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Enterprise sales often stalls on the same two obstacles: a buyer who isn't ready to move yet, and a rep who doesn't know how to handle that gracefully. This episode of Complex Sales: Decoded digs into both. Meredith Chandler sits down with Valerie Avila, Head of International Sales at Justworks, to talk through the specific dynamics of selling a complex product to buyers who don't yet understand the territory, literally and figuratively.
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Valerie has spent nearly 12 years at Justworks, building out domestic expansion and now leading the company's international sales motion. The conversation covers what separates effective objection handling from deal-killing rabbit holes, how real-time coaching is making a comeback through AI, and why "not right now" is one of the most important pieces of data a rep can collect.
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👤 Guest Bio
Valerie Avila is Head of International Sales at Justworks, where she has worked for nearly 12 years. She joined as an Account Executive in 2014 and has held roles across sales management, training, domestic expansion, and revenue development. She founded the Justwomen initiative, a speaker series that brought prominent women executives together to drive growth in the NYC tech community. Before Justworks, Valerie was in business development at SinglePlatform. She holds a BA in Communications and Philosophy from Boston College.
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📌 What We Cover
- Why selling international EOR is a fundamentally different motion from domestic PEO: Justworks becomes the full legal employer abroad, which means buyers are carrying assumptions from US employment law that don't transfer.
- How Justworks unified its domestic and international sales motion under a single AE supported by specialist overlays, and why splitting by product early didn't serve the same customer effectively.
- What just-in-time enablement looks like in practice: Justworks uses Spekit to surface talk tracks, answers, and collateral inside the tools reps already use, without requiring them to break their workflow.
- Why real-time coaching on live calls matters, the old whisper/barge function and how AI is rebuilding that capability for a remote-first sales environment.
- The objection triage framework: before handling any objection, ask whether it is a smoke screen or a real deal breaker, and whether the person raising it is the one who actually drives the decision.
- Why fixating on a small objection, a missing feature, a font, can turn a winnable deal into a mountain the rep built themselves.
- The timing objection unpacked: "it's never a no, it's a no for now." Fiscal year start, benefits renewal, and vendor contract end dates are the moments that matter, and every conversation should go into Salesforce so the follow-up can happen at the right one.
- How to stay relevant between conversations using signals, from LinkedIn activity to company events to building a custom AI agent to monitor buying intent triggers.
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
- Pavilion's AI and Go-To-Market School — operator-led GTM learning program, Valerie is currently enrolled in
- Claude — mentioned as a tool for building custom AI agents to track buying signals
- Aligned — episode sponsor; AI deal workspace for multi-stakeholder enterprise sales
