Ben Mathew is Senior Vice President at Accel Partners and Salesforce Ventures backed CARTO. On this podcast, he shares his thoughts about how you can achieve a higher level of sales success if you focus on attitude, aptitude and execution.

He also tells a great story of how he saved a huge deal by travelling 3,000 across the country to meet at CEO in Hollywood.

Listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast Episode 18: Ben Mathew of CARTO Says Sales Success is All About Attitude, Aptitude, and Execution and read the transcript.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast:

Ben Mathew: I think it’s actually 3 things that I tell all of my sales hires is attitude, aptitude and execution and you have to be good at those three things.

From an attitude standpoint you have to love what you. You have to be passionate about what you’re selling. You have to have a team environment. No man is an island. If you try to sell on your own without the support of a sales support team, whether it’s technical support or the operations support after or the SDR that supports you before the sale, you’re not going to be successful. You have to learn to maximize the use of your resources and it’s important to have a good positive attitude to the work that you’re accomplishing because it will come across in your conversation with your clients if you’re not enjoying what you do, you’re not passionate about what you’re selling and you don’t believe in what you’re trying to accomplish and what your business is hoping to accomplish for those enterprises.

From an aptitude perspective, it’s very important as well. I’ve grown up in technology sales but I’m sure any kind of sales, to have an aptitude to understand your market, understand your product fit, understand how it solves the problems for your customers and understand most importantly what are your customers pain points and then how does your product fit into those things as opposed to ‘Hears my product, you go figure out how this is going to work.’ It’s very important from an aptitude standpoint to have, if your product is a technology product, to have a good technology aptitude. You don’t have to know every single detail but you need to know the jargon, you need to be comfortable having a conversation with the target demographic.

For one of the companies I worked for, the one that I started my sales career with, the B.I. company, it was Product Managers was my target demographics so I needed to know, I needed to have that idea of how that was going to work. Fortunately, I’ve done that career in the past so I was able to communicate effectively with them but that’s important as well, to have an aptitude for the products that you sell and execution, right? At the end of the day I have an equation that I always sell my sales reps, “Hopes + Ambition + Passion – Effort = Dreamer” so if you don’t put in the effort and you don’t have the work ethic you will not be successful. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. You can work smart that’s all great but there’s no substitute to hard work. I think it’s that trifecta of attitude, aptitude and excellence of execution that’s going to get sales professionals to the next level.

Ben Mathew is Senior Vice President at Accel Partners and Salesforce Ventures backed CARTO, the Location Intelligence platform that helps enterprises turn their location data into business outcomes. He is responsible for global sales, sales development, sales operations, pre-sales engineering, professional services, customer support and customer success. Prior to that, Ben ran Growth Engine Consulting, a Consulting and Advisory practice focussed on growth strategies for technology startups and docufyi, a contracts management software company. Before that, Ben was VP of Sales and field operations for BI company, Logi Analytics, where he initially joined to start the embedded analytics OEM practice and built it up to be the global leader in that space.

Listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast Episode 18: Ben Mathew of CARTO Says Sales Success is All About Attitude, Aptitude, and Execution and read the transcript.