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Practical Go-to-Market guidance specifically for B2B software and service companies between $5MM-$50MM in revenue.
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#51: Transforming Tech Sales: Buyer-Centric Digital Sales Rooms with Gal Aga
Ever wondered how to transform your B2B tech sales strategy into a buyer-centric powerhouse? Join us as Gal, the visionary co-founder and CEO of Aligned, unpacks the revolutionary digital sales rooms his platform offers. This episode equips you with the tools to streamline customer interactions, reduce the clutter of scattered emails, and foster seamless collaboration. Discover how Aligned is not just modernizing sales workflows but also turning sales representatives into trusted enablers who thrive by aligning their approach with the buyer’s journey.
Gal Aga
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Hey, welcome back. Pros. Another guest, and we are very excited. If you have spent any time on LinkedIn and you are in and around the sales environment, you absolutely know this person. We were actually just talking before we hit record about how we really appreciate the depth of the content that you're sharing, gal. So Gal, with Aligned, co-founder and just, has been in this space a long time and we've learned a ton already in our conversation, so we're very excited about this. So, gal, thank you for spending some time with us today.
Gal:Yeah, thanks so much, Excited to be here and talk about my favorite topic Ours too. So we're about to buckle up, folks.
Gary:We're going to geek out here on you, OK, so well, for the benefit of the audience, just to give a little bit of background. We'll dive into the Aligned origin story here, but just a little bit of background on some of the precedent experience that led you to Aligned.
Gal:Yeah, absolutely so. I've been fortunate to really find my passion early on in sales and started in sales 17 years ago, 18 years ago at this point, and sales B2B tech at the beginning from the start and just kind of worked my way and developed a passion and coached myself and became like a learner and obsessed with the profession and basically throughout the years have built four sales organizations from scratch.
Gary:Were these all in tech Gal.
Gal:All in tech, all in SaaS B2B tech. Okay, got it. Yeah, All in tech, gal. All in tech, all in SaaS B2B tech. Yeah, okay, got it, yeah. So four sales organizations have been in enterprise AE. Most of my experience has been mostly in the enterprise or complex sales space and as a sales leader I've done the $1 million to $10 million ARR twice and been part of a company as a sales director through the 40 to 100 million dollar in errs.
Gal:I've seen kind of that different paths and now hopefully doing the zero to a hundred and more. Um, yeah, and to them co-founder and ceo ofign and basically continued in sales. Align is in sales tech and yeah, that's pretty much it.
Gary:Yeah, that's really helpful. So let's go now back to the Align origin story and how that's progressed over time, because the environment that we started, even a handful of years ago now, is very different. And so what was kind of the initial thesis that where you started and then how has that evolved over the last few years? And I guess real quickly. For those that don't know, just a quick summary on Aligned itself, like what is the mission or the challenge? Or problem that you seek to solve.
Gal:Absolutely yeah. So basically we're building the the new way of working with customers. It's like the, the actual platform for the deal execution, for improving really directly sales performance. It's a customer facing collaboration tool, um, also known as a deal room, digital sales room. For sales and for cs, it's more of a client portal which basically brings all of the back and forth, the chaos in email, links, attachments, instead of working in that way where things fall through the cracks and it just doesn't. It's not a really useful way to drive.
Gal:Enablement help your champions make decisions. Just bring everything into this one space that you share and that throughout the deal, just one URL helps you. Just build consensus, share it with your buyer, who shares this with other people internally, and it's just a great way to go and enable a champion to sell for you with all of them. Everyone can come in and comment and there's a mutual action plan tool inside. So really it helps you with creating mutual action plans at work. A lot of people fail with a spreadsheet, no standardization, no sync with the CRM, a lot of challenges there. So mutual action plans, champion enablement, creating a better buying experience, accessing hidden stakeholders, people that you don't know that are part of the deal and getting insights, what's happening when you're not in the room.
Gal:And lastly, it's about standardizing the sales process, so creating like a template and guided selling around how to execute the process. So all of this really in one platform that's supposed to just that's helping companies better manage, deal complexity and just drive better performance.
Gary:Yep. So, which you know, as we've talked about before, we created a framework not rocket science called buyer-led growth idea and we've been at this for well. Probably that mindset has been 10 years in the making much like you kind of an enterprise, you know and and even mid market to more transactional sales background. Um, but that finding more and more that it you really need to reverse engineer what we should be doing, not just from a sales process but really from a go-to-market process based on how the buyer buys, like where they need, where they are. So we, of course, are biased and think that this is a rising tide, but we'd love to see that happen. So go back to when you started Aligned, that core theme was still there. But when you got into Solveit, what did you see? And what have you now learned, now that you've actually been in, as you said, going from zero to one?
Gal:Yeah, so, and beyond one, by the way. Yeah, I mean yeah.
Gary:Yeah, euphemistically one yes.
Gal:Yeah.
Gary:From something, from nothing, to a lot To where we are.
Gal:Yeah, yes, okay, yes, okay, yeah. So basically, when I was VP Sales, my co-founder and I used to work together at the same company and we were always obsessed as I guess, as I know, many sales leaders are with trying to understand what makes a difference between the top reps that are killing it and the rest reps that are killing it and the rest. And you know, we, we all the time, we look for the, the, the skills and the and the personality traits and, um, they have greed, and we looked at a lot of these different things. But you know, one day there was just one, this one deal that we closed, that one of our AEs closed and it was really unique, uh, 400 K outbound deal that was closed in three months. And I remember it was just so extreme, so good, and it was so well executed.
Gal:And basically I won't forget that day where it was a Friday afternoon, we were about to go to the weekend and we raised the toast for that deal and just got signed that day and we asked the AE what did you do differently? What, what? How do you summarize, like, getting really that level of execution, what was the thing? And she said I was basically not selling for the first time. I wasn't really selling, I was just creating a buying process as a service. I was creating an experience for my buyers and I was just all the time facilitating, thinking about how do I support their internal buying stages. So basically that's when it clicked and we understood that really the top reps, that's what sets them apart, that's the behavior and, of course, part of it is personality, part of it is just skills. But that's the behavior, that's what we need to look, that's what good looks like and uh, and that's basically where the idea came from.
Gal:Because we reconnected a few years later and we saw that it was post-covid. The market is shift, shifted and we basically moved to an, a situation where we knew how things are complex all the time, but now they're just getting freaking so much more complex and we we basically were kind of looking to do something in the sales tech space and we we said, like our AEs all the time struggled with just multiple stakeholders and budget scrutiny and project managing the deal and supporting the buying stages and facilitating it and creating consensus, Like all the time they struggled with these skills. Why don't we create a platform that solves that? Because that's the top seller and the idea was it came from, let's build an Ironman suit. The SDR space had Outreach and SalesLoft and all of these tools that basically brought an Ironman suit for the modern SDR that if you just take it apart, they just don't perform the same efficiency.
Gal:So it has said, why not do it here? And then, when we dive in more, we saw that a lot of things in the market are pointing towards that direction and we saw where are the actual challenges in how we work with email and how we collaborate and share resources throughout the sales process that just make it so hard for the buyer to buy. That if we create this space, it will solve for that and it will really bring that Ironman suit. It will just solve the execution gap, not through just coaching and training, as you can replace you need also coaching and training but it's solved for specific root causes of how you work with email and how you use a mutual action plan spreadsheet and how much you know or don't know about the process by working with email that nothing else can solve. So that's, that's where everything came from.
Gary:Yeah, got it. So you know, as you, as you mentioned that, you know you. You mentioned collaboration a few times. Right, I love, I love and I know you've I think you've done this on LinkedIn before the buying process as a service. Right, thinking of of that as man, what a mindset shift. And so, and then that's where the collaboration comes in. Do you find you mentioned in this kind of enforcement which sounds like a bad word, but really almost best practices? It's like weaving it in? Do you find that the use of a tool like Aligned actually helps reps Like this is how you prosecute a deal Like these are the steps. This is the information that you need. This is where it needs to go. This is how we do it, kind of the steps between the steps is did you find that that's how it's being used and, if so, did you go in knowing that was going to be the case, based on your experience, or did you see some creative uses of it that have helped you shape the product?
Gal:Yeah, you know it's always a mix, right. You don't get the full vision and fully visualize where it's going to go. You learn things over time, but I think that, yeah, from the beginning we understood that the current workflow is just broken, Like if you think about a typical sales process. You end the first call, you send an email. That email has like four links and maybe a value summary. Maybe here's the few next steps we talked about.
Gary:An hour long recording to a Zoom call that nobody sees again.
Gal:Exactly. Here's a link to the Zoom and here's another, another, and then, if let's, let's take a complex deal, you can easily get to a hundred emails or even more easily, and then think about all of these a hundred emails have so many links in them and and attachments and a DocuSign and a Vidyard and a Gonglink and case studies and business case and proposals right, there are so many things going on and when you're looking at the buyer side, then a champion basically is required right now to go and consume all of this information and build consensus, looping people throughout the process and the likelihood of all of these people reading all of these materials. It's not engaging an email and accessing everything, knowing where it is, getting the accurate version right. Things change over time. You might have multiple versions of things and people get looped in various points of the process, so likelihood of that really being accessible by everyone and being this a good form of supporting the champion or the entire buying team is just very low and we saw that basically you have there are tools like Miro and Asana and Notion and so many collaboration spaces are are streamlining other areas in our day-to-day work right Design in Figma, and we do a lot of these things in workspaces that solve all of the mess, all of the chaos, but nothing does this for sales. Like in sales, we haven't progressed. The old workflow hasn't changed for years. So, yeah, it started with that and we understood the whole buying process of service.
Gal:Mindset basically talks about you're not looking at the stages of the deal, you're not pushing for the next stage. It's not about you and trying to get someone from a demo to another stage and it's not about the product, it's about the problem. It's not about your next step, it's about their next step. Right, it's just that mindset, it's a big mindset shift and a tool like that just makes you an enabler. Okay, that's what we wanted to do. It's just by essence, even when you share it, it sends the message of hey, I'm an enabler, I'm here to support you, I'm here to organize things for you as a buyer, and that space kind of becomes their space.
Gal:Buyers are like the biggest aha moment for AEs that are using Align is the first reactions from their buyers. I just posted yesterday about we interviewed an AE deal and she closed a $1 million deal S&P deal in three months, something crazy and she said there's no way. No way I could have done this outside of line, no way I could have built that kind of strength into why buy us and why spend so much money in such level of trust. If you and I shared this room on LinkedIn as well, it's just that her room got 83 hours 83 hours time of watch time by buyers, a by more than eight stakeholders there are. There are some people who weren't identified so we don't know exactly how many, but was around, was around more than eight, and she says that no way it could have built that consensus and collaborated easily and create that differentiated experience and make them trust us to spend so much money.
Gary:Yeah, the trust is huge and so, as you were describing that, it's interesting that you realize that as a seller, right, we're working a lot of different deals and when we get an email, we immediately orient to our CRM to provide some context, like what did we talk about before, what was it? Because I've got all my data there, but the buyer has none of that. They're not taking all of your interactions and putting it in their crm. It's it's stuck in their email. And then you talk about other people and they're coming in midstream in the conversation and they need caught up and so you can see if you that we we talked, I know previously, gal about this idea of outside in, like literally flipping the sales process so that it's designed around the way the buyer buys. And then to your point about we've talked a lot about the primary job of the seller today is delivering confidence for the buyer, like getting you to a place where you can make a confident decision and you can see how the flipping it outside in and creating that platform for the buyers to be able to structure this conversation can help with that. Because, back to the point of actually helping the seller understand what needs to happen in the buyer's process.
Gary:Right, every buyer's process is going to be different, but there's also a lot of of uniformity.
Gary:Right, there's there's a, there's an anticipated next step in an organization and maybe they, you know, go one way versus another, but sometimes our champion doesn't even know what that next step is.
Gary:And then that's when the seller can come in and say, okay, well, typically with buyers that look like this, of your size, there's some form of who in that, who in your world would would do that, and here's the kind of questions that they're going to ask. And here's what that looks like. And you know you're not just throwing it over the wall and asking for okay, well, let me know what the next step is, and being able to build that, so that that, uh, I guess it would be interesting since, since you've had people come in and you've had the deal situation, what are some of the things that you're starting to pull into the platform or extend its capabilities? I think digital sales room actually does the space a little bit of a disservice because it just feels like a microsite, right, but it's as we've talked about. It's much more than that. So, where do you sit today and what do you see kind of on the horizon of where this goes as we continue to evolve this.
Gal:Yeah, so basically it's going to become more of that Iron man suit vision, where Iron man suit vision, where basically it's going to go very deep in data, so we're now capturing. Think about these 83 hours, okay, 83 hours of not like you know we had. Like a lot of people are used to email opens or email clicks and maybe you have like a doc send or something that tells you so, and so looked at slide um eight okay, and for x minutes. But think about but that's just one point.
Gal:Think about you're waiting for decision, waiting, waiting for signature or decision stage or even waiting for signature and the CFO goes into the room, spends 30 minutes on your proposal. You know exactly which parts of the proposal they got stuck on. They're going there then to the business case, reading through the and playing around with some numbers in the cost of an action calculator, for example. They're then going and reading the negotiation transcript, because it was all there in the room in the Google doc that's embedded and you're seeing exactly what and for how long. And then they're looking at the Panadoc and they're not signing and they're going out.
Gal:Okay, now, today an AE gets excited, right, whoa, a lot of time, a lot of engagement, a lot of email opens from someone they're about to sign, they don't know who it is and they don't have a lot of context. Think about an AI that analyzes everything that I just told you, okay, plus knows the CRM stage, has some context from calls and other things that took place, and then tells you, hey, red flag. Okay, suggested next step, recommended next step get your CEO or your VP or an exec to reach out to the CFO and say, hey, excited to potentially kick off the partnership. I know you have this go live date by X date, and how critical it is for you to be able to reach Y milestone. I know I want to tell you that I'm personally going to be involved in this and support the process. If anything comes up, if you need anything, I'm here excited to get started Right. So all of that is like intelligent data-driven decision that's driven by being a fly on the wall when you're not in your room.
Andy:Right.
Gal:Okay On the buyer's world. So that's just a glimpse of of that kind of iron man for the modern salesperson. So, while you know, while you have a lot of these companies right now trying to build the a, they're building the aisdr and they're they're going to build um, the ai seller, and it's going to run very, very transactional things and it's not going to work that well. What about all of the complex sales? You want their tools as well to just do better, because what average right now is?
Gary:failing.
Gal:The average sales experience is just failing. It stopped working after growth at all cost. A lot of things have changed and we can go deep into that. That's a different topic, but you want to make sure that you elevate the entire buying experience and the level of execution of everyone. That's the vision to be able to get everyone to that level. That is good enough, because the buyer can go and self-serve and self-research and use their own GPT to take all of your materials and to build a business case, right, okay, they can do that today, right, so where is your value? So the AE the level that AEs will need to deliver is going up.
Gal:I think that there's no longer complex sales. Complex sales is no longer a synonym for enterprise sales, it's just sales. And I think that transactional sales is just there's no transactional sales. It's very rare. Very specific companies are doing it. Every deal, even S&P deals today, have more than four stakeholders and are hitting CFOs and CEO budget scrutiny. So just, everyone needs to level up. So really, that's the vision to bring an automated business case creation and insights and the room changes and gives you suggestions on what to do. We already have an AI assist in the room that answers buyers' questions based on everything that takes place in the room. That answers buyers questions based on everything that takes place in the room. It reads the materials and the buyer can ask okay, summarize this case study for me. Okay, why do I need to buy? What are the hurdles in implementation? Things that are not there? Okay, what is how?
Gal:secure is this platform, all these things we have already right now, and that's the idea we're going to build more and more into that so that the ae can really really do, uh, the complex selling very, very effectively yeah and yeah, and not to man it, no, yeah, that's the idea it.
Gary:It's uh, you know you pointed out the even smaller dollar sales have become more complex now, and I think a lot of that is that the software world, in its success, has so micro-solutioned us to death that there is nothing you can buy that doesn't ingest something from one system and export data to another system, to another system. It's like this whole web, this whole ecosystem into which we need to play, which means there's a lot more risk and complexity, even with relatively. We see that in many, many different cases. Plus, I also think there's organizations that are.
Gary:I'd be curious your thoughts here with AI ai, we're just having this conversation earlier where, when it first came out, it was like, well, it's like, this is this is amazing, that's going to change the world, whatever. And then we kind of go through a little bit of a lull. But it feels like now you're starting to see real, actual business use cases like this. This is having an impact and in some ways, you get this. Okay, I get that we have this particular solution, but where's the puck going to be a year from now, 18 months from now? Is this really the right thing? It just causes yet more complexity and more, you know, paralysis on the, on the fact of buyers, try to figure it all out. Um, so curious. You know just what you're seeing there, and then we can kind of get into the level of readiness that you, that you see, is required.
Gal:Yeah, um. So I'm not uh Elon Musk or someone who can predict right now.
Gal:Yeah, I, I don't know. I think that, uh, you know it's a bit crazy to try to do that. I think that you know we are going towards a world of agents Agents. You see, right now, I think there are two approaches. Right now, in the market, there are companies that are trying to build from scratch, from day one, the agent that will do a role, a full role, like a digital worker, and it's happening in DevTools. And here's your AI developer.
Gal:We see companies bringing these bombs and VCs are diving in and they're drooling over it because, oh, that's the future, future and it's going to kill software. I think there's a lot of that happening and it's intriguing, it's enticing, it's a direction worth betting on, but in reality, just in the day-to-day, it just doesn't work that well and they're trying to do like a bottoms up um, just full autonomous agents from day one for roles, and they're gonna try to improve them all the time. Okay, then another approach into the market is, like you know, clay versus an 11x, for example. Okay, 11x, or some of these AISDRs right, they're AISDR or Clay's coming and saying, hey, here's a co-pilot Ironman suit for your research and for everything and for you to do sales development levels that you aren't able to do otherwise. So I think that that's what we're going to see companies doing taking the very complex scenarios and just empowering them and bringing you these co-pilots to just be better. But over time it's just going to be more AI and more, in my, more automation.
Gal:And when is it going to be fully autonomous? I don't know. And how does that future look like? I don't know. That's like the. That's the Elon We'll leave that to Elon yeah. Yeah.
Gary:Yeah.
Andy:I don't know.
Gary:Well, and I was thinking too with that in mind, is that, you know, I agree, it's like who knows where it's going to go. But you know just what you're seeing in the market even today about the companies themselves and their, you know, the uh. What we have seen is deal cycles are dragging out a little bit longer, because as somebody comes in with a recommendation, it moves up, whether it's from the board level or down. Somebody saying somewhere how do we think about AI in this? Is this the right tool, given what's? You know all that's changing with AI and it just even if there's not a solution out there today and people don't even know where it is. It's just like this I don't like, I'm I'm paralyzed to make a decision yet Cause I don't want to make the wrong decision. Are you seeing something similar?
Gal:Um yeah absolutely.
Gary:Yeah, enough there, so let's go to so in your experience now, in order to be able to take advantage of the power of the Aligned platform, what kind of prerequisites do you see that companies need to have? I mean, I can think of a couple, but I won't lead the way.
Andy:Yeah, and you've already mentioned a couple, but I think a good way to maybe think about it would be it's kind of your ICP, and I think we think about ICP very similarly, which is it's not about firmographic characteristics, it's more about the inputs to getting success out of your tool. So a really good fit and a really bad fit for those inputs that you've seen lead to success using your tool.
Gal:Yeah. So basically we need complexity. If there's complexity, we add value. Complexity can be either in the number of steps and stakeholders that you take. It can be in the in the content that you share so you might have so, for example, a deal their smb team is using aligned. We know some of these deals close within a week or two, but there's just so much content that's being shared. So the complexity is not very much on the seller, it's more on the buyer. Okay, that there's so many things you can share and you want to just organize it for them and improve the decision. And then they can. And the complexity is also on the AE and the SMBAE to choose which deals to focus on. And then you see the engagement, you see if they're really serious. So there are multiple value positions there.
Gal:But we say that the real sweet spot is just the the more complex the better. Like the seven figure deals, six figure deals, these they can get the most value out of this, get the most value out of this. And a bad fit is maybe one, two calls to close. Okay, this is where we have challenges that we can solve sometimes in these situations. But if you're just very, very high velocity and you're hitting targets and you're closing within one or two calls. Setting proposal yeah, might, might be a nice to have. We might not have very critical problems to solve.
Andy:How about on the sales process itself, where you run into they're. So I think there's a Goldilocks as far as their level of organization, their level of having a refined sales process, for example, like somebody so disorganized, like you can't get them over that hump, like you can't frame it up for them well enough because they're just lost. Maybe do you find that like they've got to be kind of on their own front, sophisticated enough to like be able to leverage it.
Gal:I think that when there's no sales process, then, yes, the value is lower. Your performance problem root cause is the lack of a sales process. That's more critical to solve than align. We can still add value, we can still make your prospect's life easier and you're a champion and you can still leverage the insights to understand what's happening and make smarter decisions and identify even stakeholders. So it's all a matter of the level of no process. Sometimes you have really skilled AEs, no standardized sales process, but they're really good and they're hitting targets. But you're going to grow and you may be now introducing a POC and you need some more structure and things get dragged around the POC and you want to introduce a mutual action plan and then we can come in. So yeah, it really depends. I would say that there are situations where they're still figuring out the sales process, where Aligned adds value. But if it's really a mess and that's the root cause of why you have performance issues, then solve that first.
Gary:Yeah, how about on the RevOps side? Any you know the connections to other systems or activating some of that data? How has that evolved for you and what do you see that in the level of importance in terms of a success criterion?
Gal:Yeah, so RevOps at the beginning was more of a just there to enable the CRM integration and we're just part of these evaluations to just make sure that things are going to be compliant and working well with how they're processed. Right now, revops is really getting direct value because we push these hidden stakeholders, new stakeholders that we've identified and are not in your CRM into your CRM.
Gal:And secondly, all of the unique, never before tracked data about all of these journeys in the room, who shared and who clicked on what and how long. All of that goes into CRM in the way that you can report on it. So imagine you having a forecast, looking at your forecast and looking at Apple and saying, okay, apple is at this stage, this close rate, this probability, all the regular stuff and then seeing room engagement 40 hours, stakeholders 20, showing a timeline of no recent activity in the room for a few weeks. Okay, and maybe raising flags on specific items that they looked at. Right, you can build complex formulas based on that through your forecasting in the CRM. So RevOps right now really are loving that data and what they can do with it and they're becoming really a more serious stakeholder.
Gary:Yeah, you bring up such an interesting point, which is we think about forecasting today, which is around stages that are largely around how we, as a seller, sell. Right, I sent you a proposal, we're negotiating the proposal, you know we're in contract whatever versus all of, especially in complex sales cycles, all of the intricate touch points that we need to have. And, um you, uh, you wonder if there's a day where our sales stages are to actually start to reflect the buyer process, versus, like, the fact that I sent you a contract is part of the process, but there's all this other stuff that needs to happen around that. And that's actually to your point about forecasting. It's the what happens on the buyer side between the stages that actually gives us some level of confidence that it's actually progressing.
Gal:Exactly so. I have two things to say about that. Yeah, that's so. If you're using mutual action plan, then we can integrate it to the CRM and then you can see sales stage and mutual action plan stage in the CRM. Okay, and then you know that gives you. So the sales stages are maybe more high level milestones, right, and the mutual action plans are the like the detailed level of a we sent. We sent legal and now they need to sign. And now they need to do this, or we're waiting for this percentage of completion, right. You can see a lot of these things.
Andy:So yeah.
Gal:And the mutual action plan is more of the buyer facing, facilitating buyer stages. It's not about your stages, right? So that's one. Secondly, I would say that if you're running a sales process where your stages are discovery, demo proposal, a negotiation, close, you know something like that, then this is a sales-led, sales-centric, okay, sales process. I would say that other than you wanting to have mutual action plans reflecting customer facing stages and see things like that syncing to your CRM. I can go more in details into that, but I think that that's one of the reasons of sales organizations being stuck in more of a sales centric mindset when people are selling and not facilitating offering that buying processes.
Gal:service is because how we design the sales process, how we call the stages and how we build this entire one or three pages in our slide, in our playbook, that's called sales process. Yeah, and if you want I can dive in more.
Gary:Yeah, well, I think it's probably a whole nother podcast, honestly, Because you know, and I think that's the whole, that's the, that's the point of the whole issue, right, is that we are literally flipping outside in. I had this epiphany the other day. So my, my dad was an engineer and he later went into sales. He sold plastic injection machinery, so basically anything that you needed to make plastic. He sold the big iron, as he called it, that would go into factories all over the world and be able to manufacture.
Gary:As I reflect on what, why he was successful? It was because he was himself an engineer and actually understood the process of what it was they were trying to do and then looking for a piece of machinery to get the thing done. He wasn't just selling them a hunk of iron, he was actually thinking, working with them on. Well, I know how this integrates with your process and your systems and what you're trying to get through and your throughput. And I'm going to butcher it.
Gary:I'm, you know, I'm definitely not an engineer, but but then you contrast that with a whole generation of sellers we have today and they have no idea what's going on the other side of the hood, no idea, like we give them some product training, we give them some whatever, but actually what really goes on in their business and how they make money, and what are the workflows and the systems and the departments that are involved, and all that stuff, they have no idea. Yeah, and so Now that we and we're now, we're now, we're in peak software, right, we're in an environment where we have more software than we can possibly buy. And, and now I'm actually thinking about what? What is the right fit? What is the right fit for me? And it's completely flipped. We're back to good old fashioned selling, where you actually have to have knowledge of your buyer.
Gary:Right where you actually have to have knowledge of your buyer. And that was kind of the epiphany for me is this if you go back to really pre the dawn of SaaS, when everybody was looking for ways to basically take an analog process and make it digital, it was like it didn't matter what you bought, it was going to be better than where you were. But now everything's digital and there are implications. We've got lots of failed components there. So I don't know. I think back to your point of how we are, as you can't tell, excited about the space that you're in and excited for the potential for Aligned and others, because we believe it's a rising tide environment and we really do need to rethink this whole process of how we do this. It's almost like back to the future.
Gal:Yeah, that's interesting. That perspective is very interesting because there are two sides. One is, I think, that the pre-SAS selling, where you had to go very, very deep and to know your stuff, know the prospect was in that perpetual world where selling software was very, very expensive and salespeople were traveling and a lot of relationship building.
Gary:You weren't renting the machinery, you owned it.
Gal:Yeah, I really knew the craft. And then, you know, we went into the sas and then uh, and then the growth at all cost era and we were able just to get away with uh having a salesperson that goes on a call and dumps the features and interrogates a little bit just to get their manager happy because they need the bound band right. Uh filled up and all of that and we're just getting able to get away with it because you know people buying and not so many options and everything seems cool and you just go through it and it's not very helpful but you're just buying it. You don't have so many stakeholders involved. You didn't have that much budget scrutiny. There wasn't any PLG that got you used to the concept of, oh, I can self-serve, maybe so, and we were able to get away with it.
Gal:But I think that another thing that happened though that is very different the salesperson during that time period where you're talking about they were the source of information and there were. There were deep channel. There's no other way to get educated about these things today. We could get away with it also because the buyer can self-educate in so many other ways and they come in. You know there are all these statistics of buyers coming in I think 80% or 70% into the sales process, I don't remember exactly into their buying process when they're contacting you. So that's another big difference, right.
Gary:Yeah.
Gal:So today you're really no longer that channel, and that's why buyers are. That's one of the reasons buyers are avoiding salespeople more than ever today.
Gal:One of them is yeah, they don't need you as much as before. They've gotten burned by these bad experiences. They're tired of being sold to right In the negative way of this, and they can self-serve and self-research, and buying is just so much more complex. So if you're not going beyond the basics, okay, and you're not going to these fundamentals that you're talking about, then why do I need you? Okay, I'll call you when I need anything, if I need a case study, if I'll need a proposal, I'll get in touch with you. Why would I introduce you to the C-level or right?
Gal:I don't feel confident that you can, that you know my business well enough or know the industry or can add enough value to that conversation. Um, so right, so that these are the implications. So, basically, ghosting, single threaded indecision. I'm struggling to make a decision because you're really not helping and everything here is so complex and there's so much information and I have so many stakeholders. I'm just struggling to decide and I'm ending up in either no decision or indecision, or there's just this great AE from another, from your competitor, that's just doing such a great job and I'm just buying from that person, yeah, yeah, and even in this small business example.
Andy:They have so many choices right and they so that's gonna, that's gonna slow them down in the first place. But that's also why I love the mutual action plan, because just because they're a small business doesn't mean you're not giving them a job to do when they implement your software right. So if you can just at least let them know what that looks like which I think so many times people fall short on just giving them that perspective like you're going to need to do these things and being almost honest about it, but a mutual action plan then actually lays it out.
Gal:I think that's really powerful yeah, a lot of people are afraid for mutual action plans and they think about like having to do very deep um discussions and designing like a very, very deep process and, yes, like for the complex sales teams. I think that for the complex sales and you have pocs and things like that during the process and this is where you need to do a lot of work and using a mutual action plan properly, but even kind of just the basic next step management and talking about a few next steps ahead and agreeing overall on the high level and just managing this other after every meeting, sending a summary of the few next steps we talked about and scratching off the, the ones that have been completed, I think that can add a lot of value, even in the, the more fast high velocity deals, a yeah, and that's just so much value. I'm just I know what happens next. I know how to typically, how typically this kind of software is being purchased. I'm not as a buyer. It just brings so much confidence.
Gary:We couldn't agree more. In fact, there's a group of sellers that I work with pretty frequently where I often remind them that the contract signature date is just one of many steps along the way until the customer gets to a moment of value, and that's what they care about. So stop making it about the contract signature, because you're just going to push them away, away and that's your point about. I also see this, and it depends on the level, but in those more transactional sales we tend to come across champions who they themselves are inexperienced software buyers and even more inexperienced buyers inside the organizations that they currently sit. So they don't know what they're going to get into from a procurement perspective.
Gary:And even relatively modest size organizations are putting, because of security, compliance and SOC 2 compliance and things like that, they're putting more and more complexity into that process, and so they're like this is great, I love it. My manager told me we're good, we've got the budget, let's go, and all of a sudden, you know they take it to go, actually get implemented, and they're like wait, and there's like six more steps you have to go through, and they don't know that. Right, and so a good, a good seller, however, is going to say, okay, you know, typically what we see is this if you've got this next step, let me prepare you for that. If you're going to your economic buyer and they're, they're, they're. You know, a lot of times people ask about well, we're with Salesforce, can't we just do it in Salesforce? Here's why you can't do it in Salesforce, right? Versus just going on the happy years and saying, great, the champion loves it, let's go.
Gal:Yeah.
Gary:Move to the next stage.
Gal:I couldn't agree more. I think that when you're basically doing this planning from signature date, it's a closed plan, it's not a mutual action plan.
Gary:Yeah.
Gal:Mutual action plan also has the mutual execution plan or mutual success plan that's a few other synonyms to that concept and you know, mutual success plan is really a more buyer centric way even of looking at it and, yeah, it needs to end at success. We're live, we're delivering value and then, yeah, we can hand off also to a CSM that will talk about an ongoing multi-year milestones or QBRs and other ongoing forward plans. But, yeah, you should plan towards going live and where things.
Gary:Yeah, I love that perspective because it flows right into the activation and onboarding and it's like we're, instead of throwing it over the wall and starting over again with the information gathering, it just continues to compound snowball on it. So, exactly, it's really powerful. Well, gal, we really appreciate the time you spent. I went fast. We can. I know I personally can dig in further, but I appreciate it. We can, I know I personally can dig in further, but I appreciate it. Um we um. Where can people find you? Obviously, we talked about LinkedIn, but to to get in touch with you, where should they go?
Gal:Yeah, linkedin. Just DM me on LinkedIn, yep.
Gary:Okay, and for those that don't follow gal, you should, cause he's got great stuff out there. So, um, we're, so we're really glad you spent some time with us today. Thank you.
Gal:Me too.
Gary:Okay, well, stick around for just a second, but for everybody else, we'll see you next week and then, in the meantime, go be a pro. Bye, thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.