Building your sales partnerships

If you have ever led a call, only to have that call unintentionally taken over by a sales partner, you might relate. One of my best experiences in CS was at an educational technology (edTech) company called Pluralsight. My sales partner and I had a meeting with Boeing to discuss platform adoption and agreed that it would be a CS-driven call. After the light exchange of weekend activities, I kicked us off into our content. After a couple of sentences, my sales partner interrupted and took over the meeting. For the next 5-10 minutes, you could feel us arm wrestling to cover our different agendas. At one point, I asserted myself and tried to keep the client’s attention and he threw up a time-out hand signal like a coach, at which point I became frustrated. I decided to stop talking and let him finish the meeting, instead of further embarrassing us with the customer. In the end, I was cordial, thanked the customer for her time, and hung up the ZOOM...