52: Carly Mantione - Loopio's top AE - Getting to Value Quickly

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 Carly Mantione, who is the top account executive at Loopio. And once Again, I owe a special thank you to Gail Axelrod at OpenView Partners, who keeps bringing me these amazing top sellers from their portfolio companies. But I was a little bit on the fence about Carly, only because I've already interviewed Loopio's top SDR at the time, Florin Tatulea, back in episode 22. So it was actually Florin who sold me on Carly. I reached out to get his thoughts and he said I absolutely had to do it, saying she had been the top AE at Loopio since she started, probably the best AE I've ever seen in action. So welcome to the show, Carly.

1:05 Carly Mantione: Thanks so much, Scott. I'm happy to be here.

1:07 Scott Ingram: So this episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Story Dimensions, who you can find at storydimensions.com. And I'll tell you a bit more about them in a few minutes. Now, one of the things I often say at this point in the show is that I try to front-load the value by jumping right into the top 3 things that have allowed my guests to get to the top of the leaderboard. You're really going to want to pay extra close attention to these today because there's a lot we can learn from Carly's, and I especially like your first one, Carly, what is that?

1:37 Carly Mantione: So my first one, Scott, kind of to your point, is getting to value quickly. And I know that this is something that you do talk about a lot. And it's funny because I take a really similar approach in the way that I handle my calls, where rather than doing a really in-depth discovery at the beginning of the call, I'll ask a few key, very targeted questions, but then I want to dive right into value. I'm also not someone who's going to spend a ton of time on small talk. I really don't want to talk about the weather. I don't really want to talk about where they're based. I want to build rapport on the call naturally, but I want to get right into value within the first few minutes.

2:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah, there's so much interesting stuff about that. And you and I were just sharing, there was an article. Now we're recording this well, well in advance, but for us it was yesterday. There was a HubSpot blog post called The Sobering Truth: Why You Can't Sell to C-Suite Executives by Chris Orlob at Gong.io. And essentially the point of that article, kind of the key line was senior executives have discovery fatigue. Do you want to talk about that? Because I know you read the article also.

2:39 Carly Mantione: Yeah, absolutely. So it's interesting because counterintuitively, we've always been told that we have to do a lot of discovery initially, and this is how most people have been taught to sell. But to your point, the article that HubSpot was referring to was a study by Gong, and they actually showed that less discovery was better and led to higher close rates, at least when dealing with senior executives, and that actually asking more than 4 discovery questions led to decreased success because to your point, These executives have discovery fatigue. So for me, I think that there's always a few questions that I need to understand in order to be able to effectively show off the features that would compel someone to buy this product, like, you know, pain and process and why now. But that's the only discovery I'm going to do upfront. And I think that it's important to note that they have a problem and need a solution, and I want to help them there. And because both our time is valuable, I want to establish the credibility that I'm serious about solving those challenges and get right into the platform and how it can help.

3:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's great stuff. And I think, you know, it's really finding that happy medium. I think what nobody really enjoys is nobody wants to be interrogated, right? Don't, don't put me in a room with a bright light and only ask me questions for 45 minutes. I think the right way to do it is to find sort of a give and take. And it's been a little bit since I sold software, but I always thought of it as a demo-scovery, right? Because what everybody, everybody wants, if you're selling software, people want to see the software. So show them the software. And in the last role I was in, I was selling marketing or event marketing software. So, you know, event registration was a big part of that. I worked with one of my SEs. We built our own demo that built the discovery into the demo. So I would walk them through sort of an event registration process, but while I was doing that, I pre-populated it with everything I already knew about them. And then I would ask them questions as we went, which then guided the rest of the demo because I knew what was and wasn't important. So I think again, you have to find that happy medium and avoid the discovery fatigue that so many of us have.

4:35 Carly Mantione: Absolutely. And I think especially when dealing with, you know, directors and VPs in the C-suite, you're not really going to be able to establish credibility if you're spending 15 minutes asking them a list of questions. I think with this, you know, solution selling consultative approach, part of my role is being able to, you know, uncover problems that the prospect didn't even necessarily know that they have. And so that can't really be accomplished by asking them a ton of questions, but it relies on me to have the expertise to know what other people in their industry are facing as a challenge too.

5:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, spot on. So number one, getting to value quickly. What's number two?

5:06 Carly Mantione: Yeah, number two would be not being afraid to say no or push back on prospects. I think everybody talks a lot about the challenger approach. I'm sure a lot of your listeners are very familiar with the challenger sale, and I think that being able to challenge my prospects into thinking differently is certainly something that's made me very successful in my role.

5:22 Scott Ingram: Yeah, and I think that that goes without saying. I mean, I feel like I just had this conversation. The interviews are all starting to run together at this point. I've done a lot in the last couple of weeks, but, you know, just, just this idea of not being afraid to… I think it was, I think it was John at Emerson, you know, not being afraid to tell customers that you can't do something and that being a path to building trust.

5:47 Carly Mantione: Absolutely.

5:48 Scott Ingram: So what's number 3?

5:50 Carly Mantione: Number 3 is not being afraid to walk away from a deal, especially early on. So I think that my job really is to provide value to my prospects. But I also want to get value in return. And so I'm not going to spend time taking them through a sales cycle, which at Loopio ranges on average from 3 to 6 months. If I'm going to do that, then there needs to be a commitment from them that they're actually serious about solving the challenges that they have. And if after the first call, I know that they're not ready or willing to change their process, then they're not going to be successful and ultimately not going to buy our solution. So I'm not going to spend the time, but if on the other hand they are, Then of course I'm absolutely willing to put in the effort. But I think that prioritizing certain deals that are really winnable and walking away very early on from opportunities that are just a distraction has really helped me focus in on, on what I can actually close and help me actually be successful.

6:37 Scott Ingram: And what are the specifics? What are you looking for to make that decision on whether or not you invest the time or choose to walk away?

6:44 Carly Mantione: Yes, there's a couple of things. I mean, one would just be sort of whether, you know, how closely they align with our target market in terms of, you know, the company industry challenges they're seeing and what they're looking to do. But the other is, you know, how invested they are in actually solving their problem. You know, implementing a solution like this requires a bit of a process change, and a lot of buyers aren't really committed to putting in the work that it's going to take. And so if they're not, that's fine, but they're not really going to, you know, ever make that commitment to buy a solution like Loopio. I think as well, a good question that I'll ask initially is, you know, what happens if you don't make a decision and you don't get a solution? And if they, their answer is just, you know, well, nothing's really going to change, then, then that's fine. But, you know, probably a good deal for me to walk away from.

7:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great stuff. Good, good detail. So let's fill in just a little bit more context here. Tell us about Loopio and your role there.

7:34 Carly Mantione: Yeah, so I'm a senior account executive here. We're a SaaS platform that helps sales teams respond to RFPs and security questionnaires. And any of your listeners who have had to answer one without the help of technology know how painful they can be. And right now I'm the company's only senior account executive. So I deal with strategic accounts and have historically dealt with most of the company's enterprise accounts, but I've also worked with mid-market accounts as well. And how I got to the top, I think, really goes back to my 3 earlier points around getting to value quickly and challenging prospects and also qualifying opportunities out early on.

8:05 Scott Ingram: Awesome. And now what's your origin story? Where did this start? How did you get to this level at Loopio today?

8:10 Carly Mantione: Yeah, so in terms of getting into sales at all, my dad's in sales. He supported our family on a fully commission-based sales role. Siblings are both in sales. A lot of my relatives are as well. So I figured maybe I would be successful at it as well and wanted to try it out. So, after I graduated from university, I went into a more transactional sales role at a company called Rogers, selling to small businesses. And I was really successful there from very early on and fell in love with selling, but realized that I wanted to get into a more solution-selling role with enterprise companies. So, I made a switch over to an SDR role at another Toronto-based company called Influitive, and then came to Loopio as a senior SDR, sort of built out the outbound process here along with Florin, who you spoke with you know, on one of the earlier episodes and then became an AE and then senior AE here. And that sort of led me to where I am today.

8:59 Scott Ingram: Good deal. So I think it's interesting and I belabored this on a recent episode, so I won't go into it as much. But I feel like this… there's only 2 paths into sales. Either you knew people who did it, often your parents or close relatives, or there was some sort of accidental path. But I'm curious, is there anything, knowing everything that you know now and the journey that you've been on, is there anything that you would do differently if you could start over now knowing what you know now?

9:24 Carly Mantione: Yeah, it's a good question. I don't have any regrets about the decisions I've made or places I've worked, but I think one thing I do wish I'd known earlier in my career, and I think this is especially important for newer sales reps or people just looking to get into sales, is that it's a lot more important to pick a good leader to work for than a really well-known company. And it's, it definitely is important to work for a good company. I won't pretend it's not. But what I found is that if you can pick the right leader who's going to invest in your growth, and give you the mentorship and the coaching to develop your skills and early on learn how to be a successful sales rep, that'll give you a really strong foundation that can actually lead you to success in the rest of your career. And I think it's an easy mistake to make of going for that really well-known company that you think is going to look great on a resume, but not actually put in the thought of looking for the right leader. And it's a mistake that I made very early on where I picked a company as opposed to picking a leader. And I realized the importance of this when I came to Loopio and I was incredibly lucky to work very closely with our COO, Jafar Wainati. And Jafar at the time was leading the sales team and was hugely impactful in my earlier stage development from a sales perspective and was and still is a huge mentor to me. And ultimately I can credit a lot of the success that I've had to his approach and philosophy that he taught me when I was reporting directly to him. And so I think it's important to really remember that it's the people and not the brand or the company that are going to make you successful.

10:45 Scott Ingram: That is so good. So talk more, how would you, again, so now knowing what you know, if you were starting over, how would you vet that leader to make sure that you're finding the right person to go to work for?

10:56 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think it can be hard to do, especially if you've never had a sales role before and don't necessarily have a lot of expertise, but I think whenever you're interviewing for a position, you almost need to be interviewing the interviewer as well, or the person who you're going to be reporting to and determine whether they're going to be a good fit for you. Because ultimately they're evaluating whether you're going to be a good fit for their company and for their team. But you need to understand whether this person is going to be somebody who's actually going to help you out or whether they're just looking to add another body onto the team. Yeah.

11:25 Scott Ingram: So, I mean, so fascinating. And it's one of the kind of hidden themes and it's kind of one of the hidden themes and insights that I've had through all these interviews. So here we are over 50 interviews into this show. And I don't think there's a single example of anybody that I've talked to who is successful and obviously at the top despite their boss. They're, they're not doing it, you know, and overcoming that obstacle. They all have great bosses. So I think that is absolutely really critical to that success. And, you know, at some point, you know, we may want to dig into that a little bit further because I really love going down this route and just, it exploring the sales career in general, right? I think that there's not a lot enough information. There's tons of information about sales process and how to do all of that stuff, but there's not a lot of information about how do you manage your own sales career.

12:17 Carly Mantione: Yeah. And I think that's something I'd love to learn more about as well. I've been really lucky at Loopio, obviously with, with Jafar and even our director of sales, Nat, who I report to now. I mean, he's taken me from someone who was selling mainly to mid-market to being able to close these enterprise deals. And I've been lucky, but But I think that would be a great topic for another podcast is kind of figuring out, you know, how to navigate that, that career and how to make sure you have the right leaders behind you. Yeah.

12:41 Scott Ingram: Great, great stuff. And I think actually I'm talking with another, actually one of my former favorite bosses who is now the Chief Revenue Officer at BrightTalk, which is a webinar platform. And we're actually talking about doing some webinars on, on there. And that might be just a perfect topic. And the book that we're working on, so Sales Success Stories, the first volume of that book, about a quarter of it is sales career-oriented stories. So if this is of interest to you, I don't think as we release this episode that we'll be doing presales any longer, but watch for that to release in October. And speaking of stories, this episode is sponsored by Story Dimensions, a SaaS sales enablement company. And as you know, I'm a big believer in the power of stories. And when I saw what they offer, I was really, really impressed. Story Dimensions is the only solution that captures and packages real stories from your customers into easy-to-digest and deliver formats that salespeople can use to build credibility and trust with their buyers. And I have so much confidence in the value that this solution brings to sales organizations that I've taken on an advisory role with the company myself. I encourage you to go check it out. Uh, they just updated their website and it's much more clear, not that it was bad before, but it's fantastic. So go to storydimensions.com. You can request a live demo to see how Story Dimensions can help you accelerate sales cycles and close more deals. So Carly, let's talk about closing deals. Can you quantify your results for us? What, what has it taken from a performance standpoint to get to number 1 or always have been number one there at Loopio?

14:09 Carly Mantione: Yeah. So when I started as an AE here, I set pretty lofty goals and I wanted to hit 150% of my annual quota in 2017. So last year, and I ended up exceeding my quota every quarter, but in Q4, I actually exceeded my quarterly quota by over 200% and ended up getting to 170% quota attainment for the year, which I was really proud of.

14:29 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. And so that's a lot of different deals and a lot of different sales cycles. What's your favorite sales story from your time there at Loopio? Maybe It's a deal-specific type story.

14:40 Carly Mantione: Yeah. So actually kind of a funny way to approach this question. I actually want to talk about a deal that I lost because I actually learned a ton from it and it really caused me to change my approach a little bit. And this was back in Q2 of last year. I was working on a huge opportunity with a large healthcare company and it would have been one of the largest opportunities in our company's history. And I was feeling really confident in it, but I'd made a mistake that I think a lot of other reps who are earlier in their careers make. And I was forecasting this big op without having all the information that I needed. Now, I knew the business pains. I knew what the business case was for my champion and for the organization. We were aligned with the economic buyer on the business case. I knew what the decision processing criteria were. I even knew how we stacked up against the competition, at least from my champion's point of view, who was a VP. But I failed to take into account some of the other stakeholders who were not as involved in the evaluation. But who ultimately were going to be the end users. And what they cared about didn't exactly line up with what my main champion and the economic buyer wanted from a feature functionality perspective. And ultimately, they were able to derail things and go to a competitor who had shown them functionality that I hadn't emphasized. And so now, I've shifted my approach a bit in that I still need to know what the organization cares about and what my main stakeholders care about. But now, if there are ever any other stakeholders on a demo or a call, no matter how little involvement they seem to have in the decision process or evaluation, I'll actually find them on LinkedIn and send them a personalized InMail after the call, essentially thanking them for their time, but also asking if there was anything else that they wanted to see or any functionality that would be helpful to them that we didn't cover. And I'll offer to connect with them separately on it. And it's funny because people are actually really responsive to these messages. And even though I ask these questions at the end of the call anyway, I find some people don't want to bring up these objections in front of their boss or in front of a group. And so they hold them in. But I want to know immediately if I've missed something so that I can address it and get these people on my side and bought into our solution. And I think this has really helped me develop additional champions and advocates and also uncover a lot of potential roadblocks and red flags that I don't run into that same problem on the next opportunity.

16:46 Scott Ingram: Oh, great, great stuff. And I mean, just so true in the way that sales works today. It's not top-down, right? So anymore, the leaders aren't going to override their team. The team has a lot of power.

16:57 Carly Mantione: Yeah, it's a lot more consensus buying these days, I find. And so you need the buy-in from all of these different stakeholders, and if you don't have it, it can really wreak havoc on that deal.

17:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, thank you for, for sharing a failure story. To your point, I think we do learn more from those a lot of times. And since we're already down that path, what do you find to be the biggest challenge or obstacle that you face, or what you struggle with the most in just your day-to-day role?

17:22 Carly Mantione: I think In terms of being at Loopio, I've been here for 2 and a half years. And, and when I came here, I came from a much larger company and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are at larger companies today. But when I started here, we were only 13 people and all fairly young without a ton of experience. And so there were, you know, a lot of times where we would hit a roadblock with an opportunity that none of us had experienced before and having to navigate those new problems without the expertise was a challenge. Certainly happens much less frequently now. You know, we're over 80 people going to be 100 by the end of the year. But certainly earlier when we were very small, that was a challenge. But I think to credit our leadership team, we were really selective about who we hired and picked a group of people who were all really competitive, but who ultimately all wanted to be on the winning team. And so we've all been able to really work together to find solutions. And if we don't have them, then we'll tap our networks. And I think it's really important for small startups that are trying to grow a team to pick a group of people who are collaborative in that way, but also bring expertise and skills that are going to complement the knowledge and expertise you already have on the team. So that each new person you add can really help you level up.

18:25 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. Now, did you ever end up tapping your own network and how do you think about just networking in general as a sales professional in that way, in that capacity?

18:35 Carly Mantione: Yeah. So I think, you know, having worked in other organizations as well, I do have a lot of people on my network who maybe are more senior roles now or who've been in their role a long time, who've just seen longer deals than I have or seen, you know, different types of opportunities. So I'm never afraid to reach out to those people on LinkedIn, even if I'm not necessarily close with them. But as well, you know, my director of sales and our senior leadership team have a lot of contacts as well, both within the Toronto tech community, but also, you know, other companies elsewhere as well. So, they're certainly always willing and able to reach out to those people too.

19:07 Scott Ingram: Awesome. So, we talked about the challenges. What about the flip side? What are you most proud of in terms of what you've accomplished there at Loopio?

19:14 Carly Mantione: I think hitting 170% of plan last year was something I was really proud of and a big accomplishment for me. But I think what I'm probably most proud of is actually being the first AE at Loopio to close $1 million in ARR. And keep in mind, our average deal size is between $10K to $15K, and these are typically about 3 to 6 month sales cycles. So that was certainly one I celebrated a lot.

19:34 Scott Ingram: Nice. Now that's a cumulative million dollar ARR. You didn't do a single deal, right?

19:39 Carly Mantione: No.

19:39 Scott Ingram: That would have been really impressive.

19:40 Carly Mantione: Yeah.

19:41 Scott Ingram: This is 100x.

19:44 Carly Mantione: That'll be one of my goals. But no, it was multiple different deals.

19:47 Scott Ingram: Not quite yet. All right. Very, very cool. So let's talk about the habits and routines that really drive your success. And I always like to start this with just having you walk us through kind of a day in the life, right? Your alarm clock goes off. What time does that happen? And what happens from there? Like from, from there to when your head hits the pillow at night?

20:05 Carly Mantione: Yeah. So I'm a morning person. I really like getting up early. Typically I'll get up at 6 or 6:30, uh, have a coffee, go for a run, catch up on the news, and I really like my time in the morning before work. This is my time. I'm not one of those people who's going to get into the office at 7:00 AM. My mornings are really my time for personal development. So I'll, I'll read, I'll, I'll watch the news, but I'm really efficient during my workday and I need to have that morning time unhindered by work. Of course, there's going to be times where I'll wake up and I see I have a really important email from a prospect in the UK and I'll get back to them. But as a general rule, my work starts when I get into the office. Typically walk to work. Uh, we just moved offices yesterday, actually. It's really exciting time at Loopio, but, uh, it's about a half hour walk for me. So I'll just listen to music or just kind of, you know, walk around, get to work. You know, I have demos, I have follow-ups, sometimes internal meetings. And then typically around 6 o'clock, I may head to the gym or go out for dinner, come home and just decompress and go to bed.

21:02 Scott Ingram: Very good. Any variability between the days and how you manage that, or do you travel much?

21:07 Carly Mantione: No. So we don't really travel too much for work here at Loopio, not at least not at this stage. We have a little bit in the past, but it's not, you know, something that's central to my week or my month. In terms of structuring the week, I don't really have any preference for when I do demos or calls. The only thing I do do is I block off Friday afternoons. I don't want to do first demos. I find most prospects aren't as engaged on a Friday afternoon. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend and I typically am as well. So I'm not usually on my, as much on my game on Friday afternoon. But other than that, it's, it's, you know, pretty varied across the board.

21:37 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What about the rest of the way that you just stay organized and run your process?

21:43 Carly Mantione: Yeah, so I think managing my calendar and prioritizing time is huge for me. I take full control over my calendar. We have a business development team that'll book meetings for me. And like a lot of SaaS companies, I'm focused on closing business based on qualified opportunities from our BDRs. So there are a lot of different people who are booking time on my calendar. So I need to be really careful with that time. And especially when dealing with enterprise companies, I need to make sure that I have time to do all the activities that are actually going to push them over the line. But also make time for my other follow-ups, push ops forward in my pipeline as well. So I do have a rule that I won't do more than 3 demos in a day. I also always book at least half an hour buffer before and after a demo to make sure I have time to prep, but also decompress afterwards. And in addition to that, I'm going to block off a lot of time during the week for follow-ups. And to me, this is really sacred time. So I won't book a call or a meeting over that time. I won't move it. Because I need to make sure that when I look at my pipeline, even if I have a really healthy pipe in contracting, I have to constantly move the needle on the earlier stage ops that I have so that I actually have stuff to close next quarter too. And I find it's easy to neglect that if I'm not actually devoting time to it. So that's a huge sort of thing that's important for me in terms of managing my day.

22:55 Scott Ingram: Got it. So it sounds like you're sort of proactively time blocking your calendar. So one, that keeps you from getting demos in those slots and then those just become Non-negotiable.

23:04 Carly Mantione: Yes. Yeah. I usually write it in all caps, no demos.

23:07 Scott Ingram: So it's pretty clear. Just to be very clear, right?

23:11 Carly Mantione: Yeah.

23:13 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. So you said that your morning is kind of your personal development time. What does your information diet look like in, in that time?

23:20 Carly Mantione: Yeah. So I really liked the LinkedIn newsfeed. I think there's a lot of great content on there. I also subscribe to Crunchbase and Owler just for industry information. I like to read and watch a lot of news though, especially in the morning. And I like to also read as much as I can. So sometimes it's sales books, sometimes just general life books. I'm a big reader. I find I'll often dive back into Challenger Sale, and I'm sure we'll talk about my philosophy later on, but I do really subscribe to the Challenger Sale methodology for my conversations. I'm also just started rereading Influence by Robert Cialdini. If you haven't read it, this is probably a great one for your listeners. Talks a lot about the psychology of persuasion and explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to actually apply those understandings. So definitely recommend it if you haven't read it.

24:04 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. Well, you're a big reader. You already started mentioning books, and since you called out 2, maybe we'll round it out with, with a top 3. Is there another sort of favorite or go-to beyond Challenger and Influence that you'd call out?

24:15 Carly Mantione: Ooh, interesting. Right now on my list, I have SPIN Selling. It's funny, I haven't read it. I've had this book sitting on my desk for like a year and a half, but I've heard from everybody it's amazing and that I take a lot of the, you know, same approach to it. So I'm curious to read it, but haven't yet.

24:31 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Well, since you already opened the door, let's talk about your sales philosophy. And it sounds like it's fairly challenger-centric.

24:38 Carly Mantione: Yeah. So I don't actually subscribe to just one particular methodology. I think my style encompasses a lot of different ones. And it's funny because I haven't really spent a ton of time learning or focusing on specific methodologies, but I've been told by a lot of people that I've worked with that my style incorporates a lot of the core fundamentals that are encompassed in a lot of different philosophies. So of course, you know, we talked about Challenger. I definitely subscribe to Challenger for my conversations, challenge my prospects a lot. I'm never afraid to have those uncomfortable conversations. And I think that a lot of the people that we sell to may know that they have a problem, but they don't necessarily know what the solution is. So they often will come to the table and have all these assumptions. And I often need to break those assumptions and teach them why that might not actually be the best approach and why our approach is ultimately going to solve their problem better. And then in terms of deal management and qualifying an op through the sales cycle, I leverage a lot of the principles of MEDDPICC, or some people might know it as MEDIC, to identify the gaps and red flags that could block or derail an opportunity. And if I've identified areas that are missing, I'll very much try to get all the information I can in each interaction. And I won't really feel truly confident in a deal until I have all those specific boxes checked. And then when I do, my close rate is very high. But I wouldn't actually count any op as real until I know all that information.

25:55 Scott Ingram: Got it. Now, how are you tracking your kind of med pick gates, if you will?

26:00 Carly Mantione: Yeah, so every op that I have, I keep a notes section in Salesforce where I literally lay out all the letters. So, so M for metrics, E economic buyer, D decision process. There's another D for decision criteria. P is for paper process. I is identified pain. And then 2 Cs for coaches and competition. And I literally lay that out either in Salesforce and in the notes section of my computer. Can be a little bit disorganized there. And literally until I have all that information, I will not move things to a specific stage because I'm missing key information.

26:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Awesome. And if anybody wants to dive into, I'm going to call out just a handful of resources here because we've covered some really good ground in some previous episodes and a session at the summit. So David Weiss from ADP is the master of MEDDPICC. In fact, In fact, last I checked, when I Googled MEDDPICC, I was like 3 of the top 10 results, including sort of a video where he walks through MEDDPICC in a little bit more detail. So again, that's M-E-D-D-P-I-C-C. So you can just Google it or go to top1.fm and do a search for it there. David also went even deeper into it on the stage at the first Sales Success Summit. And if you're not already on the mailing list, one of the things I offer in the first welcome email is the video of your choice from the summit. So David's is obviously one. So if you go to top1.fm, get on the mailing list, you can either request, request David's, or we did a sales career panel. It's actually the longest session available. It's about a 90-minute session. That one was a little bit more focused on the choice between being what I call an intentional individual contributor or going down the sales leadership path and sort of the pros and cons and how you position yourself for each. So I, I'm really serious about circling back on this idea and talking about picking the right sales leader and taking just a little bit of a different approach to the sales career conversation. So, I'm sure we'll circle back on that, but there's just a handful of resources that are available to you, the listener, to help with that process. So, Carly, we talked about your philosophy. What is your style?

28:02 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think it goes back to my top 3 things. So, I get to value quickly, I push back a lot, and I also walk away quickly, but I really believe that nobody likes buying things because it's really risky if you make the wrong decision. And tying back to my earlier point, most people don't actually know what to look for. So me as a sales rep, I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to know and make you confident that you're making the right decision, both for you personally, but also for your organization. And I believe that when I sell, I'm selling to 2 buyers. There's the organizational need for a solution, and that's where a lot of the metrics come from and where the business case is focused. But there's also the specific ambitions and fears of the buyers who are involved in the process. And these buyers' goals and objectives may all be different and very personal and individual to them. And my goal is to understand and uncover what their specific fears or motivations or objectives are, and then articulate to these individual buyers how the solution could be aligned with them. And it may ultimately be to help them secure a promotion or help them hit a KPI. But I find that when I'm able to secure a really strong business case on the commercial side, but also sell to those really specific and personal goals goals of the stakeholders involved, then I have a very high likelihood of winning their business, even if my proposal is more expensive.

29:15 Scott Ingram: So would you talk a little bit about how you get to that personal level? How are you identifying sort of what those goals and objectives are at that level?

29:27 Carly Mantione: Yeah, so it's difficult to find the personal motivations. I won't pretend it's not, especially in bigger sales where you don't actually have access to all the buyers. But the way I approach it is I always make sure that I reach out to those stakeholders I have access to. And I spoke about that earlier about connecting on LinkedIn. And again, it's surprising how often those people respond. But I also truly believe, and I spoke about this earlier, that a lot of my best discovery comes at the end of the call rather than at the beginning, because I haven't yet at the beginning built the credibility with these buyers yet. But as I move through the sales cycle, being very value-driven in every interaction, I found that later on in the process, I have a really high likelihood of prospects opening up to me about their personal motivations. And this actually leads me to the second point about stakeholders I may not have access to. When I'm able to build a really strong coach who's going to help me uncover what those people specifically care about so that my business case can articulate it, that's how I'm really going to get access to, you know, what all those other people care about and what's going to be important going forward in that decision.

30:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Good. So I'm wondering if you will talk through something for me that I've been wrestling with, and that is, so when we built the current book that's It'll be out in another month as folks are listening to this. One of the things that I did is, you know, we had, I think it's 65 stories all said and done that were contributed. And I kind of decided, you know what, let me just see what comes out and we'll figure out how to organize this afterwards. And I had to go on vacation to figure out how to solve for this. And ultimately they all fit into one of 4 broad categories, and those categories were mindset, relationship, sales career, and sales process. And sales process was the biggest one, but the others were, were pretty equal. I think that Challenger really maligns the relationship, but I think that there's a lot of nuance to that. And it was all… it was actually kind of surprising to me how frequently the relationship-oriented stories sort of came out in this process of collecting all of these stories from over 20 top 1% sales professionals. How do you think about relationships and sort of since you've studied Challenger as closely as you had, how do you, how do you resolve it with the way that they position the relationship?

31:41 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I think that the reason why I don't necessarily subscribe to just one methodology is I think that a lot of methodologies are very sort of strict in that it's you're this way or you're this way or you do all these things or you don't. But to your point, relationships are hugely important. And I believe that even though I'm a challenger and my core philosophy is that it's important to challenge people and teach, tailor, and, and sort of control the conversation, those are hugely important because if you ultimately don't have rapport with somebody and don't have that relationship, they're not going to open up to you on those things. And I don't think that being a challenger and being a relationship builder are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think at the core, I'm a challenger, but I also do prioritize relationships with prospects and the prospects that I you know, ultimately have the best relationships with are often tend to be the ones that I've challenged the most as well, because when I challenge them, I establish credibility and that makes them trust me more. It makes them want to open up to me more. So I don't think mutually exclusive at all.

32:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Good stuff. And so I think it was the last interview that I did with John at Emerson. And one of the comments that he made was, you know, you don't necessarily have to play a lot of golf to be successful in sales. And maybe, maybe that's sort of, I'm not thinking about it in the very old school way enough in terms of what relation, you know, what a relationship-driven salesperson is, right? Because I consider myself extraordinarily relationship-driven, right? I get a ton of referrals. I have a lot of mentors. It has been an absolute core piece of my own success. But I think that it's not the main thing, right? And maybe that's sort of what they were pointing at. That's, that's a little bit different. And to your point, there's always nuance. There is. I'm yet to find the black and white answer between sales success and sales failure.

33:26 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think if there was one answer that, you know, we wouldn't be having these conversations, but I think there are so many different things that can work, so it's not just one or the other.

33:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so let's talk about motivation. What motivates you and how do you think about motivation in general?

33:40 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I ultimately want to be the best. I would say I'm motivated by money, and I certainly am, but I think more than that, I'm a really competitive person and I want to win. I want to be at the top of the leaderboard. I want to close the biggest deals. But even more than that, I'm really motivated to help my clients, and I really believe in the value that Loopio brings to businesses and believe that this is the best product on the market to solve those challenges. And because of that, I'm also really motivated to see Loopio continue the exponential growth that we've seen over the past few years. And I see myself wanting to contribute to that growth, both as an individual contributor, but also helping the newer sales team members we have here so that they can drive value for our prospective clients as well.

34:18 Scott Ingram: Awesome. So it sounds like you've definitely taken on a bit of a mentoring role as the team has continued to grow there.

34:23 Carly Mantione: Yeah, absolutely. It's part of my role as the senior account executive is also helping with the rest of the team as well.

34:29 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Now, is there something you believe that the average sales professional would think is crazy?

34:37 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think probably one of my points earlier about how quickly I walk away from deals. I'm just very selective with the deals that I work and walking away from not so great opportunities allows me to really focus on what's actually going to close. And I'm also not afraid to ask the tough questions and qualify people in, and not afraid to walk away from a buyer who is not committed to making that change internally. And if they're not committed, then I'm not going to spend my time providing recommendations and putting forward a solution to those challenges.

35:04 Scott Ingram: How do you artfully walk away from, from those opportunities? Because you're divesting, you know, how do you leave them so that they don't have a bad opinion of Loopio at the end of the day?

35:14 Carly Mantione: Yeah, that can be hard. And it's funny because sometimes when, when you do want to walk away, that's when people want to sort of cling on the most. But I think ultimately just being very transparent about the fact that, you know, moving forward with a solution like this is going to be a big process change. And it sounds like this is not a change that your team is looking to make, and that's okay. But if you're not, here are some other things that I can recommend to you. And if down the road, you know, you do want to make that change and this becomes, you know, sort of a different initiative, I'm happy to reconnect and I'll send them a few resources. And people tend to actually be really grateful and thank me for for pointing that out, because I think it's something that a lot of people aren't used to.

35:49 Scott Ingram: Sure. No. And I think that's a really smart process, right? I think you're being really clear about here's why, but you're not just then like, good luck, see you later. You know, here are some other resources and some additional value that you can use to kind of progress if we're not the right solution, right?

36:04 Carly Mantione: Yeah, absolutely. I think that part of my role is to help people find the best solution, whether or not it is Loopio. And if it is, that's great. And I want to work with them and provide value. But if it's not, then that's okay. Still want to help them out as much as I can, but, but again, not really focus my time on, on that opportunity.

36:20 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So coming back to the crazy beliefs thread, so I also like to look at what is it that the average sales professional believes that you think is crazy?

36:30 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think that again, the point earlier about deep discovery, I think a lot of people believe that doing deep discovery upfront is what's going to help you close a deal. And we're in a market where, like a lot of other SaaS companies, we have that BDR team. They're doing an initial discovery call with a prospect, and then from there, if it meets qualification criteria, they'll book a demo for the AE. And so a lot of AEs have been taught that they then need to do a ton of additional discovery before going on to the demo. And while I believe that some discovery upfront is important, going back to my earlier point, in order to establish credibility, you need to get to value quickly. So I'll ask a few important questions, but then I'm going to get right into the demo. And that goes back to those Gong stats earlier and the HubSpot article about you know, just, just discovery fatigue that people have these days.

37:14 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And I didn't… I failed to mention this earlier, but we will absolutely put a link to that article in the show notes. So if you go to top1.fm forward slash… I think we're going to be 52. You'll, you'll find all the, all the details there. If you don't, just do a search for Carly and you'll find it right quick. And to your last point, I think that we… you always have to be critical of every part of the sales process, right? Just because this is always what we've heard and this is the way that you do sales and maybe you've listened to this show for for 50-some-odd episodes and every single person has done something one particular way. I don't know that that has existed yet, but, you know, I think you always have to have sort of a healthy skepticism because things are evolving. You know, 10 years ago, yeah, absolutely. There was no such thing as discovery fatigue, right? But that was long before, you know, we were on web meetings all day long and where people are asking us the same questions over and over and over again. So I think that it makes sense to just be critical and be mindful and think about, you know, and I, I often like to think about like, what's the, what's the experience of this? Like, if I were on the other side of this, would I like this? Would this drive me crazy? Would this be valuable to me? Would I be irritated? You know, what, how does this feel?

38:32 Carly Mantione: Yeah. And I think that's a good point. And I think that there's, there's 2 parts of that. I think every buyer that you're going to have is going to have a different personality type. So you need to be able to tailor your approach a little bit and your messaging to those different people. But I also think that all these different methodologies and different ways of doing things, you have to take into account your personality and your style because something that works really well for somebody else may not work differently for, uh, may not work the same for me because we just have such different approaches and different personalities. So I think you have to sort of take everything you hear with a grain of salt, figure out what's going to work for you, and then use that.

39:03 Scott Ingram: Yeah, perfectly said. I, you know, I've been doing a fair number of other podcasts talking about some of these primary themes, and I think that is probably the most important one is is you have to be a student of sales. You have to read these books. You have to understand these different methodologies, and then you cherry-pick and you find the things that fit you and who you are. And, you know, I think the biggest theme that I have found throughout the show is the most successful sales performers are the ones who are the most extreme versions of themselves, right? When you're trying to do something unnatural, like, oh, you heard this is the way, but it doesn't fit who you are and the way that you operate, and it's just not genuine. Like, doesn't work. You have to find the things like, what, what is truly me and what can I do to an extreme that is, is going to help me win?

39:52 Carly Mantione: Totally. I completely agree with that.

39:55 Scott Ingram: And so, is there an example of that, Carly, for you of like an extreme Carly thing that maybe a lot of other people couldn't probably do, but because it's just your personality and your style that it just works?

40:08 Carly Mantione: Oh, that's an interesting question. I want to try to think of a good example. I think something that I do a lot on calls, and it's funny because I have this very challenger approach where, you know, I challenge people a lot and I can be very assertive, but I also find every demo that I have, or at least the ones that I end up closing eventually, are ones that I've laughed a lot on the call. And so there'll be points where, you know, I'm challenging somebody, we may be going head to head a little bit, but then 5 minutes later, there's some kind of conversation and we're both laughing our heads off. And it's very strange, but I, sort of funny thing about me is oftentimes when I laugh really hard, my eyes water. And so, our, my COO, Jafar, that I talked about earlier, as a joke, got these little vials and he put them on the sales team's desk and filled them with water and labeled them Carly tears because he thought it was funny. But it's something that happens all the time. And, and I know now if I cry of laughter on a demo, it's probably going to close.

41:03 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. That's awesome. Carly tears are the magical fairy dust of deals.

41:08 Carly Mantione: Well, and we were moving offices. We just moved to a new place yesterday and apparently the movers asked Jafar, do you want us to pack up these Carly tears? And they… I'm happy to say they made it safely to the new office.

41:22 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. Well, then, and, you know, I mean, having been at a couple of startups like that, those little things end up being like so core to the culture. Like throwing those out would have been just such a travesty.

41:34 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I'm happy they made it.

41:37 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. So what about, you know, what are the most important decisions you've had to make or the lessons you've had to learn that really helped you break through and get where you are?

41:48 Carly Mantione: I think what I mentioned earlier about being selective with who you work for, I think that's so important. And I really credit a lot of my success to this. And I think, you know, if I hadn't worked for Jafar and I hadn't worked for my director now, Nat, I don't think I'd be where I am today.

42:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Good stuff. And like I said, I, we really do need to circle back on that. So we will, we will be in touch. Maybe I'll put together a little panel and we'll dig into that, into that further, because it's such a great Great topic, but hard to define exactly what does that mean? You know, how do you fully, fully vet that sales leader to make sure that they're that type of individual? One of the things that I do is I do a lot of behind-the-scenes due diligence on anybody that I'm going to work for. Right. So I will… LinkedIn is the best tool on the planet because you can find people who used to work for that person. And ideally they're not at the same company anymore. So they have no like vested interest in the outcome. And they're not fear… they're not fearful of any retribution if this were to come back on them and, and get that truth. Because I mean, I've, I've worked for some awful bosses and, you know, have been in a position to sort of warn people off, like, look, you never want to work for this, this person. This is exactly what you don't want. And, and same thing on the flip side, you know, like, like Ryan Ashburn, who I referred to earlier. Ryan's incredible. And, you know, I would recommend anybody that given the opportunity that, that they work for them. And, and I think, you know, there's an opportunity to kind of pay it forward and, and of those ways.

43:16 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I love that. I love the advice of finding people that used to work for them that don't work at the same company now, because I think a lot of the problem that a lot of people have is that they don't want to run the risk of reaching out to somebody who currently works there and have them tell their boss. But if you know they no longer work there, that's actually a great way to get around that.

43:33 Scott Ingram: All right. Such good stuff. I want to kind of come to what I always fondly think of as kind of the soapbox section of the interview where you just get to full-on dispense advice. And I'd like to start with the advice that you would have for somebody that's just starting in their sales career today. What would you suggest that they do to build a foundation for greatness?

43:54 Carly Mantione: Yeah, I think I've come back to this a few times, but I really believe that finding a good leader who you can learn from is absolutely crucial. But I also think that you have to sell something you're truly passionate about and really believe provides value, because in my opinion, you can't be a challenger if you don't actually genuinely believe what you're saying. So, I think find a good leader and find a company that you're passionate about.

44:14 Scott Ingram: Great stuff. What about somebody who's further in? So, they've been at this game for a few years, maybe they've worked in a couple of different companies or a couple of different roles, and they're doing okay, but they're not at the top. What would you suggest to them to break through and get to the top?

44:28 Carly Mantione: Yeah, so, I haven't been in sales that long. I've only been selling for 3 and a half years, and there are a lot of people who've been featured on here and probably a lot of your listeners who've been selling a lot longer than I have. So, I won't pretend to have all the answers, but I can tell you what's helped me be successful. And I think, again, it really comes down to focusing on someone who's going to be invested in your success. And ideally, that's going to be somebody you report into. But if it's not, I really recommend you to seek out other salespeople, either on your team or in your organization or even in your network, who are successful and ask them what's worked well for them. I believe that sales is something that can be taught. And if you're in a rut or you're not at the point you want to be, I think there are a lot of resources around you that you can leverage.

45:08 Scott Ingram: You know what, that was the best transition ever. I had not really built in my wanting to talk about the upcoming Sales Success Summit and some of the things that I'm working on. So we're in this little bit of a lull right now as this episode releases. I'm pretty sure that I'm not offering any sort of presale, prepurchase opportunities on the book. You're at this point, you have to wait until I think the target date is October 16th to get the book. And so what I decided to do was focus a little bit more on the 2019 Sales Success Summit. And I I found an image that, uh, at this, at this point, as I'm talking about this, I would have already sent out to the newsletter list because I made it, I made a joke and it just rung so true about, you know, this is the deal for whatever gets up so early in the morning that it eats early birds. Like that's what this thing is. Because to be fair, the event is over a year away at this point. This, it's going to be October 14th and 15th. I screwed up the dates last time I talked about October 14th 15th, 2019, here in Austin, Texas again. And, you know, I believe so strongly in that community. You know, the conversations that we had in that last event, I just got a note here recently. He was, he was the second person to sign up for the 2019 summit, landed an amazing job, got to relocate from Chicago to San Diego. That sounds like a win to me to start with. And just got a crazy great role. It's going to be a great fit for him. And I know he's going to do incredibly well. And all of that came through through the relationships that were developed at the first Sales Success Summit. So I'm doing 2 things. One, I've set up a subscription option for folks to register for the summit. So instead of throwing down the $799 today, you can pay $75 a month for the next 12 months and get your ticket to the summit that way. That's one part. The other thing, it dawned on me this morning that since we're only going to have 200 seats available at the next summit, and we're now over 50 episodes into the podcast. And between now and the next summit, I'll do at least another 25 interviews. So that's 75 people. I think there's a pretty good chance that a quarter of the audience is going to be the folks that have been on the podcast or have contributed to the book. So I certainly won't be able to put them all on the stage. We will figure that part out later. But your opportunity to build just an incredible sales network, I think, is immense in here. I've also been thinking about is I don't want people to wait for an entire year before they get value from that investment. So one of the things I'm working on for those who either pay for their ticket now or set up that subscription is we are going to set up a method. I'm still figuring this out. We're going to set up a method for them to basically self-organize if they want to self-organize into sales mastermind groups. Because I believe in what you talked about, Carly, right? You have to surround yourself with other salespeople. And I think there's value. There's definitely value in having those relationships inside your company, no doubt, right? Because they're in your world exactly right. They know what your product is. They know the objections, they know the challenges, they know the inner workings. That's, that's important. But I think it's also really, really valuable to get that outside perspective and just have that broader network. So we're looking at creating those types of opportunities for folks. So what I would suggest is, uh, Well, I already made this commitment, so I will, I will have had something there pretty good for the last month or so. If you go to top1summit.com, that'll point you someplace good. And otherwise, the best thing to do is just get on the mailing list. That's always where I share the best things. What I started to allude to at the beginning of this is in one of those newsletters, I found a cartoon with a picture of an early… of a bird eating a worm, but it turned out not to be a worm. It was like the tail of some creature. And so the creature is behind the early bird about to eat it. So I thought that was the perfect analogy for what this is, and those are my people, right? If you are so gung-ho that you're like, yes, a year from now I will figure out a way to make the timing work and I'm going to invest in myself and get better, this is totally for you and I want you to be there. So go to top1summit.com and check that out. So Carly, when you come to Austin and you get a chance to meet all of these great folks at the summit, what is, what is it that you want to know about the top sellers in other organizations?

49:29 Carly Mantione: Well, I want to start off by saying I would love to come to Austin. I've never been, heard great things about it, and the summit sounds absolutely amazing. So definitely want to be a part of that. And I think something that, that I'm always very curious about when, when I meet people is, is what makes them successful. And I think that one of the things I love about your show is it really dives into that. But as I'm getting to the point where I'm looking to take on more leadership, I'm very curious to see how people have succeeded through that transition. Because ultimately, being an individual quota-carrying rep is very different from being a people leader and looking at the macro-level health of the team's pipeline and really leveling up the team rather than just your yourself. And I've had the opportunity to do this at Loopio, both from a strategic sense on how the company is going to go to market, but also from a mentorship and leadership standpoint on the team. But now that I have taken on more of that leadership role, I'm interested in how, as an organization, we can continue to move upmarket and increase our average deal size, but also shorten our sales cycle length to really increase the velocity through the pipeline. So definitely something I'd be interested to ask a lot of those other people at the summit.

50:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, Carly, I think that's a great set of things to look at. And one thing, a podcast that I've just discovered and another hosts that I've gotten to know pretty well here in the last couple of months is Rob Jeppson, who he started the Sales Leadership Podcast, and it is absolutely the perfect companion to this podcast because Rob only talks to active practicing sales leaders. So not people who wrote books about sales leadership, but those who are in the trenches having a lot of success leading teams in predictable ways. So that is a great, great show. And again, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. If you go to top1.fm/52, we'll get you that link over to Rob Jeppson's Sales Leadership Podcast. Carly, along those lines, who is the most successful salesperson that you know personally?

51:18 Carly Mantione: I've been really lucky to work with a number of successful salespeople, and even around me on the team at Loopio, I'm always really impressed with the talent of the team that I work with and been really lucky to learn and grow a lot from these individuals. I've also had the opportunity to work with a really great director as well, but I think the one person who who's… I've been the most impressed with and who's had the biggest impact on me is Jafar, who I spoke about earlier. He's now our COO and really the strongest negotiator I've met. And he came from a consulting background. And I think the reason that my approach is so consultative is because I learned from a guy whose background is consulting.

51:51 Scott Ingram: You just answered my question too, because I was going to ask, I'm like, wait a minute, so you're saying that like this great sales leader you had has never really worn a traditional sales hat, but you really, you feel Like, it's, it's that consulting background that gave him that skill set.

52:04 Carly Mantione: Well, yeah, and, and to be fair, Jafar was the first salesperson at Loopio. I mean, when it was just the 3 co-founders, we had Jafar, Zach, and Matt. Uh, Matt and Zach initially were focused on sort of engineering and building the product, and then Zach shifted more towards leading customer success. But Jafar was the AE on, on most of our early deals. And so, it's, it's actually cool to look in Salesforce and you see, you know, Jafar's also closed over $1 million in ARR. So, really cool to, to be able to learn from him.

52:29 Scott Ingram: Very cool. Such a, such a fun story. All right. So, we've talked a lot. I've talked a lot. One of the things I always try and do is give the listener something really actionable to close with. So, what challenge would you give to the person listening to this that they can take on over the next, say, 1 to 2 weeks that is going to help them improve themselves and improve their sales results?

52:53 Carly Mantione: Get to value quickly. If you're a rep that spends a lot of time on qualification early on, figure out what the specific questions you absolutely need to ask are. But for the rest of them, I think you should earn the right to ask those once you provided value.

53:07 Scott Ingram: Good one. Short, concise, sweet. I love it. Carly, this has been amazing. Thank you for taking your time with me today.

53:14 Carly Mantione: Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. This has been really fun, and thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast.

53:22 Scott Ingram: 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.