Welcome back to the From Vendorship → Partnership podcast, Season 2: Seller’s Journey!
This season, we’re talking to B2B sales leaders about their experience building winning processes, coaching & scaling teams, and partnering with customers.
Our guest this week is Jonathan Press, Director of Strategic Accounts at Galley.
Jonathan definitely has one of the most interesting backgrounds of all the sales leaders we’ve talked to, with past experience as an actor, opera singer, and Paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces. But for the past four years, he’s helped lead sales and GTM at Galley, which helps food companies see the data behind their operations to empower them to make more profitable decisions.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below!
🔁 How do you balance doing the unscalable with starting to build repeatability in your sales process?
If you have a large total addressable market (like Galley does in the food industry) you need to narrow your focus and identify what works and what doesn’t work for a specific segment of your audience.
As Jonathan says: “Get the no’s out of the way, so you can focus on the yes’s.”
Over time, you’ll test and start figuring out what messaging, playbooks, etc. resonate with one segment, and build repeatability around one-off successes. Constantly re-evaluate your processes and find ways to create systems around your team’s individual wins, so you can replicate them across the board and scale.
🤝 How do you effectively build relationships and partner with your buyers?
Effectively partnering with your buyers and customers starts with having a team aligned around the same vision and mission. When you have a shared purpose, it makes the rest of your goals much easier to accomplish, “instead of it being like pushing a giant rock up a hill,” says Jonathan.
Then it becomes integrating your “why” and partnership mindset into every piece of your sales process, starting with discovery: deeply understanding their organization, problems, goals, and all the different teams and people that are involved in some way with your solution.
The key is getting to your buyer’s why, Jonathan says, so that you can deliver on YOUR why.
⚡ Lightning Round: Jonathan’s Fast Sales Insights
- Your favorite sales app or software? Superhuman for email, and Vimcal for calendar.
- A helpful book or resource? The Challenger Sale.
- The hardest part of scaling sales at a startup? Avoiding burnout.
About Jonathan
Jonathan is Director of Strategic Accounts at Galley, a food data platform that is transforming the food industry. For the past 4 years, he has led Go-To-Market, scaling through Product Led Growth, and Sales Led Product. Before Galley, Jonathan ranked globally for sales at Tesla, and earlier in life, sang Opera at the Metropolitan Opera, was a Broadway Actor, and volunteered as a Paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces.
