Julie Mall is the Chief Revenue Officer at Zoovu, the AI product discovery platform behind ecommerce experiences for brands including Microsoft, Bosch, Canon and Honeywell. She did not come up through quota. She began at PwC leading change management on Fortune 50 ERP transformations, spent the first dot-com boom deploying B2B ecommerce for large SAP customers such as Occidental Chemical, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Pennzoil-Quaker State, then moved into sales engineering and built and led global solutions teams. She took on customer success, rebuilt it around technical account managers, and now runs sales, customer success and solutions as one commercial organization.
“Now we're talking about AI, but we're fundamentally still solving the same challenge.”
“I think often what happens with sellers is they come to a call wanting to sell something and they have a thing and they want to sell it.”
“They tend to have lower close rates and the cycles are longer than they need to be because what ends up happening is you end up doing all the work at the end of the cycle.”
“If we can't articulate that by the time we're putting a proposal in front of the customer, then we haven't done the right type of work in that particular sales cycle.”
“I really challenge the team not to think about discovery as a means by which to show something, but as a means by which to learn something so that we can partner better with our customers.”
“At the end of the day, discovery actually never ends.”
“So best practices, listen more than you talk. Come prepared with an understanding of the customer. Do your research.”
“What is this pain that you're trying to solve for really mean to the business?”