There are hundreds of sales strategies, but for Sales Director John Tracy, there’s only one way to succeed: Go all in on helping the customer.
Tracy leads the sales team at Celonis, a business analytics and data company. Celonis’s flagship tool is a platform that creates a digital twin of a business’s operations. The product itself offers a type of consultation for business owners — and Tracy brings that directly to customers.
“I firmly believe that if you wholeheartedly attack every day with the mission to help your customers, the outcomes will take care of themselves,” Tracy said.
Built In spoke with Tracy about his approach to solve customer problems, lead generation and more.
The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform uses process mining and AI to give you a living digital twin of your business operation.
How do you find qualified leads consistently in your sales role? How many steps do you take to get to that first conversation?
Finding qualified leads is the lifeblood of building a healthy pipeline. Our team uses a structured approach that incorporates strategic research, intelligent multi-touch outreach as well as the cultivation of strong relationships. It is important to intimately understand your industry, specific problems and pain points you can solve for as well as the target personas that drive influence and decision-making for the organization. From there, you need to be able to deliver immense value to attract the right clients and stand out from all the other noise in your space. Become an expert with a super helpful point of view and you will not only develop qualified leads but rather lifelong clients.
“Become an expert with a super helpful point of view and you will not only develop qualified leads but rather lifelong clients.”
Have you ever been in a slow period for lead generation? How do you keep yourself motivated to perform when things aren't moving as quickly as they should?
There are always problems to solve and ways to help clients in the market. I firmly believe that if you wholeheartedly attack every day with the mission to help your customers, the outcomes will take care of themselves. With the right consistency and discipline, there is no reason slow periods should ever occur. Manically focus on the inputs such as net new activity across research, outreach and ongoing cultivation of strong relationships and the outputs, strong sustained lead generation will follow.
If you could give one piece of advice to a new sales rep working on finding qualified leads, what would you say? What advice would you give to a greener version of yourself?
Follow a structured framework that allows you to measure key inputs and the outputs (qualified leads) will come. A structured framework married with an ethos of relentlessly helping your customers is the formula for long-term qualified lead development success.
