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Today’s show featured an interview with Andy McGowan, Director of the Center for Professional Selling at Virginia Commonwealth Universisty; and Daniel Kane, Director of Training, Systems and Processes at Curbell Plastics.

Find Andy on LinkedIn. Find Daniel on LinkedIn.

ANDY’S TIP: “Sales is hard. It’s not easy. You have to learn to talk to people… You have to get out there and you have to talk to people.”

DAN’S TIP: “Invest in yourself… invest in your own learning too. You want to go buy that book, that book about sales, go buy it. Go spend the 12 bucks, go spend the 15 bucks, read it and learn from it and pass it on.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Gentlemen, it’s great to see you here. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. Andy, it must be an interesting time for you, obviously. I presume you’re between school years and it’s probably a very busy time as well. You appeared on the show in January of 2026. Get our listeners caught up on the Center for Professional Selling that you run at Virginia Commonwealth University. I know it’s a fast-growing program. 

Andy McGowan: It is, and thank you for having me and thank you for letting me bring Dan on. We’ll talk about Curbell. But yeah, this is a very busy time prepping. We are four weeks till school starts. Our semester starts August 18th, so the clock is ticking, which you can’t see below the camera, is syllabi and books behind me and things getting prepared for the term. 

Since we last spoke, our program continues to grow. We’ve gone from, just a few years ago, just before I started, offering only three intro sales classes. This fall, we’ll have seven sections of our intro sales class. We started last year adding a sales enablement and analytics class. Now we have a fabulous instructor who comes to us from Salesforce and LinkedIn. We put in our advanced sales class. It reconstituted from my predecessor, Wayne Slough. It was a really busy spring since we last spoke. 

Now it’s trying to continue to grow the program. It’s like one of the growth areas. As the Dean said to me, he goes, “This is one of the growth areas for the business school and for the university, because sales is a great profession.” I try to convince our students of that all year when they’re looking for jobs when we get to the spring term, and sponsors like Dan at Curbell come on. He’ll probably tell you stories about students that they’ve brought in. It’s been a fun off-season. I think of my hockey days, like this is the off-season, you get ready for training camp right now, and then we hit the ground running in a few weeks. 

Fred Diamond: I’m going to bring Dan Kane on in a second here, but before I do, tee it up a little bit. What is the importance of corporate partners, corporate sponsors for a program like you’re running at VCU? For people who are listening, VCU is based in Richmond, Virginia, correct? Not too far from downtown. 

Andy McGowan: Correct. 

Fred Diamond: I’m based in Northern Virginia, about 100 miles north, straight up 95. Been in your campus, driven through it, stopped and walked many times. One of the great things is, a lot of your students are taking jobs in Northern Virginia, or they come from Northern Virginia, the metropolitan DC area, if you will. It’s exciting to hear all the great things that you’re doing. Give us some insights about corporate partnerships. 

Andy McGowan: Corporate partnerships are really the lifeblood for the program. It’s great to be able to be an academic and teach. I come from the business world. I went into teaching as an adjunct a long time ago. I always remember, when I was an adjunct, it was the students really loved like, “Oh, you’ve worked in this business. You’ll be teaching the class. You have real insight into what the course is, what we’re talking about.” 

Now in my role as the director for our Center for Professional Selling, I work closely with our sponsors because I call Dan up all the time asking, “What am I missing? What are those things that we should be teaching our students? How the world is changing?” I know we’re going to talk about all the things in the world that are going on, from AI, how it’s changing it. They’re on the front lines. They give us that insight that we then take into the syllabus, and again, all over my desk here, making sure that I offer that. 

They also come on campus a number of times this year and really have developed relationships with our students. They not only, as a sponsor, get to meet all of the students in the class, because they’ll come in four times during the term, they grade the midterm and the final. They come to class, they get to know the students. They also do our internal sales competitions. As they tell me, it’s like, they build a relationship with them early in the year, and over the course of the year, they’ll come back in the spring for other competitions. They get to know our students, and then they’re calling me up going, “Does that one have a job? I really want to know if they’re available,” and they are taking our top students and putting them right into jobs, which is great. I feel really good about being able to prepare those students. My goal now is really to help our students when they graduate, that they have a position when they exit school. 

Fred Diamond: One of the great things about the sales programs that are being recognized by the University Sales Center Alliance, the USCA, and I’ve interviewed a lot of your peers, Andy, at the various USCA schools, is that they’re going to get jobs. I’m doing today’s interview in July of 2026. I’ve met a bunch of these young adults and I’ve linked into them, or they’ve listened to one of the previous Office Hours shows and linked into me. Now I’ve seen over the last couple of weeks them posting where they’re going to work. One of the great things is they’re going to blue chip companies, such as Curbell. 

Dan, before I ask you about your relationship with VCU, give us an introduction to yourselves. Tell us a little bit about Curbell and tell us about your journey and what you do there. 

Dan Kane: Curbell Plastics, we’re a national plastic supplier of plastic sheet, rod, tube, and fabricated parts. We’re a distribution company, but I like to think of us as much more of a solutions company. You talk about how they’re teaching SPIN at VCU, we’re solving problems and we’re helping people solve problems within their companies. We’ve been in business since 1942. We are supported across the country with 30 locations, many salespeople. I’ve had the opportunity to work here, it’ll be 24 years in February of 2027. 

I started as an inside salesperson. I was inside sales for a couple of years, and then I was given the opportunity to move to outside sales. I did that for like three years. Then in 2008, I was put into a business management role of actually running the business in Virginia. When they asked me to do that, I was absolutely not interested. I really love the sales environment, and so I was thinking, “I don’t want to be a manager,” but then one of my peers and mentors of many years said, “Well, you can still be a salesperson. You’re going to be a sales manager. You’re going to teach people how to do it.” I did that from 2008 to 2025. 

Back in 2020, I got the opportunity to run our Pittsburgh location as well as the Virginia location. I had two locations for four years. I started hanging out with the VCU gang, with Dr. Slough, back in 2018, I think it was, 2018, 2019. I got to know Wayne, and we became fast friends, and we had a couple of pains in common. I did a career fair at VCU and I didn’t meet any students that wanted to have a career in sales. We started talking about that and Wayne said, “You’re the type of person I need to help me get the message out at VCU.” That’s how it started. 

Last year with all the recruiting I’d been doing, Curbell offered me an opportunity to move into this director of training and systems and processes, so recruiting, interfacing with universities like VCU, finding talent, and bringing them on board. 

Fred Diamond: Before we get deep into that, you mentioned that you don’t think of yourselves as being in the plastics world. You think about being in the solutions world. I’ve done over 860 Sales Game Changers Podcasts, and I can confidently say you’re the first person I’ve had on the show who’s a sales leader in the plastics solutions industry. Before I ask you specifically about your relationship with VCU, just tell our audience, what are those things? What are some of the solutions that you bring to your customers? 

Dan Kane: Great question. Curbell Plastics, the vertical markets that we spend our time in, it’s all pretty much manufacturing. It can be from aerospace to machine builders, to food manufacturing, sign printing. Andy knew us in a former life in his printing career with substrate to print on. From a sales perspective of I need to sell plastic sheets, or fabricated parts, or plastic tubes, well, you can do that, you can go to Amazon, you can go to Lowe’s, you can go all over the place. 

One of the things we like to do is really identify the folks, we study our vertical markets, so that if I talk to somebody in a machine builder environment, say, an engineer, I can actually be a trusted advisor to say, “I know your industry, I know your business, and here’s how we’ve helped other people within your space solve problems.” One of the big things with plastic is going to be weight reduction. Think about airplanes, think about vehicles, specialty vehicles, ambulances, for example, how do you make these lighter, more fuel efficient, safer? We get involved with a lot of those conversations with folks instead of saying, “I can sell you five sheets of ABS and the price is $10 a sheet.” 

Fred Diamond: Obviously, if you’re selling solutions, you got to know the industry, you got to know the customer with AI, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. The performance of the selling professional needs to improve. That being said, Andy’s program, again, VCU, you talked about how you first became partnered back at the end of the 2010s, 2018, 2019. What are some of the things that Andy teaches his students, what are some of the skills that they learn, specifically at VCU through Andy’s program, that make these students attractive to you? 

Dan Kane: I’ve been doing this for a long time. I got into sales by accident. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about sales is I went to college at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. I was on a six-year plan. You can laugh if you want, Andy. It’s okay. 

Andy McGowan: I did five, so I’m okay. 

Dan Kane: I was a goof. I tell students this all the time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a teacher, elementary ed, K-8. I taught eight months outside of college and I was like, “I can’t do this,” and I got involved with the job with the telephone, and I fell in love with it. 

When I would be hiring people a long time ago, they had to teach me sales. These students that are coming out of VCU, they understand the sales process. They understand that it’s hard work. It’s not just, “Hey, I’m a good talker. I talk to people,” because a lot of people think, “You’re great in sales, Dan, because you’re a big talker.” That’s not it. VCU and these other schools are teaching structure, the sales process, that it is a process. It is a profession. It’s not a just-in-case job like I got. It is an absolute marvelous profession. 

When we get students in, you know what we do? We teach them product, because they know the process, and the lingo might be a little bit different, but they understand prospecting. Outbound cold calling, cold calling, relationship building, I’ll bet you, it expedites that learning process a year, just because of the education these students have, and they understand that it’s not just going to be people are just going to flock to you to buy from you. It’s a lot of work. 

Fred Diamond: I like what you just said. That’s one thing we keep hearing time and time again, is that the universities that we’ve come to learn about that are part of the USCA that have these programs, the young adults who are going to graduate and go to work at a company like Curbell Plastics, they have a three-year advantage because they understand the sales process, and they understand a lot of the things that you just alluded to. 

Andy, why don’t you go a little bit deeper on that? What are some of the deeper messages that you want to get across to the companies, like Curbell Plastics, that you’d love to get involved with your program at VCU? Or maybe if they’re out of the area and they’re listening and they may have another university that’s maybe regionally closer or something like that, what’s the message you want to get to them? 

Andy McGowan: I think the thing I want to tell them is what Dan hit, is like we’re teaching them the sales process so that they’re going to interview and bring someone in that has learned sales. We’re working on it in terms of a real message for prospective companies and HR and sales programs, is for those companies that may not be sponsoring programs in their area, that they should get involved because the students are learning the sales process. They are coming out very prepared to walk into an entry-level sales job, whatever it might be, and they’re not having to teach them, “Well, gee, what’s sales?” They have done role plays. They’ve had to learn to prospect. They understand what objections are. They understand how to handle it. They understand how to build a relationship, and it’s not just, as Dan said, I’m a good talker. 

Sure, there are those students that do it, but we try to mold them in terms of there’s a reason we’re doing this. We use the SPIN methodology and we ask those questions because it’s all about the questions you ask. Dan said it earlier, you might be selling plastics, but it’s first selling solutions, and that’s what we’re trying to help them. The sales process is uncovering those problems and then being able to provide solutions. 

It’s a process. The students are getting it and I feel really confident in hearing back from sponsors that the students are stepping out of our program and are getting hired and are successful. Conversely, that’s when I’m calling up Dan going, “What am I missing? What are you seeing that we haven’t taught them that’s helpful?” Dan’s the one that said to me last year, was prospecting. Our class was just teaching them role play, and role play is great, it’s important, you’ve got to be able to do it, but man, when I was selling, and that’s how Dan and I connected. I led a printing company for a number of years. I bought half a million bucks a year from Curbell Plastics in terms of all their materials because we were a grand format manufacturer. I knew their products, or at least one stream of their products, but it’s teaching those students like you’ve got to understand the product, and now we’ve got you ready to go so that when Dan hires you, it’s like, okay, pitch your product, and away you go. 

Fred Diamond: Dan, let’s get specific. You mentioned that your people sell plastics and solutions related to selling plastics to many different verticals, I presume. What are you looking for when you’re recruiting a college student? For the students who might be listening, or parents potentially, what might be some of the characteristics, some of the traits, some of the personality traits perhaps that you have seen would be good for some of these young adults to sell plastic-related products. 

Dan Kane: That’s a loaded question. I love it. I know we only have so much time, so I’ll try to rein it in here. The biggest thing that I’m looking for all the time when I meet young folks, and I’ve got a 22-year-old son and twin girls that are 20. They’re all college-age kids, they’re in school, whatever, but I tell them all the time like, what I’m looking for, I’m looking for students who are curious, who are well put together, who can talk to me without looking at this. Who can talk to me instead of texting me, who can look me in the face and just have a conversation with me, where they’re curious, coachable, eager to learn, they stand out in class because they engage. 

Like I said, I was this knucklehead in school for six years because I was, “I don’t know what I want to do.” Well, sometimes I go to these classes and I can go to a class, in Andy or at VCU, any of these classes, I can stand in front of 30 kids, and within 10 minutes of standing in that class, I can tell what students are there to learn, who are there to get engaged and learn something. I can tell the students that just can’t wait to leave and go to Chipotle, or like, “I got to get the hell out of here.” You can see it in the body language. The students that are asking questions, instantly, there’s a connection. I gravitate because they’re curious. 

The biggest thing I think for a young person today is to be willing to have a conversation with somebody and be able to network, be able to put yourself out and just have a conversation. I think meeting a lot of young folks, we start talking about making out calls or cold calling. It doesn’t have to be scary. We’re just having a talk. We’re just having a conversation. I think that’s the biggest thing for me. It’s curiosity, coachability, and humility. 

Fred Diamond: Andy, I just want to follow up with you. A lot of the students who are in college now, again, we’re doing today’s interview in 2026, let’s face it, they grew up during the pandemic. For people who are not watching on YouTube, Dan picked up his phone at one point and said he doesn’t want the kids who are just sitting there looking at their phones. Talk about that for a minute, Andy. Talk about how do you educate these young adults that you need to engage, you need to physically talk and meet. We’re going to talk about AI. AI can get you pretty far down the path, but it ain’t going to solve all the problems, especially when you’re dealing with a 50-year-old plant manager who needs a whole bunch of plastic for things in the plant that you were just talking to, the manufacturing. Andy, give us some insights into what are you telling the young adults that it’s not just about the tech thing and the social? 

Andy McGowan: Dan said, it’s like, I started sales, I never thought of it, but when I applied for this role full-time and I was talking to my sister, who’s a year younger than I am, I got into sales at 10 years old and I was selling hockey tickets. I’m from Upstate New York, I played hockey through college and my parents had to pay a fee every year. It was 150 bucks a year, which is nowhere near that now because both of my girls played hockey, and we had to go door to door selling. We sold the raffle tickets for a buck a piece and my mother made it so that my brother and I both played, so we got 300 of them. The advantage was, for every ticket you sold, you got to keep the dollar. My mother made sure we sold every last one of them. I remember, my mother worked in the banking industry, she had a little bank box for your checks, and my sister, brother, and I went out, my mother had a territory plan. She mapped out all the streets. We had to go literally door to door, and my brother sat in the car and complained for the whole time, he was the youngest. My sister and I went door to door selling. 

I tell students sales is hard. It’s not easy. You have to learn to talk to people, and you said it earlier about the pandemic. I think that’s the biggest thing that’s different about the students now, that they were in a bubble for a number of years, either in high school or most of them now was in middle school to high school, and they just don’t connect with people. What we really work on is we make them talk to people. We make them do role plays. They have to use AI to help with a script, but you got to go one on one with Dan or another member of his staff and you’ve got to go sell. I always say this, one, sales is hard, and two, it’s hand-to-hand combat job. You have to get out there and you have to talk to people. 

Sure, technology is going to help you, but I do not think sales jobs are going away, and they are always going to be in-person because, where’s my Jeb Blount book? I’ll give Jeb Blount a plug, people buy you, and it’s true. For sales, if I have two people, if everything is the same or very close, I’m going to pick that sales rep that I think is going to be personal, is going to get it done, is going to do the follow up. I’ll even pay more money, pay a higher cost, if I know I’m going to get sales service, which is the end of the process which we’ve started to add in going, “Okay, great, you did the sale. Now what? How do you keep the customer?” Those are the things that we’re trying to get students to understand. 

What I like most is, at the end of the semester, I get a number of students that take the course, and I always ask day one why you’re taking it, and a couple of them are like, “Sounded interesting.” I remember most, I had a young lady, and Dan had her a year ago, she was in a bubble. She was terrified to do these role plays. I make them practice live in class. She went in front of Dan and she came up to me and she was terrified to do it. Dan came up to me after and he goes, “That young lady, she was really good.” I kept telling her and she came up to me at the end of the semester and she goes, “Thank you for making me take this class. It put me out of my comfort zone. I am much more comfortable talking to people and I really could see myself, if I had to go get a sales job, I can do it.” For me, that was the best. 

Fred Diamond: Dan, there’s about 70 universities out there that have programs like this. There’s five in Virginia. What is it about Andy’s students, the VCU students? 

Dan Kane: I have this kind of relationship with five different universities across the country. My opinion of the students at VCU is that they’re just grinders. I use that word, I’m a Pittsburgh guy, and that was always a word I grew up with, like, “You got to be a grinder.” I see these VCU students, they’re grinders. They’re not afraid of hard work. I know a lot of them are first generation college students, which I think gives them a bit of an edge, and they understand that these things aren’t just going to be handed out. A lot of these students are going there because they’re putting themselves through there. I’ve got a young lady sitting 20 feet from me that graduated from VCU in May. She put herself through college. She put herself through VCU, she’s from Northern Virginia, and she decided, “You know what? I’m going to do this. I don’t want to be in debt. I want to go to college and I’m going to be debt free.” First generation college student, she sits 20 feet from me right now, she’s in her fourth week at Curbell, and she was hired as an outside salesperson from VCU, but I think that’s it, it’s the grit. I think they have that grit and they know it’s not going to be a handout. 

Fred Diamond: Andy, let’s talk about that for a little bit here. You mentioned that your dean said that your sales program is one of the big growth programs in the business school. It’s a relatively new program, like we alluded to, where’s the program? Why is it growing? Young adults, like the one that Dan mentioned he just hired, telling their friends. I don’t want to put answers in your mouth, but for a parent to see that their kid is graduating with a job after having spent six figures, that’s a big thing. 

Andy McGowan: It is a big thing. I know the young lady that Dan hired. I teach two classes. I teach consumer marketing and then I teach sales. I had her for both classes and she’s a rock star. She was phenomenal. When D called me and said he hired her, I was, “I’m thrilled, but I know her situation and I know she’ll be fantastic.” 

There are a lot of students like her at VCU, as Dan mentioned, and why is it really growing? Our program is really growing because we are doing things to get them involved. Since I got involved, and taking over from Wayne Slough, he had really set the table and got us into USCA. He had made some inroads with some great partners. I’ve been lucky to just be able to try to grow it because we run more internal sales competitions. Our sales club finally became official in the business school last year. We have over 150 students that are signed up that come to events, not all at once, but we’ll get on. Our sales events, we do it twice a week, which is a club, it doesn’t cost anything to join, they come and we practice role playing. We practice quick pitch competitions. We practice different things so then the best of the best go for our sales team, our competitive team, which competes at events. 

A lot of the kids figure out like they get to go travel to ICSC in Orlando, or NCSC in Atlanta, or we’re going to go to AMA which is in New Orleans, it’s all paid for. The students are like, “Really? I get to go to this competition?” For them, that’s a carrot, that they really work hard. Then they see that because not only do they get to go, but they’ll walk out with internship and job opportunities. 

We came out of a competition last year in the spring competition, three of my students had job offers from that competition. That word gets around, so everybody’s like, “Oh, I got to go hang out with this.” We had a great student, he just graduated, his name is Tyler Lynn. He and the board really networked the heck out of it. They know all the ins and outs. They’re literally walking out with placards at school going, “Hey, join the sales club,” and kids come out of the woodwork to do it. 

The thing that’s also interesting is Wayne had started trying to get other colleges involved. We are now an approved elective for the engineering school so that, as Dan and I were talking, to go get sales technicians. I have a meeting with them the first week of school to go to one of their fairs where I’m going to pitch sales. The dean was interested because he had a meeting with our really well-known health program, the VCU health, they were like, “Yeah, we’re going to start some sales classes,” and our dean’s like, “We have that,” and he’s like, “Really?” We’re going to be meeting with him in the near future, he’s got to set me a date to go talk to the leadership. 

We had a young lady who was a premed student come to a sales practice and she goes, “I’m premed track. I want to go into pharmaceutical sales. Can I be on the sales team?” I’m like, “Absolutely, you can.” Full disclosure, I have a biology degree. I did hardcore biology and chemistry. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, that was my track through college. 

I’m thrilled that we’re going to expand sales, because the other thing I tell them outside of sales is hard is that every company needs sales. No matter what you are, if you don’t have sales, you don’t have a company. Forget all the you need finance and accounting and marketing people. If I don’t have sales, I got nothing, and they’re the last people to get let go. 

Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, Dan, you’re not the only company that’s becoming a sponsor or that has seen the opportunities here. A lot of the good students, like Andy has, and you talked about the competition in Atlanta, we went there, the Kennesaw State National Collegiate Sales Competition, 300 young adults, number 300 I would hire in a second. The talent that you’re training and that you’re educating, Andy, is actually quite remarkable. Dan, here’s your opportunity. Why would someone, one of these elite students, or mid-range, whatever it might be, why would they come to work at Curbell when they have so many in-theory opportunities? 

Dan Kane: They do, you’re right. They have a lot of opportunities. There’s a lot of great partners. What I typically talk to them about, like with the internship program, one of the things I’ve learned a lot is students, they want to be trained. I don’t know if it’s the COVID thing, or this generation of students, they want more training, they want to learn. I’ve had situations where we’ve said, “Okay, listen,” they’re struggling, maybe you set an appointment and they’re like, “I need more training.” Sometimes it’s like, “Well, no, we’re done training with that. Now we just need to do the work.” But a lot of them want a lot of training and they want to understand their stability. 

Curbell Plastics, we have three core values. Our values are respect, integrity, and learning. We have a learning culture at Curbell to where learning is very important. I’m the director of training, systems, and processes, but I’ve only been doing that for six months. There are many people before me. My colleague, Peter DelGado, that hired me 24 years ago, he is the vice president of training now, and retiring. They put all this into place where we’ve got product training, we’ve got sales training, we’ve got our LMS or our CLE is online where they’ve got thousands of courses. We pretty much let them know, I give them the structure of our onboarding process. 

When I came to Curbell 24 years ago, I got a legal pad and a pencil. They said, “Hey, listen to Scott for a couple of days and then get on the phone,” and that’s what I did. Now, it is a structure. It is a curriculum structured out through our LMS and it’s a lot of spoon-feeding information as they go. Then there’s a lot of live time in the field with myself or another peer at Curbell. I just tell them all the time, and a lot of our interns say, “Man, the training here has been awesome,” and I say, “Well, this has just been a 12-week internship program. Think about what it’s like if you just come here to work full time. That training is never going to go away.” I just think that’s a strength that we have. It’s one of the things we pride ourselves on, is really the training piece, but also that it’s a learning culture. I’ve been doing this for 24 years. I learn something about plastics every day. 

Fred Diamond: We alluded to AI, I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on it, but give us a thought or two. Andy, I want to ask Dan first on what is he expecting his selling professionals to use AI for? What are you talking to them about? What should they be doing, etc.? Just give us some general thoughts. Then, Andy, talk about how AI is playing a role in the curriculum. 

Dan Kane: AI is so new and evolving so fast. The biggest thing is, are they at least embracing AI to learn about it? A lot of people have their own, oh, AI this and it’s killing the planet, or some people love it, but it’s like, do you understand what it is? Do you understand how powerful it is? Because you may go into a job interview and say, “I don’t like AI.” You’re going to be passed up immediately. 

It’s just like when the World Wide Web came out. Remember when that came out and you had to get your disk and plug it in? It’s like, learn about it, understand it, appreciate it. Like our ownership says, AI is not going to replace people at Curbell. It’s going to make people at Curbell more efficient in their jobs if you learn it. That’s how we’re looking at it. We’re looking at learn it, embrace it, and just understand it. 

Fred Diamond: Andy, how’s it playing a role in the curriculum? 

Andy McGowan: It’s similar, because talking with Dan, he’s one of the people I lean on when I go like, “Hey, what’s up? What are you using it for?” We have embraced it. Our associate dean, Carol Scotese, at school, this whole past year, she has led the charge with, “We’re going to open our mind and eyes to AI, talk to people.” I’ve been to some workshops. I’ve spent time, I’ve taken a few workshops on it, but how it’s become important with our program is they’re allowed to use AI within some limits and some guardrails. Because as Dan said, it’s going to make you more efficient. 

Man, I wish I could have just punched a couple of things into AI and gotten a whole bunch of research on a company, or give me a draft to script. What questions should I ask? That helps them get material more quickly, but they still have to go through it, read it, and understand it, and then use it when they have a conversation with a prospect or a particular client. It just makes them, I hope, smarter. We got to be careful that the information is correct, but it’s a tool that, as Dan said, I’m hearing the same thing, if you don’t embrace it, you’re going to get passed over. 

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Dan Kane with Curbell Plastics and Andy McGowan with Virginia Commonwealth University for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast and Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. Why don’t you give us a final action step? We typically end every show with something that selling professionals, managers, and leaders who are listening to the show should do to take their sales career to the next level. Andy, why don’t you go first and then, Dan, you’ll bring us home. 

Andy McGowan: Mine’s easy. Dan said it earlier. It’s network. I try to teach my students that, like they come to competitions, or they’re like, “I don’t want to go do that. Professor, really?” I’m like, “You’re going to go to the sales competition because Dan Kane and other people are going to be there because they want to meet you.” That’s the thing that I tell all the students, like we do the competition for experience, but I really push it because it’s a networking opportunity, and because of it, Dan’s there cherry-picking. Like the young lady that he just hired, she was in the competitions and he got to meet her a number of times. Then the students are like, “Oh, you’re right. I really should go to those. I got an internship or a job out of it.” I push networking. That’s my big thing. 

Fred Diamond: That is a great thing. Nothing happens in your apartment that’s going to lead to great things. You got to go out there. You got to meet people. You got to talk. You got to expand the conversation. Dan, bring us on. 

Dan Kane: I would say invest in yourself. You’re going to go get a job, Curbell may hire you, we’re going to train you, but invest in your own learning too. You want to go buy that book, that book about sales, go buy it. Go spend the 12 bucks, go spend the 15 bucks, read it and learn from it and pass it on. I just think that the folks that are willing to invest in themselves, to learn as they continue, don’t just, “I got my job so I’m just going to sit here on the coast now,” become an expert at it. I wish somebody would have told me that 30 years ago. Don’t wait around. 

Andy McGowan: That’s why I have my collection of sales books right here. I’m pushing through them and I give them out. I tell students all the time, “I don’t have time for this class, but here’s a cheap book. Thrift books, go buy this book.” The kids that really get it, they’re the ones that come back and go, “I read that book. That was good.” You can only give them so much before they just overload. 

Fred Diamond: Like we tell people all the time, it’s like, you might be a sales rep at wherever it might be, Curbell, etc., but you are the CEO of your career. What are you doing to continually grow and take yourself to the next level? 

Once again, thank you so much, Dan Kane and Andy McGowan. Thank you for being on the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 877: University Sales Students Must Learn This, Say VCU’s Andy McGowan and Curbell Plastics’ Dan Kane first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Today’s show featured an interview with Corey Brubaker, Head of Enablement at Vumedi; and Amit Bakshi, Founder and CEO at WingRep.

Find Corey on LinkedIn. Find Amit on LinkedIn.

COREY’S TIP: “The organizations that are winning are the ones that are creating the fastest learning loops. They identify what’s happening in their customer conversations. They coach against it quickly. They reinforce those right behaviors, and then they constantly improve.”

AMIT’S TIP: “Don’t try to improve 10 things. Just pick one and really, really focus on that. A lot of times it’s just getting back to the basics. Curiosity, judgment. Just remember the essence of what good sales is. It’s not about AI. It’s about using AI to get back to the basics.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Amit Bakshi, thanks for being here. We’re going to be talking about WingRep and how Corey at Vumedi is using the tool. To tee her up, tell us a little more about WingRep and what it does. 

Amit Bakshi: WingRep is the partner to the sales rep, and we help them before, during, and after their calls to close more deals. 

Fred Diamond: Corey Brubaker, it’s great to have you here, with Vumedi. Tell us about your role at Vumedi and then tell us about this particular tool, how you’re using it. I’m also curious on how many tools you might be using. Is this one of hundreds or the only tool that you’re using in the AI realm? Introduce us to you, to your company, and what you do. 

Corey Brubaker: Vumedi is the leading peer-to-peer learning community for healthcare professionals. We actually have never had an enablement person in this space at all. Whenever I came into the organization about nine months ago as the head of enablement, my immediate first action was identifying different gaps within the organization and trying to find different tools that made sense to fill them. Someone actually recommended WingRep to me. One of our internal reps was utilizing it. It immediately became part of our tech stack. 

I wouldn’t say that we’re using an overwhelming amount of tools within our revenue organization. We are probably using the typical CRM, Salesforce. We’re using a learning management system, which we use Sana, which is also an AI tool. Then we’re using WingRep, amongst a few others. But I would say that it definitely has had some of the largest impact for our revenue organization. 

Fred Diamond: Give us a perspective on what do your sales reps do? What are they selling and to whom? 

Corey Brubaker: We have two different sales reps within the organization. We have our pharmaceutical sales reps and our med device reps. Ultimately, whenever you look at the Vumedi platform, we use our platform to educate doctors on the latest innovations within their space. Part of that, we like to get different drugs in front of those doctors from the pharmaceutical space, and of course, from the med device spaces as well. They’re selling to large pharmaceutical and med device companies and marketing agencies. 

What is really important for us is that we’re able to get ahead of the conversations that they’re having and we’re identifying different gaps within those conversations early. Sometimes a sales cycle can take a few months, and then sometimes it’s a relationship that’s built amongst a few years. Because of that, we want to treat each and every conversation as valuable as it needs to be. 

Fred Diamond: I want to talk generally about the concept of sales enablement. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, I was part of a group of people who created what was then called the Sales Enablement Society. I believe it’s actually now shifted to the Revenue Enablement Society. This was back in like 2016, I was part of a group, we were trying to figure out how do we get our arms around the concept of sales enablement. 

Amit, you brought some tools to the marketplace. What have been some of the big shifts in sales enablement over the last couple of years? We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. Amit, give us your thoughts, and then, Corey, as the professional, give us some of your insights. 

Amit Bakshi: The biggest shift isn’t actually AI. It’s moving from information to execution. Maybe five years ago it was all about more information, more playbooks, more battle cards. Today, there’s too much information. The problem is actually executing under pressure. At WingRep, we review thousands of sales calls. One of the biggest failure modes that we’ve noticed is pitching before understanding the customer’s problem. I struggle with it myself as someone that’s doing sales. Every rep knows that this is an issue, but when they’re live in the moment is when they get excited or they get nervous, or they jump into demo mode. That’s where AI can become interesting, not replacing the rep, but nudging them back to the fundamentals in the moment. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, you’ve been a sales enablement professional, nine months at Vumedi, what are some of the major shifts or the major shift that you’ve seen? Is it the same thing that Amit just expressed or are you seeing different things as well? 

Corey Brubaker: No, I would definitely agree with that. I’ve actually been in the sales enablement space for about 12 plus years. Because of that, I feel like I have seen so many different trends. I think that the biggest thing now, being in sales enablement, is that there is such an overwhelming amount of tools, data, insight. I think that it’s becoming increasingly easy to get buried in so much information and lose sight of the fundamentals that actually drive performance. 

To echo what Amit just mentioned as well, is I really think that we need to lean into AI and technology to tell us where the gaps are. Then we need to empower our leaders to help close those gaps. I really think that the organizations that are seeing the biggest impact are the ones that are actually using technology to make coaching more targeted, and because of that, you end up having more effective execution. 

Fred Diamond: Before you selected WingRep, what problem were you trying to solve? Who did the problem come from? Did it come from senior sales leadership or did it bubble up from the sales organization that come from the C-suite? How were you directed to find a solution that eventually led you to WingRep? 

Corey Brubaker: Whenever I started, as I mentioned, there was no one in enablement, and also, we didn’t have call recording. What was really challenging for me was scalability, where I was trying to join as many calls as possible and identify gaps. Quite honestly, there were not enough hours in the day for me to do that. Then I started to notice that it was the same for our sales managers. It was the same for our CRO. It was the same for our CEO. It was really difficult for all of us to be on all of these conversations at the same time. 

For me, being in enablement, I can’t bridge a gap that I don’t know exists, and it just became increasingly more complicated. This is actually something that I raised to our leadership team, to say, “This is a tool that I think would make our time a lot more valuable. It would help drive what we need to do from an enablement perspective. It’s going to give us more measurable results instead of just guessing at what we needed to improve.” 

Fred Diamond: Amit, there’s no shortage of AI tools. I get 5, 7, 10, 12 emails a day and on LinkedIn and other places where I get my information, I see the plethora of tools that are in the marketplace. They all claim the same thing, that they’re going to totally transform your sales enablement processes. Give us more of a global perspective on, where are you? You created WingRep, but where do you truly see where AI is bringing value today from the perspective that needs to happen? Every sales organization has one thing in common, they need to generate revenue. They need to find opportunities, they need to find new customers, grow existing ones, etc. Where really are you seeing the opportunities that AI is making that happen? What led to the creation of WingRep, as it relates to that? 

Amit Bakshi: Great question. AI is already working in a lot of ways, meeting summaries, CRM updates, follow-up emails. I think those are pretty common at this point. The next frontier is really helping reps during their conversations. I think we’re getting way ahead of ourselves when we talk about AI replacing salespeople, AI replacing managers. We’re all still here. Customers still buy from people. I think a good analogy is for the next frontier of AI in sales, AI can be like the GPS. It doesn’t drive your car, but it actually helps you avoid the next wrong turn. I think the best AI is not going to replace good salespeople. It’s going to help them execute in the moment. Frankly, it’s the tool that I need. As a founder doing sales myself, I’m learning on the job how to sell, I get constant feedback that helps me improve every single day. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, you make a decision to bring on a tool. Every tool, it either gets used or it doesn’t get used, where you learn things about it along the way. Give us some insights into when your company made the decision and you started implementing and you started training the sales reps on how to use it. Has everyone gravitated towards it? Is there a handful? Just give us some insights into once you made the decision, how did it go about bringing it on board and getting it utilized? 

Corey Brubaker: I think at first reps were hesitant just because they hadn’t had a tool like this before. Now it’s actually a tool that I don’t know that many of them can live without having on their calls. Like for me, what really surprised me was how quickly WingRep became part of our operational rhythm. It isn’t just a platform that people log into. It really is part of their day to day. It comes up on every single call that I am on in some capacity. 

For example, we did a training yesterday, we have new products that we’re rolling out. Our product marketing team actually used WingRep product analysis so that we could guide that training to say, these are the gaps in how we’re explaining our product. These are objections that are coming up. 

What I’m finding is that, I know on this podcast right now, we’re talking a lot about sellers, but we actually don’t just use it for our sellers. Our product marketing team is using the analysis tool. I have someone who is an agency liaison who helps us with our agency relationships. She goes in and she pulls a lot of the data as well. Even so much that we’ve been leaning into this from a pre-sales perspective. But now I’ve been working with the WingRep team to also bring this in for our post sales team. We’ve been using this for our customer success team. We’ve been testing a pilot with it. It really is something that I feel like everyone in the organization has really wrapped their arms around. You definitely don’t see that with every tool that you bring into an organization. 

Fred Diamond: Amit, I want to ask you a separate question here. Now that Corey explained some of the ways that her company, Vumedi, is using your technology, give us a 30-second elevator pitch. If I see you anywhere and you tell me, “I have this product that’s called WingRep. It helps blank,” give us a 30-second pitch. I’m just curious, now that we have a little more perspective on how Corey is using it. 

Amit Bakshi: WingRep helps sales reps before, during, and after their calls. We help prep you for your meeting. We help tell you exactly what your game plan should be during that meeting. During the meeting, we give you live nudges to bring you back on track. After the meeting, we do the work for you. We’ll write to your CRM, we’ll draft your follow up email. It’s really something that subtracts work for you and helps you jump from one call to the next. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, does it do that? 

Corey Brubaker: It does do that. But I actually think it does a lot more that you definitely didn’t mention, that someone like me, I find to be very valuable. From a leadership perspective, the insights that you can pull from WingRep, you can create automated reports that are sent to your sales leadership saying like, “This is how each rep is doing. This is how the product is doing.” You can prompt it with whatever. I actually think that that’s a huge value add. 

Then also one thing to mention is, I know that Amit mentioned that it really preps reps prior to, but before a meeting, it is syncing with their Google Calendar and with a few other resources where it’s giving you very targeted game plan. For example, the other day we had a rep who had a meeting and it actually pulled data, letting us know that the person on the other end of the phone, they had just won an award, which is something that they were then able to bring into the call. I would actually say that the true value for WingRep is that it’s doing all of those things very well, but I would say that it’s doing it to such a deep level that it really truly understands the information that’s going to move the needle for not only sales, but everybody else as well. 

Fred Diamond: Amit, there’s an additional 30 seconds worth of things that you could include. It’s got to be great to hear a customer say that to help you understand where it’s being used. Corey, when a lot of the companies invest in a tool, they want to see measurable results. I’m just curious, are there any metrics that you track to see the ROI on the investment? Are there things that your sales leaders are asking about? Do you get feedback from your sales reps? You just mentioned a whole slew of things that you leading enablement have discovered, but from your reps’ perspective, are they using it for one thing, or are they asking you for more things? Give us some of the perspective on, okay, you bought this tool for these reasons, and how have you measured success and how have you decided that it can do so many more things? 

Corey Brubaker: I think that using this tool to measure success, it’s complicated because we hadn’t had a tool like this before. Quite honestly, a lot of stuff we just weren’t measuring previously, because we didn’t have enablement, we didn’t have some of the right systems in place. I think that the true benefit, and how I’m measuring success and how my leadership is measuring it, is in behavior change. Are we asking the right discovery questions that maybe we weren’t before? Are we handling objections a lot better than what we potentially were before? Are we pitching our product properly? It’s more of the less measurable, but more of the behavior change. We inject that information into every single enablement session that we’re doing. It is truly part of the day-to-day that we’re seeing that there’s behavior change happening. 

Fred Diamond: Amit, I’ve sold a lot of software in my career. Unfortunately, some of it is what they used to call shelfware, where, “Hey, good for us, we got the sale, but it was never implemented.” Obviously here, Vumedi is doing great stuff with your product. It’s great to hear that someone is using and finding new uses and growing and helping the organization achieve its goals. Are you finding that some customers have maybe bigger eyes than stomach, so to speak, where they definitely want to bring in the technology, bring in solutions, but aren’t able to implement it? What are some of the things that you try to do to make that happen? 

Amit Bakshi: The biggest difference between our successful customers and maybe the ones that struggle more is they don’t try to improve everything at once. They just obsess over one thing. It could be discovery, it could be locking next steps. Maybe there’s a new leader that believes in Challenger, and he’s trying to spread that across the organization. I think just focus on one thing and then use WingRep to reinforce it consistently, not boil the ocean and do too many things at once. 

The other thing that really helps is having an incredible champion like Corey on the inside. Somebody that is really a power user themselves, that is the internal cheerleader showing everyone what more is possible. Corey’s one of those customers that is tinkering with our latest features before they’re even 100% ready and giving us feedback, which is just so valuable. Really what works is to have someone on the inside that is an innovator alongside us so we can build the platform together. 

Fred Diamond: We all know this. One of the ways that tools and training or any type of enablement really gets utilized is if sales management is on board. Sales management tells their reps, “This is what we’re going to use. I want you to use it and I’m going to be tracking or whatever it might be to ensure that it gets used.” I’m just curious, maybe from more of a global perspective, what are sales leaders, what are sales managers within your organization, what are they asking you for as it relates to solutions? Amit, you talk to obviously a lot of sales leaders as you bring this product to market and solutions to market. What are some of the common things? Again, we’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. 

Corey Brubaker: My sales leaders, I think that AI and using WingRep has really helped them shift from being investigators to more of coaches. That’s just something that they couldn’t do before, because again, they were just live on the call. I think that there’s a different layer of coaching that they get whenever they are actually able to take a step back, review a call, and then review it with their reps. What I’m finding that my sales leaders are coming to me with is, like actually today, I have one sitting in my Slack right now. One of our sales leaders sent me a Slack this morning with a link to a call saying, “I would love for us to sit down with this rep and go through this call.” We could have never done that before. 

I think that it helps them not only be able to say like, “These are the gaps that we need to fill,” but also ask for the right help within the organization to fill those gaps. I’m seeing that on a very consistent basis, that they’re reaching out to people within the organization that maybe they hadn’t done before, and they’re setting up different coaching sessions. Let’s say that they’re listening to a call. They identify that we’re not explaining a product properly. Then they’re taking the initiative to set up calls with our product marketing team with their team. I just think that it empowers them much more than what they would have had previously before we had this tool. 

Fred Diamond: Amit, what are people asking you for? You talk to tons. What do they say? Where are the holes in the marketplace that they’re trying to find solutions for? 

Amit Bakshi: I just want to echo one thing that Corey said. Managers have always wanted to coach. The problem was never motivation. It’s just time. If you have a bunch of reps that are doing a bunch of calls, in the good old days, maybe when they’re new, you could actually ride alongside them during the call and they can learn with you. Maybe in the last decade, you would review a few call recordings. But what AI can do is actually surface the conversations and the coaching moments that matter the most and let every conversation become coachable. 

As far as the gaps, I think that there just really needs to be more focus on what are the few things that could really move the needle the most. I think one thing I struggle with with AI is just I feel like I have so much to read. Everyone on our team is sending me these long AI-generated things and I just can’t keep up with all of this information. I think the gap, and one thing that we’re trying to do, is how do we actually shorten everything that we do? Like we have a game plan email, we have a debrief email, but does it really need to be as long as it is or can we really whittle it down to what’s the most important? I think that would be the next phase for us. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, what’s next from enablement? What other challenges are you looking to solve? You’re looking for either tools or other types of solutions. 

Corey Brubaker: I don’t necessarily think that I’m looking for new tools right now. I’m just letting these ones help steer the direction of where we go, especially because I’ve been with Vumedi for the last nine months. I filled the gaps right now that need to be filled. Now I’m just taking the direction of them. But I actually don’t think that I’m looking for any additional tools today. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to Amit Bakshi and Corey Brubaker. Thank you for your insights. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. There’s no shortage of tools. WingRep, obviously, it’s great to hear how a customer is using it, how they’re providing value, how they’re finding new usages for the technology as well, which is great. We talk, at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, with hundreds of selling organizations every year. One thing that we’re seeing, I’m just curious on your thoughts, people have invested in tools. We work with some of the top sales organizations in the world, and tools are getting them to a place. They’re saving time, they’re finding ways to be more productive, and the selling professionals in the B2B and B2G spaces we deal with, they still need to sell. They still need to develop relationships. They still need to grow accounts. They need to find new accounts. They need to expand the ones that they have. 

As you’re thinking about your final action step, what are some things that you recommend, a specific action step that you both recommend that our listeners do right now to take their sales performance and their sales careers to the next level? 

Amit Bakshi: I would say take a deep breath. Then don’t try to improve 10 things. Just pick one and really, really focus on that. A lot of times it’s just getting back to the basics. Curiosity, judgment. Read a sales book from the ‘80s, and all of that wisdom still rings true. Just remember the essence of what good sales is. It’s not about AI. It’s about using AI to get back to the basics. 

Fred Diamond: Corey, bring us home. 

Corey Brubaker: I’ve been doing this for quite some time just being in the enablement space. I think that the organizations that are winning are the ones that are creating the fastest learning loops. They identify what’s happening in their customer conversations. They coach against it quickly. They reinforce those right behaviors, and then they constantly improve. I always like to say that learning isn’t an event. It’s a cycle. What I would encourage leaders to do is to build a solid coaching cadence if they really want to change behavior and they want to do that for everyone within their organization. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Amit Bakshi and Corey Brubaker from Vumedi for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 876: How Vumedi Uses AI Sales Coaching Tools with Amit Bakshi and Corey Brubaker first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

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

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

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

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

The Institute for Effective Professional Selling has launched the Partner Revenue Academy for partner account managers who are looking to become more effective active sellers. The next 6-session cohort launches on October 16.

Learn more here.

Today’s show featured an interview with Andy Hershey, Vice President of Strategic Sales, Americas at Cribl.

Find Andy on LinkedIn.

ANDY’S TIP: “Research, who’s the best seller you or anyone in your network knows, who’s the most successful person that’s mid-career or late-career, and reach out to them. Ask them to mentor you.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026, in the summer of 2026. Andy Hershey with Cribl, I’m excited to have you on the show. You’re the first guest that we’ve had with Cribl, but you’ve worked at places where we’ve had numerous people appear on the show. I’m excited to hear a couple of things, a little bit about what Cribl does, but also, your leadership philosophy, some of your thoughts on how the thousands of Sales Game Changers listeners can take their sales career to the next level. Andy, tell us a little bit about what you do at Cribl and tell us a little bit about Cribl for people who don’t know. 

Andy Hershey: Cribl, we are an AI platform for telemetry. What does that mean? We help our customers with a wide range of use cases across security and IT and the business, where we leverage data to solve problems. We tie to business value that way. We’re an over $300 million company growing over 40% year over year. My role, I’m the vice president of our strategic account segments. We have our largest, most complex customers. My team, my goal is to build a durable business within that segment and to help customers leverage data to transform how they do business. 

Fred Diamond: You’ve led very, very successful and established technology companies. You’ve led the organizations through tremendous changes in technology. Everything right now, obviously AI is a huge topic, not just in the selling process, but as it relates to buyer behavior. What do you think some of the biggest challenges facing B2B or, in some cases, B2G selling professionals today? 

Andy Hershey: From a sales professional, I think the biggest challenge is getting access to the right people, and when you do, articulating the right problem, the right pain to the right persona, being very focused. There’s more noise than ever. People are working remotely more than ever. You can’t just walk in an office and go from office desk to desk to desk and so forth. It’s harder. We got to be smarter and more professional or more focused. I believe focus drives execution. 

Fred Diamond: I agree with you. As you were talking, and the way you just described it, going into a building, walking door to door, that used to be a great way that the selling professionals got successful. But it hasn’t really been like that in a long time. Obviously, the pandemic has shifted that. A lot of companies are very, very stringent with their security policies. Of course, over the last couple of years, work from home, when people are going to be in the office on both sides has made it challenging. 

As it relates to that, buyers keep telling us, and we know this, that they’re overwhelmed with information. They’re overwhelmed with outreach. A lot of it is automated, ways that we’re trying to figure out selling professionals, how do we slip through? From your perspective, what are some of the things that are separating the real successful selling professionals who are able to get those meetings, who are able to get in front of the customer to communicate the company’s value? 

Andy Hershey: It’s really interesting when you talk about that. I think there’s two types of sellers I’ve always seen. There’s the hunter that’s going around banging on. I think they have to be very focused on what they’re doing. They’re very aggressive, they work hard, they make a lot of calls, they’re used to rejection. Then there’s the account manager. Oftentimes they build great relationships, support customers, can call high, broadly, very polished. I think the challenge I see, it’s usually one or the other. A rep is usually one or the other. Very rarely do I see someone who has both combined skill sets. That’s really a unicorn to have. 

To answer your question, I think having both of those skills together are the key. Being able to get in front of the right people and talk about the business objective or initiative that you can help enable or solve, as well as the technical use cases with the technical sellers. Then also to really be able to execute at a strategic level with an account. That’s, to me, what the best sellers can do, both together. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s get back to that question. How are you seeing them, like the ones who are successful in getting the meetings, because people are becoming more and more aware of almost like the way it used to be. They want to have more meetings, obviously. Much more potential will happen in a face-to-face meeting, around a board room, whatever it might be. How are your top performers, or how are you coaching your selling professionals to get those meetings? We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2026. What are you telling them to do? How are you coaching? What are the best ones doing to get those opportunities? 

Andy Hershey: In my mind, the best thing you can do is not just focus on the products. We’re in a world now where we’re selling a platform. We had great beachheads that we won by selling a product to get into an account, and it’s a very straightforward motion for us to grow, especially in strategic, where we have big accounts, we have to go broader and deeper in those accounts. We don’t have a gazillion accounts. In the world specifically where I am right now, I think with most accounts, this is true, but especially in my world, you need to understand the business. You need to understand the structure, the business, the initiatives, what partners are they working with of yours? How can you strategically get in? Really having a lot of thoughtfulness into it. 

One of the things that we’re doing to help with that, we have some sellers who do that naturally. We call it tops down, bottoms up selling, getting multithreaded accounts, getting more at bats, because one of the challenges I see is typically we have one opportunity in this account, one opportunity in that account, so it’s all or nothing. We need to have more opportunities in the accounts to get a higher batting average. If one of the five opportunities closes, that’s pretty good. We call it multithreading, and our top reps can do that very well. 

We wanted to help the rest of the team be able to do that, maybe those who haven’t done it before or they don’t have the skill or the will or just the experience doing it. We used an AI agent. We built an AI agent that combines a lot of data, internal from our intranet and product information, but with investor reports, Glassdoor reports, things like that, and correlating it together to give you guidance about the account, what their business objective is, some potential targets to go after, understanding their business initiatives, but also a hypothesis of how we can help, what message you should communicate, and then you can interact with it as well. You can ask the agent questions and so forth. We’re trying to level the playing field or help everyone raise their game to do what our most experienced sellers do by doing this, and we’re seeing really good results by doing that. 

Fred Diamond: I was going to ask you for the next question, tell us a little more about AI. I’m just curious, the tool that you’ve developed or the processes using AI you’ve developed, obviously is seemingly giving your sales reps a lot of information, access to what’s going on with the customer, that AI is obviously able to extrapolate. How are you using AI to get to the next stage? You’re getting your sales reps prepared, you’re getting them educated, and hopefully the selling professionals are taking advantage of that, because one of our main themes through the Sales Game Changers Podcast is that customers have no value for you, or you have no value for the customer, they have no need for you if you’re not bringing value down the road. Not just today, July 30th, 2026, but July 30th, 2027, whatever it might be. I’m just curious, how are you using AI to close the loop to get to the question you answered before, to get in the door, to have the meetings, to be able to show the value that your company brings? 

Andy Hershey: You brought up a great point. I mentioned the agents we have that can tie to business initiatives and who you should contact, what your value point should be, how to interact, how to prepare, how to have a hypothesis, but also bottoms up, what are the use cases? We call it three rocks. We have different use cases, and use cases are customer problems, ideally ones we can solve in unique ways. Rather than thinking product first, let’s understand the use cases by buying center, IT, security, or around AI. Who are the people? What are the pain points we can solve, and go prospecting for them? As if you have a black box, don’t worry about the products. Go prospect for the person with the problem, then open up the black box and we’ll figure out what solutions are in there. That outside-in prospecting for use cases is really important. The AI agents are helping us do that with the use cases on a high level. 

In a parallel thought, we also have to get multithreaded. I mentioned multithread and not being single thread in an account. We also want to use AI. Back in the day, we would use Visio for org charts or whatever to play chess. We still want to play chess, but we’re using AI to make org charts much more dynamic, so that we can understand the path, the different players, and what the real power map looks like. In addition, that helps us, because we can work with our pre-sales team, with our partners, and have really intelligent conversations with our BDRs, not only to sell, but also like with our success engineers, our CSEs and so forth, and our DSEs and our PS team, to talk about our account strategy and get very strategic. AI can guide us that way too. Those are ways that we spend less time gathering information, reinventing the wheel, and more time selling and driving adoption effectively. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that. You work with very sophisticated, complex customers with very, very important demands and very, very important needs for the technology that you’re bringing to them. How are some of the top selling professionals interfacing with them? You talked about all the tools that you’re getting them prepared, how you’re getting them to the door, etc., what are the best reps doing right now? I just alluded to the fact that you need to show value for the next two years, not just, “Hey, here’s a tool that can help you.” Give us the insight into the top performers and give us their persona per se. What are they doing? What do they look like? How are they achieving right now? 

Andy Hershey: I think the top performers are the ones that, whether they’re a Greenfield seller or an account manager, they do both. They don’t get pigeonholed, one or the other, I mentioned earlier having both skill sets. They have a growth mindset. They’re always one to try new things and take new approaches. But a couple of things have also come to mind. One is the research in the customers when they get in front of you, Fred, I would talk to you about what other customers in your situation, how we’re helping them, the challenges. You might say, “Andy, that’s absolutely bonkers. I don’t care about that.” But I’d say, “Okay, Fred, so tell me, where are you focused?” and you can tell me about your problems, versus the traditional way that I think a lot of sellers still do it in a consulting way, “Hey, Fred, I just want to come in. Tell me, what keeps you awake at night?” I think being prescriptive, being prepared, and being intelligent are the way. 

If I would highlight one other key point that they’re doing, I would say they’re not talking to the same old cast of characters inside a company. Maybe where we landed before, or the people we’ve talked that may or may not have interest in our solutions, they’re getting broader. They’re developing relationships with partners that may know people. That whole concept of single-threaded, becoming multithreaded, that’s another thing that top reps, to me, are always doing. That growth mindset, I can’t emphasize that enough. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. A lot of times selling professionals get stuck because they’ll be selling to the same people, having the same conversations, and we want them as sales leaders to find other opportunities. I like the way you said it before, in their ecosystem, maybe your account is whomever, but what can you bring to their partners? What can you bring to their suppliers along the food chain? I love that answer. The great sales reps aren’t just looking at, “All right, my quote is $100,000 this month of stuff to Company X.” It’s, “What can I bring in to the broader perspective? Who else can I team with to bring solutions?” I love that. 

Andy Hershey: One other thing that just came to mind that top sellers do, they leverage their resources. They pull in the executive team. They pull in all the supporting resources to help them sell. They don’t wait until the deal gets closed to pull in the adoption and the PS team and the customer success team. They use them as advantages to help sell. They have CEO to CFO meetings. They leverage the resources. The ones that maybe aren’t so great, they don’t want to give up the spotlight. But the ones that leverage the heck out of our executive resources and our overall internal ecosystem also do extremely well. 

Fred Diamond: I coach a lot of young selling professionals, and one thing I advise them on is get to know your company. Know your company intimately. Know the C-suite leaders and what they do and what their responsibilities are. I love the way you just explained it, to tee them up for those foreshadowed opportunities. 

I remember, I was at Apple Computer for a long time, and our customers loved to talk to the C-suite people at Apple, and it always led the conversation further down the path, but they want their time to be used properly. It’s like, don’t send me to Seoul to do a one-minute meeting if it’s not going to lead to a $100 million deal, if you will. But yeah, you got to think strategically, leverage. People that typically spend time in the office, they love to get out with the customers and to learn and talk. That’s a great bit of advice, Andy. 

Andy Hershey: I’ve seen sellers over the years say, “I don’t want to bring our CEO in. I don’t want to bring them in. I don’t have a deal on the table to close.” You can position your CEO or any executive any way you want. You can guide them to drive your sale forward or build the relationship. Another great example is the product team, the product managers. What do they benefit from? Hearing customer feedback, getting feedback on new ideas, or how are the current products working? Why would you take them to the customer? “Hey, Mr. Customer or Mrs. Customer, or Mr. and Mrs. Prospective Customer, I really want to earn your business. I really appreciate your business. You’re very valuable. I want to bring in our product management team, at least they can hear your thoughts and what’s valuable to you, what’s working, what’s not working, because you are very important to us.” That gives you credibility in building your relationship. We need to be thinking of doing these things to sell. 

By the way, when we do these things with marketing and product management, you know what they do? They see us more of a partner than just some money-centric transactional sales rep, too. That’s how we get more broader support across our internal organizations. These are all things we ask about what the top reps do. These are what top reps do, in my opinion. 

Fred Diamond: Actually, from the customer side, the customer is thrilled. Not just at the C-suite, but I remember bringing product managers when I worked at various companies, and those peer-to-peer conversations. A customer, when you give them the opportunity to talk to someone in product management or product marketing, someone who’s an expert on something particular that they’re challenged with, especially if they traveled to get to the meetings. The Zoom is great. It’s easy to pop someone on Zoom to answer some questions. That’s probably a great thing, too. But finding even differentiated ways to show that you’re different than all the other companies who are trying just to get some sales from them. I love that answer. 

We have a lot of listeners who are sales managers. What are some things that you see sales managers are doing that just isn’t adding value, that they need to stop immediately? Maybe what’s your advice for sales managers listening that you don’t think they are doing enough of? 

Andy Hershey: I learned the hard way. When I first got promoted, I had a pretty good run as a rep, and I was told, “Hey,” it was a peer promotion, which is challenging to start with, “Just get this team to do everything you did as a rep. That’s all we need you to do.” What I found out was that’s exactly the opposite of what you should do. I know what’s really important to do is, first of all, realize everyone on your sales team is different. 

I love baseball. I’m not a Pete Rose fan, but I think he had one of the best leadership sayings ever. At one point, he was interviewed years ago, and he said, “Hey, you’re managing the Cincinnati Reds. You have these players, Dave Parker, blah, blah, blah, all these egos. How do you manage all these players?” He said, “You got to know three things, which players to pat on the back, who to smack in the butt, and who to leave the hell alone.” I was in college when I heard that in Sports Illustrated. Ever since then, I think about that with our team. Sometimes I do it better than others, but everyone has a different style, and they respond to different things. It’s not a one size fits all. I see a lot of early sales leaders treating everyone the same, and the way that they wanted to be treated as a rep. That’s one thing. 

The second thing I would say is we’ve all heard about the super rep syndrome, jumping and helping sell. We definitely want to help the seller and get deals done, especially when we can teach them how to fish so they can scale, but as a leader, I want leverage. I want my reps doing as much as possible, the blocking and tackling on their own, where I’m involved with the larger deals, the more complex situations and so forth. That’s how I add the most value. I think a lot of people see value, as a leader, just being in the middle of everything. 

One more analogy I’ll draw, if I may, I love Broadway musicals. As corny as it may sound, nothing inspires me more than going to New York City and seeing this incredible talent on stage and so forth, and clapping and everything else for the cast at the end of the show. But behind the curtain is the director, and that person’s name is in the play, but no one sees them. But that director is whispering lines, teaching them, hiring, all these things. That director is not on stage battling for the curtain call, but they know, “Hey, it’s all about the actors and actresses. Let them get the awards.” 

I think as leaders, we have to help our team get the recognition, help our team get the applause and so forth. If we’re doing that, they’ll know we’re the leaders, but we need to put our team first. I think that’s another thing. We should not be on stage curtsying and battling with the actors and actresses. Be behind the curtain and be comfortable with that. That is your success. 

Fred Diamond: I love that answer. Here’s a question I’ve never asked before on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. What’s your favorite musical of all time, and I’ll tell you mine? 

Andy Hershey: You go first. 

Fred Diamond: Rent. I love Rent. I could listen to it every day. 

Andy Hershey: My wife and I were fortunate enough to see the original Broadway cast of Hamilton back in the day. We saw the original cast of Hamilton and that was just inspiring. It was just great. The story, the music, the dancing, just found it all inspiring. 

Fred Diamond: That’s a hugely-successful musical. I hate to say this, but I think Betty Buckley, wasn’t she the original singer of Memory in Cats? 

Andy Hershey: I don’t know. I guess I am too young to know that, but yeah. 

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of young sales managers and young sales professionals who are great listeners of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Give us two skills. If someone said to you, “Hey, Andy, tell me two things that I should focus on.” You’ve given us a lot of great ideas about differentiating and research and using the technology and showing value to the customer. What are two skills that you recommend that becomes part of their daily life? 

Andy Hershey: Having the growth mindset and learning. Another question I would say is, what do you learn from? There’s so much great content. You provide great content and training, but especially early in career, there are so many good podcasts and other things out there, whether it’s through ChatGPT or the internet in general. The one I would really, really highlight that I’d say is available out there for people to access is Command of the Message and Force Management. There’s a lot of content out there you can leverage. These are things that many sellers do naturally in many ways, but as a young seller, learn these. They’re hard, they’re challenging to learn, but they will help you drive large deals consistently throughout your career. 

The other book that I really enjoyed was, I’m trying to get the name of it, actually, I enjoyed it so much and I forgot the name. It’s the one where you teach, tell, and take control, where you are prescriptively selling with a customer. I should know the name of it, but that’s a good one. For the purpose of right now, I would say you listen to podcasts and so forth. Your podcast, your content, and a parallel one is Force Management. I think that is just money in your pocket as well. 

Fred Diamond: I’ll give you an opportunity here. Let’s say there’s a sales professional you really want to hire. I’ll give you 30 seconds here to give the elevator pitch on why someone listening should come work at Cribl. 

Andy Hershey: There are very few companies over $300 million growing 40% year-over-year with the customer base that we have, over half the Fortune 100 and much of the Fortune 500. We’re in the process of transforming from a point solution or from an initial solution to a platform. We have an incredible opportunity in front of us helping customers transform how they do business, with a great team of people and an experienced leadership team that’s done it before. Come here, change your career, grow your career, make a lot of money, and have the highlight of your career. Great leadership team, great people, great product, great customer base. You couldn’t ask for anything more. 

Fred Diamond: Andy Hershey, thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, a lot of great advice on how to think differently. One of the key things right now is you got to think differently, you got to sell differently, you got to show up differently to your customer because they’re tuning out. They can easily delete your voicemail, they can delete your message, they can delete your email, so you got to figure out ways to get through to them. I love some of your ideas on that. 

You’ve given us a lot of great ideas. Give us a specific action step, something that people should do right now, after listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast, to take their sales leadership or their sales career to the next level. 

Andy Hershey: Other than come work for Cribl, that’s number one. Number two, I would research, who’s the best seller you or anyone in your network knows, who’s the most successful person that’s mid-career or late-career, and reach out to them. Ask them to mentor you. Ask them if you could have a monthly call where you could come to them with an agenda as you advance your career, that you want to learn from them, and so forth, but find someone to mentor you if you’re not doing that already. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great. Don’t be shy. Reach out to people. I tell young adults all the time, reach out to your parents’ friends who are in sales. They say, “How can I ask them to meet?” Say, “Can we meet at 8:00 o’clock on Saturday at Starbucks?” and 99% of the time, they’re going to say yes. 

Andy Hershey, thank you so much for the great insights on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 875: Skills That Separate Great Sellers from Everyone Else with Cribl’s Andy Hershey first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

This is an Office Hours: Sales Professors Unplugged 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!

The Institute for Effective Professional Selling has launched the Partner Revenue Academy for partner account managers who are looking to become more effective active sellers. The next 6-session cohort launches on October 16.

Learn more here.

Today’s show featured an interview with Dr. Sterling Bone, Professor and Director of Huntsman ProSales at Utah State University – Jon M. Huntsman School of Business.

Find Sterling on LinkedIn.

STERLING’S TIP: “Trust your mechanics, trust your process, trust your systems, but find your soul and rediscover your soul of why you sell. I think it’s taking a minute and thinking, why is it that what we do changes lives? How do we really impact? What are the real benefits that we provide?”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’ve done about 25 interviews, Dr. Bone, with professors like you who are running programs at universities. We post them on YouTube, we post them on Apple and Spotify, and we also post a couple of times on LinkedIn. Every time I do a LinkedIn post, three to four people will always comment, “I didn’t realize that there were professional selling programs at universities.” 

I’m talking today with Dr. Sterling Bone from Utah State. I’m very excited to get deep into this. We’re going to talk about a lot of interesting things that you’re doing to prepare your young adults. Before I get into my formal questions, give us a brief introduction to you and to Utah State and what you got going on. 

Sterling Bone: Thank you, Fred. It’s really truly an honor to be with you. This is an honorable profession, and I’m so glad to be connected with those that are advocating for the profession and the opportunity. To all the listeners, thank you for caring about the state of professional selling in today’s world. 

My journey started in professional selling. It goes back to my early days as a kid doing those fundraisers door to door. Didn’t see myself as a seller early on, but I grew into that. My first job was in retail, and later I served a church service mission where I was in Columbia in the jungles, evangelizing and teaching religion and faith. But even then, I didn’t see myself in sales. I saw myself in the duty of service. 

But it was after my journey abroad that I returned to my educational roots, which are Utah State University. I got two degrees here, and along the way was a real estate and financial service professional. Then I saw myself clearly in sales at that point. Then pursuing advanced studies realized that, wait, we’re not teaching sales in institutions of higher learning like we should. I would have benefited, as many of I’m sure the listeners would have, knowing that there was professional selling training. It became part of my early career and now my mid-later career mission to build great programs of excellence to train the next generations to sell with integrity and to sell with impact and sell in the ways that we hope that they do. 

Here at Utah State, I’m in my 15th year building a program from the grassroots. We like to say here in the state of Utah, we’re sitting on a goldmine of talent. We have some amazing young people across all of our institutions of higher learning out here in the West. We have a pioneering spirit that is really deeply rooted, and I’ll talk a little bit about that and how we harness that pioneering spirit in today’s seller. It’s really truly an honor to be with you. Excited to have this conversation. Thank you for bringing awareness to this honorable profession. 

Fred Diamond: You’re welcome. When we got to learn more about what the University Sales Center Alliance, the USCA, was doing, we felt such an affinity at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling with you and your peers whose mission was to help young adults go to companies. The great thing about the programs like yours that we’ve learned is you’re preparing young adults to hit the ground running. They may need to learn about the technology or the product that they’re going to be selling, maybe the marketplace, but time and time again, the companies that are sponsoring the corporations that are partnering with you guys tell me that these young adults that we’re hiring, their retention is higher, their ability to start is quicker, their ability to grow into management comes along with it as well, because the education that you are giving is so amazing. 

You mentioned you’ve been at Utah State for about 15 years. What excites you most about where the university’s sales programs are headed? 

Sterling Bone: I think it’s a great thing that we’re part of these programs. I pay tribute to my peers across the country. None of us are working alone. We’re not in competition with one another. We’re really collaborating to really build upon a state of abundance that we have. We have great young people. We have great mid-career, later career. We teach non-traditional students as well. When I say young people, we’ve got great students across the board, let me just say that. 

I’m excited that there’s been a lot of efforts over the last, I would say two or three decades, if not longer, teaching good sales mechanics. I’m glad that we have a foundation laid on understanding and teaching and knowing how to teach and instill in junior sales professionals the mechanics of how to sell. What I’m excited about is that we’ve, I wouldn’t say we’ve graduated from mechanics training and teaching, but I think we’re thinking out of the box a little bit. It’s not just about mechanics. It’s about character building. It’s bringing the human side of selling back in. It’s bringing that personal authenticity, that genuine voice. 

I think today generationally, students that I interact with, they want to be creative. They don’t want to be put into a box. They don’t want to be conforming to a model. I think it’s great that we give them those mechanics and those models, those systems, those processes. But I’m excited about the opportunity, is to unleash the human potential that is in these students and in all professionals. 

I’m currently working on a book that is couched against the importance of human persuasion in the A of AI. I think that technology is fascinating. I’m excited about the technology advancements. I had the unique opportunity earlier this summer to be in the same room with the Artemis II crew. When I say in the same room, I was in a large auditorium in Ottawa, Canada. My travels with some of my research and other involvement took me to Ottawa, Canada. I was in this room, and I’ve been fascinated with this mission to orbit the moon, as I am fascinated with lots of amazing technology and technological advances. 

It was interesting, from the crew’s perspective, while they had been trained on the mechanics of the orbiter and all of the mechanics and technologies that they were needing to execute upon and to have hopefully work, an obviously very dangerous mission, but what they reflected on most at the end of that mission was humanity. It really struck me that as technology advances, we start to question and think about, what is the role that humanity plays in this? Our perspectives change. I’m excited about this next age of sales training that we can really return to the human and really focus on the human side, what I refer to as the soul of selling. 

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in August of 2026. Obviously, AI is huge, and the tools. We spend a lot of time at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling talking about that, but at its core, the selling professionals who are exceptional, and I’ve met a lot of the young adults who are coming out of these programs at the USCA universities. They have a lot of the rigor of the process, but they’re also passionate. You’re teaching them about the passion that their customers have. Everyone that they’re trying to sell to B2B, B2G, advanced B2C, whatever it might be, there’s a customer at the other side who has committed their career to whatever it might be, to building better houses, to creating better devices for people to sell, for creating technology that’s going to improve healthcare, whatever it might be, that is what their passion is about. Yeah, they’re interested in what is your technology going to do, but they’re really interested in, why do you care, and show me why you care. I appreciate your saying that. 

I’m just curious, you talk to a lot of students who you want to bring into your program. What might be some of the biggest misconceptions some of these students may have about a career in professional selling? One thing I just want to state is we’re all about effective professional selling. Sales isn’t about, what do I got to do to get you to buy this pen? It’s not about getting people to do something that they don’t want to do. It’s about helping them achieve their mission, etc. Talk a little bit about some of the things that some of the students may not understand that professional selling is all about. 

Sterling Bone: I’m glad that you emphasize professional. I think a lot of students enter the art program and enter programs across the country, and for that matter, the world, thinking about sales from an amateur perspective. They’ve seen individuals that have sold, maybe in stereotypical negative ways, that have maybe violated some of the most important laws and norms of integrity and honesty, etc. I don’t want to promulgate all those misconceptions, those negative stereotypes. We hear about them all the time. 

I think a lot of students see sales as a drudgery, a place of lots of rejection. But in reality, what they need to know and what they need to see is how selling is really the engine of the organization, especially when we talk about these professionals. A professional seller has a well-engineered system process. We call that mechanics. With that engine, it’s got all the pistons going. But we need to teach those young junior sellers to recognize that a professional has to be practicing and constantly adapting and evolving and learning. You can’t stay status quo in how you approach your selling. I love how you brought the perspective of the customer. The knowledge and the responsibility to put yourself in that customer’s world and to really be able to think critically on your feet, is so important. 

I think a lot of students see it as drudgery. They worry about the rejection. They see maybe sales as not being a career that they can have the values of integrity and high character. A lot of that is hung up in the amateur model. But when they recognize that, hey, wait, professionals do this for careers and do this by choice, and love this and are excited about this, and well compensated, well rewarded, and advance and grow in their career, then the students are all over it. They see true professionals and they’re all over it. We constantly have to overcome some of those negative stereotypes. I don’t want to promulgate them more here, but I think a lot of it is just helping them recognize that there’s amateur sports and there’s professional sports, and we want to train them professionally. 

Fred Diamond: The reality of companies is there’s no finance department, there’s no logistics, there’s no operations, there’s no legal if there’s no sales. I remember once I worked for a very large software company. I remember sitting in a room with me and two of my closest friends and the CEO and he said, “The last person out the door is our worst sales person.” He said, “That’s what keeps the engine going.” I’ve appreciated that my entire career. 

A big part of your program is working with employers. One of the great things about these university programs is you’re training professionals to go work at blue-chip brand name companies. What are the companies asking you for? What skills do they want to see in the students who they are hiring from the schools like yours through your program? 

Sterling Bone: It’s interesting, I get to, at the Huntsman School, work with amazing corporate partners. They’re the thought leaders that come in and provide a real-world perspective for our students. The longer I’ve been an academic and away from my own professional sales career, I really lean heavily on this type of conversation. I’ve asked directly, even just over the last few months, of our corporate partners, what are you seeing? What are some of the blind spots? What is the edge that we need to give our students? 

They repeatedly talk about the need for students to be able to think outside of just the role of selling, to be able to see themself as revenue leaders. Really understanding how the revenue engine and the revenue operations, and how that interacts and interfaces with all the disciplines or the functions or departments of a company. Being able to recognize that as a seller, you’re not the only part of the engine. You’re not the only important piston that’s needing to fire in its way. You need to think beyond just your vantage point, seeing it from a finance operations standpoint. 

One of the things that we’re doubling down on is putting our sales students in situations where they need to interact with individuals from different departments or different functions of the business, that they need to think about that. They need to be able to work in a team of revenue-minded leaders and to think critically about the entirety of what they’re doing. Not that they’re necessarily going to do that in their first job or their first role, but having that perspective that, hey, we’re all one team and we need to be able to work in tandem with one another and how can I support, and how can I be more supported through the other functions and departments of the organization. Really cross-disciplinary, breaking from some of those silos. 

I was born in the area of sales during the age where sales and marketing were at odds. I think that’s silly. In today’s world it’s like, how can one exist without the other? Even in terms of a branding standpoint, I’m really trying to have my sellers think about them as revenue leaders. I have to share this with you, Fred, because this summer I was in France. I lead a program in France, which is unique. 

My first experience going into the classroom and teaching students in France, and I teach my students from Utah State also in France as part of this exchange collaborative opportunity, it struck me. I wanted to make a big splash in my first lecture. The French, culturally, they’re a little bit more reserved and they’re skeptical, especially with an American coming into the classroom. I came in and I said, “There’s one thing I appreciate about French, and it’s that you have instilled in the business language so many important words. The most important word is revenue.” If you think about the word revenue, in French, when you say welcome to someone, you say bienvenue. It’s welcome, come back, return. 

Thinking about sales from a revenue perspective is how I sell, I want to build a returning customer opportunity. It really changed the discourse that I had with those students in that classroom in France. But it’s really shaped a lot of what we do here at Utah State University with our sales program, is we want our students to sell in a way that they’re such valuable resources and important partners of their customers world that they’re invited back into those conversations. 

Fred Diamond: That’s great. I never thought about the history of the word revenue. You just touched on Utah State. A lot of people listening probably are unaware of your school maybe, but you’ve built a respected program. I think you told me you were recognized as the Associate Member of the Year by the USCA. The USCA, for people who are listening, University Sales Center Alliance, is really about the elite programs, legitimate elite programs with leaders and corporate involvement and things like that. Tell us a little bit about Utah State. What makes your approach unique? What are some of the lessons that other universities maybe could learn from it? Your students also are unique as well. Give us a little perspective on that. 

Sterling Bone: Thank you. I appreciate the plug. Thank you for these great organizations like USCA that helped us grow and spawn. A lot of what we’ve learned is we’ve gleaned from other peer institutions across the state. But we recognized in our population base that we serve, and we have students that come from all over the country, but we are a school that has the mission and the vision to become the premier undergraduate institution in business and economics. Of course, I’m trying to do that in sales first. 

One of the things that we really pride ourselves here at the Huntsman School is that we are not just training great sellers, but we want them to also be great citizens and great humans. We have our pillars where we want to give a rigorous market-driven curriculum. That’s where our corporate partners come into play and help shaping the direction that we go. We have extraordinary networking opportunities. We’re in the Mountain West. We showcase when our partners and employee recruiters come in, and we showcase the mountains and the skiing and the fishing and all things Rocky Mountain-esque. But we really want to give our students that genuine opportunity to interact with our professionals in a unique and less formal way. I think that’s generationally very important to our students. 

We obviously have a competitive national presence. Being a part of USCA and out on the circuit, our students go to competitions and we do our own internal competitions. But I think what makes us unique is that we’ve really instilled and doubled down on our fourth pillar, and that is transformative social impact. We want our students to be in a mindset that they are preparing to give back to society. This is not just a give me, give me, take, take opportunity in sales. There’s going to be opportunities to serve, opportunities to volunteer, opportunities to mentor and bring and uplift the profession. 

We have some programs that are unique in that we go back into the high schools, some of the high schools that are underrepresented and maybe limited in some of the training and resources that are provided. We do this here in the state of Utah. We actually piloted this in Los Angeles with a group called the Brotherhood Crusade, which is an incredible not-for-profit organization that takes students of color and gives them opportunities to advance in their preparation to go to college, go into career. We take our students down as peer mentors. We take them in there, and you’re going to provide some workshops and training. You’re going to rub shoulders with these individuals that are remarkably unique and different and incredibly gifted. But then our students find that they walk away from that having had the reverse happen, that they’ve walked away with the training, the ability. 

We want our students to give back. We want them to be in that mindset of giving back before they leave. We’re not going to try to convince them otherwise down the road. They need to recognize that they’re part of a legacy of sellers across the globe that are professionals, and the best sellers are philanthropic. The best sellers know how to get back and mentor and lift another. That’s one of the things that we’ve really doubled down. We work with our corporate partners to do that, but really it’s led by our students, which I’m really excited about. 

Fred Diamond: That is great to hear. I’m reflecting back on a number of the Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged shows that I’ve done. That comes up sometimes, maybe not to the level where you guys are doing it. I remember my interview with David Brauer at West Virginia University. He had his students working on special projects for the Boy Scouts, for example. It goes back to something that has been a theme through this conversation, but also in the world that I live in of professional sales, and that you live in, is that it’s not about the transaction. 

If you’re a sales professional who’s only about the transaction, you could be successful, you could be hugely successful, but you’re going to hit a point where it’s just going to stop. A lot of the great sales professionals that I’ve worked with, and we’ve worked with tens of thousands of them at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, they are passionate about their customers’ business and their customers’ industry. 

For example, we’re doing an event. We’re doing this recording in August of 2026, but at the end of this month, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling is bringing five of our B2B corporate member partners to do a day of volunteering at the Capital Area Food Bank, which is the fulcrum for 700 different food-related services in Washington, DC. I reached out to about 15 partners. They all responded that, we want to send some people, and I can only cap it at 20, but the selling professionals who truly are exceptional are the ones that understand that it’s not just about selling my product to a customer, it’s about being involved. 

I’m in DC also. We work with a lot of people who’ve sold to the government for most of their careers and they’re committed to the warfighter. They’re committed to the veteran. They’re committed to service to the citizen. I love the way you couched that and it makes a lot of sense from where you came from as well. 

Think about some of the students that have gone on to have great success. Again, 15 years, congratulations. That’s pretty remarkable. Good for you. What are some of the characteristics? Give me two or three of the characteristics that you’ve seen in the selling professionals who’ve gone through your program who have had nice, successful careers. 

Sterling Bone: Really, we’re student-centric, student-focused, and that’s something that I’ve really found to be the fuel in my engine as a professor, is working with amazing students. Our students are unique, and I’ll talk about some of the output, but let me talk about the input. Our students are unique in that many of them have served missions for the LDS Church, not all. Again, we’re a public university and we welcome students of all faiths and races, ethnicities, all different backgrounds. But a high percentage of our students have had that time from high school to college where they’ve done something. 

Some students maybe will take a gap year or two, go off to the Peace Corps or do missions or other types of outreach. That’s a big part of our cultural makeup of our students. They really want to have those lived experiences. Then we build upon that as part of our program. But the mantra that I take personally is I don’t want to mess them up. These are good people. Thanks, mom and dad, and all grandmas and special aunties out there that have trained these good people of men and women of character. 

As they launch, what I’ve seen is one of those that are the top performers maybe year one, three, five, 10, 15 down the road. I think a characteristic is that you have to be extremely curious and continuous in your learning. Something we really preach a lot is you need to be constantly adding to your knowledge base, to your expertise. Professionals do this. If I’m a golfer, I’m going to study grass. I’m going to study all the different elements of my playing surface. Similarly in sales, you need to understand your grass. You need to understand all the different elements, and that changes, and climates and things change, and everything else. That curiosity and that continuous learning mindset. 

I think our students, the top performers that I’ve worked with here in our program that have gone to high levels, have been very adaptable. They’ve been adaptable to different economic wins and shifts to different situations where maybe they’ve had to change their channel or their vertical, their industry, what have you, being able to be flexible and adaptable during that, and being open to change, open to technological advances. Those are some of the characteristics of those top performers. I think a lot they bring innately to us in our program, and we just try to make sure that we don’t do damage to what’s already good and turn them loose to the world in a good positive way. 

Fred Diamond: Dr. Bone, if you had an opportunity to be on an elevator with a possible corporate sponsor, all the universities are looking for corporate sponsors for a whole bunch of different things, give me your 30-second pitch on why corporations should consider sponsoring the Utah State sales program. 

Sterling Bone: We love our corporate partners. Thank you for even considering. The model I think is changing and shifting. I started building a partner sponsorship program. What I found is those that have been highest engaged, most engaged, I should say, and that have had probably the biggest ROI to their investment in our program, have been ones that have been able to insert themselves into our team, their thought leaders. 

As a corporate partner, yes, we value your resources. There’s one thing that I found as I’ve interacted with my partners at other universities. There’s not a single one of us where we’re all lacking in resources of some way. If they’re telling you that they’ve got it all, they’re lying to you. Every university wants more faculty, better facilities, whatever it might be, but what I found is that corporate partners, you are really the close-the-gap where there’s resource constraints in higher education, bring your expertise, bring your time, your talent, your treasure. All of that is welcome, but don’t be afraid to raise your hand and say, “I’d like to offer some thought expertise or thought leadership in this area.” 

I know my classroom is wide open for our corporate partners. We open up all of our events to our corporate partners because we know that we don’t have the full body and knowledge base that is out there. We really need that and want that. Yes, it’s your money. It’s your time. Yes, you’re going to hire and recruit good talent and great talent, we hope, here from Utah State. But the more that you’re able to roll up the sleeves and share and mentor students that way, that’s the best recruiting pitch. It’s not necessarily the info session telling you all the great things about your company, but it’s role modeling and showing what that is in a training session. 

Offer up your services to universities in your area and say, “We’ve been tackling the AI integration within our company. I’d like to come share some of the lessons learned, some of the things that we’ve seen from top sellers,” and all those topics are frankly going to be well received in university sales programs because we don’t have all the knowledge base. If anybody professes to have that, I would like to take them up on that, but I see there’s a need for that growing involvement engagement with corporate partners with universities. 

Fred Diamond: I say this to companies all the time, a lot of companies reach out to me and say, “We’re looking to hire people, but we’re struggling,” for whatever the reasons might be. I say, “Go partner with the local university.” There aren’t a ton of them. There’s only about 70 or 80 that are in the USCA that have bona fide valid programs. I know the Sales Education Foundation said there might be a couple more, but 70 or 80 premier, they could always use corporate support. They could always use corporate help to help grow. It’s a great resource for you companies locally to find some great talent and to give an opportunity to communicate more about your company. 

Dr. Sterling Bone, thank you so much. Let’s wrap up here. Just give us a final brief thought, an action step or a thought that people should do right now to take their sales career to the next level. 

Sterling Bone: That’s a big, big question. I think a lot of it is trust your mechanics, trust your process, trust your systems, but find your soul and rediscover your soul of why you sell. I think it’s taking a minute and thinking, why is it that what we do changes lives? How do we really impact? What are the real benefits that we provide? Really ground yourself in that, what I call substance in the foundation of who you are as a seller. Then return to those lessons that you learned early on in your childhood that we sometimes forget, those virtues that were instilled upon us, and allow those to come forward. 

I talk about the service, the humility, the acting with courage, bringing that spirit back into what you do. Find your soul. Something I’m taking really seriously, I’m at my midlife crisis, if you will, as a career professional. I want to find my soul and I want to make sure that my students are able to leave our program, and professionals across the board are truly selling with a soul and bringing their soul forward. That would be my advice. Find your soul, find your why, and then double down on those virtues that you know that are truths that will transcend throughout your career and across any situation that you’re dealing with your customers and industries. 

Fred Diamond: Those are definitely essentials for success. I’m reminded, one of our good friends, Larry Levine, wrote a book called Selling from the Heart, which has got a lot of attention. I’m not sure if you’re aware of the book, but it talks about topics like that. A lot of the selling professionals that I’ve worked with, and we work with tons, from junior SDR-type roles, to AE, to senior VP of sales and CROs at some of the top companies in the world, they’re constantly searching that. They’re constantly trying to figure out, how do I bring more value? Because once they realize that it’s not about them, it’s about the customer, then things shift. But sometimes you fall back into thinking about yourself. It’s like, “If I don’t hit my quota, I can’t pay my rent this month,” or whatever it might be. Then it does come there and then you’re in a state of desperation, etc. Then your performance becomes scripted. 

Once again, Dr. Sterling Bone with Utah State, thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast Office Hours. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 874: Inside Utah State’s Approach to Building Professional Sellers with Dr. Sterling Bone first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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CARMEN’S TIP: “Be proactive. Don’t wait for the phone to ring, or the text to come in, or the email to come in. Be proactive. As an OEM partner manager, try and anticipate what your partners are seeing. Be proactive, communicate in a proactive manner, act in a proactive manner.”

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Fred Diamond: The Institute for Effective Professional Selling is launching our first ever Partner Revenue Academy on October 2nd. It’s a six-session program. It’s hybrid, it’s also virtual as well, all around the globe. It’s for partner account managers who are looking to become what we call partner revenue architects. We’re going to be talking to Carmen Sorice here about how critical that is for partner account managers to build that better relationship between OEMs and their partners to generate revenue. 

We’re doing today’s interview in September of 2026. Carmen Sorice, the world has changed over the last 18, 24 months for participants on the OEM, ISV side, distributors, channel participants, and obviously for customers as well. I brought you on the show. You’re a good friend of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. I basically ask you, give us your five tips for partner success. It’s interesting because you’ve been on both sides of the fence. You’ve been on the OEM/ISV side, and now you’re in the channel. Carmen, give us an introduction and let’s get started. I’m excited to hear your five tips for partner success. 

Carmen Sorice: I love the term partner revenue architects, because that is exactly what we need our partner managers to do. Real quick, I started my career as an engineer. I was on the technology side in Telcom. I moved into the channel side. For the last two decades, I’ve been managing, building, scaling large organizations on the vendor, the OEM side. I’ve worked for software companies, services companies, hardware and software infrastructure providers, managed service providers, cloud providers, and it’s always been on the vendor side. I’ve always been enabling my partners, getting my partners to do more. I’ve managed, over the last two decades, hundreds of partner account managers. 

You’re spot on when you say things are changing. It is about revenue. The word architect is important because the partner manager has to help design, build, and execute that revenue growth strategy. Now, I’m on the partner side. I’m an EVP with E78 Partners. My responsibility is to go out and win business with new logos. I have dozens of vendors we do business with on the network side, cybersecurity side, UCaaS side. Now I find myself being in these executive reviews where vendors, OEMs, ISVs are telling me all the great things they do. I’m trying to interpret, how do I make that make sense for my partner business? 

Fred Diamond: I’m excited to get your five tips. Just as a note, you also work closely with the woman who is going to be kicking off the Partner Revenue Academy, the great Rebecca Wetherly, who you worked with at AWS. We’re very excited to have her as part of the curriculum. Let’s get started. What’s number one? 

Carmen Sorice: I worked with Rebecca when I was with AWS. That was my cloud reference. I have a lot of respect for Rebecca. You have some really good leaders lined up. It’s going to be very exciting. 

What are my five tips? The first thing I’d say to a partner account manager is, know my business. By my, I mean, your partner’s business. The ticket for entry is that you know your business. You know your speeds, your feeds, your pricing, all of your strategy for your company, but know my business. Know my metrics, know my strategy, and at a personal level, when you’re working with a partner sales rep, sales leader, know their comp plan. How are they paid? I’m not saying everything should be driven solely by their comp plan, but it’s very important for you to know how your partner on the other side of the table is getting paid. How their company’s being measured. Are they private? Are they public? Are they trying to increase their valuation? Is recurring revenue worth more than just a one-time deal? Know all of that about your partner’s business. That’s number one, know my business. 

Fred Diamond: A couple of things. One is, obviously, we talk a lot on the Sales Game Changers Podcast about what direct sales needs to do to be successful. It’s know your customer, the end customer, what is their mission, where they want to be in two years, etc. We talk about that all the time. The reality is your customer doesn’t need you if you’re not going to help them get there. Same type of a thing with your partner. Where are they going? How are they going to get there? How is your solution going to help them continue to grow? 

Also, I like the point that you made about understanding how they get paid. We had John Carey, who’s the senior VP of global alliances at SAS. He’s been on the show a couple of times. We actually had him recently talking about AI and the partner channel. When I asked him for his final tip, he said exactly what you just said. He said, know how the person that you’re engaging with gets paid. Because at the end of the day, that really is the most important thing to them, especially in the business world, is how are they going to get paid to serve their customers, but also to serve their family and to help them achieve their goals and to grow. That’s a great one to get started with. What’s number two? 

Carmen Sorice: Number two is, enable me. Yes, I’d like you to know my business, but I assume you know your business. Once you know my business, enable me to leverage your company to go qualify and win opportunities. There are a lot of tools you can use to do that. Of course, I, the partner, expect you to know your business, how you operate, what your key products are, but help me out with a battle card. How do you compare to maybe a couple of your other competitors? Where are your sweet spots? What are some use cases you can provide? If you have an ideal customer profile or two, that helps a partner. 

I’m looking to be enabled as a partner to look for, qualify, and recognize opportunities that have your name written on it so that when I bring you into opportunities as a partner, I want a high win rate because I want your company to see me as a partner bringing opportunities that are qualified, that we win with, and that we’re not spinning a lot of wheels and cycles going down paths that don’t result in a win. Again, enable me, use those tools, those battle cards, the sweet spots, the use cases to make sure I’m enabled to qualify and win opportunities. 

Fred Diamond: That is a great point. Actually, we do a lot of coaching at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling of selling professionals and more and more partner account people, hence why we created this program. I was interfacing with a mid-level, maybe a little bit on the junior side, partner account manager and they were seeking me for some coaching. They were talking about a negotiation that they had with one of their partners. They talked about how they achieved what they wanted to achieve. I said, “That’s great. But you have to remember, if you’re going to stay in this business, you’re going to be working with this partner possibly for the next 10, 15 years.” 

One thing that you and I know with some of the great companies like AWS and the Oracles and the Microsofts, Cisco, they have relationships that have been going on for decades. Looking at a little win here ain’t going to help you. You need to figure out, I’m going to be with this person for the long term. It’s win, win, win. If you and the partner win, then the customer wins as well. I love that. What’s number three? 

Carmen Sorice: Number three is all about accelerate and scaling opportunity generation and progression. It’s one thing to say, let’s do a joint account plan. Many times, those joint account plans sit on a shelf. Be active, actively manage the pipeline with me as the partner. Understand the opportunities I’m bringing to you, or you’re bringing to me, that we’re working together. Let’s actively, weekly, bi-weekly, whatever the right cadence is, let’s get together, review the pipeline, and make sure we’re moving them forward, we’re accelerating. 

One thing, on this note, I talk about with my partner managers, don’t just come back and say, “Yeah, I had a good meeting with a partner. We have a joint account plan.” Do you have actions? Do you have owners? Do you have dates? Are there specific things that you and the partner are going to do that are going to generate these opportunities and progress forward? Because at the end of the day, it is all about revenue. It’s about revenue generation. Accelerate would be my next key thing that a partner manager needs to talk about. 

Fred Diamond: I’m glad you brought that up because one of the reasons we created the Partner Revenue Academy is we go deep into that. One of the main goals of the program is shifting your mindset from a relationship manager to an active seller, to an active sales manager. That’s a different mindset that you need to come with. But as we’re talking about here, and as I’ve talked with hundreds of sales leaders in the OEM/ISV side and in the channel, if you, Mr. Partner Account Manager or Ms. Partner Account Manager, aren’t making that shift to understanding what you need to do to become a sales manager, you’re going to be struggling. Not only are you going to be struggling, you’re going to be out of a job because you’re not bringing what the company that you work with and the partner needs. 

Once again, we’re doing this interview in September 2026, and the whole world has completely flipped. I was talking to a VP of sales the other day who said, “We’re almost in kindergarten with a lot of new things that we’re having to learn and understand.” Exactly what you’re talking about here is going to be playing out in the Partner Revenue Academy that’s going to be kicking off October 2nd. Carmen, number four. 

Carmen Sorice: Number four is, I need my partner account manager to be a champion for me inside their company. Be a champion, be an advocate. That includes simplifying the partner experience I have working with you. I don’t need to know all the complexities about your business because I work with dozens of vendors. Simplify it for me, be my advocate. This really becomes important when there’s a channel conflict. I’m a partner out there selling, maybe I run into a direct sales rep from my vendor’s company, my OEM’s company. In order to mitigate that channel conflict, I need an advocate inside the company to help me get to where the win is. Being a champion and advocate is number four. 

The priority of number four increases or decreases depending on where we are in the deal cycle. Sometimes it’s just a given, other times it’s very important. Does the partner manager know someone in finance, in product, in direct sales, who can help us get through this conflict we’re facing and get to the other side? Being a champion is my strong number four. 

Fred Diamond: One thing that we talk about a lot is if your company has adopted a channel strategy, and almost every company that we deal with has at this point, you need to understand how are you making your partners as successful as possible. We still see, unfortunately, Carmen, contentious relationships. That may happen sometimes when it gets really down to the nuts and bolts, surprising, yada, yada, but the reality is your partner is closer to the customer. There’s the reason why you’re engaged with them and there’s a reason why you need to give them the opportunity to be as successful as possible. 

One thing that we’re seeing a lot, which is one reason why we created the Partner Revenue Academy and are doing all these podcasts with channel leaders like you and partnership experts, is because there’s so much more dependence on the channel for being a success for a whole bunch of different reasons that we’ve gone to in previous shows. These are great, Carmen. Let’s round us up here with number five. 

Carmen Sorice: Number five is, it has to do with speed. You mentioned we’re here in 2026 and the world’s different. One of the ways it’s different is we all have to move faster. What I found is the only way a partner and their OEM, their ISV vendor partner are going to move fast is if you build trust. It’s so important that you build trust with each other, person to person, company to company. That involves open and transparent communications. Don’t be afraid to let me know there’s bad news. I didn’t get the lead reg. I didn’t get the discount I needed. I can’t get into that account because your direct team has it as a do-not-call account list for a national account type company. Be open with me. Tell me bad news if you have to and let’s talk about it and how we’re going to work through it. 

The other thing is we both need to do what we say we’re going to do. That is so simple in business. Do what you say you’re going to do. But how many times we leave a QBR and someone says, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you that battle card. I’ll do this. I’ll do that.” Then time goes by and nothing happens. Again, in order to move fast, we have to trust each other. Building that trust is the foundation. I left it till number five, but without it, nothing else happens. Nothing else happens fast. Sometimes not much happens at all if you don’t build that trust with one another. That would be my fifth and anchor factor. 

Fred Diamond: That’s really well said. As we’re talking here, we need to think about the word partner. It’s not enemy account manager. It’s partner account manager. At the end of the day, the reason why our companies, the OEMs and ISVs that we work with at the IEPS, have these partner relationships is because you need to build your business. You need to scale. You need to grow. Obviously, companies have been doing this for 40, 50 years, in a lot of cases, that we work with. But even if you’re new or if your company is growing, it’s the fastest way to scale at the end of the day. Think about that, listeners. What does partner mean? 

Partner means you both have something you want to achieve. You’re going to work together to achieve it. What we’re doing with the Partner Revenue Academy is putting some skills behind that and putting some regimen behind that, and putting some working with you, partner account managers, to help you become more effective so that your company can drive more revenue and achieve the goals that your company has set up to achieve. 

Carmen, great five tips. I love them. They’re all very, very beneficial and helpful. Give us one final action step. Give us something that you recommend either partner account managers or anyone listening do today to take their sales career to the next level. 

Carmen Sorice: You look at those five keys we just went through for partner account managers, and for any sellers really, the one word I would say is be proactive. Don’t wait for the phone to ring, or the text to come in, or the email to come in. Be proactive. As an OEM partner manager, try and anticipate what your partners are seeing. If there’s a news blurb out there about some acquisition by your competitor, assume they’re going to want to know what the heck is going on. Be proactive, communicate in a proactive manner, act in a proactive manner. 

If you think your partner is going to need a steeper discount because they’re in a very competitive situation, maybe do some homework with product before they even ask you, and say, “Hey, what is the floor? If they come and ask for three more points, five more points, is it possible? What would I have to do to get that?” This way gets back to speed. When the partner does engage, you have an answer for them because you’ve done that proactive work. That’s just one example of being proactive. That’s what I would say, Fred, and hopefully this helps you. I think it dovetails nicely into the curriculum you’ve put together and the speakers you’ve put together for your program. 

Fred Diamond: Absolutely does, be proactive. I love that. I recommend that to everybody. Sense the needs of the people that you’re supporting and serving and your customers and your partners and your leadership. The most successful people are the ones who definitely think that way and are proactive. 

Once again, I want to thank Carmen Sorice for his five tips. The Partner Revenue Academy begins on October 2nd. Hope to have you there. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 873: 5 Keys to Partner Account Management Success with Carmen Sorice first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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BINA’S TIP: “No matter where you are in your tenure, showing up every day with authenticity and the work ethic to do the best you can, and how do you uplift the organization. In those important boardroom meetings, in those important C-level meetings, internal or external, what brought me credibility is talking with a point of view backed by data and standing up for myself.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Gina Stracuzzi: Today we’re talking with Bina Shah. Bina was with Oracle for many years, and like many of us, she found herself on the sad goodbye end of a layoff, but she is not letting that stop her. I wanted to have her on this podcast because I think so many of us get sidelined when things happen. This is really about positivity and intentionality and what you can do when you are handed those lemons that we all get. Welcome, Bina. I can’t wait to talk to you about what you’re doing with your life and how you faced this layoff. 

Bina Shah: Thank you, Gina. Appreciate it. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Tell us a little bit about your history and your background and how you got to where you were in Oracle, and then we’ll go into what you’re doing now. 

Bina Shah: I’m an engineer by training, so computer science degree development. I entered Oracle in 2010, and across two stints with a one-year gap in Splunk, I spent 16 years at Oracle, both in pre-sales engineering, sales leadership, most recently having a very large STR organization, sales development organization, creating lots of friendships, partnerships, and it was a terrific journey at Oracle, and I’m thankful for all the experiences it gave me. 

Gina Stracuzzi: It sounds like you really liked it there, and that happens. What I really love about you is that there’s no hard feelings. 

Bina Shah: No, I’m very thankful for all the knowledge I gained, all the experiences I gained. I think big thing about Oracle is because it is so large, you can pivot into many different angles and gain those experiences. I had five different roles in my 10 years at Oracle, and it was the law of attraction where the people that were in leadership in different orgs said, “Hey, Bina, do you want to come try to do this?” That’s how I ended up in most of my roles, is in trying new things, and I like a challenge and trying things I haven’t done before. I’m thankful Oracle gave me the opportunity. 

Gina Stracuzzi: From what you and I were discussing before, you’ve led 100-plus person SDR organizations at both Oracle and Splunk, and you’re really into how AI is genuinely changing that go-to-market landscape. We’ll get into that in just a moment because even what you’ve learned there and where you’re taking it is going to be of interest to our listeners. 

Let’s just talk about how you reframed this career transition. Sometimes things are gifts, even though we might not know it at the moment, because they take us in a new direction and that can be really exciting. 

Bina Shah: Gina, I want to be honest with you, when I got that email at 6:00 AM, like many others, the first moment was panic. I am pretty sure my blood pressure, I don’t have blood pressure, but it went up high. I don’t want to make it sound easy, because it’s not. Once the news settled in and the reflection started, which I encourage everybody, reflection is a part of what I do in any activity, I went for a yoga session. I think that helped me clear my mind and it helped me reflect and I took it on as an opportunity, as a sabbatical that many people take that, hey, there’s a 30-day sabbatical, 60-day sabbatical. Mine was an involuntary sabbatical, but it gave me an opportunity to reset, and honestly, just to reframe. One thing to remember, if you’re going through this, this is happening at not just Oracle, in many, many other organizations, is nobody’s coming. The first move does need to be yours. It’s you who has to get started.

Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s talk a little bit about how you got started. Once you cleared your head and you realized no one’s going to be knocking on the door looking for you, what did you do next? 

Bina Shah: I am an organized human being. I like to stay busy. I like to stay challenged. From a learning perspective, I divided up my week, my day into learning AI. Just a quick topic on, AI is not going to take our jobs, but not knowing AI certainly will, so upskilling myself, and I’m a lifelong learner. I love learning. Education is something I just constantly do. 

One of the things was I had more time to dive into AI and I was already an AI champion when I was at Oracle and I led my team, Oracle women’s team, my peer group certified 350 leaders and individual contributors on the agentic AI talk track. But what I was able to do in the last few months is I’ve learned more than I did probably in the last two years, just because I had the most important thing, and that was time. 

The other piece of it, my goal was to make sure I make it the most memorable summer for my kids. I did work on that and we’ve been doing a lot of outdoor activities enjoying the summer. Then slowly and surely your biggest asset when the title goes away, I’m no more senior director of sales, I’m no more at Oracle, what remains are the human connections, the true connections and network that you’ve built, your friends, your family, your peer group. I slowly made a list and a few people at a time started having meaningful discussions, not to go do the same thing I was doing, but just talk through that, hey, here’s what my goal is, and how do I come up with a plan? 

What I want everybody to think, as you go through it, the plan that you thought day two of this happening versus I’m in day 90 or day 100 of my plan, it’s shifted and it’s evolved. Be open to that. Reach out to your network, spend time with your family, and make sure you upskill yourself. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I actually love everything about that, first and foremost, that you’re actually having a bona fide summer with your kids, because you don’t get those opportunities very often. I love that you’re using it to spend time with them in ways that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. But the upskilling, that’s really something, because you will land on your feet and you will figure out how to make this all work. Continuing to learn in the moment is only going to help things as you progress down your journey. 

Let’s talk a little bit about as a woman who’s held a senior sales leadership role, what does it actually take to earn credibility in enterprise sales? You hit on it a little bit because you had those relationships in place where you could reach back out and say, “This is what I’m thinking. What’s your thoughts on this?” which really, I applaud you so much, because not everyone can do that. How are you using that credibility? How did you build it and how did you build great teams with it? Because someone’s listening that might be able to give you a job. 

Bina Shah: Number one, I’m thankful for all the leaders that have been directly or indirectly my mentors and provided me the guidance, my mindset. I’m a servant leadership mindset when it comes to leadership. Answering your question, how did I do that, it wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t catered to me on a silver platter. I had to earn my spot. If you’re early career, if you’re mid-career, or if you’re senior career, I think no matter where you are in your tenure, showing up every day with authenticity and the work ethic to do the best you can, and how do you uplift the organization. It was yes, doing your day job is table stakes, but it was, hey, what can I do to help my peer group? What can I do? That was just organically as a servant leadership, I love just doing that. 

It came naturally to me and it was showing up every day and then I wasn’t afraid to ask for help. I wasn’t afraid to get help. But in those important boardroom meetings, in those important C-level meetings, internal or external, what brought me credibility is talking with a point of view backed by data and standing up for myself. No one else would do that. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Using your voice, it’s imperative, and standing your ground, also critically important. There’s two words you used there, work ethic, that you don’t hear a great deal about anymore. Part of it is sometimes it’s just sorely missing and it’s an old-fashioned language in some respects that people don’t use as often, and I think it’s something that is so vital to doing well and to being a servant leader. You can’t be a servant leader if you don’t have a strong work ethic. I really appreciate you using that vernacular. 

Let’s bring it full circle now and talk a little bit about where you’re going and what you’re doing, because it might give other people ideas if they’re in the same boat. 

Bina Shah: I think because the world is changing so much, most of us, if you’re restarting, you’re not going to rebuild what you had created or what you left behind. You’re going to be doing something new and it’s going to involve fear. For me, what I’m working on are three things. One is the constant upskilling, which I think even when I go back, I have to carve out time otherwise just to stay relevant. It’s table stakes to upskill. 

The second is I am looking for my next full-time role where I can continue to serve, apply, build trust with customers, teams, and wherever that may take me, and an opportunity to just show my level of initiative. But what I’m very also excited about is I am grateful and had an opportunity to be the co-founder of an organization that’s going to bring better health to people. It’s a performance healthcare startup where we’re bringing five clinicians where it’s metabolic health, sleep, nutrition, ET, stress, and anxiety, all of it to our members where you get it, and it’s preventive health, so it’s for people that are feeling good. It’s called Outliveme. I’m excited, we’re looking to launch in the very near future, it’s outliveme.com. 

I’m excited because I think it continues to serve the greater purpose of giving back, and I also get to use a lot of the sales, the engineering, developing the platform, working on technology, marketing, sales, operation. I’m actually living and breathing in the startup world. Since I’ve done that, and on my four-month sabbatical, I’ve had a lot of friends reach out to me to help them with their sales. I’m just supporting them in helping them get started with their companies and sales. This sabbatical has been great for me, the journey has been amazing, summer has been beautiful in Boston, but that’s what I’m working on right now. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s very exciting. As somebody who actually is a functional health coach in my spare time, I really applaud that, because I think as a culture, we tend to look at health care as reactive. Rather than trying to prevent things and the effects of stress, all of that takes such a toll on the body, and certainly, these are stressful times. I can’t wait to check that out. outliveme.com, that’s so interesting. Well, you might find yourself doing a whole bunch of things. 

We get caught up in the title and the companies and the bennies and all that kind of stuff, which are important and have tremendous value. If you’re someone who doesn’t necessarily need those benefits, maybe because your spouse or partner has them or whatever, and you can do what you’re doing, which is a whole bunch of really exciting things, I think that’s pretty amazing. 

Let’s talk a little bit about what’s one belief about sales leadership that you held early in your career. The reason I’m switching back over to this is a lot of the people that listen to this podcast are card-carrying salespeople, and sales leaders too. We love to hear about different philosophies or beliefs that have guided you throughout your career. 

Bina Shah: I started as a sales leader in 2013, in my first stint as a leader. I didn’t always do this, but it was definitely learned through experiences and successes and failures. My philosophy is, yes the numbers will come, and I think as a first-time leader, my goal was numbers, which the numbers are always important, we’re in sales, table stakes. But as I’ve evolved in my leadership journey, it’s leading with empathy, making it where the team is looking forward to working due to respect not fear, and then applying whether it’s the empower coaching model or the grow coaching model is helping them get to their goals and empowering them, and whether they need a player, they need a coach, or they need you to model. As hands on or as hands off as they need, I think meeting them where they need me versus going by my principles and my models, that’s what I would say, but I think at the center of it, my goal is empathy, earning their trust, and joining them where they are in their journey. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I think fear is something that has left the building, so to speak, for the most part with really good leaders. We do still see them, and we talked about it in the forum just a couple of weeks ago. One woman had a boss that just yells and screams, and she said, “It’s really hard to stay positive in that environment.” She was sharing some of the things that she does. I think as a leader, if you use those as guiding principles, you’re going to get what you need out of those people, because they feel like they’re part of something rather than just a number. 

Let’s just talk about the biggest lesson you’ve learned as you transitioned into this next part of your life. What have you learned about Bina? 

Bina Shah: I think the art of the possible. Art of the possible is don’t limit yourself, whether it’s achieving a different health goal, personal goal, professional goal. If I had confined myself that, “Hey, I’m a leader in sales,” I can build apps now with leveraging AI, and I do have a development background, so I’m not using that. I can run marathons that I never used to. I can still do the leadership roles, but I am being head of sales and guiding teams that I didn’t realize I even have the potential. Even today, yesterday I think, I still go through some of that imposter sometimes. I did not know I could do this and this opportunity has really opened up my nervous system to being open to everything that comes my way. I didn’t think I could cofound a health organization. That was not on the agenda by any means. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s exciting. As somebody whose marathon days are behind her, I love that for you. It is such a sense of accomplishment and it really shows you how strong you are and what you’re capable of. There’s nothing as humbling as running a marathon and finishing it. It is something, for sure. 

As we like to do, we like to leave our listeners with one final piece of advice, something they could put into place today to take their careers to the next level, or help their selling out. What do you have for us, Bina? 

Bina Shah: I think it goes back to what I was saying, no one’s coming, and so what’s one thing you’ve been holding off on, whether it’s AI, whether it’s reaching out to your network, whether it’s posting on LinkedIn. By the way, I highly encourage folks to post on LinkedIn, make yourself visible, build a brand, but what’s one thing you’ve been waiting for permission? Treat this as permission. Start on it today. For one minute, ten minutes, one hour, make it easy, make it frictionless, but just start today. I think that level of initiative you start, continue on it, because it is about your level of initiative for yourself. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s not only great advice, but rather profound as well. Bina Shah, I know we haven’t seen the last of you in the lovely PubSec world, or maybe you’ll go out on commercial, but whatever you do, I know you’re going to be tremendously successful. When you get there, come back and see us or come back and talk to us about how the health company is taking off. We really appreciate your time, your honesty, and your vulnerability. Thank you so very much. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 872: Bina Shah on What Remains When the Title Goes Away first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

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

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

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

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

The Institute for Effective Professional Selling has launched the Partner Revenue Academy for partner account managers who are looking to become more effective active sellers. The next 6-session cohort launches on October 16.

Learn more here.

Today’s special two-part show featured an interview with John Carey, Senior Vice President of Global Channels at SAS, and Tom Snyder, Co-Founder of Funnel Clarity.

Explore the IDC report mentioned in this episode.

Find John on LinkedIn. Find Tom on LinkedIn.

JOHN’S TIP: “Understand the customer first, because if you can’t understand the pain of the customer, how do you identify whether you can be of any assistance? If we’re not driving value, we can’t be in the conversation.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: The reason why we’re doing part two is we were talking about a report that was funded by SAS that was done by IDC, research by IDC, talking about the disconnect between AI integration, AI use, and actual implementation in using it to truly drive measurable reports. If you go back to part one of this podcast, John Carey talks a lot about why SAS funded this report, the problems that we see with small and medium-sized businesses, SMBs, and even some large companies, John, that we referred to, that are still struggling with, let’s do AI, and then doing AI. 

Today we’re going to be talking about how companies, particularly sales organizations and their partners, will move from experimentation, from maybe dipping their toe, to getting to true measurable results. Not to go deep into what we just talked about, but John, just give us a one-minute overview. Why did you bring this report together? Why did you fund this report? Then we’re going to get real specific into what companies, particularly partners, can be doing, and the OEMs and ISVs that work with their partners, to get AI implemented the right way to truly see measurable sales results. 

John Carey: It’s really simple. AI is a huge promise, but it’s a promise that has to be realized. We felt that by working with IDC research, and specifically focusing on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, we wanted to understand, what are the things getting in the way of executing on the opportunity of AI. We know there’s a lot of AI usage out there. We know there’s a lot of excitement, but how is that showing up in actually delivering customer outcomes? This report is all about understanding what’s getting in the way and identifying key areas to be able to actually successfully execute and scale AI to meet your business objectives. 

Fred Diamond: In our first conversation, we established that companies don’t really have an AI adoption problem. Tom, on part one of this show, you talked about people are using it, they’re bringing in tools, that it’s not about the tools, it’s about the process and the management and the implementation properly. But there’s an execution problem. John, then Tom, let’s get started on fixing this problem. John, how do we fix this problem? 

John Carey: The AI readiness report identifies four areas that matter most, planning, building, enabling, and executing. To begin fixing the execution problem, companies need to narrow the focus to one meaningful business problem. Make sure the right data is available, define what success actually looks like, and then prove that value before scaling. 

Fred Diamond: Tom, we talked about this on part one. You’ve worked with thousands of selling organizations around the globe. I’m talking to Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity. Funnel Clarity is an exclusive participant member of the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace. It’s a hand-selected group of a very small number of sales performance improvement vendors that we work with, at the IEPS, that we bring to the B2B and B2G sales organizations that we work with. Tom, talk about some of that gap that John was referring to. 

Tom Snyder: I love those four things. Think about the four things that John just mentioned in the context of what most people are doing. What most people are doing is they have more or less the wild, wild west of AI implementation. There often is a complete lack of control or planning or thoughtfulness, and the sellers are racing out and doing all kinds of things. They’re having an AI engine write their emails, they’re prospecting ideas, just all of these things that AI can do poorly or do well. It all depends on planning, building, the kinds of things John talks about. 

Ask yourself a question, if you’re a member of a senior leadership team in a small to mid-sized business, do you have a plan? Do you have a plan that says, this is the process by which we are going to implement AI? Do you know that one problem that you’re solving? Have you built AI to be that capable? What we see all the time now is that, for example, let’s use the AI application that the vendor of our CRM says, this will make magic happen. Well, isn’t that interesting? 

First of all, if you’re going to use it as part of your sales function, are you certain that your sales process aligns with best practice? I work in the industry that presents that to people and trains people on it. I will tell you that the vast majority of the providers in our industry have a model, whether it’s MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, BANT, ANUM, SPIN, Counselor Sales, there’s a thousand models. The model is okay, but are we really enabling people to use it? Are we really giving them the understanding of how, and I love the word John uses, execution. Are we really executing against that best practice? Or are we putting people in training, they walk out, and they forget it. 

If you are doing this correctly, the first thing is to plan around what are the best sales practices in our industry to do the best value creation job for our customer base? Number two, have we built that? Is that a capability that is built into the very fabric of our organization? Is it an inseparable part of our strategy? Or have we bolted on and expected great things to happen? If you are going to begin one of these processes, please understand, no matter what you have invested in in terms of your sales performance model, ask yourself, am I certain that this is a best practice? Is it research-based? Is there a plan to move people from training to adoption? Do they really know how to execute against the things they’ve been taught? 

AI can make all that magic happen, or it can lead you down the path of destruction, because it creates huge efficiencies. If those efficiencies are associated with doing the wrong thing, you’re going to find out that AI is going to make your sales process worse. 

Fred Diamond: John, I want to get a little deeper into that, on what you direct your people to do. I remember we had a conversation, you told me that SAS channel managers start by asking the senior executive, what’s the toughest challenge you have right now? What’s the question you can never get answered? Why should the AI conversations start there rather than with technology? For people listening, you have high quotas on technology you need to sell. Give us some perspective on that. 

John Carey: This isn’t rocket science. Starting with the business challenge helps organizations focus on what resources they need, how they can prioritize a use case, and what the definition of success and the associated success metrics are much earlier. It’s the Simon Sinek’s, Start with Why. Don’t tell me what you do. Tell me why you do it. 

I loved how Tom rattled through all the different types of sales methodologies. They all ultimately say, understand the customer first, because if you can’t understand the pain of the customer, how do you identify whether you can be of any assistance? If we’re not driving value, we can’t be in the conversation. That’s our approach. We actually have several sales plays available for our partners and they all begin with spending time identifying the business problem. That’s where the value for the customer is. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit more about that. With all the possibility that AI presents, that we’ve talked about many times on the Sales Game Changers podcast, how does SAS help a customer identify the one problem most worth solving? 

John Carey: You’ve got the ability to solve so many things with these data and AI platforms. In our experience and the research from the study shows, the best place to start is with a business challenge that has very clear value and measurable outcomes. Now, customers can then prioritize use cases where they have leadership support, accessible data, and a realistic path to measuring impact, all of which are tied together to get you to that milestone of qualifying value delivered, which allows a customer to feel that you’ve actually delivered on the promise of being a trusted partner. 

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you both about what is expected of partners now in bringing value. But before we get to that, I just want to ask you a quick question, John. In looking at the IDC report, it identified data as a major obstacle. SAS is one of the top data companies in the history of technology. What does SAS mean when it tells customers and partners that their data needs to be AI ready? 

John Carey: Great question. AI ready data means that the data is accessible, reliable, and trusted. When data is fragmented, AI is going to struggle to deliver consistent insights, and that’s going to undermine the overall value and trust in the system that you’re building. Getting it there, accessible, reliable, and trusted means you’ve got the right ingredients to deliver that. 

Fred Diamond: Tom, during our prep call with John, John made the interesting point that SAS doesn’t necessarily need every partner to, let’s just say, arrive as an AI expert, that you want them to bring industry expertise. Tom, give us some of your insights, and then, John, I want your angle to this as well. What should partners be? Should they be technology experts? Should they be AI experts? We’re doing today’s interview at the end of August of 2026. Tom, what do partners need to be now to be successful? 

Tom Snyder: In part one, I mentioned the result of a large research project we did around creation of value as part of a sales function, not relying on what the customer is going to buy from, but creating value before they buy anything. Oftentimes, when a seller is trying to get to the bottom of what troubles a particular potential client, what they often describe are symptoms. They often don’t even know what the actual root problem is. 

Now, sellers generally have the capacity, if they’re trained to do it, to help provide that insight by understanding those symptoms as rooted in a particular problem. When you go to the doctor, you don’t tell them what disease you’re suffering from, you tell them the symptoms. We pay the doctor to figure out what the disease is. We can’t just simply chase symptoms. That research project revealed there are three major things that drive value in the interaction between buyer and seller when the seller is capable of doing it. 

One, you help the buyer understand a problem they don’t see, or the magnitude of a problem they don’t realize. Number two, you help the buyer discover a solution they may not have anticipated. Or three, you broker in the full capability of your company, even if it’s independent or unrelated to what they are going to buy from you. 

When you do that, magic happens. Price becomes less of an issue. You become a trusted advisor. You become a decision coach. You are not just reliant on your technology. Unfortunately, AI has compounded that requirement. Because if you use AI correctly, it can help you analyze in a way that no human being ever could in terms of those three things that drive value. 

If you let it just write your emails and do a little research without guardrails, as John said, you can be wandering far afield as to where there is value to be created. If your sellers have the capacity to see themselves and can execute on being a decision coach, as opposed to a product expert, they will make magic happen. AI can help do that. But it won’t do that without the foundation of best practice. 

Fred Diamond: John, you said you have 1,300 partners that you work with, the entire spectrum, from global ISVs, GSIs, etc. Here you are leading this mass organization. You’ve worked with tens of thousands, I guess, technology partners by this point in your career, not to age you or anything. But here we are in August 2026, you commissioned this report by IDC to prove something. What do you want out of partners right now? You see some that are doing great. You see some that are struggling. Give us your inside baseball on what you want. 

John Carey: I love the way Tom just answered that question, because for me, context creates value. We want partners with industry expertise. That helps organizations find the AI opportunities that truly move that industry-specific business forward. A partner who understands industry challenges, they’re much better positioned to connect AI opportunities to measure outcomes. 

If you’re a SAS partner, we want you to become trusted advisors that help your customers assess their AI readiness. Focus on what you do well and where your skills are. Customers need guidance on how to move their business forward. That just hasn’t changed. That’s been the sweet spot for the partner ecosystem since I started all those many years ago. What we want to do, we want our partners to use that proximity to the customer, that industry expertise to help their customers close their readiness gap by turning AI investments into actual meaningful business results. 

Fred Diamond: John, if I’m a SAS partner with that industry expertise, but limited AI expertise, that’s something that the IDC report very clearly spelled out, what does SAS want me to become over the next year? Specifically, how will SAS help me get there? 

John Carey: It’s real simple. We can give you the tools to become expertise in the architecture and deployment of AI. What you need is to know how to ask the right questions to get the customer to identify the value that is the most compelling for them. That’s going to differ by industry. There really is this panic around, it’s an easy button. It’s a singularity. It’s going to make everyone unemployed. 

I’ll go back to an analogy we used in the first recording. We’re looking to build centaurs. We’re looking to put a human head and body on a really efficient horse’s machine. The best of both. What do we want to avoid? Horses’ heads on human bodies. We refer to it as human-in-the-loop decision-making. You do not want to give over to AI. AI is an augmenting technology. It is not a replacement technology. Some of the things we see go very wrong right now are organizations who push it as a replacement technology, as something that doesn’t increase the value of the humans in the organization, but somehow allows you to replace that balance. 

When I think about what do I need from partners? I need them to understand it’s human value first. It’s human-in-the-loop decision-making. It’s doing the basics, understand the industry, understand the client, understand what value means to them, and help them navigate getting to that proof point. Because once they’re at the proof point, now we can have a conversation about scale. When you’re at scale, now you’re in the co-pilot seat with them. I love the decision coach phrase that Tom used, you as the partner are the decision coach. Once you’ve earned your right to that seat by helping them realize the low-hanging value that is measurable and demonstrable and creates the case for scale. 

Fred Diamond: Tom, with this great conversation here, the one title we haven’t really spoken about on part two is the partner account manager. The partner account manager needs to shift. The Institute for Effective Professional Selling is launching our Partner Revenue Academy on October 2nd. You are a faculty member for that. We’re very fortunate to have you as a faculty member for that. I’m just curious on your thoughts, how does the role of the partner account manager need to change? Do they increasingly need to become more active sellers per se who help partners identify opportunities, develop use cases, drive the measurable customer outcomes by using AI more effectively in this process as well? Tom, where do partner account managers at companies like SAS and other OEMs and ISVs need to go? John, I’m curious on your thoughts on how you’re directing your people to help the partners become more valuable. 

Tom Snyder: Big question. Let me see if I can do this in short order. First of all, one of the great mysteries in sales for a very long time has been what is best practice as a channel manager? If you think about it, if you’re doing that job correctly, you are enhancing the performance of your partners. You’re doing that by giving them the same kind of value you want them to give their customers. You’ve got to be coaching them out of, my technology is so spectacular you really need some, to, here are some issues that we can help you solve that are limiting your ability to grow as an organization. They don’t have to be AI experts. By the way, the world seems to be lorded with self-proclaimed AI experts, but it’s hard to find the real megillah. 

But anyway, the idea is if you are employing the idea, the mindset of my job is to be a coach and a resource for our partners, not somebody who simply asks where you’re going to drive the business. It’s not about that. It’s the same trusted advisor. If you are a channel manager, and by channel manager, I know that when I interact with you, I’m better. I’m better at what? I’m better at helping my customers. I’m better at helping my customers make more revenue, hit the margin, grow, beat the competition. That’s what I should be doing. Not worrying about directly like, have you sold anything? When’s it going to close? It’s not about that, just like being a sales manager is. You are literally a higher order sales manager and they don’t work for you. You have to win the day by creating value for them. 

Now, one last comment. When done correctly, AI massively accelerates that capability, because you can now coalesce enormous quantities of information and data that no human being ever could have before. As long as you know how to employ that with the idea of, I want to make our partners more successful, not just demand more sales of them. I think that’s the magic. That’s what we’re going to be talking about in the academy. That’s what I think most people will find tremendously exciting. 

Fred Diamond: John, you got this report generated by IDC talking about where the gap is between what SMBs are doing with AI and where they should be. I just want to follow on to what Tom said. How are you directing a critical part of this puzzle, the partner account managers at SAS? How are you directing them? Then to wrap up, I’m going to ask you, if you had a minute to spend with a CEO of one of your SMB partners, what would you tell them? First question, you lead partner account managers. Critical role in this equation here. What are you telling them? How are you leading them? 

John Carey: I agree 100% with Tom. I think they are strategy coaches to begin with. They are effectively communicating your intent as a vendor so that a partner can proactively choose to go on that journey with you, or choose not to, and both are viable decisions. I say this all the time, I’m not here to convince anyone to go on this journey. We’re here to point out the direction on what can be achieved and invite them into that journey with us. 

If we’re trying to push a partner in a direction, it’s the wrong partner. It’s the wrong fit, and this can happen. You’ve got to do it every year. You come in and you go, “Hey, my strategy is now here. Your strategy is there. Are we still aligned? If we’re not aligned, let’s find a great way to part company,” just like we would find a great way to come together. 

I think then once you’re in the organization, you’ve got to be the sales coach. You have to do that by leading from the front. I can tell you, I have a technology vendor, who is a strategic partner of ours, and there is an individual who spends more time on our campus than some of our employees. When I first came in, people were like, “Hey, man, what about that guy?” My response was, “I’d like you to be more like them.” That individual is so embedded in our success, it’s like they’re an employee. Understands our values, our objectives, reads our annual reports incredibly well. Understands what we want to do and how we can get there, and every engagement, that individual brings value to it. That’s the model. What can I do to bring value to this relationship today? Because when we show that, we’re showing those partner sales managers how they have to emulate that to their people, and then that’s how their people will interact with their customers. The culture has to be top down. How can I bring you value? As long as we’re doing that, we’re the vendor. If we’re not bringing value, why should you partner with us? 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank John Carey, the senior VP global channels with SAS, for making us aware of this IDC report. The links are all over the show notes for both shows of our two-part series here. Tom Snyder, thank you so much, with Funnel Clarity, for providing some color throughout today’s interview, and also part one as well. 

John, I’m just curious, just to wrap up the show, if you had the opportunity to talk to the CEO of one of your most important SAS partners based on everything we’ve been talking about, what are two things that you would tell them to help them be more successful? 

John Carey: The first thing I’d tell them is we’re in this together. What can we do to be successful? I would like to focus with them on outcomes, use cases, available data, and simple measures, so that we can be a trusted guide for our client’s AI journey. That’s it. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity, John Carey with SAS Institute. Thank you both very much for being on this two-part special episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 871: SAS Alliance Leader John Carey on How Partners Can Turn AI into Measurable Customer Value, Part Two first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.

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

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

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

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

The Institute for Effective Professional Selling has launched the Partner Revenue Academy for partner account managers who are looking to become more effective active sellers. The next 6-session cohort launches on October 16.

Learn more here.

Today’s special two-part show featured an interview with John Carey, Senior Vice President of Global Channels at SAS, and Tom Snyder, Co-Founder of Funnel Clarity.

Explore the IDC report mentioned in this episode.

Find John on LinkedIn. Find Tom on LinkedIn.

JOHN’S TIP: “Skills are one of the biggest differentiators between AI experimentation and AI execution. If we’re going to move AI into the business, we’re going to need people who can connect AI initiatives to business goals. They’re going to be able to prepare data, manage change, and measure outcomes.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Tom Snyder, we’re doing two shows here, a part one and a part two. We’re going to be talking in a second with our good friend John Carey from SAS about a really interesting report that SAS funded that was done with research from IDC. I’m talking to Tom Snyder here, Funnel Clarity. You’ve been on the Sales Game Changers Podcast numerous times. You’re a member of an exclusive group that we call the Selling Essentials Marketplace from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. I know that you’re working with a lot of companies on how to implement AI in the sales process. We’re going to be talking with John in a second here about some of the research that they’ve done. 

This is going to be a two-part show. Part one, we’re going to be talking about the discoveries that John and his team found. Then in part two, we’re going to be talking about solutions, what companies can be doing to implement and better utilize AI to improve their sales processes. Tom, before I bring on John, how are you doing and what are some of your thoughts about these two shows that we have teed up here? 

Tom Snyder: First of all, I found the report information that John and his team put together absolutely seminal. I think it’s probably the most interesting such research I’ve seen in a number of years, and it comes at a very timely moment. The tectonic level changes being forced into many industries by the AI capability have in some ways been great and in some ways been a problem. As John goes into talking about what those data say, I think people will be fabulously shocked in a very positive way, because it’s a great, great, the best I’ve seen of uncovering what is required in today’s professional selling. 

Fred Diamond: John Carey with SAS, it’s great to see you again. You were on a previous Sales Game Changers Podcast episode and you gave probably one of the best final bits of advice that we’ve ever had. I’ve repeated this many times, I ask you for your thoughts on what selling professionals should do to take their sales career to the next level. I’m sure you remember you say, understand who you’re talking to, who you’re selling to, who you’re partnered with, how they get paid. That was such a brilliant gem that I’ve used many, many times. It’s actually helped me understand, as I’ve worked with selling professionals around the globe, on how they can be more effective. 

Your team reached out about this report that SAS funded by IDC. I really want to get deep into this. I want to remind people that we’re doing today’s recording at the end of August of 2026, if you’re listening sometime in the future. John Carey, it’s great to see you again. Give us a real brief intro so people know who you are. Give us the intro and then let’s get right into it. Everyone’s talking, of course, about AI adoption. SAS funded a special report by IDC. What did the IDC research tell you? What about that surprised you the most? 

John Carey: Fred, first of all, it’s great to be here again. I’m so glad that that comment landed. It was actually given to me by my mentor, Steve Garside. I use it daily as well. Tom, great to have you with us. 

Now, when we talk about AI, gosh, everyone’s having the conversation. There are as many opinions as there are blades of grass. What was really interesting in our work with IDC and the results of their research was to find out that when we think of small and mid-sized businesses, less than 10% had really fully embedded AI into both their strategy, operations, and decision making. 

The second thing, we are definitely at a time when AI is no longer a distant concept. We are seeing cycles accelerating. Our partners are dealing with their customers needing a result in a shorter cycle than ever before. To do that, organizations are going to have to move past the early stages of AI maturity in order to scale and see a real impact in their businesses. I think the net that really struck me was that SMBs don’t have an adoption problem. What they’re actually experiencing is an execution problem. They definitely need help from partners and help from vendors to navigate an effective way to execute. 

Fred Diamond: You’ve observed that there’s a readiness reality gap. What exactly is that? Why should business and sales leaders care about that? 

John Carey: Great turn of phrase. The readiness reality gap. It’s basically where AI ambitions outpace the ability to execute. We know that the organizations we deal with are seeing AI’s potential, but they’re really struggling to turn that into a repeatable business outcome. Why should business and sales leaders care about it? Well, because it shows that they do not need another big idea about AI. What they really need is a plan to deploy AI at scale and deploy it in a way that has value to their business. Even though many SMBs have moved past awareness, maturity has to be the goal. 

Fred Diamond: Tom, you’re doing a lot of work with one of our other Selling Essentials Marketplace partners, Zeev Wexler and his team. What are some of your thoughts right now? 

Tom Snyder: Boy, did you say it right, John. McKinsey put out a study about four months ago of AI adoption across a breadth of industries and discovered, to everyone’s horror, that 87% of those corporations who implemented a corporate-wide AI initiative discontinued it because it was making things worse. Not because there’s anything wrong with the LLMs, not because there’s anything wrong with the technology itself, but it directly related to what John said. You just have to have a plan of adoption that allows those people to execute according to what is best practice. 

The problem is AI is an extraordinarily efficient operator of whatever you are training it to do. If your internal processes are not aligned with best practice, you create a world where you are highly efficient at doing the wrong thing. That efficiency creates less performance. You have to have a plan to lay out, are we actually employing best practice? Do we know what that is prior to just launching a tool? It’s not about AI-enabled tools. It’s about getting the right process. 

Fred Diamond: John, I didn’t really give you the right opportunity to introduce yourself. For people who haven’t gone back to your previous show, just give us a brief introduction. I’m curious, how many partners do you work with? 

John Carey: I’m the SVP of global channels here at SAS, I joined four years ago. We have about 1,300 partners globally, and that has grown during my tenure. We have partners from strategic technology partners, Microsoft, AWS, Google, Intel, Red Hat. We have our GSIs working with us with our Fortune 100 accounts, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Accenture, KPMG. Then we have a broad pool of regional solution providers and service providers who are focused on helping our clients realize the value of their SAS investments and tackle their most difficult problems and answer their most empowering and profitable questions. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the sales side of those partnerships specifically, which a lot of the information from the IDC report came out. Where are sales organizations? What have you seen with your vast array of partners? Where are they getting stuck between experimenting with AI and actually generating measurable business value? 

John Carey: I think this is fairly common and it crosses customers as well as partners and vendors. Sales organizations are adopting AI, but they’re not operationalizing it. What does that mean? Organizations are running pilots, they’re testing tools, they’re experimenting with use cases, but they’re not necessarily building the foundations needed to scale those efforts for the entire business. It’s being used in pockets rather than as part of a coordinated strategy tied to specific documented goals and outcomes that align with what businesses need to succeed. Many organizations, to be honest, lack very clear success metrics, making it difficult to prove value and actually scale what does work. 

Fred Diamond: Tom, you’re working with a lot of sales organizations around the globe. We’re doing today’s interview in late August of 2026, why is there still the disconnect between seeing true measurable business value? 

Tom Snyder: I hate to sound heretical here, but it seems in our experience with our clients, boards of directors are racing around quick, go get some AI. What people don’t seem to understand is AI, when done correctly, is actually an entity, it’s not a tool. Think of it as you need to hire someone. This someone doesn’t get a salary, doesn’t go to bed, works 24 hours a day, but it needs to be trained. Therefore, that training is not happening when you just go out and buy quick, let’s go get the AI application in XYZ tool. Now you have a plethora of tools operating independently using an LLM without any structure. It’s not about the tools. It’s about if you’re a salesperson, you can have a never-sleeping, always-on, always-learning research assistant, never-sleeping, always-on strategy guide, sales coach, all these things. 

But if you don’t have those things structured and you’re just getting tool after tool after tool, you have great risk of moving backwards, and a bigger risk of not optimizing what AI can do. I often liken it to saying, “Okay, let’s let our four-year-old drive the car.” Not a good idea, you know what I mean? 

Fred Diamond: John, one of the things that came out of the report as well is the whole concept of fragmented data as being one of the biggest barriers. Of course, we’re talking to the VP of channels at SAS, one of the leading data companies in the history of technology. Why does an AI strategy often become a data strategy so quickly? That’s probably one of the reasons why a lot of companies aren’t really in a position to best utilize the AI process to be successful, to get these results that we’re talking about. 

John Carey: Look, we’ve been around long enough to know that it’s always about the data. AI is only as good as the data behind it. If you have fragmented data, you’re going to limit the ability to get the most out of the AI that you deploy. When information is spread across disconnected systems, your AI solutions are going to struggle to deliver consistent insight. This is why you want to use a partner who can take that step back and say, “On your journey, what is the best first step?” That means that even though we may have to slow down initially, we’ll actually get you to your outcome much faster than if we try and go too fast right now. To respond to Tom, how do we not put the four-year-old in front of the vehicle? How do we put them in the right seat in the back so they can see who’s driving that vehicle on a very straight road so that when we do want to teach that teenager to drive a car, they’re already aware of the context of what a road is, what a car is, and where to go? Then they’re going to get better at it a lot faster. 

Fred Diamond: You talked about partners. Tom, I’m going to ask you this question. Then, John, I want to come back to you. In part two of today’s podcast, we’re going to get into real detail about what you can be doing. Tom, you mentioned the four-year-old and John just took it to the teenager. Do SMBs that you guys have come across, do they actually have people who know how to move AI from experimentation into the business? One thing I think that we’ve all learned is that it really is a skill, not just a skill that a person needs to happen, but truly skilled professionals who need to understand how to utilize the AI processes, the mechanisms to get to results to make them happen. 

Tom, why don’t you give us some of your thoughts? I know you’re working with one of the elite providers around, Zeev Wexler and his team, to understand some of this. Then, John, I want you to tee us up a little bit for what we’re going to be talking about in part two. 

Tom Snyder: We have yet to encounter an SMB that is doing the right groundwork to implement AI and make it a real force multiplier. I don’t condemn them. I think there is a race to embrace this technology on the fear that their competitors will arrive first. The way most companies are going about it, it’s going to not produce the kind of outcomes you want. 

I also think that there’s nothing magic about large companies because they’re lacking that same kind of thing. We have a client right now who has stopped, a very large multi-billion-dollar company, stopped their AI implementation, moved backwards, and are now going to, let’s first understand what processes and information integrate into a tapestry of performance, not just get disparate tools, all of which don’t talk to each other, and all of which take a different piece of the pie, and you end up with a mess. 

I think there is a recognition increasingly that although the LLMs are updated at a frightening rate, they move so fast in terms of new capabilities, and it’s sometimes very exciting to have someone in the sales seat go, “I just did this on Chat, and Gemini just told me this, and Claude just told me that,” which is kind of cool, but oftentimes, if you don’t know how to do that, the AI agents and projects are performing in a way that you don’t understand. Even if you tell them don’t hallucinate, they wander off the rails, you have to have a real system in place to say, “Here is the foundation. Now let’s create the efficiency based on that foundation.” It’s not just SMBs, Fred. John will tell you, it’s almost everywhere. 

John Carey: Tom, I think you’re 100% right. Skills are one of the biggest differentiators between AI experimentation and AI execution, and it really doesn’t matter the size of the organization. There was a great quote, I was listening to an interview the other day, when it comes to technology, we want to be the centaur. We want the human brain, the human body on top of the power of the horse. What we don’t want is the horse’s head on the human body. We’ve got all the wrong combination. 

Tom Snyder: That’s beautiful. 

John Carey: Not mine, completely referencing it from this interview. But this report with IDC shows that many SMBs are really now working to build the organizational readiness needed so that they can actually scale AI skills and build that expertise. If we’re going to move AI into the business, we’re going to need people who can connect AI initiatives to business goals, centaurs. They’re going to be able to prepare data, manage change, and measure outcomes. Frankly, I think this is where channel partners come into their own, never been a better time for a trusted partner to help customers navigate and close that skill gap. Close it for them in the short term by delivering while they build up into the long term the skills they need in their own organization. 

Fred Diamond: John, as we wind down part one of today’s conversation, what do you want? You’re managing relationships with 1,300 partners, many of them are SMBs, small, medium-sized businesses. What do you need? Why are we having this conversation today with you? I’m going to tee it up like that. I’m not going to answer the question that I’m going to ask you here, but why are you so driven by the data by getting this report done? How critical is it for you for the SMBs to get two, three levels from where they are for your success? 

John Carey: I think our success is intrinsically tied to our customers’ success. SAS is a data and AI company. We’re in our 50th year. We’ve done 50 years of trusted data and AI. We were doing AI back when it was called machine learning and neural networks. We’re heavily invested in helping our clients solve their problems through the use of this technology. The best way we can do that is by working with partners in the same geography, in the same region, in the same district, where they can understand their customers intimately, they can understand what success really means, what the pressures are that they’re experiencing, and use this information from this report to help to create the guide map to staying relevant. 

I think that’s one of the things that’s probably keeping most SMBs up at night. Will I be relevant? I’m rushing into AI hoping it will actually maintain my relevance, give me an opportunity, help me grow at an accelerated rate, but they don’t know. With a partner, they can have a lot more confidence. Why we’re emphasizing this report, why we’re working with our partners, is we want SMBs to work with people who live their lives, partners, who themselves are SMBs, who are able to write that navigation map to help them get to the outcomes they need so that they can stay relevant in an ever-increasingly fast change cycle that they are forced to constantly react to so they can get out of reaction and into response. 

Fred Diamond: We’re going to tee that up as we move on to part two, but Tom Snyder, I just want to ask you a couple of questions. The Institute for Effective Professional Selling is launching our Partner Revenue Academy, where we’re working with partner account managers, channel account managers at OEMs and ISVs. You are a faculty member for a number of the sessions. The same thing with AI as it relates to the OEM, ISV, Partner Account Managers, where do we want to go with that? 

Tom Snyder: There are a number of things that I could comment on. I think the big picture there is that particularly in the world of VARs and folks like that, the customers have begun asking, what value are you adding? If I am a VAR and I represent an OEM and I have traditionally been a source for channeling that capability to you, the customers are now, I’m not getting a lot of added value. One thing that over the last 60 years in sales is that there tends to be a delay between the demand for something from a sales force and how that sales force is equipped to deliver it. AI has now accelerated that gap. 

One of the books I wrote was about creating value during the sales process before you ever sell anything. What that basically means is being able to provide either insight, the benefit of expertise, or the benefit of experience from that sales team or that sales person, that sales organization, to the benefit of the potential customer before they ever buy something. Now with AI, if you know how to do it, you can be so far armed and it gives people so much forewarning. But the problem is, unproperly implemented, you have a huge deficit. 

Channel management has always been a place where there has been a great dearth of what is actual best practice. You’re not just an encouraging motivator. You’re not just someone to answer questions. If you’re going to create value for your channel partners, it’s even more difficult because they don’t work for you. They aren’t your employees. You have to bring that expertise to the benefit of those VARs so that they can do the same for their customers. That’s what we’re really talking about in the channel manager program from the IEPS. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, John Carey, thanks again for telling us about this IDC report. We teed up the situation. Like I said, we need to go into a second part of this. We’re going to get specific. We’re going to get deep. We’re going to be talking about how do companies, and particularly sales organizations, and their partners move from this experimentation, from this awareness, to measurable business results. Thanks again, John Carey. Thanks again, Tom Snyder. Join us again on part two of this conversation. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 870: SAS Alliance Leader John Carey on the AI Execution Problem Hampering SMBs, Part One first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KRISTYN’S TIP: “Know where you want to go. You don’t have to know how you’re going to get there, you don’t have to know exactly what it is, but have a big crazy dream of where you want to go, invest in the relationships and people who are going to push you and help you get there.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Gina Stracuzzi: Today, my special guest is Kristyn Hogan, global vice president of partner sales at Cisco. Welcome, Kristyn. 

Kristyn Hogan: Thank you, Gina. Happy to be here. 

Gina Stracuzzi: We’re happy to have you. I always like to start with our guests telling us a little bit about how they got to where they are today, and then we’ll go into some deeper questions. 

Kristyn Hogan: As you mentioned, I lead our global collaboration partner sales team at Cisco. If you think about Cisco, big company, most often known for really being that networking infrastructure, powering the AI era, but the other part of our business, which I lead, is collaboration. When you think about what is collaboration in the context of Cisco, think about the video conferencing and how we’re re-imagining work with our customers. Think about something that we’ve all experienced, which is calling into a customer support, really powering how our customers engage with their customers, and then obviously enterprise calling. All of these things make up the collaboration business. I look after really accelerating all of that through our channel, which for those of you who are familiar with Cisco, you know that over 90% of our business goes through the channel. That’s what I do. 

How did I get here? It’s an interesting year for me in that this coming February, I will celebrate my 23rd anniversary at Cisco, and not to age myself, but interesting anniversary for me in that it will mark over half my life will have been spent at Cisco, which is unbelievable. Time flies. How do you put 23 years into a 30-second blurb? I was really fortunate, I joined Cisco right out of college. Cisco has a new college hire training program that we actually just brought back. It’s been on hiatus for a couple of years. Just quick plug, if there are any listeners who know a new college graduate who’s a star, we’d be lucky to have them. 

Nevertheless, back in 2004, Cisco handpicked, you couldn’t have cast a better reality show, 25 sellers, 25 engineers from around the country, brought us to North Carolina, where we really had this great fortune to get what I call a masters in Cisco and a masters in sales. Truly, I look back and that has been the foundation, that year, foundational to my career. That’s how I got into Cisco. 

Left that program and moved home to Houston, Texas. I did commercial sales in Houston for a number of years where I quickly learned that the key to my success was figuring out a way to have more than 24 hours in a day. How do you do that in sales? By activating the channel. I spent a significantly, probably disproportionate amount of my time as a young seller at Cisco, really engaging with our channel partners, using them to scale myself. Then it was just a natural progression to move into the channels organization at Cisco. 

Moved into the channels org on the collaboration side of the business, which funny enough, wasn’t called collaboration back then. I was tasked with really building practices at our partners for this cutting-edge brand-new technology at the time, IP telephony. Did that for a number of years and then really got to a crossroad where I thought to myself, “If I stay on the partner side, it can’t be in collaboration. If I stay in collaboration, it can’t be on the partner side.” 

Cisco had just acquired a company called Meraki, and really interesting turning point in my year. I often say I had this this opportunity to both leave Cisco and stay at Cisco, in that I truly turned in my Cisco laptop, reissued a new Meraki laptop. Even after a decade of being at Cisco, went to Meraki new hire training for two weeks. Did a number of years at Meraki. 

Then fast forward in 2020, we all know what was happening in the world in 2020. I got a call saying, “Hey, we’d love for you to come back to collaboration.” I think we all know, I don’t like to revisit these years yet. Collaboration had an interesting time in 2020 in that we were not the company that became the verb and noun for the virtual meeting during the pandemic. Got the call to come back and lead this global collaboration channel. Fast forward six years, that’s what I’ve been up to. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I get that you’ve technically been at the same company, but I like how you moved around and gathered more knowledge, which is always good for a career, the more knowledge you can have. It’s something that comes up in the forum quite a bit because sometimes women get little tentative about making a lateral move. Sometimes that’s the best thing for your career. I like how you embraced new opportunities and made them work for you. 

That’s a nice lead-in to what I want to talk about channel sales. We know that channel sales is built on influence rather than direct control. It’s all about the relationships. What have you learned, and certainly with collaboration, what have you learned about getting people aligned and moving in the same direction when they don’t actually report to you? 

Kristyn Hogan: It’s funny, and my answer to that question would be the same. I feel like the same attributes that can drive that success of the channel are candidly foundational to being the steward of one’s career. Number one, it really comes down to being able to build solid relationships built upon trust. When I think of that, both in the context of leading a channels organization and even in the context of my own career, if you look across Cisco, 80,000 plus employees at Cisco, we’re lucky to have a disproportionate number of people who are remarkably smart, bright, doing the work. What I’ve learned is, again, in terms of a career and in terms of leading the channel, it’s not enough. It’s foundational to do that remarkable work. But the real differentiator, and taking this to the next level, is that ability to build the relationships inside of Cisco, outside of Cisco that are going to equal parts, back to what you mentioned, to expand your thinking, push you outside your comfort zone. 

It’s interesting, in this long career I’ve had at Cisco, I often share, I’ve interviewed two times. I interviewed to come to Cisco and I interviewed when I made that Meraki rotation. Every other move I’ve made at Cisco, and I’ve made a lot of them, has been because I built relationships and trust with people who opened a door for me. Those same two tenets I think are what differentiates being a good channel leader and building good channel relationships. 

Gina Stracuzzi: It really goes to people knowing your work and being willing to be an advocate for you when you’re not in the room, like, “We need to be looking at Kristyn for this.” That’s an important part, that’s something I talk to women about all the time. It also makes me think about the new program that Fred is standing up, the Partner Revenue Academy. It’s really all about how those roles have changed. Partner selling is not the beast that it once was. It’s a very different beast. It seems like you’ve really managed to leverage every change in those relationships and make it work for you and for the company, which I love. 

Now, let’s talk about the roles, talking about how you’ve moved around within the company. You’ve had direct sales, business development, distribution, global partner sales, you’ve done it all. What did you learn from those responsibilities and as your leaderships go through, but what did you have to unlearn too? 

Kristyn Hogan: That’s such a great question. In terms of the unlearning, you’re going to see some common threads. I think it’s that to not really believe your own limiting beliefs. I’ve often told folks, “Don’t believe everything you think.” Specifically, and again, goes back to these relationships, there’s two folks who I credit as both driving two unique turning points in my career. 

Earlier, the story of my very first leadership job at Cisco is an interesting one in that I had moved into the collaboration business at the partner business for having done sales and was working for a wonderful woman, Kris Zimmerman, and simultaneously was building my career and I also had my very first baby. I’m out on maternity leave and Kris Zimmerman calls me to check in, and I’m holding that newborn first baby, and she’s like, “How are you?” 

I tell her, “I’m great. Kris, I don’t know if I’m going to come back. I think I’m done.” Kris is a mom. She had twin girls. I thought she’d be like, “Great,” and see me off into the sunset. 

She was furious. She was like, “I know you, absolutely not. Not only is that not your path, but as a matter of fact, one of the reasons I’m calling you, what I’d like for you to do is interview while you’re out on maternity leave for your very first leadership role. Disclaimer, Kristyn, don’t worry. No one gets the first manager role they go for, but this will be great. Let’s go for it.” 

She pushed me. I interviewed for the role. Spoiler alert, sometimes you do get the first leadership role that you ever go for. I think that first unlearning was sometimes don’t trust yourself. Trust others sometimes who might know you and have that ability to push you farther than you might think is possible and push yourself and figure it out later. 

Then years later, when I stepped back into this collaboration business, we were in the depths of the pandemic, like day two, this newly brought together collaboration SLT was pulled into our Cisco headquarters, at the time, Building 10 San Jose. Parking lots empty, it is COVID, the office is technically closed, two conference rooms full. It’s dark in the building. One conference room, our CEO and his ELT prepping for an earnings call. Second conference room, this deer-in-the-headlights collab team who’s tasked with turning around this business. 

I’ll never forget, Chuck Robbins popped in, he’s like, “You guys got this.” I remember thinking like, “I don’t know if we’ve got this.” Jeetu Patel, who was at the time our collaboration security product leader, now our chief product officer and president, he was at the front of the room. Really and truly, it was that moment where what I had to unlearn was every single reason why I thought we couldn’t do it, and had to relearn. Again, this is what I call like, “You got to figure it out.” That was another level-up moment where it wasn’t so much of an unlearning as a like believe that anything is possible type of moment. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That was such an unbelievable time for everyone. I think we all learned a great deal about what was possible, and look at us now. Ten years ago even, if you had said to somebody, “90% of the workforce is going to be talking through screens,” everybody would be like, “Forget about it,” especially sales, right? 

Kristyn Hogan: Yes. I walked out of that meeting, flew home, and it was game on. It took a little longer than we thought, but we had a Cisco earnings call last week, the collaboration business got a little shout out, record highest year on record for collaboration in seven years. We did it. Full circle moment. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s really awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about those partner relationships and how you build on them to make sure you get to numbers like those. Now, partner relationships are often described as strategic. Even when the day-to-day is still pretty transactional, it’s still built on strategic relationships. In your estimation, what separates a genuinely valuable partnership from one that just looks good on a slide when you’re presenting? 

Kristyn Hogan: I have what I call my money slide for explaining, what does the channel do? What is the power of the channel? It’s one of those classic iceberg images where I’ll start with, people who haven’t done a partner role or are deeply ingrained in a partner emotion, when you ask them, so what does a channels team do? What do you think about a partner team? Nine times out of ten, you’ll get, “They show up, they do like lunch,” and it all looks very glamorous, the top of the iceberg stuff, “They meet with their partners.” Yes, we do spend a lot of time enabling partners, but the internal mechanics of running a partner organization are a lot more strategic and there’s a lot more depth that’s building that transformational three-year plan, five-year plan, what routes to market will we need to have to support our business years down the road? 

I often say that channels and the partner org, we are busy planting the seeds for revenue dollars that will sprout, not this year, not next year, but we’re driving the business of the future. First and foremost, I think there’s a whole strategic element of running a partner business that unless you’ve done it is unknown or underappreciated. 

From there, when you look at it through the lens of a partner and what sets apart our most strategic partners from those that are more transactional, I always come back to really four key pillars. These pillars were tried and true for me 10 years ago. They were relevant when I led the Meraki channel. They’re relevant in collab. 

Number one, it’s on, in our case, Cisco, to provide to our partners the world’s best technology platform to go sell and go wrap their services around. Number one, we owe our partners that. But number two, we’ve all been there, our partners, they’ve shown us, are willing to go sell the world’s second best or third best technology platform in the world if it’s more profitable. If you can make more money selling the second best, that’s the path we’re all going to take. I find our most strategic partners are those that are maximizing these profitability programs that we put in place to drive their success. 

Third element, the onus is on Cisco and our most strategic partners, is mind share. We have to earn it every day and it’s not something you do once a year. I’m a little more of the above the iceberg, but waking up every day, ensuring that we have the mind share at our partners from the highest executive level all the way down to that frontline seller and everything in between. When I look at our most strategic partners, these are metrics that we look at. They are the ones who top to bottom are investing and most enabled. 

Then last but not least is this pillar around really simplicity. Listen, till the day I die, my time at Cisco will be spent, like we aren’t necessarily always known for our simplicity, and it’s not something that you can master, but the degree to which we can make it simpler for our partners and our partners can also make it simpler on their end of working with Cisco, engaging with their customers, that’s an area that I believe really sets our partners apart and can set us apart. Platform, simplicity, profitability, mind share. 

Gina Stracuzzi: Those are good tenets. I would think that keeping those in mind would bring you to this level of success that you’re knowing. We have to throw an AI question in there at some point, because who would we be if we’re not talking about AI. We know it’s changing how companies are selling and some are doing really well with it and others it’s rather scattershot and they’re not knowing the same success. How do you see it changing in partners and what they need from vendors? Where do you think channel leaders need to rethink the old playbook rather than simply adding AI to it, which is something that really comes up? We have people who are just like, “Yeah, it comes down from on high. We have to use AI.” There is no strategic thought to it and there’s five or six or seven tools that companies have bought with no direction. What are you doing and what are you seeing? 

Kristyn Hogan: I’ll use an analogy that we’ve all heard in that AI is the icing on the cake, and AI strategy can’t be the cake. I’ll go back to those four tenets. If you don’t have a rock-solid platform that you’re arming the partners with, a profitability story, winning their mind share, and a maniacal focus on simplicity, if you don’t have those four things in place, AI is not going to get you out of that. You can’t AI your way out of a foundational solid partner strategy. 

Number one, I think is not an over rotation to thinking that AI is going to solve everything. You still have to have this foundation. I think where both Cisco and our partners can really shine and then kick it up a notch is layering innovative AI on top of that rock-solid foundation. When I look at even just some of the interesting ways, it’s evolving every day. We’re in this super charged cycle, but there’s a productivity pillar of AI, and I’m fascinated. I love productivity hacks, and for me personally and for my team, we’re always looking at ways of how can AI, again, it can’t be the cake, but how can you layer it on top to be more productive, get more time in your day. 

The other area that I think is fascinating is this reinvention of managing and engaging with partners across a sales process. Cisco recently has rolled out Gong on the sale side, it is now our forecasting tool. On the partner side, it has really reinvented how we’re engaging with partners. A real-life example, I love it in that lead a big team, global team, big business, first thing I log into every day, I log into Gong and I see a snapshot of what the whole organization is up to. If I have a meeting with partner XYZ today, Gong sees that I have that meeting and says, click here to catch you up. Instead of having to call my team and bother them for some briefing doc, I can quickly scan through and understand all of the meetings, all of the deals this partner is working. Again, just two ways of how we’re leveraging AI, and we’re just getting started, but AI is nothing if you don’t have that foundation in place. You’re way out of a bad strategy. 

Gina Stracuzzi: I have to say that is probably one of the most definitive answers that I have received anyway, I can’t speak for Fred, on how teams are using it. Even leaders don’t seem to be able to wrap their minds or their hands around everything that’s available and how they should be using it to really elevate their teams. But it sounds like you’ve got a great handle on it, which is awesome. 

You’ve been recognized as the channel leader and you publicly champion women in the field, which I absolutely love. What helped you become such a visible leader? What do women in the channel need to recognize about making contributions and making sure they’re recognized? 

Kristyn Hogan: It goes back to what I mentioned previously, which foundationally, remarkable work. Table stakes, deliver remarkable work. Number two, invest in those relationships that I think are mutually beneficial, that are going to push you outside your comfort zone. It’s funny, literally just this week on Monday, if I could spend my whole day mentoring rising star talents, my favorite thing to do, I never say no. I actually found myself on one of those calls on Monday with a rising star at Cisco, 28 years old. She’s in our PR and AR team at Cisco and is getting curious about what she wants to do next. She’s about to get her masters, has these big plans for her career, but a little tentative. Halfway through the call, we’re on a video call, and I stopped me in my tracks, I truly felt like I had been put in a time machine and I was looking in a mirror at myself, which 20 years ago, time flies. 

To answer your question, for me, the differentiator, it’s been specific, there are freeze-frame specific people and specific moments where I was pushed. I was pushed to do something I didn’t think I could do. I mentioned Kris Zimmerman who not only said, “You’re coming back to work and you’re going to be a working mom and you’re going to be a leader,” I was pushed outside my comfort zone to do something I’d never done, which was be part of the team to turn around this collaboration business. 

Number one, do great work, invest in these relationships, and then if there’s one quality that I look for in who I hire, who I mentor, who I coach, who I want to be, I call it the figure-it-out factor. I’d never done any of those things before. I don’t look for people who have done the thing. I look for, do you have the figure-it-out factor? Do you believe in yourself or do you have someone who believes in you and is going to push you to do it, and just go figure it out? 

Gina Stracuzzi: If I could add something to that too, it’s don’t be afraid. Don’t hesitate to talk about what you’ve done. 

Kristyn Hogan: Or what you want to do, for that matter.  

Gina Stracuzzi: Another one, yeah. Don’t keep your aspirations to yourself. No one can help you if they don’t know what you want. You’re aligned on quite a bit of what we talk about in the forum. I absolutely love that. 

We are at that point in our conversation, which has been really fabulous, where we like to ask our guests for one piece of advice, something that anyone listening can put into place today to take their career, their selling to the next level. 

Kristyn Hogan: You teed it up perfectly in that number one, know where you want to go. You don’t have to know how you’re going to get there, you don’t have to know exactly what it is, but have a big crazy dream of where you want to go, invest in the relationships and people who are going to push you and help you get there, write it down. I stumbled upon this document I wrote in 2009, old style word document where I mapped out. I had the beginning, I didn’t really have the middle, but it ends, the document ends, I wrote down, as I thought life ended at 40, because it said, “By the age of 40, I would like to be a VP of sales at Cisco.” Probably need to write the next chapter, but have a goal, write it down, invest in the relationships with people who are going to push you, and above all else, hone that figure-it-out factor. Figure it out. This is corporate sales. This is not curing cancer. This is not solving world peace. There is nothing that we do that isn’t figure-outable. Figure it out. 

Gina Stracuzzi: That is fabulous advice. Really great. There’s always a solution. There’s always an opportunity. You just have to figure it out. Thank you, Kristyn Hogan, and we hope you will stay in touch with us. Thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 869: Stop Waiting Until You’re Ready: Kristyn Hogan’s Blueprint for Career Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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

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Today’s show featured an interview with Ann Sojka, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Cincinnati.

Find Ann on LinkedIn.

ANN’S TIP: “One huge life motto of mine is no ask, no get. If you never ask, the answer is always no. It takes a lot of courage to be bold and ask difficult questions, but if you don’t ask, you’re never going to get it.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited to be talking to Ann Sojka with the University of Cincinnati. A little bit of Sales Game Changers Podcast trivia. Your mother, who also teaches classes with you, was on our Women in Sales show with Gina Stracuzzi, who runs our Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership. That was in the heyday of the pandemic when we interviewed your mother, but she’s very active in women in sales. That’s where we originally got to her. That was before we started doing the Office Hours shows and that was way before we got involved with the University Sales Center Alliance. Every couple of weeks we post one of these shows. 

I met you at one of the USCA organizational meetings. It’s such a great organization that is helping young adults get educated on professional selling, but also providing great value to companies that are looking to hire selling professionals who are ready to go. One of the amazing things about the young adults who come out of programs such as yours is they’re ready to go. They may need to learn the marketplace and the products and how the company uses HubSpot, Highspot, or Salesforce, or whatever it might be, but how you and your peers at the USCA are preparing young adults is something that we’re really excited about at the IEPS. 

I got a lot of great questions here. I’m excited to learn more about what you’re doing at University of Cincinnati. Give us a brief intro to yourself and tell us a little bit about the program at University of Cincinnati. What do you offer the young adults who go through your program? 

Ann Sojka: A little bit about me. I spent 10 years out in the field as a seller. I worked my way from a sales development program all the way out to the really good life, other than being a professor, which is enterprise outside sales. I did that all within the same company. Once I started teaching, I developed a really strong passion specifically for our students at the Grau Center for Professional Selling at the University of Cincinnati. 

A little foreshadowing, but I pivoted my career. I’m a full-time educator now at the University of Cincinnati. Along with my counterpart, my executive director, Jennifer Barlow, I’m the academic director of the Grau Center for Professional Selling. We are a really large sales program. We offer a sales minor, and our program is interdisciplinary. It’s very inclusive. As a result, we have 400 students each semester in one of our sales classes. Students can earn a sales minor, or they can take the introductory confident selling course, develop some life skills, that’s what we’re really hoping for students to walk away with, and use those to help them interview or feel more confident in their classroom. 

Our program is based around a couple of principles. We believe everybody sells something. We think sales skills are life skills. We believe that sellers are made and not born. We want more people to be equipped with the skills that sales curriculum and sales education helps them learn, hopefully, to go into professional selling, but if not, just to feel more confident in whatever career path they take. 

Fred Diamond: That is amazing. We have listeners all over the globe. For those who don’t know much about Cincinnati, tell us a little bit about the University of Cincinnati. Is it an urban school? Just a little bit of a background on the school. 

Ann Sojka: It’s really unique. University of Cincinnati, it is an urban campus. We have a couple of remote locations as well. It’s a regional campus. A very large percentage of our students are commuters and first-generation college students. That makes their experiences really unique, and in my opinion, and what I teach my students to talk about, it makes them really uniquely qualified to be really successful in sales. We have a really diverse student body and it’s concentrated in a really small campus, since it’s urban, but our students at the Lindner College of Business are required to co-op during the summers. They’re getting real-time experience, and like I mentioned about our program, it’s co-curricular. Our classes are fun because we have engineering students, we have design students, media, all in our sales classes, which makes the conversations really robust and dynamic. 

Fred Diamond: As you alluded to, you’ve lived sales from three different perspectives. You were a student. Then you were in enterprise sales for about a decade. Now, you’re an educator. Just curious, which experience most influences how you teach today? 

Ann Sojka: My students know this about me, Fred, and you’re going to find it out as we have this conversation, I love quotations and mottos. One of the mottos I impart on my students is that no experience is wasted. That’s true for me in each of those experiences that you asked about. 

As a student, I was part of the Global Sales Leadership Society at the Kelley School of Business. I joined because I saw a poster that indicated that most marketing majors get their first job in sales. I said, “I want to get a job. That’s where most marketing majors get their jobs? I’m joining this club because I want to learn how to sell.” It was also, as a student, where I learned this closing line, how to ask for the job in an interview. I teach that to my students to this day. I’ve used it on every interview I’ve ever had, and it’s been a few years since then. That really influences my teaching and my passion for my students and teaching them sales. 

My students love hearing about my experiences in the field. I can talk to them about what it’s like cold calling. I did smile and dial, 100 dials a day, getting hung up on, and talk to them about the victory and the feeling of accomplishment when you take a deal from a cold call to execution and getting the purchase order. I get to talk to them about the value and the fun in building relationships. It’s really fun being in outside sales because you get to entertain your customers, take them to concerts, take them to happy hours, and like a doctor, you’re on call. When data centers go down, it’s usually not from 8:00 to 5:00 on a weekday. I talk to my students about that. They love hearing about those experiences. I always keep in mind too, what do I wish I had known when I was their age that I can help them get ramped up faster and fill the needs of the partners who hire from students? That’s a big influence. 

Fred Diamond: I like the way you said you’re thinking about what can they learn, what can you teach them so that they’re prepared? One of the great things that we’ve learned at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling about what’s happening at the USCA universities is you’re preparing these young adults to hit the ground running. One of the great things is because of how you’re preparing them, the retention that is going to be happening at the companies that do hire is going to be much higher. 

I’m just curious, before we continue the conversation, is there another quote, or two? I’m a big quote guy as well. My favorite quote that’s had even more validity in my life recently is the Henry Ford quote, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” I used to think that was just about business, if I think I can get another client or something, but it attunes to almost everything in life. If I think I can get a meeting, if I think I can do this. I’m just curious, do you have any other go-tos? Do you go by Professor Sojka in front of your students, or Professor Ann? 

Ann Sojka: I do, yes. I go by Professor Sojka, and I have a couple. One huge life motto of mine is no ask, no get. If you never ask, the answer is always no. It takes a lot of courage to be bold and ask difficult questions, but if you don’t ask, you’re never going to get it. I try to impart that on my students. 

Then another one is it’s about showing up. I have it on a post-it right here on my desk. It says, “Being pleasant and having a good attitude is a simple way to be luckier.” I love that, because as salespeople, we generate opportunities by being nice to be around, by building relationships, being trustworthy, and having a positive attitude. I love salespeople because they’re the most optimistic people in the world. They’re solutions oriented. They want to help their customers get out of pain and, by the way, make a lot of money while they do it. Those are a couple of quotes. My students have fun with this. We collect all the quotes every semester. We start off our class, every meeting with somebody giving an inspirational quote of the day. 

Fred Diamond: I’m thinking about one of our clients who said to me recently that his salespeople are really, really good at waiting for the phone to ring. That ain’t going to get you any business, especially now. We’re doing today’s interview in the mid-summer of 2026. I love that, no ask, no get. It’s like the Gretzky quote, “You don’t score any of the shots you don’t take.” It’s all about doing that. 

You alluded to before that sellers are made, not born. What’s something you’ve seen students develop that completely changed your mind about their potential? 

Ann Sojka: I mentioned this before. I was selling for 10 years and really didn’t have a plan to stop selling. I love selling. If I weren’t teaching, I would still be in sales, because it’s fun, it’s dynamic, make a lot of money. But I started teaching at night because there was a need for sales instructors, and I had the experience and I applied and got the job. It was my first semester of teaching where came in, 6:00 to 8:50 at night, after selling all day, teaching a workout class 6:00 in the morning, and I think I’m going to teach these students what they need to know is the sales fundamentals. They need to learn SPIN selling, how to ask good questions, uncover customer challenges, and deliver benefits to solve problems. They need to learn how to negotiate and how to close. I still teach my students that. They do need to learn that. 

But I had a conversation with a student one day that really changed my perspective. She was one of my brightest students. She asked to meet after class because she’s interested in exploring careers in sales. Yes, I love it. It’s working. I asked her, “What do you want to talk about?” 

She said, “I really like sales. I’m interested in it,” but she felt a little intimidated, and she had a little imposter syndrome, because she said, “I’ve never had an internship or co-op during the summer.” She didn’t feel qualified in other words. 

I said, “Well, you’re in my class. What other classes are you taking? What do you do when you’re not at school? Let’s see how we can frame a story.” 

She said, “Well, I take most of my classes at night or online. I’m a commuter. I’m living at home because I’m paying for my own school. I’m the first person in my family to go to college, paying for my own school. I take my classes at night because I work full time at a bank in the day.” 

I said, “How many hours a week are you working?” 

She said, “40 hours.” 

My jaw was on the floor. Talk about somebody who has the potential to hit the ground running in a sales career, because she has a high motor, she’s self-reliant, responsible, can manage competing priorities. She had all the skills that it takes to be successful in a sales career, accountable, and yet it was a messaging problem. 

What I recognized about our students, and my mindset shift in the potential of our students, is they need to see sales in a different light. This is why we have our philosophy. We teach an abundance mindset in our sales program, which is that we are actively dispelling the myth that you have to have a specific sales pedigree. You have to be an extrovert, competitive, cutthroat, pushy, aggressive, persuasive person to be successful in sales. 

Instead, what we focus on educating our students with is that anybody can sell. Everybody should learn sales skills. We help our students develop the confidence to tell their own story, to demonstrate the value they can offer potential employers as a seller. Even though I thought I was just going to teach my students technical skills, oh my gosh, that’s the reason I pivoted to education, and why I’m so passionate, because my students are hard workers. I want them earning a lot of money because I know they’ll work hard and do a good job and solve problems. They need the encouragement and see their potential reflected back at them. 

Fred Diamond: A quick follow up on that. We’re the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Everybody that we work with is a sales professional, typically B2B, business to business, or business to government, but enterprise. We work with companies like Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Hilton, Gartner, etc. People know that they’re in sales. But I’m just curious, when the young adults matriculate to University of Cincinnati, how many of them are going there to go into your programs? Do they maybe have someone who’s a friend who took a class and they say, “You got to take a class with Professor Sojka. This has been great. I didn’t know I could do this.” Like you said, a lot of first-generation students, so they’re probably working maybe different things as compared to some of the enterprise-type sales things that we’re talking about here. When do they learn, when through the four years, I presume four years, maybe something longer, etc.? 

Ann Sojka: We recruit a lot of different ways. Word of mouth is a big one. I have a lot of students in my classes who say, “I’m taking your class because my friend said I need to take it.” Word of mouth is a big one. We have a lot of co-curricular organizations that also draw students in. We have a competition varsity sales team. You have to take a sales course to join the varsity sales team because you need to learn how to sell. That’s a big reason. We also have a sales leadership club, which is a little more open-ended and developmental. 

I’m a little sneaky and I teach big sections of intro to marketing every single fall. I recruit for our sales program because I want students, again, we’re trying to change the perception in our program. We’re doing a really good job of it, by the way, of that there’s one type of person who’s a sales person, and that there’s one type of sales role. We also are really fortunate to have a lot of really strong partners who we work with. 

They come, we do a sales expo, just a sales-focused career fair. Every fall and spring, we usually have at least 50 partners that all of our students go to. When students, they see, “Hey, there are jobs, there’s a career fair just for sales, that must be an indicator.” They hear from their friends that the sales class is fun. There’s no final exam. You do a sales role play instead. We talk to each other all the time. We practice interview skills. When that word of mouth gets around, in addition to our other faculty and other departments really recognize the value of the skills in our sales program. 

Our finance folks, they realize AI can do some things that we’ve been teaching our students they have to do. But what AI can’t do is build relationships and build trust. We need our students to be equipped with those soft skills, competencies, people competencies, so that they’re really marketable to recruiters. 

Fred Diamond: Let’s follow up on that with the companies that are participating in your programs, your corporate partners. You mentioned you had about 15 or so that participate. Maybe there’s more. What’s the value for them? Are these employers typically big in Cincinnati or are they from the Midwest or all over the country? Who are you looking to get involved? Which ones are getting involved? What’s the message you want to get across to them? 

Ann Sojka: A couple of things are valuable. One note, in our sales expo, we have 50 people come through. Then we have different tiers of partners. But a huge value that our partners see and get value out of is when they come and interact with our students in our classrooms, and when they act as buyers in the final sales role play. I said there are about 400 students every semester in our sales classes. They all have to do a sales role play, at least one. Our partners are really excited to see our students in action. I think that is a big distinction versus hearing a student in an interview talk about, how would you build rapport? How would you close a deal? Our partners get to see our students in action. 

Some of our partners assist with the varsity sales team. Those are our most elite group of sales students, who are really, really serious. Otherwise, they get a lot of opportunity to recruit from our role plays and from visits to our classroom. 

Fred Diamond: What kind of positions are they recruiting for? 

Ann Sojka: Great question. Everything from business development programs that feed to outside sales to business relationship management. More of like a post-sale relationship type of position. Another good benefit of working with the University of Cincinnati, we’re in a metropolitan area. That gives our students an advantage because they don’t have to travel somewhere for their co-ops or internships. We have a lot of big companies that are local who recruit. We have a lot of students who want to move away from Cincinnati or who aren’t from Cincinnati. We have partners who relocate students across the country. What I like to think about University of Cincinnati, it’s a really diverse student body. There are students who are happy and excited to cold call. There are students who want to do more of account management. We find partners recruit for all of those positions. 

Fred Diamond: Ann, love your energy. Sales is about energy. You mentioned various types of people, extroverts, introverts they still have to have the same energy, that they are willing to put in the time. If you’re an introvert, a lot of introverts are great at sales because they can think strategically about how to do the business and who needs to be involved. As you know, in enterprise sales, it’s not just a phone call and, “Gee, would you like to buy a million dollars’ worth of stuff?” Yes, great. Good. it’s a process that may take months, years, and you may have to speak with six, seven people, and you need financial thought through the process and strategic thought. There’s a lot of ways to go. 

If you had the opportunity to speak to a parent, they came to you and said, “My child registered to go to University of Cincinnati. I never thought of sales. No one in our family is in sales. Why should they take your classes?” I’m just curious, what would you say to them? 

Ann Sojka: Frankly, same. My parents are teachers. Nobody in my family was in sales until I was in sales, and I had no experience selling until I had my first sales job. I think about this pragmatically, everybody needs to interview. I think every student that I talk to that is enrolled in a college and in a business school wants to get a job. An interview is selling yourself. If nothing else, if you take a confident selling class, which is our introductory course offered at least eight sections every semester, your student will be equipped with the confidence they need and the skills to sell themselves in an interview. That’s a low-hanging fruit. 

When it comes to considering a career in professional selling, one of the objections I get a lot is about, “I don’t know about living on a quota. I’m concerned about making commission. Don’t sales people get laid off really quickly.” Nobody knows the future, but I’ll say for myself, I spent 10 years at the same company in sales and progressed from a sales development program to the best job in the world, other than teaching, which is outside enterprise sales. I did that for five years. I was never laid off and I made a lot of money. I like to tell my students, listen, I am not competitive. You don’t have to be competitive in sales. I am ambitious and I would describe myself as coin-operated, but really, I went into sales because I like helping people. 

A big philosophy that we have in our business program in the Lindner College of Business is that our students are problem solvers. That’s what selling is. A good seller needs to know how to ask the right type of questions, uncover a customer need, and then deliver value to solve that problem. By being the seller, you help your customer solve their problem faster and you get to make money. 

Fred Diamond: A thing we usually add to the end of that is having the skills and ability to be in a position to communicate that value that you uncovered. One of the challenges right now is that with AI, and it’s been like this for years, the customer can get whatever information they want to know off of the internet and of AI. If they want to know your product strategy, they don’t need you to come in for half a day to present it like you and I might have done in our previous roles. But they could just type in, what is the product strategy for company X, whatever it might be. As a selling professional, you need to be able to think ahead, where your customer might be going to, and it’s not hard to do that, but it requires work. Then you put yourself into the opportunity to communicate that value. 

Ann Sojka, is there anything else that you want to get across that we might not have covered today? 

Ann Sojka: I hope that I have conveyed a lot of enthusiasm and passion for not only the sales profession, but for the potential of the students in the sales program at the University of Cincinnati. These students are hardworking, like many college students, they’re hardworking, they’re gritty, they’re resilient. They have what it takes to be really successful and contribute to student organizations. I’m really passionate about the potential of our students. I want to see more young people go into this extremely lucrative, challenging, and rewarding career, because I think it’s so fun. It’s so fun. 

Fred Diamond: Yeah, it is the greatest profession. We talk about this all the time, is that we think the most important job in every company is the selling professional. There are no jobs for the accountants, and there’s no jobs for the finance people, no jobs for HR or marketing if things don’t get sold. 

Before I ask you for your final action step, do you have one more quote you want to pull out that you want to impart upon us? 

Ann Sojka: I want to paraphrase because this is part of my educational philosophy, and it comes from Stephen Covey, and it’s his perspective on leadership. This really drives how I interact with my students. He said that leadership is seeing another’s worth and potential so strongly and communicating that so clearly to them, that they begin to see it in themselves. That’s what I see my responsibility as an educator to be. I want my students to see the potential and I want to make it so explicit to them that they see it in themselves and they feel confident to go out and take a risk, try something new. 

Fred Diamond: You know what, Ann? That comes through in today’s Sales Game Changers Office Hours podcast. There’s no doubt about your passion. One of the cool things since we’ve been doing the Office Hours shows is that the educators that we’ve been speaking to, they want their students to have amazing futures. We all know that the potential in sales, it’s not going to be easy, there’s going to be bumps and you may be working really hard on a prospect and they go silent and you’re wondering, “What did I do? What do I need to do?” You may be making up things about your pipeline. But if you stay with it, if you work hard, if you really put yourself into the athlete’s mindset of what should I be doing to practice, and you do a lot of that. 

You mentioned the teams, and to go to the competitions, you might have to practice a role play like 500 times to get it down. That’s one thing that amazed us at the IEPS, when we started going to the competitions, is how amazing these young adults were. I’ll give you an example. I went to a competition where Gartner was the main sponsor, and Gartner does a lot of work with the universities at the USCA. I’ve been a Gartner customer 10 times. The students that I saw at the role play, it was the National Collegiate Sales Competition in 2025, even the worst student was great, and was even better than the best Gartner sales rep that I’ve seen. 

Ann, it’s been great talking to you. Congratulations on the success and the continued success. Give us a final action, something specific selling professionals listening to today’s show must do to take their sales or sales leadership career to the next level. 

Ann Sojka: I’d say take action. Go do it. Fail fast. It ties back into my no ask, no get mentality, which is you can do all the account planning, you can rehearse your pitch over and over again many times, but until you go talk to a customer, you don’t know if it’s successful. I got one more line for you, Fred. You either win or you learn. That’s what happens when you try. You either get the deal, you get the call, or you learn what didn’t work. Then you go back to the drawing board. 

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Ann Sojka from University of Cincinnati. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. 

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 868: Building Sales-Ready Graduates at the University of Cincinnati with Ann Sojka first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.