EPISODE 706: Specific Ways to Add Value Selling to Government Customers with Appian Federal Sales Leader Jason Adolf

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Today’s show featured an interview with Jason Adolf, Vice President – Global Public Sector Vertical at Appian.

Find Jason on LinkedIn.

JASON’S TIP:  “For people who sell to the government, shed the COVID mindset. You need to go out, find a trade show, find an industry day, find a networking event, and go register for it and go. Your government customers are coming out. Your partners are going to be there. Washington tends to be a very incestuous community as far as trading people. If you are not out there, somebody else is. Your competitor is out there. If you are not out there, you’re not top of mind.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: Jason, I’m excited to have you on the show. We’ve had a number of Appian sales leaders on the show. Matter of fact, earlier this year we had Dave Dantus, who did a great job talking about some of the sales things that you’re doing to the federal marketplace. Give us a brief introduction. Also, Appian is known for low-code. Tell us what that means. Later on in the show, we’re going to get to some examples of things you’re doing for the public sector specifically.

Jason Adolf: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. As you mentioned, you had Dave Dantus on the call a little while ago. He and I worked very closely together to lead our public sector business. My background was delivery. Before Appian, I’ve been here about eight years, I came from the systems integrator community and did a lot of BD work, kind of classic government BD work. It’s been an interesting transition for me going from what I would consider classic systems integrator BD work to software sales, and in a very different market. I think one of the reasons that I enjoyed the transition was I got marketed to quite a bit and now I get to see what it’s like on the other side. The two of us, we tag team a lot of this stuff. I also support in a matrix to other sales leaders across the globe, managing the global public sector vertical from a functional strategy aspect. We do a lot of BD work.

To your question, so what does low-code mean? This market is really crowded. There are lots of people that are selling low-code everything. Even our friends at the big ERP companies, they like to find something that they can use that terminology to describe how they do something in ERP. Quite simply, it’s a means of building applications. It’s a different method of building applications.

You’ll hear it described in different ways. Some people will use the terminology high-code. High-code being Java, .Net, Python, that kind of stuff. Then you have low-code, which is more COTS with some configuration. Then you’ll hear other vendors talk about no-code, which is literally everything is a click.

The advantage that we’ve seen, and where I think you’re seeing in the federal government, is there’s a really happy medium with low-code where they’re getting the benefits of COTS because we support it. They’re getting the benefits of configurability because that’s what it’s designed to do. Ultimately, you’re getting a lower total cost of ownership because it’s COTS, it’s configurable, and the cost of making changes to the things that you build in low-code is significantly less than if I’m custom built.

I think if you also look at it versus the lower end of the market, the truly no-code end of the market, there’s a lot more flexibility to address what we would consider fairly complex mission needs. I know we’ll talk about use cases and stuff, and we’ll talk about it there, but that to me is what low-code is. It’s, “I’m giving you a bucket of Legos and I’m asking you to build something,” and we give you some cool Legos, we give you the Star Wars Legos, the Ninja Legos, and we give you all that stuff with low-code, but that’s what it is.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned COTS a couple of times. For people who don’t understand that acronym, what does that mean?

Jason Adolf: COTS is commercial off-the-shelf, which means if I was just a consumer, commercial off-the-shelf in the olden days was I would go to Best Buy and I’d buy a copy of Windows or Microsoft Office, and that’s COTS. Or I’d buy Quicken for my small business. That was COTS. The government and our customers buy two different things. Some they buy packaged applications. I need an HR product, there are plenty of HR products I could go and buy. There are things that many, specifically our government customers, only that agency would do. We do a lot of work with the FDA and only they approve drugs, and so there is no COTS package for that.

The next best thing for them is, how can I get some of the benefits of that packaging? Things that have been tested, there’s a foundation that’s tested, but also configure it to do something that only they would do. That’s where I think there’s that difference. But the government wants COTS, but needs configuration, let’s put it that way.

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, you mentioned that you came from the systems integrator world as a BD. The Institute for Excellence in Sales, when we created it, was originally called the Institute for Excellence in Sales and Business Development, which is why our website is still i4esbd, to have that BD. But we made a shift in 2015 when most of the community we were servicing was typically in sales, like you said, B2B, B2G, software, technology, hospitality sales, whatever it might be.

That being said, let’s talk about the state of sales right now. How are things going? We’re doing today’s interview in the middle of September, and you mentioned public sector. The end of the federal fiscal year is approaching, September 30th. We’ve covered that a lot on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Give us a state of the union for where you are with sales.

Jason Adolf: You are absolutely right. We would call it silly season over here in September in Washington. What’s interesting when you sell to the federal government is it’s fiscal-year-dependent. It’s also budget-dependent. What we mean when I say budget-dependent is when the government’s not shut down, there are different ways the government is funded. Sometimes we operate under what’s called a continuing resolution, which means that new projects can’t start, but I can continue to spend money on things that I’ve spent money on in the past.

Where we have customers that have been long time customers, we can continue to expand business there. But this year we had a CR that went almost all the way into, I think, March or April. What that meant was the government had all this money that got dumped in their lap with basically six months to spend it. That compresses the timeframe into wait till the last minute. I think a lot of people who come from the commercial side and see what we do don’t quite grasp that if they don’t spend it in September, it goes away. The September Q3 is the Super Bowl of selling to the government. We’re in the thick of it. We have been having some pretty monster years in our public sector business.

As a share of Appian’s revenue, it’s grown significantly. I think the level of sophistication that we’ve created internally around selling has been different. But the market is very competitive in this space right now. I would tell you that we’re a little bit of David and Goliath. Our principal competitors are Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft, and their market caps are a gazillion dollars more than ours. We’ve had to be very nimble. We’ve had to be very focused, and when I mean focused, not just focused on a niche but focused on certain customers and certain use cases. That’s what has allowed us to compete with those Goliaths, which is wild.

Fred Diamond: You made a great point about it being the Super Bowl. People have described it as the NFL, et cetera. For people who don’t know much about the federal government, it’s the largest marketplace in the world. You have Department of Defense, you have civilian agencies, of course you have special agencies. How do you develop a sales strategy? Because like I said, there’s no such thing as the federal government. There’s all these pieces of it, and you can’t have the same strategy, even though you’re right, the budgeting process and the spending process are similar in many ways. But how do you develop an overall strategy selling to a humongous market like this?

Jason Adolf: There’s a couple of dimensions. The first dimension is simply coverage, is, does Appian want to cover all of the agencies in the government? Most vendors of a certain size would say, “Yes, we do want to cover all the cabinet level agencies and their peculiarities.” The second is, are they buying what we’re selling? It’s been interesting for Appian, because I could build you one of anything, but that doesn’t mean you believe that I could build you one of everything. What’s happened with us over the last couple years is we’ve started to self-select into certain categories of applications.

I would tell you right off the bat, and this is fairly broad, but if you are an agency and you have a one-off that you need to do, you’re the only one that’s going to build it, in low-code, that’s been one of our specialties. But we would also tell you that we have a huge business around procurement and acquisition monetization, so people buy those types of systems for us. We said, “Okay, let’s lean in there and let’s look for agencies that we know are going to be buying or replacing those systems in the future.” For those maybe uneducated, the government does somewhat telegraph what they’re going to buy. That’s the whole point. They have to budget for it, they appropriate for it. We can see that.

Then we look at the product strengths. Well, the product strength is case management. That’s what it does. When you look at it, we’ve segmented to say, we’re going to pursue what used to be custom-coded applications that are due for modernization. We’re going to pursue acquisition and procurement, we have some out-of-the-box, more turnkey solutions for that, and we’re going to pursue things that look and smell like case management, because that’s what the product does. Therefore, from a competitive standpoint, if we’re smart and we can get ahead of deals, people will see that in those sales cycles. You layer that dimension with can we be competitive given cabinet agencies? That’s what drives the strategy. That’s how you cover the feds.

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in September and it’s the end of the federal fiscal year coming up. If you’re going to start making your sales process today, the sales process in the marketplace, for the federal, it’s sometimes years ago. I like the way you just explained that sometimes you need to bring the idea to the customer to understand what they can do. What people don’t also understand too is that the federal government as a customer is doing a lot of great things. There’s a lot of demands on what they’re supposed to do. Obviously, they’re protecting citizens, first and foremost, and they’re also providing value to citizens, making roads easier, health and human services, food, things along those lines. That’s why all these big companies are in this marketplace. It’s a great thing.

As a matter of fact, I’m doing today’s interview in Northern Virginia. You’re not too far from me. Microsoft’s public sector headquarters, Oracle’s public sector headquarters.Tell me about you, tell us about your leadership approach. Give me your top two or three leadership concepts that Jason Adolf goes about every day as a sales leader.

Jason Adolf: I started reading a little bit up, as I was seeing it all over LinkedIn, around servant leadership. I think if I was to categorize how I operate, I want other people to succeed. Like I said, we’re on a sales podcast. The way I get comped is by other people succeeding. I’m not a commissioned sales rep. I’m not an account executive. I have an OTE plan where the more people that succeed, the better I do. From a leadership perspective, I take a very hands-on approach. Not from a micromanaging perspective, but I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.

What I typically tell people is when salespeople are very binary in how they go to market, if you’re not adding value in their sales cycle, you are not coming to meet their customer, you are not involved in their deal. I’m a firm believer that if I can add value, no matter how minuscule the task, then people will trust me, they’ll rely on me, and they’ll believe me when I say I’m going to do something. I take that mantra to how I lead people, which is there’s no task that is beneath the role that I play. I am in the trenches alongside the team because if they win, I win. We celebrate others’ successes. We are very collaborative and constructive. I don’t like to punish people because they tried something that didn’t work. To me, if you’re not willing to walk the walk, write a lot of proposals and write a lot of proposals, then you are just not going to have the influence, and people will follow people they believe in.

Fred Diamond: We talk all the time about providing value, and the essence of sales is creating value for the customer. You used the expression even minuscule. Give me an example of a minuscule value add that a sales professional in the public sector space can offer his government customer.

Jason Adolf: We’re in the consultative sales business, and if you looked across our portfolio of the things that we build, they are high complexity, mission critical things for these agencies. You brought it up a couple minutes ago. One thing that I don’t think a lot of people who either sell to commercial businesses understand is, what you’re selling might be life or death for that company. Sometimes what we’re selling are actually just life and death. It could be the difference of you getting a benefit, you getting the disability benefits that you need to put food on your table. Or if something fails, our soldiers are exposed in a war zone. You see that.

The way that we talk about delivering value through our salespeople is by actually consulting our customers through the sale and hopefully providing a forum to draw out ideas. Because I’ll tell you this, what’s interesting about what we sell is we sell to a lot of, and I’m going to use this term very loosely, undereducated customers, because they’ve never bought this type of thing before. A lot of these government systems could be 20 years old, 15 years old. The people that built them or bought them do not exist in those organizations anymore. You’re going into a sales cycle where your customer may have never bought enterprise software before. How do they know what to do?

You and I would go and say, “I know how to buy a car. I’ve bought a car before, so I know what to expect.” You might never have bought a commercial office building, so how would you know what to do? Our salespeople, because our customers are mission owners, need to help guide them to know what to do to make an educated decision. We want them to make an educated decision in our favor, but if we don’t tell them and help them with the steps, those are not things that we’re charging them for, but if we do a good job of it, the outcome tends to favor us.

Fred Diamond: We’ve heard many people in sales have thrown around the term that, the Challenger said that, the customer is 57% down the path before they even approach a salesperson or “take a call”. Gartner, I believe, recently said it’s as high as 70%. But as sales professionals, and I like the way you answered that question, a lot of us are selling things that the customer doesn’t really have exposure to. They’re not 57% down. They’re further down the path without even thinking about what you do. So many technology companies offer so many amazing things. The customer may be thinking about them from 15 years ago, if they’re still around.

How do you coach your salespeople to get in there and to make that opportunity happen when it’s getting harder and harder to get the customer’s attention, even if we’re in good stead with them?

Jason Adolf: That’s a fantastic question. The people that are good at doing that are the ones who make the most money in federal sales. There are typically indicators that an agency is going to do something well in advance of them doing it. You could go through and look at things that are formal. They put in Exhibit 300, which is their, “I’m telling Congress that I need to have this requirement and give me money.” That could be a tell a year in advance, 18 months in advance, but they had to be thinking about doing this a year before they submit that document.

The question is, are you going to industry trade events? Are you listening to the presentations that senior leaders are making about initiatives? Most agencies put together a multi-year strategic plan that may have initiatives that won’t get funded for years, but there’s some nugget in there about, we’re going to change this, we’re going to improve this, we’re going to do this. Somebody looking at that says, “They’re telling us that they’re going to make a change.” Who owns that change? How do I get to that person?

The name of the game, I think, in this area is, how do I connect the initiative to the mission owner and influence that when they’re trying to figure out what’s the approach? Because you were correct, a lot of times when these RFIs come out and stuff, they picked an approach. They might have said, “We’re going to do this in low-code.” It’s totally different sale at that point, because then we’re trying to say, “How do I steer them towards my low-code?” You’re getting out of features and functions and into they’re buying past performance, they’re buying qualifications, they trust you. We’ve got to build that trust really early on. That advisory consultation, meeting that mission owner before the acquisition strategy’s been determined, that’s 60%, 70% of the battle in our game.

Fred Diamond: We’ve interviewed people who have been in the same job in sales, they’ve progressed for 30 years, selling to the same entity. They’re selling a lot of times to the same people, but they’re deeply entrenched. The federal marketplace is one of those markets where that can definitely happen. Because the government’s been around since 1776, or whatever, but the whole technology side, it’s been around for years.

I wasn’t going to ask you this question, but as we’re talking about this, what got you into the federal space? I know you mentioned that you moved from a BD systems integrator role. A lot of times I’ll talk to people who have devoted their entire career selling to the federal marketplace. What is it about this market that has guided you to devote your entire career to it?

Jason Adolf: Interesting story. You and I are talking about the 2000s timeframe. Well, I was a finance major and I actually interned at an internet trade association in the late ‘90s. In the late ‘90s in college, everybody thinks, “I’m going to leave college and I’m going to get a BMW, I’m going to be a millionaire straight out of college.” I graduated in December of 2000. A month later, the whole internet bubble burst. I think I was unemployed for 8 of 12 months. I actually collected unemployment. I did somewhere in the avenue of 64 job interviews. Interestingly enough, the day after Christmas, I was offered a job at SRA International, one of the big old school systems integrators, now part of GDIT, and I became an executive assistant at SRA. That’s how I got into federal contracting.

You know this as well, the economy’s been fairly stable in Washington for people that do government business. We’ve weathered every recession, we’ve weathered sequestration. You look around and you say, “Okay, you can make good money doing work for the federal government.” You mentioned they’re one of the largest buying markets, if not the biggest buying market in the world. There’s an art to selling to the government. I was fortunate to do delivery work first, understand how projects are delivered. Then I had a lot of good mentors at SRA and then at Serco, and did a lot of classic BD work. I said, “You know what? I like talking about this stuff and I’m good at this,” and that’s how I ended up truly on the sales team. That’s how I ended up here.

Fred Diamond: I started my career at Apple Computer, and this was in the mid to late ‘80s. I was in Apple’s public federal group and I went on a sales call, this would’ve been late 1989, I think. We went into Downtown DC, and the guy who’s had 20 years’ experience at Xerox, he might have been at IBM as well, we got out of his car in Downtown DC near the National Mall. He said, “Take a look around at all these buildings. They’re never going to tear down these buildings. This marketplace will be here for all perpetuity. This is a marketplace to pursue your career.”

Before I ask you for your final action step, give us an example of maybe how a public sector customer or an agency, maybe using low-code specifically, if you’re willing, to bring some value to what they’re trying to do.

Jason Adolf: We are fortunate to do a lot of things that touch every American. We do a lot of work with the Food and Drug Administration. They’re using our software to manage the regulatory process for things like veterinary medicine, food additives, drugs, infant formula. When you consume those products, they have gone through a regulatory approval process that was managed in Appian. That would be an example.

In defense, we’re the Department of Defense standard now for acquisition. The things that they buy, they buy through Appian. We’re talking about buying tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars of things through using our software to manage those processes. We do a lot of work in grants. All public transportation grants go through Appian into the Federal Transit Administration. You see these large-scale mission type systems, we do banking supervision, we do all sorts of cases. We work part of the Affordable Care Act helping people get insurance. We do disability claims with the program at the VA. You see a lot of these different mission type systems that are complicated to sell, but they are rewarding to see the benefit that they provide.

Fred Diamond: Jason, I want to acknowledge you and thank you for being on the show, for all the great insight you’ve provided today. Give us a specific action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas. Give us something that you recommend people do right now to take their sales career to the next level.

Jason Adolf: For the folks that are selling to government, we got to shed the COVID mindset. You need to go out, find a trade show, find an industry day, find a networking event, and go register for it and go. Your government customers are coming out. Your partners are going to be there. You may make friends with salespeople. Washington tends to be a very incestuous community as far as trading people. If you are not out there, somebody else is. Your competitor is out there. If you are not out there, you’re not top of mind. That would be the action step.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. We’re doing today’s interview in September of 2024. We’ve talked many, many times on the Sales Game Changers Podcast about coming out of the last four years and what people should be doing. I think that’s great advice. As a matter of fact, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we do our Big Stage events at the Carahsoft Conference and Collaboration Center in Reston. Go check our website. Every month we’re doing programs. You got to get out there people. You can’t be doing the type of stuff that you need to do to influence the customer, you can’t do that over Zoom anymore. You can’t do it via email. You can do things from home and over Zoom, of course, but you got to be with them. You got to be with the customer. You got to be creating opportunities to get your message across for what you do.

Jason, thanks again for the great insights. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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