It’s not often you have a company with 2 GMs. It is probably less likely that you have both GMs in the same room at the same time, but that’s exactly what happened in Chicago this past week. For 2 overlapping weeks, the PreSales Collective had 2 GMs running the community. Chris Mabry has served as operator for the past 18 months and I had just joined to take the role over from him. It has been a whirlwind of learning and I’ve been extremely grateful for his time and care during the transition.

‍

We met up in Chicago and found some time to chat about a few topics about the community. These conversations were recorded, and you can find the video of the conversation posted on our YouTube channel.

‍

To kick things off, what’s Chris going to be doing? He’s mentioned he’s not going far as he’s moving to the newly created Advisory Board with the PSC. I asked him what he was going to be doing and why now.

‍

—

‍

Chris:

PreSales Collective has had basically three or four different steering committees over time. I found that a lot of the time when I was creating content like the executive summit we're running now, I didn't have the best support. I was making up a lot of the decisions myself. I felt that we just needed a steering committee to meet on a quarterly basis to do things like design content topics.

‍

Are we missing anything? Plus just get a view from an outside organizational perspective on where we could be better. So it's in some ways it's for accountability for PreSales Collective to continue to further the profession.

‍

—

‍

It’s hard to keep on top of things in your industry when you step out of that industry to run a community. I had been concerned of these things, so was happy to hear this was exactly Chris’ thought process when he had formed the board.

‍

—

‍

Chris:

I was no longer running a presales team, but now I've got this huge amount of people that I can pull from and talk to and understand.

‍

—

‍

The topic switched to enablement, and where the presales community at large is headed in regards to enablement. Chris recalled it was something very important to me when we first were talking about me joining as the GM.

‍

—

‍

Chris:

One of the things you talked about when we first got on the phone, about this role and about general manager and about PreSales Collective, was the future of the organization. We talked a lot about enablement.

‍

Jack:

It was such a surreal moment. I was looking very specifically at what I wanted to do with my career, and I was looking at moving into presales-specific enablement, which isn't as big of a space as I want it to be, right? It's still a very niche thing, and most organizations aren’t really adopting that as a practice.

‍

—

‍

We started talking about the new Unlimited enablement program which provides teams with full access to all of the PreSales Collective enablement courses.

‍

—

‍

Jack:

What I love about the Unlimited program is that it is even better than a lot of the typical sales trainings that are out there today. Everyone goes and you spend three or four days learning this thing and everyone's getting really fired up about it, and then you go back to your regular day job and you forget about it.

And then by the time two years have gone by, as sales teams cycle in-and-out, most of the people working in the organization were never in the program in the first place, right?

‍

Unlimited gives you that ability to say everyone knew coming in. You're going to take these three courses. These are the three that are most important to us. And every person coming in is going to have the same level of training, the same standards that they work off of.

‍

—

‍

This is something that Chris and I have both been very excited about, and we really think it becomes a game-changer for presales and sales organizations as a whole.

‍

With just a bit of time left, the topic switched again, this time we talked about how we each got started in sharing our voices and creating content in the presales community.

‍

—

‍

Chris: 

The first thing that I would recommend to anybody, and the first thing I did was to turn off that internal demon that says nobody cares about this. Or you're not smart enough. Or you don't know as much as that other person who has a lot of followers. So turn that off.

‍

I remember one of the first posts I ever did was around curiosity. I have this love with curiosity because I think that curiosity, in all areas of life, is a way to be more present, to be more interested in things, to be better with customers, and to be way better in presales. And so I just started talking about how to use your own curiosity into your conversations with prospects, into your conversations with people internally, and just asking a lot of great questions.

‍

Jack:

I absolutely love that. And you're so right, because I very much remember I worried about people coming back and saying, well, why are you speaking up about this? You don't have the necessary experience. I've been doing presales for ten years and I was having this thought of: You don't have enough experience to be speaking into the presales space because some people have twenty years and thirty years.

‍

You have something to contribute. I love that you started posting on curiosity, and I love that idea of taking something that you're interested in.

‍

I started with something small and something easy, which was actually not even my idea. It was an idea from The Social Sales Engineer by Patrick Pissang. One of the things he says to do to start is go find a quote that you find meaningful. Post the quote. Talk about the thoughts you had around that quote. Just post it. Just do that to kind of start to grease the skids.

‍

—

‍

Chris and I talked about getting involved with the PSC and how, honestly, we need your content, and we want the PreSales Collective to be a space where you can find your voice and use us as a platform.

‍

We’re just getting started on the next chapter of the PreSales Collective, and I’m excited to work with you on building our community together.

‍

Take the time to watch the video, and after that I encourage you to start your own journey with us and find your own voice.

‍

You can find both of us in the PreSales Collective Slack or on LinkedIn.

‍

Jack: https://linkedin.com/in/jackcochran

Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pscgm/ 

‍

It’s not often you have a company with 2 GMs. It is probably less likely that you have both GMs in the same room at the same time, but that’s exactly what happened in Chicago this past week. For 2 overlapping weeks, the PreSales Collective had 2 GMs running the community. Chris Mabry has served as operator for the past 18 months and I had just joined to take the role over from him. It has been a whirlwind of learning and I’ve been extremely grateful for his time and care during the transition.

‍

We met up in Chicago and found some time to chat about a few topics about the community. These conversations were recorded, and you can find the video of the conversation posted on our YouTube channel.

‍

To kick things off, what’s Chris going to be doing? He’s mentioned he’s not going far as he’s moving to the newly created Advisory Board with the PSC. I asked him what he was going to be doing and why now.

‍

—

‍

Chris:

PreSales Collective has had basically three or four different steering committees over time. I found that a lot of the time when I was creating content like the executive summit we're running now, I didn't have the best support. I was making up a lot of the decisions myself. I felt that we just needed a steering committee to meet on a quarterly basis to do things like design content topics.

‍

Are we missing anything? Plus just get a view from an outside organizational perspective on where we could be better. So it's in some ways it's for accountability for PreSales Collective to continue to further the profession.

‍

—

‍

It’s hard to keep on top of things in your industry when you step out of that industry to run a community. I had been concerned of these things, so was happy to hear this was exactly Chris’ thought process when he had formed the board.

‍

—

‍

Chris:

I was no longer running a presales team, but now I've got this huge amount of people that I can pull from and talk to and understand.

‍

—

‍

The topic switched to enablement, and where the presales community at large is headed in regards to enablement. Chris recalled it was something very important to me when we first were talking about me joining as the GM.

‍

—

‍

Chris:

One of the things you talked about when we first got on the phone, about this role and about general manager and about PreSales Collective, was the future of the organization. We talked a lot about enablement.

‍

Jack:

It was such a surreal moment. I was looking very specifically at what I wanted to do with my career, and I was looking at moving into presales-specific enablement, which isn't as big of a space as I want it to be, right? It's still a very niche thing, and most organizations aren’t really adopting that as a practice.

‍

—

‍

We started talking about the new Unlimited enablement program which provides teams with full access to all of the PreSales Collective enablement courses.

‍

—

‍

Jack:

What I love about the Unlimited program is that it is even better than a lot of the typical sales trainings that are out there today. Everyone goes and you spend three or four days learning this thing and everyone's getting really fired up about it, and then you go back to your regular day job and you forget about it.

And then by the time two years have gone by, as sales teams cycle in-and-out, most of the people working in the organization were never in the program in the first place, right?

‍

Unlimited gives you that ability to say everyone knew coming in. You're going to take these three courses. These are the three that are most important to us. And every person coming in is going to have the same level of training, the same standards that they work off of.

‍

—

‍

This is something that Chris and I have both been very excited about, and we really think it becomes a game-changer for presales and sales organizations as a whole.

‍

With just a bit of time left, the topic switched again, this time we talked about how we each got started in sharing our voices and creating content in the presales community.

‍

—

‍

Chris: 

The first thing that I would recommend to anybody, and the first thing I did was to turn off that internal demon that says nobody cares about this. Or you're not smart enough. Or you don't know as much as that other person who has a lot of followers. So turn that off.

‍

I remember one of the first posts I ever did was around curiosity. I have this love with curiosity because I think that curiosity, in all areas of life, is a way to be more present, to be more interested in things, to be better with customers, and to be way better in presales. And so I just started talking about how to use your own curiosity into your conversations with prospects, into your conversations with people internally, and just asking a lot of great questions.

‍

Jack:

I absolutely love that. And you're so right, because I very much remember I worried about people coming back and saying, well, why are you speaking up about this? You don't have the necessary experience. I've been doing presales for ten years and I was having this thought of: You don't have enough experience to be speaking into the presales space because some people have twenty years and thirty years.

‍

You have something to contribute. I love that you started posting on curiosity, and I love that idea of taking something that you're interested in.

‍

I started with something small and something easy, which was actually not even my idea. It was an idea from The Social Sales Engineer by Patrick Pissang. One of the things he says to do to start is go find a quote that you find meaningful. Post the quote. Talk about the thoughts you had around that quote. Just post it. Just do that to kind of start to grease the skids.

‍

—

‍

Chris and I talked about getting involved with the PSC and how, honestly, we need your content, and we want the PreSales Collective to be a space where you can find your voice and use us as a platform.

‍

We’re just getting started on the next chapter of the PreSales Collective, and I’m excited to work with you on building our community together.

‍

Take the time to watch the video, and after that I encourage you to start your own journey with us and find your own voice.

‍

You can find both of us in the PreSales Collective Slack or on LinkedIn.

‍

Jack: https://linkedin.com/in/jackcochran

Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pscgm/ 

‍