GTM 128: The Death of Demos and Selling What Customers Actually Need with Fred Viet

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Fred Viet serves as the Chief Sales Officer at Aircall, overseeing global sales and playing a key role in scaling the company’s reach over the last four years. With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth.

Discussed in this Episode:

• The differences between selling in APAC and North America markets
• The evolving role of partnerships and channels in software sales
• Strategies for effective annual revenue planning
• The impact of AI on sales processes and team structures
• The future of SaaS pricing models and their implications for sales organizations

Highlights:

(3:29) Differences between selling in APAC and North America
(9:10) The importance of understanding your ICP in partnerships
(15:07) Advice on avoiding job-hopping early in your career
(19:59) The impact of AI on sales team structures
(24:34) The potential of AI to level the playing field for SMBs
(30:10) Mistakes to avoid in annual revenue planning
(35:46) The shift from demo-centric selling to value-based conversations
(41:38) Strategies for aligning sales and marketing teams
(31:55) One thing revenue leaders believe to be true that Fred thinks is bull$***: focusing too much on product demos
(43:28) One thing that is working for Fred/Aircall in go-to-market right now: leveraging the ecosystem and aligning sales and marketing

Guest Speaker Links (Fred Viet):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredviet/

Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
Website: https://gtmnow.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/

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Episode Transcript

Scott Barker:
Hello and welcome back to the GTM podcast. As always, you’ve got your host, Scott Barker. Thank you for joining us for the next 40, 45 minutes or so. We will do our best to pack it with as much value as we can, give you some tactics and strategies that hopefully you can implement. It is Q4 right now. It is the insane time of the year where you’re trying to get everything in the door while also planning for next year. But have a fantastic guest joining me today. I am joined by Fred Viet. Fred, welcome to the show.

Fred Viet:
Hey, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, as you said, it’s Q4. It’s crushing time.

Scott Barker:
Yeah. Well, the good news is it sounds like things are buzzing and alive at Aircall. We had to switch rooms actually right before we went live because of the noise coming from the sales floor. So that’s usually a good sign.

Fred Viet:
Yeah, we hope so. I mean, And as you can imagine, everyone is focused on closing the year. But also, I think what is important is prepping next year on, I would say, prepping Q1.

Scott Barker:
It’s always such a tough balance as leaders. It’s like, where do I focus my time? Like, I need to be in these deal calls. I need to understand, you know, day by day, my forecast is where we’re going to land. But then, you know, the bigger picture is we’re going to have a new quarter. We’re going to have a new year. How have you found balance or is there no such thing as balance sometimes?

Fred Viet:
I think there’s a few elements. The first one, I know my sales cycle. So that means I know how many months ahead I need to look at to make sure I’ve got enough pipelines. So if I look at a month or a quarter, you start and you say, okay, do we have enough pipeline? We need to build, we need to close. And then I would say… Last month, I started focusing not anymore on the closing, but I would say I switched 60% as well on, okay, what about next quarter? So it’s more this kind of repetitive mental model on balancing, and I balance based on my sales cycle, knowing that, okay, if I don’t look at that right now, I will be late and I will not be able to recover next quarter.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, makes total sense. Makes total sense. And quickly, just taking a step back for the listeners, I always like to do a super quick bio. And, you know, Fred is the chief sales officer at Aircall. You know, we’ve got a lot of revenue leaders and founders listening to this, so many are probably familiar with Aircall. But he oversees global sales and has been really instrumental in scaling the company’s reach over the last four years, starting originally in the APAC region and has also held leadership roles at AWS, which is pretty cool, Microsoft, Lenovo, and really just a proven track record of building high-performing teams and also active investor and advisor. One of my questions right away was just, you made this transition, at least at Aircall, from APAC and running that to now overseeing you know global what are some of the differences between selling in apac and selling in in north america hmm.

Fred Viet:
It’s a big difference. So I think I’m going to start with what is the same. And I think if you look at the Australian market, they are early adopter exactly as the U.S. In fact, it’s as a matter of fact, funny thing is, I think a few years ago, we were looking at the Fitbit adoption and it was higher than in the U.S. So roughly when you’ve got like a trend in the US you can expect that few months later it’s going to land in Australia so that’s I would say the common point the major difference is the scale of the markets it’s like, more than 10 times bigger so that means when you think about an action or when you think about like your organization or your reach, you need to think at scale. Where in Australia, you can be a bit scrappy. That’s going to work because your market is not so big. As soon as you move to the US, you need to think, okay, you can start being scrappy, but very, very soon in your progress, you need to think about system and process that helps you to really scale and I would say maximize the reach you’ve got on the market.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, that makes sense. And would you suggest, let’s say I’m an early stage leader listening to this, should I dip my toes into the Australian market? Is it worth going into that or should it feel like more of a natural pull and then you resource it more?

Fred Viet:
The mental model we had, and we are doing expansion as well in other markets currently, is, Always trying to have some early signal. I like what you say about making sure the market is pulling you. Because I think when you start having the signal that, I’ve got a product market fit, I’ve got organic traction, I can win, I can keep my customer. Okay, let’s go on invest. But I would say the first mental model is always to look at early signal. and I would say making sure the market is pulling us instead of trying to force too much in this direction.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, for sure. I remember, and this is maybe outdated because I haven’t ran BD teams in many years now, but back in the day, if it didn’t look like we were going to hit our number that month, we would set up Aussie hours where my team would cold call into Australia. And I always found it, because I’d be in there with my team, an enjoyable market to cold call into. I don’t think they’re as against cold calling as maybe the U.S. Market has become over the last little bit. Or maybe they’re just friendlier. I don’t know.

Fred Viet:
It’s a different culture. But funny enough, we did the same techniques. The U.K. team, we were like, hey, any volunteer to experience something new? And then we had like few BTRs start like early morning or late evening trying to call and reach out the Australian market and we had like traction then we said okay, We need to be closer to our customer. We need to be inside the ecosystem because that’s a key model for us. So let’s go and land the team there.

Scott Barker:
For sure. Yeah. I remember that being a question that did come out a lot was, do you have an office out here? Like, I think there’s like almost a sense of like pride or they want you to be close or have like an Australian presence. I think that’s true in a lot of different regions. And on that note, I do want to shout out our analyst, Amit Aloni, who did some great work here at GTM Fund, had the itch because he was around all these operators and felt getting operating experience would ultimately lead him to being a better investor. And he’s now the newest BDR at Aircall, which is super cool. And our mutual friend and one of your sales directors, Elizabeth Nimchak, I know was instrumental in making that happen. So a lot of good friends over at Aircall, and you continue to hire great people and talent.

Fred Viet:
That’s good. Thanks.

Scott Barker:
Awesome. Well, what I wanted to dive into, because it’s a personal passion of mine, I’ve been in kind of a partnerships function for a while, at least while I was an operator at Outreach. And I know you’ve had some great experience, particularly while you were at AWS, running different partner sales, channel sales. And I still think that it is a sort of a loosely defined role in software, at least at like kind of earlier stage companies. I think if you talk to 10 different partnership managers, they’re doing 10 different things, and they will describe their role differently. I guess, From your time at AWS and now at Aircall, how have you seen partnerships work and how do you actually make that channel be a productive force for revenue growth versus just spending time doing co-branded webinars and doing fun things that make you feel good, but maybe don’t actually affect the bottom line?

Fred Viet:
Yeah. Partnership is a fun beast. And to be fair, the funny part is I started in the channel in hardware. And that’s a completely different model because it’s a reseller model most of the time or an MSP. And I think all this kind of knowledge we had changed when we came with cloud. And I remember at AWS, suddenly there’s no margin. They cannot resell. So they need to reinvent themselves. They need to start building a repeatable product based on AWS. They need to be able to, I would say, build services on top of the software. And I think that’s where we are currently with more and more of the SaaS model.

Fred Viet:
On to your first point, I think we use partnership, but it means so many different things. If I look at for example Aircall partnership can be the tech partner we in SaaS we operate in an ecosystem your customer they’ve got like a tech stack, they use for example outreach or some other solution so you need to really understand what is if you look at your ICP what is their tech stack on how your product can be Part of that, how it can be integrated on that means it will bring value to your customer, based on automation, based on how all those, I would say, different software is going to interact with each other. So that’s one part, I would say, of the alliance. And then it can be as well what I call a route to market. That’s, as you mentioned, it’s what we call the system integrator, the VAR, the MSP. And I think here you’ve got another mentor model.

Fred Viet:
Does it need to be a lead source? Or if you look at, for example, some of the CRM, they started and they say, okay, my solution is a bit complex. And if I want to scale, I need people who can implement for me. And it’s not my business to do, I would say, professional services. So they start to create, I would say, an ecosystem of system integrator that are going to be certified, that are going to implement instead of like the software company implementing. So that’s one model that work on the more you’re going to build that, then the challenge to, I would say, switch and help your partner to switch from an implementation model to more like a sales engine as well. And that’s where I would say most of the software company on the channel they are struggling is they are really good in terms of technical capabilities but are they able to go and help you to grab a grab new customer so um that’s one of the biggest challenges i think in uh in early stages is define where you’re going to spend time.

Scott Barker:
Yeah for sure and then there’s all like these sort of mom and pops shop like consulting services so you know we have like fractional executives now and all of those can be sort of channels there’s like you could almost put uh the rise of like influencer marketing there’s like a partnership component to that of how do you enable these folks that uh maybe have a wide reach to either resell or bring customers or talk well about you but it’s certainly it’s an interesting space the partnerships piece.

Fred Viet:
But I think to your point is I think the first one is to always define your ICP the more you understand, your customer and their behavior you will be able to understand okay what are the tech partners I need to work with, On that mean, we can do co-marketing or things like that, but it’s very precise. On how those customers are buying, who are the trust advisors? It’s exactly that, the trust advisor. Sometimes it’s the IT shop at the corner. They went to the same school. It was clearly the case in Australia, for sure. So you need to have that because those, especially if you think about SMB, They don’t have, I would say, technical people inside their organization. So they really want to have a trust advisor. But again, it comes back to really understanding your ICP, their behavior. Based on that, you work backwards, you pick the right, I would say, type of partner you want to work with.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, totally. I agree. Yeah, it could be a center at the enterprise, or it could be, as you said, the small fractional CRO that happens to work with everyone in a fintech vertical, if you sell into fintech, or you got to, you know, map those out. So, all right, I want to go to the next section of the pod, which people love, is when we kind of speak through stories, lived experiences, and I’ll keep this pretty open-ended, but, do you mind sharing a story from one of the most impactful moments of your career? And then maybe we’ll try and tease out some learning. So we’ll jump you in a time machine and go back to whatever moment sticks out in your head.

Fred Viet:
It’s more an advice that I receive. And I think it was in the first two years of my career. In 2017.

Fred Viet:
You start, you think you’re really good, and you’ve got a lack of self-awareness. You don’t go really deep. On every single six months, you want to change job. You know, I’ve got that. I’ve done that. Smashed my target twice. So what’s next? And I remember I was quite pushy saying, hey, what’s next? What’s next? And one of, I think he’s still a mentor, he was my sales director. And they look at me and say, Fred, your generation, they are in front of the TV because at this time it was more the TV than I would say an iPad. And they are switching programs. You don’t go to the end. And that’s exactly what you’re doing. So you don’t take the time to really go deep. So instead of having very strong skills, you’re going to go at the surface. You’re going to move yeah perhaps but then all those gaps they are going to resurface some sometime and that’s where it’s going to be really hard to, overcome that because you you’re going to accumulate gaps, and it will be too late so I think it was I always use this this one I, say the same thing to my team sometime when we are in a hurry but yeah that was a really good advice that I received.

Scott Barker:
Yeah. So incredibly important. We’re always in a rush to get to the outcome or the next step, but like, you know, it sounds cliche, but like that journey and that progression is where you’re actually developing all of the skills that will in turn serve you for that next chapter. Because there is a chapter after the outcome or the promotion or whatever. You then have to go and be successful at that. and had an interesting conversation with Pete Kazanji, a good friend on the podcast the other day of… In a similar vein of we’re adopting all this technology and we’re automating so many things. You know, we’ve got AI, STRs and AI now like cold calling and things. And it’s actually robbing us and the younger talent of like learning the muscle on how to do those things. And maybe it’s a great thing that we can automate more and more of this, but how can we be intentional where we’re still building the muscles, like the function of cold calling is yes to book a meeting, but it’s also teaching you grit. It’s teaching you resilience. It’s teaching you all these byproducts of you actually doing the thing. And I thought it was interesting to think about the trade-offs we make when we lean into technology and we’re outsourcing the job, but we’re also outsourcing the skills that are developed by doing that job.

Fred Viet:
I agree with you on that. I think I’m a big fan of AI. Clearly, it’s going to help us. It’s going to help us to accelerate on, I would say, reduce the time we spend on non-very useful tasks. But the point is, sometimes people, they think AI is going to do the job for them. If I look at one thing, we all think about consultative selling, about active listening. And I think there’s a bias currently on the market thinking that, hey, because I’ve got the AI taking the notes on everything, they are going to come with a solution. No it’s going to help you reduce the time you’ve got after or whatever it’s going to guide, but the reality i think the one that are going to emerge is the one that are going to go and spend more time to to develop those soft skills like the one that are transposable, and they’re going to use ai to enhance those one and uh it’s going to be interesting in the in the in the next few months or years.

Scott Barker:
Do you think AI is going to reduce our overall headcounts on revenue teams? Or do you think that it’s just going to, maybe that the rules will shift and we’ll have more of these like GTM architects and quarterbacks that are overseeing these different motions? Or do you think it’s just going to enhance the people that we have and make them you know 30-40% more productive.

Fred Viet:
I think at the end of the day we all look at one thing is we need to grow the business and you want to grow, but also you want to make sure you grow in a profitable way so, what I see and it’s I don’t know if you had the same discussion with some other sales leader but it’s funny the SaaS we used to have like I’ve got SDR for the inbound. I’ve got BDR for the outbound. And then I’ve got the A. The A is just a closer. But tomorrow, you could have exactly the same number of people. Your AE are becoming a bit more full cycle. So instead of having 10 BTR on 10 AE, you could have like five BTR that are really focused on a very specific segment and you’ve got 15 AE that are a bit more full cycle. That’s one example. The other example as well is it can help you to be more productive on a segment, a lower segment. So that means you’ve got the right economics and then you use your, I would say, a high-end resource towards a bigger segment where you know you will have better return on investment with bigger deals. So I think it’s going to help us to really reallocate the resource where you’ve got the best return on investment and have a more granular targeting operating model.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, I tend to agree, particularly on the point of people becoming more full cycle. And I think a lot of roles will get more well-rounded. I think for the last 10 years, everyone was like, specialize, specialize. You got to find your lane and hyper-specialize. And I think AI is going to see the rise of the generalist again, because you can have maybe some sort of AI co-pilot that does the job of a technical solutions engineer for you and so you can you can outsource some of that like technical knowledge and then you can have a lot of automation and that is helping book book meetings and so it’s more about understanding how to orchestrate all of that um as one and like it’s going to be interesting to see that the evolution but um we’ll see how it how it all all plays out but interesting interesting times um i wanted to get your outlook um because we are planning season we talked about it in the uh the beginning of this this interview what what’s your outlook for for 2025 it looks like there’s some you know we’ve got the ai revolution happening maybe the biggest uh, likely the biggest technological boom that we’ve seen in my lifetime and maybe in the history of humanity. The market seemed to like the election results.

Scott Barker:
Not political in any way, but the market seems to be reacting correctly. We saw Service Titan actually today go out and IPO, and I think they shot up from 71 to like 101. There seems like hope. What’s your outlook for 2025? Do you think this is going to keep going? Are we going to see a rebound? Maybe budgets unlock a little bit?

Fred Viet:
I don’t know if I’ve got the answer, to be fair. I’m more on the optimistic side. Perhaps that’s why I’m in sales. I would say perhaps my CFO has got a different opinion. The first point is, where do you play? There are still a lot of markets that are really deep. We are just at the surface. And I think, you know, you mentioned the AI, I think we’re at the early stage of trying to understand what we can do and what is the real total addressable market on that. You know, if I look at our business, we were thinking, oh, the AI is going to be a headwind, you know, people are going to be replaced by AI. And what does it mean for business model? The rate is it’s becoming a tailwind more than we were thinking. So it’s increasing our total addressable markets so so i think it’s uh overall i’m i’m quite uh quite positive um, then of course it depends on on on the market uh us is going in the right direction there are some other parts of of the world that are perhaps a bit uh, 2025 is going to be tougher, I do think.

Scott Barker:
Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s both, like, yeah, geography and then also just, like, sectors of the economy. Our others are ripe for opportunity. I think one of the things that AI has done, particularly, like, you know, recently, like, OpenAI and what they did brilliantly was, you know, ChatGPT getting in the hands of, like, consumers. So you have to see, like, how far we’ve come. Like anyone can go interact with it and you’re like, wow, this is where we’re at with technology. And part of what that did, I think, was force a lot of these other sectors of the economy outside of tech, outside of the bubble that a lot of us live in to go and reevaluate, okay, how much have we actually digitally transformed in like shipping logistics, insurance, financial services? Some of these, you know, you walk in to an office on my building, and there’s still many that will look like they did in like the 80s, you know, and they’re not full with this crazy tech stack that we all have. And so there’s so much of the economy. And I think just the buzz around AI is making all the leaders at all of those companies go and evaluate kind of the technology that they have, which I think will be a really big, big opportunity.

Fred Viet:
I mean I think an example that is quite close for me is got a lot of like SMB business in the US on the, And sometimes, you know, when you start or they’re starting a business, e-commerce, whatever, they don’t want to have like a phone number on their web because they don’t want to have someone who has to answer to this phone and it’s going to slow them down. So they are scared. I can help them to solve that. So then it can help them to really move to be more digital and accelerate their growth as well. So I think you’re right, it’s going to help other verticals, other segments. And I’m a big believer in the SMB space. Of course, Fortune 500, they all have big money. They already have millions of consultants looking at that. But I think there’s a plan. It can really accelerate. It’s in the SMB. Like it’s a core of the business as well in the U.S. It’s still very important of the economy.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, yeah. Great point. And when I think of AI and calls, I always think of like robocalls going outbound. But the use case of like call arbitrage is incredibly helpful. You know, I think even on this like podcast, I obviously don’t keep my phone number out because I get way too many calls. But if I just said, hey, here’s actually what I have a problem with. Here’s my phone number. And then I just have AI sifting through the hundred phone calls and only get like, oh, these two actually can help you solve this problem, can make that introduction, can do that thing for you. It’s a very efficient way to do business.

Fred Viet:
Think about the small company, carpenter company or whatever. They are every day, they are working. I mean, they are on the ground. They are not on the phone, they are losing business, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, people try to reach, hey, are you available? Can I make an appointment? Are they going to hire someone to answer the phone? No. Can they use AI? Yes. So then it’s helping us to have a better, I would say, better reach to their customer on making sure that they don’t lose business. To the bigger guy who’s got like enough money.

Scott Barker:
A car center.

Fred Viet:
Yeah, a car center or whatever. So I think it’s interesting. You know, it’s a bit like, I think what we see with the cloud is the cloud a few years ago when I was at AWS, it helps smaller companies to disrupt bigger players because you don’t need to invest a lot and you’ve got this kind of pay as you go, you can innovate. That’s what we saw. I think AI is going to do the same thing. It’s helping the SMB, the emerging business, disrupt and change a bit the landscape in some areas.

Scott Barker:
Level the playing field a little bit, which is super cool. And to that point, I literally called a locksmith a few weeks back and just called until the first one answered. And the first one that answered got my business, you know, which is an exact example of that. But that’s, yeah, I think it will almost be both of like, we’ll have these, I think AI is also going to help the big get bigger, you know, the big models of the world will have these like huge huge companies and then we’ll have you know, more and more entrepreneurship and these like smaller smaller companies which i think is is cool um i want to go to a founder question because it’s right in kind of the vein of what we’re talking about we’re talking annual planning looking ahead um and this is a founder question and it is what are the biggest mistakes made in annual revenue planning uh looking back anytime time you’ve made annual plans? Have you made any mistakes that others can avoid?

Fred Viet:
We all it’s it’s a challenging exercise, you know, you, You want to be aggressive, but you don’t want to. If you’re too aggressive on you, too optimistic, I think the biggest mistake you can have is your growth is not there. You bet all your OPEX on this kind of growth, and then you’re in a very bad situation. So I would say what we always try to do is have a backup plan and say, okay, we’re going to invest, and we think the growth is going to come, but making sure you can put back or I would say redirect your investment if it doesn’t work.

Fred Viet:
And I would say back to the safe plan is, you need to understand that we are in tech and product is important part and you need to make sure you’ve got a strong alignment between the product and the go-to market. I think it’s, that’s not a, for me, disalignment is key. You know, okay, are we aligned that this new line of product is going to be able to bring this amount of revenue? Are we aligned on the roadmap? And sometimes I’ve seen too many disconnects between the product thinking or developing something without having like a, I would say good interaction with the go-to-market or the commitment from the go-to-market that yes, we can make this number. So the biggest mistake is thinking more like on a siloated way and not having product on go-to-market aligned.

Scott Barker:
The goals and plans will shift in accordance to the product roadmap and their ability to shift, right? They don’t live separately. If product isn’t shipping, the features that everyone agreed upon like that will have an impact. And pipeline and closed one is going to be closely aligned. So it’s almost like building in if this, then that statements into your plan. If this is missed over here, that is going to waterfall down into planning.

Fred Viet:
The other thing I’ve seen, to be fair, and especially, so I look at after the overall revenue, so not only the new sales, but I would say existing customer. And I’ve seen in the past, I think it changed a bit, but in the past I’ve seen too much about like, hey, let’s go on WinCustomer, on WeWin, WeWin, WeWin. And everyone is looking at that, but nobody is looking at the leaky bucket we’ve got. And it’s making sure when you look at your growth, it’s really understanding like, hey, what’s the percentage of growth should come from? New, because we are early stage, it’s all about like acquiring new customer, new logo. or your, Later in your company stages, okay, still a debt market to go after, but what can we do about our existing customer? What about the NR? I would say the market change, you know, five years ago, it was all about the organic. Know it’s more about the real value you can bring to your customer, the platform you’ve got, the multi-product you’ve got to be able to, I would say, increase your revenue per customer.

Scott Barker:
Yeah. I think 2025 is going to be the year of cross-sell, up-sell, renewals, because I think everyone seems like there’s not, a ton of appetite. and maybe this is shifting with new AI to link, but like an appetite to like try more. It’s like, okay, we’ve got a lot. Let’s make the most of it. And if you have been in the lucky position where you’re already a trusted partner, I think customers are going to trust you with the new technology that you bring to market versus a net new, you know, small startup that they don’t have a relationship with.

Fred Viet:
The other thing you mentioned, And I think the change we’re going to have as well is, okay, we all adore, I would say, pricing per seat. But now it’s like with AI, how you do that? You know, and we’ve seen like a lot of companies changing, like saying, hey, I’m going to invoice per, I would say, customer request closed. So it’s funny to see that the unit of economy is going to change and the pair agent is going perhaps to be only one part of the component and we’re going to have like a pair as you use or different unit of economy. So that’s, I think, is going to be one of the 2025 challenge.

Scott Barker:
Totally. I mean, that could be a whole other podcast, Yes, but something I’m thinking a lot of and have a close eye on is like, yes, pricing per seat seems to not have that long left, like shelf life. I think it’s going away. And then there was like, okay, maybe it’s consumption model. And then now we’re seeing the rise of like, kind of what you said, like an outcome model of like, okay, what are you using Aircall to do? Like, what is success? And then you’ll pay us every time, you know, these success models are reached.

Fred Viet:
Yeah. But you see how this is going to change because when you pay, when you’ve got like back to our discussion about everyone is specialized. So you’ve got URI, they close new logo. But it’s easy currently, you know, you sign a contract with… 50, 60 users, one-year commit, done. But tomorrow, how you change that? Because you’re going to sign a contract and it’s a blank check and then they’re going to consume. I mean, you need to make sure they adopt and they start consuming. What does it mean for the A? How do you comp them? So this is all the questions we’re going to have to figure on and it’s going to change as well how we think about organization, how we think about or complain.

Scott Barker:
Yeah totally yeah because in that world which goes back to what we’re saying it it makes much more sense to have an individual that is full cycle even into like cs right because you can’t just reward them you know by signing the contract no it’s actually your job to enable the outcomes that they have purchased and we want to hit 50 000 outcomes this year and that’s going to turn into xyz and you’re here to to do that um it’s an interesting world but one where incentives feel closer aligned in a in a good way uh it’ll just be a an interesting needle to to thread for a while and will be an adjustment i i think we’re the world’s not going to shift overnight everything’s a little slower than we think even though it feels really fast right now but um it’ll be cool to see all right well fred really appreciate that the time, I just have two final questions for you. And again, I keep them intentionally vague. So take them wherever you want. First question is, what is one widely held belief that revenue leaders still believe to be true that you think is bullshit or worth letting go of?

Fred Viet:
I’m not sure if it’s from the sales leader, but it’s something I’ve seen.

Fred Viet:
Is we spend too much time on, especially on the tech, about the demo. And, you know, like it’s, why? Because the last seven years, people, they were coming saying, hey, I need. So we, our team, they were not selling. They were just demoing a product without selling the value. And we always think about the feature. We always think about like training in terms of like product, the reality is we are missing that customers are coming because they’ve got pain. And sometimes they don’t know the pain they’ve got. You are the trust advisor. So I think it’s finding the right balance between, yeah, okay, you are a tech company, tech is very important, but if you think it’s very important to have a sales representative, an A speaking to a customer, That means you need to really understand the pain point. You need to understand why your customer is coming or what are you going to solve for your customer? For me, the funny thing is the best sales rep is sometimes the new one because they know nothing about the product. So they cannot demo it. So what they do is the basics. They ask questions. They just listen. And then they do a very brief demo. They come back. But the race is they’ve got a bigger impact at customer than just demoing the product.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, it is interesting now, even just like, look, that’s been the focus of everything. Drive people towards this demonstration of the product. And now we’re in a time where like self-serve is easier than ever. There’s products like, you know, TestBox and DemoStack where you can just send a highly interactive demo. and who better to demo it than the actual customer or prospect themselves. So, you know, that meeting can be spent understanding, you know, goals, priorities that maybe comes after the initial, you know, demo call. But that also forces us to level up our talent to be, you know, can they have that executive level conversation and have a point of view? Um and i know with myself and my my reps in the past i would i play this thought experiment of like okay can you be so knowledgeable in our industry that this person who’s showing up to this meeting would pay for this meeting regardless if they get the software or not like that is that’s that’s what should be happy they should leave with enough that they’re like i would have paid 500 bucks for that consulting call that i i got with all this free information all this new data that i didn’t know about.

Fred Viet:
I agree uh i yeah it’s it’s it’s that’s exactly that.

Scott Barker:
And i think that is where we’re going and i hope that’s where we’re going and then that’s that’s a uh then sales becomes fun again you know that if that’s how you feel um when you leave a call like that is a very good good feeling instead of just all right that’s my eighth demo of the day where i did the same thing like that’s that’s what technology can do you know if a route task is is perfect for technology and ai um humans are good at connecting and connecting dots and um anyway um final question for you uh i call it the silver bullet question uh silver bullets we know don’t exist but there are things that work um and question is what’s one go-to-market tactic or strategy that is actively working for air call in this environment i’m.

Fred Viet:
Going to say um two um when we touch base on the first one is the um.

Fred Viet:
Kind of understanding we play in an ecosystem and making sure we stay very close to our ecosystem and they are they are um i would say a referral partner that means they they understand and they they help to make sure their customer understand why they should go with with their call so i think it’s it’s really like playing the ecosystem the the second one is perhaps not a a silver bullet but it’s one of the, you could spend another two hours on that. I spend a lot of time to align sales and marketing. You know, it’s just, I’ve seen so many times where you’re disconnected, you don’t move in the same direction. Your metrics are not aligned for collaboration, but they are siloed and you just create friction. Healthy friction is always good. I mean, that’s how you move faster. But I think making sure that you align your sales and marketing. In fact, it’s more like you align your customer journey. You walk backwards from your customer journey. Your customer doesn’t want to deal with your org chart. It’s your problem. For the customer, it should be frictionless. And let me align everyone from the lead generation to the to the expansion.

Scott Barker:
Yeah and again that that could be a whole other podcast topic so i don’t want to go too deep in it but have you found um over your years doing this that it’s primarily an, incentive problem is that the best way to get people beating to the same drum is have shared incentives or is it communication problem what’s kind of the main crux do you think.

Fred Viet:
I think it’s two things. It comes with company objectives, like using mechanisms like OKR. So that means, you know, everyone really understands what can be their contribution on what are the cross-functional OKR that help. So if you go back next step, it can be a common goal, making sure, you know, like to incentive the marketing on leads or on the EMR, and things like that. The last point for me, it’s about example. Making sure at the top you’ve got strong alignment, making sure you always come as one on not two different voice. And I think when you show that, you don’t open the door to your report to, I would say, go rogue on your line. So I would say it’s the three things that I think can help aligning everyone.

Scott Barker:
Yeah. Great advice. Well, Fred, I appreciate, again, taking the time. That was a really enjoyable conversation. I got a page full of notes. And for those listeners that might want to follow along on the journey, are you an ex-guy, LinkedIn? What’s the best way for people to continue to follow along your journey?

Fred Viet:
I’m more on a LinkedIn guy. And I know I need to spend more time on that. So yeah, so more LinkedIn.

Scott Barker:
Perfect, perfect. And of course, if you’re a revenue leader listening to this, of course, go check out Aircall if you haven’t recently, credible technology platform. And yeah, to all our listeners, I say it every week, but listening is one thing, executing something totally different. Hopefully we gave you some tips and strategies and spurred some ideas that you can take into your own organization. And we will see you all next week.

Fred Viet:
Thank you, Scott.