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EPISODE 158: CrowdStrike Public Sector’s James Yeager Struck Gold When He Applied This Approach to Sales Performance
JAMES’ FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Make sure that the individuals that are in your organization know that you’re invested in their success. This is a people business so start first by hiring the right people, make sure that they’re trained, give them the tools they need to compete and win. Then empower them and support them with everything you’ve got.”
James Yeager is the VP of Public Sector and Healthcare at CrowdStrike.
Prior to coming to CrowdStrike, he held sales leadership positions at Tanium, McAfee and Oracle.
Find James on LinkedIn!
James Yeager: CrowdStrike is an endpoint security company and we have a very versatile cloud platform that offers a variety of endpoint security capabilities to our customers. We also provide threat intelligence based services as well as both proactive and reactive professional services to meet this arena’s demands.
Fred Diamond: Who is the customer that your team is selling to?
James Yeager: That’s a good question because public sector can vary from organization to organization. For us at CrowdStrike, public sector consists of the federal government, it consists of SLED or State, Local and Higher Education and then healthcare. In the healthcare realm of matters it’s really just the provider side of the house. Think any institution that has a bed.
Fred Diamond: Who typically do you sell to? Who are you trying to reach?
James Yeager: Security and the requirements for who needs security certainly can change but I would say Chief Information Security Officers or CISO’s, we certainly have some compelling value statements for Chief Information Officers, security operation centers and analysts and operators who have their hands on the keyboards dealing with security threats on a day to day basis.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about your career, how did you first get into sales as a career?
James Yeager: Believe it or not, right out of college I was a high school teacher and while I enjoyed that a great deal, I quickly transitioned into sales for reasons that the audience probably wouldn’t care for. I wasn’t making any money and all my friends were doing sales, I figured I’d give it a shot. Initially I was doing what a lot of people were doing here in the area which is IP, telecommunications working for companies like Savvis and WorldCom and I immediately fell in love with it.
I knew that sales was something that I was destined for and I think during the first few years I developed a really good rhythm and feel for it. I eventually entered what I consider my first real sales job where it became real to me, that was at Oracle. That’s where I began to learn how to combine the art of sales, if you will, with the science and techniques of sales that I learned at the likes of Savvis and WorldCom. That’s where it really became fun for me, too.
Fred Diamond: We’ve had a lot of great sales leaders who came from Oracle on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we interviewed Mark Testoni, Ron Police, Tamara Greenspan. Oracle is one of the classic, world-class sales organizations in the tech history. What are some of the things that you learned when you made that transition from teaching high school to working for one of the biggest names in the history of technology?
James Yeager: There’s no doubt I would concur with you, great leaders, great corporate fabric. I learned a ton when I was at Oracle, I think initially what stands out to me was the need to be professionally patient. If you think about it, sales is a profession where you’re going to hear the word no entirely more frequently than you’re going to hear the word yes. I think Oracle does a good job of teaching people the basics, a lot of the fundamentals and the blocking and tackling. If you can develop repetitions and behavior for how you’re going to achieve your goals, Oracle is a good place to do that, a lot of people have learned it from other places.
Also, being persistent and persistence is tricky because persistence could be misinterpreted. You can be a nuisance, you can really turn people off so finding how to be patient but also have that stick-to-it-iveness – I learned that at Oracle quite a bit as well. This is a performance based business, so the demands on you are always very high. I think the other two things that I would say I learned when I was at Oracle – and I learned this just by force of habit but I also had a number of great people teaching me – was planning, the need to plan, the need to establish goals and more specifically writing these things down.
It’s not enough to have a plan in your head, it’s not enough to have goals in your head. I’m a firm believer that if you don’t write them down, you’re not always going to be reminded by them, they’re not always going to be staring you in the face. When you have your down days, when you’re not feeling well, when you’ve heard that no word way more than you’ve heard yes, you need those plans to remind you to get back on track and stay focused.
Fred Diamond: We’ve spoken, again, to some of the leadership come from the Oracle world and the ERP world and applications world, if you will and in some cases selling to the government public sector could take years. Hence the professionally patient, but how long is a sale cycle for something like what you’re selling now? Security, is it a much quicker sale because of the urgent need or is it still, because of the customer, a drawn-out, long term process?
James Yeager: I would say it’s definitely more drawn-out. Your mileage can vary, there certainly are sale cycles that can be much more rapid. Take for example someone who’s suffering from a security incident or two that’s blown up into a breach, they tend to get their hands on money a heck of a lot quicker and they tend to have the ability to cut through some of the bureaucracy and the red tape to actually get through an acquisition process with more expediency. For the most part – and I say this as a term of endearment because it is what it is, it’s the only segment of the business that I’ve ever sold to in my career – the government is going to go at their own pace.
There’s really not a whole lot about it that’s fast, but you have to just stick through it and be very process-oriented and be patient. If you’ve done what you need to do as a sales professional which is demonstrate value and establish the strong relationship with your buyer, then things tend to work out.
Fred Diamond: We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe all over the world, people listen to the podcast. Many of them aren’t familiar with the federal sales marketplace that you just alluded to and you mentioned, James Yeager that your whole career has been in this space. What is it about this market that you have devoted your career to? Why the public sector, why federal?
James Yeager: That’s a good question and one I get quite frequently. I’ve been accused of being a glutton for punishment, quite frankly. I think for me, it’s an appreciation for what their pains are and what some of their challenges are. I remember when I was at Oracle and when I moved from selling the core technology and data base in the middleware parts of their product family to the ERP and application side of the house, I picked it up so quickly because I was talking to prospective buyers who were describing some pain and suffering and challenges that they were contending with on a day to day basis relative to citizen service. How is it that it can take so long to get a permit or a license? How is it that it’s so difficult for me to manage my partners and my suppliers and supply chain? You can very easily put yourself in those shoes and you can relate to the conversation and it makes you more relatable to the customer.
Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us specifically what you’re an expert in? Tell us a little more about your area of brilliance.
James Yeager: An expert? I would say nothing, absolutely nothing. I’m sure you’d want to hear something more graceful than that but for me, it’s an ongoing process trying to learn and develop.
It’s a part of my profession and my career that I commit to that I really enjoy learning, evolving, growing. I do a ton of introspection, I spend a lot of time with my team and my peers trying to get peer reviews and peer recommendation, I get a lot of great coaching internally and externally. An expert in any one thing, I would say no, an expert in nothing. If you had to pin me down and say, “What is your area of strength?” I would probably say it’s in the arena of building teams and establishing, building and fostering culture. I’ve been very blessed, very fortunate in my career and I’ve had the luxury of having a number of the people that have worked for me, including folks that work for me today, work for me at multiple jobs.
To me, that’s a sign that I’ve done a few things well and it’s a reminder that if you treat people well and if you establish the right conditions and build the right culture, people will look at this as not a job, not a work place. I always make a comment, if someone hates Sundays and if the dread Mondays, then you’re not enjoying your job. All kinds of problems and challenges start to seep into the environment, then that starts to put some of your personal and professional relationships in harm’s way and then you’ve got a much bigger issue on your hand. To me, it all starts with culture.
Fred Diamond: You’ve worked for some great people, you’ve worked for some great names. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?
James Yeager: I’d isolate two, probably. The first one would be someone that a lot of your listeners are probably very familiar with and her name is Cam. Cam is short for Carrie-Anne Mosley and Carrie-Anne was my first manager at Oracle. She was the one that gave me my first opportunity to be the leader of people and there’s just such a special place for Cam in my heart. I saying that knowing that I don’t keep in touch with her as well as I should, she’s going to listen to this and call my bluff. I think what I learned from Cam was to trust my instincts. She taught me that I belonged in the position, that I earned the position, and she taught me to have confidence and again, just to treat people with fairness and kindness and that what I had done to get me into that role had me well-positioned to thrive in that role.
If I had to pick another person, it would be my current boss today, Mike Carpenter who’s the President of Global Sales and Field Operations at CrowdStrike, I’ve worked for Mike for the last 12 years at both Tanium and McAfee. Where do I start with Mike? I’m amazed by how he gets so much done. When you get to that level, the responsibility is enormous. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into being effective in that assignment.
For Mike, it’s about how he gets people to collaborate and there’s a lot of dysfunction in these organizations. It doesn’t mean the company is bad, but there’s a lot of disruption, a lot of dysfunction and Mike has a very uncanny way of bringing people together. He’s honest, he’s fair but he’s a straight-lined guy and he gets people to communicate and collaborate, he’s able to put some of these issues that can be a distraction for production aside and get to resolution very quickly. The other thing that he’s taught me – and this is I think his biggest area of strength – is he’s very operationally sound. He’s got a very unique way of learning about the business, understanding what makes it tick, has a great pulse for what adjustments need to be made about the business.
This is an area where I continue to grow each day, each week. When I first started running sales teams I didn’t know how to analyze my business aside from reading report and looking at what I call the stoplight chart. “This is green so it’s working, this is red so it’s not working.” There’s a lot of mystery and intrigue behind those numbers and behind that data and you really have to peel it back and get into it. Again, that’s what I think gets sales organizations to be highly performing ones is when you can really understand what’s going on underneath the hood. Mike has taught me a great deal and I continue to learn a great deal from him about how to be operationally sound.
Fred Diamond: Along the lines of that, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?
James Yeager: When I got here to Crowd Strike, I was charged with building public sector up from ground zero. When I got here, literally there were no dedicated resources to public sector. We have been in business for many years and in all other vertical segments of our sales organization we were thriving, if you will but there just hadn’t been an investment in the public sector. While I’ve enjoyed literally every single minute of it, I love it here, I love the people and I love what we do, how we do it, why we do it, it has not been without its challenges.
It’s tough to be patient, that patience I talked about, it’s tough to be patient and to find the right comfort and balance between the demands that you impose upon yourself. You’ve got such sustained track record and history of being successful and not having to wait for results while also having a leadership team, an executive team that expects results in a highly performing and rapidly growing business unit. Especially when they know that there’s big dollars out there to be spent in federal and there’s big contracts to be won, so it’s been challenging working through that.
It’s not for the faint of heart, I can tell you, again it’s been a challenge for me but one that I’ve really enjoyed. The other thing that I would say – and these two are very much interconnected, Fred – is keeping your people happy. I talked about culture, one of the first things that I did when I got here is I built out a staff, that team was very lean in the first year but the team was also very talented, very tenured. What typically happens when you’ve got really tenured, really experienced people who have had a lot of success, that also means that these are individuals that are accustomed to earning at a high level, they’ve got personal demands and personal expectations, they’ve got standards of living that they’ve got to adhere to and conform to and maintain.
Keeping them happy, getting them to trust the process, getting them to buy in and make sure we’re going to build this, we’re going to build it the right way, we’re going to build it in a methodical way but that we’re doing all the right things. Again, a lot of that comes down to culture, it comes down to being upfront with your communication and if you can get people to buy into what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, then they’re willing to make sacrifices. I think we’ve been able to do that here.
Fred Diamond: Take us back to the #1 specific sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?
James Yeager: It’s probably hard to pick one. As I said earlier, I’ve been very fortunate but I would have to say roughly 10 years ago when I was at McAfee. I took on at that time what was the biggest challenge of my career which is running the federal civilian business. I inherited a team that was performing well but it was still a part of the business that was relatively flat and not growing at the same rate as other business units. There were a ton of reasons for that, but there was some pressure from day 1 and I think contributing to some of those high expectations was the idea that I was walking into a relatively sizable opportunity with one of the government’s most high profile agencies.
It was just a massive opportunity, an 8-figure opportunity and there was this misconception that the deal was already done and I was walking into it. I quickly found out that that was far from true, so not only was the deal not big but we really had a ton of selling left to do. It took a few quarters, but we finally closed what ended up being a $15 million dollar deal, it’s a deal that was really a catalyst for that organization, McAfee’s federal civilian unit but also for that particular agency and what they would do in the years to come.
Even though the deal was never really close when I stepped in the role, again there was that perception that we were going to potentially lose it on my watch if it didn’t happen. For me personally it was a moment of arrival, it was a moment of arrival for our team and it was also a validation point that a guy that came in and no one really knew and no one had worked for before, that I could contribute in that value. We all know that all of these deals have fingerprints from a lot of individuals all over them but I was materially involved in the deal. I was a sales guy at heart and I rolled up my sleeves with the team. For me, I think it was eye-opening to them like, “This guy can help us, he wants to help us, he’s willing to get in the trenches and see this thing through.” That was very impactful for me.
Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. You brought up the word “value” a number of times and value comes up all the time through the Sales Game Changers podcast, especially now it’s more imperative that sales professionals bring value. In the security world, what type of value do you bring? What are some things that you can offer to your customer besides the tool and the solution that CrowdStrike is bringing to the marketplace? What might be some value things that your customers would accept from you as a sales professional or someone who’s selling what you sell?
James Yeager: One of the things I think I do personally is I bring compassion and understanding to the table. I take great pride in being informed when I go into meetings and doing research. I’ve got a great team that I’m surrounded by that equips me with information so that I know what I’m talking about, I know my audience. I think that’s essential when you’re sitting across the table from someone because they get called on by tens, hundreds of people every day, everyone wants their time and they’ve got choices, they’re going to be selective. If you get in there and you prove to them that you understand what’s important to them, I think you’re adding a media value.
As a company, CrowdStrike has a ton of different value propositions. In the public sector specifically we’re seeing challenges with relatively massive organizations, highly complex organizational structures and with that, becomes a lot of brick and mortar infrastructure, becomes challenges with scale. How do we empower technology in cyber in particular to be effective in an organization that’s very monolithic and built on some very archaic technology principles? We bring speed to the table, we bring scale to the table and we bring a wide variety of subject matter expertise here at CrowdStrike. On our executive team we’ve got a lot of individuals who have grown up in the beltway, a lot of people that have committed their careers prior to CrowdStrike to public service. We’re showing our customers that their concerns, their problem sets that they’re trying to solve or their challenges are not only paramount to us but we can relate to them and we can build solutions that are engineered to address their specific needs.
We don’t take a “one size fits all” approach here, there’s a lot of commercial based technology that can be leveraged and should be leveraged in public sector. We’re building, I would say, segment-specific, vertical-specific solutions and tailoring out messaging directly to them so that we can help differentiate ourselves from some of the noise that they’re hearing on a day to day basis.
Fred Diamond: Again, you started off in sales relatively quickly, you were a high school teacher for a little bit after you graduated from college. Did you ever question being in sales? James, did you ever say to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?
James Yeager: This is an easy one, no, not really and I don’t say that to be arrogant. Sales is a game of ups and downs for sure but the one thing I always try to do is remain neutral emotionally. Don’t get too excited about the highs, that can lead to complacency. Don’t get too down when things aren’t going well and instead trust your process, trust your belief system. For me, it’s never been about whether or not sales is for me, it’s been about how can I stay poised and focused when things are not going well.
Again, in a leadership position this is incredibly essential, I can’t allow my team to see me discouraged, they’re looking at me always observing, listening. I just mentioned how we’re building something from the ground up, they can’t see me wavering, they can’t see me frustrated and sometimes I’ve got to put on a show a little bit. At my core, it’s about believing that we’re doing things the right way, that we’re believing in our cause, that we’re believing that we can help our customers so no. I love this profession and I’ve never questioned it once.
Fred Diamond: James, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors I just want to ask you one other question. You brought up the term “professionally patient.” That is something that you learned when you were at Oracle and of course the sale cycles were longer and you’re 20 years into your career now. Times have changed, people want immediate gratification, a lot of people are now working on inside sales so it’s so hard to get somebody on the phone that when you get somebody on the phone sometimes you think you’re halfway to the sale when you and I both know you’re probably not even at the first percentage, if you will. How do you instruct some of the younger people that are working on your team or that you come across that you need that professional patience?
James Yeager: I think what we’re doing right now is one way, giving them an opportunity to hear from people that have sat in their chair, that have walked in their proverbial shoes giving them mentorship. I was just down in Austin, for example, we’ve got an inside sales organization and sales development organization down there in Austin and quite a bit of individuals that support my public sector org and I spent quite a bit of time with them. I started out in inside sales, I know what it feels like, I know how painful it can be, I know how frustrating it can be to go home every night and be like, “I don’t know if I got anything done today.” It’s about telling your stories, it’s about having empathy but I think also it’s just having some of those discussions around where you want to go.
Everyone wants to be promoted, everyone wants to go from inside sales to go to the field, people want to be directors or managers, directors and managers want to be VP’s. I wanted to be a VP early on in my career because I thought it would be really nice to be a VP, and I had someone ask me the question, “Why do you want to be a VP?” I didn’t have a good answer for that. When I took a step back it was like, “Maybe I wanted the title, maybe I wanted the money that came with the title, maybe it was both.” I did not really have a good answer for it and when we flushed that out it was like, “It will happen, you’ve got to put in your time and you’ve got to do your thing.”
You’ve got to perform and when you do that, people around you will notice, and those that care about you and have your best interest in mind will do the right things for you but it all starts with what you do on a daily basis. The best thing about this profession is we control, in large part, our success. The more effort you put in on the front side, the more likely it is that you’re going to get something out on the other side of the equation, so I love that.
Fred Diamond: James, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the junior selling professionals listening around the globe to help them take their career to the next level?
James Yeager: I would say the development and the curation of messaging, the delivery of your message. I always tell folks, “Learn to talk about business outcomes. Focus on how what you’re selling can produce a positive or desired business outcome for your prospect, how your positioning can help them solve some of their problems.” You have to look at the customer’s business, you have to learn what their objectives are, understand what their challenges are, what they’re faced with, what they’re trying to achieve and then you have to work backwards. Features and capabilities are important always, but salespeople spend far too much time, in my opinion, talking about that. It’s mostly noise to the end-user, so you have to think about the customer, the prospect and I mentioned it earlier, think about how often they’re getting pitched.
The reality is that everyone is trained to say the same things. A couple weeks ago we were a lot of us in the security business and IT business, we’re out in San Francisco in RSA and everyone’s saying the same thing. “It’s artificial intelligence, it’s machine learning, it’s platform” and again, it’s really just noise and everyone’s plagiarizing off one another. Frankly, they’re saying what they think they need to say, what they think the audience wants them to say, what they want to hear. You’ve got to get their attention in another way, you’ve got to talk to them about how you can make their job easier, how they can become more efficient, how they can accomplish more with less resources. Whatever the value proposition, whatever the problem statement is, focus on the outcome, study your audience, understand what challenges they’re contending with, start with the outcome in mind and work yourself backwards and continually hone and curate that message.
Fred Diamond: What are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?
James Yeager: Great question. I would say for one, as I said earlier about learning when you asked me about what am I an expert in and I said nothing, so it’s about training yourself to always want to be better. I’ve got so much to do, Fred, in order for me to get where I need to be. Humility is a lost virtue in many ways, there’s a lot of different ideas, I would say. Don’t be intimidated by other people’s success, surround yourself by good people, find someone that is highly successful and be a sponge. Listen to them, ask them questions, pick their brains, a lot of people say to read and then they say read some more. I’d be lying to you if I said that’s something I do, I’m just not a big reader.
I do watch a ton of videos, social media, Ted Talks, there’s a lot of polarizing personalities that I follow, Gary Vaynerchuk, Simon Sinek. I’m trying to soak in as much knowledge, as much information as I possibly can from others because it would be foolish and unwise for me to suggest that I’ve got it all figured out, that I see all the angles. Am I trying to take someone else’s philosophy, someone else’s ideas and completely steal them? No, I may steal pieces of it or borrow but really it’s about finding my way and finding my form of success. Part of that I will get organically just based on instincts and things that I know have worked for me but you have to always evolve and be sharp like you said. Go get some of those other ideas and figure out what other people have done to be successful and don’t be shy to take advantage of it.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, don’t be intimidated by other people’s success. Basically for the Sales Game Changer listening, we’ve done about 180 episodes of the Sales Game Changers podcast, we put the contact information for everybody, we’ll do the contact information for James. Reach out to the people that you hear on the Sales Game Changers podcast, people are just a LinkedIn profile away especially based on the two stories that you told us about Carrie-Anne and Mike Carpenter, your two mentors and how helpful they were to you. People out there listening, don’t be afraid to reach out to people, ask questions and get that advice. James, what’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?
James Yeager: One of my major initiatives today at CrowdStrike is focused around the acceleration of rep production or maybe stated in other way, decreasing rep ramp time. When I first got here, I mentioned there weren’t any dedicated resources, I quickly built out a team and now with direct and indirect resources we have nearly a hundred people supporting public sector. That is difficult, it’s difficult to get all those pieces moving in the same direction, get them functioning in an optimal way.
The last two companies that I’ve worked at have been in the innovative and disruptive technology space in CrowdStrike and Tanium and I’ve been fortunate to work at those two companies but growth capacity increases. All those things equal targets and expectation so the faster that you can get your team on-boarded, get them tuned, get them to turn the corner, the quicker the results come in and good things come from there.
Part of how I get there and what we’re working on goes back to some of the comments I made when I was talking about Mike Carpenter and how operationally sound he is. I have a sales operations guy that’s my wingman and very essential to everything we do in our business. We live in data to the point where sometimes our eyes are bleeding, frankly, in how we can make sense of the data. We’re looking at so many different moving pieces of the organization to figure out what can we do to more optimize something that’s working well, what can we do to eliminate some friction in the business. I spent a lot of time doing skip levels, I did some this morning before you got here talking to the field. “What tools do you need? What resources do you lack and what would the business case be if I went and invested in that for you or acquired that tool or brought a new resource in to the business? What would that do, how would that accelerate your ability to produce at a rapid clip?” That’s a big strategic imperative for me today.
Fred Diamond: James, sales is hard people don’t return your phone calls or your emails. We talked before about one of the challenges with messaging and every company, even in your space, sounds the same if you will. The customer is listening a certain way, you just mentioned this before a couple times, the customer has so many demands on them internally and yet tons of vendors are trying to reach out to them as well. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going? I get your passion for it, I get your passion for learning and introspective and bringing value but tell us a little more about why sales as a career has kept you going.
James Yeager: I think that’s a pretty common question to people like myself. To flip it around, it’s a question that I ask during the interviews, it’s how I flush out whether or not someone that’s going to come work for me is the right fit because the answer that they give me tells them in large part whether or not I want to continue the conversation. Maybe not necessarily whether I want to hire them out, because everyone’s got a different way to get it done and for the most part you’ll hear, “Money” or, “I like working with people” and those could be very genuine and authentic answers but to me, that’s equal parts nonsense. Those are natural byproducts or benefits for when you do this job well what you can achieve and it shouldn’t be why we do this, in my opinion. For me, this is very simple, it’s about competing and it’s about the desire and the unrelenting motive to win.
The sense of accomplishment that you get when you have a highly productive conversation, when you move the ball down the field in the sales engagement and to me, it’s about winning. It’s not about getting someone to spend their money with me. Is that necessary in order for me to achieve success? Of course. Are there financial benefits for those of us who can do that more than others? Of course, but for me it’s about competing and winning and there’s so much to this, we don’t have enough time to talk about it. That could be an entirely different segment but it’s competing internally, it’s competing with yourself, it’s competing with your industry competitors, it’s competing with the prospect for how you’re going to command more of their attention and more of their time.
All of these are individual competitions that you have to be set out and destined to win, and the result of winning and that sense of accomplishment that you get – even with the small wins, not the big win which is the deal closing, the $15 million deal with the federal government – it’s about all those wins and all those competitions. That’s why I do it, that’s why I love it and that’s why I’ve never gotten frustrated and lost faith in the profession.
Fred Diamond: Nothing wrong with that. Are you competitive in most aspects of your life as well?
James Yeager: I think if you asked anybody that knows me well, they’d say yes. If you asked my kids, if you asked my wife, they might say too competitive at times. I can park it when I need to and it’s an interesting question because sometimes that competitive nature can come off as edgy so you’ve got to be able to temper it but use it as fuel is what I try and do.
Fred Diamond: James, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire them today?
James Yeager: As a leader, I would say it’s about being real with your team, being direct, showing compassion, showing them that you care, working for them. You’ll hear me talk internally about “us” and “we” and you’ll hear me talk about “so and so doesn’t work for me”, I say, “I work with so and so.” Make sure that the individuals that are in your organization know that you’re invested in their success, there are a ton of X’s and O’s in this business, that’s for sure. Strategy, absolutely, tactical movements and shifts, naturally but at the end of the day this is a people business so start first by hiring the right people, make sure that they’re trained, give them the tools they need to compete, win, power them and then support them with everything you’ve got.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez