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Debates

Should sellers control information as leverage, or be fully transparent with buyers?

5 recorded positions from 5 people, first said Aug 17, 2022. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.

Transparency is the new normal

Jordan Van Horn · Aug 17, 2022

Customer-oriented selling should win out over the current distrust between sellers and buyers, and the companies that matter are the ones driving business impact for customers

The best sellers and companies care about customers who put their reputations on the line buying the software; Snowflake is a good example

49:35 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo

Frank Fillmann · Mar 22, 2023

Solution selling built on information asymmetry — hiding information and telling the customer what they don't know — is dead; the right posture is asking what the buyer already knows and being fully transparent.

Buyers now have wide access to information about your firm, organisation and product, so protective information-hoarding is a twenty-year-old tactic.

46:16 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia

Kevin Egan · Jul 12, 2023

Withholding information as a sales tactic is dead; transparency is the new normal

At Oracle you once had to email a rep just to get a white paper or technical documentation, and that has changed dramatically

31:56 20Sales: Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox: Five of the Biggest Lessons on Starting, Scaling and Managing Sales Teams from 25 Years Leading the Best with Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

Salesforce won against incumbents by making transparency about security and uptime the core of its sales process, overcoming buyer fear of putting data in the cloud

At the time putting data in the cloud seemed crazy, so the process was built on 'trust us' — showing security, showing uptime and downtime, being very transparent with customers

45:42 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Also on the record

Emil Michael · Oct 24, 2022

In a negotiation you should give as little information as possible and extract as much as possible, and keep your research advantage hidden rather than revealing what you know.

Information is power and people underrate it; if the other side hasn't done the research, it isn't your job to do it for them.

13:25 Control information as leverage and extract as much as possible from the counterpart

Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.