"3 pieces of advice I wish I'd received at the start of my career" by Nicolas Mirail, Chief Revenue Officer at Seyna

If you're not an expert, learn to become technical in everything. Quick.

Becoming a salesperson means helping customers solve their problems. To do this, you need to: 1) understand the common issues, 2) build solutions together and 3) measure success.

And to do this, you need to be constantly on the ground, in the hustle and bustle. Understand what a press campaign entails and the reputational risks it can generate, the definition of Go-To-Market plan and what it costs, the indicators that your contact will use to defend his positions in front of his hierarchy, the obstacles linked to a given technology, reading between the lines of a financial balance sheet, etc.
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👉 Tip #1: This tool can help you understand how the person you're talking to operates. Get there prepared: BuiltWith

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You're never alone in the sales process

Forget about your product and focus solely on the issues. That comes last, once you're sure you have the right answer. Before that, you need to build trust at every level of the collaboration. To do this, get your teams involved in a "dance". Get everyone to connect with their contacts. Everyone needs to perfectly understand their counterface’s issues, and identify what is “keeping them awake at work”. Everyone has a role to play. Never underestimate or neglect anyone.
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👉 Tip #2: It may sound basic, but an exercise that I find structuring when done rigorously is to start again from the business model canvas.

Fill it in on the basis of your understanding of your customers' business, adopting their language. Place in each box the teams involved in the process. For each one, define: i) expectations, ii) fears, iii) KPIs. From experience, your view of sales will change. The level of interaction and the quality of exchanges will move into another dimension.
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If you feel the time is right, listen to yourself.

No significant impact can be made overnight. The key is to be consistent and that requires tenacity.

In large organisations, we generally talk about intrapreneurship. The aim: to constantly shake things up. To achieve this, you have resources at your disposal (i.e. a budget, a salary in line with market standards, etc.) but in return you have to deal with a labyrinth of internal procedures and inertia. It's extremely rewarding, but it can also be exhausting. The day your way of doing, acting and thinking becomes systematic, the time has come to think about the next challenge. As a former French President once said: "Habit is deadly comfort".

Alternatively, there are the more entrepreneurial missions - radically the opposite. By this I mean salary concessions and smaller budgets for your projects, but no limits on your creativity. The effort is more like a sprint. It's fast, it's exciting, but watch out for the 'slam'. You'll also feel the jolts. Make a point of taking a moment every week to reflect on the relevance of your strategy and nurture team cohesion.
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👉 Tip #3: Talk - until it becomes a team joke - about "why" you're there. At Snickers, it's about enabling people to be themselves again by giving them back their sense of sassiness (I promise ...

At Seyna, we're building a platform that centralises everything brokers need to protect those who want to go further.

With you, it will be something else, another quest, another mission, but that's the key to success: the commitment of your employees.

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