Fireside Chat with Daniel Borodyansky
For the past two years, I’ve been coaching Daniel Borodyansky, a Microsoft AE.
When we started working together, he was only in sales for two months and had just switched from his prior role as Product Marketing Manager.
He had a burning fire in his belly, but no experience.
One of the first things we worked on together was overcoming Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome comes in three main types:
Type 1: Feeling afraid to meet with Senior Level Executives because we don’t think we can add enough value as a as salesperson (and they know more about their business than we do)
Type 2: Feeling like we aren’t prepared enough for meetings because we don’t know our value proposition, key differentiators, or specifics on how our products and services we can help
Type 3: Feeling like we got “lucky” with prior successes and still don’t know what we are doing
Daniel struggled most with Type 2 Imposter Syndrome.
When we first started working together, he would spend hours researching clients extensively to try to identify a POV on how Microsoft could possibly help.
He would then spend another hour crafting the “perfect” e-mail to articulate everything he had learned to key stakeholders.
Most of the time the emails didn’t convert, as Senior Executives receive a ton of e-mails and have little time to meet with vendors, even those as well known as Microsoft.
Finally, when he landed a meeting, he would spend several more hours preparing, because Microsoft carries so many products and he wanted to identify what products or services could best help them.
The problem was, that he had never spoken to the client before!
So he would spend 4+ hours preparing for a 30 minute initial meeting that may or may not go anywhere.
While I’m a HUGE proponent of preparation and deep work, Daniel’s process was utterly inefficient.
He had lots of accounts with many stakeholders, and this approach simply couldn’t scale.
Six months after we started working together, ChatGPT was released.
Daniel started playing with it immediately, and shared his excitement on our calls.
He said it was saving him hours per day on research, and doing a better job than he ever could.
On every new call we had, he would share additional use cases where ChatGPT helped him save time.
Writing highly targeted, personalized e-mails.
Preparing relevant questions for meetings.
Listening to transcripts of earnings calls and identifying key areas Microsoft could help with.
Developing Executive memos and briefs.
Even role playing for meetings based on an Executives personality type!!!
He then started building repeatable prompts which he could use at every stage of the sales cycle. Over and over again.
His new approach was working.
He had overcome imposter syndrome with the help of ChatGPT, and felt very comfortable going into every meeting.
He did great his first year and was promoted to Senior Business Applications Executive.
He’s already over his number in his second year, and still has two months to go (Microsoft’s fiscal year ends in June).
My mind was blown.
I told him that he had figured out a way to save reps hours upon hours of doing “deep work” which is the research and planning which many reps resist and avoid.
I told him that we should develop a course teaching sales reps exactly how to use ChatGPT in the exact way he was using it, and give them the specific prompts that he had built.
Daniel spent 5 months building the course, and I’m thrilled to share that AI for the Strategic Seller is now live and available for early adopters at an 80% discount through May 10th!
You can now access this course for $197, reduced from $997 through May 10th.
Our goal was to price this significantly below market value to make it as accessible as possible to both new and experienced reps and reward early adopters.
Last week I interviewed Daniel as a Fireside Chat guest to learn more about his sales journey, share how he’s using AI to crush his number, and discuss his new course.
Daniel is gonna blow your mind – enjoy!
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