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 Bringing Authenticity Back Into Sales with Stephen Thomas, CRO of Asigra

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, we are joined by Stephen Thomas, Chief Revenue Officer at Asigra. 

In this episode, Lee and Stephen discuss the importance of authenticity, relationship building, and open communication with customers for sales and RevOps leaders.

Stephen has over two decades of expertise in sales leadership and cybersecurity. He is currently the Chief Revenue Officer of Asigra, an award-winning agentless enterprise cloud backup and recovery platform that proactively hunts ransomware. Stephen is further an Advisor at MassChallenge, a global network for entrepreneurs and innovators.

Time Stamps: 

  • 01:36 – Who is Stephen Thomas?
  • 08:28 – Learning from revenue leaders
  • 09:47 – Finding product market fit
  • 11:48 – Are businesses still authentic in 2024?
  • 14:25 – Moving away from being transactional
  • 18:53 – Being human-led in the age of AI
  • 23:12 – What young companies do wrong
  • 26:43 – Aligning products to customer needs
  • 33:14 – Stephen’s book recommendation: The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge
  • 34:41 – Where to find Stephen

Highlights:

The Importance of Authenticity

One thing enterprise companies can learn from younger companies is the importance of being authentic in relationships. With the influx of new sales and marketing technology, revenue leaders often get lost in the tools, and thus struggle to maintain their existing relationships with clients. Stephen believes that we need to move away from this transactional culture, and instead focus on relationship building and authenticity, ensuring we are delivering the value that we promise. Revenue leaders should evaluate whether or not they fully understand their customer journey and then examine where their relationships are failing to be able to regain the focus on authenticity and relationship building.

Moving Away from Transactional Relationships

To move away from transactional relationships, Stephen advises putting a tickler in your CRM to check in with previous customers and ensure they are getting the outcome that they desire. He also advises actively engaging with customers, partners, and contacts on LinkedIn, or other social media sites, to continuously build your network and relationship set. 

Aligning Products with Customer Needs

To align your product with customer needs, Stephen advises digging into your product market fit. This could be through customer or partner interviews to understand where problems exist in your consumer base and ensure that you are solving them. It comes back to building up relationships with existing customers to ensure you know your buyer personas. To Stephen, nothing replaces a conversation with a customer, and you should leverage the insights you get from them to inform your product and engineering team and strategy. 

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