🎙️Transcript: How to Maintain Momentum During Uncertainty

Gong.io: Celebrate Online
"Deal Execution: How to Maintain Momentum During Uncertainty"
Justin Welsh, Anna Phalen, Stephanie Jenkins, Ralph Barsi

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Summary

This panel brings together sales leaders navigating deal execution during a highly uncertain period.

The discussion centers on leadership adaptation, remote team management, the shift toward empathy‑driven selling, and the challenge of maintaining consistent pipeline progress when prospects face instability.

The group emphasizes communication, flexibility, and creativity as the non‑negotiable standards for high‑performing teams in crisis.

The leaders also unpack how qualification, deal standards, messaging, and inter‑team collaboration must evolve rapidly.

They highlight best practices for sharing insights horizontally across departments and vertically across skill levels.

The conversation closes by forecasting how COVID‑era learnings will permanently reshape sales: more empathy, more video, more distributed teams, and more proactive communication.

BIG Takeaways

• Remote Leadership Requires Over‑Communication and Structure – Leaders must rebuild the rhythm of the workday: morning huddles, evening wrap‑ups, video‑on norms, and clear sign‑off times. Remote work removes natural boundaries, so discipline must be intentionally reintroduced. Teams perform best when expectations are explicit, predictable, and reinforced consistently by managers.

• Empathy Is Now a Core Selling Competency, Not a “Nice‑to‑Have” – Every panelist reinforced that conversations must begin with genuine care for the prospect’s situation. Many industries—especially HR—are under extreme strain. The directive is simple: listen first, sell second. Empathy doesn’t replace rigor; it anchors it. Prospects respond better when sellers acknowledge reality rather than pretending it's business as usual.

• Deal Standards Must Be Flexible but Never Loose – Rigid processes break during uncertainty, but lack of structure breaks pipeline. Sales leaders advise maintaining strong qualification fundamentals while adapting criteria like timelines and financial flexibility. Integrity remains non‑negotiable: creative solutions should serve the customer and the company, not mask desperation or cut corners.

• Top‑of‑Funnel Messaging Must Be Human, Research‑Driven, and Relationship‑First – Cold outreach must shift from transactional asks to helpful insights. Teams are using personalized videos, research‑backed messaging, and warm introductions more aggressively. The most effective approach: acknowledge the uncertainty, state the reason for reaching out, and propose a long‑term relationship even if timing isn’t right today.

• Knowledge Sharing Must Scale Horizontally and Vertically – High performers are holding open office hours; teams are using Slack channels, Gong snippets, and cross‑functional all‑hands meetings to rapidly circulate insights. Sales organizations must capture what works in real time, curate it, and distribute it proactively. In crisis, velocity of learning often determines who wins.

• RevOps and Sales Ops Move From Back‑Office to Mission‑Critical – Leaders are demanding real‑time visibility into leading indicators, daily pipeline health, and operational workflows. RevOps teams are reprioritizing long‑term projects in favor of daily dashboards, new loss reasons (e.g., COVID‑19), and incentive rewrites. Agility in systems and data quality becomes a competitive advantage.

• Uncertain Times Reveal Leaders—And Create Them – The panel stresses that crises expose character. Reps who lean in, stay positive, help teammates, and control what they can control often accelerate their careers. Motivation must come from purpose, not pressure. Teams that stay connected, creative, and grounded in service will emerge stronger on the other side.

Transcript

Host (00:00):
Now I am really, really excited guys to head into our next session, which is a panel with some of the most amazing sales leaders from across the country. We have folks from LA all the way to the East Coast, New York, and we're going to be talking about how to maintain momentum during uncertainty. It's all about deal execution.

There really is no playbook on how to operate during these uncertain times, but what we do have are other smart leaders that we can lean on for advice and perspectives. We are all in this together. So we're going to be joined by four folks.

Justin Welsh, he's the founder of the official Justin Welsh. We have Anna Lan, VP of Sales and account Management at Jellyvision. Ralph Bars, who is the VP of Global Inside Sales at tre io.

And Stephanie Jenkins, the VP of sales at Glassdoor. Hello everybody.

Anna Phalen (00:55):
Hi. Hello.

Host (00:57):
Hey, great to see you all. For the audience, I just want to remind you that we're going to be using Slido. We really want to get your questions and anything that you'd like to ask any of the panelists as well as Justin, the moderator, I'll be coming back in for the last 10 minutes of this session to help moderate some of the audience questions.

So anytime during the session, again, go to slido.com on your mobile phone or open up a new tab. You can enter in your own questions. You can also vote up and down other folks' questions, so it's pretty fun and an engaging part of the day.

So with that, I want to head into a quick icebreaker question for all of our panelists. So we've all been sitting at home, we're trying to figure out how to occupy some of our extra time. What is your favorite app or maybe even a website that you've discovered since you've been working from home?

And perhaps you can't even live without that now. Justin, we'll start off with you.

Justin Welsh (01:53):
Cool. So far I've really been enjoying two things. I've been enjoying Notion, which is a desktop app that I use to basically run my whole business, and it's coming a lot of handy for staying organized.

And I also really like product hunt.com because I'm bored like a lot of you guys part of the day, and I like discovering some really cool new products and tools that are being found around the web. So those are two that I spend a lot of time on right now.

Stephanie Jenkins (02:17):
Love it. Stephanie, how about you? I was going to say the free time.

I have zero free time right now. I've got two kids at home too, so it's become very challenging all of a sudden. But I do run a lot and I love exercising a lot and in Chicago, all of the parks and lakefront paths are closed.

So I've been addicted to Active, which is an audio workout app, and it's been very, very fun.

Host (02:42):
Terrific. Anna, how about you? Anything new that you've been trying out?

Anna Phalen (02:45):
Yeah, so I wouldn't say this is new, but I've been pretty excited because I have a three-year-old daughter and I've recently been introducing her to the Muppet movies. So what I've been doing online is trying to find every single Muppet movie in which streaming service it is. So I go to Disney plus, I go to Netflix, it's on Amazon.

So that's sort of how I've been occupying my time on the web.

Host (03:08):
Great. And Ralph, last one.

Ralph Barsi (03:09):
Yeah, for me it's masterclass. So I've subscribed to Masterclass for some time now, but in these unique times I've had a little extra time to dive in on some classes. You can see I'm constantly working from my kitchen, so I've been watching a lot of cooking classes.

Host (03:28):
Love it

Ralph Barsi (03:28):
From Gordon Ramsey and others, and it's been awesome.

Host (03:32):
Terrific. Well thanks for your thoughts on that. I'm going to hand it over to Justin and I'll see you guys back towards the end of the session.

Justin Welsh (03:39):
Thanks, Sheena. Awesome. Thanks Sheena.

Well, hello everyone. Welcome to the session. This session is all around deal execution and I'm really, really excited to have Ralph Barce from trade.io, Anna Fain from Jellyvision, and Stephanie Jenkins from Glassdoor.

And before we dive into the deal execution part of this, I'd like to start off with talking a little bit about leadership. And I think it's really fair to say that many of us are working from home or remotely for potentially the very first times in our careers. And I know for me, I'm learning a ton in the first few months that I've had to spend working from home.

And I'd be curious to the panel, how you've had to adjust your management style to keep up with the changes in how teams are working remotely. And Anna, I know a few weeks ago you released some tips on LinkedIn for working from home, and so I'd love to start with you. How have you had to adjust your management style to keep up with remote teams?

Anna Phalen (04:43):
Yeah, I think I'm learning day by day, but the biggest takeaway that I've taken from the leadership team in my CEO at Jellyvision is focus on what you can control. So as a leader, I'm constantly talking to my team about, okay, we cannot do anything about the pandemic that's happening outside our walls, but within the virtual walls of Jellyvision, we have a job to do, so how are we going to do that? How are we going to band together as a team and make that happen?

We've been crowdsourcing ideas from a lot of folks on the team and just looking for new ways to be nimble and adjust our strategies. So clearly what we're doing three weeks ago is significantly different to what we're doing today, but it's just trying to focus on what can we actually control ourselves.

Justin Welsh (05:28):
Got it. And Ralph, I know that you're managing sales development folks, so a lot of what you're doing is opening top of funnel. Anything slightly unique or different based on the fact that that's the team that you're running or how are you changing your style to keep the team up to speed?

Ralph Barsi (05:43):
Sure. Just being mindful, especially in sales development for the most part, they're initiating conversations with the marketplace and setting that first impression. And so leading with empathy, leading with caution, with humility in our conversations is top of mind.

I mean, frankly, it's something we should be doing anyway, but this is certainly a unique catalyst event that's going to reinforce that. So that's where my focus has been on just reminding the team of that and also always sharpening the attitude of gratitude. To Anna's point, you have to focus on what you can control and what you first should do is just take stock of what you have and who you have in your life and be grateful and thankful for your health if you are healthy and keep a positive outlook on seeing your way through this nuttiness and making sure to remind and reinforce that with others around you and lead by example.

Justin Welsh (06:48):
Yeah, absolutely. I'm feeling like each day that I wake up, I'm blessed to be feeling good. So I think I'm keeping that top of mind.

I'm keeping that top of mind with my teams as well. Stephanie, I know that Glassdoor is a relatively large organization, and are you seeing any unique or interesting challenges based on the size of the organization or what are you seeing from your vantage point?

Stephanie Jenkins (07:11):
Yeah, so in early March when this started to go down, this is my biggest concern is how are we going to manage everyone remotely? And I manage a very large team that are a lot of early career professionals too and that are all in the office right now or we're in the office learning from each other, hearing each other's talk tracks. So a lot of what they were learning was really through symbiosis and I was very concerned about us moving remotely, but we tried to build a lot of structure and rigor around how we can still create that symbiosis and how we can still learn from each other.

So the first three days that we went remote, we went into all of our managers and directors put together a game plan for their individual teams on how they could get the effectiveness out of each day. And a lot of them came up with new strategies which were actually really creative and really good. So like a morning huddle, an evening huddle to answer questions, increasing the cadence of one-on-ones or team meetings to cover different and specific and tactical things.

(08:11):
I think a big one for now that we're all remotely and something that we didn't really realize until we're about a week into it is audio and visual on visual I think is one thing, but audio, even when you're in a team meeting, having that audio on and being able to send little tips and tricks in unless you have a legitimate excuse or a dog barking in the background. So we put in all these best practices in place and we rolled them out to our team. And I think though the one piece of leadership advice that I would give and that we've been saying since the beginning, in addition to Ralph here, positivity and gratitude, I think those are absolutely great plays has been to try to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

So we've been touting this zen proverb or I have been touting this zen proverb, which is lettuce exist like a lotus at ease in muddy water, no mud, no lotus, and that's been our phrase.

Justin Welsh (09:08):
I like it, I like it, I like it, I like it too. One thing that became really apparent to me early on, and this is just maybe diving a little bit deeper into this topic before we go into deal execution, is that when you're working remotely, it almost feels like you could potentially lose boundaries. And so I know that some of the businesses that I'm working with, everyone knows that we're at home right now, we're all sitting in front of our computers for the most part.

I know some of us have kids, some of us don't, but I'm seeing a struggle or a challenge where suddenly we're more available and I think when we're more available and when people know we're at home, there can be a tendency to overwork. How are you guys dealing with that and making sure that you're not calling those 5:45 PM meetings, you're not having your team on eight 15 and pretty soon you're working 15 hour days. Are you guys seeing that?

And if so, how are you handling it? Maybe Stephanie, you could start us off.

Stephanie Jenkins (10:02):
Yeah, absolutely. For the first few weeks, I think that was the case, but now that we've gotten into a little bit of a cadence and realize that that was turning out to be a big problem amongst our teams, I think little things can prevent that. So we started a slack like, hi, I am here in the morning, and that usually doesn't happen for most of my team members until nine o'clock or so, 8 39 and then a slack sign off to your team, Hey, I'm signing off for the day.

And that happens around four 30 to five 30. And from that is really respecting that outside of those hours, we all have lives and we all have things to do and we all have things to take care of and we have to respect that time. So you can't really depend on someone turning in something outside of those hours as an example.

So little things like that have helped a lot. And then Slack statuses has actually been really big and really simple. I'm eating lunch right now and putting a little sandwich or something like that has been very helpful.

Justin Welsh (10:59):
Yeah, that makes sense. Go ahead, Ralph, do you want to add?

Ralph Barsi (11:02):
No, I mean, I was just going to piggyback off Stephanie's comment. There's a dichotomy in this over-communication approach. On one hand, you've got to over-communicate and say, Hey, look, I'm eating lunch right now or I'm signing off for the day or for the next half hour.

But at the same time, you've got to be respectful of the team's schedule as well, and don't be communicating that stuff at nine o'clock at night that, Hey, I'm signing off for the day, but if anybody needs me, it's just like it's nine o'clock at night. Give them their time and their space as well and just create little barriers, if you will, or guardrails throughout the day. Make sure that your calendar is visible to your team and be specific when you're communicating and it'll go a long way.

Justin Welsh (11:53):
Awesome. Anything to add on that, Anna, from your perspective?

Anna Phalen (11:56):
No, I think it's just at Jellyvision we have a flexible work from home policy. So while we have an office, many of us are new to working from home, it's one of those things of just use good judgment. We have a lot of parents that are working and they're juggling kids and they're basically just saying, Hey, PS from two to four, it might be a little bit of craziness of me changing diapers and running around just heads up and it's like, just communicate and be honest and we've got you back.

We can support you through this. We're all doing some crazy things that we never did before.

Justin Welsh (12:28):
Yeah, totally. I don't have kids, but I have wine to drink at night and I can't be getting bothered at 7:00 PM when I'm on my second glass of pinot noir unless you a bad business decisions.

Ralph Barsi (12:39):
That's right.

Justin Welsh (12:40):
So cool. I appreciate y'all addressing that. That was something that I had a major concern with was how we put up boundaries, let's switch and move into deal execution as that is sort of the topic of this talk.

And I've been at some companies where there has been rigidity to every deal to move deals sort of along, but I've also been at companies where the mantra is sort of do whatever is required to win the deal. So I'd be curious if, especially in this situation, if you've had to install things like deal standards and how you hold both your managers accountable to those deal standards, but also how your managers hold their reps accountable. Ralph, why don't you kick us off on that one?

Ralph Barsi (13:25):
Sure. I could shed light on the top of the funnel activities since I oversee sales development as we talked about. Well, it's critical in those early conversations when we're engaging prospects to diagnose and to qualify for the right areas the first time around because what we're essentially doing is we're creating a medical record, if you will, that's going to get handed off to those who are prescribing the solution in the AE role.

So we want to make sure that we're hitting on all cylinders early on so that we can set the tone for the prospect that a mutual plan will be put together. We're going to identify timelines and catalysts that are critical to your business and the problems that you're trying to solve, and then we'll reverse engineer from there and work our way backwards, making sure that we identify and hit the certain milestones together. So if we need to be rigorous around the deal mechanics, we're going to be rigorous along with you, and if we need to be a little more flexible, we'll be a little more flexible with you, but we're working in concert with the prospect of course, to move that deal through the pipeline.

Justin Welsh (14:36):
Do you feel like right now, I'm just coming right back to you quickly, Ralph. Do you feel like right now, given the situation that you've had to change the way that you qualify or added additional qualification criteria into your process, or is it sort of business as usual for what you guys are doing?

Ralph Barsi (14:49):
No, it's definitely the former because there is no playbook to what's going on right now. There's no silver bullet. No one is certain as to when the dust is going to settle and things are going to be back to normal.

And so one of the key criterion that our sales development reps are qualifying for is timeline. And so when we talk about timeline and when we want these desired outcomes, both parties are very aware that there's that layer of uncertainty. And so that goes back to what I was talking about where you need to be flexible, and so we will acknowledge it upfront with the prospect and see what we need to do to work together through it.

Justin Welsh (15:34):
Awesome. And Anna, have your deal standards changed? Have they remained the same?

Have you had to install them for the first time? I'd love to hear about what's going on at Jellyvision.

Anna Phalen (15:43):
Yeah, so in general, we have a really nice, well-defined buying journey, and it's basically because we have one product to sell and we know how to sell it, and we have certain initiatives in place and tactics that we move forward. However, to Ralph's point in the beginning, our main focus right now is lead with empathy and be helpful. That's something we always try to do, but when we get in on meetings, on calls, we have to be humans first and listen to our prospects.

We sell into hr. So a lot of our HR customers and partners, they're dealing with a lot of chaos on their end. So I've been coaching my team is the deal structure, the buying journey, but first listen only start really truly selling if it's helpful, and we do think we can be very helpful in this moment, but we need to be human first.

Justin Welsh (16:38):
Absolutely. I'm reading a lot online about empathy being human sales 2.0, a lot of that stuff, which to me, especially given the circumstances makes sense, but then I flip it and I think, but we've all still got business to close and jobs to do, right? So the rigidity of our process becomes even that much more important.

Stephanie, what are you seeing on your end? Are you seeing an increase in rigidity again, are you going back to what's been working for Glassdoor previously or have you had to change and pivot a little bit?

Stephanie Jenkins (17:08):
Yeah, so that's a great question. Deal integrity is very big at Glassdoor. We really want to make sure that we're doing the right deals with the right companies.

So all that shady selling, we try to eliminate it. We really want to have high integrity standards because we really want to help our customers and help them do the right thing. So as we have shifted and moved into this environment, things have absolutely changed and pretty quickly in the last few weeks.

So the right thing now really might not have been the right thing a month ago. So as an example, if someone asked us for free job postings a month ago, that might not have been the right thing because we need to create a mutually beneficial environment. But now things have changed a little bit and it's important that we're supporting the businesses that are essential businesses that we can get across the line while also trying to figure out what's right for us.

(18:01):
So we've moved mountains in the last few weeks to create new deal incentives for reps, new incentives for companies to partner with us and to try to create a really mutually beneficial environment for those companies that are hiring and working on their employer brand and the existing customers in place that may be meeting more challenging times. And it was important for us to not do that in a one-off, a one-off way, like a rep doing a shady deal, but to do it together as a company because we really believe it's the right thing to do.

Justin Welsh (18:29):
Yeah, that's awesome. I think a few of the companies that I'm advising for, when we used to think about incentives, we always thought about rep incentives,

(18:38):
And now as we're in this sort of crisis mode, we're starting to think a little bit more about customer incentives as we probably should have been in the very first place where how can we help our customers navigate this situation? How can we make it easy and simple for them? So it's good to hear that a lot of you are thinking through that in a similar fashion, and I'd like to maybe take it back up the funnel because we're talking about what does it look like to move our customers through this journey?

But I would say that right now, this is probably the most uncertain time to get someone to even begin a journey. This is a really, really challenging and difficult time. So what's the right kind of message to send right now, the right tone to use to get prospects to respond?

Ralph, we'll kick it back off with you since you're sort of the top of funnel guru of the group. What are you seeing working for your teams right now?

Ralph Barsi (19:32):
Yeah, well, first of all, we steer our focus on them and not us. And so when we do engage with prospects, whether that's by email or by phone or on the web like this, we're leading with, Hey, look, first of all, how, how is your team doing? How's the company doing?

And the reason for my call or the reason I'm reaching out is because I've been researching your company or you for some time, as has the team here, and these are a couple things that we've noticed and I wanted to reach out to at least acquaint you with who we are so that when it does make sense for you and for the business, we want to have a seat at the table to at least share with you how we might be able to help you solve these critical business issues. If the time is not now, that's fine.

(20:21):
At least we know one another at this point, so let this just be an introduction, but if it makes sense to you, why don't we pin something on the calendar for X number of weeks or months from now so that when the tides change a little bit, we can reengage and reconvene. And again, you're approaching the whole conversation and the whole cycle with the understanding that, look, we're going to build a long lasting relationship at some point. It's just a matter of when that's going to start.

That's really the impetus of the call right now today.

Justin Welsh (20:55):
Cool. And are you seeing any particular messaging resonate or even any particular types of content that's happening right now?

Anna Phalen (21:04):
Yeah, so

Ralph Barsi (21:05):
Yeah, go ahead.

Justin Welsh (21:05):
Go ahead.

Anna Phalen (21:06):
Oh, so in general, I think for us, we are really focusing again just how we can be helpful and in terms of what resonates is being sure that you, as Ralph said, that you did your research beforehand and you're bringing content to the table that really makes sense to them. We have done some fun new strategies of doing some ARDS and sending videos to folks and seeing if that engages them. That's a lighthearted and that's gotten some people to get on the phone with us, but again, just making it about them and not about you.

Justin Welsh (21:40):
Cool. What about you, Stephanie? Seeing anything different?

Stephanie Jenkins (21:43):
Yeah, it's funny because at Glassdoor we do a lot of thought leadership, especially around jobs and hiring and a lot of that content and even what people are clicking on and opening has certainly changed over the last few weeks to more things like how do I treat employees if we're in unprecedented times? So we've had to adjust a lot of our messaging and we do offer a lot of free products that kind of get you comfortable using the tool, like a free employer product where you can kind of learn a little bit more about Glassdoor. So Ralph, to a lot of your points of how do we just start a relationship with our customers, how can we use the free tools and products that they have and the thought leadership that we have produced to create the beginnings of a relationship for a long-term successful partnership?

And if it makes sense for them, then how can we get them into a paid sponsorship from there?

Justin Welsh (22:36):
Yeah, there's so many things that we're sharing I think that are working during this crisis, but also work regularly on a regular basis and our best practices for talking to customers. I'd be interested if any of you have anything really creative that's worked that's been surprising or interesting to reach out and engage and chat with your customers that's maybe outside the box or something that you might take out of this time and bring back into your normal outreach workflow? Ladies, I'll let you go for it.

I mean,

Anna Phalen (23:10):
I think the thing that I have been pleasantly surprised about, and this is a one specific example, but the crisis of the COVID-19 situation has led us to be innovative. It's given us an opportunity to pause and say what we were doing three weeks ago doesn't work anymore, so what can we do differently that's going to get prospects to engage with us that's going to be helpful to our customers? And to me, that's been inspiring and in giving me some motivation to really think outside of the box and also lean on my team to come to the table with ideas.

I don't exactly know how to move forward, nobody does, but there's a hundred of us on this team. Let's put our heads together, come up with some new ideas and just test 'em out.

Ralph Barsi (24:00):
Yeah, it's a combination to Anna's point of creative thinking and critical thinking. So on the creative side, you have to think about what's going on when you zoom out the macro and then relate it to the micro and what's going on in the business that you're talking to. So sometimes creative thinking involves combining things that wouldn't otherwise be combined where critical thinking is starting with the answer first, making sure that you're deconstructing to root cause of a problem and identifying it in its bits and bites and doing that along with the prospects you're talking to.

And let's not forget whether it's COVID-19 or not. The best way to warm up your calls and to engage prospects is to leverage any mutual connections out there, make sure that you're exhausting all options for warming up the initial engagement, and it's going to go a lot more smoothly in those early conversations than otherwise.

Justin Welsh (25:04):
Absolutely. One thing I'm advising any founder who will listen to me during this time is we all talk to our customers. We talk to our customers to get product feedback, to do a lot of different things and upselling, but one thing that I've seen be really, really helpful is talking to our customers about how they might like to be talked to if they were prospects.

And so that to me has been one area that I've been saying, Hey, let's reach out to our customers. Let's get 10 to 15 of our customers and let's hear what kind of language, what kind of tone of voice, what kind of channel, what kind of messaging they would want to hear if they weren't yet a customer of our product during these really challenging times. And that's been a really interesting and unique thing that we probably, at least some of the businesses I'm working with don't do enough.

And so we found that to be really interesting. I don't know if you guys are seeing anything like that or spending time talking to your customers today to learn more about that.

Ralph Barsi (25:56):
That's an awesome idea. Was it enlightening? Justin?

Justin Welsh (25:58):
Super, super enlightening. Essentially we scraped all our language and we're like, this is the wrong language. We need to use this language instead based on the 15 customers we talked to and when we were able to go out and prospect, the messaging became more clear and I think more prospect relevance.

Anna Phalen (26:15):
I like it.

Justin Welsh (26:16):
Thanks. I think it kind of takes us to the next sort of question, which is it's great, there's lots of learnings happening right now, but it's really difficult in this uncertain time to remain agile. So you can take these learnings that you're finding and you're getting all these different parts of your team and make sure that everyone's looped in, everyone's communicated to everyone is getting the learnings.

How are you guys doing that? What are some best practices for sharing information and learnings across your teams in this time? Maybe Stephanie, we'll start with you.

Stephanie Jenkins (26:48):
Yeah, so first is really encouraging people to share. It's when you do have a good idea, when you do have a good customer conversation, when you figured out some good messaging, you have to share it. So we have very lively slack channels for each team and segment that are kind of off having a lot of fun right now and doing quite a bit of sharing, but in addition to that, it's your job as a leader to also help curate that.

So looking through reading the important things and figuring out which messaging is working and really sharing that in a more succinct way. I would say also, we are doing these weekly trainings too, to adapt our messaging for a lot of our teams, really starting to figure out how do you take what they're doing and replicate that at scale, so how do you have them work with your marketing team to develop better messaging? Similar to your point of talking to our customers too, how do we have our top reps try to replicate that at scale too?

Justin Welsh (27:40):
Awesome. What about you, Ralph? You seeing anything that's helping you share tips and tactics across your team?

Ralph Barsi (27:46):
Yeah, again, Stephanie's nailing it. Those are great ideas. Stephanie, we're doing very similar where we're actually cutting and pasting responses.

We're getting from prospects and sharing them in our channels in Slack as well. And then as a company, we have increased the rate of all hands calls that we have, so it's every other week we have an all company all hands where we're sharing insights from across the organization regardless of business unit, where're sharing what we're hearing in the market and what we're seeing from our customers and prospects, and it's just keeping everybody on the same page and in the loop, which is helping us on an individual basis tailor our messaging and our outreach. Awesome.

Anna Phalen (28:32):
Yeah, I would say the one thing I would add, in addition to just communicating, having meetings using Slack channels, we have also been utilizing Gong snippets with our customers. So we're in a position where our customers are coming to us and asking us for help. We create software that helps explain healthcare benefits.

So they're asking, how do I communicate about COVID? How do I communicate about telemedicine, which is really critical to how we can help them. So we're taking those snippets and then we're forwarding 'em to the product team and then separately meeting as leadership team every other day to figure out what is our strategy.

We have to react quickly, we have to pivot pretty quickly if we're actually going to make an impact. So that's been a really useful tool for us as well.

Justin Welsh (29:18):
I know someone mentioned doing all hands biweekly, that was you, correct, Ralph, Anna and Stephanie. Are you guys increasing the amount of times that you're communicating to the full business? I'd love to learn about how that's changing.

Stephanie Jenkins (29:34):
For me a hundred percent, it's sending a twice weekly email and stuff, but once weekly email to my team, it's doing a lot more video content too, which has actually been kind of fun trying to get creative with it too and engaging, so you absolutely have to increase the communication at our company level. HR is sending a lovely email every single day, and from the top down, everyone has increased their communication flow, which I think has given a lot more comfort to a lot of people.

Anna Phalen (30:06):
On top of that too, just more time to hang out. We've been doing virtual happy hours and standups and just, we've actually been doing a crib tours, so taking people around our homes and giving them a tour of our house and just another opportunity to have that human connection, share ideas that maybe might not have anything to do with work, but help people be more engaged and more leaned in so that when we roll out strategies, we know how to get ahold of them and use that type of tactic.

Justin Welsh (30:35):
Great. Yeah, I'm seeing over communication, but providing the why behind a lot of the things that are happening I think has been really important for the businesses I'm chatting with is why are we doing the things that we're doing? And I think that getting people all bought in when they're all so disconnected physically has been a really big win for some of the businesses that I see.

And a lot of the sharing is what I might call, and it may be the wrong description, but horizontal sharing, so sharing across departments from marketing to sales to product and engineering. But let's talk about the sort of vertical sharing. And when I say vertical, what I mean is you've got a lot of folks at the top who are top performers and right now I sort of feel kind of bad for the folks that are sort of in the average or bottom performing category and struggling to improve their performance right now because we are so disconnected and because this is so new.

What are some strategies that you're seeing to not just share knowledge horizontally, but to help your top salespeople up uplevel your middle tier or bottom performers right now? What are you putting in place to make that happen? Anna, you want to kick us off there and love to learn about that?

Anna Phalen (31:42):
Yeah, for sure. So I think really empowering the team to lean on one another. If we're going to win, we do it together and I don't think there's an individual, if they're the highest performer, that's going to help the team win as a whole.

We have to do it as a group, so empowering people to shadow one another's calls, listen to their calls after they've taken place, share wins, share losses on Slack. Sometimes it takes a little nudging, but really encouraging people to lean on each other at this time and hopefully that's something that comes from the ground up, but certainly can be supported from the management side as well.

Justin Welsh (32:20):
Ralph, anything different from your side or anything that you're seeing that's working, sharing best practices from your top performers and getting your middle tier trained up really effectively?

Ralph Barsi (32:30):
Sure. Very similar to what Anna said, but our top reps, our top SDRs for example, hold their own office hours where twice a week they do a one hour block of time on their calendar, which is an office hour for anybody to hit them up and ask them the dumb questions, I guess. And also we do on Tuesday, what's called a team Tuesday, where we'll have a representative from the sales team or one of our top SDRs or someone from around the organization, from any business unit, share best practices in their own business function so that we can then relate it to what we're doing and how we're talking to prospects.

And it's super, super helpful. We've had sessions on best email copy, best voicemail, greetings, how to frame up an effective calendar invite, real detailed stuff that's helping tweak things by even two degrees, but it's getting people up into the right where they need to be.

Justin Welsh (33:33):
Cool. What about you, Stephanie? How are you guys leveraging this challenging environment to spread best practices a little faster or better?

Stephanie Jenkins (33:41):
Yeah, Anna, Ralph, I think you said a lot of those, and I completely agree with you, Ralph. It's a really fun time to do a lot of contests like that too, which is practicing and sharing it. But I would say the only other thing to add is really giving a lot of time and space for that self-learning because it doesn't happen by just absorbing it.

It really happens by absorbing it and practicing it and again, practicing it several times. So it's giving people time to really educate themselves and then to practice it and encouraging the managers to do the same with their teams. So it's encouraging and time.

Justin Welsh (34:14):
That's great. This is one area where I've seen, and this is a shameless but very truthful plug, one area where I have seen gong be a superstar product for the teams that I'm working with. We're just oversharing in gong right now.

Anytime that we get a great objection handled a great win, an interesting customer comment, we are just sharing nonstop, so it may be information overload, but we're trying to assemble it as best as we can and we've seen that be working a lot, so cool. Well, those are great questions all around deal execution. Thank you so much for providing some really cool and interesting and unique answers.

I'd love to maybe move to one final question, which is how do you foresee the changes in working due to what we're seeing with Coronavirus impacting the sales profession in the longterm? Maybe Anna, you can kick us off with this one.

Anna Phalen (35:07):
Yeah, I think it's really hard to predict, but if there's one thing that I've learned in this uncertainty that everybody's dealing with and to double down on it again, is we have an opportunity to be innovative. So moving forward, no matter what happens, what are the things that we can do to take advantage of new and unique ideas to help progress the business forward? That's something that I'm excited about.

Justin Welsh (35:37):
What about you,

Ralph Barsi (35:37):
Ralph? Yeah, for us, a couple things. The way I see it as number one, we need to empower one another moving forward, just trust after teaching of course that your reps are going to own their business within the business and they are going to lead by example in their own right.

Another thing to keep in mind is start creating contingency plans, be productively paranoid and start building the checklists. If all engines fail, what are the levers you're going to pull to kind of keep the plane in flight? It's really important to think about on a daily basis anyway, but it takes times like these to kind of bring it to the forefront and I think that's really important moving forward.

Stephanie Jenkins (36:21):
Yeah, I agree with that completely. This has certainly helped us all reveal our strengths and weaknesses during times like this too. So you've got to keep evolving.

For me, I think one of the biggest changes is just moving a hard, hard away from being that sales person or that salesy attitude and really moving more so leading with empathy, which is what we've all been talking about. So instead of being a salesperson to a sales consultant to, I think at this point we're in a sales therapist zone. We are a therapist right now, so I think we're all going to lead more with a lot more empathy.

And then the last thing that I was joking with myself when I first read this question was I think finally everyone's going to turn their video on, which I'm really excited about. It's so much more lively to interact with someone over video than I think over a phone call. So I do.

That happens. It's

Ralph Barsi (37:11):
A great call. You're right, no pun intended.

Justin Welsh (37:16):
I think we're going to see a really interesting thing. I think that companies who doubted remote work before are going to start really recognizing that this is a huge opportunity for them to save some money to hire folks across the country that they wouldn't normally have access to. And my hope is that even though we're no longer physically as close, that communication across departments might actually improve.

This has really forced me to communicate more with internal stakeholders than I ever have in the past, even though we were physically closer. And that's been a really interesting learning for me and I hope that continues because I think that's a really good way to stitch together a strong business. Well listen, that is the conclusion of the questions that I had for you all, Ralph, Anna.

Stephanie, thank you so much for participating. I had a lot of fun, Sheena, thanks for having me and I'll turn it over to you.

Host (38:08):
Yeah, that was super fun. It was great to be backstage, literally backstage watching you guys though. Thanks for all of that.

We've had some great q and a come in to Slido, which I'm going to go through some of the top voted ones there and ask those to the panel. For those of you who are listening in, it's not too late, you can go over to slide out, throw in your question or vote some other ones up. And we have definitely to get through a bunch of these today.

So the first one is how do you handle the COVID objection when you know have handled every other objection and the deal is ready to be closed, but this COVID objection shows up,

Anna Phalen (38:52):
I can jump in and then whoever wants to take over. I think it's really understanding and saying, yep, I get it. We're all in the same boat, we're all dealing with this together.

What levers do we need to pull to help this move this forward? I think for the first time ever, we're exploring different types of ideas that we can get deals closed. Is it giving something for free that we wouldn't normally?

Is it payment terms, is it pricing? So just having that really honest conversation and if you can both be honest, I think you can both come to conclusion that's mutually beneficial, but you just have to ask the question. Great.

Ralph Barsi (39:34):
Yeah, I would put measures in place to not be surprised when they bring that up, get in front of that and being the trusted advisor that you should be as their salesperson, you should be suggesting some things they and their business need to be thinking about now as it relates to COVID so that you can kind of keep the train on the track and not be surprised.

Stephanie Jenkins (40:02):
I completely agree with Ralph is as much as you can build that into the qualification criteria so that you're preventing that from coming up later, I think that's the most important thing to do right now is proactively addressing it.

Justin Welsh (40:14):
Yeah, I think it's all about helping companies recognize that oftentimes the companies that pour resources in right now come out of crisis like these the strongest, and so we have a lot of those conversations, but often this is a real objection and the answer sometimes is it's not the right time for the deal unfortunately. And I think we're going to see that a lot and I think we have to be empathetic with our customers and we can't force a deal down their throats when they can't afford it, don't have customers. I think we have to be really cognizant of that.

Host (40:45):
Very true, very true. This one is pretty highly voted up. Are quotas being adjusted, taken off, lowered raised?

What do you all think about quota attainment in this environment

Stephanie Jenkins (41:04):
Will start by transparently saying that we have adjusted hours and compensated for the environment that we're in right now, and I think that was an important thing to do. I think it's an important thing that we continue to be agile with it so that we show that we really value our people in our organization and that we keep everyone on board and motivated and excited to work here and excited to do the right thing.

Host (41:30):
Thanks for

Anna Phalen (41:30):
That. Yeah, we did the same thing. I think it was an opportunity to show our reps that we understand and we care and that we are going to be nimble and take action right away.

So I think it built some really good trust for our sales team.

Ralph Barsi (41:45):
For us. We've kept targets where they are. That being said, our ears close to the track, watching close of quarter calls, seeing that, like I mentioned earlier, the macro trends going on, but to manage through it, what we've done is we've implemented great spiff programs not only to the benefit of the reps, but to the benefit of the community.

So part of our spiff will include a collective donation to a local food bank and to organizations that are doing good for those who can't go grocery shopping for example, or get out of their house. And we're finding that to be a real fruitful incentive for people because they're really thinking outside of our organization and our number and making a positive impact to the community at large.

Justin Welsh (42:43):
I love that. I would add just being very candid, it's all about the health of your business, right? If your business has 55 million in runway, you can probably afford to reduce quotas a little bit, but if you're at a startup that doesn't have a whole lot of runway or you're not in as good of a financial health as another business, you might not be able to afford to do that.

And I think that the big key here is the CEO, the founder, whoever's leading the company, has to communicate throughout this course of this time why our quota is going down, why our quota is staying the same, why our quota is going up. And as long as they can communicate the why and do it transparently and candidly, I think that you're going to have better reception from your salespeople regardless of what your choice

Host (43:28):
Is. This next question touches a little bit on some of that transparency and engaging with some senior folks, your managers and executives on the team. So my colleagues and I are struggling with managers management style now that our team is remote, how can I approach this most effectively

Ralph Barsi (43:50):
Approach the varying management styles

Host (43:53):
Remotely? Yeah, maybe if you're having difficulty with your manager's style and you were in person, it may be easier to broach that conversation or have conversation. How do you broach maybe even just more broadly challenging conversations?

You have multiple mediums now that you're working remotely, you have Slack and you have Zoom and you have picking up the phone. If you're having a tough conversation, what's your recommendation for that?

Ralph Barsi (44:19):
A couple things. One, if you encounter an issue, first of all, before you escalate it to your leader, come up with two solutions or potential solutions to that problem. And then that way you're not going to your leaders saying, Hey, can you solve this problem?

Instead, you're taking leadership and you're showing a couple ways that you could see that thing through to resolution. That's number one. Secondly, with respect to how to speak with them, meet them where they are, ask them how do they prefer to communicate?

Do they want to fire off texts throughout the day? Do they want a web call like this? But give them multiple choices in both respects, so you have done the work for them and all they need to do is tick the box, give you the answer, and it's going to set a pretty good example of your own individual leadership if you do it that way.

In my experience,

Justin Welsh (45:16):
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the more uncomfortable a conversation, the more important it is to have it. And so if you're feeling uncomfortable about having a conversation with your manager, I think it depends on your style. I like to write versus speak.

So normally when I'm going to have an uncomfortable conversation, I write the whole thing out first and then when it's time to chat with that person, I like to figure out what medium they like to participate in. And then I think it's about meeting in a mutual medium and having a really difficult conversation that has to be had.

Ralph Barsi (45:49):
I have a book recommendation, book recommendation based on Justin's response. It's called Difficult Conversations. You can order it now on Amazon and it'll help you navigate through those waters.

Sorry to interrupt you, Anna.

Anna Phalen (46:03):
No, I was just going to say I think one thing that everyone can just continue to take into consideration is that every single person's impacted by this pandemic in some way. So again, lead with empathy. Your manager or your leader might be dealing with something super personal on the outside, so just kind of take that into consideration, lead with good intent, but certainly have that honest and open conversation.

Host (46:32):
Great. So this is for Ralph, but anybody can chime in. How do you tow that line between selling and showing that you can solve a problem they may have?

Ralph Barsi (46:41):
Again, based on your research of the industry they're in and your knowledge of their business, that's how you can suggest solutions to potential critical business issues they're running into. And to be a little more specific, if you sort your number of leads or number of accounts by industry or vertical and then by persona, you're going to have a lot of the same conversations and a lot of the same engagements so that when you do connect with a key stakeholder in one of your target accounts, for example, you could say, I was talking to three different vice presidents in your business function in this industry, and here are the three to five things all of them have brought up. I'm just going to presume that those issues that you're dealing with as well, is that fair?

If it is, your second question is going to be, well, how are you stack ranking those issues in terms of when and how you want to solve them? And that's going to help us gauge how we can best partner with you to resolve those issues.

Justin Welsh (47:48):
One of the pieces of advice I gave to my team was because this situation is so challenging, it's almost time to move away from selling for selling's sake. And it's more time to start having a conversation with your prospect about their business as though you might have a conversation with your best friend. My teams, if they're listening will laugh at this because they've heard me say it a thousand times, but I always picture my prospect as my best friend who just sat down with me at a bar, ordered a beer and said, I've got a massive problem and I know that you know how to solve it.

Can we talk about it? What kind of questions might I ask my best friend if they were in a really crappy situation, how deep would I dive into their answers? And so I try and treat my prospects that way, and I think that will come across really well in times like this and I think moving forward as well.

Host (48:34):
That's a great suggestion. Alright, this one's a little bit more specific. This is from mena.

How are you prioritizing sales ops rev ops requests in these times? Do you have any perspectives on that?

Stephanie Jenkins (48:50):
For us? We've reprioritized a lot of our sales operations and revenue operations time to adjust to the current circumstances. So as an example, a few months ago, a lot of it was based, a lot of what they were doing was annual FY 21 planning as well as booking deals as they come up.

But we reprioritize a lot of their time to work on the current incentives that we were developing and to be more agile in this environment. And it's simply because we've really needed to and we've needed their help to really get to where we are right now and adjusting really quickly to the current circumstances

Ralph Barsi (49:30):
For us and being agile in the midst of all this, we've really focused on daily inspection of pipeline, for example, really looking at our leading indicators and working with our rev ops teams. We've had to shift priorities together and we've really leveraged them, for example, to build workflows where needed so that everybody is alerted in real time of changes that might be taking place in terms of pipeline velocity, days in stage meetings booked versus meetings held, et cetera. So it seems like things are changing daily.

So if anything, we're really tightening up our interlock with our ops teams, that's for

Justin Welsh (50:14):
Sure. We're using them to do something called daily health metrics, which is, I want to know the minute things are starting to look better. I would love to just understand are we coming out of this?

Are there indicators like Ralph said, that things are getting better or getting worse. And so we've gone from this zoomed out monthly or quarterly view of our business into an all hands executive team every day looking at daily health metrics and understanding is this getting worse or better? Because I think knowing that and seeing those trends helps you make better decisions.

So that's how we're leveraging our teams.

Anna Phalen (50:48):
I think it's been funny too, I've been asking them to pull reports that I've never asked them to pull before. How many of our prospects did not move forward because of status quo, pull those people out, nobody's in status quo. So they've been really nimble and helpful of just like, I have this really weird report I need you to pull that you need to help me create.

Stephanie Jenkins (51:07):
Yeah, almost immediately we created closed loss reason COVID-19.

Ralph Barsi (51:11):
Yeah, same us too.

Host (51:13):
Same. Yeah, I think having that real time data driven approach is more important than ever in this environment for sure. I'll do a last question and then I'm going to throw it back to you guys.

So how do you motivate your teams even with all the uncertainty around their ability to hit quota?

Ralph Barsi (51:29):
You can't motivate or inspire them unless you are a motivated and inspired person, otherwise don't give it a shot because it's not going to work. But then also these are times when you need to do things that are not at scale. You need to get to know your individual team mates better and have an understanding or better understanding as much as they'll share on what their true purpose is individually.

That way when we get into rough patches like this, you can remind them of what their greater purpose purposes and why they're even here in the first place. And that usually gets 'em pulled towards the target versus pushed towards the target.

Anna Phalen (52:08):
One thing that I think is just really fascinating about this situation is normally when something happens to you, you can call up that wise old sage and be like, what did you do during this time? But there's literally nobody we can call and be like, so when you went through a global pandemic, how did you sort of react? So I've been taking that whole idea of like we are all in this together and in terms of motivating one another, I do my best, but I'm also leaning on my team for ideas of what should we do or how can we help or what can we test out?

So just always keeping my ears open and acknowledging that nobody's done this before, so we're doing it together.

Stephanie Jenkins (52:48):
That's a good one. Anna, you said at the beginning focusing your teams a lot on controlling what you can control. We just got to control what we can control.

And one of my managers asked me the other day, they're like, so what can we control? The nicest thing in the world? And very honest.

And we went through a list of things that they can control and then at the end we were like, you know what? Something else we can control is how much fun we're having every day. So we can control our attitude, we can control our positivity, we can control how much we make this environment fun for our team members.

And so that's still something that we can control. This doesn't have to be boring or treacherous. This can be we get through it together.

Justin Welsh (53:29):
I think if you look online at anybody that you might follow in the sales or business space, whether it's Jason Lemkin or Gary Vaynerchuk or whomever your person of choice is that you like to follow, they're all saying something really similar right now, which is this is one heroes get made. This is when real leaders emerge and help their companies through these really incredible and challenging times. And I try and remind my entire team that all the magnifying glass, all the microscope is on them, and this is when these leaders are going to emerge.

And I think people deep down, they know it's going to be hard, but they actually really want to be that leader. And when you have folks on your teams who want to say, wouldn't it be crazy if we actually over-delivered on our quota during this really challenging time? If you've got a team like that, this is when folks like that get really motivated.

So I love it. I love these times. Not for the COVID part, but for the leadership part.

Host (54:23):
I love that. I'm fired up by that. Justin, I'm going to throw back to Anna, Stephanie and Ralph, myself and Justin.

We've asked a bunch of questions. Do the three of you have any questions for each other that you'd like to pose or something that you'd like to mention that we haven't talked about today?

Anna Phalen (54:40):
I think, I guess one thing I just want to call out is that because learning day by day, this is more of ongoing for everybody in the community is like, please continue to share ideas and thoughts of what's working and what's not working, because nobody we've already established. Nobody has a roadmap. Nobody knows this is going to go.

So as you day by day come up with new ideas and strategies, please share.

Ralph Barsi (55:04):
Yeah. My question is, I mentioned a book title earlier. What books are you reading, if any, and what would you recommend we check out?

Stephanie Jenkins (55:14):
I just got through David and Goliath, which was fantastic, Malcolm, and very applicable during this time, so I highly recommend that. A lot of really good quotes in there, especially during these times that you can share with your teams.

Ralph Barsi (55:26):
Awesome. I'm finishing talking with strangers right now. It's fascinating.

Anna Phalen (55:30):
That was good. That was really good.

Ralph Barsi (55:32):
It's a good one.

Anna Phalen (55:33):
I'm doing the Watchmen. I just needed something different. It's a comic book.

It's

Justin Welsh (55:40):
That's

Ralph Barsi (55:40):
Awesome.

Anna Phalen (55:43):
It's a break from reality.

Justin Welsh (55:44):
Cool. Check out Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Anna Phalen (55:47):
Excellent.

Justin Welsh (55:48):
And building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. If you like Copywriting Sweet,

Host (55:54):
I'm reading Protopia by Emily Chang, which is all about women in tech and some of the history behind how that has been set up. So recommend that for anybody interested in that topic.

Ralph Barsi (56:09):
Awesome.

Host (56:09):
Alright. Anything else, guys?

Ralph Barsi (56:11):
Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Go out and get it, and yeah, be sensitive to others. Be grateful.

Be transparent and honest. Be kind. It's a unique catalyst event that we're experiencing right now.

It's just a reminder, Hey, be cool to people. This is how you should have been acting prior, and this is definitely how you should be acting moving forward.

Anna Phalen (56:39):
So yeah, I'd love to say thank you. It's nice to know we're all in this together, so I appreciate hearing everybody's perspective and just receiving that support of that. We're all dealing through the same challenges, and that's really nice.

Host (56:53):
Well, Anna, Stephanie, Ralph, Justin, want to thank you on behalf of the entire Gong team and all of the attendees today for joining us at Celebrate Online. It was a really tremendous session. So great to hear all of your advice and tidbits.

We'd love for you to stick around the event if you want to participate in the chat and engage with some of the folks who are here. I'm sure they would love that. But with that, I'll say adios, and we'll see you soon.

Thank

Ralph Barsi (57:18):
You. Thanks.