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Today’s show featured an interview with government sales leader David Peed, the Regional Director Department of Defense, Special Programs and System Integrators for Fortinet Federal. This is his third appearance on the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Find David on LinkedIn.
DAVID’S TIP: “You want to be thorough in your follow up. Timing-wise, you want to make sure that you hit all the marks there, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a little time, showing a little patience, and the customer or the person you’re interacting with, give them some time.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m very excited today. My guest today, David Peed, was on the Sales Game Changers Podcast and had a great conversation with him. I’m looking forward to his sales story today. David, why don’t you give us a brief introduction to the audience?
David Peed: Fred, it’s always great to see you. My name’s David Peed. I currently am responsible for the indirect channel market for Comcast Government Solutions, which is an entity underneath Comcast business. Career government contractor, absent three years, I worked for the US House of Representatives. I’ve spanned across multiple different verticals, including the telecom cloud platform and cybersecurity, and until recently, been here at Comcast Business.
Fred Diamond: David Peed, tell us a great sales story.
David Peed: Fred, when we first talked about this, I thought long and hard, and as you know, I’m an avid horse racing fan, so I’m going to do a trifecta of a story, which means three. At the racetrack, it means you’re betting on the first three horses. But I thought there were three stories that I could talk about that would help the audience and also leave them with some advice.
First, and I’ll leave the person nameless, when I was at Ciena. The moral of the story is, it is important what you do outside of work. I know you’ve shared with many about your passion for understanding and helping people with Lyme disease. But at Ciena, a big sell-through was to Tier 1, and there was one in particular I did not have a foothold in, and it was at Verizon, and I’ll leave the person out of it.
I was coaching football for 10 years for both my sons, head-coaching both the teams. In this one particular weekend, I saw this guy. Actually, he wasn’t there, but I was coaching against a team, and they had a girl on the team, and she was a phenomenal athlete. As I would do for any athlete, but especially since she was the only woman on the field, I gave her lots of words of encouragement, cheering for her, cheering her on when she’d make a great play.
I’m at a conference later on, maybe a few months after, and I see this guy in line, and he said, “Hey, you coach football in Ellicott City.”
I go, “I certainly do.”
He goes, “You coached against my daughter and you encouraged her and cheered for her more than her own coach did. I was really amazed at how disciplined and how organized your team was, but most importantly, the impact you had with my daughter. It just made her day. She thought it was pretty cool that the opposing team’s coach was so encouraging.”
That just to say not just be a good person, Fred, but it really does mean you just never know where or how you’re going to get an intro into an organization, into a government, wherever it is. It could be the place you least expect it. This person was gracious enough to give me some time for a meeting.
As always, you have to have something meaningful to say and meaningful to present when you get those opportunities. But sometimes those opportunities are won, lost, or found in a way you just never thought of. I would argue that, especially in the DC metropolitan area, whether you’re in the Columbia area or Northern Virginia, sports and the environment, but most importantly when you’re dealing with youth sports, you just never know who you’re going to run into. That really is the message of get involved with the community, be a good person, but you just never know when you’re going to meet somebody important. That’s one.
Second story is there was a not-for-profit that I was on the advisory board for. Even at a nonprofit, it’s important for them to grow. The young man who was running business development for them was trying to close in on a sale. He called me one day and he said, “Dave, I’m really struggling with the pace of how I interact with this potential client.”
My advice, and I’ll leave this with the audience as well, I said, “Christian, chasing a sale and trying to follow up on leads is very similar to when you meet a girl in high school and you really want to date this girl. Somehow you cross paths, you get her phone number.” I’m like, “Hey, if you call every day, that’s probably not a good thing. If you don’t call for a couple weeks, that’s probably not a good thing. If you call a couple times and you don’t get a return call, it’s probably some insight into that the person is, for whatever reason, not interested and not even willing to make that extra or take that time to meet with you.”
But oddly enough, Fred, I think my advice and the nugget I would have here is as some of the newer members of the audience are going through this, and you’re trying to pace the play of cadence of when you meet a first contact, you meet a government employee, or if you’re outside the government sales, you meet somebody. A good thing to remember is the interaction you would have with somebody when you’re just trying to start off a personal relationship is really you’re looking for the same thing in business. If you wouldn’t say something in your personal life, it’s probably not appropriate to say in business. The cadence and pace of play of how you would interact with somebody on the personal side is really relevant on the business side. There’s usually something there.
I’ll tie in the third story, and actually, it will help, I think, with that as well. My wife and I have a wonderful relationship, married for almost 25 years, and for my whole life, we will talk once a day. I like to say we live in a very narrow band where the highs don’t get too highs and the lows don’t get too lows. For 23 or 24 years, I’ve done a golf tournament with a group of about 20 guys that really I helped put together years and years ago when I was running Qwest Federal before it became CenturyLink, before it became Lumen, the sales there.
We had acquired US West and we were going to do a golf tournament to build comradery between the new folks that came on board from US West and the folks that were resisting from the classic Qwest side. For whatever reason, the folks from US West couldn’t make it out. We still did the golf trip and always go out. I’m an early bird, so it’s not likely that I’m out past 9:00 or 10:00, but this one particular evening, I had a few cocktails, not a social nuisance, but I had a few cocktails. The next morning, 6:30, 7:00, I’m waiting for time to click by before I call my wife for a conversation. I was like, “I forgot to call my wife.” I call her that morning once it got to a decent hour, and I said, “Honey, I’m so sorry, I forgot to call you yesterday.”
She said, “David, we talked for 20 minutes last night.” It obviously had slipped my mind. I wasn’t inebriated, but old age stinks.
I learned a valuable lesson with that, and I think it’s carried on in my personal life and professional life ever since. The message is, don’t apologize or don’t be sorry for something until you know you’ve done something wrong. It really is that one incident with my wife where just busy the day and totally forgot, but I made that phone call. I’ve used that so many times in business, where your initial reaction is to, and especially these Type As and people who are really aggressive, and you’re like, “Go get that sale and close that deal.”
My advice to the audience is, there’s been times in my career where I’ve thought about reaching out and maybe inquiring about something, or maybe have I done something wrong or was that presentation okay? My message really is take a deep breath, give it some time, have some patience. In the story about the golfing, in essence, don’t apologize until you know you’re wrong. I should have waited for my wife to yell at me for not calling the day before. Then I could have apologized and everybody would’ve been fine. But I think it’s something I’ve used in my personal life and I’ve also used in business. It’s just be patient. Wait that extra little bit of time before you overreact to a situation. In essence, you resubmit a proposal or you send an email lapping over top to something you’ve already sent and maybe you just never really needed to send it.
Fred Diamond: Those are three great angles there. One is you definitely want to be interesting and definitely you want to not seem over anxious, but you don’t want to seem under anxious. When the customer doesn’t call you back, when it’s going on three or four months, you need to think of another angle to get in there, because there’s still probably a good reason for you to serve. I like the concept also of not apologizing. People, a lot of times, they’ll start phone calls with, “Am I bothering you?” Or, “Is this a bad time?” Like you said, wait for them to come back at you.
David Peed, those are some great angles. Give us one tip that you learned from those three to end today’s Sales Story and a Tip Podcast.
David Peed: The biggest tip I can say, for me, whether it’s OCD or impatient, it’s just take a deep breath, give it some time. You want to be thorough in your follow up. Timing-wise, you want to make sure that you hit all the marks there, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a little time, showing a little patience, and the customer or the person you’re interacting with, give them some time.
Fred Diamond: If it’s a good fit, if it makes sense, they’re going to come back to you, especially if they’re an existing customer. Sometimes if they may not return your calls right away, you go into your mind and you go into your head and you think of things, and the reality is, maybe it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had some of those situations too. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, the customer will come back and say, “Hey, we’re ready. Sorry. We’ve been dealing with some internal things,” so we don’t always know what’s going on.
I want to thank my guest, David Peed. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo