65: Jovan Perez of SiriusDecisions

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: This episode of the Sales Success Stories podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Dale Carnegie. To learn more, you can visit DaleCarnegie.com and keep listening for a special offer they have exclusively for listeners of this show. If you just can't wait, go to top1.fm/Dale for all the details. My guest today is Jovan Perez, who is the top-performing hybrid rep at SiriusDecisions and is also the team leader of the Midwest. And we'll talk about what all that means as we get going here. Welcome to the show, Jovan.

0:57 Jovan Perez: Hey Scott, thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. It's a pleasure and a privilege, and thank you for having me on your show.

1:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, thanks for, thanks for being here and sharing your time, and super excited to dig into this. And let's start like we always do. We jump right into some immediate value, and I'll ask you, you know, what you believe are the top 3 things that have contributed most to your success there at Sirius.

1:18 Jovan Perez: Be more than happy to. I'd like to talk about the top 3 things that have personally contributed to my success at Sirius, but I'd also like to predicate that I would say that a prerequisite to all this has to be discipline. And discipline meaning that, you know, you have to do things consistently on a regular basis and make the conscious decision to be excellent. It's not just about doing these types of things when you feel like doing it or when you feel good. So that being said, with no further ado, I would say the 3 things that I would attribute to success is one, audience centricity and knowing your buyer. 2, I'd say focus, and 3, simplicity. And Scott, if you don't mind, I will dig in a layer deeper for each one of those 3 components that I think…

2:02 Scott Ingram: Let's do it. You sound self-winding.

2:05 Jovan Perez: Absolutely. All right. So I'm going to talk about audience centricity. I would say that it's been critically important for me to really understand my buyer, and knowing my buyer just isn't enough. I need to make everything we do, every interaction about them, and that's easier said than And I guess I could say that all that's subordinated by the fact that, from what I've seen from my personal experience, is the likelihood of a deal closing dramatically increases any time that I could concisely articulate the business challenge that my prospect was facing, and also communicate how we're gonna solve this. And having this kind of a deep understanding has been crucial, but it requires knowledge at multiple levels, multiple layers, because of course, sales is Simple, but it's not easy. And the multiple layers of knowledge, I'd say, exists at 3 different main levels. I'd say the account level, the buying center level, and the buying process level. So for an account level, I would say, you know, it was important for me to understand inherently what does our ideal client profile look like? What is our sweet spot? And what attributes are present that demonstrate that this particular client has a high propensity to buy, and it'd be a path of least resistance for me to go after. And, you know, an example might be, is it a certain industry? Is it certain firmographics, as employee count, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The second component that I talked about is the buying center level, is, you know, who actually owns the budget for the purchasing of this particular service, and who is involved in the purchasing process? And that cascades right into the third component when it says purchasing process. I say it's buying process, as in, what does the decision-making process look like for this organization? How do they decide whether or not they want to enlist our services? Is this decision made by a committee of individuals? Is it made by consensus, or is it made by one singular individual? Now, of course, a committee and consensus tends to be a little more complex. There might be an RFP process, but what that tells you is there are certain knowledge requirements that these particular buyers have in order to advance a deal. When I say knowledge requirements, I mean they need to know certain things about my organization and the products we offer, and I need to know certain things about them. And the reason why that is all very important is once you understand the buying process, and what each individual in the buying process cares about, that's going to really help enable you to really position all conversations and interactions so that you're focusing on their needs about them, or as to what value are you bringing to that person rather than going forward and having a product selfie and saying, hey, Here we are, we've been in business for X amount of years and we're great, so that's why you should work with us. It's more so, hey, I understand this is what you're going through, this is what you're looking to solve, we can help, let's talk. And I'll pause there to see if that makes sense, because that was a lot of words I just said.

5:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah, but it's solid, right? I think that your structure and the way you outlined it is perfect to the point where I don't even have a great follow-up question. So let's go into number 2.

5:13 Jovan Perez: Yeah, focus. I would say focus is that me personally, I'm very process-oriented and I'm very regimented when it comes to managing a sales process. And I am a firm believer that there can essentially be a Lean Six Sigma of sales and marketing, that there is more of a science rather than an art. And again, it's up for debate, but that's my opinion. But that being said is, you know, what I take a look at from focus is I look at what is my annual goal? What's the quota? Okay. How does that relate? And how does that trickle down to quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals? What do I have to get done today? What meetings do I need to have? Who do I need to speak with? Okay, I have a sales call later on this week with a head of marketing or a head of sales. All right, what am I closing for? What needs to happen to advance the next step in the process? Okay, what questions are you going to ask in this meeting to understand whether or not I know where this deal is, and vice versa? So I'd say every action being done needs to have a purpose. And you want to make sure you're as productive as possible, because being busy is great. But if there is no significant output, it's a fruitless effort. So again, you want to effective. And I think that every action having a purpose needs to really roll up to a desired output. And if you're goal-oriented and you're focused, I think it's going to really help, you know, drive that process forward for you.

6:32 Scott Ingram: Nice. And then what is your process for documenting that and planning for, for that?

6:38 Jovan Perez: Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question. So it's embedded actually in our organization where we do have something called quarterly plans where you put together an idea of where your revenue is going to come from for the quarter based upon certain things where organizations that have a propensity to buy, things that are in the pipeline, people they have relationships with, or also existing contracts that are due for renewal or whatever. So that's embedded at a higher level for quarterly, but I think that's more so of an exercise to really get your brain thinking and operating as to what is it that you should do. So me personally, I have my own Word document and I just write everything down. Okay, here's what needs to happen. Here are the folks I need to work with and invite them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then what I do is on a weekly basis, I have 5 things, very simple, 5 things that have to get done that week. And usually the night before I go to bed, I map out, you know, one, what meetings do I have the next day and where I am with those 5 things I need to get done. So that's pretty much my process. One, the firm plan that I have to do every quarter. 2, my own Word document where I keep a running list on what has to get done. And 3, on a daily basis, I take a look and see what has to be done the next day and what barriers might have to happen. And then there's sometimes where I say, I am not leaving the office until XYZ gets done. I can't leave.

8:04 Scott Ingram: So awesome.

8:05 Jovan Perez: And again, that's, that's discipline too. That's the prerequisite.

8:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And we'll, we'll come back to a lot of those things and dig a little bit deeper as we start talking through kind of your daily and weekly process. I want to understand kind of the Word doc a little bit more and some of those things, which brings us to ironically simplicity.

8:19 Jovan Perez: Yeah, absolutely. And simplicity, I would say there's essentially 2 buckets that I put simplicity in. Things, one, need to be simple for the buyer to understand. Again, what exactly are we solving and how are we solving it? And the reason why this is so important is because, you know, if the buyer is making a decision on their own, you could get away with things being a little complex and uneasy and they can impute their own kind of perspective on it. But if you're selling to a committee of different individuals, things need to just be explicit. And the simpler things are, the easier it is for folks to interpret and the likelihood you're going to have buy-in. So I say keep things simple. And also I would say simplicity, the other bucket of simplicity is simple activities and fundamentals yield good results. There's nothing really sophisticated about it. You know, and when I say fundamentals, I mean, okay, for every sales call that you have. Do you open and close the calls effectively, Jovan? You know, do you have a good agenda? You know, what is the purpose for the call? What are we closing for? And are you gonna ensure that you have alignment and consensus with the prospect about duration of the call? An example would be when I open a call up, very fundamental, 101, you know, you again kind of break the ice, but typically you have that deep breath. Okay, so the purpose of today's discussion is to learn a little bit more about XYZ and hopefully share a baseline understanding of how we helped other individuals that are looking to accomplish similar goals. By the end of the call, I'm hoping we're at a spot where I could come back with a very structured approach on how we helped other people solve that problem. How's that sound? So, I mean, it sounds like, you know, when I just went on the script of how I typically open calls, but what you're doing there is you're setting agenda, you're ensuring that it's an agenda that your prospective buyer agrees to, and then it makes it a lot less awkward where at the end of the call, they're gonna say, wow, that was a really well-run meeting. And there was a purpose, there was a desired outcome. And I felt like I got a lot out of it. And it seems so simple. And it seems so fundamental. And lo and behold, it is so effective. So I guess my key takeaway is people often get seduced by complexity, when in reality, there's certain simple things out there that can be done that are very effective and very good.

10:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah, this, this is great. So I can already tell you have got just a really great structure around the way that you operate. I can, I mean, obviously, from the notes that you sent me in advance and some of the prep that you did, and I can tell that you're doing the same thing in, in your call. So I'm, I'm really excited to dig into that. Let me tell you about the special offer from Dale Carnegie that I alluded to at the start of the show. One of their core sales offerings is a course called Winning with Relationship Selling. It's all about learning how to operate in a more collaborative, confident, and credible manner to really connect with your customers in a more meaningful way to drive more business together. This is an online course that's conducted live with an instructor in a very interactive experience over the course of 8 weekly sessions that are each 2 hours. What makes this particular offer so special is that they're offering a course starting Friday, April 26th, that's only for Sales Success Stories listeners, and I'll be taking the course with you. So in addition to the core content, there's a ton of opportunity to build relationships with the other participants in the class over the course of these 16 hours. But hurry, because the class is limited to just 16 people. For all the details and to register, go to top1.fm/dale, and I look forward to learning with you. Let's contextualize this a little bit. So, for folks who aren't familiar with SiriusDecisions, let's kind of bring them up to speed there and then just talk about your role. I threw out a variety of different things, the hybrid thing, the team lead thing. Help us kind of get all of that picture.

12:12 Jovan Perez: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start at a higher level. SiriusDecisions, essentially what we are is we are a research and advisory organization that helps heads of marketing, heads of sales, and heads of product management within business-to-business settings improve their performance. And how do we do this? We essentially offer them 3 things. We offer them research, we offer them data, and we offer them access to individuals that have had their job before, that are essentially seasoned practitioners. So an example I'd use for the sake of Simplicity is if you have a CMO that's looking to improve marketing's performance, or have marketing be a revenue-contributing function of an organization, what essentially we would do is say, hey, the way we'll help you out is we'll give you a structured approach on how other heads of marketing have gone through this transformation, and we'll give you, one, a starting point, which is pretty much a best practice framework that we've seen from other functions. We'll give you data on what your investment allocation should look like, but also to help you take those incremental steps to get to marketing utopia, We're gonna connect you with a fellow CMO that's done this job before where they could act as a coach. So the short of it is we pretty much give everybody toolkits that they need that would enable them to undergo the type of change that they're looking to have in their business.

13:29 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. Now talk about your role and how that works.

13:32 Jovan Perez: Yeah, absolutely. So as hybrid, what I am essentially responsible for are 2 functions, hence the word hybrid. One of them is identifying new business and new logos and winning the deal. So it's typical sales. The other function of my job is once a deal is won, what I do is I help deliver on the promises as to, okay, if we're going to help you improve your marketing organization by structure, design, people, processes, here's phase 1, here's phase 2, and here's phase 3. And I'm responsible for coordinating efforts with connecting the folks to the right research, the right data, and also the right analysts. And sometimes that includes going on site, hosting webinars, and really working with the analysts to revise and validate some of their plans. So essentially I'm an intermediary where it's a classic account management type of role.

14:19 Scott Ingram: Awesome. And what… is there a percentage allocation of kind of each of those things? Like, how do you think about that?

14:25 Jovan Perez: Yeah, that's actually a great question, Scott, because there is a degree of autonomy that's needed. So for example, for me, I started off with a book of business that again needs to be renewed. And then there's also a growth number. My growth number is slightly lower than somebody that would be solely new business. But at the same end, if people don't renew, that creates a hole or a gap, if you will. And then therefore I need to sell more business, whether it's in the form of existing clients through cross-sell, upsell, or through new logos. For the sake of math, right? If you have a $500,000 book of business and you have, you know, roughly $100,000 of it that does not renew, you're gonna be in the hole by $100K. So whatever your growth number is, add $100K to that. So I guess what I could say is depending on the book of business for different folks, that really has an implication on where you want to focus your efforts. You may just be okay with renewing clients, right, and delivering value, and you don't need that much more in new business in order to hit your number. Me in particular, I would say roughly 70% of my job has been renewal, you know, where I can hit my number, and then the other 30% has been new business. So if I were to break it up that way, that's, that's the way it operates. But luckily for myself, I had a very good year when it came to new business, and right now I'm overachieving my plan by positive 260%.

15:45 Scott Ingram: So So that's a great, great delta. Quantify your results for us just a little bit more. Give us the more full picture. And I want you to emphasize, because we talked about this before, just the consistency that you've had too, which I think is really important.

15:59 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah. So I'd be more than happy. So with consistency, I'll start there. This is the second year in a row that I hit my plan and I hit my number quite a few months before the end of the fiscal year. So at SiriusDecisions, our fiscal year ends March 31st. And last fiscal, I hit my number in the month of November. And this fiscal, I hit my month in a… excuse me, I hit my number in the month of November as well. So that's been kind of like my consistent basis where I was first 2 years in a row to hit my number. To be quite honest, last year I really wasn't first by a couple different hours. Someone, another rep actually hit her number. Her name's Kristen Asper, so shout out to her. But again, I guess through folklore, I'm coined as the individual that hit his number 2 years in a row first. That being said, by the numbers right now in current time, my quota was essentially at, you know, $150K of growth for my book of business. And right now, again, I'm at, you know, well over $400,000 when it comes to growth. So that's roughly 260% from a percentage of quota overachievement in real time. And what does that look like? I would say my book of business is roughly just over $90,000 in MRR. And started off with $65K MRR. And again, the challenge is that $65K of monthly recurring revenue that I was looking at, there's a significant amount of that that could have came down. And luckily, I was able to get those renewed and also upsell and cross-sell, with my biggest deals being $16,000 monthly recurring revenue and $14,000 monthly recurring revenue, respectively.

17:33 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. And just to give a little bit, I try to keep these as evergreen as we can. But I think the dates are important here. And I'm way ahead of interviews. So, it might be as much as a couple of months before we release this. So, we're actually recording this at the very start of March. And so, your fiscal year isn't quite done yet, even though I might be releasing this after the close of your fiscal. So, you got a little bit more work to do. And the reason we connected, the reason I found you is one of your colleagues thought enough of you to write not just a LinkedIn post, like one of the full-blown LinkedIn articles. And he was talking about you and talking about Jovember. So, talk more. Talk about this article, if you would.

18:14 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, first and foremost, I'd like to give a shout out to Dana Therrien. Essentially what he is, when I, when I mentioned our model and how we connect folks to fellow practitioners that have had the job before, Dana Therrien, he runs our sales strategy practice, and he works closely with sales leadership to help them develop plans to improve their performance. I work closely with Dana when it comes to winning some deals and also managing clients. So with the relationship that I've had with Dana, we traveled together sometime to close some deals, and we got to know each other a little bit more on the road. And he pretty much asked me a couple things that really, you know, kind of were top of mind for him as to, hey, Jovan, what is it that you're doing that's helping you be successful? You know, you explained to me that you're planning on hitting your number this month. You're one deal away. It's pretty significantly early in the year. You know, tell me about this. You know, so I kind of corrected Dana and I said, hey, Dana, you know, you know what month it is, right? And he did say, yeah, it's November. And I joked around and said, no, it's Jovember. So that's part of my branding. Where I kind of use positive, you know, thought process to really build myself up, brand a little bit. But yeah, so Jovember essentially is something that stuck with Dayna, and he loved the idea of how motivated I was. But I did share some personal stories with him as to where I came from and how I kind of had a proverbial chip on my shoulder, and which I was always motivated to do better and progress. And that was pretty much my source of motivation. And if anyone's listening, I fully encourage you to read the article that Dana wrote. It was well written and it really picks apart, you know, who I am as a person, as an individual. And the theme is, I guess, that there are some bad situations that occur in life. And just because you start off significantly behind others, that does not mean that through hard work, dedication, consistency, and discipline and focus, you can't end up where you'd like to be in life.

19:58 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Yeah, we will definitely link that up in the show notes. So if you go to top1.fm, I'm not going to give you a number because I don't even know, but if you go to top1.fm/jovan, J-O-V-A-N, We will definitely have a link to that article there and you can read that. And let's talk about that story. I mean, this is typically the point that I like to ask about the origin story and how you got into sales, but maybe you want to start a little bit before that.

20:18 Jovan Perez: Yeah, not, not a problem. So I can start before that too. So I always longed to break into management consulting coming out of college. You know, that was my career goal where I always wanted to, you know, understand how businesses operate at an industrial level. And that's pretty much where I ended up right after college. If we go a little beforehand, I really should not been in college, statistically speaking. I did grow up in a harsh environment where, you know, if you do read the article, I don't want to talk too much and be a Debbie Downer, but things were not easy for me growing up. It was tough. And I guess one of the biggest challenges I had to come across is when I was in high school, you know, I did live in a very tough neighborhood, I guess you could say, where I did have to regulate my patterns of coming home just to avoid bad situations. And unfortunately, my father did go to federal prison. And he was deported subsequently because he was a drug dealer. And neither of my parents graduated high school. So that being said, you know, really stricken with poverty and feeling down, you know, I focused and I said, this is not what I want in my life. You know, I do not want to be in this situation. I want to progress and I want to make sure that I am making the positive choices and taking the incremental steps that are going to help lead me to success because I am very privileged. You know, I'm in the United States of America and there is a chance for me to be successful as long as I apply myself the right way. So that being said, that kind of was my motivating factor, you know, in high school. I performed well academically. I did go to college, and after college, you know, I was really making some career choices as to where do I see myself fitting in best, and I was always intrigued by management consulting where I wanted to help organizations improve processes, improve outcomes. Nonetheless, I did have some trouble breaking into that field right after I graduated college, but I did have a job that was offered to me from a medical software organization focused on project management and implementation. So I went in there underneath the idea that that if I could get some experience when it comes to managing projects, implementing projects, and helping hospitals hit milestones, that'd be a good transition for a consulting experience. Also, maybe I could try selling for this hospital at an enterprise level, and that would give me experience where I could quantify my impact. Fast forward a couple years, I do end up making it into a sales role where I'm in the Northwest Pacific, traveling back and forth, by the way, from Boston, Massachusetts to Seattle and Anchorage on a weekly basis. And while doing this, I was consistently reading Bain and Company white papers and seeing how world-class organizations are using marketing to contribute to top-line revenue. And I was always saying, hey, you know, this is something we should be doing within our organization, you know. And I developed that interest. And as fate would have it, subsequently SiriusDecisions tapped me on the shoulders asking me if I was interested in a role. And, you know, I asked exactly what it is they did, and it was, oh, we help help organizations improve their sales and marketing performance. And I thought that was very interesting, and I went on a couple interviews. It was aligned to what my passion was when it comes to breaking into management consulting, and I thought that being privy to executive-level conversations and helping folks improve their performance would be a great start for me. So I ended up at SiriusDecisions. So that's how I ended up at the company. Now, I'll tell you this, Scott, and it's a prevailing theme It was not all horseshoes and rainbows when I came to SiriusDecisions and started selling. I was in the Midwest territory, which was previously untapped, low brand awareness. And with our fiscal year starting in April, I did not close a deal come end of October. I was pretty significantly into fiscal and I was at zero and I did not close my first deal until November.

23:50 Scott Ingram: Are you taking a breath or was that the end?

23:53 Jovan Perez: No, I was waiting for validation. All right, hang on.

23:57 Scott Ingram: Let me, let me prepare my stroking of your ego. I'm just kidding. So, Jovan, that doesn't sound like the, the Jovember that we just heard about.

24:05 Jovan Perez: No, it doesn't. And I think that it was a good breaking point where things were really tough, you know, for me that first year. And the reason why I bring that up is because it can be very disheartening having a tough time in sales. But at the same time, I would say that I really reveled in that type of environment just because even though it was a new territory, low brand awareness, it was tough for me to build up. It really forced me to, one, really get a really good grip and refine my discipline when it comes to managing a sales process from cold to close and bringing in the right resources at the right time. And I'll tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed it because I fell in love with the process despite being at zero. And it also was a desirable difficulty that, you know, again, I could say not only helped me refine my skill set, but I got to travel. In person and receive world-class training, not only from one of our sales leaders, who I'll give a shout out to, Steve Dodman, who I consider a mentor, but also the CEO of our company, one of the co-founders, Rich Eld, on a regular basis went out and traveled with me in the Midwest to meet with clients. So, and there's other folks too that were involved, but I would say I had the ability to have exposure not only at the executive level, but also see exactly, you know, how we service and how we help executives solve their problems. So through this like world-class, I guess you could say, mentorship and development program, I was still happy despite being so far below my number. But I would say my learning curve, it really helped me accelerate and understand at a deeper level how executives are looking to solve problems, how I can position our solutions to help out. And that's when I really became self-sufficient. And I, again, to wrap this all up, despite things looking bad, there's such a thing as, I would say, desirable difficulties, where it's a, it's a good difficulty to have because in the long term it's going to assist you. And the term, I did not make that up. I actually got it from Malcolm Gladwell and his book David and Goliath. It's a great read. I highly recommend it. But essentially within that read, Malcolm Gladwell points out how the prevailing sentiment is that David is considered the underdog in David versus Goliath because Goliath was bigger, stronger. He's an experienced warrior with a ton of weaponry, whereas David is a small shepherd with a sling. Reality is David had zero intention of engaging in close-range combat with Goliath. And the reason being is if you look at ancient warfare, there's 3 types of warriors. There's cavalry, which are pretty much horse riders and chariots. There's infantry, which are foot soldiers with heavy armor like Goliath. And there's artillery, which are archers and slingers. If you think about this like rock-paper-scissors, artillery… artillery, excuse me… typically beats the infantry and the foot soldiers. And that's exactly what David was. He was a slinger, and he had a devastating weapon, with historical records showing that experienced slingers could hit targets from 200 yards away and also hit birds in flight. And given that accuracy and given the devastation of that weapon, Goliath was essentially a sitting duck. So I'll come back and say, you know, even though popular history states that David was the underdog in that situation, upon further examination, it was actually a pretty good desirable difficulty that he had. And hence David actually was a very favorable person to win, and he was not in a very unfavorable position despite that's what things look like on the surface. I would say, given what I had being in a tough territory and not hitting my number, I felt very confident that I loved the process. I had great exposure, great training. I was in a really good position, and I am so blessed and so happy and so privileged that SiriusDecisions put me in that great position.

27:42 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. So I'm most curious about just sort of managing your mental state and getting through that, right? Like knowing this is really hard right now, this looks not very fun, especially with this goose egg next to my name. Just being able to break through that. What Talk me through that.

27:59 Jovan Perez: Yeah, and I'd say there's different levels. One, I had the reassurance from leadership that I was doing the right things and that they saw all the right, I guess you could say, activity inputs that were the leading indicators to business closing. Because again, there's leading indicators and there's lagging indicators. I would say that meetings, face-to-face meetings, quality meetings, and engagement with clients for a longer sales process. Those are good leading indicators, and you're just waiting for that revenue to click. So the validation from leadership and support really was great for me. But there's still the same extent that you have a big goose egg next to you, and you're in sales. If you're competitive, there's other folks that are closing deals, ringing the bell, and kind of looking around saying, "Oh wow, you're at zero. Is everything okay?" You know, so I'll tell you, it was really tough dealing with that. Not not gonna lie. But staying focused and staying positive and keeping your eye on the prize as to saying, "Hey." Hey, here's the pipeline. Let's stick with the plan. Let's move forward and make that conscious effort where, again, you want to prospect, you still want to build up other opportunities in case the other ones you have fall through, but at the same time staying focused at the end goal and not getting stuck in that minutia of the day-to-day types of things. That's what helped move me forward where I knew it was very possible to hit my number and I knew that it's still doable to hit my number. Just, just stay positive, move forward, and even so, You're learning so much right now, and you're developing a really highly sought-after skill set in the sense that you're going to be able to manage these deal processes from cold to close on your own come come the future.

29:30 Scott Ingram: That's that's awesome. Well, and if you think about it, I mean, you really had two significant strikes against you, and just sort of in that phase, right? You were building a territory from scratch, right? So these are it's not like everybody knew who you were, and you had meetings going. This was building something from scratch, and you were ramping. It takes a little bit of time to get up to speed and. Learn that solution and learn your customers and learn all of these things. So I'm curious, where did you finish? Like, how did that first year finish given that you started, what is that, a little bit more than halfway through at zero?

30:07 Jovan Perez: Yeah, unfortunately, I did not. Although I got my first deal in November, which I said, which is tough, which I call Jovember again, because this is when I got my first deal in, I did not hit plan. I was about an earshot away. From hitting plan for a couple deals that pushed over to the following year. So I hit, I hit just under, I think just about 50% that first year. And it was tough. I'll tell you, it was a tough rock to swallow. But I would tell you, from that point forward, I just had this chip on my shoulder where, all right, I built up the territory. I was a freshman on campus. I really didn't know too much. I'm ready to perform at a high level consistently. And I had that motivation and I brought it with me the following year. And hence why I I did hit my number within November the following year, Jovember, and then subsequently again this past year, another November, just because I felt the first year I did not want people thinking that it was a fluke where things just worked out. Doing things 2 years in a row, quite early too as well, has been great. And not just, I guess you could say, from an accomplishment for having recognition, but more so for personal satisfaction where you work hard and when you see those outputs It really feels great too, as well. And I just, I guess I could say I thoroughly enjoy working with some of my peers and also some of the analysts and some of the clients where things have been great. And yeah, it wasn't all horseshoes and unicorns year one, but after that fact, things were wonderful.

31:32 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's awesome. So is there anything that you would have done differently if you could start over? Like knowing everything you know now, if you could start that whole process over, is there anything you would have done differently?

31:43 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah, actually there would have been a few different things I could have done if I could start the whole process over with respect to working at SiriusDecisions. I guess I would have asked more questions around, hey, how exactly do these folks typically make decisions? What does it look like? You know, walk me through it. All right, who usually is the one that signs a contract in this type of situation? Where are the buying centers? The things I talked about in the very beginning. I would have had a firmer grasp on that. And the reason being is that really would have had an impact on the way I ran my calls, desirable outcomes and observable outcomes I was looking for for each of my calls, and the way I would have structured my questions. Because if you ask the wrong questions, you typically get the wrong answer. And I found that, you know, a lot of deals that I had that weren't closing was because all I would do is just talk in the very beginning about who we are and what we do and not elicit enough information as to what the pain points were for my particular clients. So I guess what I would have done to put that, tie it together, one thing is I would have asked a little more thoroughly, how are decisions made for these particular segments? And then 2, what I would have done is have a firm understanding, okay, how do I want to structure and ask questions that are meaningful so I can build enough of a business case so that when I come back to solution, it's more about the person and their challenge.

33:08 Scott Ingram: So it sounds like that's really where you developed the whole idea of audience centricity that you talked about.

33:13 Jovan Perez: Absolutely. And I would say that… and that's great that you pointed that out. I would say that audience centricity, I knew about it, I guess, at a higher level, but I never internalized it. I guess it's the type of phenomenon that we face right now in society where a lot of folks think they're smarter than they really are because of the proliferation of, you know, the internet in a sense that people mistake having access to information as understanding that information and being able to apply it. I knew about the concept of audience centricity, but it wasn't present on my day-to-day interactions. An example I'll use so folks could take something with them is when I sent messaging out or emails out to executives, I'd go on and on about, hey, this is what we do, who we are, whatever. And I then transitioned and adopted a framework where when I outreach at a very beginning level, if, you know, I'm trying to get a meeting with somebody, all I want to sell is just the meeting, just the reason for them to speak with me. And the way I would do that and the way I'd execute against it is there'd be no more than 3 sentences for executives, 3 portions for the email. First part would be something indicating that I know who they are and I know there's a business challenge that they're facing. The second paragraph would be the business value that we bring by a structured approach, and the third would be a concise ask as to what to do. So an example might be is, hey Scott, I noticed that you're having a great symposium in October and you're looking to drive attendance. Event managers that we've worked with have driven positive attendance by 3x by doing 3 key things. I'd like to walk you through those 3 key things. Do you have time to speak next week? Those are 3 sentences, and I could just send it to you in an email, and chances are you probably might want to take a meeting more from that email than for me saying, hey Scott, I've been in business for over 200 years, and I put on over 500 events. I want to talk to you about what events are good and what events are bad. Do you have time to talk next week? I'll be with my manager. There's a vast difference.

35:02 Scott Ingram: So talking about audience centricity and actually doing it are 2 totally different Yeah, no, that's that was a great, great example, and and thank you for you just saved me from having to ask the question because I was going to go there next, and you just did it for me. So that's that's fantastic. Talk since we're already on kind of the prospecting topic, talk a little bit more about what what is your process around that? When do you do it? How do you do it? Give it get get into the guts of how you're typically opening new doors.

35:29 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So I think it's important to point out. Again, this is based upon my own experience and understanding, and also within the context of our selling motion at SiriusDecisions. This is relatively complex what we sell, because we're selling executive support services and outcomes, right? So that being said, these tend to be not necessarily transactional types of deals. So if you have a sales process or a sales cycle that typically take anywhere between 3 to 6 months, depending on, you know, the complexity of the deal, it's important to know that you need to build that pipeline and prospect so that you're going to close that deal, you know, months out. So that being said, when it comes to my prospecting, it's something that I alluded to early. Within prospecting, my philosophy is all you're selling is a meeting in the very beginning. So the skills that are necessary to book meetings and get those meetings are vastly different than the skills that are necessary further down in the sales process when it comes to gathering information, confirming value, and moving on to the next step. So through that type of lens, again, I'd say that there's different competencies that are necessary during different stages of sales process from cold to close. When we're talking cold, we're talking prospecting, it is something that I do on a regular basis where I am consistently… it's not blocked on my calendar, there might be a 2-hour block, but if I have any downtime, I'm on LinkedIn. I already know exactly, you know, what my top accounts are going to be, because it's in my head. And then I might look at, you know, Scott Ingram. If he's the VP of Sales for Top Sales One Network, I would be taking a look at Scott Ingram's LinkedIn. I'd be taking a look at his Twitter. I'd be taking a look at any, you know, developments that have happened on news on Google. And I'd see how exactly I can help him solve that particular challenge. So to put a pretty bow on this, Scott, I would say that on a weekly basis, I typically know on an account level who I'm going after. After. But what I would do whenever I'm free is, hey, for each account, the person I'm going after, what is their business objective? What can we do to solve? Let's send a message out to these folks and see if we can get them on the calendar. And that's essentially the framework that I operate on.

37:37 Scott Ingram: Awesome. And so in a given week, on average, how many accounts do you think you might be going after? And how much time in aggregate are you going to put against that, recognizing that, you know, you're taking advantage of little downtimes here and there Yeah, and that's actually a great question too.

37:53 Jovan Perez: I would say if we're looking at any given week, because mind you, a lot of what I do too is deliver on the services, but on any given week, if I do have these high propensity accounts that I'm looking to go after, I would lower it down to there's 10 individuals that I'd be looking to speak to. And for about 2 hours during that week, I'm just gathering information, planning, and I usually send my messaging to these folks. Books probably on a Thursday where I send about maybe within an hour and a half timeframe, targeted messaging, targeted calls. But if I say it's an hour and a half that I'm sending, that's just execution. The amount of work that actually goes in may be an hour each day where I'm perusing and gathering factoids to load my brain with so that when I do go and put this messaging together, I'm not switching gears. I'm just in the full mode of outreach, see if we can book some meetings, and I'll see if I can book some travel Nice.

38:46 Scott Ingram: So what's a good outcome or a typical outcome? You've got these 10 contacts that you're really putting some good thought into and doing some meaningful outreach to. How many people are you getting meetings with?

38:57 Jovan Perez: Yeah, so I would say if I do targeted messaging for 10 different individuals or buying centers rather, usually a good looks like a 30% success rate. So if there's 10 particular instances, I should get 3 meetings out of those. And that's typically what I always wanted to operate on, 3 meetings a week. That I could book that are legitimate new pipeline opportunities.

39:20 Scott Ingram: Nice. Awesome. So we call the show Sales Success Stories. I'd love to hear just a story of a sale, whether you won the deal, you lost the deal, but probably something that you learned something from along the way.

39:33 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'll talk about one of my deals within my first year because there's so many good ones that I have, Scott, where I developed great relationships with folks, but one of them I would say is my first year when I didn't hit my number. I was a month and a half out from year close, and I'll tell you, I was staying in a room just locked up, and I was hitting the phones hard, and I was hitting LinkedIn hard. And one of my key accounts that I was going after, I lost a deal with them a couple months previously from one of the marketing folks in one of their business units. So I went after corporate marketing, and I took a look at Twitter and I saw the CMO tweet about a marketing transformation that they're looking to undergo. So right after that trigger, what I did is, it was 6 PM, I remember it vividly, I gave her a call on her cell phone, cold call, and I pretty much indicated, hey, you know, I know we never met, but I'm reaching out to you because I just saw on Twitter that you tweeted about a marketing transformation and how you're doing a people-process-technology approach. I'd like to walk you through some guidelines and essentially a playbook that we've seen other CMOs deploy To really help mitigate risk and also ensure that you're coming along the timeframe that you're looking. Do you and your lieutenant have time to speak about this? And the answer was a resounding yes. So a couple months later, you know, actually a month and a half later and a few face-to-faces later, it's right at the end of our fiscal and we have an opportunity in front of us that was pretty sizable too. And what happened was, you know, even though I was well behind my number, 19% to plan at that time, time, I still was going for the win for pride, you know, so I really wanted to close it out. So I just didn't have a terrible number that year. And when we had that particular contract or opportunity drafted up, which was, by the way, $9,000 in MRR, there is a host of objections that have surfaced. And the objections were timing and price. So we stopped, and I was in a conference room with my mentor who was on mute, and I was talking with the buyer. And we asked if we could regroup later, see if we come across something. And the reason why I like the story is because I saw this as a learning opportunity and a pivotal learning experience for me, because the objection that was put in front of us was timing and price. And my mentor coached me on how to pinpoint those objections, isolate them, so that we can obtain consensus. All right, so lo and behold, we did obtain consensus, and I could talk about how we overcame the objection in a second, but the buyer that we happened to interact with, he was very good at negotiating. So he essentially got some incentives out of it, but we ended up closing the contract down. I was really happy because it was a pretty sizable contract. And in real time right now, I have an excellent relationship with the gentleman I closed that time, and he bought another sizable deal this past year, and things are going great. So that was why it was one of my favorite stories. I was really far down, but due to pride, we still pressed forward, and my mentor coached me in exactly how to develop a new skill And it came across isolating objections. And essentially, the objection that we found was timing and price. So what my mentor taught me is he said, okay, this gentleman is telling you that price is the objection, and that's really a couple buckets that we got to isolate. We got to know more about price. What is it about the price he doesn't like? Is it the value that we're going to bring? Is it timing? Or is it legitimately budget? If he could tell us that it's a combination of timing and budget, we could then go back and put together a creative solution to solve the problem. If it comes forward where he says that he doesn't think the price is worthwhile because he's not getting value out of it, we didn't do enough of a good job on the front end really selling to him. So that type of framework and that type of operating really helped me develop into a more strategic seller. So that's why I love this deal so much.

43:17 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Great, great story. And thanks for going into the, into the detail. You were certainly saving me from asking all of my, my follow-up questions that I, that I would have. So, I mean, you've done a lot. You've had a lot of really good consistent success the last couple of years. What are you most proud of?

43:33 Jovan Perez: Yeah, I guess, you know, Scott, the accomplishment I'm most proud of is being an individual that my younger family members generally look up to and tell me that they want to emulate. And that comes in the form where they say they're happy for the way I performed academically. They're really proud that the whole idea of Jovember and the sales performance And they're really happy that, you know, I set an example of not making some bad decisions where, quite frankly, statistically speaking, you know, it's very easy in an environment that I grew up in to turn into either consuming drugs or selling them and going to a life of crime. And the fact that, you know, I, I could be somebody that my family members want to be and want to behave like when it comes to little cousins, aunts, you know, it's something I'm very happy about.

44:21 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Well, I think in general, unless I'm totally mistaken, there's a lot more money in selling technology and big B2B type stuff than there is in selling drugs.

44:31 Jovan Perez: Well, unless you're in enterprise drugs, I don't know. There's a lot of money to be made there, but I'm not sure if I could say that online right now.

44:38 Scott Ingram: Oh, that's funny. Enterprise drugs. All right. We need to get back on track. All right. So let's definitely change gears quickly here. What is… walk me through kind of the rest of your routine. I think you gave us some hints at the pieces of it, but let's really get into the detail there. And the way I typically ask this is, you know, the alarm clock goes off, what time does that happen? And give us just the play-by-play from there.

45:02 Jovan Perez: Yeah, absolutely. Am I supposed to answer right now?

45:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

45:05 Jovan Perez: Okay, perfect.

45:06 Scott Ingram: I thought you were scrolling or something.

45:08 Jovan Perez: Yeah, so the alarm goes off, all right? I wake up 5:45 typically in the morning, sometimes 6:15 depending if I hit the snooze button. And what I do is I go straight to the gym and I do my cardio for the day. And what that does is, one, One, it helps wake me up, but 2, it also helps me plan out my day, you know, on what needs to get done and what has to get done. After I do my exercise in the morning, I have my cup of coffee, I get to the upstairs of my home office, probably around after showering, 7:30, and I take a look at my emails, I take a look at my calendar, and make sure there's nothing urgent that I haven't missed. And things fall into 2 buckets usually. I'm either doing client fulfillment or I'm doing net new business. If I'm not doing any sales calls that I have, usually I've already prepped for the day before, I do build in some time to take a look at LinkedIn and send some follow-up notes to, or prospecting notes rather, to other folks. So I guess a simple way to put this is I wake up in the morning, I do my exercise, I shower, by 7:30 I'm taking a look at emails, I'm organizing my calendar, and then I'm planning my day to make sure that I have time to do some prospecting, and also adequately follow up on any client fulfillment. I usually leave the office, Scott, probably around anywhere between 6 and 7, and then I head to the gym again. I do some weightlifting at night, and then when I'm done with my weightlifting around 8:30, 9-ish, I'm taking a look at, you know, my calendar, and I'm figuring out what are the 5 things that I need to get done that week and how I'm trucking along about there. So that's essentially a day in the life of Jovan Perez.

46:44 Scott Ingram: So let's get into the detail of kind of the 5 things. Do you wanna give us some examples of that, or how you're deciding on that, and tracking that, and your Word doc, and that kind of stuff?

46:53 Jovan Perez: So, yeah, that's a great question, Scott. So, there's 2 buckets. There's active opportunities that I'm working within our CRM, and those are automated where it's just within a CRM. There's also other prospecting where I manage, and there's something that I call, I guess you could say, unborn pipe. And what that is, is those are folks where I've developed a hit list where I think that they have a propensity to buy because there is a need that I've determined that I've elicited either through LinkedIn or through what they're posting, and they're worth me reaching out to and having a face-to-face meeting. So I do have a running list on hit list folks that I call them, and I reach out to them on a weekly basis. And usually I ping about maybe 5 of them, you know, that, hey, here's the folks I need to reach out to. Let's do some research and block out some time to put together some messaging. And it turns out that if 5 of those folks, let's say 3 of them happen to be a head of marketing, I'll try to have similar messaging to them, you know, when it comes to how we're going to address their business needs, because their business needs takes different forms, of course, but I could repurpose some of the messaging so that's relevant. So again, what I do is typically Sunday going into the week, I pinpoint at a high level, hey, who are the folks I want to reach out to? And then throughout the week, I gather information about them, and then I make sure I reach out to them by the end of the week.

48:12 Scott Ingram: Awesome. And then what does your information diet look like? What are you reading, listening to, and watching, and when do you do that?

48:17 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So there's… it's really a running type of thing that I consistently do, where I'm consistently, you know, if I have some downtime, reading on a regular basis so that I could, you know, kind of grow and develop a little bit more. And the source usually comes from LinkedIn, Quora, and of course, I guess you could say SiriusDecisions research. Just happened to be that I happen to be a B2B marketing and sales junkie, and I have the unique ability where I could take a look at all of our briefs and executive, you know, points of view on certain areas such as marketing, sales performance, management, marketing programs, sales process, sales methodology, etc., etc., etc. But all the topics that I typically, you know, look for in LinkedIn and Quora, I set up my own filters where it's around business, sales, marketing, private equity firms, company valuations, business transformation, etc., etc.

49:12 Scott Ingram: Very cool. Well, given your sales and marketing junkiness, I'm super interested in just your thoughts on whether you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy or not.

49:23 Jovan Perez: Scott, that's a great question. And the short answer is I don't subscribe to a specific sales philosophy because sales philosophy tends to be akin to an approach, an approach to how to advance a sales process. And typically what I found and what I've seen both within our organization and other organizations is that's really subjected to the specific sales mode as to how that buyer buys. So an example I'll use is for a complex sales process, enterprise deals, you know, it might be a little more layered on how those buyers make their decisions, and the sales process should reflect that. Vice versa, if it's a really small transactional type of sale, the way the buyers make their decisions is gonna be a little bit different, so therefore you're talking about 2 different selling motions. The analogy I would like to use is a sales process could be generally the same, right? Where it could be like a football field where it marks where you are for any particular deal depending on what stage you're in. However, the approach to advance the deals could be a little bit different, and that's more like a sales methodology. So within the football field analogy, I would say, you know, what you have is some teams, they run their offense where they throw precision-type passes. To move the ball down the field, where some other teams, they might run an offense where they just run the ball frequently. That being said, those are more akin to your offensive design, your sales methodology, where one methodology might work for a particular selling motion, or it might not work particularly well for another selling motion. So for that reason, I don't subscribe to a particular sales philosophy. It really depends on what the selling motion is, and that heavily depends on Guess what? Audience centricity. How does your buyer buy? And then we figure out what the best selling motion is going to be for that buyer.

51:12 Scott Ingram: Got it. So how would you describe your style then?

51:16 Jovan Perez: Yeah, my style, I would say, is I'm like a child, an eight-year-old child. I ask a lot of why questions, and I ask questions that most folks would not deign to ask because they don't want to seem unsophisticated. But I generally really want to know exactly what is the challenge that these folks are looking to. To solve. So I would say my style is very, I guess you say, inquisitive, you know, but it doesn't feel like an interrogation. You know, I really open up broadly where I say things along the lines of, hey, so tell me what it means to be the head of marketing. Tell me what it means to be the head of sales. Okay, tell me about your team. Tell me about your structure. How do you folks go to market? Where are you looking to grow? Are you looking to grow for your segments? Are you looking to grow for a particular product launch? Okay, why is this specifically important to you? So I ask a lot of these questions again, so they're impactful and it shows that I understand typically what other folks are going through. But at the same time, I ask a lot of why questions so I can know what the root cause is. So my style is kind of, I guess you'd say, somebody that's just curious and that wants to help. Nice.

52:20 Scott Ingram: Now, did you say that in your first job that you were in kind of a project management type of role?

52:26 Jovan Perez: It was implementation and customer service type role. So essentially what would happen is a hospital would buy medical software. And there'd be various applications that span both the clinical space and I guess you could say, you know, the ancillary spaces where it might be medical records management, laboratory, or whatever. My job was to implement the application on-site at the hospital and also train the trainers so they knew how to use the particular software and then run any customer service type of issues with it. So that was my first job out of college where, you know, there was a little bit of customer service that was needed. Needed, but also a lot of project management where you had to know exactly what milestones needed to be built, when it needed to be built, when and when it needed to be delivered. And yeah, so I wouldn't say project management was a title, but there was a project management element to it.

53:15 Scott Ingram: How much does that project element kind of background and skill set come into play in the way that you run your sales motion?

53:24 Jovan Perez: That's a great question. With respect to the way I run my sales motion, I think it's really helped me because there's certain milestones, and the certain milestones tend to be stages in the sales process. So there's certain observable outcomes that I need to know are reciprocated from the buyer into myself in the mutual consensus so that the deal could advance, you know. So I'd say it's helped out in that sense, but it's also helped out when it comes to me crafting, you know, proposed solutions and engagements for folks, whereas, you know, I really orient, hey, Hey, here's the goal you're looking to accomplish. Here's step 1, here's step 2, and here's a milestone. And once we hit this, that's going to then feed into, you know, stage 3. And what we're going to do is we're going to take the output from stage 2, and that's going to feed into the output that we need to have for stage 3.

54:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that, you know, it's, it's really fascinating. And, and, and I know just from the, the quick conversation we had before we got started here that you, you didn't get a chance to listen to this yet, but I was my own guest on, on the podcast. Jeff Bajorek turned the tables on me and, and interviewed me back in episode 62. And one of the things that came up for me, and I really only started to think about it the morning of that interview. And if you go back to that episode, if you start at about the 67-minute mark, I know that because I dug into it just a little bit deeper also on the Daily Sales Tips podcast. And I don't remember which tip number that was, but we'll find it and we'll link it in the show notes. It was in the 30s somewhere. I really think that there's some power and some magic to that. And sort of taking a little bit of that project management thinking and bringing that into the sales process and sort of managing those steps. And anytime there's complexity, right, you've got multiple things and things that happen to have certain things have to happen before other things can happen. And just creating that type of a roadmap for your client can be really, really powerful.

55:11 Jovan Perez: Absolutely. It's just like, again, I would say sales is more of a regimented, is more regimented and process-oriented than most people give it credit for. And it's just like math, there's an order of operations, right? You don't go ahead and start doing certain steps in math before the others. There's certain rules, you know, GEMA, if you remember that back in math class. So essentially, I would say that holds true when it comes to sales process. You can't advance a deal until a buyer gives the consensus and confirmation that this is something they're interested in. This is a problem they want to address, and they think it's worth their time addressing the problem. And then they need to decide whether or not your service service is going to solve that particular problem. So all that confirmation could happen very quickly, but they still need to happen nonetheless. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. It is a project that needs to be managed and it needs to be very regimented.

56:00 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. And especially, you know, if you think about it in terms of, of SaaS or technology, your contract can't be signed if it hasn't been approved by legal and it hasn't been… it hasn't gone through a security review and those kinds of things. So you also have to be mindful of some of those other processes that a lot of times you can run in parallel while you're figuring out the, the business terms and the commercial terms and, and figuring out kind of the scope of the deal.

56:24 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah. And again, that, that has to happen too, in a sense where, you know, it's fair to ask sometimes folks, hey, can you help me understand exactly what the decision-making process looks like? And asking them that question, they're going to really reveal to you, again, there's legal, there's this, there's that. And what that tells you is, by proxy, okay, Okay, so since there's legal involved and also the CFO has to sign off on it, a business case needs to be presented to the CFO. And what does the CFO really care about? They care about, one, why are we purchasing whatever it is? 2, what are the alternatives? 3, what if we don't do this now? Why are we doing this now? And 4, what is the business impact that we're gonna have, essentially? And if you could understand that, you could really pretty much structure your collateral accordingly to make sure that the deal is gonna get advanced based upon that particular persona that's making a decision. So I wholeheartedly agree, the more you know about the process, the more you can be better prepared. And as much as folks say, oh, this deal is so unique, so unique, every deal has essentially pretty much the same process. Yeah, you might have to tailor the content, you know, there's certain variables, but it's still like a mathematical equation, you know, A B C. B might be different, it might be 5 here, it might be 6 here, but there's still a skeleton process that needs to Yeah, awesome, awesome.

57:38 Scott Ingram: I think that's a really strong framework. And if I throw the word interlock in there, then I think I can win like SiriusDecisions buzzword bingo, right?

57:46 Jovan Perez: Well, again, you know what I'm going to tell you? I go back to simplicity, Scott. And when I say simplicity and audience centricity, you got to… and I'm throwing buzzwords at you too, again. Buzzwords, it doesn't really help. If my 5th grade cousin can't understand what I'm saying, if my dad can't understand what I'm saying, I usually don't sell in my sales pitches. And what I would say is, you know, as a part of a litmus test or a canary in a coal mine, if you will, I do talk about my pipeline with my father, who lives in Dominican Republic, by the way, and I talked to him about my deals and essentially, you know, what I'm propositioning to potential buyers. And if my father doesn't understand the concept, I realize that I have to simplify it a little bit more.

58:27 Scott Ingram: That's fascinating. I just, I had to have some fun. I have a ton of friends at SiriusDecisions, and I've been to multiple summits, so I know your world a little bit too Well, excellent, excellent.

58:36 Jovan Perez: Well, I'm glad you're familiar with our world. It's it's a fun one, complex but fun.

58:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. So let's switch gears here a little bit, and I'd love to know if there's something you believe that the average sales professional would think is crazy.

58:49 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah, and that's actually another fair question. And I'll say it again: it's a little repetitive, but sales is more regimented and process-oriented than people give it credit for. You know. And the more structured you are with your approach, the more you understand exactly, okay, what are the buyer requirements for each stage? And buyer requirements are twofold. Buyers need to know something about SiriusDecisions, and we need to know something about the buyer. What do they have to be, and how do I ask my questions to get to this particular type of stage? And again, there's a little bit of an art on the execution on how you position position your questions, what questions you ask, and when you ask them. And that's a little more of the art side, but that still has to happen nonetheless. So I'd say the more better off you are with process and the more oriented around process, you could then identify where your gaps are as a sales practitioner and then improve. And then whether that might be improving your storytelling, whether it might be improving your questions that you ask in a more impactful, meaningful way, or whether it might be improving the way you set an agenda. You're gonna be able to see that there are certain areas and gaps that exist, and then you can make those type of self-improvements. So again, takeaway is sales is very regimented and process-oriented. I would say it's more of a process and a science than it is an art, in my opinion.

1:00:12 Scott Ingram: There you go. Well, let's, let's take that question and turn it around. Is there something that the average seller believes that you think is crazy?

1:00:19 Jovan Perez: Yeah, yeah. I would say the average seller or the average person that thinks they know sales. That's a good qualifier. Yeah, yeah. I would say that they think that volume automatically translates to success, you know, and they think that activities, you know, automatically translates to particular outcomes. And I couldn't agree more… disagree more, excuse me. Volume is great, you know, you really want to be… you want to get as many at-bats as you can, but if you're striking out every single at-bat, that's not good for anybody. You know, so you want to make sure you're reaching out to the right people that actually have a propensity to buy, and that you're articulating exactly what we are going to do to help those types of people. So volume does not equal success. I'm all about quality. Yeah, you want quantity, of course, but you don't want quality to go down. And at the same extent, you know, I'd say another example to make practicality is a lot of folks think that just because incentives are cool, that they're going to lead to more closed deals. And that's not necessarily true. You got to make sure that value is established, people want to engage engage with whatever you're offering. And then, you know, if there's certain barriers that exist, you use an incentive to kind of lower that barrier so that you can win the business. So the takeaways I'd say again is volume does not equal success, and trivial activities do not necessarily lead to the outcomes that you want to have unless there's a good context around it.

1:01:39 Scott Ingram: Super solid. So what have been the most important decisions you've made or the lessons you've had to learn to get where you are today?

1:01:47 Jovan Perez: Yeah, I'd say the lessons I learned is you have to appreciate everything and be gracious for everything. And when you have that kind of mindset, what happens is it begets positivity. And then what it does is it really creates and fosters an environment for you to want to learn and develop. And what I mean by that is, again, I'll use it within the context of sales. Being at zero for almost a whole entire year, it's tough and it's discouraging. But being appreciative of what I'm learning and the world-class training I was getting, it was great because it was a constant motivator telling me that, hey, keep going, you're going to get to where you want to go eventually. Just keep doing the right things and make sure you're putting 100% effort in and doing the right things so that you can get the fruit that you want to have eventually. And I, I think that's the most important thing… mindset, positivity, and not just empty positivity. You have to have a goal, you have to have a plan, you have to make sure you're doing the activity to get to plan. And in order to do that activity, you know, you have to have the right mindset where you're positive about it, because there's some days you don't feel like doing it. But you have to have that conscious effort saying, hey, there's a purpose to all this. I want to get to this particular standpoint, which is winner's circle. How am I going to get there? You got to talk to people, and you got to say the right things, and you got to be open to learning, and you got to be open to personal development, and you got to be open to constructive criticism. And I'll tell you that SiriusDecisions has offered me all those types of things where I'm very grateful for the coaches that had for the peers and analysts that have helped me develop. And even some folks, you know, you can learn something from anybody. I had one of my team members, you know, help me out when it comes to prospecting in the very beginning. So you just have to be open to that coaching and have that good mindset and positive mindset.

1:03:23 Scott Ingram: You are ridiculous. I swear to God, you are answering every question I have in my head before I ask it, because what I was gonna ask is, how do you continue to develop yourself? And it sounds like you're really just leveraging the mentors and the people that you have inside of your organization to help you get there. Is there more to that?

1:03:39 Jovan Perez: Yeah, I would say consistently being open and learning from anyone around you, because I see every opportunity that you interact with folks, you learn. I always enjoy talking to different folks within SiriusDecisions and hearing their perspective, because even everything I said today, I didn't make most of it up. It came through the filter of other clients I've worked with, analysts I've worked with, research I've read, or other very good reps. And if I can give a couple shoutouts, you know, one of them that helped me with my prospecting, his name is Antony Roy, really great rep. And you know, working in the same group with him, my prospecting was not good, and he was somebody that really helped me develop a little bit more. Another one again, I give her a shout out. It's Kristen Asper. She's the one that hit Winter Circle a little bit before me last year, even though I'm coined as the first to hit Winter Circle two years in a row. But you know, she's really helped me up my game when it comes to prospecting, and also talking about you know how she happens to you know have a lower. Last year she had significantly lower. Lower sales cycle than I did. So I collaborated just to learn a little bit more. So I guess my example is talk to your peers, see who's doing good things, learn more from them, interact with them. There's always an opportunity to learn more. Tom Brady, I couldn't tell you how many coaches he has. Like, you know, he has a fitness coach, he has a nutrition coach, and he's the best quarterback in the league. If Tom Brady could find people to coach him to make him better, there's no reason why you can't find other people around you to make you better at what you want to do.

1:04:57 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. So what advice would you give to somebody that's just getting started in their sales career today, or maybe they're just getting started in a, in a new role, but they're still early in their career?

1:05:08 Jovan Perez: Don't be afraid to ask questions, but don't ask the same question twice. You know, give yourself every opportunity to succeed, you know. And I would say even at a higher level, ask your manager, what are… what's our organization responsible for? You know, I don't care if you're doing customer success or if you're doing marketing or whatever, but what have we signed up for? What are the goals for this specific function and division? And how can I be a stress reducer for you? What can I do to help us hit those goals? And when you can really understand from a holistic perspective what an organization's goals are, and then what the functional goals are for your division, and then what your role is in advancing those, I think the gears tend to click where you're going to have a little bit more fulfillment, you know, and professional satisfaction. But at the same time, your performance go up and you're probably gonna be respected by your peers more.

1:05:56 Scott Ingram: You know, that's, that's so interesting. I had some really fascinating conversations at dinner last night and shout out to, and of course, by the time I release this, this will have been months ago, but shout out to Betts Recruiting and Scaled who hosted just a great dinner in Austin. And, you know, one of the things we were talking about is there's too often, especially as individual contributors, right? You're so geared into your comp plan, right? And how do you maximize that comp plan? And, and I don't think we often pick our heads up enough to look at, okay, that's what the comp plan's trying to get me to do. And of course, I'm going to game that and I'm going to try and make as much money as I can. But what really is going to be best for the business, right? What is good? What is going to holistically help us the most? And one of the things we were just kind of talking about, this is a, this is a conversation we're having at our, at our table is, are there ways that you can better align that really kind of internal value chain, right? So that everybody is on the same page and rowing in the same direction?

1:06:59 Jovan Perez: Yeah. Huh. So if I heard you correctly, you're saying, is there a way that we can be a little bit more cohesive? So there's kind of a shared goal, shared vision, and that encourages us to collaborate a little bit more so that we're not working against us and with misaligned incentives.

1:07:17 Scott Ingram: Exactly, exactly right. I think it's it's it's taking on and again these are so out of order. I'm I'm talking myself in in circles. But the the interview that I did yesterday that we released released back on on March fifth with Tracy Lim, she was talking about being the CEO of your own territory. And you know I think when you think about what is best for the business and and I'll. I'll reference another conversation here with, with Carson Heady from Microsoft. He talked about the… he, he called it the Holy Trinity of sales. And, and this idea of balancing what's best for my client, what's best for my company, and what's best for me, right? And if you can get really good alignment there, but in order to do that correctly, you have to really deeply understand what's best for each of those things. So do you really know your your client? Do you really know what they need? Do you really know what's best for them? Do you really know your company? Do you really know what's, what's best for your company? And, and so the example, the misaligned example here is, you know, closing a deal that you know is going to churn, right? And so yeah, you're going to get your commission, but at the end of the day, it's bad for… it's bad for the company. It's bad for your reputation, right?

1:08:36 Jovan Perez: It's, it's going to create some toxicity in, in the Oh, 100%, and I couldn't agree with you more. It's funny you say that because even within SiriusDecisions, our mantra is client first, company second, you third, you know. And again, it's… a lot of things are great in theory. Does it always happen in practice? I don't know. I can't speak to that. But a lot of times, you know, the perspective would be, okay, it's always great to win business, but you don't want to leave a trail of bodies behind you after you've won a couple business deals because that's not going to be good for the organization. Brand, and it tends to be too, again, I'll say it, where folks, they tend to change jobs, and if they change jobs, they go somewhere else, you don't really wanna have that negative publicity because I guess stats are, you know, a lot of folks make their decision based upon either direct or indirect customer experience. So to your point, it is exceptionally important to make sure that we do well for customers, and I say we as in me, in you, Scott, because we're both sellers, that we want to do well for our customers or else, you know, it's not going to help anybody. So I agree wholeheartedly.

1:09:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, let's, let's get off of that tangent and back on track. So I also like to ask what advice you would have for somebody that is further into their career and they're either, they're, they're either struggling or they're doing okay, but they, there's definitely another level for them to achieve.

1:09:56 Jovan Perez: What advice do you have for them to get to that next Yeah, I would say, you know, at this point, advice to get to the next level would be have an open, honest assessment of yourself, you know, because I think all this is predicated by personal responsibility and accountability, you know, where I'm a firm believer that we all control our own destiny for better or worse. And 95% of the time, we really could make choices to put ourselves in the best situation to be successful. So that being said, okay, I'm not advancing, I'm not hitting my number, let's take a look. Maybe if there's a good sales ops team that you have, you could ask, hey, can I drop some data to take a look at most of these opportunities I lost? I don't know if their CRM would allow it, but can I see the stages I lost these deals? And then just take a look and say, where am I losing deals? At what stage of the process? Huh. Ask somebody to tag along and say, if I'm losing deals and they're not really getting past first or second call, have somebody tag along, observe, and say, give me constructive feedback on how this intro call is going, because essentially what's happening is I'm not getting past it. Or if I'm losing deals in a mid part of the process, you could then use that data and have that type of analysis and say, all right, I'm losing deals at this particular stage and they're not advancing. Maybe the symptom might be that I'm not gathering enough information to make a compelling business case to advance this type of deal. So I guess my advice would be have an open, honest assessment with yourself. Take a look at your sales deals and your processes, where you're losing, and ask for feedback as to, you know, what can I do to improve that, either through a third party, if it's a manager, a different manager, or maybe a team member that's doing really well. When I say team member, I probably should say peer. But yeah, that would be my advice.

1:11:36 Scott Ingram: Awesome. So what would you want to know about the top sellers in other organizations?

1:11:42 Jovan Perez: Yeah, what would I want to know about top sellers in organizations? This is a good If I were able to peer into other top sellers, I would like to know what is the biggest challenge they are facing when it comes to closing more deals? What's the biggest hurdle? And then my follow-up question would be, okay, what are you doing to overcome that hurdle? The answer might be, I'm not. So I'm probably closing deals somewhere else where I'm avoiding that type of hurdle. But that would be what I want to know. What's the biggest challenge? You have.

1:12:13 Scott Ingram: Nice. And what is that for you? What's the biggest hurdle?

1:12:16 Jovan Perez: The biggest hurdle for me, I would say, time. I'm spending a lot of time and I'm not sure, you know, kind of juggling between different buckets. And I would like to get a little bit better with my time management because, you know, I think it definitely is possible for me to be a little bit more efficient, not effective, sorry, efficient with my time. There's a difference between effectiveness and efficiency. I definitely could be a little bit more efficient. And, you know, I'd like to know maybe a little bit more on what people are doing to maximize the efficiency of their time so they're not working all the time. Because again, even though if you're not working 70 hours a week, I would say if you're a sales rep, you're always thinking about deals and next deals. It's always in your head. You think about it before you go to bed, you think about it when you wake up. I'm wondering if there's a way to be able to turn off a little bit.

1:13:01 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Again, I'm, I'm going to reference out-of-order conversations, but the, the conversation that I had with Jono Clegg, who was an Olympic athlete and brought some of those skills to sales and the way that he thinks about recovery, right, I think is a really fascinating topic. And I think a lot of this, a number of these things, the time management, the recovery, some of these things are definitely topics that we're going to get into at the Sales Success Summit in October. And in fact, I'm planning on doing a deep dive on just my own process. You know, I'm off and asked, Scott, how are you managing all of this? You know, how are you managing a $3+ million quota and hosting these, these podcasts and writing books and hosting an event and, you know, still having a family that likes you? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of share some, some insights there. And I think that we're gonna learn a lot from, from each other in all of that process.

1:13:58 Jovan Perez: I'm very excited to see what you put together there. Absolutely. That's something interesting. And by the way, kudos to you. That's very impressive.

1:14:04 Scott Ingram: Well, thanks. It's sleep maybe, maybe hurting. I'm, I'm in one of those weeks right now where I, I actually looked at my Fitbit stats this morning. I'm like, man, why I'm, I'm feeling a little bit off my game. What's, what's the problem? What's going on? And I looked at it and I'm like, oh, it's Friday and I am, I'm averaging the very, very low end of 6 hours of sleep. Yep. That's a, that's a problem. So we all, we all have to manage.

1:14:28 Jovan Perez: If you wanted to sleep, Scott, you'd be a surgeon, right?

1:14:32 Scott Ingram: Very good. All right, so Jovan, the last question I always ask is we try and make this as actionable as possible. There's so many great ideas. I think you've shared just a lot of insights, a lot of wisdom, but what would you have the person do over the course of, say, the next 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:14:52 Jovan Perez: Yeah, I would say if there's something actionable I would give advice to, what I advise would be Step 1, prioritize 10 individuals that are top of mind that fall within accounts that are within your organization's sweet spot, and just write them down, right? Okay. Underneath those 10 individuals, write up, and it has to be one sentence, you know, what is a business challenge that they're facing that your organization could solve? For them. And then the third would be draft up 3 sentences to reach out to them, you know, and send a note out. Hey, XYZ, I see that you're focused on here. We've helped other people achieve this. Let's talk. And send it to those folks and call them up. And I think you might be surprised on how effective it would be. So again, to wrap this up in a pretty bow, get 10 prospects, write down concisely business challenge that you're positive that you folks can help out. And then what you could do is you take that information, that template, and then send out a note that addresses… that you know who the person is by addressing their challenge, concisely articulate exactly how you're going to help them solve that challenge, and then you ask for a specific time exactly for you to sit down with them and have a conversation on what you can do for them.

1:16:09 Scott Ingram: Great stuff. Now, you talked about it a little bit earlier, but I, I want to… I want to double-click on the identifying their business challenge. How are you suggesting they do that? Because that's key.

1:16:20 Jovan Perez: Yeah. Oh, this is excellent. So what I would do is first, if you don't have a LinkedIn, get one. I hope you do. But no, go on LinkedIn and just read what they're doing on LinkedIn. Google the person's name, Google the company, see recent news, and see exactly what it is that they're doing. Now, it depends what you're selling. If you're selling, let's just say, I don't know, give me an example, a marketing automation platform. Platform, you might wanna get a layer up and see what they're doing from a marketing perspective. Are they launching a new product? Does your product particularly help with product launches so that they could capture the particular market segment they're going after? You know, you gotta really figure out what the business initiative that they're facing and exactly what are you gonna do to help 'em solve that business initiative. Talking about your product and talking about exactly who you guys are and how you have multi-tenanted, like, cloud computing, whatever, that's not gonna really help somebody saying, I need to get something done. I have a specific deliverable. I have a milestone I need to hit. What can you do to help me?

1:17:18 Scott Ingram: Jovan, this has been fantastic. Thanks for everything that you shared, all of the insights and wisdom. I think this is going to be really, really impactful, and I really just appreciate your contribution.

1:17:28 Jovan Perez: Thank you very much, Scott. I appreciate you thinking of me and having me on the podcast. So thank you very much. I appreciate it.

1:17:34 Scott Ingram: All right. Until next time, thanks for listening, everybody.

1:17:36 Jovan Perez: Till next time. 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.