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The secret sauce to your sales success? It's what happens before the sale. It's the pre-sales. And it's more than demo automation. It's the work that goes on to connect technology and people in a really thoughtful way. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, pre-work centered around the human that makes the dream work, but you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what you already do best—combining your technical skills with your strategic insights. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to grow revenue. You're not just preparing for the sale—you're unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales engineers who make a difference, their challenges, their successes, and the human connections that drive us all, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Hey everyone, and welcome to V5, where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox about hot topics in B2B SaaS. Presale, sales, engineering, solutions, consulting, whatever you want to call it. I'm really excited because today I am joined by Julia Lustig, who is the head of sales engineering in Southern Europe. Julia, welcome. How are you today?
Julia Lustig [00:00:24]:
Well, I'm great, Jared, thanks for having me on. I'm super excited. I've listened to a bunch of these five-minute takes and I love them. Short and sweet.
Jarod Greene [00:00:32]:
Short, sweet, to the point. So with that said, what is your hot take and hot topic? I'll let you explain it to the people. The timer goes off, get after it. Let's go.
Julia Lustig [00:00:42]:
As we discussed right before, I have a few of those of the hot takes in my head, but one thing I think I'm thinking of right now, and I feel like it's not just us, but it's every business out there in 2024, is how do you do things purposefully? You know, everything's tough with, you know, the markets, the clients, and everybody is just really, really tight with their money, with their budgets, with their projects, with everything. So how do you change the way you do business and adapt? Right. I always go back to this, but how can you expect to get different results if you're always doing the same thing? And this year, or maybe probably in the last two years already, things have gone wildly different. So it's a lot of out of the box thinking, elastic thinking, but it's exciting.
Jarod Greene [00:01:27]:
Yeah, absolutely. So finding time to be purposeful rather than kind of scattershot and then random acts of randomness, how do you and the team find time to do that, to focus, to lock in, to avoid some of that scope creep and sprawl?
Julia Lustig [00:01:42]:
I think looking back at what has been done and viewing the analytics, viewing the facts is always a good thing because it's not just someone saying it out there. Nobody's actually then listening because it's like, oh, yeah, that person said so. No, it's, this is what's going on. These are the facts. This is what we're getting as feedback from our prospects or from our clients. How do we now take that in? How do we structure that data as in terms of like, we're getting that feedback, but really what does it mean and how can we structure it so that we find some patterns and that we can say, okay, these are the patterns. We're not going to go everywhere and anywhere. We're just really going to focus on what works Right now and then expand on that.
Julia Lustig [00:02:26]:
Right. So I think being more collaborative with the team, bringing in with these takes on what's going well, what's not going well, getting also feedback from them. Because, you know, everybody has their points of views. Don't get me wrong, we need to make sure again that that's structured in and not just going everywhere, but really making sure that you have a good format so that you bring that in and then you make something out of it and take action.
Jarod Greene [00:02:50]:
Totally, yeah. One of my favorite saying is like the content without context just gives you chaos. And I think we've seen this like massive explosion of data. Everybody's got a point of view. There's no report that can't be run. Every meeting's recorded, every client or prospect blip is on the record somewhere. So how do you make sense of all that exhaust? There's a lot of signal and a lot of noise, but how do you kind of filter out as best as you can with some of the partners you'd work with to make some of those contextual cases?
Julia Lustig [00:03:18]:
I think really again is to take a step back and look at what are the small changes we can make. Because when you're looking at the mountain from afar, you're like, okay, this is scary, like, how are you gonna do this? Right? So there's no point in doing that. There's more point in saying, okay, that mountain is there, sure, and we can climb it, but we need to figure out first, what are we gonna do step by step. It's good to have a long-term plan. I like long-term plans, but don't get fixated on it because long-term plans, in the end you realize it never ends up being what you thought you would get to. Right? So I think it's good to have that, but also realize that you need to be flexible and again, have input from other people around the table. Because I just think, you know, synergy, one plus one equals three is real. Whatever I have in mind, it may not be what you have in mind.
Julia Lustig [00:04:06]:
And you know, having that thought process and brainstorming and figuring out on how we can get through to next step is great. And then again, making sure that we're not too many around the table either, because then that becomes just like chaos right after doing that. I think having a point of view and that point of view, sticking to it, I think it's good to be flexible, like I just said before, but it's also you need to make sure that whenever you take a decision, you go all the way through with your decision, you don't halfway just be like, oh, this is actually not working. Let's change halfway. I think if it's long term, sure, you have to be flexible, you have to change. But if it's short, people are also going to get confused. Right. If you just up and leave and change on the way.
Julia Lustig [00:04:49]:
So I think you also need to have a very clear point of view and work towards that and make sure everybody around the table is all on the same boat and understands the mission.
Jarod Greene [00:05:00]:
So you heard it from Julia directly. It's all about making data informed decisions, having a little bit of patience, making sure the right people are at the table, and making sure you can contextualize the information in front of you. Julie, this is outstanding. Thank you so much. Is there anything you're working on that you'd like to plug or share with the audience?
Julia Lustig [00:05:16]:
Right now is a tough time for everybody. So I think making sure that you also take the time to think about yourself, think about mental health, and also dare to speak up. Most people have great ideas. They just don't want to put it on the table. And they should. Yeah.
Jarod Greene [00:05:30]:
Oh, man, I feel that energy. Speak truth to power. Let's get it. Jude, thank you so much for joining us from V5. Really appreciate it.
Julia Lustig [00:05:37]:
Thanks so much, Jared. Have a great day.
Jarod Greene [00:05:39]:
You got it. Hey, everyone. I just wrapped V5 with Julia and it was a great conversation. Julia, what should the people be excited about when they tune into our episode?
Julia Lustig [00:05:48]:
I think having a different point of view, going for what you want to say and putting things on the table, wanting to speak up and have a strategy, a plan in place, have people around the table and figure out a plan of action strategically and focus.
Jarod Greene [00:06:05]:
All right, you heard it. Tune in. See you guys soon.