This is an Office Hours: Sales Professors Unplugged sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Find Brad on LinkedIn. 

BRAD’S TIP: “You’ve got to be coachable, you’ve got to have grit, you’ve got to be willing to continue to learn and grow as everything evolves.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Today’s show is a special Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. Brad Anderson with Cal State Fullerton, we’ve done probably close to two dozen shows where we’ve interviewed directors of professional selling organizations at universities. A lot of these universities are part of the University Sales Center Alliance, and they’ve been great shows. We typically talk about how you’re teaching the students, what the curriculum is, how you’re working with sponsors, and anything else that would be appropriate. It’s great to have you on the show. 

It’s interesting, you had mentioned to me that you’re one of the only schools on the Western side of the United States. I went back and I checked and yeah, you are the first professional sales leader at a university that we’re interviewing on the West side of the United States. I know we’re going to be talking about that as part of the context today, but it’s great to see you here. Thanks for being on the show. 

Tell us a little bit about your journey to running the selling program at Cal State Fullerton. Tell us a little bit about your sales career before you got into academia. 

Brad Anderson: I didn’t actually want to go into sales. I actually thought I wanted to be a teacher and then learned how much they didn’t make to start their salaries and went into business instead and changed my degree. I got a degree in economics from the University of Redlands. It’s actually management science. I changed that also my senior year. Then started my career with Carnation Company, which was purchased by Nestlé right after I started with them. 

It was really my 30 years at Nestlé, I started carrying a bag in this Riverside-San Bernardino sales area, similar to some of our sponsors like Gallo, Southern Glazer’s, and Kellogg’s. Basically worked my way up through the management there. I became a trainer, then a manager, then an account manager, then I ran the LA region. Then I went to our headquarters. I was one of the first people at Nestlé in the sales side to have a personal computer, which got me into what was called sales technology at the time. I basically went to our headquarters. I was a director of sales planning, got into our order entry system and forecasting for salespeople, things like that. 

Then this new thing called category management started in CPG. I got hooked up with Brian Harris, who started Apollo and started the category management, basically vernacular for CPG. That became my road to more management and more experiences at Nestlé where we worked with our retailers. I got very involved with Nielsen, with IRI, and with Intactix on their space management, the category management, managed a whole team, started the team at Nestlé for category management. 

Then when we purchased Purina in 2001, I transferred over to Purina, started actually training people how to sell pet food in a grocery store and also how our salespeople could sell pet food, because a lot of them came from Nestlé and didn’t sell as much pet food. We had a learning center. We brought people in, talked about consumer, and so it really started my teaching. 

At the same time, I was also teaching at a junior college here in California, got my teaching credentials, worked there for about four years, but it got to be too much. Because of travel, I couldn’t teach and travel, we didn’t have Zoom at the time. Then I started working with Purina on tools and automating all of the sales tools. Basically, we created some things for automated assortment planning, space management, we used the tools that were available from Intactix, IRI, and Nielsen. We also did an automated sales presentation. Basically, an account manager could come in, put in their account, the product, and a few other pieces of information and it would spit out presentations that they could then automate, edit, use, whatever. 

Then I came to Cal State Fullerton, because I took early retirement, came to Fullerton and replaced a former Nestlé co-worker as the director of the Sales Leadership Center. I’ve been here almost nine years now. 

Fred Diamond: I’m based in Northern Virginia. Nestlé, one of their headquarters is based not too far from me in Rosslyn. As I mentioned to you before, part of the pandemic, we had one of your peers, Dominic Strada, who was on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Before the pandemic, I used to do the interviews in-person. We actually did his interview at Nestlé’s headquarters down in Rosslyn, Virginia, which is right across the river from Georgetown, Washington, D.C., and had a big, beautiful vista of the D.C. area from that. 

It’s interesting you’re talking about sales technology and tools. A lot of the great big brands were first in the game with sales automation tools and some of the things that you had alluded to. Now with AI, a lot of things are becoming more spread. It was pretty interesting to see that you were way early in the game. 

Cal State Fullerton, first of all, tell people where exactly that is. We have listeners around the globe. It’s interesting that your student population, maybe compared to some of the other universities that are part of the University Sales Center Alliance, might be more diverse. Give us a perspective on the school and why that might be. 

Brad Anderson: Cal State Fullerton is relatively new compared to a lot of colleges. We didn’t start until 1957. That’s when it started. It basically is a state school. The Cal State system works as a university, then the Cal State University, and then Cal State colleges. It has a three-tiered program. We’re in the middle of that. We’re one of the largest business colleges on the West Coast. We have 40,000 students in the university. Of that, over 27% of it is with our business college, which is where I report. 

We basically do have a lot of first-generation undergraduates. In fact, about 40% are first-generation, their parents have never gone to college, but they push them. As far as undergraduates, we have almost 10,000 of that. About 4,000 are transfer students. We have a lot of transfers as well as a lot of first-generation. This makes us a little unique because California is basically flooded with universities. We have probably 16 or 17 universities in the LA Orange County area. High competition, everything from private universities like Chapman, University of Redlands, to the colleges like Irvine, which is in the UC system, Cal State like us, then Cal State Los Angeles is also nearby. 

With our college, we actually have 13 centers of excellence, which basically the Sales Leadership Center is one of those 13. We have things like women’s leadership, regular leadership management, things like that, entrepreneurial. Then we were also very big and worldwide-known for accounting. 

Fred Diamond: I feel a little bit of affinity because I got my master’s in business at San Jose State University. I was very, very proud of that way back in the day. You mentioned that California is a hub for a lot of universities. There’s a lot of them. There are great ones, a lot of great community type colleges, but you’re one of only two University Sales Center Alliance recognized programs in California. Why do you think there are so few professional selling programs out West? 

Brad Anderson: I don’t really understand it other than I think a lot of the people that started the USCA, which is a great program. We love it. I’ve learned a lot from them. They helped me onboard when I came here. But I think because a lot of them started more in the Midwest and East, that they’ve concentrated more there. You’re right, it’s us and Chico State here in California. I do know that San Diego State is looking at trying to create a program, but there are a lot of requirements. That’s why the USCA is very good at accrediting, very similar to like Western States or anything else. There are a lot of requirements and I think that’s what protrudes them, is you have to have a center, you have to have a budget, you have to have dedicated personnel. Then you have to have the right academic and integration of nonacademic skill sets. 

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about your curriculum. Tell us about some of the classes. Do you offer a degree, either a major, minor, or certificate? What are some of the trends that are shaping this curriculum? 

Brad Anderson: We do not offer a major, we offer a minor in sales. Since most of our students in the business college are marketing majors, and it would be duplication, they cannot get a sales minor and a marketing major. Instead, we have the certificate, which is also accredited by the USCA. We offer the credentials for the certificate. They have to take three classes. If they take the minor, it’s five classes. It’s all set so that we do augmentation beyond just what’s in the classroom. In our classrooms, we have a sales class, we have a sales management class, so specific to sales, we have consumer products, we have negotiations, and then we have ISDS, which is more info systems. 

Fred Diamond: Tells us a little bit about how your program fits in with the rest of the universities. One of our big friends at the Institute likes to say that even as late as 1980, in the US census, if you were in sales, you had to check the box, it said peddler. One of the interesting things that have happened with our Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged is a lot of people have been surprised that there are programs that teach professional selling. Yet the irony, I think, is I’ve worked for some of the best technology companies in the world, and some of those important employees are the sales professionals, and it’s a science. There’s so much to it. It’s not just like a nice handshake anymore, or even relationships, especially with technology and AI. Especially when you’re selling complex technology, it really is a thoughtful endeavor, we believe. Obviously, everyone listening to the show probably believes that as well. Give us some insights into how your program is fitting into the rest of the university. 

Brad Anderson: Part of it is because we have a diverse background of students as well, or ethnicities. We’re high Asian, high Hispanic, low Caucasian, low everything else. We cater to that. The school, basically, we just funnel the same type. What helps us here is a lot of people don’t understand that sales is part of everybody’s life. In fact, one of the exercises I do my first day of sales class is have a little role play where I get two students to come up and they just read my role play. It’s basically them, they were going to go to lunch, so they know they have a need. They already know each other. They don’t have to be prospecting. But now, they start negotiating about, do they want Del Taco or McDonald’s, In-N-Out Burger, and how and why. It takes about two minutes and then they see how this is really how everybody goes through their life. 

How we fit with the university is the mission statement for our college and university is to be nationally recognized and also service all of these different ethnic backgrounds. We do exactly that by providing them all of the skill sets and the soft skills that go with the academics they get in the classroom. Then we also reach out to developing those programs that help them develop those skills. We do sales competitions. We do role plays. We are starting to use some AI with some of the role plays as well, which is becoming very interesting. We have a lot of the students that when they have experiential learning to go with the academic learning, it makes them a better product for the companies that then want to hire them. 

Fred Diamond: With your student mix, what do they want to learn? You’re saying a lot of them probably are getting newly exposed to what professional selling is and the science behind it, and how you need to interact with the customer. There’s a lot of thought that needs to go into a complex sale. What are some of the things that they’re excited to learn about? What do they want to learn about? 

Brad Anderson: The first thing they want to learn is why should they even be in sales? We take them through the fact that it’s just part of your life and that B2B sales, which is the bulk of what we prepare them for, is not the same as B2C sales. Most of their experience is about B2C. They go and buy something. That’s their experience, which is why sales has a bad rep. But the bulk of the business is done B2B. We start showing them how you start using the methodology to sell the process, you do the information, you have to do research, and there’s a lot of academics, a lot of research that goes behind building a science for making a sale. 

They want to learn how to do that. What’s that process? How do I get successful at that? How do I get the skills so that I’m going to be better than someone else at doing that? That’s where some of our sales competitions, our role plays, the academics, all of that fits together because we help them build those soft skills that then help our sponsors when they hire them. The onboarding is much faster. The training, because they’re coachable, they’re ready, is much easier. Their training programs are much more effective and they’re more productive faster. 

Fred Diamond: One thing that we’ve learned from a lot of the companies that do sponsor programs similar to yours is the fact that the students that they’re hiring are so well prepared that they’re three years down the road. It’s not like they’re hiring a young adult right out of college who needs to understand. The ones who are coming from programs at the USCA, and yours at Cal State Fullerton, these young adults, they’re three years down the road. They know a lot of the things, however, they need to be trained on the product and the market and the nuance of what they sell. 

One of the cool things for me that I really enjoyed is seeing how much the students who are going through programs like yours are enthusiastic about the professional selling process. They learn that it’s not the ridiculous, what do I got to do to get you to buy this pen type of a thing, or what people might think about selling is. B2B sales, you’re selling for some of the best companies in the world. You have to have shown that you have earned the right to be a sales professional at companies like these. 

Talk about some of the corporate sponsorships. Tell us about your relationships. What do they know? What do they expect? What would you tell a business that may not know about this, but has learned about it and would like to get involved? 

Brad Anderson: One of the things with our sponsors, like you were saying with onboarding, we have success stories from our students. Our platinum sponsors, Enterprise Mobility, which is the car rental company, they get many of our students every year. They have a two-year training program to get into management. A lot of our students basically go through that in about 14 to 15 months instead of the 24 months. Some of them have gone a lot faster. Daikin, which is another one of our sponsors, has a student right now that has gone through their management training program in two years and he’s already running full divisions. They get far ahead and that’s what our sponsors like. They like the fact that we prepare them for coachability, for soft skills, for getting ready to make good presentations, and how to get the information so that their training programs are more effective, their management training programs are then faster and better. 

CED have a very good program for training their management development people. Maybe they’re very strict on who they hire and they only hire a couple each year, but then they hire some of our students just to be regular employees and can still make some of the same head roads into management. Yes, our sponsors look for the soft skills. They come to our competitions as our judges to actually see the students in action and watching them do a role play, which is a real role play. 

We’re coming up on a sales presentation right now with a competition on April 10th where Enterprise will do the role play and they’re going to use their fleet management, so it’s B2B. The students will be selling the fleet management services to other companies. But then we have many of our sponsors like Samsara, they’re in technology. Like you mentioned, technology is something where a lot of the technologists are very good at programming things like that, but then they don’t have good people skills to go sell their own good products. Samsara has an excellent culture behind their company. 

We’ve got all kinds of companies, and we thank our sponsors because we need them to basically come and sponsor us so we can host these events to help the students. But then as much as we want their money, we also want their participation. Because if they’re not on campus with the students, the students aren’t going to know the connections, they’re not going to network. Some of these companies, I just mentioned CED and Samsara, the students don’t even know who that is. Enterprise, they understand. Gallo, they understand. Kellogg’s, they understand, because those are all companies that are consumer products. But when you start talking about these background Ryerson, Patterson Dental, or Amcor, students have no idea who these people are. We’ve got UKG does a great job of putting together programs for internships. 

Anything we can do to help them get students in front of them so that they can then recruit them and hire them, that’s what they’re looking for. They do look for ROI, because I deal mostly with recruiters, but they’re looking for those soft skills, they’re looking for networking, and they’re looking for students that are hungry to win. 

Fred Diamond: The students, a lot of them, they get educated as they matriculate. Then they learn about the offerings that are there and they learn more about what type of job potential they can get from something like this. Tell us about some of the expectations that your students have. How much of them will go into sales, the ones with the minors, and how many will be in professional selling? I know your program is relatively new, but how long will they be in? Will they be in sales leadership and management for their entire careers? Is that what they’re expecting to move into from this? 

Brad Anderson: That’s a great question. Actually, no, they don’t expect to always be in sales. Some of them do stay in sales. I stayed in sales in the sales department most of my career. But no, they don’t expect necessarily that, but they’re open to that that could happen. Some of them, like the one I mentioned with Daikin, he’s been there since 2021. He’s already in second level management and he did not think he would be selling more than a couple of years. Now he’s in sales management, loves it, wants to stay in that for his whole career. He even got his MBA so that he could actually be more participatory in management and strategy in the management department. 

They want careers, they want good jobs, and so we offer that. I do vet our sponsors as well. As much as they vet us, I vet them to make sure that they have good training programs, that they have longevity, that they offer development. The students look for that. They want to know that they can grow. They want to know that there’s good training programs. I mentioned Enterprise, they have one of the best training programs in the country for any entry level sales person. But they also look for growth and solid competitive benefits. They’re not always looking for the highest salary, and we actually try to guide them to looking at total benefit packages, not just income. 

Fred Diamond: Congratulations on the success of your program. Like I said, one of only two USCA-recognized programs in the State of California. I did a similar interview with a guy named Plamen Peev who runs the program at Towson State, which is in Maryland, just to the east of Baltimore, similar type of a thing. A lot of his students are first generation. They don’t know that B2B and complex selling exists. They work with a lot of great sponsors who are looking for hardworking, who have grit, who want to prove things. They’re the first generation in college, so they want to take their careers to the next level, and they have that support. It sounds like some similarities there. I applaud you for the great work that you’re doing for them. 

Give us a final action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but give us something specific that you would recommend sales professionals do to take their sales career to the next level. For someone listening to the show, for a student, what would you give them for advice? What would be your one thing you would tell them to do? 

Brad Anderson: You need to continually learn, because our environment in business is changing radically every day. Everything from AI to data. Big data is a big problem. At Nestlé, that was one of the reasons we were ahead of the AI curve and doing automated presentations. You’ve got to be coachable, you’ve got to have grit, you’ve got to be willing to continue to learn and grow as everything evolves. I don’t think AI is going to replace sales. It will change how we sell. It will change how we get some of the research done. It will change how we interact. But there is always going to be a need for people to be selling one to one, because AI can’t tell you what it doesn’t know. It picks up from what’s the past, what’s existing. It doesn’t try to go to the creative and it can’t, at this point in time anyway. 

I would say definitely reach out. If you’re going to be a good sales professional, you’re going to need to learn more. You’re going to need to adapt. You’re going to continue to network. Network with people beyond just where you are. Find mentors, things like that. For companies that come to us, we want your money because that’s how we stay in business to do and produce things, but we want your participation as well because the only way you’re going to get our students is to interact with them. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Brad Anderson with Cal State Fullerton. Congratulations on your success and for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 843: Why Collegiate Professional Selling Programs Matter More Than Ever with Brad Anderson 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!

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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 Mark Conley, Vice president of Americas Channel Sales at Cohesity, and Lisa Kidder, Cloud Solutions Architect of Amazon Web Services at NetApp.

Find Mark on LinkedIn. Find Lisa on LinkedIn.

MARK’S TIP: “The three characteristics of great salespeople are ego, empathy, and guts. You’ve got to have a resilient ego, the ability to understand what the person you’re selling to wants, and the courage to commit to something that you’ve never done before.”

LISA’S TIP: “Volunteer for the presentation you don’t feel ready for, raise your hand before you feel 100% prepared. I think that’s the best way to not only gain that confidence, but get the visibility to just have your career take off.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Gina, we’re doing a lot of shows and we’re doing a lot of work at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling with channel leaders, strategic partnership leaders. We have our new Partner Growth Program where we take partner manager through a six-session cohort over three months. We announce that at our award event on April 29th. It’s going to be starting in July, this summer. We’re doing today’s recording in April of 2026 but that program is going to start in July of 2026. 

We’ve met so many great leaders in the channel side, we’ve been very fortunate to meet them. We reached out to Mark Conley with Cohesity, got to know him a little bit. Mark and I had some conversations about how he’s leading channel organizations at Cohesity, but also he’s been at Sun, he’s been at NetApp. We were talking about what we do at the IEPS and he says, “Well, you really need to talk to my daughter, Lisa Kidder.” We reached out to her and she had done some really incredible things, and she’s doing some great things at NetApp, helping on the AWS side. I said, “Well, why don’t we do another parent and child show?” We’re very excited. Let’s get started. 

Mark, it’s great to see you. Thank you so much for introducing us to Lisa and for what you’re going to be contributing here. You’ve led channel teams at some of the top brands in technology in your career, I mentioned Sun, NetApp. You’re presently leading the channel business at Cohesity. How’s the ride been? Looking back, what were some of the key drivers of your success? Feel free to chime in with anything else that you want to mention from your background that I might not have covered. Then we’ll go back and forth asking questions to you and then to Lisa. 

Mark Conley: I’ve been involved in channels, it feels like my whole career. I started working for a reseller when personal computers were brand new and worked with channels as a sales manager, worked managing channels for a long time. It’s interesting, I was with a group of partners yesterday, and everyone was introducing themselves and they were saying, “Well, I’ve been in this business for 20 years and 25 years,” and some were joking and saying, “I got into it when I was six years old.” It came around to me, and I was last in line, I said, “Folks, I used to think of myself as the young person in the room always. After today’s session, I can’t look in the mirror and say that to myself anymore, because I’ve been doing this for 45 years while in the channels.” 

I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. It’s been a lot of fun. I think that the key drivers for me that have made me successful and helped me to do good work with the companies I worked for is that I feel like I’m a firefighter. I always thought that I could be a good fire jumper, the kind of person that gets into a forest fire and tries to assess the situation and make some progress right away. Not that I have anywhere near that kind of courage, but I’m pretty good at being dropped into a situation, assessing the situation, and figuring out what the next best path forward is. I do a lot of research, I make sure my decisions are well-reasoned, but I like to take action and I feel like there’s a law of diminishing return when it comes to assessment. I make those quick assessments and get into things really quickly. 

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s awesome. I love hearing people who’ve been doing something for a very long time and are still super fired up about it. Lisa, let’s move over to you. It looks like you’re following your father’s footsteps and now you’re in tech sales yourself. What was it like growing up in your household? Did you understand what your dad did? Did you understand what sales was? Was that something you always wanted to do? 

Lisa Kidder: My dad and I have always been very similar in many ways growing up. I never thought I would go into sales, and maybe that’s because I was thinking I wanted to be different than him. I always thought being so similar to him was almost a bad thing, but I never really understood what he did. I never knew what sales was and so I never thought, “Hey, I want to have a career just like my dad.” I knew he worked hard, I knew he travelled a lot, but probably the most thing that I noticed is that he talked all the time to a bunch of different people. His job came with a little bit of flexibility, but a lot of pressure. There wasn’t really a clear line between work and home. I was always aware of what he did, but I never really knew what it meant. 

It really didn’t become clear until I started being in college and trying to figure out what do I want to do with my life? Where do I want to go? Ultimately, a lot of that led to technology. I never really thought about sales until my dad really connected the dots of, technology is people. Technology is just one part of the sales business, because sales is all about people. That’s really when I started to consider sales as a real career. 

Honestly, not much has changed in our household growing up. I’m the only one that followed in my dad’s footsteps. Instead of now just my dad talking all the time about his passion at work, it’s turned into both of us going on and on at the dinner table and my mom has to remind us to take a breath and step back and include the rest of the family. It’s been nice having my dad as that role model. It made sales a much easier decision than I ever thought it would be growing up. 

Fred Diamond: Mark, as a lot of listeners know, I have a daughter who’s in sales. She’s in sales at Hershey and she covers some territory for Hershey. One of the fun parts of that is that she contacts me almost every day. “Hey dad, this happened today,” or, “How would you have handled this,” or yada, yada, type of a thing. That must be fun for you. 

What’s your advice for Lisa and others as they start their careers in sales? 

Mark Conley: Listening to her first answer, I think I should be taking advice from her, frankly. I get a chance to talk to early-in-career people pretty often. We have an early career program here at Cohesity and we had one at NetApp when I worked there before Lisa worked there. It gave me a lot of joy to deal with early-in-career people and try to give them some advice and tell them about channels and about sales. 

I always tell them that the most important thing you can know is yourself. That’s cliche, but knowing what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, helps you to put yourself in positions where you can be more successful. Now, when you’re in your 20s and sometimes you’re even in your 30s, you really don’t know who you are. You think you do, but you really don’t. It takes some time to learn that. 

I put myself in a position one time where I was a program manager, where I was back office, where I was writing things, developing things, talking to myself most of the time and not other people, I found that I really just didn’t like that kind of job. That’s not me. We had a situation recently where there was a female sales leader in an organization that was considering coming into my organization. There was a twist between doing that and doing something else that was back office related. I said, “Look, you can make your own decision. But when I look at you, I think of you as a front office kind of person. You’re a person that attaches to people, that motivates people, that wants to be with people. If you go in the back room and you’re a program manager, I tried that, I didn’t like it.” Know yourself, put yourself in a position to be successful, and be true to your personality. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s great advice. Thinking about what your dad just said and figuring out what it is that works for you, you got your degree in computer science from Clemson. Did you take any sales courses at Clemson? Were you thinking along those sales lines at that point? Or what drew you to taking computer classes? 

Lisa Kidder: I really wasn’t drawn to sales. I never really thought about it as something that would be on my radar. I didn’t take any formal sales classes at Clemson, to no fault of Clemson, but I thought of myself as a computer science person. My dad definitely helped me get into that field, because he said, “You can do whatever you want with that. It gets you into that technology.” I even liked math so much growing up. It was a good way to keep on to my very black and white math background while having a lot of different opportunities for careers. 

Later in college, I did add a business minor, which I think gave me a lot more perspective to broaden my potential career path. Definitely with the advice of my dad, he kept always saying that I was very competitive and I was very confident. I never believed him until I started to realize that business had a lot bigger impact in technology than I ever thought. No real formal sales classes, but a lot of the ComSci background helped me get to where I am today. A lot of the technical background helps me get that credibility with customers. 

One of the biggest things is a lot of the sales and technical combo is it’s just a lot of tech at the end of the day, because the people is, for me, the easy part and the fun part. The degree helped me understand that technical background that I needed. Then the people is the fun part that I get to work with every day. 

Fred Diamond: We also do the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged version of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, where we talk to directors of the professional selling programs. We recently did a show with a guy named Matt Radomski, who went to Clemson. We got to know the leader of the Clemson selling curriculum. It’s definitely a great school to prepare people for sales. 

Mark, Gina and I both have children who recently graduated from college. Did you support your daughter’s choice of major knowing what you might have wanted for her as she came out of school? I’m just curious, were there activities that you encouraged her to do while she was growing up that prepared her for this career? 

Mark Conley: I definitely was very proud and happy when she decided that she wanted to do that. It seemed like a natural for her because I always said that she’s a five-tool kid. She’s smart, she understands technology, she’s gregarious with people. She’s the one I don’t have to worry about. If you have more than one child, there’s always one that you just don’t have to worry about, and that’s Lisa, but I really encouraged her. 

I remember it probably differently, I’ve made this story up in my head, but when she was in high school, she was a math and science person. She really understood that stuff. She said, “Dad, what should I go into it?” 

I said, “Become an engineer, because number one, you’re smart enough to do that. Number two, you’re not a typical engineer. You’ve got a bigger personality than most engineers do.” I said, “If you’re a female engineer in computer science in one way or another, you are a blue diamond. You are a rare commodity.” As Lisa has put it to me several times, the people that are her peer group are typically balding middle-aged, white, left-headed males. She’s going to be a standout just from that point of view. 

In fact, when we were interviewing at colleges, she went to my alma mater, which is Illinois, and she interviewed with the dean of the electrical engineering and computer science department. He said, “You would be a standout in my department.” I’m the proud father and all that and I said, “Why is that?” He says, “Well, because we just don’t have any white females in my group.” That’s the advantage you’re looking for, but I’ve always encouraged her to do what she wants to do. 

Growing up, I can’t say that I put her in situations or tried to guide her into situations that would have helped her get into this line of work of hers, she just naturally chose it herself. She understands herself better than most people do at her age and so she’s got her own career. 

Gina Stracuzzi: You’re absolutely right. Just even being able to be the subject matter expert and the salesperson, it’s an amazing thing. Let’s talk about that. You went into engineering sales right after school, and you’re moving up pretty quickly from what I understand. What’s motivating you to be that successful? Where are you going with it? 

Lisa Kidder: I didn’t think I saw the competitive nature of myself until I got into sales. It might be the hardest thing to admit, but actually in that training program that my dad had mentioned that NetApp has, it’s called the S3 Academy, they had us rank what matters most to us, what’s most impactful in terms of feedback from a peer or a manager. What I had at the top of my list was actually recognition. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I think it’s very relatable in sales, because it’s very visible. 

My dad mentioned one time, “When you do well, people notice. When you don’t do well, more people notice.” It was a lot of internal drive for myself of how can I be the best I could possibly be, and get the most attention for all the right things. Sales really gave that to me, and engineering, not necessarily did it lack it, but it didn’t have that personal connection or that personal motivation where when the people I care about praise me, it’s because of the preparation results. It’s truly because of what I have worked for. I think that’s what’s motivated me to stay successful in sales, is building that trust with people. When a customer trusts me or when a leader pulls me into a bigger conversation, it tells me that I’m actually adding real value. It’s really just that striving for the next big thing. 

Fred Diamond: Mark, in the beginning of the interview, you talked about how it’s a people business, and especially in the channel. To be successful as a partner manager or channel manager or strategic alliance manager, a lot of times you’re bringing together the partner and the vendor, maybe other partners, maybe other vendors to provide, especially now, bigger solutions. What’s your advice for building relationships? You and I are probably about the same age and we’ve spent plenty of time at events and industry events, and we would go all the time frequently on a plane. That’s not as natural to a lot of people anymore. A lot of things are over Zoom and web broadcast, etc. Going to those types of events aren’t as intuitive maybe as it was back in the day, so to speak. Just give us your advice for junior sales professionals on how they need to build these relationships. 

Mark Conley: A couple things, you got to show up. That’s cliche, but you got to show you care and you got to show up. I’ll give you a couple of good examples. You build your network brick by brick in a foundation, the people that you built that foundation with 10 years ago, you may not use those bricks for 10 years into the future, but you got to continue to build them your whole career. A couple of stories about that. 

There’s an individual at one of our largest partners that was new to the role, but he headed up the Alliance Relationship Organization in that partner. He was the key man. He was an enigma, hard to know, not many people knew who he was. He was an intellectual, so he didn’t really fit into the sales culture like the rest of us did, but I thought, “I’ve got to get to know this guy.” I contacted him, and he was in New Jersey, so I said, “I want to come to New Jersey, have dinner with you, and get to know you.” That’s it. No agenda, of course, there’s always little things you want to talk about, but I want to get to know him. 

I did that three times before I felt like we had a relationship going on. It was purely because he was the right guy for us to know. Turns out that about six months ago, he was given a new responsibility, including the things he had been doing, but now he’s responsible for their most strategic accounts group, the largest accounts, the global financial services accounts, the global manufacturing accounts. He has become even more important to us. It was because a year and a half ago, two years ago, I decided that he was a guy that I needed to know that it’s going to pay off for as long as I decide to have that relationship with him. 

Another similar story is years ago, there was another individual who was someone that I was told didn’t really like us that much. He didn’t really like our line that much. He was ambivalent towards us. I got a chance to spend a few days together with him at an offsite. I said, “I’m going to make this guy my best friend. I’m going to spend every moment I possibly can with him. I’m going to have dinner with him.” He and his wife and my wife and I had dinner with him three nights in a row. I had a sneaky motive, and I don’t feel good about saying that, but what I found is that he was one of the most funny people I’ve ever met, just absolutely hilarious, your stomach hurts by the end of the night kind of thing. 

He and I are friends now, real, real friends. Every time I go to his hometown, and he still works, and now he’s got a much bigger responsibility, we have dinner or lunch together, we just have a great time. Build your network, go out of your way to see people. There’s the old saw that says, “Fly a thousand miles for a five-minute meeting.” That really does mean something to people. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Lisa, that’s a good segue into what I wanted to talk to you about. How are you working on building out your network? Have you taken some of your father’s advice on that? Because we all know that, especially salespeople, you live and die by your network and how far it extends. That’s internal and external. What are you doing to build that? 

Lisa Kidder: I think my dad nailed it. It’s really just being dependable. It’s reaching out when you don’t need something. He always said that to me of, even around the holidays, he wouldn’t just send a gift or send a note. We would brainstorm a lot of, how can I make this thoughtful and intentional for this person? It wasn’t even that he advised me necessarily. He just did it with his network and he made those relationships a priority, both personally and professionally, obviously, as you just heard from his stories. I think I’ve taken a lot of that and just tried to live by it because he always told me similar things of the small actions are what actually builds the reputation. 

I’ve been grateful enough to have seen that throughout my eight years at the same company. The people that I worked with eight years ago are now circling back and working with me all over again. Having that reputation that I’ve just built over the years from making those relationships count, it seems simple, even though it’s really hard, because you got to reach out over and over and over again, but that’s as simple as it can get. 

Fred Diamond: Based on something that Mark said before, most people will stay in the same industry most of their careers. Maybe in tech, they’ll jump from companies, Mark, you’ve worked for some great ones. Especially now that a lot of companies have shifted over the years, you may find someone you worked with 30 years ago who now is working for a company that you’re targeting. 

As a matter of fact, Gina and I were just talking about this the other day. A guy I worked with in the mid-90s and have loosely kept in touch with is now a senior person at one of our big targets for the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. He’s made introductions to the leaders at his new company. If I had pissed him off 30 years ago, he probably wouldn’t have helped, but he was great. By the way, Mark, how do you feel with all these great answers that Lisa’s giving us? 

Mark Conley: It’s a pretty proud papa moment. I was looking forward to this, but it’s even better than I thought it was, because what’s funny is I’m hearing her talk and I’m hearing some things that I recognize and things we’ve talked about before, but I’m hearing all kinds of brand new stuff too. I think she’s attributing things to me that didn’t actually happen, but I appreciate the fact that she’s giving me credit for things like that. 

Lisa Kidder: Well, no, like you mentioned in the beginning, Fred, all the phone calls you get from your daughter. My dad’s the first person I call when something exciting happens at work or whenever there’s a challenge or some advice I need. He is the first person I call. A lot of these things you may not remember saying, but it just happened in flip it conversations. 

Fred Diamond: My daughter at Hershey, one of her favorite expressions is your network is your net worth. She’s very good at meeting people, and Gina knows who she is. Mark, when we first met, you told me about some of the interesting things that Lisa had done, some of the places she’s traveled to to broaden her horizons. How did these things prepare her for success? 

Mark Conley: She’s living the life that I wish I lived when I was 30 years old. She’s gone to some amazing places. She’s been to more countries at her age than most people her age, and actually more countries than I’ve been to at my age. I’m really proud of that, her wanderlust and her appetite for different cultures and things like that. I’ve always appreciated diversity. I’ve tended to gravitate towards people that really weren’t like me. Engineers weren’t really like me, but I found I could learn an awful lot from them, and people that were in different countries, I appreciated their points of view because it was always different than mine. I always felt like I could learn from other people. 

I haven’t really seen that in Lisa, but I’ve got to believe that she’s learned from that diversity too, because she’s seen different cultures. She can tell you, but they’ve been to Iceland and Spain and Machu Picchu and Southeast Asia and Fiji and all kinds of different places, just an amazing group of places. We’re actually going with her and her husband, Dylan, to Portugal in June. We’re looking forward to that. I’m sure that the experiences she’s had in those different cultures and those different rules and laws and economies and things like that has really helped broaden her perspectives on business and understand how to deal with a much wider diversity group of people. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I’m just thinking how wonderful it is that you have this piece in common. I’m sure you’ll drive your respective spouses crazy talking about things while you’re in Portugal. 

Mark Conley: Gina, if I can put one more thing in there, when COVID hit in 2020, Lisa was a sales engineer working in Atlanta. This is one of these stories that sticks in my head, so maybe it didn’t happen like this, but what I remember is she called and she said, “Dad, I’m not going to be able to see clients for a long time. This is really a shutdown.” I said, “You’re probably right. It’s happening with me. It’s going to be happening with you.” I said, “Why don’t you buy a motorcycle and drive across the country, or go live in Aruba for six months,” because at 23, 24 years old, in a situation like this, only you can do that, and they did. Her and Dylan, they lived in Denver for six weeks, and they lived in Austin for seven weeks, and they lived in Miami Beach for three weeks, not consecutively, but they really explored the United States and other countries as well. 

She came back and she said, “Dad, we’re moving to Austin.” I said, “Wow, that’s great. You’re a grown woman. You can do whatever you want.” But it’s that kind of appetite for adventure and diversity that really is a big part of who Lisa is. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Lisa, you and I would get along just fine. I did all that except for I did it without any money. There just weren’t those kinds of opportunities back when I was your age, but it was fun and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

Lisa, where do you see the future of sales heading? What are some of the things that you’re striving to do with that particular view of the future? 

Lisa Kidder: That’s a great question. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what my future looks like, let alone the future of sales. At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s going away or changing. I think that it’s going to become more and more about the people. I always strive to be one of those people that people can depend on. When they need something, they know that they can call me, they know that I’ll always say yes. Some people say that some of my biggest weakness is saying yes to everything and not knowing how to say no, but I use it as my biggest strength because I’m always itching for that next big thing, that next challenge, that next country, that next crazy place to go to and crazy person to talk to. I don’t know exactly what the future of sales or even necessarily my future looks like, but keeping it focused on the people and as strategic as possible is really my dream and my goal with my career. 

Fred Diamond: You’ll definitely have a great career with all the things that you plant here and putting the advice that your dad, Mark Conley, had suggested. I want to thank you both for all the great ideas, the great conversation. Gina, like you and I have said many times, we got to do more of these because they’re always a lot of fun. Our audience at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling and Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership are leaders in professional selling looking to be more effective, typically B2B and B2G. What you both have expressed, Mark and Lisa, are definitely things that people should consider to help them become more effective. 

We like to end each show with a specific action step. Lisa, why don’t you go first, you’ve given us a lot of great ideas along the way. Give us something specific that listeners should do right now after listening to the show or reading the transcript to take their sales career to the next level. 

Lisa Kidder: I was trying to think about this before, what kind of advice, what kind of action I would suggest for people. I think for anyone, but especially for anyone early in career, to intentionally put themselves up in uncomfortable situations. Early in my career, I think that was my biggest growth point, is saying yes before I completely felt ready. Sales has a lot of confidence involved, and that could be really tough, especially early in career. My dad mentioned, you don’t really know who you are in your 20s, and even your 30s, but you still have to have that confidence in sales, whether you have it or not. Volunteer for the presentation you don’t feel ready for, raise your hand before you feel 100% prepared. I think that’s the best way to not only gain that confidence, but get the visibility to just have your career take off. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Gina, you and I have talked about this many times, is that the customer is not thinking that. The customer is not thinking about what’s in your head. The customer is thinking about, how are you going to help me achieve my goal? What value are you bringing? If you do the preparation and if you really devote yourself to your craft, work on perfecting your craft as a selling professional, then there’s a lot of great opportunity. I love the way you express that. 

Mark, why don’t you bring us home? Give us a specific action step to take their sales career to the next level. 

Mark Conley: What Lisa said about courage is really important. The three characteristics of great salespeople to me are ego, empathy, and guts. You’ve got to have a healthy ego, not an overblown ego, but a resilient ego to be able to take no and keep on moving. You’ve got to have the ability to understand what the person you’re selling to wants from an epithetic standpoint and try to position what you’ve got as what they need. But it’s those guts that Lisa was talking about, is the courage to commit to something that you’ve never done before and step off the edge of the cliff knowing that either you’ll figure out a way to fly or something else will happen. That’s not really the next step that I wanted to talk about, but I just think it’s really important. 

The next step I want to talk about is if you’re listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, if you’re reading the transcript, send me a LinkedIn connection request. I’ll challenge anybody who listens to this or reads this to send me a LinkedIn connection request, but don’t try to sell me something right away. Just reference the fact that you saw this or you heard this and you want to make a connection. Then maybe a month later, do some research and figure out what might appeal to me and then make a sales pitch to me. By the way, there is so much information about everyone available online that there should be no problem with you knowing who I am, what I like, how to appeal to me, and that kind of stuff. 

One more quick story, I got contacted by an early-in-career salesperson about a week and a half ago, and she was trying to get in to see an IT leader at one of her prospect accounts. On his LinkedIn profile, it says he’s a music snob, it’s what she said. He said he’s a self-proclaimed music snob, and she knew that I was a huge music fan. I collect vinyl, I listen to records all the time, all rock records. She said, “If you could help me get in to see him, that would be great.” 

I went on Facebook, and in 20 seconds, I found this guy. It says in his first post that his favorite new recording artist is Angine de Poitrine, which is a very unusual group. You can look it up, Angine de Poitrine. I got back to her and I said, “This is his favorite group,” and she goes, “How did you find that?” I spent 20 seconds finding this, so I guess the moral to be heard on this is trust in yourself, do some research, get to know somebody, be empathetic, and then try to appeal to them with what they care about. 

Fred Diamond: There’s no excuse for not getting that type of information. Gina, final thought. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I just want to say that, Lisa, you are spot on about raising your hand, making sure you try things that you don’t think you’re comfortable for. What happens too often to women, the higher up in your careers you get, the more that’s at stake and the less of you that you will see around you, and so that bravery and that courage starts to go away. You’re a little less likely to take a chance. Do it anyway. That’s what this book is all about. It’s about what happens when you don’t take those chances. 

Fred Diamond: All right. I want to thank Mark Conley and Lisa Kidder for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 842: Sales Lessons Across Generations with Mark Conley and Lisa Kidder first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is the first 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.

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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: “With the right training and AI, you can take hours, days of work, and put them into 30 seconds and get all the information you want for you to be able to push the sale further.”

TOM’S TIP: “If we can get salespeople to uncover very early on what’s changed that has the buyer interested in considering a new solution, and understand who all should be involved in the conversation, we begin to get a resource that tells us whether it’s a qualified opportunity or not.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: All right, both of you guys have been regular guests on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. You know how this works. We’re going to be basically addressing a question every week that is challenging sales leaders, specifically around how to utilize AI to enable success. Tom, you and I have talked about this concept called the Ghost Town Funnel. My question for you, why do prospects go completely dark after a perfect demo? Why do deals stall in the sales funnel? 

Tom Snyder: It’s one of the major complaints of most sales leaders and one of the things that salespeople often ignore. A deal does appear to be moving through the funnel. We get to a certain stage, it’s usually about halfway through, where either there has been a demonstration or they’re waiting to get the demonstration scheduled and all of a sudden, we get ghosted. And the salesperson makes lots of excuses for the prospect, the sales leader gets more and more frustrated, and the sales funnel backs up with all kinds of nonsense. There are several different causes of the problem which are easily avoided if the salesperson understands best practice. The salesperson understands what science has told us about buyers making a complex decision. And two, really stand out in the answer to this question. One, the problem really is the very front end of when the sales cycle starts.  

Sellers fail to uncover, and this is the important point, the changes that have negatively impacted their status quo, meaning the buyer’s status quo. What are the changes that have caused the buyer to begin to view their current solution as non-optimal, their current solution as perhaps frustrating, getting a little long in the tooth, no longer meeting the current challenges? We don’t uncover that, and as a result, we’re not really sure where’s a live opportunity and where there isn’t. Compounding that problem is the fact that sellers often remain single threaded. What could be more fun than talking to somebody who’s engaging and excited to talk to you or interested in your solution, or always answers your phone call and your emails? What could be better than that? And we have no idea if that individual has any authority, if that individual is a lone wolf crying in the wilderness of otherwise satisfied people using a solution. We have nothing. We just have an interesting new friend.  

The thing is, if we can get salespeople to uncover very early on what’s changed that has you interested in considering a new solution or what change would you like to implement to do better than you currently are, now we begin to get a resource that tells us a piece of the puzzle as to whether it’s a qualified opportunity or not. The next thing is to figure out; do you have any colleagues who feel the same way?

Now, that’s a little bit crass the way I phrased it, but the idea is, are there other folks in your organization, particularly those in some leadership positions, who recognize the same frustration or aspiration you do? If you could get sellers to simply uncover change that may be happening outside of the company, change the company may want to make, and you could get them to understand, who all should I get in touch with? Who all should I start a conversation with? What are the list of people that I can get, have a pretty good idea, have influence on the kind of decisions I care about? I’m so much further ahead now.

The primary reason sellers have not ever been doing that traditionally is A: they’re not trained in what sales excellence requires, and their own company encourages. Quick, put it in the funnel. Quick, let’s close it. We stay riding our single thread, only to be disappointed that the deal goes dark. We don’t have the training and we don’t have the research time to find the answers. That’s what’s causing the problem.  

Fred Diamond: Yeah, that’s a huge problem. One thing I remember is a sales leader of mine years ago said, “Fred, we have enough friends”. You mentioned, you get through to somebody, all of a sudden you have a new friend. He goes, “we have enough friends. We need customers”. So I love the way you described that. I love the tee up here to Zeev Wexler. You’re one of the top sales experts on utilizing AI, to be more effective in the selling process. Give us some of your insights on what Tom just said.  

Zeev Wexler: Love it. So, first of all, these are the two biggest blocks for why sales get stalled, and with the right training and AI, now you can solve that. What do I mean by that? If you basically take these questions and load them onto an AI system, the AI within minutes, if not seconds, can go through all of the issues.  

What can block your sales, the changes that are happening, the company, what is going on with them, and give you a brief that would take you hours, maybe days in the past to create, looking through every resource and really equipping you with what is the knowledge that you need and what is the knowledge that that company is going through right now as it pertains to what you’re trying to sell to them.  

The other question, it’s even easier, the artificial intelligence system, if you prompt it correctly and know the right processes, can create exactly who you need to talk to, who’s involved in the process, who has authority, who has budgets, what they’ve done in the past. In today’s world there is no “it’s too hard, it’s too much time”. The company leadership wants it to go into the pipeline. But you can build with the right training, the right knowledge, the right expertise like Tom provides, you can build a system that can do that literally within seconds. You can take hours, days of work and put them into 30 seconds and get all the information you want for you to be able to push this sale further.  

AI is the special weapon if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s a waste of time. But if you know exactly what it is that you’re doing now, you have a power multiplier, a 10x that will make you really good in the process and make the sale go further to the place that you understand whether you get it or not.  

Tom Snyder: I have spent decades in the industry of training salespeople on what science really tells us works and not myths or anecdotes or whatever. One of the most amazing things that I have learned from Zeev, it blows my mind, is the speed and depth of information that’s essential to know that you can now get in literally a matter of seconds. It’s incredible because one of the things, you know, the well equipped, well researched salesperson will, by virtue of simply that information be differentiated.  

If you marry that to the techniques that best practice tells us, it’s amazing. What Zeev does is the, I hate to use this because it sounds trite, but it’s literally the magic elixir of getting your salespeople to not just learn, but to embrace and master best practice. Because it’s like their constant coach, their constant assistant. It’s literally mining information. It would take you hours and hours to find yourself, that is so valuable, but no one has the time to do it. And getting this done correctly is magic. I’ve seen it happen. 

Zeev Wexler: I’ve seen it happen with so many companies, Fred, of how you take this. And now salespeople love to research because it takes seconds. Now leadership knows they have all the information they need. They now are equipped to do more, to close in higher percentages, to do things better, faster, cheaper, right? Better, faster, cheaper is the solution, the best solution for everything. If you know how to do something now, you can make it happen so well, and it can really revolutionize your sales funnel. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Everybody reach out to me, Fred Diamond, or Zeev Wexler or Tom Snyder. We have a great solution available from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, bringing two of the greatest minds in sales, performance improvement and selling effectiveness. Using AI to help your company achieve your goals. All right, gentlemen, this is the AI and Sales Brief. Every Monday morning we’re going to be tackling a question that revolves around this. And the goal is to help you and your company become more effective as a selling organization. My name is Fred Diamond. 

The post EPISODE 841: AI and Sales Brief: Fixing the Funnel 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.

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Today’s show featured an interview with Brett Cheplowitz, Vice President, Commercial at Blackwood.

Find Brett on LinkedIn.

BRETT’S TIP: “Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. You can’t win it on your first meeting, but you can definitely lose it.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Brett, it’s great to have you here. I’ve learned some stories about how Blackwood has grown and how it’s become such a force in the IT space. I’m interested in getting some of your perspective. I know you’ve been there for a while. I know that you started at Blackwood when the company was primarily focused on the federal marketplace. Give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself and then tell us, what did you learn when you were asked to take the company into commercial and enterprise markets? First, give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself and a little bit of an introduction to Blackwood. 

Brett Cheplowitz: I’ve been with Blackwood now for 15 years. I grew up in the space, and to your credit, doing your research and knowing some of the folks that I grew up in this industry with. When I started years ago, we were almost 100% federal business. I was employee number four sitting in a cube in the middle of the office and really had to learn the ropes on my own, given the, “Hey, this is what we do here. Go to work.” I had a couple of federal agencies that I was responsible for. When I started getting to work, I realized like, “Hey, there’s a rhythm to this. You can pick up on some of the things that you need to do to ingratiate yourself with the customers and figure what they need and what their pain was.” 

After a little bit, we made the decision like, “We need to diversify.” I think it’s a lot easier to say what I didn’t learn. I was able to learn a lot of things the hard way. It was a very different time for us back in those days. To Blackwood’s credit, to Ryan Morris’s credit, they gave me the keys and said, “Hey, go figure it out,” and I was able to make every mistake in the book. I’m a person who was learning lessons the hard way. I was able to get out there and struck my blades on my own for a while and then realized like, “Hey, we need some help. We need to bring in some people who are much better at sales than I am.” 

I was able to go seed territory and backfill with people that are better at sales than I am. I think that’s the number one thing I learned off the bat, is you got to have good people on your team. If you want to succeed in this, and probably any industry, you got to have good people and a team that you can trust that are going to carry your message forward and be just a good brain ambassador at the end of the day. Be obsessed with problems the way that I was obsessed with outcomes, the way that Blackwood’s always been obsessed with outcomes for their customer. 

I feel like that’s been learned. Honestly, I got to say, I don’t think that’s changed. If you’re doing anything today, especially as fast-paced as this world is, you got to have A players in your team. That’s probably the number one lesson I’ve learned. 

Fred Diamond: Just curious, in one minute or less, what does Blackwood do, so that people can put the rest of the conversation into context? 

Brett Cheplowitz: We are a technology broker that is focused solely on cybersecurity. We’re trying to bring the best-of-breed solutions to our customer set, which is basically your entire public sector gambit, massive federal agencies, state and local government, higher education, Fortune 1000 and above on the enterprise side of things. We’re trying to bring this to bear, not just in a product way, but how does this solve a larger problem set for you with all of the problems you’re facing in today’s world? At the end of the day, technology broker focused on 100% cybersecurity solutions. 

Fred Diamond: What is the biggest mistake that technology selling professionals make when trying to sell cybersecurity solutions today? 

Brett Cheplowitz: There’s all sorts of ways to trip over, especially when you’re getting into the door. I would say the number one mistake I see is symptom chasing. Where it’s like, a customer might come to you and say, “I have a certain problem,” and you want to dive in head long into that specific issue. That might work the first, maybe even the second time, but eventually you got to get to the heart of the issue. You got to find the root cause of these symptoms. If you’re not really doing the proper amount of discovery and trying that conversation up, way left of the problem starting, “Okay, how did we get here?” Just symptom chase, you can fill your pipeline, but you will not be a durable business. You will not be a durable business owner. You have to get to the root of the problem. I think that’s the biggest thing. 

There’s so much pressure to go out and take your number, get to your quota, like, “Hey, go to the line.” It’s really easy to make the mistake of, “That door open, I’m going to walk through it,” instead of basically saying, “I’m going to take a step back. Let’s take a breath. What else is going on here? Who else is involved in this conversation? What are we not talking about in this room that might be contributing to this, that’s actually causing these symptoms?” I think that’s a mistake. I got to say that, again, probably not just in this industry, it’s probably all younger sales reps out there in any industry, they want to dive in and sell something. I think sometimes it’s really convenient. The hard answer is to hit the brakes. Let’s step back and figure out what’s going on. 

Fred Diamond: A lot of the listeners to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast sell cybersecurity, or it’s a piece of what they’re selling. Just curious on your thoughts having been doing this for so long, what are the differences between selling into the security organization versus general IT? Or am I wrong there? Are you selling cyber solutions into the IT organization? How does that fit? Do you sell into the security organization? Or do you sell into the IT organization? What do we need to know about that? 

Brett Cheplowitz: I think that’s a really good question, because when I first started, there was no security team. It was network and they had some security add-ons and things they needed to accomplish. They got some of the budget for that, but there was no security people. It was just like, “Hey, I’m responsible for this.” Obviously now that entire thing has changed. 

I think what we like to do at Blackwood is we like to have big conversations. Like how does this bridge the gap between multiple teams? I think you’re going to need ultimately buy-in on most of these, especially if it’s enterprise-wide deployment of, name your product. You’re going to have to be able to sell to multiple different layers of this organization. You do have to sell to all different teams. 

I think from my perspective, if you really break down what the difference is between selling to cybersecurity, and almost everyone else, where it’s like, “Hey, this is what we need,” sometimes you have to help create the need when someone says these are the symptoms. You have to go find the root cause there. For us, it’s like, well, there’s no budget for that. When you’ve got something brand new, when you’ve got something that solves these problems, and it might be a year-old technology, it might not be a box check type of deal for that customer. They might not have a budgeted line on them to say like, “Hey, you know what? I don’t lose insurance if I don’t buy this.” You really have to be able to say, “This is why this solves this problem for you,” and you have to be able to create that need. You got to help them go sell to the broader organization, because a lot of times it’s going to be obscure for right now. People might not know about it today, especially if you’re in there selling to an early adopter, they might not know about that technology for another 8 to 12 months, and you don’t have that kind of time. They need to solve this problem yesterday. How do you like, “Hey, okay, I’m listening to you now. Let me help you with this conversation.” 

You do have to create some of that need, and I think that’s probably the biggest difference. But to be honest with you, things have gotten so big now that at a certain point, you’re going to have to be able to sell to the broader organization and help your champions go do that on their own. When you’re not in the room, you got to give them enough ammunition to go back and say like, “Hey, you know what? This is what we’re hearing. I think we can solve it this way.” You got to help them form that kind of messaging internally. 

Fred Diamond: A couple of the words that we talk a lot about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is trust, credibility. Cybersecurity is a pretty important thing. It’s protecting the company against huge amounts of risk. We’ve all heard about fraud and break-ins and all those kinds of things. For the selling professionals listening today, I guess one of the first things you need to do is you need to build credibility right away with the chief security officer, information security officer, the security team, the leaders. These are pretty serious people who are dealing with big challenges. What is some of your advice on building the credibility from Jump Street, from day one? 

Brett Cheplowitz: I think the biggest thing is actively listening and being able to say when something’s good enough. A lot of people come in and they want to conquer the world and they want to say like, “Hey, you know what? Everything you’re doing today is wrong. Every piece of competitive technology you have in here is incorrect.” The quickest way to lose credibility is basically say like, “I’ve got an answer for all these questions.” 

When you don’t know something, say you don’t know. If you already have a great piece of technology in place, you guys are doing awesome. You can’t just go in and try to wipe the slate clean. I think that’s a really quick way to lose that credibility. I think with so many of these things, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. I feel like you can lose it on your first meeting. You can’t win it on your first meeting, but you can lose it. These things are built over time. You’re going to learn to trust me over time. 

You’re never going to have a conversation with me or anybody at Blackwood, that basically like, “When I walk out of there like, I don’t trust a word that that person said,” that’s just not going to happen. It’s an integral part to what makes us who we are. That comes back to, you got to hire people that are not only A players, but they got to have integrity. 

Fred Diamond: I’m going to talk to you about the people who are successful. You’ve hired a lot of people, and you mentioned A players. What makes a good cybersecurity selling professional? If I’m a young selling professional, or if I’m someone who’s been selling IT and I want to move into cyber, what are some of the things that you’ve observed over the years that are characteristics or qualities of people who are successful selling cybersecurity? 

Brett Cheplowitz: It’s going to sound extremely cliche. I think the biggest common denominator that I see across not only this industry but all, is just grit. It’s being able to get knocked down and get back up and go back into the fray. No one has to come manage your behavior. You have to manage to a process. You got to have a process, yes, you have to have a brand, and that all has to be there and consistent. But I don’t have to go track any of my guys down and say like, “Hey, are you working?” I think most of the time, your most successful reps, they just have that gritty type of tenacity. They’re going to get up and keep going. 

For me, on the management side, it’s fun to watch. You got to realize like, you like the hustle culture and how to push people and how to ultimately engage. A lot of it’s the other side. A lot of it’s having the empathy and having some EQ and understanding when somebody is on the struggle bus, to be able to reach in and help them a little bit because you don’t have to add a lot of fuel to their fire. They’re already just going to get up and go to work. 

I also got a long time ago, when I first started in this industry, it’s like, hey, if you get up and you put your shoe on and put in your hours, you’re going to be fine. It’s so true. It’s just getting up and having the resolve to keep going. I think that’s the biggest thing I see in successful sales reps. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer there. What are some of the cybersecurity trends that selling professionals need to be paying attention to right now? We’re doing today’s interview in March of 2026 with Brett Cheplowitz of Blackwood. What are things that they need to be thinking about and knowing about today to be successful? 

Brett Cheplowitz: I think I can probably hear your little eyes at the back of their head with this eye roll. But unfortunately, the answer is AI. Unfortunately, it is agentic AI, in my opinion, more pointedly. I think if you’re not paying attention to this space, you will absolutely fall behind, yes, but also just a lot of the cloud security conversation from a decade ago, it reminds me a lot of the endpoint conversation from so many years ago. It’s like, say those words to eight different customers, it’s going to mean eight different things. 

Everyone has a slightly different definition. Everyone’s attacking the problem in slightly different ways. It’s up to us to have opinions in this space and guide them to where we think this market is going. We aggressively looked at this market for the last several years and started tracking here’s where we’re going to end up. In my opinion, you’re going to see every big brand in the world bake this into their product. You really saw third party players come in and taking over because let’s face it, there’s a massive talent gap, and we’ve been talking about that. How do we reduce the talent gap without taking away jobs? That’s no one’s prerogative here, but I think the tier one analyst, it changes. It actually allows you to analyze, actually look up the stack the way you’re supposed to and set up just triaging all day. I think it’s a massive trend. I don’t think it’s going anywhere and I think every single player in the game today will have some flavor baked into their product. 

Fred Diamond: In the cyber world, it’s interesting, when you look at all the vendors out there that are making products, almost everything is AI empowered, cybersecurity, so many things, it used to be very crystal-clear what companies used to do. Now they’re trying to explain and show that they almost do everything. There are so many partnerships that you used to have that you need to have. You need to have relationships with OEMs, got to have relationships with other VARs, other service providers who may have a little more expertise in certain solutions to be able to provide the right service and value add to the customer. What does a great vendor-partner relationship actually look like in practice? What do you want to have as far as your relationships? Give us some insights there, Brett. 

Brett Cheplowitz: You hit the nail on the head earlier in this conversation, trust is a big piece of this. It’s like any other relationship you have in your life. If there isn’t a two-way street of trust, there’s nothing. If you don’t trust that when Blackwood is in the room having conversations on your behalf that we’re doing it well, you won’t entrust us with anything. You won’t entrust us to lead any conversations. I think that’s the foundation, like any good relationship, is I trust you, you trust me. We’re going to do the right things together. If we’re in the room together, fantastic. But I also know if we’re not in the room together, we’re going to handle these conversations the right way. You’re going to portray my company message the right way. I’m going to fold you guys in the conversation. It’s built on trust. 

I also think if you look at over the years of Blackwood for us, what are the partnerships that have really just taken off? It’s just this all-in attitude that we leave the room with. Like, hey, these reps on the street, on the field level, are on with my reps. They’re talking weekly. They’re on the same page. They’re out there prospecting together. They’re talking about what makes the relationship go with their customers, what outcomes we’re trying to reach, and we’re honest. We feel like that solution is the best fit for these things. It’s all about like if I tell you that, you’re not going to go shatter the rest of the relationship because you don’t like the answer that I gave you. 

To me, it really just comes down to that rudimentary thing, is there trust at all levels? Do we have trust? The C-suite all the way down the field. Without that, you truly have nothing. You might win a couple of deals together, but it’s never going to be a real partnership. 

Fred Diamond: Tell us something specific about you. You’ve had some great success. You talked about how you were employee number four and the leaders came and said, “Hey, why don’t you take us into these other markets?” What’s one habit or mindset that you have specifically that has made you a more effective sales leader? 

Brett Cheplowitz: This habit, I would say, I give this to almost anybody who will listen. I think it’s not only helped me in my career. I think it’s helped me in my life. That’s really taking a step back and mapping out and planning out your day. It’s the simplest thing on earth, that’s making the pen and paper to-do list. It’s sitting down. What are the top five, top six things I need to accomplish today? What didn’t I get done on my list yesterday? That’s the number one thing I got to do right now. As a natural procrastinator, it’s the only thing that I can do to that feeling of like, “I’ll get to that later in the week.” If you ask my wife, she’d tell you, “If it’s not in the list, it’s not going to happen.” 

For me, I set out my day the night before. Before I sign off for the day, I’m mapping out tomorrow’s activities. I’m going to add things throughout the day that I need to accomplish either the next day, that week, or whatever. If I need to change priorities, I can do that. It’s not known. I think that’s not helped me in just my career. I think that’s helped in my life. If you look at even a weekend to-do list, it’s there. I’m making a list of some sort. What do I need to go do? It keeps my thoughts organized and it keeps me on track. I would recommend anybody doing that. Period. It doesn’t matter if you’re the world’s top performer in any sport, any profession, you can benefit from having a list in front of you at any time in your life. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great advice. Brett Cheplowitz, from Blackwood, thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. You’ve given a lot of great ideas. Give us one specific action step, something specific that people listening to today’s show or reading the transcript must do right now to take their sales career to the next level, something actionable and specific. 

Brett Cheplowitz: That’s such an awesome question. For me, go get a mentor. Go find someone, and it does not have to be in your industry. It doesn’t have to be at your company. It could be someone you were neighbors with 10 years ago that you respect what they do and how they carry themselves. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the same industry at all. I would say the things that have helped me most of my career have always been open conversations with people that I just respect what they do. 

I had an old boss the first month that I started working at this company. For my first challenge, they’re like, “I want you to go interview the six most successful people you know, not intent to sell them anything. I just want you to find out how they did it. I just want you to find out their story.” I’ve remained in contact with some of those people. Actually, that old boss is still a mentor of mine, where if I’m in a situation where it’s like, “I just don’t know what I’m doing here,” that’s the first person I call. That’s almost 20 years ago. Then for me, getting someone that you respect, and understanding, “Hey, I’m coming to you empty cup. I’m going to come to you, draw out your answers. I want your feedback.” I think that is the most important piece that anybody can add to the puzzle, is just find someone that you can rely on to give you good guidance. That’s huge. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great advice. I tell a lot of young professionals who are getting started in sales, or actually any part of their career, if they want to go into sales, I’ll say, “Go find a friend of your parents who is in sales.” They say, “Well, how do I ask them for time?” Just say to them, “I want to talk to you. Can we meet at Starbucks nine o’clock on Saturday?” 

My son, when he left college and he had a bunch of friends who were now moving into sales, I must have had half a dozen conversations, and I was thrilled. For people out there, people will be thrilled to share with you. Now, don’t say something like, “Can we go to dinner at Morton’s?” They may not give you three hours, but, “Can I meet you at Starbucks or Panera Bread nine o’clock on Saturday?” and come prepared with the questions. Don’t just say, “What is your advice?” 

Brett Cheplowitz: Take notes. 

Fred Diamond: Yeah, take notes, bring a notepad. I tell that to people all the time. Take a notepad, not in your phone, on a piece of paper, and then action, and then follow up with gratitude, and things like that. Brett Cheplowitz, 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 840: Building Trust and Credibility in Cybersecurity Sales with Brett Cheplowitz 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!

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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 Corey Rooney, Director of Channel Partner Business Development at Carahsoft, and Federal Business Development and Marketing expert Robert Efrus.

Find Corey on LinkedIn. Find Robert on LinkedIn.

COREY’S ADVICE: “Avoid vague value statements, clearly itemize what the government’s getting, and frame out in your response how it impacts their outcomes.”

ROBERT’S ADVICE: “The most important thing is to first understand the environment your customer is operating in, what the mission requirements are of their agency, what the priorities are of the current leadership, before you even have the conversation.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m excited today. We’re doing todays show in April of 2026. We have Rob Efrus and Corey Rooney with Carahsoft. Corey is the senior director for partner business development at Carahsoft. Rob, we had you on the show in December. It was right after you did the 16th Annual Budget Breakfast at the Carahsoft Conference & Collaboration Center, and we went deep into what you talked about then and the changing landscape for companies that are selling to B2G, specifically to the federal government. 

On April 4th of 2026, you did the 4th version of that presentation to the partner community within the Carahsoft ecosystem. Corey, you were a major part of that, which we’ll talk about in a second. You gave very decisive, very insightful thoughts of where we are now as a selling community, as a support community to our customers, and to be frank, what value-added resellers, what companies that are distributing and selling technology to the government you got to be doing, you need to do, because so much has changed. 

Rob, before I turn it over to you to set the table, Corey, this is your first appearance on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I have a feeling it’s going to be the first of many. We’ve had many of your peers at Carahsoft on the show. We actually just posted a show with Sehar Wahla, who manages the AWS business. We’re doing a great event on May 14th at the Carahsoft Conference & Collaboration Center. Give us a brief intro to you. Then, Rob, I’m going to ask you to set the stage of why we’re doing this show today. 

Corey Rooney: I have a couple of roles here at Carahsoft, but in the context of what we’re talking about today, I oversee a team that supports our corporate nationwide resellers, our strategic resellers, our tactical resellers, our value-added resellers, which includes all the long-tail and the new reseller and value-added reseller partner onboarding. We transact with over 4,500 roughly a year. Over almost half of those are transacting in the US federal market. I’ve got a team supporting their growth, business development, joint sales and marketing campaigns. That team has been growing significantly over the last few years and we’re working to have a many to one scale at Carahsoft of resources that are supporting the dedicated value-added reseller and solution provider growth ecosystem because it’s near and dear to our hearts and that ecosystem, that landscape is cherished by Carahsoft. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do to support our vendors without that broad scale. 

Fred Diamond: Many of the partners that we’re talking about participate in the Institute for Effective Professional Selling programs. We’re very fortunate to be in this community. Rob, I’m just going to state and then people can Google you and find you, you are the expert on public sector budgeting. Again, 16th breakfast you did back in December, earlier this month was the 4th. I’m just going to make that statement so that we can get right into the content. 

Rob, talk about some of the administration’s guidelines, the priorities that have got us here to this point. 

Rob Efrus: In terms of setting the stage, we’re about a year and a half almost into the Trump administration 47. The Trump team has made IT modernization a major priority, which is great news from a selling perspective. In addition, as part of that goal, there’s also been a concerted effort to improve how the government acquires technology to make it more efficient to eliminate the silo purchasing and to overall try and unify the process by which government agencies acquire software, hardware, and related services such that the government isn’t buying things over and over with different pricing, etc. 

This has put pressure on a number of stakeholder groups in our community, including the software manufacturers, including the resellers, including the systems integrators. The net effect of all of this is that those sales personnel that are working in a channel related role are needing to stay more on their toes in terms of understanding what these changes are and how specifically they impact the channel. From a reseller perspective, this requires, I believe, a reselling motion that many professionals in this channel environment are not used to. That is to demonstrate the value of the reseller in terms of supporting customer requirements, in terms of getting the best deal, etc. 

In addition, it also requires a little more awareness of what changes are coming down from the top. The general services administration and the office of management and budget in particular are the two main agents of change affecting the channel environment in particular. There’s a specific initiative called OneGov being administered out of GSA that really for the large enterprise software vendors has been disruptive, frankly, where there have been efforts to go direct to manufacturers on the belief that this is a more efficient route. 

The selling motion that is new and different is that the reseller community needs to be more proactive, not only in understanding these changes, but demonstrating the value of the reseller channel to end user customers, to contracting officers, to program managers who are getting signals from the top in order to make these changes, but often are doing so, in my opinion, in a ready, fire, aim manner that sometimes throws the baby out with the bathwater. 

Fred Diamond: That’s very well said there. It’s just so many things have changed. Like you said, we’re 18 months into the new administration. They want to modernize government, but that affects everybody that sells things to the government. Every company has had to rethink how they go about their marketing. 

Corey, Carahsoft is at the center of this. 4,500 resellers you work with and over a thousand vendors/manufacturers bringing critical solutions to the government to achieve their goals. Give us some of your insights into how we should be working with VARs and what VARs should be doing. 

Corey Rooney: There’s been this illusion of what the value-added reseller and solution provider community is bringing to the table. All they see at first glance, the government industry thinks, “Hey, it’s just the margin and they’re passing paper.” Really, that illusion doesn’t take into full account of what a lot of our partners are doing on a day-to-day basis. I speak with a lot of partners. I speak with a lot of value-added resellers. I speak with a lot of solution providers, a lot of system integrators. The idea that, hey, they’re just taking an order and passing along and marking it up is completely incomplete when you look at all they’re doing, coming into bringing in expert advice, doing the research and analysis and helping the government and customers vet new and existing technologies, the requirement analysis, managing all the supply chain risk management, the performance reporting, all the installation integration and training that’s required, certification testing, the list goes on and on. 

We have partners that are doing a tremendous, tremendous job taking the message of the manufacturers, taking the solutions they’ve built, in many cases at a commercial level, and translating that into the needs of the government. We’re very fortunate to have a big, broad ecosystem of partners. It does seem like the pressure has become a little bit more intense on some of those partners. I’ve spoken to some and they’re getting that pressure, but they’re also leading in with value. It takes sometimes thousands of hours of critical work between the manufacturer, the work that we’re doing to support all of these partners to get them enabled, educated, provide resources to do all the configuration, to help program manage some of these large and complex opportunities. 

It’s not just about passing paper and it hasn’t been for quite some time. I think for good or for bad, this is a little bit of a push to help this ecosystem evolve into providing more of the value that is expected from these customers that are still coming to a lot of these partners and saying, “Hey, we need your help.” It’s been an interesting ride that frankly we’ve been well positioned here at Carahsoft for the last many years to help take that message from those manufacturers, add in a lot of value by helping translate to that market, and then enabling our ecosystem partners to really go drive that value. 

Fred Diamond: Rob, give us some insights into what is going on inside of the government for the technology buyer. They’re also going through major challenges too. We talked about this back in December. There was a large reduction in force with government. A lot of people took the option to retire and to move on, less with more, etc. Rob, give us some of your insights for the people listening about what’s going on inside the government, the government employee, not just only the ones who are making the administrative decisions, but the ones who are buying technology and have to solve the challenges that government solves, infrastructure, service to the citizen, military support, whatever it might be. 

Rob Efrus: I could name at least three specific trends that are worth noting. The first is there’s a major effort to reform the procurement rules governing IT purchasing. The federal acquisition regs are currently undergoing an overhaul. This is more at the 30,000 foot level, but the emphasis there is on more commerciality, less customization, buying and paying for services to modify a commercial product to meet very custom requirements. All of that is flowing down to the contracting professionals in government agencies, and you add to that this specific effort to try and disintermediate the traditional buying patterns of IT products and services. 

I say disintermediate to the extent that the government and through the general services administration, second major point, where GSA has expanded its portfolio in terms of being the entity that is seeking to make those purchasing motions more uniform and more applicable across government to enable to minimize stovepipe purchasing and to ensure that the government is getting the best price at the agency-by-agency level across government instead of within a specific agency. 

I say that and use GSA as an example, they’ve lost thousands and thousands of personnel through retirements and furloughs, etc., and so it’s a bit of a contrast. On the one hand, their mission is expanding, GSA’s, but on the other, there are less federal employees able to help. Then you’ve got from the political level, as I briefly described earlier, this push by federal CIOs, by the Office of Management and Budget and the E-Government and Technology Office, and of course, the political appointees within GSA to put greater pressure on manufacturers, hardware and software, to sell their products directly to the government and cut out the distributors and the resellers on the assumption that that is a more efficient way to purchase given the margin-related concerns that Corey mentioned. You add all that up and it’s a period of great change combined with a greater acceleration of technology’s life cycle. Talk about AI in particular, how that’s dramatically impacting everything that the government does. 

Last point, the government is seeking to modify the procurement roles that I mentioned earlier to encourage non-traditional vendors into the marketplace. We’re seeing this mostly right now within the Department of War, but as part of that effort to make the defense industrial-based more robust and resilient, a lot of the rules requiring those non-traditional vendors have been modified such that it’s a heck of a lot easier to get into the federal market than it has been in the past. You can be sure that those non-traditional vendors as part of their table stakes are being encouraged to go directly to the government, assume all of that liability, which is a tough sell for a smaller company. Those three or four things are trends that are dramatically impacting the folks in the middle, the reseller community. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, I know there’s a couple of examples of success. There’s got to be hundreds of thousands, but give us a couple of them, some that you’ve seen first-hand. 

Corey Rooney: You’ve also been leading in with some of these defense disruptors. Their go-to-market, the build-first, buy-later, that works for certain use cases. That’s a strong business model when operating in a war environment and operating in the defense sector. There are certain use cases where that model works, but we’ve got a really great ecosystem, and some of those more complex stuff, that build versus buy doesn’t always work. When you’re building complex systems, there isn’t a single button to push. 

You’re going to need to rely on ecosystem partners that can integrate those technologies, not necessarily from an implementation side, but to really scope and configure and understand the needs of the government, because some of these larger entities, they have great sales teams specifically around the US federal government, but being able to navigate better together messaging, being able to figure out where they can complement one another, we’re working with lots of partners. 

The CDWs of the world, I think what Ben and Corey Stonehocker are doing, takes a real heavy lift to go after contract vehicle like maps. I know the solicitation alone is over 300 pages long and the volume that comes out based upon the needs of those types of customers can be overwhelming for a single entity. You need companies like those, you need companies like ThunderCat, you need companies like NewTek that can manage these extreme volumes of solicitations, be able to handle that and be able to navigate that at a price and it’s fair and reasonable and it’s providing a lot of value. 

We’ve got a lot of partners like CTG, for example, they’re doing a lot of good things around data center infrastructure and modernization. Red River and what David Raffetto and Jeff Brown are doing over there, it’s been really strong. Even WWT, they’re out hosting the Army Lieutenant Generals and the G6 staff at their global headquarters, walking them through their ATC, showing the new technologies, and getting them in front of those technologies. There is good work that’s being done out there at the early stages to help really figure out those needs of the customers and then translate that into what’s something they can consume and implement at a reasonable time and value that’s not going to take them 12, 24, 36 months in order to be able to implement something based upon a set of requirements. A lot of great partners out there. 

We’ve got another, and I’ll call out August Schell, they’ve recently negotiated an ELA where they had to do customized license management portals. Could an OEM do that? Perhaps, but can any small vendor who doesn’t really know the FAR, doesn’t hold clearances, doesn’t have an ISO 9000 or 9001 cert, and might not even know what CMMC stands for, can they handle that type of effort? Probably not. We’re at a time where in order to implement something like that would be overwhelmingly costly for a small vendor or even a medium sized vendor to implement. We’ve got a lot of great examples out there. I could keep talking, but we’re excited by the different, call it spectrum of capabilities that a lot of these partners are providing to the US federal government. 

Fred Diamond: I spent a lot of my career working on the OEM, the manufacturer side, and software and hardware. One thing that I learned is we were really good at making things. We weren’t particularly great at what happened at the ground level. One of the key words that we keep using that’s emerged over the last couple of years is ecosystem. We’ve used that word many, many times. It used to be channel partners, whatever, but the whole ecosystem, there’s so many pieces that come into play and there are so many niche things that make things successful. 

Corey, I’m going to ask you about things that you’re doing with the OEM community to get the messages more effectively across to the customers. But, Rob, before I get to that last question with Corey, give us some more insights on, you work with manufacturers, OEMs, you work with the VARs, and the channels. Also, you come from government, you know what they do intimately. If I’m a selling professional at a company that we’re talking about here, what should my conversations be like with the government employees, the ones who are in the various places where you alluded to in the previous answer? 

One word we use a lot is empathy, on the podcast and at the IEPS. Give us some of your recommendations if I’m a VAR listening to this, I’m an account executive at a VAR selling to maybe one or two agencies. Usually, if I’m that person, I’m selling to one place. Maybe I have a couple of accounts within that one department or agency. Give us three or four salient things that you recommend how they’d be talking and what they should be talking about. 

Rob Efrus: The most important answer to that question is to first understand the environment in which the end user government employee or contracting officer, what their environment is. Part of that environment is external to their agency as it relates to the type of policies, like OneGov, like acquisition reform, like efforts to bring in nontraditional vendors, understand that environment. Because going into and speaking with a government employee without understanding their world, at least having a cursory understanding of their world, what the mission requirements are of their agency, what the priorities are of the current leadership. Bonus points, what are some of the congressional oversight concerns that are impacting the behavior of the agency, before you even have that conversation, that’s the most important thing. I would suggest, and we can loop back on this, that the visibility into that environment, I would argue needs to be much broader than those working in the channel are traditionally focused on, which is primarily a transaction related perspective. That would be the first step. 

The second is in discussing the solution offering to have an idea as to how that offering aligns with those priorities, whether it’s from the procurement perspective, whether it’s from the mission perspective, whether it’s from the cost reduction perspective, the personal career advancement objectives of the person or persons that you’re speaking to. The government employees, it is supposed to be a meritocracy and career development is always a priority of every government employee you’re speaking to, including those four or five thousand or so at the political level. You need to adapt that message to the audience you’re speaking with. 

Don’t just talk about, this is the obvious one, features and benefits, but really link those mission-related requirements and those that I listed off there, and to make sure, lastly, that the people that you’re speaking with understand the value that you’re adding to the deal. Whether that’s greater efficiency, lower spend, more alignment with mission requirements, etc. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Actually, the most uttered word on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is value. We use it many times here to talk about value-added reseller. The value is changed now because of the pressures that are under not just in B2G and public sector, but all the markets that any of our listeners are selling to. 

Corey, just briefly, I know you’re doing a lot of work with the OEM community to refine their message to their partner channel to get the message to the customer effectively, why don’t you share one or two things that Carahsoft is doing there. 

Corey Rooney: We do a lot from a partner-enabled perspective. We do activation days. We do partner enablement training certification days. We do on-site boot camps and helping get some of our partners technically certified translate that message. There isn’t a day that goes by in our office where it doesn’t feel like there’s a manufacturer in here with a partner, not only enabling, but also working with the partner to help them sharpen their message and going after and starting conversations with those customers. 

We do a lot of power blitzing where we’ll get the manufacturer in with a partner, with our sales teams, pull together a really strategic outreach list and go through that, talk through what our message is, make those phone calls, start to set those meetings, see how that message is resonating, and then tweak and adjust as necessary. We found a tremendous amount of success with that, especially in some of the more bleeding edge cybersecurity and AI vendors. That’s been a really, really important and helpful and impactful sales play that I think goes beyond what you just consider a typical prospecting outreach campaign. Those are a few examples of what they’re seeing real high success with and high-value impact. 

Fred Diamond: Actually, you got to do the work. You got to do it smart. One thing that we’re getting from today’s conversation is that you got to be smarter in how you go about yourself as a selling professional. Craig Abod, the president of Carahsoft, has said, “You got to perfect your craft.” I love the line from the Godfather too, “This is the career we’ve chosen.” You need to be the best you can be. The reality is, if you’re not, you’re toast. The customer will not need you if you’re not providing this value and you’re just going to be shut out of deals. 

We end the show with a specific action step. You both have given us a lot of great ideas that we’re going to continue to get out there. Give us something nice and concise, an action step that you recommend to people listening do right now after listening to the show, watching on YouTube, or reading the transcript. Rob, why don’t you go first? Something nice, concise, and crisp they must do right now. 

Rob Efrus: It’s been my experience that within the ecosystem of hardware, software manufacturers and resellers, that the reseller community traditionally has been the least strategic in looking at the marketplace. I say that and I’m painting with a broad brush to make a point that the channel is focused on transactions. One of the reasons I started working with Craig Abod and Carahsoft a long time ago was that he clearly broke that mold and was thinking way more strategically than most distributors and resellers in the federal IT space. 

The first suggestion is be more strategic about how you are viewing the trends and purchasing behaviors of the government customer, and specifically, to stay on top of the latest news coming out of the IT VAR community in terms of what’s coming out of GSA, what’s coming out of OMB to disrupt and change that environment. 

The second major point is that a lot of the push to go direct between the government and manufacturers results in a sole source behavior on the part of the government, where they are seeking to go direct to a manufacturer and have created a sole source justification that supports that behavior. The folks in the reseller community need to be tuned in to when a sole source and justification comes out as part of a request for quotes that it’s not just, well, they’re seeking to go sole source and therefore we’re not going to touch it. That’s not the way to handle that. 

You want to work with your contract management team and your bid and proposal team to have arguments conveyed to the contracting officer managing that acquisition that state clearly how going through the channel is a better deal for the government in terms of time, in terms of cost, and in terms of expected outcomes. 

In the event that that intent to go direct is not moved by your company’s response to that, there is always the protest option. I don’t say that lightly, but my observation having been in this space for a long time is that a lot of these acquisitions where the government is going direct are unchallenged. Yes, it’s a risk in protesting, yes, there’s the potential for a black eye, but on the other hand, those kinds of protests happen every day in the defense world, in the aerospace world. That’s a last resort, but you need to be aware of that last resort to strengthen your response to these efforts to go direct. 

From the selling professional perspective, I’ll close with, those folks in the middle, if you will, need to be way more proactive in understanding the selling environment beyond the specific transactions that you’re looking at in terms of all of these pressures, so that you’re armed with, as Corey referenced, a very strong value proposition to counter these efforts to go direct. In terms of what’s going to be the impact on the mission, what’s going to be the impact on the cost, and are those costs being truly accounted for, and put that seed of doubt in the government customer’s mind and to try and make that case persuasively. I’ll close with that. There’s a role for government affairs people and lobbyists, but that’s not what I’m talking about I’m talking about your day-to-day interactions with the various stakeholders, the program officials, the contracting officers, and include in those conversations these kind of themes so that they’re aware that you’re watching what’s going on and that you have persuasive arguments to suggest that going direct is potentially a risky proposition. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, bring us home, something specific people should do. 

Corey Rooney: Rob brought up a great point, being strategic. We used to have a joke, and still do, is the work that I’m doing today sometimes doesn’t pay off for 12 to 18 months. That seems like in the current climate it’s shortening down, especially with things like memory costs going up and government getting more efficient at the competition processes, bid processes, GSA and NASA doing a great job, or some of that, but I’ll start with what to avoid. 

If you’re getting put in a situation where the government’s asking you, “Hey, why can’t we go direct?” The OEM pays us, not the government, not your funding, and avoid vague value statements. What we’ve been focusing on with our partners is really a transparent framing, clearly itemize what the government’s getting, frame out in your response the compliance, the accountability, the aggregation support, the need to be in the systems for award management, all the financing aspects of it. 

Rob hit the nail on the head, it’s what the government outcomes are, the lower risk, the reduced life cycle costs, faster acquisition and having to have a vendor and a manufacturer that doesn’t know how to do business with the government, and that improved compliance and optimization. Then provide that data-driven proof, real examples, the down times that you’re avoiding, direct deal costs, the invoicing potential delays, support burden, having full-time employee impacts. 

That’s really what we’re focused on, is the government is negotiating these GSA OneGov agreements, and they’re a great idea. We’ve done 17 of them, all of them are through our GSA schedule and available to our partners that have agreements with us, they can sell leveraging that and work with Carahsoft to navigate the partnership programs that allow them to really take that message and bring it into their bag and portfolio when they’re out there talking to customers. We’ve got a great list of partners that are teamed up with us and even have dealer and agent agreements. 

Transparent framing, focusing on government outcomes, data-driven proof, those are really what’s driving the message, and that I think, if we’re all focused on that, those stresses and bringing that message to the customer, then I think we’ll be in an okay place 12, 24, 36 months down the line. We all just need to collaborate a lot more closely and really communicate the value that we’re doing from the start of the conversation all the way through to that bid going out, all the way to that order getting placed, and even more importantly, what happens after that technology gets delivered, what they’re doing to implement, what they’re doing to support the use case, avoiding shelf life for technology. We spend a lot of time helping our partners do that, communicating that value, and really focusing on what comes next after that customer buys that technology and tries to go to implement to make it successful to the mission. 

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Corey Rooney and Rob Efrus with Carahsoft. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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PLAMEN’S TIP: “If you’re in a sales role and you have trouble justifying the value of what you’re selling, it’s probably time to look for another job, because long term, that’s not going to work.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re talking today with Plamen Peev with Towson University, not too far from me. As a lot of our listeners know, I’m based in Northern Virginia, technically Fairfax, Virginia, on the west side of the DC Beltway. You’re located on the complete other side of the Beltway further north from us. What’s interesting is a number of people who’ve been on the podcast before have reached out to me. As a matter of fact, it was our good friend, the great Kevin Carr, who introduced us originally, Kevin with Cvent. I think he was episode number nine on my podcast back in 2017 when we were first kicking off. He saw what we were doing with our program with universities and said he’s very active at Towson and he introduced us. I’m excited to talk to you about what we’re going to be talking about. 

First, give us an introduction. We’ve got a bunch of questions I want to get to. Let us know about you. How did you get to this role at Towson, and whatever else you want to tell us? Then we got a bunch of great questions to ask you. 

Plamen Peev: Thank you, Fred, for having me. Kevin Carr, he’s a Towson University graduate. He’s on my advisory board for the newly created Sales Center at Towson University. It was sometime last year when he made me aware of the podcast and I’ve been following it and it’s very exciting to finally be able to talk to you on the podcast. Appreciate your invitation. 

I came to Towson University from the University of Georgia in 2011, when at the time, there wasn’t really anything related to sales education that was going on here. As a matter of fact, this is what probably got me the job, nobody wanted to teach sales, and they had a sales class as part of the marketing major. We started really, really small with a really small-scale sales competition. Probably this was 2015, 2016. I think it’s our 10th year actually in organizing that. The judges were mostly personal contacts, family and friends of other faculty members. 

A couple of years later, we introduced sponsorship opportunities because we felt that there are a lot of companies in the area that hire our graduates for sales roles, and we saw a lot of excitement among the business community. Sales people get excited about stuff like this really, really easy. As soon as I reached out to people and said, “Hey, we’re doing this thing at Towson University.” First of all, I have been recruiting here for 10 years and I’ve never spoken to a sales professor before. I was like, “Well, that’s pretty easy because there was none.” There weren’t any sales professors per se. 

Since then, we’ve used that momentum. Now we do two sales competitions per academic year. We usually have between 60 and 70 students in each. We are ready to launch a sales certificate. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about it later in the podcast. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that now. I know you have a new certification. Give us a little bit of an insight to that. 

Plamen Peev: The sales certificate will be something that students are going to be getting recognized on their diploma. Don’t ask me why it’s not a sales minor. It has to do with the way the University System of Maryland operates and it’s a little bit of a political issue, a little bit of a procedural issue in terms of what the approval process is within the University System of Maryland. I’m not going to get into details about that. But we have the certification, which we currently have two classes. One is an intro level professional selling class. The other one is an advanced selling class, which is an elective. We’re going to add to these classes two newly created classes, which are sales leadership, and then we have one that I’m very excited about, the sales innovation and technology class. 

These four classes, along with students participating in the sales club that we’ve created during the last year, and the sales competitions, that’s going to constitute the certification. We just went through voting on the approval at the university level. I’m fully expecting the certificate to be launched with probably 10 to 15 students in the fall, with the expectation to grow this exponentially in the next few years. 

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview at the end of March of 2026. When you and I were doing the prep talk for this, you talked about the unique profile of the Towson student. It’s a diverse student population. You were telling me a lot of students are first-generation college students. Give us a little bit of a peek into that and how that is relevant to the sales program that you’re creating. 

Plamen Peev: Again, coming from the University of Georgia, which is another big flagship public university, although in a different state, I was probably not quite ready. It was a little unexpected, the profile of the population at Towson University, which I knew was also a large public university, but it’s very different in demographics from the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Once I got here, I found out that a lot of our students actually have full-time jobs in addition to taking classes. I would probably unofficially put that number at about 50% of the population and probably even more of them have part-time jobs. There was a definite difference in just the amount of grit that those Towson students had compared to what I’ve seen at the University of Georgia. Then I started hearing from employers, they really appreciate the grit of the Towson University graduates, and I saw that theme. I’m like, “This is stuff that’s actually very applicable to the sales profession as well.” I think we have that going for us for sure. 

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting. Grit is a word that we used to use all the time on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. One thing we do at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling is we do events for selling professionals. We’ve actually done sessions just on grit. I can see a young adult with a full-time job and the commitment to go to college to take their lives and their career to the next level definitely is overcoming challenges and trying to figure out how to balance things, and I hate to use the word sacrifice, but to make prioritization of things. That’s pretty good. 

You mentioned to me that you also teach a class on business etiquette. Why is that? 

Plamen Peev: I feel like we benefit from a very, I don’t want to say necessarily blue-collar student population, but definitely the socioeconomic background of our students is different from the big private universities in the area, or the flagship public universities. A lot of these students are first-generation students within their families. I had a couple of conversations with students that came to me and came to my colleagues and said, “Look, I’m going through this interview process for this company and the third round of the interview is supposed to be a formal dinner. I’m freaking out a little bit because presented with all these options in terms of forks and spoons, I don’t actually know exactly how everything works here.” When you start hearing stuff like this on a consistent basis, you figure out, “Maybe we need to have an etiquette dinner.” 

The marketing club decided that that we’re going to have this workshop dinner once a semester. We found a company in Towson that specializes in exactly that kind of education. We had Towson’s own Black & Gold Catering to do a six or seven course menu. As we go through the menu, the company we hired explains the importance of what’s happening during dinner, everything that goes along with it, the small talk and all the other exciting stuff. It’s eye-opening very often for us as well. We definitely have a few things to learn, but for the students that participate in that, I think it’s an amazing experience. Even if nothing else, it gives them the confidence to handle situations like that. 

Fred Diamond: A lot of what we talk about at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling is how you communicate, and not to your peers. In a lot of cases, the selling professionals or the young adults who are coming out with these degrees, because of their knowledge of the sales process and what they’re being taught, they’re getting access to people that are, career-wise, above them, maybe a couple of notches above and they’re used to a certain type of interaction and communication. I’m thrilled that you’re doing that and showing them various ways of how to communicate effectively and how to present yourself, especially as they’re given this opportunity with this education to now provide value to the company. 

You were telling me that almost anyone who’s enrolled at the university can take your classes, not just the sales team. Obviously, you don’t have a major or a minor, so there’s no students who are just in that path, so to speak. Is that happening, are students from all over the university finding out about your classes and then taking them? 

Plamen Peev: We still have to do some missionary work in terms of getting the word out. But I can see more and more students becoming aware of the fact that there’s just a lot of opportunities in the sales profession. We teach our classes from a business-to-business perspective. That would involve a lot of industries where the salespeople have to have a little bit of knowledge of, say, chemistry or biology or some of the fields that are associated to engineering. It’s not necessarily limited to the business students. 

There are a lot of manufacturers out there who are really looking for this perfect and very rare profile of somebody with the technical education background, but also knowledge of the sales process and understanding of the importance of asking the right questions and understanding the needs of the buyer, so you can actually solve the problems that the buyer is facing on a day-to-day basis. I think that’s not necessarily unique for business students. I think they were probably the first to become more aware of the fact that this is where a lot of the jobs are. Even if your job is not necessarily a sales role per se, you can apply a lot of those skills every day at work. 

We’re going to expand. We’ve made some changes when it comes to our sales classes, since they required a marketing class as a prerequisite. Now, we’re going to open that up and make these classes accessible to all students in all majors. We’ve historically had a lot of mass communication students who minor in marketing, a lot of sports management majors who minor in marketing. These are majors outside of the business school. I had one year when a nursing student won second place in the sales competition. We went to the Kennesaw State competition and the companies were very interested in him because he was probably the only student out of 150 contestants with that specific profile. Also, I’m in talks with the dean of the Fisher College of Science at Towson University and he’s very open to really advertising this new certificate program to the science students as well, which I think is where we’re going to find a lot of traction. 

Fred Diamond: A lot of the leaders that we interview for the Sales Game Changers Podcast and that are part of our Institute for Effective Professional Selling, maybe they came from chemistry, or they came from other sciences. One of the two things we always say is, to be successful in professional selling, you need to intimately understand your customer’s marketplace and what they do and why they do it and for whom, or you need to really, really understand what you’re selling better than anybody and how it fits in in the ecosystem with other products and other solutions, if you will. Coming out with a degree in chemistry or biology or other sides, medical, that’ll definitely give you a heads up. 

Just curiously, these students, what do they want to know? Obviously, they might have heard, “If I can get a job in sales, it pays more money, better career,” all those kinds of things. What do they want to learn from you and your organization? 

Plamen Peev: In the intro professional selling class, there are a couple of moments during that first semester when I can see students change their mindset in terms of how they approach thinking about professional selling. One of those moments is when I tell them, “Look, if you end up in a sales role and you really have trouble justifying the money that people are paying for your product, in other words, you’re not believing really in your product, it’s probably time for you to look for another job, because long term, this is just not going to work for you.” 

When I drop sentences like this, or when we have these moments in the classroom, or telling them, “Hey, if there is no problem that I’m solving for you, I don’t really want you to buy anything from me, because what’s the point?” Creating customers that then have questions about their decisions to purchase a couple of months later, or a couple of weeks later, that’s not working well for anybody really. You see their eyes and they’re like, “Oh, okay,” so this may be different than the stereotypes that they had when they were walking in the classroom. I think they’re excited to explore sales in that sense. I think they’re eager to learn how to ask the right questions and how to listen well and how to probe for solutions. It’s this investigative work that I think is exciting for a lot of them to try to figure out an issue that maybe even the buyer is not fully aware of. I think that’s exciting for the students. 

Fred Diamond: It opens up a whole new way of thinking about sales. We view sales as a being of service. The companies that work with the Institute for Effective Professional Selling are some of the top companies in the world and their customers don’t buy things, especially now, we’re doing the interview in 2026, that they don’t need, that they don’t want. Not only will they not buy, they don’t even want to engage with sales organizations unless the selling professional is bringing value for where they need to get to, that they may not understand, or that they know they need to get to, and they just want true professional assistance. 

Speaking of that, you had mentioned before that there are some companies that are supporting your efforts. What do they expect from supporting your efforts, being corporate sponsors? What’s a message that you want to get across to those who may not see the value in being associated with a program such as yours at Towson State? 

Plamen Peev: There are companies that have been with us pretty much from the beginning. The enterprises of the world, Cintas, Northwestern Mutual Assurance, Williams, a lot of these big companies from different industries are doing this at a national scale. I think they’re not necessarily looking for a finished product, but they want to engage with students in order to see a little bit of potential. If they see that potential and then good basis in terms of interpersonal communication and coachability, I think is very important as well, we all know, they go for it. A lot of these companies are short in terms of the positions that they have open and their ability and needs to hire more salespeople. They’re excited that a university would invest in sales education, looking for a little bit of potential in those students. They see them as gems that may need polishing and whatnot. 

I think Towson University presents a little bit of a different profile. I’ve talked about grit, but also, I think that we are one of the few schools that probably reflect the population of the community in which we exist, in terms of the percentage of students that are minority students, Hispanic, African-American. We have a Greek community here, Italian community in Baltimore. Our classroom pretty much looks like any public space you would go to in the City of Baltimore, the Baltimore County, or the State of Maryland for that matter. I think that’s also something that they reach out to us with and say, “Hey, we may need a Hispanic speaker for this one role that we have open. Please keep us in mind and let me know if there is a student that maybe fits that profile.” I think that’s also something that companies are becoming more and more aware of, that they have to have people that look and sound in a way that fits the customer base that is being served. 

Fred Diamond: Just to remind people, Towson is basically around Baltimore, Maryland, not too far from there? 

Plamen Peev: Yes. We are right inside the Beltway, technically a couple of miles into Baltimore County, but very close to the City of Baltimore. It’s about 15, 20 minutes right from Downtown, from the Inner Harbor. 

Fred Diamond: Well, thanks for giving us the introduction to your program. Congratulations on your success with the new certification program coming out. It’s very exciting to see. Is there anything else that you wanted to bring up that we didn’t get a chance to address briefly? 

Plamen Peev: Getting the word out is important for us at this point, especially now that we have some infrastructure in place in the sense of our officially-recognized sales center at the university. We are members of the University Sales Center Alliance, which is how we connected as well. We have the certificate launching in the fall, and also, we’re looking to have the blueprint for a new sales lab in the next business building, the building you see behind me. It really is the oldest building on campus and it’s very beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, we can really use a building with a little more modern space and arrangement. 

Fred Diamond: I did a show recently with a guy named Frank Hauck who built the Sales Performance Lab at Bryant University. Feel free to reach out to him or Dr. Boyer over at Bryant on some of their ideas. 

Plamen Peev: Yeah, I talked to Stefanie actually at our last meeting at the USCA in Dallas. You were there as well. 

Fred Diamond: Go listen to the show that we did with Frank, a Bryant grad who supported that. Plamen Peev, thank you so much for all the great insights. Give us one specific action step that people listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast today should implement right now to take their sales or sales leadership career to the next level. 

Plamen Peev: We’re really hoping that our sales certificate actually is going to grow to serve the community of some lifelong learners as well. We see that as a dual-purpose program, which is going to serve traditional students at Towson University, but also we’re hoping to be able to offer specific classes and workshops on a piecemeal basis for anybody who’s got their degree in say healthcare or engineering, but then coming back at a certain later point in their career wanting to get more training on the sales side of things, which is very often what people switch to at some point their careers. We’re really hoping to be able to serve that population as well in the future, so something to look out for. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Plamen Peev for being on today’s Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Thank you so much. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 838: Teaching Working Students Selling Skills with Plamen Peev from Towson University first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Find Gina on LinkedIn. Find Tamara on LinkedIn. 

GINA’S TIP: “Being successful isn’t the hard part for women. We can sell, we can lead, we’ve proven that again and again. It’s everything around that, the expectations, the responsibilities, and the roadblocks, that make it harder than it needs to be.”

TAMARA’S TIP: “The most important thing is to raise your hand. Take a risk, even when it feels uncomfortable, because that’s how you gain experience, expand your network, and move your career forward.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Gina, we first met Tamara Greenspan on the Sales Game Changers Podcast before the pandemic. I screwed up the recording a couple of times and we had to redo it. But the third time was a charm, and even more third time being a charm is she’s with us today. We’ve developed such a rewarding relationship with her as truly one of the Women in Sales leaders that we’ve been fortunate to have as part of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. 

The book is called Success Was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks, and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership. Gina, first off, how does it feel to be a published author? 

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s beyond exciting. I have to say that I really am humbled because while I have a lot of my thoughts in there, it’s really the stories of the women that I have interviewed on the podcast or have spoken at our conferences or roundtables, any number of places, that shared their stories so honestly and rawly and bravely that really have made this book possible. While it’s got my name on it, they are the heart and soul of it. 

Fred Diamond: It’s a great book. I’ve read it, you feature 60 stories of overcoming adversity and setbacks, comebacks. Then the book is also peppered with over 100 insights, ideas, and thoughts that women could use this book as a guideline, and actually, to be frank with you, men, too. There are great stories of sales success. 

Tamara, you’ve been a great friend of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. You were our Women in Sales Leadership Award recipient in 2020. The great Jim Peterik actually sang a song to you. You got the Eye of the Tiger. You wrote the foreword to this book. First of all, we’re very honored that you did. It’s a beautiful foreword. Tell us what you were thinking as you submitted the foreword for the book. 

Tamara Greenspan: First of all, congratulations, Gina. I’m so proud of you and just so amazed with your stories as well and how you pay it forward and help so many women who are trying to achieve their career goals, and Fred, to you as well. I really appreciate every opportunity you have given me personally to help other women’s journeys to achieve their professional goals, to be part of their journeys, and to tell my own story. But also, I love to say I’m faculty for Gina, but to teach a course in what I’ve learned over the years to help women get the support they need in a way that’s going to make their path easier. I don’t mean by the hard work, but easier by getting the connections and getting the leadership they need and the sponsorship they need to pull them through their career. 

It’s been an honor to be part of this organization and to continually help these incredible women who, to be honest, are the successors for all of us. They’re our next generation of leaders. They’re impressive. Like I needed help as I was growing up in the ranks, they need help. I’m so glad that you’ve put together an A-list cast of individuals, and this book, that helps women on that journey. 

Fred Diamond: Gina, tell us about the book. Tell us what you hope readers get from the book. What is the outcome that you’re desiring? 

Gina Stracuzzi: There’s a couple, really. One, I love giving women the opportunity to be heard and seen. But the really fundamental point of this book is for sales leaders, sales organization leaders, for companies to get with the program, to really understand that being successful isn’t the hard part for women. We can sell, we can lead. That’s not the hard part. We’ve proven it again and again and again. It’s the complexity of being a woman and a wife, and a mother, and a caregiver for older people, and the one that takes the dog to the vet, and all of that. When that is not taken into account and when unnecessary roadblocks are put in the way and those things aren’t taken into consideration, it changes the whole dynamic of someone’s career. 

It is the companies that lose out because women can sell like nobody’s business. They are great managers. They build really diverse teams. People stay longer on those teams. Tamara knows all of this to be true and it’s just not necessary. What I want is for everyone to be treated the same, for women to be given opportunities based on what they’re working on, what they’re doing, what they’re delivering, not the idea, “Well, her potential is limited because she might have a baby,” or, “Her potential is limited because I know she has elder parents.” That’s not fair and it’s not serving the companies either. I want this book to be read across the board. I want women to see themselves and say, “If she did it, I can do it.” I want companies to go, “I hadn’t thought of that.” 

Fred Diamond: One of the great programs from the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership is our Women in Sales Leadership Forum. It’s this extension program held over three months. Gina, you’ve been leading it since 2018. It continues to grow strong, it continues to grow women in sales leaders at blue chip companies like Oracle, Hilton, Salesforce, and Amazon Web Services. We’ve been very fortunate to have Tamara frequently as the opening session at the Women in Sales Leadership Forum. By the way, the next one starts on May 15th. It’s a hybrid program, in person in Reston, Virginia, and virtual all around the world. 

Tamara, you’ve been either the opening or one of the first speakers. It’s going on six, seven years now that Tamara has been our kickoff speaker. Why have you taken this on and what is the message that you want to get across to the women in sales who are going through the forum every time you take our stage? 

Tamara Greenspan: It’s an honor to be part of that program and meet such impressive women in different stages of their careers and listening to them and their stories. What I focus on is to point out the need to have mentors and sponsors to help advance their careers, and really to have them understand the difference. There’s a big difference in those two roles that are in your professional life and the value of what they can each provide. Sometimes we find that the women don’t understand what the difference is and they don’t understand how they can leverage those professional relationships. 

We also focus on the value of networking and continually learning, because that also increases your ability to find the right mentor and to basically keep your sponsorship relationship moving forward, or even gaining a sponsor if you don’t have one. I will tell you, we’re finding, and Gina and I are surprised, more Gina than myself, I’d like to add, most women do not have a sponsor. We work with them to try to figure out who their sponsor could be and how they can actually make that a professional connection that will help them fulfill their professional career advancement, because it’s all about career advancement, getting to that next step. 

Fred Diamond: Gina, I’ve read the book. First of all, they’re great ideas, they’re great stories. I’ve seen many of the women on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, and a lot of them have spoken at the Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference that is being held. The one thing I kept getting was your passion to help women achieve what they can achieve in their careers. Where does that come from? Why are you the founder of the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership? Why did you devote all the time and energy at this time in your career to publish this fascinating book? 

Gina Stracuzzi: When I broke into sales, it was selling commodities in Texas, convincing them that I could help them hedge their cattle prices and their cotton prices, and whatever else they were growing or building, and that’s a hard sell, as you can imagine. I’m a New Yorker, I was talking fast, I was whatever, but in order to do that, I needed my commodities license. The men were so bad back then, just awful. They put a big board on the wall of the office and took bets that I would fail my commodities license test. 

What was interesting is every one of them had failed it at least twice, if not three times, and they had all had special training. I just wasn’t going to have any part of that. I taught myself, I passed with an 86, and I outraised capital three to one with all those Texas boys. It taught me to be really firm and really stand in what I know to be true, that I can do something. I could have either just quit and let them have their fun, or I could show up and take charge. 

Fast forward 30 years, I had been out of corporate sales for about a decade and I was running my own business as a business development consultant. I started coming to the IES and meeting all these amazing women. I was listening to their stories and they were dealing, if not with the same overt shenanigans I had, certainly the same they get talked over in meetings, this and that, and I’m like, “How can this be? This can’t be.” I really got talking more to them and I thought, “We need something more profound,” and that’s how the forum was born, just this idea you can’t just go to one day’s conference or a workshop or a panel discussion and change the world. 

You need to be with other women who you share an experience, but you also come to the same realization that, “This is about what I do. This is about how I show up. I’m the only one who can fix this,” because there will always be people standing in your way. It’s what you do about it and how you use your voice. That was the impetus for the forum. Then the book just became this rallying cry that more women need to know what the women in the book know, that they had to take charge and they did, and that’s a beautiful thing. 

Fred Diamond: Tamara, for people who don’t know, you’re a senior leader in the public sector division of Oracle. I tell people this all the time, Oracle is one of the top five technology companies in the history of technology. You’ve been in the room with some very serious people who are doing very serious things for the health of the country and for the sanctity of the world. You mentioned mentorship, you mentioned sponsorship. What else do you want to get across about what it took you to get to the highest level of Oracle sales? What are some other, maybe a secret or two that has driven you to get to this particular place in your career? 

Tamara Greenspan: One of the important things that I like to stress is, and I always say this and I’ll explain it, but raise your hand. The most important thing is to raise your hand. What I mean by that is take a risk. Do something sometimes that could be uncomfortable because you might not feel that you’re best suited to maybe join a task force, or join a different team that’s going to help deliver something special, something out of your norm, but you will learn so much and it actually helps your career because it does two things. It not only gains you valuable experience, but it also lets you connect with people outside your normal management chain, your normal daily engagements. Don’t just do the norm. Just take a risk, and sometimes when you do that, you’ll see that it’s worth it and you’ll keep doing it and continuing, and you’ll learn more. You’ll actually expand your reach across and within and actually globally with your company, and it’s just such a valuable lesson. 

It can be hard to do, and scary, because I find that some of the women just are afraid to get out of their box, but I really encourage them to do it. If you’re somebody that doesn’t like to do things by yourself, call somebody else, like me, they’ll meet me in the forum, I’ll introduce them to people in some of these other networking things, but just find someone that will bring you along, because there are folks that will do that. Some people you find are just uncomfortable, but it is the most beneficial lesson that I learned along my career, but just putting myself out there. 

Fred Diamond: It’s not just in your company. It’s also externally as well with industry groups or business development groups or charitable type of entities as well, that can definitely not just get you attention to get you attention, but to get you involved with people who are trying to do better things and bigger things. 

Once again, thank you for the foreword. Gina, the book, Success Was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks, and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership. What are some of the plans that you have to get the book out there into the hands of people who need to read it? 

Gina Stracuzzi: All kinds of things. We’re going to be doing special events, special book signings, going into companies and having panel discussions and some social events, and really highlighting the women that are in the book. We’re going to be putting them back on the podcast and just figuring out every way we can to really bring this book to everybody. I would say, if you’re in a company and you have a women’s group in there, I will be coming. Tamara and I were just talking, I’ll go to see OWL at Oracle. Women in technology groups, women in sales groups, I’m going to be coming to your office and knocking on your doors. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, congratulations to Gina Stracuzzi, Success Was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks, and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership. It’s available on Amazon. If your company has an ERG that focuses on women in sales, Gina would be a great person to have there. Gina, let’s go sell a million books. What do you say? 

Gina Stracuzzi: I love that idea. I’ve heard we know some salespeople, so we should be able to get it done. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Congratulations, Gina. Tamara, thank you so much. My name is Fred Diamond. This is a special episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 837: Celebrating Gina’s Stracuzzi’s “Success Was Never the Hard Part” and Its Meaning for Women in Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is an AI and Selling Effectiveness sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

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

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

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

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

Find Stephanie on LinkedIn.

STEPHANIE’S TIP: “AI should be used to eliminate the friction in your sales process so you can focus on what actually matters. The goal is not to replace the relationship, it’s to give sellers more time to build it and move the deal forward in a meaningful way.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: This is a special AI for Selling Effectiveness Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’re going to be talking to Stephanie Jordan with World Fuel. Her company is going to be a recipient of the second Annual AI for Selling Effectiveness Award that’s going to be given out on April 29th at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling 16th Annual Sales Excellence Award. Viacry is one of the sponsors of that. You’re going to be giving out that award on April 29th. 

Zeev, we’re also going to be announcing a brand-new offering from Viacry and our good friends at Funnel Clarity. It’s part of the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace. It’s a great introduction to AI for Selling Effectiveness, bringing your skills, Viacry skills, in AI for Sales, and Funnel Clarity, our good friend Tom Snyder and Jill Ulvestad, their expertise in sales performance improvement. What do you think about that? 

Zeev Wexler: I’m excited. I’m excited about the event. I’m excited about what we’re doing. I’m excited about our new offering. I’m excited about Steph and World Fuel coming in and receiving this award. This is going to be such an amazing event. I love honoring sales professionals that actually understand AI and understand how it’s going to impact. Even in something like what World Fuel is doing, which is selling bulk fuel and a lot of other things, which is relationship-based and very relationship-based selling, they still understand the power of artificial intelligence and how that’s going to move everything forward. I’m so excited about the offering we have with Funnel Clarity. It’s going to be a game changer. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s get right to the award. We have Stephanie Jordan here with World Fuel. Zeev, we went through 100 companies that we invited. These are companies that aren’t selling AI, but they’re using AI for the sales process, B2B, business to business, or business to government. We eventually whittled it down to two companies. One is World Fuel. We’re very excited to have Stephanie Jordan here. 

Stephanie, it’s great to see you. Congratulations on World Fuel being the recipient of the award. We’re excited for your acceptance speech at the award event. Why don’t you introduce yourselves for people who don’t know about World Fuel? Tell us about what the company does, what you do. Then let’s get into the specifics. How are you using AI for selling effectiveness? 

Stephanie Jordan: On behalf of World Fuel, a subsidiary of World Kinect, we thank you for the award. As you all know, changing sales mentality sometimes can be a challenge. To be recognized for the work that we’ve done is really a great honor. As you mentioned, I’m Stephanie Jordan. I am the Vice President of North America, FBO and airport sales, as well as our commercial sales. World Fuel, part of World Kinect Corporation, a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company, is a global energy management company. We cover all three different segments of business, both aviation, land, and marine, with a wide range of fulfillment and solutions. Those could be payment method solutions, technology solutions. My specific area is in the FBO and airport space. To bring that to life a little bit, we deliver large loads of fuel to the FBOs and airports around North America and throughout North America. 

Fred Diamond: For people who don’t know what an FBO is, what is an FBO? 

Stephanie Jordan: Great question. An FBO, think of it almost like an executive gas station for private aircraft. Any of those corporate aircraft that you see traveling around, they will fly into an FBO, they’ll have hangar space that the FBO can provide, and they’ll get all of their fuel and services there. They’ll pay, they can participate in a rewards program. Very, very similar to what we would think of as a gas station, but it just happens to be for large jets. 

Fred Diamond: Zeev, you’ve been doing some work with World Fuel and we talked about some of the things that they’re doing. Let’s get specific. What are some of the things that World Fuel is doing to utilize, again, we’re recognizing you for how you’re using AI to improve the sales process and make it more effective for your sales professionals. 

Stephanie Jordan: We actually started a couple of years ago, about two and a half years ago, with the fundamentals, recognizing that this was going to be really a pivotal time in the world and that we wanted to make sure that our sales were leading that charge. We started with the fundamentals of removing the fear factor. We’ve all heard over and over and over, jobs are going to be taken away. 

As you mentioned, Fred, our business is very relationship-focused business. I think most salespeople will say that. Specifically in aviation, it is a very deep relationship business. Making sure that the sales team can understand where their strengths are and where they can focus that time and effort versus what they could use AI to supplement the areas that they don’t enjoy doing. That was really our approach to take away the fear, because if it adds value to their selling ability and to the bottom line, sales are about those revenues, then they were much more willing to engage. 

The other part of that fundamental is introducing it and keeping it consistent throughout. Whether it’s our monthly meetings, whether it’s our sales managers during their one-on-ones covering pipelines, or our annual sales kickoff, AI has been consistently a part of that, as well as that peer-to-peer training and information sharing, where one sales rep tells another sales rep, “I use this as a tool and here’s my example.” It brings it to life and it’s not that management just beating the drum of you have to do something new because I said so. Really that was a pivotal point where we decided to bring in outside resources and that’s how we connected with Zeev and invited him to our annual sales kickoff meeting to really take it up the next notch, and we were able to utilize him to start to build out agents and I would say move it from a 1.0 AI approach to a 2.0. 

Zeev Wexler: In addition, something I love that World Fuel and Stephanie do, they actually educate their clients on AI as well, which is something that I love. There is such a variety of sales people within World Fuel. There are very, very new sales people, there are people that have been doing it for 35 years, so they’ve done a great job of making a status quo of this is how everybody should use it, this is how it’s going to help you, and then taking the actual processes that they want everybody to do and actually putting that into a system that helps the sales professionals do their jobs better and educate their actual clients, give their clients the same education that they give their salespeople, which was very inspiring to me, Stephanie. 

Stephanie Jordan: It’s a great point, Zeev. Interestingly enough, we find our customers are in that exact same scenario as our employees, meaning there are some that are either new to the business or have owned the business for years, and interestingly enough, their AI knowledge and AI interest ranges in that full spectrum too. We certainly have customers that are afraid of AI or say, “I’m not sure since we fuel airplanes and there’s so much physical work to how we serve our customers, how can AI help.” Back to the peer bringing our customers together and them sharing ideas of here’s I created this standard operating procedure or I use it for our template so all of our customer service reps have that same voice that we want going out to our customers. 

There are so many similarities in the foundational information, the sharing information, and then pushing people out of their comfort. It should constantly be a learning incline and it’s not natural. It’s not just one of those things that you can spend 30 minutes and then, “Okay, I know everything in AI.” It needs to be that constant evolution. 

We’re a large publicly-traded company, we utilize Copilot, which I’ve found a lot of large organizations default to that. With that, we’ve worked both with Zeev and on our own internal teams to identify ways that Copilot can be used for brainstorming in advance, researching in advance of a customer or prospect visit, keeping better track of information, organizing information so that it makes it faster to put it into our CRM program. 

I mentioned at the beginning sales teams can sometimes be a little resistant. We zoomed in on things that irritate them, expense reports. I have never met a sales person that said, “Give me more expense reports. I love doing paperwork.” Something as simple as upload your hotel bill and ask AI to dissect out the lines, because in our expense reports you have to have the hotel expense separate of the tax bill, separate of any other fees. Traditionally, you had to manually do that, either on a calculator or Excel or whatever. Literally you just pop that receipt in, except you can do it on your phone with one of the AI tools. It really has brought value to them, in addition to what Zeev was saying. 

I think the biggest impact where it brings leadership and sales together is that standardization, both from our research as well as request for proposals. We work with a lot of airports. Those request for proposals can be pretty intense. A 60-page document is not uncommon. It has very meticulous requirements that if you don’t meet those requirements, it can be thrown out. Utilizing and building an agent that can take that type of document and parse out the different information that the different critical business partners need out of that RFP, to bring that to life a little bit more is we get an RFP and our supply team needs to know these pieces around the volumes and any seasonality and things like that. They don’t want to come through 60-page documents in order to get what’s typically a page and a half of information for their portion. Marketing needs a portion, credit, and there’s all of these different teams that need this information, as well as we have to be hypersensitive to any deadlines, any question periods, things like that. 

The way it used to be done is a human would take that and would take all the time to separate out this PDF document and try to serve it up. A lot of time somebody would not have time, because you get a lot of RFPs in. Then you just have to blast out this 60-page document to all the team members. They’re not as quick to respond. The wasted time was just incredible. Now, to have a standard process that the team can follow, it lightens the burden of our admin so we can actually produce a better-quality proposal in return. It’s a win-win on every front. 

Fred Diamond: Zeev, what Stephanie’s talking about here are things that we’ve talked about numerous times on the AI for Selling Effectiveness Podcast, and it’s great to see it in action. There are a couple things. One is obviously improving the existing sales processes. She talked about proposals, etc. Secondly, we talked a lot on the show about standardization. We kept using the term in the first number of shows that we did, the Wild West if you will, and there was a lot of individuals doing stuff. Then we’ve always talked about we want to get to a place where there’s smart, and I want to say standardization from a limiting perspective, but from the ability for everybody in the company to utilize whatever the strategy is the same way to get the outcomes that leadership says we need to get to. 

Zeev Wexler: Something I love about Stephanie and World Fuel is the balanced approach, that it’s not just we’re going to use AI to get more revenue, which is extremely important, what we do our business. But we use AI to make it easier for our salespeople, like the mention of the expense reports, so now culturally it’s much easier to bring in because now we’re taking something that the sales force does not like to do, they must do, they need to spend hours doing it, especially with the amount of travel that the World Fuel team has to do, so now we take that off. Now we’re dealing with something that instead of somebody going through a 60-page, yes, we want to increase revenue, but we want to make your job easier and we want to make things not just standardized from the World Fuel perspective or the business perspective, but standardized that you don’t have to waste your time. 

One thing I love about working with World Fuel is I got to work with the actual managers, the actual people that do the sale. We broke down processes of how they actually create their research, how they do what they need to do. Then we took that process and made AI simplify it in a way that doesn’t limit anything, doesn’t reduce any of the quality, but makes it instead of a two-hour process, a literal five-minute process, but doing it the way that it should be done. Now, what sales person wouldn’t want to get the exact research that they need to do to go and visit one of their clients, but instead of spending two hours and doing things that are not the things they love to do, but doing it in five minutes, getting the report, and being prepared to sell more, being prepared to enrich their relationships with all of the information that they got? 

That is the balance I really, really like, and what I said before, the addition of taking time and breaking AI down to their clients, of educating their clients with what they’re learning about artificial intelligence. I love that balance and I love the standardization from a true bias. It’s not just, “World Fuel, this is how you guys are going to do it.” It’s how the sales team is doing it, how you got wins and successes in the past, and now how can we automate it and make it simpler, easier, and get to the results you want. 

Fred Diamond: Stephanie, congratulations again and well done working with Zeev and his organization and to be the recipient of our AI for Selling Effectiveness Award. Stephanie, how have you become a better leader? You’ve obviously embraced this and I love what you’re saying from two perspectives. One is, it’s not just about the standardization, but it’s about if you get as efficient as you can be utilizing AI more effectively, you can then do more empowering things. Like you said for an expense report, if a sales rep is spending an hour or two hours on an expense report, he or she is not spending an hour and 45 minutes prospecting, or working with the customer, or thinking about how they could bring more value to the customer. How have you become a better leader? Obviously, you’ve dived into this. From your perspective, how have you become a better sales leader by going all in with this? 

Stephanie Jordan: I think there’s a couple of ways. In our sessions, both on the customer side and the employee side, with Zeev, he really brings to life the importance of what we as humans bring to the table that AI can never bring. I think focusing on that from a leadership perspective, I have been so excited and enthusiastic about seeing the time that it can save, the efficiencies that it can give not only myself but my team and our customers. We should always be driving value to our customers. As a leader, I want to enable my sales team to be able to serve up value. The more value and the more deeper relationships that they have with customers, we call it a win-win-win. Everyone wins. 

I think for me it’s the enthusiasm that I have been able to bring around AI, because as an employee, you want to work with someone and in collaboration with someone that keeps that energy, is excited for every day, is constantly looking for ways that we can become better and improve. I just feel like AI is one of the most exciting things that certainly I’ve ever seen. 30 years in the industry, I think this is just a phenomenal time to be in sales and to be in business. 

Fred Diamond: I want to congratulate Stephanie Jordan and the team at World Fuel for receiving the IEPS AI for Selling Effectiveness Award on April 29th. Thanks to Zeev Wexler and Viacry for sponsoring that award. Zeev, it’s going to be a great day on April 29th. We’re also going to be announcing a special offer for companies, it’s going to be with your company, Viacry, and one of our other Selling Essentials Marketplace partners, Funnel Clarity. We’re going to be announcing that on April 29th to continue to work with great companies like World Fuel and to help sales organizations become more effective using AI and AI strategies. 

Once again, congratulations to Stephanie Jordan with World Fuel. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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SEHAR’S TIP: “The most successful sellers acknowledge that customers don’t have the answer. They get close, become trusted advisors, and work hand-in-hand to solve the problem, not just sell technology.”

PETER’S TIP: “It’s not enough to have the best solution. You have to show how it fits the customer’s mission, their people, and their process. That’s what builds instant credibility.”

JOSHUA’S TIP: “Your success comes from adding value in every conversation and becoming a trusted advisor, so customers bring you their hardest problems, not just the easy ones.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m doing a little bit of an opening here with Sehar Wahla with Carahsoft. Sehar, it’s great to see you. You’re going to be on the panel on May 14th. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience before we bring on Josh and Peter, and tell us a little bit about what you do. 

Sehar Wahla: I am responsible for the AWS distribution business here at Carahsoft. I’ve had the pleasure of working very closely with both Peter and his team and Josh and his team, as well as Shannon Judd and a lot of the AWS partner leaders. I’m really excited to participate in this event. 

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us an opening statement? What are some of your thoughts on what’s going on right now and what people attending on the 14th will be able to learn? 

Sehar Wahla: I’m excited. This is my first event with you. I think it’s a very important event, especially now. We’ve all been part of this massive transformation, both from a technology perspective, but also the government adopting a lot of this technology. I think the partner community is very important in helping our government customers make this transition. This is going to be a great event for any sellers that are looking to learn from experts in this space on how to do that, because these guys and Shannon and their teams are experts at this. 

Fred Diamond: Interesting word, transformation. I would say massive transformation. Obviously, a lot of things that happen with federal downsizing and the move with AI coming onboard and the move to cloud environments as well. It’s a perfect storm of a lot of things coming together. I’m excited for your organization and for the teams that are going to be there. 

On that panel on May 14th and on our podcast today, Peter Cipriano and Josh Dirsmith, and we’re very excited to have you both here. Why don’t you both introduce yourselves and then we’re going to get detailed into what would be our advice for selling professionals right now in being successful. Peter, give us a brief intro, and then Josh. 

Peter Cipriano: I’m the CIO at J3 Consulting. We’re a woman-owned small business working in the fed-cyb space. We support agencies across cloud, IT operations, and acquisition services with a focus on helping our clients make better use of their data so they can make faster and more informed decisions. Over the last couple of years, we worked very closely with Amazon and Carahsoft through programs like Think Big for Small Business and the Business Outcomes Xcelerator to bring more of our capabilities to our clients faster. 

Fred Diamond: Josh, tell us about yourself and your company. 

Joshua Dirsmith: I’m Vice President of Public Sector for Effectual. Actually, the day of this event in May is going to be my 10-year anniversary here. Very excited and blessed to have partners like Carahsoft and AWS, worked very long time with Sehar and Shannon and very excited to meet Peter and Fred in person. 

Effectual is an AWS-only services partner. We do the professional services to enable the cloud for our public sector customers from those who are dipping their toe into the proverbial cloud waters, all the way up to those who are using it for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and deriving more value from the data that they have today. We were awarded Amazon’s 2025 Public Sector Consulting Partner of the Year for North America at re:Invent in December. Very excited and honored for that designation and we’re looking to use that as a megaphone to reach more public sector customers this year. 

Fred Diamond: We’re excited to celebrate your 10th anniversary. As you mentioned 10 years, I was going to say, well, I guess nothing’s really changed in the last 10 years. If you think about what’s changed in the last 18 months, let alone 10 years, it’s actually remarkable. One of our commitments is to helping selling professionals in the AWS ecosystem be more effective and more successful. 

Josh, if I’m a seller, if I’m in this AWS ecosystem, going after federal business right now, what would you recommend that they focus on? 

Joshua Dirsmith: Great question. As we alluded to, there is so much change going on in the federal government today, from resignations and other departures and things like that, where the folks and decision makers and the individual contributors who remain have to be able to do their job more efficiently just in order to maintain the status quo, and leveraging technology is an incredible way to do that. There are tools on AWS. It’s not just the compute and the storage and the networking of yesteryear that everybody understands, but it’s these data analytics tools. It’s their artificial intelligence capability. 

What I would say to the seller is become an expert in some of those things. The reason that my team has success in selling to the federal government is because they themselves are able to add value to the conversations that they’re having with federal customers. Our federal customers more so than ever need to be able to trust the people that are selling to them and selling your value as the seller, along with the products and technologies and services that you’re selling, is crucial so you attain that trusted advisor status with your customers and they come to you with the hard things, not the easy ones. You know your customers like you, whether they say it or not, if they come to you with those difficult challenges that they’re facing and they’re looking to you to enable them to solve them using Amazon technology. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. We tell our sales professionals all the time, you’ve got to be an expert in your customer’s business and you’ve got to be a couple steps ahead. The most successful selling professionals that we deal with right now at the IEPS are experts in their customer’s business, or they’re so advanced in their knowledge of what they’re bringing to the marketplace, one or the other. Your customers don’t need you if you don’t have that value add. 

Peter Cipriano: I’m going to answer from a small business perspective and it dovetails off that where it is expected as a small business you bring the intimacy that a larger integrator may not be able to. We have to be able to say, “I know you can use Amazon services within your culture and mission.” It’s not enough to say that you have the best Amazon solution. You have to be able to say, “I know how to integrate that technology into your program, make it personal. I know this will work because of X, Y, and Z.” Amazon sellers need to focus and understand those day-to-day challenges which can be people, process, and policy. It’s not always better technology will fix it, and that approach will give you that instant credibility that you need to sell. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. Sehar, Carahsoft and your team, you’re on the leading edge of all of this because you’re working with so many value-added resellers and technology partners like the guys we have on today’s show who are bringing solutions. What should they be doing? What are you telling them that they should be doing? Maybe what are you seeing that they’re not doing that they should be? 

Sehar Wahla: I think the most successful sellers that we work with are acknowledging that the customers don’t have the answer. A lot of times we all don’t have the answer, but they’re getting close with the customer, they’re becoming trusted advisors. They’re not just selling them technology, they’re not just a vendor, but they’re actually working hand-in-hand with customers to solve these problems. Josh, you’re spot on, if your customer is calling you with your hardest problems, they trust you. You are part of their process. 

Whether it’s our team, whether it’s partners that I’m meeting with, my recommendation is always get to where you’re coming forward and providing a clear plan for our customers, because there’s so much noise, there’s so much technology available. Get deep in understanding what their problem is so that then you can propose technology solutions for it. Maybe it’s AI solutions that can help, maybe there’s cloud solutions, but how do they solve their problem in a scalable fashion using technology? 

A lot of that too, and the last thing I noticed with successful sellers, is that they’re agile, and agile in terms of as you’re building a framework where the customer things are going to be changing, but so is technology. The most successful sellers, even in the last 10 years, are ones that have grown with their customers and grown into solving more complex problems. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. Let’s talk specifically about that. One of the major changes over the last year or two is the mission criticality of what government employees are doing. Obviously, there was a lot of people who left their jobs in the last 18 months or so and the reduction with DOGE and everything else. The best selling professionals, what we’ve seen, they’re presenting their AWS-based solutions as mission critical, and not just like a generic offering. There’s no value if you’re just going in with generic or what customers can ascertain on the run. 

I like that all three of you touched on the fact that the selling professionals who are successful now, and we see this not just in the AWS world, but in every vertical that we address, with every technology and every industry, you got to understand the mission criticality. Talk about how the best selling professionals are getting to that level. We talked about the value add. We talked about the expertise. How are they getting there? 

Peter Cipriano: From what we’re seeing, your AWS story needs to be grounded in real operational and business context. Your solution at the surface may be the best, cheapest, most efficient solution they’ve ever seen, but if your solution comes with a lot of overhead like the need to retrain the entire staff, or if you’re not sure if their staff can even quickly pick up that solution, you probably will not be seen as mission critical. To be mission critical, you have to show you connected all the dots, from technology, to the business, to the people maintaining and using your solution. This builds that credibility with your client. 

Joshua Dirsmith: Just to extend on that, one of the things we see is Amazon’s ability to do things compliantly that publicly-available technology cannot. Let’s take artificial intelligence. Everybody has used ChatGPT or the Google version or whatever the case may be, but to do so with mission-critical data on a compliant-accredited system, that’s a different can of worms. Our customers on AWS technologies are asking us, “Hey, what if I could do something like this technology over here publicly available, but do it compliantly on my systems on AWS GovCloud, for example?” That’s one of the things that we’re seeing a lot, coupled with having to replace human horsepower with technological horsepower, and enabling those people who remain, the decision makers, the individual contributors I was talking about earlier, enabling them to do not only their jobs, but the jobs of the folks who are no longer with them. That is critical in leveraging AWS technologies, doing it on GovCloud. 

As an example, Amazon Bedrock is available in AWS GovCloud with all of the large language models that are the top of the top. It’s both Claude, it’s other models as well. Those kinds of technologies available in GovCloud compliantly, that is a game changer for our customers. We’re seeing it not only across the federal ecosystem, but also in aerospace and satellite, in manufacturing, in state and local government, in nonprofit, in healthcare. All of those public sector entities that are federal adjacent, they’re also using it as well because it is transformational for them to be able to do it and do it compliantly rather than hide their use of modern technology. 

Sehar Wahla: I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach but weave together a little bit of just the work I know that Peter and Josh and their teams do. When I think of just a generic cloud offering, no one’s walking into the government and saying, “Here, buy some AWS.” They are taking AWS technology, they’re taking other SaaS that integrates or platforms on AWS. They’re taking managed services that are going to make those solutions possible. They’re looking at accreditation. They’re looking at procurement challenges. Sellers are helping, as best they can, simplify that all for a government customer. 

I also look at the role of collaborating across the ecosystem and the importance of that. Actually, both of these gentlemen, they and their teams are experts at this. I have firsthand worked with them and their teams on some very complex government customers that they both support today. They’re also the first to say, “That’s not my domain. That’s not the part that I’m good at, but I’m going to partner with other people in the industry and the ecosystem to solve for that part. My team’s going to be hyper-focused and being a specialist in solving this mission-critical outcome for our customer. I’m going to partner and lean across the aisle with other peers at other companies or ISVs or AWS or Carahsoft to solve some of these other challenges.” I think the strongest partners are the ones that are not looking to become the experts on everything, but they’re very strong in where they’re solving a specific problem. 

Fred Diamond: We’re having the event at the Carahsoft Conference & Collaboration Center and the Carahsoft team that you manage, the AWS practice, has such a wide breath in understanding who does what really, really well. I love that answer. The event is on May 14th. We’re going to be having Josh and Peter and Sehar and also Shannon Judd from AWS. It’s going to be a great day to learn what you need to do as a selling professional to be more effective, but let’s talk about the customers here. 

They all have hard jobs. If there’s less of them, there’s obviously more oversight. We’re doing today’s interview in April of 2026. You guys and your teams, you’re all dealing with customers every single day and they’re under a lot of pressure. Things are changing not just from a government workforce perspective, but from a need to be technologically-advanced to get the solutions done that the United States citizens need. Give us some advice here on what government customers are really asking from you and from your teams and how you can bring those solutions. 

Sehar Wahla: I think one of the biggest things and opportunities I see as industry to help our government customers is let’s work as fast as possible. I say this to my teams all the time, on all the commercial innovation and all of the technology that’s being developed, how are we getting that into the hands of our government customers faster? Because ultimately that’s going to make their jobs easier. As teams on the industry side, that’s what we’re so hyperfocused on. Is it alleviating contractual burden? Is it educating customers on how these new technologies are going to help solve their problems? Is it leveraging tools like AWS Marketplace? Is it getting more partners spun up on the programs that AWS offers so that we can help move faster? 

I think as sellers, we should obviously be focused on being as smart as we can with the technology that’s out there and understanding what problems it’s solving. I think we’re obviously focused on let’s alleviate some of these procurement challenges. But I think the last thing, someone said this to me probably about a year ago that really stuck, but it’s being empathetic with where our customers are right now will go a long way. We’ve talked about reduction in workforces that have affected government, but just understanding the scale of the problems that they’re trying to solve right now and pairing that with the scale at which technology is moving, it’s a lot and it’s a lot more than they’ve ever been asked to do. 

I think we serve our government customers the best by being partners to them, being invested in their mission, being invested in their success, and ultimately co-owners of those outcomes, because as citizens, we are co-owners of those outcomes. I’m hoping we can get into more of that in the event and how we’re supporting government, but that’s my thought. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. I’m glad you brought up empathy. A lot of our listeners know, the number two most uttered word in the history of our show is empathy. It’s such a critical thing right now because yes, obviously industry has gone through a lot of transformation. Government customer has gone through a ton and it hasn’t been very pleasant for a lot of them, and the challenges haven’t gone away. The challenges continue to grow. By the way, the number one most uttered word, we’ve already used it a number of times on today’s show, is the V word, value. Josh, what is your advice for what we need to know about the customer? 

Joshua Dirsmith: I’m going to double tap on something Sehar said. The contractual and acquisition flexibility, structuring arrangements with customers that are applicable for them today but also can be flexible enough to be applicable tomorrow, that is critical to the success of our customers. We talked about earlier on this show, they do not know everything they need to know today, let alone everything they need to know tomorrow. Helping them through the RFI process get flexibility within their awards and within their contracts to account for something changing tomorrow, something changing next year, that’s critical. Educating them for how to do that through the RFI process, through conversations between sales professionals and customers before solicitations are released, that’s critical. 

I know Sehar and I are working on a very large one with a customer that we’ve guided in the past to what right looks like from an acquisition perspective, and it has shone through in the solicitation that’s active on the street today. It’s enabling that and having these contracts in place to enable these very modern technologies like Amazon Quick or Amazon Kiro or Amazon Bedrock, just to name drop a couple of artificial intelligence tools that Amazon is being able to make available to their public sector and government customers compliantly in GovCloud. But contracts that existed a few years ago, those tools didn’t exist. Having the flexibility to add them without having to restructure or re-award your entire contract ecosystem, that creativity and that flexibility is critical to enabling our customer success today. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Obviously, you got to understand the technology, where the customer is going. But for listeners here who aren’t all that familiar with the federal marketplace and public sector in general, procurement, contracts, compliance is such a critical factor. For you to be successful in selling today, obviously you need to be an expert in that as well. Peter, why don’t you bring us home with some fresh thoughts here? 

Peter Cipriano: This is a great question to end with because it brings home almost everything that we’ve been saying since we first started. What we’re hearing from our clients right now is the need for stability from the chaos that we’ve been in in the past year. There’s been a lot of disruption. We don’t need to repeat what we’ve seen. We’ve all seen a lot of our good friends of years of service go away. What that’s done is that’s exposed a tremendous amount of gaps in data services and IT services and decision making, as Josh just pointed out. I think it’s up to us to let them know that we understand that and that we are compassionate and we understand that it’s not just a solution. There’s real people that are hurting right now. 

I tell my folks, “Sometimes you got to read the room. You have to know when not to say something and just let something go.” I think right now, like we said, empathy, compassion, we’re here to help you succeed. That’s all of our main goals here. That’s all of your main goal is. Sometimes we go in with one solution and we come out with something else, because you just got to read the room. 

Fred Diamond: We always end the show with specific action items. You all have given us great ideas. Give us something nice, crisp, and succinct that people should do right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Joshua Dirsmith: I would say call your largest customer that you have in your portfolio today and talk to them about what their biggest IT challenge they’re facing is today, and then either react to that immediately or react to that within 24 hours about how you and AWS and Carahsoft can solve that problem for them. 

Fred Diamond: Great answer. Get on the phone. Pick it up. Peter. 

Peter Cipriano: If you are a small business, again, pick up that phone, contact the Carahsoft small business team, the Amazon small business team. We would not be here without their support. There is work to do, but pick up the phone, they’ll guide you through the process. As Sehar said, you will meet those other businesses that could complete your solutions. 

Fred Diamond: Great decision. Sehar, why don’t you bring us home. 

Sehar Wahla: As sellers, I think keep learning. Learn something new about technology and that’s going to serve you and it’s going to continue to serve your customers. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, my name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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ERAN’S TIP: “Use the AI machines for the 80% to get the right messages and insights, and then bring yourself into the last 20% to shape it the right way so it will work.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Eran Rozenfeld with Matrix, it’s great to have you here. Congratulations on being one of two of our second AI for Selling Effectiveness Awards. We’re going to be giving that out on April 29th. We received applications from, Zeev, a pretty good chunk of companies. I think we started with well over 100. This award is recognizing a company that is helping the sales process by using AI and how is AI making their sales process, whatever it might be, at various stages go more effectively to help the company grow more revenue and grow more business. It’s great to have you here, Zeev. It’s great to have you here, Eran. Zeev, tell us a little bit about Matrix and why you’re so excited to be sponsoring this award. 

Zeev Wexler: Matrix is a wonderful company, and Eran is a wonderful leader. Why I’m so excited about Matrix is they practice what they preach. Matrix themselves actually help other companies with AI. They’re incredible on layering data and just an incredible technology company, but themselves they use artificial intelligence in their sales process, in the process of identifying their ICPs, in the process of doing the research, preparation, and also reaching out and creating a stage for their sales professionals to actually use artificial intelligence in ways that help them. 

I’m really excited that a company that really understands AI and helps with data and AI for other companies actually uses that for themselves. That’s why we were very happy to give Matrix this very well-deserved award, our second annual. We’re excited to hear exactly what Matrix is doing with artificial intelligence and to show the community that artificial intelligence is here, it’s time to use it in sales, and it’s not just chatting with ChatGPT. 

Fred Diamond: We’re going to be talking to Eran in a second about what Matrix is doing, but I’m also very excited because at the award event, we’re going to be announcing a very special offering from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling with Viacry and our good friends at Funnel Clarity, which is designed to help companies apply great ways to use artificial intelligence to grow the sales process. I’ll hold off on some of that until the award event, but it’s going to be a lot of great AI for Selling Effectiveness. 

Eran, it’s great to have you here. Congratulations again on receiving the award. Zeev and I and the team that evaluated the companies that were doing things looked at a lot. A lot of companies, to be honest with you, Zeev, we saw this last year too, they weren’t really quite using AI the way that we want companies to begin to use it. Matrix was. Eran, it’s great to see you. Tell us a little bit about Matrix and give us a little bit of an introduction into some of the things, and I’m really excited to hear you and Zeev engage in some of this as well. 

Eran Rozenfeld: Matrix is a system integrator. To Zeev’s point, we are supporting customers with almost everything technology-wise. Since we are a multi-billion-dollar company with about 17,000 employees worldwide, we are ranked I think number eight in the US, which gives us the opportunity to work with all sizes of businesses and support them with all type of technologies, such as cloud, cyber, data, and AI, which we’ll talk about today, a lot of financial services that we support in customers, and many more. 

On the data and AI, which is the practice that I am with in the US, it’s pretty fascinating what’s happening right now. I had several calls with Zeev in the past and so on. To your point right now, it makes sense that a lot of customers or even companies that provide services, are still not utilizing AI tools. This is great to see you guys promoting that and helping customers understand or organizations understand how they should be using AI tools. The reason for that, that you don’t see that enough right now, it is because we are still in experimentation and piloting phase. A lot of the AI large ambitious projects doesn’t really work well. But what we find that works well is the approach where you go and you find those specific winning use cases, you tackle those, in a very short period of time you bring those quick wins in an organization, and you move on and utilize the next use case with AI model or with tools or what not. 

I’ll give you the highlight right now and I’ll let Zeev touch base on that, but I’ll be happy to share with you at least four steps in the sales cycle where we are utilizing AI and where we are helping customers utilize AI. It could be from the lead generation and prospect discovery, through the outreach and sales engagement, the assistance with meeting, opportunity management, all the way to proposal generation, replying RFPs and bids and so on. I’m happy to dive into those, but that’s what we see in the market, this is what we’re supporting customers. Of course, we’re supporting customers to do the same, not just with sales processes, but with their HR processes, the operation processes, and many more. But happy to talk today about how we use it in order to create better effectiveness of our sales processes. 

Fred Diamond: That’s what we’re hoping to hear. We’re going to be hearing about that on April 29th. Why don’t you get us started? You mentioned there’s four things you want to briefly address here. Let’s start with number one. 

Eran Rozenfeld: Every sales process starts with the lead generation, discovery, prospect, and so on. With the tools that you have out there today, without going to specifics, because as you probably know, things are changing on a weekly basis right now. But the tools are there and the ability to customize AI models is out there as well, the ability is there. Even if you look at the lead generation and prospect and discovery, it starts with mapping your market, understanding your addressable market and what’s available out there. 

With the tools, with the AI machines that are out there, putting and explaining exactly what are the services or the products you’re providing, analyzing the ICP, the ideal customer profile, analyzing the personas that you’re chasing. Adding some more flavor on where should the AI help you to look for those personas, and how do I look for CIOs right now, or CTOs, and which company sizes and flavor or industries or vertical they are in. Are they on LinkedIn right now? Are they publishing, are they moving, are they participating, are they publishing articles and whatnot? 

Putting all of this knowledge into the machine and asking the machine to look for the right prospects for you, to analyze why this is the right prospect, and maybe add to that, which are the events that those prospects are participating in, and many more. The bottom line is, instead of putting so much human power and so many hours to do that in the traditional way that we all know how to do, use some AI machines to save some time here and get better efficiency and better focused leads and prospects so then you can move on to the next stage with that. 

Fred Diamond: Zeev, you’re dealing with hundreds of companies, maybe even thousands by this point with all the work that you’re doing to get out there, lead generation and AI. 

Zeev Wexler: Basically, everybody needs to understand right now, and I think you and I spoke about this in the past, it’s not about output, it’s about outcome. It’s not really about having AI tools just do output, “My AI tool sent a thousand LinkedIn messages today.” That makes no sense. What works with AI is analyzing what worked for you in the past without AI and utilizing AI to really enhance that, to make that into a 5x. Looking at things that your Salesforce did successfully, that your system did successfully, and now automating that, and now you basically have a bunch of agents, a swarm of agents in your pocket that act like you, that do what you do, what works for you. It’s not just output, it’s about outcome and about results and about taking advantage of this incredible technology to move forward. 

We’re moving into a token economy. Right now, we measure output of AI by tokens. Now again, it’s not about output, it’s not just about doing emails, but the output that a salesperson can do in a year can be measured by a few million, let’s say 20, 30 million tokens. That costs, from an AI standpoint, a couple of 100 bucks. Now you as the sales professional can efficiently focus on the relationships, can focus on reading the room and understanding everything that’s going on in the market instead of figuring out data points or doing research. All of that now is being utilized by AI, and if you do it correctly, like Eran and Matrix do, you give your sales force and yourself so many more opportunities to make outcomes in the market. 

Fred Diamond: Eran, you said there’s a second thing, as we’re moving through things that you’re doing at Matrix to optimize the selling efforts of your organization. 

Eran Rozenfeld: Now you’ve got the leads. You’ve got the pipeline and this is the first stage of leads and you have hopefully better leads and you did it in a short period of time, so you can reach out to more, etc. But now you can use the AI machines, and our sales force can use the AI machines, in order to have a better personalized outreach and sales engagement. On a traditional way, you know that when you have a pipeline, you want to analyze each one of the leads and understand where they’re coming from, what do they do, what is the type of message that I should use with them in order to engage, or which event I should meet them and whatnot. 

Use the AI tools now to have this more personalized, more accurate, more focused in order to get better rates on results, better engagement rates. That’s what we do with that. It’s not just about sending thousands of emails, but who are the right people? What is the right message that should work, and use the AI machines in order to measure that and to get better rates, as opposed to what you did before, which is very, very manual, very, very hard to measure and monitor. Now with the tools, you can do that and have the second stage of engagement, better rates, better success towards the third one that we’ll talk in a bit. 

Zeev Wexler: This is something really important. I know Eran and Matrix do this, but you need to utilize the tools, but not lose your voice in the process. I see so many salespeople just sound like ChatGPT, or sound like Grok, sound like Claude. You need to maintain your voice. It goes to the point that I had before of doing what works, and I can do that too. Analyze what types of messages work, create a persona for yourself, teach the AI, how does Eran, how does Fred, how do they speak? What is my tone? It’s really, really dangerous. We need to rely on these tools, and everybody that knows me knows I’m a huge AI fan, but we need to do it with keeping our truth, keeping our tone, and keeping what makes us unique in the market. We created the success, AI can enhance that, AI can make that bigger, but it’s a big danger and I see it happening all over the place where AI is overtaking the voice of salespeople, sales professionals, and that is not the right way to do that. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. We see that all the time. Customers, unfortunately for the sales professionals, they can see through that. Everyone’s getting trained on seeing through that. I love the way you just said it will further optimize who you are as you begin to work with the AI, to train it in your voice, your understanding. One of the things we talk about all the time at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling and on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is that you need to bring insights to customers and value that they don’t anticipate you’re going to bring, but that you need to bring it, because otherwise there’s of little value that you are bringing them. 

Eran, you said there are two other things that we looked at as part of the application process for the AI for Selling Effectiveness Award for 2026. 

Eran Rozenfeld: Absolutely. I think that even before I touch the third point, it’s super important, this human touch. I don’t think that we are in a phase right now that is all AI. I think that we need to be smart about how to use AI properly, smart in order to support our processes, and to provide us the best ROI that we can get from this technology that is available. 

The third part that I chose to speak about today will be how the AI tools can assist our sales force with meeting and opportunity management. Now that we have the leads and we know how to now analyze properly and get the opportunities in place, etc., there are so many things that we do as sales that can be supported now with AI. I’m not talking about just preparing information like sales enablement, documentations, and PowerPoint, PDFs, etc., definitely things that takes you a while now. Use the AI machines 80% of the time to get the right messages out there and then go bring yourself in and the last 20% shape it the right way so it will work. 

In this phase with the sales assistant, etc., we will use AI transcribes calls, there are so many tools out there, use those tools, not just to save the information, etc., but also to get the right sales insights and explain to the AI machines that you’re working with and keep on training them what are the insights that you’re looking for and how to translate those insights to my next steps with your opportunity. Now I have a machine, I have co-workers in a way that works with me, smart ones that can support me and get the rates of moving this opportunity from an opportunity to an actual proposal and move to the next stage in the process. 

Zeev Wexler: This is really brilliant, Eran, and this is an advice I want to bring down to earth level. Artificial intelligence is like your co-workers, but it’s like your junior co-workers. I hope I’m not going to hurt anybody’s feelings, that’s not my goal, but I want you guys to visualize this. AI is like a brilliant junior employee, junior co-worker of yours, that English is their second language. They’re brilliant, they know how to do things, but they can’t really put things the way you want it. Just like you would work with a junior team, a sales assistant, an assistant, you need to massage what comes out. You need to train them of how you want things to be and you still have the oversight. Oversight is crucial with AI. 

AI is still on the level where it’s our helper, but it’s not something we just let run autonomously and say, “Go do all these things.” That’s where a lot of mistakes happen. Treat AI as a brilliant, incredible, young co-worker that you want to grow inside the company, but that co-worker, English is not their first language, which for me and Eran it’s not. Understand that there’s nuances that the artificial intelligence doesn’t understand and you need to bring that in. It can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but you are responsible for the outcome, you are responsible for the quality, and you’re responsible to bring the nuance into it that only you know. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, Zeev. Actually, at the end of the day, you’re responsible for everything. We like to say that even people who are working for companies, you’re the CEO of your career. I love the way you just explained that and brought that out, that how can AI help you as the selling professional and as the selling professional leader, and we have a lot of people who are leaders listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast and who were involved with the Institute for Effective Professional Selling or managing a large number of people who need to also utilize this for them to become more profound leaders, more effective leaders, and helping their company’s goals. 

Eran, I know there’s one last thing that you guys have done to implement AI to help the selling process move quicker. Why don’t you wrap up the show briefly with that? 

Eran Rozenfeld: We got all the way from lead generation to optimize the messages and now better engagement and understanding insights, and so on, to prepare to this next stage I’ll talk about. I’m sure that you guys dealt with other things that AI can help with, but I’ll touch on the AI for proposal generation, pricing, and bidding. You got a great machine that can help you do some research, understand historical data, market signals, what pricing should I go with, and so on, and you can automate that process. 

I would not say fully automate, because again, this is where really the salesperson needs to spend the time with, but use the machines now to research for you, to prepare the proposal for you, to even help you with RFPs and preparation over there, and allow the machines use the 80% where then you come and you put the 20% where you have all the insights available, smarter insights that are available for you. The coworkers that we talked before that are there for you to support you, all you need to do now is place that part of personality by the sales person, make sure that you stepped it right to have a better win rate. 

Fred Diamond: That is excellent. Zeev, any final words for us to bring it home here? 

Zeev Wexler: Guys, we’re recording this on the first day of Q2. AI needs to belong in your process in a safe way with guardrails, but you cannot sit on the fence anymore. Sales and AI, you and AI is the new sales standard. There is no going away. There is no going back. The same way you can’t do business without an email, a computer, and a smartphone, you definitely cannot do business in the future without artificial intelligence done the right way. That’s why we’re showcasing companies like Matrix and people like Eran that really do it the right way and all of us need to get off the fence and do it with ethics, with guardrails, but utilize artificial intelligence. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Once again, congratulations to Eran Rozenfeld and Matrix. On behalf of Zeev Wexler, my name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 834: Using AI to Specifically Increase Selling Performance with Eran Rozenfeld first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.