46: Enterprise Sales Forum NYC with Trong Nguyen on Negotiating and Managing $50M-$100M Deals

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.

0:24 Scott Ingram: So welcome to a special bonus episode of the Sales Success Stories podcast. I am on the 51st floor of a building with an amazing view in the Ladders office. Thanks to Doug for being our host here in New York City at the Enterprise Sales Forum. And we have a live audience who is going to do a lot of my job today as I interview Trong Nguyen and talk about some of the experiences that he's had selling multimillion-dollar deals. So thank you all for joining us, and let's make some noise for Trong Nguyen. Woo! So we asked the audience before we got started, maybe a quarter of the folks have heard the podcast before and have maybe heard Trong. But Trong, give us just kind of the high-level walkthrough of your career. Where have you been? What have you done? And give us some results because you've been pretty successful along the way.

1:21 Trong Nguyen: Awesome. Let me just kind of reflect upon my career and just give you some of the key highlights. Closed a $100 million deal at IBM, one of the biggest of its kind at the time. A $75 million, $50 million deal at Dell, at 2 customers that never ever wanted to ever deal with Dell at all. So we cracked that code. I cracked the first health insurance company for Microsoft, and the work that we did there became the foundation for all of our legal contracts and agreements for Microsoft in the healthcare space. And then I cracked the, one of the first banks to ever move to the cloud. For Microsoft that was global in nature. I think some of those are the key highlights. I think the thing that I'm most proud of, and the people in this room can attest to this, if you're on the podcast and you're listening to this, you're going to have to kind of believe me when I say this, but I'm 6'4 and devilishly handsome.

2:17 Scott Ingram: Pretty close. He stands on his tiptoes. So, and what Trong didn't share is when he was at Dell, obviously when you put up those kinds of numbers, your position in the organization is rather significant. So he was the number 1 global account manager at Dell, number 1 at Microsoft, featured in very expensive, high production value videos that were shown at sales kickoff meetings for the entire sales organization. A lot of great stuff. Trong, why don't you give us some context, though, around what's it like working on one of these large multi-multi-million dollar deals and how you're managing it and how you're going about it?

2:57 Trong Nguyen: I'm going to sum it up really short for you, and then I'll kind of expand and unwrap it a bit. It's freaking hard. Like, it's really, really hard. The deals that I work on take 12 to 24 months to go due, right? And it's tough because I'm working at one of the largest companies in the world, selling to the largest companies in the world, right? And so what you end up doing is half your time you're selling internally just to make sure that all of the different teams, sales teams, marketing teams, operations teams, the technical teams actually all want to swim and go down the path that you're going down, right? I would say 60% of your time is actually spent doing that. And then when you go to the customers, you're talking about big, big major banks, right, that I was dealing with, am dealing with. They have so much legacy and inertia that to move them to do something else different takes like an act of God to go do, right? And you are going to disrupt a lot of status quo. You're gonna disrupt a lot of careers because there's a lot of folks that don't want that change. And unfortunately, if you want to impact that change, they're gonna have to go find another home elsewhere because some of the things that you'll bring up to the executive teams will force them down a different path. Right? So none of it really, really hard. And I gotta tell you, you get… you have to bleed it, you have to believe in it, and you have to kind of dream about it the way Jiro Dreams of Sushi, right? All day long.

4:28 Scott Ingram: What a great documentary. If you haven't seen that, you gotta watch it.

4:30 Trong Nguyen: It's good, it's good, it's really good.

4:33 Scott Ingram: So we're gonna cover a little bit different ground today. There's, there's quite a bit of content that Trong and I have done together. So if you go back to episode 25 on the podcast, you'll hear my first conversation with Trong. And as I suggested earlier to the audience here, in the room, if you go to top1.fm, get on that mailing list, you can also request to receive Trong's presentation from the Sales Success Summit that we just held in Austin a couple of months ago. And in that, he walks through a lot of the details of working one of those specific deals and how he was mapping the organization and doing that kind of work. So I'll leave you with that and suggest that you go absorb that additional content. But what we wanted to focus on at least initially today, was talking about negotiation, right? Especially at this type of scale where you have so many stakeholders. So, Trong, I'll just let you kind of outline this, how you want, in terms of how are you framing and thinking about entering into this scale of a negotiation?

5:34 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, so when you're talking about deals that range anywhere from $10 to $50 to $100 million deals, keep in mind your negotiation is actually going to take that long as well. Right? It'll be anywhere from 6 to 9 to 12 months long. And as you're thinking about it, think about all the gives and gets that you're gonna be able to offer to the customer, right? And what are you gonna get in return? And think about all the different meetings that are gonna happen within that 9 to 12 month period where you're negotiating and you're giving something. Because what ends up happening is folks who've kind of sold into smaller accounts where it's quicker transactions and deals, It's really easy. You're reactive, right? You go in, you go, here's my price, here's my product, here's the terms, and the customer tells you, no, I need A, B, C, and D. You give A, B, C, and you're done. You're out. It doesn't work like that in the enterprise, right? Because it's so complex, they will have outside attorneys that they are paying $2,000, $3,000 per hour, right, to negotiate on their behalf because a mistake through a contract of that caliber will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars down the road, right? And then it gets so complex on your side, like a company like Microsoft or IBM or Cisco, that you actually need outside counsel as well, right? One of these deals, when I negotiated it, I think I must have burned through half a million dollars worth of outside legal counsel because it was so complex with the customer, right? So think about that as you go through it. Some things that I've kind of done as a practice: anchor early, anchor high, anchor early. If you're the first one to anchor, that becomes the starting point, and everything after that you can kind of revert back to that point at all times. I would say keep your emotions in check is another key thing that I learned along the way too, because what ends up happening is if you're negotiating a deal and it takes you 6, 9, 12 months to go due. Trust me when I say this, at the beginning you're great, but midway through the negotiations towards the end, every little thing that comes up, the customer might just ask for something very, very benign and say, hey, you know, can we change this sentence to this? And, you know, if you had a fresh set of eyes, you would go, yeah, that's not a big deal. But at the 11th hour, at the 11th month, You would go, what the eff? Like, are you serious? Like, I've got better things to do. I'm gonna walk away. I mean, that's how your emotions get so amped up. I mean, I had one lawyer that I was negotiating with. I mean, this guy was so good, like amazing. I know they were paying him $3,000 an hour, and he would try to get under your skin. So he would say something innocuous, like you're in the negotiations, and he would go, Wow, that added a lot of value, like sarcastically, right? And then you look at him, you go, what? And then because he did it purposely to kind of get a reaction from you, and then he'll kind of circumvent, go around it. All of a sudden you've just, you have to give something back to save face, right? And I had one of those where one of the guys on my team, like he just blew a gasket when we had one of those things come up and I had to kind of put a pause on the negotiations, walk out, and then, you know, get them settled down. Half an hour later, come back. So keep your emotions in check because when it takes that long to go do, you will be on nerves at the end.

9:02 Scott Ingram: So let's talk a little bit more about the emotional part of this. So I was talking with another guest who'd been on the podcast. We were actually talking about one of the stories that he'll maybe write. So since it's not public and he hasn't written, I won't call him out by name. But one of the things he was talking about was just the challenge of managing your own emotion around the dollars involved, right? Like when, when you're in this deal and you know that your commission is hundreds of thousands of dollars, his comment was, you kind of get to a point where you're like, I'll give you anything you want, just sign the freaking paper because this is really good for me, right? But you have to continue to, to advocate on behalf of, of your company. How do you manage just your own mental state when the stakes are that high?

9:49 Trong Nguyen: That's a good question. And I think it really depends on the company and context that you're working in. Right. And so, you know, when I was working at Microsoft, the company has a lot of checks and balances in place with the legal teams, operations teams, the finance teams. So you could not unilaterally just go, hey, we're going to go offer this to the customer. Right. I mean, you had to get so many different, sign-offs and buy-offs on it. So you're always kept in check and balance on it. Scott, I would tell you it's really tough because those big deals will pay you that much money, right, at the end of it. But I think, at least for me, if money was the only motivator, you would never survive it, right? It was always about doing something different, doing something special, doing something that no one's ever done before, because you get so many low lows as you go through this 12, 24-month journey that if all it was was money, you would have quit a long time ago. Right. So that's how I would kind of think through it.

10:50 Scott Ingram: Well, and that's certainly been the case in what you talked about. I mean, so many of the deals that you've done have truly changed industries. Right. Or have sort of laid the foundation for now we can go do more deals like this in this industry. It hadn't been done before, but now we've, we've laid the groundwork. How… I'm sure you're doing a lot to control the process as much as you can, knowing that this is going to drag on for months. There's going to be a lot of people involved. How are you doing that? How are you sort of building the overarching strategy and controlling that as you work through it?

11:25 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, it's a good question. And it's got to be a joint strategy with you and the customer, right? And so right at the beginning, I lay the foundation and the vision for my team. And to go, hey, here's what we're gonna go do. We're gonna chase this bank and get them to the cloud. I have quarterly business reviews. I have weekly meetings. I have monthly meetings with the teams to make sure that we're going down this path. As we're negotiating the contract, I do the exact same thing with them, but then I do it actually with the customer as well, right? And I say, hey, you know, here's our plan to closure by this month, right? These meetings have to happen. You need to agree to this. By this date, we have to agree to some things by this date. Are we all aligned to that, right? And you have to get their buy-in and alignment to that because if you don't, you will never get the traction you need to kind of get to closure. These deals at major companies always have 50, 100 different ways to die, right? They do. And even when you think it's actually going to be done, it could die, right? I mean, I've had deals die on me 50 times at the last minute, and I've had to go back and suck my thumb so hard that the epidermis just came off, right? That's how you need to approach it.

12:44 Scott Ingram: And what's the mindset? What's the approach in the deal death and resulting resuscitation process that has to happen, right? How are you… because I know, and maybe this ties into… I know part of what you do in the morning is just sort of locked-down thinking time where you're going through and putting this strategy in place. So how are you getting through those times? Because, you know, I'm sure, like you said, it dies a thousand deaths.

13:11 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, I think there's, there's a few elements that you kind of have to think through, right? At some point you need to get a bit of balance, right? Because you could be in it so deep that you can actually lose perspective. So at certain points in the deal cycle, I would tell my team, listen, we're gonna just shut it down for the weekend or for the next couple of days. Go do something else completely different, right? And get it off your mind so that you can come back with a fresh set of eyes. Personally myself, I mean, I've got… I found a few coping mechanisms that have actually worked for me to date. One is I love to cook. So if you find that there's a feast at home, you know I'm actually very, very stressed, right? Because there's a lot of good food there. I love to work out and run, so, and do karate as well. So I do that to kind of get the adrenaline going, sweat it out as well. And then I love to read, so I'll read a book and just enjoy it, right? And so you kind of, you need to reset your mind frame and thought process there. I do that a lot. And then just getting back to practicality, When you come back, right, take a look at it with objective eyes, right? What's the real issue here? What caused this to die? And then how do we actually bring it back? What will make this deal come back to life again? And when you can start to really articulate that and itemize those different things, then you know what to go ask for, right? When you've got that list, you can go back to your leadership team or you can go, hey, I need A, B, C, and D. And then you can go back to the customer and go, hey, you've asked for 5 things. I can only give you 3. This is the best I can do. And in return, here's what we want for it.

14:55 Scott Ingram: So I think you called out such an important piece that we really haven't talked about, which is probably half of this negotiation is not with the prospect, right? It's with your company.

15:08 Trong Nguyen: Yeah.

15:08 Scott Ingram: So how are you managing that part of this?

15:12 Trong Nguyen: I think it goes back to the beginning, which is when you're selling the vision and dream, you need to actually sell your executives on that as well, right? Like when I was selling them on the bank, like they needed to believe that, hey, if we invested all of our resources to go crack this bank, it lays the foundation to bring down the next 5 banks that are going to be worth $3 billion to the company, right? Are we willing to make $100 million investment to get the $3 billion. Absolutely.

15:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. You guys, that microphone has not been used yet. Help me out here.

15:46 Trong Nguyen: Come on, ask the questions, guys. Come up, come up, ask some questions.

15:49 Scott Ingram: That's what I'm talking about. I'm done for the night. I'm gonna go get a shower. So we were talking about the 60/40, right? 60% of it has to be sold internally. The other 40% is you doing a lot of change management. At $75 million, these platforms are basically getting ingrained in every process. A lot of people are having to make a magnitude of change. What has been your catalyst? What has been the framework to help mitigate all that change for the client? Great question.

16:24 Trong Nguyen: I think in general, business is just business, right? And so no matter which C-level executive that you're talking to, the present CEO, CIO or whatnot, if you have a value proposition that does one of two things, it either helps them grow revenue or cuts expenses in a big way so that the company is more profitable, then you've got a story to go tell them, right? And when you tell it at the highest levels, and I always kind of encourage them and tell them, listen, don't take my word for it, right? Do your due diligence. Do your analysis on it, and if I'm wrong, I'm happy to walk away, but I haven't been wrong yet, right? And when they do their due diligence, they go, oh my God, I think that Trong guy was right. I think we could save $100 million by doing this, this, and this, right? And then it becomes a top-level CXO initiative to go, how do we start the change management process? How do we go with the human capital change management process to get people on board, to get people bought off on this, right? So that, that's what I normally do. So you make these massive multi-million dollar deals, and they like to say when you, when you finally make the sale, you lose your best prospect. So through that mindset, once you've made the deal, you know, you've lost essentially your best prospect. How do you get kind of pick yourself back up and say, okay, I want to top that, find that next multi-million dollar deal?

17:53 Scott Ingram: What's your process for that?

17:55 Trong Nguyen: That's a tough one. I think you'll see it in the book that's gonna come out, but it's hard for me because I live for this. Like, I breathe sales. I live for the hunt, not so much for the win. Like, I love the win, but it's more about the hunt. And after I close it, I get so, so sad, right? I almost get depressed, to be honest with you. Because it's just been a relationship I've cultivated, developed, built over the last 2 years, and now it's kind of, it's coming to its natural closure, right? And then at that point, I mean, there's only 2 thought processes that come into my mind. One is I've got to make sure this customer is wildly successful because I have no doubt I'm going to call back on them 5 years from now, 2 years from now, 3 years from now for a reference for another customer or whatever that is. Right, and so that's part 1. Part 2 is then I think, okay, what's the big next big thing that no one's been able to do, right? And it's easy. That's an easy question to ask any SVP in sales because they'll tell you, yeah, we've never been able to crack Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, whatever that is, right? And then you kind of have your pick of who do I want to go chase? Right? And then once you've kind of decided that, then you mentally commit that, hey, this, this is a 24-month journey I'm going to go on, and you start it all over again.

19:22 Scott Ingram: Hey, Trong, thanks for this.

19:24 Trong Nguyen: I want to throw you a curveball. I've been laboring in B2B tech startup, so it's not Dell, it's not Microsoft, it's a company you've never heard of, and I'm going to try and approach you to make a $2, $3, even just $5 or $10 million sale.

19:39 Scott Ingram: How do you do that?

19:40 Trong Nguyen: How do you, how do you, like, it's a company they've never heard of and maybe even a product or a niche that we just created. We are the first ones on that Gartner quadrant, the only ones on that. How do you get their attention? Yeah, I mean, I think you're at a disadvantage because you don't have the logo and brand name. So I'll give you that. But the process itself is actually not all that different from chasing from a big company, right? What I always do is I triangulate data. Right, so pick a company you want to go call on, right? Pick the executives that you want to call on and do as much research on that executive as possible. Talk to your extended network, other teams, anyone that would actually have a connection to know someone who knows that person, right? And then I start kind of cold calling them with something that will attract their attention, but it always comes back to data. You know, I'll give you an example. When I was trying to crack one of the banks, right? I literally spent 2, 3 months meeting with anyone that I could to get as much data as I could on the bank, on the executives, right? And kind of building my own mosaic out and seeing who does what and who is actually the real power players because the org charts in and of themselves don't really tell you all that much. Like they tell you positional authority, But they don't necessarily tell you who actually gets stuff done, right? And that's so important. And then you start building out and branching and making one or two of those connections and then getting those connections to help branch out and get you more connections. So that's how I branch out and do it. Great. Thanks. You read this book called Never Split the Difference. It's by this guy, Chris Voss. He used to do hostage negotiation for the FBI back in the day. Well, you want… one of the things you said, he says in the book about anchoring high early in the negotiation. He says a lot of good stuff. A lot of it is kind of stuff a lot of salespeople use anyway, like labeling and mirroring, all that stuff. But there's something he talks about I want to hear what you think in your experience. He talks about getting to the no instead of everybody… a lot of salespeople were taught get them to start saying yes, get them to start agreeing, ask a lot of questions that they got to say yes to. And he says no, don't do that. Get them, ask them the question where they got to say no. Get them to, because there's a power in saying no. You feel a sense of control. You feel like you haven't given anything up yet. I mean, in your experience, have you seen that? I have, and I've used it a bunch. And I've, I would augment that a bit. I try to get to the no fast, but then I always go, why? Right. And keep on unraveling that with the whys until you get to the heart of something. Right. It's funny, I'll give you an example. When I was negotiating with this bank and they were like, hey, we need audit reports if we're gonna do this cloud deal with you, right? And we need the audit reports within a month of our request, right? And I went back to my audit teams and my operations teams and said, hey, here's what the customer is asking for. My operations team's like, no, we can't do it. Right? And that was gospel. That was like given. No, we can't do it. And every team prior to me actually took that as gospel and they're like, okay, that's it. We can't do it. And so I said, I don't understand. From my perspective, the customer is actually asking a pretty reasonable request. Why can't we do it? I don't understand. And I kept on getting, no, no, we can't. And I finally escalated it up high enough where I said, I don't understand why. And then I finally actually talked to an accountant, right, within Microsoft that he said, okay, here's why we can't give it to you within 30 days. When we do an audit for a customer, right, it takes us 15 days to do, and then it takes us 15 days to actually kind of put the report together. So that's 30 days. But here's what happens. Within the first 15 days that we do the audit reports, if we find something wrong, we stop the audit report, we continue later on, and then, you know, now you're going into 45, 60 days, right? And so that's why we can't give the audit reports within 30 days. And so I said, you know what, actually that makes a lot of sense. I totally get why we can't do it now. And so when I actually went back to the customer and explained the rationale to them as to why we couldn't do this, they're like, okay, I totally get that. Can you put some language in there that says, hey, you know, you'll do your best efforts? I'm like, done. Right. And so that's how you kind of get around the nos really quickly by just asking why and keep on going through with it. Yeah. You know, that's, that's very similar to what he was talking about. Thank you. Hi, you mentioned you closed a couple of deals for Dell to companies who are never going to use Dell. How? You know, you have to find a supporter somehow. I'll give you an example. Major healthcare insurance company out of Illinois. We had never done anything with them before. They hated Dell with a passion. And I kept on meeting with different folks, and I ended up meeting with a director in procurement. And for one reason or another, he ended up really liking me. And we kind of built a bond and connection. And so I parlayed that in terms of, hey, can you help me get to the rest of the team, right? I want to get to know them a bit more. And so he would actually just line up meetings, and they took his meetings with me because he set them up. And then that kind of parlayed into the VPs, the CIOs, and then up the chain of command. And that's how I kind of cracked them. So it starts off with one little relationship somewhere that you can expand on. So in other words, sell your charming personality and then sell… I'm being serious… and then sell the benefits of the product. It's really more the personality that cracked it open, that he felt comfortable and he trusted you. Yeah, you know, it's… I would say it's not so much personality, but it's more about being authentic and genuine and just trying to add value. Right? And when you're having these conversations with the folks, they will sense it, you know, that you're actually trying to do something good for the company, and then they'll want to help you with it. And I think that's how I started with them, and that's really how I start with most of my customers too, right? It's not about going out having drinks or dinner all the time or some sporting events, right? I mean, that's good for the short term, but it's not really good for the long-term relationship building. Thank you. Cool.

26:21 Scott Ingram: So a question on value-based pricing. If you save $100 million for customer each year, what price tag do you put on that solution?

26:33 Trong Nguyen: That's, that's a good one. You know, it just depends. I mean, your competitors will keep you in check, right? The customers will only have so much money to go spend. And as good sales reps, you're out there trying to find out what's the maximum value you can extract from the customer, and then you end up meeting somewhere in between. But do you have any sort of rule of thumb in sort of how much value you create and how much of that you want to take if it's… Not really, not really, because the companies I've been with have been so different from SaaS models to hardware to software to services, so we never really applied a rule of thumb to it. All right, Trong, 2 questions that might end up being one answer. The first is, have you had a coach or a mentor, a manager anywhere along your career path that has kind of pointed you in the right direction when you were going after, let's say, an account the wrong way or your approach was off? And 2, for people that are newer in their sales careers, is there any piece of advice you have to offer? That's a good question. So I would tell you, I've had so many mentors along the way, and it's just not one or two or whatnot. When I started my career, I had an amazing, amazing account exec as a mentor, and he kind of taught me the ropes, took me under his wing. I had a VP of sales that took me under his wing as well. And what I learned is along the way, and they gave me this advice right from the beginning, which is be curious, and meet and network with as many people in the company as possible, because at some point you're gonna need their help. And I think that's been the one of the best advice I've ever gotten. And so from that point, what I ended up doing at that company and every other company afterwards is when I'm free and available, I'll go make lunch meetings with different folks all the time in marketing and operations, in different sales teams, and try to get to know them. And try to get to learn from them. So in effect, they actually become mentors in different ways and fill up the gaps that you're trying to fill, right? And so that, that's what I do with kind of mentoring. The one piece of advice that I would kind of give to all of you that are starting out in your career is treat sales like a craft. I do, right? And by that, what I mean is if you think about the great performers, you know, whether it be actors, singers, any type of entertainer out there, the really, really, really good ones, they're craftsmen, craftswomen, but they treat it as a craft. They're always kind of educating, learning about their craft, improving themselves. So I think you guys are doing a great job just getting started by being here at this sales forum. But never stop learning, right? Keep on reading, keep on learning, keep learning from different folks, and really treat it like a craft. Some really good points. Thank you, Trong.

29:32 Scott Ingram: And I'll mention, I've read, in addition to reading a lot of sales content, I've read a fair amount of networking content. And probably the best piece I've ever read was a Harvard Business Review article called Better Sales Networks. And it's kind of dated at this point, but I reference this so often I have a short link for it. If you go to top1.fm/hbr for Harvard Business Review, it'll take you right to this article. And what it talks about is the expectation… when people think about sales networks, they only think of one dimension, which is who do you know that we can get into an opportunity with, right? It's kind of the Rolodex approach, right? And what it speaks to a lot of is what Trong's speaking to, is yeah, but in order to progress that deal, you need to have good relationships inside your organization to be able to deliver and work through the process that is product and engineering and legal and all of the other things that happen from that perspective. And you need to develop relationships of influence within the organization because anymore it's not like there's one person that just makes the whole decision, right? You can't just know that one person and now we're good. So great, great article. It's a much quicker read than any book you would read also.

30:43 Trong Nguyen: All right, thank you. So you mentioned that you knew that the lawyer made $3,000 an hour. So to what extent are you doing research on all the stakeholders of the company trying to sell? And maybe if you can give us an example of how you can use that to an advantage. Yeah, so it's, it's kind of funny. I do a lot of research behind the scenes, and folks who are kind of new into sales and get the wrong impression of sales, they always go, oh my God, he's another sales guy, all he can do is lunch and dinner and stuff. And it's so far from the truth because that's only the 10% that you see, right? I spend so much of my time actually behind the scenes researching folks, networking, learning about the folks. I research on everybody and not only about their kind of professional lives but their personal lives, what makes them tick. Because what I found is that, you know, and I, I'd love to hear from you guys if you think see differently, but I've lost major deals based upon politics. I've had the best solutions, I've had the best technical validations, I've had the right support at the executive levels, and I still lost because of politics. And I've also lost because of personal agendas. What I found is personal agendas will always trump business agendas, right? You, you get a VP in somewhere who has a personal agenda to kind of help you, they'll find a way to make you win. You have a VP who has a personal agenda that says, hey, I don't really want this solution, then you have to work 10 times as hard to navigate around that person, neutralize them, to get your deal done. Are you just using the standard ways like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter? Are you talking to people who know them? Like, how are you getting… All of that. All of that. All of that. What I found to be extremely helpful is actually YouTube, because if you search them on YouTube, the top executives, they will have done videocasts, podcasts of somewhere, and I just watch it. Hi, Truong. Hey.

32:41 Scott Ingram: I was curious, so these sales cycles, you're saying 12 to 24 months, you're doing a ton of research to prepare for the calls, you have internal stakeholders behind you. I'm curious to get a little bit more specific on like the first conversation or like the first and second? I mean, obviously you're not closing these deals on the first call. And I know that obviously rapport and building a relationship is a really big part of that, but can you walk through kind of like your approach and your process for like those first like 1, 2, 3 conversations to kind of set the agenda and then set the path for the next couple years?

33:08 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, think about this, right? So whatever it is you're calling it, like let's say it's a CIO or CXO, right? Before you even have that first meeting, I actually have a bunch of meetings with folks, you know, a few levels below them and a few levels, you know, horizontal to them as well. And I try to get as much data as I can around the company, their key initiatives, the projects that they're working on, things that they might not be happy about. Then I go up to the next level of the directors. I do the exact same thing. And what I do is I trade information. So, you know, a director in HR will have a different perspective on something than a director in IT. And so when I meet with the director in IT, I'll say, hey, let me update you on a few things, right? And then I tell them what the director in HR told me, and now he's like, oh, okay, that's really interesting, I didn't know that. They didn't know that because, you know, in big organizations they never talk to each other, right? So you trade information back and forth at the horizontal layer, and then once you've got enough good data, then you bring it up another level to the VP. You do the same thing, and then you go to CIO. And so by the time you get to the CIO, you'll say, hey, listen, you know, I wanted to meet you. I want to talk to you about some of the key things that you're working on, but I also wanted to actually give you some perspective in terms of what your teams are saying, right? And, you know, you go off a few things that they're saying. I guarantee you 9 out of 10 times they would have never heard this before because so much of what gets up to them by the time it gets to them is so filtered that black actually is like white or off-white when it gets to their level. So that's how you kind of get value. And then once you have that meeting and you show the CXO that, you know, hey, you know, you've put a lot of thought to this and you've added some value, they will totally meet with you again, right?

34:58 Scott Ingram: Thanks. So you talked about it a little bit on saving the company money, but let's talk for a second about competitors and whether you're selling into a client that already has your competitor, or you're in the middle of a sale, you're 12 months in, and all of a sudden the competitor starts knocking and he starts competing with you at the same time. And whether it's an RFP process or something where it's, you know, or further down the road, you know, how do you manage it at that point? Either… so I guess 2 questions. One, selling into a company that's working with a competitor. And 2, when you're in the process and you start getting competition.

35:31 Trong Nguyen: Okay. Okay. You know, I've been through so many of those. I'll give you an example around the Microsoft side. And so when I kind of called on this bank, they had Cisco equipment everywhere, right? And we compete heavily with Cisco, but it's a different technology. So Cisco has the hard phones, they have the soft phones, and not all of the platforms are integrated, right? So instead, when I sold to the executives, I painted this vision as, hey, if you want to become a digital bank, right, here's how I would approach it. Here's how I would change the sales force. Here's how I would change your real estate and facilities. Here's how I would change your working environment to kind of facilitate that collaboration. And oh, by the way, all that actually includes our soft phone, right? And so you kind of pivot and just change the whole conversation completely. If I went in and I said, hey, you know, our softphone is better than Cisco's and here's why and I'll cut you a deal, that's the last thing they want to hear, right? Because that doesn't help them in any way.

36:35 Scott Ingram: When you're in a deal already and somebody starts attacking you from it, like, oh, well, your competitor does this or competitor does that, is it the same? Do you think it's the same tactic or is it just depend… is it case by case?

36:44 Trong Nguyen: I think it's case by case at that point because sometimes when I've had competitors do that, to me and go, hey, you know, here's the speeds and feeds, all that. And I always come back to them and go, you know, if all you care about is speeds and feeds and the lowest price, you should go with them. You should, right? We're trying to help you transform the company and you need to transform because if you don't transform, these other banks will eat your lunch. And they know that too, right?

37:11 Scott Ingram: So, Trong, let me follow up on that and ask about just dealing with RFPs. That's the question.

37:19 Trong Nguyen: You know, it's tough. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of RFPs. And I turn down…

37:26 Scott Ingram: That's what every salesperson always says.

37:28 Trong Nguyen: I turn down more RFPs than I actually respond to, right? And my litmus test is this: if I actually haven't spent 6 to 9 months wiring the customer and knowing that they actually have to go to RFP and all of my stuff is embedded in the RFP, I won't respond to it, right? The customer will ask me, hey, we need you to respond. I'm like, we respectfully decline, right? Because the odds of me winning that, 50/50 at best if I haven't wired it. And if I haven't wired it, trust me, someone else has wired it, right? So do you want a 50/50 shot or do you want like an 80/10, 80/20? Hi, I have a question related to your career. You've worked with some of the major brands, Dell, Microsoft, and pretty impressive career moves. And I was curious, was that kind of when… how did you know you were ready for that change? How did you know that you were ready for that move? And what did you get a push along the way by others? Just was curious about that. Yeah, you know, I always looked at it in terms of, hey, what's the next big wave, right? And you want to get in front of that wave to kind of go to it. So one, you can make a lot of money, and 2, you can have a lot of fun, right? And so I loved my stint at IBM because I got so much education out of it. I mean, shoot, they paid for my MBA, they paid for like the Harvard program, all these other things that just cost a lot of money. And so when at that point I felt that, hey, I'd been grounded enough, I'd learned enough, I need to go chase the next big thing. And Dell was the hottest thing at that time. So had a lot of fun doing Dell. And then it got to a point where I'm like, what's the next big wave on this? And next big wave was cloud. And Microsoft was going into that pretty heavy. So I jumped on there, rode that wave and had a lot of fun. And I'm doing the same thing now at ServiceNow. It's growing like gangbusters, right? So, hey, Trong, so you've created a repeatable model for deals wherever you go and you're able to get these big deals done, not at the same company, not the exact same industry. My question is, is there a champion at all of the big deals that you've done in terms of a repeatable process of having this champion who doesn't have to be a C-level or VP, but as a director who just helps you push things through? And secondarily, if so, or if not, do you show them your org chart or your deal map? We call them mud map, but it's that internal org chart about the opportunity and who influences who. Just want to hear your take on that. I actually get them to help me build it, to be honest with you. I don't even show it to them, right? And it really comes down to, I spend a lot of time finding that supporter, that fox that you would call it, right? And it doesn't matter where they are. It doesn't matter. They don't have to be that high, but someone needs to be your fox and champion. And then once I have that person, they have to be at a certain level because they need to be able to get you good intel, right? And at that point, I start sharing with them, you know, here's my plan, here's my vision. I want to go do this at the bank. I want to go do this at the healthcare company and help me think through, coach me of how to go about doing it. And at that point, they actually open it up completely to you. They'll tell you, okay, for you to actually go do this, you need to kind of talk and spend time with these 10 people and build relationships. And by the way, here's what they're really interested in, right? And then those people, once you develop the relationship with those, they'll tell you, hey, you need to go spend some time with these other 20 people. And then eventually that becomes the map, right?

41:16 Scott Ingram: So, Trong, continue along those lines. We talked about sort of mentors more generally, but I know you build mentoring relationships inside your customer companies? How do you do that? How do you think about that?

41:27 Trong Nguyen: I think in general, right, people just want to help people, right? And so I always approach it in terms of when I work with someone there and I kind of paint them the vision that, hey, here's what I want to do with your company and here's why it makes sense, because it's got to make some type of sense for them. And then I always ask Help, right? It's so simple, but help me, right? How do we do this, right? And at that point, you know, if you are authentic and they believe you, they will want to help you. And then eventually you get one supporter and 2 and 3, and it just starts to snowball. And that's how eventually you kind of get enough momentum to actually do something.

42:12 Scott Ingram: I had a question.

42:13 Trong Nguyen: I've been at startups most of my career so far.

42:15 Scott Ingram: At a big company, I don't know how relevant it is, but a startup, you're calling somebody You talk to the gatekeeper, they won't put you through. You send an email, they don't always respond. How do you get through if they're not giving you the time of day? Do you move on to an account if you can't break into it after a certain period of time, or do you keep trying at certain intervals?

42:33 Trong Nguyen: You know, it's funny. I, I've had that happen to me like everywhere I've gone. Yeah, it just happens. Yeah. And what I found, what I do, and I'm not sure it's the right approach, But I just surround them, right? So I'll run into a gatekeeper that says… this is funny because this one guy, when I met him, he's like, hey, so whenever you come call on our account, I want to know ahead of time who you're calling with, what you're talking about, when you're going to be there, right? And if I ever catch you on our campus, on our site, and I haven't been briefed ahead of time, this will be the last time you call on us. Do I make myself clear? And I've had so many of those conversations. And what I do with them is I tell them, I said, listen, I don't work for you. I work for the CIO. And if the CIO wants me to kind of work within that avenue and that process, I'm happy to do it. But I want an email from them stating that and copying their boss. And as soon as you kind of put it back on them like that, they're like, Oh shit, he just called me out, right? And then what you do to augment that is then I build relationships quickly with other folks and peers of theirs, seniors of theirs. And then at that point they go, shoot, there's nothing we can do about Trong. Like, he's got a rabbi, he's protected, right? And at that point, you You have free rein.

44:06 Scott Ingram: Okay. So it sounds like you just keep talking to people till somebody gives you time of day, unless you hear from the CIO that they don't want to talk to you.

44:11 Trong Nguyen: Yeah. Because think about this, right? If you accept that as a no, and that's a no, you're done. Like, what do you have to lose to go above them or around them at that point? Nothing.

44:20 Scott Ingram: So second part of that question, if you email the CIO and he's like, no, or not now, how long do you wait before calling him again or emailing him again?

44:26 Trong Nguyen: Like 6 months, 18 months, 12 months? No, that's way too long. So what you want to do with these top-level executives, is you want to build a cadence with them and you want to show that you're adding value. So what I'll end up doing a lot is, CIO doesn't want to spend any time with me, totally cool with that. The latest book I'm reading that I really, really like, I sign it inside, personalize the note saying, hey, listen, I read this book, thought you might like it. Look on page 81, there's a good paragraph there that I think would resonate with you. Right? Send it to them. You might not hear anything back, doesn't matter. You know, a few weeks later, hey, I just read this HBR article around collaboration. I thought you might like it, right? And keep on pounding at it. And I swear to God, it's worked for me relentlessly. After about 2 or 3 months of doing it, they just meet up with you because they're tired of it, right? And when they meet up with you and they find out that you are the real deal, You're going to help their company. They continue to meet up with you.

45:29 Scott Ingram: Okay, so it sounds like you just keep pounding until they give you time of day.

45:32 Trong Nguyen: Okay, thank you. Hi, Trong. I'd love to follow up on something you mentioned earlier, and that was aligning internally, specifically around marketing and sales. So how have you worked with your marketing team to swim in the same direction that you want them to swim in? You know, it, it, uh, it's a lot easier than I think you might think. And I'm not sure if this is a gross generalization, but most people, most salespeople are actually allergic to marketing people. Like, they never talk to them, they never want to do anything with them, they think marketing is just overhead. And I actually take the complete opposite view. And I go, God, marketing is actually a great partner of ours. And so what I ended up doing with them is I tell them, hey, here's where I want to take these customers down this journey, and here's how much revenue we're going to drive with these customers if we do these things right. What events do you have that can help me accelerate this sales cycle for these set of customers? And so then they'll kind of lay it out in terms of, hey, we got this event coming up, we got this event, here's what the next 12 months looks like. At that point, I go, I love that. But I need a bit more. Here's what I was thinking. Can we do 1 or 2 events centered around this? Because if we do this with the events that you have, it would really help me accelerate it. And then they get so excited that they go, you know what, let me figure out a way how I can help you do one of those events, right? And then we do it and then it becomes a massive success. So I leverage marketing to the hilt.

47:07 Scott Ingram: So like 2 questions, I guess. You talked about like $100 million deals, $75 million, $50 million. When the deals are smaller in size, do you change your sales process or your approach? I know you're saying you're spending a lot of time, just 3 months just gathering information. Like, are you changing your approach or your process, or is it, I guess it's kind of fluid, is it changing throughout? And then my second question is completely different, would be, you mentioned you worked on so many deals. Is there one that kind of stands out to you as far as having the biggest obstacles? And if so, how did you overcome them?

47:37 Trong Nguyen: Okay, when you say the smaller deals, like how much smaller are you talking about? Like a magnitude smaller or just a bit smaller?

47:43 Scott Ingram: I would say just like a magnitude smaller. I guess as you've evolved in your career, because obviously I don't think you, you know, you didn't start with $100 million, you started lower, you know, how did you change your process? Was it just more or less just gathering more threading between the, you know, the company? Like what did you change as far as your process is concerned?

47:58 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, so I'd give it a different lens on that. So if you have 1 or 2 customers that you deal with and those are your only global clients, you can do everything that I've talked about in depth to the nth degree and you become the expert within that customer that they call you for meetings, right? Eventually what ends up happening is you know so much about that customer. I've had VPs wanting to set up monthly one-on-ones with me and I've had so many of those because you know more about their company than they do. Right? And so when you have 1 or 2, you can actually do that. When you have 10, when you have 20, when you have 50 customers, you can't get to that level of depth that I'm talking about. So then you start to kind of skim more on the surface and not drill down as deep on it. So I'm sorry, what was the second part of the question?

48:49 Scott Ingram: Just talk about like, is there any deal that kind of sticks out in your head as far as being, you know, the biggest obstacles and kind of what were those and how'd you overcome them? I know you mentioned the procurement, but is there something outside of that, kind of the largest obstacles you faced?

49:02 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, I think one of the last major deals I did at a Canadian bank, taking them to the cloud, was probably one of the hardest deals that I've ever done. And I'll give you the context of why I say that. So picture this, any Canadians in the room? Okay, I'll say this because I'm actually Canadian, so I can say this. So Canadians are like the nicest people in the world, and I hate nice people. Think about this, right? If you have a room full of really nice people, execs that you're dealing with, right, and you want to get a deal done, and they're shaking their head, yeah, yeah, we'll eventually do it, we'll do it, and it never happens, what ends up happening? You lose credibility with your management team. Eventually you're gonna get shot. Right? Because you can't forecast properly, right? And so I was looking after this bank. They'd been doing stuff the same way forever, right? And now they had an American come up, tell them that they should look at things differently. And I had no relationships in Canada. I had no relationships at the bank. And my own team, internal team, were skeptical of of me, right? Because I don't know if you guys have worked much in Canada, but when you have an American come up, Canadian teams hate Americans coming up, doing their 1 or 2-year stint, and then bailing on them, right? Because then they're like, you're just going to get your ticky mark and then leave. Like, why should we invest in you, right? So that was the kind of mentality, and it took me a long time to earn that trust with my internal teams. Then to earn that trust with the customer. And it was really, really tough because they had a lot of executives that did not want to change, that did not want to do anything different, and they thought they were king of the hill, right? And when you're faced with that and you go toe-to-toe, someone's going to lose and someone's going to lose their job, right? I can tell you it wasn't me. And so those are the kind of tough decisions and calls you have to make.

51:09 Scott Ingram: Trong, you should write a book about the ins and outs of that deal. Maybe you already did.

51:14 Trong Nguyen: Maybe I will. I wonder if you could comment about managing the vendor management process within a large account. We haven't touched on that. That's one question. And then secondly, on your 60/40 split, how have you dealt with bad word of mouth from a sale that another colleague conducted? It's tough on the vendor management side of it. I think you have to get to the stage where they have to kind of treat you as a peer, and a trusted peer that can't be moved, right? And it took me a while to kind of build up my rapport and relationships with these guys, but you know, eventually what you want them to think of you as, hey, he's authentic, he's a fair negotiator, and he means what he says, right? And when you get to that point, they give you the respect. I mean, you're going to be fierce negotiators no matter what, but they don't treat you as, hey, he's just another scumbag sales rep, right? And then when you have conversations and you go, I cannot do any more than this, like that is it, they trust you enough to go, okay, I'm not gonna push that point anymore. I'll move on to something else. So that's how I kind of do vendor management. In terms of sales, bad press from other deals, is that the question? That's a tough one. I, I, I've only had a little bit of that happen to me, but then, you know, in those situations, I would just be honest about it. Like if, if you've kind of implemented, you've done a deal or someone's done a deal and it didn't go well, understand what the reasons were, why it didn't go well. And then I would have that conversation with the customer to go, here's why that deal didn't go well. Here are the 5 reasons why, right? And then I would go, but here's how we've changed to actually go fix that, to make sure that that doesn't happen again. And I think that's probably the best you can do. I mean, I've done that a handful of times, but I would just be honest about it because I think the worst thing that could ever happen is if you kind of falsify, pretend, and then you kind of sell them on something else and they go buy it. And then when you go to implement it and it's not what you say it is, It's even worse now.

53:23 Scott Ingram: Let's do 2 more questions. Sure. As you think about the network map of an organization, you know, large tier 1 bank, and you've mapped out the hierarchy 4 or 5 levels up, what's your strategy for actually moving up the hierarchy if things are actually moving well on sort of rung 3, but you know the decision made at 2, you know, rung 2 or rung 1? Do you kind of just start going around folks early on in the process? Or let it play out and get the warm intro to their management level, the next management level, the next management level up? Or do you kind of just start surrounding them very early on in the actual deal process?

53:59 Trong Nguyen: I would probably start surrounding them early on. I don't… even if it goes well, the intent is you need support way up the chain of command and wide, right? And so you might have a great relationship with the director or VP who is your biggest sponsor and advocate, And if they are, they will understand that, hey, you have a job to do and you need to kind of call at the highest levels and have relationships with them as well there. If they don't support that and they kind of block you from there, are they really a supporter?

54:31 Scott Ingram: A pretty comparable question, which is how do you vet the sort of the people in the intel and the champions early, early on, like before you've had 10 or 20 meetings And you kind of have an instinct for a gut check on what people are telling you, but you're 2, 5 meetings in and you still don't know whether the person that you're getting information from either just doesn't know him or herself, or they're totally out of the loop on things, or they're kind of like… because so much of these big organizations, they don't even know what they don't know.

55:08 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, you know, I, uh, it sounds bad when I say this, but I don't trust anybody, right? So when I get intel from different levels, I always try to triangulate the data to go and verify, hey, is it accurate or not, right? And then you put your own mosaic together. What I found is the higher you get in an organization, there will be a lot of politics and games that are at play, and VPs will tell you something that will suit their agenda. It might not be accurate at all, but it'll suit their agenda, hoping that you will actually spread that gospel through. So if you're, if you're talking to 10 people and 8 are saying the same thing and 2 are saying not, you know, you can kind of quickly go, I'm not sure, the other 2 are probably outliers, right? And that's how you triangulate the data. And I do that at every level. I don't trust anybody.

56:00 Scott Ingram: I'm gonna pull the founder's wild card and ask a question, close it out, unless anyone has any other questions. But, uh, in my time I've had to, uh, manage my internal executive team who sometimes wants to get involved in the deals. How have you incorporated executive engagement, both trying to prevent negative consequences as well as leveraging your executives for positive outcomes? Because in your deals particularly, they're high visibility.

56:31 Trong Nguyen: Yeah, I would tell you, if, if you have a chance to bring senior executives out, always do. I'm the first guy that will bring any of our executives out when they're in the city, in the country that I'm in, helping to accelerate a deal. So I would tell you, first and foremost, bring all of your executives out to your accounts, to your deals. The other thing I would tell you though is be very, very prescriptive, right? In terms of what it is you want them to do, what it is you want them to say, how you want them to act. These top executives are really, really good when you lay the context of where you're at in a deal and what you need to get done, right? And how they're going to help and what role they're exactly going to play. As soon as they know that, they will execute to that. And so I'm very, very prescriptive and say, you know, Yanni, you're coming to this meeting. I need you to be the bad guy. Here's what you're gonna go say. And when you say that, here's how the customer's gonna respond. And when they say that, we're all gonna go quiet, not say a word. Do I make myself clear? Right? And you have to be that maniacal and that prescriptive about it.

57:48 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. So as you guys can tell, Trong is an unbelievable fountain of knowledge and really a rare breed that somebody that's playing at his level is giving back to this degree, right? Just getting ready to release his second book. The time that he spent on the podcast with us today at the summit as we get ready to release the Sales Success Stories book, Trong was the first person to deliver his stories. Now he kind of Cheated because we repurposed some chapters. But I just, Trong, I want to thank you for all that you do for this community and giving back and helping us all get better and raise our own game. And thank you all for having us and help me thank Trong once again.

58:33 Scott Ingram: 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.