NETAPP – Jeremy Goodrum
Your training has completely changed my career.  I have seen more impact from the lessons I learned in that course than any other that I have attended.  I have successfully delivered three major discovery meetings and the impact in almost immeasurable.  For example, I met with a customer who had been excited about NetApp but refused to listen to the account team’s selling tactic.  This customer is now poised for a major design shift in their infrastructure.

How a $30 Lunch turned into a multi-million dollar deal
A few weeks after attending the Elite Consulting class, I had the opportunity to sit down with the Executive Director of a large mulit-national IT company.

We had spoken several times before but today was going to be different. He was explaining to me that his team was being pushed to migrate to a new datacenter and it was a nightmare.

As the conversation continued, I decided to test out the SOCIT Questioning skills I learned in Elite Consulting. I began to ask what he wanted to see out of this migration. He told me about the challenges that they were facing which included a complete platform overhaul. It was killing his team and he was dreading the overall impact that this would have on new development.

I sat there for a minute recalling all of the lessons that I had learned in Elite Consulting. I decided to not ‘pitch’ a product but talk about a solution. “What if we could put a new platform in place that would allow you to dynamically scale up and down at the touch of a button? What if this new platform could be built in a way that spinning up new development environments were mere minutes instead of weeks and months? Would that help you achieve your goal?”

He literally leaped out of his chair and exclaimed, “EXACTLY! This is EXACTLY what I need!”.

After I explained how we could build a solution, he was fired up. I went back to the account team to bring them up to speed on the conversation. There was stunned silence on the call and finally one of the Sales Engineers spoke up. “How did you convince him to do that? Every time that we have pitched this idea, he has refused to listen to us for two years.”

I just replied, “I didn’t pitch him an idea… I actively listened to his needs.”