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!

On today’s show, Fred Diamond and Julie Murphy meet with Tony D’Angelo, Vice President of Public Sector at Fivecast.

Find Tony on LinkedIn.

TONY’S TIP: “Master your craft. Be an expert. Don’t apologize for what you do. Be proud of it. We’re solving problems, we’re bringing technology to people that have real problems and solving those problems.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Julie, I’m very excited. We’re going to be talking to Tony D’Angelo with Fivecast. I really enjoyed the prep call that we had with Tony and his team. I’m excited for what we’re going to be talking about here. 

Julie Murphy: Yeah, me too. We’ve got a lot of questions for Tony. Tony is a longtime sales leader in this space. I first met Tony when he was vice president of public sector at Lookout, where we did a lot of thought leadership together around mobile security and the sales team and marketing. PR team worked really tightly there. 

I also met Tony because his daughter was the lacrosse coach for my daughter, which was really nice, when she was in fourth grade and his daughter was in high school. Now she is a D1 lacrosse star. This town is small, so you can meet people in a lot of different ways. Tony, we’re really excited to hear about your advice and the trends that you’re seeing in the market. Welcome to our podcast. 

Tony D’Angelo: That was great. Thank you for having me. 

Fred Diamond: Tony, I’m excited to have you here. I forgot about the lacrosse tie. As I told you, I have a son who is a hockey professional. He played a little bit of lacrosse. I know you’re mostly on the girls’ side. Maybe we could tie in some of the lessons from what you’ve learned from coaching. 

Tony, tell us briefly about yourself and then let’s get started. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. What’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in enterprise buying over the past couple of years and how should sales and marketing leaders be responding? 

Tony D’Angelo: It’s a good question. I think predominantly it’s the access to information. That’s changed dramatically over the years. The buyers are far more educated than they used to be. Now with AI tools, it’s gotten even better for the consumer. They can look at you, your competitors. They can create a capabilities matrix with just a couple of keystrokes and have everything at their fingertips. 

The trick for marketing leaders is to take back control of that messaging. I’m a big fan of ABM, account-based marketing, highly targeted marketing campaigns. If you know your client base, who’s going to resonate best with your message and your product, it’s pretty easy to come up with that target list of accounts. Then within those target accounts, really identify the target individuals that you want to market to and create custom content for them. It’s a lot of work, it’s hard, but nothing is easy in this business. 

The ones that put the time in, put that extra energy into it and control the marketing, you may not be able to do it before they actually do their own research, but you might be able to at least give yourself more of a fighting chance because they could make up their mind before they even meet you. But if you have that opportunity to try to control some of that messaging and some of that custom content, you’re going to be in a much better position. 

Julie Murphy: I absolutely agree with you on ABM and really targeted marketing and thought leadership because marketing is really getting as close to one-to-one as possible, because your customers expect when you’re talking to them that it’s customized. You’re not going to walk into a federal agency and start talking about profit margins. It’s an immediate turnoff. The more customized you can be toward your customer, I think the better. 

You had also mentioned AI. What do you think organizations are getting right and getting wrong when they apply AI to marketing and sales? What have you seen? 

Tony D’Angelo: In the last year is probably the first time I’ve really used it and I’ve seen the team really use it as a key tool within the business. If I look at the sales professionals, I think they’re doing a really good job at building business plans with it, doing the research, trying to identify the right target customers. Even if you’re talking about government, which is what my team focuses on, really identifying even the sub-agencies and sub-organizations that we may not have known that much about, even though most of us have many years of experience, there’s always going to be new corners, whether it’s reorganization, a different sub-agency pops up or a mission moves from one to the next. These AI tools are providing tremendous lift and helping us to just really narrow our focus. 

The other thing, on the marketing side, where organizations are getting it wrong, I would say it’s tempting to let AI do most of the work. I think it’s a good tool to do a lot of the busy work, but it still requires human hands and that human touch. I think there’s a temptation to generate too much content. I think there’s a temptation to let AI generate all of the content, again, without that human intervention. I think, at times, we have so much bombarded at us through social media, LinkedIn postings, all different types of media coming at us that oftentimes can feel cold and lifeless. I think just making sure that we don’t stray too far away from the human element, but use tools like you might use a traditional set of tools in a toolbox. You’re not going to hammer a nail without a hammer. You’re not going to do it with a block of wood or your bare hand, but there’s those other elements that just really matter when it comes to making sure that content looks and feels right. 

Fred Diamond: Just give the audience, if you don’t mind, just a brief introduction to yourself and what you do. 

Tony D’Angelo: I’ve been in the industry over 30 years now. I’ve spent my entire career in the Washington area. Worked for private sector technology companies the entire time. I’ve led not only public sector organizations, but commercial as well. It’s hard to not attach yourself to government business living in the Washington area. The thing I just love most about it is the mission and the client base. It’s also the largest enterprise in the world. There are many unique things going on. 

The team I lead today is focused on public sector for the Americas. Fivecast is an open-source intelligence software platform. We collect off of open web, across social media, and a variety of different data sources and generate risk profiles for things like law enforcement, defense, intelligence, other use cases around fraud, different things like that. We’ve got customers across state and local government and then all sectors of U.S. Federal, and that’s globally as well, across the international governments too. 

Fred Diamond: One of the challenges, and we talked about AI and all the access to content and information, is that buyers, customers have access to all the information that they want. As a matter of fact, if an IT professional working in a government agency wants to know whatever he needs to know about Fivecast’s product strategy, he can probably go into any of the AI tools and within a minute, he can get your plans that have already been communicated somewhere. What does that mean for today’s modern sales professional? It used to be 15, 20 years ago, sales professionals were walking brochures, and that’s not pertinent anymore. What does that mean for the sales professional? What are you looking for? How are you leading them to be effective today? We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. 

Tony D’Angelo: It’s a very interesting question because we have this conversation a lot. Customers used to use a sales call to educate themselves. It’s no longer the case. You’re lucky if you can even get in front of them face to face. Oftentimes it’s over a call like this and they don’t even turn their cameras on. There are so many other challenges, and so that’s a much longer conversation. 

I think the way that I coach the team, and even what I try to do myself, is to be agile. We want to learn as much as we possibly can, ideally from that prospective client, before you get in front of them, whether it’s an initial phone call or even it’s an email exchange about what this meeting agenda and what the meeting flow is going to be like. But oftentimes you just don’t know or you could be caught a little bit off guard. Being agile and just being prepared to jump into a later stage of the sales motion than you might normally expect. 

Customer might be highly educated on your platform and they’ll say, “Hey, I’ve already done all my homework. I got 20 minutes. I just want to see a demo.” You need to decide if that’s what you’re going to do and if that’s how you’re going to allow the call to flow. Are you going to let them control the call and is that the way that it’s going to go? Generally, you might have to go that route if that’s the only airtime that you have. You might want to make your best impression. 

As best you can, also do your homework on the client. They’re doing research on us. We can do the research on them, particularly if it’s a government agency, I can learn a lot. Is it a defense agency? Is it a weapons systems program? What do I know about the budget? Have they been in the news? Has somebody been hauled in front of Congress? Are they having problems? Is the program going really well? There’s a lot that I can glean from this. I can virtually map out the leadership just doing my own research. Then ideally, show value and try to map capabilities to the mission, understand the mission as best you can, because then you’ll have some credibility. If you’re just going to show up and let them completely lead the call and assume that they know everything because they’ve done the research, you’re probably not going to get a second call back. 

Julie Murphy: Tony, it’s not even just your customers that have access to all this data. Fred and I have talked about previous podcasts that sometimes customers are researching up to 80% closer to their decision before they actually even talk to the sales team. But you have data as well, both marketing and sales teams. There are lots of different ways that you can track your prospects, whether it’s through click through rates, leads that you’re getting from trade shows. Really now, because there are so many different channels to reach these prospective buyers, you have more data than ever. 

What metrics really matter to you when you’re looking at the data, because there’s a lot of activity that you can do, but what are you tracking? What numbers do you think are really contributing to the revenue? 

Tony D’Angelo: Yeah, lots of activity, which can be confused with productivity, as I like to say. The sales numbers are pretty easy to measure. Even the contribution from marketing or channels, things like that, it’s the amount of qualified pipeline that’s been created. Then in addition to that, if sales and marketing and channels are helping to create qualified pipeline, are we closing that pipeline? We can even measure that in different sectors. What’s the percentage of opportunities that we’re closing that are generated by sales versus marketing versus channels? 

Virtually every company I’ve ever been in, marketing will say, we’ve created thousands of leads for sales. What does sales say? I have no leads. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. There could be a lot of reasons for that. It could be, not to get overly technical on marketing, but MQL to SQL conversion rates, so marketing qualified to sales qualified leads. Who’s generating the leads? Are they properly qualified? All of those things. It requires a bit of digging, but the data typically doesn’t lie. 

Fred Diamond: Tony, we’re over 850 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes. One of the keywords that sales leaders like you bring up frequently, value comes up all the time and effectiveness, but preparation is a word that comes up all the times. The sales leaders that we typically present on the show and at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling understand that and are excellent at that. What is some of your advice for the selling professionals listening, and the ones that you manage, about preparation? What do you expect of them? What are some of your tips and guidance for them to be more effective? 

I like what you said before. If you get the opportunity to be in front of the customer, no matter how they want to be presenting themselves, it’s gold. Every time you hear back from a customer, you get a chance to speak to a customer or a prospect, it’s gold, but you got to be talking to them of things that are of purport and of value. They don’t want to talk about the World Cup, but they want to talk about how is your technology going to affect them as they’re trying to achieve this mission or this goal, whatever it might be. Just curiously, since this is the Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast, what might be your advice for the marketing professionals out there to help the sales professionals be more prepared when the opportunity arises? 

Tony D’Angelo: You think about job interviews and what people go through with that type of preparation. If somebody wants a sales role at Fivecast and they spend a few minutes looking at the website for the interview, it’s probably not going to cut it. That’s probably the bare minimum, because if I or anyone else says, “Well, tell me what you know about Fivecast,” and it’s very little or nothing at all, clearly they haven’t done the preparation. 

Same thing goes with meeting with a prospective customer. It’s doing that work. The data is generally there, unless it’s a classified environment, classified program, you can learn a lot about your client. This goes along the ABM route as well. Doing your homework on what’s the message that might resonate with this client? What is the particular use case? What problem are they trying to solve? Do we have a solution that solves that problem? Who are the individuals that are probably going to be most interested in what we’re doing? This is where I like to take ABM to the next level, I jokingly say almost like a stalker-ish level, because I want to know the individuals that are interested in our type of technology who might be speaking at trade shows, who might be posting online. 

If you put the time in and do that level of research, you’re probably going to find out, because if someone comes back and tells me that, “Hey, we’re going to meet with these three individuals, and these are the people that I’ve targeted,” I’m going to ask why, why the CIO or why the CISO. They might have no interest in this technology. It might be somebody else, but until you actually do that homework, because you could literally, just based on titles alone, you could probably come up with 50 people that sound like they could be the right person. But until you do your homework, you could narrow that down to four or five people. Without belaboring the point, I think it’s that deep preparation and just understanding the potential client and the mission outcomes. 

I think the other point is be a master in some sales methodology like MEDDPICC or something like that, because training your brain, when you have a very short amount of time in front of the client, you tend not to miss things. You’re going to look for an economic buyer, you’re going to understand the evaluation criteria, you’re going to try to implicate pain, if you will, what problems are they trying to solve, and then be able to help them. Because you can be a relationship sales person, you can be a very technical sales person, but the ones that are going to be the most successful, the ones that are solving problems, that’s what customers want. Understand what I do, understand my mission, understand my problems, bring me a solution that solves my problems. If you can do that, you’re going to be very successful. 

Julie Murphy: That’s very smart, Tony. What you’re talking about when asking why, it’s what are the motivations, what’s the buyer behavior, and what’s motivating them to be interested in this particular product or service, which is why the messaging and collaboration between sales and marketing. You’re helping each other, you’re speaking the same language. I know that’s something that you’ve always been a champion of. I know that during my time when I worked with Lookout and you were there, you were very open and collaborative with the thought leadership team and getting that messaging right and getting the right talking points out there and awareness in the marketplace. From what I’ve seen, you’ve been doing that at Fivecast as well. 

Everyone talks about sales and marketing alignment, not everyone really does it. In organizations that you’ve ever been a part of or that you’ve seen that really do it well, what consistent behaviors are you seeing? 

Tony D’Angelo: I would add channels to that as well. I look at it as a three-legged stool, so sales, marketing, and channels. I expect that the pipeline contribution is going to be a third, a third, a third from each. We talked a little bit about that before. The way that that is best managed, my opinion, is when marketing and channels are completely part of the sales go-to-market business plan, down to the rep level. Each rep, each sales individual, sales professional needs to have a marketing plan, needs to have a channel plan, needs to be very actively engaged with their peers in those organizations. Because if you’ve got a marketing organization that is off doing their thing and they’re creating content and mass-emailing it across a number of different verticals, government and commercial, it’s going to generally fall flat, in my opinion. It’s that close alignment. 

The marketing leader and the sales leader, as well as the marketing individual and sales individual contributors need to be complete partners, as well as the channel leaders, and just all do that together. Because if we’re building marketing plans for a specific ABM, we can see that and measure that and then tweak it. As I’ve told people, when we’re doing these ABMs, we’ve already decided who are the target accounts. We’ve decided who the target individuals are. We’re not going to try it and then stop. We’re going to try it until we get it right. If we’ve got the messaging wrong, we’re just going to keep going. 

If we’ve identified our target accounts and our target individuals, we’re just going to keep going. Maybe we get in through a channel partner. Maybe we get in through this great marketing content. Maybe we meet somebody at a trade show, but it’s going to be that persistence and the close collaboration across that three-legged stool of sales channel and marketing that will win the day. 

Fred Diamond: Knowing who those companies are, or in your case, the government agencies and who the people are, will definitely save a lot of time, make your marketing more effective. It may not lead to a quicker sale, hopefully it will, but it definitely makes the efforts of everybody involved. 

Tony, I’m going to ask you to give us your first thing that comes to mind to the next couple of questions here. What do you see sales reps doing wrong? If you could just pick out one thing, you’ve managed hundreds of sales professionals, maybe thousands in your career. Again, we’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. What’s the one thing that you’re constantly seeing selling professionals do wrong today? 

Tony D’Angelo: I would say not focusing enough on the growth and retention aspects. We’re a SaaS company. GRR and NRR, as the terminology goes, it’s the renewals and the expansion of that existing client base. If you’re a company that’s growing 35% to 40% a year, roughly 75% to 80% of your annual revenue is going to come from your renewal base, and then if you can grow that renewal base, roughly 20%. But yet most sales leaders and sales individuals will spend the majority of their time chasing the logo business, which might represent 20% of the growth. 

Those are important, don’t get me wrong. It’s super important to have new logo and continue to expand that footprint, but the gold standard, if you can hit a 95% renewal rate and then retain your existing clients and grow them 20%, you’re going to solve a lot of problems. The sales cycle is shorter and the cost of sales is a lot shorter. It’s a lot easier to retain and expand your existing client base than it is to go find new clients. 

Julie Murphy: We’re going to have some fun with this next one, Tony. If there’s one marketing or sales buzzword that you’d like to see retired, and I know you’ve heard a lot over the course of your career, what would you be okay if you never heard it? 

Tony D’Angelo: There’s a lot of them. Just one. Synergy maybe. There’s a lot of corny, tacky ones, circle back, there are so many, but yeah, Synergy probably. It’s just vague and it sounds good, but there’s not really much meat behind it. 

Julie Murphy: A little empty. I agree with you on that one. 

Fred Diamond: That’s funny. I have a daughter who’s a sales manager at the Hershey’s Corporation and she just got promoted to manager and we were talking about words, like Julie’s reflecting on here, and buzzwords, etc., and I said one of my favorites is circle back. Anyway, I want to thank Tony D’Angelo. Julie, thank you for bringing Tony on the show. This was the Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast, a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Thank you, Tony, for the great insights. The whole notion of ABM, I’ve been saying this my whole career, knowing who your prospects are, knowing who’s most likely to buy, and it ain’t thousands of companies. 

I used to work for a guy who worked at IBM, who was a senior VP of sales at IBM. This was when IBM was the technology company, the hugest one. Even he said that not every company was a target of theirs. They couldn’t satisfy every single customer. My daughter, that I just mentioned, sells Hershey’s candies, same thing. I said, “Well, I guess everyone buys Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups because it’s the biggest candy.” She said, “Well, peanut butter is not very big with Hispanic audiences.” It’s a lesser product in some neighborhood convenience stores, for example. I love what you brought up with your team and directing them, makes marketing efforts a lot more effective, etc. 

You’ve given us so many great ideas here. Give us one specific action that people listening to the show or reading the transcript should do right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Tony D’Angelo: Master your craft. Be an expert. There’s this notion of 10,000 hours to be an expert. I don’t think that’s enough for sales. Maybe it’s enough to play the piano or to do something else, but put the time in. Don’t apologize for what you do. Be proud of it. We’re solving problems, we’re bringing technology to people that have real problems and solving those problems. Do the hard stuff. Put the time in. Read books. Listen to podcasts like this one. Just continue to get better and hone your craft. Like I said, 10,000 hours, I think, equates to less than five years in the workforce. That’s not enough. Just keep at it and you’ll get better. 

Fred Diamond: As we’ve said many times, if you’re a professional, be a professional. What are the things that professionals will be doing? Julie, any final thoughts before we wind down here? 

Julie Murphy: I think you’re right. I think the 10,000 hours is a good starting point, but it’s also never stop learning. Our industry is changing too much. 

Tony D’Angelo: Changing really fast. 

Julie Murphy: If you took a back for five years and came back, we probably wouldn’t even recognize it. I think it’s a continual over the course of your career, is to try to keep up. That’s what we do as well. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, thank you, Julie Murphy. Thank you, Tony D’Angelo. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 866: Align Sales, Marketing, and Channels to Better Serve Public Sector Says Fivecast’s Tony D’Angelo first appeared on 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!

The Institute for Effective Professional Selling has launched the Partner Revenue Academy for partner account managers who are looking to become more effective active sellers. The next 6-session cohort launches on September 11.

Learn more here.

Today’s show featured an interview with Dr. Andrew Loring, Associate Director, Reynolds and Reynolds Sales Leadership Institute and Senior Lecturer at Texas A&M University.

Find Andrew on LinkedIn.

ANDREW’S TIP: “We can’t be perfect at everything. There are areas of the sales process where we’re naturally going to excel, and others where we need to double down and work a little bit harder.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Dr. Loring, we’ve done about 20 special episodes where I’ll interview a professor, an executive director of a university program. Either it’s a sales major, a minor, or a certificate in professional selling, educating young adults to go work at the companies that are part of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Great companies that are doing B2B, potentially B2G, business to government, sales. I got to say, the work that you and your peers do to prepare these young adults for careers in professional selling is world-class. 

It’s great to have you here. I’m very excited. I’m excited to learn more about some of your vision for the University Sales Center Alliance, specifically what you’re doing at Texas A&M. Why don’t you get us started? Tell us a little bit about what’s going on at Texas A&M. Tell us a little bit about your program. 

Andrew Loring: I’m the associate director of the Reynolds and Reynolds Sales Leadership Institute at Texas A&M University. We’ve been a recognized program for the last 10 years now. Actually, last October in 2025, we celebrated our 10-year anniversary. It’s been a really exciting milestone in everything that we’ve achieved over the last decade in sales education. 

Fred Diamond: It’s quite remarkable. Actually, there’s a number of schools in Texas. I’ve interviewed Dr. Howard Dover. I interviewed Semira Amirpour from University of Texas at Dallas. Of course, Dr. Linda Alkire at Texas State. Why is Texas such a great home for some of these programs? 

Andrew Loring: I’ll add, Fred, that we’ve actually got more than one sales program at Texas A&M University now. Willy Bolander heads up a program in the College of Engineering as well. There’s sales all over the place in Texas. 

As you may see in the news, Texas is booming economically. College Station is right in the middle of what some people refer to as the Texas Triangle. Within three hours of College Station are about 15 million people. DFW, Houston, and Austin are just booming. Companies are moving in and they need to hire great sales candidates. 

Fred Diamond: Actually, I neglected to mention Baylor University. We’ve had Dr. Andrea Dixon and Lane Wakefield, and they have multiple programs there as well. Great stuff is happening down in Texas. As some people know, my daughter recently moved to Austin, so I’m excited to learn more. 

We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026, middle of your term as president of the USCA. You’ve had a front row seat to the evolution of university sales education. What changes have you seen in the past, you mentioned 10 years that your program has been around, that have had the greatest impact? 

Andrew Loring: We’ve certainly seen a lot of changes. I’d say that more and more companies have come out of the woodwork, so to speak, sharing the great opportunities that they have for our students, for young graduates. The change specifically that I’ve seen are more and more companies wanting to hire sales students off of college campuses. That’s been a dramatic shift. Ten years ago, you’d always have the big players that were there. But more and more lately, we’re seeing companies and really obscure industries that are really interesting, that are great places for our students to go work. 

Fred Diamond: When these companies get the message, I’ve done a couple interviews with your peers and sponsors of their programs, and when they get the message, they’re recruiting and hiring young adults that are three to five years advanced from new employees who might not have gone through your program. They have to learn about your technology and your offerings and your sales process, but they understand sales process, they understand solution selling, they understand the various models. One of the great things about these young adults is they’re not afraid. They’re fearless in getting on calls, on doing interactions with prospects. 

As the president of the USCA, what trends are you hearing from the sales programs across the country that really should resonate with these business leaders that should be sponsoring and attracted to these programs? 

Andrew Loring: For any recruiter or someone who works in HR, sales executive, attrition is a big problem. Anytime you hire a new salesperson, you run a risk of them getting there and realizing, hey, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be, and then they quit. That’s where the USCA and sales programs come in and play a huge role, because our graduates are walking into roles at companies that they’re already familiar with. Perhaps they’ve interned with that company, or at least they’ve met recruiters over, in some cases, several years, and so they know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. As a result, they’re quitting far less. Companies, they couldn’t ask for something better than a student who knows what they’re doing and they’re hungry to get after it and achieve their goals and work hard. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Losing an employee, it could be six figures, especially for some of the roles. That’s one of the things that we’ve been pitching as well, is it’s a strain on a company, costs a lot of money to recruit. They might be taking a shot, but when the young adult has the preparation, they want to be there. They know they’ve been exposed because a lot of these young adults who go through your programs, it’s not like senior year last semester. A lot of them that we’ve spoken to, they get it. They might not know when they go to college, but maybe after the freshman year or early on in their career, they begin to see what your programs offer. Even more importantly, the career opportunities that come after that. They’re hitting the ground running. 

Texas A&M runs one of the nation’s premier programs. Tell us a little bit about why it’s such a premier program. What do you think distinguishes some of the great sales programs at the USCA from others? 

Andrew Loring: One of the big benefits of the USCA is our accreditation. We meet the same accreditation standards as all other USCA schools. It’s hard in some regards to say that we’re better. I don’t believe that we’re any better than other programs. I will say that we tend to focus more on students innate personality characteristics and help them increase their emotional intelligence and relate that to different companies and jobs that are out there. 

As we know, we all have different personalities. Some people are better suited for hunter roles, while other students are better suited for farmer account management roles. We try to do a real deep dive into emotional intelligence and personality to help our students understand where they best fit in the wide world of sales opportunities. Again, being in the middle of the Texas Triangle, our students will go to oil and gas opportunities in Houston. They’ll go do everything in DFW. They’ll go do tech in Austin. It’s really important that they understand the differences between B2C, B2B, B2G, hunter, farmer, all the different types of sales roles that are out there and how they’ll progress over their careers in those different roles. That’s where we tend to focus, is more on that personality. 

Fred Diamond: I want to go a little bit deeper into that. 10 years ago when the programs were getting kicked off, did you think that emotional intelligence was going to be such a critical thing? It comes up so frequently on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’ve even had the author of the great book, Selling with Emotional Intelligence, Colleen Stanley, on the podcast many times and on our stage. Talk a little bit more about how the work that you do, because you’re absolutely right, if you keep pushing someone in sales to do the wrong thing, they’re probably going to fail. I love that you’re doing this work when they’re in college, because they’ve already acknowledged that they want to go into sales. Now you’re getting even more specific in setting them up for a career of success. 

Andrew Loring: I’ll give you an example, Fred. All of us, we do role playing with our students. In those role plays, we follow a sales process, just like all sales people do, or most sales people should. In that sales process, I tell my students that we, as human beings, we can’t be perfect at everything. There are areas of the sales process where we’re naturally going to excel at, and there are areas that are going to be more challenging for us. 

A very simple example is the natural extrovert. They’re going to be really strong in that meeting opening category, the very beginning of a role play in that rubric line item, where they’re knocking on the door with excitement and hunger to meet someone, small talk comes naturally to them. Whereas an introverted student might struggle at that beginning, but then they pick it up when it comes to the discovery. They’re incredibly good at asking questions and listening intently and coming up with content that backs up the benefits of those needs that they discovered. 

We take the emotional intelligence down to that level, where we break down each step in the rubric and help our students align their innate personality characteristics to each line on the rubric. They go into our role plays with an understanding that there are some areas of that rubric that they’re going to do naturally better than others. They know where they need to double down and work a little bit harder in preparation because it doesn’t come so naturally to them. 

Fred Diamond: As a follow up, talk a little bit about the types of companies that are recruiting from Texas A&M. I love the way you’ve just made that distinction between the extrovert and the introvert and so many of those extroverts are great in the early stage. They’re fearless on the phone. Maybe they’re athletes, they’re used to rejection, so to speak, and it doesn’t really bother them. But the introverts, they maybe are better at the more complex deals where they have to talk to multiple people and think out the strategy. It’s not just bursting through. I’m just curious, the grads at Texas A&M, where do a lot of them go work? 

Andrew Loring: Where our students go is pretty diverse. We’re agnostic to industry. We are named after a company, Reynolds and Reynolds, and Reynolds and Reynolds, they’re an automotive dealership solution provider and they’re based all around the country. It’s exclusively B2B and highly complex. They go in and they help car dealerships understand what needs and solutions they can provide with their award-winning technology. That’s much longer sales cycle, but our students will also do tech sales. A lot of them will go to Austin into BDR type roles. Many will go down to Houston in oil and gas. Some of our students go to Baker Hughes and other oil and gas companies. 

We do a lot in logistics and most everyone does insurance. A lot of our students go to Gartner, PepsiCo, and AT&T, so all the major players. But we also have been getting in recently with a lot of healthcare. We have two fabulous partners in healthcare with AbbVie and Amgen and they’ve been tremendous supporters of our program because our students have really found a niche in their desire to go into healthcare sales type roles. 

Fred Diamond: That is great. That is a wide range of industries. What’s even cooler about it is, you mentioned some companies, Gartner, PepsiCo, AbbVie, these are companies that are doing some important things. As I tell selling professionals all the time, you’re providing a service. There might be attraction at that young age about the money you can make and the brands, etc., but sales is the part of the business that really makes things go. For the types of companies that you just talked about, to be committed to working at the university level to bring those people into their process, it’s pretty impressive. I’m just curious, how do you communicate to those companies about getting involved? What really is it that attracts them? 

Andrew Loring: The easiest way to put it is that we help them hire great candidates that don’t quit, so it reduces their attrition. Obviously, companies have one of two choices. They can either hire an experienced salesperson or they can hire a college student who’s about to graduate. Our pitch is that our students are much more malleable, so they’re hungry and they’re willing to learn your company’s ways from the ground up. Companies love it. They love it. They’re willing to come on campus and meet our students earlier and earlier, as early as sophomore year in some cases, and keep that relationship going over time until graduation so that students are ultimately walking into a role that they feel like they’ve been working at for the last two years, which is pretty incredible. 

Fred Diamond: It’s 15 minutes into the interview. We haven’t brought up AI. AI is changing how we prospect, research, communicate, everything in the sales process. How are you using AI to prepare students? Where does AI come into your curriculum? 

Andrew Loring: I’m glad you brought this up, because this is a hot button topic of the USCA. In fact, we brought in several AI vendors to our fall meeting last year. We’re using AI in the same way that all other programs are using it. It’s as a supplement to help students prepare for human-to-human face-to-face role plays. We use it as where our students will role play with an AI agent in an avatar. They’ll do that with piece by piece of the sales process ahead of their face-to-face role plays. That’s how we’re exclusively using AI. 

Fred Diamond: We talked about sponsors a second ago, and it’s amazing. Every time I post an Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged show, I pop it up on LinkedIn, invariably, I’ll get three to five people who will say, even though we’ve done close to 20 shows, gee, I didn’t know that universities had sales programs. It’s a relatively new thing, if you will. The USCA, the University Sales Center Alliance, you’re bringing together universities and corporate partners. You just mentioned some blue-chip world-class companies. You mentioned that they’re looking at some of your young adults when they’re sophomore and early on in their careers. Talk a little bit more about what do you expect from corporate partners? What is your recommendation for other USCA members to be of more value to get more corporate partners involved? 

Andrew Loring: The number one thing that any company that’s listening to this podcast can help all schools with all programs is hire our students, be willing to hire off college campuses and maybe let go of the experienced hire because of the baggage that they come with. Open your mind to the university hire. I promise you that you’ll have a good experience no matter really wherever you go. 

For universities, for programs, my ask for all of them is to make it easy for companies to engage on campus with you. Invite them into your classrooms. Invite them to your events, whether it’s a career fair, a networking type of event, or maybe you have your own sales competition. Make it easy for them to come on campus, because at the end of the day, they’ve got to drive to your campus whether it’s close or far, they’re giving up time to do that, and they obviously want to see a win-win, some value in their time, and that is meeting your great students. It is 100% worthwhile. We’ve been doing it for a decade and we’ve had tremendous success. 

Fred Diamond: One of the cool things about doing these particular interviews, the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged, is that you’re committed to helping the young adults get their careers started off in a great way. We all know, everybody who’s listening to this, that sales is a great way to do it. As a sales educator specifically, what are some of the skills that you desperately want to ensure that they are leaving your program with? 

Andrew Loring: I love that you asked that. It’s funny because every single year we host an advisory board meeting with all our corporate partners. I ask them that same question. I’m like, what do we need to be teaching our students this year that we didn’t incorporate last year that are going to help them get better prepared? 

What’s interesting to me is every single year it’s typically the same thing. They say, I don’t care about the technology. We can teach them how to sell. We can teach them about our products and services. What we can’t teach them are the interpersonal skills. Their ability to build a natural, genuine relationship, their ability to ask outstanding questions and connect those to future problems that could be solved. That’s what they can’t teach. That’s what they look for. That’s why we’ve doubled down on our ability to help coach and develop our students in their interpersonal skills. 

This is where AI is helping play that role, is it’s giving them more repetitions, albeit with an AI avatar. But still, they’re practicing the oral communication, which is incredibly important to all these companies. They want them to be able to have a good, genuine conversation with anybody as they sell. That’s where we’ve really doubled down and that’s ultimately what companies have wanted to see over the last decade and continue to want to see. 

Fred Diamond: If you’re going to graduate a young adult in the sales program, you don’t expect that they know everything about the beverage industry. If you think about Pepsi, they deal with so many different entities that they sell to. You need to interface, as a selling professional, with multiple people, especially as we’re talking the B2B and the complex. You need to talk to finance people. You need to talk to tech people. You need to talk to other sales people, depending on what your role is going to be. I love that you use emotional intelligence. To be perfectly frank with you, Dr. Loring, I think you might be one of the first Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged guests who have focused on that. We believe it’s such a critical thing. It comes up time and time again. 

You’re the president of the USCA, University Sales Center Alliance. Are more universities coming to you? Where do you see the growth of programs? If someone were to come to you, what might be your advice? 

Andrew Loring: Most often we have new programs. Faculty that are just starting at a new university and have been charged with starting a sales program they typically find at the USCA, because that’s one of the primary functions of why we exist, is to support sales programs and their growth and development over time. 

I want to call out James McIlroy at the University of New Hampshire. He’s a current board member of the USCA and he created something called the Sales Program Maturity Model that is actually a map where you can look at your program on a bunch of different variables and see where you land today and then you can chart where you want to be in the future. We use that maturity model to help programs, whether you’re new or you’ve been around 20, 25, 30 years, measure your success today and then help you improve in certain areas for tomorrow. That’s the major success area that we try to bring to all programs who are involved with the USCA. 

Fred Diamond: What’s your favorite part of your job, not of the USCA, but of running the program at Texas A&M? 

Andrew Loring: There are several things. The first thing that comes to my mind, I love being in the classroom. I love teaching and facilitating. I do a lot with emotional intelligence. I’m a CliftonStrengths Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach. I’m a DiSC Certified Practitioner. I do a lot of that. One of the favorite things I have are students who sit in the class in an entry level professional selling class having a negative and a skewed view of sales day one. They’re like, yeah, I’m only here because it’s a required course. I don’t really want to be here. Then soon, by the end of the semester, they learn about all the things that we talk about and they leave saying, this is amazing. You completely change my perspective on sales and sales careers. That’s probably the most rewarding, the most fun thing. 

Fred Diamond: Here’s an opportunity for you. If a sales executive or a sales leader within two hours of College Station is listening, give their pitch. Tell them why they should get involved with your program, either at the individual level, if there’s a spot, or at the corporate level. 

Andrew Loring: I’d say no matter where the school is, I would look at the proximity they are to sales programs. It’s not just about Texas A&M. I’m going to call out all the USCA schools. They’re all listed on our website. If you recruit in a general geographic area that’s close to any USCA program, the faculty’s contact information is on our website. Please look them up. But the pitch to them is just hire the students because they will walk in knowing more than anybody who has graduated from a non-sales program. There’s a huge advantage. This has been proven in the research over time that sales program graduates, they ramp up faster and they turn over less. They quit less. That’s the first thing you should think about, is always hire from a sales program directly. 

Fred Diamond: You’re the president of the USCA. You’re doing a great job, by the way. Part of the goal is to get the message across to corporate America, and you’ve done a great job over the course of today’s show, of the value of it. Where do you want to see us in five years from now? What is there, about 85 universities that are part of the USCA? 

Andrew Loring: That’s correct. 

Fred Diamond: Where do you want to be in five years from a university membership perspective and maybe from a corporate sponsorship perspective? 

Andrew Loring: We had our first international meeting in Europe, and in Europe, there’s a big need. Our world is getting smaller and smaller and doing business globally is happening more and more like it has for the past 15, 20 years. From an expansion standpoint, obviously we’re trying to plant a bigger flag in Europe, get more European schools involved, and we’re doing the same thing in the United States. But the area where we want to really make real progress is spread the USCA brand in the corporate world far more than we have. 

The reality is we will go to SHRM events, Society of Human Resource Management events, and just talk to companies and it’s mind blowing how few companies that hire for sales don’t know that sales programs exist. Now, I get that sales programs have really only been around for the last 20 years or so. They’ve really taken off in the last 15. I understand that we’ve got a lot of work to do. But from a USCA mission, one of our marketing strategies over the next year is going to be shouting from the rooftops that we’re here. We exist and we’ve got great students for you. 

Fred Diamond: Getting to know the universities, speaking to the students, the work that you and your peers are doing is a great service to companies. I love the way you talked about retention, making sure that the young adults going through your programs get into the right sales career, and they may learn different things once they get out there. 

As a matter of fact, this morning, again, we’re doing today’s interview in July 9th of 2026, we did a program at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling this morning. We had about 200 sales people. One of the young adults asked me for advice. I said, get to know your company. Get to know everything about your company. I know you’re in sales. You’re probably going to learn about the product. You’re probably going to learn about the industry. But understand what finance does. Understand what operations does. Because one thing that your customer wants from you, sales guy or lady, as the face of the company is, how do I submit invoices? How do I get tech support? How do I track my orders? That’s a role that you do. Get to know the whole company. 

Dr. Andrew Loring, Texas A&M College Station, University Sales Center Alliance, great job. Is there anything that you want to get across that we haven’t spoken about as we wind down today’s interview? 

Andrew Loring: I just want to say thank you, Fred. Thank you for having me on this podcast. It’s been great. If anyone who’s listening to this wants to connect to Texas A&M, to our Sales Leadership Institute, or the USCA and other schools, please, at any time, reach out to me. I’m happy to help. 

Fred Diamond: Great job. Congratulations for the continued success. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 865: How Texas A&M Grads Stand Out in Professional Selling with Dr. Andrew Loring first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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AMANDA’S TIP: “Mentoring circles are important. Fill your circle with quality of individuals, ask for help. If you’re doing all these things and you’re not respected at that table, go build a different table, go find a different table. A lot of times we hold on in roles way too long, and you have a choice.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Gina Stracuzzi: My guest today is Amanda Brown. She is senior VP for XFERALL. Welcome, Amanda. 

Amanda Brown: Thank you, Gina. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I like to have my guests introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about how you got started in sales and if this was your chosen career or something you fell into and just decided this was for you. 

Amanda Brown: Interesting enough, out of high school, I thought I wanted to be an interior designer. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Me too. 

Amanda Brown: Quickly realized that was probably not my path and we all have our own stories and we’re all writing our own stories and chapters. Right before I graduated high school, moved out on my own, thought I could rule the world as a young adult, and started working in corporate America at the age of 18. I did a lot of admin jobs trying to figure out and navigate what I wanted to do. I enrolled myself in community college and went part-time at night. Started working a lot of administrative functions, customer service, order entry for someone who had little to zero experience. 

The first company I ended up landing my feet in, we had a female sales leader there and I worked in customer service, completely different department, and I was so inspired by her. She was so strong the way she came in and she just commanded the audience and I wanted to work for her. I had spent several years in another department just doing everything I could to outperform my roles and responsibilities and finally got the opportunity to join her team. 

It was an inside sales position. It was a lot of cold calling, a lot of outreach. I was very green and early in my development, but I wanted to prove to her that I could do it because she gave me an opportunity, and then ultimately prove to myself. That’s really how I got started in sales. She gave me that opportunity and I never looked back from there. It’s been quite a journey. 

I’m about 25 plus years into sales leadership, operational roles. But from that early on period, in those first few years, I outperformed my team. I was the youngest professional on the team. I made the most amount of calls. I drove engagement. I started cross training my colleagues and peers. They wanted to see what I was doing. By the age of 22, I was promoted into management leadership role of the sales team. It was really about learning and listening and seeing what was working. I’ve carried a lot of those skill sets in my career. But that’s really how I got started in my sales journey. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I love that you had someone to look up to and aspire to be, because that’s not always the case. A lot of my background is aligned with yours in that I went to community college, I moved out early, worked for companies, and I was like, “I could do that job. I could do that job,” kind of thing. 

Amanda Brown: That’s a rarity too, to have a woman in sales as a leader. Thinking back and reflecting, seeing her, everyone thought she was super tough. I looked at it, I was like, “She’s super disciplined,” and her strength and just watching her navigate. I’ve stayed in touch with her for many, many moons after, but she really was the one, she said, “You know what? I’m going to give you that opportunity.” I didn’t have any experience, but she saw that I was willing to put in the work and learn and really just listen and learn from others. It was a rarity at the time, and now I will do everything I can to encourage everyone, but also rising women who are also looking to enter into sales careers and leadership as well, whatever I can do to support. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I love hearing that. My theory about women is if we don’t all rise, nobody rises. You got to bring people along with you. That’s a great story. I love that you stayed in touch with her for such a long time, too. 

Amanda Brown: She’s a wonderful human. That’s for sure. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That is really great. You’ve spent now more than 20 years leading growth in healthcare technology. Let’s talk about how that field has changed over 20 years, and how you used what I consider some of women’s superpowers like empathy that comes naturally to us. How have you used that to do the growth of yourself and others on your team? 

Amanda Brown: Empathy is the perfect word. I use it often. Interesting enough, early in my career, the first six or seven years, it was a completely different industry. Having a family member that had also worked in healthcare, I realized I’d outgrown and didn’t feel as connected to the prior industry I worked in, and so I started looking at healthcare opportunities. I was second pick for an opportunity at a Fortune 500 company to manage an early-career sales team. 

Once I joined the company, I really started to look at these were early-career sales professionals, I was building up this sales leadership development program for the company, is being able to connect and really listen and empathize with others the more I learned about healthcare and who you are partnering with on the other side. A lot of times it’s clinical leadership, they are thinking about patient care first and foremost, they’re thinking about their staff that are taking care of patients. There’s a vulnerability and a human connection in that aspect of patient care, that you really have to take a step back and understand, what am I selling to them? If you’re thinking about selling a widget, or you’re thinking about your number, all of these other areas from a metric perspective, then you’re missing the mark. 

I started building my teams to really want to understand and connect with the individuals that we were selling to and empathize with them, put yourself in a day in the life of a clinical leader, who’s got patient care, patient escalations, patients dying, patients sick, nurses calling out, nurses with family members that are sick. Empathize with them and understand that they are thinking about a lot of different areas, all while trying to make sure that patient care is being delivered at the highest level of quality. 

All of the teams that I’ve had the opportunity to lead and build, I always encourage them, find a connection to the human on the other end, it’s really, really important. Also, find a connection with what you’re selling and the impact it can make. Historically, in the last 20 plus years in healthcare, I have gone to work for companies that I feel are high impact to the work that we do, that I can feel connected to the mission, I can feel connected that we’re actually helping improve the system, versus a widget. There’s a whole role for widgets and selling from that perspective, but for me, being personally connected. 

When I hire talent, I’m looking for individuals that also feel personally connected to wanting to make a difference. That empathy becomes really, really important that people can connect to at a human level. It’s something special and all the teams that I’ve had the opportunity to build, and I can speak on behalf of my team now, every individual is connected to our mission. They’ve seen someone that’s been affected in the healthcare setting and they want to be part of making it better. Empathy is really, really important in the healthcare arena, especially really understanding the enormous amount of constraint and pressures these healthcare leaders are on. 

Partly why I’ve stayed in healthcare, it’s just so many areas. The healthcare industry has been faced with funding cuts. We have our baby boomers are retiring. We don’t have enough nurses to clinicians to support the care that’s needed. On top of that, we’ve got technology that’s rapidly changing way beyond these organizations can realistically adapt to that change. As partners, we can help them through that journey. 

Gina Stracuzzi: What you’re describing in so many ways are traits of a really great salesperson. You step away from what you’re trying to achieve and figure out what your client or potential client needs to achieve. What are their pressures and what’s happening to them? We do so much work with technology companies, a lot of them who deal with the government, and it has been a wild ride for the last 16, 17 months. It made me think like, that patient is on lifelines, some days it feels like that. I can see the parallels there very much. 

Something you said when you were talking about how things are changing so rapidly in healthcare technology, do you have a sense of how AI is impacting healthcare technology and how that changes how you sell to the healthcare field? 

Amanda Brown: I do. It’s probably one of the hottest topics. I actually just left an event last week, it was a conversation around AI and technology and innovation. We were at the same event the prior year and it was the healthcare ecosystem, it was really focused on, how do we governance? What does it mean? How do we make sure AI is not making decisions and our clinicians are making decisions? How do we make sure it’s used in a way that doesn’t disrupt care, but it supports our clinicians and the work that the teams are doing? It was more on governance and structure and a lot of fear over the last few years AI is going to replace. Now we’ve shifted beyond that. 

The conversation is, how do we bring the right change leaders between IT, clinical, and operational together and make sure that the AI that we’re implementing has meaningful impact to our patients and our staff and our organization. Many of them had already finished mini pilots and are widely adopting. Almost every healthcare organization is adopting AI in some form or fashion. 

Understanding those shifts, AI is also very expensive for these organizations. They have to be meaningful. They really have to think about where are they using it and the impact that it’s making. As we think, even as far as selling and bringing AI solutions into the healthcare ecosystem, you really have to know the value and the impact that the AI is making. It has to be measurable. It has to be ensuring that it’s not making decisions on behalf of patients, it’s supporting our clinicians, the medical staff and their roles so they can continue to do the great work and do it even faster and better and with more quality. 

When we sell AI solutions out, we really have to be thoughtful, because you could go in and say, “This is going to reduce your staff time by X,” and all of the clinical leaders, it was like, “I can’t get rid of my staff,” immediately. You have to be thoughtful in what’s the value and impact. But these organizations that are going through, almost all of them, as I shared, they’ve adopted some form of AI. Even on the vendor and the partner side, every company is using AI. But what does it really mean for patient care? What does it mean for the clinicians? You have to really tie back to the impact that you can bring in all these organizations, because they have so many AI projects that they’re piloting or looking at, they have to also prioritize. Where you can align with what’s important to them and their goals, that’s first and foremost, for sure. 

Gina Stracuzzi: This might be a good point in the conversation to tell us a little bit about your products and services. Not a commercial standpoint, but just give us a sense of what you do as a company, because then I really want to get into how do you coach your salespeople in this changing market? 

Amanda Brown: The current company that I am, and I’ve had the opportunity to be part of the journey for almost five years, we are a healthcare technology partner. Our platform is really designed on helping patients get from one level of care to the next in this care coordination network. We do a lot of work in behavioral health. In behavioral health, one in eight patients that show up in emergency department front doors is facing a psychiatric crisis. There’s a lot of clinical administrative burden that these individuals are having to, once they determine the patient needs to get to a higher level of care, they’re calling and faxing to try to find an available facility to transfer this patient to. Then on the other side, these receiving psychiatric hospitals, they’re getting all these calls and faxes. 

You can just imagine the call, someone sitting there with calls, faxes, walk-ins, patients right there. Our platform provides a real-time care coordination platform that helps them clinically locate and gain acceptance, exchange securely in real time to get that patient transferred so they can get the care that they need. We create these networks that connect everyone together and it’s really helped reduce the ED boarding time, patients getting out of crisis, into appropriate level of care. We’ve seen tremendous growth because it’s been such a high need. 

Every patient that comes into a hospital and the four walls of their emergency department is getting care faster by moving the patients that are not in the right clinical setting to the appropriate level of care faster, regardless whether it’s behavioral health and others. We’ve seen a rapid growth from helping patients and helping these health systems and behavioral health providers become connected for better patient access and care. 

Behavioral health is a conversation for a different day, but it’s definitely a demand in our country and people need access. They need access to services and care. We need to be helping our clinicians locate so they can get back to the bedside of caring for patients and not spending their time on administrative burden. As we lean into how we partner with these organizations and how we leverage our sales team, it really is about understanding where those bottlenecks, where those impacts are. The more we can understand that, the more we can pathway into helping these organizations help those patients get to where they need to be. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I can imagine, it’s a big need, and sadly, growing. Let’s talk a little bit about how you’ve helped the organizations that you have been with achieve significant growth. Really, one of the things we like to talk about on the podcast is how leaders build really successful teams and bring them up and get them ready for leadership or for greater roles. How do you go about it? 

Amanda Brown: I’ve actually had the opportunity, several times now, to build net new teams from scratch. One of the first areas when I join a company is I really want to make sure I understand what are we solving and what’s the impact, and who are we selling into and what the dynamics are. I actually like to roll up my sleeves and actually work some opportunities with partners first. I’ve done that at the last few companies. I’ve had the honor to lead and grow teams at where I wanted to go sell the solution first. 

It’s not something that can always be done, but I like to really understand, and really understand who the buyers on the other end are and what they care about and start to determine what is the skill set of the teams and the talent of the teams that we need to develop and build that can really understand, empathize, and align with the partners that we’re looking to expand into from a growth perspective. 

Even when I joined my current company, I wasn’t quite sure. Building out care-connected networks, there are two different sides of that. It’s an ecosystem. If you go look on a sales resume, you’re not going to find a lot of ecosystem connected networks where they’ve built up in a very complex, and healthcare is very complex, and so it’s not a transactional sale. I started to look at building up a team of individuals that had that relationship. They knew how to connect relationships and found meaning and understanding, well, this CNO makes an impact here. This then impacts the COO from an operational perspective, and how they navigated. 

I diversify my team, their experiences. I’ll look and see, do they have a nursing background? Have they worked in this field? Every team member has a different experience and perspective that they’re bringing to the team, and strengths that they’re bringing to the team. When you do that and you bring them together, it’s pretty significant of what you can get accomplished, and everybody is rowing at the same beat. I’ve got individuals that are very, very strong on their communication skills and articulating value and they can go present at a large conference and present to executives. I’ve got individuals that understand the daily life of a nurse and what it means at an in-user level and being able to connect at that level. 

I’ve always tried to build out and blend those teams from a strength perspective. The sales leaders and growth leaders, there’s a couple of times I feel like in your career, you hit a special point where everyone is working together, helping each other. You’re in this sweet spot of a company growth that everything is moving at a very healthy pace and the impact that you’re making feels really, really good when you put your head down on the pillow every day. Even if you didn’t accomplish everything today, the next day you are just as excited to wake up and make an impact. 

When I look to build teams, I really look at a variety of experiences. I also try to make sure that we’re sharing those experiences and creating opportunities for the team. It’s not my role as a leader to go tell them what to do. They are the experts. I’m there to support them, to help elevate them, to bring strengths when they need strengths, and to help strategize with them and giving them that runway to do that has allowed me to maintain higher attention on all my growth teams and even bring individuals and leaders along with me. That’s been a special part of the journey of just building out growth teams at multiple healthcare technology companies thus far. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I like that approach. You are in a unique situation team wise, where having people with lived experience in the medical field is probably crucial to their success and in your success as a company. Whereas quite often in the straight technology sales, it’s on-the-job training and on-the-job learning about how the end user might be using the product. This is really quite fascinating to me. 

What advice would you give to women who are especially in their early sales career, and especially if they’re aspiring to leadership roles? What lessons do you wish maybe that you knew before you learned them the hard way? 

Amanda Brown: Definitely they were learned the hard way, not having a forged path ahead. Some of the lessons that I would share with rising women who are looking to either go into sales or in leadership, one of them is start to look around and observe the leadership around you. There is so much that you can learn through others. Find those qualities that you’re like, I want to be like them when I grow up in my career, and go meet with them, connect with them, build a mentoring circle around, having a strong support system. I often felt like I was on an island alone. It wasn’t until probably the second half of my career that I realized and really started to take advantage, where I had a strong mentoring circle, and both men and women. Those perspectives are equally important. 

Being able to build mentors around you, and you also have a role in that, because you can be a mentor to others. A lot of women think, “Well, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to begin,” but you can begin by helping others too around you. I spent a lot of my early years, and that’s how I went into management and then really developed my leadership skills, was through helping others. Instead of saying, “I want to be the top sales performer,” and all I care about is me and my numbers and my financials, I wanted our entire team to be successful. I was willing to sit down and happy to just share what I was doing, and not in an egotistical way, but help them. When people genuinely want to be helped, or they’re like, “I’m not meeting my number. Why don’t we just sit down? Maybe we can brainstorm and come up with some ideas.” 

Definitely start to build a mentoring circle. You can also learn from the traits of individuals that don’t make you feel good. You can learn just as much from those individuals, whether they’re leaders of the company or colleagues or you see the tactics, learn what not to do, put that in your toolkit. I have learned just as much from those experts and carried those forward and I’m like, “That is definitely not what I want to be like. What would I do differently?” You have to ask yourself because you can always point out things that you don’t like, but what would you do differently? You start to change your mindset and how you think and you’re like, “Well, I would do this differently.” 

I’ve always said, I’m CEO of myself. But if I was running my own company, even to this day, I know things that I will do differently. I’m excited about those opportunities. But mentoring circles are important. Fill your circle with quality of individuals, ask for help. If you’re doing all these things and you’re not respected at that table, go build a different table, go find a different table. A lot of times we hold on in roles way too long, and you have a choice. You can make that choice any time to leave, and there’s a strategy and a process to do that. If you network and you have that strong mentor circle, they can help support you through that transition. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Amanda Brown, thank you very much for this conversation. Give us one piece of quick advice that people can put into place who might be listening to the podcast, or something to start thinking about today? 

Amanda Brown: One piece of advice is when you sit down every day and you’re thinking about, what did you accomplish? What were the goals that you set? What did you accomplish? Maybe you didn’t accomplish everything you thought. Reset yourself. Don’t get lost in that. Or if you had a deal that went wrong or something that just went away, I have found if you can reset quickly and redirect those moments, it fuels your acceleration in whatever you’re doing. But a lot of times we get stuck because we didn’t accomplish something, or we lost a deal, or something went awry. 

I’ve seen talent over the years that have gotten stuck in that moment for way too long. It’s okay to acknowledge it and find your lessons learned, but just find that reset button quickly. Next hour is a new hour. Tomorrow is a new day. When you can reset and use that as fuel, you’ll just accelerate so much quicker and faster and accomplish your goals faster. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s great advice. Acknowledge what went wrong and move on. I love it. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you, everyone, for listening and we’ll see you next time. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 864: Amanda Brown from XFERALL on Building a Successful Career as a Woman in Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Today’s show featured an interview with Jillian Swenson, Vice President of Federal Sales, and Alex Cruz, Senior Director of Global Field Enablement at SentinelOne.

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JILLIAN’S TIP: “It’s unacceptable to show up not prepared. With AI, there’s no reason for that. That was last year’s problem. This year’s problem is then how do you translate it into business value.”

ALEX’S TIP: “AI is amazing. It does just crazy things for reducing time as a rep. But without guardrails in place, it can get you in some hot water if you send something over that’s generated and you don’t do trust but verify. We’ve all come through that frame of thought. We have to verify AI.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. We’ve got Jillian Swenson and Alex Cruz with SentinelOne. Jillian and Alex, just give us a brief introduction, what you do with SentinelOne. I’m excited that we’re going to get very deep into how you and your sales organization are using AI tools to be more effective. 

Jillian Swenson: I have recently joined SentinelOne as the vice president of federal. When I did this show before, the closing question for me was, what’s your best advice to sales leaders? I said, if you’re not using AI, you’ve got to embrace it. When Fred reached out about me doing the show again, I’m like, well, let’s go deep on AI and talk about that. I’m excited to talk to you today, Fred. 

Fred Diamond: That was a great bit of advice. That was close to two years ago. You were ahead of your curve. Good for you. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. It’s a different world as it relates to AI. We’re going to get deep into how you’re directing your selling professionals. Alex Cruz, give us an introduction. 

Alex Cruz: Been with the company for five plus years. I’m the senior global director of field enablement at SentinelOne. That means onboarding, field enablement, obviously everything on productivity. AI is close to our heart in making sure that the field has what they need to be successful. 

Fred Diamond: I’m glad to have you on the show because we’ve done a lot of shows, we’ve done over 850 Sales Game Changers shows. We actually have a special sub-brand called AI and Sales Brief, where we get into the ties with AI and sales. A lot of it has evolved a lot since we’ve been doing this over the last year. The podcast has been around for nine years, but AI topics, and Jillian was one of the first people to get us started. 

Alex, why don’t you get us started here. Every sales leader is talking about AI, thinking about AI. However, many have struggled on how to standardize and manage across the sales process and with the sales organizations. What made SentinelOne decide that this wasn’t something to watch, but something that your sales organization needed to embrace? 

Alex Cruz: This is something that when Jillian came on board, she said exactly that. She is just firsthand all AI. How can I use it to be a better leader, but also how can I really unlock productivity within the sales org? For us specifically, at enablement, it’s all about how can we really enable the teams on the right workflows? What are the repetitive tasks that you’re just drowning day in, day out that AI can automate? It honestly goes to our DNA as a company. If you look at SentinelOne’s history, way back when we were founded 13 plus years ago, Tomer Weingarten really looked at all these threats coming in, and we were a signature-based antivirus, how can I use AI and ML to stop attacks at machine speed? 

When we’re thinking that and flipping that on the sales productivity side, how can I look at a sales person’s day and see what’s taking so much time? There’s just so many areas of account research, proposal building, RFIs, RFPs that are just drowning a sales, and even account team when you think about a sales engineer, and all the other folks that are involved in that process that are just eating up time. For us, it’s how do we really provide the tools necessary that an account team has to automate a lot of those tasks and get some more time back in their day? 

Fred Diamond: We’re going to be talking about the tools in a second here. I’m going to ask you to take us through some of the tools. A follow-up question, Jillian, I’m going to have for you is, we talk a lot now about workflow and how AI needs to compliment the selling professional’s workflow. I’m excited to ask you that question, but first, Alex, give us a little bit of an orientation. You mentioned several different AI platforms. Walk us through some of the different tools your team uses. More importantly, why would someone use Gemini versus Claude versus maybe a tool like Actively. I’m sure you’ve gotten deep into them in the sales process. Which performs best at the various levels? 

Alex Cruz: This is honestly one of the very first questions we got when we were starting to go heavy on productivity for AI. There are so many different tools and a lot of times there’s overlap. We are a Google shop. I think definitely on Gemini, NotebookLM is an amazing tool, which can do amazing things for account planning and really just building together really good notebooks for all of your accounts. We recently got Claude this year. That is still a learning journey. I won’t say that we are experts in it, but we’re making a lot of great strides in it. 

Then as we’re thinking about really the agentic form, because a lot of the enablement that we’ve had was more of using these tools to be more efficient. But how can we leverage a tool that is going to go out and be an agent working for you 24/7, where it’s looking at signals, buying signals, looking at a recent podcast like this and saying, hey, there is an account that is matching the ICP and matching these buying signals that you should engage and reach out. This is where we’re really taking it to the next level of leveraging AI to be more proactive and more engaged in those early sales cycles. 

Fred Diamond: I love that because there are so many tools and what a lot of people get wrong, we think, is that they focus on the tool. Especially in enablement, there are thousands of tools at this point, if not tens of thousands. You could spend all the time working on tools and it’s really about the workflow. 

Jillian, why don’t you walk us through the typical sales day with AI? Where does AI show up for the first customer interaction until the opportunity closes? 

Jillian Swenson: We’re actually seeing a big shift there. Even just five, six months ago when I joined, got with Alex’s team, started looking at it, and my team had not embraced AI much. I was a power user, really experienced on Claude. My first thought was, well, how do we start doing that basic research? That is where we started. Then we started to get more focused on what Alex touched on, which is how do you take the work out of routine activities? If you’re putting together a presentation, you can leverage Gemini to create your Google PowerPoint, for example. Or if you’re putting together a communication, what does that look like? 

Then I had my team doing things like their account planning, using a tool that Alex’s team built that’s like, our account plan is going to look like this, going to leverage everything underneath. We started doing more of that prep and research. But now with the implementation of Actively, we’re starting to switch into the more proactive, strategic focus on a daily basis. My team is just getting up to speed on that. It’s a new implementation for us. We’ll have to do this again in a year, because I’m sure it’s going to have completely changed at that point, but it really is about starting to just look at your workflow and figure out where it is not a high value, high experience task and shift that work over to an AI tool. 

Fred Diamond: Most people probably know about Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT. Could you tell us a little more specifically about Actively, about what actually it does, how it’s used? To be frank with you, it’s not a tool that I’m particularly familiar with. 

Alex Cruz: Actively is really an agent that’s trained on the vast majority of our systems internally. That’s also hooked into LinkedIn, into ZoomInfo, into Demandbase, which is our buyer intent tool. What it’ll do is crawl the internet. It crawls basically all of the signals on LinkedIn and then basically compares it against all of our internal systems that will essentially Slack a rep, an SDR, an account team as soon as there’s intent. As soon as it identifies there are some signals going on with this account, that marks an engagement. That’s not just a signal of, hey, go reach out. It provides buyer from LinkedIn. It also will provide a customized email. It’s basically doing a lot of this guesswork of, okay, which accounts do I need to really start engaging with? 

I think this is the one thing that gets me most excited about AI. It’s like, when you have this account base and you were hunting, and we all were there before when we didn’t have AI, and you were looking for something, you were looking for some diamonds in the rough, a tool like Actively will literally eliminate a lot of that, just that time space of here’s someone in the market that right now is searching for a problem that we can solve. It does a lot more, but that’s really the intent behind it, a 24/7 agent that’s working for you to find those ripe accounts. 

Fred Diamond: Jillian, I’m going to ask you in a second about some of the biggest promises with AI and what some of the things are that you’re seeing from an improvement perspective. I’m going to ask you a very basic question. Alex, you just mentioned LinkedIn, maybe Jillian, you can chime in, again, most basic tool that there is right now, probably one of the biggest tools in B2B and B2G, etc. How are you instructing your sales organizations to use LinkedIn? Very basic question, very basic tool, but I’m curious, we’re getting deep into the AI, what’s your advice and strategy for them on using LinkedIn? 

Alex Cruz: LinkedIn for us, it’s critical. We have LinkedIn Navigator and that’s something that we use to really understand where the contacts are. Again, just understanding their profile, matching up honestly with us, understanding who we have relationships with within SentinelOne that could actually broker a meeting. That’s something that we use very heavily here within SentinelOne, and then just understanding that profile of do we have really good buying intent also with openings of job boards? 

AI security is top of mind. If they’re actually going and hiring a lot of AI data scientists, a lot of web developers, AI right now, we’re looking for those job roles on LinkedIn, which are mostly posted, and using that as buyer signals. Jillian, go ahead and share more. 

Jillian Swenson: We’re doing all the typical things, social amplification, driving people to our events that you’ve historically seen. Where I’ve personally used it and seen my team using it more recently is having that outreach very customized. Having the research done across their public profiles, not just LinkedIn, but where they’ve spoken publicly, articles someone might have published, and really getting a sense of what that person is trying to drive at their organization before you do the outreach. Doing the background research and then actually customizing it. 

I was sharing with Alex recently, I was doing a cold outreach to three different C levels at the same company, and I wanted to make sure that the messaging was consistent, but was completely customized to their particular role. Having Claude just rapidly do that, it would have taken me maybe two hours to craft a great response, and I was able to take that, do it pretty quickly, but the only thing I changed was the first responses didn’t sound like me. They were flowery, they were long, I’m like, oh no, that’s not me. Let’s just get to the point, make the ask, use the data, and go. 

I was able to work with Claude and send it to my previously written emails so they could have more of my voice and tone. I think that’s important. We talked a lot about AI slop. I get stuff in LinkedIn every day, just delete, delete, delete, because it’s just spam at this point, and I don’t want to show up that way to our customers. 

Fred Diamond: Jillian, let’s get back to some of the biggest promises of AI, and of course, one of them is speed, and hopefully speed being more productive. What are you seeing as some of the biggest gains with your sales organization? You mentioned prospect research, account planning, writing emails, writing LinkedIn requests. You just talked about collaboration amongst groups. Are your sales reps getting faster? Are you seeing improvements from them by better utilization of all the tools we’re talking about? 

Jillian Swenson: A thousand percent. Just looking at typical sales cycles like, how to do annual planning, how to prep for account reviews with a customer, they’re leveraging the tools and it’s making it better, more effective. What I will say, particularly with Claude, is that as you move up the maturity level and working with AI and you stop using it just as like a super Google, and you really start refining things and having it as a conversation with Claude, you get a much, much higher quality product out of it. 

I’ve had results come back initially that aren’t quite right, and my experience allows me to say, that’s not quite right. Let’s tweak it a little bit. We found that if you are working iteratively with Claude in particular, that it gets very good at actually recommending approaches to take, it will often give you three options based on the research that you provided it and things like that, and help you really hone your messaging. 

Fred Diamond: AI, Alex, becomes more powerful when it’s connected. You’ve already begun to talk about some of the ways that it gets connected here to various other applications, but talk about how you’re integrating AI with platforms such as Salesforce and maybe Highspot. How does that change the seller experience? Because everything we’re talking about here is designed to make your sellers more effective. I run the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. The reason, in May of 2025, we changed our name from the Institute for Excellence in Sales to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, because Jillian, we talked to 200 people like you, senior sales leaders, who said, coming out of the pandemic, our people just need to be more effective at 30 different things. 

Alex, I’m getting from you that you really enjoy this, that you really enjoy community solutions. 

Alex Cruz: You got to be passionate about it. Yes, exactly. I love what I do. As any good enabler, I definitely held a bag for many years, had a passion for mentoring, and here I am. That’s what I love. Seeing other people really get successful is something that I crave. 

For the integration piece, and I think this is what’s critical, and it might parlay into another question you have just around areas that we’ve seen as concerns or issues that we’re seeing across the Salesforce, but it’s critical that we connect into Salesforce, just making sure that all the data is hooked in there. If you want to query your account base, if you want to query an account, the next steps to win have to be we’re really diligent on having that deal and the opportunity at the next step level, so getting into those areas. 

Highspot for us is really our source of truth when it comes to content, when it comes to sales plays. Leveraging that content when we’re querying Claude and making sure that there’s guardrails in place. AI is amazing. You can definitely spend just any amount of times building great content, but if you don’t have guardrails that are really making sure that we’re staying on brand, that we’ve got really our key value messaging, then it’s going to have a tendency to hallucinate. There’s no way that you can just eliminate hallucinations unless you put some guardrails in place. 

Another example is really big on value quantifying value. We’re solving a lot of big pain points, a lot of time back into these security teams. If we just trust AI without any checks and balances, who’s to know that that calculation is right? We do have a business value assessment tool, which we’re now working on integrating within all of our AI stack, so that when you say, hey, I want to create a value assessment, a cost ROI analysis, it actually is using guardrails to eliminate a lot of the hopeful calculations and content that’s built without some guardrails. That’s a little bit of things that we’re dealing with now, which I think the folks on the call would appreciate. 

Fred Diamond: I want to follow up on the guardrails. How do you encourage experimentation while making sure that customer data, messaging, compliance and quality stay protected? I know that SentinelOne has a tool related to that. Would you mind addressing that now, the whole concept of guardrails? 

Alex Cruz: The guardrail piece, and this is something that when we rolled out Claude, we saw just a lot of amazing innovation, where specifically the SEs, the engineers, were first that bad of creating these amazing skills and just these things that other people could use. What we did is very quickly established an SE innovation center to just go and make sure and see, okay, is this something that we can leverage internally? Is it customer-facing it needs definitely a lot more checks and balances and governance? We have a good process of inorganically trying to surface up some really good talent and just skills that an SE may be using in Vancouver, that could be something that could be applied globally. That’s something that we’ve had really good success in. 

Also, as a company, for engineering and support, we also have an area of review for skills and then making those publicly available. Speaking about the human piece that Jillian was saying, we’ve all seen those AI-generated emails. We actually have a humanizer skill that will go in and crawl your emails and look to see your voice of tone, your inflection. How are you speaking on Zoom and making sure that your AI-generated communications out to the customer are in a human nature and they’re not AI with all the hyphens everywhere. But going back to essentially the solution, I think this is something that’s really one of the fastest growing lines within SentinelOne, is prompt security. 

Shadow AI is rampant everywhere. Before we had a lot of these guardrails in place, you can imagine employees just want to leverage AI. They’ll go on to their own personal instance of ChatGPT, of Gemini, of Perplexity, and start loading up possibly some sensitive data, like account information. You want to build an account deck, but you’re using your account information on these personal websites. This is a severe risk, which obviously a lot of companies are grappling with. We have one of the best solutions here that cannot eliminate the use of shadow AI, but enable safe use of it. 

This is imperative that companies shouldn’t stifle innovation, but you have to have some guardrails in place. If there’s sensitive information, we can either redact it, stop it, and then actually give a bit of information back to that employee of this is why we can’t have you loading this instance of information, and then also making sure that we’re staying within separate governance and guardrails. Obviously, data compliance is massive as well. 

Fred Diamond: Alex, one of the things we’ve talked about as social media got big was how do your people represent the company on places like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram or other types of social media? That may or may not have been a huge challenge. But you also mentioned developing SentinelOne-specific AI skills. What does that mean? Your employees represent SentinelOne. Yes, they’re human beings. Yes, they have hobbies, hopefully, and maybe kids in Little League and maybe political views and whatever it is that they want to get out there, but they’re representing SentinelOne in the work environment. It’s a little bit blurry. How do you make sure that their usage of the AI reflects SentinelOne positioning, competitive differentiation, and best practices? Tell me if that’s a big challenge and how do you do that? 

Alex Cruz: Internally, for sure, hooking into Highspot, number one, enables us to make sure they’re on brand. These are things when they’re developing custom content, we want them to tailor content. You don’t want boilerplate decks going over and just assuming these are the challenges you’re dealing with. We want them to customize until the content, but we also want the main narrative to be involved there. 

Going back to social media, we have a really good social and brand team, which will build out LinkedIn posts on key announcements, on key thought leadership pieces. Ensuring that they’ve got a good baseline, we encourage a little bit of flexibility. To Jillian’s point, we want to make sure that it’s supporting her federal DoD and CIF teams. But at the minimum, as a company, we should be supplying that overarching narrative, that key areas of differentiation, and then from there, we’ll tailor it. But yes, that’s the key thing of hooking into a lot of our systems and also working closely with our social and brand team so that sales teams are leveraging the approved content that should be going out. 

Jillian Swenson: We actually have a resource spread that specifically focuses on taking that core messaging and then making it appropriate for the public sector, particularly federal customers, because some of the words are different, some of the way you talk to those kinds of customers are different. We want to make sure that we have the appropriate wording approach with our federal customers that are slightly different than what you’re going to see in the commercial space. 

Fred Diamond: Jillian, you told me that adoption happens when leaders model the behavior. Talk a little bit more about that. What are you directing your management level people, your sales managers, what are you directing them to do differently that encourages sellers to embrace all these great tools? Obviously, we’re bringing on Alex. He’s obviously doing a lot of things. The company’s investing a lot. You wanted to come on the show to talk about some of these great things. How are you directing your leaders to make sure that it happens? 

Jillian Swenson: My poor team, they probably hate me at this point, but I found Alex’s team in my first week at SentinelOne and just started asking them all kinds of questions and using all the tools and probably asking them for things like, we hadn’t thought about that, and really leaning in. That’s why Alex and I are both so excited to be here today. 

I started with just getting an evaluation. Where was the team using any of the tools? I honestly did not see that much adoption. I started to make it non-negotiable. We said, we’ve got this meeting coming up and we’re going to talk about this topic. I want you to use this tool. One of the things Alex’s team created was a strategic deal coach almost. It would say, I’ve got this opportunity. You could actually put in very little about it. It was surprising how much you could get out of the tool. I’ve got this customer. Here’s what I’m trying to talk to them about. Fairly minimal requirements to enter. It would come back with an entire play. 

We use Command of the Message as our sales training. It was completely aligned with Command of the Message. It would give you a way. We were in the process of adopting AI and adopting Command of the Message, and this tool really brought it together and made it impossible for the account executive to not comply with both requests. It made them much more productive and it got the adoption level up very quickly. 

Then it went into the second phase where it was like, oh, I’m asking you a question. If you come back to me with an answer and I can’t tell that there was some deep AI work in here, I would go ask the question. I’d say, oh, what you gave me was okay, but look what I was able to get in 30 seconds. Then they’re like, oh, no, now we need to get serious. You’re going to check. Then it was more proactive on their part. Now I think we’ve come out with Claude in particular, it’s a much stronger tool. With the investment in Actively, now I’m seeing my reps starting to across the board just embrace it. 

Fred Diamond: Jillian, I want to ask you a general sales leadership question. We talk about the fact now, we’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026, sales professionals have always had to bring value, now, more so than ever. One of the great things about the AI tool that you’ve touched on, it can do a lot of research into what your customer’s direction is. Especially with public sector, there’s never been a problem with knowing where government agencies are going, because it’s public information. Of course, you had to read a lot of things and you had to research. Now at the flick of a button, you could figure those things out. How are you leading your teams to help them bring or at least show the customer value? 

The customers don’t need to be talking to salespeople because they can go on AI as well and type in, what is SentinelOne’s direction, or what are the tools that you fit in with your competition’s direction? They don’t need you to sit for a day and go through a product roadmap. How are you instructing your reps? Alex, if you want to talk about non-public sector, or your thoughts, how are you helping them use AI, not just for the productivity sub, which we touched on, but to bring more value to the customer? 

Jillian Swenson: One of the things that Alex mentioned earlier on was our business value analysis tool. I have one sales rep that has just been all in on that tool from day one. We actually hold her up as the model for how that tool works. It is not just, oh, plug in some numbers on some ROI spreadsheet that a lot of people have historically put in front of customers. It is a very structured analysis that shows if you move to this platform, here are the various areas we can bring value back to your business, and to have that business-based discussion. I think it’s one of the primary areas. 

It’s unacceptable to show up not prepared. With AI, there’s no reason for that. That was last year’s problem. This year’s problem is then how do you translate it into business value? It’s particularly challenging in the federal space where you’re not looking at an annual report and going in and saying how I can increase your earnings per share. It’s a very different discussion. Being able to not just take that business value analysis from a financial perspective, but then being able to translate that into a mission impact, is something where I still think the experience and the human touch is highly additive to AI. 

Fred Diamond: Alex, what are your thoughts on that? 

Alex Cruz: I couldn’t agree more. I think everyone right now is selling an AI-powered solution. How do you separate yourself from all the noise? It’s literally quantifying what we can actually drive and providing a proof point of how we’ve done it. Going back to Command of the Message, it’s all about business outcomes. Here’s what we’ve seen. Here is an example of hypothesized value. Then helping your champion actually provide this and sell it internally to the economic buyer. These economic buyers need to see clear line of impact to their business. Same on the enterprise and commercial space. You need to show how we’re attaching to business problems and how we can actually influence the business. 

AI is tremendous there, and latching on to regulations if they don’t adhere to. The AI EU Act is huge in Europe, even for US companies that are doing business in Europe, you have to adhere to it or else you’re at risk for 7% of revenues. Quantifying that and making sure that they can build the case internally, paramount to getting these six-figure deals across the finish line. 

Fred Diamond: You guys have implemented a ton of things. There had to have been some mistakes, some lessons learned along the way, especially Jillian, you leading such an important organization. Jillian, what’s a mistake that you learned that in retrospect, you wish you didn’t go through? 

Jillian Swenson: I edit everything. I actually read it. Fortunately, I didn’t get too far down the path with some slop that came out that wasn’t usable, but I have seen people present things to me that have obvious errors. It’s a very basic mistake, but there’s a disclaimer at the bottom of everything, this is AI. It can make mistakes. Guess what? That’s true. Also, not just the glaringly obvious errors, but things that are just not strategically where you want to go. You can’t just rely on AI to do your job. 

Fred Diamond: That’s something that we all hate, is when we see something that’s obviously AI generated. I like what you said before, Jillian, you talked about how you had to train it to be humanized to you. We constantly know that needs to happen. Alex, what’s a mistake that you’d like to focus on? 

Alex Cruz: I’ll piggyback on Jillian’s comment. Just putting guardrails in place so that we can minimize the amount of inaccuracies. AI is amazing. It does just crazy things or just reducing time as a rep. But without guardrails in place, it can get you in some hot water if you send something over that’s generated and you don’t do trust but verify. We’ve all came through that frame of thought. We have to verify AI. We’ve got to make sure that before we send out anything to a customer, we’re reviewing it with a subject matter expert. Is this, in fact, legit? Are there things here that we don’t know we need to make sure that we’re validating before we send out to a customer? 

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Alex Cruz and Jillian Swenson with SentinelOne. This has been great. As a matter of fact, we’ve done over 850 shows. I think this might be the first one I ever did with an in-the-field VP and sales enablement leader. I’m going to be doing more of these. I love the way that you both worked on each other, bouncing ideas and getting the key message across. I want to thank you both with that. 

As a wrap up, final thoughts. If you want to talk to something, maybe give some advice, Jillian, to a peer who’s maybe six months to a year behind you and wants to get going. Alex, maybe the same thing with enablement leader. One of the great things about what you’re doing, Alex, and what you’re talking about, is you’re literally helping the field become more effective. Jillian, one of her challenges, is making her selling professionals more effective. I love to see the synergy and the working together. Alex, why don’t you give us advice, maybe for your peers on what they should be doing, and then Jillian, you’ll bring us home. 

Alex Cruz: There’s nothing more than really spending time with the field to understand what the problems and where the time savings could be. I think this is where we got it right, was as soon as AI came out and we had just like we’ve got to get this jump on board, we very quickly span the field globally and said, what are the major use cases that are spending the most time? RFIs, RFPs, account research, proposal building, how can we help build out really good thorough prompts, use cases, and provide those for the field to quickly manage? I think that’s one thing staying close. Then honestly, for me, speaking with Jillian and understanding what she’s dealing with and constantly iterating, because as AI is moving at lightning speed space, those use cases have now changed. I think the constant iteration, making sure that the field has what they need, for us is the number one thing, for us as enablement, or ensuring that we’re close to the field. 

Fred Diamond: Jillian, bring us home. 

Jillian Swenson: You stole my answer because my answer was going to be go out and find your Alex. Having that partnership between sales leadership and sales enablement is completely game changer, to steal from your title. That’s important. Also, you have to do the work. Your people will only do what they see you doing. I think one of the reasons I have credibility with my team is I was in sales for a long time, and Alex carried a bag, I carried a bag. Well, now I’m using the tools. I’m not asking them to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself. I make time for myself every week, even if it’s just one small thing to do that I haven’t done with AI before. I’m actually surprised myself. It’s like, oh, I wonder if Claude can do this. I just ask it and like, oh, this is amazing. Just challenging yourself every week to just get a little bit better, and that way you don’t get so far behind you’re not going to catch up. 

Alex Cruz: I will piggyback also on that. The leaders have to lead from the front. You can’t go and say learn AI and you as a leader don’t know it yourself. This is something that Jillian, when she came on, just was passionate about show me what we can do with AI, show me the stack. I’m going to really get my team to the next level. You have to lead from the front. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely, and you have to be doing it. Once again, I want to thank Jillian Swenson and Alex Cruz with SentinelOne for sharing these great insights today. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 863: Leading a Sales Team Through AI Adoption with Jillian Swenson and Alex Cruz at SentinelOne first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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In this special episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, host Fred Diamond is joined by industry leaders Rebecca Wetherly, Craig Booth, and Marc Palombo to introduce the Partner Revenue Academy, a new leadership development program designed to prepare partner account managers for the next generation of channel sales.

Learn more here.

Find Rebecca on LinkedIn. Find Craig on LinkedIn. Find Marc on LinkedIn.

REBECCA’S TIP: “Partner sales roles are super complicated. You have to be a jack of many trades. You’re critical to the sales process and need to always be demonstrating value to partners and colleagues. Driving revenue and creating meaningful pipeline growth has never been more important.”

CRAIG’S TIP: “We’ve got to get people thinking about their job as literally a partner revenue architect who’s responsible for leveraging data and AI to help generate better revenue for their partners downstream.”

MARC’S TIP: “Once you actually get in the trenches, no plan survives five minutes with the enemy. It’s about being able to take the initial plan, make adjustments, and rinse and repeat what’s working and what’s not working over time.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. I have the faculty with us today for the first ever Partner Revenue Academy cohort. It’s going to be a six-session program kicking off on September 11th. It’s going to be virtual, but we’re also going to be having a live portion for people in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. 

The faculty, Rebecca Wetherly, Marc Palombo, Craig Booth, and Rebecca, you’ve been on the Sales Game Changers Podcast a couple of times. Craig Booth, you were on recently with Pam Johansen. Marc, even though I’ve known you the longest out of everybody here, this is your first appearance on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Before we get into details about the program, let’s talk about the state of the partner account manager. We’re doing today’s interview in August of 2026, and the program, the Partner Revenue Academy, is kicking off September 11th. Rebecca Wetherly, you had a great career. You, by the way, were a IEPS Partner of the Year in 2024. You’re a tremendous supporter of many of our programs, including our Women in Sales Leadership Program. You’ve led partnership relations at AWS and Dell, and you’re extremely well known in the industry. Where are we today? August 2026, what’s the state of partnering? 

Rebecca Wetherly: Great to be with you guys today, and we’re excited about this Partner Revenue Academy with Marc, Craig, and yourself. What’s super exciting is that this role of the partner account manager is both pivotal and critical, and certainly complex. Not only do you need to understand your partner, your customer, and your company, but you have to understand programs that help create value for partners, investments to leverage sales, as well as lots of complicated customer industries. You need to decipher which partners to work with in specific accounts, what partner-to-partner mechanisms exist for mission outcomes, and you also need to know what partners are committed to you and your company. 

With all of this complexity, Fred, there’s just little to no training offered. There’s on-the-job training, there’s mentoring, and that’s what most partner professionals have to lean into. Today, many companies are shifting partner roles from partner development to partner account management. Along with that come sales targets, quota responsibility, and the real responsibility to generate new revenue. 

Something to consider. Canalys projected that partner delivered IT will account for roughly 70% of worldwide IT spending at last year. In 2025, 70% of worldwide IT comes through a partner. That makes the channel the primary go-to motion across enterprise technology. They also project continued double-digit growth in partner-delivered managed services and the rapid expansion of software supporting channel operations through 2028. This is super critical to consider, as your partners will drive consumption of software, hardware, and cloud, but they’re also going to reap the benefits of managed services, AI services, consulting services, security services, which are all core to their P&L. You’re going to need to understand what behaviors drive your partners and their willingness to engage and lead a deal. 

Fred Diamond: You’re going to be kicking off the session on September 11th. We’re going to swing back to you in a second to talk a little more about what you’re going to be focused on. Now, Craig Booth, Channel Force, a couple of months ago, back in early 2026, one of our IEPS great partners said partner account managers are way off right now. They’re doing the wrong things, they’re not focused on what their companies, the OEMs, need them to be doing. Fortuitously, we’ve known Pam Johansen for a long time. She’s been a good friend of the IEPS and she reached out and said, “You need to meet this guy, Craig Booth, who’s doing a lot of really smart thinking on shifting partner account managers to,” your term, “partner revenue architect.” I’m excited that you’re going to be a big part of the curriculum and the instruction moving forward. Where are we and what led you to shift your thinking or to make your thinking more well known about this transformation that needs to occur? 

Craig Booth: I’m really excited about being part of the academy here, obviously working with amazing people like Rebecca, who you just heard. I don’t even know how to follow up after that. Rebecca and Marc, I’ve learned a lot from Marc as well. I think you’ve got a really good cast to help create the vision for this program and to carry it forward. 

Answering your question, what is it that drove me to think through how things are operating? I came from a sales background. I never understood why some of the metrics that we see in partnering, why we accept those metrics, like the 80/20 rule. Why is it that 20% of our partners or less are driving a majority of the revenue? Why is it we have all these long-tail partners? Less than 5% of the partner ecosystem of sellers will actually do anything to proactively position our products and services. This is what’s really killing the channel. It’s killing what we’re actually doing from a performance standpoint. As it relates to the potential of the partner program, you have a lot of underperforming partner programs. 

The shift for me is all about how do we create 5X more active sellers? How do we literally take and move the metric of production from the partnering, and measuring at the partnering level, and move it down to active sellers and account engagement? Then how do we resource and structure that active seller to be efficient and effective at positioning and selling both a joint sale strategy? 

What I’ll be covering and what we’ll be going through quite a bit is this shift from partnering to creating active sellers. Then how do we equip those active sellers to be highly productive and efficient, because we all know, profitable, efficient growth is what is the key metric that every CFO is looking at, and our channels and our partner programs have to start aligning to efficiency and efficiency metrics. 

Fred Diamond: We’ll get into the details here about part of the curriculum that you’re going to be involved with and instructing. Marc Palombo, I’ve known you for probably close to 20 years now. What do you see right now? You’ve worked in the manufacturing side, the OEM side. You also have worked with many partners around the globe. You’re one of the guys that I call when I have a question. I’m excited to have you part of this curriculum. Where do you see the partner community right now? 

Marc Palombo: Just reiterating what both Rebecca and Craig said, thanks so much, Fred, for putting this on. I think this has really been a long time coming. As Rebecca said, I agree with her, there’s a lot of inexperience. Unfortunately, the next generation of partner managers and leaders coming out of the woodwork, they don’t have enough folks mentoring and coaching and training them, and enough formal training programs like we’re doing with the IEPS here for the Partner Revenue Academy, to really get people knowledgeable about what works and what doesn’t work. 

I also love Craig’s methodology on KPIs and measured performance metrics, deliverables, targets, revenue targets. All of these things are critical. What you see today in the partner channel, what I see day in and day out, is a lot of confusion. In addition to the folks that are inexperienced, not really knowing what to do, as the old saying of fake it till you make it, sorry, you can’t do that anymore, especially in the age of AI. If you’re going to train your AI models, be sure you know the things you’re training them on, if they’re accurate, and getting the results you need. 

I didn’t hear too much of what’s been happening in the market around hyperscalers. You’re seeing a lot of push towards AWS, towards Azure Marketplace, towards GCP. What I tell a lot of folks that I work with is either you’re in the stadium or you’re tailgating the parking lots. I think having these partner managers understand that over 800 billion dollars are being sold now in the marketplace today, and if you’re not actively engaging those marketplaces and you know how to co-sell for the market effectively, you’re going to fail. We need to talk about some of that. 

I also look at there’s so much confusion. There are just more and more technology vendors coming to the market. There are thousands of vendors. Whether you’re on the ISV side of the equation or the partner side of the equation, who’s managing that? Who is saying, “Hey, this new partner we just signed up, what are the key metric for success?” We’re at a point 12 months from now, was this a good partnership? Was it a bad partnership? Was it a partnership we should never have signed in the first place? We have to really analyze and understand that. 

Last but not least, I’ll talk about this when you come back to me about things I’ll be covering in the course, but partner marketing is a huge area that has fallen by the wayside. I know as a former marketer yourself, I see thousands, if not millions of dollars, being spent on direct marketing with maybe a two to three percent direct conversion revenue. then you look at partner marketing and you can get conversions of 30 to 40 percent because these are the people that are the trusted advisors to a very large customer base. Why would you not spend more money on partner marketing? Those are some of the things that I think about from a planning perspective, things I see that are lacking in the marketplace today. 

Fred Diamond: As people who are listening to this will definitely attest to, we’re going to get deep into what really needs to happen. We’re going to be kicking off September 11th. We’re going to go through six sessions that are going to culminate on November 20th. Each session is going to be virtual, so you can be participating from anywhere in the world for that matter. If you’re in the local DC, Reston, Virginia area, Northern Virginia, we’re going to have some type of in-person as well. 

Rebecca, I’m very excited that you’re going to be kicking this off on September 11th. We’ll introduce people and then we’re going to get right to it. By the way, for the people who are going to be participating, we’re going to have a bunch of online support, meaning that we’ll ask you, tell us what you do, where do you work, so that our faculty members will know about you. We’re not going to be spending a half an hour every session introducing yourself to our participants and the faculty. We’re going to get that all handled, so we’re going to get right to it when we start at 11:00 o’clock Eastern Time. 

Rebecca, you’re going to be kicking off session number one. I’m very excited. Give us a little bit of a peek into some of the things that you’re planning on covering. 

Rebecca Wetherly: I’m excited to kick things off, Fred. I love, by the way, Marc, what you just said about marketplace and brand-new avenues that folks may not have considered, because they’re massive opportunities, and channel-lite in terms of friction, which all partners love. I’m thrilled you’re covering that. 

I’m hopefully going to be the hype girl that gets everybody totally psyched and feeling like you’re part of a cohort. I want to create openness and camaraderie that you’re going to expect to have with your cohort colleagues. I have worked in the trenches, from partner marketing, to partner development, to partner sales, account management, and executive leadership. As Fred mentioned, I’ve been at Dell. I was at a company called Silicon Graphics way long ago. I most recently left AWS after 13 and a half years leading a large part of the consulting partner business. I’ve done it. I’ve been there with you. I am going to plan to share my top tips for partner sales and encourage you to think about working with a customer-first mindset. 

This is going to include considering your partner as a customer, as well as their end customers. I’m going to lean into the why, which stems from are you making sure that you’re not just selling products and solutions, that you clearly understand the mission that you’re serving. Speeds, feeds, product offerings are not good enough to position. You have to know what the mission is for your customer and why and how your offering is important. 

As I shared earlier, partner sales roles is super complicated. I think it’s the most complicated out there. You have to be a jack of many trades. You’re critical to the sales process and need to always be demonstrating value to partners and colleagues. That’s the difference. Driving revenue and creating meaningful pipeline growth has never been more important. Shifting your mental models and how you are leveraging AI to create real business value on lessons from the experiences we all share is what you’re going to learn in the program. You have the opportunity and the responsibility to put these lessons into action during the program. I’m going to get us started, lay the foundation, and get you guys totally ready for the next five sessions that will go from there, and really helping prepare you for great success in your career. 

Fred Diamond: That is great, and that’s the attitude. I love the idea that you’re talking about, which is our cohort. At the IEPS, we’ve been doing cohorts for nearly a decade right now. For people who are looking forward to participating, we’re going to have people from multiple companies, and complementary companies. One of the great things is you build those relationships as well. May suit you today, may suit you in two to three or five years, whatever it might be, but that’s going to be one of the things. Eventually, we’re going to be building a strong community. 

Craig Booth, Rebecca is going to be teeing up what you’re going to be getting down and dirty into, the whole concept of shifting from what we used to think partner account managers were, that is no longer valid, as Rebecca very well said, to the concept of being a partner revenue architect to help design predictable revenue systems, to create repeatable revenue systems that will help your company achieve its goal, be able to forecast where it’s going. Like you mentioned before, and as Marc touched on, identifying the partners who really have the skills to help your company grow and to help them grow. You’re going to be handling sessions two and three. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a peek into what you’re going to be talking about? 

Craig Booth: The concept here is really shifting thinking. We’ve all learned one way to run our partner programs. We’ve run with, I call it sprinting through the 50-meter mark, when the real race is running all the way through the 100-meter mark. We’ve learned how to recruit partners, on board, enable partners, get partners compliant to our partner program. Where the struggle has always been is how do I take those partners and activate those partners at the seller and account level to actually drive push into the market in a structured way and in a repeatable way that’s scalable. 

What we’re going to talk about first is how do we shift the mindset from where you are as a traditional partner account manager, which I think is really important. We still need trust. We still need the foundational principles that a partner account manager will traditionally operate in, but we’ve got to add to that. We’ve got to get people thinking about their job as literally a partner revenue architect who’s responsible for leveraging data and AI to help generate better revenue for their partners downstream. We’re going to talk about the principles that shift around that. 

The first session, we’re going to go into something called structured performance partnering, and structured performance partnering is essentially we’re going to teach you how to plan revenue, build a production process, with a coverage model associated with that. We’re going to teach you how to execute a strategy and how to enable partners using a MEDIC-based process to create active sellers. Then we’re going to use AI to optimize that. We’re going to show people a complete process there as we walk through. 

The second session that we get into, we’re going to get into the weeds where we’re going to take the foundational principles that we learned in the first session, and we’re going to start applying this into a methodology we have called Connected Probability scoring, where we’re scoring the solution strength, partner impact, seller impact, ICP scores, relationship scores, and the corresponding strategies that wrap around that. We’re going to go into territory management. We’re going to teach people how to plan territories, how to effectively predict revenue based on this. We’ve got a lot to cover in a very short period of time. 

We’re also going to teach people how to build effective sales playbooks, how to leverage AI to do that. We’ve got a lot to cover, but I think that essentially what this is all about is we’re going to teach people how to produce revenue out of partners. That’s really what it’s going to come down to. 

Fred Diamond: Those are going to be two very, very meaty and exciting sessions. Marc Palombo, you’re going to come on and you’re going to help us basically operationalize all the stuff that we’ve spoken about in the previous couple of sessions. Give us a peek into what you’re going to be talking about. 

Marc Palombo: I like to think that everything that Rebecca and Craig is talking about really gets you from the ecosystem to the operations, the KPIs, all those things. I look at what I’m covering really as practical applications. Once you actually get in the trenches, as the old joke goes, no plan survives five minutes with the enemy, it’s about being able to take the initial plan, make adjustments, and rinse and repeat what’s working and what’s not working over time, double down the things that are working, get rid of things that are not working. 

Every partner ecosystem is different. I’ve run things for ERP channels, FinTech, LegalTech, EdTech, and every buyer persona and ideal partner profile, which we’ll cover as well, is different. You may be in a mature program. You may say, “Hey, we have a thousand partners, but honestly, 50% don’t really fit the ideal partner profile. Why are they partners?” You may question yourself. Or you may be starting from scratch. You’re a scale up or a startup, which is typically companies that I work with, and you’re trying to build that program from scratch. Who are the right people you want to talk to? 

I talked about executive buy-in, because all the things that Craig and Rebecca cover, if you don’t have either the chief revenue officer, the CEO, or the VP of sales, whatever that role happens to be, high enough up the food chain to say, “Hey, we need to treat your company as a strategic partner and we’re going to do these things,” it just falls in deaf ears. Then that leads into one of my favorite things, which is the partner business plan. Do you have partner business plans for all of your partners that talk about all these deliverables and KPIs? What are you being measured on? What does success look like from 12 months? 

Now, I would add to what Rebecca said about treating your partners as customers. I tend to treat my partners as an extension of my sales team, my marketing team, my services team. To that end, imagine if you hired a salesperson and you said, “Hey, Fred, your quota is a million dollars. Go sell and I’ll see you in a year.” That’s unfortunately what we do. We sign up a partner, we give them a quota, we don’t talk to them for a year, and we say, “You didn’t hit your numbers. We’re going to demote you now. We’re going to fire you from the program.” It’s just silly. 

What are the processes? Are you going to do target account mapping? Are you going to do monthly pipeline calls? Are you going to have quarterly business reviews with executive leadership to understand if sales are doing what they need to be doing, marketing is doing what they’re doing, and service is doing what they’re doing from a delivery perspective? All those, what I call the three-legged stool, all those pieces of stool working, because if one leg of the stool breaks, the stool falls over. These are going to be the practical applications of things that I’ll be covering. 

At the end of the day, it’s really about how do we create a win-win. You always hear about better together stories. You want to be sure that both you and the partner are aligned, that you’re working together, and you’re on the same team driving towards building each other’s company’s revenues. Again, dovetailing on Craig’s point about those active sellers, because they’re the ones, I hate to say they’re coin-operated, but we’re all coin-operated. We’re trying to drive business and revenue and we want this to be successful. That’s why successful partner strategies work so well. 

Fred Diamond: Then session five, we’re going to be getting deep into the operations at the partner. We’re going to be talking to executives on what drives them, what drives their revenue models, what optimization they’re looking for. Then in session six, we’re going to bring it all together with final questions, ways to work together, ways to implement the programs and the lessons that we just learned from. It’s very, very exciting, if you’re interested. By the way, after just listening to Rebecca, Craig, and Marc, if you’re a partner account manager and you ain’t interested in this, you’re going to be halting your career. I can tell you that right now. Our whole mission at the IEPS, Institute for Effective Professional Selling, is to help companies engage with customers and their sales professionals. Rebecca, you and I have talked about this before, I view the channel professional as sales, it’s all sales role, working on the same thing, bringing a revenue to our company, helping them elevate their leaders and helping them empower revenue success. 

Go to theieps.com, you’ll find the link on how to register. We’re going to be starting the session on September 11th. It will sell out, so if you’re listening to this podcast now, if you have any questions, reach out to me, Fred Diamond, or any of the faculty members will answer them for you, and we’ll get you to participate.  

Rebecca, Craig, and Marc, I’m excited to have you on this next endeavor with the IEPS. For all the listeners today, I’m excited for you, for your investment, and taking your career to the next level. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 862: Partner Revenue Academy Faculty & Program Details first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Today’s show featured an interview with Brian Green, Advisor at CodeSignal and Founder of GenerativeSelling Solutions.

Find Brian on LinkedIn.

BRIAN’S TIP: “Mission clarity is not what you claim to believe. It’s what your business can consistently decide, defend, and deliver.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Brian, it’s critical right now because there’s more pressure than ever on selling professionals and companies that are in ecosystems and the channel to be generating revenue. It’s not a time of niceties anymore. It’s a time of what are you doing for me now? Brian, give us a little bit of a catch-up on where you are today, what you’re doing. I’m excited to get into the six critical steps for generating predictable revenue that you generated. 

Brian Green: Thank you, Fred. A big honor. We started this process together. You were so kind to invite me to be the first guest of what now is over 800 shows, rapidly approaching 1000. I’ve been a big supporter of you, your organization, the amazing annual event that you have every year bringing sales and marketing professionals together under one roof to celebrate a very difficult profession, a very challenging profession. Every year I come to see you, you get bigger and bigger in the names and the brands, which ironically, we’re going to be talking about today, get more and more impressive. You’re not just serving local, regional organizations, you’re serving national and, in many cases, international brands. This hopeful conversation is going to be helpful and informative for all organizations, small, medium, and large. Happy to join you and get into this very productive conversation. 

Fred Diamond: What triggered scheduling this particular show is you said that predictable revenue is not accidental, it’s designed. What do you mean by that? I’m excited to get deep into this conversation. 

Brian Green: Just for your listeners’ clarification, I’ve been a professional who’s carried a bag. I’ve been a senior vice president, overseeing a large team of international sellers. I’ve been partnered with marketing, I’ve been partnered with our program and operational staff. I have a good perspective in serving large organizations, large federal departments, large systems integrators, large defense contractors, as well as spanning into state and local governments and nonprofits and small businesses as subcontractors, SDVOSBs to my contracts that I had with say like the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

My lens really cuts across a wide swath of organizations and how they serve the customers that they serve. I’ve also been the benefactor of working for some organizations and leaders of those organizations that really got it, and got it really well, and taught me, and I learned a lot from them, and then certainly contributed back. 

What started this journey for me, when I founded GenerativeSelling Solutions, which is an organization that really is designed for providing service, support, training, process, development for organizations that are doing sales and marketing and operational support of their customers. As a successful seller myself, I recognize that talent has a lot to do with being successful, capability, competence. All of that has a lot to do with being successful in sales. But one of the most important benefits that I had in working with the organizations that I did is the total scope of how we looked at that customer journey. 

Those six factors that we’re going to talk about, I’ll just preview, is mission clarity. Why should the market trust your organization? That also compounds to why should they trust you. What value are you bringing as an individual? We’ll talk about brand ambassadors in a little bit, but value articulation is why should the market have confidence in our ability to solve their problems, which is different. Trust and confidence are two totally different things. I love you, I trust you, I like your organization, I like what they’re doing, but you don’t have a product or solution that solves my problem, so I don’t have a need to do business with you. Trust and confidence are two totally different dynamics. 

Customer alignment, so the ideal customer profile, if you would, is who are the customers that we’re best aligned to serve long-term? I say that specifically because usually the best customer growth happens after the first sale, not the first sale itself. Who are those customers that we should be serving long-term? How are our products and our services maturing to serve those particular customers that we want to serve long-term? Demand generation is how do we make ourselves impossible to ignore by the customers that we’re aligned to serve best. In so many cases, I serve and support clients that are going after .mil clients, going after small businesses, going after local governments, and they’re all over the map, basically chasing revenue, not really targeting those customers uniquely. We’ll talk a little bit about that as well. 

Then the final two is discipline selling, which I’m a proponent of, but how do we convert that trust, confidence, and deal momentum into revenue? How do we align that really well with the buyer journey? The buyer only cares about their lens and their roadmap and if you’re aligned with them, and if you are, good things happen. If you’re not, you’re going to hit one of the exit ramps pretty quickly. 

Then the last one, which I just teed up, was the expansion strategy. How do we compound that earned trust into a deeper, more durable partnership? We’ve got a couple of different stories that we’ll get into now, describing how organizations that do this really well, how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and what the net result is. 

Fred Diamond: You used a couple of words there that we talk about all the time. The word trust comes up almost every time. Some of the most popular words that we’ve heard on the over 850 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes, trust, value, etc. Mission clarity. Basically, the question there is, why should the market trust us? I know you have an example here of Southwest Airlines. Why is Southwest such a strong example of a company whose mission became more than just words on a website? 

Brian Green: Southwest is a really good example for a variety of reasons. If you look at Southwest and their core message, their core mission clarity is the freedom to fly. That’s their anchor statement. That’s because they never really wanted to be the cheapest airline. Their larger purpose was to make sure that air travel was accessible to ordinary Americans, being obviously a Dallas-based company, but also, all citizens in general. 

Travel at the time was obviously very expensive, and still remains that way today, and Southwest had this model of, how do we create freedom to fly? That mission clarity gave the business a very clear operating filter, not just for ticket agents and pilots and everybody else behind the scenes, but that low fares was not just a pricing tactic. Fast turnarounds was not just like an operating metric. Ironically, their stock symbol is LUV. Their employee culture was just not a branding choice, but it was really this holistic approach of ensuring that the marketplace trusted their organization to continue to be focused on this mission clarity of offering people the freedom to fly at the lowest price possible, with the quickest turnarounds, with the least disruptions. I just think it’s one of the best statements for an organization. As an employee, as a pilot, as a customer, as a traveler, you just hear that and immediately you get gravitated towards Southwest as an airline to travel with versus some of the other players in the market. 

Fred Diamond: For the semi-professionals listening today, connect this to them, how should the sellers show up in the marketplace with mission clarity? 

Brian Green: I would say that the single most important part of the relationship, as you just said, is trust. That initial first impression that a selling professional or a marketing professional can create is a moment of trust in the organization, trust in the team, trust in the leadership. Mission clarity is not what you claim to believe. It’s more what your business can consistently decide, defend, and deliver. The faster that we can get that messaging out begins to break down that wall. If you think about it through a buyer’s lens, they’re possibly evaluating 20, 30 different companies to solve a problem, 10, 15 companies, 3 or 4 companies, whatever that might be, there is always competition. How do you begin to bring down that veil of resistance, if you will? 

The first way of doing that is to create that trusting relationship with the organization, what we stand for, how we deliver, who we serve, how we serve. Mission clarity is, I think, in my impression through the 30 years of work that I’ve done in this profession, it is the single most important part of the conversation, is to create trust in that initial first impression. 

Fred Diamond: A word we just used a little bit of go, value. Once you build the trust, or as you’re building the trust, I guess it’s a great opportunity to communicate value. You call it value articulation. FedEx is a company that you and I have talked about who does a very good job of doing that. Tell us a little bit about that, your angle on that. Why do so many selling professionals struggle with the ability to communicate the value? Having done 850 Sales Game Changers Podcasts, having spoken to thousands of selling professionals, the ability to communicate it is something people still struggle with. 

Brian Green: I agree. The reason why I think is because we’re always taught that value is in the features and functions of our capabilities. Just in that first example alone, the freedom to fly has nothing to do about feature or function. It is really putting the customer in that focus first and then figuring out what the customer wants and then how do we speak to that customer, resolving that risk, avoiding that pressure point, or removing that pressure point. I think so many times we get lost in the value of something. It really is, how are we delivering value to the individual? 

The FedEx example, their slogan is when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. FedEx created this, one of the clearest examples of value articulation. The power of that line is that it does not just simply describe the service as an overnight service. It captures the buyer’s pressure, or what I like to call the sense of urgency, which John Kotter in his famous book, Leading Change, says that the number one way of invoking change in organizations, find the sense of urgency, address that, and that’s how change occurs. 

When you think about a buyer’s sense of urgency, they’re trying to get something off of their table. They’re trying to get their boss off their back. They’re trying to get this risk resolved. They’re trying to get the network secure, or whatever those things might be. That value is also speaking to that sense of urgency, the pain, the pressure that someone feels, and it’s a lot squishier and it takes a lot more time and energy and effort. But again, if you go back to that mission clarity piece and you really describe and define who we are as an organization, how we serve, who we serve, why we serve, all of a sudden that value story just becomes incredibly easier to put your finger on. 

FedEx wasn’t saying that we’re a logistics company. It says basically, when failure is not acceptable, we’re the ones who you trust. If the buyer is feeling that same way, that’s a great opportunity for any seller, any marketer to express the service capabilities that you have through that value articulation of removing problems and solving problems, or removing risks and solving risks. 

Fred Diamond: That goes into the third one, customer alignment. There’s a couple of myths that we’ve been uncovering as AI continues to grow. As we talked about AI and selling effectiveness, which we spend a lot of time with, one of the things that people are saying is, “Well, gee, you could use AI to get your message to a plenitude of companies now.” Well, the problem is even the biggest companies in the world don’t serve everybody. Talk a little bit about customer alignment. Why is it so difficult for companies to admit that they’re not really built for every single customer? Then what’s your message to the selling professionals who don’t realize that yet or need to be slapped over the face and told not everybody’s a prospect. Focus on the most important ones. 

Brian Green: I think the best example of this is a company that I think most everyone knows about Patagonia. They had a campaign one time that said, Don’t Buy This Jacket. It was so odd and everyone was like, “That’s a huge failure.” But if you thought about what Patagonia’s ideal customer profile was, it was that they’re telling people not to buy something unless they really needed it, because that was who their customer was. It was someone who valued durability. Most of their buyers or customers are environmentally-responsible. They prefer long-term use over disposable consumption. They knew specifically who their customer segment was and down to the level of detail so much that it was safe to say, Don’t Buy This Jacket. Immediately it was like, “Well, okay, now why don’t I want to buy this jacket?” It almost created the reverse effect, which is why it was such an incredible campaign. 

Customer alignment is the discipline in your organization when it’s not chasing every wallet. I think that’s what selling professionals and marketers sometimes get bogged down in, which is everybody’s a customer, and that’s not true. That’s why pipelines in many cases look full but revenue stays fragile, because they’re just chasing, chasing, chasing, and that buyer journey lacks that intimacy, that trusted, high-confident relationship that we established at the very beginning, which puts two organizations together hand in glove, and that’s how a pipeline becomes real. That’s how a pipeline becomes revenue. 

Versus we’re chasing every deal just for the numbers and we don’t know who those customers are or are not that are those that are best aligned with our ability of solving problems, removing risks, whatever that might be. I would say that in this, understand who your customers are, and the faster that the organization can tell those customer stories through testimonials, through use cases, through all the audible and video capabilities that we now have to distribute that message, the faster that you’re going to open up that market to really understand who that customer is, where they’re at, what their needs are, and how you can serve it. 

Fred Diamond: One of the biggest challenges, as we’re talking to Brian Green here and moving through his six factors of revenue generation, generating revenue, etc., that are critical to happen, you could see how these things all come together. Which lands us to number four, which is demand generation. Every selling professional on the planet is striving to get prospects and existing customers to pay attention to them, to want to spend time with them. The way you do that is by showing value, etc., but how do we make ourselves impossible for the customers to ignore that we know that we can serve? 

In B2B and B2G here, Brian, I know you’re an expert in both, every sales professional who’s successful believes what he’s going to do is going to help, but the customers are thinking about 5,000 other things. The great selling professionals have their attention. It’s not just the biggest companies on the planet, the Amazons, Microsofts, etc., in tech. There are smaller companies who figured out a way and the selling professionals have figured out a way to get that attention. 

Brian Green: That’s right. DemandGen is probably one of the most challenging roles that any organization has. Email is getting more and more filtered and, in many cases, not even used. Now you’ve got AEO, GEO agentic searches going on where we’re trying to figure out how to get AI to recognize and understand our company. But at the end of the day, DemandGen is about getting relevant attention on your core mission. You’re seeing a thread here, why this entire arc is so important, because when you’re able to create demand by the people who are seeking your products and services and are core to your mission and their mission, magical things happen. 

Not to say that DemandGen isn’t a numbers game, because it is. You touch as many people as you can with relevant messaging, but it’s become so saturated. One of the examples that I use is the Red Bull Stratos story, where they didn’t run an ad. They created gravity. Back in October of 2012, Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space. Millions viewed it, over a billion watched it. It just immediately drew the attention of the Red Bull ICP, their ideal client profile Who was it? It was enthusiasts. It was A Type personalities. It was outdoors. It was X-game type enthusiasts. They knew exactly who their customer was and they knew exactly the campaign that they needed to tie their brand to. 

It got probably one of the most attention-getting campaigns probably in our history, which is when Baumgartner jumped off from 24 miles high in the sky, and we’ve all seen it, first human being to break Mach 1 travel as a human. It’s just incredible. You go, “Okay, well, we can’t all be Red Bull.” But the relevancy of how Red Bull understood who their customers were and what the core desires of that community that drink Red Bull, that are looking for that surge of adrenaline, they knew that that was the answer. It was an amazing ad. It got a billion views. Let’s shoot for 50,000 or 100,000 views, but the key is understanding mission, understanding value, understanding your customer. When you tie those things together, DemandGen becomes increasingly much easier. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s get specific here for selling professionals. Number five is discipline selling. The things that we’re talking about here, building trust, mission clarity, communicating value properly, give some specific advice here for the selling professionals. We’ve estimated that 60% of our listeners are B2B or B2G selling professionals. Then another 20% above that are leaders, director and above. Let’s get specific in what selling organizations need to be doing to create better performance. 

Brian Green: This is one that’s obviously near and dear to my heart. I’ve got workshops on this. I speak to this in most of my customer interactions. What I would say on the discipline selling front is if in fact you’re willing to sweat the details as a professional, not everyone’s going to be a rainmaker. Not everyone is going to be number one. But in most cases, leaders don’t want a room full of number ones. They want a room full of A minus, B plus, because that’s consistent. A room full of number ones come and go. You want consistency across your sales teams. You want everybody operating at a consistent operating standard with messaging, with engagement, with negotiations, with effectiveness. 

The example that I like to share on discipline selling is not an organization, but the British Cycling Organization. For 76 years, they were a train wreck. Then Sir Dave Brailsford basically came in and applied a discipline called the aggregation of marginal gains. What the philosophy was, was to break down performance into every contributing factor on the team as a racer, as well as the support teams. Each one he looked at, they looked at nutrition, they looked at the bikes, they looked at the equipment, they looked at everything. 

After this process that they went through, having 76 years of abysmal failure, all of a sudden this aggregation of marginal gains was applied and they made 1% to 3% corrections in nutrition and training and psychology. Then from 2007 to 2017, they won 65 or 66 gold medals, 5 Tour de France wins, it was incredible. It was that concept of looking at where selling is occurring across the buyer journey, and the reason why I call it discipline selling is because I don’t think that you can just take talent and apply it anywhere. It’s got to be a process. That process has to follow a disciplined journey where the buyer is and where they ultimately want to be. 

I had a rep one time who was an amazing man, I won’t say his name publicly, but he was an amazing young man, a great rep for me, was killing it every year, year over year. All of a sudden something went south in his life and he was literally at the bottom of my team. I went to him and said, “What is going on. What happened?” I figured out a way of just building him back up and I created what’s called a Silky Sullivan Award. Silky Sullivan, if you’re familiar with horse racing, he was known as the California Comet. This horse, of all the great closers, was the one that usually came from the furthest back. He was down like 41 lengths one time and came back and won it in three. 

All we did at that time, Fred, is we looked at every single part of our methodology, from his initial outreach to his initial messaging, to his proposal design and development, to the conversations that he was having, to his forecasting capability. We looked at every single element of his plan, of the methodology, of his engagement, of his writing, of his presentations. The same thing, we fixed the little elements across his entire approach, just to get him back up into a high-performing selling rep for our company. Ultimately, he won the Silky Sullivan Award. He came from the back of the pack the previous year and returned to the number one spot on my team. I’m a big believer that discipline selling is not just looking at great talent and putting them in a direction and saying go. Discipline selling is really taking great talent, putting them in a system, and allowing that system to create aggregate level results across the entire team, not just for one individual. 

Fred Diamond: It also sounds like there was great coaching there too. As a sales leader, you recognized some things were happening and obviously they were talented because they were able to get back to where they were, and things happen sometimes. 

Brian Green: I’d almost say also, just to share one more analogy, the great Bill Belichick, his famous line of, Do Your Job, with the New England Patriots, was Do Your Job. Understand your job, figure out those stones that you’re walking on to do your job effectively, and do that to the best of your ability, and wherever those stones are missing, let’s rebuild those stones and keep going. 

Fred Diamond: The final of the six is expansion strategy. Every selling professional, you want to get that first deal if it’s a new client, but then you want to have the client for 5, 10, 7 years. Just give us some insights into expansion strategy and what selling professionals can and should be thinking about to have that as part of their six-pronged approach. 

Brian Green: Love it. Probably the single most important part of any company going from startup to growth is how you create long-term relationships with organizations. I would just have your listeners walk away with thinking about Disney and how they go from creating a character to merchandise. Merchandise becomes a theme park. That experience becomes a memory. The memory becomes loyalty. Just think about Disney as an example of how and where we can leverage the trust and confidence in our mission alignment and customer clarity on paper and how do we put thoughts and energy into expanding that, partnering more closely, having an expansion and a broadening strategy. 

Expansion means other services and solutions that we can offer. Broadening means taking what we did here and leveraging that into another organization, and we constantly, constantly, constantly have to be thinking about sales, marketing, and operations being at the center of that conversation, because program managers, operational expertise, marketing expertise, selling expertise, all of those customer interactions are creating that trust and confidence moment for your organization. So long as there’s tight alignment between those three teams who are uniformly touching that client, your expansion strategy will take care of itself. 

Fred Diamond: Congratulations on bringing these six strategies together. They’re all critical. It’s great seeing you. Best of luck here in the future development as you bring these solutions out to more companies. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 861: The Sales Framework Every Revenue Leader Needs with Brian Green first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Today’s show featured an interview with Jared Shepard, Chief Operating Officer at Hypori.

Find Jared on LinkedIn.

JARED’S TIP: “Understand your technology well enough, or your capability well enough, that you can articulate to that need and then also understand the implications of that articulation, i.e., am I reducing cost, am I reducing burden, am I reducing friction? I hope you’re doing one of those, because otherwise, people just aren’t taking on new burden and new friction right now.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re doing a different interview today. I’m talking to Jared Shepard with a company called Hypori. We’re both members of the Northern Virginia Chamber. Many of our listeners know that I’m based in Northern Virginia. At the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we work with a lot of companies that do B2G, business to government, selling to public sector, etc. Jared, I saw you on a panel that the Northern Virginia Chamber ran. I guess it was in May of 2026. We’re doing today’s interview in June of 2026. I was really impressed. 

I was impressed by two things. One is your directness in participating in the panel. But I also liked how you started giving some advice for veterans that were looking to start businesses. For people that are listening to the show, again, I’m based in Northern Virginia. Government contracting obviously is a huge part of the economy. Former military veterans going into government contracting and related services to move from their military service into their commercial ventures. 

You had some very, very specific things that you discussed on the panel and I said even though you’re not a VP of sales, I thought it would be interesting because a lot of the companies that service them sell things to the military, etc. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. I think this is going to be a great show. I’m very excited. What I’ve learned about you and your company is quite remarkable. We’ll get deep into that. 

We’re also going to get deep into your advice for veterans, for former military, what they should be thinking and doing as they make their move into commercial and starting businesses. Jared, it’s great to see you. Tell us a little bit about your military background and your journey into the business world. What does your company Hypori do and why did you create it? 

 Jared Shepard: That could go on for an hour by itself just because I’ve had a very atypical story. I usually answer that by saying I’m the atypical CEO. I was a high school dropout and homeless kid that joined the army to get off the streets. I largely self-created. I was a knucklehead when I was young. The military ended up giving me the principles. I don’t by accident have a nonprofit called Warriors Ethos. It gave me the ethos or the moral compass that I really needed to build my future. It taught me leadership. It taught me accountability. It taught me the importance of impact and mission, which then later led to me starting my first company almost 20 years ago to the month. 

Now my second company, I joke, when you said I’m not a VP of sales, I feel like I am because I am the best sales guy in the company. At least I feel that’s my responsibility as the CEO, is always to be the best sales guy in the company. I always look forward to having a great VP of sales that I can learn from. 

My military background, I originally was an infantry guy. I served for a little while as a sniper. I got to do some cool stuff. Ultimately, ended up deciding to reenlist and become an IT guy, in part because it was during the late ‘90s and I didn’t like Fort Hood, Texas at the time. I reenlisted into IT to get away from Fort Hood, and God had a sense of humor and sent me back to Fort Hood as an IT guy. But it ended up being a great experience for me because I got to work for a three-star general on September 11th of 2001, and being told to work for a three-star general in September 11th, 2001. I was a strap hanger that got to sit in the corner of a room and listen to people like Condoleezza Rice, or Chad Edwards, or Newt Gingrich talk about how the country was going to respond to September 11th. 

I realized, coming from a guy that still had a GED and didn’t have a perspective on the world, that, man, the world is way bigger than I thought it was and I could have potentially a much larger impact. I made the decision to get out of the military because I felt that I could more quickly and more effectively have the impact that I wanted to have. 

Fred Diamond: That must have been some pretty heady stuff being in the room with some of those people at that time. I’ve interviewed a couple of people over the course of the Sales Game Changers Podcast who were very involved with the response. Obviously, there was a lot of communications companies. One of the things we learned is companies had to come together better to get communications more unified, etc. That may be a separate show that we’ll do some time down the road. 

Along the way, you also founded Intelligent Waves and Warriors Ethos. Tell us a little bit about that and how did that come together with your creation of Hypori? 

Jared Shepard: Hypori was actually the third of the creations. I started out with Intelligent Waves. I was working as a civilian advisor for a guy named General Ray Odierno and a gentleman named General Joe Anderson, and they asked me to step in and help build a new military organization called JIDO, the Joint IED Defeat Organization. Along the way, I had a bunch of great mentors who were like, “Hey, you should start your own company.” This is after I had already deployed once with the III Armored Corps in the beginning of the Iraq War as a lead technical planner, and I decided to start to wear my own t-shirt, as I told General Anderson at the time. 

General Odierno puts his maw of a hand, he was this giant human being, soft-spoken, very intelligent, but giant human being, puts his maw of a hand on my shoulder and says, “Jared, this is the American dream, to have come where you’ve come from, to have served your country, and now have a chance to start your own company.” He’s like, “I’ll tell General Meigs I support it.” That was the birth of Intelligent Waves and it was also the beginning of me becoming the J6 for JIDO, and a tremendous amount of great experiences and great mentorships and great leadership examples that I was a witness to and got to participate in after that. That would be 20 years ago next month, I think. 

Along the way, spent almost three, four years in deployed environments, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Somalia, etc. In the first few months of my first deployment with General Odierno, he gave a speech to his leaders that caused me to have a bit of an epiphany. That epiphany was the idea of the ultimate sacrifice. As we all learn in school, the ultimate sacrifice is when you die for your country. But what I realized was, that’s a little bit of bullshit. I don’t mean it as in that’s not the ultimate sacrifice. It is. Unequivocally, it’s a sacrifice that the country can never repay and there’s nothing that we can ever do to give back to the family who’s lost a member of their family for something greater. But the ultimate sacrifice could also be bigger than that. 

It could be losing a limb for your country. It could be being injured for your country. It could be watching one of your friends die next to you for your country. It could be just spending time away from your children as they grow for your country, for something bigger than you, for the idea of freedom, for the idea of what we represent, what our democracy represents. I think those are all forms of the ultimate sacrifice. When I had that epiphany, and this is back when it was me and one employee, and I decided, “If this Intelligent Waves thing becomes a real thing, I’m going to have to find a way to give back.” 

It started out with, I think 18 months later, I wrote my first check to the Wounded Warrior Project, same way almost everybody else was giving back back then. General Odierno actually came in and flew in and presented it to them on my behalf, which was a great blessing and privilege. I think we wrote a $134,000 check to the Wounded Warrior Project at the time, which was big for a little company, but we did that for a few years. Then I ultimately separated ways with the Wounded Warrior Project and met a young man who was a wounded special operations communications guy. 

I realized that I had developed this mantra in interacting with wounded soldiers, and that mantra was, what’s next? What do you do next? Like, okay, yes, you were injured, but your life isn’t over. What are you going to do next? That fundamentally became the basis for what Warriors Ethos became, which is, what’s next? We started out purely helping and servicing wounded soldiers, and this was 12 years ago, wounded soldiers, which there was a plethora of, unfortunately, at the time. But as we grew and evolved, we really found that anybody who served, especially those who had served 20 plus years, they need help figuring out what’s next. Because you become so fundamentally institutionalized with the military and the way that the military functions, learning how to then adapt, it’s not implied. It’s something that has to be learned of Warriors Ethos. 

Then along the way, I was asked to solve a really hard technical problem to allow people to communicate in most of the disparate environments under disparate challenges. Fundamentally, that became what is now Hypori, which is the company that I run now, because we’ve essentially been able to solve the idea that you could use an edge device, a phone or a tablet, to communicate with the security enterprise with no data in transit and no data at rest. Subsequently, we assume that your phone is already compromised, and the advantage of that is that means you keep your privacy. We can allow you to interact with an enterprise and you get to keep your privacy. Enterprise doesn’t take risk and you don’t take risk. Everybody wins. That’s when I realized what Hypori was going to be. 

I hired a CEO to run Intelligent Waves for me. I spun Hypori out of Intelligent Waves. Intelligent Waves is still running around today, doing great. Now I run Hypori. That’s my legacy of where I’ve been and where I am. 

Fred Diamond: First off, my apologies for not saying thank you for your service prior to this. Thank you for your service. 

Jared Shepard: I tell people all the time, it’s always an uncomfortable thing to hear sometimes when you say, thank you for your service. The reason for it is because I got way more out of my service than the service probably got out of me. I learned so much from the Army. The Army is so much of what I was that the best thing I can tell you is, no, thank you. Thank you for my ability to serve. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great. We could have an offline conversation about that because living in the Northern Virginia area as long as I have, and having met so many veterans who have given the sacrifice that you talked about, it truly is genuine. We talked prior to the show about some of the companies that I’m involved with, and many of the people we’ve dealt with have come from service. 

I want to get right to some of the heart of the conversation here. Again, you were on the panel and you were talking about misconceptions that veterans have when they are going into commercial business, which could be government contracting or technology, whatever it might be, professional services. What’s the biggest misconception military veterans have about starting a government contracting or any other type of commercial business? 

Jared Shepard: If you’re talking about entrepreneurship and them starting their own business, one is, I tell them never to do it when they first come out of the military, in part because when you’re getting out of the military, you probably have every skill set necessary to be successful in business, except for the single most important skill set, which is a fundamental understanding of money. The military by design doesn’t teach money. Nobody gets laid off if they don’t make numbers. Nobody doesn’t get bonuses. The military, they want you focused on mission and people. Money is never one of those things that, whether you’re an officer or enlisted, it doesn’t matter, it’s not a serious consideration for your day-to-day life inside of the military. You have to learn that when you’re getting out and running a business is the antithesis of taking risk and applying all of your time to produce an outcome, which is generally measured in money, and how could you do that without a knowledge of how that works. 

I always advise veterans, if you’re getting out of the military and you have that entrepreneurial spirit, great. Go work for somebody else for the first year or two. Go learn on their dime and on their risk before you make that decision to do it for yourself. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. There are so many aspects of the business. You just alluded to the fact that you as a CEO are essentially the VP of sales. We talk about this a lot. The entrepreneur is responsible almost invariably for could be years, may even be a decade worth of business. Then as the company grows, they need to figure out how to leverage their ability, bring in other professionals to focus on that. There are so many aspects. 

What are some of the advantages that veterans bring to the federal public sector marketplace that many non-veteran entrepreneurs don’t have? 

Jared Shepard: I think it’s their ability to triage and prioritize. Having an operational understanding, a lot of people, when you ask, what’s the best skill set a veteran has getting out of the military? A lot of people will go, leadership. The military teaches leadership wholesale, and they do, but what else they teach that you don’t hear people talk about a lot is followership. When I say followership, I mean the military’s integrated necessity of learning how to make the people that are your peers, the people below you, and the people above you successful. The military lives off of that. 

You got to make your boss successful. You got to be able to do your boss’s job. You got to be able to do the guy two steps below you’s job. You got to be able to help make the person to your left and your right successful. Corporate America thrives off of people who are successful with that. Military may not necessarily have all the technical skills necessary for success outside of the military. They definitely have the operational understanding and the ability to navigate an organizational structure. 

Fred Diamond: You alluded to this a second ago, but if a veteran came to you today, maybe they saw you on a panel or you get referred, whatever, because you’ve had your success, and they say, “Jared Shepard, I want to start a GovCon business,” what would be some of the questions you would ask them to find out, are they suitable to be successful? 

One thing that you talked about on the panel was coming out of service, most of them have the mission. A lot of the VPs of public sector sales that I’ve interviewed, one of the questions I ask them is, why have you been committed to the B2G marketplace, business to government? It almost always comes down to mission, if they’re selling to military, if they’re selling to intelligence organizations, or medical organizations, health care, whatever it might be. What might be some questions you would ask them to get to the heart of why they want to do this? 

Jared Shepard: One of the big ones is it depends on where they’re at in their stage of life. I always tell people, what do you think it costs to start your own business? Most people always think it has a dollar value associated to it. Ironically, it doesn’t. It costs time and risk. If you’re retiring after 20 years, you’re in your late 40s, you have a 13-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a 6-year-old at home. Can you really give 100% of risk and 100% of time to be successful in an entrepreneurship journey? 

When I started mine, I wasn’t a parent, I didn’t have kids. There’s no way I could do it today with young kids at home and give to my company the amount of time and effort and risk that was necessary to start my first company to be successful. A lot of that had to do with the risk goes up when you don’t have experience. If you’re just out of the military, and you don’t have experience running business because you’ve never done it with anybody else, then your risk profile is even higher. 

I would ask about your risk profile. I would ask about, who’s at home, who’s depending on you? How much risk can you take? How much time can you commit? How much flexibility do you have? Then the number one thing I always ask is, how are you going to differentiate yourself? It has to be simply more than ambition. It has to be something that you’re going to do that you can say, I can do this thing better than anybody else out there. 

Fred Diamond: I agree with you, that they go work somewhere. How hard is it for a former military person, a veteran, to find an opportunity to join a company to learn? Are there many places? Do they know about the places they can go? Obviously, there’s websites with companies run by military. Is it easy to find a job if you have those ambitions? 

Jared Shepard: I don’t think anything is ever easy. The most important thing to do when you’re transitioning out of the military is to be receptive to mentorship. That means when you get out, whether you’re getting out as an E-6 or an O-6, as a colonel, you have to realize that when you’re getting out, whatever company you go to work for, everybody in that company has more experience than you do now in business. In some ways, it’s a reset. You have to be receptive to, regardless of what rank you’re taking off when you’re getting out of the military, that, Joe, that former sergeant in the Army, who’s been out for 10 years now and is now a vice president of services or a vice president of marketing, he knows a crap ton more than you do. You better not come to him and tell him how things work. You better come and ask him how things work and figure out how that fits. 

The way I tell guys is like, look, when you make the decision to get out of the military, you made that decision because you hit some glass ceiling, whether you just didn’t get promoted anymore, or you chose that you served long enough, or that you wanted to do something different, or your family needed something different, whatever it happened to be. You hit some kind of obstacle that made the decision that you’re not staying in the military any longer. When you get out of the military, sometimes you have to take a step back to get out of under that ceiling to then get to a place where there’s no ceiling again, or where the ceiling is much higher. 

That is the step of getting out of the military, is you sometimes have to take a step back. Especially senior leaders, E-9s, O-6s, etc., telling them like, “Look, don’t put you are the COO of an organization, or the CEO of an organization on your resume,” because to be frank, it’s bullshit. You are no more the CEO of a company than I’ve ever been the captain of a ship. As a CEO of a company, I’ve never been in command of a brigade or the captain of a ship. Even though you were a brigade commander, you sure have never been the CEO of a company either. Be honest with yourself about that. Be receptive to talking to people who have and be prepared to learn from and get back to it. 

Transitioning folks from military, ironically, the higher rank they are, the harder time they potentially have, because they have to unlearn some of the habits that they had for so long in the military to learn the new habits that are necessary for success. 

Fred Diamond: Once they’ve made the decision, let’s say that they’ve made the decision, they’ve gone through the year, two or five, whatever it might be, and they decide, “You know what? I really do think that I, whoever I am, have the capabilities.” We’re talking about a small percentage of the veterans. First of all, to be a CEO and an entrepreneur, it’s something that is very unique. We interview business owners all the time. If you are fortunate enough to have some of the skills that you’re talking about here, Jared, you’ve grown to understand some of the things related to running a business, managing people, hiring the right people, teaming with the right people. Many veterans then focus on getting certifications, like Small Disadvantaged, if you will. 

What do they need, or what’s been your experience, or what do you want to share about what they need to understand about going that route? 

Jared Shepard: If you’re going to go into GovCon, that stuff matters. If you’re going to go into GovCon, go use every tool that’s available to you. Go get your 8(a), I don’t know if 8(a) is around anymore, but go get your HUBZone, your SDVOSB, anything that gets you to the door to get you an opportunity. Now that being said, I tell folks, especially 8(a) folks, don’t go get an 8(a) until you’ve built the past performance that you can actually use that, because it comes with a timeline, and that timeline expires. 

I still am learning every day how to be a CEO, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years now. I routinely have been challenged by my board, by my other executives, etc., and I’ve had to learn to be a better person. You don’t have to know how to be a CEO to start your own company, but you should understand the risk and the time that’s involved. Then specifically, you hear about those things called an elevator speech, 30 seconds worth of how do you distinguish yourself from your peers? Can you honestly look at yourself in a mirror, and in 30 seconds, tell me how you’re going to distinguish yourself as a new company against your peers? If you can’t comfortably do that, I’d say go back to the drawing board until you can. 

Fred Diamond: 20 years. A lot of guys and women have tried to start companies and many have failed, obviously. Most companies will fail at some point, let alone companies that we’re talking about here that are being run by veterans. What have you seen from your experience that separates the veteran-owned businesses that have successfully won contracts, created a truly successful company, from those that have struggled? 

Jared Shepard: I’m blessed that I’ve had two different veteran-owned companies that have both been successful. I wish I could say it’s because of me, but maybe that’s the secret to success, is that it’s not about me. It’s about you have to constantly challenge yourself. You have to constantly try to bring smarter people into the room with you, people with more experience than you. I always say, never be the smartest guy in the room, because if you are, you’re the only one who walks out with nothing. Be humble enough that you know, even if you’re the CEO, it doesn’t mean you need to be the guy that knows the answer. You’re just the one coordinating the answer from people who you trust to achieve an outcome of some kind. 

Understand that when you’re small especially, if you’re going to start your own company, you can’t do everything. You just simply can’t. There are so many small companies that try to say that they can, “Well, if I can’t do it, I could go hire somebody.” Yeah, so can Booz Allen Hamilton, and they can probably do it more effectively than you. How are you going to do one thing, or maybe a small set of things, very well, and distinguish yourself in that way and surround yourself with experts, define yourself by your ability to deliver it at a lower cost than a big integrator could, with a more effective or better set of skill sets than a big integrator could. Then now you’ve made a business argument as to how you could stand up and be successful. 

Then last, the most important piece is, never get comfortable. Every time you win, you have to go back to the drawing board again and start over. A good friend and mentor of mine who became one of the youngest VPs in Booz Allen’s history, and then his twin brother is now the youngest partner in Booz Allen’s history, he told me two decades ago, “Jared, every day you’re not growing is a day you’re dying.” So many small businesses rely upon that SDVOSB status, or that 8(a) status, or this one contract award or this other contract award, and they sit back in their seat and they go, “Huh, I did it.” No, you didn’t. The golden rule of owning a business is it never gets easier. No matter what anybody says, it never gets easier. It just gets bigger. It gets more complex, but it just doesn’t get easier. 

Fred Diamond: There’s constantly challenges. We’re doing today’s interview in June of 2026 and the federal government spent the last 18 months rethinking how they want to procure products and/or services. They’ve implemented a lot of things and AI coming in has also made a lot of shifts. 

I’m going to ask you a question that just occurred to me. I’m just curious on your thoughts and don’t overthink this. If you could have done something differently in the last 20 years, and you’ve probably thought about this. I doubt that you’re the kind of guy who has a whole lot of regrets, but if there was something along the way that you wish you had done maybe, or you maybe should have done 10, 15, 20 years ago, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind, if anything? 

Jared Shepard: Know your weaknesses and hire against them. My kryptonite had always been a CFO. Ultimately, somebody who truly understands money management. I am a charismatic leader. One of my mentors and my board members is a guy named Ray Lane. Ray Lane was one of the founders of Oracle, and then Larry Ellison built Oracle. He told me something that’s important for all of you who are listening to understand, he’s like, “Jared, don’t confuse inspirational leadership with good management,” because those two things are different. 

You can be an inspirational leader, like I believe I am considered, but that doesn’t make you a good manager. That doesn’t mean you know how to make the trains run on time. If you’re not going to be that person, then you sure the hell better go hire that person and make sure that person is on your team. Same thing with money, same thing with operations, same thing with recruiting, same thing with HR. You have to know where the pain points are and you can’t just hope that they solve themselves. You’ve got to solve for them. 

Fred Diamond: You mentioned Ray Lane, one of the founders of Oracle. You mentioned a couple of high-ranking generals that you had the privilege of working with. Would you recommend for the people listening that if they are starting, or maybe the first year or two, that they strive to get that level of people either on their board of advisors or board of directors? Ray Lane, that’s like hitting a home run type of a thing. I don’t know the history, we don’t have to go into the detail of how you got to them. We talked about somebody during the prep of today’s call who is an amazing leader who is great to have in your camp as well. Would you say that may not be the smartest thing to do in the beginning, but as you grow, I don’t want to put the answer into your mouth, but what are your thoughts on striving for that level of assistance? 

Jared Shepard: I think one of the most important things to do to be successful is to be receptive to mentorship, period, and to seek the appropriate level of mentorship for the level that you’re operating at at that time. When you’re starting a brand new company, going and getting a Ray Lane or whoever the business magnet is, is probably not the right guy, because they’re just simply not going to give you advice on how to start your first company and how to get your first contract. They’re going to talk to you about how to build a billion-dollar organization, but you have to have that in your toolbox already. 

Going and hiring a four-star, I’ve hired a bunch of them. I’ve had a bunch of great four-star advisors, etc. That’s great if you’re operating at the four-star level, but if you’re starting your own company, you probably aren’t. Go find somebody who built a $30 million company, a $40 million company, a $50 billion company, who then may be retired and sold it, and go ask him. Or go find a medium-sized business as a mentor protege and just go say, “Hey, I admire what you’ve done and I’d like to try to do something similar. What can I do?” 

It might start with table scraps and advice and lunch, and you take somebody to lunch and you maintain these relationships, and these relationships build. I’ve been blessed to have some really well-known mentors and coaches, but it’s not because I sought them, it’s because I think they saw my ambition and my passion, and when I got an opportunity to meet them, they said, “Hey, I’m willing to help that guy.” I think if you’re willing to be receptive to getting help from anybody you talk to, and you’re willing to have that elevator pitch down and believe in it and have the passion for it, that you’re going to find those appropriate mentors at the different stages of your life. 

Fred Diamond: We talked today with Jared Shepard from Hypori. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your lessons for military veterans who are looking to start businesses, to create their own entrepreneurial success stories. Usually, Jared, we end the show with an action step for selling professionals to implement. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but things they should implement and act upon right now. I’m going to ask it for you, slightly different.

What would be an action step for either the CEO who’s selling his company services, or maybe a first level VP of BD or something along those lines? Give us an action step for a CEO in your place or the VP of BD that they should do right now to take their company’s business to the next level.  

Jared Shepard: There’s a lot of the traditional stuff, the build back better, build great, it’s actually like that, and I could give you the traditional sales stuff. But I’d actually say today, understand the implications of AI to your technology. I’m not saying you have to understand AI, I’m not saying anything else like that, but today, if you’re going to go and talk to most sales leaders out there, or most buyers out there, they want to at least understand, does your product impact AI? How does AI impact it? Do you alleviate, not add to their existing burden?  

Understand your technology well enough, or your capability well enough, that you can articulate to that need and then also understand the implications of that articulation, i.e., am I reducing cost, am I reducing burden, am I reducing friction? I hope you’re doing one of those, because otherwise, people just aren’t taking on new burden and new friction right now. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, my name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I want to thank Jared Shepard for being on today’s show. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 860: What Military Veterans Must Know Before Starting a Business According to Jared Shepard first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is an AI and Sales Brief episode, a 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!

Today’s show featured an interview with AI expert Zeev Wexler, CEO at Wexler, and sales expert Tom Snyder, Founder of Funnel Clarity.

Find Zeev on LinkedIn. Find Tom on LinkedIn.

ZEEV’S TIP: “You are not just using AI to send more emails that do not work. You are using AI with what has been scientifically proven to work at a higher percentage.”

TOM’S TIP: “Do you know why people say it’s a numbers game? Because they do not know what the best practices of sales are. The science tells us what the best performance direction is.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond:  Welcome to another episode of the AI and Sales Brief, a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I regularly bring on two of our experts, Tom Snyder and Zeev Wexler, to talk about how B2B and B2G selling enterprises can more effectively use AI to improve sales performance.

Tom and Zeev, as you know, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling spends a lot of time with major OEMs, their ecosystems, and their channels. We keep hearing that VARs, value-added resellers, and solution providers are struggling for a number of reasons. Many buyers are asking what value the channel and value-added resellers actually bring to the equation. So let’s talk about the role that AI and sales best practices can play here. How can AI help in the ecosystem?

Tom, you and I have talked about this many times. You are a frequent speaker at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling’s Sales Stage Live programs, which we regularly host in a hybrid format. We see people in the channel, and it is getting tougher for a number of reasons.

Tom Snyder: This is a phenomenon that happens periodically in sales. Sales as a profession tends to drift a step or two behind the expectations of its customer base. This is a vivid example of that. When customers turn to value-added resellers and ask, ‘Where is the value added?’ you are seeing a symptom of a larger disease: being out of step.

The irony is that these VARs have the expertise, insight, and experience to create value for decision-makers. The key is creating that value prior to the sale. The current demand from customers across B2B and B2G is, ‘Help me make a better decision. Help me understand my own world better through your sales process, and I will award you my business.’

Tom Snyder: It is about how you sell, not just what you sell. Too many VARs are still trapped in the mindset of saying, ‘Look at this fantastic technology. Isn’t it incredible? Don’t you want some? We’ll implement it for you.’ There is a tactical path to creating value before you sell anything. It is not just an aspiration. There are very specific skills and behaviors involved. Harness that, and you have half of the equation. The other half of the equation, the piece that allows you to truly dominate the marketplace, lies in what Zeev is about to explain.

Zeev, give the audience a sense of how AI can accelerate what I just described.

Zeev Wexler: Beautiful. Resellers and VARs are often focusing too much on reselling and not enough on adding value. You now have tools that can research your market, your prospects, their competitors, and what is happening around them in moments. This is information that many salespeople often do not have the time, knowledge, or ability to gather on their own.

Now you can come to prospects fully equipped with the information they need, not just to buy your product, but to see you as someone who brings value. You want to become someone they can call when they have an issue and ask, ‘What do you think about this?’ Instead of spending a week researching, you can use an AI tool, combined with your own knowledge and expertise, to equip yourself with the right information.

I think many VARs are focusing on reselling and forgetting that their first job is to add value. If you create a plan for how you are going to bring value to your prospects and clients, and then build an AI system around that knowledge and process, AI can do the heavy lifting. It can give you the information you need so you are truly adding value rather than simply pushing product.

Sometimes the product is needed, but before the product is needed, you have to show your value. Value comes before the sale, as Tom said. The work that used to take two weeks can now take six minutes, and the quality is not lower. It is probably higher if you train the AI correctly. Every salesperson needs to build a system that helps them provide value. It is easier today than it has ever been in history.

Tom Snyder: You are the wizard of truth when it comes to the future of sales. Zeev and I have noticed that early adopters in this area are dominating their marketplaces. If you do not move quickly, you may not be in business, because that is the power of marrying best practice with AI.

Zeev, I would love for you to comment on the difference between having a corporate AI initiative for sales and simply relying on tools like Salesforce AI or outreach AI. It feels like everyone in the world now has some kind of AI tool. Can you speak to that?

Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. When you bring an artificial intelligence system into your business, stop thinking about it as SaaS, technology, or software. Think about it as bringing an entity into your business. That entity needs to be trained, educated, and tested.

The problem with most organizations is that they keep buying tools. They buy one tool, then another, and the tech stack keeps growing. Soon they are spending thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on tools. What many people do not realize is that behind the scenes, many of these tools use similar or even the same models.

A tool may give you a shortcut, but that shortcut does not necessarily include your knowledge, your expertise, your company’s experience, or your special sauce. Because of that, the tool may not do enough for you. Instead of simply bringing in tools, you need to bring in an entity, then educate that entity in what makes your VAR unique. How are you bringing value? How are you successfully selling? Then you grow that entity.

AI is not a magic wand. It will not come in and solve everything automatically. AI empowers what is already working for you. If something was not working before, AI is not going to fix it on its own. But whatever was working before can be strengthened with experience and knowledge to actually help you.

Companies that keep buying tools left and right, and then stop using them because they do not work, are missing the point. It is not about the tool, and it is not just about the technology. It is about bringing in an entity, training it, educating it, testing it, and then making sure your team knows exactly how to use it.

I think we talked about workflow on the last show. That tool, or entity, needs to be educated in your workflow, what your company does best, and how your company creates value for its clients. Do not just look at tools. Look at the entity you are bringing into the organization, educate it, and keep the knowledge inside your organization. In the future, many of these tools will go away. I would even say 90% of them. Do not rely on things that may disappear. Build the knowledge within your organization.

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Tom and Zeev. Ecosystems and channels are under pressure right now as customers look for easier ways to get access. It is no longer just about transactions. It needs to be about helping your customers figure out the right solutions, and there are many ways to use AI to do that.

If you are looking for solutions that can help you use AI to improve your selling process, improve the ability of your selling professionals, and strengthen your channel, reach out to me, Fred Diamond, Tom Snyder, or Zeev Wexler for more information about how we can help solve those problems.

My name is Fred Diamond, and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

The post EPISODE 859: AI Best Practices to Improve B2B Sales Efforts first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is an AI and Sales Brief episode, a 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!

Today’s show featured an interview with AI expert Zeev Wexler, CEO at Wexler, and sales expert Tom Snyder, Founder of Funnel Clarity.

Find Zeev on LinkedIn. Find Tom on LinkedIn.

ZEEV’S TIP: “Do not just look at tools. Look at the entity you are bringing into the organization, educate it, and keep the knowledge inside your organization.”

TOM’S TIP: “The key is creating that value prior to the sale. The current demand from customers across B2B and B2G is, ‘Help me make a better decision. Help me understand my own world better through your sales process, and I will award you my business.'”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond:  Welcome to another episode of the AI and Sales Brief, a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I regularly bring on two of our experts, Tom Snyder and Zeev Wexler, to talk about how B2B and B2G selling enterprises can more effectively use AI to improve sales performance.

Tom and Zeev, as you know, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling spends a lot of time with major OEMs, their ecosystems, and their channels. We keep hearing that VARs, value-added resellers, and solution providers are struggling for a number of reasons. Many buyers are asking what value the channel and value-added resellers actually bring to the equation. So let’s talk about the role that AI and sales best practices can play here. How can AI help in the ecosystem?

Tom, you and I have talked about this many times. You are a frequent speaker at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling’s Sales Stage Live programs, which we regularly host in a hybrid format. We see people in the channel, and it is getting tougher for a number of reasons.

Tom Snyder: This is a phenomenon that happens periodically in sales. Sales as a profession tends to drift a step or two behind the expectations of its customer base. This is a vivid example of that. When customers turn to value-added resellers and ask, ‘Where is the value added?’ you are seeing a symptom of a larger disease: being out of step.

The irony is that these VARs have the expertise, insight, and experience to create value for decision-makers. The key is creating that value prior to the sale. The current demand from customers across B2B and B2G is, ‘Help me make a better decision. Help me understand my own world better through your sales process, and I will award you my business.’

Tom Snyder: It is about how you sell, not just what you sell. Too many VARs are still trapped in the mindset of saying, ‘Look at this fantastic technology. Isn’t it incredible? Don’t you want some? We’ll implement it for you.’ There is a tactical path to creating value before you sell anything. It is not just an aspiration. There are very specific skills and behaviors involved. Harness that, and you have half of the equation. The other half of the equation, the piece that allows you to truly dominate the marketplace, lies in what Zeev is about to explain.

Zeev, give the audience a sense of how AI can accelerate what I just described.

Zeev Wexler: Beautiful. Resellers and VARs are often focusing too much on reselling and not enough on adding value. You now have tools that can research your market, your prospects, their competitors, and what is happening around them in moments. This is information that many salespeople often do not have the time, knowledge, or ability to gather on their own.

Now you can come to prospects fully equipped with the information they need, not just to buy your product, but to see you as someone who brings value. You want to become someone they can call when they have an issue and ask, ‘What do you think about this?’ Instead of spending a week researching, you can use an AI tool, combined with your own knowledge and expertise, to equip yourself with the right information.

I think many VARs are focusing on reselling and forgetting that their first job is to add value. If you create a plan for how you are going to bring value to your prospects and clients, and then build an AI system around that knowledge and process, AI can do the heavy lifting. It can give you the information you need so you are truly adding value rather than simply pushing product.

Sometimes the product is needed, but before the product is needed, you have to show your value. Value comes before the sale, as Tom said. The work that used to take two weeks can now take six minutes, and the quality is not lower. It is probably higher if you train the AI correctly. Every salesperson needs to build a system that helps them provide value. It is easier today than it has ever been in history.

Tom Snyder: You are the wizard of truth when it comes to the future of sales. Zeev and I have noticed that early adopters in this area are dominating their marketplaces. If you do not move quickly, you may not be in business, because that is the power of marrying best practice with AI.

Zeev, I would love for you to comment on the difference between having a corporate AI initiative for sales and simply relying on tools like Salesforce AI or outreach AI. It feels like everyone in the world now has some kind of AI tool. Can you speak to that?

Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. When you bring an artificial intelligence system into your business, stop thinking about it as SaaS, technology, or software. Think about it as bringing an entity into your business. That entity needs to be trained, educated, and tested.

The problem with most organizations is that they keep buying tools. They buy one tool, then another, and the tech stack keeps growing. Soon they are spending thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on tools. What many people do not realize is that behind the scenes, many of these tools use similar or even the same models.

A tool may give you a shortcut, but that shortcut does not necessarily include your knowledge, your expertise, your company’s experience, or your special sauce. Because of that, the tool may not do enough for you. Instead of simply bringing in tools, you need to bring in an entity, then educate that entity in what makes your VAR unique. How are you bringing value? How are you successfully selling? Then you grow that entity.

AI is not a magic wand. It will not come in and solve everything automatically. AI empowers what is already working for you. If something was not working before, AI is not going to fix it on its own. But whatever was working before can be strengthened with experience and knowledge to actually help you.

Companies that keep buying tools left and right, and then stop using them because they do not work, are missing the point. It is not about the tool, and it is not just about the technology. It is about bringing in an entity, training it, educating it, testing it, and then making sure your team knows exactly how to use it.

I think we talked about workflow on the last show. That tool, or entity, needs to be educated in your workflow, what your company does best, and how your company creates value for its clients. Do not just look at tools. Look at the entity you are bringing into the organization, educate it, and keep the knowledge inside your organization. In the future, many of these tools will go away. I would even say 90% of them. Do not rely on things that may disappear. Build the knowledge within your organization.

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Tom and Zeev. Ecosystems and channels are under pressure right now as customers look for easier ways to get access. It is no longer just about transactions. It needs to be about helping your customers figure out the right solutions, and there are many ways to use AI to do that.

If you are looking for solutions that can help you use AI to improve your selling process, improve the ability of your selling professionals, and strengthen your channel, reach out to me, Fred Diamond, Tom Snyder, or Zeev Wexler for more information about how we can help solve those problems.

My name is Fred Diamond, and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

The post EPISODE 858: How Value-Added Resellers Should Use AI to Improve Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is an AI and Sales Brief episode, a 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!

Today’s show featured an interview with AI expert Zeev Wexler, CEO at Wexler, and sales expert Tom Snyder, Founder of Funnel Clarity.

Find Zeev on LinkedIn. Find Tom on LinkedIn.

ZEEV’S TIP: “AI doesn’t fix bad sales processes, it exposes them. If you accelerate a broken workflow, you’re not improving performance; you’re simply making mistakes happen faster. Build the right sales process first, then let AI amplify it.”

TOM’S TIP: “Begin with a workflow based on sound sales practices. Once that foundation is in place, AI can accelerate it in extraordinary ways. The difference between AI applied to a broken process and AI applied to an optimized workflow is almost impossible to overstate.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m excited about today’s conversation. On a regular basis, I speak with Tom Snyder and Zeev Wexler about how sales professionals can use AI to grow their businesses, increase sales, and become more effective. 

Tom and Zeev, it’s great to see you again. There is so much happening in AI. Zeev, you frequently discuss how quickly the field is changing, and I follow your posts about new developments, emerging solutions, and the tools becoming available. Today, we’re going to explore a very specific sales question. 

First, how are you both doing? Tom, are you excited about what’s happening with AI and selling effectiveness? At the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace, we’re very enthusiastic about the solution you and Zeev have developed and what it can offer sales professionals. 

Tom Snyder: I am. The key issue is that nearly everyone senses the chaos surrounding how sales organizations are trying to embrace AI, even if they cannot fully articulate it. Many organizations are discovering that poorly managed AI adoption can actually push performance backward. 

Through the IEPS, we have recognized the power of combining genuine sales best practices with AI implemented correctly. Our research suggests that fewer than 1% of corporations are doing both of those things well. The results, when they do, are extraordinary. AI can accelerate the implementation and adoption of best practices in ways that are incredibly powerful. 

Fred Diamond: As I often do when I bring you both on, I’m going to pose a timely question and ask for your expertise. You have both said that workflow is an essential starting point for effective corporate AI adoption. What do you mean by workflow, and why is it so important? Tom, why don’t you begin? 

Tom Snyder: When we use the word workflow, many business leaders assume they understand what it means, but often they do not. In this context, workflow means mapping the full set of processes involved in moving someone from a potential prospect to a renewable customer, including every step that occurs along the way. 

The unfortunate reality is that our research suggests more than 99% of corporations operate with a workflow that is suboptimal and does not conform to best practices. Then, when the process fails, the salespeople are often blamed. My view is that we must begin with a workflow based on sound sales practices. Once that foundation is in place, Zeev can help customize and accelerate it with AI. 

Zeev Wexler: I’ll start at a high level and then get more specific. AI does not fix bad data; it exposes it. More importantly, AI does not fix bad sales processes; it exposes them. If you put an amplifier on a process that is already flawed, you are not helping yourself. You are accelerating the problem. 

I have worked with many companies that wanted to automate sales. Most simply gave salespeople new tools, such as Copilot or another AI platform, and told them to use them. But if the workflow is not clearly defined, how you identify opportunities, prospect, qualify leads, move opportunities through the funnel, and close them, you are simply accelerating a process that does not work. 

That is why working with Tom is so valuable. Before AI can accelerate anything, the process itself must be correct. AI can make almost everything faster, but you do not want to drive faster if you do not know how to drive. That is how accidents happen. 

The first step is to define the problem. AI should not be adopted simply because it is interesting or because a company wants to appear technologically advanced. It should solve a specific business problem. Are you failing to generate enough prospects? Are you qualifying them poorly? Identify the issue, build the right workflow, and then use AI to improve it. If you simply use AI to do the wrong things faster, you will waste money and eventually conclude that AI does not work for sales. 

Fred Diamond: That reminds me of a sports analogy. If you are a poor free-throw shooter, taking 200 bad free throws after practice will not make you better. We have emphasized this repeatedly. Tom, do you have any final thoughts on what Zeev just said? 

Tom Snyder: The only thing I would add is that the difference between poorly implemented AI on a suboptimal workflow and correctly implemented AI on an optimized workflow is almost impossible to overstate. People may feel they have heard similar messages before, but in this case the difference in results is genuinely enormous. 

Zeev Wexler: I would add one more point. Every salesperson uses email and a computer. AI will eventually become just as fundamental, but far more powerful. The problem is that most people are still using it incorrectly. 

Used well, AI can function as a sales coach, a follow-up assistant, a meeting listener, and a consultant that helps move opportunities forward. It can support the salesperson at every stage. The salesperson still makes the decisions, but AI provides structure, context, and guidance. 

Many people use AI for only one narrow purpose. They may use it to draft follow-up emails or conduct research. But AI can assist across the entire sales process if it is given the right workflow, the right intelligence, and the right content. 

Salespeople are naturally optimistic. We often hear that someone wants to talk and immediately assume the deal will close. AI can help keep that optimism grounded by supporting research, reinforcing good habits, improving prospecting, strengthening follow-up, and assisting with closing. It is like having several specialized assistants helping you reach the same goal: closing more business. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. The challenge is not only complexity; there are also many tools, ideas, and competing recommendations to consider. If you are listening today, reach out to me, Tom Snyder, or Zeev Wexler. We can help clarify your objectives and build a path toward stronger sales results. 

Once again, thank you, Tom Snyder, and thank you, Zeev Wexler. My name is Fred Diamond. 

The post EPISODE 857: Implementing Sales Workflows That AI Can Actually Improve first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.