Office Hours with Tomasz Tunguz & Bill Binch

In this episode, Office Hours will hosted legendary sales leader Bill Binch. Bill started his career at Oracle where he rose to VP. He led Marketo sales as EVP of Worldwide Sales. Most recently, Bill led the sales team at Pendo as CRO. Today, he’s an operating partner at Battery.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy. Bill & I have been trading emails about different ways of accomplishing this goal. In addition, many founders & sales leaders have asked questions about the details, the pros & cons, & the alternatives to this strategy.
During this Office Hours, Bill talks about:
- his perspective how sales have changed throughout the last three decades
- best practices in structuring sales compensation to achieve different sales strategies
- predictions for how software changes

[@scottt9382]

I liked this in context. As a former enterprise salesperson/leader at two of the FANG's, I will offer that this is more SaaS/SW focused, of course - as well as less enterprise-customer leaning (which Bill does qualify here and there). I would enjoy hearing much of this re-contextualized for hardware startups focused on selling to the enterprise (maybe some SMB). Complex B2B, deep tech, long deal cycles, etc.......Also, one of the biggest drags to enterprise sales motions can be agreements. It once took us almost 2 years to negotiate such things at a massive account - and the only reason we were in the running was that the account gave up on two years of negotiation with the competition: the biggest industry leader who got there first before we even had a service. So, NDAs, EAs, MSAs, BAAs, etc. were the bane of my existence - the use case identification, LoB sponsorship, budgets, technical vetting, and overall selling were the easy parts. I would enjoy hearing more about effective ecosystems built to prioritize 'moving paper forward' as so much of that stateful negotiation is beyond the sellers' control and firmly in the GC/maybe-CFO org.

[@pablogoulart3076]

Great content!