Come hear some best practices in helping yourself or your team’s presales careers grow. Mike Soldan (COO at Shmoop) will be reviewing how he moved from a frontline tech sales role into the C-Suite.
In this webinar, Mike Soldan talks about the challenges of moving into the executive suite and the importance of introspection, grounding ourselves, and possessing key skills such as strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and empathy. He discusses the role of decision makers who may not fully understand the value of pre-sales and explains the talent distribution curve, which tends to have a long tail of strong performers and a majority of C players due to vanilla job descriptions. Soldan emphasizes the importance of objection handling, problem deconstruction, understanding resourcing, not shying away from sales, and solution building. He also stresses the significance of being operationally minded, contributing to the organization’s growth, pursuing self-improvement, and realizing that one does not have all skill sets. Soldan ends with a quote from the founder of Honda, highlighting the importance of repeated failure and taking action to achieve success.
00:10:00 Mike Soldan discusses the importance of objection handling and problem deconstruction in his early career at Verizon. He explains that being able to understand the logic behind a problem, rather than getting caught up in emotions, is crucial in creating solutions, especially in dealing with objections in large deals. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding resourcing and why things are the way they are in an organization, which can lead to proposing better solutions and being more innovative. Moreover, he encourages presales
Mike Soldan is the COO (Chief Operating Officer) at Shmoop where he leads the vision and execution of Shmoop’s focus on helping the “whole child”. Prior to Shmoop Mike was the VP of Global Presales & Professional Services at Pluralsight where his teams brought the leading technology skills learning platform to the world. With a deep background in user-centered design, technical sales, and operations, Mike is helping public sector edtech reconnect with the students and put them at the center of everything brought to market.