🤝 Jen Allen: Challenger, Chief Evangelist

Market-to-Revenue

Meet Jen Allen, Chief Evangelist at Challenger. Lack of leads? Lack of buyer alignment? Teach where prospects go to learn. When you are teaching in those spaces, don't teach the solution. Once you've won over someone on that message (they look at the problem the same way you do) make sure you don't fall short at the goal line by just assuming that they'll be able to socialize the problem inside of their business in the way that you would.

18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. View the transcript.

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

1. Teach where prospects go to learn. What I mean by that is: instead of just relying on the traditional sales process to hopefully find someone who's ready to buy, figure out where your customers go to learn, with or without you, and make sure you've got a message there.
2. When you are teaching in those spaces, don't teach the solution. Teach your interpretation of why the problem exists and alternatives to solving that problem. So make it problem-teaching, not solutions-teaching.
3. Once you've won over someone on that message (they look at the problem the same way you do) make sure you don't fall short at the goal line by just assuming that they'll be able to socialize the problem inside of their business in the way that you will. So rather, spend time making sure you've armed them to go tell the problem story in the way that candidly you would tell it if you were in the room.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

1. Lack of leads. This is very timely, it’s how I got this new job. I sold in the large enterprise space and I was a hunter rep (or someone who just focused on new logo acquisition). Last year, I was just seeing a dramatic drop in the amount of leads that were coming in the door. And so rather than just go back and beat marketing over the head with it and try to figure out what can marketing can do, that's how I started getting more involved in things like social and podcasting and that sort of thing to try to generate interest, again to my earlier point, where people go to learn. Have a presence there.
2. The lack of buyer alignment that exists today. I think probably everybody feels this because now we're all, in many cases, operating virtually, we just don't have the benefit of customers who see each other in the hallway and can talk about the problems together. And so just having a really disconnected buying group that are coming on for Zoom, and then jumping into their next room, was a problem. It was just really difficult candidly to sell what I sell last year. So, part of what I did to overcome it was think differently about the agenda and the time that I was spending that with them. So, instead of trying to cram a ton into one call, because that was my one and only opportunity with the buying group, slowing that down and saying, “my first call them has to be on aligning on the problem. I shouldn't even get to solution in that call. If we align on the problem, then we can talk about solution. Then when we've aligned on the solution, then we can talk about pricing.” I think previously I was trying to just cram all of that into one meeting.
3. “What else could I do to keep this job interesting?” This actually relates to number one. ****I'm someone who's always considered themselves to be a lifelong seller, and that was perfectly fine for me, but I started getting an itch last year and say, “I know I don't want to go to the manager track. I know I don't want to go down the enablement or a leader track. What else could I do to keep this job interesting?” And that's when I looked to turn what I was kind of doing on the side of my desk, in terms of the social stuff, into more of a formal role of evangelism.

What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?

1. Dispersed teams and figuring how to get customers to make decisions in a really effective but efficient manner, is still a work-in-progress. Like the second one above. That's something I candidly think will be on my to-do list for every single year moving forward. So, I would say that's still something I've made progress on, but still have more work to do.
2. A different competitor for the same category of spend. Specific for our business, one of the things that I've observed as a result of everybody having to go digital, is now we have a different type of competitor. We play, traditionally, in the sales training / sales enablement space. But now, with many companies saying, “gosh, with virtual, we need to invest in sales tech, and we need to become much more sophisticated there.” It's not that they are a competitor in the sense of what we do, but they are a competitor for the same category of spend. So to summarize it, thinking differently about how do I frame against new and emerging competitors that may not be our traditional set.
3. Socializing for the business. It relates to my new job because so few people have an Evangelist role, formally. I don't think it's really understood or understood how to use effectively. So, one of the things that I'm working on right now is socializing for the business. How does Customer Success think about where Evangelists can step in? How do AEs? How does marketing? Sort of playing nice in the sandbox with all those functions.

What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?

These all come straight from the bible of the Challenger sale, so I am absolutely a convert on that:

1. Make the “Pain of Same” greater than the “Pain of Change.” In every sales conversation I have, I am thinking about “how do I make it so that customers first see that the pain of what they're currently doing is much greater than the cost of whatever solution I'm asking them to implement?” And it goes a little bit beyond just the cost of the solution, more so around the idea that I can buy a better solution from you or somebody else. But I also, in the back of my mind as a customer, know that that road to better is going to be like my political capital at risk. It's going to be budget. It could be my team looking at me being like, “why did you change this process? What we were doing was good enough.” And so the mental model that I'm approaching every sales conversation with is: avoid the urge of building up the benefit of the upside of if they go with us, and really, really hammer home the cost of whatever they're currently doing. So I refer to that as, “make Pain of Same greater than Pain of Change,” which one of our clients actually came up with years ago. That's number one.
2. That mental model, but applied to Opportunity Prioritization. So I think a big mistake I made early in my career, and candidly up until a couple of years ago, was when I would get a territory in January, I’d looked through and I'd say, “what are all the sexiest names, biggest companies biggest sales teams?” I'd spent a lot of time going after them, not appreciating that in many cases, their Pain of Same was not greater than their Pain of Change. They may have already had an established methodology. They may have built something. I would kill a lot of time and productivity trying to convince them to do something different when I had a ton of companies who maybe had no sales methodology at all. Or, maybe a ton of companies that were shifting the portfolio of what they sold from hardware to software. So, taking that pain of same mentality and applying it...