How Ayal Steinberg Sells: People Move When They Feel the Heat, Not When They See the Light

Two forces have shaped who Ayal Steinberg is today: 

• His parents immigrated to the US in the 1960s. Their credo – work hard and value education.
• His wife, who he’s known since high school. Her credo – be honest, no shortcuts.

Put those two together – hard work, high integrity – and you get a great career. In the case of Ayal, it’s one in sales, as he serves as General Manager of Technology Product Sales at IBM, leading sales of IBM's Software, Infrastructure, and Technology Lifecycle Services. He also is the author of the Selling with Data newsletter. 

Why did Ayal pick sales?

“I’ve always enjoyed working with people and, perhaps more importantly, I’ve always enjoyed solving puzzles,” he said. “And I always saw complex enterprise sales as a puzzle. You are helping customers achieve an outcome they couldn’t achieve without your product or service.” 

What has Ayal learned in his career, which has primarily consisted of leading sales teams at big companies like IBM and Oracle, and smaller companies like DataStax and ProfitLogic?

We sat down with him for our latest edition of How I Sell to find out:

1. What motivates you to come to work, even on the days you'd rather not?

I like doing hard things. So even on hard days, I look forward to figuring out how to get through it.

It’s the days when I’m doing the same thing that I don’t look forward to. But I don’t find many of those days in my job – I purposely try to identify and focus on the hardest things with the highest return for the business to focus on. These are the kind of things that most people live with and find workarounds for.

Right now, IBM is in the midst of a massive transformation. And that can feel slow, especially in an organization this large. The hard thing about that is you might not get the validation each day, and having regular validation feels good because you know you are on the right path. When you work on something that is complicated, where you might not see the benefits immediately, it’s critical to have the self-validation and a clear north star that reconfirms what you are doing as the right thing and your path as the right one.

It comes down to accepting the challenge. I look forward to these challenges every day because I know that’s what pushes me to grow.

2. What's your sales philosophy, in three sentences or less?

I have two one-sentence philosophies, and I’ll expand on each:

• Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Nobody wants to meet with a know-it-all. You have to lead with empathy and EQ and build an authentic connection with a person before you can expect that person to listen to what you have to say.

• People don’t move when they see the light, they move when they feel the heat.

So many things that people try to sell that have a clear ROI and solid business cases, but that isn’t enough. People tend to do the same things the same way until it no longer works for them.

I’ll give a personal example. If I’m driving an old car, that’s okay for me. Sure, it might not start right away every morning or I may need to remember to use the right pressure on the door handle so it opens but doesn’t fall off, but I’m okay with that because I don’t want to spend the money on a new car and I’ve adapted myself to the situation. No matter how much better a new car is, I am going to stick with my old car and not seriously consider buying a new one.

But, if I pass that car on to my son, those things I accommodated as inconvenient suddenly become unacceptable to me because I don’t want my son to be in danger or hassled. Now, the pain of not changing has become too much, and I’ll look to buy a new car.

It’s the same in enterprise sales. Most people won’t move because they see the light, they’ll move if something bad will happen if they don’t. 

3. Is there anything that makes your sales process unique?

I’m uniquely interested in my customer achieving the business outcome they are solving for, more than winning the deal.

I’m in a lucky position where my number is so big, no single deal is going to make or break me. This allows me to focus more on customer problems than the pressure and tactics of closing the deal.

I started off selling as a presales consultant, and a good presales consultant will see the solution before the customer. There is a point in the initial discovery where the seller knows if their product or services will help the customer. Once I know that we can uniquely help, our job as a sales team is to help the customer understand the solution and build belief that the solution will help them.

My approach is to become a trusted advisor by understanding the problem, being honest about what we do and do not do better than anyone, and work through objections to close a good deal for both the customer and me. I stay focused primarily on the customer’s outcome and won’t agree to removing things like services or anything that will hurt the customers’ ability to be successful.

I don’t want to close a deal just to close a deal. I want the customer to completely believe in what they are buying. 

If I sense there is friction from the customer or our team is selling too hard, I’ll create an intentional pause to reconfirm the business problem and that the customer still feels that solving that problem with me is still the right decision. I’ll even ask a client for their help articulating in their words why they are open to working together. That will help us get aligned, figure out a new path forward, or even determine we should go our separate ways for that project.

The deal is one of multiple milestones on the sales journey. The destination is when the customer achieves the business value they originally set out to achieve and is willing to share the success with their peers.

4. What are the top sales trends you're tracking?

There are two.

One of the most significant changes in sales is that the customer has much more information than they had before. And they use that information to go much further into the process on their own than they did in the past.

Twenty years ago, sellers were the primary source of information about their products. And a seller could exchange that information with a buyer for access and meetings.

Now, all of that information is on the web, and there are third-party reviews of your product. All told, buyers are now spending only 13% of their time talking to sellers, and that’s usually split among two or three different vendors. That means any individual seller is only getting about 3-to-5% of that buyers’ time. Think about that, more than 95% of the time customers evaluate a purchase the seller isn’t there!

The opportunity here is that all the independent research buyers do online leaves digital breadcrumbs. Using that, marketing and sales need to work closely together to understand where buyers are in the buying process. And then come to the buyer with an informed point of view that shows them how they can help their business.

There’s a difference between a user and a buyer. Usually, sales and marketing focus on the buyer. But today, because tools are more readily available, users are getting much more input.

And while the users might not be able to write a big check, they probably will make a recommendation on which provider to go with.

As a sales professional, you need to know how to orchestrate the buying committee. In this case, users generally don’t want to talk to a salesperson – they want to talk to someone more on the product side to really dive deep. The salesperson needs to know that and bring in the right people – perhaps, in this case, a sales engineer.

Another route is to work with users to build a business case because, generally, a user hasn’t led a big enterprise buy before and needs help putting together a business case – which is exactly what salespeople do. A great salesperson can work through the user to build a business case for their boss and ultimately implement a solution that way.

As buying committees grow and software becomes more ubiquitous, this only becomes more complicated. The better the salesperson can orchestrate the buying committee, the more effective they’ll be.

5. What excites you most about the future of sales?

I’m really excited about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and AI.

Previously, with custom-built software solutions built on-premises, a salesperson often would sell a solution, and it would take months to implement or it wouldn’t get implemented at all. And while salespeople might like closing the deal initially, it doesn’t feel great to close a deal but never have the solution implemented. This not only hurts the customers but also hurts the credibility of the seller and hurts their chances for any future business.

Conversely, SaaS dramatically compresses the time the client can deploy the solution – and start fixing their problem. That aligns the sellers and buyers, reducing complexity, and getting to outcomes much faster.

We are still in the early days for AI-assisted selling, and I am excited about how governed AI is going to continue to change sales.

Just like when Starbucks introduced self-service ordering from a mobile device with pickup in the store without talking to a person, customers’ expectations immediately changed, and any competitors that didn’t offer the same service were left in the dust. That same thing is going to happen with sellers that use AI versus sellers that do not. AI will help sellers improve territory management, prospecting, speed and quality of support, and trial conversion, and improve nearly every stage of the selling process. 

6. What do you look for when hiring a salesperson?

There are three things I look for:

• Curiosity. To me, that’s really important. You need to be really interested in learning about the customer, the industry, innovation, etc.
• Coachability. Whenever I meet with a salesperson, I’ll always ask them, “What can I do better?” The reason I do it is that I want their feedback, and I want them to ask back. That’s how you improve. Even elite athletes benefit from a coach to motivate them to do wind sprints. 
• Tenacity. Everyone wants the outcome, but are they willing to put in the work to achieve that outcome? You can see that in work history. Do they jump around every year, or do they stick it through even when it gets hard? That’s something I look for.

7. Is there any habit you have outside of work that you believe helps you perform better?

Most weekends, I set aside time for a 30-minute shower. In that shower, I unpack everything I’m thinking about during the week and find extreme clarity on what I should do.

Purposely, if I have a big decision to make, I’ll let it go over the weekend. I’ll take a shower and, in my mind, literally visualize a table where I’ll put all the components of the problem. By the time I’m done, I have complete clarity around the problem and almost always know exactly what to do next.

8. What has been your biggest failure in sales, and how did that experience transform you?

I think of sales as a two-way street. There’s what the product team delivers, which sales communicates to the customer. But there’s also an obligation from sales to give back to the product team what you’re hearing and sensing from the market.

I’ve always been stuck because I didn’t want to be the salesperson who makes excuses based on things that I didn’t control. I was always hesitant to share back product-specific feedback I was hearing from the customer or prospect because I didn’t want it to ever come off as an excuse.

Looking back over 20 years, there were times I observed shifts in the marketplace, and I wasn’t vocal enough in sharing that feedback back to the product team. By the time product caught up with it, it was too late. By not being vocal enough, it actually hurt the business.

You always have to sell what you have. But specific feedback you are hearing from customers is invaluable to both product and the business overall. Now I share that feedback, both good and bad – with the goal of being as specific as possible – so we can stay ahead of the market, instead of chasing it.

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