the idea of selling as it was proposed in GAP Selling, because everybody of us has this certain script in their head that they just follow along their process with discovery and demo and trial phases and stuff like that. But there's either sales methodologies that show you what questions to ask, but not in which way you should ask these questions or the other way around. And you just need something to uncover the true need of your buyer, to put it into perspective in the whole corporation that you're talking to, and also to enable yourself to be the best advisor possible, to just have this mix of open and closed questions, this storytelling question being, hey, please onboard me to your project team. What would you like me to know? And also these bits and pieces of sharing knowledge, selling these value nuggets, like success stories. They don't even have to be in written form because most of the people don't trust them anymore because most of the people just get a massive discount if they just sign up for doing a success story with you. So just telling people, hey, we've done it like that, or these are other cases from your industry that we work with and we're doing it like this way around? Would you be considering this? You just put yourself on eye level with your buyer once again. And I think this is what most of the people value mostly when they actually decide to be sold to, because as we also already mentioned it, nobody likes to have the feeling that they're sold to.

1:16:22 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:16:23 Carolina Braeuninger: So just make the process as smooth as possible.

1:16:26 Scott Ingram: In your experience, I'm trying to understand this piece because the way that you talked about kind the opportunity to pitch, is there almost like a hand-raising moment? Do you really come to a place where you're like, okay, you know what, I'm interested, I'm ready, pitch me? Is that part of your process? Is that…

1:16:40 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, in networking conferences, it actually is because I don't care what you sell. I don't care whom you're selling it to. I just care about you as a person and what I can learn from you. And if I want to be sold to, I ask for your opportunity to pitch me. And if your pitch doesn't ring a bell with me and my needs, I'm not going to hop onto it and start a sales conversation with you. And this is, I think, very representative for most of the salespeople or also most people in business in Germany, because we might be very open to expand our network and just see if there's any areas for collaboration. But this area of collaboration doesn't have to be a sales opportunity for you or me. Presumably. It also can just be us, I don't know, attending a conference together, or I don't know, going to a networking event or to a masterclass or sharing podcasts with one another. But it doesn't have to be pinpointing sales pitches because it just makes most business people in Germany uncomfortable. That's at least my experience.

1:17:49 Scott Ingram: What is… I know the American version of this, but what's the most common sort of opening question in a networking conversation in Germany?

1:17:58 Carolina Braeuninger: Oh, that's a good one. I actually have to think about that for a couple of seconds. But most of the times it's, hey, I'm Carolina, I'm working for Dealfront. What do you do?

1:18:10 Scott Ingram: Okay, so it is the same. So because I was going to say the American version is sort of a, what do you do? But I've heard that in some other countries, Americans, we're so associated with our role, with our job. That's the thing that we talk about where a lot of other countries are like, Like a job is that's just a thing I do. That's not the first thing that we talk about, and maybe the difference is maybe that wasn't the best example. We're at a networking event where that is the purpose is we're going to talk about our jobs. But if you're having coffee with somebody or just a more social setting, because even in a social setting, if we're at a party, we'll ask, "Hey, what do you do?" So what's the opening question at a party?

1:18:47 Carolina Braeuninger: I'd say, "What are you doing here?" Hmm. So it's more about what brought you here today. What brings you here? Are you related with the one throwing the party? Are you the neighbor? Of the fiancé of the one throwing the party. I don't know, but tell me about yourself. And even on networking conferences, I just try to shift my question more on the purpose of somebody's job. So I'm like, what problem do you help solving?

1:19:12 Scott Ingram: Oh, interesting.

1:19:13 Carolina Braeuninger: Because I can just see your job title and your employer just by pulling up your LinkedIn profile, but I don't really understand what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. So it might just be a bit more interesting for me also to spark a meaningful conversation between me and you if I know the purpose of your job. And even if you're only heavy, only an SDR, well, your job is way beyond booking meetings.

1:19:41 Scott Ingram: Right.

1:19:41 Carolina Braeuninger: The purpose of your job is way more than that. So let's just talk about this because you're even just focusing on it every day, 9 to 5.

1:19:50 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. I usually ask the question, what is your style? Is that the subtle selling or do you think about that differently?

1:19:58 Carolina Braeuninger: I would say it's a mix of subtle selling, or it's gap selling, heavily being influenced by subtle selling. Because I think gap selling is the methodology that comes closest to being subtly in selling, because you provide value along every single stage of the sales process. And you're more in this consulting and advisory role than in the active seller's role. Of course, you take the seller's perspective in the negotiation, for example, Or also when you're just having a roundtable with purchasing and, I don't know, chief commercial officer or so, I get it. But still having this advisory-heavy and consulting-heavy approach in sales has helped me being in the spot where I am, just because I think if I can sell my tool and my product that way, I can also sell it in a very pushy way.

1:20:52 Scott Ingram: Is that your sales superpower or is it something different?

1:20:56 Carolina Braeuninger: I think I have to agree with you on this one. I think that's my sales superpower.

1:20:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:21:00 Carolina Braeuninger: Selling to people without giving them the feeling that they're actively being sold to. And I love it. I would love to see other sales professionals do it exactly the same way.

1:21:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. I would argue a little bit differently. And I shared a tip. I actually released this today as we're having this interview. So of course I don't remember what the number is. It's 1816 or something. Something on Daily Sales Tips. The title of my tip is Don't Lock Superman in the Phone Booth. And it's really this recognition. It was more a message for sales leaders because I see so much, and I kind of drew the distinction between their sales leaders and then their sales managers. And to be a leader, you have to really see the human. And the piece is, I think we all have different superpowers. So saying, oh, we should all do it that way. I don't think that's right. I think you should do it your way. So for some people that approach might work. For other people, they have a different style and trying to do it your way actually wouldn't work. I'm really proud. It's actually one of my favorite tips I've done in a long time. It's an idea I've been thinking about a lot because it really just kind of challenges this idea of particularly sort of management by the numbers. We're trying to put everybody in the same box and measure them the same way and think we're going to get the same conversion rates and outcomes. I'm like, yeah, but you know what? Carolina's really great at establishing these kinds of relationships and building these trusted conversations that stylistically somebody else on the team literally couldn't do it that way.

1:22:35 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, I really have to agree with you on that one. And I just might reframe what I just said a little bit. It, I would love to see a few more salespeople just tapping into this subtle selling thing, because it also lets yourself being perceived as a business partner grow beyond measure, because you're not this pushy salesperson that has commission breath and who's just collecting checks, even if they're not even in the works yet, but you're this trusted advisor who you know that you will always come back to no matter what they're selling, just because you know that you're in good hands.

1:23:12 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. You and I are very similar stylistically, and I would even think of it for myself, I would think of it more as collaborative selling, which is a lot of what we've kind of talked about. If we're collaborating with our champion to help them build the business case, if we're sort of offering these ideas, hey, this is a way that we might be able to improve your business. What do you think? What's your perspective? And just bouncing those ideas kind of back and forth and coming up with the best idea that we can then kind of take forward.

1:23:39 Carolina Braeuninger: Yeah, I love that. I love that. I think I have to just note it down and just pin it to my laptop on a sticky note. I love that.

1:23:45 Scott Ingram: Well, it's on the record now. Everybody gets to listen to it.

1:23:49 Carolina Braeuninger: Well, but I heard it way before everybody.

1:23:52 Scott Ingram: So you did.

1:23:53 Carolina Braeuninger: Sticky note. It's the sticky note.

1:23:56 Scott Ingram: That's too fun. Although we're going to move this fast. I think we're going to release this next week. So everybody will be able to hear it really, really, really soon. Carolina, how do you think about motivation? What drives you?

1:24:07 Carolina Braeuninger: Actually, the feedback of my prospects.

1:24:09 Scott Ingram: Ooh, say more.

1:24:11 Carolina Braeuninger: Not only along the process when we're not even being close to close this deal, but also afterwards, because from time to time, I have these clients where I established a great relationship, sometimes even friendships. And I'm like, hell, would you just mind giving me a recommendation on LinkedIn? And everybody's jumping on it like, sure, let me just draft something together. I'm just going to share it with you before I publish. And I'm like, I don't want to proofread it. I just want to read it first time when you published it. And most of them and all the feedback that I've gotten from them is that I was the first salesperson who was only focusing on their needs and not mine, on their timeline and not mine. And every single time, and they're also because I'm friends with him, when I I just had an argument with my manager just because of my forecast and my pipeline because another deal slipped to another month. I was like, well, pushing even more will not help me secure this deal, but it will certainly help me lose this deal. My job as a salesperson is accommodating my prospect, not accommodating my manager, because I was hired to sell to people, not to, of course, to create shareholder value, but I'm doing this through doing a good job in sales. So, the thing that drives me most and that motivates me most is the feedback of my prospects, because they see firsthand what I do every single day. And they're not biased because we're friends. So, I'm getting the most neutral, positively coded feedback I can.

1:25:48 Scott Ingram: I love that. But I love just your approach and the way that you're working with buyers even more. I think it's That idea that we can impose our timelines upon our clients… I think that's one of the biggest things that gives sales such a bad reputation. Our timeline is irrelevant. Yeah, and if you have enough pipeline, if you have enough of these things going on, it'll all come out in the wash.

1:26:15 Carolina Braeuninger: And the thing is, even if you're utilizing mutual action plans or stuff, there's always going to be something that might kill. Your timeline. Yeah, it has just been like that with a very big deal of mine yesterday, where we had a public holiday in a couple of states in Germany. And my buyer just missed that the signer lives in one of these states where they had a public holiday yesterday. And the state where I live in has a public holiday today. So of course, this deal will slip to next month. But being pushy and trying to find out the signer's private mobile wouldn't have helped me secure the deal. I can't impose my timeline on them. I just have to wait because I have to go, I have to buy in. I just need to wait patiently for a couple more days, which will not kill me. It's just getting on my nerves, but no damage done.

1:27:08 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this is a pretty good setup because I always like asking kind of the controversial questions. So is there something you've believe that the average or typical sales professional would think is crazy?

1:27:21 Carolina Braeuninger: Sometimes it's good to lose the deal. Ooh, keep going. At first, having a 100% win rate is not humanly possible. But I'm not spiritual. I'm not religious. But I still believe that everything happens for a reason. So whenever you lose a deal, it's been for a reason. Maybe the buyer or the users would have been a very big pain in the you-know-where for customer success and account management. Maybe they would have just signed up to buy to sign up for churn 2 months later. Maybe the company will go bankrupt in half a year. You don't know. But still, every single deal that you lose is a deal that you win on the other hand. It just balances itself out. Out. And every single deal that you lose is a deal that also shows you where sometimes you could have done differently, where you could have done more, or also where you could have done less.

1:28:23 Scott Ingram: Oh, greatness in the you could have done less. The way I'm understanding that, or the way I think about that, is lose faster. If it's not going to be a good fit, get out. Why are you wasting your time? Tell them it's not a good fit and walk away. Or also another controversial thing.

1:28:40 Carolina Braeuninger: Most of the discovery calls that I hop onto end up being disqualified. Yep. I'm not gonna swamp my pipeline and my time with customers and prospects that will only waste my time and resources. I rather just have two dozen, three dozen projects that I work on every single week than just swamping my day with ten meetings of twenty different clients. Clients, and 80% of them will just end up never buying. It's not worth my time. And it's also not worth my resources because they're limited with a 40-hour workweek.

1:29:14 Scott Ingram: I was just gonna say, if you want to lose balance, don't qualify well and work on a whole bunch of deals that are irrelevant and waste a lot of your time. Yeah. What about the flip side? Is there something that kind of the typical traditional salesperson believes that you think is just garbage?

1:29:32 Carolina Braeuninger: Never change a running system. I'm not one of these people that think that you can always just get half a percent better, that you can also always get more efficient and stuff. I like if a system is running properly, but if you've done things for decades, if you've done things since the '70s in this very way, if you've used Excel as your CRM systems in 1976, well, there might be some time now to think of changing that. If you've used an on-premise ERP system since the mid-'90s, it might just be a good idea to swap this and go to the cloud. It just might be a good time. So I don't like if people are blind for change. And I also don't like if people are the change themselves just because they can't stick to something and just get better in what they have at the moment and just always always seek for something better. It's not just my style.

1:30:32 Scott Ingram: Oh gosh, that's really good. So both sides of that, you have to be open to change, but changing all the time is freaking dumb. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so good. So good. What have been the most important lessons you've had to learn to get where you are now?

1:30:48 Carolina Braeuninger: Stay true to yourself, just by any means. I'm a young woman and most of the times I'm talking to old white men. Men on boards having degrees, diplomas, I don't know, dissertations written, and I have 2 non-finished bachelor degrees. But still owning your spot, owning your voice, and just not only having an opinion but also having the guts of voicing it. If you have an opinion, why not speak out? And the people that don't like you and that don't like your opinion most of the times are even playing that critical role in your life. So I think that's one thing that was very important for me. And don't focus on the things that you can't change. If you lose a deal, just focus on the things that you could have done differently, or also just accept that a feature wasn't working properly, but go on and don't let yourself and your mental health just get drowned in this negative spiral of, oh my God, my life is so horrible and I'm just a horrible salesperson. And everybody will notice soon that I'm horrible and blah, blah, blah, just because you're signing yourself up for, I don't know, at least sleepless nights. So owning yourself, having an opinion and have the power of voicing it and don't focus on the things that you can't change.

1:32:10 Scott Ingram: I have enjoyed this so much. Is there something that you were hoping we would talk about that we haven't talked about yet before we wrap up? Yeah. When you're coming to Germany, I can't make any hard commits, but it is very high on the list.

1:32:28 Carolina Braeuninger: Looking forward to it. I love that.

1:32:32 Scott Ingram: I love that. Anything else?

1:32:33 Carolina Braeuninger: No, but just, just one thing. I'm very humbled and I'm very honored to have been here as a German-speaking salesperson. And I'm very happy that I just got the opportunity to tell your listeners, our listeners of this episode on how German people work and function. It was an honor. Love it.

1:32:55 Scott Ingram: Love it. It was so fun. Well, we still have to try and make this actionable. So what would you challenge our listener to do over the course of the next 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:33:09 Carolina Braeuninger: I'd actually just encourage you to just ask your colleagues for feedback. And if they can't give you feedback, just ask to hop on one of their calls, join them on one of their calls, or also listen to their call recordings. Because in sales, people always perceive sellers to be very egoistic, be very self-centric, and not be willing to be open to help others. But it's getting lonely if you don't help others and if you don't help In forms of asking for feedback and giving feedback openly. So just ask your colleagues if you might join one of their calls. And most of the buyers and prospects don't even care if there's two sellers on a call, just because you learn from each other. That's it. And another thing is try to network with sales professionals outside your network. People working for the competition, people working for partner companies. In my case, it would be. Sales professionals from Salesforce, from HubSpot that don't work in Germany, but they might work in the UK or Italy or Spain. Not even the markets that I sell to, but just international salespeople, because our profession is the same. It's called the same all around the world, but our job is certainly not the same and not even comparable. So if you really want to learn from people also think outside the box and just connect with them that you wouldn't have considered talking to in the very first place. Love that.

1:34:43 Scott Ingram: I know we were trying to wrap up, but I know you use a tool that recently popped up on my radar that does kind of exactly that called SalesHookup. Yeah. So that might be worth something exploring. And then certainly if you want to surround yourself with greatness, you should probably reach out to me and we should talk about the Sales Success Carolina, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.