Mark Cranny

“If I'm getting an RFI, if I'm getting an RFP, and I haven't gotten out in front of it and influenced that, I've probably wasted my time.”

“The first question we're going to have to ask ourselves and that the buyer's going to ask themselves or prospect is, why should I do anything? I mean, anything different than what I'm doing now? The second is why you know, versus the competition, and the third…”

“Another kind of rule of thumb, be able to put together kind of ranges, you know, conservative versus aggressive, because it's very rare that you're going to go in and get the entire environment up front, that that's going to build over time.”

“Understand that process trumps heroics every time.”

“Here's the as is, here's the to be, you know, you really kind of need to think about, all right, well, they don't recognize they're sick. Let's help them. Recognize the unrecognized pain. And then show them a path to what could be with our value proposition.”

“In all of these situations, if you take a large organization, you break it down into threes. What are the CEOs or CXOs or senior management care about? It's going to be more of those high-level things, high-level strategies and initiatives, and it's really mor…”

“So one of the things this does is going to insulate us From a sales process standpoint, particularly later on, we might need to be negotiating because I'm going to know when, if I'm, you know, rolling up six, seven, or even eight digit proposal, and you know, …”

“Particularly in a startup and or high growth situation where I'm selling something that's completely new because of a platform shift, it's a new way of doing things, is there's not recognition of that new way of doing things. And very common in my career where…”

“So competitive, high courage, focused discipline, people that have a little bit of charisma, you know, a lot of intellectual horsepower and can think quickly on their feet and people that can take a beating, right? That they can actually go in and take a lot o…”

“The problem with getting a real VP of sales or a big executive too early is they're there to scale, and if you're still wandering around a little bit in the desert trying to figure out the fit, you might be a little early there.”

“And you don't get that sitting in a cube in, you know, San Francisco or Silicon Valley. You get that from walking the halls Of these big organizations and really understanding, you know, what their initiatives are and how you're to be able to map up what your …”

“And actually, they get more productive the less territory they have, the less amount of accounts that they have, because they're able to, it kind of forces the situation to do, you know, where you're penetrating deeper into accounts, getting a lot more intimat…”

“The need may not be there, but I think CEOs might be being pretty short-sighted that there's not going to be competition down the line, particularly as they try to expand inside a account.”

“It's way easier to go down than it is to go up.”

“Somebody that gets excited about doing this exact thing, it's typically not the one that's been running in somebody's playbook. It's the one that really understands how to go create that playbook from scratch.”

“If you're not reviewing, you know, a win loss type report on a monthly, at least a quarterly, you know, some kind of fairly frequent cadence, depending on what's going on in your business and in the market and doing the postmortems on both sides of that. I thi…”

“It's very common on the inside type bottoms up motion that particularly as you, they build out the management that sometimes you, they'll miss moving up market because the BP might not have that skillset, you know, to go build out that next level.”

“One trap a lot of CEOs or founders might fall into here is I'm going to go hire somebody that's selling something similar to what I sell.”

“If it's something that requires you to come in high and move left and right and be agile in the organization as well as up and down, and because of the complexity is, that typically means there's also going to be a big outlay, either cap, capital and or Operat…”

“In almost any proposal type situation, we wanted to Have not only your initial pricing per unit set, but you need to go model and understand what would happen if that customer adopted throughout their entire enterprise. Now early on, it sounds like a pipe drea…”

“You can have that, you know, that beachhead established, but if you're just spending all your time going to establish another beachhead at another company, you're at risk of getting pushed out by the incumbent and or somebody that's got that organizational con…”

“And if you don't really know how they're depositioning you can go through a whole cycle and come up empty at the end because they've laid the traps. They've set the criteria. And if you don't know enough about your competition to understand when you're walking…”