VP, Chief Sales Strategist: Enzo DiMichele from Neural Impact

Enzo DiMichele, Chief Sales Strategist at Neural Impact, jumped on the Sales Ops Demystified Podcast and shares his experience and journey into sales operations.

Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

To learn more about Enzo DiMichele and Neural Impact:

• Enzo DiMichele
• Neural Impact

Key Takeaways

Enzo’s journey into sales strategies

Enzo has been in sales for over 20 years. Getting a head start from a smaller Canadian technology company, Enzo built his professional career from sales to sales leadership and operations.  

He describes defines himself as an “unconsciously competent” talent-wise when he began his career while he explained his progressive journey from the fundamentals of sales to sales management and finally towards being a VP of sales. 

The company he was with at the time, under his guidance, started closing more deals, and the overall win-rate hiked up. As Enzo states, “the team started giving me superhero shirts which were at first kind of flattering, but it didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t good.” 

Enzo noticed the lack of customer acquisitions and that his team needed to better understand the buyers’ mindset. Therefore, better tools and processes were built around it to boost win rates. 

Enzo’s focus on the sales enablement strategy

There is a broad spectrum of offerings, tools, guidelines, and processes that vary from client to client, but generally are used to increase engagement and marketing, produce better deals, and understand the market and buyer’s psyche to provide the best sales approach and solution product. According to Enzo, it’s more about understanding the team’s skillsets, the individual’s talents, and qualities, and how we can utilize those to full potential.

A practical assessment is needed to understand what the team already has in terms of talents, skills and tools, and then create a set of sales and management tools, processes and training methods that would best utilize the company’s skillsets and articulate the most appropriate strategy to push through. 

Challenges for sales representatives

Enzo says, the entire world is going through a challenging period; “what’s going on is freaking a lot of people out, and rightfully so, but these are NOT unprecedented times”. Sales and sales management have always been tough gigs. What’s happening now is just the next reason that is making it tough to sell.

Enzo advises sales managers and representatives not to panic. The only way this business can be successful right now is to be dealt with calmly, be held accountable for decisions, and reassess buyers. 

In a complex (multi-step) sales cycle there are 7 Strategic Moments That Matter. The better these moments are understood, the better a salesperson can be prepared and thereby execute a more successful sales cycle. It can make be the difference between proactively managing a Sales Cycle, and reactively Servicing a Buying Cycle.

Advice to increase productivity during remote work

According to Enzo, a specific set of tools and guidelines around the company’s skillset should be provided so that they know exactly what to do and how to go on about the business without any lags. A road map can help the reps remain professional and the work, structured. Enzo mentions that a game plan, or a roadmap, while working from home can ensure that the managers and sales professionals stay on track as this system of working humanizes us, but being professional is still a top priority.

He mentioned that they have been resorting to remote training for the clientele, which means that instead of a 2 to 3-day face to face workshop, training and strategy advice is given on webinars with digestible packets of information spanning over 2 to 3 months.

#1 Sales metric: Commit, Upside deals and WinRates

He talked about being pragmatic and understanding the buyer’s motivation, and behaviours, an and devise a roadmap figure out a way to align your engagement model with their needs. Furthermore, he mentioned three essential Sales and Sales Management  metrics: 

• Commitment (betting on which deal will stick)
• What deals they are considering upside (got some belief of victory)
• Win rates( how many deals will be successful which they will close), regardless of the economic and social climate

Enzo’s biggest Influence 

• Mark Stuyt – Chief Engagement Officer at Neural Impact

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