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Today’s show featured an interview with sales performance specialist Cara Pacific Campbell.
Find Cara on LinkedIn.
CARA’S TIP: “It’s the relationship. If you are going to sell a multimillion-dollar deal, people are not buying your technology. People are buying your relationship, your support. They’re investing in the trust that you’ve built. That was all relationship, the whole way.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’ve got Cara Pacific Campbell. You were a guest on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Cara Pacific Campbell: I work with sales leaders to help them to create an environment where their sales teams can actually thrive. We focus on increasing productivity and performance, of course, but also making sure that they’re happy at work and engaged, and they feel good and they’re healthy. It’s a complete shift. We’ve always focused on the productivity, but now it’s much more holistic in the work that I’m doing.
Fred Diamond: Tell us the name of your company and what it means.
Cara Pacific Campbell: It’s named Kusi Nuna, and it actually means happy soul or happy person in the Quechua language from Peru. We’ve operated off this basis that, hey, you’re happy when you’re successful, but I actually believe that happy people become more successful. When we’re actually working on health and happiness and stress mitigation upfront, we see productivity gains on the backside.
Fred Diamond: Cara Pacific Campbell, tell us a great sales story.
Cara Pacific Campbell: I’m so excited to share this story with you. I love this story so much, and it’s one of my favorite customers, but when it started, it was a little rough. At the time I was selling engineering software, and I had just started with strategic accounts. I had just moved from territories to strategic, and I got this customer that on paper was perfect. Multibillion-dollar global company, tons of engineering requirements. Perfect. The only problem was that they had thrown us out and they asked my predecessor and my manager to never come back, don’t talk to anyone, don’t show up. They had reduced their footprint with us from several hundred thousands of dollars to 14,000. That was just like maintenance, just what had to happen to keep the lights on, keep low level. I get this customer, I think, I don’t know exactly where to start, but I’m told, “There’s one guy, he makes all the decisions. If you contact anyone other than him, you’ll get kicked out. You got to follow the rules. But he does have two managers that work for him.”
I start with the managers, they manage the licenses anyhow, and I spend the first few months just providing immaculate support to those managers, doing everything I can, trying to understand what had happened. Finally, they sponsor me. I get the account in January, they sponsor me to a vendor day in April. Fantastic. I’m finally going to get to meet the gatekeeper guy. It’s a foreboding cold, rainy day when I get to headquarters for this. I watch as, no lie, from 7:00 in the morning until 5:00 at night, vendors are lined up to talk to this guy, one after the next, after the next, and they’re schmoozing and they’re pitching. I realize, “This guy’s been here for like 20, 25 years,” and we all know how the vendor game works.
You get a rep for a year, year and a half, they either get promoted or they don’t do a good job, and they get moved to a different account. He has watched this rotating door of reps come in and he’s heard the same thing over and over and over. I just sat back and finally by the end of the whole event, it was my chance. I had just a chance meeting with him instead of waiting in that line. I said something really glib and offhanded and he looked at me like, “What just happened? Who are you? This is different. This is fresh.” I introduced myself and I apologized out of the gate. I said, “Listen, I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I am a hundred percent sure we have botched this relationship, and I am so, so sorry.”
He looked at me like I had two heads, like, “I’m not exactly sure who let her in here or what this is.” I said, “Listen, I know that you’ve talked to vendors all day. I get it. I don’t want to be one of those people. I don’t want to keep you any longer. I would love an opportunity to sit down and just hear your side of the story and understand how I can make reparations.” The guy was floored, said, “Yes, absolutely. Come back.”
The next time I met with him, we had a brief call just real fast, and he said, “Yes, we should be talking more. This is okay.”
I said, “All right, well, what do you expect from this relationship? What’s an ideal look like?”
He said, “Well, you’ll be here every two to three weeks. We’ll meet for half an hour to an hour. We’ll go to lunch and we’ll just get to know each other.”
I spent from April to June doing that, just showing up, no strings attached. He would quiz me on products or applications or the industry or different things. I sold him nothing. I tried to sell nothing. My management was furious, but I was just spending this time showing up and showing no progress whatsoever until June. The guy says to me, “I swore up and down that I would never ask for a quote from your company, but do have this one opportunity for a license? You are the superior product, but we don’t care. We’re willing to go for a lesser product, but here’s your chance to put your money where your mouth is. If you can show me I’m a business partner, if you can treat me like I’m lining up with what you’re saying I line up with, then we can continue talking.”
Oh my goodness, Fred, I went back and I had to go all the way to the CEO at my company, because I said, “Listen, we have to, have to, have to do this.” To my surprise and happiness, we did, we were able to give him a wonderful deal, and he was more surprised and happy than I was. He executed it right away and said, “This is different than every other time I’ve worked with you.” All of a sudden, he very slowly started to give me the keys to the kingdom. “This group over here in Michigan needs help. This group in the UK needs help. This group over here needs help. South Carolina needs help.” All the while I’m running around with my team. We’re doing test cases, we’re doing proof of concept, we’re training people, we’re gathering data for the ROI, it was a busy, fast and furious year.
But by April, so a year later from when I had originally met him, I had put together a full proposal. In fact, the exact one he used to take to his CIO that showed the return on investment for a large global deal with us. He’d even given me all of his information on spends, like what he spent with each one of our competitors, when their renewal dates were, and I was able to put all of that in. It was fantastic. He went and got it approved right away. We went from $14,000 to $7 million in basically a year. The relationship had completely changed. We were their standard vendor. It was fantastic. He and I have remained close ever since.
Fred Diamond: Did he ever tell you why he shifted you back down to the 14,000?
Cara Pacific Campbell: We were idiots. We believed for a long time that because we had the best technology, we didn’t always have to treat people that well. He was a prickly guy. I would say that he was a very sweet porcupine. He had a dry sense of humor. He wanted you to jump through hoops. He had no problem shooting his spines out at any point in time if you were doing the wrong thing. We let that accelerate into a little bit of a pissing match, where it was like, “No, no, no. You can’t treat us that way. We know that we’re your best technology.” He eventually said, “We don’t care if you’re the best technology. We want the best business partners.”
Fred Diamond: I like when you said in the story that he said that, where he said, “We will take something that’s of lesser quality.” It’s interesting as you’re telling this story, Cara, there’s so much to unpack here, but one of the critical things is that you have to know what’s going on at the customer. A lot of it is a person who for some reason, right or wrong, maybe it’s, they want to have their domain, whatever it is. We don’t always really appreciate in sales what the customer’s job means to them. The customers aren’t usually looking to jump from place to place. The customers are usually looking to be stable for the most part, especially if they’re in IT, or operations, or finance, or supply chain. They’re not looking to jump from place to place. They want to have a job for 10, 15, 20, sometimes 30 years.
Cara Pacific Campbell: He was a lifer. Yeah.
Fred Diamond: He was a lifer. Especially if it’s in a company town type of a thing and that type of environment. A lot of times we don’t appreciate that in sales, but we have to, especially if someone ascends into a level of success. That’s a great story. Cara Pacific Campbell, give us a tip that you took away from that particular story and experience.
Cara Pacific Campbell: It was hard to try to distill it to one, because you’re right, there’s a lot to unpack there. But the real tip was, it’s the relationship. If you are going to sell a multimillion-dollar deal, people are not buying your technology. People are buying your relationship, your support. They’re investing in the trust that you’ve built. That was all relationship, the whole way.
Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful. Once again, I want to thank Cara Pacific Campbell for being on this episode of the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. Thanks for listening.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo