Areya Dargahi leads mid-market sales at Gainsight, a Series E SaaS company that helps businesses drive efficient growth by unifying the post-sales customer journey. Areya has built out their mid-market sales team from scratch, and now his team is bringing just shy of $10 million ARR.

Gainsight started off as an enterprise-only solution and then moved down to target SMB and mid-market clients. They saw that smaller companies had outgrown the tools available to them and realized there’s a huge opportunity to expand.

Although from a product perspective there weren’t many strong competitors that rivaled Gainsight, their downmarket motion still required quite a bit of competitive intel and strategy to ensure that Gainsight wins those competitive deals.ls. What really helped them was setting up a slack channel where the whole team monitors their competitors and shares their insights - whether they are positioning changes, new content releases or notes from going head to head on a deal.

Areya is a huge proponent of quick response times during the sales process. While features do matter, for upmarket deals there’s always a possibility that a feature gets custom built for that client, but in order to build enough mutual trust for such a big, two-sided commitment, something as simple as quick response times can work wonders when putting prospects at ease during the sales process.

Tune into the full episode to learn why you should improve your sales process by taking a customer success approach!

HIGHLIGHTS: 

0:00 Intro 

2:44 Getting to Sales and Customer Success alignment
3:57 Moving from Enterprise to Mid-Market/SMB
5:13 Building Gainsights competitive intelligence 
7:40 The importance of quick response times
11:01 Relationship vs Outcome selling
12:53 Winning the deal is only half of the battle
17:54 Account Executives need product expertise
22:31 How to approach teaching AE’s product

Connect with Areya - https://www.linkedin.com/in/areyad/

Connect with Max - https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-greenwald/

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