In sales, customer champions can often become your very best friends.
But cultivating them can be tough.
To help you transform customers into the ultimate advocates, David Graswick (Databook’s VP of Global Sales) will be hosting a community roundtable on Thurs. 7/11 that’s all focused around giving you a clear path to success with an army of customer champions by your side.
But first, ask him anything in advance!
Drop all your question below… and then make sure to RSVP HERE to join the virtual discussion.
REALLY looking forward to this session with Dave! Question for Dave:
Since the time you that you began your career in sales to today, what’s the biggest change that you’ve seen in building and cultivating customer champions? What has changed and what DOESN’T work, the way it used to?
i.e., For myself, back in the early 2000s, we could build relationships and champions within our accounts, by taking them fancy dinners and sporting events. That doesn’t work as well today. We have to know their business challenges better than they do and offer REAL business value, not just a “Good time”. I’m wondering if this is what your experience as well?
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thanks but nothing to ask
How do you balance internal pressure to get higher / engage top-down with the need to maintain the level of trust you’ve built with your champions? Even great champions can be hesitant to make executive/c-suite introductions, often promising to make these connections “at the right time”. In my experience, the confidence in your champion (and belief that this person has the juice to get something done) isn’t always shared by your leadership team which can lead to pressure to go over their head. I’m curious how you’ve handled this in the past.
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@will.valera.1 's question is a good one.
Since COVID we have been remote and everyone has been on back to back to back virtual meetings making it hard for small talk upfront.
Today, I am seeing interest in meetings becoming shorter and shorter making it harder to spend that time to build rapport which in turn makes it a challenge to identify a potential champion (step 1). I am on the fence if it is harder to build a champion or take a long time to do it.
So the question is, what have you seen done successfully to identify and build a champion while still in a virtual world?
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We’ve often seen that while a customer may be a fan of our product, they don’t want to say anything publicly because they don’t want to give their competition visibility into what they are doing. How have you seen this hurdle overcome?
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