Ep. 21: Guest Lynn Powers - Unlocking Success in Software Sales

Welcome to software sales simplified MOOC to success, your weekly podcast for the latest and greatest with respect to selling enterprise software. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just getting started out, please come and join us here every week for insights and the latest and greatest on what's happening in the world of enterprise software sales. I'm Kevin Donville. I am your Co host. I'm joined by my illustrious as colleague and partner in crime, Matt Long. Matt, how you doing?

I'm doing great, Kevin. How's everyone doing? Doing fabulous here and we're joined by our special guest this week. We're being joined by Lynn Powers, who's going to be telling us a little bit about her experiences with respect to software sales, a little bit about her journey and some of her advice on how people who are looking to be more successful and perform better in the world of sales may be able to achieve exactly that.

But before we go any further, do want to remind you folks, if you are liking what you hear, please take a moment like subscribe and follow our podcast and we'd love to see you here every single week. So without much further ado, Lynn, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. Super excited to be here. Thanks Kevin for the

introduction. Well, we're super happy to have you here, Lynn. You and I have already had an opportunity to chat a couple of times in preparation for the call today, and they were fun conversations and I really enjoyed the chats that we were able to have. I'm very excited about being able to go in and introduce you to our listeners here on the show. I mean, I know a little bit about your background. You've got a very interesting path.

You know, you were commercial agents, you were an instructor, you were a board member for Women in Revenue. Can't wait to delve into more about those things. So for those who don't know you, take a moment, take the floor, please tell everybody who you are, what you do, and and the organization you're with now. Yeah, so great to meet everyone.

My name is Lynn Powers. I have been a seller, we'll call it for the last 10 years in the technology space. I originally started selling database software technology, went to Oracle, sold at map bar. And the reason why I bring that up is because originally I really wanted to harness my career around a couple different areas in sales. So one being at a Fortune 500 company, another one being through merger and acquisition activity, another one being sold

through an acquisition, right. And I have the lovely fortune to work at Clary now. And I've been at Clary for the past six years and my career trajectory at Clary has been substantial. I've been our top performer since we'll call it 2019. So have consistent been hitting quota. One of the things that I'm well known for, no pun intended with my name, but linearity across my pipeline is a great one for me. And so I spend a lot of my time really diving in really deep with my customers.

My trajectory here at Cleary is no surprise that I do really well with my customers. And that journey has really taught me a lot because I started in commercial really learning and understanding how do you deal with the volumes of deals and then moved into more of a mid market position where I got more strategic, really dialed into what are some of the other components of a sale that I need to start bringing into to have larger deals. And now I'm a part of our

enterprise team. And so I work with our most strategic customers on their success within Clary and have been doing that for the past couple years now. And so in the midst of the work that I do at Clary, I also spend a lot of my, we'll call it voluntary time working with other sales educators and different media companies that are really hoping to drive better sales across the universe. And no matter what industry or what you are doing today and just make it aware that it is a

job out there. I think the other thing that I hold myself really prideful on is just being a woman in sales. So it's not common to see a lot of faces like mine in the world that I live in. But one of the things that I hope to do as I spread my success in my journey in sales is also bring awareness and bring other women into the forefront to have also an experience in sales.

We've had a couple of guests on our show already that have had a similar type of experience to yours and they've shared that same perspective as well. So it is an interesting one. Before we get too much further along though, tell us a little bit about Clary. I mean, you've been there for a while and you've had a lot of great success for what is for maybe some of our listeners who weren't familiar with it so.

Clary is a revenue platform. So what we do is we help companies create, convert and close all of the different revenue motions that happened across their business.

So the way that I like to think about it is anyone from a BDR that starts that initial inception or that first market touch that goes out there and someone's trying to reach out until a board member is listening to the feedback of what's happening across your business and trying to understand where your investment should be put in every moment in between that should be measured for most companies, you would think it's, it's dialed in, but a lot of these efforts and with

technology coming to where it is in this evolution, a lot of folks are moving from spreadsheets or a BI tool or a mixture of a bunch of different solutions. And So what Clary does is we really bring all of those key revenue moments into one platform to really help orchestrate the team from marketing, customer success, sales, any cross functional partners to really have a more

predictable pulse of the. Totally see why that would be important, particularly in our world, that's been traditionally a very challenging thing for organizations to be able to do and, and the downfall of a lot of them, even though they had great products and great teams. Just the orchestration of that

right being a failure point. But you've been, you clearly understand the value of your solution and how your solution helps your customers with having been as successful as you've been, as you said since 2019, you've been the top performer. What goes into that? How does a person end up enjoying that kind of success for that duration? Yeah, I think the number one thing for me is just being able to create this arena of success around me.

Being able to have the support of my customers, prospects, my network, my cross functional partners internally is really key for me. One of the things that I think helps me over perform is being able to stay focused. And what I mean by being focused is being able to finish one course until successful. And So what that means to me is I have to set certain intentions before I get started on what ways do I want to leave meetings? What ways should I be wanting to make an impact in this

conversation? How can I take this task and bring on others that might be able to help or get involved with what we're trying to work towards? And so in order to do that, I try to take this approach of being able to feed my pipeline on that create side all the way

to really understanding how much do I need to convert, how much pipeline do I need to have to be able to convert and then to be able to close successfully. If you think about now of a day-to-day of a seller, there's a lot of different tools that are out there. There's AI in our pocket that's helping us, right? So it's also understanding where do we need to embed the different ways to help accelerate that process with the people that are involved.

I'm just curious, who do you, who is your, is your buyer of your solution and who do you target first? Do you target them or does it get rolled in up to them or how does that work? Yeah. So great question. My target buyer is typically basically someone within the revenue space, right? So a CRO is our typical buyer. However, I think now there's been an evolution in what I like to think is what is, what is a buyer in this world? And I think it's evolved to be

more of a buying committee. So there's a lot more people that are getting involved in these deals. It's not just, yes, sales wants a tool. So let's just talk to the sales team. And now it wants to know if there's AI, what else? What else do we need to be double checking from a security standpoint? Should we do that right? So I think it's a, it's a loaded question in the current times of who is buying and, and how is that approach?

Like one thing that I've done really well with my customers is really just try to understand what is the pain that they're trying to solve for and what happens if they do absolutely nothing, right? And that then tells me who my real buyer is, because whoever has the largest purse string to be able to fix that and cannot do without making a change are the ones that are likely going to be the ones that champion us

through. So I have Michael Buyer, but I would say that's where I like to get creative. And I imagine that change somewhat also going from commercial to SMB to enterprise because that audience gets larger and larger as you get up the the chain there. What are some strategies I guess you used to define or identify who those people are that you actually need to talk to?

Yeah. So one of the things that I typically we like to do is just understand overall what is it today that they're doing for those current solutions. So we'll take it just from a forecasting perspective, right? If I know that they would like to change something around forecasting well likely might involve someone from finance that's trying to put up a projection typically to their

board. Depending on how deeply involved their board is. If it's an SMB company or a smaller commercial business, they might have a very heavy advisor, right? That is going to influence what is actually happening in that particular deal versus in the enterprise space. It's a lot different in terms of sometimes it needs to pilot it, sometimes you need to have a POC that validates that. Sometimes there needs to be a formal RFP that's released and you need to abide by whatever

that RFP is, right? So it's really being able to be agile about what is your customer looking to accomplish and how do you then provide the right solutioning and the value that you're trying to drive with the customer so that you close those gaps. I can see why I was getting so excited when I was talking with you as just as you're going through your explanation and there was three major pillars there that you were talking about.

I picked up on your dedication to being disciplined in your approach, the preparation that you do and also the way that you are focused on pipeline development with respect to that. But then as you start talking about how you engage with the customers that themselves, the tenants right out of the methodology that Matt and I

adhere to, the move methodology were like just right there following right along with what you're talking about. What is the pain? What are they doing? Who really owns it all that about motive. What's the cost of doing nothing relative to that area? And then operationally, how do they buy? If they need to buy, how do they buy? What are the mandatory steps as you're going through?

And how do I map the value of my solution to the way they need to understand that to go and justify and validate the spend, go and drive this solution home? And I got so excited listening to you talk about that when we spoke earlier on, Lynn, and I'm getting excited about it again here. Do you think that the way that you think about selling, how pervasive of it is that kind of way of breaking deals down? I'm looking at the solution. How common do you think that is

in your vertical? I think it's, it's, it's a little bit different in a couple ways. One is because I think a lot of competitors that are out there in particular that I come across in relation to Cleary, they might have a very pointed solution, right, of what we're trying to solve for the beauty of Cleary, it's a platform, right? No matter which angle we want to go, we can take it in that direction.

However, it's the value that you're creating for the customer of what does that actually mean for them? So typically folks might say, Oh yeah, here's my 700% ROI number, right, that I'm trying to track for this, this buying group where in the reality of it is, is they really just need to understand what is it that they're changing and how are they going to orchestrate that change across the business?

And when you start to think about it from that lens, it's a lot different from just a, I'm solution selling. I'm trying to find the pain. I'm trying to map the solution. It becomes how can I stay ahead of what they might need to deliver on and what ways can I then insert different value points for them to be that strategic advisor or to have

that strategic guidance right? So I think it's, it is a reframe of a mindset of the process can no longer just be, oh, here's the, the stages I need to execute on becomes OK, great, I have this information, I'm constantly being agile with this information. Now I just need to just stay prepared in order to act on it once the time comes.

And I think that's the really balance of trades that you get within a sales job is you might not know what's coming or you might you might have an agenda planned, but there might be other things that intersect in those moments where you can really take advantage of them if you're prepared to have those conversations in those moments. So I think it's about from a competitor perspective, it's not just showing that you have the material, not just showing that you have a feature available.

It's how are we going to learn this together? Here's how I'm prepared to be curious about your business based off of what I know. And here's where I think it might make an impact, but I need more guidance to really partner with me on how to deliver that I.

Think one key aspect or one aspect or feature of Clary is call recording and then analysis, right? Because I think we use that our last company actually. I'm just curious from your perspective. I mean, the thing I've noticed over the years is that as we've gone virtual, so many more of these meetings actually happen online. So you can record them, right? Because before a lot of it was done, you know, as much as an in person and you weren't captions, you rely on people's notes.

So I think that's fundamentally changed our visibility and understanding of the sales process. I'm just curious from your perspective, how do you use Cleary now in that respect? And does that help you and the whole sales team kind of get aligned better in terms of how you're attacking your particular opportunities? Talk a little bit about how I approach my Clary because it really orchestrates my entire process.

So inside of Clary, I have what is called a cadence, which in any business you have 13 weeks that you have to accomplish something in one of those weeks. And if you're not looking forward, if you're not looking back, you might miss what's in front of you. Essentially, the beauty of AI is I'm able to get those triggers of, hey, this one might have some risk in it or this one might be moving faster than you typically would move it and it will flag me of where I need to

spend my attention. The way that I then use Cleary is I have triggers that literally tell me what's going on in any one of my accounts and then also showcase for me what is the best message? What is the best time? What are the other folks that I haven't been reaching out to? And it populates that as actions for me.

You mentioned call recording. I love my Cleary copilot because after every single call I'm getting a Slack message to me of a example follow up e-mail based off of what I typically send. I also am getting a list of actions that I need to orchestrate not only internally but externally as well. I'm getting that fed into specific slack channels so that I don't have to go update my team on any of this. I have alerts set up for all of my technical counterparts.

So they're getting pings if security or IT or something specific has been mentioned that they weren't on a call of. So there's a lot of background work that I would typically have to do where I have this busy work of. So then I get to reinvest my time into other things. And so the question then becomes, OK, if you don't have to do all that, where is your time actually spent?

I can fit probably 12 meetings, probably more with customers throughout the day, which in a normal world would have been completely insane as like now I can run really fast and go really wide with the types of conversations I'm having because I don't have to do that heavy lifting of, hey, I need to follow up with this. I need to go figure out this. And all of those resources are driving to me so that I'm just

actioning on them. I think the other thing that's really powerful is I get this lens of not only what's happening in deals that I have an opportunity in, but the ones that I don't have an opportunity in, which is also vital. So it's educating me on where do I need to feed my funnel, but also convert the opportunities I have at hand and then continuously repopulate that with, hey, here's another opportunity that might come up based off of this intent that

came from this account. So from an end to end perspective, I would say it helps me spend my time more with customers. I'm able to see that I'm able to generate more pipeline from it and I'm converting at a higher clip than I've ever seen in my career, which typically I've always been a top performer. But here at Cleary, I can really dial it up in the way that I typically look at it is all of the quotas, we can call them double.

And if I'm hitting at least 2X of my coverage on that, then I'm gonna go way over my number. And so as long as I'm

orchestrating that entire 13 week process inside of Cleary, I know what is needed of me, when it's needed of me and I can just really focus on my customers. So the day-to-day admin work that I would typically spend time on is either automated or everyone has that information feeding to them, where I don't have to be the facilitator of giving that information to

anybody. That sounds excellent because one of the challenges that Matt and I had seen over the years is people have tried to go and manage particularly complex sales cycles that have a lot of potential stakeholders involved with. It is how do you make sure that your organization is ready to engage them correctly and that everybody understands and the the lattice work of, of success criteria that ends up manifesting as a result.

And it sounds to me like Clary's doing a really good job of helping you automate and streamline and manage that process so things don't get out ahead of you guys. Is that correct? I would say not only that for us internally, but also for my buyers. So like I have mutual action plans that are created within Clary that I then share with my customers so they're able to dive in and jump in and recourse me if I'm on where I have a mile

incorrect or timeline incorrect. And so when you think about it from that perspective, it's not just my manager pressure testing me. I've like, Are you sure you're going to commit this this quarter? Are you sure you can bring it in? And then it just be this weird conversation that slips every quarter, right? Like they can directly see that I'm engaged with my buyer, what my buyer is signing themselves up for, how my buyer is holding themselves accountable.

And if we both are missing that mark, it becomes a how can my leader come in and help orchestrate or help guide into a better success path forward versus a weird interrogation and then this emptiness with the customer, whether you know or you don't know the information. So I think it just opens the lens in general between not only what's happening internally but also externally with my buyers to know what to expect from me.

That's, that's critical. And, and one of the things I admire about your methodology and your, your daily practice is and you hit upon it earlier and the phrase you used was learning together. And it's something that I think is so important. And I can understand why Clary's helping you there, because it's helping create visibility, what you are learning together with your customer.

But that thing about helping the customer learn things about themselves, about their own process, about their own challenges and their needs that they may not be fully aware of as they get into the sales cycle with you is so critical to building that. Trust and that long term relationship and the platform upon which you're going to create this, this contract, if you will, of delivering value to

them. Yeah. And that's, that goes so much more deeper than just, you know, what other people in the industry are doing.

And, and you would hit also earlier on about talking about how things are changing about the way people are buying. How is that ability to help the customer learn about themselves? How does that translate to success over the terms of your engagement with them? Yeah. So I think the way that I like to leverage this particular kind of relationship with my customers is I'm an extension of their team. I want to be able able to jump

in and support them. I want them to feel confident about any of the presentations, any of the paperwork I'm putting in front of them. They should also feel very fluid about how to approach it, how to present it also to other folks. I think one of the things in this lens of time that folks are getting away from, as I mentioned earlier, this concept of ROI. So the way that I approach ROI is it takes multiple decisions that need to be made.

It's not just the number that they're trying to get the return on investment of. It's what actually are you serving for my group that I can hold to a measurable attainment. So how has your of being a customer with us impacted you in comparison to what you were doing before? And so I like to paint that picture and then decide who should be held accountable for what and how, how can I showcase the change of that within our time together in presales,

right. So it's really about weighing what exactly does value mean to who and then understanding how do we then go showcase that back to their team? And is it a buyer or just one person who owns the check that you need to go get that answer from? Or is there multiple validations that need to happen across multiple different places and then we're going to get an

answer? One thing that I do to help empower my prospects and my customers throughout this process is really sit with them and really understand how do they buy, How do they sell? Then I can almost mimic that same home, same phrasing that they're using to then approach the way that they're using our platform and be able to use it a lot better instead of force feeding a feature function that may or may not hit the mark with the way that their maturity

curve is with technology. Yeah, I like that. We had a guest on several weeks ago that was a kind of a value consultant and his thing was like speaking the language of the customer, not in your language. Understanding that and really hearing how they express their problems and the solution and how they care about it is all really important in that process. I'm just curious from just the way that you go to these opportunities, do you work with an SC that helps you?

Do you work with consultants? What does your team look like and how do you kind of orchestrate that during the course of delivering or executing on this opportunity? Yeah. So I typically just partner with an SEI, don't have a BDR. I use robots for most of that stuff. So it's again new age of time, but I'm going into most of these conversations with just an SE. What I want to drive with the customer, however, is that

strategic lens. So I think, Kevin, you mentioned this a little bit earlier too, of what value or how exactly are you providing value through this process? And I think it's a part of this evolution too, between humans and AI, where an AI robot or something can spit me out a follow up e-mail, which is great. But what touch can I put on it that will make the buyer feel like, oh, this is something that I can use or this is something

that I actually care about. And that's where I think that I personally love to share what I call my liturgy or enthusiasm or the efforts that I put towards the project. But what I'm really trying to do is create that experience where they're not just using a tool, but it's a structure of how they're adopting to use it long term.

So is it something that they're checking in with their teams on or is it a persona that does something specifically in the tool that they're held accountable to do every week? Like what is that cadence we're building with them?

And then the way that I also think about this is again, there's this is a market where you can have a spot solution for just the call recorder or just the note taker or just the forecasting or my lovely spreadsheet that's hiding, you know, like there's multiple different ways that people go in and take on these different solutions. Understanding that is a big part of my process. So just taking it apart, undoing it, redoing it, understanding

why it was built that way. Why shouldn't you change? Why would you change? And then really getting them to realize what is that process? Because the biggest fear for most folks when they're buying is just the change, right? And if you can hand hold me through the change, I'll probably be a lot happier and a lot easier to go talk about it than me being very unfamiliar with something, not knowing how to do this. I've never done it before.

And that's really the value that you're driving almost from a human, human behavior perspective. You've touched on one thing I think is really critical is after all the years in enterprise sales and in business, it's really about process optimization, understanding the process and be able to optimize it.

And, you know, so that's part of the solution that you're delivering because I love that because a lot of times it was about actually helping your customer figure out how they're going to make this thing happen, right?

It's about, you know, how are they going to implement what's that's going to look like? Can you hold their hand through this process? And the more that you can convey that that's the case, the more likely they are to trust you to go to the next step. Because it's not always about the money. They have money to spend, but it's like, I'm going to spend this money. Am I going to get the value I need out of it? And the value is it's going to be used, right?

You brought up a really good point with that that I love, which is you become an advisor. The way that I like to put this had on is like you need to be a trusted advisor when you're in these conversations. The greatest analogy I have for this is if you just bought a house and you're trying to install flooring and you're gonna call flooring person and they're gonna give you a tile, a carpet, like all these different options and you're gonna have to choose something, right?

If I know that I'm going to go fill my bathroom with something and someone comes directly and says, well, you need this carpet. Like I probably wouldn't listen to them as much as I would someone that's talking to me about tile in a bathroom, right? So it's just being very simple about what is it that you're dealing with that is the problem or is it just a optimization you're looking to have within the business? And let's focus on that core piece. Most customers I speak with,

it's I'm trying to go IPO. We missed our forecast last couple quarters and we need to get back on a better trajectory. I'd rather spend time talking about that knowing that it holds a lot more weight across the entire company than me saying there's the call recorder, it can help you take notes afterwards. And this is going to drive you impact in a certain way. It won't, it won't, it will miss

the mark entirely, right? Like you need to bring the information that you're learning, be agile with the different personalities, different people that you're involving yourself with within the buying committee and then determine the right solution for them that comes from that trusted advising place. Well thank God. Carpeted bathrooms I think went out in the 70s. You know, you're bringing up an aspect of selling that is I think an elevated way of being able to engage the customers.

We're not talking about what our solution does. We're talking about the value of having us there and not necessarily just as a product, but as a partner going forward. And you're mapping the value with them and reaching across going you need to fix this problem and it's critical to the entire enterprises. You were just describing that it is a bigger issue that has a broader footprint and a broader impact on the overall success of the organization.

How often are you able to bring that part of the conversation to a sales cycle where it's like it's not just the product you're getting, you're getting us. We're going to work with you and we're going to collaborate with you to create this awesome degree of value and success. I think I do it pretty often.

It's critical for my sales process personally. The reason why I say that is because if you're not diving into the why, you're likely going to get a churned customer 2 years from now, right? And as someone that's closed multi $1,000,000 here at Clary, I hold that weight very seriously, right? Where if I'm driving the value and the intention really early, I know exactly what their expectation is going to be 5 years from now when I'm asking

for them to renew again, right? So I think one of the key pieces that sometimes people might overlook for example, is what is it that will help me see the customer differently? And then how can I apply this again and again and again so that I have a pipeline full with deals that can convert versus this one deal I'm banking on and it must come in, otherwise I'm

going to miss my number, right? There's that balance of trades of you owe it to yourself as well to find those common denominators across your account patch and say, OK, great. This is a typical problem that I'm seeing across these different businesses. And now I can be a consultant on how I've seen others attack that one solution versus again, feature function go to battle, put on my box and gloves with every vendor that's in every single one of these accounts.

Like it doesn't make sense to do that. So I think it being maniacally focused on what is it that the business is trying to solve and then attach myself to that. And then the other mentality that I like to keep that's a little bit different is you can't have this limiting belief that the whole company is also going to reach out to this customer and they will only know about us because all of the great work our whole teams doing.

Like, no, as a sales Rep, you are the sole person that is responsible for that relationship. And so if there's a way that I can either at least know about what they're going through or understand or meet the leaders that are controlling a lot of what's happening in those companies, like that's a bigger win for me because I'm understanding a lot more things beyond what the scope of their my accounts are deal by deal basis, but also my whole

territory. And how can I be successful across my whole territory versus having this limiting belief that I am the only person that's going to get benefit from all the pipeline that's going to come to me? It's like, no, you need to go do it and you are the person that they want to hear from. There's a degree of investment in the relationship that you're talking about, and you're bringing your own value beyond just what the organization and

the solution is doing there. And I love that phrase you meant about not going down and getting into a knife fight in a phone booth over feature function. Well, I've got this button, which is better than their button. What advice would you give to an AE out there? Who's listening to the podcast? Who's struggling with getting the conversations above that? What kind of tactics or practices can they put in place to try and and avoid getting

themselves boxed in? Because I hear people on calls, they'll box themselves into that conversation. What advice would you give? Them I would say know your strengths and play to them. Let me give you an example of what that means to me. So for example, I come across Salesforce and every ideal they are, every customer has to have sales force. And so any person that I'm engaged with, they at least have the knowledge of what sales

force brings to the table. Where I see myself as a kind of a differentiator in where I would run with this advice is you don't have to be that person. Know them well enough to know the expectations that they would deliver and then go challenge that. Just know that you're not stuck in this box of OK, I need to do another demo. I need to go do another like technical qualification, like I need to go do something else that is in your typical workflow.

It's OK to break things up. I have a lot of pipeline. So I like to disqualify just as much as I like to qualify. And so one of the things that I like to do with that is be OK with saying, yeah, Salesforce, go run your course with them by week 4. This is where I would be if you are not there by week 4, we should be friends outside of this Zoom conversation. And you need to call me on a serious note and say I have X budget and I only have X much time because I made the wrong decision.

Like those come from a very confident place, but as a seller, you need to be comfortable with being agile enough to make those decisions for yourself. No one's going to give you that kind of overhead advice either of like this one's going a little S maybe let's close lost

it and we'll focus over here. It's like you need to be able to know, hey, what can I do differently within this deal from a strategic perspective that might have to put it on the back burner for a second only for me to play faster later. So I would say my biggest advice to anyone listening to this podcast, please take away from this that don't stay in your box. Be authentic, use your strengths and double down on whatever those strengths are in a very confident. Manner, yeah, I love that.

And also, you know, having that North star of the value that you're delivering always helps because you know, you can pivot however you want, but you're always calling back to what they want to do. Maybe your tactic is different or your approach is a little bit different, but you know, the the ultimate goal remains the same. One more question for you before

we kind of wrap up here. But you know, getting back to process, I think you said, you know, one of the things you loved about Clary is the fact that it helped you kind of cover the blocking and tackling of all the things that go on and opportunity allowing you to focus on the things that are more important. I think one of the things you said was FaceTime, but what are the other high value things that

you can do? Once you have all these other things taken care of, Where would you focus your time? Yeah, I always like to focus my time on where else can I optimize, right. So if I look at my last sales cycle that I did was half the time that I normally spend on a sales cycle that large. And so it was a lot of OK, great, I have this time now given back to me, where can I

fine tune things? And so as part of this learning experience in the deal I just closed last week, it was OK, great, Chachi BT can help me in XYZ ways, but how do I get dangerous with it where I'm starting to think more ahead than I typically would? And how can I get ahead of those things a lot sooner and maybe put it on a calendar or like put it on as the agenda for the next meeting, right.

So for me, it's always reflecting on what could be different and how I could be different, but using that time wisely to then use it with the customer. So again, I mentioned earlier, I spend way too much time in customer meetings, which is the best thing in my world. But having the time to spend with those customers or meet with more people within that particular buying committee or the influencing committee is going to move my deal a lot faster than me doing another prep doc.

I like bite my tongue saying that because I love my prep docs, but at the same time I know that if I just hit the phones and talk to people I'll get more accurate information. Right. Go, go where the money is and go where the money generates, right? I always say if this actually I constantly ask myself this question if I do a task or if I'm in a meeting, it's like, is this revenue generating activity or how can I make it a revenue generating activity? That's, that's great advice.

That's a great perspective to look at those things, right? And that's a, that's a really valuable litmus test to use on anything you're doing on a day-to-day basis. Lynn, one of the reasons why I was so excited about bringing you on to the call today is because I really think there's so many practical things that you've brought up today about how you engage your customers, selling, solutioning.

If there's are people out there that are sitting there going, I just can't get stuff to land, I'm spinning my wheels, why am I not making more progress on my quota? What advice would you give them If they're just they just don't know what to do next? Say go find a friend in the company and learn from them. It could be anybody, but at least you'll have a litmus test of what's happening if you're even hitting a wall at that aspect. I just like to get creative with just who humans are.

This sounds really crazy, but you know, if you're networking with a bunch of people that live in a big city or there's a different topic that is top of mind for people that are in that region or an event or something specific that can gravitate their attention towards something that might be helpful or it might be valuable for them. Or find that common relation with them and then try to attract it from that perspective.

But my always go to is find a friend and network as much as you can within the account because the knowledge that you'll gather can inform what you're actually orchestrating in the deal itself. And then you can always pivot and ask for guidance and questions from those early people that you tried to network with or get advice from. That's great advice. I concur.

I, I do believe that mentorship and and collaboration, sometimes it can only take a matter of a few tweaks and it can have tremendous impact on your overall success. I know that mentorship is extremely important to you. If there are people that want to reach out to you, Lynn and, and find out more about you, what you do, your philosophy or seek guidance from you. Is there you being their phone, a friend? What's the the best way for them

to reach out to you? Yeah, the best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn so you can find me at Lynn Powers. The other high loving advice I would give to anyone looking to grow their career or get some type of mentorship in sales is Women in Revenue also has a really great mentorship program. So if you're not involved with them or if you're looking for a new mentor, looking for someone to mentor you or a group to be surrounded by, really great place to go is so great.

Also to spend time with folks here, I would love to get people's feedback if there's any questions that they have on my particular deal process or how I typically engage or how do I over perform So much so happy to chat with you one-on-one. Send me a message. Well, and we'll make sure we put that in the notes for the episode. It'll be in the description. So people will reach out to you on LinkedIn and they can also get find out more about women in

revenue as well. Matt, turn the turn over to you. Anything you'd like to go and share with Lynn before we go and bring your episode to the close? No, it's just been a pleasure talking with you, Lynn. I love your enthusiasm as well as just your methodical approach to things that differently dovetails nicely with our careers and kind of things that we thought were important. So thanks again for sharing everything you've shared today. Absolutely.

Thanks for joining us, Matt. Lynn, thank you so much for coming out of the call. I enjoyed this conversation immensely, just like all the other ones we've had. And I look forward to future ones we're going to be having again in the future. But we do need to bring the episode to a close, much to my chagrin. But thanks to you for coming in and talking with us today. And thanks to the listeners who've been listening to today's

episode. Folks, if you love what you hear here, drop us a comment like, follow, subscribe, share your thoughts with us so we can bring more great content to you that matches what it is you guys need if you want to know more about the methodology that you've heard us bending. Back and forth about today, go onto the website and buy, you get the link over to being able to buy your own copy of our methodology. You can find the links to do

that there. But unfortunately we are going to bring this episode to a close and looking forward to being able to go. I'm here. We bit of an echo just waiting for it to go away. So folks, thank you for spending time and we're going to be able to coming back again next week with another great guest and hopefully we'll have Lynn back on again soon. Thank you very much. We'll talk together soon.