Benjamin Ard (00:55)
Welcome back to another episode of Content to Close. Today I'm joined by Tamra. Tamra, welcome to the show.
Tamara Asselta (01:01)
Thank you for having me.
Benjamin Ard (01:02)
You bet. Tamara, this is going to be an awesome subject. I'm excited to talk about it, excited to dive in. But before we do that, let's let anyone listening to today's episode get to know you a little bit — your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff.
Tamara Asselta (01:15)
Absolutely. So my name is Tamra Asselta. I am the founder of Stratis Consulting, where I help women-led businesses and growth stage companies solve complex problems by building trust, recreating clarity, and ensuring teams actually adopt the solutions we build. I have over 15 years of experience in SaaS and tech companies. I've had a focus on building operations, coaching leaders, doing sales, and I'm also a recent powerlifter and a motorcyclist of many forms, like we were talking about earlier. I'm just truly delighted to be here and have this conversation with you.
Benjamin Ard (01:55)
Love it. Tamara, this is going to be fun. And it's a subject that I really care about. When we were emailing back and forth trying to figure out a subject for today, we came to the conclusion of trust. And you said something in this email that I really want to call out and kind of kick the conversation off with. You said building trust is the most crucial skill anyone can work on. Now, why is that the case, especially in a revenue kind of environment? Why is trust the number one thing that people should work on?
Tamara Asselta (02:24)
Yeah, so trust is the fundamental foundation needed to build a relationship with someone, whether that is a friendship, it's romantic, or in this case, a business relationship. In a revenue environment, trust means your prospects believe you'll deliver what you promise, that you understand their business reality, and that you're actually invested in their success. You're not just trying to close a deal. So it becomes the foundation of every movement you have after that, every approach, every discussion.
Benjamin Ard (02:59)
I love that. And that's a cool definition when you're talking about sales to prospects, internal to external. There's also some bridges that need to be built internally. And I love, as we were talking before, you used the term bridge. And I think this is a great kind of analogy. How do you build the trust bridges internally from sales and marketing and onboarding and all the different departments? What does that look like? And how can we work on that trust factor?
Tamara Asselta (03:25)
This is my absolute favorite question, as you probably noticed earlier, because it helps to establish something else that's really important — the collaboration that's required between various departments and sales. I think oftentimes I have found sales and marketing or services will try to act in silo, but the most successful sales organizations I have seen understand that their goals will be more successful when they develop internal relationships at their business with their marketing teams, their product teams, their finance teams, and customer service teams.
They need to understand how their goals can mutually benefit each other and actually how they conflict. So to go about that, sales needs to spend time with the teams that are part of their workflow. For example, if you have a service team, make sure you understand what is possible in delivery and where you can be custom and innovative. If we make promises that the services team can't keep up with, we're eroding that trust now — not only externally, but internally. And that sets up that services team to fail. And now the trust will be lost on all sides. I've seen this happen, unfortunately, way too many times where you have a salesperson promising one thing and the services team going, that's not how we deliver this.
And it's because both teams are only focused on their own goals. And I have an example. I had a client where sales was promising this custom deliverable that the product services couldn't support at scale. I brought both teams together, I mapped out what was actually possible, and co-created a tiered service model that gave sales flexibility while protecting that quality of that deliverable.
Sales ended up closing more deals because they could confidently promise what would be delivered, and the product services team trusted that sales wasn't setting them up to fail. And then you had the result that you could show to the client because there was that collaboration that happened internally to make sure what we promised in the sales cycle was actually going to be the outcome.
Benjamin Ard (05:40)
I love that. That's so cool. And I love the story, how to build the trust, the importance of the trust, what that looks like, all of that fun stuff. Now the focus of this podcast series, a lot of it's on content, and content can help us close new deals, work through things, and help individuals out on the subject of trust. How does content provide trust, and how can you build trust into the content? I know those are almost like the same questions, but how do you work trust into the content experience itself?
Tamara Asselta (06:12)
Sure. I say this phrase a lot, which is listening to understand. And in order to understand the content that you need to tailor for your client, you have to listen. And listening to understand means you are not just waiting for your turn to talk or mentally drafting your response. You're catching what's being said. And even more crucially, what's not being said.
When I'm listening to understand, I'm asking myself, what is the real problem here? What is this client trying to say? What are the keywords that they're using? What pressure are they under and why? What have they already tried? And what is success going to look like for them? Because if you can't answer those questions, you're not going to know what the solution is.
And this shapes that content strategy that you bring up because it prevents us from leading with what we want to say and it forces us to start with what we need to hear. So tools like Gong or Jiminy, there's a lot of these automatic note takers — they're great. They can help capture details you might miss. But the skill is in knowing what to listen to in the first place. You can't automate genuine curiosity in the present moment.
Benjamin Ard (07:31)
So this listening, which I love, and I love the phrase of, you're not just listening and crafting the response in your head and trying to get things back on track where they ought to go. It's about what that person genuinely needs, picking up on that. I also love how you talk about it's not what they're saying, which I think is where AI probably really struggles to give you that value. When you've listened and actually understand the listening to understand framework you have, does that go into content creation? Does that go into what content I should share? What does that actually look like? When I understand it, how do I turn that into trust when it comes to content?
Tamara Asselta (08:11)
Right, so I think I actually have a story that will help answer this. I had a client that we had never worked with before. And a sales rep on the team wanted to go in and do a typical templatized get-to-know slide deck, right? We've all seen them. Templates are great. Templates are necessary, but usually they are meant to be a starting point. And you need to take that initial call that you have with the client where you're really trying to have a conversation and get to know them, build that relationship, build that trust. You can go in with a plan. You should have a plan. You also need to be able to pivot. Pivoting is the difference of showcasing to the client you are listening to them in real time, and you are hopefully presenting them a path that's bringing them closer to a solution.
So before you get into that initial call, before you start to build what your content strategy is going to be, how you're going to approach this conversation, you have to gather as much info as possible beforehand. Because this client hadn't worked with us before, I asked the sales rep, hey, did you go and get any information? Do you know why they're coming to us? What's the context? The rep had asked. They just took the form that they submitted as face value. So I had the rep go back, and I said, we need — I need you to let them know we appreciate their time. We want to ensure we're being intentional about this conversation, and could they give us more context of how they got here?
Because sometimes we go in and we try to ask all these questions, the clients don't always know what they want. You have to be very clever about your questions. Instead of being like, what service would you like or what tool would you like to use? You have to ask, what are your problems right now? What is keeping you up at night? What is your boss trying to tell you that you need to be doing right now? What are the struggles of your company? What are the struggles of your department? And they might not always know the exact answers to that, but I guarantee it will get you closer.
Benjamin Ard (10:13)
I love that. That's so cool. And I like the story of going back and potentially saying, hey, apologize, there's more information I need, and all that fun stuff. When you have that information, you've done active listening, you have good content — how do you translate that into getting a deal across the finish line? Like, what does that look like? We've had conversations, there's genuine interest, I understand what you need, I'm trying to provide solutions. How does that kind of go through the final steps of the process?
Tamara Asselta (10:42)
Yeah, and I love this part because this part means everything you did before, everything we're talking about, has worked. Trust is what turns prospects into partners. I want us to focus on that word, partners. So I'm going to say it a few more times and we're really going to get this through. When you can show concrete examples, not just on paper, it's also in the way you talk. It's in the way you respond to their questions. You are then letting them know you've done this before and you're going to get the job done.
Not only will they want to work with you, they will want to partner with you. The difference between a client versus a partner is that a partner is going to collaborate with you on this project or whatever you are deciding you're going into a contract on together. That means if they're willing to collaborate with you and they're willing to trust you, you're both going to be much more successful. There's been so many times I worked with a client where they were just pushed into this contract because somebody told them to, the whole thing was kind of rushed. And I had to go back when the contract was already signed and start to develop that relationship. And it really needs to happen in the beginning. It needs to happen in the sales process.
Partners tend to invest more as well. They are less scared of investing in a larger or longer term project. And it's just a very important thing to keep in mind when we talk about clients versus partners, because a partner is the result of developing that trusting relationship.
Benjamin Ard (12:14)
I love that. The framework, the mentality. One final question, because we're almost out of time. How do you keep the trust in the partnership alive when someone becomes a client, they're your partner, but now you're handing them off to different departments and different groups of people to kind of help fulfill on that? How do you keep the partnership-level trust there and really provide the value that you've wanted to provide the whole time?
Tamara Asselta (12:44)
Yeah, so this goes back to our conversation we had offline, which now we can have here. And that is making sure that there's somebody in the company who becomes that bridge between sales and delivery. Now that can be your sales rep. That can be somebody on your services side. These days, that title tends to be somebody called a sales engineer or a sales architect or a solutions architect. It doesn't really matter what we're calling it. The core function of that individual needs to be the person who was a part of the sales process, and is hand-delivering all of the context that has happened, and is being a partner to the internal delivery team, whether that's product or services in your organization, and is making sure for, let's say, the first month or so, however long it takes, to make sure that the context and the conversations that happen in the sales process are carried over into how this is going to be delivered.
Now that core function — what they also need to have is not only those listening skills, but they also need to be the type of person that understands how this actually gets delivered. They might not be the one who does the delivery, but they're going to ensure that it kicks off on the right path, the right approach, based on what was promised in the sales process. That bridge is crucial. And sales organizations that don't have that type of individual being that bridge between those two entities will often fail and will often have less client satisfaction and lower retention.
Benjamin Ard (14:28)
I love it. That role is so crucial. I love the passion for it. That bridge, the engineer. I love it. This is amazing. Tamara, we are out of time. But for anyone who has listened today that would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Tamara Asselta (14:45)
Yes, you can find me at stratusconsult.com or on LinkedIn — Tamara Celta on LinkedIn. I have a very easy LinkedIn, no extra numbers, just the name. You can also find me on Substack if you are a person that peruses that platform. My Substack is called Let's Build. You can also just find me by my name though.
Benjamin Ard (15:06)
Love it. For anyone listening today, simply scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. Click on the links there. We'll have everything there in the show notes in the description so you can find Tamara and connect with her there. Tamara, thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been amazing. Really do appreciate the time and insights today.
Tamara Asselta (15:24)
Thank you so much for having me, Ben.
