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Today’s show featured an interview with Craig Patterson, Global Channel and Ecosystem Chief at Exabeam.

Find Craig on LinkedIn.

CRAIG’S TIP: “Stop measuring activity and start driving outcomes. It’s easy to become focused on how much you’re doing, but the real question is: what are you actually trying to achieve? The best sales professionals measure success by the business outcomes they create.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in late May of 2026. A lot of things have happened with the channel, the disintermediation, shifts, of course, AI has played a large role. Craig Patterson with Exabeam, I’m excited to talk to you about that. Let’s get started here. 

Introduce yourself to the audience briefly. Tell us a little bit about you. Tell us what you’re doing now. We’re going to get deep into topics such as how AI is affecting the role and true value for sales professionals, especially those managing channel relationships. 

Craig Patterson: Channel is the operating model for scale. I’m glad you’re incorporating that into your program. As you think about if you’re a sales professional sitting in cybersecurity or technology, the channel is the unlock to actually scaling. 

Who is Craig Patterson? Craig Patterson is a guy that spent the last two decades of his life focused on the channel, getting up every single morning, having some coffee and thinking about how do we drive favorable outcomes in the channel community. Today I work for a company called Exabeam. Exabeam is a market leader as it relates to cybersecurity. The area we focus is in the security incident, events management space, which think of that really as the brains. Software that lives in a security operation center, it’s the brains that analyzes all the different log sources to correlate potential risk for companies. That’s our primary focus. 

Our secondary focus is around insider threat. When you think about all the breaches that are happening out there, a good percentage of all breaches correlate back to insider threats. I know we’re going to talk about this a little bit more today, the insider threat landscape is changing rapidly with the emergence of AI and all the adversaries out there leveraging AI to create harm. That’s a bit on me. I’m based in Colorado and excited to be on here my man. 

Fred Diamond: For people who don’t know, let’s talk about what the channel is for Exabeam. Help explain that, what type of companies do you work with, who do you manage, how does your team manage, those kinds of things? 

Craig Patterson: First on the Exabeam side, we’re roughly a $300 million cybersecurity vendor, Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader six times in a row. Really good technology validated by the market. That’s a bit on who we are. In terms of the channel, when you think of the channel, it’s the way the companies scale. The way that works in cybersecurity is about 90% of all sales and revenue flows through channel distribution. What we’re talking about here is strategic global partnerships to get created. Basically, partners come on board, they become an extension of our sales force. We train them, we enable them, they position our services with the entire portfolio of offerings they’re providing to customers. 

Our ecosystem, we have about 3,000 partners globally, some big names such as Optiv, one of the largest cybersecurity vendors in North America, GuidePoint, CDW, these are names you probably have heard of. We focus globally, so I’ve got partnerships in the Americas, also Europe, also Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. You name it, my friend, I probably have a partner in those countries that we work with. The name of the game really is building a program that drives value to our strategic partners as they’re out meeting with customers, talking and helping them solve some of the biggest challenges that exist in cybersecurity today. 

Fred Diamond: Quick question for you before we get a little bit deeper. I’ve been training myself not to use the word channel anymore and to more effectively use the word ecosystem, which you brought in. I’m just curious on your thoughts on what are some of the words that you use to describe the partnerships that you manage? 

Craig Patterson: Ecosystem is definitely the big topic today because you think about the evolution of how deals get structured. What we found, if you manage the ecosystem, basically what we’ve determined is there’s about 28 touch points a customer goes through in terms of the buying cycle, 28 different moments in terms of them researching your topic, researching your technology. Then across those 28 buying moments, there’s about six, seven, eight different partners that are aligned across that journey. 

When you take all those different buying signals, you take all the different partner types and you map them together, now we’re talking about an ecosystem. I always use the phrase channel sells, ecosystem scales. What we’re seeing today is more and more companies adopt these ecosystems. They’re analyzing all the signals that are happening across those buying signals and getting their entire partner ecosystem working together across those buying cycles. 

Fred Diamond: One thing I’ve seen you post about is, I’m going to use a quote here, “The unlock isn’t more partners. It’s more capable partners.” We’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026. There’s no shortage of partners. It’s really good ones that we’re trying to work with and grow and depend upon. Give us some more of your insights on that. 

Craig Patterson: This is a great topic and one I write often about. I post a lot of content around this. Cybersecurity vendors are all faced with a lot of the same dilemmas. We have these very large ecosystems. In my example, I’ve got 3,000 partners globally. I’m not in a situation where I need to go recruit hundreds and hundreds of new partners to drive an outcome. What I need to do is I need to align better outcomes with the partners that I already have. How do I look at the ecosystem I have today? How do I raise their competency level? Because that’s the name of the game. It’s less about volume, having more and more partners. It’s more about driving more favorable outcomes. 

The way we do that is by raising their competency level, making them smarter, making them more knowledgeable so they’re going to be more effective in terms of how they position my services. Everything we’re doing here, we think about how we drive those outcomes, those outcomes aligned back to the operating plan for my company around very specific measured things we’re tracking. I can go into more detail on that if you’d like as well. 

Fred Diamond: Yeah, let’s go into more detail. One thing that I’ve seen you post about is the shift from tools to outcomes in cybersecurity. In the previous answer, you used the word outcomes four times. Talk about why that’s so important, why it’s happened. Then talk about how are you working with your partners to enable more outcomes for your customers around the whole concept of cybersecurity? That’s a big topic, I realized as I threw it out. 

Craig Patterson: Really two topics here. One is the topic around how our companies really position themselves for more favorable outcomes using cybersecurity. One of the things around the cybersecurity space is that we were in this mode where people were just like, “I want to have a different outcome, I’m just buying a new tool.” For many years, we’re just buying more and more and more tools until we got to the point that these CISOs, these chief information security officers, had themselves in a situation they had so many tools they didn’t know what to do with. In fact, if you do some research, I think a lot of the Fortune 500s have more than 130 different cybersecurity tools they’re running at any given moment. The average enterprise runs 76 different tools, by the way. 

Think of the complexity there. You’re sitting in an environment, you’re managing a security posture, you have all these tools that are stacking on top of each other, and it just becomes a bit of a tool sprawl, if you will, very difficult, complex environment. Now what we’re saying is like, how do we take those tools and how do we drive a more favorable outcome? Things like how do I reduce my mean time to detect an issue? How do I take all these different sources? You think about the world I live in, basically I’m analyzing all the log sources that are happening across an entire company. That could be thousands or 10,000 or 100,000 different events happening very frequently, how do I take all those different events and correlate that back to risk? 

The way we play that out is we help companies detect these issues in a much more efficient manner. It’s basically the mean time to actually detect. Then there’s the mean time to actually respond and repair the situation. Those are some of the outcomes that we drive, is reducing that cycle time. 

Secondarily, when you think about the emergence of AI, what we’ve done is we’ve built part of our engine in our platform, it’s called Nova. Nova basically helps triage a lot of those events. It can essentially make a normal analyst, think about the guy or gal sitting down every single day, analyzing all these tickets, all these different events, it makes them 80 percent more efficient in their day. If I can be more efficient, I can be more effective. I can analyze more tickets. I can respond in a quicker manner. All those actually align back to an outcome I’m looking to achieve in terms of improving my overall security posture. That’s the big trend that we see in the cybersecurity space in terms of how we’re effectively changing the outcome. 

Now, on the partner side, we’re also leveraging AI to improve variables. I talked about how we align our plan with the operating model for my company. We’re private equity backed, so we’ve got certain outcomes we’re looking to achieve. Obviously, we want to grow new bookings. We want to increase our conversion rates. We want to improve the probability of the opportunities we’re winning. We want to improve our speed and velocity. How do we improve with speed and velocity through our sales cycle time? How do we increase our conversion rates? 

Then as we look at the partner side, how do we improve the time to the first deal? If you’re a new partner coming on board, if the average time is nine to 12 months, how do I make that eight months? Then how do I do that at scale? Those are some of the outcomes that we’re looking to improve on the partner side. The way we’re solving that is we’re introducing new enablement platforms that are powered by AI that really help the partners become a better seller of Exabeam across a number of different use cases. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s get into the enablement side for a little bit. Talk about the end user customer, the customer at the end of the day who is utilizing Exabeam solutions. What do they need today from partner and what do they need from Exabeam? 

Craig Patterson: Maybe if you look at the partner lens first, and then we’ll correlate that back to the end user customer. The partner essentially, we’re helping them become a better seller of Exabeam first. The way we do that is we built a platform, we call it Sherpa. Sherpa is a powered AI tool that we created. We launched about six months ago, so we’re well beyond MVP stage, and really three use cases in terms of how we’re improving those outcomes we talked about before. 

Number one is a virtual always on what we call channel account manager. I’ve got a team of channel account managers around the globe that supports the partners. The real value of AI isn’t for me to actually go out and replace my team, it’s amplifying them, making them better. The way we do that is we augment the work they’re doing and we create this virtual channel account manager for the partners. Use case number one is basically always on. You can ask the general questions, “Hey, how do I position this service? What are the capabilities? What are the use cases? What are the ICP customers? What are the target accounts?” things like that. You as a partner can integrate through Teams, through Slack, or you can just log into my portal. You now can talk to a virtual channel account manager 24/7 in your natural language. If you’re sitting in the Middle East and you speak in Arabic, no problems, talk to it in Arabic. That’s use case number one. 

Use case number two is our training and certification platform. If you’re a partner, you want to be a better Exabeam seller, you’ve got a very intuitive learning path, structured learning path. You log in, you take the learning as you like to take it. You practice your pitch, you upload your pitch and it says, “Hey, Fred, you did a great job in this. But next time, to be better, say it this way.” Now we’re raising a competency level, making them actually better, helping them positioning in a practical manner. 

The third use case is the virtual coach where if you are on with an end-user customer, you’re having a conversation, it’s going to help you in the background. Customer gave this objection, talk to him about this value, this use case, this feature or functionality. It’s basically helping you position with that end-user customer real time. That’s the tool we’ve built for the partner community. We’ve really focused there because when you think of the cybersecurity market, 90% of all the customer demand is coming through the partners. That really is the unlock. If I can help create education and awareness, raise competency level there, the opportunities are going to come. They’re going to follow because I’ve raised their competency level, they’ve identified the issue the customer is looking to solve, and they bring it to us. 

Fred Diamond: Craig, the landscape has changed a lot with the whole shift to AI-driven threats, where primarily it was attackers, maybe inside, maybe outside, malicious, hackers, etc. How has that changed the dynamic? How has that also changed the channel perspective as well? 

Craig Patterson: Great question. We’re seeing a major shift in the market. You think about the traditional insider threat landscape, that’s where most companies are really focused because it correlated back to the majority of the breaches they were seeing. Various types of insider risk from people intentionally causing harm, the malicious insiders or people that are accidentally causing harm, or maybe something isn’t set up correctly, or there’s the hijacked situations as well, where maybe you’ve fallen for a phishing email, something like that, and they essentially take over your credentials. That’s the normal state of what we’ve seen over the years as it relates to insider threat. 

The thing that’s really changing is the evolution of AI. This is happening so rapidly right now. Actually, I just read a stat on this from Gartner. Gartner said by 2028, about 28% of all security breaches will be caused by Agentic AI. Massive amounts of breaches will be caused by Agentic AI. I read a survey the other day, about 93% of all security professionals are extremely concerned about the rise of Agentic AI. It’s happening so fast. Microsoft Copilot, there was over a million AI agents created in one single quarter. The last quarter, over a million AI agents created in Microsoft Copilot, which is up about 130%. What do all these numbers tell you? That the landscape is changing so rapidly, which puts everyone in a situation they need to be thinking about, how do I protect against Agentic AI? 

What we’ve done is we’ve taken our UEBA capabilities, which is basically the insider threat framework, and we’re now applying that to Agentic AI. Now we’re starting to profile what the AI agents are doing within an organization so we understand what a normal behavior of an agent is so when we see them acting out, we can start to predict risk. Basically, the way that works is every AI agent within an organization gets identified. We correlate an identity to every single AI agent. We understand their workflow. We understand what time of day they’re operating. We understand the systems they have access to. We understand the sequence, things along those lines, so we can correlate all the work and activities going on. 

Time and time again, we’re seeing examples of these AI agents that are acting out outside of those workflows. In fact, there was one that just happened last month, a company called PocketOS. PocketOS is in the car rental space. They had Claude running on some development work. Claude was going through this non-production workflow and it hit a roadblock. Basically, the roadblock was it didn’t have the right credentials and so on its own accord, it’s starting to look for the answer across all the files it had access to. Well, it finds this API key and it uses that API key to try to solve its particular task. 

Long story short, it takes the entire production environment down and deletes the entire database in a matter of nine seconds. The interesting part is the company went back and asked the AI agent, “Why’d you go do that?” and the AI agent responds, “I violated every credential, every workflow that you gave me, I violated it,” and it was very honest in its feedback. It’s like, “Well, why would it do that?” Well, it’s because these AI agents, they have reason now and they have the ability to access information to solve challenges. 

All these things stacked up create enormous risk for all the companies out there. Those risks create opportunity for all the channel partners, going back to your question. How is this landscaping changing the opportunity for the partners? Every single company out there needs to be thinking about the emergence of AI and how do I set up these guardrails to protect against it? That’s why we’re leaning in on these enablement tools, is to really help partners understand these use cases so they can become better and educate the clients on how to actually solve them. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about channel managers, the people at Exabeam and companies like that. You’ve been a leader for a long time. I’m interested in your thoughts on building high-performance cultures and teams. But what is your advice specifically for people who have the title and the position to manage these partners? It’s complex. Like you were just saying, especially in the cyberspace, almost all technologies now, things are changing quickly. AI is forcing a lot of the change. You were just giving this great example of how the Agentic AI can even begin to rationalize and reason, which is absolutely insane, but that is the reality. That’s what it is, reality. We can’t just go back. What’s your advice for channel professionals? How can they be as effective to your company right now as they can be? 

Craig Patterson: The channel or ecosystem world is very much a trust and relationship game. How do you become better? You build the trust. You build the trust in your local markets. How do you do that? Number one, you create value for your partners. They’re always looking for ways to increase their opportunities, increase the production of their companies. You find ways to actually create value. 

I always believe relationships are built in hard times. Whenever there’s a problem and the people that are taking this device right here and they’re picking it up and they’re answering it, when things are really, really difficult, those are the ones that are actually creating a relationship with their partner, because they’re creating credibility, they’re creating trust. You do that every single day over the course of the career and that compounds your brand in that local market. All of a sudden, then you’re known, you’re trusted. People rely on you, they trust you. That’ll open up a lot of opportunities and doors. I think that’s the key for people out there, is to really spend time building relationships with the partners in their local markets. 

The other thing is these ecosystems are starting to evolve a bit. You really need to take the time to educate yourself on where they’re going. There’s new types of partnerships being created. For us in the cybersecurity world, think of relationships such as companies that deploy AI agents. They’re going to need a security partner to go right along with the deployment of those AI agents. It’s understand the market where it’s going, building relationships and building trust in those local markets. 

Fred Diamond: I want to talk a little bit more about trust and then I’ll ask you for your final action step. Build relationships, build trust, give us some examples on how channel professionals, ecosystem professionals can build trust. One of the challenges too is that trust can be built over years and decades, and unfortunately, it can go away in seconds. Give us a little bit of a deeper dive into what trust is needed to be built. The channel partners, where do they need a trusted partner coming from the OEM, if you will? 

Craig Patterson: I want to correlate that back to how do you actually build trust with your own team? I’m thinking about all the listeners out there, and I guess it’s a very important topic too, and I’ll circle back to what you just said. For me, when I think about culture, it’s something that I’ve always been very focused on because culture really helps me bridge the gap and build trust with my own employees. What I have always found over the last two decades is if I get really focused and prescriptive around building a high-performing culture, the results always follow, because at the end of the day, people want to follow leaders that create good culture. They want to follow leaders that are actively working in their best interests, they’re helping them be better in life. For me, when I think about culture, it comes down to a number of key things. 

Number one, you always want to have clarity with your organization. When I say clarity, it’s spending the time to really build a strategy. Obviously, you’ve got to do that, but then being very clear in terms of how do you align your organization to the mission, because every single person wants to be part of that mission. They want to understand what is their specific role, not only just what their role is, like what does good look like? How am I measuring success around their specific role as they’re aligned to that particular mission? 

Then the second piece is you’ve got to have accountability. You’ve got to have accountability, which means everybody has to have clear goals set, a real KPI set that aligns to that mission. You’ve got to hold people accountable on a weekly, quarterly basis, just making sure we’re moving the ball forward. 

Then the third piece is about opportunity. When you think about all the people in your organization, everybody wants to be better in life. They want an opportunity to grow. It’s giving them an opportunity to grow, to be better in their career. Maybe that’s creating more exposure. Internal to the organization, getting them aligned to the right people, or giving them opportunity externally to help build their brand up a little bit. Maybe that’s getting them ready for a speech or a podcast like this. Helping teach them on how to better their own personal brand. 

I also think just the overall recognition is important for me in terms of high-performing culture. We always recognize people for a job well done. I think the flaw that people sometimes make here is they wait for those big moments. They wait for that big monumental win, but you got to take the small wins that happen every single day that lead up to the big wins. 

I think you got to have an element of recognition. Then you got to have an element of candor, which means you got to be willing to tell people the hard truth, obviously in a professional manner. But I found if you focus on all those things together, you put yourself in a situation, you build a high-performing culture that people want to be a part of and they actually fight to be a part of. That’s why when you look at good, high-quality leaders, you can validate if a culture is good or not by how many people follow them, how many people have followed that leader on their second time or third time. To me, that’s a good measurement you can look. If you’re researching an opportunity, look at the leaders, see how many people have followed them across multiple steps. That’ll give you some correlation to actually how good of a leader they are. 

That’s what I think of internally, what I focus on to create that trust with my employees, and externally with the partner community, you think about building a program that creates value. There are a million programs out there, but the ones that really are helping to drive value for the partners. When I think about what partners actually want in the market, they want a path to profitability. Making sure they have a clear path to actually making money and understanding that path. 

Secondly, they want to have good, high-quality enablement. Making sure you’ve built the tools to drive enablement, the things that we talked about previously. The third piece is not all partners are created equal, so making sure, at the end of the day, you have a specific path for the partner type that they are. Then making sure you have the variances that cater to partners globally, whether they’re based in Europe or based in North America, not everything is the same. Then making sure you have the right programs aligned to really help partners create value. 

There’s a number of ingredients to go in to really creating that trust with the partner ecosystem, but I think if you think about it from the lens of how do I create value, how do I support partners in a time of need when things are really difficult, you do that time and time again, that’s how you separate yourself from the pack. 

Fred Diamond: It’s a great answer, particularly point number one, which is understanding, of course, you got to understand your company and what your drivers are, but what are the profitability drivers for the partner? Every company that we deal with in the tech space has gone through a lot of shift and change over the last two years, and how they’re going about their market, how they’re serving their customer, their cost model, AI has affected everybody throughout the channel and the economy in 2025 and early 2026. I love that answer there. You build trust by understanding what their drivers are, what their shifts have been, what their leadership is now directing their company towards and who their customers are, how their customers are demanding things from them. 

Craig Patterson, Exabeam, great stuff here. Congratulations on all your success and the recognition that you’ve gotten, which originally drove us to you. I appreciate all these answers. Once again, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we’re launching our Partner Growth Program, where we’re working with partner managers through the ecosystem. Great insights. 

Give us one final action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but give us something specific that either channel partners or people who are working with them, or your salespeople, should implement right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Craig Patterson: I’d go to two different things quickly. I think the first is you got to do a good job of building your brand. Think about the domain that you live in. Go find the people that are actually experts in that particular domain. Follow them every single day. Read what they’re posting about. Read the content they’re driving. Understand their perspective. That’ll help you become better in your own particular domain. It’s understanding the people that are thought leaders in your domain and then following them every single day. 

The second piece is on this topic that we’ve had over this podcast, is stop measuring activity and start driving outcomes. I think that’s the key, is people get so focused on activity they sometimes lose sight of, what am I actually trying to achieve? 

Fred Diamond: Outcome is obviously one of the key words that came out of here today. I’m going to give that a lot of thought. Once again, I want to thank Craig Patterson with Exabeam. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 856: How AI Is Powering Outcome-Driven Partner Ecosystems with Craig Patterson first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

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Today’s show featured an interview with Matthew Radomski, Regional Vice President of Federal Civilian at Harness.

Find Matt on LinkedIn.

MATT’S TIP: “The customer is the North Star. Their success should be your success. Everything else figures itself out. Don’t focus on selling. Focus on their value and what matters to them, and then help them along the way.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Matt, a lot of our loyal listeners know that about a year ago, we started doing a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I’m talking with Matt Radomski with Harness. I’m excited because we started doing a show called Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged where I interview directors of selling programs at major universities. As a matter of fact, we just had our 16th Annual Sales Excellence Award event. We gave our first Sales Educator of the Year Award to Brian Collins with Virginia Tech. 

You and I have known each other for a couple years on LinkedIn primarily. Harness had come up a couple of times in conversations with other people. I went back out and connected with you again and turns out that you went to Clemson and that you also participated on the sales team and had done competitions. You didn’t necessarily go for a sales degree per se, but it was great to talk to you. You’re a VP at Harness, but it was nice to see the connections there. You introduced me to the leader of the Clemson program there and we got him into our loop as well. A couple of our worlds are coming together and it’s great to see how you’ve grown in your career and how your experience at Clemson, taking sales classes and participating in competitions, etc., framed you for where you are now. 

Tell us a little bit about yourselves. Tell us about Harness. Tell us what you do there. Give us a little brief introduction to your journey. 

Matthew Radomski: I run the federal civilian business at Harness. I have lived and worked in the DC Area in federal software sales. I think this is year 14 for me, so becoming a veteran slowly in the industry. Started my career at Oracle, worked my way up from the BDR world of cold calling, setting up meetings, to inside sales at Oracle, up to the field, and really owning an account. 

Then from there, pivoted to Salesforce when they were becoming a mature sales organization in the federal space, supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs under Joe Markwordt, who I know has been on your show in the past. Worked there for five years, really expanding that account out, and then wanted to go smaller and wanted to be on the ground floor of creating a federal organization. I went down to a pre-IPO company, Harness, to help the build that they had started. It’s been a really exciting journey. 

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about Harness. Tell us what they do. 

Matthew Radomski: The easiest way to think about Harness is it’s the easy button for what is historically a very messy and complicated world of software delivery. You think about after a developer or an AI agent writes code, the process from building that into an application and deploying it safely is extremely difficult in most organizations. It’s why we see government and highly-regulated industries take months or even quarters to deploy something new, because they need to do it with security and compliance built in. Harness takes all of those things and at an enterprise level automates everything after code commitment to make sure that all the innovation can be done at the speed of light without any issues of worrying about downtime or security or compliance issues once something gets to production. 

In the world of the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world doing a lot of the coding for us, there is just this giant influx of code, but there needs to be a way to get those pipelines automated out to deployment. That is what we do and that’s what we’re helping some of the biggest companies in the world and some of the largest federal agencies in the world do. 

Fred Diamond: 30 years ago, I was a product manager for what was then known as automated testing. It was with a company called Compuware in the late ‘90s. We were inventing automated testing actually, had done a lot of it on the mainframe and then of course on client server in the late ‘90s. I was deep into that space and it’s amazing how far we’ve come in 30 years. It’s great to have gotten caught up on what Harness does, etc. 

As we get into this next part of the conversation, you’ve participated in sales competitions when you went to Clemson. Having started your career at Oracle and then to Salesforce, those are two heavy hitters. I’ve had a bunch of sales leaders on the Sales Game Changers Podcast from Oracle. I’ve had a bunch on the show from Salesforce in the public sector and commercial side. You don’t become a VP of sales at Salesforce or Oracle just because you say you want to be. There’s a lot of competition. They’re hard environments. We’re doing today’s interview in April of 2026. 2025 was a very challenging year. 2026 is still challenging, a little bit more open. Give us some insights about how your college, the competitions, and studying for sales, how they framed you for where you are right now. 

Matthew Radomski: That’s a great question. I know you were introduced to Dr. Ryan Mullins. I remember taking his class. When I was in college, this was the age Mad Men was on TV, and I thought I wanted to go into advertising. I was like, “I’m going to be a marketing executive.” I took Dr. Mullins class, along with Carter McElveen and some other professors there in the sales organization, and it really changed and molded what I wanted to do into, “Okay, I think actually sales and being on this side of the business makes more sense for me.” 

I think the first and foremost was taking the fear out of pitching and out of being in front of people. I always liked presenting, but the thought of picking up the phone and calling someone I don’t know was a daunting task for a college kid. Getting through that and learning the tools of how to add value and deliver value on your first 10 seconds, 15 seconds, I got through that before I ever graduated. I remember walking into Oracle and there was a class of 60 people that all had just graduated college, getting into their first job, and being two or three steps ahead of people because I had already gotten past that fear, which I think most new sales reps, it’s what they struggle with the most. I could just hit the ground running. It was really impactful for me to have some of the basic tools from graduating college going into that first role at a cutthroat sales environment like Oracle. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. One thing we talk a lot about that we’ve learned on the Office Hours – Sales Professors show is that they’re preparing the young adults to be a couple of years ahead than the average student. I like the way you just described that. When you graduated, you got past the fear that everybody goes through, even those who are very successful and seasoned. As we say, there’s a 99% chance you’re going to be rejected. Even with a customer, especially now, people don’t have to answer their phone and they don’t have to reply to you, even if you’re an existing customer and you’re bringing them more value. I like the way you said that you were a couple years ahead of the competition. For the companies that are investing in the young professionals, young adults who are coming out of colleges, either with a major, minor, or just having taken a couple of classes and getting exposed to that, there’s a huge advantage for the companies that are doing that. 

We mentioned blue chips, Oracle and Salesforce. Like I said, I have a lot of people who have been leaders there historically. Of course, Salesforce was created from Oracle, or at least some of the leaders, one in particular, Benioff, the leader. But give us some of your lessons from those two companies. For people who don’t know who are listening to today’s show, that’s kind of like the New York Yankees and the Dodgers of technology, and good for you for getting a job for both of those companies early in your career. What are a couple of things that you took away from them that have stayed with you that have allowed you to progress your career? 

Matthew Radomski: I’ll do lessons from two people who I know you know as well. At Oracle, when I was trying to go from inside sales to the field, I tapped Lee Fisher, who at the time had just gone into leadership for the first time at Oracle. He had a really, really successful field career as a field AE. I was just asking him like, what is the difference in going from this inside role that’s a little more transactional to trying to build up these enterprise and really transformative type opportunities for your customers? What did you do differently that other people missed? 

Lee told me this story about staying with a customer. If it wasn’t overnight, maybe it was like till midnight or 1:00 in the morning, trying to stand up a new system, maybe an engineered system or a new deployment they were doing, because his whole thing was that the customer’s success was his success. Even though the deal was done, the sale had been made, his job was to make sure that his customer was successful and that he helped them every step of the way. 

I think he told me, he was like, “There’s nothing I could do technically. I’m not an expert. But I showed my commitment to their success and I was there if they needed something. If there was a lever that needed to be pulled, I was legitimately right there next to them.” What Lee taught me, which was really impactful, was the customer is the North Star. Their success should be your success. Everything else figures itself out. Don’t focus on selling, focus on their value and what matters to them, and then you’ll help them along the way. That’s my Oracle lesson. 

My Salesforce lesson is Joe Markwordt. Papa Joe, the AVP when I was at Salesforce, he had a quote that I actually have written down. I pull it when I talk to my team, which is, “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of someone else’s plan.” He taught me, and he ingrained it in me, which is you have to come to every meeting, every week, every day with a plan, or you will just get caught in the motions. It really helped me structure not just maybe an opportunity, but a big part of my career, which is just having a plan and trying to execute on that plan the best you can. 

Fred Diamond: Those are great stories. Actually, Lee and Joe have both been on the podcast. Joe has been on twice. He was actually the very first person at Salesforce that I interviewed. We originally got him through a guy named Anthony Robbins, who ran NVIDIA public sector for a number of years. He had a guy working for him named Rick Simmons. Rick said, “You need to meet this guy named Joe.” We do regular events every month at the Carahsoft Conference & Collaboration Center, where we bring a panel of three to four great sales leaders. Lee was on one of our panels in 2025. 

I’ve heard stories from some of the sales leaders, that are legends in my mind, who have called on customers at 3:00 in the morning. The story that you just told is a great one in that the sale doesn’t end with the sale, especially in the types of companies that we’re talking about here, because you want to grow the accounts and you got to prove that you’re successful to go. Even if you’re doing great in an agency or a big corporation, maybe you’re hitting 5%, 10% in a lot of cases. You want to keep growing. Show me the customer that you’re going to be there with them till everything gets up and running. Those are great lessons from two great sales leaders. 

You came out of college and you went right into the federal vertical. I talk about this all the time. When salespeople ask me, young sales professionals, I say, “You need to be very, very knowledgeable in one of two things, either the customer’s marketplace, or your product and technology,” but you got to be leagues above everybody else to get to the elite level. You’d made a decision earlier in your career that you’re going to focus on federal. For people who are listening, who don’t know, there’s an expression that federal, even with DOGE and cutbacks and federal employee layoffs, etc., it’s still Fortune 1, and use the analogy of Fortune 500. I was on a session today where they talked about how the federal IT budget is about 137 billion. That’s just not all going to the Oracles of the world. Give us some insights on why you made that decision to focus on that vertical market. 

Matthew Radomski: This is a funny one. I have to actually peel this back a little bit to tell you the background. I got to Oracle through cold outreach. Out of college, Dr. Andrea Dixon at Baylor, her daughter was a friend of mine growing up and interned at Oracle. I basically did Google research and said, “What are the top 10 best paying software companies for software sales?” I knew I wanted to be in tech, I had interned at a Series A tech company, but I wanted to start big and I wanted to start somewhere with a good foundation. 

I reached out to Taylor Dixon and I said, “Hey, you’re an intern. Can you give me some names of these people who are hiring?” She name-dropped the director of their BDR program, I cold called him, got an interview. I’m going through the interview process and I am five steps behind everyone that is a pipeline out of college to these programs, and I’m doing everything I can to stick out. One of the questions they asked me was, “If you were hired here at Oracle, where would you want to be?” They were hiring 90% of the people for Austin, Texas. I had already been looking at apartments. I just thought I was moving to Texas. But in my back pocket, I said, “Well, Larry Ellison founded Oracle by creating Project Oracle,” which was the database for the CIA. I said, “I think it’s really, really cool that Oracle started in DC in the public sector. I’d love to be anywhere Silicon Valley, where headquarters is, Texas, where this new sales organization is, or even DC in the public sector.” 

I thought that was a great answer and I thought that would just help me stick out. When I got hired, they told me you were so passionate about the public sector business that we’re sending you to DC. I had to call my dad and say, “Scrap the plans. We’re not going to Austin. I got to pack up and go find an apartment in the DC Area.” It happened by accident and then ended up making a career out of it, and I’ve loved every minute of it. 

Fred Diamond: That was how we actually reconnected. When I did my post for the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged, I interviewed Dr. Andrea Dixon. It was a great show. She is truly one of the top two or three leaders in education for young adults in colleges at Baylor. Did a great show with her. Then I saw you had commented and it didn’t hit me at first, and then I realized and reached back out to Dr. Dixon, she had some very nice things to say. 

What advice do you have for young sales professionals? You’ve done very well so far in a relatively short amount of time. We’ve talked about the journey to get there, but give us two or three things that you advise young sales professionals to get to the level where you are. 

Matthew Radomski: I would say first and foremost, be extremely curious. When you’re in an inside role or you’re in a BDR role, you have this very structured responsibility. “Hey, I’m responsible for outreach,” or, “I’m responsible for closing deals up to this threshold.” But if you don’t intend on your career ending at that role, you should be really curious about the role that’s next. 

What I talked about earlier, what I did with Lee, I knew that even if I wasn’t going to be promoted or get to the field, I needed to know the things that he did over the others in that industry that were successful to be prepared. I remember as an inside sales rep, I was mapping up to Josh Miller and Jay Smith, who was the leader at Oracle. I asked anytime I could be in the meeting for a deal I wasn’t a part of, but it was out of my scope, “Could I just sit in the corner? Could I be a part of it? Could I see how the deal structure was made? Can I be added to this spreadsheet?” Those things, even though I was not maybe participating, soaking it up like a sponge was really, really impactful. It helped me when I was trying to get prepared for that next role, have some insight and hit the ground running when I got the opportunity. 

Fred Diamond: That is a great story. I’ve told the story many, many times. Early in my career, when I was working at Apple Computer, I was working in marketing. My boss said to me, “We’re all going to be valuable if we help in the sales process.” Apple was of course one of the top marketing companies in the history of business, but I did the same thing. He said, “I want you to go into every sales meeting.” I would sit in the back and listen. In the beginning, they were wondering, “Why is Fred in this room?” Then I paid attention and I would ask good questions when I felt it was right. Then they started noticing that I was doing a little bit of extra homework and giving some insights and eventually I noticed I was sitting at the table. 

I wasn’t taking over the meeting because that wasn’t my place, but for the young sales professionals, and even if you’re listening to this and you’re in marketing, think about the value that you’re adding to the sales process. The only way that you can understand that is by doing what Matt just suggested, by having as many conversations with the sales professionals as possible. I love the way you keep bringing up some of these great sales leaders that you soaked up knowledge from and you learned. You know what? They want to share. People ask me this all the time. It’s like, “How would I approach someone who’s 20 years older than me to ask them questions about their career?” I say, “Reach out to them and say, can we meet for coffee at 9:00 at Starbucks?” or the local town square, wherever it might be. They’re going to say yes. Come prepared with the questions. Ask them things that they can answer. Just don’t say, “How can I get better?” 

Matt, you’re obviously a thoughtful guy. What are customers telling you these days? Federal marketplace was challenging 2025. It’s still challenging, a lot of cutbacks, etc., but it’s still a humongous marketplace even with continuing resolutions and things like that. It’s still 137 billion in IT is going to be spent in 2026. What are customers telling you? What are customer engagements looking right now? What do customers want from selling professionals? 

Matthew Radomski: I think there’s two routes to go here. Route number one, from what they’re looking to move towards organizationally or structurally is there seems to be these shifts. You see these shifts in technology where it’s like, we want all these best-of-breed solutions and we’re going to start putting them together and start molding them and customize things. We’re seeing a shift towards we want consolidation. Having 100 contracts, 1,000 contracts, 10,000 contracts, depends how big the organization is, is becoming a burden on these organizations. Consolidation, standardization, having a single platform, single policy is really, really a move that we’re seeing, not just in the private sector but in the public sector. It is funny to see how that has shifted and there’s these ebbs and flows and we’re coming back to centralized platforms, a single pane of glass is helping organizations stay structured and stay organized, especially in a compliant-heavy world. 

Number two on the technology side, also these shifts, they almost always come back to how do we get services and technology and systems out to our customer? It could be a constituent, it could be a veteran, it could be a warfighter in my world, or it could be a consumer customer here in the commercial or enterprise space. It is about getting those out effectively, easily, securely, and getting those services to the people that need them. We saw a lot of this be customized 10, 15 years ago. Then we saw this shift to no-code, low-code, the Salesforce days of being able to say, “Hey, we have this platform where we can get out these tools and these applications really quickly and securely with drag and drop. Might not need a developer.” 

Now we see this shift back where the creating code, and being able to develop software, is becoming faster than ever because of Claude and because of OpenAI and all these new dev tools coming out. We can customize things really, really fast, but we need to make sure it gets to the consumer in a secure way. We need to maybe pump the brakes on areas where AI is coming in and creating chaos, so it’s adding structure around that. It’s really interesting that no matter what the end result is, how do we get our solutions out to a customer and how do we serve the customer, but how organizations are doing it continues to change depending on what the technology landscape looks like in front of them. 

Fred Diamond: Matt, I want to thank you for being on today’s show. You brought back some great names, some great lessons that we share. Also, it was great to be able to tie in the fact that you took some college classes in sales and that you were able to deploy that while you were in college, proving what we’ve been saying for the last year, is that the young adults who are getting trained on sales, and your degree wasn’t in sales. What was your degree in again? 

Matthew Radomski: I was a marketing major, minor in business administration or some other business piece. Then I got a sales certificate. I think that was the accreditation at the time. 

Fred Diamond: Before I end today’s show, I’m going to ask you for a specific action step. Just give us two habits, two things that you do that you can attribute a lot of your success to. Then I’m going to ask you for your final action step. 

Matthew Radomski: The first one is I am a Sunday night planner. I like to organize my week on Sunday night. My wife and I do this in our personal lives, because we have two little kids, and then I do this with work as well, of getting my week ahead of me and figuring out like, what does success for my week look like, before that week actually starts. Number two is I always try to have very realistic goals, but I set the benchmark really high at the beginning of the year. I start every fiscal year the same way by mapping out my knowns and unknowns and trying to figure out the gap to the goal that I’m setting. I think those things at a very tactical level week to week and then a very strategic level for the year have helped me along in my career. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Matt Radomski with Harness. This is a great show that we tied in a lot of things that we’re talking about on other Sales Game Changers Podcasts, and of course, the Office Hours show. Thanks for that and congratulations for the success you’ve had so far in your career. 

Give us a final thought or a final action step that you recommend selling professionals do right now, maybe even to your team, to help them take their sales career to the next level. 

Matthew Radomski: I’m going to repeat one that I did earlier, which is the Joe Markwordt quote, is if you don’t have a plan, you become part of someone else’s plan. My number one action is always, always put together a plan and be organized and structured. If you create those tools and the structure for not only your day to day, but your week by week, quarter by quarter, everything else will roll into place.  

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Matt Radomski. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 855: Creating a Foundation for Long-Term Sales Success with Matt Radomski first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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ELISABETH’S TIP: “Don’t let the little voice in your head tell you, ‘You can’t do it. It’s too early.’ You should really not allow all these self-limiting beliefs to stop you. You should be bold and ambitious in terms of what you’re able to achieve and what you’re able to do.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Gina Stracuzzi: Hello everyone and welcome to the latest installment of the Women in Sales segment of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I am really excited to have my guest today, Elisabeth De Dobbeleer, all the way from Belgium. She is the senior vice president of Cisco Partner Program. It’s taken Elisabeth and I a little bit of time to get this all together. Welcome, Elisabeth. 

Tell me a little bit about yourself, and the audience, how you got to where you are today and a little bit about your career journey, and then we’ll go from there. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: You already mentioned a couple of things and maybe for those of you who can recognize accents or even family names, I live in Belgium and I was born in Belgium as well. I’m actually from what we call the Flemish part. I speak Flemish, which is the same as Dutch, which is the north of Belgium. I was born and raised here and then I went to study in the US, I went to study in Germany, etc. I’m actually a lawyer by education. I studied law and I started my career as a legal trainee in all kinds of commercial work, so I did a lot of negotiations. 

Around the time just before Y2K, and I’m mentioning that because my career was very much shaped by those early years around, well, first the internet bubble bursting and then Y2K and all of that. I spent a lot of time in tech, in commercial law. From there I was contacted by a client who had just moved to Cisco and he asked me if I was willing to join as a company lawyer and join Cisco. That happened in 2000. I joined Cisco in 2000 as a sales lawyer, at the time working on legal negotiations in the Netherlands and Belgium. 

Then I had multiple roles in the legal team until somebody asked me whether I wanted to join at the time channel operations because we saw the first fake products popping up in China. I was asked to join a team called Brand Protection, which was part of the channel organization at the time, to do something about that, which I did. That actually brought me to Hong Kong. I moved to Hong Kong. I spent a few years there working on a range of activities going from explaining to our customers and partners on how to recognize fake products, how to recognize genuine products, but also working with manufacturing to make sure we tighten up any scrap leakage procedures and all of that, so very different activities. 

Then I missed the sales environment, and that’s actually a common theme. I think I’ve always really enjoyed working in sales and the adrenaline of trying to make numbers and working with customers and partners and the negotiation piece as well and the activity of selling. I applied for a role in Middle East and Africa, sales operations. It was a little bit crazy at the time. I just had my first child, I think he was probably one year old at the time, I was living in Hong Kong, and I applied for the role. I got the role. 

I moved to Egypt as the sales operations leader for Middle East and Africa, which was really interesting because I did strategy and planning, sales operations, but we were also investing in offices across Africa. We were implementing Salesforce. We were defining growth strategies, etc. I learned a lot. 

Then from there, I moved back to Hong Kong, back in the legal team, negotiating some huge contracts in the region. Then for personal reasons, I came back home. That’s now probably about 14 years ago. Then I had more legal roles, but this whole appetite for sales and working with the sales teams and with customers and partners always felt close. I volunteered for all kinds of projects as I was the head of legal in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, I was an executive sponsor for different customers across the region. I was in charge of competitive campaigns and all kinds of things. 

One day, the regional channel sales role came up and I applied for it and I got the role. That was in March 2020, which you probably know by heart what happened that week. I went back into sales in an executive role, and in the same week that I was told I had the role, I was super happy, I think the next day we were told we were all in lockdown. I spent a year and a half in that role from this office. That was really interesting. From there, I joined a corporate transformation team and then back in the global partner sales. Then I led the transformation of the Partner Program over the last two years. 

Now I’m part of the global partner sales organization in Cisco. Cisco is very partner-centric and partner-led. 90% of our business is sold through and with the ecosystem. I’m in charge of the entire value proposition of us as a vendor to the ecosystem. Most of my career with one company, but different countries, different roles. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s very exciting. You seem to have made a lot of the right decisions. I always love hearing women talking about they basically raised their hand for different opportunities or committees or whatever the case is to really get themselves out there, which is something we talk about a lot in the Women in Sales Leadership Forum that I run, because it’s so critical to your career goals to do that, and look at all the places that took you. That’s fabulous. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: I always say it’s the advantage of growing older, that you can actually look back and there’s still some lessons learned and understand better why you did what you did, or didn’t do what you didn’t do. But when I look back, I think a common theme is that I am someone who enjoys change, I’m quite adventurous as well. Obviously, more adventure when I was younger than as my kids were there and then they grew older and all of that. But I think this motto of, yes, you can, is really important. 

Very early on when I was asked to join that Brand Protection team, I was so nervous because I was trained as a lawyer, I worked like a lawyer. It was my education and my identity, let’s say. I was asked to join that other team and I was very nervous. I asked an executive that I admired at the time, and he said, “Well, at this age,” but in the broad sense, he said, “It’s all about learning and getting more experience.” He said, “You should take as many jobs as you can, one year to learn, one year to deliver, and one year to move on.” Still today, that was excellent advice, because it’s true. You can’t really go wrong. 

Even if you take on a new responsibility or a new role and six months later, you think, “Well, that’s not quite it,” which happened to me, I went back to legal and then I missed sales. Still, it’s all experience. You can’t really make any mistakes. If you have that mindset, it’s all one big journey and growing and experience. To my point, the beautiful thing about growing older is that you get to know yourself better and better. You get to know your strengths and typically what you’re good at is what you enjoy most. What you enjoy most is what you typically get better at. The more you get to know yourself, then the more deliberate you can become in picking and choosing the right roles for you. Of course, the more senior you become, the better that is. I think that’s a really important theme. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I really like to coach women to think about lateral moves as well, because when you learn as much as you can about the business, one, it opens your eyes to the unlimited possibilities, perhaps right in your own company. But it just makes you a more well-rounded leader in the end. It can be scary, especially if you’re already taking time off for maternity leave or helping elderly parents or something. Then you think, like, “Ooh, this is just lateral. There’s not an increase in title.” But I think your point is just keep raising your hand. Anytime you’re learning, you’re growing. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: I’m a very firm believer. My team and I, we just let this huge transformation of Cisco’s Partner Program, the biggest change in the last 20 years. I think there are multiple reasons, but one of the reasons I was able to do that is precisely because I had such a broad experience, operational, strategic sales, legal finance, compliance, everything really. All of that together meant that I knew a lot, and I had a huge network, so to learn something that was so impacting across the enterprise. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s great advice. That’s a key word too, the network. Your network inside of your company and outside your company in the industry are so critical to career growth. You hit on all points without me even coaching you. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way in all of those really pivotal roles for your career? 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: There’s a couple. I think the first is the one we already said. I think don’t be shy, lean in, don’t let the little voice in your head tell you, “You can’t do it. It’s too early.” We have a tendency to be, “I first have to study all these things. Then I have to try all of those. Then I have to prove all of that as well. Then maybe five years from now, I’ll be ready.” You should really not allow all these self-limiting beliefs to stop you. I’m not saying that you should be arrogant, of course, not. But I do think you should be bold and ambitious in terms of what you’re able to achieve and what you’re able to do. 

I am convinced that you can apply yourself to anything really. That’s the next lesson. You need to always be open to learning. People often tell me, “Well, how is it possible that as a lawyer, you managed to now be a leader in a global partner sales organization?” Then I always say, “Well, it’s not like I woke up yesterday morning and I said, ‘Let me now go and do global partner sales.’” Obviously, all along the time that I was a lawyer, I was always very curious and interested in the business. I always volunteered for things in the business. I was always very close to my colleagues in the business. It’s not like I made some kind of day and night switch or I suddenly came up with this idea. It was a journey where I’ve always been considered as a lawyer who was extremely curious and interested and engaged in the business. 

When I said, “Well, I would like to move into the business,” all the people said, “That makes a lot of sense.” I think being open, being humble, always willing to learn. I would argue, I used to say this years ago, but even more now, the world is changing fast. It will only go faster. We should all just accept that, the role of AI, all these things. That’s something else one of my mentors said years ago. At the time, I was going to work on marketplace and cloud and all of that. I said, “Well, I don’t really know much about cloud or marketplace.” He said, “I didn’t hire you because you know a lot about marketplace and cloud.” He said, “I hired you because of your character.” Meaning it’s not about everything you know, because everything you know by tomorrow is outdated, or after tomorrow, it’s not anymore about that. Plus, knowing things, you can catch up, you can learn, you can study, you can teach yourself, train yourself. But it’s about this ability to adapt, this ability to be very open minded, to be humble enough that, “Gina, what you just said, I don’t quite understand. Can you explain it to me?” 

I see a lot of people are, especially at senior levels, people may take on new roles. Then they are, I think it’s probably misplaced, they think that saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you just said. Can you explain that to me?” it shows weakness, but it’s not. Showing vulnerability and an appetite to learn, first of all, it will get you to understanding and knowing very fast. Second, it makes you more human as well. I think that’s really critical also. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Honestly, you’re saying everything I want women to know and to hear. We’re naturally curious by nature, I would say, and yet, and this is what I see, the higher women go, the less likely they are to say, “Wait a minute, I don’t quite understand that,” as if they’re supposed to have all of that knowledge walking in. To your point about the gentleman who didn’t hire you for knowledge, he hired you because of who you are. You’re naturally curious and you don’t mind saying, “Wait a minute, I don’t quite understand that.” 

When you do that, it also shows the people that work for you that they can say it too, like, “I don’t understand this,” or, “This is new to me. Can you explain more?” That is such a brilliant thing because it allows everyone to feel that and it gives you the opportunity to grow. I could use you all the time in the forum, come in and talk. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: Again, talking about when we designed the new Partner Program, I made it a point, and this is how I lead as well. I’m picking up on something you said. I believe strongly in the wisdom of the crowd and I believe that the answer is always somewhere. Somebody knows the answer. It’s all about putting your ear to the ground and listening to it. If you create an environment where I can say, “I’m sorry, can you repeat? I didn’t quite understand what you meant.” You can call it the Socratic Method. We are doing a lot of that because there’s always something that somebody was thinking that then leads to something else that leads to a really, really great idea. If you didn’t do that or you don’t allow for that, you miss all these great ideas. I’m a very strong believer in that. 

I’ve always said also, it’s not about, when I had managers doing these performance reviews and say, “You’re doing a great job.” I said, “Well, I’m not here to do a great job. I want to do an excellent job. I want to be the best lawyer you’ve ever had. I want to be the best Partner Program leader you’ve ever had.” I use the word excellence, I’m here to do something extraordinary, not to do something mediocre or something safe pair of hands and all that. I want to do something extraordinary. If you want to do something extraordinary, you need to go and look for the extraordinary ideas, and they’re always there. 

You just have to allow people to say it, like, “Gina has something she’s been thinking about for years, but nobody ever listened,” and maybe her idea is like 60% there, but if she is allowed to express, then somebody can say, “Hey, but if you do this, Gina,” then we actually solve it. A lot of the things that we are doing in my team come from those kinds of discussions. Then people are starting to enjoy themselves because that’s a very natural human need. We all want to feel like we’re doing something useful and interesting and impactful. Then it adds fun and job satisfaction and then suddenly you have a highly-motivated team that is striving for excellence. 

I’m also very focused on identity. I do it with my kids as well, like, this is who we are. We are the team that delivers excellence. We are the team that respects each other. We are the team that goes looking for these nuggets and these ideas, and people are picking up on that. I believe that’s how you can deliver extraordinary results. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I love everything about that, Elisabeth. Even a few seconds earlier when you were talking, I was thinking that it’s very much like when you were in grade school and you were learning all these new things and everyone was just looking around, little kids like, “Oh my God, I don’t understand.” As soon as one person was brave enough to raise their hand and say, “I don’t get this,” then everybody was like, “I don’t get it either.” You open up the floodgates of thinking and understanding when you actually ask for clarification or more information. To your point, you can just extract some extraordinary thinking when people feel like, “Okay, this is a safe place. I can share what I don’t know and then add what I do know.” That brings you to extraordinary, I think. I love that. 

Let’s switch gears a little bit, and let’s talk about what you see happening in the industry. Yes, AI is everywhere and now it’s how can sales teams really engage AI in a way that is a little bit uniform so everybody’s not going off in different directions using things differently, but really to advance what they’re doing and how they’re approaching sales. Certainly, I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know, the customer is a different animal today. They’re much more educated. They don’t need you to come in with a glossy PowerPoint and try to tell them what they need. They know what they need and they have lots of ways to get it. How are you working with these changes and how are you guiding your team? 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: An excellent and a pretty philosophical and strategic question also. There’s a couple of things. First of all, the basic human value of if you want to deliver something that the customer needs, you have to listen. The basic human principle is still very much standing. Again, I’m not so much selling to customers than I’m selling to partners. That very basic first thing about what does the ecosystem need? What can I drive as a value proposition that is compelling, differentiated, and driving their preference for Cisco? That’s still putting your ear to the ground. Again, that’s why we did co-design. I think that still very much stands and we have to keep doing that. 

I think AI, it’s a lot about agility and being able to keep up, and being able to keep up is not so easy. People sometimes feel overwhelmed. You will probably quickly see that I’m very much of a people person, so maybe that’s why I’m coming at it from that angle. But I think with AI as well, we do a lot of things in my organization, just listening to each other on what people are doing in terms of best practice and how they’re using it and how it’s making their work better, their relationship with the partner better, etc. We are doing a lot of that, like sharing and exchanging best practices and learning from each other, which is back to my earlier point about having an open mind, being humble, and constantly learning and being open to learning new things and discovering new things and keeping up, because that’s important. But this very basic human need of delivering what the customer needs and assumes understanding it, and in order to understand it, you always still have to listen, being prepared, listening, and all of that. That still all stands, I think. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Yes, and I really believe that that is true. It goes back to being curious. Customers need that. It is a little harder sometimes to get in front of them. It’s something that we hear quite a bit at the IEPS, that the industry is changing and not all sellers really know how to keep up. But I think your point is well taken, that when you just imagine that the humanity of it all is pulled out of the equation, and now we just have to machine to machine, that’s not it at all. It’s really, as overwhelmed as we might be, they are too. You have to come at us with that humanity. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: Yeah, I think so too. That basic principle about let me understand where you’re coming from and what you are worried about, that still stands. Back to the point, Gina, if you’re talking to a CIO who is worried about Mythos and who is worried about AI and who’s not keeping up, and who has to maintain the same budget year over year, and who has their CEO asking about what are we doing about this and what are we doing about that? Then you have to be understanding on, how can I help this person be more successful? Then from there, everything else will follow. I think that very basic principle is still very much there. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Yes, I think so too. It’s interesting listening to different sales teams, how they’re trying to incorporate all this new rapidly-changing technology and feel like they can talk about it in a very educated way, which is I think where part of the problem is. Even some customers don’t necessarily know what they want and what they need. Staying curious, asking questions, and bringing that in I think is a great approach. Hopefully it will still give us all lots of opportunities for growth, which I think are there, and to your point, keep learning. Keep learning is really critical. 

Let’s just tweak that a little bit. I don’t know in Europe, you work for an American company, but do you see a lot of the same things happening in the European market as you do the US market in terms of how sales is changing and what it takes to keep up? 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: Yes and no, because the world is becoming smaller every day, I think. A lot of themes, especially in the technology sector, then it’s a small world, even if it’s a big world. I think in that sense, a lot of trending and the themes are very similar. I do think that in Europe in particular, and you could argue to some degree, APJC as well, the geopolitical piece around the concept of sovereignty and digital sovereignty, and in Europe, for example, there’s a lot of thinking about how can we create more technology independence. There’s a lot of investment going into promoting European homegrown technology. That’s a topic that is very prominent here. 

Cisco, as a US HQ’d, company has to think about that. We have launched a series of critical sovereign infrastructure solutions, specifically for customers that are sensitive to think about national security, defense, government, and all of that. But on-prem solutions, solutions with special legal privilege and protection to allow that protection and that national sovereignty type of concern. That’s a typical topic that is different from the US and outside the US. That is super interesting also, because again, from a philosophical point of view, as the world becomes smaller and smaller and more and more interdependent, there is also this emerging, I want to protect inside my borders. 

It’s just a very interesting balancing act, because we are absolutely in favor of open technology, open internet and all of that. We can all benefit from ongoing technology developments, but at the same time, there are these concerns from national governments or European institutions to have that right balance in terms of technology developments. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I just was listening to a really fascinating talk on how keeping the security of things now is so vastly different than it was even a year ago. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: Even three months ago. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Yes, even three months ago. To me, it is quite amazing and quite exciting and a little terrifying too. I think we all have our work cut out for us. Well, this has been a fabulous conversation, Elisabeth, and I’m sorry it’s coming close to an end. One thing that we really like to do on our shows is ask our guests for one final piece of advice, something that sellers can put into place to advance their careers or perfect their selling game, shall we say, that they can start today on. What do you have for us? Any thoughts? 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: I love talking about being fearless or fear less. I think we are often self-limiting because we have the little voice or we are afraid of things going wrong, or we are afraid to being fully ourselves, or we’re afraid to proposing things, or we’re afraid to raise things. I think it’s really important to be fearless or just fear less. I think that’s really important because if you think about it, you should live your life to the fullest extent. Maybe in private life, that’s more difficult or more scary, but at least in your professional life, you should. I think that’s really important, especially in today’s environment. We live in such exciting special times. I think don’t let fear stop you. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I absolutely love that. As one guest I had on a while back said, what’s the worst that could happen? I think that’s really a great way to think about it. Be fearless because what’s the worst that could happen? You make a mistake. It’s not the end of the world. 

Elisabeth De Dobbeleer: No, no, no. I would say fearless in combination with humility, because that’s how you will be open-minded and grow and learn and always get better and better. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Wonderful advice. Elisabeth De Dobbeleer, thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to hearing more from you in the future. Thank you everyone for tuning in. See you next time. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 854: Inside Cisco’s Monumental Partner Program Transformation with Elisabeth De Dobbeleer first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is the fifth episode of AI and Sales Brief, a new 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: “Sales and marketing are a circle. The problem most companies have is that sales and marketing are treated as two separate parts that do not work for one another and do not collaborate. AI can help fix that.”

TOM’S TIP: “This is the peace treaty of all time. Both objectives, marketing and sales, can be served, and everybody can get what they want. Instead of arguing about leads, both teams can align around understanding what prospects need to fix, accomplish, or avoid.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I am joined by my good friends Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity and AI for sales expert Zeev Wexler. I believe this is the fifth show we have done. Every Monday morning, we tackle a sales challenge, and it has been exciting to see people beginning to listen to and utilize the advice we are sharing. 

Here is the challenge we are going to tackle today. It is a historic challenge in B2B and B2G sales. Much has been written about the eternal divide between sales and marketing, and we talk about this frequently at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Does weaving together sales science and AI do anything to finally answer and solve this conundrum? Tom, get us started. 

Tom Snyder: I want to talk about the problem and give more time to Zeev on this one. The struggle you always hear in B2B and B2G companies is that salespeople believe marketing does not produce enough valuable resources or leads, while marketing believes it produces an enormous amount of valuable material and leads that salespeople do not use. What is wrong there? The thing they are suffering from is the lack of a natural intersection. That natural intersection is understanding the orientation of the total addressable market around something prospects need to fix, accomplish, or avoid. There are obviously various viewpoints on that at any given moment. 

Producing a lead just because you have a phone number and a name is not adequate for a salesperson. If you can align marketing around the idea of finding people who are either suffering from a problem they need to solve but do not yet recognize that the time is right, or finding people who are looking for that solution right now, I will celebrate marketing all day long. 

You can still deliver the brand promise. You can still do the other things marketing needs to do. But this is what sales needs. The problem is that, for a salesperson to do that on their own, it is arduous. You have to search all kinds of resources, identify clues and triggers, and most salespeople are not trained to do it. It is also not something they typically find rewarding. They want leads. 

That is where the conflict begins. What I have learned from Zeev is that this is the peace treaty of all time. Both objectives, marketing and sales, can be served, and everybody can get what they want. Zeev, please take it away. 

Zeev Wexler: I love both sales and marketing, but I think sales and marketing are a circle. The problem most companies have is that sales and marketing are treated as two separate parts that do not work for one another and do not collaborate. 

There are a few solutions. The first and easiest one addresses a problem I have heard from many companies with sales teams: marketing is producing leads, but sales does not believe they are the right leads and does not want to waste time on them. Then, habitually, sales leaves those leads alone. 

If those leads are more top-of-funnel or not yet ready, AI can help figure that out and determine which leads should go to sales. It can also explain, ‘This is why this is a good lead for you.’ The number of leads may go down, but the quality of those leads goes up. Now sales can build a habit of looking at them. 

In addition, you can use the data that AI collects from sales and bring it back into marketing. Now it is not just anecdotal. It is not simply, ‘This salesperson said something, but I do not like him,’ or ‘I believe something else.’ Now it is facts. 

Now you can say, ‘This is the data that shows what our clients say when they buy and when they do not buy. Let us use that in our marketing. Let us take that data and turn it into something the actual buyer wants to hear.’ Then the salesperson knows, ‘If this person said yes to this, they are interested.’ It is no longer just a phone number and an email collected through an email marketing campaign. 

In those two ways, you can do so much. Again, at the end of the day, I am a humans guy. AI is great, but this is about habits. We habitually do not trust one another in sales and marketing, and AI can help fix that. 

AI can take the burden of evaluating weaker leads and funneling them into better leads. It can also take data from sales and give it to marketing so marketing can produce better campaigns and better messaging. Tom, I would love to hear your thoughts on this, but this solves so many problems by using data that was simply hard to use before. 

Tom Snyder: I genuinely get so excited when we talk about these things. To make it quick and simple, at any given moment, a snapshot in time on any given day, five different studies by five different companies have come to the same conclusion: 3% of your total addressable market is looking for your solution, or something like it, at that moment. 

Another 56.5% of the total addressable market is completely satisfied with the solution they have. Whether they should be satisfied is another argument. The remaining 40.5% of the market is frustrated by something you can solve, but they are not yet looking. 

Imagine if you could give sellers the 3% and the 40.5%, along with information about how to approach each group differently, and then put the 56.5% into brand marketing. And imagine if you knew you were doing it right. That is what Zeev and AI can do. It is unbelievable. 

Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. It is not 100% right off the bat, but once you start doing it, it gets better and better. The more you use it and the more data you have, the better the AI becomes and the better everyone gets at identifying the 3%, the 40.5%, and the 56.5%. 

You can determine which people should receive brand marketing so you remain in their minds, and which people salespeople really need to work with and why. 

Tom Snyder: I would submit that, from day one, even before it learns a lot, it is better than what is happening now. From day one, it is better, and it just gets better from there. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. On the sales side, we often say things like, ‘Marketing is not giving us the right leads, the right events, or the right opportunities.’ One of the historic problems is that marketing often does not know. There are many smart people in marketing, but they may know market trends or what the industry looks like, not necessarily what is happening at the customer level. 

They may not know where customers are going, where they need to go, or how they need information to be communicated to them. Utilizing a solution like this can solve a lot of problems by getting the right information to sales professionals so they can communicate more effectively with customers. 

Tom Snyder: Exactly. The exact numbers are not the most important point. The three unequal segments of the total addressable market are what really matter. 

Zeev Wexler: Think about a sales force with 200 people, where each person has three prospect calls every week. That is 600 calls a week that AI can analyze. Over a couple of months, you are talking about thousands of calls that can produce actual data for marketers, who love data. Now you can create much better marketing that is specific to what the sales organization is trying to achieve. 

Fred Diamond: Tom, one of the things we are most excited about at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling is our Selling Essentials Marketplace. We have hand-selected about a dozen companies, including Funnel Clarity and Wexler. You both have come together to bring a great solution to the market that solves many of these problems by combining AI, sales performance excellence strategies, Zeev’s AI expertise, and your sales performance expertise. Tell us a little bit about that offering. 

Tom Snyder: I have been in the sales performance improvement industry for more than 30 years, and this is absolutely the most exciting major change I have seen. From my perspective, it may be the most significant change in 70 years, and I suspect we may still view it that way decades from now. 

The business world has heard the phrase ‘sales best practice’ so many times that it has become trite. People have also heard that AI is the new tool so many times that they are scrambling to implement AI as quickly as possible. 

If you think about those two ends of the spectrum, then ask: what if we really had scientific proof that a set of practices were true sales best practices? That is the sales magic. The label may be boring, but what if you really could separate wheat from chaff? 

What if you could put together a corporate initiative that says, ‘Yes, everyone is scrambling to use AI, but in some cases, handing AI to teams without the right structure is like handing a sharp knife to a four-year-old. Let us not do ourselves harm.’ 

When you bring these two things together – the power of AI as a core corporate initiative and the reality that there is a science of sales – you create an accelerant that has never been seen at this magnitude before. I do not say that casually, and I do not believe it is hyperbolic. That is what this offering is about. At least give yourself a chance to talk to us about it. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Reach out to me, Fred Diamond, Tom Snyder, or Zeev Wexler. 

Once again, this is the AI and Sales Brief Podcast. Every Monday morning, we tackle a sales challenge.  

The post EPISODE 853: How AI Helps Sales and Marketing Focus on Customers That Matter 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!

Today’s show featured an interview with Jason Gallo, Global Vice President, Partner Value Accelerator at Cisco.

Find Jason on LinkedIn.

JASON’S TIP: “Innovation is predicated upon trust. The fundamentals of who we are as salespeople is still continuing to build that depth of relationship and never forget that aspect of what it means to be a world-class sales professional. Trust is the ultimate lever to get us to the outcome.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Jason Gallo, I’m excited to talk to you today for a couple of reasons. One is we recently had our 16th Annual Sales Excellence Awards, and we gave our Lifetime Achievement Award to the great Nick Michaelides. We had a lot of amazing people from Cisco at the event. Nick was the last Cisco leader that we had on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We spend a lot of time talking about the ecosystems and channels. You’re a leader in Cisco and the channel world. We’re going to get deep into some of the evolution, some things that Cisco’s recently announced. We’re going to get deep into why they were announced and how critical they are. For people who don’t know you, give us a little bit about your background. Tell us about your role at Cisco and how you support the partner systems. 

Jason Gallo: As you mentioned, Nick, what an incredible leader and love the fact that your organization recognized him. One of the last projects actually that he did before he retired and left Cisco was working with me as we were looking at how to bring our partner and our sales teams even more closely together when it came to selling enterprise agreements, and really, where we’re headed with the future of recurring revenue. Awesome that we invoked such an amazing sales leader’s name and how we had a chance to partner together. 

For my part, I am the global vice president here at Cisco. My role, it really spans a few areas. First and foremost, how do we work with our business unit as we’re thinking about bringing new products to market and driving strategic initiatives? How do we go to market, literally go to the market, if you will, with partners? That’s a really deep and embedded part of the Cisco philosophy and the sales motion. 

The second piece is how do we start to expand our ecosystem? We know that partnerships are no longer just built around your traditional resellers and managed service providers and distributors. There are other areas of the ecosystem that complement those motions. We have one, for example, we call MINT, mentored installation type partners, where they focus on advanced services. They will never compete on a resale basis, but are a great complement or a new route to market that we have started to incubate within our model. 

Then the third piece, it really has to do with a lot of the partner programs. One of the most exciting things in my role that I’ve had the pleasure to take on in the last two and a half, almost three years, was the launch of the Cisco 360 Partner Program, where we really reimagined and launched a whole new partner program that evolved the long-standing 30-year type of program that Cisco had been known for, with gold partnerships, etc., to this new modern version that I think is ready for an AI environment that we find ourselves in. 

Fred Diamond: We’re going to get deep into that. I’ve been in technology for a long time, as a lot of people who are listening to the show. Cisco has historically had one of the top most effective channels in the history of technology. Here you are coming out with the Cisco 360. Let’s talk about how Cisco is reimagining the partner model. I was curious, as I was preparing for this interview today, I was just thinking to myself, is Cisco 360 really a new partner program or is it Cisco forcing the channel to evolve? It’s because of how critical it is, where you all play, and if not every entity on the planet, at least a high number of them. Let’s get deep into that. How is the reimagining taking its place? 

Jason Gallo: I would even frame the forcing the channel to evolve part of it to say, in some ways, the partner is forcing us to evolve. I think the recognition and what made it so successful in terms of the way we approached this project was this concept of co-design. From the very beginning, we wanted to do things differently. I think vendors in the past, they wait till the program or that initiative is perfect and they think it’s all buttoned up and ready. Then they reveal it to the partner base, and often it lands flat. 

Even if it’s the best, most well-intentioned program, often the partners may not have time to evolve. They didn’t have their fingerprints all over the evolution and the thinking, and so we tried something different. 18 months before the program went live, we announced it. I have to tell you, that was a shock to the partner ecosystem as they thought, “Well, wait a minute, you’re revealing something that’s not ready and this is going to cause confusion.” It’s so many things that aren’t answered. 

I can remember doing one of the first webinars and they were asking questions and they’re like, “Well, we don’t know yet.” “What do you mean you don’t know? Is this going to impact our model?” But the reason we didn’t know is because we wanted them to tell us what they needed. It was a very different approach that the market had not really fully seen before when it comes to large scale transformation. We have 35,000 plus partners in our ecosystem. To come out and literally say, “We want to listen to you all, again, not force the transformation, but what transformation would you need, and co-design this with us?” 

Once we got past that initial shock, I was probably a good quarter or two into it, of repeating that, “Trust me, it’s not that we’re hiding something and that we have all the secret plans in a file somewhere. It’s we literally want you to tell us so that we come up with the policies and the rebate structures and everything else that will not just drive a program, but really drive business models that will move us into a modern era.” 

The second thing, besides co-design, that we said from the very beginning of the outset was, start with a focus on the customer. Even though this is a partner program, it has to have a customer-in approach. I think that term sometimes gets overused, but for us, it really set the foundation, the guiding principles, if you will, of what does it mean for a partner to be valuable in the eyes of a customer? When you ask that question, what is the value that a partner has for a customer? It became a lot clearer on what to add into the program, and frankly, what could maybe sit at the periphery as philosophies that may have existed in prior versions or industry norms of what programs are supposed to look like. 

We say, “Well, no, we’re not going to take that approach if that’s not what the customer sees as value.” That allowed us to come up with something called the Partner Value Index, or affectionately, we now call it the PVI. That Partner Value Index is a core part of how we’re able to measure through key metrics the most valuable customer. That combination of co-designing the program, but then also starting with a customer-in approach and measuring the value that a partner brings to the customer. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the customer here. What were some of the major findings that customers told you? That’s actually interesting. We’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026. 18-some odd months ago, a lot has changed in the last year. Things in 2025 with the economy, obviously AI has become not just important from the OEM side, like Cisco and the partner side, but from the customer perspective, the customer is using AI to get a lot more information. What are some of the things, when you were talking to the customers about the relationships through the ecosystem, that came up? 

Jason Gallo: Two in particular, and then I’ll tie it back to your second point on AI. The first one was there is a level of breadth but depth. Customers want breadth, as in, bring it all together and just give me the outcome. But at the same time, I need to ensure that they’re deep in certain areas, like security, because we can’t have any environment that is not fully protected and it cannot be vulnerable. I want the best of the best, the most capable. There are certain areas where we said we need to recognize partners that can go really, really deep because the customers want to be protected, or let’s say go deep in AI. 

But at the same time, they also want partners that are recognized for bringing it all together into the ultimate outcome. That’s a very difficult balance that we found, depending on the customer, what part of the market you were playing in, or frankly, just which project they needed to be able to, the customer that is, differentiate between different types of partners. The value index is quite a flexible system that you can gain more points in the overall value index, both by bringing together the solution. At the same time, you could also be a partner that just focuses in one area like security and still rise to the top of what we call a preferred partner. 

We got rid of this notion of gold, the precious metals of the past, if you will, which was diluted in some ways because it was really generically across. It wasn’t bringing together the different areas and showing how to demonstrate its success and case studies that the partner has delivered those outcomes, or they’ve been able to go really deep. That breadth versus depth balance. 

The second part of your question though, I would say we don’t necessarily share that score externally. But with the internal Cisco partner account executive teams, as well as the partner, as they’re able to get more data and insights into these 10 metrics, whether that’s foundational, how they’ve set up their business, whether that’s performance, how they’re growing alongside our salespeople, whether that’s capabilities, the number of trained individuals, sales, SEs, operations, marketing, or the level of engagement that they have, adoption, life cycle, and all of the land, adopt, expand, renew type motions, they have an insight that they can now feed into AI. 

We are seeing more partners doing account and practice planning with our field teams because they can feed this wealth of data that we’ve never had before on each partner into these AI models. It’s creating a much richer set of conversations and connective tissue between our teams and the partner teams. It really has changed conversations and QBOs because we can be a lot more specific in these key areas that are now well understood and regularly being measured through the construct of the program itself. 

Fred Diamond: A lot of things come to mind here. How are you working with your channel professionals, Cisco channel professionals, to modify their behavior, to work differently with channel partners? This PVI is amazing. How are you training them to work with the PVI and the partner specifically to ensure success? We still need to grow revenue and grow into the accounts and keep Cisco as the top of mind, etc., and you’re so integral with so many places. If you can, talk a little bit about how you’re working with your channel professionals to make their partners more effective. 

Jason Gallo: One of the things I’ll say and hit upon a little bit was these four areas, foundational, performance, capabilities, and engagement. By having a standardized view of what the best partner looks like, we are now able to put out more rich quarterly business overviews and performance dashboards on each partner and provide playbooks and training to our partner account executives to have more consistent and I’d say go deeper into conversations. But it also works in reverse. 

The partners are now telling us that, okay, well, if this is what I’m being measured on, does this align with your sales teams? Are your sales teams being measured this way? Are your sales teams looking at these same metrics? Because you’re saying this is what I need to drive and my profitability and rebates are based upon that, does this align with your sales team’s compensation? In fact, it does. 

With our own partner account executives, we’ve really helped them to explain the program, but more importantly, the business connection points that they can make with our sales teams as they show that part of their metrics are based on TCV growth, which is total contract value, or ACV growth, annual contract value, and understand recurring revenue streams. Those aren’t things that have traditionally been part of the concept of partner programs, but now it creates a sales connection with our field teams and different conversations because it aligns to how we’re compensated. 

I think the second part, though, has been more tactically. We created champions in the field, in our partner account executives. We call them partner account executives or PAEs, who took the message forward in each of the regions. My role is global and I can tell you we had very specific advisory boards throughout the globe. I just hit my million miles on United last year, so it was quite a bit of flying, but the amount of partners and advisory boards that I’ve had the pleasure of attending, that these champions put on our field teams, really helped drive that momentum. 

Fred Diamond: I attended a regional Cisco Connect event, and I’ve been in technology marketing most of my career, it’s complex. Complexity even gets more so, and I’m not saying that as a bad way, I’m just saying it as a fact. It’s getting more complex. Sales professionals need to be able to communicate, and in the channel, communicate more specific things to customers because it just has gotten much more complex. A couple of follow-up questions here. 

One is, we’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026, have you seen a shift? Are partners dropping out because maybe things have gotten too technical and the customer demands have gotten too much? Do you see new partners emerging, or do you see existing partners, the historic 20, 30-year general partners, filling in those gaps, getting technically-proficient? It’s a broad question, Jason, but I’m just curious, where do you see the channel evolving to? 

Jason Gallo: There’s a lot in that question, but let me try and unpack it. I do see the normal ebb and flow of partners, and I don’t think that’s necessarily changed or accelerated, so this is not a response to the program. I’m just talking about the market in general and the complexity of where technology is headed. At the same time, though, I think that there has been a call for deeper understanding as well, and so you are finding more specialized or players that can go deep in things like AI or security, and there are some additional players that have come on board, at least in the Cisco context or Cisco ecosystem, but we’re also seeing new routes to market open up. Whether that’s cloud marketplaces and working with the hyperscalers, whether that’s OT suppliers that are selling into the OT space, or even a very new area that has emerged is in the area of what we call connected purpose partnerships where, whether it’s sustainability or crisis management, digital and digitization is hitting every single part of the economy, and there are partners that are adding to what they typically deliver to those customers in the form of Cisco’s portfolio. 

Now, Cisco’s portfolio is very broad. We do everything from Webex headsets that you can listen to your music on on your iPhone, to massive routers that you need a crane to take off a truck. Our portfolio, I would say, is comprehensive, but we try to make sure it’s not complex, and that’s where we’ve offered new training as a part of the update to the program. Simultaneously, we came out with curriculum that allowed for journey maps, we call them, teaching these companies to retrain their teams in terms of the emerging technologies if they choose to go deep. 

One of the benefits of the program, once you unlock the higher levels, it’s not just rebates and discounts anymore, they get 10 free licenses to Cisco University, so they can send 10 of their people to get trained, and that complexity, hopefully, it simplifies it as they’re now getting some of that free access to their professionals. 

Fred Diamond: I want to wind down the show here with some of your advice for channel partners and what your recommendations would be for them to be more successful with Cisco 360 and moving forward over the next couple of years, because like I said, we’ve seen so much change over the last year. The program is great. It hits all the right things and it’s well thought out, so congratulations to you and the team who pulled it all together. It’s definitely an industry-leading program, and Cisco’s always been that way. Cisco’s always been, I believe, at the forefront of channel relationships and optimizing how channel partners should go to market. 

What would be your advice for channel partners to be totally successful or more successful moving forward in the Cisco world? For example, one of the words that comes out frequently now is outcomes, and a lot of companies are telling their resellers, “You need to focus on outcomes as compared to tech solutions and things along those lines.” I’m curious on some of your thoughts and how that’s perpetuating within Cisco channel leadership. 

Jason Gallo: I appreciate the question. What I would say there, and I’ve mentioned this before to people, an outcome or innovation in general is predicated upon trust. I think the fundamentals of who we are as salespeople is still continuing to build that depth of relationship and never forget that aspect of what it means to be just a world-class sales professional. People think that outcomes or innovation happens because there’s some brilliant or groundbreaking idea or that we talked about the complexity of technology and how that’s expanding so fast, and so the technology is so amazing that everyone’s just going to adopt it. But the truth of the matter is it still takes that frontline relationship to make sure that that innovation succeeds. 

Yes, you have the big idea and your customers will have that. You have to bring together a group of experts in an ecosystem and different partner types who can fulfill their specific role and move the customer towards that outcome. But ultimately, someone has to bring that most important ingredient, that trust that says, “Okay, I’m going to let you tinker with my environment and allow you to breathe life into this idea.” But more importantly, sometimes trust is about allowing the right questions to be asked, the hard questions, and then the right truthful answers to come out so that you can get ahead and take that first step towards that outcome. To me, I think it still comes back to the fundamentals, maybe looking at it a little differently, but it’s not just the classic way of looking at trust. Trust is the ultimate lever to get us to the outcome. 

Fred Diamond: You all just spent all this time and energy to launch this program. You gave us a great understanding of why it was created and your advice for channel partners to be successful moving forward. I love some of the concepts you brought out here, the Partner Value Index, and all the other things that you discussed. Looking ahead two to three years, what excites you most about the future of the channel? A lot of thought must have gone into where’s it’s going, not just what we’ve got to do today in 2026. But because of AI and the impact that we’re all really beginning to truly see, and we don’t even know exactly everything that’s going to come from this and how that’s going to modify how companies like Cisco not just get to market but are utilized by the customers. Tell us some things that might excite you about this whole channel world moving forward. 

Jason Gallo: Fantastic question. For me, it is the promise of AI allowing us to drive more productivity in these types of relationships. Cisco 360 and the data that we now have that we can have these new conversations with our partners to help make them successful. One of the things that we have started to think about and even explore is as we move into a world where we talk about where the critical infrastructure for the AI era, how do we also think about agents? Whether that’s in our sales teams, whether that’s in our partner teams, what is the best of the best in terms of using AI agents in these motions? For people like me, what does that mean in the context of partner programs? How do I measure a Cisco-certified engineering agent? How do we start to, on the next horizon of where we’re headed, ensure that all of our partners have those agents and are profitable and building out great businesses that support the Cisco model, but ultimately with those agents can deploy a better outcome for the customer? I’m really excited for that piece of it. I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions in that. But that’s also where it’ll keep guys like me busy for the next few years thinking of what’s next. 

Fred Diamond: Like I mentioned to you in the prep, my MBA thesis was on channel theory and design. It was 33 years ago, but I’m always still fascinated. One thing that excites me is how the various channel participants are going to take their game to the next level. Obviously, companies like Cisco and the OEM side, you’re constantly having to do the innovation and think about the outcomes and understand where the markets are going. Cisco is top four or five in that historically. But the channel partners have a pretty important challenge, which is how do we still stay valid? How do we provide technical expertise? How do we provide industry expertise to provide the value to the customer? It’s great to see a program like this that I think supports those who are willing to figure it out, put the time and energy to understand how they can provide more value through the channel. 

Jason, give us a specific action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but if I’m someone in the channel who’s listening to this, I’m a sales professional in the channel, or even a sales professional at Cisco, I know we’re going to get a bunch of people listening as well, and probably companies, other OEMs in your ecosystem as well. What’s your advice for them as a selling professional to take their careers to the next level? 

Jason Gallo: That’s a good one. If I look back on what happened over the last two years, and if I’m very honest in my own career, it was a loud change to happen. I think we get into a pattern of things that worked. I think we may have sold into a territory or a customer set that we become very familiar with. Then something happens, a shift change. We temporarily can lose our footing or feel like the whole game has changed on us. I think the people that succeed and where I think the magic really happened for us here in the team that drove Cisco 360 was embracing that chaos, embracing that change, and making it into an opportunity that said, “We can recreate this. This can be an opportunity to listen differently, to co-design. This can be an opportunity to challenge the norms.” In fact, this is where you can bring everyone with you and turn it from an incremental shift into a movement. I guess as sales professionals, that’s what I would leave your audience with. Sometimes the things that you think are a setback are actually setting you up to have a much bigger impact than you ever expected. 

Fred Diamond: That is a great answer. You’re not going to reverse the change. Some things you have to deal with, especially as it impacts your customers. At the end of the day, the only reason we’re having this conversation and anyone’s listening, is because we have customers that we need to serve, and they’re dealing with this change as well. 

Jason Gallo, congratulations on the launch of Cisco 360. Thank you so much for taking us through the changes and why they were made and how channel professionals can enact upon this to be more successful. I want to thank our listeners as well. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 852: Jason Gallo Details the Cisco 360 Playbook for Partner Growth first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is the fourth episode of AI and Sales Brief, a new 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: “No salesperson is going to listen to every call, capture everything that was said, and track every client response manually. But for AI, this is a matter of seconds. The more you use it, the more it learns.”

TOM’S TIP: “Do not prioritize pursuing the companies or potential clients you most want. Pursue first the target-rich pool of those who appear to most want you. It is a lot easier to chase the ones that most want us.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Welcome back to another episode of the award-winning Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Once again, every Monday morning, we tackle a B2B enterprise sales challenge and address how AI can provide solutions to that particular problem. 

I am joined by my good friends, sales expert Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity and AI for selling expert Zeev Wexler. Gentlemen, are you ready to go with today’s sales challenge? It is good to see you both.  

One problem we always hear about is the struggle companies have with getting clean, up-to-date data entered into their CRM systems. How can AI and sales best practices solve this problem? Tom, get us started. 

Tom Snyder: I think this is one of the most profound and unrecognized advantages and uses of AI in sales, at least from the perspective of the people I speak with. 

If you look at the average CRM, it is populated with very poor data. Why? Because we do not actually give salespeople any guidance on how to enter the data. Further, we do not really know how to make the CRM work for salespeople. It works for every other constituency in the business. There are fancy charts and beautiful reports, and I have no problem with that. The problem is that if it is not producing anything but more work for the salesperson, what value does it really provide? 

Properly configured, a CRM can be a huge boost to seller performance. But the biggest improvement comes when you marry AI to it. It is phenomenal because AI does something very specific. I will let Zeev answer that question. Zeev, this is much more your area than mine. 

Zeev Wexler: This is not only one of the easiest ways AI can help sales, but also one of the most fundamental. I will give you a live example of something I recently did. 

We worked with a company that had very poor information in its CRM because, again, salespeople are busy and do not always want to put the right information in. We built an AI system that connects with the prep call information and the actual client call. It then automates all of that into the CRM in the way the salesperson wants it entered. 

This is not data for the sake of data. It is data that helps us sell forward, and it is all automated. 

Imagine we are doing a prep call and preparing for a meeting with a major client. All of that information is analyzed according to rules that the salespeople and leadership decide. Then the client call is recorded and analyzed. All of that information is synchronized and entered into the CRM automatically, and it produces recommendations for the next stage. 

Everything is factual. It is based on the prep meeting, the client data that AI can source and verify, and the actual meeting with the client. None of it requires the salesperson to click through fields or manually enter information. 

Now we have the data we need in order to move the sale forward and close more business. This is easy in the sense that AI technology does this very well. We do not make the salesperson type everything in. We take the information, synthesize it in the way we want, and put it directly into the CRM so it can guide future steps. 

Now everything is there, and we are selling more. 

Tom Snyder: The second thing I want to say is that one of the things you have taught me, Zeev, is that one of the applications of AI is that it is outstanding at pattern recognition. Make a comment, if you would, about a sales force of, let’s say, one hundred people. If everyone is equipped with the kind of system you just described, would it not be possible for AI to look for patterns inside that CRM? 

Zeev Wexler: Not only inside the CRM. It can also identify patterns in the sales calls of the salespeople. 

From there, someone like you can say, “That was a great sales call”, but you also need to ask what success looks like. That is something the AI can recognize when a salesperson is not doing it. 

Inside the actual tool, over time, AI can identify patterns such as, “When these things happen, the percentage of closing a sale triples.” When those things happen, that opportunity can automatically be marked as a hot prospect. 

It can see, based on time and what happens throughout the sale, which signs are actual buying signs. Not generic signs in the world, but signs specific to this salesperson, product, and company. We can start ranking what is hot. When certain things happen, the opportunity automatically moves into the A tier or whatever system a company uses. 

Each company can train the AI to work according to the way it operates. No salesperson is going to listen to every call, capture everything that was said, and track every client response manually. But for AI, this is a matter of seconds. 

Tom Snyder: One of the most profound things we try to teach companies is this: do not prioritize pursuing the companies or potential clients you most want. Pursue first the target-rich pool of those who appear to most want you. 

That is easy to say, and it is revelatory to most people. Marketing tends to say, “Here are the big ones. Here are the ones that have a lot of potential for us. Let’s go chase them.” It is a lot easier to chase the ones that most want us. 

How do you find that? It takes research in the marketplace. It takes looking for certain characteristics. Zeev and I have talked about looking for change, looking for what the customer is trying to fix, accomplish, or avoid. AI can do that for me now much better than I can. Am I right? 

Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. I will give you an example that recently happened. 

We helped a company that works extensively with the Japanese market. We had AI research Japanese business culture. Salespeople should do that too, of course, but AI performed the research and found that Japanese businesspeople may say yes without necessarily meaning yes. 

In that context, “yes” may simply be a polite response. They may say, “Yes, yes, we want that,” but the pattern showed that this was cultural. Salespeople heard that and thought, “Oh my goodness, we have a sale. This goes up.” But the AI recognized that the response did not necessarily mean there was a real buying signal. 

The actual buying signal was slightly different. It appeared when they asked certain types of questions. With that insight, we were able to save the sales team many hours they might have spent chasing Japanese companies that were saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” without truly signaling intent. 

That saved the company a lot of time, and now they understand who the real hot prospects are. As salespeople, we all love when someone says yes. We think, “Let’s go. We are chasing this.” But AI can take cultural information, company information, and past actions, and combine it into something useful. 

The more you use it, the more it learns. That is the beauty of this. 

Fred Diamond: That is great. That is really exciting. 

One of the things the IEPS is most excited about is what we call our Selling Essentials Marketplace. We have hand-selected about a dozen top resources for sales organizations. Funnel Clarity and Zeev’s company are both part of that. 

It’s exciting that you both have come together to create an AI and selling effectiveness solution. I want to encourage our listeners to reach out to me, Tom, or Zeev about that. 

Zeev, would you give us the elevator pitch for that? 

Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. Tom Snyder is an incredible, world-class sales trainer, and he helps companies all over the world. I help sales companies all over the world automate their AI. 

The “aha” moment between Tom and me was that if we bring his genius into our processes, the sum becomes much greater than its parts. That is what we are doing. 

We are taking brilliant sales training that works and combining it with AI automation and AI technology that changes everything. When we bring those together, your sales team is equipped for much greater success. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, we have done a lot of work over the years with Funnel Clarity and with you, Zeev, and many of our customers, clients, and members of the IEPS. The results have been tremendous. 

Now, seeing you both come together for a solution that will definitely change the direction of how companies use AI, and of course improve sales performance excellence, is very exciting. 

Reach out to me, Fred Diamond. Reach out to Tom Snyder or Zeev Wexler, and let’s get something going with your company. 

This is the AI and Sales Brief Podcast. It is a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

The post EPISODE 851: Using AI to Make CRM Data More Valuable 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!

Today’s show featured an interview with Dr. Steve Gladis, Executive Coach, Author, and Professor at George Mason University.

Find Steve on LinkedIn.

STEVE’S TIP: “Start thinking like a team, not a group. Start thinking basketball, not golf. Think about what you can work on together while still performing in your individual silos.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Dr. Steve Gladis, it’s great to see you here. I’ve known you for a while and I’m excited. This is the first time we’re going to have you on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’re going to be talking about the six principles of leadership, which can apply to leadership in almost any business setting. We’re going to tie them specifically to sales leadership, because the IEPS, our whole mission is to help sales leaders engage their teams and customers, elevate their leaders to new heights, and empower their success to generate more revenue to be more effective. 

Give us a brief introduction to yourself and we’re going to be hitting the six principles. Tell us who you are and why you’re here and I’m excited to go through the six principles. 

Steve Gladis: I teach at George Mason, have for a number of years. Before that I was at the University of Virginia and before that was with the FBI. I have an interesting, different background, but I’ve been an academic all my life and I’m a writer. I’ve written a number of books on leadership, about 25 actually. Now I’m into writing novels, which is fun, about my FBI career. A lot of fun. 

This particular book we’re going to talk about today is called Leading Teams. It’s really about what it takes for teams to survive and it’s not what everybody thinks. Everybody thinks, we all have to get along. We all have to love each other, do off-sites, and all that stuff. While that helps, it isn’t really what makes teams work, and we know this by research done at Harvard. That’s what I’m about. This particular interview hopefully is about that and how you can apply it to your sales team. 

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026. The last 18 months have been a real challenging time. Sales is always a challenge, of course, but the last 18 some odd months, maybe two years. A lot of the people who listen to today’s show, they’re in B2B, a lot of them are in B2G, business to government, sales. The government has seen a reduction in force. DOGE has come in and in theory, made government more efficient. Steve, at the same time, the government budget has grown for IT and it’s close to 138 billion. There’s still tons of opportunities for companies that are doing things right. They need to shift, leaders need to be more effective, and we’re going to be talking about that today. 

I know they’re broken down into two sets of three. There are the essential conditions and then the enabling conditions. Let’s just start at the top with number one and we’ll go through the list. 

Steve Gladis: The first is, do you have a real team? Most teams are teams in name only. They call themselves the sales team. They call themselves the executive team. But most of the times they’re like golf teams. They report up to the same person, but they’re not like basketball teams, which integrate with each other and work with each other, what I do affects you kind of thing. That’s really the first question. You’d be surprised how few teams are really teams. Are they interdependent? Do they work together? Does my work affect your work? Is it a stable team? 

Unstable teams are not effective at all because people keep coming and going. They don’t know the history. They don’t know the culture. It’s very disruptive to the team. In fact, the history of basketball teams, the ones that stay together the longest win the most championships. Look at the Chicago Bulls and other teams like that. They’re a team that stuck together. That’s really the first one of the essential conditions, is to have a real team. Is your sales team a team? Probably not. I’m guessing most sales teams, I have been involved in sales teams, most sales teams are not. They are individual performers who want to get their bonuses and they’re going to keep their customers and clients to themselves, they’re not going to share them. Those teams don’t do as well as a team, as an entity, as the ones that actually work together and say, “Hey, cover my lead. I’m going on vacation. You take the commission.” It really is a very different game for most people. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the definition. Let’s say we have a leader who manages the district team for a particular product at the company that they work for. Usually in those situations, they use the team pretty frequently. They all report up maybe to a district sales manager or a regional VP or something, but they all have their own quotas, their own territories, their own accounts that they’re responsible for. Maybe they have some people who work with them, someone in marketing, maybe somebody in engineering, maybe somebody in contracts. But to make sure I’m clear here, what you’re saying is if the guy has five accounts and another person on the team has five accounts, and another person has five, by definition, you’re saying they’re not really a team which will lead to success. 

Steve Gladis: Yeah, I would say they’re not. Unless they begin to work together and share leads and do additive work together, they’re really not a team. You might as well just have five different companies. That isn’t to say that they can’t have their own teams. If you’re in tech sales, you need to have a tech guy and engineer with you, yet you don’t want them talking themselves to the client. You want them as a technical backup, maybe working with you, but typically you want the sales guy talking in English so that the customer can understand. I know, I’ve done this before, and believe me, I love my tech guys, but sometimes they talk at a level that people can’t understand. 

That could be a team in itself, but the team above it, all those sales guys and sales managers, they should be working toward a common goal that allows for cross-functional stuff, a lot of interdependence. The more interdependence you have with teams, the more likely they are to hold together. I know it’s difficult because a lot of sales guys want to be, “Hey, I made my quota. I don’t care about your quota.” There is a company that you’re working for whose quota really matters, and that’s the essential role that I think companies should acquiesce to, if you would call it. 

Fred Diamond: I think we should go through all six and then we’ll come back and then I’ll have some clarifying questions, because I’m thinking like, so the guy or woman who leads that team that we’re talking about, he or she has a quota that they want to achieve. In theory, the entire, quote/unquote, group, I wonder if I should even use the word team or just say group. 

Steve Gladis: Most of them are groups, yeah, they really are groups, gatherings, gaggles, if you will, but they’re not teams. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s go through the list here and we’ll come back and see if we can put it together. 

Steve Gladis: Do you have the right people? Is there diversity in your group? If you look around and they’re all men, you’ve got a team that’s a problem. If it becomes a team and not just a group, you’ve got a team that’s not going to win. Some research talks about 50% women is probably where you want to be if you want a team that actually works well together. Do they have the skills that you need? Are they trained? You keep training them on new skills. If your sales teams aren’t using AI, I won’t call them stupid, but they’re behind the curve. They’re going to lose. It’s skillfully using AI. There’s AI and there’s AI. It’s this idea of the right people? 

The third one is, do you have a compelling purpose? Does the team have what we would consider a compelling purpose? I had a guy in here yesterday, I said, “What’s your future goal?” 

He says, “$10 million.” 

I said, “Do you think that’s going to really excite people that’s the goal? That excites you because you want the money, but that’s not vision. Your vision is to be the leader in your area, to break new ground, to excite people, and things like that.” That’s what people get excited about, is this idea of a sense of purpose and challenge of what you’re doing for the industry, not $10 million. A number never gets people excited. 

Then the three enabling conditions are, is there a sound structure? Is your team designed around a team goal? Do you have the right team size? If you have a team of more than nine people, it no longer is a team. It’s what we used to call a hootenanny, a bunch of people getting together and having a good time, or not. Then is there a sense of team norms in terms of this team structure? What are our norms? What do we hire and fire over? What are the things we expect of people in our teams? 

The fifth one is support, that people have the reward. This is really important for sales teams. Do they have the rewards that they need? Most sales teams, as you know, people are rewarded based on their quotas. What we would suggest is that you can certainly reward people, but you should reward the team. It should be a team component that says, “Hey, as a team, we made the goal,” so that there’s more likelihood that people will work together toward that common goal of the manager, of the company. 

The last thing is, does the team have, and also do we have information that we need? Do we have the education, stuff like that, and the resources that we need? I was working with one group that didn’t have nearly any amount of resources they need to be successful, until they had that. When they finally got that, they succeeded, but it was because they were so under-sourced, so to speak. 

The last one is team coaching, and that is, do you have somebody who’s actually getting the team together periodically to work on the team, not in the team? That’s a real important deal. A lot of people, like in marriage, they work in the marriage and they do the day-to-day stuff, but they don’t really work on the marriage. They don’t really go out for dinner. They don’t sit down and talk. They don’t go on vacations by themselves. That’s what we mean by working on the team. 

We work with teams usually on a monthly basis for a year, really, to get them working together and talking about, “Hey, what are some of the things that we’re doing right? What are some of the things we need to change? How do we need to change with this new AI stuff? We’ve got a lot of employees that are upset about being laid off. What are we going to do? How are we going to present that?” Those are the kinds of things we talk about on a monthly basis and we’ve problem solved with them. 

The teams that work together like that over time with an outside coach, it doesn’t even have to be an outside coach, you can use an interior coach, but bigger teams, more sophisticated teams really need an outside coach to help them work through some of the issues. Those are the six issues. 

Fred Diamond: At the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we have a couple of programs. We have our Women in Sales Leadership Forum, which basically works for women in sales leaders, typically director and above, from companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Carahsoft, etc. We have a program that we’re very excited about, which is called Emerging Sales Leader Program. Those are typically men and women who are entering management or leadership for the first time. A lot of times, Steve, those people are good individual performers who get promoted. You’re our top sales guy. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to put you inside leading a team. We don’t always find that that’s the right fit. That’s a classic conundrum of organizational growth. 

Give us some of your advice for companies that are bringing new people into sales leadership for the first time. Maybe they’re managing the inside sales group or a bunch of SDRs or a small territory. We’ve always found that those people are left on their own. Especially over the last couple years, there’s been a lot more of, “Okay, Bill, you’re promoted,” or, “Sue, here’s your salary increase,” here’s whatever it might be. What would be your advice for companies to ensure that those people are successful? 

Steve Gladis: The old conundrum is the car salesman. You promote the best salesman to manager, you lose your best salesman and you get a lousy manager. That’s the old joke, and it’s true. What I would suggest, especially depending on the size of the company, if you’re going to promote somebody where millions of dollars are at stake, or hundreds of thousands, I would invest in some form of coaching. 

One of my former clients, and now coming back to me, is starting to do something we told them 10 years ago to do, which is to develop a leadership development organization so that you get to promote people from potentials to managers to vice presidents, create a process by which people can learn what it is to be a manager. I am pushing this book because I think it’s that good. There’s a book called The Four Elements of a Great Team Leader, which if you took that book today and had somebody internal who knew something about training, you could convert that into a leadership process. It’s based on a ton of research. It’s easy to understand. Those are the kinds of things that I would do. I would just adopt the book at a minimum. But if you can’t afford to get a coach and if you can’t afford that, develop a training organization within your own organization to sustain itself, also to move it through a process of leadership development. If you’re not investing in leadership development, you’re not going to get leaders. You’re going to have a lot of failures. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to that example you just used, where the top sales rep is now promoted to manager. I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s got to be relatively high, where the sales rep gets into that role and they’re happy about it, but then they realize they’re making less money, they’re working harder. Now they have the headaches of eight people on their team as compared to just their own. Can those people be saved? Can people who find themselves, “You know what? This isn’t really what I wanted.” Can a company make them successful? Or what have you found? Is it best just to push them back to become an IC, individual contributor, or can those people be developed into great managers? 

Steve Gladis: I think anybody can be. I don’t think great managers are born. They don’t come out of the womb and say, “I’m going to be the Batman of the world.” That never happens. Everything is a learned behavior. It just depends on whether, A, the person wants to learn it, and B, the company’s willing to help them sustain that. What happens is small companies don’t invest in things like that until there’s a real problem. You see 25 million, I’m just giving you numbers, 25 million or so, they really get stuck getting serious about this. Then 50 million, they really are serious about it, because they realize that they’re starting to lose people to other companies. Then it becomes a competitive advantage. 

You want to build a culture that people stay with. People stay with cultures if they trust you. In terms of trust, there’s three elements of trust. Does the company have character to it? Does it do what it says it’s going to do? Is the company made of competence? The people in the company, the leaders, are they competent? Thirdly, and most importantly, is caring. Does this company care enough about me to train me to invest in me? If you have those three things, character, as a company, competence and caring, you’ll keep people a long time. 

Turnover is the most expensive thing you can have. I’d rather work with somebody to keep them who’s been successful in the culture rather than get the money. If they want to revert back to it, and some do, they want to go back to selling because this isn’t what I really wanted to do. When I started a company, I didn’t want to start a company that had 1,000 people in it. I just wanted a small company that I could do the things I like to do. That’s a real decision you have to make. 

Fred Diamond: I have a question about the original thing you said. The two sets, the first is essential. The number one thing is, is it really a team? Let’s go back to the example I used before, where someone in a large company manages eight people. All the eight people have their individual responsibilities, their accounts, their quotas. Of course, it rolls up to me as the leader of the team. But in reality, they’re not really a team. They’re eight people who have quotas that they need to achieve. But I still need them to perform. 

Even though it’s not really a team, does that really matter in this case? Is that, “Okay, you know what? We really don’t have a team. I just need to make sure that eight of the individuals perform as well as they could.” Or is there value in me trying to do things to make them a team, although they’re not responsible for each other’s quotas and they don’t back cover. Maybe they talk to each other, maybe some of the older ones mentor, I’ll let you take that question. 

Steve Gladis: No, I think it’s the latter. I think if you really wanted to be a team, you’re always going to get X percentage out of treating it like a group, where you have four individual sales teams of five teams like that. You’re always going to get a certain level of performance, but you’re not going to get winning team performance. You just won’t. Even an executive team where marketing and sales and CMO and so forth, when they don’t work on common threaded things like talent development or budget performance, when they don’t work on things that cross each other, and they don’t knit together with a common set of goals, they don’t work as well and you turn people over. When people start to work together and talk about, “Okay, sure, you can have individual responsibilities, but there’s also team responsibilities.” I might be a father, but I also am a businessman, I’m this and that. We’re not just one thing. I think that’s where teams make mistakes, especially sales teams. 

I come from a family of sales. I know how to sell, I’ve taught sales, my family was in sales. I know what that’s like to covet your leads and build clients up and take care of your team, and this is my team. What you don’t want is internal competitiveness. You want external competitive and internal collaboration, whatever you have to do. We help teams set up goals, objectives, norms. We actually have strategies for each team. We know the corporate strategy, but we have a strategy for, how is this team going to work? That’s an important distinction, I think. 

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of new sales leaders, sales managers. They’ve been promoted and it’s tough. Like I said before, a lot of times they’re tapped on the shoulder and the company may invest in some things, but there’s not a whole lot of classes for sales managers. Some great books, there is some great curriculum, but a lot of times companies won’t invest, but they will send people to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling to participate in our programs. 

If you had to recommend two things to the sales leader, the new sales leader, tell me the two things that you would recommend to them to get them on a path of much larger career success. Again, just promoted, you’re now managing six people. As a matter of fact, my daughter was just promoted. She works at Hershey’s and she was an individual contributor, had a territory, and she was just promoted to manage six people in a brand-new territory. What would you tell her? Sales leader, sales manager, her name is Abby, what are the two things that you would tell her to focus on to ensure she’s on a path of success? 

Steve Gladis: I would say number one, find a mentor. Find somebody that really cares about you as a person and talk to them, have somebody to talk to, because you’re going to run up against all kinds of things. Have somebody you can turn to and say, “Hey, this guy’s doing this. Got any thoughts on that? You’ve been through this?” “Yeah, I’ve been through this 20 times. Here’s what I’ve done.” Maybe it won’t work for you, because not everybody can do the same thing. First of all, I’d say try to find a mentor. 

The second thing, honest to God, and this is so self-serving I almost hate to say it, read that book, The Four Elements of a Great Team Leader. It is 60 pages long, it’s got a 10-page summary in the beginning, and it is the result of 25 years of research on teams. I’m telling you, it’s worth her looking at. She will get it immediately. If she has questions about it, I’m always open to a phone call. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, we spoke to Dr. Steve Gladis today. Steve, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. You’ve given us so many great ideas that people need to take advantage of to be successful as a sales leader, and it’s the most challenging time. Like I said, we’ve gone through so much in the last 18 months, but you still need to perform, and you still need to lead teams, and you still need to serve your customer. The most effective way you can serve your customer, I agree with what you’re saying, is to build strong teams so that you’re addressing what they need to achieve, and you’re thinking about all the elements that are part of their equation there. 

Give us one specific action step. You just gave us two for my daughter, Abby, but one more for sales leaders out there that you recommend they do right now. Mentor was great, read the book, The Four Elements of a Great Team Leader, give us one final thing to leave us off here. 

Steve Gladis: I would say start thinking like a team, not a group. Start thinking about if we were a basketball team, start thinking basketball, not golf. People love golf, I’m not trying to piss off the golfers here, but I’m not talking about adding up low scores and we win or whatever. I’m talking about start thinking like a basketball team. That’s the analogy I use all the time. It really works. If you think about, what are the things you can work on together while still performing in your individual silos? That would be my hope. 

Fred Diamond: I like that. Shifting the mentality of actually being part of a team. As you were talking before about the Bulls, I’m visualizing how those team together in the various roles. On most of those teams, you have two or three world-class leaders and then you have other people who do other things, who get rebounds, who focus on defense or whatever it might be. 

Once again, Dr. Steve Gladis, I’m glad we finally had you on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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Today’s show featured an interview with Shiraz Hasan, Head of Channel Sales at AT&T.

Find Shiraz on LinkedIn.

SHIRAZ’ TIP: “Always take the time to understand the outcome your customer is trying to achieve. Focus the discussion on solving that business problem, and let the sale happen naturally behind it.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. We’re doing a lot of shows now with those who are leading channels and alliances. AT&T, one of the greatest brands in the history of technology and communication, Shiraz Hasan, I’m excited. We’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026. I’m really excited to hear what AT&T is doing and how AT&T is transforming partner relationships, etc. 

Shiraz, give us a brief introduction. Let us know who you are. We have some great questions lined up I’m excited to get to. 

Shiraz Hasan: I run AT&T’s Alliance Channel. What that means is I have responsibility over the value-added reseller, the technology solutions distributor community, or the TSDs, and we have our SP channel. In layman’s term, if I’m responsible for AT&T’s distribution through third party, where we do the resell through medium, small, and large businesses, and we allow these partners to help us sell into each one of these different segments of the business. 

I just hit two years in this program with AT&T. I actually started my career early on at AT&T, did about 14, 15 years, did a lot of work in the IoT space, then went out and did a couple of startup stints and worked in the UCaaS space and then came back about two years ago and excited to be here. 

Fred Diamond: AT&T is such a broad brand, obviously one of the longest brands of all time. I use AT&T for my phone service, but give us a little more perspective on what are some of the AT&T products that are sold into the marketplace via the channel so that people understand who we’re talking to and what you do. 

Shiraz Hasan: AT&T is a very large organization. We have our consumer segment, an online segment, and the AT&T business segment. We operate within the AT&T business segment and I run what we call indirect distribution for our business customers. The idea is to take our fiber and mobile products and services that we offer out to our customers, leveraging the vast presence our channel has and allow our partners to be able to solve customer problems, leveraging our mobile 5G, IoT, and fiber capabilities. 

Fred Diamond: It’s an interesting time. We do a lot of shows with the OEM and the manufacturers and it’s a challenging time for the channel to show its value. We talk about that frequently. I’m excited to get some of your ideas on that. Partner-first, what does partner-first actually look like at AT&T today, day to day? Where are most partners succeeding and where do you think some of the partners are getting it wrong? 

Shiraz Hasan: I’ll start with partner-first. It’s not just a slogo internally for us. It’s really become how we operate day to day. The idea really is to make sure that we make it simple and frictionless for our partners to be able to do business with us and be able to take our connectivity products and services out to the customers. We don’t have enough feet on the street from a direct sales perspective. We have a fantastic online presence, but we can’t get to all the customers that we want to get to through an omnichannel approach. We really, truly decided as a strategy for the company to really expand our distribution, especially in business, and leverage the partner ecosystem and allow the customers to operate with us in the manner that they want to leveraging the partner’s breadth and space. 

The other thing that I’ll say is companies that get it wrong are the ones that try to fit the partners into a model that they already have and try to work around the friction. What we’re trying to really do over the last couple of years, and our results are showing it last year and this year especially, is we are creating an environment in which it becomes easier and easier, reduces the number of handoffs that the partners have to go through to solve the business problem that they’re looking for the end customers. 

Partners have choices. They can work with many different carriers and vendors. Our goal is to make the process simple, easy, frictionless, and do we run into problems still? Yes, of course, but it is to me the best experience in the industry. They come and talk to us and they engage our channel teams into extending our mobile and fiber services out to our customers. 

Fred Diamond: What is the average tenure for the partners? I’m presuming you’ve worked with for scores. You mentioned looking to bring in new. Give us the mix, if you will. 

Shiraz Hasan: I think from an AT&T perspective, we have multiple different programs within the channel. We have a wholesale channel that a peer of mine runs. Within the retail channel, I have four or five different programs. We have the value-added reseller program, we have the TSD program and we have our SP program. The tenure in each one really is different. We have partners that have been with us for 10, 12, 15 years. We have some partners that have many employees within their organizations that are former AT&T folks, that know our systems, know our processes, and have a strong level of comfort with how to go get things done within our environment and they can help us navigate the partner environment, so it varies. 

Since I’ve taken the program over, we also have added a lot of newer partners that have seen some of the friction that we’ve taken away from the system and joined the program. We have a good slew of new. What I tell all the partners that have joined the program is we don’t believe for a second that we know everything on how it needs to be done in a partner program. We have a pretty good idea it’s working extremely well, but we are very open to partners coming in, providing some input, and continue to formulate this program in a way that best fits for them. We leverage the experience we have with the partners. We’re also taking the learnings from the new folks that are coming in as well. 

Fred Diamond: Things are changing everywhere. I like that there are former AT&T people in the channel who are willing to give you that feedback. They also understand the internal systems and how to get things done. How is AT&T partner solutions designed around how partners actually sell and scale today versus maybe how vendors wish that they would? 

Shiraz Hasan: We have multiple options for our partners that are out there. We have a wholesale program. Partners that want to own the customer, rebrand our connectivity, and sell it under a different brand, we allow our partners to do that. I have a peer of mine, she runs that business. Then within the resell program, there’s partners that predominantly play in what I will call the hardware space, from a mobility perspective. They’re selling routers, monitors, printers, tablets, even non-stock handsets. They just want an easy, simple way to extend our mobile connectivity out into those devices. We have a value-added resell program that does that. 

Then we have partners that are predominantly focused on fiber. They just want to be able to quote, price, and contract customers as quickly as possible in a very effective way. They want us to be able to provide that service fast. We work through them in a slightly different model under the TSD space. 

What’s unique about our program and what a lot of the partners run is our overall converged strategy. We have a very strong fiber network and we are one of the leaders in the wireless 5G space. What we’ve been able to do is across all these different programs work with our partners and expand their distribution and their offerings by saying, working with AT&T. Not only you can offer a fiber solution, but you can also take those customers who you’ve sold fiber to and then go back and sell mobility. Same goes the other way around. If you’ve sold a lot of mobility, you can go back and sell fiber. 

What is really great in multiple experiences that I’ve had with this channel is our channel partners do a phenomenal job of building a trusted relationship with these customers. Once they’ve bought something from them to sell that second, third, fourth product, it’s a lot easier for these partners. It’s upon us to continue to just enable them with the multiple products that we have in the portfolio and just allow them to take that to the market. 

Fred Diamond: Probably the most uttered word in the history of the over 850 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes is trust. It’s so critical right now. Customers are challenged with so many things. We are as vendors, of course, the channel, but customers are challenged with so many things with the end users and servicing them quickly as the customer gets access to more information. It was that they were getting more information over the last 15, 20 years because of the internet, and as we all know, over the last 18 some odd months, getting access from AI has definitely hastened that. It’s made us sharpen the game. It’s made the partners sharpen the game and those of us who are working with the partners. Where does the indirect channel give AT&T a competitive advantage that direct sales just isn’t able to cover? 

Shiraz Hasan: I think it’s multiple aspects of it. First and foremost is reach. We just don’t have enough feet on the street to be able to reach all the customers that we want to go. That cuts across our enterprise space, our public sector space, and even when you get into medium and small business spaces. 

The other thing is partners have this trusted relationship with the end customers. They have the ability to also bring in multiple aspects of the solutions that surround the connectivity aspect. They have UCaaS, CCaaS security, and a lot of life cycle management services that they are brilliant at performing for the end customers. If you’re a medium and small size business, and I’ll just use that as an example for a second, you really don’t want to worry about the speed at which the internet’s going to come in, or how many gigabytes or terabytes of data I’m going to use. 

What you want to be able to say, “Hey, the business problem that I have, can this connectivity solution, encompassed with other products and services, allow me to run my business effectively and efficiently and worry free?” If we can answer those three questions with a yes, most medium and small businesses that don’t have typically a large IT staff or aren’t looking to employ a lot of folks to go manage this, prefer to do business with these partners because they not only provide that solution, they provide many services around it where the partner can go sell the solution to the customer and they can forget it. It just works month in and month out and it continues to allow them to run the business that they are in versus worrying about the connectivity. 

Fred Diamond: You’ve mentioned the word frictionless a couple of times. I worked at Apple Computer in the beginning of my career in channel management. We had an expression, make it easy to do business with Apple. There were signs all over the warehouses and customer service centers. You mentioned how you’re trying to remove the friction. What are some of the biggest friction points? It’s interesting, a lot of people who are listening to the podcast, are looking for ways to get better, from the OEM, to the partner, to the customer. What are some of the biggest friction points that partners face today? How are you, Shiraz Hasan, and the partner organization at AT&T trying to remove them? 

Shiraz Hasan: I would say we’ve done a couple of things. Number one is we have taken direct and indirect channel friction out of the equation across all segments. We’ve simplified our ROE, or rules of engagement model. When you’re a partner with the AT&T partner solutions organization, you no longer have to worry about where an entity may sit within inside of AT&T business. If you bring us business, if it’s net new to us and it’s incremental, there’s a simplified single rules of engagement across the board for you. That was the number one feedback I heard as I came onboard. I’ve got to give a lot of credit to my team. They provided really great feedback of if we want to truly scale, this is the one thing that we’ve got to do. We’ve taken that off the table. 

The other thing that we’ve also done is internally, we’ve invested in tools and processes. we’re continuing to do that over the next couple of years. That is adding some velocity at which our partners can get price, quote, and when they get a customer nodding and saying, “Yes, I’m ready to move forward,” a contract out to that end customer. If you’re a partner listening, those are the things you expect from your partners or supplier. Those are the things where we have made a lot of investment in removing the friction by simplifying the ROE, improving your experience. 

Do we believe we still have some work to do on the experience side? Absolutely. But I would tell you what I tell the founders and the entrepreneurs that are in this world that I love working with, is don’t judge us on how things have been historically. Judge the managers on how they are today and are they better than where they have been. I would say any partner, Fred, that you talk to of ours, they will tell you they were better 12 months ago than 24 months ago, and they are much better now than they were 12 months. It’s a commitment of AT&T’s continued investment and there isn’t an entity within AT&T business or into AT&T that isn’t committed to this cause to make sure that we get our distribution right. 

Fred Diamond: I’m glad to hear that. How long has AT&T been in business? It’s got to be 150 years. 

Shiraz Hasan: We just celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the first phone call. I don’t know if you saw that or not, but absolutely, it’s been a very long time. 

Fred Diamond: It’s amazing because customers are changing and business is changing. Like you said, a year ago or two years ago, it became apparent that if a customer calls in, we need to get them to where they need to get to. As compared to, I’ve seen so many companies fail at this, where they tell their customer, “You’re calling the wrong place,” or, “You need to deal with this,” which doesn’t make sense with their business. I applaud you for the awareness to make changes like that. 

Let’s talk a little bit about flexibility models. Your team has mentioned like reseller and co-sale. How does it translate into growth for partners? A pre-question is, do most of your partners want to grow? Is that something that they’re coming to you with? “Shiraz Hasan, here’s my goal. We want to grow, either into this market or new revenue.” Is that a common thread that you hear with resellers? 

Shiraz Hasan: Absolutely. I think partners absolutely want to grow. What we consistently hear is they want to grow and they want to grow profitably for the business. They’re willing to make investments into their respective companies. What they’re asking us is for stability and simplification of ROE. We’ve done that. They’ve given us tremendous amount of feedback on how do we make it simpler and easier from a systems and a tools perspective for them to do business with us. There isn’t a single partner that we sit down, whether we do QBRs or the ones that are on advisory councils with us, when they come in and advise. They’re consistently talking to us about the investments they’re making and their growth path. 

One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve also aligned our, for example, the organization that I run, is the channel manager goals. If you’re supporting a partner, your success is dependent upon the success of that same partner. We’ve aligned channel management team roles and responsibilities and their success metrics to the partners that they’re supporting. We’re in the boat with you, we make money when you make money as a team and as an organization. We want to make sure that every piece of business that’s coming in is coming in profitably and is coming in the right way. Most of our partners are raising their hands and going, “Sign me up, I’m all in.” 

We’ve made this an extremely collaborative experience because I truly believe, if our partners are successful and they’re able to grow in a profitable manner, it’ll automatically grow our business. With the distribution conversation I just had, it’ll grow the overall AT&T business the right way if we’re able to do that. 

Fred Diamond: As you’re saying that, I’m reminded, unfortunately, of how frequently not everybody realizes that, that it needs to be win-win and bringing value to the customer. I’m going to give you an opportunity to get specific. How should partners be thinking about leveraging AT&T’s leadership in fiber and 5G to drive revenue in areas like AI, IoT, and the edge? Give some specific examples here of that’s a value-added opportunity. Give us the pitch on that. 

Shiraz Hasan: I think if you’re a partner listening to this and you’re thinking about partnering with someone in the communication space, we are very uniquely positioned with one of the largest fiber footprints and we have publicly stated that we are also making huge investments into expanding that fiber infrastructure. Then you couple that with the investment we’re making in 5G, some of the acquisitions that we’ve recently made that give us the spectrum and the capacity to continue to enhance our mobile capabilities. If you’re looking at where the growth in this industry is going to come from, it is really going to come from taking advantage of the high bandwidth, high speed circuits that are going to empower all the data that’s going to get generated through the investments that are going on in AI, Fred. 

We are working with very large customers, including hyperscalers, where they need bigger and bigger pipes. Our partners can help us deliver those pipes as well to the end customers. Our partners are also selling IoT 5G solutions for us, whether it’s in the sensor data, whether it’s for fixed wireless solutions, and they can take advantage of the investment we’ve made in fiber and mobility to formulate customer solutions for the end customers and solve the problem. 

As AI becomes more and more prevalent, when you’re looking at working with partners that are in the data center space or are really looking to innovate with AI, you can work with those customers and go leverage AT&T’s fiber capabilities to help them transmit that data in a reliable, secure way from one data center to the other, or to the edge where they really need the compute power at times. 

Fred Diamond: This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast and we’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026. What is your advice for alliance managers, for channel partner managers? How can they be as valuable and successful as they can be today? If you had someone who’s on your team or someone who’s thinking about joining AT&T, what would be your advice for them to optimize their career opportunities right now? 

Shiraz Hasan: I would say two things. Number one, look to make sure that this is the best place for you. Take the time to understand our channel program that we have, bring the relationships that you have with the entities in the ecosystem with you. There are many different ways we go to market within AT&T business, whether it’s direct or in the indirect space. Find what you are passionate about. I’m a strong believer in if you wake up in the morning and you’re excited and happy about what you do, you are automatically a few percentages more productive and helpful. 

If you truly want to help medium, small, large businesses grow along with the company that you work for, channel is the best place for you to be in, because we partner with companies across that spectrum and help them grow. If you like working in a collaborative manner and helping solve business problems, be in the channel sales program. If you like building programs, we have a great channel marketing team as well. We can add you to there as well. If you’re a partner listening to this and are looking to join a partner ecosystem that is growing at double digit growth rates, and you want to get on the AI, 5G, IoT, and the fiber growth that we’re on, come and join us. 

Fred Diamond: If a channel CEO came to you and said, “Shiraz, what could we be doing better?” You mentioned opportunities business-wise, but from a sales perspective, from a business development perspective, what would be your advice to a standard typical AT&T partner who said, “What should I be doing better, Shiraz, to be more successful?” 

Shiraz Hasan: I think one of the things that I would say is, first and foremost, listen. Take a step back and listen to your partner community. Don’t try and impose a one-size-fit-all policy. I think you’ve got to have some flexibility in the type of programs you have. Work with the partners in the way that they want to go to market, and most importantly, keep the end customer in mind. What is the industry, what is the segment that that’s a sweet spot in for, and design your program with some flexibility around that. If you get those two or three things right and then create a model that’s frictionless like we talked about earlier, Fred, I think those are the recipes for a beautiful, beautiful program, from my perspective. 

Fred Diamond: Shiraz Hasan, congratulations on your success. A lot of great things are happening at AT&T. Appreciate all the insights. For people listening to the show or reading the transcript right now, give us one specific action that the selling professionals listening should take right now at this moment after having just listened to the show to get more success. 

Shiraz Hasan: Having been in sales for about 20 years now and having done direct sales, indirect sales, technology sales, I would say for anyone that goes into sales, and I say this to one of my kids who is starting college now and is looking to get into business development, had his first door-to-door sales job this past summer, and he did great, is always take the time to understand the outcome your customer is driving to do. Focus the discussion on solving that business problem and let the sale happen naturally behind it and you’ll always be successful in sales. 

Fred Diamond: Great advice. Once again, Shiraz Hasan with AT&T, thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 849: How Shiraz Hasan is Building a Partner-First Growth Strategy at AT&T first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is the third episode of AI and Sales Brief, a new 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 is not only a virtual coach. It is baked into the process. When you make something easier and better for a salesperson, adoption happens.”

TOM’S TIP: “For at least the past 70 years, companies have struggled to adopt best practices and move from exposure or training to habit and mastery. Now, with AI, you can create what is essentially a full-time, never-sleeping, always-ready, always-helping coach.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I am excited to be joined by sales experts Tom Snyder from Funnel Clarity and Zeev Wexler. You may recognize them both, as they have been frequent guests on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Each week, we focus on a sales challenge and talk about how AI can help solve it.  

The question we are going to tackle this week is one you have both raised before: AI solves the biggest problem sales organizations face when trying to adopt best practices. Tom, what does that mean? 

Tom Snyder: For at least the past 70 years, companies have struggled to adopt best practices and move from exposure or training to habit and mastery. That is not because people are necessarily resistant. It is because of how the human brain works. 

For an adult to adopt a new behavior, it takes much more than simple exposure, no matter how much that person wants to do it. Adoption requires leaders, managers, and enablement teams to spend time and energy reinforcing the behavior. Because those people already have a lot to do, that reinforcement often gets shortchanged or ignored. 

Now, with AI, you can create what is essentially a full-time, never-sleeping, always-ready, always-helping coach. It becomes a virtual digital coach for each individual and each manager. That removes much of the friction from adoption. As Zeev will describe, AI can amplify that even further with all the other capabilities it provides. 

This is magic, and I wish people understood that I am not simply trying to sell something. I have been in this industry for 30 years, and there has never been a tectonic moment like this. What Zeev can bring to the table is absolute magic in terms of accelerating sales performance, from onboarding a new person to changing the behaviors of a veteran salesperson who resists everything because old habits are blended into the nature of the job. It is not seen as an independent activity. 

Zeev, I hope I have not muddied the waters too much, but this is really where the magic is.  

Zeev Wexler: You never do, Tom, and thank you.  

In sports, when a team goes through pressure, it does not matter how much coaching they have received. In the moment, people tend to revert to what they habitually do. AI can do even more than what my brilliant colleague just described. It is not only a virtual coach; it is baked into the processes. 

AI can make it easier for salespeople to follow best practices throughout the entire process, from prospecting to preparation, the sale itself, and follow-up. The best practices are built into the workflow, so it becomes easier for the salesperson to do the right thing. It flows inside the process and becomes part of everything they do. 

It is not just an AI or digital coach telling them, ‘You should do this.’ It is built into the process. When you make something easier and better for a salesperson, adoption happens. If you tell them, ‘This will help, but you need to do A, B, and C,’ and it is not the way they are used to working, they will naturally push back. But when you bring it into the process, it is right there. It is easier, faster, quicker, and more cost-effective. 

That makes it much easier for salesforces to adopt AI and use artificial intelligence the right way. I have said this to you many times, Fred: AI works on what worked before AI. If a process worked before, AI can supercharge that process. If you can make it easier, faster, and smoother for the salesperson, then magic can happen. Salespeople can sell more, prospect more, prepare better, follow up better, and ultimately close more sales. 

When you build these AI processes, all of the brilliant scientific facts that Tom brings in are already included. Everything happens through the process the salesperson is using, and it is easier than the process was before. It is simply much better. I hope that makes sense. 

Tom Snyder: Can I amplify that? Because that was excellent. 

Let us take a real-world example. One of the things we teach falls under the rubric of opportunity management. That is just the title. The centerpiece is a process we call the Strategic Opportunity Plan. It asks the seller to organize different pieces of information: Who is making the decision? What role are they playing? What are they trying to fix, accomplish, or avoid? What criteria matter to them? 

As that landscape emerges, each time you acquire information, you are able to create more precise next-best actions. Those actions help you either close the business quickly or get it out of the funnel. 

Isn’t that exactly what you mean by a process? Isn’t that exactly what you are talking about? This is what makes me so excited. To expect a salesperson to do what I just described as a separate tool is unrealistic. When they do it, they discover it is unbelievable. But now, with AI, it is simple, easy, and frictionless. I am telling you, Zeev, you are a wizard. 

Zeev Wexler: Thank you, my friend. This is very important. 

A lot of people push back on AI and say, ‘AI makes us stop thinking. It makes us less smart.’ This is the opposite. AI will ask you the right questions. It will push back if you are not giving the correct answers. It will give you data that it can fetch online in seconds and say, ‘I think this is incorrect because this is what your client is saying.’ 

All of this is built in, and it is as easy as answering the questions. If you do not answer them the way you should, which many salespeople do not, then there is constructive pushback. Now you have the right next move. You are thinking more clearly about what your client wants. The process is better, the result is better, and there is less friction. It is quicker and better. 

Fred Diamond:  Absolutely. 

Gentlemen, one of the things the IEPS is most proud of is our Selling Essentials Marketplace. We have hand-selected best-of-breed partners in sales performance improvement. We brought together Funnel Clarity and Zeev’s company to produce an AI for sales solution. Anyone can reach out to me, Tom, or Zeev to learn more. 

Tom, can you give us a brief look at what that solution looks like? 

Tom Snyder: Yes. This is what Zeev and I are really excited about. We have recognized that together, we are more than the sum of the parts. There is great amplification on both sides. 

This is not simply a matter of bolting AI onto some best practice from Funnel Clarity. This is about weaving these threads into a beautiful tapestry of performance. It makes everything about AI adoption, AI clarity, and sales performance excellence more frictionless, easier, and more supportive. 

It significantly amplifies what sales professionals are expected to do. I will leave it at that. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. It is a great solution, and I am very excited to bring it to the marketplace. Reach out to me, Fred Diamond, Tom Snyder, or Zeev Wexler. 

Once again, every Monday morning, we tackle a sales challenge on the AI and Sales Brief Podcast, a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.  

The post EPISODE 848: The Biggest Sales Challenge AI Can Finally Fix 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!

Today’s show featured an interview with Barb Huelskamp, Global Vice President of Channels and Alliances at SolarWinds.

Find Barb on LinkedIn.

BARB’S TIP: “Stomp out imposter syndrome. Stomp out fear. I took some fearless leaps early on that I think at this point in my career I would be a little scared to, but I did, and they paid off.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Barb, I’m very excited. We’re going to be interviewing Barb Huelskamp with SolarWinds. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Barb, as I told you, we’re launching our Partner Growth Program from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. We actually had our 16th Annual Award Event this week. We’re doing the interview with Barb in May of 2026. We’re going to be launching the Partner Growth Program in July of 2026. Basically, what we’re looking to do, as we always do at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, is helping selling professionals become much more effective. 

There are so many challenges that have happened over the last 18 months in so many different parts of the B2B and B2G marketplace and selling environment that people need new things. They need to look at their jobs differently because their customers are different. There’s been reduction in force and there’s been customers who have chosen to change. A lot of the dynamics of the channel and the ecosystem have shifted. I’m very excited. 

You recently did a trip to Italy and you learn five leadership principles, which I’m very excited to delve deep into. But before we get to them, give us a little bit of an introduction. Tell the audience who you are. Did you see that Kevin James movie that came out a couple of months ago? It was called Solo Mio. Kevin James was getting married in the Tuscany region and he was stood up at the altar, not to spoil it for anybody who hasn’t seen it. But the imagery of Italy was just amazing, and the hills and the food and the vineyards. I just encourage people just to glance, just for the scenery. I’m sure you’re going to be intimating some of that as you go through your leadership principles, but just give us the introduction. Tell us who you are, and I’m very excited to delve into this. 

Barb Huelskamp: I’m the vice president of our global channels and alliances here at SolarWinds. Been here just over a year and excited to learn about your Partner Growth Program because I think we’re, like many of the organizations that you mentioned, really elevating our channel organization to be strategic stakeholders and advisors to our partners. I think our teams have done a great job really leveling up to more strategic conversations on how we can help our partners, and driving great customer outcomes together, and we’ve got to do that at speed. We’ve got some great innovation on our platform. Tech is moving very fast. Customer demands are changing. AI is driving more efficiencies. Really proud of the team globally and a lot of what we’ve accomplished since I’ve been here together. 

Fred Diamond: Give us a brief intro to SolarWinds for people who don’t know what your company does. 

Barb Huelskamp: We are an IT monitoring, observation, and reliability platform. We help monitor everything on your network, in the cloud, devices. We were talking about some really cool use cases with the government this week with drones and other secured assets. We have a broad partner base of resellers, distributors, MSPs, GSIs, strong relationships with some of the hyperscalers as well. 

Fred Diamond: Your trip to Italy. When did you go to Italy? 

Barb Huelskamp: I’m back about two weeks. We spent two weeks there. It was a bucket list trip. We actually planned back in 2020 and it got canceled because of COVID. We spent some time replanning that and finally got to go this year. We started north at Milan and worked our way down all the way to the Amalfi Coast. I’ve got a wonderful friend who is a travel agent. She hooked us up with an amazing agenda that I probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out on my own, or didn’t have the time to figure out on my own. Beautiful stops, like you said, the countryside is gorgeous there, and every city has its own culture, has its own history, has its own views and beat to the town. Milan was very different than Rome, which was very different than the Amalfi Coast. Trip of a lifetime. 

As we trained from city to city, we flew into Milan and then trained from city to city, I started taking notes. I just wanted to take some notes because I was making a photo book. But as I started taking some notes about the experience, I’m like, “There are some really cool business lessons in here that I want to bring forward,” because even though I took the break to just disconnect, I was making these connections quite easily to lessons learned and applying them to business. 

Fred Diamond: It’s interesting. I’ve been to Italy many times, but it’s always been on business. I’ve spent a lot of time in Milan. I remember the first time I went to Milan, my boss, who sent me on a business trip, said, “By the way, Fred, it’s like the Pittsburgh of Italy.” But once you go deep into it, it obviously has all the beauty and the opera and the fashion, there’s so much to it. 

Let’s get started. Your first lesson, be local globally. Give us some insights into that. 

Barb Huelskamp: If you’re a global leader, you need to understand culture and expectations. That’s essential. But being in the region allows you to experience that firsthand. You better understand, you really have to get local if you’re in a global role. Italy reminded me, they move at a little bit slower pace, they appreciate the simplicity, and the lesson I brought back with me just overall was let’s make sure we don’t overcomplicate things. The mindset that we have shaping our new partner program, we kept that in mind, launching with the basics, driven by direct feedback from our partners. Then layering in the nuances, getting back to that be local globally, making sure that you adjust to the regional nuances to accommodate emerging markets. 

Our program is simple at its core. We wanted to make sure we didn’t overcomplicate it in unnecessary ways. We pre-briefed and collaborated with partners in every region to make sure that we stayed ahead of what the local learnings would be, driving different benefits and requirements by geo and country group. Just being there reminded me, and I remember going back and looking at our benefits and requirements and going, “Yeah, this is what they needed in each of the geos.” 

Fred Diamond: That is a great point. Even with all the globalization and the fact that you can connect with anybody over Zoom or whatever it might be, a lot of the local traditions still apply from years ago. I remember I went on a business trip in the late ‘90s to Florence and it was amazing, but we didn’t eat until 8:00 o’clock. A couple of the Americans, we were like, “Huh,” and we had a big dinner and it was like five courses and they said this is what it is. The reason I bring that up is, I went back again to Italy in like 2010-ish and dinner was served at 8:00 o’clock. There are still the local customs, but as you’re looking at implementing the programs, I love the concept of what’s going to work across the industry and globally. 

Barb Huelskamp: Two- or three-hour dinners that are an experience. For me, I walk faster, probably talk too fast. I purposely slowed my gate, my walk, and went into dinner going, “This is an experience. It’s not about eating and getting out for the next table.” They cared about that experience. 

Fred Diamond: Do you remember some of the food you had on the trip? You must have, because the food must have been amazing. 

Barb Huelskamp: Number one, Prosecco there is unbelievable compared to what you can get in the U.S., but the burrata, I wanted to take it all home and I didn’t know how to get it home. We tried burrata in just about every city, and then we had a couple of tasting menus. There were a few things I tried, because I’m going to try anything, that I didn’t love, but overall, almost every place, large or small, it felt like mom’s homemade meal, and it was served with love. The service was incredible. 

Fred Diamond: Yes, it still is like that. That’s incredible. They’re treating their businesses locally too, which goes into the next point, which is never underestimate the small merchant or the small partner. I’ve led a lot of channel teams when I worked at Apple and Compaq and companies like that. I remember, a lot of times, we would get more impact from a mom-and-pop than we might at the computer world, if you will. Give us some of your insights there. 

Barb Huelskamp: What led me to thinking about this, Florence is known for their gold and their leather. I wanted a little bit of everything from every stop. We were walking around Florence looking at all of these really large leather shops. We were looking for some specific items and some specific sizes, we’re not small people, and just kept coming up empty. It all just felt the same way. 

If you’ve walked around Florence, it’s not really an alleyway, but there’s lots of little narrow cobblestone roads. We walked down this one, it was just tucked away, and we turned a corner and there was this tiny shop that had exactly everything we wanted, the sizes and unique pieces. They looked to have a very small footprint, but I don’t know if they had a big warehouse in the back, but they had all the right inventory, the right sizes, sharper focus. They didn’t have a lot of the tchotchke souvenir type things, but good quality merchandise and really unique merchandise. Then some cool services like free embossing with initials and things like that on a leather bag. 

The next day, we did truffle hunting with dogs in Chianti country. Tina was the dog that I got, she was the smallest youngest dog, and she stole the show. She went her own way. She and I found like four, because you get five truffles each, four or five truffles in like 15 minutes. The owner of these dogs was just shocked because mom and dad, the more tenured hunting dogs, hadn’t found one yet. 

In both cases, the smaller player, the niche player delivered an outsized result through specialization. You can make that parallel to the channel. One, don’t overlook the niche partner. Don’t overlook their specialization and their subject matter expertise, because even if they’re younger, like Tina, she was younger, she brought a different lens and thought to go places the older dogs didn’t go. But in all of them, speed and quality matter. Nurture those younger partners, nurture those partners with some of those unique talents, specializations, public sector comes to mind. Not everyone can sell in public sector, and those customers are demanding some subject matter expertise. 

Fred Diamond: We’re stretching this a little bit, but one of the things right now is the channel partners need to really demonstrate the added value. There’s a lot of challenges, particularly in the B2G space, where there’s been some executive directions that the customer should go directly to manufacturers, the OEMs, the vendors, if you will. How are the partners showing that they are providing true value? We just did a podcast interview with, do you know Rob Efrus? 

Barb Huelskamp: I do not. 

Fred Diamond: Every year at Carahsoft, he does what’s called the Rob Efrus Budget Breakfast. He is a savant in government budgeting and funding and things along those lines. But the challenge right now is the government has said, we want to go directly to the SolarWinds, the Microsofts, the Amazons, if you will. They just view the channel as transaction. As I’m thinking about your dog, the differentiation is your dog knew exactly where to go to the truffle. The old school ones, who knows what they were going through, but maybe they were taking it easy. 

Barb Huelskamp: Sharper senses, innovative. I’m going to take a risk, I’m going to go over here and I found something. For me, as the customer in that experience, real value and great delivery. When you’re thinking about that differentiation, don’t underestimate the relationships you build throughout the organization. Because you’ve got a user, you’ve got layers of management, you’ve got procurement, relationships at each one of those stops along that buyer journey are critical, because their opinion of you and understanding your value from their lens matters. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point too, is a lot of times that the smaller partners, in a lot of cases, you used the word nuance before, they might know who’s really the decision maker, why they make decisions. That might be the value that they bring to you. Also, at the customer side, is helping them understand how you as the partner brings all that together. I love that. 

Barb Huelskamp: We sell technology. We are continuing to invest in the right technology and the right roadmap for our solution. But our partners bring that all together, whether it’s their services on the front end or the back end, but also, it’s rare that your technology is not integrating with another technology. It’s got to be cohesive in a customer environment. Our partners do a great job with that. They need to make sure that their government customers know that. 

Fred Diamond: That’s the biggest challenge right now, Barb, I believe, is that they need to let their government customers know exactly that, and there’s been a lot of challenges to that. I’m thinking about that dog just hustling to get you those four truffles. The other thing too is, how many people were in your group with the hunt? 

Barb Huelskamp: It was just me and my husband. It was a private tour. It was beautiful. 

Fred Diamond: I was thinking if there was like 10 people, the older dogs are just moseying and you were getting the truffles. 

Barb Huelskamp: I beat my husband. We were competing. I won. 

Fred Diamond: Very good, and you had the right partner. Number three, don’t erase history documented. Give us your insights into that. 

Barb Huelskamp: This one was profound for me. This one hit after I left Rome and Pompeii. We did several private tours with guides, and those guides were from the area sharing their passion and their history about the area. We saw century-old buildings, art, and sculptures, and some of them had been torn down, buried, and excavated to make way for new empires and rulers. It dawned on me, so much money and resources are now being spent to excavate, restore, and document what was lost, particularly in Pompeii. These archaeologists, they told us there’s enormous history gaps because no one was recording everything before Mount Vesuvius erupted. They have got huge gaps in documenting some history. 

The lesson for me, history is data. You want to preserve that. Even if it didn’t work, what didn’t work in one environment could work in another market, another era, could work with different buyers, different timing, there are different conditions. The goal here isn’t to be haunted by the past, but make sure you don’t repeat failures, and leave a record. 

I’ve been here a year, and we could look at, we’ve tried this, we’ve tried this, this worked, this didn’t. But I don’t have all of those history lessons documented, and the history lesson from a partner that’s been with us 10 years sounds a little bit different than the partner that’s been with us 10 months. Just because it didn’t work before doesn’t mean it won’t work again, but if you document what did or didn’t work, the lessons learned, there’s a richness in that for your future. 

Fred Diamond: A lot of times when you’re selling technology, you have the partners who’ve been with you from day one, and then you have the new ones, but the ones who’ve been there from day one, they’ve seen your company’s history at the customer. They know all the things that have happened. They know what the customer has been using as well. The customer transaction history, the history of, like you said before, it’s almost never one technology, especially now with companies quickly coming to markets and companies adding new things, but not everybody knowing everything that you do. Every industry, every customer has complexity and you got to understand that, and you got to pay homage to it. It’s easy to say, “Well, we’re going to totally get rid of everything and upgrade.” Well, what about that system over there in Cleveland that is operated this way? 

Barb Huelskamp: There’s still some beauty in the history. I say this a lot, especially with some of our partners who’ve been with us for a while, we are not the same SolarWinds we were five years ago, let alone one year ago. That doesn’t mean we have forgotten our history. I think it’s quite the opposite. I think we’ve built on our history. I think we’ve continued to layer up, from a partner program perspective, on our platform, with our people learning that lesson. That’s why I said this was a profound thought as I left Rome and Pompeii, because the strain on that area trying to excavate, they actually said, “We’ve stopped our excavation in Pompeii for cost, but we’re going to leave some of this for the next generation to discover, because of how much it’s done for us.” I thought that was so cool. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great one, which goes to the next point, which is adjust quickly and go all in. One word that we use all the time is commitment, figuring out what the plan is, then getting everybody on board. You as a channel leader, it’s a big challenge because how many partners does SolarWinds have? 

Barb Huelskamp: Thousands. 

Fred Diamond: Thousands. You got to get them on board, especially now. We’re doing today’s interview in May of 2026, we got to be urgent, man. With AI and everything that’s related to it, and intermediation, if you will, you got to go all in, but everyone’s got to be on board for you to go all in. Tell us more about that. 

Barb Huelskamp: The example for me on this one, we were on the Amalfi Coast, it was our last stop, and we had a yacht tour planned. It was the thing I was looking forward to the most on this two-week trip. Number one favorite thing, private yacht just for us staffed for a day, and then it was canceled. The two days we were there, 20-mile-an-hour winds, choppy water, it wasn’t safe. I knew it, but I was still disappointed and I was sulking. 

The staff where we were staying totally surrounded us with alternatives, and immediately, we ended up having a very different day, but it was wonderful. It was different than I planned, different than what I expected, but it was also what we needed. What I mean by that is we had two weeks of all these tours, we were averaging 10,000 to 13,000 steps a day. What we ended up doing that day was rest. We had a massage, and not 13,000 steps, and it was still beautiful enough to be outside. I was like, “You know what? I’m going to practice what I preach,” because I was also starting to bring my husband down. “I’m going to pick up my head, I’m going to stop the sulking, and I’m going to commit to this new plan.” 

The business lesson, as we’ve talked about, you might not always agree with the strategic pivot, but you’ve got to commit and go all in, because honestly, half-hearted execution is worse. I’m a big believer in progress versus perfection, and that’s been a work of art for me as well, because I can be too much of a perfectionist. 

Again, connecting it back to our program, we still have many things we want to do, but I think we’re kicking off at a great start and I’ve asked our team to go all in, because as you said, we’re getting our partners on board, but first I’m getting my team on board with the transition. There’s a lot to do to prepare. We talk about our CARES values, and the R in CARE for us is ready, be ready. We’re spending a lot of time right now making sure we’re ready to support our partners once we launch this. It’s going to be a good day. Just like those last two days in the Amalfi Coast, we’re going to adjust, we’re committed, and it’s going to be a sunny day. 

Fred Diamond: One of the points here is that everybody’s got to be on board. A decision’s made, I’m sure a lot of data and process and debate went into, what are we going to do? But then once you make that decision, you got to be all on board. Everyone’s got to be all in. If you have an issue, you got to sound it, but then quickly shift back. Like you were saying, you were sulking because the yacht trip was canceled, darn, but then you had to quickly shift plans and get all on board with whatever the next thing is. You can’t have any confusion with the partners. 

I remember leading channel teams and whenever there was a dissent from the partners and we gave into it and we weren’t behind what the company was saying, that always led to a challenge. 

Barb Huelskamp: I believe in debate. I talk a lot with my team that I might have a good idea and it’s rough, but together, we’ll make it better. Debate, but then commit. I think the important thing after that, once it’s executed, is the feedback. I’m proud of our agility here at SolarWinds, because I think we listen and we can iterate and adjust pretty quick. We’re not so big that, “Well, that’s going to have to wait till next year,” but that feedback is helpful. I love other people’s ideas. I might come up with something that I think is pretty good, my team and other partners make it better, for sure. 

Fred Diamond: This is great, Barb. Number five, and these are Barb’s five leadership lessons from her two-week trip to Italy. I’m going to an event tonight, but I’m thinking about going for Italian food tomorrow. The best wine is meant to be shared. 

Barb Huelskamp: This is the really fun one. Obviously, everyone knows Italy is famous for its wine. It was really fun for me to learn and try new grapes. Often at the restaurant, I would say, “Here’s what I like in a wine, you pick.” What do I know about these brands? Most of the brands served aren’t available in the U.S. The one thing that became really clear, nobody sits down to a great bottle of wine alone. It’s poured at a table and the stories while you’re sharing that get richer, and you create really strong connections to the experience. It’s not just about the wine, but the whole experience. 

Think about that. When you go on a trip, a conference, you’ve had a partner meeting, a hard week, a customer win, good or bad, sometimes my instinct is to just process it maybe even privately and move on, but the real value comes when you bring your team along. It was fun to take these notes, because I wanted to share these stories. Great salespeople tell great stories in front of their customers. Find stories like this to connect the dots, to convey a message to your team, to your customer. 

Like my dog, Tina, I’m going to talk about that dog, Tina, and those truffles for the rest of my life. But it’s created a space for me to have personal connection with people, to laugh, use those opportunities to build your teams up, build your partners up, and create that experience, giving them the space to pour out their stories and share the richness that they can bring into your life as well, knowing about their experiences. 

Fred Diamond: The Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we just had our 16th Annual Sales Excellence Awards. We give out what’s called a Lifetime Achievement Award. The recipient this year was a gentleman called Nick Michaelides who used to run Cisco Public Sector in USA. The reason I bring this up is we had a lot of Cisco people and partners at the event, and a number of them came up and told stories. The time that they helped this defense command implement a system overnight because something had to be done. The trip they made to this fort to build out this system with their partners and the memories of all those things. There are so many great memories that people who are in tech, either on the OEM side or the channel side, have with each other working together to solve a big customer problem. 

Barb Huelskamp: When you have got a big partner meeting, presentation, a conference, they might not remember everything you said, but they’re going to remember the story you told. Connecting that where it’s relatable to folks in the audience, that is a great skill to have. 

Fred Diamond: The Tina story, there are so many lessons to learn from all of these stories with Barb from SolarWinds. Thank you so much. I love this. I love that you documented this. If I were you, I would encourage you to write some of this down in more detail and publish it. I don’t know if your PR person, Kate, can help you with that, but I’m sure she can. 

Barb Huelskamp: Yeah, she is. 

Fred Diamond: Hopefully she’s listening to today’s interview. Thank you to her for getting us connected to you. Barb, this is great insight. You’ve given us a lot of things to do and think about, but give us a specific action for people listening to the show or reading the transcript, something they should do right now, an action step to take their sales career to the next level. 

Barb Huelskamp: Wow. Big question. Well, if you’re early in your career, stomp out imposter syndrome, stomp out fear. I took some fearless leaps early on that I think at this point in my career, I would be a little scared to, but I did, and they paid off. Advocate for yourself and get that mentor. Folks a little bit farther along in their career, I do think it’s my responsibility at this point to help that next generation of leaders, and I want to. I want to make things easier for you. I want you to avoid the mistakes I made. Find that mentor, especially if you’re a rare woman in a leadership position, I promise you, the other women in leadership want to help you. 

Fred Diamond: Thank you so much. The Institute for Effective Professional Selling, our Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership, we have our Women in Sales Leadership Forum. We also have our Emerging Leaders Program and we have our Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference and we’ll continue to get more information about those. 

Once again, Barb from SolarWinds, thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 847: Channel Leader Barb Huelskamp’s Trip to Italy Taught Her These Five Leadership Lessons first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.