The Secrets of How to Win Billion-Dollar Sales That Start Long Before the RFP with Shari Begun

[00:00:00] Shari: When was the last time you called a store and said, I'm gonna buy a tv, a phone, a car this year? You know, it's hard for companies to forecast and if you're able to deliver to them so they can build their products in a fast timeframe, and you're keeping track of when you've done those favors for them, those are great conversations.
You got to your customer a quarter early. You were able to ship a billion dollars of revenue because we were able to upside 10%. Of what you needed. So those kind of things lessens the price discussion.
[00:00:32] Mike: My name's Mike Lander and you are listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations, and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders, and procurement leaders.
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Shari, thanks ever so much for joining me on haggle the B2B Sales Club podcast. Great to have you as a guest.
[00:00:59] Shari: Nice to be here.
[00:01:00] Mike: And you are in sunny San Diego currently, correct?
[00:01:03] Shari: Today I am, yes. I'm on a business trip
[00:01:05] Mike: and I imagine it is quite sunny.
[00:01:07] Shari: It's gorgeous out
[00:01:09] Mike: as always in San Diego, correct?
[00:01:11] Shari: Yes.
[00:01:12] Mike: So for the listeners, who are you?
What do you do and what's your favorite song and why?
[00:01:16] Shari: Well, hi, I'm Sherry begun. I've spent my career. In high tech sales. I currently run strategic accounts at Global Foundries. I work in the semiconductor industry, and if you don't know what a semiconductor is, think just about anything with an on off button.
There's a semiconductor inside. My expertise is really leading complex enterprise sales that literally have two to three years of a sales cycle, and I manage several billion dollars in revenue a year, and I work with teams and customers all over the world.
[00:01:48] Mike: And that was several billion dollars, not several million dollars.
[00:01:51] Shari: Oh, sorry. Billion. Yes.
[00:01:53] Mike: Yeah, that's what I thought. So listeners, just so you're aware, I'm a really big fan of bringing learning from other sectors. A lot of my listeners are often marketing agencies, professional services companies. Is I think we can learn a lot from how other sectors approach enterprise sales, and that's why shows very kindly agreed to come on the show.
But before we get into that, what's your favorite song and why?
[00:02:14] Shari: So, one of my favorite songs is Crazy Train by Ozzy Osborne.
[00:02:18] Mike: Ah, brilliant track.
[00:02:19] Shari: Yes. And the reason why years ago, I worked with an extremely challenging customer and it was when your ringtone on the phone, you could change 'em. And I put that on there and what it did was it reset my mind.
Right, exactly. Because they always came to you with issues. Yeah, and I just went embrace it. Go on a ride, you're gonna learn something, it's gonna turn into revenue. So it's. Is, I'd say kind of one of my hype songs when I know I have a tough meeting or something going on. I crank it on Spotify and Seth. So anyways, that's brilliant.
[00:02:50] Mike: But that's a really good point actually, Shari, is that I was talking about the same thing with someone else a couple weeks ago about resetting your mindset. You need a trigger. Some people have bands on their wrist, some people have things that they imagine. Some people have songs. I have certain songs to get me into a certain mood.
Exactly,
[00:03:07] Shari: yeah. And I've learned over the years, you know that when there's a problem and you figure out a solution, that's when a lot of the trust. The business comes and those kind of things. And that just took me time, you know, to learn and just like embrace it versus get stressed out about it and stuff.
So I still, that one is such a great, I mean, it's a great opening in that song and stuff, and it's,
[00:03:30] Mike: and in fact, interestingly, I'm just building something in Claude Code the moment, uh, product. And interestingly on Spotify, I've got groove, kind of playlist because it helps me create, whereas if I'm writing something that's quite cheap.
Challenging to write. I'll stick a classical playlist on or a classical album. It gets us into different states of mind.
[00:03:50] Shari: Yes.
[00:03:50] Mike: Definitely. So without further ado, let's get into the questions. So let's just start off with closing complex high stake sales lessons learned from the front line. Just talk a little bit about, when I say closing complex high stake sales, what makes 'em complex?
What do you mean by high stakes? What's the kind of gestation period of the kind of deals that you work on?
[00:04:10] Shari: Yeah, so first of all, I'll start with one of the things is the time it takes from when our customer has an idea until when we see revenue and it's somewhere from two to. To five years on there.
And if you think about that, you're investing and you really dunno for sure how it's gonna end up and there's a long time wasted if it doesn't turn into revenue. So that's one part of the complexity. The other is I work with some of the bigger, biggest consumer data center customers on the planet. So they're constantly pushing the envelope.
They want technology, you know, they're happy with what you have today, but you have to be thinking about where they're going three to five years from now. So not only are you putting time in, you're putting money in investments and products. And then the third part of that complexity is, you know, we live in a very virtual world now.
Even though companies have headquarters, more people are back to office. I have not one deal where all the people are in one location. So it's very common to have somebody in California, in Germany, in Taiwan, all working on the same project. So there's a lot of players in there that you not only at your company, at the customer too.
So all those different things makes it very, very complex.
[00:05:28] Mike: So you know that I was an engineer by training. I'm not sure that my listeners do, but many years ago I left school at 16 non-traditional route, became an engineer. And I got into kinda like technical pre-sales as an engineer, which I really enjoyed because I liked the commercial side of the conversation.
Now as an engineer, I ended up working with quite a few marketing people and salespeople as a kind of technical pre-sales person. Is that still the case today? Do you still have technical pre-sales working with you?
[00:05:54] Shari: It depends what organization you work at, but we have what are called field applications engineers.
[00:05:59] Mike: Good application engineers. Exactly.
[00:06:01] Shari: They do a lot of that. A lot of times they have expertise in a c, certain end market or an expertise in a certain product. Yeah. And our sales, I'm actually engineer by training also.
[00:06:12] Mike: Oh
[00:06:13] Shari: yeah. I didn't know. A lot of salespeople in my industry do have an engineering background, but you know, when you have a broad portfolio, you can't be an expert on everything.
So as a salesperson, you still need to be able to talk the language and understand it, but we have people to support us that are part of those early conversations as well as you mentioned, marketing engineers. So we also travel a lot with them to make sure that we're having the right people in the room to have those deep technical discussions.
[00:06:41] Mike: Exactly. And just kinda like drawing a parallel, so people that are in professional services that are listening or knowledge, the knowledge worker economy, obviously you bring in subject matter experts. What I remember from my engineering days and see if this kind of like resonates and draws a parallel, is I'd imagine you are effectively, like in an orchestra, you are very much the conductor.
You are orchestrating the or. Now anyone bluntly ultimately could make an orchestra play a tune in a certain way if they chose the skill is what are we gonna play? How are we going to play it? What tempo, what happens when someone doesn't turn up? What happens when someone's slightly outta tune? It's a complex role that you play as the conductor, and I think in other sectors, a lot can be learned from that kind of conductor role, orchestrating people to do the right thing and the right sequence at the right time so that it all sounds right.
Is that a half decent analogy?
[00:07:33] Shari: That is actually the exact analogy I use with my team.
[00:07:37] Mike: Okay. I didn't know that, but I do now. Yes.
[00:07:40] Shari: I'll say, let's make sure. Okay. Maybe it's a choir, but we're singing off the same Yeah,
[00:07:44] Mike: exactly.
[00:07:44] Shari: Song sheet. And then who's your audience? Even? Is it a bunch of teenagers? Is it people who are older?
You know, what are they gonna wanna see? And that's exactly it, because a lot of times we'll have in the room. At our customer, different people from different parts of the organization, and they all have different pain points and we gotta figure out how to address that and say it right, that it resonates with all the different folks in the room.
So that's exactly the analogy I use.
[00:08:11] Mike: A popular phrase now is multithreading, but that's just a modern term for what we've done for all of my years in selling, is multiple stakeholder management. You have to bring multiple stakeholders along with you. And that's what you've just described.
[00:08:23] Shari: Exactly. And you know, when I mentioned earlier.
That it's billions of dollars. You can imagine at what level in a company, at your customer you're working with. So you also need to figure out what titles and stuff that people a lot of times wanna know that your CEO is backing this because they're investing a lot, also our customer.
[00:08:44] Mike: Absolutely. So Sheri, the beauty of this podcast is we have a few themes that we talk about, but I quite often go off pieced.
So that's one of the moments we're gonna go off pieced, which is a couple of things given the, these are really high stakes deals. These are billions of dollar deals. Two things kind of spring to mind. One, do you have like a tool that you use? It can be a bit of paper, but a framework for mapping out where all these different stakeholders sit in the organization.
And then secondly, how do you go from an engineer to a CEO in a company? It's a big challenge for salespeople is you can get trapped at a certain level and you almost feel like you have to ask permission to go up and no one gives you permission ever. So you have to work out how to navigate it. I suspect you're a master at this, so let me know.
[00:09:30] Shari: Yeah, so first of all, I've worked with different formats, Frank. I think a nice Excel or if your customer gives you an org chart, you know, just starring.
[00:09:40] Mike: You can mark it up. Yep, exactly.
[00:09:41] Shari: Yeah. Who on there? It does not have to be. Matter of fact, I hate. Super fancy ones because like, like you said, it's, it's relatively simple to, you know, ask a lot of people, I think, say, I like to say it's like a puzzle piece.
Ask the same question to multiple people over time. You won't get it in one meeting, but you'll figure out who has decision making power at your customer. And a lot of times just putting a star on there and going, you know, this person, maybe it's a technologist, so a technologist at our company might be the right, it's, you know, a business person.
So maybe another marketing person might be over. Right match for them. Someone who likes to have higher relationships, maybe the CEO, even though they're not at that level hearing from our CEO, might be the right. So that's one how I like to map it. Just let's keep it really simple on there. Not spend a lot of time on it.
[00:10:30] Mike: Just to repeat the kinda learning there again, is the conductor of the choir or the, or. Your job with your team is to map out those stakeholders, work out who should engage with who in that stakeholder environment, and then make sure that all the messaging has a consistent thread through it. 'cause that's not easy either.
[00:10:49] Shari: Correct. How to get to different levels of the organization. I mean, one, I mean the good news is, is some of the deals I've worked on are so big it naturally happens, but that doesn't mean that certain key people you have a tough time getting access to. And stuff. So a lot of what I've done, I'm gonna have my team done is just be very transparent with the customer of, Hey, we're about ready to put a team of engineers working on this.
We're about ready to invest this amount of money in this, and we need to hear from you. You know, you said so and so is the decision maker. My whoever needs to just look this person in the eye and go, yes, we're supportive
[00:11:32] Mike: exactly
[00:11:32] Shari: of this. And a lot of times I've found that just if you're transparent with that.
People are pretty open to asking them for help
[00:11:41] Mike: because they get it. They're like, ah. So you are gonna invest 10 engineers time in developing some early stage ideas that's gonna cost you real money. So of course you'll want our CFO to know, is that actually what we want to do?
[00:11:54] Shari: Exactly.
[00:11:55] Mike: But just ask the question in a professional way, but lay it out very clearly and go, is this serious?
We're gonna invest time and money. We want to talk to someone that is a budget holder that can go, yeah, okay. That makes sense.
[00:12:06] Shari: And then another way we've been able to do it is we do a lot of what we call roadmap alignments or quarterly business reviews or executive business reviews. And that's a great time to get introductions to those people and over time you're forming relationships with them.
So it's kind of natural. And then planning out to have people just check in. A quick email, a quick, I'm gonna be in town. Do you have time for lunch? So it's, there's no necessarily thing that's pressing at the time. So then it becomes a natural when those more higher stakes things where you need true buy-in, there's already relationship in place.
You're not going around, but that takes time. I mean, that doesn't happen overnight, but those are maybe some tools of getting early access to those people before you need it.
[00:12:57] Mike: Brilliant. And just talk to me about executive business reviews. A lot of people will be familiar, even if they're not doing it, but they should be q bs quarterly business reviews.
But in an executive business review, how do you again orchestrate that? 'cause you're gonna get some senior people in a room, physically or virtually. Time is precious. Credibility's on the line. You've gotta make the best use of their time. How do you think about that when you are assuming they agree to go in the room, you've got the CFOs, COO head of r and d in the room.
How do you plan for that?
[00:13:27] Shari: Yeah, so a couple things. I like to keep it very simple of a, what does the customer wanna get out of it? And at that level it's down to where they investing, where's their future at, and how do you help them get to market faster? Yeah,
[00:13:41] Mike: faster
[00:13:41] Shari: at a competitive price. You don't have to be the cheapest, but that they can still make money on there.
And I think if you frame it. In that way, but that's like, I guess your goal is what do they want out of it, and then what are we doing together that have helped them? And I'll give you one example. I had a meeting with the VP and he had pointed out that we had delivered something to them three weeks earlier than they needed it because of our engineering team that allowed them to get it to their customer a quarter earlier.
They were first in
[00:14:11] Mike: exactly
[00:14:12] Shari: their customer, so
[00:14:13] Mike: So they had a first mover advantage.
[00:14:15] Shari: Exactly. So in those executive things, one, what does the customer wanna get out of it? Where they're investing, where you can maybe create some value for them. Secondly, one or two, just simple examples of when you've already done that, and then some places of maybe we could work together in the future.
The painting a picture on that. But you know, those meetings typically last, you know, less than an hour. Absolutely. And there's hours and hours of work that goes into them to make sure that they're leaving that meeting hyped to work with us. And then at the same time, we've advanced something too. Because you don't ever want a meeting with a customer to be completely one way you'd like, like it to be something you got out of it too.
And sometimes that doesn't always happen. It needs to happen over time.
[00:14:58] Mike: Exactly. Just for those executive briefing reviews, those EBRs pre-meeting papers, do you circulate pre-briefing papers so that people have a chance to read before they get there?
[00:15:07] Shari: Absolutely. And we even, um, most of the time do a live meeting.
So we'll do a pre-read, just as a very tactical way of doing it. I like to have it out a week ahead of time so people have time to absorb it. We do a pre-meeting, then we can course correct. If there's something in the messaging that people don't agree with, typically we align it. Also with our customers to make sure that there's no surprises in the room.
That the people who helped orchestrate that don't look bad. You want them to look great too. So a lot of work goes into that. But honestly, I've never left one that we didn't know more. We didn't have more opportunities, and then that kind of future we can call in a favor down the road because we've established credibility and there's already a relationship there.
[00:15:53] Mike: So yeah, really, really genuinely. Very interesting. Another topic that I get asked about a lot, and I talk about a lot as an exy to anyone selling at any level of any deal size is about articulating value, is in the deals you are talking about. There must be a really, maybe not consistent, but a clear way of describing what the value is that you create for your customer.
Because I'll link it back to, it's not about the lowest price in my experience. It rarely, rarely is. It's about the best value compared to the price that you can buy it. How do you go about, just, just some thoughts around how do you go about articulating your value? Have you got a framework for it or?
[00:16:29] Shari: Yeah, so there's a couple things. First of all, because it is a technology sales, not everything is apples to apples comparison. And sometimes you might have a product that's, let's say like a Ferrari, but they're not using it on a racetrack. And they only need a Honda, you know, for that. So the first thing in articulating value is you've really gotta understand their problems they're trying to solve.
Do they need performance or do they need a value or a simple solution? And typically we have both that we can offer. So that's one is in understanding the problem you're trying to solve
[00:17:04] Mike: and the value parameters. So basically you're saying what are their value parameters that they have to optimize for?
Correct. In fancy words, but yeah.
[00:17:10] Shari: And the second is, you know, I mentioned we have application support. Sometimes we can help. With bring up of a product with them, we can at times help with writing code for them. There's different things we can do that help them get to market faster or relieve some of their engineering support is another, a third.
It's really big now in days is supply assurance and having exactly geographical diversity.
[00:17:37] Mike: Absolutely.
[00:17:37] Shari: In the company I work for, I mean we have manufacturing in the US and Singapore and Germany. And then we have, a lot of times we'll manufacture the same product at two different plants. So that's a huge thing because sometimes our customers need to build in the US or they need to build in the eu, or you know, they need to build in China.
So geographical diversity can be another value for them. So it all goes back to is what does that customer care about? And then you have to about, well, what tools do I have in my toolbox and how do I position that to me? Because someone who doesn't care about us manufacturing, then why bring that up to why
[00:18:14] Mike: keep going all about it?
Yeah. Absolutely it is what I thought, which is like you, you've got a number of levers that you can pull in terms of value levers. The the skill is in tuning into exactly what the customer values at the beginning and then working out what's in your toolbox that matches what they really value. And then price becomes a discussion always, but it's not the determining factor usually.
[00:18:37] Shari: Yeah, and I've thought about one other thing that's been tremendous amount of value, because I do work in the manufacturing industry. If you think about a lot of products that you buy, electronic products, those forecasts can be all over the place. Someone gave me an example a long time ago. When was the last time you called a store and said, I'm gonna buy a tv, a phone, a car this year?
You know, it's hard for companies to forecast and if you're able to deliver to them so they can build their products in a fast timeframe and it turns into billions of revenue for them, you may have shipped them a million dollars worth of product and they're able to ship a billion and you keeping track of when you've done those favors for them.
Those are great conversations when you're having these QBR or EBRs or before, not rf Qs can come out and remind them. You got to your customer a quarter early. You were able to ship a billion dollars of revenue because. We were able to upside 10% of what you needed. So those kind of things lessens the price discussion.
Absolutely. It doesn't go away, but
[00:19:38] Mike: they, they have material value, absolutely. Material value to that customer demonstrable value.
[00:19:42] Shari: Absolutely
[00:19:43] Mike: Brilliant. So this is excellent. Right? So lemme just check because I'm also conscious I could carry on for hours as people know, but I won't. Yeah, let's just like talk about the critical role of trust and intuition, managing deals, building customer advocacy.
I think you've touched on quite a few bits, but just kind of round that off.
[00:19:59] Shari: Yeah, and a lot of this started very early in my career. I was a 25-year-old working in a market that everybody was twice my age and I was just very consistent in reaching out to my customers. I mean, I literally would track it in a planner, you know, of call this person in very consistent.
And when they gave me an opportunity, even if it was super tiny, I treated it really well. I followed up with them, and I would just always ask for something. At the end of the sales call, I'd say, I know you have great suppliers, but if they ever fall on their face, please call me first. And fast forward a year and a half later, myself and my inside salesperson got their entire package of RFQ and he awarded us the business.
And I think it was because for a year and a half just was very consistent and I did what I said I was gonna do. If something was gonna take me longer, I'd call him in advance. And it was just very basics, and I think you can do that at all levels. Of an organization is you see something going wrong, speak up.
If you see something that can help the customer speak up, be consistent. Check in with them on a regular basis, and know that they can rely on you and they can predict you.
[00:21:10] Mike: So it's reminded me of the kind of trust equation that was done by Meister many, many years ago. Trust equals credibility plus reliability, plus professional relationship building divided by self-interest.
What you've demonstrated is you were credible because of the, you know, the company you were with for sure, and yourself, your knowledge. You were a hundred percent reliable. You did what you say, you'll due on time. You build a relationship and you are far more interested in them than you were in yourself.
18 months later, you win a deal that probably has your fingerprints all over it, I suspect. Before that RFP was ever issued or the RFQ before it was ever issued, you'd had 18 months worth of conversations. I suspect lots of your thoughts were already included in that document. 'cause you'd educated them.
[00:21:52] Shari: Absolutely. And that is the key is when you get that RFP or RFQ, it is as close to what you have to sell as possible.
[00:22:00] Mike: Yeah, exactly. So finally, when it comes of your time developing sales talent in a virtual first world and with AI replacing knowledge workers, how do you develop sales talent? How do you develop entry level talent?
It's really hard in this market, I think.
[00:22:15] Shari: Yeah, so a couple things we're doing and that I've done, I mean, first of all, you can have all the best tools and training in the world, and that's great for getting them technical on there. But I think a lot of it is just on the job of whether they're joining a teams call, whether they're traveling with people.
On there. So I think it's really important that there's that face-to-face interaction, or at least video to video interaction of seeing how people overcome stuff. But a couple things we've done from an AI perspective. We have now like sales agents that you can ask questions to point you to, rather than spending an hour looking for an intranet to find, you know, something on your technology, you can actually do a search and it's pretty darn good.
So that's one thing. Two, one of the things I use a lot, my team uses a lot is copilot to summarize, like the last month, what happened at this customer. Look at my emails, look at teams, look at our CRM on there, and now there's a record for any new person that were to come on board. But a lot of the stuff that is hard to teach is that intuition.
That maybe when a customer is checking out of a conversation and those kind of things of, of bringing people along. And I always like to ask, how do you think that went? What did you learn? And see what a person picked up on. And then after that I can assess, okay, they miss this, they got that, and just tell 'em, Hey, you got a cd, great, but here's something you needed to pick up on.
You know, they wanted to cancel the meeting next week. You know, they started shutting down when I asked about competition. That's not a good sign. It's not a good sign that a new person may not know, you know, on there. So I still think you need to have that just on the job, at least in a sales organization to understand people.
[00:24:04] Mike: Which is what kind of what we've done for years as sales leaders is we've gone out on visits with our salespeople and we've acted as their bad carrier and we've coached them. And the customer said like, who are you? I'm the sales director, but I'm just here to take notes, just here to like help my colleague and give some feedback at the end.
And most customers are like, great. That's okay. It's no problem with
[00:24:23] Shari: that. Absolutely. And early in my career when I really didn't know what I was doing, I loved traveling because they could take my conversations to a different level and I still use a lot of the things. I learned 25 years ago when I was in a meeting, you know, deer in a headlights going, yeah, going, okay.
That was how they broke down a complex problem. They separated it out. So I, now I use that all the time. Or you know, a customer's really upset. How do you. Calm down the situation and repeat back their what they heard. So a lot of those things I learned by just being with somebody who was a lot more experienced than me and put my own words into it and still use it 25 years later.
[00:25:05] Mike: Like you, I was very lucky. I worked with some very, very talented sales leaders, particularly in the consulting world. With partners that were brilliant at selling. I learned most of my sales skills from them. Some from formal training, but most of it from watching and being around very talented people and finding out and asking questions, being curious, why did you do that?
How did that happen? When she said that, how did you get them to think about that? What happened? I just picking up on all those small things.
[00:25:29] Shari: You hit the key word. Curiosity, I think being curious of your customer, you can get a lot of information, and then being curious with your colleagues. In the organization and asking questions of the why behind they did something.
You can learn a ton.
[00:25:43] Mike: Brilliant. Shari, it's been amazing just at the end now, just kind of pulled together a couple of things. Just kind of if someone's, you know, driving or on a train or a bus on their journey and they were going, oh, what should I try and do tomorrow? What are one or two things that you would say?
About improving the way that you lead a sales team? As a sales leader, what are the kind of things that you would focus on?
[00:26:06] Shari: One is to try and have a blank slate, or even bring somebody in from the organization, maybe another salesperson who knows nothing about that customer and blank slated if there were no constraints, like what could we do here?
Because you know, a lot of times if you've been working with a customer a while, you're thinking in a box versus opening your mind. So one would be just get some quiet time. You talked about early. With some classical music and just go, if I knew nothing about this customer, like what could I do if there were zero constraints over there?
I think that's a great way to start. On there. And then secondly, no matter how crazy the idea is, okay, maybe if it's super crazy, but try a few things. Try a few new things in a safe environment, maybe with a customer that you already have a relationship, but just try it out. And he would be surprised sometimes by just suggesting a crazy thing to a customer.
They may say yes exactly to it. So I'm really big on that creativity thing and just taking a step back and thinking through things when it becomes a little challenging.
[00:27:09] Mike: Shari, it's been amazing. Thanks ever so much for joining me. Where can people find out more about you?
[00:27:13] Shari: I'm on LinkedIn, uh, S-H-A-R-I B-E-G-U-N.
[00:27:18] Mike: Brilliant. Perfect. And yeah, it's been a real, real pleasure having on the show. Thanks ever so much for joining me.
[00:27:22] Shari: Thank you.
[00:27:24] Mike: Thanks for listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host Mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.