Ep 14. Understanding Customers to Create & Close | How the Deal and Partnership Was Done with Sean Adams

In this episode we meet Sean Adams: the head of Sales and Partnerships at Iorad. Sean brings a wealth of experience to the table. He started his career as a business owner, serving home service businesses in the contractor space for a decade. Then, he entered the world of SaaS as an account executive and now leads sales operations with a focus on customer centricity.

Thinking Outside the Box: Sean shares a challenging situation from a past company where deals were constantly stalling due to issues with customers' accounting systems. Sean worked to establish a connection between the systems. This innovative solution allowed the technology to seamlessly communicate with each other, eliminating the barriers that were holding back deals. The outcome was transformative – deals started to flow smoothly, and lost opportunities became closed deals.

Overcoming Obstacles and Gaining Insight: During his strategic partnership and deal journey, Sean faced internal management obstacles. He engaged in no-obligation interviews with prospects and customers. However, as Sean and his team began to better understand customer issues with accounting software such as QuickBooks, and used video footage of them explaining their issues to persuade internal stakeholders.

Instilling Creativity and Tenacity: As the head of sales and partnerships, Sean Adams shares his approach to instilling creativity and tenacity among his team. Rather than just telling his team what to do, he leads by example and brings new talent into calls and meetings to watch and learn how it is done.

TIMESTAMPs

(0:00:29) - Sean Adams is the head of Sales and partnerships at Iorad

(0:02:58) - Software company had problems with material syncing between accounting system and supplier

(0:06:14) - You've connected the dots between SaaS and technology

(0:07:50) - So talk about some of the obstacles or where some of your master plan went off the rails

(0:11:40) - We'd love to hear about the outcome and then some of the learnings since then

(0:13:56) - Sean is the head of sales and partners at Iorad

(0:16:47) - Sean, this has been really insightful and can we point folks or where should we point

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-adams-sales/

Check out Sean's Best Practice Article for those interested in being a guest on a podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-become-guest-your-dream-podcasts-sean-adams/

Questions, comments, tips - reach out and connect with Andrew on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkappel/