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Today’s show featured an interview with Splunk VP for Public Sector Bill Rowan.
Find Bill on LinkedIn.
BILL’S TIP: “A good account plan will have a combination of things that you understand, directions, strategies the account is following, but also let’s understand the gaps we might have in the account. What do we need to be working on today, next week, next quarter to continue to build relationships? That’s the portion I always want the team to come back with when they’ve done their account planning, is what have we discovered that we don’t really understand well enough about the account, whether it may be a new initiative, a new program coming under way, maybe a challenge with a competitor in a particular area that we can exploit. Understanding those pieces that we don’t understand, to me, is just as critical as the components that we do.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m very excited because I’m interviewing Bill Rowan today. Bill has been a guest twice on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Bill, I’m excited to hear your story. Give us a brief introduction to the audience.
Bill Rowan: Fred, thanks for having me on again. I always enjoy these opportunities. I am the Vice President of Public Sector at Splunk. Splunk is a software company, probably known a lot for our cybersecurity, our analysis of data. I lead the public sector business, which is a roughly 400 professionals focused sales, system engineering channels, et cetera, covering the public sector gamut as a whole. We are a company that works almost exclusively in the public sector with our channel partners, value-added resellers, integrators, global systems integrators. We have a great thriving business, and I couldn’t be more excited to be with you today.
Fred Diamond: I also want to acknowledge also that Splunk was a 2023 IES, Institute for Excellence in Sales, Premier Women in Sales Employer.
Bill Rowan, tell us a great sales story.
Bill Rowan: Fred, too often in sales, I think we have a propensity to want to just dive into the account, go gangbusters over the Chief Information Security Officer, CIO, wherever your call pattern is taking you into those organizations. I’m a firm believer that truly a professional has to take the time to do some real good account planning. My story is one that converges account planning with relationships. We have the Department of Defense as a customer, has been a long-time Splunk customer, and our rep has been in there and had the same account now for a number of years.
She’s extremely, extremely professional. Understands about not just the relationships with the customer, but those tangential relationships that could exist with other partners across our ecosystem. Whether those be hardware providers, like Dell and HP, a network appliance, maybe there are other software vendors, a ServiceNow, Broadcom/VMware, whatever the case. Certainly, cloud service providers, the Amazons, the Microsofts, the Googles of this world. She’s always done a very good job of building those relationships as much as the relationships with the end user and client and the integrators working with that particular space.
This client had done a significant purchase with us a year ago in April. Under our contracts, they have basically a 12-month and then those are up for renewal again. Well, in talking to the customer about six months into the agreement, she realized that they were going through their capacity that they had acquired from us a lot quicker than initially anticipated. She foresaw that this was going to drive an opportunity that initially we thought would be this upcoming April, that she saw an opportunity to get something closed before the end of the year.
But that was going to require an awful lot of planning, an awful lot of touch points to ensure the business case. We’re asking the government to spend money before they were ready to spend money from a budget perspective. We all know with CRs, et cetera, that can be a very complex process.
As it would happen, our CEO was going to be in town a number of months ago, and he was intown to meet with a series of customers, both on Capitol Hill and across a variety of agencies, civilian defense, intelligence oriented. This rep said, “Hey, I’d like to get him and I’d like to spend a little over an hour because I want to visit two or three different customers within the organization, the CIO, the CISO, and the deputy budget director of the organization, “knowing that as this opportunity worked its way through the account set, those relationships were going to be important.
Now, it’s important to understand that our CEO had actually met with the Chief Information Security Officer once before, but had no relationship with the CIO, had no relationship with the budget folks. But this rep saw how important that might be at some juncture down the line and engaged him. It was a little bit concerning because you’re going to go in and meet with a budget person who’s not necessarily an IT person, not necessarily a security person, and what curve balls could come up.
There’s risk in some of those things. But this rep said the benefit down the line was greatly going to outstretch what the risk might be. If we came up with questions, well, there are probably questions we’re going to hit eventually anyhow, so let’s be prepared for them.
Long story short, we go in, first two presentations go quite well. Last presentation is to the budget person, and the budget person starts throwing out a lot of discussions about expenses and costs, etc. Well, some of those things caught us a little bit off guard. Our CEO, Gary Steele, though, had heard a lot of these type of issues, especially at the banking and finance organizations, and started to walk through and talk about, “Yes, there are some additional expenses involved, but let’s talk about what the risk and the downside of the inaction and what would happen.” Started talking about the relationships and those discussions that he has with both budget folks within say the banking and finance arena, as well as CISOs, and across a variety of industries, including other government customers that he met with while here in DC.
Long story short, the budget person then finally did understand what the issue might potentially be, but nothing happened for about three and a half months. The customer continued to move along and then right before the end of our year, it popped up that they were really running out of capacity and needed to do something earlier. We were able to puta proposal in place that was going to give the customer some incremental discounts to act before the end of January, which is the end of our fiscal year, versus waiting till April.
Sure enough, that proposal made its way through both the chief information security officer, to the CIO, and eventually to the budget folks. When it hit the budget folks, our rep, again, having built those relationships, as this package was moving forth, she crafted an email for our CEO to send back to the budget folks and say, “I know we chatted a number of months ago, you may not remember me, but here are some of the things we talked about. I know you all are looking at a potential opportunity here to make some advance purchases based upon some capacity needs. If you should have any questions, I want you to feel free to reach out to me.
Well, that shifted the memory of the deputy budget person that we had met with. He said, “ I do remember the meeting. I remember how much I learned.
Long story short, we get the opportunity approved, close to $20 million in business to Splunk and our important partners that we work with in the project. It speaks to the fact that when you’re doing account planning and you’re building relationships, you need to think over the long term. You can’t be thinking about next week, next month, and this quarter. This was someone looking at an opportunity six months ago and saying,“I need to start building some of these key relationships, because when this opportunity comes about, it’s going to come about very, very quickly. We’re not going to have time to go in and build those relationships now. We need to build them in anticipation of what might happen.
Sure enough, she played it out perfectly.
What people can take away from this is what separates many of the professionals in our business today from those respectfully who might work in a Verizon store selling Apple products or Android products, is what kind of time and effort are you putting into the account planning, understanding the long game that you and your customers are going to be engaged in? What are you doing in terms of constantly building new relationships and expanding the relationships that you have?
Lastly, as you work on those opportunities, that last tip that we’ve now acted on is, are you sending thank-you notes to those executives, to those customers? They’ve made a commitment in you. Show that you’re appreciative of that relationship and appreciative of the hoops they had to jump through.
I think it goes a long way to the next time that we have an opportunity to engage with that client. Couldn’t be more proud of my sales team and the way they approach this in a professional manner over the long term. I couldn’t be more proud of the way the client also reacts and sees the value in what we do on a regular basis.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great story. A lot of things are popping up for me. I just have two quick questions. You mentioned that you brought the CEO of your company to have these conversations. You don’t get the CEO to come on every single sales call. How often do you tap into that relationship to bring them to important customers? I want people who are listening to understand that again, you’re not going to bring your CEO into everyone. It’s got to be really thoughtful as well. I love the way he was ready to go with the answers, because he’s obviously seen it all, and then he was able to then send the follow up. How often do you have that gift, that fortunate opportunity?
Bill Rowan: We’re lucky. We get Gary coming into the DC area typically about twice a year. We try to maximize that time. In fact, we have another series of meetings coming up in April where we’re going to do what we call on-the-road EBCs, our executive briefing centers on the West Coast in San Jose. Sometimes that’s complex for DC customers to travel there. We’ve setup two days and we’re going to bring out a couple of our VPs of product and engineering, as well as Gary Steele. We will do roughly 14 executive briefings over those two days. Gary will get a chance to come in and meet with a series of clients throughout the day, spend half hour here, half hour there, half hour, kind of more doing an intro.
The second portion we do actually is when you have that opportunity to bring them in. Webring in our best partners, both integrators and resellers, and maybe we’ll do a dinner one night. It’s a little bit more back and forth about what’s going on, what are the trends we’re seeing in the industry. We understand that many of the partners that we work with represent other technologies other than just Splunk. I think having an understanding from that ecosystem perspective is very important, but we’re lucky we get them twice a year. Try to maximize as much as he can. I want him going home exhausted after being on the road with us for two days.
Fred Diamond: Your sales professional who’s managing the account knew that she needed to have this meeting. She needed not just the meeting, but she needed to meet with the customer to explain what was going on, to give your story so that when the time arose that you were going to be having this need, that they were going to be prepared. Talk about briefly if you could about the process to your team. You manage this person, there’s other people on the team. Did you get together every day for an hour and plan this out? Or did you tell the sales rep, “Hey, you’re in charge, figure it out. Tell me what you need. Let’s get Gary’s schedule together and let’s go in. Tell us some of the logistics to make it happen.
Bill Rowan: When I look at account planning, I look at it as much broader than just the rep and one of my managers, myself, with their SE. We have a fairly significant size organization, whether I talk to them about your system engineers, your cloud specialist, your security specialist, maybe you have customer success. You can have a fairly broad organization that’s involved in touching the account in a variety of ways.
What I like to do is, we call our client exec’s regional sales managers, the RSM, get everybody together and give out tasks. They’re the experts in particular areas. Let them bring forth information. An important part, when we look at account planning at Splunk, I’m not necessarily looking for everything you know. I’m looking for us to exploit the things we don’t know. A good account plan will have a combination of things that you understand, directions, strategies the account is following, but also let’s understand the gaps we might have in the account. What do we need to be working on today, next week, next quarter to continue to build relationships? That’s the portion I always want the team to come back with when they’ve done their account planning, is what have we discovered that we don’t really understand well enough about the account, whether it may be a new initiative, a new program coming under way, maybe a challenge with a competitor in a particular area that we can exploit. Understanding those pieces that we don’t understand, to me, is just as critical as the components that we do.
As the team built that plan, and it’s a living, breathing document, so as we’re covering things, we’re adding to the document, everybody can read it, make sure they’re on the same page. It also gives us a really good document then to hand off to our CEO prior to a sales call and let him take 15, 20 minutes of reading to understand everything we see throughout the account. That way, when he’s sitting in a meeting, he has a little bit of a broad perspective of where they’ve been and where they’re headed. It can serve multiple purposes in that framework.
Fred Diamond: Thank you so much. Once again, my name is Fred Diamond. That was Bill Rowan with Splunk. This is the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo