In this episode of #NutsAboutSales, we speak to Dan Wardle, VP of Revenue at Vidyard.
Watch our interview with this sales industry pro to learn his wisest B2B sales tips, what he hates about the current SaaS sales process, and what he thinks is the biggest mistake to avoid in your sales pitch.
Watch it now or read the transcripts below:
What’s your name and where do you work?
I’m Dan Wardle and I’m the VP of Revenue at Vidyard.
What’s your most embarrassing sales story?
Going back 10 years, Movember the charity was new, so not a lot of people knew about it yet, but I had grown the mustache for the month of November and I showed up to a meeting in Wisconsin and all of the guys at that meeting had real mustaches, not for charity.
And they were all like, “What are you doing?”
And I had to explain the charity to them and that I wasn’t making fun of them, I was doing it for a cause.
What’s the worst mistake to avoid in sales?
Getting desperate.
Creating artificial urgency. You’re not actually helping their business if you’re forcing them to start using it when they don’t actually need to use it.
What part of the sales process do you hate the most?
It’s at the end.
Everyone still has this mentality that you have to negotiate, you’ve got to go back and forth. We’re both adults now, you should just be able to say: “Yes, I want your platform, give me the right price.”
What’s the most genius move you’ve made to save a deal?
This wasn’t me, I’m going to give this to one of the reps on my team. She remembered that this person, somehow it came up that they liked Arnold Schwarzenegger. She went on that app, Cameo, and got him to make a little video to send to the client. And the person responded right away.
What’s your best sales tip?
The pendulum effect. If you’re trying to drag someone over the line, if you’re trying to prove to them why they need to close, they will always swing away from you.
What’s your biggest challenge when demoing?
The biggest challenge when demoing is always being derailed by the customer.
Especially when you’re dealing with multithread, 20 people on the demo. Making sure you’re keeping people focused on the value they’re going to derive and not getting down into the features and functionality all the time.
How do you celebrate closing a big deal?
We had three floors and we drilled a hole right through all three floors and put a post down and attached it to three church bells.
So when you closed a bigger deal you can go up and grab that pole and shake it up and down and it would ring all three bells at the same time.
Sell me a walnut!
This morning, my wife and I went for a walk down the road … and all of a sudden we realize that this little tree next to us has a walnut.
So now you’ve got this beautiful walnut that you can use in multiple ways. It could have been a picture there in the tree, you can use it to take it home and make some cookies out of it for the holidays, there’s a ton of different ways that you can use this walnut, it just depends on really what you need.
