How Christopher Edge Sells: Your Output is Only as Strong as What You Put Into It

Christopher Edge?has moved up quickly in the sales world. After transitioning from research to sales for?FedEx?in 2015, he’s since moved from account executive to an account manager to then head of US e-commerce for?DHL Express?and to now a vice president, first at?Global-e?and now at?Maergo.?

What drives him every day? What’s his sales philosophy? How is he adapting to the new demands of buyers? What was his biggest failure in sales, and what did he take away from that?

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

1. What do you love most about selling?

What I love most about selling is connecting a product with a need.?

When I first got into sales, I think what was most exciting to me is, “I got this great product, but who am I going to sell it to?” And I think what you end up loving about selling is that that product can actually improve something for somebody.

So, whether it's somebody's personal life or in the case of us in B2B sales, we're truly improving a company's existence. We're improving their customer experience, we're improving their revenue stream, their repeat business, and their lifetime value.?

So, I think to sum it up concisely, it's taking a product, finding a great fit for it, selling that product into a company, and then ultimately seeing that product deliver what it's supposed to do. That’s a great experience.?

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

Find the gap or find a fit for our product and then deliver that message to the customer to where they cannot say no.?

I think our goal is to find the gap and to deliver a product for them that's immediately going to enhance their business processes and their customer experience.

3. What is one piece of sales advice you've received and never forgotten?

Get rid of the noise.?

I'll never forget, I had a manager back in the day. And he pulled me aside and told me, “Hey, you're great with the customer. You check all the boxes, you're very thorough, which is great. But at the end of the day, sometimes there's just too much noise around the opportunity.”?

So the advice was to get in, get out, identify the need, support the need with our product, and keep driving the opportunity forward. The benefit is it reduces the sales cycle time, increases time to revenue and ultimately creates a better buying experience for the brand, because we're able to move through the process really quickly.

4. The buying process has changed since the pandemic. How are your best sellers adapting to it?

Even as a seller myself, I get sold to every single day. I get probably 100 sales emails a day. And I can tell you maybe one or two of those are relevant to what I need.

And so, for me, it's ensuring that what you are selling to that individual is actually relevant. So that's key number one.?

Brevity is also key. Every time I get an email that's more than a couple of sentences, I can tell you I hardly ever read them. And I can tell you that in most cases, the most effective sellers that I've seen are able to clearly articulate the reason for the email, the next steps, and the call-to-action within two sentences.

Those emails get read, generally speaking. They're read, because they have the brevity that's required and it's got a powerful message. And that can be in a sentence or less.

I think that's going to differentiate anyone immediately.

And then the last thing I would say is preparation. I think that goes completely across the board.?

That's from the moment that you reach out to somebody the very first time to that very first discovery call that you have with them to the presentation and then moving them through the process. You've got to be prepared at every single step of the way, and you've got to take the extra couple of minutes to ensure that that person that you are selling to is going to have a positive experience with you. That they're going to believe that what you're telling them and what you're selling them is actually going to make their product better.?

On the back end, you yourself also have to believe and know that what you are offering them is truly going to make an impact. Because if you do all of the preparation and you truly believe in what you're doing, you're going to make a much greater impactful with any buyer that you're going after.

5. What’s your favorite discovery question?

With my team, we take a little bit different direction on our discovery calls. We're much more about doing our research, doing our homework, and confirming those things versus going through and asking a list of discovery questions.?

One of the things I've learned throughout the years is if you go in with the mindset that you've got a checklist where you want to ask a bunch of questions, it's going to become monotonous. The customer's going to be bored. And especially if you're asking questions that you can already get the answer to.

If I had to say a specific question, I’d go with, “What's the biggest pain point?” I think that's kind of a no-brainer. But my philosophy is to hopefully go in with the answers, confirm those answers, and let the customer know that you've done your research.?

6. How do you use LinkedIn when selling?

We use LinkedIn in a significant way.?

For us, LinkedIn enables social selling, which we know is hugely important. It enables us to have a brand presence, but also a professional and even a personal presence where people can really get to know you digitally. It almost becomes tangible, if done right.

So, on your profile, you’ve got to have who you are, your picture, what you’re about, your company information, and the problem you can solve. And maybe I'm putting that in my headline, which is a good way to catch somebody's attention.?

But most importantly, it allows you to find the right people quickly and message them in a nice way through Sales Navigator, where you're getting tailored insights on specific verticals or specific companies or specific people that you want to talk to.

One of the biggest ways that I use LinkedIn is to gain insights on what people are doing and what brands are doing specifically. Every brand now has a Page (on LinkedIn). They're very active in promoting something that they're doing or that they're looking to have done. So we find it invaluable.?

For us, it becomes a much more personal selling tactic than finding somebody's email address on the website and sending them a random email. We've got a very specific cadence for how we handle outreach. And LinkedIn is either our first or second touchpoint as we're going through our selling process.?

That's been hugely impactful for us.

7. What sales book or movie or both do you think every salesperson should take a look at?

The one I'll never forget and I always go back to is?The Wolf of Wall Street, specifically when Leonardo Dicaprio challenges his team to sell a pen.

The first people who try it say, “Oh, look at this pen. It’s so great. It writes really well. It's a ballpoint. It's expensive.” Whatever the case may be.

But ultimately, what ended up happening is that somebody said, “Well, can you write down something for me?” And the other person is like, “Oh, I need the pen.” Right??

And I think at the end of the day, it's the most basic part of sales. Somebody has a need for something. You need to identify that need. If you do that, you know, that person is now all-of-a-sudden going to be a very, very likely buyer of your product.?

So I'd say that part has always stuck with me. There are some other ones that hammer “sell, sell, sell” and “always be closing” and all of those sorts of things. But for me, I think it's keeping it very basic, identifying the need, and solving that need for the person.?

So?Wolf of Wall Street, sell me this pen.

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

When I first got into sales, I was an inside sales rep, where I was essentially hooked up to a dialer. So I had a CRM, I had a headset. And all day, every day it was an automated process where the dialer would make calls for me over and over.?

And I was just not successful at that at all.?

I was not getting anybody interested. Even the people that were willing to talk, I was not able to clearly articulate what my valid business reason was. Why was I calling them? What was the main reason or what was the main thing I was going to tell this person to get them interested in my product? I couldn’t answer that.

Ultimately, it came down to the fact that I wasn't putting in any time or effort into doing any sort of research whatsoever on the individual that I was trying to talk to. And so my manager sat me down, put me on a performance improvement plan (PIP), and gave me some great advice, which was, “Your output is only as good as the work that you put into it.”?

And so from that day forward, not only for myself personally but for everybody that's ever worked for me, I have an absolute requirement that every single time they're going to get on the phone with somebody, they have to take the 20, 30, 40 minutes –?however many seconds or minutes it takes to truly understand how you are going to catch that person's attention and how you are going to truly enhance or solve a problem for them –?before you call.?

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