The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Register for the September 13 Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference here.
Register for the IES Women in Sales Leadership Development programs here.
Today’s show featured an interview with Sales Leader John Reilly, Sr. Manager Global ISV Sales at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Find John on LinkedIn.
JOHN’S ADVICE: “Execution starts with relationship and trust. You only have one thing in this world, and that’s your word. Once you break it, you’re done. Business is built on trust with your customers and with your team. It’s the most foundational element of all business. You have to earn the trust. It’s an active thing, not a passive thing. You’re not just granted trust, you have to actually go out and earn it.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: John Reilly, I’m thrilled to have you on the show. We’ve had a number of people from Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services is an Institute for Excellence in Sales Premier Sales Employer. Learn more about that designation on the Institute for Excellence in Sales website. We love interviewing the sales leaders at Amazon Web Services. I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself and then I’m going to ask you a question that I’ve been meaning to ask you for a number of years. Give us a brief introduction.
John Reilly: Hey, Fred. It’s great to be here with you. I’m John Reilly. I’m a Senior Sales Leader at AWS and I’ve been here for just under four years at this point in time. I’ve been in the channel about 24 years.
Fred Diamond: Most people probably don’t know this, but you were actually a client of mine. I was an outsourced CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, in the early 2000s. You were working at the time with PC Connection and you were a VP of Sales. I was living in Virginia. I was going up to Nashua all the time. I was helping provide the marketing services to the public sector space. You and I had a conversation where you told me about what brought you into sales, and it’s an unbelievable story. Would you mind sharing some of the highlights of that, how you got from what you were doing into technology sales?
John Reilly: It’s actually interesting and it was a long and winding road, and you reminded me how old I am, the fact that we did this in the early 2000s. I originally started after college, I became a police officer. It was my lifelong dream. It was a wonderful career that lasted an inspiring five years. The reason it lasted five years was because after about two and a half years, I was shot in the line of duty. After being shot eight times and recovering, I came back into the department after recuperating. The new thing was the internet and servers, and client server was actually something pretty special at the time. That’s how long ago it was, around ‘97, and I went into an IT department in the very early days. That’s what spawned us to the point that we’re at now.
Fred Diamond: I remember when you shared, you told me about some of the supports you got and some of the things you had to learn to move in. That’s remarkable. I don’t know how many people I’ve had on the Sales Game Changers Podcast that stubbed their toe, let alone were shot eight times, which caused them to leave. First of all, thanks for your service and I’m sure you provided great service and you’re a great guy with a lot of interesting things. You’ve had a pretty remarkable career. Give us a little more insight into your background.
John Reilly: It’s actually a diverse background, I can hold a job, but there are many different things that I’ve done. It’s been about 24 years I’ve been around the channel. I started in product management actually at PC Connection. It was product and partner management. Then I decided to go to the manufacturing side and I joined Hewlett Packard proper before they split as a business unit lead, which really is a product inception all the way through P&L. Then went into sales after that at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and started running the channel for them. Then went from there to another sales role, VP of channels at Xerox. Then ultimately made my way to AWS and really excited to be here. But yes, it’s a bit of a diverse background between product and reseller management and then onto P&L management with a product portfolio, and then on to sales. It’s actually quite helpful to have that diversity.
Fred Diamond: It’s actually pretty remarkable how you worked at some really big brands, Xerox, HP, and now you’re at Amazon Web Services. Tell us what your current role is at AWS, and tell us how you work with partners.
John Reilly: I’m a Senior Sales Manager over global ISV. I have a team that sits around the globe and my team’s objective is really twofold. The first is that we work very closely with partners to help them build out their solutions that they bring to market, the ISV solutions. We help them get optimal performance and the highest level of security within those solutions. Ideally, we help our partners and the customers and our field sales with enablement and education, technical collaboration, architecture design recommendations. Then there’s a second piece of our team’s role that is co-selling with our field. We have field sellers that are assigned to actual end user accounts, and we created a partnership with our ISV partner, our field sales, and my team to bring solutions to the market in the most efficient and productive way.
Fred Diamond: John we do a lot of shows where I talk to people who manage partner relationships. You mentioned ISV partners. For people listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast who don’t know what an ISV partner is, can you just briefly explain what that type of an entity is?
John Reilly: ISVs bring total or complete solutions to market built on the AWS technology.
Fred Diamond: You have companies like that all around the globe who you’re working with.
John Reilly: That’s correct.
Fred Diamond: Tell us about how your background influences your thought process. Let’s get deep into that while also driving a business.
John Reilly: I mentioned earlier I actually leverage that diverse set of experience in everything that I do and I have in every step of my career. At the core of it all, I leverage the learnings of being very data-driven from those financial roles that I had in combining those with the more people-centric skills that I picked up as I went into sales, or I did the partner management. IT reseller program management helps when you’re dealing with the people side of things and then you go all the way through numbers and data when you’re trying to build out strategies and execution.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about some of the key takeaways from the background that you want to share. We have sales professionals listening all over the globe. Maybe give us four key takeaways from your background that you might want to share.
John Reilly: I think about strategy, the execution, and the acceleration. Start with strategy. Your strategy has to base itself, in my opinion, in data. Business moves rapidly. There’s a lot of noise in every business. There’s always a changing priority in most big businesses. I found that it’s very helpful to ground yourself and your strategy in the market data, the customer data, and your business data to ultimately create a north star. Then underneath that north star, to create the actions that will move you closer to that ultimate goal. What I found is, if you think about that second tier of goals and not just the big results, so not just your 100-million-dollar quota that year, but rather the things that are going to get you there, it’s actually quite helpful. If you can gain insight and build the plans and then measure the steps, you ultimately will grow closer to your goal because you’re actually defining and measuring the things that are going to get you there, rather than just worrying about the end state.
While this sounds like a bit of common sense, my observation is that many times in sales specifically, as I made that transition from a product and financial role into a sales role, the sales leaders oftentimes will talk about that quota or the activity. It’s actually that middle ground that if they were to measure that, I think they would ultimately see success. At least that’s been my experience. One of the things that I learned is if you do focus on the things that matter that move you closer to the result and manage that, you don’t have to worry about the result, because ultimately the plan comes together because it was based in market and core data that built that.
Then secondly, in terms of execution, it starts with relationship and trust. One thing that I learned a long time ago is you only have one thing in this world, and that’s your word. Once you break it, you’re done. Business is built on trust with your customers and with your team. It’s the most foundational element of all business. I think all of us that have been around for a while learned that trust isn’t free. I remind my team all the time, we have a leadership principle of earning trust, and I remind them that there’s a verb in that. You have to earn the trust. It’s an active thing, not a passive thing. You’re not just granted trust, you have to actually go out and earn it.
Then secondly, in the execution, it’s building a great team. Many years ago, when I first got into business, I thought I could do it all. You quickly realize that you’re not going to do it all. You can have a lot of success, but in the end, if you build that trust and you can get that with a team of people, and you hire the top talent and bar-raising individuals that can gel as one team, you ultimately are going to make magic happen.
One thing that I think I came to appreciate midway through my career, and certainly now, is that diversity is really important. We oftentimes hear about it and you hear a lot of debate about it, there’s stuff in the news, but what’s most important is that you get people with different backgrounds, different skillsets, different cultures, and ultimately it really can make making decisions and making plans much, much better, is at least what I’ve experienced.
Then lastly, in terms of accelerating and helping your business move faster, communication. Going back to number one of open, honest, and transparent communications and building that trust we talked about a minute ago, that ultimately helps the team, your customers, and your business as you move through the progression of a plan. The reality is not all plans work all the time, and it’s super important to be transparent about when things aren’t working, but it’s even more important, I’ve found, to be able to articulate why it’s not happening.
Many times, I hear others in my past talk about anecdotes of why things, “Well, the market’s slowing down.” Is there data to show me that the market’s slowing down? If you can base your storyline with your team, with customers, or with your senior leadership or board of directors in data that supports the story, I find that they can digest it and they can oftentimes help to go course correct. But it’s important to base it in data. As a matter of fact, I had a senior leader at Hewlett Packard, when I was in the business unit, and his famous saying was, in God we trust and everyone else bring the data. It was his little tagline, but I’ve learned that data is super important. Then to think about your messaging while you’re communicating that. I’ll give you a visual, and I use this with teams for many years.
If you think of a pyramid, and at the very top is a single box, or a triangle, and then there’s two underneath, and then four, and then eight and so on. Oftentimes people dive right to the 10th level down or they stay at the very top level. It’s actually more important to be at that level two or three and bring your audience through the talk track that you’re trying to communicate. Then those lower levels can be supported with data. I find that really helpful, whether it’s a business conversation or a sales review, a pipeline. Overall, if you structure your conversation like that with the data to support the storyline, I found it to be quite effective. Those four things have really helped me think about how do you create the plan, how do you execute the plan, and how do you accelerate the plan?
Fred Diamond: What I found is for the sales leaders who have good data and present it well, there’s really not a lot of opportunities for dispute. A lot of times people question decisions, but when you clearly present, “Here’s really what’s going on.” We’re doing today’s interview in the middle of the summer of 2024, and one of the biggest arguments I always hear people say is, “Nothing happens in the summer. Nothing happens in July and August.” Well, a lot of things happen in July and August. As a matter of fact, I’ve done events where I’ve had the most amount of people show up in an event in August. Now, not everybody will be, because some people might be on vacation, but less things do happen, so there’s an opportunity for the great sales professionals to really make business happen.
John, appreciate your insights here. One thing that I like is when we talk to a lot of AWS people, is they go back to the leadership principles. I hear that in almost every conversation. “Would you guys be interested in doing something like this?” “Well, one of our leadership principles is X,” and good job for AWS and instilling those in their leaders and down in their people as well, because they are remembered and those are adhered to. It always makes it easier as a partner to work with a company when people stick to that dead on.
John, we like to end our shows with a specific action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but give us an action item or a takeaway that our listeners can take with them as we end today’s podcast.
John Reilly: I’ll give you a little story and then a tip. As a young boy, I spent every available weekend with my grandfather. To this day, he’s my idol. His mom came here in the ‘20s. His father passed away and she had to raise a very large family on her own. The catch was she didn’t speak any English in the middle of the Great Depression. He and his brothers and sisters all grew up to be quite wealthy and quite successful, so the story ends really good.
One weekend, I was sitting at the dining room table and we were playing chess and I made a move that cost me the game. I’ll never forget, he wore a pinky ring, and I can still hear it to this day as the pinky ring hit the wooden table, and he said, “Reilly, think ahead.” In fact, I just did it on my table as I was telling you this story. I heard that phrase many, many more times as I got older, as I made mistakes growing up as a teenager, et cetera, “Reilly, think ahead.” It was the greatest advice ever given to me. I think about it every day in business.
If you can stay one step ahead of the market, your competition, your team, and the business, it always allows you to be prepared with plans and contingencies. Doing the work when nobody’s looking to be in that position has worked out very, very well for me.
Fred Diamond: Just curiously, your grandfather, was he a big guy or a little scrappy guy? Just so I can visualize that.
John Reilly: He was a very big guy. In fact, I didn’t get his height. He was probably 6’2” or 6’3” and 250 pounds. Big man.
Fred Diamond: May he rest in peace. That is a great story. Once again, I want to thank John Reilly for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo