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Today’s show featured an interview with Okta Federal Vice President Amy Johanek.
Find Amy on LinkedIn.
AMY’S TIP: “Prepare. Think about the outcome that you want to achieve, put a plan into action, one that fits into your strategy, that has both near-term and long-term steps. Don’t fall in the trap of being caught up in the day-to-day or the end of the quarter. Have a vision and make a plan and execute against it. Above all, deliver value for the customers, and your preparation won’t be wasted if you do that.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Amy Johanek: Fred, thanks so much for having me. I am Vice President of Federal, which means I’m responsible for Okta’s civilian agency business as well as our DoD and intel business.
Fred Diamond: For people around the globe, we have a lot of listeners all over the globe, that’s a pretty substantial marketplace. The federal marketplace, we like to say, it’s Fortune 1. A lot of interesting things. As a matter of fact, we’re doing today’s interview in early September of 2024, and it’s what’s known as the busy season as the federal fiscal year ends on September 30th. Are you really busy right now? There’s a lot of interesting things going on?
Amy Johanek: We are heads down, Fred. This is the run up to the end of the federal fiscal year. We’re very busy, a lot of activity. I think what’s interesting though, when I think about our government customers, a lot of them are getting very savvy about not leaving a lot of things to the end of the fiscal year. Maybe years ago, we’d be spending a lot more time just getting transactions through the pipeline and out to close. But our customers are getting smarter about moving the renewals around. While it’s still a very, very busy time, when I reflect back to my many years in government, I think in some ways it’s less busy. It’s busy all year round because we’re constantly working with our customers. When their renewals come up, that tends to be when we’re doing a lot of business with them.
Fred Diamond: I want you to give us your background. You’ve worked at some really exciting places. I know you were at Splunk, and we’ve had a number of Splunk public sector leaders on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, but it’s a good point. Actually, I’m harking back to something. I spoke to one of your peers at a well-known tech company, and I said, “It’s September, you must be going crazy.” She said, “Actually, we’re trying to find things to do because the pipeline’s been rich and full.” Like you were just saying, not everyone’s waiting till the last week of September to close business.
Tell us about yourself a little bit and tell us also what Okta does for people who don’t know.
Amy Johanek: I am actually just shy of three months at Okta in this role. I came from Splunk. I was there for four years leading part of their federal civilian business. Before that I spent time at Gartner, which was a truly interesting organization, really impactful in terms of serving the C level in both government and private sector. Before that, I spent almost 14 years at IBM in a variety of roles, including doing delivery solutions, leadership, operations, really cut my teeth in all the aspects of business, always serving the federal government though. Through my career, I’ve really tried to stay focused on the mission of government, and it’s served me well.
Fred Diamond: Tell us a little about what Okta does for people who don’t know.
Amy Johanek: Okta is the world’s identity company. Our vision is to free everyone to safely use any technology. We are a pure play identity solution provider. We are working with our customers to allow their customers as well as their employees, their workforce, to access applications, to log into their systems, and to do that with a really great user experience. Okta is a cloud-native solution. It was one of the things that attracted me about coming to the organization, very focused on public sector. Because we’re cloud-native, we’re very focused on compliance solutions.
Okta has FedRAMP Moderate, FedRAMP High. We also have Okta DoD Mil IL4, and we’ve signaled interest in serving our classified customers as well. It’s very exciting for me to be in a company that is taking the public sector so seriously with those investments. We really are trying to make sure people can access technology in a secure manner, but one that’s seamless in the way they want to interact with their technology today.
Fred Diamond: A lot of the guests I’ve had on the Sales Game Changers Podcast are leading sales organizations in public sector, in many cases federal. A lot of people know, I’m actually basing the show out of Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. Most of your career has been in serving the public sector. Could you give us an insight into why you’ve chosen this particular marketplace to serve?
Amy Johanek: It’s interesting. My first job out of college was actually in the government. I do think that a lot of us that either work or sell to or support the government in anyway, are really as passionate about the mission of our government as even some of the folks that work there as well. It’s one thing to sell or support organizations where revenue is their goal, but there’s something about the mission that really I think makes us all feel very good about making our government the best and most effective that they can be. Watching individuals working hard to deliver those missions, it’s exciting and I’m proud to be a part of the customers that I support every day. That’s what keeps me here, is just that spirit of support and really making sure that our government can be the best they can be with its mission.
Fred Diamond: A lot of people who are listening aren’t all that familiar with the government and what it does, but it’s leading the way in health and human services, obviously, safety and security and protection of its citizens.
How are things going for your sales organization right now? How would you say the state of sales is right now in the organization that you’re leading?
Amy Johanek: I am really excited about what I’m seeing with my sales team right now. That’s another reason, Fred, you talk about why you stay serving and selling into the government, is that you get sellers who are very passionate about the mission. They’re very motivated. What I see my team doing is constantly trying to think out about how we can show up the best way we possibly can, wake up every day thinking about how we can serve our customers and how we can bring our solutions to make them more effective. Because at the end of the day, it’s really all about the customer, the individual, their mission. It’s not about what solutions we want to bring to them. We have to have that match between what we’re able to offer the market and what that customer truly needs in a very complex environment.
You talk about people who don’t understand the government. When I think about the VA, which is an organization I’ve worked with a lot over the years, they’re very much like a Fortune 100 company. You have a healthcare system, an insurance company, and a memorial service, and one of the largest workforces in government. The complexity that is there, it really requires all of us to wake up every day thinking broadly about the territory or the agencies that we serve, so that we can understand them very well, so that when we do show up, we’re showing up with value, we’re showing up with an understanding of their mission, and we’re not just putting solutions out there that aren’t a match for solving the problem.
Fred Diamond: How do you develop a strategy for that? We alluded to at the beginning of the conversation that the government operates on a fiscal year. For a lot of people who are listening, there’s terms like CR, continuing resolution. We’re doing today’s interview in the early part of September, and there’s articles about the government might be shutting down. There is a complexity of what they use the technology for, but then there’s also process because they are using taxpayers’ monies to buy things. Talk a little bit about what it takes to build a sales strategy selling into this marketplace.
Amy Johanek: Complexity is the right word. The complexity of their mission, the complexity of some of the technical stacks that they have, some of the legacy, the need to modernize, and then you layer over the budget and how they have to operate with the constraints around how they’re funded. Don’t quote me on this, but we’ve probably had a CR, someone told me once recently, I think it was 15 years straight or something. It almost becomes part and parcel of what we’re up against every year.
I think the key for me is always about preparation. If you do good preparation and you’re ready to iterate through the strategy that you created, then you can pivot. I think things like the CR, things like different funding sources, different programs then come up. You’ve heard of the Technology Modernization Fund, the TMF, the PACT Act at the VA. You always have to be thinking about what are ways that you can tap into these resources and help your customers tap into them so that they can actually meet the goals of their projects.
My team has heard me say many times, I even have it framed in my office, my famous quote is, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I think that’s about really understanding and setting a plan out for our fiscal year, for example. Then layering that over what the customer’s calendar might look like and where do we meet along the way? But really the only way I see through it, and maybe this because when I was at IBM, I was also a certified project manager, is all about planning and preparation.
If you have that planning and preparation, then you’re able to be ready when opportunistically things come up that maybe you didn’t foresee in your plan, but you already really understand your customer well. You understand the resources you have to help them. When things open up, you’re ready to take action. That’s happened to me many times in my career. Some people call it right place, right time, or you could think of all the different ways of saying that, but I think the people who are truly successful with that is if they’re prepared when you are in the right place at the right time.
Fred Diamond: One of the things about the federal marketplace is they publish their strategy. There are tons of research. You mentioned Gartner before. There are tons of organizations that publish exactly what the budget is. They are public. Because again, it is taxpayer money. There might be some clandestine type projects, et cetera, but for the most part, you can understand the mission, you understand the organization. It is published in many places.
Talk to what sales professionals, maybe who are on the junior side, what should they do? You’ve made your career so successful by doing the preparation, by looking into the future, knowing what they need. Give some advice, give two or three things that you would tell a junior sales professional, or maybe someone who’s been in the job for 5, 6, 7, 10 years, two or three things that they should do.
Amy Johanek: In that theme of preparation, you really do have to do your homework. I know that seems obvious. When you do that homework, you can use all those sources that you mentioned. Every agency has a strategic plan. You can look at the budget documents. But then I think the key thing is that you have to engage in a way with a lot of curiosity and an ability to listen. Because how all of that strategic planning and all of those budget talk documents actually transcend down into the individual, and how they’re going to execute on that, is that’s where you have to really be a good listener and listen to your customer. Because sometimes things that get put into strategic planning documents aren’t necessarily what’s happening on the ground, or maybe that’s an aspirational goal, and they’re still six to eight months away from that. I think you have to really do your homework, but then really practice good listening and good curiosity to see how all that strategy is actually playing out in your customer.
I don’t know, Fred, if you’ve talked to some customers and you parrot out, “Well, I see that your goal is to get Zero Trust,” and then you find out, “Well, yes it is, but I have these seven obstacles in my way to meet that mandate.” Showing up with this beautiful Zero Trust solution when you’ve not addressed and helped talk through how you can help them through the seven obstacles, is really tone deaf. It’s the balance between the strategy and the listening and the curiosity that I think allows you to connect with the customer and bring forward a solution that is a better fit.
Fred Diamond: We did a show recently with a woman named Tricia Fitzmaurice, and she’s a VP of sales. She was at Red Hat at the time, and now she’s with Rancher. She talked about it was one of her first opportunities, and she found the strategic plan that the new CIO for the agency had published. She didn’t just parrot it back to him, she came to their meeting with solutions on how her company could assist in the implementation.
Speaking of that, give some insights from your career on what do you think customers are expecting from salespeople. We talk about this all the time, where customers now are in the driver’s seat in many ways because they can get information. They don’t need you, sales professional, to come in and do a day of slides on your company’s strategy. They can just type into any of the AI engines, “What is the strategy of blank for the next 10 years?” But what do real live customers, what do you think they want from sales professionals right now?
Amy Johanek: Honestly, it’s some of what I was saying before. Someone who’s taken the time to understand their mission, someone who’s a good listener, because priorities can change. The other thing that I think people miss is there’s a lot of politics that go on in any organization, public or private, and I mean little P politics. Some of that is having an influence, so being able to listen and support your customer to understand how the politics are impacting what they’re trying to accomplish. You have to seek to understand what the value really can be and often show up in ways that they might not even anticipate, with ideas, unsolicited ideas about how you can help them solve the problem, how other agencies are solving the very same problem.
We all want to learn from each other and sometimes we get so focused in that we don’t have the time to look up and look across. But as a federal team, we have that opportunity to share stories among different agencies and how they’re being successful and how they might be successful in the same way. I think it’s always showing up with value, not showing up transactionally. Really being a partner with that customer on their journey and how we can fit in to help them.
Fred Diamond: I like what you just said before about the curiosity. We had a conversation with a sales leader at a well-known technology company who said she went into a meeting with some of her salespeople and a senior level group at the customer site in the public sector. The customer spoke for 10 minutes about some things that were going on. The salespeople on her team went right to the close, “Great. We have a solution for that, and I can even give you a 20% discount.” The VP was cringing because there were no follow-up questions. She was like, “Ah…” and afterwards they did a brief, “You need to ask follow-up questions.” The customer was looking at them like, “What are you doing? I have an opportunity to speak with you to get some solutions.”
I want to ask that question with a little more expansion, talk about relationships. I want you to talk about it from two different perspectives. Talk about building relationships with government customers, and there’s such a huge community of other vendors, partners, and consultants that are trying to do work with the government. Talk about building a network within industry as well. What have been some of your successes?
Amy Johanek: From an advice perspective to other sales professionals, and I think the best ones do this, and especially in the public sector and in federal, in some ways we’re a small village. We all are interacting with the same government customers. We’re all in the same industry events. It’s really managing yourself in a way that you show up credibly every time. When you’re making connections between people or between agencies, you’re doing that very thoughtfully and trying to bring value and trying to create connection and not a transactional self-involved.
At the end of the day, I feel like if you do all of those things to create value and connections between people, good things come from that. In sales, we have to manage a process and we have to be very disciplined. But I think the way that you do that is the outcome of that are the business results. When I think about building relationships in our community, I try to do that with a lot of credibility, with a lot of being very forthright and making sure that the connections I’m making are with the right intent. I think that has really served me well. It means a lot to me, and I think it means a lot to other people in our community, that you have a reputation as being someone who really is mission-focused. There’s no secret that we’re in sales and we’re trying to progress and grow our organizations and grow our revenue, but I think we do that in the spirit of helping the mission, and then it’s successful for both sides. You’re making the customer successful, and thus, in my case, I’m making Okta successful.
Fred Diamond: Do you want to share an example or a use case of how the public sector, and you could talk as generically or specifically as you want, about how they’re using Okta solutions right now?
Amy Johanek: I’m just three months into the role, but one of the things that has struck me, I think a lot of people when they think about identity, they think about logging into things. They think about the authentication process. But there’s a lot of complexity to identity. One of the areas where I think we’re having a really big impact is the idea of authorization. That’s the idea of once you are authenticated in and you have to traverse, whether that’s your workforce, that’s your employee, or whether that’s a partner that needs to access systems, you have to make sure that they’re authorized to do that. It’s one of the principles of Zero Trust. We are very strong in that, and I think we’re being successful with customers where we’re able to come in, even if they have a different solution for authentication, we’re coming in and helping them with that authorization or that administration or that governance side of things so that they have a full scope identity solution and not just piece parts. Because if you have all that, then you have a much more secure solution.
We’re a truly independent and neutral identity company. We’re not part of a broader platform. We are actually able to integrate. That’s one of our strong points, is integrating with a lot of other solutions. That’s helpful to our agencies who are trying to have maybe technical debt or different solutions that they want us to integrate with. They don’t want us to handle every piece, but we’re able to do the integration and support where we can bring value, such as in that authorization space.
Fred Diamond: You’ve been at Okta about three months now, and you’ve been to some other great companies. You started with IBM and Gartner and Splunk. We’re doing today’s interview in September of 2024. The last four years have been very challenging for a lot of people, obviously, in the world, not to be ignorant here, but in sales. Sales has changed in a lot of ways. A lot of people have been working from home over the last couple years. They don’t want to come to the office. The customers are also, in many cases, working from places where you can’t physically get to them. People are traveling, but not as much, to things as they used to.
As a sales leader, what are you looking at as a top priority to ensure your organization and your team’s success?
Amy Johanek: When you were talking about what has changed since COVID, I think you want to create opportunities for your customer to engage with you that are very valuable. Because we are connecting and engaging in different ways, we have different patterns. It’s interesting to see that conferences are back in a good way. When people are not teleworking or working in their office, they are taking the time to go out and interact with their peers. I want to ensure that our organization is creating really thoughtful opportunities for engagement. That could be we do a gov summit here with Okta. We have our Oktane User Conference in October 14th in Las Vegas. We bring that on the road to our customers here in the DMV when they can’t get out to Las Vegas, and trying for our folks to think about making sure if you’re going to ask people to take their time, to make sure that they’re showing up and they’re having something that’s thoughtful and really relevant to them. Relevancy, value, you’ll hear me talk a lot about that. We want to show up the right way in every interaction with our customers.
Fred Diamond: Amy Johanek, I want to thank you again for being on the podcast today. Best of luck. I’m sure you’ll have great success in your new organization. Thanks for sharing some of the insights and letting us know what Okta does. You’ve given us so many great ideas that people can implement. For people who are just listening right now or reading the transcript, give us one final action step, one thing specific that they should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Amy Johanek: I’ll go back to my favorite theme, which is preparation. Prepare. Think about the outcome that you want to achieve, put a plan into action, one that fits into your strategy, that has both near-term and long-term steps. Don’t fall in the trap of being caught up in the day-to-day or the end of the quarter. Have a vision and make a plan and execute against it. I think above all, deliver value for the customers, and your preparation won’t be wasted if you do that.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Amy Johanek for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo