00:00:00 Alex Kane: There's lots of people who can solve your problem. There's not many people who can say: what about the next five problems — can they also solve those too? And so to differentiate yourself, it's not in the words that you say. It's in the things you can show. For instance, one of the products we sell is a dash camera. And I say all the time: if all you tell people about is the value add and the ROI you'll get from having dash cameras, all you've done is sell them that they need dash cameras. Why do they need your dash camera? 00:00:44 Pim Roelofsen: Hey everyone, great that you're joining this video. This is Elite Dealers, where I talk to some of the elite salespeople out there. Today I'm joined by Alex Kane, who is joining us from San Francisco. We're going to talk about one of his best deals. So welcome, Alex — great to have you here. 00:00:58 Alex Kane: Thanks for having me, Pim. I'm excited to be on. 00:01:01 Pim Roelofsen: Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into it? 00:01:04 Alex Kane: Well, I'm Alex Kane. I'm a salesman through and through. I'm based out of the Bay Area and I've been working in tech sales for the past ten-plus years. 00:01:13 Pim Roelofsen: I've seen some of your best years, I suppose — because we go back a while. Wasn't it 2016 when we both joined Cisco Meraki? Way back when. 00:01:22 Alex Kane: Those were the good years — we were young bucks. 00:01:24 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, yeah. So I think you told me back then — what is your favorite sports team? 00:01:28 Alex Kane: Golden State Warriors, through and through. Steph Curry might be the greatest shooter of all time. Anyone who has doubts about that just needs to keep watching the man. He's incredible. 00:01:40 Pim Roelofsen: I'm looking forward to seeing whether there'll be discussion underneath the posting of this video, because I think there are a few players out there who might come for that GOAT spot. I'm no expert, so I'll go with what you're saying there. And I remember when we were spending some time as part of the same Ignite group — we went to a brewery one day, or it might even have been our time in San Francisco together. What is your go-to drink? 00:02:18 Alex Kane: Go-to drink when I want to just be comfortable for the night — greyhound. Grapefruit juice and vodka. It's smooth, you get a little bit of vitamin C with it. It's healthy, I think. 00:02:30 Pim Roelofsen: Okay, that's interesting. I'll keep that in mind for the next time we get to meet and have a couple of drinks. Anyways — we're not here to talk about alcohol or sports, we'll save that for later. This is to get into one of your best deals. Why don't you give us the overview? 00:02:56 Alex Kane: Absolutely. So one of the most interesting deals I've ever worked on — it's a large food trucking company. They've got a thousand vehicles, two thousand trailers, and they have a hard time keeping track of all the moving parts. They're spread all over the country, running a very lean team. What they were really looking for was a platform — something to make their life simple. 00:03:16 Alex Kane: When we first met them, they were struggling with a variety of systems. The initial pitch was simple: why have so many systems when you can have one that does the same thing as all of them? Consolidate down to a single place. And that's kind of where their interest began. 00:03:38 Pim Roelofsen: Is this the typical way that you approach customers? What makes this one special in particular? 00:03:44 Alex Kane: What makes this one special is that they saw the bigger vision. They didn't just do one piece at a time and slowly roll it out — they knew that if they made a shift in this direction, the advantage was in the end outcome. So instead of doing it slowly, they ripped the Band-Aid off and went right for it. They were installing vehicle dash cameras, trailer temp sensors, door monitors — all at once. And to see the data light up as fast as it did, at their magnitude — it was like being fast-forwarded from 1995 to 2022 in a single moment. It was incredible. 00:04:25 Pim Roelofsen: I like that. It sounds like you found something early on that you were able to employ. What did this deal look like in terms of stakeholders — the type of personas you needed to engage with to get visibility across to the right people? 00:04:48 Alex Kane: The key champion — which was a perfect fit for this — was the CIO. He's sitting right in the middle. He needs to get buy-in from the executive team, who are going to approve the budget for this switchover. But he also needs buy-in from the operations team who are going to use the product. So there are a lot of opinions involved. From above: this is very costly, are we sure it's going to be better than what we have? From below: there are a lot of people who've never used this system before. They're comfortable on what they have — even though it gives them trouble, they know it well. Change is scary. 00:05:35 Alex Kane: So there were a lot of detractors in both directions. But a CIO in the middle, pulling them all toward the greater outcome — better data, more information, and an ability to see their operation in a brand new way. In a lot of ways, they were flying blind. They never knew there was anything better out there until we really showed them what it could be like. We took our time. It wasn't something we tried to rush or pressure-sell — it was about doing something the right way. And I think that came through to the ownership who approved the project, because it wasn't a deal — it was a partnership. 00:05:58 Pim Roelofsen: I love that. And I hear you say "we" instead of "I" — indicating this was a team effort. So talking about stakeholders on your side — how did the alignment within your own team look? 00:06:19 Alex Kane: Life at a technology company in hypergrowth — you work with a lean team. Me and my engineer, we handled most of the burden. We were the ones on all the calls, on the on-sites. We went out to help hold the hand of the installation. Post-sale is when we start to bring in the extra resources — implementation consultants, Customer Success managers, technical solutions engineers. Pre-sale, we stay very lean and tight: just a sales rep and an engineer for the most part. 00:06:58 Alex Kane: And then once we get to post-sale, that's when we really start bringing in all the company's value adds and saying: let's measure twice and cut once. Because if we can just get off on the right foot, we're going to reduce the support burden on this account significantly — because they're not going to just run into problems as they go. We're going to set them up so that there aren't problems. Which I love about this company. 00:07:18 Pim Roelofsen: That's amazing. So you were very much thinking about the possible when you were doing the deal — is that fair to say? 00:07:23 Alex Kane: Definitely fair to say. I envision the outcome very often and I help visualize it and show it to the customer, so that they know where we're going. Because if they don't have a clear picture of where this goes, you can't expect them to follow you. 00:07:39 Pim Roelofsen: What I wanted to ask you about — the first thing we talked about was in the realm of value, the second was stakeholders. If you think about process and aligning those things — for this customer specifically, what can you tell us about that? 00:08:07 Alex Kane: What's interesting about projects like this, where you're really pushing a new initiative — something tech-forward — is that they can't imagine what it's going to be like. So we spend a lot of time on the trial, setting it up in a demo environment so that they can envision what the next step is going to be. And then once they see it, they start saying: can it also do this? Can it also do this? So the process really is a kind of land and expand. 00:08:25 Alex Kane: But what was unique about this customer was what they were able to do in such a short period of time. Six months from start to finish was about our sales cycle. We had an initial conversation, found the pain, sent out the trial gear, propped up the whole pilot, got all the stakeholders involved — and then just six months later we were implementing and rolling out a major project shift for the way their company functions on a daily basis. The heartbeat of their company's systems. 00:09:05 Pim Roelofsen: Going back to something you mentioned earlier — the CIO was your champion. Did that champion give you access to the economic buyer? The ultimate person who could say yes or no? 00:09:24 Alex Kane: In this case, we were dealing with an economic buyer group that was more like a board — many people involved, kind of a family of people. I was able to present to them for the final presentation, but they were not heavily involved in the actual technology side, which at the largest scale is very common. It's not technology they interact with on a daily basis — they expect their CIO and operations team to guide them in the right direction. But they are very fiscally conscious, so ROI matters quite a bit. And we were also dealing with a rip-and-replace of current technology that was causing them great pain — so they knew they had to move somewhere. The ROI was very easy to justify just in time saving alone, before you even got to the real heavy lifts. 00:10:11 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah — it's interesting to think about holistically. Because in our industry, we sometimes expect buyers to be quite up to speed on everything you can provide. But actually you're a subject matter expert for a reason, right? 00:10:33 Alex Kane: Exactly — you've got to show them what you can do. What a lot of people miss is they spend too much time focused on learning all the inner details of a company, and they fail to show them what you can actually bring as value. Showing your value is an important piece of the early stage of a project — because they really need to want to do this. It's an emotional thing to switch technologies. If they're not invested in it, the deal doesn't happen. 00:11:11 Pim Roelofsen: So what does your typical preparation for a first meeting look like? 00:11:15 Alex Kane: I take a fairly structured approach — but I do keep it customized. I know that if all I do is show you what you want to see, you're going to miss the bigger picture of what we can actually do. So I do focus on giving you a wide gamut of capabilities: here is where we excel, here's why people are flocking to us, this is what we do best — now let's talk about what you actually need right now. But I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't show you the real reasons behind the why of this company, so that you can see the bigger picture of where this can all go. Because that's the differentiator. There are lots of people who can solve your problem. There aren't many who can say: what about the next five problems — can they also solve those too? 00:12:17 Pim Roelofsen: And you do that on the basis of success you've had with your current customers, I suppose? 00:12:20 Alex Kane: Absolutely. A lot of social proof selling. Not everyone wants to be an innovator who takes the risk for their entire industry and is the first to do something — they want to know who's already doing it and what kind of success they're having. 00:12:38 Pim Roelofsen: This is interesting in terms of how you think about discovery. Sellers who don't have an approach like the one you're describing tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is someone who just pitches everything they can do and pulls open the entire catalog of propositions — purely product-based. The other is hard discovery without the context of other customers — just: "what's keeping you awake at night, what's your single biggest problem?" And if you do that in the early stage, you haven't really earned the right to ask those difficult questions yet. What you're describing is going into a cycle on the basis of customers you've been successful with — creating a picture of a before state and a utopia after state — so that you're not calling their baby ugly, but you're giving them the opportunity to open up as they relate to that story. Is that how you typically see it happen in your cycles? 00:14:01 Alex Kane: That's a great description of exactly what I feel is going on there. We really want them to know what this can become — because they don't actually know everything about your company. You have to show them what people are doing with it, so that they don't make assumptions and see it in the wrong light. 00:14:19 Pim Roelofsen: And if you take that one step further and think about things like setting traps for the competition — do you feel like you're already doing that in that early stage? 00:14:28 Alex Kane: Absolutely. I'm saying: I'm going to play my game and you have to match it. So unless you can do all the things that I'm showing off here, you're going to be at a disadvantage — because I'm making it about everything. And I know you think this project is just about one thing, but when you bring in those other influencers and other aspects, it becomes about more than just that one thing. They start seeing the down-the-road view of where this goes. And where this goes is actually what they're buying — not what it can do right now. 00:15:02 Pim Roelofsen: And talking about competition, Alex — from your point of view, is competition only about competitive solutions, or can it be other things as well? 00:15:17 Alex Kane: In terms of the competition we have out there, it's a very crowded, very noisy space. The words "real time" and "AI" get thrown around very liberally by many companies — they're buzzwords at this point. So to differentiate yourself, it's not in the words that you say, it's in the things you can show. It's always better to show someone something than tell someone something. Because if you show it to them, they see what it's really capable of. If you tell them, they assume what it's capable of. 00:15:50 Pim Roelofsen: No, that's a great point. And in a broader competition context, I always find it interesting to think one step outside of that — everything else competing for the same budget. This deal you're describing is a family-owned business, isn't it? 00:16:14 Alex Kane: Correct — almost 100 years old. 00:16:17 Pim Roelofsen: And for big publicly traded companies too — there's typically a limited budget to do a limited amount of things. So sometimes it's not just about another solution that might solve the same issue — it could be other initiatives, or even inertia. Is that happening in your industry a lot, where they just don't do anything at all? 00:16:57 Alex Kane: Absolutely. If it was something that everyone wanted to do, they wouldn't need sales reps. Our job is to convince people who are on the fence, people who don't think they need something — and we have to show them the reason why they do. For instance, one of the products we sell is a dash camera. And I say all the time: if all you tell people about is the value add and the ROI you'll get from having dash cameras, all you've done is sell them that they need dash cameras. Why do they need your dash camera? 00:17:37 Pim Roelofsen: That's powerful. And you mentioned land and expand earlier — how do those two things connect? Because on one hand you're saying you typically start smaller and then grow. But what do you mean when you put those things together? 00:17:58 Alex Kane: A lot of times there are a variety of contracts involved, and certain contracts come up at different times. So you don't always have the ability to do everything at once. But you're setting the stage that when those contracts do come up, we're going to be right there — we have the functionality to do what you need at that level too. And then there's also this idea that they've only budgeted for the first piece of the project, but we've opened their eyes to so much more — and now we've created the need for more budget in the future. 00:18:49 Alex Kane: But step one is getting out of the gate. Because once they start with that first product, the idea of consolidation is at the core of our pitch and our overall value. So in the back of their mind they're thinking: how do I consolidate? How do I make the moves in those directions? Sometimes it happens very quickly — like in this case, which is why it was such a special deal. And sometimes it occurs over many years. We want people to go at the pace they're comfortable with, because if you start using technology before you're ready to use it, that's how you don't see the value — when you're not using something you're paying for. 00:19:08 Pim Roelofsen: I think you're describing something quite powerful there — the difference in mindset between what can we sell this customer versus what value can we add to the way that they operate. But also this goes beyond just the deal itself. How do you stay engaged in a way that's effective, to make sure that when you've landed that first deal, you can keep on aligning to the right stakeholders and expanding the account? 00:19:57 Alex Kane: Thank goodness for Customer Success and customer support teams — they allow me to stay focused on net new customers and new projects. With current customers, I really do want to be their point guard. I expect to be looped in when something isn't going perfectly, I want to assist — but I'm not the one running day-to-day support. In the end, I want their experience to be great because I'm going to need them to be a testimonial for me at some point. Their neighbor is going to be interested and is going to want to know what this company is doing. Their happiness level matters very much to the future success of many other projects. 00:20:49 Alex Kane: But also — as a tech company in hypergrowth, you're constantly releasing new products and new features. These are the customers you want to have that great relationship with so that they can test and consume the new products and grow with your company as you grow together. I look at it more as a partnership and a friendship that has now been forged. And to keep any partnership or friendship alive, there's a saying I like: the best time to call someone is when you need nothing at all. So I go out of my way to call these customers not because I have something new to sell them, but just to be in touch. And in the nature of those conversations, they begin to ask: what else are you guys doing? What else is going on? And it happens so naturally. That's the right way to communicate, to sell, to upsell — as opposed to calling on the 29th of the month just because you're trying to bring in the last little bits. If that's the only time you're calling, the relationship will not be a friendship. 00:22:06 Pim Roelofsen: Absolutely — it's not based on mutual value in that sense. I love that. So last question, because we're coming up on time. What you described at the beginning sounds like the way you'd also set the post-sale team up for success with the customer. What does that look like for you — your role in getting them in as a new customer, and then setting your team and the customer up for success going forward? 00:22:35 Alex Kane: Absolutely. It's a phased approach. First, there's an implementation team — purely focused on install velocity. Platform setup, API integrations, all the heavy lifts that happen in the first two to three months of a project. Once the lift has occurred, the system is working, the team has been trained and has adopted it — then we bring in an additional layer: a Customer Success manager. The implementation team moves on to the next implementation, and the Customer Success manager is more focused on overall customer happiness and communicating new features as the product evolves and changes. 00:23:00 Alex Kane: My role is really in the space of expansion and new products — and being a general jack of all trades. If there's a support ticket that's taking too long, let me know about it. If there's a shipment you want an ETA on, hit me up. We share the responsibility of taking care of this customer — I'm on the upsell and value-add side, and the Customer Success manager is on the continued success and feature adoption side. 00:23:30 Pim Roelofsen: That's amazing. Hey — I feel like we've covered a lot here and the time is getting away from us. But to summarize: I feel like you described for one of your best deals how you align to value for the customer not just in the later stages, but from early on. How you set both yourself and the customer up for success. The way you align to the various stakeholders you need on your side. Understanding the process to bring it home. And what I didn't expect coming into this call was the full customer lifecycle angle — making sure the rest of your organization is set up for success so that your customer is too. Building a foundation for a relationship filled with meaningful, mutual exchange of value. 00:24:31 Pim Roelofsen: There are a lot of valuable insights there. I just want to thank you very much for taking the time to share these on this first episode of Elite Dealers. Thanks again, Alex. 00:24:50 Alex Kane: Pim, thanks for having me on the show. This is a very cool project — I can't wait to see more episodes. 00:24:55 Pim Roelofsen: We'll see each other again soon!
