Samantha McKenna is an award-winning leader who serves as a Regional Vice-President of Sales for ON24. She’s a thought leader and speaks across the country on topics covering women and tech, sales and leadership, alongside topics of domain creation, sales and content marketing and how it all comes together to impact sales. Listen to her Sales Game Changers Podcast to understand how she has worked with her customers to more effectively develop relationships and bring them solutions.
Listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast Episode 28: ON24’s Sam McKenna Says Showing Me You Know Me and Being the Urgent Bird Will Propel Your Sales Career
Here’s an excerpt from the podcast:
Fred Diamond: You mentioned the Challenger Sale before and we haven’t really spoken too much about it. But, it comes up not infrequently. Challenger Customer came out recently and I believe they said that the number of customers in an enterprise deal that you need to interact with, I think it was like 5.4. I’m good friends with Brent Adamson, the co-author of The Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer and I believe he said that number’s even increased to 6.
Sam McKenna: I adopted The Challenger Sale, it’s funny actually, after I heard on my solutions engineers do this years ago. I was always so keen to look at our clients, our prospects who say, “This is how we do it” and for me to say “We can do it that exact same way. Just come over here instead.” And, this was really when I was junior in sales and one of my solutions engineers was on the phone with a prospect and they said, “This is how we want to do it” and he said, “Why?” and I said, “Oh my God.” I was so nervous that the client was going to push back and say “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it and just do it this way or we won’t be able to.” And, I listened to this conversation.
I listened to how he challenged them and he said, “Well, have you thought about this or have you thought about that?” and my fear was that nobody wants to change. Everybody hates change, right? Most everybody hates change. And so, if we suggested you can come over here and change your process that they’d never do it. Man, was I wrong. Right, so I think if you really have a look at the way that your client is doing it and say, “We can do that but have you thought about this or look at the success of that.” Start to challenge the way that they think, challenge the way they sell, they market, whatever it is you need them to do to use your product.
Get them to open their mind a little bit. They might say, “No, we want to do it this way.” But, by doing that challenger piece you’re also showing your level of intelligence and your aptitude for what they’re doing. You understand their business. You understand what they need to do in order to be successful and they’ll welcome that versus somebody who’s just saying, “Sure, square peg, square box, let’s do it.”
Samantha McKenna is an award-winning leader who serves as a Regional Vice-President of Sales for ON24 and has worked within the SaaS sales and marketing space for ten years. She’s a thought leader and speaks across the country on topics covering women and tech, sales and leadership, alongside topics of domain creation, sales and content marketing and how it all comes together to impact sales.
Samantha served four years as a board member of the Legal Marketing AssociationCapitol Chapter, actively volunteers with financial literacy initiatives in Washington, D.C. and writes for publications such as Sales Hacker and Sales for Life. She holds a Business degree from Florida State University and lives in Reston, Virginia. She originally hails from Geneva, Switzerland, is an avid wanderluster and got her first taste of how to negotiate as she maneuvered her way through 37 speeding tickets.
Listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast Episode 28: ON24’s Sam McKenna Says Showing Me You Know Me and Being the Urgent Bird Will Propel Your Sales Career
