How to build a simple mental model in your prospect's head

Anything you say in a sales call either adds or detracts. It's signal or noise, and buyers don't want noise. 

In this episode of Content to Close, Tim Schwedes, who leads enablement and training for sales engineers at Egnyte, explains how to use content to build a simple mental model in a prospect's head. He hates slides used as a crutch and prefers a few bullets or a single diagram that anchors the conversation without taking it over, because a sales conversation is a "knife fight" up close while marketing is the "air cover" that has to resonate with everyone. He walks through Egnyte's internal "jawbreaker slide" on content graphs (a content layer, a user-behavior layer, and a domain layer, like the terms dictionary that finally gets AI to spell Egnyte right), why "does this address that requirement you talked about" beats "does that make sense," how the same simple diagram gets tailored for construction versus financial services versus life sciences, and why "steal, steal, steal" is the fastest way to improve, even from competitors. If your content keeps getting more complicated, this episode shows you how to pare it back down.

About Tim

Tim Schwedes leads enablement and training for all sales engineers at Egnyte, the cloud content platform. His career started with a chance seat next to a consultant on a train in college, which turned into an internship and then years spent implementing old-school enterprise document management systems on projects that could run for years. About six years ago, he joined Egnyte as a sales engineer, moved into managing the SE team, and now trains every sales engineer at the company. His core philosophy: hunt pain, map the solution to it or disqualify honestly, and keep every sales conversation a conversation, not a pitch.

Show Notes

• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timschwedes/