Unleashing Sales Success: From Sales Engineer to Sales Leader with Marni Heinz

In this episode of the Revenue Accelerators Podcast, Deep Trikannad interviews Marni Heinz, the Founder & CEO of MH Consulting & Coaching. Marni shares her background, including her 12 years at Salesforce where she started as a solution engineer and eventually moved into leadership. She also talks about her experience buying software while at Google and doing IT consulting work. 

Marni explains that her focus now is on coaching sales performance and leadership. She helps leaders, teams, and individual contributors achieve sustainable results. 

Deep asks Marni about her transition from sales engineer to sales. She shares that while buying software for Google, she saw the variability in the sales teams she interacted with and wanted to be on the sales side. She pursued a sales engineering role at Salesforce, with the intention of eventually moving into an account executive role. Marni discusses the challenges she faced when she made the switch and had to adjust to a new role and identity.

Deep and Marni also discuss the importance of customer success in software sales and how it impacts growth and customer satisfaction. They talk about the role of account managers and customer success managers, and how they work together to retain and grow accounts.

Marni shares a lesson she learned in sales, which is that customers will form opinions about you based on factors like your title, and it's important to be aware of the impression you're creating. She emphasizes the importance of building rapport and finding common ground with customers to establish trust.

They also touch on the role of research in the sales process, with Marni noting that customers often do extensive research before even reaching out to the sales team. She highlights the importance of being prepared and coming across as a thought leader and advisor to customers.

Finally, Marni discusses her coaching practice and the clients she works with. She helps individual contributors and sales leaders, offering one-on-one coaching, group coaching, and workshops on topics like emotional intelligence and sales skills.

To connect with Marni and learn more about her coaching services, listeners can find her on LinkedIn and schedule a conversation.