This is a Sales Story and a Tip episode! Watch the video of the interview here.
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Read more about the Institute for Excellence in Sales Premier Women in Sales Employer (PWISE) designation and program here.
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
Today’s show featured an interview with Jon Jumento, Sales Director, Aerospace and Defense at Juniper.
Find Jon on LinkedIn.
JON’S TIP: “In complex B2B and B2G sales, your product isn’t your only differentiator—your account team is. It’s how you show up, how you execute, and how you take care of your customer that sets you apart.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Jon, I’m excited to talk to you. You’re with Juniper. We’ve had some of your leaders on the show way back in the past when we actually, believe it or not, we used to do these shows in person. I would zip around the East Coast interviewing sales leaders. We had the great Bob Dunn on the show a long time ago. I know you had some history with him. Jon, I’m excited to hear your story. Why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell the audience a little bit about you that we need to know.
Jon Jumento: I’ve lived in the DMV since late 1999. I’ve been in the industry for about 25 plus years. Today, I manage what we call the Federal Systems Integrated Group at Juniper, falling under the federal division within that group.
Fred Diamond: I’m excited to hear more about your story. Jon Jumento, tell us a great sales story.
Jon Jumento: I started at Juniper roughly about three years ago. The team that I developed did not exist, so I brought a whole new crew of AMs all within the first year, so six in total. There was one particular AM that I’d like to highlight, and that’s what the story is going to be about. It was a gentleman who primarily focused more on the commercial side of business. He had sold more on commercial sales, insurance companies, healthcare institutes, that kind of thing. He had recently came from a job where he was managing reseller channel relationships, but wanted to get back into sales, because he decided that that’s what he really wanted to do.
When I hired him, I brought him in with the understanding that he’s got a good foundational knowledge, he understands how to sell, he has that intrinsic motivation. But unfortunately, one of the things that I saw was some of the lack of experience in the type of customers that he would be dealing with here. That segues into my story.
He’s developing, he got into a customer, a customer that traditionally was very tough for us to get into. Did a great job, meeting the right people, having the right conversations, where about six months in, he’s like, “Jon, I really need help. Circling the wagons here, making sure that I’m only talking to a few people. Let’s talk to the executives. Let’s talk to all the different BUs. Let’s talk to compliance. Let’s talk to procurement.” Did a really great job really mapping out his strategy and going through all the different communities of interest.
Fast forward 12 months later, we start talking about budget, which is a great thing, with customers. We’re talking about a strategic project that’s going to happen the following year. Come to about 18 months now, they have a problem with the incurred investment they made in Juniper, probably two years prior to us being involved. It was a significant product quality issue. As you can imagine, with all these great relationships that he built up, there’s a lot of credibility both north, south, east, west, within the organization. Now, it turns into one of these situations where it’s like, okay, sales is sales. But now we’re running into a customer satisfaction issue. The deal that he had on the table was a deal that would double his annual quota, so obviously he was very nervous.
In working with him, we were like, “Okay. Jon, what do we do?” I said, “Well, traditionally, one of the things that I do in a case like this, and something we should always aspire to do, is we should show up and we should show up in a way that differentiates us from any other competitor out there.” Naturally, the next question is, well, how do we do that? Well, along with all the people and all the relationships we’ve built, let’s not just have you and I show up. It’s your engineering resource, it’s our product leadership, it’s our executives, it’s my boss having the relevant conversations with the relevant people within the organization and reassure them. “We’ve identified the problem, we’re going to fix it. Any risk that you’re looking at as a result of this product quality issue, we will help you mitigate it all the way to the end.”
Fast forward a little bit. We went ahead and connected all the different people within the organization. My boss and we got product leadership connected with their InfoSec security folks who had some questions about it. Their engineering leadership, which is basically holding the purse strings to actually approve an additional purchase. We answered their questions and said, “Hey, look, we’ve identified this problem as this is a quality problem with some of our mechanisms and equipment, some of the suppliers that we deal with. Let us just go ahead and replace this. No questions asked. Let’s just go in. Let’s figure out how to replace all this bad equipment,” it was a couple hundred pieces of equipment across two different geographies. It was pretty substantial.
We agreed to flip the bill, we shipped everything out. We provided onsite resources. We even paid a third party to come on site and figure out if there are any dependencies that were even outside of what could be, but even in the realm of possibility, we flipped the bill, we made sure their executives knew it, made sure the team, we worked with it. We made sure all their BUs knew that we came in there, and not only did we help them fix the problem, but we always made sure it wasn’t another problem causing it.
At the very end of this, I’m very happy to report that we still got that very large deal, which was fantastic. We’ve got tremendous kudos from both their executive leadership and engineering literally stating that, “Hey, no other vendor has come in here and fixed a problem like you guys did as soon as we identified it.” In a lot of cases, they’ve said, “A lot of other vendors, they come in, they say, ‘Well, maybe you did this, maybe you did that.’ Nope. You guys came in, you helped us identify the problem. You went in and fixed it expediently. There is no other vendor we would love to do business with than you guys.”
I tell that story going into my tip. A lot of sales enablement organizations and a lot of sales leaders talk about sales differentiation. They’re talking about a product. They’re talking about whatever they’re selling, or a service. My story, the account team is the differentiator, and the customer service you bring to the table when you work with customers. It’s really based on three things, values, actions, and empathy.
Value comes from what we talked about in the story, is really understanding why they’re working with us in the first place and what prompted them for us to come in and what value we establish with them. It all comes out as a good conversation and relationship building. Getting to all the different communities of interest and being able to repeat back, “Hey, we’re providing you this service, we’re providing this product, but we’re also an OEM, and here’s why.” We take specific actions like we talked about with developing long-term agreements to make things mutually beneficial from a cost and from a maintenance perspective. Executive roundtables we put together to connect their peers with our peers at Juniper so they understand how we work as a business in addition to industry peers.
In public sector, there are a lot of customers that mimic a lot of commercial industry. There are like organizations that do industrial manufacturing, industries that take care of healthcare. We’re quantifying that value to the customer outside our product of service to show what value we provide, and that’s our differentiation. Then obviously at the very end, I coach my folks in really understanding that empathy. Understanding that empathy is understanding your customer. What is successful to them, what does success mean to their leadership, and what does success mean to their overall organization?
In conclusion, my big sales tip is, sales differentiation is your account team, how you show up, and the customer service you provide.
Fred Diamond: Thank you for sharing that story. Frequent listeners of the Sales Game Changers Podcast will know that two of the most commonly uttered words from my sales leader guests are empathy and value. Matter of fact, everything comes down to showing your customer more value. At the end of the day, everything is about execution, taking the right actions.
I want to follow up on one thing you talked about, which could be a lesson for a lot of the junior salespeople. We have a lot of people who were in the first 10 years of sales, and a lot of them think they have to go at it themselves. They have to be the hero. They have to know everything. They have to know all this. But when you work for a company, obviously Juniper’s a large company, but mid-size company, there’s resources. There’s people, there’s even sometimes I’ve actually brought customers to deals for new customers to talk about the relationship and the success.
I’ve found that a lot of the top sales performers who grow their careers are the ones that can tap into places. A lot of times when I’m coaching young sales professionals, I’ll say, “Get to know finance. Get to know logistics. Get to know operations, because they’ll help you become a more complete sales professional.”
Jon Jumento: Correct. A hundred percent agree. As a matter of fact, I’ll add to what you just said, Fred. Those folks, when I talked about empathy and relationship building with customers, they do just as good a job, if not better, internally. They know how important those functions are to their business because of the way they can support their customer. In that same vein, we were talking about training reps who are in their first 10 years, that’s a lot of what I notice. When we talk about sales training and stuff like that, it isn’t really communicated as much. When I was a rep, I would’ve loved a sales leader to focus just on that and say, “This is really important,” because it wasn’t as obvious to me that I really need to master that in order to be able to support my customer adequately.
Fred Diamond: The other thing, obviously showing up. Just being there. A lot of people know that sales is about, I like to say the next call. The next interaction, you’re constantly going to the next interaction, and the next interaction, and the next interaction. Every time that you get a communication or an opportunity to be with a customer, that’s a win. You’re continuing even relationships that you’ve had for 15, 20 years in some cases. In public sector, a lot of times the customer has been at the same job or agency for decades sometimes. Showing up is such a critical piece. Can you over show up? Is there a risk with trying too hard to show up?
Jon Jumento: I think there’s a risk with showing up in a certain way too much. But showing up, no, I absolutely don’t. If anything, you show how important you think the customer is to you or your business. Even today, Fred, I have customers who’ve since moved on from the organizations they work for, they still keep in contact with me because to all my junior reps, I tell this, and I said, “Hey, I know you want to get a sale. I know there’s pressure to get through a quota number, that kind of stuff. But at some point, you’re going to have to make a decision. You do right by your customer, I promise you, that stuff will come and I’ll help you navigate that.” But if you don’t do well to a customer, if you want to stay working in this industry, even after you leave this organization, let me tell you something, they will remember. It won’t be the organization they remember. It’ll be you. Ultimately, that’s your value that you carry around with you as a sales professional as you continue your career.
Fred Diamond: We like to tell people, you are the CEO of your own career, and think of it long term, et cetera. Jon, thanks for being on the show. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo