EPISODE 271: Mohegan Sun Convention and Expo Sales Chief John Washko Says His Team is Doing This to Make it Safe for Conferences to Restart


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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the CREATIVITY IN SALES Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on September 16, 2020. It featured Mohegan Sun VP of EXPO and Convention Sales John Washko,]

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EPISODE 271: Mohegan Sun Convention and Expo Sales Chief John Washko Says His Team is Doing This to Make it Safe for Conferences to Restart

JOHN’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Speak directly to your customers every day. I didn’t say text, I didn’t say email, speak to them. Get on the phone and talk to individuals because it’s very easy to get caught up in thing like strategy sessions, building tools, being in meetings, managing up, explaining the situation to leadership and to ownership. You’re going to really understand what you need to do and what your path is if you continually talk to customers on a daily basis – and I mean that if you’re SVP of the largest sales organization in the world or if you’re a junior salesperson just starting out. Make sure that you’re talking to customers specifically on a daily basis.”

Fred Diamond: Today we’re talking to John Washko, he’s the VP of Sales at Mohegan Sun for expos and conventions. John, it’s great to have you here, it’s obviously an interesting time. We’ve been talking to sales leaders every Wednesday on the Sales Game Changers Live and on our podcast about challenges that they’re going through and how they’re working to come out of it. You’re deep into it, Mohegan Sun, you guys bring so many people to your beautiful location up in Connecticut, it’s a wonderful location, I’ve been there numerous times. First off, thank you so much for being with us today, I know you have a lot of great things to share. I also need to say that you’re the Board Chair elect for HSMAI, the Hospitality, Sales and Marketing Association International. I want to thank Bob Gilbert and his great team for being a supporter of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, so congratulations on that. How are you doing?

John Washko: Fred, thank you for the congratulations. Yes, I’ve been actually honored and blessed to be involved with HSMAI for a long tenure of my career and now as the Board Share Elect I’m moving into a different realm and really one of the hardest impacted industries of anything during this pandemic, which is hospitality and travel. We’ve been hit square in the teeth by this worldwide pandemic and it has created a completely – you’ve heard the term- new normal for all of us. I’m excited to talk to you about that.

Fred Diamond: We know what’s been going on, we’re six months into the pandemic, obviously people aren’t in mass going to the conferences that they were going to but I do know that some things are coming back. We’re going to be talking about some of the things that you as the sales leader and your team are specifically doing to start not just preparing but bringing people back in a safe environment. That’s actually one of the things we want to talk about, how do you talk to your customers? You guys are on the front line of this, what are they saying to you and how is your sales team responding to them? Let’s get right to it. Again, I know some people are coming back and beginning to do some conferences and conventions.

John Washko: We’ve had some good successes here and we’ve got a unique model, Fred, because we are a sovereign nation, Mohegan Sun is owned by the Mohegan Tribe so we are under federal mandates versus state mandates when it comes to things like indoor gathering sizes, outdoor gathering sizes. We’re able to use out health department – because Tribe has its own health department – and our own scientists and doctors to guide us in our path as we reopen our business on May 1st. What we identified immediately was the need to develop robust tools in our business for individuals, the meeting planners and the organizations out there that were almost frozen about how to move forward if they felt comfortable to have an event, they had no place to start.

This is a completely new environment and it was all about safety and safety protocols. The first thing that we did was we started to build a very robust resource center of ways that we could help to educate the meeting planning industry and organizations about how they can move forward, but the key to that is when they’re ready to meet and hold either a face-to-face or a hybrid event. What tools do they need? How can we help to educate and guide them so they would feel comfortable about the safety protocols that we had in place in Mohegan but overarchingly, they needed to be looking for no matter where they’re holding the event. Whether the event was in Texas, Florida, Chicago, San Diego, there’s certain things that the planning community needs to know and ask that they never used to have to ask before. We’ve focused on that as the foundation for our sales effort.

Fred Diamond: Cvent is a platinum sponsor of the IES and they’re at the front line of this as well working with associations and organizations that hold events. I want to show a video in a second that you’ve produced to give your customers comfort but I’m just curious, two quick questions. If you can give us the scope of your event business – if it’s proprietary, don’t tell us – in general, how many events do you have and how many people come to your events on the course of the year?

John Washko: Mohegan Sun, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is 5.5 million square feet under air with a 1,600 room mega resort with a 10,000 seat arena, 2 casinos, 40 restaurants and about 30 shops. If you picked up Mohegan Sun out of Mystic Country, Connecticut and you placed it on the Las Vegas strip, it would compete with any of the big dogs in Vegas. That’s what we’re talking about from an overall volume perspective. The meeting and expo business, I’ll give you one example of the volume. We would do over 500 events annually and we open up an expo center and just through that expo center on an annual basis we looked at that increased visitation to the property of 500,000, so half a million additional visitors into the property just from adding that piece to our overarching convention center offerings.

Fred Diamond: Before I show this video that your team has produced, give us a little bit of perspective. Again, you’re building the resource center, talk about what your top priorities are right now. You manage a lot of people, obviously people look to you to run your organization. I’m just curious, what are your top priorities as a leader within Mohegan Sun? As a sales leader at the top, there’s probably a lot of expectations. What are your priorities from the customer side, from the team leader side, organizational and also as an executive of the organization?

John Washko: My priority as an executive within the organization is I was very involved with the leadership team. When we closed in mid-March we started our reopening plan the next day, we all worked together and shared knowledge. A hotel, a resort, a casino isn’t built to close, we don’t even have locks on our doors, we’ve never even had any kind of a playbook on how to close, much less reopen. How do we do that safely? My priority #1 is team member safety and that is among my sales team and all of the 3,400 associates at Mohegan Sun’s amazing venue on a daily basis. Safety is #1, that’s my top priority and then from within my team members, my top priority there is really understanding what’s going on with them not just professionally but personally. These are unprecedented times, people have all kinds of variables, parents with health issues, kids with health issues, getting back to school right now, that’s a new component. Everyone’s life has become extremely complex and I think to be a good leader and a responsible leader you have to understand both the professional and the personal aspects of each one of your team member and to be involved and to be a resource to them in both those areas.

Coming back to the video, in talking to our customers what we realized is they were having a real difficult time in visualizing what does a meeting room look like? What does check-in look like? What do the safety protocols that we’re talking about look like? That was the impetus behind this video is, “Let me show you each individual leader of these important touch points within the customer journey so that they can see what their experience would be on the ground entering into Mohegan Sun to hold a meeting or a convention.

Fred Diamond: Let’s run the video. For people listening on the podcast, you can go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com/johnwashko J-O-H-N-W-A-S-H-K-O. We transcribe every single webinar that we do, you’ll see the link to the video as well. I’m going to run the video right now, for the people watching today’s webinar, it’s about two and a half minutes long and it’s really informative.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about how you brought your team to get on board and to all bring everything together, to get everybody on board to get the message together and the things related to that.

John Washko: I brought the individuals from the different departments together and I said, “Here’s what we’re facing. If we can’t create a feeling of confidence in our safety protocols, we’re not going to have one group move forward with us. There’s a lot of trust that had been established with our customers here at Mohegan Sun. We have a unique model, when we talk about the fact that we’re a reservation and that we’re owned by a tribe, no one else can own this property. As hotel entities and large resorts are bought and sold and held by institutional investors, the end customer and the meeting planners have gotten used to the fact that they really don’t know who they’re doing business with.

What we looked at as a real competitive advantage that we have is that our story is all about the fact that since this property opened in 1996, this had one owner and only one entity can own Mohegan Sun and that’s the Tribe. The Tribe is not going to shortcut safety protocols or take any chances on the safety of their team members or their guests for short term profit. We have a 13 generational view looking backwards and looking forwards is how the Mohegan Tribe looks at life and at business. It’s really conveying that message assuring our customers and our organizations that we’re doing everything humanly possible to make their experience in our facility as safe as possible.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about some of the conversations that you’ve had with your customers. Again, you work with event planners, you work with organizations who are looking to provide amazing events for their customers. If you’re going to get everybody on a bus or a plane to Mohegan Sun, it has to be spectacular, the event has to be crisp, there are so many things related to that. All of a sudden, all these other factors were thrown in obviously related to the pandemic and the economy that fell through with that. Tell us what you and your team are talking about with your customers right now. One of the key words, John, that’s come up a lot on the Sales Game Changers Live has been empathy so I’m sure that’s been a huge one, but talk a little bit about how the conversations have evolved. You talked about safety, of course but where are you taking the conversations right now and where are your customers directing it?

John Washko: Initially, Fred, the conversations were all about moving the business that was on the books currently. As we started to get into March and we started to see business erode as confidence was decreasing about the ability to safely hold an indoor event, we had a full slate of meetings, conventions, expos on the books. For a long time, all the conversations were about the rescheduling of events and doing that in a way where there was no financial exposure to the organization for doing that. Our strategy 100% was let’s find future dates that work for you and let’s just move the event, no harm, no foul. We did that for groups and some of them we’ve had to move three times. Initially you had a fair degree of confidence in certain organizations, “This may be a month-long blip so let’s take our March event and let’s put it in June, we’ll be fine by that.”

The June event obviously wasn’t fine because we didn’t even reopen until May 1 so the June event then maybe went into October. October is now somewhere in calendar ’21. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to be talking to these organizations through these changes and you have to look at that as a really good opportunity to, at each one of those touch points, find out how things are going with that organization or association or within that individual meeting planner’s business model. It’s really been an opportunity because you’re talking about things that aren’t that comfortable but you’re making it as comfortable as possible. We really have looked at that as a way to deepen relationships and to be as flexible and empathetic as possible in our conversations. Also, these organizations want to meet too, they’re not trying to get out of the events that they booked, they need these events to move their business forward so it’s also brainstorming about, “Does this make sense in a hybrid?”

Our first group back was a supply chain group, they usually bring a hundred people to one destination. They ended up bringing 20 people to us and four other destinations around the country and they connected on a hybrid event and it was a celebration. There was laughter, there was clapping, the energy just from having 20 people in the room in an otherwise quiet convention center was really great for our team and all of our team members to experience. Things like that are how we get back to business slowly but we can help to be a resource in showing how to move forward differently still with a face-to-face and hybrid component.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that comes in from Sam and Sam is in the DC area, thanks, Sam. Sam wants to know, “Can I be empathetic and still move the business forward?” That’s something that’s come up a lot on the Sales Game Changers Live show that we’ve done is like you’ve said. I like the way you just said because things have moved out, there’s been touch points where you and your people can be talking to people at various places. One of the things that we all know is that there’s been an evolution over the course of the pandemic and it’s gotten somewhat clearer but there’s also still a little bit of mistiness about what could be happening. Are you able to move new business forward at the same time or are you still in the mode of, “We have to meet our customer where they are because of things that are beyond our control”?

John Washko: I think every industry is different. Sam, thank you for the question. We are in conversations with organizations about other events, I will tell you we have very few people that are inking paper right now because there’s still so many unknowns about timelines. We’ve got the two barrels of travel restrictions that also play into what we’re doing whereas other sales organizations may not be in an environment where there’s a lot of uncertainty. If our governor changes the quarantine – right now in Connecticut, if you come in from a hot state there’s a 14-day quarantine. As soon as that happened, I had a piece of business coming in two weeks later from Arizona that fell off the books. The changing landscape of the travel regulations have created a lot of uncertainty for planners to move forward. When you’re dealing with empathy, the way that you’re positioning yourself to move forward is differentiating how you’re talking to the customer versus other people in the industry and how you’re showing maybe the resource center that we built. Guiding them there and saying, “Let me help you walk through these resources so you can manage up to your organization and let your decision makers see what that pathway forward looks like.” It’s being a resource.

Fred Diamond: A question comes in from Mason, “We saw on the video some of the things that you’ve done, we saw obviously six feet apart with all the various seats and we saw a lot of people wearing the mask. You said there’s been a couple of events that have happened, what’s been the response for people who now are going to events?” Again, it’s much smaller than the large events that we all love and want to get back to but how has the attendee responded to the events? Mason, thank you for your question.

John Washko: Across the board, very enthusiastic, glad to be back, enjoying the opportunity to interact with their colleagues and we’ve done all kind of different events. Two days ago we had a law enforcement luncheon that had 200 police officers in conjunction with the Mothers Against Drunk Driving, it was an awards luncheon. We’re hosting a residency with Showtime Boxing and Bellator Mixed Martial Arts, MMA, so our arena is now an international broadcast center. We’ve got that dynamic coming in and out of our property and that started in July. They’re so happy with our safety protocols that that continued, so overarchingly it’s been really positive and invigorating for the sales team and for my services and banquet team.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that comes in from Dean in New York. This question has come up a couple of different times. In the very beginning when we would have our webcast, people would say, “You’ve got to respond, you’ve got to sell new things.” It’s very hard, but have you been able to, besides the safety protocols and working with your customers, produce anything else to sell? You just mentioned MMA, in an empty conference space have you been able to do that? Has that been asked of you or has that pretty much been, “Let’s just do what we need to do to be ready when people start coming back”?

John Washko: No, we’ve been very proactive. For example, we look for the events that have a propensity to move forward. We’re in extensive conversations with the NCAA about hosting a number of basketball tournaments in December. As a matter of fact, we may have a big announcement today for you all. So no, we realized that there’s less of that corporate customer that was our bread and butter and our most profitable, candidly. We’ve looked at things like setting up this international broadcast center and this residency with CBS Viacom. I do want to stress that that came from an existing relationship, Bellator would hold events in our arena twice a year so we came up against LA and Las Vegas, two formidable competitors. Mystic Country, Connecticut located equidistant between Boston and New York on the side of the Thames river won out and that was really because of the relationship that we had developed with that customer and the trust that they had that the Tribe would back up and do what they said they were going to do as far as the safety protocols. That really hearkens back to, “Don’t ever underestimate the importance of relationships in good times and bad.”

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you talk about that for a second? Again, you’ve worked in some amazing places, you’ve been the head of sales in some beautiful locations – feel free to mention them if you’d like – all over the world. Talk about relationships. Again, you’re now also the Chair Elect for the Board for the HSMAI, the Hospitality, Sales and Marketing Association – again, thank you to Bob Gilbert and his great team for that. We have a lot of people here watching today’s webcast and who listen to the podcast who are relatively junior in their sales career. Give some of your thoughts on what they should be doing to build strong relationships.

John Washko: Great question, I’ll just share the three largest organizations where I’ve led the sales effort. The 3,400 room Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas, I actually worked there twice in my career for a total of 11 years. I worked at the five-star, five-diamond 744 room Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colorado, luxury historic resort located at the base of Cheyenne Mountain and now I’m at the magnificent 1,600 room Mohegan Sun. What I would say to the individuals that are thinking about what role does relationships and being involved in organizations play is I would find, if you don’t have one already, a mentor. Make sure that you identify a really good, seasoned professional that can take you under their wing, give you some guidance, give you some direction.

I had a great one, his name was Mike Shiny Diamond, he got me involved with HSMAI on a board level and he really was a man that was one of the great sales leaders of the hospitality industry. As a matter of fact, there’s a picture directly behind me of me and Shiny, great guy and he taught me a lot. He taught me that everybody in that room is important, everyone that you work with is equally important, and I watched him go and thank the people in the kitchen that were cooking the meals for our groups, thanking the stewarding staff that cleaned up after the events and housekeeping. I mirrored that and understood that I have internal and external relationships and on both of those, everybody is the same to me. Everybody is an important person to the overall success of me as a sales executive, of my business and that everyone should be treated with respect and on the same level. It was a great lesson that my mentor Shiny taught me.

Fred Diamond: Shiny Diamond. We have a lot of questions flying in, before I get to a couple of the questions we have here, I mentioned a number of times that you’re now the Board Chair Elect for the HSMAI. Talk about things like association membership, you mentioned that Mike Shiny Diamond got you involved with HSMAI, a lot of the people here are involved with organizations but I know we have a lot of younger people who listen to the podcast who may not understand the value. Talk about that for a few seconds.

John Washko: People say, “Who’s got time for that?” and my question is, “Who doesn’t have time for that?” Hotel Sales and Marketing Association which I’ve been involved with for many years, it’s a huge resource center. One of the things that you can do when you have lulls in your career or you need to get reinvigorated or the environment has changed is you’ve got to look for where the resources exist where I can get some direction, I can get some insight, motivation. Where do these things live? These content hubs that associations create within vertical industries are invaluable resources for a sales executive. HSMAI pushes out a ton of white paper, a ton of information and their leader, Bob Gilbert who I consider a very dear friend is one of the great association leaders in the world. He travels all around the world preaching about how to improve your skill sets, what you need to know to advance in your career. You can’t rely on the organization you work for to give you all the tools you need to climb the ladder, if that’s what you want to do. You need to look at what are the associations that you need to align with that are going to provide you with the resources so you can get better at your craft.

Fred Diamond: And show up, participate and get involved. John, we have a question here that comes from Mike and Mike is in the DC area, it’s an interesting question. Mike says, “How did you keep your sales team motivated when so many deals that they had inked are now getting pulled back?” That’s a question that’s come up a lot as well. 2020 was going to be everybody’s best year, back in February and January we at the Institute for Excellence in Sales have dealt with so many sales organizations that were so excited, so motivated, so many great things were planned for 2020 and then we all know what happened. That’s a great question, Michael, thank you so much. Again, we do know that in your industry there’s been things like furloughs and stuff like that, but how have you as a leader kept your people motivated in the scenario that Mike describes and in general?

John Washko: I still have some of my team members furloughed, I have a 25% staff right now but what we instituted right away was we put together a weekly Zoom call for everyone, whether they were working or furloughed. It was not mandatory but what we did was we communicated and over-communicated on a weekly basis what was going on with the business, with reopening, with demand so that people felt a part of it. I think a big thing that can happen as people disperse and are working from home or they’re furloughed or whatever is they feel completely disconnected from the business. I think one of the key ways to keep individuals motivated is keep connected with them, and it’s not always easy. A lot of times the message I had to give wasn’t really the message that they wanted to hear, “We’re not seeing a huge uptick in overall demand and we’re not really seeing a clear path of when we can bring the whole team back together.”

They appreciated the fact that I was honest and transparent with them on a weekly basis and continue to be as transparent with them and let them know that this is what’s going on, this is what the future looks like. Also to give them really strong direction while they’re furloughed on how to improve their skill set, to go out and get additional education, designations, to use resources out there to come back stronger. Don’t sit back just feeling sorry for yourself, start to really improve yourself so that you can hit the ground running when business returns.

Fred Diamond: One of the key lessons we learned from doing a webinar every day is that there may not be a whole lot of transactions per se, but if you are truly a sales professional, are you doing things that a professional would be doing right now? John, when I talked to you one of the first things you said is you wanted to show that video that we showed at the beginning of today’s session. Laurie wants to know how have you used this video, thank you for the question, Laurie. One of the first things you said is, “Fred, I want to show this video during the webinar.”

How have you used it? Have you mass sent it out via email, have you had your people, the first thing that they said is, “It’s right up there on meetings.mohegansun.com”? Talk a little bit about how you as a sales leader used that tool. Thanks again, Laurie, for the question.

John Washko: Laurie, what we did with that is we built a complete COVID-19 resource center within meetings.mohegansun.com. In that, there’s 9 different PDFs, there’s that video which is the first thing that you come to as you scroll through that page of additional content and we’ve been adding pictures of the actual events. It was important to visualize so all of our advertising message has been driving through e-blasts, I’m back in publications, I’ve got a very robust banner program on the meeting industry websites because they’re extremely busy. A lot of planners are at home and are looking for direction so what we’re looking to do is position Mohegan Sun as a resource.

I’ve spoken to a number of planners that weren’t looking at Mohegan Sun for their meeting, their meeting had to be in Texas or their meeting had to be in LA or it had to be in Arizona but at least I’ve been able to walk them through some of the PDFs that they need to share internally and the questions they need to be asking. Things like egress, everybody thinks it’s all about the set and the room but no, you’ve got to walk in and out of that room. How do you do that in a safe way so that you avoid choke points? That’s just one example of a myriad of new considerations that people didn’t used to have to think about. We have pushed that out digitally, we’ve pushed that out in presentations, I’ve been doing a number of webinars, I’ve been a speaker for a number of organizations pushing that out. We’ve really tried to hit that through every multi-digital channel available to get as many eyeballs as possible on that video.

Fred Diamond: John, I love what you just said and you used the word ‘resource’ a lot on today’s Sales Game Changers Live, but I also liked when you said that for the salespeople watching here today, don’t assume that your customers have figured out what they’re going to do and that they’re going to figure out how they’re going to reopen and restart. The reality is, and we hear this all the time, everyone’s in the same boat. We’ve heard this before that for the first time in our history, everybody is in a similar situation. Unless you were alive in 1918 during the Spanish Flu, everybody is coming out of this particular situation and we’re all trying to figure out how we deal with that. As a sales professional, you can’t make the assumption that your customer is on top of what they’re doing. I love what you just said, come to them with resources, with ideas, with suggestions.

We have time for a couple more questions for John. John, this question comes in from Suzanne, Suzanne is just outside of Chicago. Suzanne says, “How have you changed as a sales leader?” Again, you’re leading a beautiful facility, you’ve been a sales leader at many world-class facilities, you’re now the present Elect for the Board for the HSMAI. It’s the middle of September when we’re doing this interview, six months in, how have you changed?

John Washko: I’ve dialed it back. I’m a hard-charging sales leader, I don’t make any apologies for that. I think that I bring a lot of enthusiasm to the day, I’m extremely competitive, I always want to win and I want a team that is built of people that want to win. When you get in an environment where everybody wants to win and for a while nobody’s winning, it’s really important to let everyone know that that’s okay and really to say, “Our role right now is we are resources to our industry, not just to our customers but we’re resources to our industry. We need to be looked at as an organization that helped get the meetings industry back on track and if we can be looked at playing an instrumental role or integral role in that process, then all boats rise and we’re going to win from that.” We need to recalibrate what winning looks like, it’s not in how many definite room nights or how much revenue did we book this month but how did we help the overall meetings industry to get back on track to where they need to be so that we can get back to face-to-face meetings and help everybody that’s out of a job today back working?

Fred Diamond: John, I’m going to ask you for your final thought for all the people listening to today’s webcast and podcast, but before I do I have one final question. This question comes in from Lynn and Lynn also is in Chicago, thank you to the windy city. The question is, “John, what are your expectations for your sales professionals right now?” Again, you did mention that there’s a different level of staffing but you still have people who are professionals, we just talked about that. We have a lot of sales professionals listening right now in the event space, technology space, software space – again, I want to thank Cvent, one of our platinum sponsors for all their support of your industry and of the Institute for Excellence in Sales.

What are your expectations for sales professionals right now? Then give us your final thought to inspire us today.

John Washko: I also want to say hello to my friends at Cvent, I know a number all the way up from Reggie down, a whole bunch of the top leaders within Cvent, amazing organization and a great partner for the hospitality industry. My expectations is that every one of my sales team members enter the day with a positive attitude. We can’t have a defeatist attitude, we have to control the things we can control in this process and one of those is our frame of mind. I really emphasize with individuals and I ask them, “What are you doing for exercise? What are you doing for stress relief? Are you meditating? What are you doing to help make sure you’re on top as much as you can be on your game in this new world?” We all know that your physical health and your mental health are going to directly correlate to how you perform, so I don’t step away from that. I make sure that they’re doing the things that they can control to enter the day in a positive way and then, I just look for them to recalibrate win, but let’s talk about what those wins are and let’s celebrate those wins.

If we were able to walk someone through an aspect of our resource center, maybe it’s our social distancing banquet menus and that helped them to plan an event someplace else. That’s a win, it’s not a direct revenue for Mohegan today, but I guarantee that that individual will say, “That sales executive at Mohegan didn’t have to spend all that time with me that they did walking me through those resources and helping me in my journey for what I need to do for my job.” Karma is the strongest force in the universe, you reap what you sell and you’re going to get back that investment in time a hundred-fold. That’s how we recalibrate what a win looks like in today’s environment.

My final thought: speak directly to your customers every day. I didn’t say text, I didn’t say email, speak to them. There are sales leaders here, you get on the phone and you talk to individuals because it’s very easy to get caught up in strategy, building tools, being in meetings, managing up, explaining the situation to leadership and to ownership. You’re going to really understand what you need to do and what your path is if you continually talk to customers on a daily basis – and I mean that if you’re SVP of the largest sales organization in the world or if you’re a junior salesperson just starting out. Make sure that you’re talking to people and customers specifically on a daily basis.

Fred Diamond: We talk about this all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, pick up the phone. We’re getting a lot of thanks here, Don says thank you, Judy says thank you, Martin says, “Thank you so much, John, for this.” John Washko, again, I want to thank you so much. Bob Gilbert, thank you for introducing us to John. Best of luck getting back to the Mohegan Sun, people showing up, it’s such an incredible facility. I want to thank everybody who watched today’s webinar and listened to today’s Sales Game Changers podcast. John Washko, thank you again so much.

John Washko: Thanks, Fred. Thanks, everyone, I enjoyed my time today.

Fred Diamond: Take care.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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