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LORENZO’S TIP: “When buyers make decisions, what matters most is not advantages versus disadvantages, but their perception of risk. Reducing uncertainty is what leads to the sale.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Dr. Bizzi, I’m very excited to have you on the show. You’re the author of what I thought was a great book, Myths vs. Science of Selling. You’re not necessarily a sales professor. A lot of the professors that I’ve been interviewing on the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged show are typically in the sales department, typically with universities that are part of the University Sales Center Alliance. You’re a strategy professor, but you wrote a book on the Myths vs. Science of Selling. It’s really, really good. It’s an interesting approach that you take where you talk about a common myth that people may have about sales. Then you go into why that myth might have perpetuated. Then you talk about what’s real in that particular space. Then you give advice on what selling professionals can be doing. It’s a very well-done book. 

You cover a lot of ground, and actually you tell a lot of great stories. You talk about some famous sales leaders from way back in the day, like the Zig Ziglars of the world. Kudos to you on the research and the content that you have in the book. I could tell as I was reading it, you’re very, very good at research and you put a lot of time and energy into thinking this thing through. Before I get into some of the details of the book, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you so that we can understand who you are and a little more background on what you do. 

Lorenzo Bizzi: It’s a pleasure for me to be here and to have the opportunity of having this conversation about work that I spent four years to develop this book and a lot of effort to try to make something impactful. As you correctly said, I’m a professor of strategy rather than a professor of sales. But as I’ve always taught MBA students, in our MBA program, we actually do real consulting work with local businesses. These are generally B2B businesses, and the majority of the times, the projects are about sales. That’s where I developed expertise on B2B sales. 

Most times I see very, very strong links between strategy and B2B sales. That would not apply to B2C for sure, but a lot of times, since you have to explain to the buyer how your product or your service is going to improve their business, this is very, very similar to strategy. In fact, a lot of the contents in my book overlap. There’s an overlap between strategy and sales. That’s why I developed an expertise and a strong interest in B2B sales specifically. The book does not really offer a lot of content and insight for B2C, but it’s particularly valuable for both B2B and B2G. I’ve been working four years on this book. I’ve been doing consulting and teaching for 13 years here in California, and this is where I got my idea to try to build my book. 

Fred Diamond: It’s a great point that you just made there. You start off a lot of the chapters talking about things like you need to be an extrovert to be successful in sales. On the Sales Game Changers Podcast, we’re all about B2B, and we have a lot of guests and listeners who are in the B2G, the business to government space. There’s a lot of nuance to it because of the customer regulations and things like that and how they go about buying. But the way that they make their decisions are very, very similar to B2B. There’s a lot that you need to know. You talk about things like, do you need to be in a relationship to get sales? You make really good points, which is it helps, but that’s not going to get you the sale. The way that the customer buys, the way that the customer discerns. 

Talk about that for a little bit. Talk about the concepts of popular advice. A lot of times people will say to someone, “You’ll be very good in sales because you’re a great talker.” Or, “You have a great personality,” and that’ll only get you so far. Talk about the big difference between popular advice and real hardcore research. 

Lorenzo Bizzi: The main premise of the book is that there is a gap between popular advice and what research shows. The reason is very simple. Nowadays, everybody has a voice and the space is extremely crowded. A lot of YouTube stars, a lot of influencers, a lot of social media people. Everybody has a voice, everybody talks, and it’s very difficult to get noticed if you want to say something about an advice for sales. The way in which people respond to this pressure is by exaggerating claims. How can I be heard if I just say something that is true? Sometimes truth is mild. The truth is not exaggerated, truth is not empathic, truth is not emotional. A lot of people tend to exaggerate claims then to say, “This is the one thing that is going to make you super rich.” The one secret, secret is a beautiful word, all the time we mention secret, “This is a secret nobody knows, but I’m going to tell you, and it’s going to make you instantly rich.” 

When I started reading a lot of sales books, it was feeling uncomfortable. This idea that we have to always exaggerate claims, and that’s not true. A lot of times, researchers with many, many years of work produced a lot of beautiful insights that sales professionals do not know. Here I got my motivation of trying to say, “Look, this is what the advice says, and this is what research says.” Most of the times the advice can actually be true, but the impact is enormously exaggerated. 

I just say, for example, goal settings, set ambitious sales goals. That is important. Setting ambitious goals helps performance, but just a bit. While, if you read books, it says it’s going to change your life. You can dream whatever you want to get, and you’re going to get it. This is unfortunate because it then creates false expectations. People, at first when they read the books, they’re super excited. But then after they get this illusion, and unfortunately, they leave sales. What I really hate about the profession is that turnover in B2B sales is enormous. I blame it to a lot of the articles and books that create false expectations, making people believe that success is instant, that they’re going to be able to implement this one secret and right after they’re going to be able to succeed. That is false, and it eventually creates disillusions, excitement at first, then disillusionment. 

Now, you mentioned, for example, the personality, how being an extrovert can help, how curating rapport in a sales relationship can be important. This is very important, but it’s not enough to bring the sale. I’m going to talk more about it. The way in which you build rapport, your personality, perhaps your extraversion, we can talk a little bit more about extraversion because it’s a very interesting construct, but your personality can influence the extent to which the buyer pays attention to what you say. Nobody pays attention to someone they don’t like. Everybody pays attention to someone they like, but paying attention is different from purchasing. 

I pay attention, I listen more to what you have to say. If the product is good, then I’m going to buy. But if the product is bad and I’m paying more attention to what you say, then I’m actually less likely to buy. There has to be both personality, both rapport, both paying attention to what the buyers are saying, combined with a very strong sales conversation focused on rationality and on explaining well the product or services that are likely to impact the business and eventually result in ROI. That is really what brings a sale. Your personality, your rapport can empower listening, but then that listening must be converted to a sale with a very powerful sales conversation. 

Fred Diamond: That is a great point. As I was reading the book, I was thinking a lot about the evolution of professional selling. My organization used to be known as the Institute for Excellence in Sales. In May of 2025, we changed the name to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. We created our Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership. 

I remember, we have a good friend at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, his name is Tom Snyder. He runs a company called Funnel Clarity. He’s also written a couple books. When he speaks, he talks about how as late as 1980 on the census, if you were in sales, the only option you had was peddler. If you were in sales and on the census, you chose what business you do. The only one that was there was peddler. When you think of a peddler, you think of a guy in a monkey in a carnival type of a thing. 

Now, when we think about the B2B sales that we’re doing, it’s very hard for a couple reasons. One is, you’re selling something that first of all could be very expensive. Second of all, there’s very low risk from your customers. They need to make sure that they’re making the right decision. A lot of times, what your customers, in IT, operations, finance, supply chain logistics, those are usually pretty complex operations. It’s not like an enthusiastic call is going to get them to write a check for $50 million worth of AI software. It might take a year or two, three. Then you got to think about competition and cooperation and partnerships. As I’m reading your book, I’m thinking in my mind about sales professionals I’ve met over the years and how they have evolved and how right now for the sales professionals who are listening, and to be frank with you, Dr. Bizzi, for the sales professionals who are in their 30s, 40s, it’s a whole different world. There’s a lot more complexity. You need to know more about the customer and their business to be successful, or else the customer doesn’t really need to spend time with you. 

Lorenzo Bizzi: Yes, absolutely. Things have changed so much, complexity has increased, but the game is now more interesting. If there is more complexity, that means that intelligence, preparation, and research are more relevant to close the deal. Now sales has become a game in which you can really attract interesting people, motivated people, and intelligent people, because the sales conversation with buyers has become more complicated. 

In the past, people were underprepared. A lot of times the sales profession was not appealing. Now, really developing a strong conversation with buyers to understand and to explain how your product and service can get into their business, can reinforce their competitive advantage, can help them be protected against the attack of the competition. This is a beautiful conversation. Now this has made the job of a sales professional extremely rich. It’s essential to be able to break the problem down well. 

As I do consulting with businesses, I realize that B2B sales is very, very proximal to what a consultant does when they’re making recommendations for anything to improve in the company. You help the client break the problem down. You help understand the source of the problem. You provide strong evidence in support of your claim and hypothesis, and then you justify and explain well how your solution is likely to impact the profitability of the company. It’s exactly the same as a B2B sales professional. A B2B sales professional is like a consultant, not just merely in the sense of consultative selling, we all know about it, but in the idea of, “I help you break your problem down, we go inside your organization together so that you get more insight into what really could cause the problem.” This creates a beautiful connection. 

You’re not just someone there to try to sell, but as you help them better understand their own problems, then I can develop trust and I want to talk with you. I want to do business with you. This increase in the importance of expertise has made the game more complex, but at the same time, more interesting, and has made the professionals, B2B sales or B2G sales professionals, much more insightful, much more powerful, and much more able to give a wonderful career to individuals. 

Fred Diamond: I love the way you said that, you said it very, very well. The sales professionals that we see being valuable right now and successful are those that are truly bringing value to the customers on where the customer needs to go without being told. Without the customer saying, “How can you help me get here?” the sales professionals need to know where the customer’s going, or else they really don’t need to spend time with them. 

I remember, as late as 15 years ago, a sales professional was where the information was gotten. I remember being in two-day-long meetings where our sales reps would present vision, strategy, roadmaps, things like that. Now the customer can go to Claude or ChatGPT and type in what is Apple’s product strategy for the next five years and within 30 seconds, it’ll appear. 

You cover a lot of ground in the book, and you make a great point that there’s no one secret to success. I love the way we’re talking here, and this is why we changed our name to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Professional Selling. If you are a professional, what does a professional do? Give us some of your insights in having read the book. What are some of the things right now that selling professionals, B2B or B2G, must be doing to be successful? 

Lorenzo Bizzi: It’s a beautiful point that you say, Fred, the stress on the word professional, because it’s also important to notice that when you ask buyers what perceptions they have about salespeople, a lot of time professional is not the first thing that comes to mind. When you think about what people associate the sellers, the sellers a lot of times are not trusted individuals. They’re trying to manipulate you. You have a good idea that we need to transform salespeople into professionals. 

Now, there are a lot of advice. I’d like to maybe focus on one, one interesting piece of advice that I found insightful in the book, is the idea of listening to the customers. Everybody says you have to listen to the customers. This is no news. But when you look at the books, a lot of times the advice for listening is you repeat what they’re saying, you paraphrase what they’re saying, you nod. In other words, active listening forces you to think about how to respond when someone is talking, so you’re not really listening. When someone is talking in your mind, you already have the script and you’re selecting what answer you have to provide from a tree that was given to you in advance. You’re not really listening. Listening is not about responding, of course, it is about responding, but not only about responding, it’s about sensing. Sensing is about understanding what the others are doing. 

How do you empower your understanding? Attention is extremely difficult. When people talk to you, especially about complex businesses, being able to understand what they’re saying is very difficult. We retain only a fraction of what people are saying, and then when we repeat and we respond, the buyer says, “This person shows a very shallow understanding of my situation.” That’s where preparation upfront becomes important. The more we study, the more we are expert of the problem, it’s not just important because it helps you sell more, it helps you converse better, but because it helps sensing more. It’s less effortful if you’re an expert of the problem, of the company, of the industry to pay attention. This is where expertise and professionalism come into the equation. The more you know about the industry, the competitor, the company, and the problem, the less effort you have when you listen to what they say, and you are able to get, instead of 20%, 50%, 80% of what they’re saying. When you respond, you show that you’re actually smart and you’re someone you need to have a conversation with. 

Really listening is not about responding, nodding, paraphrasing, “Hmm, that’s very nice.” That’s what you read in books. Listening is about sensing and being better able to absorb the information that the others are saying. In order to do that, the only way is to develop expertise that will allow you to switch from remembering 20% of what they say to remembering 80% of what they say. 

Fred Diamond: That’s such a great point. In the early days of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, I used to do the interviews in-person and I would go to a VP of sales office. Then when the pandemic happened, obviously everything went over to Zoom, and the conversation shifted more to, “What do I do today?” Or, “What should I be doing now?” One of the questions that I would ask the sales leaders that I would interview, typically VPs of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM, is what are you great at? People would always say, “I’m a great listener. 66%, I have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that order.” 

After getting that answer time and time again, I started saying, “Okay. Well, help my audience. How can they become better listeners?” They hit on some of the things that you talked about, preparation, becoming an expert, asking better questions, training yourself. I like the way you just said, most people, when they talk about listening, they’re basically listening for their opportunity to talk. In sales it’s the same thing. It’s like, “Oh, okay. Interesting. Okay. Oh, huh, interesting.” But I know I need to get to my three questions. It’s like, “Interesting. Well, it’s interesting you would say that because where do you see-” I love the way you said that. 

Talk about maybe the concept of reducing uncertainty in the sales process. I think that’s going to be very important, because a lot of people who are listening are sales leaders, and they manage people, and everybody has a quota and everybody has a number that they need to get to. We’re doing today’s interview in January of 2026 and for some reason, a lot of the companies that are members of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, their fiscal year ends January 31st. A number of them have said to me today that they’re closing in. Talk about the concept of reducing uncertainty when sales leadership is striving for certainty. When are we going to close this deal? How much is it going to be for? Because I need to tell my boss, who needs to tell his boss, who needs to tell our CFO for reporting. 

Lorenzo Bizzi: This is a fascinating topic, and I believe one of the most important points that I discuss in the book. Whenever a buyer makes a purchase, you can actually break it down into a matrix with two variables. One is my judgment on the product, I like it, I don’t like it. The other one is the uncertainty or certainty of my judgment, I think I like it, versus, I’m sure I like it, or, I think I don’t like it, versus, I’m sure I don’t like it. You can imagine this matrix. Most of the classic advice focuses on changing the judgment and shifting it from, I don’t like this product, to, I like this product. I say in the book that the most important point is actually shifting the judgment from, I think I like it, or, I think I don’t like it, to, I’m sure. It’s really what matters the most to the sales, especially in a B2B or a B2G context. I’ll tell you why. 

Research shows that when buyers make decisions, what’s most important is paradoxically not advantages versus disadvantages, but is my fear, my perception of risk. We assess the risk. We want to feel safe. Making buyers feel safer is more important than explaining the advantages and convincing them the advantages are higher than the disadvantages. This is paradoxical, because we are always thinking, “Yeah, I got to put all the advantages, make clear all the disadvantages.” But you see, the advice of trying to shift from, I don’t like this product, to, I like this product, as a result makes sales professionals inflate the benefits and hide the disadvantages. 

This unfortunately creates more uncertainty because if the buyer is an expert, the buyer’s going to say, “Hey, what’s going on? I don’t trust anymore what you’re saying.” My perception of uncertainty increases, and I’m not going to like to buy. In the human brains, when it comes to purchases, it’s more important there’s a feeling of comfort and a feeling of safety. If you are able to reduce their perception of uncertainty in the process, you make it very clear, they feel comfortable, they feel comfort. This is way more important than convincing them the advantages are superior to the disadvantages, then they can gauge. This is important. We first responded to a situation of uncertainty with fear and distance. You need to make them closer to you, and you make them closer to you only by reducing their perceived uncertainty. 

Fred Diamond: I love the way you explained it. I’ve been saying for years that sales professionals need to put themselves in the shoes of the customer. Most customers in IT, or in operations, or logistics, or finance, they don’t want to lose their job. They want to hold onto their job. They don’t want to be the guy or lady who spent $50 million on a financial reporting system that was never implemented. They want security mostly in those positions that purchase B2B related things. They want to hold onto the job. The way you lose your job, besides obviously remote layoffs, etc., is by not making glaring errors. That’s such a great point. I used to sell ERP solutions 30 years ago, and everybody talked about the guy who brought in the $500 million SAP system that was never implemented, etc. 

It’s been great talking to you, Dr. Bizzi. The book is Myths vs. Science of Selling: When Research Reveals the Opposite of Common Belief. You go through a couple dozen areas like we discussed here, where you talk about the misconceptions, the myths, if you will, why they’re wrong, what’s factual, and then how selling professionals can utilize this to be more successful in their sales conversations and their process. 

I want to hit on one thing before I ask you for your final thought. A lot of salespeople want to be liked. You mentioned rapport before, but it doesn’t work anymore the way it used to. Customers, yes, they do want to like you, but they want to implement solutions that are going to help their company or organization achieve its goals this year or next year or two years from now, whatever it might be. Talk about that concept for a little bit, the whole idea of rapport. Yeah, it’s nice to have, but it’s not going to get you to your quota. 

Lorenzo Bizzi: Liking still matters, and I’m going to have to tell you, Fred, liking will matter even more in these times of AI, in which personal rapport becomes more important. Trust is going to be more difficult to acquire the stronger AI is, because every sales professional is going to be able to come up with the most beautiful stellar presentation. The buyer is not going to really believe those numbers. Anybody can show fantastic numbers, fantastic projections, beautiful stories. I don’t know how much that really comes from you or it comes from AI. Personal rapport and liking is still important and will become even more important. 

The mistake of sales professionals is to believe that liking is enough, and most importantly, that liking can replace a weak sales conversation. “Since they like me, the product doesn’t need to be that good anyway. They’re going to buy it.” That’s wrong. They interact. Liking. With a strong sales conversation, with a strong idea of why the product is good or better, leads to the sale. Liking is not a substitute for a poor conversation. That’s where people make most mistakes. “I’ll just focus on being liked. Then the sale is going to come.” No. Liking without a strong sales conversation leads to nothing. Liking combined with a strong, rational, powerful sales conversation that reduces uncertainty will lead to the sale. Liking still remains important, but like I said before, liking gives the attention, which is the precondition to be able to develop a conversation. But then again, still we need to focus on reducing the uncertainty, and that’s when the sale is going to happen. 

Fred Diamond: I love that you’re covering this because we’re over 800 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, events like our Women in Sales Leadership Forum, our Emerging Leaders Program, that is such an important message is, what’s the most important thing to the customer? At the end of the day, I’ve been saying this for years, it’s avoiding risk. How can you present this? 

We’re talking to Dr. Lorenzo Bizzi from California State University at Fullerton. Give us something specific. We’ve covered a lot of ground here, but something specific you recommend our listeners do right now after listening to the show, watching it on YouTube, or reading the transcript to take their sales career to the next level. 

Lorenzo Bizzi: This is a very beautiful question. The book itself has a lot of very specific actionable steps. The last part of each chapter, I have over 30 chapters, that goes into specific actions, how you can convert the conversation, transform it into a specific set of actions. There are a lot of little specific sets of actions, exactly what you have to say and what you have to do in this specific situation. But if I would say, what is the most important point of the book, is that I’m not this scholar or the professor that claims to go there, criticizes popular advice, science is right versus popular advice is wrong. That is not the goal. I always believe that if you tell people what to do, they won’t do it. But if you make them think about it, then they’re more likely to implement any recommendation. 

Yes, I have a lot of very little pieces of advice at the end of each chapter, but the key goal of the book is that each chapter creates a contrast. This is what popular advice says. This is what research says. I’m not going to be bold and say research is right. Popular advice is wrong. But by creating a contrast, you stimulate the mind of the readers. The whole goal of the book, although it provides a lot of little pieces of advice, is not actually to tell you what you have to do, but it’s to stimulate your thinking. If I give you contrasts, you’re forced to think and you’re forced to take your own position. Then after, when I provide the little piece of advice, you’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to do it,” or, “I’m not going to do it.” But if you only tell people do this, they’re not going to do it. Make people think, stimulate their minds, create contrasts. That, in my point of view, is the only way in which you’re going to make people do some of the actions that you recommend. 

Fred Diamond: I noticed in the book you talked about System 1 versus System 2 thinking, which is what you’re covering right now. I was very happy to see that because you’re absolutely right. It’s one thing we learned a long time ago, is that customers get more value in what they discover and what they decide to do versus what you tell them to do. Throughout your book, you’re talking about ways to get the customer to discover that type of thinking. 

Once again, Dr. Lorenzo Bizzi, California State University at Fullerton. Thank you so much for being on today’s Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 827: Debunking Sales Myths So You Sell More Effectively with Lorenzo Bizzi first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Find Rishi on LinkedIn. 

RISHI’S TIP: “If you engage customers in their context, not in technology terms, that’s fundamental to success. When you can speak both mission language and technical language, your credibility is established immediately.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re talking today with Rishi Bhaskar, and I’m going to let you introduce yourself in a second, but I just want to acknowledge that AWS is an IEPS Premier Sales Employer. It’s a great place to work. You have so many amazing people there leading teams. What AWS is doing, particularly in the public sector, which we’re going to be talking about, is not just remarkable, but it’s so vital to what’s happening in the public sector, and everything that’s going on. 

I just want to tell people we’re recording today’s show in March of 2026. There’s a lot of things going on in the world, and we’re going to touch on some of that. For partners who may not know your background, briefly describe your role and how you support the partner ecosystem at AWS. 

Rishi Bhaskar: In simple terms, what we do here in my organization is we’re essentially what I would call the connective tissue between AWS and our public sector partners. We help our partners build, sell, and scale their solutions alongside AWS in really some of the most complex and consequential technology environments in the world. We really look after this from a global perspective, so when we look at our partner base, yes, there’s regional nuances that we account for, but we support the public sector business worldwide for AWS and our partner network. 

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of sales professionals listening all over the globe, and a number of them are in public sector, of course, a lot of them are also in commercial enterprises. We have a lot of B2B, a lot of B2G people that listen. On the Sales Game Changers Podcast, we talk about how sales leaders are leading teams now, working with customers. We do a lot of shows with sales leaders who are leading partner ecosystems and the whole partner world. I’m just curious for our listeners, what’s fundamentally different about selling cloud into defense as compared to commercial enterprises? 

Rishi Bhaskar: It’s a great question. What’s interesting about AWS is we define public sector as pretty broad. It’s not just their traditional government organizations. Yes, we cover all levels of government, national, local government, but we also cover education, state, and local government, as well as healthcare and life sciences inside of our public sector definition. What’s really interesting about what’s different in the commercial world or the defense world or the public sector world is we really lean with mission outcomes. 

We don’t go into our customers and talk about technology, essentially, as a first lead-in. We go into our customers and our partners together to really talk about, what’s your mission outcome? Is your mission outcome effectiveness, efficiency, security, supply chain, edge compute? There are so many different use cases that we get after with our partners. But the key, though, is to look after their opportunity in the context of their mission outcomes. That’s what really drives the difference. 

I think there’s one other thing that’s really important, is when we go into that environment and try to solve their mission outcomes, when we have relentless customer obsession combined with domain expertise and their mission outcomes, that’s when we really drive transformational change for our customers. 

Fred Diamond: Before I get a little bit deeper into this, I’ve thrown around the term partner frequently. For our audience, can you define what the partner ecosystem looks like with AWS Public Sector? 

Rishi Bhaskar: That’s a great question. Because we define public sector in a really broad way, we define our partner network in a really broad sense as well. From our setup, it’s a bit unique. We look after all of our partners that sell into public sector and customers. That goes along with the definition of public sector I talked about earlier, governments, education, healthcare, life sciences, nonprofit organizations as well. Then we look after the diversity of the partner ecosystem. We look after everything from big global systems integrators, national or regional systems integrators, defense industrial base providers, as well as distribution reseller partners, and right on down the line. 

What’s also pretty unique about how we go to market is we have an inflection point of our partners essentially being customers. The defense industrial base is a remit that’s within my organization. We partner with the defense industrial base to deliver mission outcomes, but we also look at the defense industrial base and several ISV partners as customers in my organization as well. We’re a bit dual-hatted from that perspective. We’re essentially a customer team and a partner team in one organization. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s get specific on what you’re seeing right now across the Department of Defense or Department of War and defense contractors in terms of cloud adoption. Give some insights into what’s accelerating and maybe what’s holding things back. 

Rishi Bhaskar: What’s interesting about the Department of War or Ministries of Defense around the world is we’re in an inflection point. A few years ago, the conversation was about whether cloud was viable for defense workloads. I think that conversation is actually over. Now it’s about operating at scale across mission-critical systems. The biggest acceleration is around AI and machine learning. We’re seeing defense organizations that are sitting on enormous volumes of data. There’s a real urgency on how do you make that data actionable? That’s driving cloud adoption by itself, because we have to get on the data journey in order to make the data valuable from an AI perspective. 

We’re also seeing really significant momentum around software modernization. We see agencies around the world moving off legacy monolithic systems toward cloud-native architectures that give them speed and flexibility. But it’s still hard. It’s still hard. It’s less about technology and more about organizational change. Legacy systems integration, data silos, workforce readiness, navigating a complex acquisition process. There are real friction points in this process, but frankly, that’s where our partners add enormous value. We bring a technology portfolio, we bring context of the mission outcome, and our partners turn that technology portfolio plus mission context outcomes into transformation across the world for our customer base. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the best ones. What separates the high-performing partners in this space from everybody else? You’ve dealt with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of companies that fit that wide ecosystem. We’re doing today’s interview in March of 2026. What are the best ones doing differently from everybody else? 

Rishi Bhaskar: We have such incredible partners in our partner network, and thousands of them as well. But what I see consistently with the partners who win the most is that they don’t wait on us. They don’t wait on AWS or the customer to tell them what to do. They show up with the point of view. They’ve already studied the mission problem, they’ve built a solution around it, and they’ve come to the table ready to execute. You contrast that with partners who claim they can do everything, we see that all the time, it’s not really helpful, to be honest. The best partners are specific. They show up. They say, “We solve a problem for this type of customers. Here’s the proof point where we’ve done it already.” 

The other thing that’s really interesting is what the best partners do, and I’ve seen this firsthand, they invest in people. They invest in clear talent, especially in the defense world that we work in. They invest in operational understanding of the defense environments. It’s incredibly valuable and incredibly hard to find that type of talent that has mission experience, plus the right credentials to work in this space. The partners who prioritize and understand that investment need, they stand out immediately. 

Fred Diamond: I like that answer. One thing we talk a lot about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is the fact that if you’re not bringing value to the customer, that the customer hasn’t thought about yet, that you’ve shown, you’ve put the work in, the energy, the thought into where the customer is going, that is really where you’re differentiating yourselves. Otherwise, with AI and with everything else, customers can get a lot of the information that they need. They could find anything they need about what AWS is bringing to the marketplace. How are your partners bringing some unique value? I’m just curious, are there any vertical specializations that you see really emerging today that you would search for, I would say recommend, but I would say maybe you search for right now? 

Rishi Bhaskar: Our customer base is so diverse in public sector, but the key theme with every single one of these customers is vertical specialization. Understanding the customer’s challenges, the context of how they’re solving problems, and that leads you to the right technology solution every time. If you engage customers in their context, and not in technology terms, it’s fundamental to success, both for you as a sales professional and your customer, and delivering those transformative outcomes for your customer. 

One of the things that I think is super interesting is we can teach anyone cloud skills. We have training programs all over the world, in-person, virtual, we have certification programs that go across our entire portfolio. You can do them online and a lot of them are free actually. What we can’t teach sales professionals is that 15 to 20 years of experience and understanding how a specific mission community operates. What are their real pain points on the ground? That only comes with domain and verticalization and expertise. 

When a partner walks into the room that can speak both mission language and technical language, their credibility is established immediately. We see that as a real game changer for our partners and our partner sellers. Conversation quickly changes in that environment from a vendor pitch to really solving a problem that the customer is desperate to solve. 

I don’t want to also dismiss broad technical capability entirely, it’s super important. The ideal partner combines deep domain expertise with strong cloud fundamentals. What’s really important in that is if you’re a partner and you’re a partner leader in these organizations and you’re trying to decide where to invest first, I believe you should invest in the customer’s real-world deep understanding of their context and the technical skills can be brought along, but they are foundational to driving success. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about AWS and how you’re supporting partners right now. There’s a whole slew of things that your organization does. Talk about some of your priorities from a how can we and how are we supporting your partners right now? 

Rishi Bhaskar: We support our partners in multiple ways. We support our partners in building solutions. We look at solutions that are required in the industry. Again, whether it’s in any one of our public sector disciplines or verticals, we really look at partners that bring unique opportunities to say enterprise resource planning transformation programs. That’s a big opportunity across the sector right now. We also look at generative AI and what opportunities our partners can bring forward from a GenAI perspective. I think there’s one bucket of we look at the solution capability of a combination of AWS with the partners technology or partner services. 

Then we also look at how do we enable those partners to get to market to drive those solutions into the end customer’s hands. As we started this discussion, Fred, we know where there’s a lot of moving parts in our industry right now. There’s a lot of opportunity in our industry right now as well. Finding the gaps and opportunities around our partners’ capabilities with AWS is transformative capabilities and really bringing those together from a solution. But then also a go-to-market execution mindset, which is really what drives our results with our customers, is super, super important. If I just pick two things that are foundational that we focus on, it’s developing solutions and executing in the market. 

Fred Diamond: The channel is expanding. More and more partners are coming on board. Developers, manufacturers, the OEMs, the AWSs of the world need to have a great channel organization to get to the customer, because that’s where a lot of the relationships are. I’m just curious, what are you looking for? What are some of the skills that a channel manager at an AWS needs to have? If you are starting an organization from scratch or looking to hire more people, what are the two or three things that you want your channel professionals to have as skills? 

Rishi Bhaskar: It’s an interesting question because it’s different in a lot of partner organizations around the industry. I’m slightly proud, slightly embarrassed to say I’m in my 28th year of my career. I’ve seen all walks of life around the partner ecosystem or the partner networks across multiple industries. I think what’s really interesting, what I look for foundationally is not just someone that can go create solutions and do partner enablement. I really look for folks that understand industry disciplines, as we talked about, but then also know how to sell in a multi-tier sales environment. 

We actually are all salespeople in my organization. We do some partner enablement work, yes, but we really focus on selling and executing through multiple tiers with our partners. Sometimes that’s just simple, a prime with AWS. Sometimes it’s a prime with multiple downstream partners. Sometimes it’s a distribution partner that has multiple downstream partners. Sometimes it’s an independent software vendor that’s selling our portfolio into multiple end customers. I think from my perspective when I look for that capability and skill set, domain expertise in any one of our disciplines and ability to sell and understand a multi-tier sales model. 

Fred Diamond: If you were advising a channel partner CEO today and they came to you and said, “Rishi, what is one strategic move that I should make this year to grow cloud revenue?” What would be your go-to advice for them? 

Rishi Bhaskar: There’s a lot of advice out there, but I think one of the things that sometimes gets lost on the industry is building one-off versus repeatable solutions. There are tremendous opportunities out there where you can focus on a repeatable solution around a specific mission challenge. Whether that’s in one agency in one country or multiple agencies across the global opportunity set, it’s really important to make sure we’re building repeatable solutions. Those point solutions are going to be a good way to get a little increase in your revenue opportunity, but then it’ll stagnate after that. I also think it’s also important to really, really identify the right talent, the right talent that can bring those solutions forward in a repeatable way and drive scale. 

Fred Diamond: AWS is at the forefront of all of this, the leading company in all the things that we’re talking about here. What are some trends that your partner should be preparing for in the defense world, the defense cloud over the next 12 to 24 months? 

Rishi Bhaskar: In the defense area specifically, we’re seeing AI move from pilot to production. Our partner network is really focused on that. We’re obviously helping our partners move through that AI journey, but what’s really important right now, considering where we sit today, Fred, is the experimentation phase is ending. Organizations are going to start demanding AI capabilities that work in real operational environments at scale. But we have to have the right governance and security frameworks to support them. Partners who help customers operationalize AI and not just build models, but deploy, monitor, maintain them in production, are going to be an enormous demand by our end customers. I think that’s really fundamental and that’s the first big trend. 

The second I think is data interoperability. It is the strategic imperative, the ability to connect data across systems, domains, classification levels, that will really elevate mission outcomes. 

I think the third one, and we’re seeing a big push here, is around edge and tactical cloud capabilities. Computing, as we all have seen, is moving closer to where the missions actually take place, at the tactical edge, in disconnected environments, in contested spaces. That requires a very different architecture and a very different skill set. Partners who start building edge capabilities now are going to have a very significant head start in some of these big trends. We’re very excited about this opportunity. We’re really excited about the opportunity to work with our partners to lead in these areas now. 

Fred Diamond: I’ve interviewed over 800 sales leaders over the years, and many of them have built their career in public sector. I’m just curious, what motivates you personally? You’ve devoted your career to the defense ecosystem. Why is that? 

Rishi Bhaskar: As I said earlier, it’s been 28 years at this career, which has been a lot of fun. It’s been a cross-section of some commercial work early in my career. It’s a lot of public sector work in the last 10 or 15 years. I’ve always been very passionate about creating the right outcomes that help society, that help humanity. Whether that’s in defense or whether that’s in public safety, I spent a bulk of my career in the public safety world as well. Whether that’s in providing better health outcomes for our citizens around the world in our healthcare life sciences discipline of our business. 

To me, it’s all about trying to use technology for good. You asked me what motivates me, that’s it in a nutshell. I’m a technologist at heart. I was a software engineer earlier in my career, and trying to understand and figure out how to use technology to make the world a better, safer, more efficient place for all of mankind, I think is super, super important. That’s what really keeps me motivated to put in the blood, sweat, and tears to make sure we’re delivering the right outcomes for our customers. 

Fred Diamond: Congratulations on your success. You’re leading a huge organization that is touching so many entities, so many critical organizations around the globe to make the world a better place and to solve so many problems. When you were describing the breadth of what public sector looks like in AWS, it’s not just defense, it’s not just the U.S. government, it’s organizations, you mentioned not-for-profits, healthcare, etc. We all just want to make the world a better place. Kudos to you and to your organization for all the great work. 

I want to thank you for all the great insights that you’ve shared. Give us one specific action step, something that sales professionals should do right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Rishi Bhaskar: Learn how to leverage AI. I know it sounds easy to say, and a lot of folks are familiar with the commercial tools out there, but I think spending the right time, understanding how to not only just use AI but use it specific to your discipline and how you can actually create the right outcomes, it doesn’t happen quickly. You’ve got to spend the right time and make sure you’re leveraging the right tools that are out there and available to you to drive your AI skillset. I think that’s super, super important for all sales professionals. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Rishi Bhaskar for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 826: Selling Mission Outcomes in the AI Era with Rishi Bhaskar of AWS first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Greg, on April 9th in Baton Rouge at the campus, is it on the campus of LSU, your event? 

Greg Accardo: That’s correct. Yeah, it will be at our Alumni Center here on campus. 

Fred Diamond: Very good. I got Greg Accardo, and the program is the LSU Sales Symposium. The agenda really caught my eye. You and I have talked a couple of times before. We’ve interviewed a lot of the directors of University Sales Center Alliance programs, so we’ve been wanting to get you on the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. But since you have the symposium coming up, I want to talk about what you’re going to be covering, why you’re doing the program. You have six world-class speakers, some from business, some from academia, and I’m excited, I want to get deep into what they’re talking about. But since this is an Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged show, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about your journey to LSU. 

Greg Accardo: LSU is like a lot of other sales programs at other universities around the country. We’ve been around now for about 12 years. I was fortunate enough to be hired to be the first director of the program. Being an LSU alumni, that was a great honor, to be able to come in and take this startup from basically nothing and grow it and nurture it and made it my baby over the last 12 years. It’s been a nice ride and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. 

LSU is an R1 state school here in Louisiana. Our College of Business is probably about 3,800 students. 900 of those students are declared marketing majors. We have about 200 of those students that are declared for the sales concentration. We also offer a concentration in digital marketing and also a concentration for marketing analytics. In addition to that, we also have a sales team that competes nationally and regionally across the country. In fact, we’re gearing up for a competition. Next week we’ll be leaving. The fun thing about the sales competition is I get to interact with all the great people you talk to all the time, the other sales faculty members from around the country. 

Fred Diamond: I’ve gone to a bunch of competitions all over the country. As listeners of the Office Hours Sales Game Changers Podcast know, we’re blown away by these young adults. We’re blown away at how talented they are. It’s funny, I tell people, Gartner is one of the big sponsors, and I went to a competition last year where the young adults were doing, it was a National Collegiate Sales Competition, and they were selling Gartner services. I’ve been a customer of Gartner in the past, and these young adults were better than any sales rep that I’ve ever been sold to by Gartner. 

The sales program, tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about some of the curriculum. Where do the young adults want to go after they graduate? What type of companies, how do you prepare them, etc.? 

Greg Accardo: Typically, I guess the best way to address that is a lot of the students who come here to pursue a degree in marketing in our college, I would say half are not really sure what they want to do. They’re at that point where they don’t know what they don’t know. Luckily for them, we feel like we offer them enough opportunities to fill in the gaps and figure out where they should be going, where their desires are, their tout, if they want to be regionally. Obviously, a lot of the big metro centers tend to be attractive. Students want to go to Dallas, they want to go to Austin, New Orleans, or maybe on the East Coast, Charlotte, New York City. But the thing that I’m proud of the most is that our students who come in and perform well in the program, I have yet to have a problem working with a student trying to find them a job. That takes care of itself. 

Once they come into the program and they absorb the material we give them, they take advantage of the opportunities. Those opportunities just happen between our corporate partners, our companies that are not our corporate partners. I think maybe some of that too is we really leverage our students hard to put a lot of effort in their LinkedIn profiles, because we’re preaching them all the time that your LinkedIn is your digital footprint. It is almost now more important than a paper resume. I don’t know of a single recruiter that’s out there recruiting salespeople that’s not going to go straight to your LinkedIn page, even if they got your paper resume. It’s almost like they have to go there to see, “Let me go see the details of this person. I want to see their picture, their branding image. I want to see the titles they’ve put in here, their experiences, maybe any videos they might have added.” We really push them hard to put some effort and some time into that LinkedIn profile, and that has paid off. I will admit. 

The other side of that is that we offer a lot of networking opportunities for our sales students. We do a Sales Career Expo, both spring semester and fall semester. Those are well attended by students. We gamify that event. We have a speed selling competition. We call it the Golden Ticket Championship. Students can get really competitive. There’s also an added incentive for all the sales students to complete a journey around all the companies that are at the Sales Career Expo. They can earn extra credit from some of their professors. We’ll offer them a little extra credit if they make that effort to go and do that elevator pitch to those companies, give them that resume, tell them a little bit about themselves, learn something about them. That’s paid off. I think that we’ve created the environment, we’ve created the tools, and we’ve put it all together and we just sit back and let it happen. 

Fred Diamond: I agree with you about LinkedIn. Since we started doing the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged, I must have gotten maybe 200, 300 outreach from selling students who were on LinkedIn who were reaching out. I see a lot of them. They all have the 500 connections that most of them should. I could see where they’re populating their LinkedIn to be oppressive, to be a good candidate with students. I agree with you too. One of the great things that I’ve learned since we’ve been doing the podcast is you’re preparing students to hit the ground running. Not just to hit the ground running, but to hit the ground running as if they’ve been working for three, four years. 

All the programs that I’ve worked at, the people I’ve met, associated with yours and other programs, these students, they understand the sales process. Now, they need to learn about the company and the markets and products, which takes a little bit of time, but a lot of the employers that we’ve been talking to said that these young adults are as if they’ve been working for three years, which helps with retention, which helps with management, and it helps with leadership. It’s great to talk to you and the various people around the country that we’ve spoken to. 

Now, on LinkedIn, I kept seeing these announcements about the LSU Sales Symposium, and it’s on April 9th, it’s in Baton Rouge, it’s on campus. Tell us a little bit about this program. Then I want to get into the details about your six speakers and why you picked them and what it’s going to be focusing on. Are you looking to have students or selling professionals from the Baton Rouge local industry? Who is it really for? 

Greg Accardo: First of all, let me give you a little bit of a history and how the event grew into what it is now. One of the classes that I teach is the capstone course in the sales program. In the capstone course, we’re pushing the students into a live sales project where they’re selling a real product to real people. We equip them with CRMs, some AI tools, and we put them in teams with a sales manager that they select, and we drive it like a company, and they have a quota they have to meet. 

We have a couple of events that are set up each semester for the class to sell participation in those events. We do a Topgolf event in the fall, and the class sells the bays on the third floor of Topgolf. But in the spring, we do a symposium. Part of this is a twofer. It’s a sales project for the students, because they have to sell the tickets and they have a quota that these teams of students have to meet. But it’s also for us to showcase some of the academic stuff that we’re doing, not only at LSU, but at other universities to give the world of sales what’s happening at the academic level and at the practitioner level. We design it in a way that salespeople and sales leaders can come to these events and walk away with something that they can take back to their company to make them better, to make them a little more productive, more efficient. 

In the past years, we’ve covered the gamut. We’ve done sales technology, we’ve had sales training. We did one with women in sales. We’ve hit all the bases. This year, we decided to turn the lens around. This year the focus is going to be on the buyers. As sellers, we are really so focused on our own skillsets and our own methodologies. Do we have the utmost up-to-date tools? Are we using the right methodologies if our cadences align just right? But very little time is spent setting the buyers. 

My good friend, Leff Bonney, who’s going to be the keynote speaker, gave a talk at one of our academic gatherings a few years ago. I remember Leff’s slide he put up, and the first slide was, yeah, AI has changed selling, but AI has also changed buying. That’s interesting. What has the emergence of AI done to the people who do buying? Luckily, I think there’s enough emphasis now in the academic side, is that’s now geared toward focusing on this evolution of the buying process because of technology. But what’s happening to the selling process is it’s still siloed away from the buying process, it’s aligned with the buyers and how they’re making decisions and how their buying processes have evolved and adapted. We think that we can really come away with something here that helps sellers to step back, not necessarily look at themselves so much, which is important. We know that training is important, keeping up to date, but are you doing anything that’s preventing your buyers from saying yes because your process is antiquated? 

We want to dive into that topic, and that’s the theme we’re going with, is it’s not just a buying process, but it’s also the psychological impact of buyers because of the emergence of artificial intelligence, because that has now entered that space. I think Leff even said it before, is that your buyers probably have better AI tools than the sellers do. Sellers may not even be aware of this, and they’re just going into a sales situation blind without thinking about or studying, what’s going on with my customers or my prospects, and am I doing anything that’s making it harder for them to say yes? 

Fred Diamond: That’s right on target with everything that we hear on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, not just the Office Hours shows. It’s been an evolution probably for the last 20 some odd years that has really accelerated over the last two and a half years with all the GPT tools. We keep talking about this all the time on almost every single Sales Game Changers Podcast and at every Institute for Effective Professional Selling event, is that if you’re not bringing real value to where the customer needs to be in a year or two years from now, they really have no need for you. Like you just said, I’ve never thought about that, but they probably do have great tools, probably better than what we’re using on the sales side. 

I like the way that you’re focusing that because people would say that the customer was 57% down the road, the Challenger statistic that we’ve all been talking about for about 15 years now. It’s probably even further down with AI, because you can get so much more and better information. 

Let’s talk about the agenda. You’re going to be kicking things off with George Talbert from Elon. He’s going to be speaking on From Pitch to Perspective: Why the Future of Sales Starts with the Buyer. You just gave us a great perspective. What do we expect from George? 

Greg Accardo: George is a great friend of mine. He’s at Elon University. George is unique because George does a lot of consulting. In addition to his academic work and his research, a lot of companies go to George for help in solving sales-related problems. George has got a long history, a lot of years of experience working directly with big companies, trying to navigate these complex issues. When I challenged George, I said, “Hey, we’d like to have you come and be part of this event.” He said, “I’ve got a perfect presentation for it.” I don’t want to take too much away from George, but he did tell me that it’s going to be pretty impactful, and it does align with this theme that we want to help sellers to get better educated about buyers. 

Fred Diamond: This topic caught my eye. Kip Knight, tell us about him, and How Sellers Can Build Custom Apps To Attract and Qualify Buyers. 

Greg Accardo: Kip Knight, he’s a great LSU alumni and a great friend of the marketing department at LSU. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s been head of marketing for several companies. Right now he’s head of a startup called CMO Partners. Kip is one of those guys that you want to be around a lot because he’s got that kind of brain, almost like an Elon Musk type thinking. He’s always looking for the next best technology to attract customers and engage with people, because that’s his whole background, is marketing. He’s been a marketing executive his whole life. 

He’s been dabbling in this world now with how do you create these new apps that you can use that would help your buyers find the products that they need and lead them straight to you. Kip is going to talk a little bit about this. There’s always some new software that he’s been experimenting with and he’s tested it. Kip is going to come to this more from the CMO perspective, which I think is important. We should understand what are CMOs looking at, because their whole world’s about attracting buyers. 

Fred Diamond: I love the theme throughout the day. That’s going to continue with Bob Rickert, whose title is The Buyer-Seller Exchange Is Being Rewritten. You very crisply clarified that for us in the beginning of today’s Office Hours – Sales Professors. What do you want to tell us about Bob? 

Greg Accardo: I met Bob about eight years ago. Bob had a book that he had published. It’s called Profit Heroes. I saw the book, I bought it, I read it, I was blown away, so I contacted Bob. I said, “Bob, look, I read your book. This is a game changer. From a sales perspective, I think this is something that’s really impactful if we could teach students how to do this.” Bob and I talked about how could I design this into a class where you’re selling the financial impact. Bob uses some spreadsheets that are calibrated. You can plug in numbers and show a customer very intuitively, if we pursue this pathway, these are some of the outcomes you can expect. I thought Bob would be perfect for this because Bob is also a consultant. I think he’s working on another book now. He’s from the Chicago area, so he is up there working with a lot of the companies in the Chicago area doing his consulting thing. But again, Bob understands, he’s at the ground level. He knows that the script is being rewritten. We want to hear his insights on what he’s seeing and bring a little different light to the subject. 

Fred Diamond: I tell you, man, listening to hear you describe what’s going to be talked about at every session, it’s going to be a masterclass in what selling professionals should be doing. I applaud the young adults who are going to be listening to this as well, and so much great content from them. You mentioned Leff Bonney at FSU, who’s going to be doing the keynote speech, How Buying Behavior Has Changed in the Age of AI, which you touched on. I’ve seen Leff Speak again. He spoke at the University Sales Center Alliance annual meeting back in October at University of Texas Dallas. Obviously, a bright guy, came from industry as well. Anything else you want to tell us about what he’s going to be talking about? 

Greg Accardo: Just to let everyone know, Leff is from Florida State University. He’s a tenure professor in their department of marketing, primarily in sales and sales management. But Leff is a really impressive speaker. I’ve never been to a presentation where Leff was presenting on a topic where I wasn’t just amazed. I think part of that is Leff has a big presence in the consulting world, and he is able to gather all that real-world knowledge and bring it into the academic world, making it part of his research. But he’s always finding these new things, and they’re just amazing. It’s like, why didn’t I think about that? Obviously, it made all the sense in the world to put him at the top of the bill on this and make him the keynote, because again, he was the catalyst of this. I still remember Leff’s presentation years ago about what has AI done to the buying process? Are we even looking at that? That’s been a few years, so I think Leff has got a lot of meat to put on the bone for that with all the research he’s been doing. 

Fred Diamond: Speaking of research, the next topic is going to be Dan Rice. He’s going to be covering The Salesforce-Customer Interaction: Modern Perspectives from Consumer Behavior Research. University, academia, I’m excited. Can you give us some insights into what type of research he’s going to be presenting? 

Greg Accardo: Dan is a colleague of mine here at LSU. Dan is also the director of the Behavioral Research Lab here in the College of Business. Part of that lab is Dan has some really advanced tools for eye tracking, facial recognition. We have technology in there where students go in to do experiments, and you can watch a video and it tracks the muscles in your face with a trend chart to see what parts of that video are positive or negative. Dan’s got some really unbelievable research that he’s been doing recently in the consumer behavior world that really fits into this whole theme about what buyers are seeing and what are they thinking. Part of what we’re going to do with Dan, Dan may even bring his technology and do a demonstration for people, where they’d look at a picture and see the heat map, where their eyes track on the picture. But Dan’s going to bring some insights on what are the modern buyers looking at? What are they thinking about? What’s motivating them? This is going to fit in really nicely with this theme, is that if you’re a seller and you want to get into the mindset of buyers, this is going to be something you’re going to want to walk away with. 

Fred Diamond: Actually, we’ve worked with some companies that have created that type of technology that tracks it. It’s just fascinating. It gives you other angles on how do you engage? As we talk a lot on the Office Hours and the Sales Game Changers Podcast, everything’s about engagement. We’re doing today’s interview in early February of 2026, engagement’s gotten harder. Not just because of AI. The pandemic has shifted so many things. Most of our engagement now is over Zoom and over web-type technology, and there’s only so many things. A lot of sales professionals who were successful in the ‘80s and ‘90s that are still working, early 2000s, they miss the personal interaction. Being with a customer, there’s so much more you can gather. You could see movement, etc., you could see various signs, and that technology we’ve gotten demonstrations of, and it may not be exactly what he’s doing, but it’s similar concepts. It’s absolutely mind blowing some of the things you can discover. 

You’re then going to be winding down the event, the last presentation is with our friend Howard Dover, who also has been a guest on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. He’s covering The End of Spray-and-Pray Outbound: How Precision, Relevance, and AI Are Redefining Go-To-Market. By the way, I want to applaud you for having your agenda set two months ahead. I’ve gone to conferences where it’s completely different, or there’s a lot of TBHs here. Kudos to you for filling this out. How’s Howard going to wrap things up for us? 

Greg Accardo: Howard’s been a mentor of mine since the beginning. We’re great friends. We visit regularly. In case you didn’t know, or your audience doesn’t know, Howard’s got a great book out. It’s called The Sales Innovation Paradox. Highly recommend, anybody in sales or sales leadership, more importantly, should get a copy of that book and read it. But Howard’s at UT Dallas and he’s been at our event before. This is right up Howard’s wheelhouse. Howard comes to this from a perspective as a technologist. Howard understands the benefits of technology, but also understands the limits of technology, and how technology can be great in the sales world, but it can be damaging if it’s misused or overused. I think Howard’s going to turn this around and try to let sellers take a different perspective to study what technologies are being used on the other side of the table from you and how is that putting you either at advantage or at a disadvantage? 

If it’s a disadvantage, maybe you need to adjust. You need to change. If you keep going the way you’re going, this situation is never going to improve itself for us as sellers. I think as sellers, it’s imperative for us to always be cognizant of what’s going on with our customers and our prospects. How are things changing in their world? If we’re not changing and adapting and evolving to make this alignment possible, we’re never going to reach the numbers we want to reach. There’s working hard and working smart. Howard’s the perfect candidate to come in to tie all this together at end of the day. Then at the end of this, when we’re done with Howard, then we’re going to have a discussion panel. What I’m working on now is bringing in some head of procurement and buyers in the local market to come. I’ve got a few who have committed, but have them sit and take questions from the audience based on all the presentations about what they’re actually doing as it relates to these presentations that everyone just heard. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great. We’ve done a couple of shows on the Sales Game Changers Podcast where we’ve had customers, CIOs, CTOs, and they talked about things that are most important to them, and those shows were always great. Really understanding what do they need. I remember I interviewed a CIO on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, and I asked him, “What do you want from sales professionals who call on you?” I expected he was going to say a 10-year roadmap. He said, “Just help me understand how to navigate your company.” How do we get an invoice through? How do we get a customer support request through? That’s going to be a great way to wrap things up. 

We like to end every Sales Game Changers Podcast with an action step. In the beginning of the show, you gave us a lot of good information. You’re going to be presenting great information at the symposium. For people who are just listening or reading the transcript, what is an action step, something specific that you as a sales educator would like to get across to either sales professionals or people who are already in sales, or students, to help them take their sales career to the next level? 

Greg Accardo: There’s so much that I can cover with that, but I can boil it down to this, and this is the same conversation I’ll have with my students. I say, your key to success in sales is that you need to strive and really work hard to understand your customer’s business, even better than they do. It’s not so much that you’re just bringing them a solution to a problem. You need to become a resource also. That’s what separates you from your competitors, because all the products are really good, but what makes you different? That difference needs to be that you are a resource that they can rely on for advice, help, and information. 

Fred Diamond: That is a great bit of advice. I love that. It goes to a lot of your theme with AI. The customer can feel that they’ve gotten everything they need from AI and from the internet, which obviously aggregates it. How do you as a sales professional make yourself distinct? How do you separate yourself from the competition? It’s exactly what you just said. It’s giving your customer some insights on where the world’s going to be in a year from now as it relates to what they’re doing. Like you’re in estate capital, how can they serve the government customer that needs to serve the citizen with whatever it might be? If they’re in financial services, how can they look out to where customers need to be a year from now, two years from now? If it’s in selling entertainment, where are customers going? How are they going to be spending their dollars? Those kinds of things. 

The sales professionals now who are distinguishing themselves are the ones who are coming with those conversations. Like you just said, the customer could find out whatever they need about any product. When I was at Apple Computer, we used to do two days of product roadmap. A customer can type into their GPT, what’s Apple’s Roadmap for the next 10 years? 30 seconds later, there it is. How can you help them understand how they can serve? 

Once again, congratulations. Look forward to having you have a full day at the symposium. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. We have Brian Collins, Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. Brian, even more excited, you are the 2026 Institute for Effective Professional Selling College Sales Educator of the Year. That is going to be presented to you on April 29th. It’s going to be at the 16th annual IEPS Sales Excellence Awards. Just as a quick notification, we also give out an award at that event called the Jay Nussbaum Rising Sales Star Award. We’re excited, one of your former students, Kevin Riley, is going to be the recipient of that. It’s a great day of celebrating Virginia Tech, you, the program that you’ve developed. How do you feel about being the first College Sales Educator of the Year recipient from the IEPS? 

Brian Collins: Great question. Very humbling. I know when we first met and we were talking about that, to be considered for something like that or for such a prestigious award with all the sales professors that are around the country, and people that I know, and mentors that I’ve had, and people that I’ve worked with, really, really humbling and very thankful that you considered me for that. 

Fred Diamond: We’ve gotten to know a lot of the professors who are running programs associated with the University Sales Center Alliance. I know you’ve been very involved in that organization and some of the committees. This is the first year we’re giving out that award. It just made sense because at the IEPS, we’re spending a lot of time with universities that have these programs, like we’re going to be talking about, to prepare young adults, your students for careers in professional selling, and at great companies, B2B, some cases B2G, business to government. Some cases, I guess it might be more corporate B2C, if you will, but there’s just a lot of synergy with what we do with the IEPS and the work that you’re doing to prepare these young adults for great jobs. 

I know one of the ways we got originally attracted to you, or got to know you, was one of our corporate partners, Cvent, Darrell Gehrt at Cvent has been a big supporter of yours. I believe he was your board of directors’ president at one point. He had been talking for years about the great work that you’ve been doing at Virginia Tech. 

I’m the author of Insights for Sales Game Changers. We frequently do programs with sales organizations, not just new sales professionals, but at Cvent, we would talk to a lot of the young sales professionals. I would sign my book and I would say, “Where’d you go to school?” 

“I went to Virginia Tech. My name is Bill.” 

“Thanks, Bill. Hi, what’s your name? Where’d you go to school?” 

“I’m Mary. I went to Virginia Tech.” 

“Okay. Hi, Mary,” blah, blah, I sign the book. “Hey, what’s your name?” 

“My name is Jared. I went to Virginia Tech,” and Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech, and not just Cvent, but so many companies in the Northern Virginia and the D.C. business community. 

Tell us a little more about yourself. Give us some insights into your journey to Virginia Tech. Like I mentioned, you’re also the director of the Sales Center at Virginia Tech. Tell us what that entails. 

Brian Collins: To start, I am a Hokie. I graduated from Virginia Tech years ago with a BS in finance and a minor in English and an MBA in finance. I’m definitely a Hokie born and bred, was 23 years or so in the real world, mergers and acquisitions, sales, national sales, all of those types of things, and had an opportunity to come back to Virginia Tech to take over the program. I was on a couple of different boards at that time, president of a couple of different boards, and they called me and said, “Hey, we need somebody to help us with the program. Can you take it over? The professor that was here, unfortunately, had to exit.” 

I thought that was going to be a one-year thing, and that was 11 years ago. Time flies. I literally thought it was going to be one thing I would just come and help out for the year and go back into industry, and I loved it. It’s something that going through and understanding where the kids are learning, how they’re learning, how they can use that to better themselves, to get good jobs, to do all those things, my priorities changed. My priorities really changed from going out and grabbing that next deal to coming back and giving back to my university and giving back to the students that are here. 

As director of the sales program, I’m responsible for running all the curriculum to responsible for doing everything with our sponsors. You mentioned Cvent. They’ve been with us, one of the few that have been with us through the beginning. There are a couple others out there, PepsiCo, memoryBlue, just to name a few that have been around since we started, and helped us build this program. It’s not just me. We get a lot of feedback from our sponsors. They keep us up to date. They tell us, “Hey, we’re seeing this in the industry, maybe you should make some changes to your curriculum or think about it.” We all discuss it and we all look at it. If it’s a good thing, then we go do it. 

The director part was more about building the program, building out the sponsors, taking care of everything. In the last 11 years we’ve done that. Now we’re growing to do more things and coming into the future. 

Fred Diamond: You very kindly had me come down a couple of times to do some book signings. It was great to see blue chip companies, Home Depot, PepsiCo, Cvent, CoStar. It’s a great list of companies that you’ve forged relationships with, and these are big companies. These are global brands, obviously. It was great to see the interaction when I’d been down there a couple of times at the career fair with the young adults who were looking to grow. 

Actually, one of the cool things too is a number of your students come from this area. I’m based in Northern Virginia, right outside of D.C., and it was fun. Some of the students came up to me and said, “My dad is a member of the IEPS, or has come to your events, Fred, over the years.” We’re more corporate-focused right now, and a couple of them I’ve linked into. It’s nice whenever I’ll post, I’ll see one of your students comment or like. It’s the ties between what you’ve done in the business community. You’re amazing. 

You mentioned curriculum. Give us a little more insight into your curriculum. Maybe some of the classes you offer. Do you offer a major or a minor or certificate? Tell us about that. 

Brian Collins: That’s a great question, because a lot of the sales programs are very different across the country. We started as a minor and have been a minor for the last 10 and a half years. That also entails concentrations as well. Classes that you take are beginning sales, principles of selling, is what we call it, where you just start learning about B2B sales. Then we have the more senior level, which is usually what I teach, strategic sales force management, which is how you manage your sales folks. 

Then advanced professional sales, which is, for those people that are sales out there, a lot of us are listening to this, it’s basically a role play class. We take them through real live role plays that are from our sponsors, things that have happened or things that are happening, and they go through and they compete. Both of my classes are competitive classes. They’re competing for micro scholarships in amounts of 1,500, 1,000, and 750. It’s actually just like the real world, we try to incent them on doing well and doing better. 

Very excited to say that we were just approved to be a major. As of 2026 in the fall, Virginia Tech will have a professional sales major, one of probably less than 10 universities that I know of across the country that have a full major under marketing and professional sales to go forward. You’ll still be able to get the minor if you’re outside of the school of business, but hopefully those people in the school of business will now either double major, or if they’re in marketing, choose the professional sales as their focus. 

Fred Diamond: That is great. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the universities at the University Sales Center Alliance. One of my little favorite things to do is when I talk to someone new about this, I’ll say, “How many universities in North America do you think have a sales major, minor, or certificate?” The number is probably 70 that have something like that. It’s great to see Virginia Tech coming out with the major in September of 2026. 

I’m just curious. You mentioned they came after you about 11 years ago and said, “Brian, we want to help you create this program.” Give a little bit of insight into how your program fits in with the rest of the university. Obviously, you’re inside the Pamplin School, so how does it fit in there? Then how does it fit in overall? Do people know that there’s an official sales program, professional selling program? Give us some insights into that. 

Brian Collins: Do they know is a great question. Actually, one of the things that we require our students to do is to go tell people. It’s actually one of the things that we, in my strategic sales force class, they have something called spread the word. They are required to call up professors that are at Virginia Tech and get time on their schedule, go into their class, and present on the professional sales program. The way we run this is any major can declare a minor. From that perspective, we have a number of different disciplines that come in. That allows us to go tell that story in a lot of different places. 

Working into Pamplin, Pamplin has been a great place to try to be innovative. They’ve allowed us to take that lead. Both previous Dean Sumichrast and our current Dean Sarker, have both allowed us to be that cutting edge part of the school and try things out. You were asking a little bit about the curriculum. One of the things we also do is everybody that goes through our program, every student, comes out with at least 10 certifications. Those are certifications in things like HubSpot, SmartBox, Salesforce.com, Clay, AI. Lots of different things that we do on that side that Virginia Tech is now saying, “Hey, that was pretty cool. We should do that too.” We’ve done internships, things like that, and now Virginia Tech is going to be requiring us going forward and starting with the incoming class of 2026. 

Seeing those things come to fruition across the campus have been pretty neat. To be able to be a part of that and to have some runway to allow us to make those decisions. Fitting into Pamplin has been wonderful. We get a lot of support. We’re very lucky. Sales, as everyone, especially on this podcast, knows, permeates all. If you’re a computer science major, if you’re an engineer, if you’re a chemistry major, ultimately sales are what’s going to hide to keep your job and create that income. It’s nice having students from all those backgrounds that come in and take the classes. 

Fred Diamond: I love that spread the word idea. It reminds me word of mouth. But I’ve said for years that the best sales person in any company is the receptionist. Obviously, now with voice mail and stuff, it’s easier to get past that person, but everyone’s in sales. Everyone needs to understand what the company does. Having that legion of students out there spreading the word, that’s a brilliant idea. 

Back to your students. What are some of the things that they want to learn? You just mentioned 10 certifications. I didn’t know about that. That’s great to hear. One of the words we use for sales professionals who are exceptional is curiosity. What do they want to learn? What are they curious about? Give us some insights. Related to that, what are some of the skill sets that you emphasize that you believe that they need to be good at? 

Brian Collins: Thinking about what we try to do and what we try to give them as tools in your tool belt, if you will, is trying to work with them on communication skills, I think is a big thing for them. One of the things that’s hard is these things right here, phones and our computers. The generation that we have now is bombarded with technology. How do we step back and teach them the communication part? All good salespeople know you got to listen. That’s one of the first things we have to do, is ask good questions and be quiet and listen. But that’s hard sometimes to teach that because that’s not skill sets necessarily that they’ve learned over the time that they’ve gone to school and things like that, especially in the COVID years and things, which we’re now getting beyond. But that definitely took an effect on that, of how do you teach those skill sets of business? 

We focus on B2B sales at Virginia Tech. Nothing wrong with B2C sales. It’s fantastic. We just choose to focus on B2B. In those conversations, you’ve got to learn how to build trust. You’ve got to learn how to ask good questions. You got to learn how to make a good discovery call, how to listen. The very first thing I ever tell my students when they walk in is it’s not about you, it’s about them. It’s about your client. They don’t care if you need to hit your quota. That’s not on their radar. Their radar is they have issues and if you could help them with those issues and find out what they are, hopefully you’re successful. 

Being inquisitive, I think your curiosity is definitely something that’s there, teaching them how to ask those questions, helping them understand that you’re not going to sell every single day. Maybe you will, but more than likely, it’s going to take you a little bit of time to build that relationship. That’s really what this is all about. People buy from people they like. Right now we can all go on the internet and we can find 20 companies that sell the same thing. But if we can find that individual that we deal with that we really like and that we have a good relationship with and we trust, we’re more likely to buy from them than we are from someone else. 

Teaching those skill sets, I think are things that students thrive. They don’t really have, they embrace, they go through. Our students are very coachable. I think from that standpoint, they’re thirsty to learn. Giving them something new and challenging them, they really step up. I’m very lucky I have great students. 

Fred Diamond: I recently coached a student, not at Virginia Tech, at a different school. She said, “How do I make it through the day when people keep saying no?” I said, “You know what? Learn why they’re saying no and be happy when you get a yes. Then figure out, how do I get more yeses?” Because as we know, especially now, it’s harder to get through. It’s hard to get in the door because of security, and people are working not necessarily at offices anymore. You got to be creative. You got to think things through. You got to understand the value that you’re bringing. A lot of the skills that you’re teaching these young adults is so critical for success. 

Brian, we touched on your relationship with corporate sponsors a couple of times. What do they want? Why would a company invest in being a sponsor at a program like Virginia Tech? What kind of return do they want to see from this? What do you tell them that they may not know? 

Brian Collins: In looking at the program and looking at when we first started to set it up, I’m a finance person by trade. Good or bad, I look through the lens of finance, and ROI was extremely important to me. What is the return on investment? That’s a really good question that you posed. We set up things and the reason why we wanted to be for them is things like having their own recruiting day. Rather than going to a large recruiting event that has 3,000 people at it, we can pare that down to one that has 300 that all students want to be a salesman. 

It allows them to cut through a lot of the, I don’t want to say noise, but a lot of the things that are out there, and get to the true students who are studying that and going through. Our statistics show that our kids ramp up 50% faster. When they go into a job, they stay 100% longer. If you’re thinking about, “Hey, I’ve got to spend all this money on training in the first year and things,” one, you’re not going to spend as much because our kids are going to be ready to go. Two, they’re going to be producing for you for a longer time period. An ROI for most of our sponsors is one. They hire one and they’re already way ahead compared to what they’re paying us for those particular students. 

I think two, the other part of that is they get to come into class. The only way to come into our class and to get in front of our students is if you are a sponsor. There are special events that the only way you’re allowed to be at those events is if you’re that. That constant of getting students from the time they’re sophomores all the way up through their senior year, getting familiar with the companies, that also helps because the students know the company. By the time they go to work for Gartner, they know who Gartner is and they know what Gartner does. That’s a big positive as well for the companies, the sharing of the culture. 

Also, they get a lot of interns out of it, and internships in sophomore and junior years. They get to see what that student looks like, how they approach business, all of those things, and see that it’s a fit, maybe culturally or personally, whatever. You have a lot less failure. All of that adds into that ROI of, “I’m going to spend a little bit of money up front, but on the back end, I’m going to be able to go through and see kids that are going to stay long or produce for me quicker. I get my money back really fast.” 

I think the last item I’ll leave with at is also the input on the program. We just recently, actually this past Friday, we had our sales board meeting. One of the things we always do is, tell us what you’re seeing. That’s a lot, where we mentioned certifications earlier, that’s where that idea came from. We have a sales technology class, and that whole class, that whole certification came from our board who said, “Hey, you’re graduating great kids. They’re fantastic. They need more knowledge of CRM. They need more knowledge on how to go through and manage a pipeline. They need to know all that kind of stuff before they come to us.” We said, “Sounds great. Let’s figure out how to do it.” That’s where a lot of those certifications come from. They get to see the kids. They get to interview them. They get special recruiting. They also get input to the program. All those things add up to an ROI for them. 

Fred Diamond: I want to follow up on that last thing that you just said. That’s great that you’re getting the corporate input and the corporations are saying they need to be more tech ready and more tech savvy on some of the tools that they’re going to be using out there. Just one thing I want to highlight is the whole concept of retention. Every corporate sponsor that I’ve spoken to, not just Virginia Tech, but they know that they’re getting students, first of all, who have been educated on how to sell. 

Now, of course, once you’re out in the real world and one of the things which I’m going to ask you about here is, the world’s moving fast. Obviously, AI, etc., which we’re going to talk about here in a second. They need to learn how to be flexible and adjustable and agile and all those kinds of things. But the students who are coming out of these programs like Virginia Tech and a lot of the other USCA schools, they’re three years ahead, five years maybe, of a new hire, and they want to be in sales. It’s not like, “Well, I heard I can make a lot of money. I’m a chemistry major.” They have chosen because they’ve seen a parent or a relative, where they’ve gone to Virginia Tech and somehow the word was spread that got them to take a look at a class or a career fair. It’s huge value, which is why we’re continuing to do these. 

I’m just curious, what are some of the big trends right now? We talk a lot about the trends in professional selling, obviously with AI and more and more digital type of engagement happening. Tell us a little bit about what are some of the main trends you’re seeing, especially as you’re getting ready to launch a major. Just hit on maybe one or two, Brian. 

Brian Collins: I think AI is definitely one that’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue right now. It’s hard to avoid. We’ve chosen, in our sales program, to embrace that. There are some universities and some professors who will say, “I want them to ignore AI. It’s not allowed in my class. We’re not going to do that.” We don’t do that in sales. We view it as a way to work smarter, not harder. That process of going through, we make sure our kids are documenting what they’re doing. But from the standpoint of going out and making an email as something for a role play, they’ve got to contact a client that we’re playing. 

Create your email and then put it into Copilot, Chat, whatever you want, see what that comes back with. Does it give you any ideas that maybe you didn’t know, or some things that were tweaks that were good? It doesn’t mean you use that as the sole provider, but it does mean that you can use it for support and maybe make your message more targeted and better received. You mentioned earlier, people may not be in their offices, it may not be easy to get in touch with them. It’s a whole lot harder maybe now than it used to be. How can we target those things that makes it about them, that makes them want to respond? Well, there’s some things out there that can help you with that. Why not use it? 

When we talk to our sponsors, a lot of them are the same. They’re using that to make it more targeted and to get into those areas. Using things like LinkedIn and going through some of their products that a lot of the companies use, and being very targeted and special with the way you do that. I think AI is definitely going to make a change. I’m looking and I don’t know. I could be way wrong on this, and nobody really knows, I’m wondering how long the SDR position will be like it is now. If you have a computer, just for example, who will call 24 hours a day, never get sick, never cares about saying no, never cares, it’s just dialing the next number to get you that appointment, potentially to me, that means SDRs, we may need fewer. But the good news is, I think the BDRs, we need more, because they’re going to have more to follow up on. That depends on your company, what you use. In our world, SDRs are usually the ones generating some of those initial contexts. BDRs are usually the ones that are trying to close it. 

I think that you’re going to see a change too. Again, I may be wrong, this may be way in the future, but as quickly as things are happening, as prices come down, to be able to afford that, I think you’ll see more and more people think about investing in that world. I may be naive, I don’t think you’re ever in the B2B world going to take away the human factor. I think people like to deal with people and I think, ultimately, you’re going to still have people involved in that process. I think it’s just going to change. I think it’s just going to modify and become a little bit different. You know what? Good news about salespeople, we all know what change is. Change happens every day. If there’s anybody equipped to handle that, it’s probably sales. I’m not really worried about our students adapting. I’m just trying to figure out what’s coming. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, Brian, great stuff. Congratulations on the success of the program. Give us a final thought, something specific for us to put into play, perhaps, to wind down today’s show. 

Brian Collins: As you look at your business, go back through and really be honest with yourself. One of the things that I always tried to do when I was managing salespeople, and then also when I was managing my own pipeline, too, is spend the time where you’re going to be most beneficial. Sometimes we try to leave things in thinking they’re going to happen and knowing really in the back of our mind that they aren’t. Make the decision, move forward, save yourself some time. The one thing that we all don’t have is time. If we’re spending our time on the wrong things, it’s not going to help you in your career.  

That also, too, as your halftime, which is few and far between, get yourself some more education, and I don’t necessarily mean going to Virginia Tech. We’d love to have you, but podcasts, things like that. I’ll give a plug right now for you. I use your podcasts in my class. Our students, I’ll have them listen to sales professionals and listen to what their experience has been and how they’ve gone through. I’ve done that for years now. It’s learning from others and taking that in, and I think anytime you can do that. It could be a continuous learner, manage your pipeline, and do the best you can. You’re going to have good days and bad days, we all know that, hopefully you have more good ones. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely, keep moving forward. All right. Brian Collins, Virginia Tech. Thank you so much. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 824: College Sales Educator of the Year Brian Collins Prepares Students for Elite Sales Careers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is a Marketing and Selling Effectiveness sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.

FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast!

Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!

Find Kelli on LinkedIn. 

KELLI’S TIP: “In complex markets, if you win the narrative early, you win the contract later. Marketing doesn’t close the deal, but it shapes the conditions for it long before the opportunity appears.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Julie Murphy, it’s great to have you back. It’s great to be doing another Marketing and Selling Effectiveness show. Sage Communications is a Selling Essentials Marketplace Partner of the IEPS. We get a lot of people reaching out to us, looking for recommendations for sales resources, and we’re always thrilled to recommend Sage Communications. 

Julie Murphy: Thank you for that. We really appreciate. As you know, Sage is a full service PR marketing firm and we love working with IEPS and supporting all of your events because it’s so important to align sales and marketing, which is what this podcast is all about. I’m really excited because we have a fantastic guest today, Kelli Furrer, who I’ve known for many years. Many companies keep the sales and marketing functions separate, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to start this podcast, to really break down those barriers. 

In this case, with Kelli, it’s my great pleasure to welcome her because she is both the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Revenue Officer at Slingshot. Slingshot is one of those companies that is at the leading edge of that, of understanding how important it is, where marketing can impact the sales pipeline and function. Before Slingshot, Kelli was at Dell. She’s a perfect guest to have on our podcast to talk about marketing and sales alignment. Welcome, Kelli. We’re excited to have you. 

Kelli Furrer: Thanks, Julie. I’m super excited to be here. Fred, it’s nice to be on a podcast with you. 

Fred Diamond: It’s great to talk to you. Like Julie said, we do this particular sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast because it’s just so critical for marketing and the selling organizations to align together. There’s not as much time, customers are more demanding. Sales and marketing are getting more involved at earlier places and different places through the sales process. I’m excited to hear some of your perspective. 

To get us started, tell us a little bit about Slingshot Aerospace. I’m just curious, you made the shift from Dell to this industry. What is it about the space and the government technology sectors, where you spend a lot of your career, that inspires you? 

Kelli Furrer: When my friends ask me, they say, “You’re working for a space company? What does that mean?” I start with a simple explanation, which is that Slingshot Aerospace is a leader in AI-powered solutions for satellite tracking, space traffic coordination, and space modeling and simulation. In even more simple terms, I say, we really help customers understand what’s happening in orbit. We use our own system of sensors that are placed in locations around the world, take millions of images, and put advanced AI on top of that so that we can track those satellites and debris as they’re rotating around the Earth to predict potential collisions and simulate scenarios really before they happen so that operators can make smart, fast decisions in a very crowded environment. 

Once you get a little bit into the space of space, I think that what I’m really inspired by is really building a domain that’s still being defined. Space science and technology are really smashing together here, and space is no longer just about exploration. It’s infrastructure, which is the world that I come from. It’s economic and it’s strategic. We’re at this inflection point where a small number of companies will shape how this domain operates for decades going forward. Being part of building that responsibly, intelligently, and at scale is incredibly motivating and fun for me. 

Julie Murphy: Slingshot is growing so quickly, and as you mentioned, the space industry is exploding right now. When you’re in a high-growth environment like that, I’m curious, because you’re one of the few executives that lead both marketing and sales within an organization, and those two teams haven’t always played nice with each other in the past, but are really so critical to each other’s success. I’m curious how you’ve seen that relationship between marketing and sales evolve through the years. 

Kelli Furrer: You and I have known each other for a long time, and you know that my career has lived at the intersection of sales and marketing. I’ve always believed that marketing exists to make sales jobs easier by building trust and clarity and demand before a rep ever gets on the phone or shows up at an event. Wearing both the CRO and the CMO hat isn’t really about holding the two titles. It’s really about owning the entire front-end system of our business so we can coordinate it from end to end. With that I say, marketing ensures that our positioning maps the real customer priorities, the actual problems they’re funded and they’re on mission to solve. Then revenue leadership ensures that we’re accessible through the right buying pathways. 

We were talking about Carahsoft, that is a great buying pathway for the US government. Whether that’s enterprise procurement, channel partnerships, marketplace models, or long cycle bespoke contracting environments, but together we design the revenue model to support the platform at scale, not just one program at a time. Those two things living together, what’s changed over the years is that the line between sales and marketing has become much more data driven and systems oriented than it was 15 years ago, when we were doing this earlier in our careers. 

It’s no longer marketing generates leads in a stove pipe and then sales closes the leads. It’s a shared revenue engine and messaging, product packaging, pricing, enablement, customer expansion, all of those things have to align. In a small business like Slingshot, we really have to be very efficient about how we bring them together, and not just a small business, but a complex tech market, especially where now we have AI, we have data platforms, and integrative systems. The story you tell, the way you sell, and the way you deliver, all of those things have to reinforce each other, and that is something that I talk about a lot, the Slingshot flywheel. If there’s a gap between the narrative and execution, the market sees it immediately, that alignment that we’re talking about here between sales and marketing, it is a structural requirement in today’s market. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s get a little more specific, a little more down in the weeds, if you will. How do you structure your team and your processes to ensure that marketing is enabling sales, and vice versa? Give us some of your insights into, like I said, in the weeds, at the ground level, what are some things that you’ve done that have helped this process happen that our listeners would see value from? 

Kelli Furrer: We’re still a relatively small team, so structure matters a lot in our environment. You don’t have the luxury of redundancy. Every function has to directly move the revenue needle. My belief is simple, sales and marketing shouldn’t operate as centralized silos, like we just talked about. The execution roles, which I consider to be field marketing, partner marketing, and enablement, they should be embedded with the sales regions. They need to know who the customers are, understand the buying dynamics, and really support specific revenue outcomes, not just campaigns. 

At our size, that also means really tight operating discipline, shared pipeline goals. I expect my marketers to know as much about the pipeline as I expect the sales people, because the fast feedback loops are so important. If we’re doing something in marketing that’s not helping a rep close or expand the account, then we need to adjust it really quickly. Marketing’s job isn’t just to generate and work on activity. It’s really to create leverage. We ask ourselves every day, with a small team, we have to be helping to create that leverage. Alignment for us is really the force multiplier. 

Julie Murphy: When you think about something like the type of work that Slingshot does, space domain awareness and AI and your sensor network, it’s pretty technical. How do you think the sales team should help the marketing team, specifically with messaging, in a space where it is technical, and what role does thought leadership play in really communicating and connecting with your customers? 

Kelli Furrer: In technical markets, the message is everything. You can lose people more quickly than you can probably win them over. Because every buying decision includes both business stakeholders and technical stakeholders, the messaging is really, really important. A lot of my sales team have engineering or very deep technical backgrounds, which is a huge advantage. They can absolutely nerd out on the space stuff and that credibility really matters. But the real skill is the translation. The message has to be simple enough that a non-technical buyer can remember it, repeat it, and explain it to someone else internally. 

I think there’s like 16 stakeholders involved in a buying decision today, because being able to repeat it internally, that’s how the decisions actually move forward. The story gets retold in a meeting you’re not in. We rely heavily on sales in the message development. They know what resonates, where people get stuck, and what language creates clarity versus confusion. That’s also where thought leadership plays a role, not as marketing fluff, but as a credibility tool. The best thought leadership makes that technical story accessible without dumbing it down. It gives both the engineer and the executive a way to say, “Yes, that’s the problem. Here’s why it matters,” and more importantly, “This is what we can do about it.” 

Fred Diamond: I’m curious if there’s any examples that come to mind of something specific, from a content side or a marketing side or awareness building side, that you could attribute to having helped make a deal happen? 

Kelli Furrer: I’ve been at Slingshot for about a year and a half now. I’d say a great example is our recent $27 million Space Force award to power their AI-driven training environment. For the past year and a half, two years before I even got to Slingshot, we’ve been building a simple thesis that in complex domains, more data wins. More data plus more compute leads to better decisions and better outcomes. We’ve consistently positioned our global sensor network. It’s what I talked to you about at the very beginning when I was describing Slingshot as the data advantage, and TALOS, which is our Thinking Agent for Logical Operations in Space, as the AI that turns that data into machine speed and action. 

Over time, that evolved into a bigger idea, which is AI native space training. Operators shouldn’t train against scripted scenarios. They should train against adaptive intelligent opponents powered by real data. That’s that real data coming off of our sensor network 24/7/365. When the US Space Force and the OTTI, the Operational Test and Training command opportunity emerged, the market already understood our worldview. We weren’t introducing a concept. We were executing on a thesis that we had been reinforcing for years. This became our first large prime contract, integrating alongside major industry players and delivering a platform level capability. That only happens when customers see you more as a vendor. Marketing didn’t close that deal, but it helped shape the conditions for it along the way, because what I believe is, in complex markets, if you win the narrative early, you win the contract later. 

Julie Murphy: Kelli, you’ve been a part of this business for a long time. I have a fun one for you. If there’s one marketing or sales buzzword that you’d be happy if you never saw again or would love to see retired, what would it be? 

Kelli Furrer: I don’t know that I need it to be retired or never say it again, because I do say it daily, but I think the buzzword today is AI powered. That is used everywhere. I also used it, but it’s become a blanket label that everybody uses. But real AI is not a marketing adjective. It’s a serious data science workload. At a technical level, what we’re talking about with AI powered, you’re talking about machine learning at scale, feature engineering, vector math, and models operating over data sets that are so large they can only be processed by machines and not by humans. It requires clean training data, compute infrastructure, evaluation loops, and continuous retraining. Those are disciplines we are deeply involved in every single day. 

When I say AI powered, it’s not a marketing adjective. It is the business that we are in and the output shouldn’t just be AI. The output should be measurable decision advantage, faster classification, better prediction using that data, higher confidence, and ultimately lower latency and more decision advantage. When a company says AI powered but can’t explain that data foundation, the model behavior, or what decision is improved by it, it’s usually just branding. For me, I put a second level threshold for, what do they really mean when they say AI powered? Because it is a very important word in today’s economy. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. Now that you’re answering it that way, I wasn’t sure what you were going to say is the buzzword, but it’s so commonly used that it doesn’t really take on the vastness of what true AI really does provide. It’s not just typing into Chat. There are so many things that can be utilized to form truly intense answers that are needed to project business and the world for that matter. It’s an eerie statement by me on this podcast, but I loved your answer there. 

Julie, this has been a great interview. Thanks for bringing Kelli on the show. Kelli, thank you so much for your insights. I know you’ve only been at Slingshot for a year and a half or so, but best of luck on your continued success there and for what you all are bringing to the marketplace and for all of your recent success. 

You’ve given us some great ideas here. Give us something specific, one action that our listeners should implement right now after listening to the show or reading the transcript. Something specific you recommend that they do. 

Kelli Furrer: Julie and I, we have this long-standing relationship, and she’s known me both as a salesperson and a marketer. If I could give one piece of advice, it would be this, early in your career, and I tell my kids this, intentionally curate cross-functional experience. If you want to be a great marketer, carry a sales bag first, sit in the discomfort of having a quota, learn what objections sound like in real time, understand how hard it is to move a deal forward, because it is hard to be a professional salesperson. If you want to be great in sales, spend time in marketing, learn positioning, learn how markets are shaped before a buyer ever even takes a meeting, understand pipeline build and messaging strategy. 

The best leaders I’ve seen aren’t deep in just one lane. They understand how the whole revenue system works together, and when you’ve lived in multiple functions, you can make better decisions, you build more empathy for your co-workers and your teammates and you can just simply move faster. I think the fastest way to level up your career is to go one function to the left or one function to the right and then back again, and really that’s going to do a lot to amplify results. 

Julie Murphy: That’s really great advice Kelli, and I also think it builds empathy, because we’re talking about when groups don’t collaborate as well. If one group is saying, this isn’t working for me, if you’ve been in their shoes before, you can better understand why and maybe how you can help fix the situation. I love that advice. That’s really good. 

Fred Diamond: Yeah, it’s very solid. Once again, Kelli Furrer, thank you so much. Julie’s been speaking about you for years, so it’s great that we can finally get you on the show and communicate your wisdom and your excellence. On behalf of Julie Murphy, my name is Fred Diamond. This is the Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 823: Break Down Sales and Marketing Silos to Drive Revenue with Kelli Furrer first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is a Women in Sales Leadership sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.

FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast!

Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!

Find Louise on LinkedIn. 

LOUISE’S TIP: “Bring your best self every time. If you’ve done everything you can, then the outcome isn’t failure, it’s just part of the journey.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Gina Stracuzzi: Louise McEvoy is the Senior Vice President Global Channel Sales at Keyfactor. Welcome, Louise. 

Louise McEvoy: Thank you, Gina. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I appreciate the invitation. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Tell us a little bit about yourself, and go in to some of the things that you do in your off time, but we’re going to dig deep into that as we speak further. Give us a little bit of you background and then well go from there. 

Louise McEvoy: I would say my brand is channel and cybersecurity. That’s where I’ve spent the majority of my career. I recently moved to Keyfactor, it’s a cybersecurity company focused on cryptographic risk. You think, what is that? It’s all quantum forward. If you want to talk quantum later, it’s a fascinating discussion. It’s also very, very scary. But we can set that aside for now. 

Spent the majority of my time in the channel with IBM and a number of big companies. I’ve just really enjoyed cybersecurtity. It’s a fascinating place to be. I didn’t realize you could have a career solely based on cyber and channel, but it’s possible and I’ve really enjoyed it. I moved just six months to Keyfactor and really had my eyes opened to the quantum space and just what’s coming and what we should be prepared for. It’s a fascinating discussion. 

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting to me that you used the word scary because you do a lot of public speaking, which is scary to people too, and your other little side hustle, exciting thing you do, is climb mountains. It seems that you have a predisposition to scary things and you take them on with a lot of enthusiasm. I love that. Before we go into the mountain climbing, just give us a brief synopsis of what quantum cybersecurity is. 

Louise McEvoy: People talk about cybersecurity about protecting their email, their endpoint devices like laptops, iPhones, etc. But beneath all of that are these certificates, public key infrastructure or cryptographic certificates. These certificates have been in place, those standards have been in place for years and years and years, decades even, and they haven’t quite changed or been updated. There are millions all over. In any one organization, you will have enormous amounts of certificates. 

As we get more and more into AI, and AI gets better and better, at some point, we’re going to hit this tipping point, and it’s going to be quantum. Quantum will be able to decrypt cryptography, or these public key infrastructure, the PKI. We need to update that so that everything that we have in this underlying layer is secure. Right now, everything that we do has these certificates from decades ago in places we don’t even know exist. We need to make sure that we have a cybersecurity layer on top of that. We offer that to our customers. 

People are thinking AI and cybersecurity, but they’re not quite seeing the bigger picture from what we’re seeing and talking to customers and partners, that this quantum forward mindset needs to be in place because there’s a risk involved if we don’t take care of what’s going to happen at quantum. Who knows when quantum breaks? I’ve been talking to a lot of thought leaders around this and we’re seeing it not in the next decade, but in the next few years. When quantum hits, when all these computers have gotten so, so smart and they can break these encryption codes, there’s a lot of information that will be out there for public consumption, lots of information. That includes public consumption that could be taken by threat actors, bad threat actors. What do they do with that data? What do they do with all the information? It could be a different world and we just need to be mindful that quantum is coming. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Color me scared now. 

Louise McEvoy: I don’t mean to scare you. It’s more about there’s preparation ahead. In the channel world, it means there’s a lot of opportunities for partners because we need to talk to our end customers about what quantum looks like. There’s enormous services engagements with everything that we’re doing. There’s a lot of opportunities, but we need to start now because eventually, we will get to the point where AI has gotten so smart we’re now looking at quantum computing. 

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s the next thing forward. My husband is cybersecurity as well. It’s an evolution. You’re absolutely right. There are ways to protect ourselves, but preparation is everything. 

Now that we’ve talked about the sales part of things and the work part of things, let’s talk about the really exciting stuff that you do. I know you have a public speaking company with your sister and you do a lot of public speaking, but before we talk about that, because it is what you talk about in those opportunities, that is the real exciting piece, and that is mountain climbing, but not just any mountain climbing. Tell us about what you do and how you got into it. 

Louise McEvoy: Thank you for thinking so much about that journey. I do high altitude mountaineering. A lot of people get confused that it might be rock climbing or it might be hiking, but it’s the high altitude. I’ve climbed the highest mountains in the world. If you name pretty much any mountain, I may have climbed it, including summiting Mount Everest in May of 2018. It started as a very, very different type of journey, and part of the speaking I do is that we’re all on a journey and sometimes bad things happen to really good people and that puts us on a journey that we may not have realized. 

I moved countries, I had a life change and I needed to break away. I started reading a book about Everest and it was fascinating. I didn’t know that people like me could go on these types of journeys, like climb high mountains, and I became fascinated with it. I made a promise to myself I’d one day see Everest. I saw Everest from base camp. I made a second promise, one day I would climb Everest. I spent the next 14 years climbing all over the world in pursuit of that goal so that I can get used to that high altitude, the training, the expeditions, different conditions, mountains, weather, and I made Everest on my first try. 

Since then, I’ve gone on to many more mountains and I’ve been asked to speak a lot about this and so it’s a little joint venture between my sister and I, she lives in Canada, I live in Southern California, really just to bring us closer so we get a chance to talk every day, week, whatever. It’s been very fulfilling. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s wonderful. You read a book, you got intrigued. You started doing high altitude climbing. Did it not strike you to start smaller to begin with? 

Louise McEvoy: I did start smaller. I did a trek to base camp at Mount Everest, which was a three-week journey. From there I decided I want to try something more. I climbed Mount Rainier, which was a little bit more technical. From there I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and then it just became something more and more and more and I just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and took lots of different climbing courses, technical courses, avalanche courses, wilderness first aid, just in pursuit of getting better and better and better at this passion of mine. 

I don’t even know if you’d call it a sport, but it’s definitely a passion. It’s something I wake up to every day and I’m excited to know what the next story in the news is around climbing and who’s doing what, and what the next goal is, and where the next trip will take me. It’s been very, very fulfilling and I would encourage anyone just to find that passion and it could be in some far-flung way that you never even expected. I didn’t grow up in any way in high altitude and it just became something that I got introduced to, from moving countries and not knowing anyone and someone suggested I read a book just as something to do that weekend, and from there it took off. I had no idea that journey was ahead of me. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That is so exciting. Let’s combine the two things that you do. I know you started, with a friend, you started a community of women in IT, I believe it was. Now you do retreats for these women in this community. The first question that came to my mind was, did you start this as an IT community and then it expanded into the climbing, or did you decide, these are women that could really benefit from pushing themselves and really trying something different? How did those two come together? 

Louise McEvoy: I firmly believe everyone’s on a journey and sometimes these journeys start in the most benign ways and ways you don’t even expect. I’ve been climbing for approximately 15 years, doing this high altitude climbing. An acquaintance of mine in the industry reached out to me and she heard me speak about Mount Everest and she said, “Do you want to go hiking sometime?” and I said, “Yes, of course.” We met months later, we didn’t know each other that well, and we started hiking together. 

From there, we did it a lot more and I introduced her to what’s called a 14er, which is a mountain over 14,000 feet. There are only mountains in four states in the U.S. over 14,000 feet, a 14er. We did a 14er together and it was her idea, she said, “Well, what if we invited other women to hike a 14er?” In my mind, “Who wants to hike a 14er? This is just my little world,” but I introduced her to that world and she said, “Let’s make this bigger. Let’s expand this to other women.” 

We invited women to join us on a long weekend in Breckenridge, Colorado. We hosted in a big house and we brought in a private chef and we had swag, and it was just a fun thing and we had nine women join us. Then we realized, “Wait, there might be other women who might want to join us,” and more women joined, and then the next year more women, and now we’re hosting teams 13, 14, and 15 in September. We’ve had already 12 teams of women and there’s approximately 12 to 16 women on each team, and we hike a mountain, non-technical, and we hike it over 14,000 feet. It’s a little oxygen, it’s a long day, it requires some training, and we do that together virtually. 

Then these women meet and they become friends and there’s great networking opportunities and just friendships that have been formed in ways I never expected. I sit back and I’m so proud of the women who come together, women who don’t know one another. They decide to go on this retreat and we all share a house and rooms. We had one of our teams last year who they bonded so well they wanted to, as a team, come back again this year, and these women didn’t know each other. Some come with friends and others just come alone, and they bonded so well, so quickly, so strong that they asked to have a trip just for them. We’ve set up a trip and there’ll be over 200 women who have come through this by the time this year is over, and so many interesting stories from this. I’m really proud of it. As my friend, Erin Figer, says, it’s a labor of love. It takes us some time to put this together but it’s something that is very fulfilling, nourishing, and we get a lot out of it as well. We have a college SheSummits14ers. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I did rock climbing once and I have a tremendous fear of heights, and I made the mistake of looking down. Now, I’ve done some hiking and climbing mountains, and I didn’t have that experience when I would hike a height necessarily, it was something about looking over and there’s nothing there. Do you find that people adhere to the situation pretty quickly, or do you have people who get up there and just find it really difficult? How does that work for most average humans? 

Louise McEvoy: It’s a mix. Some people really embrace that challenge and they don’t have that fear. We had one woman last year where we had a pretty narrow traverse on rocks and she was terrified, absolutely terrified. I’ve got a lot of experience in this and we handheld her through this narrow section. At the summit she was freaking out about how does she descend through this narrow section that was really tough for her. She started descending and she realized she’s already made it to the top, she’s just coming down, that’s the easy part, and she flew down and she was so proud of herself when she got back to the trailhead. She couldn’t believe she did it. She couldn’t believe she overcame that fear. It was wonderful to see that bright light in her and how she could conquer that so quickly. It took some effort, but she made it through and she was so proud of herself. We were all proud of her. 

When you get a community together who are proud of you for an accomplishment, it just feels good. We’re all very supportive of one another and people wait for each other. We just do whatever we can to make sure everyone is successful, because it’s a team. This isn’t an individual approach. It really is, let’s all make the summit as best as possible, and we go back to the house and we celebrate with lots of festivities. We have a number of those successes. 

I also think it’s a mindset too, and I talk about this, is when I’m climbing Everest, there’s a lot of scary things when you’re climbing, like climbing over those crevasses on those rickety ladders, but I also think you got to accept that fear. Once you do it often enough, you overcome it. “Okay, now I’ve done it.” Now it gets easier because you know you can overcome hard things. But if you don’t take that first step and you say, “No, I’m too afraid,” then you’re stalled. But if you’re like, “I’m going to try it, and I’m going to try it again, and I’m going to try it again,” before you know it, it becomes muscle memory and it’s no longer fearful. I try to use that in life in general, just, “Okay, it’s scary, but I know I can do it. Just step forward, just keep moving forward.” If I step back, then I’ll be stepping back in things. I try to use that mindset in everything I do. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I’ll make a generalization here that sometimes women tend to let their fears rule them. Fear of not being accepted, fear of sounding silly, or whatever the case is, whatever environment you’re in, you have those little voices that talk to you. Doing something like this and stepping far beyond that voice, that fear, that thing that holds you back has got to be incredibly liberating. 

Louise McEvoy: It is. When I first started mountaineering, it’s a very, very male-dominated sport. Kind of like our industry, channel sales, there’s a lot of men in the boardroom. It is a little intimidating. When I started mountaineering, it was hard. Sometimes I’m the only female in the team, so I get my own tent. The guys bond on their own because they’re together and there’s a different type of environment. 

One of the life lessons I learned when climbing Everest, we had nine people on that team. Out of the nine people, we had four women and five men. When we think about the numbers, you’d think most of the men are going to summit. No. In fact, all of the women summited and only two of the men summited. I say this because it’s not to say men or women are better or whatever. It’s that we’re different. Everyone’s different. We all have strengths in different ways. When we think about Everest, it’s an endurance mountain versus a strength mountain, because you’re going for very, very long periods of time. Women are really good at endurance. Men are really good at strength. Where there is a mountain that requires you to carry heavy, heavy gear, sometimes the men will be stronger there. But in the endurance mountains, the women are stronger. 

I always try to make that distinction. We all have a strength that may not be visible, but we do have it, and not to judge people and not to look at anyone different. When it comes to the SheSummits14ers, it’s a community of women. There’s a different mindset and we all want to make it to the top. We all want to do it together versus individually. We come together as a team, we go together as a team, we look to summit as a team. It’s a different type of feeling and it’s not about rushing to the top. It’s about getting there together and we want that team picture, we want everyone to succeed. It really is a supportive environment in that way and it just makes the difference when we’re all in it together. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I can appreciate the difference in mindsets. Sometimes people do things just for the glory of it. From what you’re explaining, for most of the women that go on your retreats, it’s the journey. It’s the process of overcoming fear, of doing something as a group, for the experience of it, not for the glory of it necessarily. 

Louise McEvoy: Sometimes glory is okay. That’s fine. But in this environment, it’s about supporting each other, becoming friends, and growing together and doing hard things together. I think it’s a lot more satisfying when you’re doing it with someone else, with your team, versus, “I made it to the top and nobody else did.” It’s a lot more fun when you’re in it together. You support one another. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s really awesome. We will make sure that in the show notes, and when we post this, that people know how to reach out to you, because I’m sure there will be other women that will want to join. We have a lot of women in IT in our group, and sales, not that it’s necessarily limited to those. 

Louise McEvoy: We have people who bring their friends and they may not be in IT. It’s moms who might be needing something different, or someone outside of IT who just wants to go on a retreat weekend. It’s not limited to women in IT. We started there, and it’s grown, but our main connections are women in IT, but it’s definitely not limited to them. It’s just a retreat for women. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Most of the women that listen to this are in sales and they’re in IT sales, so it’ll be a natural connection, but hopefully they’ll share it with their friends and bring them along too. 

One of the questions that came to mind too is, how does all of this translate into how you approach sales? Has it changed your approach to it or your thought process about winning? Because it’s all about winning those big contracts and winning the sale. How has this impacted that? 

Louise McEvoy: That’s a good question and I think I’m still learning every day. It’s not like I’ve got this fixed mindset and therefore this is how I’m going to do it. I really look to surround myself with people who have a growth mindset and I want to have that as well. I do think what the lessons from the mountain have taught me is that I can do hard things, I can take risks. I have to set myself up and allow failure to happen, but know that I can go back and try again. 

Sometimes the best reward is from things that have been hard and things that I’ve had to learn. Sometimes setbacks are also a teaching moment. I recognize that. When I’m in an environment at work, I try to bring my best self. When I’m training for a mountain, I am not going to not summit because I haven’t trained enough. I am absolutely at my best capacity. It’s something else that has not allowed me to summit, whether it be the weather or conditions on the mountain. I try to take that mindset with everything I do. 

In business, I am the best I can be. It’s some other extenuating factor that allows me not to have that success at that moment in time. That’s okay as long as I bring my best self to the business, to our partners, to our customers, it’s only so much you can do. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s true. It’s a great mindset too. That makes me think of one other question that came to mind. I noticed that you have a lot of speaking engagements, and you mentioned like Boy Scouts and school groups and what have you. I was wondering, what message do you deliver to them? Both as a sales professional, do you push the industry too? Like, “You should think about sales.” Also, from the climbing piece, what do you share with them? 

Louise McEvoy: Interesting. It just depends on the audience. I look at the audience and what message that people want me to deliver to them. If it’s a women’s group, it could be around women in the boardroom and we can do hard things. If it’s schools, I look at what’s the main message that they’re looking for. I present to a kinesiology department at a university, so it’s the effects of the body on high altitude. It may not always have that sales message in it. It might just be the motivation, the inspiration, things like you get out of bed every day and you have that mindset, put two feet on the ground and go, “Okay, I’m going to reach my Everest today.” What is your Everest? It doesn’t have to be a mountain. It could be getting that next job, getting that house, something. What’s your Everest and how are you going to get there? 

When I talk to industries, schools, community groups, I always say, “What is it that you’re trying to reach and how do you get there?” Sometimes it’s a mindset. You have to do hard things. You have to train, you have to plan. You’re going to have setbacks. How do you get over setbacks? I really try to break through all that. There’s so many lessons that I’ve learned from the mountain. Sometimes there’s a setback, you have to go back down to base camp, but that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. You can still go up again. You have to read your environment. You’re on the mountain, you have to read the weather, the snow conditions, the team, who’s sick, who isn’t, and figure out a different plan. 

I try to get them motivated in different ways and it really is just the audience and what is it that they’re looking to accomplish? If I look at the Boy Scouts, when they were trying to summit Mount Whitney in California, “What does your training look like and what are you going to do when you hit hard times and hard things?” Those breakthrough moments and what I did to break through and reach that summit. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Those are good lessons. I’m sure, as you say, you have a wealth of them across a number of audiences. That’s really fantastic. Tell us a little bit about your next big challenge. 

Louise McEvoy: That’s my Achilles heel. I sigh heavily. I’m trying to finish what’s called the Seven Summits, which is the highest mountain on every continent. When I started off climbing, I had no idea I was on this journey to the Seven Summits. I did Base Camp, I did Kilimanjaro, I met someone on Mount Rainier who introduced me to Mount Elbrus, which is the highest mountain in all of Europe located in Russia. Just through a series of events, people, and different things that I came across, I was on this journey to the Seven Summits. I had no idea the Seven Summits even existed. I started climbing and climbing and I realized, “Wow, I’m halfway on the Seven Summits, let’s keep going.” 

The last and final, I’ve had six of the Seven Summits completed, that’s the highest mountain on every continent. I still haven’t completed North America. Highest mountain in North America is called Denali, also known as Mount McKinley. It’s in Alaska, very, very cold environment. The weather holds you back most of the time. A lot of crevasses, a lot of avalanches, and just high winds, extreme cold. I’ve tried it twice now and we didn’t make the summit due to weather. I’m going back again in May for the third time to hopefully finish Denali and complete my Seven Summits. It’s an extraordinary amount of training. When I talk about endurance mountains versus strength mountains, this one’s strength. We don’t have porters, Sherpas, cooks to support us on the mountain, you’re carrying your own gear. 

I was there last year and we carried 50 pounds in a sled that we pulled and 75 pounds in a backpack, so 125 pounds of gear going uphill at altitude on what’s called fixed lines. Those are the ropes in the mountain on a rope team where you’re all climbing together. It takes some effort, some coordination, some training. I’m really, really, really hopeful that the weather gods are on my favor and I can summit Denali. If I do, I will have summited the Seven Summits, and there’s a lot of women in the world who have done the Seven Summits. I’m hoping to be part of that very elite club. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s exciting and a little terrifying, just listening to it, to be honest. Mostly the cold and the icy conditions, that would take a lot. Hopefully the third time’s a charm, as they say, and this will be your crowning effort. But then one must ask, what’s next? 

Louise McEvoy: There’s a lot of mountains still left to climb. There’s a lot of 8,000-meter peaks in this world that are over 28,000 feet that I would like to climb before I get too old. I always say it’s more of a sport for younger people. It’s hard on the body when you’re sleeping in a tent. Denali, it’s over three weeks in a tent. Everest, it was seven weeks on the mountain, six weeks without a shower, and you’re eating really bad dehydrated food. It’s very hard on the body being at high altitude in that kind of stressful environment. I want a couple of more big mountains under my belt before I do something that’s not quite high-altitude mountaineering. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Maybe then you can start teaching it or something. You could become a coach. 

Louise McEvoy: Maybe. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I will say those last bits of information are not key selling points for talking other people into it, but you might as well know what you’re getting into. This is really fascinating and I am really excited for you and what you’ve accomplished. As someone who works with women sales leaders, I work hard to get them to understand their own innate power and strength. I hope they’ll all do at least a 14er. It’s exciting stuff and I am thrilled to have spoken to you about it. 

We like to leave our audiences with one piece of advice that they can put into place today to take their career, their sales, their life to the next step, something they could do right away, what would that be for you? 

Louise McEvoy: I love that question. I alluded to a few things, like we’re all on a journey, so you might be already on a journey that you don’t even know is ahead of you. I would say, embrace things, say yes to hard things, say yes to new challenges. You may not even know that that challenge going forward will lead you into your Everest. You don’t know. I would also encourage people to try hard things. Yes, things are scary, but things are less scary when you do them over and over again. It becomes muscle memory. Crossing a crevasse on a rickety ladder, no big deal anymore. 

It doesn’t have to be on mountains. I think just life in general, just embrace that challenge and just say yes to doing new things. Opening up that opportunity will give you insight into something you didn’t even know was there. I didn’t realize high-altitude mountaineering would become part of my life. I didn’t realize that my high-altitude mountaineering could open the doors to women experiencing a mountain over 14,000 feet. I had to be introduced to someone who had the idea, and from there, it just became a thing. New people, new experiences, just say yes. I would really encourage that. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s great advice. Absolutely great advice. Thank you, Louise. I appreciate you joining us. It’s been a fabulous conversation. For our listeners, we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for everything. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 822: Climb Higher in Sales and Life with Women in Sales Leader Louise McEvoy first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Today we’re talking to Nick Michaelides. He is going to be the Institute for Effective Professional Selling 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award. That award event is going to be on April 29. It’s going to be a great event. This is our 16th. It’s going to be in person at the Marriott Fairview Park. It’s going to be a breakfast event. There’s going to be a lot of great recognition. It’s a celebration of the sales professional. We’re going to have our Women in Sales Leadership Award recipient, Vicki Schmanske from Leidos, our Partner of the Year, the great Kim Napolitano from Hilton. The morning is going to end with your Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech. I know we’re very, very excited about that. Before we get into the questions, it’s great to see. How are you doing today? How are you feeling? 

Nick Michaelides: Good to see you. I’m doing great. I got a cup of chai tea here. I’m warming up from the cold weather, and I’m ready to get at it. Just super excited to be here with you and share some of my thoughts on IT sales leadership and equally excited as you touched on to be recognized this year as the Lifetime Achievement Awardee from the institution and share that with some other amazing awardees that you mentioned as well. It’s an honor, and I’m definitely looking forward to our conversation here. 

Fred Diamond: When we select the Lifetime Achievement recipients, we talk to a lot of people. We view it as a Hall of Fame, a Mount Rushmore, if you will. One of the fun things about selecting you this year, once we started announcing it, the response that we’ve gotten at the IEPS has been great. Great choice. Right guy. Looking forward to honoring him and celebrating him. Let’s get some of your insights. You run organizations at Cisco, at the highest level. How many sales reps do they have? They have at least a thousand, probably a couple of thousand. 

Nick Michaelides: We have thousands globally obviously, but the team that I managed was well over 800 salespeople and probably equally support people around that. It was a very, very large organization and it was very, very rewarding running the Americas there. But spent the majority of my time supporting the US public sector customer there and just the last few years having that opportunity to run the Americas, which includes North America, all of Latin America, and Canada as well too. It was a good journey. It was a good ride. 

Fred Diamond: It’s great to recognize you because Cisco has always been one of the premier selling organizations in the history of technology. It’s great to have you there to be recognized and to talk. Let’s get deep into this. We’re doing today’s interview in February of 2026. What are the biggest issues facing selling organizations today? 

Nick Michaelides: First off, and I think we all know this, there is unfortunately no shortage of issues facing sales organizations today. We could talk about things like the long-standing impact that DOGE has had on the federal government, and even though that’s been somewhat in my mind ramping down over the last six months or so, I think it’s had a huge and maybe lasting impact. As an example, like government looking like and showing up like and negotiating like a big commercial enterprise or some of the things that I saw when DOGE first came on the scene. 

There are other things like memory shortages. We’re all reading the news, we’re all seeing in the press now, you got memory shortages, which is impacting the entire industry that’s out there. You got price increases which create challenges around supply chain and delivery. You also got increased pricing for components. You’ve got reduced profits for OEMs. You’ve got partner profitability potential impact, and you got increased pricing, unfortunately, for our customers. 

I think another big one, Fred, if you think about it, is this issue facing software companies today around AI integrations and challenges. AI will be able to replace some of the applications that the customers have out there. Then how will automation and say generative AI impact our customer’s environment? What impact will that have on software applications as those applications are really starting to compete with AI? Because AI can actually do some of the things that the software applications can do today. Trust me, Fred, there is definitely no shortage of challenges for our sales orgs. But for me, it’s all about generating predictable, high-quality pipeline. Period. 

Say what you want to say, we all know this industry is all about, what have you done for me lately? In my mind, truly, all seriousness, if you have a strong, predictable, high-quality pipe, like forecasting improves, quotatainment follows, morale increases, growth becomes a reality, we could go on and on on this one, but I’ll pause here just to maybe name a few examples for you. 

Fred Diamond: Actually, on your last point about pipeline integrity, I talk to a lot of young sales professionals, people who are entering the sales career, who have been there for a couple of years, and they ask me for advice. I’m sure you’ve gotten tons asking you for advice. That’s one place where I always start. I always say to them, your manager is managing eight people. His manager is managing 10 people. His manager is managing whatever. How you’re doing is going to keep laying up to the organization, which means you need to be as transparent as you can, you need to ask for support when you can, but you need to understand your role in the organization. That obviously gets monitored via the pipe and things along those lines. 

We talk a lot in the Sales Game Changers Podcast about B2B, business to business, and B2G, business to government. What are B2G and B2B enterprise customers demanding from sales professionals right now? 

Nick Michaelides: I think there’s a ton of similarities between selling to traditional big enterprise and government having spent the last two years now supporting the Americas outside of government. But there’s also differences and I think nuances, Fred, and I know you know this. For me, it was really, really a great experience and a great learning opportunity to cover the Americas versus just US public sector over the last few years. 

As an example, for government, they need to know when you show up, you have good working knowledge and an understanding of the agency’s procurement strategy, and that’s pretty diverse. Like the partners that they want to use, the contract vehicles that they want to use, the terms, etc. Does your company understand compliancy, security? Do you know how to sell into regulated industries, and that your offers are compliant? They’re going to need to know that. 

Versus say maybe a big commercial enterprise customer, they also care about security and privacy, but they do it in a different way. For them it’s more around SOC and ISO and things like that. But commercial customers also want to ensure that you, the sales rep, that you have an understanding of their business model and that you can articulate how your solutions are going to create real benefits for their business and then help demonstrate strong ROI back to the company and for the shareholders to some extent. 

At the end of the day, I think both want reliable, trustworthy salespeople who have a strong understanding of their business or mission and can deliver proven, repeatable, secure solutions. Not albatrosses, not one-off, but proven, repeatable solutions. 

Fred Diamond: When you began the conversation, you talked about some of the challenges facing sales professionals. I think more than ever, over the last couple of years through the pandemic, there’s been more of an awareness on what customers are going through. In public sector, again, we’re doing today’s interview in February of 2026, in 2025, it was a very disruptive year, not just for those selling into public sector and other markets, but for public sector. There’s been a huge amount of downsizing. There’s been a lot of layoffs. You mentioned DOGE with “government efficiency”, if you will. A lot of change and also procurement change as well with how they go about it and what the companies that have been selling to the government and public sector have had to go through. 

If you were giving some guidance to junior sales professionals, but also sales professionals who’ve been around for a couple of decades, who’ve been there, who’ve done that, who’ve been through things, what would be your advice for them about what customers are going through? 

Nick Michaelides: Some of the things you talked about like been doing this for just over 40 years, I’ve never seen anything like it. I think all of us in the industry, when DOGE hit and when government shutdowns hit, when all these things started to come together and create chaos for selling into the government space, I think we were all looking at each other going, “Oh my gosh, we’ve never seen anything like this before.” 

But for me, first and foremost, you just need to be patient. We all know that customers are under an immense amount of pressure to deliver outcomes and value for their respective companies or agencies, whether that’s supporting private and/or public sector customers, it doesn’t matter, which within many cases, I think less budget, not in all cases, but in some cases with a lot less budget. I think AI for both OEMs and customers, this is for both sides, are having to deal with one of the largest most strategic IT transformations, in my mind, since the innovation of the internet, maybe more closely like the cloud and things like that. But it is the largest most strategic IT transformation I’ve seen in my career. 

From a customer perspective, AI is really driving this shift toward value creation. Customers are leveraging AI to improve IT efficiency with things like AIOps, which is really like AI for their IT operations, or like self-service tools and analytics. For the selling professionals, they really need to understand how their products and their services that they sell are really going to help their customers. This is important because every single customer is implementing AI or planning to leverage this to some extent in the short term and long term. 

They are absolutely allocating budget towards this transformation right now as we speak. As such, I think OEMs and salespeople really need to just show up and help our customers really understand how their respective products and solutions have AI capabilities embedded, or not, and then how their solutions can really help customers with things like AI governance and risk management just as an example, and their investments, just like a customer’s investments in talent and skills development around AI. Fred, this reminds me of the days when cyber was the new big transformational IT thing that was happening. All companies and OEMs and partners alike, we were all fighting for this really, really, really small talent pool around cyber. This is the same thing with AI. You’re having to deal with talent shortage and development of your staff. These are just a few of the many things that I think the sellers of today really, really need to be focused on with their customers. 

Fred Diamond: We’re doing a lot of work at the IEPS bringing together AI and selling professionalism. As a matter of fact, at the award event on April 29th, we’re going to be giving out our second AI and Selling Effectiveness Awards. These are for companies that aren’t selling AI, but that are using AI in the selling process. It’s definitely disrupted everything, to say the least. People still say it’s the early stage. Well, it’s moving quickly past the early stage into how you need to be using this, because if you’re not, then your competitors are definitely doing it and they’re flushing you out. 

Nick, I’m just curious. We’re doing today’s interview at the end of February of 2026. What should be the priorities right now for senior sales leaders? One of the other big changes we’ve seen is that people are pressed to do the right things now. It used to be, what are we going to do for this year and how are we preparing for the next two years? As a senior sales leader, I know you’ve always had quarterly pressure, etc., but now it’s even like today. What do I got to do today to be a successful selling professional? What should tech or B2B sales leaders be focusing on right now? 

Nick Michaelides: Top priority for senior sales leaders today should start with making sure your people have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them. Expectations, like how do you deliver appropriately if you don’t know what’s important? There’s just so much coming at the sales reps and the sales organizations, you need to help them understand and know what the priorities are. I think another big part of senior leadership right now is to ensure that the company that you work for, no matter who understands what your customer needs are, making sure your company is focused on solutions that meet your customer expectations and needs, whether that’s hardware/software features, functionality, and/or ensuring that the products and the software are certified for use with a public sector customer as an example. 

The other thing I’d say is that senior leaders today really need to understand that all of our customers, no matter what customer segment you support, doesn’t matter, commercial, federal, enterprise, SMB, all of them are trying to figure out how they are or should be effectively leveraging AI. For the senior leaders out there, how your company and the products that you make can help your customer’s IT journey be more AI ready or more AI agile. 

Then maybe last point, because you said like now, what are you doing this week? I think as it relates to this week, you better hit your forecast, because again, it’s a, what have you done for me lately world. But you know what? If you and your sales teams don’t wake up every single day, focused on short-term, medium-term, long-term, sustainable, profitable growth, you will be challenged, and not in a good way. Because, Fred, you said it, if you’re not getting on board with some of this stuff, your competitors will. 

Fred Diamond: What are some of the best activities that you would recommend that the best sales reps are doing right now? Also, similarly, the best sales leaders. I understand, you get to understand AI and understand customer. Tell us specifically, what are you seeing these top sales leaders and professionals do? 

Nick Michaelides: I’m going to start off with relationship and trust, and they really do matter with your customers, especially based on some of the challenges they face and some of the things we talked about. Know this, customers will 100% lean in with a vendor and companies that have been there in the past and want to do business with whom they trust. For OEMs, you need to have trusted relationships at all levels of your customer and the organization that you support if you’re going to be successful in this very competitive environment. It’s not okay just to have the relationship with the technical side or the C-suite. You got to have it at all different levels. 

The other thing is you’ve got to be transparent with your customers. We talked about this at the beginning a bit. Be transparent about delivery times. Be upfront about price increases and the impact that your supply chain is facing right now. I think this ties back to what we just talked about around being transparent and building trust. As an example, if you can’t deliver product A in a timely fashion for deployment for the customer, do you also present alternative B that can potentially meet their requirements and delivery timelines? Giving them options and flexibility, I think is going to help with that trust that we just talked about. 

Then I think showing up with tangible cost savings such as could be license model optimization. It can be optimizing say a customer’s maintenance cost or say consolidating applications that overlap each other, because customers, it’s not may, they do, customers have multiple apps that solve for the same problems. If you can help them reduce the number of applications and the cost associated with those, customers will trust you, they know you’ll have their back, and they’ll know that you’re going to be working in their best interest, not your own interest, but their best interest. I think it’s super important and it’s powerful and helping to build that trust we were talking about. 

Fred Diamond: At the IEPS, we’re doing a lot of work with universities that have selling professional programs. We also do our Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged podcasts. I went to a competition this past weekend at the University of Toledo. We’re also going to be giving out an award to our first College Sales Educator of the Year. We have Brian Collins from Virginia Tech. You talked about relationships, you talked about trust. 

One of the great things about Cisco is you probably have, if not the preeminent, one of the top two or three partner networks globally around the world. If you don’t mind, talk a second or two for the young sales professionals about building relationships. It’s gotten harder because the pandemic, a lot of people were behind screens, a lot of customers make it difficult now to get into their office. There are challenges with getting to them. Of course, with public sector, there’s rules on ways you can engage. Like I mentioned before, the challenge isn’t how do you develop a 10-year relationship? It’s how are you going to develop a relationship this week? 

A lot of younger sales professionals are asking me that. They’re saying, “Fred, how do I develop these relationships?” Because it’s not about reading a script. I hate to say the old days, but in the past, getting to events, going to events, meeting, and I know one of the great things that we’ve gotten when we’ve told Cisco partners about the award event on the 29th of April is a lot of them want to be there because they have this long-term relationship with you and with Tim Coogan and Gary DePreta and the other people who are going to be involved. What’s your advice for the young sales professionals on developing relationships? 

Nick Michaelides: If you’re a young salesperson, you should have potentially multiple mentors and coaches. I know you support and believe in this as well. It’s typically not one. It’s multiple people. Some people are better at this than some others, but networking is something that I learned from a leader a long, long time ago who was the best that I’d ever seen in the industry at doing this. But their ability to network and stay connected with partners, people in their organization, higher up, peers, etc., and partners and customers as well, was better than anybody I had seen. 

For the younger folks out there getting into sales, you got to have the network. The only way you’re going to get that network, you got to get out there. That’s one of my messages to the sales teams out there. When the pandemic hit and COVID happened, we all learned how to do sales from home. Well, it’s over. If you think about relationships, it’s tough to build a trusting relationship if you’re not sitting in front of somebody and they can see the genuine character of you come out, or see how you carry yourself and things. You just can’t do that virtually. You got to get out there. You got to be in front of your partners. You got to be in front of your customers. There’s just no other way to do it, and it takes time. You just don’t get it like that. 

Fred Diamond: I agree. It comes up time and time again, is for the young professionals out there, you got to meet people in person. You got to make the effort. When I say build relationships, it’s not about hanging out at the bar every night. Maybe you’ll share a drink here and there. I was talking to a couple of young sales professionals this weekend. It’s about the moments along the way, the help that you brought to a customer. “Do you remember back in 1994 when we were going after Department of Defense, and blah, blah, blah, we offered this solution.” Those wins along the way, helping customers solve their problem and helping your own company get to the next level. 

Nick Michaelides: 100%. I think the days of taking your customer out for drinks and dinner, that’s okay, but that’s the way we sold a long time ago. I think people want more than that. I know they want more than that. When I think about some of the great salespeople, sales leaders that are out there, are you showing up at a customer site and joining them in a give-back event? How powerful and how important is that? I’ve seen my sales reps and the engineers and the CX people show up on a weekend when there’s a customer outage, and the customer sees that. Or say there’s a catastrophic event and FEMA’s been deployed and Cisco’s lending its NERV truck to help people light up comms in an area that was just devastated. To me, those are the things that are really going to build that relationship and that customer trust, more so than the dinners. There’s a necessity for those, but that can’t be all it is. 

Fred Diamond: Give us a little peek into some of your personal guiding principles. What are some of the things that you’ve been conscious of along the way to achieve your success? 

Nick Michaelides: First and foremost, I know this sounds cliche, but it’s got to start with the customer. Customer obsession speaks for itself. In my mind, I was taught this very, very, very early on in my career back in the early ‘80s, if you take care of your customer, everything else will take care of itself. I think the second thing is building a high-performance culture within your teams. The right people in the right roles comes to mind for me, and when you don’t have the right people, that you have that courage and conviction to either move on from those folks in the very most respectable way possible and/or coach them up, but you got to get the right people in the right roles at the right time. 

The other guiding principle for me, ethics, integrity, and trust. Without trust, there’s no me and you. I expected every single salesperson that reported into my organization operated with the highest level of integrity. Clean ethical business is a must. I think constant coaching. Our jobs as sales leaders is to help our salespeople be the best they can. Leverage all the wisdom that we’ve all gathered over those multiple decades and really help them not to make the same mistakes that maybe we did, and then help them get to that best outcome maybe sooner than later. Maybe last but not least, team before self, or maybe team versus self, doesn’t matter, but I learned early on, never ever allow success or the great accomplishments you have be about you. For me, it’s always been about the team. I think that’s just good sales leadership. If I could do this, I would make sure that there was a requirement that sales leaders strike the word I from their vocabulary. It’s never about you. It’s about your team. 

Fred Diamond: The more selfless you can be and continue to be a professional and show professionalism. I loved your idea of the coaching. One of the things that we’ve heard back from, which has been a shift from earlier days, you used to get your review once a year. You knew, on April 1st is my review and I’m going to get my whatever percentage increase if I keep working hard. A lot of young professionals, I have one guy who wants to get reviewed every week. He constantly reaches out to his leader. Be conscious of that and continue to grow. 

Nick, you’ve given us so many great ideas here. Give us one specific action step, something that the sales reps and sales leaders listening to today’s show must do right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Nick Michaelides: This one I think is super important because I know we’re going through a major transformation with IT. This is calling all sales reps, calling all sales reps. By the way, this includes systems engineers as well. But we all, all of us, need to lean in on this one. I’m less worried about the younger IT sales professionals who were raised on IT, born with an iPad in their hand. It’s folks that have been selling in this field for some time that may attempt to take the position of like, “Hey, look, I’ve been wildly successful selling the same way over the last few decades and I’m going to just keep on doing what I do.” In my mind, that’s a recipe for failure. 

Every sales professional needs to understand the AI journey from the days of deep learning in the 2000s, which was around image and speech recognition, to say generative AI. For IT companies, even like Cisco, like help me write code, help me use generative AI to do reports or briefing documents. To say agentic AI where we have agents talking to agents, not just providing valuable information and insights, but now having agents reach out to other agents who have information that may be beyond your own enterprise, to then actually having those agents action things. 

As an example, you and me want to go on a great vacation. Who doesn’t want to when it’s cold like this? We can use AI to research the best vacation place to go. But then I want that agent to reach out to the airline and book my tickets. I want then to schedule travel from the airport to the hotel. Then I also want to set up a one-day excursion like hiking and have that all done for me. That’s where we’re going. In short, we all need to lean in, you need to lean in, you need to leverage it to your advantage, because if not, you will 100% be outsold by somebody who does. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, Nick Michaelides, congratulations again on the IEPS 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award. We look forward to seeing everybody at the Marriott Fairview Park on that day. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Dave, I’m excited to have you on the show. We’ve probably had dozens of people that you’ve worked with over the years. A NetApp channel leader for 19 years. We talked about Mark Weber on the prep. Before the pandemic, we used to do our shows in person. Mark, when he left NetApp, he went to the Catholic University of America and started their world-class sales education program there. When I interviewed him, I interviewed him at the Catholic University of America. We took a picture right in front of the Basilica at Catholic University, which is in Washington, D.C., not too far from downtown or from Capitol Hill. I know you’ve done a lot of work with him and probably many people. Introduce the audience to who you are. 

David Drahozal: I’ve been at NetApp for 19 years. Prior to that, I was at HP for 25. Wide variety of sales backgrounds, almost all of them focused on public sector, but the pinnacle was really my 19 years at NetApp, working directly for Mark for roughly half of that timeframe. The responsibility of the role really is public sector, Fed and SLED. To me, one of the fascinating things that makes it kind of an MBA case study to a degree is started off to be a fairly small business. Today, it’s a rather large business. You got to see all the different growing pains and the exposure to the wide variety of companies that participate in those markets. It’s really super interesting. That’s a very quick snapshot. 

Fred Diamond: For people who don’t know, tell us what NetApp does and what it does right now. We’re doing today’s interview in February of 2026. Give us a little peek into what the business is. 

David Drahozal: NetApp is in the data storage market space. The key is not just placing the data somewhere, but it’s protecting the data, having the ability to move it into the different clouds, move it on prem, set it up for disaster recovery, integrate it into a couple of the big industry needs, right now being AI. That’s a big piece of the business. But the other business is also making sure that you can secure the data. We have some data security that makes the offering a bit special. When you look at the whole picture, it paints why NetApp is the top supplier of data storage to the federal government. That gives you a great ability to say a whole boatload of the federal government’s data resides on NetApp. 

Fred Diamond: Actually, it continues to increase because obviously all the stuff that’s happening with AI. For people who are listening, I’m based in Northern Virginia, they’re building a lot of data centers in the Northern Virginia area. Matter of fact, they’re popping up almost like fast food places nonstop. I remember I asked a friend of mine who is in sales for one of the data center companies, I said, “Don’t we have enough?” He goes, “You haven’t begun to see how many data centers we’re going to have.” Some of these centers are just for a vendor. You would think that they’re like a department store with cages and stuff, but a company may have their own space, if you will. The need for storage is going to continue to grow and grow. 

I’m interested in some of your thoughts. We’re going to talk a little bit about your leadership approach. You’ve been doing this at NetApp for 19 years, then HP before that. I’m also curious on your advice on what people should do when they start a new job, or when they move into a new company. Then I’m curious on some of your tips and tricks, things that you’ve gathered along the way that would be valuable for people to listen. We’ve got a lot of people in the channel who listen to the podcast. We’ve got a lot of people in public sector and B2B in general. Let’s get started here. I’m curious, your leadership approach, give us some insights into that. 

David Drahozal: I’ve led teams, that’s the important thing, is the word teams in there. I’ll start this description off by, I was always fascinated by really, really excellent leaders. I went and looked at the University of Maryland’s men’s soccer team, is always top 10, frequently top four, and I’m not talking for a year or two, for decades. They’ve had a single coach over there, Sasho Cirovski, just a little bit of reading. His number one rule I adopted as my number one rule, and that is, pick the right team. You want to pick the best available athletes to put on your team. You always have to keep in mind when you’re picking people on your team that you’re never going to have enough people and headcount to accomplish and cover everything that you want to cover. It’s really, really critical to pick the right people on your team. 

There’s another rule I use here. I use the next-door neighbor rule in this, and that is, if I’m going to put somebody on my team, would I be happy with them as my next-door neighbor or not? If not, I want to be able to have them as a great next-door neighbor. That creates just a good positive environment for everybody. 

Second thing there is also empower your team. I know some of this might sound a little cliche-ish, but when you put all of this together and actually do it, it has a very powerful impact on the team. I just had lunch with one of my former team members today, and he specifically commented on this, “Dave, you gave us the mission. You showed us the tools. You let us do our thing in our way, not just making it the way that you would do everything.” You have to have a lot of trust and that trust is first off kicked off by picking the right team. 

The other element of picking the right team is often you’re going to have different types of people. In some scenarios, covering and dealing with a certain partner, you have to be very technical. In some other scenarios, you have to be very methodical. You have to recognize what those differences are and pick the right team members and then mesh these individuals together to actually become a team. That’s all in the people. 

The second is really creating the vision. I drew this off of the old saying of the most powerful thing in the world, it’s an idea. When you build the idea, and the idea that I always had, and even when I interviewed people, was at NetApp, I wanted to have the best team in my industry segment and I wanted to have the best team within NetApp. That means that you have to do some things that might be a little bit different. It might be a little bit more and you have to be committed to that goal or you’re not going to fit in well on the team. Creating that vision for the team to all work against. 

Next item is, one of your key roles as leaders, put your people in a position where they can be successful. That’s giving them the right tools, making them feel empowered to succeed. Every time they need to make a decision, they shouldn’t be coming to you to make the decision for them. If you pick the right people, they have the ability to make the decision, let them make the decision and support them through that journey. A great team, all the different members support each other’s success. That’s all driven by understanding the mission. 

The last thing I’ll throw in here around my leadership fundamentals is the people on your team don’t really care how much you know until they know how much you care. I’m quoting Tom Mendoza, one of the founders of NetApp in this, but it’s really super applicable. You can’t create a team over here and then have you over here. You have to be a part of that team. You’re going to lead the team, but you have to be a whole part of that team. Those are the fundamentals that I really just start off when it comes to leadership in order to get all these people working in a singular direction in order to execute against that vision, which is to be the best team in the industry and the best team within NetApp. 

Fred Diamond: You’ve been in the channel space. For people who don’t know, that means there’s NetApp and then there’s companies that bring your solutions to customers. You’ve focused on value-added resellers, partners, solution providers, whatever the terms might be. How does that apply when you’re leading these cross-company teams? When you’re leading a team at NetApp, one of the things that we all know is that the reason why NetApp has been the leader in the industry is because they’ve had great technology and the ability to have great people to be on these teams, to be led by people like you. Give some insights into how the people listening could be effective leaders with other companies that are part of bringing your solution to the marketplace. 

David Drahozal: That’s a skill set. What I coach people to do is, first off, identify what your assets are. Your assets are partially certainly going to be things that your company provides, but we are in a role, like my team’s role, which is dealing with multiple organizations, multiple companies, and perhaps even different segments of the organization that you’re employed with. In order to bring a singular solution or a singular message to a government agency’s mission, you have to go out and identify what are all these different assets that are brought by all of these organizations. 

Your own personal company’s assets might be things like demo equipment or marketing money, or different incentives and all that. But the other assets from the other companies are just as valuable, whether it be contracts that they have, services that they deliver, expertise in particular areas. You identify your assets as one of the key things that you do when you walk into a situation like that. As you’re doing that, you’re also going to be building your extended team. Most of the time in our industry, it’s not going to be just one organization that has absolutely everything in order to support the mission. 

You’re going to have to develop those relationships with those other organizations. You’re going to have to get them all together in order to buy in on a single mission and a single goal in that particular project so that you do have alignment and goal congruency. They should be clear, they should be action-oriented, and they should be measurable. All these team members should hold each other accountable towards driving towards that vision, that mission, which is ultimately to support that agency and their mission. 

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, and this may open a can of worms, but let’s say that you’re the leader. Do you believe that people, who may not be great followers in the beginning, maybe they came from another team with a great leader, but there’s some tension. Do you believe that people can be brought into the way you want to be the leader, or is it best to cast them aside? That’s a broad statement, but can you teach someone to be a good follower if you’re a different type of leader than they’re used to? Or basically, is it, “You know what? You’re just not going to be good for me as the leader. I’m going to find you another job in the organization,” and bring on more people who would be better followers. 

David Drahozal: That’s a really good question. That’s a determination that leader is going to have to make quickly. You can get verbal feedback, “We’re in agreement, we’re in agreement,” but you’re going to have to also look for different ways that they’re communicating to you on whether they buy into that mission or not. There’s a saying of it’s better to fail fast. That’s something that is a really good rule to follow as a leader. I fundamentally believe in the idea that if you’re a good leader and you are aligning with the customer’s mission and everybody sees that, that they can support that singular approach, even though in some instances they might give up a piece of the puzzle that they want to have, but they can do that. That’s the job of the leader, is to monitor that very, very closely with steely-eyed objectivity and make that determination. That goes both with the overall project and with the people themselves. 

Fred Diamond: I think you made a good point there also. It’s so critical because everything is about the customer right now. We’ve been talking about customer centricity, everyone’s trying to understand what does that really mean? In a lot of cases, in some certain tech companies, it was lip service. We believe in the customer, but you knew they only had one option, perhaps. Some of your competitors, I know, definitely have had that type of permeation. But now the customer doesn’t need you unless you provide such value and you’re showing them that they are first and foremost. It behooves the leaders to bring the great people together so that their company is doing that so that they can survive and grow. It’s very challenging times. 

We’re doing today’s interview in late February of 2026. We all just ended 2025, which was a very, very challenging year for not just people in the public sector, for all the reasons we’ve discussed multiple times on the podcast, but the world’s going through change, AI is making a lot of things different. Now is really a great time for the top leaders to stand up. One thing that you’re also pretty savvy on is how to start a new position. Could be a new channel position, could be something else in sales, or with a new company perhaps. I’m interested in your thoughts on that as well. 

David Drahozal: I’ll melt that together with some key tips and tricks, because some of that just has to do with identifying your assets and building your extended team. That’s certainly a big piece of this. But when I had somebody coming in and they’re starting, and I learned this from the most difficult guy and the best guy that I ever worked for, who you’ve had on the show before, preparation. We emphasize that, I emphasize it, do your homework before the meeting, before the discussion every time. I’ve witnessed this over the years, both when I wasn’t as prepared, and I witnessed it when other people are not prepared, you walk in and you expect other people to have the answer to the meeting and you don’t do the right preparation. The meeting doesn’t accomplish the goals or only takes a small step forward when you could have taken a much bigger step forward. Do the preparation, do the homework. 

The other thing, I talk about a tip and trick here, is have the meeting before the meeting. In particular in these partner roles when you’re going to have maybe different companies or different organizations within companies and you have to bring them all together perhaps on this example of a topic that you brought up a second ago, where maybe somebody has to give up a little piece of what they want to propose in order to make the overall solution better. You get with each one of these organizations or each one of these pieces to work with them, communicate with them on what the objective is, what their objections might be, starting to handle those objections, and you work on down the line with all of the major stakeholders in that meeting. When the meeting actually happens, to a large extent, you’ve already had the meeting. You have a much more predictable way to execute against the objective of that meeting. I found that to be super powerful over the years. 

Fred Diamond: There’s a couple of words that continue to come up time and time again. We’ve done over 800 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes. When I talk to a lot of sales leaders, I’ll say, “What is your superpower?” “I’m a great listener.” I would then say, “Great. Well, give us some advice on how you’ve become a great listener.” Then one of the answers has been, “I prepare more than anybody. I know almost anything that’s going to come up because I’ve prepared.” If you do the preparation, very few things are going to catch you, especially when you’ve been doing this for 19 some odd years to the same customer base. 

Now again, there’s been a lot of things that have changed over the last year, but still, there’s no excuse because the customer is meeting with you now only because you’re proving to them that you can help them achieve whatever their mission is, and hopefully, things that they haven’t thought about that will help them achieve their mission. 

David Drahozal: Couldn’t agree more. In fact, the next tip and trick that I have specifically had to do with listening skills, and I agree, it is super related to preparation. The other dimension that you can hit on listening skills though is continue to be curious and dig for the facts. There’s a lot of times you get emotional feedback, “I don’t like this.” “Well, why don’t you like it?” Well, dig for what the real issue is and be curious. When you love what you do, you’re going to ask all these questions. Those are two super related topics. I really emphasize, listening is not the easiest skill out the gate. People, their first reaction is to want to express how much they know about something. They want to talk first. 

Fred Diamond: Listening for that opportunity to talk. I’m curious here. You’ve had a very successful career in channel with some brand names, world-class companies, kudos to you for a great career. If someone were starting out and considering taking a job in channels, maybe someone who’s three years out of college, maybe they were an SDR or something along those lines, sales development rep, or BDR. Channels are becoming bigger. They’re becoming more important. Almost every company right now, it’s so dependent upon their channel partners because the channel is closer to the customer in a lot of ways. Or they may have a market where the company needs to go into, or a skill set. 

To a lot of people who are taking looks at jobs in the channel, what would be your advice? Would you say absolutely? I’m just curious, if someone said to you, “Dave, should I pursue a career in channel management?” 

David Drahozal: I think it’s a great business job. Now, one attribute that I typically look for was, did they have any direct sales experience? I think it’s super important to have that experience because you need to empathize with how that partner, that customer of ours, which is the partner company, what motivates them, how do they work, etc.? I think that’s super important. The partner job is a very business-oriented job. You’re going to work with everything from legal, to contracts, to engineering, to corporate, to salespeople, sales leadership. Then your other customer set is the actual partner themselves, the whole stack within the partners. It’s a very good, challenging job, and you can learn a whole lot from it. 

I would encourage you to go into direct sales first, and then transition into partner world. Other people may have different experiences and different opinions on it, but that’s one of the fundamentals that I really did look for, because there’s nothing like taking all these pieces of the puzzle and putting it together and working with the customer to turn one dial up and one dial down in order to get the optimal outcome for that agency. 

Fred Diamond: I like your answer. At the end of the day, the reason why channel exists, and by the way, my MBA thesis was on channel theory and design. It’s very inapplicable. In retrospect, I wish I had done an MBA thesis on an online bookstore, which would have been a little more effective, or a chain of ice cream shops or something. But seriously, at the end of the day, the reason why there is channels is to sell. I remember one of my professors said, “The whole purpose of channel theory and design is to find the highest quality, lowest cost way from the manufacturer to the customer.” I tell that to people all the time. Maybe a big part of it starts with, how does the customer require their purchasing? But then still as the manufacturer, you got to figure out, how do we make that as effective as possible? 

David Drahozal: Yeah, put the technological puzzle together. The most effective partners that I’ve dealt with, period, are the ones that really understand the mission, really understand the mission. They’re committed to the mission first and making money second, versus the other way around. 

Fred Diamond: Right, but it’s not 99% of 1%. The reason why we’re here, at the end of the day, yes, is to serve customers, but it’s to sell things, services, solutions, products, partnerships that are going to help the customer. 

Dave, this has been great. Thank you so much for all your insights here. 19 years, public sector NetApp channel, and I’m excited to post this show. Congratulations on your success and all the value that you brought to NetApp. How many partners have you dealt with, do you think, over the course of your career? Definitely thousands. Do you think tens of thousands maybe? 

David Drahozal: Well, a hundred or so in federal. We set a bar that we want the partners to obtain before we fully embrace them. SLED side is a little bit different. You’ve got a much broader, much diverse market, probably 4X the number of partners in that piece of the business. It’s a lot of partners. It’s a big number. 

Fred Diamond: Dave, you’ve given us a lot of great ideas, some great things for people to follow for selling professionals. Give us one specific action step that people should implement right now after listening to today’s show or reading the transcript. We like to end every show with an action step that people should do to take their sales career to the next level. 

David Drahozal: One is the Ted Lasso quote, “Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing.” Always do the right thing. That’s the quick one. The second one will be equally as quick. Implement the 120 rule. That rule is, you often walk out of a meeting, you’ve got a lot of tasks, blah, blah, blah. If something takes under 120 seconds, do it immediately, because otherwise, you get all these little things plus big things that pile up and then it can get a little bit overwhelming. I do it in my personal life as well as my professional life. It’s 120 rule. If you can get it done in 120 seconds, do it right away. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, Dave Drahozal, congratulations. Thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Today’s show is a special show. It’s our Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. David Brauer, you’re with West Virginia University. I am in Northern Virginia, as a lot of our listeners know. It’s about a four-hour drive. It’s a beautiful drive to Morgantown, where the school is. Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged, we typically interview college sales professors, those who are running programs, typically at the University Sales Center Alliance universities. David Brauer with West Virginia, I’m thrilled to be talking to you today. It’s great to have you here. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about your journey to West Virginia University? 

David Brauer: I’m married to my college sweetheart, Beth, and we have two boys, Grant, who rows at Syracuse University, and his younger brother who’s in 10th grade, Christian, who also rows. My journey to West Virginia University came through sales in general. I grew up in a household and actually many generations of salespeople. My dad was managing director of Marsh & McLennan and then Liberty Mutual and retired in his early 50s. It seemed like a pretty nice career to me from my vantage point. 

When I graduated from college, I went into financial services working for a Fortune 500. My dad’s always been a good mentor to me. I had an amazing coach out of the gate, and I became annuity salesperson of the year. I was in the top 10 of annuity sales for four or five years in a row there at that Fortune 500 company. 

When I was in my early 30s, my children were born and I wanted to have a career that lined up more with my family. The grind of the sales, I was no longer interested in once my children were born. I wanted to be a good dad more than I wanted to be anything else. We brainstormed to think about what type of careers could I possibly have. My wife was a school teacher, and I thought, “Well, I don’t want to be a high school teacher, but I might consider being a professor.” 

I went to Durham University in the UK. I had a great mentor who told me, “Go to the best school in the world you can get into.” Durham University in the UK is a Russell Group school, I guess US equivalent of Ivy League. For some reason they accepted me and I decided to commute back and forth to the UK to earn my doctorate. 

I came back to the United States and taught at a few schools before being invited to become the sales director at West Virginia University. I pounced on the opportunity. It was a young fledgling program, I wanted something to grow, and so I grabbed a hold of that opportunity and I’ve really enjoyed being the sales director there and really scaling the program. 

Fred Diamond: Like I mentioned, I’m based in Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, D.C. West Virginia University is one of those schools where a lot of people have gone to, or their children go to now or have graduated from. It even made me more interested to find out about your curriculum and the classes that you offer. Do you offer a major, a minor, certificate? Tell us a little more about your program there. 

David Brauer: When I took over in 2020, we had about 80 or 90 students taking sales classes a year. There was just one or two different sections of sales classes and that was about it. Now we have over 600 students taking sales classes a year, and we’ll probably scale to 1,000 and then plateau in the next few years. 

We’re one of the fastest-growing sales programs in the country. We do that by offering five different sales classes. Now we’re the host of the largest live sales role play competition in the world, which has over 900 sales role players and over 60 universities that are involved in that. That’s with our sponsors at Fastenal, and that is on the platform called Sales Role Play Arena, where you can go to salesroleplayarena.com and see that there. 

Before COVID, there was probably only about 20 role players doing this comp. To go from 20 to 900, and then in our sales program to go from 80 or 90, scaling seems to be my thing with these programs. I like to grow them and make them big. We offer those. We have an area of emphasis in sales as well as a sales minor. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great, to be part of something that’s growing so significantly. Everyone who’s listening to today’s Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged is a sales professional, or they’re in the sales world at some level. Either they work for a company with a large B2B, and in many cases, B2G, business to government, so they’re selling professionals. We also have a lot of young adults who are now moving into sales because of this particular show. 

To grow a program from 60 students to close to 1,000, where you want to get to, I’m just curious, you must have a lot of the support of the university. Tell us a little bit more about how that came about. How did the university decide that they want to grow from 60 some odd students to 1,000? I’m curious on how that whole process worked. 

David Brauer: They’ve been fairly hands off with me. When they asked me to be the director of the sales institute, they hired me because they wanted me to grow the program, and they said, “Have at it,” and so I did. We had two other professors teaching sales at the time, Emily Tanner and Suzanne O’Connell, and they were great. They were able to scale with it and help grow the load. They had lots of ideas and we collaborate very well about how to grow. In our marketing department, we’ve had a lot of support. 

The person who brought me on, Dr. Michael Walsh, he was there at the beginning of the program and helped start the program with a gentleman who’s now at George Mason, Andy Wood, I think is his name. Those guys started it, and then they brought me in. Andy moved over to George Mason, Mike had it by himself, so they let me do that. They had also found a benefactor to help sponsor this. 

All of these sales programs require outside funding. The state schools and these smaller schools and bigger schools, they can’t just draw that out of the normal funds. It’s fairly expensive to take students to these different sales competitions and go all around the country and do that. It’s really important that you have all stakeholders involved. Alumni who had previously been in sales, maybe even before we offered a sales program, a lot of those people are very successful and they come in and help and offer their support. 

Fred Diamond: We actually did a show with a gentleman named Frank Hauck, who went to Bryant University and built the Sales Lab at Bryant University. He was a graduate of Bryant, as was his wife. He had a great career at companies like EMC and done really, really well. Then recently, within the last two years, made a pretty substantial investment into a sales lab, where the students can do role play with state-of-the-art AV. You probably know Dr. Stefanie Boyer over at Bryant. She does a competition every fall and I got to meet Frank. We had him on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. If any of your alum are listening and want to replicate what Frank did, I’m sure you’d be very welcome to that. 

David Brauer: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. We would. 

Fred Diamond: Tell us more about your students. How do they learn of the program? Do they come to West Virginia University knowing that your program is available or do they discover it as they’re trying to seek a major? Talk a little bit about that, and are there any requirements for taking classes? 

David Brauer: More and more parents are asking about sales. There’s been this question out there about whether it’s even worth it to go to college anymore. People know that a lot of the trades pay fairly well and that whole generation is retiring as well, so there are opportunities out there to do other things. Where higher ed really needs to connect with where the rubber hits the road, is they need to offer skills that can translate into an ROI for those parents, for their children to have solid careers. Sales happens to be that golden nugget for a lot of people. 

It is a field where at West Virginia University and many of the other great sales programs that are out there have a hundred percent placement rates. From our sales team, that’s an elite part of our program, the average starting salary is around 85,000. According to the ICSC, we are ranked eighth in the world at West Virginia University. People want to be part of a winning program. They want to be part of something where, “Hey, I can do sales and I can make 85,000 a year.” Now, that is not true for everybody, but the placements are quite good. For the right students, opportunities can go from that to we’ve placed students in the low one hundreds. 

It’s an amazing opportunity for the right people that want to put in the hard work. We have lots of students that take the sales classes because of that. Also, maybe many people don’t realize it, but over 50% of people that are in business school are going to end up in sales at some point of their career anyway. It’s an amazing skill to be able to deliver for them. They hear about it from word of mouth. Then most of our students that start taking sales classes are juniors and seniors. They already have all of their core curriculum. Now they’re looking for a career. They go to career services. “Hey, what do different jobs pay?” Lots of students that age, if you ask them what they want to do, the answer’s maybe not the best, but I’ve probably felt the same way, “I don’t really care. I just want to get paid a lot of money.” Sales, if you work hard and they put their mind to it, this is one where they can make a lot of money fairly quickly. 

Fred Diamond: It’s great that you’re teeing up the students with the skills. One of the great things I’ve learned since we started the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast back in the spring of 2025, is the students who go through a program like yours, they’re a couple years ahead of students who haven’t gone through this, who start their career in sales. 

Some of the corporate sponsor-type companies that I’ve spoken to says that if a young adult goes through a program like yours at West Virginia University, they’re three to five to seven years ahead of general hires, which means that they can hit the ground running, they can progress faster. They still got to teach them their product and the industry and their sales process per se, and things about their company, but they understand what the sales process looks like. In general, of course, each company may have their own, doesn’t really matter, but they understand what it means to be a sales professional. 

I want to ask you a question that I haven’t asked in a while, if ever. What do you learn? What do you learn from students? One of the things that we’re seeing in the industry is customers are beginning to retire out. 2025 was a challenging year for a lot. There were a lot of layoffs at the typical companies that we might sell to. There’s a lot of layoffs in government, of course, and related public sector. Now we have younger people who are customers. I’m curious, what’s a nugget or two that you’ve learned from the students that go through your program that might be interesting for our audience to hear? 

David Brauer: Buying signals. I think that these students are amazing experts at knowing how to pick up buying signals. They may not recognize what it is they’re seeing or what it is they’re reading, but because they’re so adept at social media and because they were born as digital natives, because they can navigate information so quickly, they’re really good at being able to pick up buying signals with the right guidance. 

You have platforms out there, let’s say software-buying platforms like G2, which was founded by Godard Abel. Those people have the foresight to be able to see that buyer intent and buyer signals are going to be really important. Our students can be really good with that if they know about those tools. ZoomInfo, same thing, has buyer intent and has the ability for you to be able to find all the contact information for those buyers that you need to see, when did they look at it? How long did they look at it? What were they looking at? It really adds a lot to the conversation. 

With the tools that we’re delivering, the classic foundational tools of being able to communicate, along with their ability to pick up on buying signals, allows sellers to have more time to talk to the right people. In sales, with many careers, time is your most valuable commodity. If you can filter through the people who are actually going to buy more quickly, you have more customers, you make more money, you make more commission, you’re more successful for your company. I would say that these students are experts at buying signals. They just need to be guided into knowing what it is they’re looking at. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. That’s something that we’ll definitely pursue on a future episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. In line with that, the students, it’s not just like, “Gee, I got a degree in sales. Now I’m going to make high five figures, early six, just because I have the degree.” It’s like an athlete. You got to keep working at it. You got to be hungry. One of the things that we’ve really enjoyed by getting involved with the University Sales Center Alliance and going to some of the competitions, is seeing how committed these young adults are at being great, and preparing and asking the right questions. I’m interested more in the ones who are going to succeed. What are some of the things that you found that they really want to learn about professional selling? 

David Brauer: Reece Sutphin is a role player on the WVU sales team, and he was a D1 baseball player. What he brought with him was total work ethic. My dad volunteers to coach the WVU sales team and helps prepare them for being sales role players. People like Reece, with that amazing work ethic, want to absorb as much as they can from those people that have retired or are retiring that have a lot of skills that, frankly, they don’t teach anymore. 

We start with foundational, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I tell the students, listen, we’re not teaching parlor tricks. I’m not teaching anybody really to sell anything. What we’re teaching you is how to make a best friend and how to make your best friend successful. If you can find out what it is that your friend needs by asking the right questions, whether you offer the product or service or not, if you know where it can be found, deliver that information to them, you’ll build a long-term relationship with people that will always know that you’re the trusted advisor to go to bar none, and that will build a successful career. I think they’re looking for that. 

Fred Diamond: I love that answer. It keeps coming back to what we say a lot of times, is if you’re going to make your customer continually successful, then they’ll keep coming back and they’ll stay with you. How can you make them more successful? One of the classic lines is it might not be what you’re selling them today. It may be a referral. It may be an idea on something you’ve seen at one of their competitors. That’s a great answer. 

You mentioned your competition before, and your work with companies like Fastenal. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with corporate sponsors. I like the way you said before that they’re very important to helping your programs grow. Every other professor and director at a university professional selling program has the same challenges getting sponsors involved. What do they want? What do they expect? For companies that haven’t considered this, or maybe they’ve been approached but haven’t gone to the next stage, what might you want to tell them to interest them in learning more about becoming a corporate sponsor of a program such as yours? 

David Brauer: We have very few sponsors. We don’t take all comers. We don’t take everybody who’s interested. We’ve turned people away. We’ve let people go. If they’re not the right cultural fit for our students, then we don’t have any business having a relationship with them, regardless of if they want to give us money or not. We focus on quality over quantity of sponsorships, and we try to deliver an amazing ROI to our sponsors. We also offer exclusivity in industry. Let’s say for example with Fastenal, we wouldn’t bring on Grainger as a sponsor. They’re direct competitors. They compete just on every level. We have no business bringing in Grainger. We’ve got someone who fills that niche. 

There are two areas that we’re still looking for, which are software and pharma. If there are sponsors out there that are in software or pharma, hurry up and grab it because there’s only one seat of each available. We deliver an amazing ROI. That’s what we’ve done with Fastenal. Fastenal was sponsoring some of the large competitions in the United States. With those competitions, and they’re great competitions too, they were a little frustrated that maybe they were looking for possibly more students to talk to. I was thinking, “How could we possibly deliver that to them?” I said, “What if you were the only sponsor of this program, and we scale it out to the other universities, but you’re the only one. You’re running the role play, you’re having the conversations with the students, and you’re the only one hiring there.” 

They said, “That’d be amazing. No one does that.” 

I said, “No, they don’t, but you should.” 

We’ve now been doing that for two years. The first year there was 550 student role players. This year there was over 900. It has become one of the largest recruitment initiatives for Fastenal. This is an area where universities and their sponsors, it’s the job of the sales institutes to deliver ROI to their sponsors and to their students. Their students first, by getting the right sponsors in there that will give them the jobs, and then their sponsors who are helping support those students to make their dreams come true. 

Fred Diamond: The main reason why companies would sponsor is access to these talented young adults who are going to be a couple years ahead of the curve. Maybe they hire a science major or something, or another liberal arts major or something. They’re going to have to teach them the sales process, all the things that you go through using various tools, etc. The main advantage for companies to sponsor is to get access to professional athletes basically at sales. 

David Brauer: That’s absolutely right. 

Fred Diamond: I know you’re also very active in the Boy Scouts, and you’ve also gotten your sales students involved with some activities. Tell us a little bit about that as well, because I see this a lot when your peers, and I’ve begun to meet a lot of the students who’ve listened to the Office Hours shows, they’re posting things related to community service and being involved in the community, et cetera. Tell us more about what you do with your students with the Boy Scouts. 

David Brauer: I met a gentleman about a year ago, at this point, his name’s Mel Pirchesky. I met him at Carnegie Mellon at an event. We were just talking to a bunch of different people, and he asked me if I would donate to the Scouts. I said, “Sure, I could do that, but what are you trying to raise money for? What is it exactly for?” 

He said, “There’s these disabled kids that it’s very expensive for them to go to camp. Their parents have a lot of other expenses with medical and other things, and sometimes people just can’t get there. There are these kids who are wheelchair-bound who are sitting on the sidelines and can’t participate.” 

He showed me a video of this young man who was in a wheelchair and the zip line was adapted for him. When he did the zip line, at the end, they were talking with him, and his smile was so big, I thought he was going to break his face in half. He was so excited. It dawned on me that I’ve been on a zip line and I think it’s cool. I asked my students, “How many in the class have been on a zip line?” The majority of them have been on. I said, “Pretty exciting, right?” 

They said, “Yeah.” 

I said, “Now imagine you are confined in your body and you can’t really do a lot of things like that, but there’s this one thing you can do that’s exactly like the rest of us. You get to experience that thrilling exhilaration.” 

Every time, even now, when I tell this story, it gives me goosebumps. I was overcome with emotion about that because I thought, “If we can give that to people and we can teach the sales process by giving that to people, then that’s what I want to do.” Mel and I worked together with some people at the Laurel Highlands Council from Scouting America. We talked about how we could develop a program that would not just work for Laurel Highlands Council, but work for a lot of different councils. 

In the fall, I had my students learn the sales process by using ZoomInfo, profiling the profile of an ideal prospect. I had them profile people. I said, “Imagine your dream job. Where do you want to work? Find people who work in your dream job that might be 40 or 50 years old. Reach out to them, tell them you’d like to talk to them about their career, and reverse engineer from college to that job.” The second part of it is, in my sales class, we’re raising money to send these disabled scouts to camp. Is this something you could get behind? 

Long story short, from that project last fall, we had four students land in their dream jobs. That was pretty amazing. This one gentleman reached out to a CMO in New York City, and the guy offered him a job after the phone call, and then gave a $500 donation on the spot. Their quota was $350 and he said, “Now what do I do?” I said, “Keep going.” But he landed his dream job. I had a really nice letter from him at the end saying, “Thank you. Had it not been for this project, I would’ve never done that.” 

All of the students in our sales classes raised a little better than $79,500. It was a pretty good haul to send those scouts. That translates to about sending 24 disabled scouts to camp in the summertime. Either the Jamboree or scouting camp in West Virginia or Pennsylvania in our area. 

It was so successful that two other sales professors heard about it. I’m on the board of the University Sales Center Alliance, and some of my friends reached out to me. Rhett Epler at Old Dominion University, shout out, he’s adopting this as well, and Andy McGowan at Virginia Commonwealth, who you recently had on your podcast. They’re adopting that for their classes as well. Who knows, hopefully lots of other professors in the University Sales Center Alliance adopt this in the fall. This is tremendously impactful for the social outreach, to send these children to the camp. 

Fred Diamond: There’s so much benefit to that. By the way, Rhett was also on the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged show as well. It reminds me of something, we talk about this all the time. When you’re really successful in sales, and we touched on this a little bit before about helping your customers, sales really is about service. It’s about serving your customers to achieve their goals. If you’re not going to help your customers achieve their goals, then there’s no value for them to even consider working with you or your company, and a major way that that represents itself by being involved. 

Almost all, if not all, of the top sales professionals that I’ve worked with in my career have been involved with something else, some type of philanthropy some type of charity. Maybe it was personal, maybe it was related to a child, maybe it was hunger, whatever it might be. During the holidays you see companies posting left and right. By the way, we’re doing today’s interview on Martin Luther King Day in early of 2026, which is a national day of service as well. Good for you. I’m glad that the students found jobs, but also, hopefully that triggered a lot in them to continue being of that. 

You mentioned you came on board in 2020. A lot of the students graduated when the pandemic happened, spent the first year or two of their college careers in the COVID world, remote classes, etc. Sales has changed in a lot of ways. We’ve covered this on almost every single episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I’m just curious, what are some of the trends? Obviously, AI. It’s amazing we haven’t mentioned AI yet. But what are some of the trends in professional selling that are related to the digital transformation that has affected your curriculum and your teaching? 

David Brauer: I’ve mentioned it a little bit earlier with tools like ZoomInfo and being able to find buyer intent and buyer signals. That lines up exactly with AI. Those people that can build the personal connection skillset that’s taught through things like How to Win Friends and Influence People, and talking with people who were born before social media and maybe came in early on emails. I remember my first sales campaigns, I was actually sending handwritten letters out to people for my initial prospect calls. I’d send those out, then I’d follow up with a phone call, now it’s a DM or email, and then follow up with a phone call. I would say a lot of the things are exactly the same except for the speed at which you can do it. 

A smart, savvy salesperson should be able to work a lot more quickly and use their time to be in front of the customer more than it was possible for us to do in the past. Someone who can be extremely organized and regimented in that, and also be open to all of the different sales processes that are out there. There are a lot of companies that offer sales education, like Sandler and Dale Carnegie and Challenger, there’s a lot out there. But the University Sales Center Alliance and the schools that offer that now to expose students to different sales methodologies, really is super helpful and we’ll build professionals. We’re building a new reputation of sales. 

Fred Diamond: That is great. Actually, at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we’ve gotten involved with a lot of the university programs and give some tutoring, some guidance, some career advice as well. 

David Brauer, West Virginia University, thank you so much for the great insights. We covered a lot of ground here. I greatly appreciate it. We end each show typically with an action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas. For people listening to the show or reading the transcript, if you could give them one bit of advice, one thing they should do right now to take whatever it is they’re doing in the sales world to the next step, what would that be? 

David Brauer: Build your network. Have a great network. Always be growing no matter how old you are or how far in your career you are. Connect with new people. You can learn from everybody. My son asked me that, he goes, “Why do you still go to all these sales conferences and different things?” 

I said, “I go for the nugget. I go to find one nugget of something that can help me out.” 

I have to tell you, connecting with you has been eye-opening for me. It’s been really nice, and you’re a new connection for me. This is really pleasant, but I think people need to always keep their eyes open and to always be expanding their universe. This is an old saying, but opportunity dances with those who are on the dance floor. If you’re not on the dance floor, you’re not going to have an opportunity. 

Fred Diamond: What do you tell students who, again, a lot of the students that you work with, they grew up behind a screen. Because of the remoteness, they’ve grown up behind Zoom, they’ve grown up behind their phone, etc. How do you encourage them to get out and meet human beings? Because it’s still a huge part of the sales process, is knowing people. Even though you can meet a lot of people with LinkedIn and grow connections online and the social network groups, etc., being with humans in presence is something that really takes things to the next level. What do you tell your students about that? 

David Brauer: We take them to these different sales competitions, but we also host sales networking nights on our campus. The whole sales networking night is just that. It’s our sponsors, it’s people who are in sales, it’s our alumni. It’s people who get together and we just spend a couple hours together socializing, networking, and learning about each other. The students always come away and say, “Wow, that’s really a lot of fun.” It is a people situation. The better you get at that, the more fun you’ll have, the more successful you’ll be. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank David Brauer with West Virginia University. This is the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Podcast, a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Dennis Lucey, I’m excited to have you on the show. You’ve been a participant in many of our Institute for Excellence in Sales events. Every first Friday of the month, if you may recall, before the pandemic, we used to do our Big Stage program, and you were a frequent attendee. It was great to have you there. It’s great to see that you’re still out there making things happen for your company and selling into the public sector. I want to get deep into your career and also what you’re seeing now and your advice for sales professionals. First off, how are you doing? It’s great to see you today. 

Dennis Lucey: Great seeing you also. 

Fred Diamond: Thank you so much. Your company, Akima. In 2025, Akima was ranked number 31 on Washington Technology’s top 100 government contractors. Tell us a little more about the company. What do you do? What do you focus on? What are you selling to, and why it’s been so successful? 

Dennis Lucey: Akima is actually an Alaska native company. We are owned by 13,000, 14,000 Eskimos, and we can use the word Eskimo because they fish on the Bering Sea. As you know, it was actually created back in the ‘70s when the state became a state almost. They made some decisions on how to divide the land up there. We’re owned by the Eskimos. As a result of some of the issues there, the Congress in the United States needed to get the oil out in the ‘70s because of the oil crisis. As a result of that, in order to keep everybody happy, particularly the people in Alaska, they gave the Eskimos certain privileges that nobody else has. 

For instance, the rules of the normal 8(a) are you can be in the program for nine years, number one. Number two, there’s a dollar limit, about $5 million on that. Number three, you can protest it, and there’s other restrictions on the normal 8(a). What they gave the Eskimos initially, and then they threw it open to every region up there, was certain privileges because of a lot of the damage down by the pipeline, and also some of the issues on ownership of that land. Number one, they said the ANC would be a perpetual 8(a) by law. This is a law now. Number two, it’d be a dollar limit up to about a hundred million, but it could go beyond that if necessary. Number two, you cannot protest it, and there’s other restrictions in that program. 

Now, I’ve been in this town since the ‘60s, a long, long time. I started with the Burroughs Corporation in the mainframe business, and then I moved on to the computer side of Xerox. Then I was with a company called Storage Technology. I’ve been here at Akima for almost going on 25 years. We started small and we’ve grown quite large now. We’re big in a lot of different areas. We’re big into cyber, cloud, data analysis, AI, we repair jet engines for the Air Force. We’re in construction. Also, we look after parts of the White House Communications Agency. All of our profits go back to sustain the Alaskan Eskimos. Believe it or not, they’re probably the poorest people in the United States. Everybody says, “They got the oil up there, they must be rich.” Well, there is oil out there, but the oil has to go from the north part of Alaska to Long Beach, California, get refined all the way back again. They don’t make that much money on that oil. Hence the ANC model is critical for their livelihood. 

Fred Diamond: Before I get into a little more about your career, you just gave us a touch point, what are some of the projects or some of the programs that the Alaska native companies, Akima specifically, participate in? 

Dennis Lucey: We’re in many of the agencies now, both the civilian, the DOD, and the so-called three-letter agencies. Well, let’s take a look at, say Navy to start, pick one out here. The Navy has a huge, huge center in a town very few people have ever heard of called Millington, Tennessee. Millington is a suburb of Memphis. There used to be a Navy air base there. Millington now is the home of the Navy Personnel Command. It’s a big operation there. We’ve been there for many, many years working with the Navy. We also do a lot of work with the Army personnel side, which is at Fort Knox, Kentucky. We’re in a lot of different agencies, civilian, as well as DOD, as well as the three-letter agencies. 

Fred Diamond: You’ve been selling 60 years. Why has this been your career focus? I’ve interviewed a lot of public sector leaders and I always like to ask that question, why have you picked this industry to singularly be your focus industry? 

Dennis Lucey: I’m from San Francisco. I was trained by the Jesuits at the University of San Francisco. I came to Washington D.C. with the Burroughs Corporation in the mainframe computer business. Now, as you know, Burroughs and UNIVAC merged, and that company exists today, it’s called Unisys. I enjoyed selling, I’ve always enjoyed selling, starting with Burroughs for a couple years, then I moved on to the computer side of Xerox. I’ve always enjoyed selling, number one. Number two, I found the government marketplace to be unique and also very profitable. That’s how I got started and I’m still here. 

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in February of 2026. A lot has happened to the government marketplace, 2025 with a lot of the reduction in force and agency shifts and things along those lines. What are some of the major things that you want to get across to selling professionals that they should be aware of when selling to the federal government right now? 

Dennis Lucey: I think one of the toughest jobs in selling to the government is in the area of business development. I think some small companies, and even some large companies, think all you have to do is walk into the Pentagon and you’ll walk out with a $25 million contract. It really doesn’t work that way. I don’t have any tattoos on me, but if I had tattoos, it’d be a big 25/50 on my chest. It takes up to 50 months to get a deal. Why so long? Because number one, you have to know what the transaction is. You have to really know it. They have to know who you are, they have to like you, and it just takes forever. 

I think if you look at an opportunity and find it’s going to be coming out in a month, I think that’s much too late because there’s too many other players that have worked that agency for years. That’s why it takes so doggone long. I enjoy business development, although it is difficult and I get a kick out of it sometime. Even in our own company, we have some good pricing people and they say, “Hey, without my price, you’d never win a thing.” I come back and I say, “Hey, without me, you never would have anything to price?” You can see how difficult it is and how important it is to get in and get to know the agencies well. 

I like people, I enjoy talking to people, and that’s how I stayed. Now today, we’re trying to keep poor people alive. I think the Eskimos are probably one of the poorest people in the United States. Our game here is to keep them alive and that’s why I keep working. 

Fred Diamond: You’ve dealt with a lot of federal employees over your career. What do they want and expect from selling professionals? 

Dennis Lucey: That’s a great question. I think the government people are very, very sharp, very intelligent, and that is as important to me. When I go in to visit a customer, I’m always asking them questions about themselves. I think a lot of sales types go in and start talking about their product or their company, and as a result, nothing happens. There’s an old CIO here in town, he was probably one of the first official CIOs. He always told me the story of salespeople coming in to visit him. He feels that so often they come in and they don’t know much about the agency. They don’t know much about some of his problems, and they expect him to educate them on what the problems are. I think that’s backwards. I think you have to go in and you have to be able to help people. Not so much talk about yourself or about what product you have or what service you have. 

This guy was real funny. He would take calls from sales types and he’d sit down and he had a relationship with his secretary, that she would come in exactly five minutes after the talk began, and she’d say, “The secretary or the assistant secretary’s on the line for you, sir.” Well, his philosophy was this, if this call was going well, where the salesperson was going to help him and make him a better CIO, he’d say to the secretary, “Tell her/him that I will call back after this meeting.” However, if it’s going terrible, he’d say to the salesperson, “Hey, look, I must get this call. You send me the information,” and that would be the end of the call. The bottom line there is that let’s not waste our time. Let’s show them how we know what some of their problems are, and let’s offer some solutions to those problems. I think that’s the secret. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second. I agree with you a hundred percent, especially now, again, we’re doing today’s interview in February of 2026. Every customer on the planet can go to the internet or an AI tool, a ChatGPT or whatever, and they could type in about the technology the company is offering. I remember when I was at Apple, we used to do two-day roadmap strategy sessions for customers. Now the customer can type in, what is Apple’s product strategy for the next 10 years? What is your advice for selling professionals to be prepared for that? How have you done that, and how should sales professionals know what they need to know to get a couple steps ahead so that the CIO doesn’t take that fake call? 

Dennis Lucey: I think the secret is to get to the right person. If you understand that the right person is the right person, and you understand the problems that person is facing, and you have a solution to that, I think you’re way ahead of the game. If you’re walking in a call for the first time, not knowing anything about that person and not knowing what his problems are, I think that is not going to work well. 

Fred Diamond: How have you done that? Do you do a lot of research online? Do you go to meetings? What are things that you’ve done to be able to get into that meeting with the information that you need to know? 

Dennis Lucey: What I’ve done for many years is to go to breakfast every morning, just about every morning. I shouldn’t put a plug in, but the Silver Diner in Tysons, I try to meet a couple companies every morning, try to understand what they’re doing, what they’re up to, and who they know. That’s the secret. I think some of the small companies really don’t know anybody. There’s obviously organizations like yours when you had that sales group. That was a great meeting group of normally business development types. I think business development types are unique people and they know quite a bit. 

There’s a group here in town that I’ve been associated with since the beginning called the Capital Business Development Association. They go to dinner one night a month at the Army Navy Country Club. The secret in that club is this, you have to tell the name of your company, what you do, what you’re looking for, and if you stop there, that’s not going to be helpful to you. You have to go the next step, “Hey, I have contacts in the following agency that might be of help.” I think business development types, it’s a brotherhood, sisterhood, that are helpful, because they’re all in this together and they realize how difficult it is to even get into these needs of the government. Particularly now with so many changes happening here, it’s really important to get to know people. 

Fred Diamond: There’s so many different leaders, and you could use AI all day long, but a lot of the stuff really comes from the institutional knowledge, the people who’ve been selling and they know what’s going on. I’m just curious, what don’t people know about how the federal government procures technology? What are some things that you think people don’t know you want to share with them? 

Dennis Lucey: The opportunities are there. The question is how to get to the right person to do the selling within the government. A lot of companies shy away from the government, particularly out in Silicon Valley, because they think there’s too many rules, there’s too much you have to disclose, and it takes forever. Well, it does take a long time, but I think that if you understand the government and really understand what they need, I think it’s very profitable, number one. Number two, you can do a lot of good for your company and also for the country. 

Fred Diamond: I’m talking to Dennis Lucey today from Akima, has been in sales into the public sector marketplace, the federal marketplace for going on six decades. Congratulations to you for your continued energy and your success. It’s still great seeing you appear at events around town and it’s always good to have the energy that you exude and your knowledge that you’re willing to share on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. Before I ask you for your final specific step, what would be your advice for people who are new, people who are brand new, maybe they’re out of school, maybe they’re making a career shift that are new to selling to the federal government? 

Dennis Lucey: Getting back to an understanding of the government, understanding of the agency, understanding of what the problems are. I think that’s the secret, and that takes a little time. Number one, there might be other individuals in your organization that would help you there, but I think it’s tough to walk in cold and not understand what the government is doing. There’s organizations out, we mentioned CBDA, there’s other groups called Fast Rope. There’s obviously AFCEA, there’s a lot of groups like that. I think to get active in those groups, that would be a real positive thing in the sense that you’re going to get to know certain people that would be helpful to you in the sales process here. 

Fred Diamond: Do you recommend that people pursue the federal government as their career focus for selling into? 

Dennis Lucey: I do. I’ve been at it a long time and I think it’s a great marketplace and I think the government’s going to be around a long time. 

Fred Diamond: I remember once I was on a sales call with a sales rep, this must have been 30 years ago when I was at Apple. We were driving through Downtown D.C. and he stopped his car and he told me to get out and he said, “Look at all these buildings. They’re not going to tear down these buildings.” When you get to understand the breadth that government is in, and I’m not saying this from a political statement, but with healthcare and with infrastructure and with so many things that are designed to serve the citizen, then you understand the breadth of the entity. They need tools, they need advice, they need suggestions on how to continue to do it better. 

Thanks again, Dennis Lucey, for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas. Give us one specific action step that you recommend selling professionals take right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Dennis Lucey: Get a real understanding of the agency. Find out who in the agency has the problems and offer a solution to that individual. 

Fred Diamond: You know what? That’s not hard to find. We actually did a show recently with Mark Amtower, who talked about how to find the right people on LinkedIn that you can get to. A lot of it is public information. It’s not that hard to find, but you got to put in the work and you got to understand what are the people responsible for? How willing are they to work? A lot of these people in government, people don’t realize, they want to use your technology to improve their services. There are things that make it a little bit kludgy along the way that we’re trying to continue improving, but they want to do better. They want to be of service. They want to use the right tools to build the best systems. 

Dennis Lucey, congratulations on all your success. Thanks for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 818: How Dennis Lucey Built a 60-Year Career Selling to the U.S. Government first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.