Selling is Solving

After eight years of trial and error, Daveed feels he has finally figured out the sales model for, Valens Global. 

He heard about the rainmaker sales model from a very successful law firm. The senior partner initiated discussions with clients that demonstrate the firm's expertise and ability to solve a particular problem. 

For Daveed it meant taking the lead with the customer to define the problem and the framework to solve it. His teams, often working in parallel, taking charge of delivering the solution. 

We love to solve problems and when we are focused on doing that the sale comes naturally. 

Highlights:

02:01 Valens Global solves problems that involve the intersection of evolving technologies, changing global society, often changing ecology or environment, and manifest in ways that are different as patterns than they were in the past. Disinformation, for example, is one such problem set problems involving climate change, problems involving terrorists, and evolving technologies.

03:53 We use simulations and games. What is different about our games is first we've invested significantly in storytelling and world building techniques. So there's a cinematic or novel quality to our games.

05:30 For our university clients, we get a lot of students coming back and saying that this was the most profound educational experience that they'd had during their university career.

06:36 Last year we did a racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism workshop. It was a series of workshops that used a Valens simulation tabletop exercise to anchor the conversations.

08:32 Given the life and death nature of the topics that we deal with, practicing self care for your team is very important.

09:09 I started Valens Global because I was tired of correctly predicting outcomes that were against the consensus opinion. Valens allowed me to productize my subject matter expertise and rise above group think consensus.

21:39 Our sales model has shifted from a sales team model to a rainmaker model that I learned from a famous law firm.

33:19 It’s really important to listen and learn about a customer's problem. And in many cases, we deal with big problems and we can’t afford to fail. Solving these problems is my sales model.

About Our Guest:

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is an entrepreneur, practitioner, and scholar with specialized knowledge of violent non-state actors and terrorist groups. He is the founder and CEO of the private firm Valens Global, which has twice been named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s E360 list of the top small businesses in the United States. 

He is also on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and Duke University. Among the many projects that Daveed has undertaken for Valens Global, he led the company’s efforts to support the drafting, threat assessment, and crafting of priority actions for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, which received widespread acclaim. 

The New York Times, for example, editorialized that the strategy represented “a shift that is both urgently needed and long overdue.” He holds a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.

About Guest Company:

A few sentences about Valens Global: Valens Global was founded in 2014 on the belief that the private sector is vital to addresing key twenty-first century challenges, including advancing the national security interests of America and its allies and to saving lives by protecting the public from terrorist attacks and other threats. Valens's high-quality analysis is paired with numerous interlocking capabilities, including in physical security, training, threat assessments, detection of insider threats, and messaging. The company's goal, simply put, is to understand, predict, and act to empower clients as they navigate and address emergent challenges rooted in security, technology, and a changing global society.

Resource Links:

You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.
Website:https://AliceHeiman.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/