1. 8/23/16, 10:05 AMAn Insider’s View - A Sales Mastery Interview with Patti Elliott, CSO of Yapta - Sales Mastery Magazine - Connect to Be Your Best
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An Insider’s View - A Sales Mastery Interview with Patti
Elliott, CSO of Yapta
By Mary Poul, publisher of Sales Mastery magazine
by Mary Poul
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2. 8/23/16, 10:05 AMAn Insider’s View - A Sales Mastery Interview with Patti Elliott, CSO of Yapta - Sales Mastery Magazine - Connect to Be Your Best
Page 2 of 5http://salesmasterymag.com/an-insider’s-view/
She busts every myth of the egocentric, hard-charging senior executive. She sets the model for
the high performance sales executive: customers are eager to do business with her
and employees seek out opportunities to work for her again.
As the co-founder of the TAS Group and founder of Certified Selling, she can certainly run circles around any
executive when it comes to employing the best sales processes. In fact, she won a Galaxy Award for Lifetime
Achievement in Sales Excellence for pivoting a global corporation from a channel-based selling strategy to a
direct sales model with great success. She did it again at Expedia, taking them from a B-to-C selling structure
and pivoting into a B-to-B organization.
What revealed Patti as the ultimate sales professional is her response to the accolades and accomplishments, “It
feels good promotionally, but it’s a bit embarrassing to be honest with you. I’ve always felt it was about the
team. I keep trying to pull them on the stage with me because they are the ones who really make it happen out
there. I don’t like all the glory. It’s really about the team.”
Be a Leader People Love to Follow
Her grounded perspective and focus on who she is serving was a common theme throughout our interview. I
asked her about the many sales reps that have followed her to new companies in her career and how she
developed the leadership style that made people want to follow her. Patti responded,
“I never really thought about it before, but I do have some great friendships and successes with colleagues. I
think my style just comes from a true desire to help others succeed and to do whatever I can to help them. That
may be to work with marketing, to create the perfect pitch that earns them a big commission, to talk them down
from the ledge and remind them this isn’t heart surgery. We will get over the losses and we’re going to learn
from this and grow from it. I’ve always been a true believer that people come first. I get a kick out of seeing
them happy and smiling and buying new cars and going on trips. I think our job as a leader is to give them the
vision and to keep them motivated because it is a roller coaster ride. Some days we are at the top of the roller
coaster and winning and some days we are at the bottom. That sums it up. I love the hunt too. I love the win,
but not as much as I like when I help others to win. Isn’t that funny? It comes from being in with the troops
forever. It’s more rewarding.”
How a CSO Sells to Other Execs
In her leadership role at Executive Conversations, Patti helped client companies master the executive
conversation and negotiation. We discussed the mindset that leads to successful executive selling and how she
now coaches her global sales team at Yapta.
“I learned a lot with Executive Conversations about how to get sales teams into the right mindset to talk with an
executive. A CEO is just another human being. Everybody imagines this grumpy old man in a blue suit sitting on
the 70th floor of a New York tower with five assistants. That’s not the case with 99% of them. Most of them are
just like your next door neighbor or your Dad or your boss. So the first thing I do is to motivate the team to get
over being afraid and just get out there and try it.
The second thing is how you do your homework. Read about the company, their financials, the press releases,
understand their industry. All of this gets you into the mindset of that executive. What is keeping them up at
night? What problems are they dealing with and how can your product and services help them.
From there you design your first 20 second conversation with that executive. I have all kinds of tricks for

3. 8/23/16, 10:05 AMAn Insider’s View - A Sales Mastery Interview with Patti Elliott, CSO of Yapta - Sales Mastery Magazine - Connect to Be Your Best
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practicing. When you go in and meet the CEO, you can now come from caring about them and what’s important
to them. If you have something that can really make it happen for them, your conversation starts from there. It’s
all about your first two minutes with them.
When people sense that you have something to help them, the door opens even wider for them to introduce you
to the other departments. All of that starts from the hard work of studying their annual report and trying to
determine what their problems are. Your research also goes into preparing the bullet points of your negotiation
as well.”
Knowing readers would be curious about her secrets for preparing her executive conversation, I asked.
“You want to know my secret? Okay - I study, often for an hour or two, about their financials, their press
releases, their LinkedIn profile. I get a feel for who they are. Then I write a couple of sentences as my
introduction. Before I call them, I use my voice mail or the voice memo app on my iPhone. I record my opening
and then I listen to it. I practice that first 20 seconds or so. And usually my first time I think, “Oh my gosh, you
need to sound a little bit more relaxed or this word doesn’t fit.” Then I rewrite it again and I’ll do that probably
10 to 20 times.
It works for me and for a lot of my team members who I’ve taught this little secret to. When they walk into the
CEO’s office, they might not use every single word that they wrote, but they are so comfortable opening up the
dialogue and using what they practiced - it works like magic every time. It brings you confidence. You can look
at them in the eye, you know what you want to say, you know the curiosity you want to create with them. And
the best words to hear from that executive are, “Tell me more. I want to hear more.” Give them a little bit in
your intro, don’t give them a lot.”
Negotiate Like a CSO
For some, the only thing more intimidating than trying to get an audience with a CEO is negotiating with
one. The hours of preparation Patti recommends don’t just go into her executive introduction, it also feeds into
her negotiation style.
The methodology I use comes from Think! Inc. Basically, on one page, you map out your deal from your
customer’s side and from your side. You design how you could work with the customer as three different
proposals. And you present each of them to the customer. What happens is the customer starts taking what they
like from each of them and creating their own win-win. Negotiations have so many components beyond price.
Sometimes you just need to write down all that is important to the customer and use the mass leverage in your
negotiation.
I like this process because you end up with one sheet of paper with all of the moving parts of your deal. You get
the customer to start thinking about your deal in multiple layers, not just the price. And you can have a
discussion about what the customer is willing to give up for a lower price and what is too important to give up.
Your customer is a part of the process instead of being confrontational in the negotiation process. People think
that you have to be on one side of the desk and they have to be on the other side of the desk and you don’t.
You can sit on the same side with them. Talk about what’s important to them and write it all out. Talk about
what’s important to you and write that all out. In the middle is a great deal. I end up having high margin deals
because I allow customers to pick and choose.
Negotiation starts with your very first conversation, at the beginning 20 second pitch. When I’m studying a
company, I’m trying to find out their weaknesses, their goals, what they’re striving for in the next year. My 20
second introduction is about that. I ask 4 or 5 questions to verify what I researched is indeed what is happening

4. 8/23/16, 10:05 AMAn Insider’s View - A Sales Mastery Interview with Patti Elliott, CSO of Yapta - Sales Mastery Magazine - Connect to Be Your Best
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and then determine how important it is to them achieve those specs. Once I determine how important it is, I
bring that up during our negotiation time because sometimes it gets lost if I’m handed off to a procurement
officer or somebody else. So I get back in to see that CEO, “Wait a minute we had this conversation and you said
it was 90% of importance, your top priority in 2015.” I repeat all the things that I can deliver to help with all of
the things they want. I have that dialogue again, reminding them what was important.
It helps to bring that emotion back into the negotiation conversation. I remind them of what their needs are and
if they really want to put off addressing some of those needs to get a different price. It helps since they’re the
ones who stated their needs up front. All I did was ask the question to surface what impact this has on their
company if I can get them to realize their goals next month? When they explain, then it becomes their idea, not
your idea.
The Think! Inc. methodology taught me to title each of the three options according to the customers needs.
You’re showing the customer that you heard them and you’re presenting back to them three different options
based on their three business drivers or initiatives for 2015. Each of those three options are a mixture of your
product offering. Every time I’ve done that, they’ll say, “‘No, I really don’t want this third one.” Then we look at
which parts of the other two options they like to come up with a pricing package that your customer likes. And
your customer is the one who designed it. They’re driving that conversation.
It’s fun. It takes the tension out of negotiating. I use the process internally with my team on everything. It works
well. I think everybody wants to win and everybody wants to feel they’ve gotten a good deal. By choosing what
they want based on what is most important to them, they’ve gotten the perfect deal. The price is just a
secondary part of that conversation. You focus on their emotions and what their business needs are first, and
then you help with that.”
Overcome Obstacles and Celebrate Like a CSO
Certainly someone with the success that Patti has accomplished has dealt with big obstacles along the way. And
learned to overcome them especially well. When asked about her mindset for overcoming obstacles, again
Patti’s perspective as the ultimate sales professional shined through.
My mindset at its core is that I believe my product is going to help my customer. I stay true to my
communication style. Maybe the deal isn’t going fast enough, or the customer isn’t understanding the value. I
regroup. I review with myself what I’m saying and how I am saying it. What can I change? What’s going on in
their world that I should know about. Again, the closer you can get to how customers think, the quicker the
sales process goes. Also, if you asked anybody about me you would hear, I never accept ‘no’.
My rule of thumb is three ‘no’s’ and then I’ll leave you alone for a year. But I’m going to come back because I
know what I have is going to work for you. Obstacles are usually how your communications are being heard by
the customer. If they shut down on me or we run into a road block, I generally just pick up a phone and have a
heart to heart, “Tell me what’s going on in your world. Obviously I didn’t hit the mark here.” Usually those
conversations open up a lot more opportunity to work with the customers, especially if they trust me. They’ll
give me some insight into the political climate or they give me insights into themselves, like maybe they don’t
have the signing authority that I thought.
I have a deal on my desk we just signed - it took 14 months on a process that should probably have taken 3 or 4
months. It was a hard one. We had to work through a lot of change management with the customer. But I kept
at it, speaking with more people within the company and sharing with them the vision of what this is going to do
for them. So, I got the deal in 14 months. It’s a Fortune 50 company and I got the signed contract today. It was
worth it to persevere. I think a lot of times maybe people give up and move on to the next shiny object. I just

5. 8/23/16, 10:05 AMAn Insider’s View - A Sales Mastery Interview with Patti Elliott, CSO of Yapta - Sales Mastery Magazine - Connect to Be Your Best
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by Mary Poul
stay with it.”
Naturally, I asked her, “How are you going to celebrate?”
“Beer - lots and lots of beer. We’re here in Seattle and we’re cheering on the Seahawks. Our office has a
keginator. So, beer – that’s how we celebrate.”
By the end of our conversation I had a great understanding why so many of Patti’s employees want to follow her
as she moves in her career. Her perspective is always to serve – how can she make her customers’ lives better,
and how can she help her sales team keep a healthy perspective and win. Who wouldn’t want to work for a
leader like that!
When Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they
want,” he was surely referring to Patti Elliott.