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On today’s show, we interviewed Frank Hauck, former President, Banking, NCR Corporation, and the founder of the Hauck Sales Performance Lab at Bryant University.
Find Frank on LinkedIn.
FRANK’S TIP: “Preparation drives performance. Don’t walk into a call hoping to be good. Prepare until you’re great.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. We’re talking to Frank Hauck. A lot of people who listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast know that we also created a new podcast within the Sales Game Changers family called Office Hours – Sales Professors Unplugged. Basically, I interview leaders at universities with either a sales major or minor, or a certificate. Many of these universities are members of the University Sales Center Alliance. I frequently interview them, of course, and I’ve gone to a number of competitions. At the competitions I’ve gone to, people said, “You need to go to Bryant University. You need to see what Dr. Stefanie Boyer is doing up there and you need to see the Hauck Sales Performance Lab.”
There was a competition up at Bryant University. For people who are listening, it’s about 10 miles west of Providence up in Rhode Island. Interestingly, my son was a student at Johnson & Wales, so we knew Providence relatively well when he was a student there. I was excited to go back up, see the competition, but I was drooling with anticipation of seeing the Sales Performance Lab that you and your wife, Marion, had funded and built, and it’s great.
I want you to talk more about why you created it. It’s within the Business Entrepreneurship Leadership Center. It’s right on campus at Bryant University. Beautiful campus up in Rhode Island. I know there’s some history with the building, which you could talk about, but when I went to the competition, I saw these role play labs and AV studios, and it was just a very comfortable corporate setting as well. From a learning perspective, it was very modern, crisp, clean, well-organized.
First off, I know you’ve had a great career. I want to talk about your career as well, but thanks for being on today’s show. Talk a little bit about why you and your wife made the investment in the Hauck Sales Performance Lab and get us caught up. Then I want to go through some of your history. You’ve had some senior roles in many great companies. I also want to get your advice for the sales professionals listening to today’s show.
Frank Hauck: With respect to the Sales Lab, it was very fortuitous. My wife and I, we both went to Bryant University. Our daughter went to Bryant. We had stayed somewhat connected to the school, but it wasn’t until I got involved judging a contest that they’d asked me to do for their international business program, and that was the hook that brought me back to the school.
A few years later, my wife and I decided to make a donation to the school. Quite honestly, we weren’t exactly sure what to do or where to go with the donation. We reached out to the school and said, “What are some of the things that are on your hit list?” They had established a project 2030 for the school, meaning all the new investments that they wanted to have in place by 2030 to transform the school of business into something unique.
One of the things that they came back with was a sales laboratory, a place for salespeople to actually learn their craft, learn their skill, develop it. What happened was, in the same year that we decided to make this donation, Fidelity donated a new building to Bryant University. Essentially, they decided to move the entire school of business into this one building, which had to go from essentially a corporate environment to a university. In that build out, we were able to build the Sales Performance Lab.
You mentioned Dr. Stefanie Boyer. She’s just a dynamo with respect to sales training. We sat down and figured out, what do we need to make this thing really compelling? Stefanie does a lot of preparation with her students around sales conversations, which is all about practice and preparation. Building a lab that had recording capabilities, building a lab that leveraged AI. Essentially, a lot of students don’t like role plays, so they want to practice against a bot. They developed a sales program that they could actually practice, get feedback real time. They could make it harder or easier depending upon the capability of the students, but essentially it gives them the ability to drive a sales conversation and learn what things they’re doing or saying that’s actually working well or not working well.
That took about a year to develop and to build. The lab came into play essentially about a year and a half ago. Now it’s being leveraged for the NISC, the Northeast Intercollegiate Sales Competition, that Stefanie runs. We use about 20 of the rooms for the competition. The students get a copy, they get essentially a recording of their performance. They get to see the scores and the feedback. It really aligns with the whole development and training activity to help students go from essentially no sales training to hopefully, at the end of the day, they’re really competent at having a really unique and compelling sales conversation.
Fred Diamond: At the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we spend a lot of time with universities. We’re doing today’s interview in January of 2026. I actually went to the competition, which is where I met you, and met Dr. Boyer, and I was a judge. There’s a number of competitions around the country, and it’s amazing how these young adults who are going for either a major or a minor, or a certificate, how well prepared they are, and how thoughtful they are.
It was funny, during the competition at various levels, you’re asked as a judge, which I was, I was actually a buyer in a couple of the situations. I was the one who was interfacing directly with the students, and we were asked to throw curve balls, like, “Look at our phone as if something upset us,” to kind of have the young adults shift their thinking. But one of the great things for those of us who judge these competitions is these young adults are amazing, and they’re thoughtful, and they’re energetic, and they do their research. You could see how a lab, like the one that you’ve created, can help them prepare for the kinds of conversations that they’re going to have once they move into their career of professional selling.
Frank Hauck: Sales is a skill. It’s a craft and it needs to be refined and developed, and you need coaching along the way. Having the ability to evaluate your own performance with someone else and then redo it based on that feedback, you see the level of confidence that the students entered competitions like that with, where they essentially walk in the door feelings like they can win this thing. You can tell it’s from the hours of practice in their dorm rooms, doing it with their roommate, doing it with their parents.
What’s funny is they have some butterflies before they walk in that front door. You can almost see the camaraderie. But then when it’s all over, they feel like they have accomplished quite a bit. They went through that 10-minute sales conversation and they feel like they can take on the world. But I’m always impressed with the poise, the maturity, the confidence of the students walking in, and having a really knowledgeable conversation with someone that they just met with five people sitting in the background judging where they can walk out, shake their hand, and feel like they’ve accomplished something really well.
Fred Diamond: For people who aren’t familiar with this, basically a company will sponsor it or they’ll make up a company. The young adults who are coming in at the first level, maybe they’re talking to a general sales enablement manager. Then they move up the chain to maybe a sales leader, then maybe eventually to the CMO of the company or VP of sales. What always amazes me is how much they understand of the challenges in college. A lot of times I’ll think to myself, “Well, that student maybe should have gone this path.” Then I say to myself, “Wait a minute, these are college kids.” Frank, at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we work with young adults who are new to sales, working for great B2B, or some cases B2G, business to government, companies like we’ll talk about in a second, where you’ve held great leadership career. But these are college kids. They’re talking to me as if they’ve been in the industry for 5, 10, 15 years.
The work that happens at a university like Bryant with Dr. Boyer, and there’s about 90 other universities that are part of the University Sales Center Alliance, the way that they’re preparing these young adults to hit the ground running, to give these young adults like a five-year head start, I think in many cases. The AV and the capabilities and the AI that you’ve built into the performance lab is amazing. Are you very much involved still with what happens at the lab and how it’s going to grow and what are some of your visions for the future?
Frank Hauck: Essentially, it’s a living place where new technology will come down the road. Our objective is to leverage it across the board to continue to bring in new tools and resources, whether it be leveraging CRMs that the students will learn in the school, to leveraging things to drive a differentiated customer experience. All the technology that people are working on to leverage new prospecting tools, whether it be AI tools, all those things are going to be part of the lab going forward.
In fact, I’m working with Bryant to figure out how to get a tie between their AI lab and the sales lab and to hopefully even have a similar type of a performance competition between schools where people would get essentially a business problem, and then they would leverage the AI tools around them to help solve it and then present it back similar to what they do in the sales performance contest. You get that knowledge building process, that preparation, and then the ability to articulate to a senior leadership set of judges your thought on how to best solve the problem.
Fred Diamond: You’ve held senior roles in your career, and you’re giving back, which is great. Give us a brief synopsis of your career in 45 seconds or so, and then I want you to share advice. What is your advice? You’ve led thousands of sales professionals, you’ve worked with thousands of customers, partners. Tell us how you eventually culminated your career, and then I want to get your three or four advice for sales professionals on how to be more successful.
Frank Hauck: I entered sales probably the middle part of my career. I spent about 10 years inside of EMC, who is now part of Dell, running the services organization. In part of that, the rocket ship of the ‘90s was really successful at EMC. We went from essentially 100 million in revenue to like 12 billion. It was a wild run. In running the services organization, our product was put in some mission-critical environments across the world. It made us very successful. But when it broke, there was a big impact. My job was to go see customers once it broke and to figure out how to turn a problem situation into a more positive situation so hopefully we could sell them again and keep that relationship going and keep that customer relationship solid.
That journey sometimes took place by me traveling out there, explaining what happened, why it happened, what I’m doing so it’s not going to happen again, and hopefully to build the confidence so that the customers would still view us as a strong and strategic business partner. In doing so, I spent a lot of time with salespeople and I spent a lot of time with customers. Over those 10 years, I developed some really strong relationships across the board so that in 2001, I was able to take on not only the services group, but also the sales organization at EMC. We essentially had several thousand people in our sales team, and I’ve worked with some of the best sales folks in the world.
I was very fortunate to inherit the team that I did. These folks, I view them a certain way. They had a desire to work with the best because they wanted to learn from the best, and they wanted to every day compete against the best, because ultimately they wanted to be the best. The people that I was able to work with, I would see them at the club events every year. One of the things I noticed was a lot of times it’s the same people showing up every year, which is difficult to do because once you’ve received a certain level of success, your quota typically gets raised. To be able to do it year in and year out, these are some really special sales folks. What I found is that the folks that achieved that success year in and year out had a unnatural desire. Essentially it was they wanted to be successful and they worked harder than everybody else.
They were prepared better than anyone else, and they marshaled resources where they needed to to get help. They weren’t shy about looking for whether it be the leader of the engineering department or the CEO to help them essentially interact with their customers in a way to change the conversation. My advice for salespeople is make sure that you do your homework about what your customers need, and then leverage the resources that you have at your disposal. The best of the folks play quarterback. It’s their customer, but they’re essentially using the resources as they see fit to make sure that they can get the optimal results. Hopefully that drives a good relationship and a really good customer experience.
Fred Diamond: There are a couple things that you just mentioned there. You mentioned the ‘90s. I recall EMC in the ‘90s. It definitely was one of the behemoths in the technology world, and it was known really well for its products and its sales processes as well. A couple things you just hit on.
One is whenever young sales professionals ask me for advice, I say, “Get to know your company.” Get to know the finance people, get to know what happens on the loading dock. Get to know people in support. One of our most famous Sales Game Changers Podcasts, I interviewed a couple of CIOs and I said, “What is your advice?” They said, “Help me navigate through your company.” They said, “You don’t need to tell me your technology direction. I can find it on the internet, but help us understand how we get paid. How do we get support? How can we expedite shipping? How do we get things fixed? Whatever it might be.” That is great, understanding the breadth of your company, how to navigate it, etc.
The other thing that you said there, which I agree with a hundred percent, sales is a full contact sport. Not to get into cliches about sports, but really being at your peak. Really being at the highest level of knowledge. It’s even gotten harder now, Frank. We’re doing today’s interview in 2026, because you mentioned AI. The customer in every space can get whatever information they want in 30 seconds on the internet. Especially now with GPTs, it can go even a lot quicker than just the general internet.
How do you as a sales professional get to the highest level? It’s by providing value to the customer that they don’t even foresee. The only way you can do that is by really going all in, going for the highest levels of knowledge, of professionalism. That’s why it’s so beautiful that you have the lab there. I wish that sales professionals, when they graduate, continue to practice. We did a show with Hilton recently. They have a lab at Hilton, not really a lab, but they have breakout rooms where people can go and practice. There’s nothing worse than practicing on your way to the customer if you haven’t done it before.
Frank Hauck: I agree with you. It all comes down to being prepared and actually, to your point, bringing insight and value to the conversation. Making it so that the customer feels like, “Wow, this was a really good use of my time. I learned a lot. I’ve got a potential partner here that I can do business with.” But essentially you establish that credibility and trust.
Now, my last six years I was at NCR, I ran the banking group there, and post-COVID, we’d have a lot of customers visit us in our Atlanta headquarters. I would see virtually every customer that came in. I would spend the first hour with them because they made the trip to Atlanta. I wanted to make sure that I imparted what we were working on. I would share, “Here’s what I’m spending money on for R&D. Here’s where we see the marketplace going. Here’s where we think the competitive advantages are going to be down the road.” It’s amazing the credibility that you build by just opening up about what we see as the future. Because some people will say, “We’ve got the same list of priorities. I can’t believe you said that. That’s perfect.” We say, “Hey, have you thought about this one? Because we thought about that, but we pivoted left or right.” It drives a very productive conversation, but it all comes down to just having the level of understanding of the people that are walking in the door.
One of the things that I harp on with sales teams is when somebody brought folks in for a briefing, I could tell before they showed up whether it was going to be a good briefing or not, based on the preparation from the sales team. Some people would go through, “Hey, here’s the team that’s showing up. Here’s their priority. Here’s what this person thinks about what’s going on strategy-wise. Here’s the people that needed to be convinced that our solution is the best.” When we had that conversation, those briefings were typically a home run. Without that, you’re walking in blind. I put that back on the sales person, they might not be the highest level in the room from a seniority standpoint, but it’s their customer. They’re the quarterback of the team. It’s their job to direct resources like myself about, one, what’s the objective of the call? Two, what do you need me to do?
Fred Diamond: Frank Hauck, thanks a lot for being on today’s show. Again, the Business Entrepreneurship Leadership Center, the Hauck Sales Performance Lab at Bryant University. What’s the name of the town where it is?
Frank Hauck: Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Fred Diamond: Do you guys give tours?
Frank Hauck: Absolutely. Yeah.
Fred Diamond: If you’re listening to today’s show, reach out to Frank and you’ll be amazed. It really is, especially for those of you who hire from universities. One of the great things too about judging these competitions is the young adults who are really trying hard, they want to succeed. These are young adults who are going to have great careers. You could see the ones who did a little bit more. In these competitions, a lot of the information that they get is all the same, but someone would come up with a little twist. Then I would go back to the booklet or the data sheets that were given, and no one else will mention this one little data point. You could see those are the young adults who are going to have amazing careers, they’re going to get to the next level. They do the little bit of extra work on the polishing and the presentation.
Frank, you’ve given us a lot of great advice. We like to end every show with one specific action step. Give us one specific thing people should do right now after listening to the show or reading today’s transcript to take their sales career to the next level.
Frank Hauck: Let me share one quick story. I had to do a webcast when I was at NCR, essentially to my sales team kicking off the new year. It was one of those webcasts where they said, “Listen, you have 10 minutes, but we don’t have any editing capabilities. If you have any fillers or ums, you knows, we’re going to have to start all over. Try and get through it without saying anything that we’d have to go back and redo it.”
I go through my 10-minute presentation, and I see the person that’s directing the whole show comes walking up to me and I’m like, “Am I good? Did I do it?” He looks at me, he goes, “Frank, you were good.” I started taking off my mic and he goes, “Wait a second. You didn’t come here to be good. You came here to be great. This time it can be great.”
The one thing I’ll say to salespeople is continue preparation until that call’s going to be great. Whether it be gaming it out, roleplaying it back and forth, preparation drives performance. The better that you can be prepared for that conversation, the more likely you’re going to be successful.
Fred Diamond: Great way to leave us on the show today. Thank you for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. Congratulations on the lab. It’s amazing, and it’s going to definitely change many, many lives. It’s a good for you and for your wife, for taking the initiative and creating that. For all the future students at Bryant and the ones who participate in their competitions, it’ll definitely make an impact on their life. Once again, my name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo