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Today’s show featured an interview with Dave Dantus, Vice President Sales– US Public Sector for Appian Corporation.
Find Dave on LinkedIn.
DAVE’S TIP: “You just need to allocate time on developing strategy and culture. If you’re micromanaging account executives and you overfocus on dashboards, you won’t have the time to focus on it.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Dave Dantus is the Vice President of Public Sector from Appian. If you’re a long-time listener of the Sales Game Changers Podcast and you recognize Appian, it’s because, Dave, we’ve had three of your long-time predecessors on the show. As a matter of fact, we actually did the interview with the Appian people before the pandemic. I actually went to your beautiful office over in Tysons Corner, Virginia and interviewed a number of people.
Dave, I’m excited to talk to you. I remember when Appian was created. I actually worked for a company in 2000 called OneSoft Corporation, and it was a Microsoft e-commerce application company, and a couple of the people from OneSoft actually made it over to Appian. I believe your CIO Malcolm was a coworker of mine. This is ridiculous, Dave. This was 24 years ago, has been with the company and is still there. It’s great to see how successful the company is. I’m excited to talk to you. Dave, why don’t you give us a brief intro? And then we’ll get right into it.
Dave Dantus: First of all, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. I have great respect for you and your show. As you mentioned, I’m the Vice President of North America Public Sector. I oversee the federal and state and local business. I actually moved into this role in April. While I’ve been with Appian for a little over six years, I’m very excited to move into this new role and share some of my thoughts with you today.
Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in the spring, May of 2024, if you’re listening sometime in the future. How are things going for your sales organization right now?
Dave Dantus: I’ve been a veteran in the industry, I’m not sure the exact number of years, but I’ve been around for a while. This is one of my most rewarding experience. I joined Appian a little over six years ago as a Regional Vice President, just overseeing the DOD business. I had four or five AEs reporting to me. What I really liked about Appian was it was DC-based. They understood the government market. The US Army was one of the first customers and really was selling into the federal market. Working for a DC-based company that understands DC is a big deal. Sometimes it’s challenging working for organizations that don’t have that understanding.
However, when I took over the DOD, it was an underperforming business. What I noticed was two things. The sales team had a weak culture, and there was really no clear strategy. Not surprising. I know you speak to a lot of sales leaders, but I think that culture and strategy is one of the most overlooked areas. There seems to be an over-fascination or overfocus on micromanaging deals and dashboards and simply not the focus. I took that approach. I really put a heavy focus on culture and strategy.
Since then, the DOD team became one of the fastest growing teams within Appian. I was promoted to Area Vice President back in 2022. The compounded annual growth rate was over a hundred percent every year for the last five years. This business has been taking off like a hockey stick. Then as mentioned, I was promoted to Vice President. Now there’s over 50 sellers. We’re quite a large organization servicing the public sector market. All in all, we have about 200 professionals in the public sector business, so we’re quite a force.
Fred Diamond: That’s impressive. Let’s talk a little more about sales strategy and culture. I agree with you, a lot of people who are especially new into sales management, they believe it’s about… Now, it’s definitely about the numbers, let’s not get that confused, but overfocus and focusing on the wrong metrics sometimes when you do that micromanaging, I found. How do you develop that focus on sales strategy and culture?
Dave Dantus: First, it takes time. You just need to allocate time on developing those areas. If you’re micromanaging account executives and you overfocus on dashboards, you won’t have the time to focus on it. Let’s just talk about each one of them individually. As I look at strategy, after being in the business, Appian sells a platform and most of our customers are looking for a solution for a specific business challenge. They also prefer to buy from organizations that are both credible and relevant for those specific solution areas. When you sell a platform, it’s difficult because it could do just about everything. Certainly, that’s a good thing, but it’s also a curse, because without that focus, you’re just selling technology.
When I started out, after about two months into the role, I got the sales team together and I said, “We really need to focus on a few areas.” I looked at where did we win? Where’s the competition? Where’s our pipeline? Then I picked three solution areas to focus our sales efforts, and I got the whole sales team behind it. Once that happened, I got the executives of the business, our SDR, our business development organization, our partners and our marketing, all kind of focus in these few solution areas. It’s really been a game changer. I think that’s really been a key to the growth because instead of having the different groups, different things, marketing pushing one thing, sales development pushing another and partners, we all got it all together and we really became very well known in these areas.
The other area is culture. There’s a lot written about culture, and what I found working as an account executive during the first part of my career, in enterprise software, it’s a brutal area. It’s a really tough thing where a lot of salespeople were not treated with respect. There was a lot of more of threats versus appreciation, and that really molded the way I decided to lead the sales team. It really drove my leadership style to really appreciate that and really make this more of a pleasant place to work, built upon positivity versus negativity.
The first thing you need to do is really define the culture and then be very intentional with how you actually lead the organization. Some of the things I like to stress in the culture is a collaborative environment. I really believe selling is a team sport, to really focus on collaboration, hiring great salespeople, but also hiring great character. Making sure that the people are really team players. Then some of the basic things like a sense of trust and appreciation. One of the things I found, particularly with COVID, an overlooked thing, is showing up, actually showing up to the customer’s site and not just dialing it in. Those are some of the things I try to stress in the culture.
Fred Diamond: We’ve all gotten accustomed to Zoom. Of course, we’re doing today’s interview over Zoom. Before the pandemic, I used to physically go to people’s offices. Like I mentioned, when I interviewed some of the former leaders at Appian, I literally went to your building. There’s so much value in being in-person. You could look them in the eye, you could look off to the side and not have people thinking why you’re not paying attention. You could see body expressions and you could also just move around. There’s so much more value in that.
You and I were talking about one of the challenges being sales professionals not necessarily selecting the right deals to pursue and pursuing deals that are going to take them off course, waste time, may not be qualified. A lot of salespeople go wrong on that. Give us some of your insights onto proper focus.
Dave Dantus: When I first started out selling, one of the sales leaders that I worked with once told me that our customers certainly select us, but we should also handpick our customers. We should also pick our customers. When I started selling, it seemed kind of crazy to me, but it made sense to me after I’d been in the business. Many organizations like Appian could do a lot of different things, but you really need to be well known. Being relevant and being very credible is very important for prospects. They look to work with organizations that understand their business challenge and speak their language and have done this before. They have references and they could talk about it.
That’s why I mentioned earlier how important it is for federal leaders like myself to define a clear strategy, but it’s also to understand that account executives know what is a good deal to pursue. It’s a very target-rich market. The government market, there’s lots of opportunities, no shortage, but it’s really important to focus your sales team and AEs to focus in the areas where they have the highest chance of winning. Those are the areas where you’re relevant and credible and where you have a lot of focus.
It dovetails to our earlier point, which is it’s really important for account executives to stay in those lanes, to working on the right deals. It’s very expensive for organizations like Appian to pursue these large deals. The time involved, the people involved. That’s why it’s so important that account executives know the right deal to pursue, and a lot of times it comes right off the strategy that you pick.
Fred Diamond: You talked about customers in that last answer, and again, delving in the public sector marketplace. I want to talk about federal customers and what they’re looking for from a sales professional. We talk about this a lot. Even though salespeople might jump jobs for a different opportunity, or the company is no longer pursuing the markets, customers typically don’t move. Especially in a market like federal, a guy who’s a director of IT, or a woman who’s on the app staff or something, they want to hold onto those jobs for their career 20, 30 years. What are they looking for from a sales professional? I’m curious, for someone who’s senior in sales and also for someone who might be relatively new to sales.
Dave Dantus: A lot of technology companies, I think they train. How do you enable your team to really service your customers, to service the federal market? A lot of folks certainly train the sellers on product benefits. What the federal customers are really looking for are customers that understand their business challenge well. I look at some of the deals that we’ve won and lost, it’s who knows the customer the best. Not so much from the vendor’s perspective, but from the customer’s perspective. They typically will choose an organization that they believe understands their problems. It’s quite simple.
The other thing that’s quite interesting is most federal leaders buy enterprise software once or twice in their career. They generally don’t know how to buy software. They don’t do it very often. As sales professionals, we sell enterprise software all the time. I do think that the federal leaders are not only looking for solutions to their problems, but they’re looking for organizations to coach them and lead them along on. How do we buy software? What should we be asking for? How do we structure it so it’s a faster procurement?
A lot of times sales professionals take for granted that our customers really have done this a lot of times, and they simply haven’t. I always say this, it’s really important that we only provide value in solving the problem, but we also help the customers buy it. Because the federal acquisition is a very complicated and very time-consuming process.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit about trust. We’ve had some conversations about building trust, and that’s a word that comes up all the time. Dave Dantus, we have listeners all over the globe, trust comes up, trusted advisor, expressions like that. Give us some of your deep insights into what they should and can be doing to build trust.
Dave Dantus: Trust a lot of times is about relationships. I think it could apply if as a sales professional, you could look at how do you build relationships personally. A lot of those concepts you can apply to developing trust in business relationships as well. There’s so many areas and I think we could probably just for this conversation, really just pick a few of those.
One of the things is you really need to make it about the customer. Quite often sales people go in and tell how great their product is and all about the company, but it’s really about the customer who has got the problem. Make it about them. Something that dovetails with that is, some of the best sales professionals who I’ve hired and have worked with are just great listeners. They listen to the customer. They have great empathy. Empathy is a really important skill to have. It’s also important to let them know that you get them, that you basically imply, “I get what your needs are.” You validate it, that you really understand what their needs are.
You have to really make sure that you value their time. There’s so much information available today that before you meet them, you should demonstrate that you understand their problem, you understand some of their initiatives, and the people that work in their organization. Obviously, some of the basic things is consistently deliver value. When you meet the customer for the very first time, make sure before the meeting that you have a plan to deliver value in the customer’s eyes.
One of the hardest things is how do you do that during discovery when you’re learning the customer’s needs, and how do you deliver value and trust? One of the important things, especially for a product like Appian, and a lot of your listeners are working for organizations that are disruptive, is coming with a point of view. When you’re doing discovery, the frequent question is, “Hey, what keeps you up at night?” That’s the question you hear all the time. I’m not sure if that’s the right question to ask versus, “Hey, we’ve seen a lot of organizations like you have a similar issue,” and actually come in with a point of view prepared for the meeting, show some thought leadership throughout the discovery process. I think when you do a lot of those things, you can effectively build trust.
Fred Diamond: I think the worst question of all time is what keeps you up at night? But I like your answer there about coming with some ideas for the customer. We talk about this all the time, preparation before you even have an opportunity to go into the customer. We’ve spoken to some sales leaders who said that they’ve met with their team for 10 hours before they went for a simple call. A lot of times we’ve heard about people who did their practicing in the rehearsal in the car on the way there, or two minutes before they hit the Zoom record button. But the great sales leaders out there and great sales professionals, they are so passionate. It’s something we see a lot in the public sector market.
A lot of times I’ll ask sales leaders who cover public sector, why have you devoted a big part of your career to focusing on public sector? Besides the fact that it’s the biggest market in the world, and if you do well and you go for the right company at the right time, you could do very well from a living perspective, and obviously a lot of rewards. But it’s also a customer that it’s clear what their mission is, it’s published. Every public sector customer that you’re going to call on, their mission is published. You can just Google or just go to ChatGPT and type in, what is the mission of Health and Human Services? You will see exactly what there. There’s plenty of articles written about what they’re focusing on, what the challenges are. There’s no excuse for a sales professional to go in without understanding that. The reality is, if you don’t go in with that understanding, you ain’t going to go back.
Tell us a little bit about Appian in the public sector. I’m going to guess that many people listening today aren’t familiar with your solution. If they are, give us a sample use case of Appian in the public sector market so they can understand more context of what you and your salespeople are doing.
Dave Dantus: What does Appian do? As I look at in this market, quite simply, we modernize key mission applications and we focus on all the applications that tend to be unique applications. What do I mean by unique? Unique applications are things that you can’t buy off the shelf, like invoice processing or some of those applications. One of the reasons why I chose to come to work for Appian was there’s a ton of those in federal, especially in DOD, where they have unique applications. Appian is very strong. A lot of those applications were written in custom code, maybe even Cobalt 20, 25 years ago. Now they’re not supported, or they need to be more intuitive, and Appian is a very, very strong candidate for modernizing these applications.
It’s a platform, but we tend to focus on specific solution areas. That’s where we spend 80% of our time, in these solution areas. Some of the things that we do that are examples are things like in the acquisition. Contract writing is a great application area where Appian is used. Things like investigative case management or legal case management is another area, grants management and some of the civilian or even state and local. But one of the interesting ones is contract writing.
Contract writing was a very, very difficult and complicated process in federal government. Our customer DISA just had to modernize their system and they chose Appian. When it came time for the Air Force to modernize their system, instead of reinventing the wheel and developing their own, they went to DISA and said, “Hey, your application’s 80% the same as ours.” They actually acquired the DISA system, and the Air Force went live in nine months with the authority to operate in IL4, which was record time.
Fast forward two, three years later, the Army and the Navy had the same need. The Air Force shared their application, which is unprecedented, is looking at sharing an application, and now the Army, the Navy, the fourth state, and the entire DOD is using an Appian-based system. But what’s interesting is these organizations are actually buying it once, and they’re actually sharing the code across the organizations, shows a lot of commonalities. It’s a great deal for taxpayers because they’re only paying for the services once and they’re able to go live in a fast time. That capability of sharing intellectual property is something that’s unique within Appian and has really taken off like wildfire.
Fred Diamond: One thing is citizens, we want to see efficiency in government. A lot of times the organizations, the agencies, et cetera, might be too siloed. I’m glad to hear you say that, that there’s that type of sharing going around. What all people don’t realize about the government is, from an IT and technology perspective, it really is in a lot of ways on the leading edge. Now, the process with government is a challenge, and there’s still a lot of rules.
We did a show last week on the history of the Federal Acquisition Regulations, which is known as the FAR, which is how the government needs to buy and how its purpose might have gone too far. But from a usage of technology with government people wanting to improve services to the citizen, it’s just remarkable. I’m glad to hear that you’re getting some leverage there.
Dave Dantus, what are the best sales reps doing right now? You work with a lot of sales reps. You’re new to leading the public sector team at Appian, and you’ve led a lot of sales professionals over your career. What are the best ones doing right now? Again, we’re doing today’s interview in the spring of 2024. We’re still coming out of the pandemic, which is going to have lingering effects for the next five years, I believe. Everybody is still dealing with the effects of the last couple years financially, personally, spiritually, whatever it might be. What are the best reps doing right now?
Dave Dantus: It’s interesting you talk about the pandemic. Someone once told me showing up is 80% of selling. Just open the door versus dialing it in. The best reps if I look across my team, they’re out in front of customers. They’re not doing Zoom calls, they’re actually out in front of customers. That’s probably the most important thing. The best reps also, they’re not lone wolves. They’re actually leading a cross-functional team. What I mean by leading is every week the sales consultant, the services team, sales development, and even partners, they talk about during the week what’s going on, what’s going on in the account, they exchange ideas. The best reps are confident and they’re viewed by both the customer and even within the sales organization as adding value. Their insights are encouraged. I’m really lucky to have several new folks that meet this definition on my team, which makes my job a lot easier.
Fred Diamond: I live in Northern Virginia, and Appian has employed a lot of people. Like I mentioned, in 2000, the company I was with, a whole bunch of people went to Appian when it first got going. Your CEO has done a great job hiring a lot of people, providing jobs and providing solutions to not just government customers, but many customers around the globe. I’m excited to talk to you and get the update there.
What would be your expectations now? You talked about sales professionals going out and meeting with customers and doing those kinds of things. For the people listening on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast, what are your expectations? What are the leader’s expectations for sales professionals right now?
Dave Dantus: Some of them are what I would expect in somebody defining what a good rep is. First of all, I would expect that they would be meeting weekly as a team with the marketing and sales consulting, and they wouldn’t be a lone wolf. I’d also expect that the sales professionals basically know their customer, and what does that really mean? One is that they understand their business challenges. They understand their business really well, as well as they understand our products. But also, we enjoy multi-level relationships, not just they have relationships, but I have relationships, and our CEO and our CTO may have relationships.
I think the other one would be they have creativity. It’s very easy to find problems. All organizations have issues and challenges and customers a lot of times say, “Hey, we can’t buy your product.” I expect sales folks to be able to navigate and be able to deal with when someone says no, or when they come to me with a problem, they don’t just have a problem, but they have a creative solution for it. Finally, confidence goes a long way. Confidence drives sales execution. I would expect salespeople to believe in themselves, so they believe they could hit their numbers, they believe in their team and that they could be the best.
Fred Diamond: Dave, thanks again. Appreciate all the insights. For people listening right now, give a final action step, something they should do specifically right now after listening to the show or reading the transcript to take their sales career to the next level.
Dave Dantus: One thing we didn’t cover during this interview is the importance of your personal network. One thing that I would say is more important, fairly quick and actionable, network is really important. Whether you’re recruiting people, you’re prepping for a meeting, like you talked about, what’s available on the web, or you’re prospecting. But it takes time. My suggestion to your audience is take time to build and cultivate your network. I take 15 minutes a day before the day starts and I go into LinkedIn and I try to help people. I’ll respond, I’ll ask a reference or provide help. Give back to your network. I think that a network is really cultivated.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Dave Dantus with Appian. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo