Bill Strogis, Chief Revenue Officer of Trax Technologies, recently joined The Scale Up Show with Ryan Staley to share his unique perspective on enterprise sales, neuroscience, and the transformation of a 30-year-old company. Drawing from his experience as a four-time CRO and former mechanical engineer, Strogis offered valuable insights into modern sales approaches and buyer psychology.
Reinventing a Legacy Company
Trax Technologies exemplifies what Strogis calls a "start over" - a unique position where an established company reinvents itself while maintaining its core strengths. "We're not a startup because we have 30 years of experience," Strogis explains. "We have customers that are some of the largest, most complex supply chains in the world, many of the Fortune 500, but where we are in our thinking and our mode, we're very much like a scrappy startup."
The company has transformed from a traditional services provider into a data-focused technology company, building a modern SaaS platform for freight audit and payment solutions. This transformation allows Trax to leverage decades of experience while embracing innovative approaches to solving long-standing industry challenges.
"What we do with the data that we deal with is so unique that we didn't just reinvent ourselves in terms of changing the name to Trax Technologies," notes Strogis. "We're really focused on building a data platform, a truly modern state-of-the-art SaaS data platform that solves a very old problem."
The Hard Way: A Deliberate Enterprise Sales Approach
Strogis champions what he calls "the hard way" in enterprise sales. "Our go-to-market motion is intentionally, right now, probably the hardest way to sell enterprise software," he states. "We don't have a large channel, we don't have a giant marketing budget... we're doing it the hard way. We're understanding our target audience's business, we're giving them a reason to talk to us."
This approach focuses on quality over quantity, targeting decision-makers directly rather than casting a wide net. "I'll take one meeting with the decision maker over 50 meetings with people that will then try as best they can to not let you get to the decision makers," Strogis emphasizes. "We will have fewer meetings, fewer deals, fewer customers, but we're going to do it with excellence."
The Science Behind Enterprise Sales
A fundamental misalignment exists in most sales approaches, according to Strogis: "Most sales organizations forget that even though they sell software every day, their audience typically does not buy or evaluate software every day." This insight drives his approach to enterprise sales, focusing on understanding buyer psychology and decision-making patterns.
He introduces a strategic framework called the Customer Engagement Model, which creates structured alignment between seller and buyer objectives. "Your team is ultimately going to burn a lot of calories on this if it's something that's important to you," Strogis explains to prospects. "My team's going to burn a lot of calories, and so I think we owe it to each other to agree on what great looks like."
Creating Intrigue vs. Education
Strogis strongly advocates moving away from traditional educational selling. "If you think that your purpose is to educate because the person on the other end not only wants to be educated but somehow that education is going to magically result in them going 'well great, therefore I should buy Trax’s software' - it just doesn't work that way," he states.
Instead, he emphasizes creating intrigue and helping prospects rethink how they want to solve their problems. The goal is to guide buyers to "find and accept and articulate the value that your differentiators bring" and reach a place where they recognize unique solutions that only your company can provide.
The Engineering Mindset in Sales
Drawing from his mechanical engineering background, Strogis applies analytical thinking to sales processes. "An engineering perspective, an analytical approach to building a sales motion - thinking about what are you ultimately trying to accomplish and what should that look like and what are the variables and what are the people on the other side thinking - building something smartly, that's what enterprise selling is about," he explains.
This systematic approach helps ensure alignment between the sales process and buyer journey. "If your sales process doesn't align to that at some point, what you think you're trying to accomplish as a seller is not at all what the buyer is looking for at that time or what they're expecting to get from you," Strogis notes.
Building for Sustainable Growth
Rather than pursuing rapid expansion, Trax focuses on building a sustainable business model. "Growth at all costs is a terrible business model," Strogis emphasizes. "We are an extraordinarily well-run business. We are very efficient, we're very focused on creating a truly profitable, sustainable, durable business."
This measured approach aligns with what Strogis learned from Mark Roberge's concept of "Excellence repeated for scaling." As he explains, "We're doing things really well, we're getting better and better every day... doing things the hard way, doing things the intentional way... it's worth the effort because as we get better and better at that, then we're going to be able to start to get that to scale."
To learn more about Trax Technologies' innovative approaches to freight audit and payment solutions, visit traxtech.com