How Sarah Brazier Sells: Find the Truth and Then Solve the Problem

What does being a great seller and being great at?speech and debate?have in common?

A few traits immediately pop into mind. Thriving under pressure. Being a strong orator. Persuasiveness.?

But for?Sarah Brazier?— who was a 13-time national finalist in speech and debate at Western Kentucky University and has spent the last four years obliterating quotas at Gong – that’s not quite it. Instead, according to Sarah, the most important trait for being a good debater and for being a good seller is something far more investigative.

“Speech and debate was previously called forensics, which means the search for the truth,” she said. “That’s really what you do in debate, and that’s also what the core of sales is – it’s the search for truth.”

“Good sales starts out with really good forensics,” she continued. “You have to find the truth of what's really going on.”

That commitment to finding the truth has served Sarah well. After serving 18 months as an SDR at Gong, she was promoted to account executive in 2020, and her numbers haven’t skipped a beat. All told, in four years at Gong, she’s never attained less than 105% of quota in any given quarter (and, in many quarters, she attained far more than that).?

What’s her key to that success? Where does she find her prospects, what questions does she ask them, and how does she close deals?

We asked all of that and more in our latest edition of?How I Sell:

1. What motivates you to come to work each day??

My answer changes, depending on when you ask me.?

When I first got into sales, my objective was to get so good at it and that the company would value me so much, I’d earn flexibility. I wanted the freedom to act in a play and still do my job, for example. Now, I’m focused more on creating the life I’d like for myself and my family. And then I'm an extrovert, so some of the motivation is just I work from home and I need someone to talk to (laughs).?

So, it’s changed. And it helps that I find work interesting each day; that’s really what keeps me going.

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

Solve the problem. Serve the customer. Get out of the way.

3. How do you make your prospecting stand out?

I start with the low-hanging fruit. Gong has great content. If people are downloading that content or interacting with it, I’ll start there.?

When I send a message, I try to connect the dots between the person’s LinkedIn profile, their industry, the global economic climate, and what we can offer them. So, for example, for sales leaders, I can generally assume that it was going really well 12 months ago, and it’s not going so well right now.

And so, in my outreach, I’ll say something like, “Hey, you probably are being asked to achieve the same or similar revenue numbers with half the staff, now that things have slowed down. And your revenue streams, which were once full, are now probably leaking out some water and you might not know where those holes are. Is that a fair assumption?” And they'll go, “Actually, I do know where the holes are,” and I'll go, “Oh, interesting. What are they?” and suddenly, we’re having a conversation.

Lately, my SDR Kimmy has been doing a lot of gifting. She’ll find something on a prospect’s LinkedIn profile – maybe that they are a mountain biker or love an author or whatever – and give a gift that unites that passion to what we do. But she won’t even send a note; she’ll just send the gift.

Then, via email, she’ll send a note, asking if they enjoyed the gift. And then, we can start a conversation on if Gong is right for them and go from there. She’s sourced a lot of leads that way for me.

So, again, it comes down to research. Kimmy and I focus on what CROs would care about now, what’s top-of-mind, and lead with that messaging. Maybe it’s a wrong assumption, but even a wrong assumption is a better opener than just a generic, product-driven message.

4. What's your favorite discovery question?

I have two discovery questions that I like.?

One is pretty obvious. It's just “What's the impact?” Getting concrete examples of how a problem affects a business helps me understand how much of a priority it is to the person and highlights the importance of the pain we’re solving for.

The other discovery question I use a bit later, when I’m doing a demo. And it’s just following up whenever someone says a feature is “cool” or “interesting.”

If I hear that, I’ll stop, and ask them why they think it’s cool or interesting. Because then, they start telling you all the ways that they would use that feature or how this would solve a problem.

That gives you a really good pulse check on whether or not you've actually figured out what their issue is and their level of excitement toward solving it. And then, you can dive in deeper, and figure out how to tactically solve some of their core challenges.

It’s an important reminder that discovery doesn’t end when you go into your presentation — it’s a continuation.

5. Do you have a preferred closing technique?

I just sit down and say, “Hey, this is where we're at. These are the number of seats, this is the rollout date, and this is the price. How does this look?”?

If they tell me they're uncomfortable with what they're seeing, I’ll ask them what makes that uncomfortable??

Sometimes, they just don’t have the budget for that offer. We can usually work around that — maybe limit the number of licenses or have a staggered rollout — to make it work.?

Other times, it might be more about the value. They see the value for some roles or not others, or maybe they don’t see the value at all. That means I haven’t done my job as a salesperson, and I need to start back from the beginning again.

To avoid that, we do a lot of pilots at Gong. As part of the pilot period, we’ll develop success criteria we’re looking to hit. And we agree that if we hit that success criteria, we’ll commit to moving forward.

If we hit the metrics and they don’t want to move forward, I’ll go back to the commitment. I’ll say that we revealed all of these things about your business you didn’t know before, which is what you wanted. But usually, if we meet the success criteria, they will move forward.

If we do negotiate, I aim to keep it a give-get. Meaning, you never want to give without getting something back in return. So, if you give something to them – fewer seats, anything like that – then maybe you can get a guaranteed commitment or a longer deal or an accelerated timeline.

And I’ll always give pricing upfront, within the first or second call. So pricing is never a secret. The last thing I want is sticker shock for a buyer, as then we’ve just wasted time.

6. Is there a habit you have outside work that helps you sell better?

Two things.

First, when I’m off, really being off. I don’t have Slack on my phone, for example. I want to really disconnect when I’m not on the clock and not be looking at work email or pings.

I've also cut out alcohol. Especially during Covid, I found myself winding down at the end of the day with a glass of wine or beer. But I recently learned on the Huberman Labs podcast how drinking more than two drinks a week raises your cortisol levels, which is your stress hormone. So, I decided to cut out drinking entirely, which has left me more energized and less prone to stress.?

As a result, I have so much more time to exercise and do other things I'm interested in. Instead of sitting back with a glass of wine and an episode of Severance, my husband and I are going on a walk in the evening or finding a local concert or show to attend.

I've had so much success cutting down on alcohol, that I've decided to cut it out entirely for at least a year. My three sisters and three brothers also joined the challenge, and jokingly check in on each other about our progress on "The Path.”

7. What LinkedIn or Sales Navigator feature do you find most useful for sales?

I have LinkedIn open on my computer all the time. I can’t prospect without it.

There are two features that pop out. First is, when people think of social selling, they think of posting content on their own page. But it’s really the opposite — it’s engaging with the content your prospects are posting. So, commenting, and just creating conversations with them on the platform. And I really appreciate the Sales Navigator lists that notify you when your top prospects post, so you can stay engaged with them.

I also like the feature within Sales Navigator that shows people who were customers of Gong, who have since moved to a new company. There’s a ton of jewels there, because they already understand the value of the product and, often, they are already a champion of Gong. It’s a great way in.

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

Three months after being promoted to an AE, I lost a really big deal. They were favoring us in the beginning, and then it flip-flopped over to our competitor.

It was an unusually large account for my book, and I made the mistake of running the sales process like the account was much smaller. Retrospectively, there were a lot of questions I didn't even know to ask.

It taught me how to close an enterprise-level deal and how that buying process differs from an SMB.

The other big lesson from that was it’s okay to ask for help. In fact, I’d say it’s not just okay to ask for help, but to insist on help.

One of Gong’s best enterprise sellers told me that, in enterprise sales, there are two sales processes. You have to sell the customer, but you also have to sell the deal internally because there are so many stakeholders you need to get on board often for it to close. You might need a product person to get on the phone to talk about the product or the product roadmap, or you might need legal to help expedite redlines.

I didn’t do that in that deal and I missed opportunities. So now, if it’s a big deal, I don’t ask for help. I insist on help.

But I hate the word failure because There’s so much learning that goes into this job. Everything is a learning opportunity; you can’t dwell on the losses. You just need to use it to get better and keep moving forward.

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