Thanks to Cox Business for sponsoring today’s episode. Learn more about sales career opportunities at Cox here.
Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch hundreds of replays!
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on March 17, 2021. It featured Kevin Carr of Cvent. Cvent is an IES Premier Sales Employer.]
Register for the IES Women in Sales Leadership Forum here.
Find Kevin on LinkedIn here.
KEVIN’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Sales leaders – encourage your teams to get out, to get out of their house, to get out of their apartment, to get out of their bedrooms whether it’s once a day or twice a day. The weather’s better, go for a walk, go to Starbucks in the morning, get that routine going. Sales is really tough, it’s a grind and if you’re sleeping and working in the same room you need to get out. Get some fresh air, smell the roses, meditate, whatever it takes to get out of that routine of being stuck in your cubicle of a bedroom and embrace it. My fear, candidly, is some of the people that are young in sales are going to get burned out and they’re going to give up on a profession that is awesome, you can make more money in sales than any other profession in the world. I would hate for someone to give up only because they got a little burned out because of the pandemic. Encourage your teams to get out a couple times a day.”
Fred Diamond: Kevin Carr was episode #8 of the Sales Game Changers podcast back in 2017 which was about 26 years ago, it feels like [laughs] and neither one of us looked like we did back then.
Kevin Carr, it’s great to see you. A couple reasons why you’re on, first of all, you’re a sales leader. Every Wednesday we bring sales leaders on the Sales Game Changers Live and of course, you were one of the first guests that we ever had back in 2017. But even more interestingly, your company and your customer has gone through a lot of interesting stuff and what a lot of people asked us was how are sales leaders working with companies or organizations that were significantly challenged or went away?
One of the jokes – not even a joke, one of the stories that we frequently talked about is one of the companies that’s involved with the IES sold things to arenas and back in April of last year, one of the sales leaders sent me a note saying who do I know who could use two tons of popcorn because they were closed. They’re slowly coming back and DC just announced that they’re going to be opening the doors to a small percentage but let’s get right to it, man.
Talk about your customer. Who do you serve? Give us a little bit of the background of what they went through last year and talk about how we’re moving forward.
Kevin Carr: Fred, thank you for having me, it’s good to be with you again. I love to do work with your team and this venue, I think it’s awesome what you’re doing. 2020 for Cvent, Cvent was at the forefront of the challenges of the pandemic. Cvent as a company services two large markets, media and event planners on one side of our house with our meeting and event technology and the hospitality section where our large customers are hotels, travel managers, destination venues, etc. So 100% of our customer base was impacted directly from the pandemic, none of our customers got a free pass or free ride so we were really in the eye of the tornado for much of 2020, to say the least.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about what that meant. We don’t really want to dwell on the history, per se, because we’re talking about how sales organizations move forward but just curiously, how did you lead your team over the last 12 months? It’s interesting, one thing that Cvent was able to do was to establish yourself as a leader in virtual events. As a matter of fact, the IES does a big award event every Spring, usually we do it live, last year we did it virtually and we hosted our event on your virtual attendee hub and it was flawless. You guys quickly created something, brought it out, the team was amazing, we had a first-class event, we had 700 people who attended our virtual award event, we’re going to do it next on June 3rd. Give us a little bit of a peek into what it was like as a sales leader for you over the last 12 months, and then let’s talk about the future.
Kevin Carr: It’s very interesting. I think that was the greatest success that Cvent had in 2020, was able to pivot with our technology because we were built on in-person meetings and our technology support side. Those went away, our customers still wanted to meet, still wanted to provide some service to their clients even though they were all working from home. How do they do that?
Our technology team did an amazing job and developed solution incredibly fast, lightspeed fast, to come up with what we call the Virtual Attendee Hub, now just the Attendee Hub and I’ll explain that in a second. We were able to use our sales as a guinea pig, we had an event every year, it’s in Las Vegas, it’s massive, we get about 4,500 people attending it live every year. Obviously, we had to cancel that event.
When we transitioned that to a virtual event using our own technology, we got more than 45,000 attendees at this event. It was such a pivot that our customer Aperture opened right away for both hospitality and event planners but I tell you, Fred, the best thing that we had that happened from that event, it produced so much hope for the meetings and events business that they could see 45,000 people saying, hey, I’m still in this, I know it’s going to get better, we’re going to get through this and when it gets better, we all can’t wait to meet.
Now we’re all virtual events, this year they’re transitioning to hybrid events because people are starting to meet face to face but we’re not going to be able to hold an event this year with 45,000 people live. So as we transition that to a hybrid event, we hope to get a few thousand this year, maybe 3,000 live, it could even be more because the recovery is coming so fast. Maybe next year we might have 7,000 live and 50,000 remote. Now every event is going to become a hybrid event and the technology, you take advantage of it, it has been a great pivot.
I think for my team, the last time it was a huge challenge, it was a challenge for us because customers weren’t going to spend any money but the harder challenge was every conversation we had with our customers was a very difficult and emotional conversation. They had to lay off staff, some hotels closed for long periods of time, some marquee hotels have closed and will never open again. It was really getting through the psychology of that both as a sales organization and helping our customers, it was probably the biggest transition that we went through in 2020.
Fred Diamond: I want to talk about that a little bit. Actually, we just got a question from Josie, Josie is a frequent listener and a frequent attendee at our webinars who asked about what your conversations were like. We actually just did a show last Thursday with Howard Brown from ringDNA where we talked about empathetic conversations and as a lot of people who watch our webinars and listen to the podcast know, there’s a bunch of words that we hear all the time: preparation, mindset, of course we do a show now every Thursday but the other one is empathetic conversation.
How did you, as a sales leader – and you’ve been a sales leader for a long time now – work with your team? You mentioned every conversation with your customer was challenging because hotels were closing, there were no live events last year, they are beginning to come back at some level but how did you lead your team, let’s say, from last summer through a month or two ago? You have to keep your people motivated, did you teach them how to be better empathetic listeners? Was that a thing or did it come naturally? I’m curious.
Kevin Carr: It’s a little bit of both, Fred. I think that you don’t want to strategize and say, hey, let’s have a strategy meeting on empathy, but I think that you have a natural curiosity in sales. That curiosity I think leads to empathy when every customer that you have is going through a difficult time. One of the first questions that we ask is very simply, Fred, how are you doing? You would get any number of answers, you had some people that were incredibly positive, “I know we’ll get through it, we had tough times before” and they were really stern and excited about it.
You got others that really just broke down, it was an opportunity for them to be vulnerable and have some really emotional conversations probably that we weren’t prepared for, to be completely honest. But I think it gave us an opportunity to really – it’s an old cliche, to put yourselves in the feet of the customers. You can really do that. We were having challenges to make any sales, obviously, but really hearing about the challenges that they were having with their staff, with their families, with COVID in general.
I think when you start off this conversation, you really have a conversation where we’re not trying to sell them anything in the middle of the summer, we were just trying to hear what they’re going through, when they think it’s going to get better, what help they need. What could we do, what could Cvent do? I’ll give you two quick examples.
In addition to a software marketing company, we’re also a data analytics company so we have information that has a lot of data about the markets. We can tell you exactly where things are progressing, where it’s flat, where it’s still going down. We gave access to many of our customers to that data at no charge because while it’s valuable and something that we could certainly sell historically, it wasn’t right to hold onto that information when they’re desperate for information to be able to go back to their teams.
Another thing that we did which is a really great idea from our marketing department – I want to give credit where credit is due – is we also have a very robust training organization where we can certify meeting planners and hotel salespeople. What we found is those planners that are certified actually get more business so there’s a value to it. We gave that certification training for free and this was real, live training like you and I are having a live conversation, this wasn’t just computer recordings. This was live instruction-led training that people could get certified, the ones that got certified now posted on their LinkedIn profile so it gives them a competitive advantage in the space.
We had more than 10,000 hospitality employees get certified last year which did a couple things. One, made them more competitive in their own business. There was also a little bit of almost survival guilt where my staff got laid off and I still have a job and I don’t even have anything to do, I’m in a hotel that’s empty. They can go to our training and it was a full week of training, it can really feel like I’m adding value, I’m still getting paid and I’m giving something back to my company so those are just two good examples where we were able to give something back to our clients that they really benefited from.
Fred Diamond: One of the big words that everybody was talking about in the beginning of the pandemic was that sales is really about service, so how do we service our customers right now with what they’re going through? I remember when the certification program was announced, how powerful that was.
Let’s talk about your priorities right now. As a sales leader, what are your priorities? Again, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, it’s the middle of March 2021. Like you mentioned, there are some places that are beginning to come out, you and I are in the Northern Virginia DC area, it’s slowly emerging. I talked to someone yesterday, a sales leader in Florida, I think you and I even touched based on this, Florida is almost open right now with events, not just the beach. Talk about you as a sales leader, what are the sales priorities for you as a leader right now this week?
Kevin Carr: One of the things that we did last year, I think the Japanese have an expression that crisis has two pieces, danger and opportunity. We lived through the danger, we looked at this crisis as an opportunity to restructure our entire team. On my side of the house, we have just under 200 people worldwide, we reflected back as our organization set up for the recovery. Are we set up to employees to help Cvent grow as an organization? Are we set up to make our clients more efficient?
The short answer is we weren’t, so we took this opportunity and we spent the better part of four months blowing up the organization at least on paper and then rebuilding that and then rolling that out in early January. In the earliest part of January we announced this new reorganization, new teams, new managers, new reps but we also rolled out different things to sell. Historically, we would have a specialization model where the sales exec might manage the account but he would pull in specialists and they would be responsible for selling additional products. Transition that to the account executives responsible for selling all those products.
Also realized we weren’t aligned to support our clients. Last year, Fred, I might have had seven reps that were calling on Dallas depending on the hotel chain and the area, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense for Cvent as a company, wasn’t efficient, wasn’t helpful to the customers because none of them were an expert on Dallas. So we went from seven to two and assigned Dallas to two reps and said, “You need to know the insides of Dallas irrespective of your selling to a Marriot, a Hyde, an independent or the convention center.”
Our priorities were rolling that organization out in January, February we had our global sales kick-off which was awesome and because we’re all virtual, spread that out over two weeks instead of doing a core dump of one day and now we’ve rolled out the comp plans and quotas. So the priority as of today is to make sure every rep understands their comp plan, can calculate their commission and help them understand how they can take advantage of that comp plan to maximize their income. That’s today’s priority.
Fred Diamond: I want to talk a little bit about another concept here. One of the key things, Kevin, that’s come up a lot is because of the challenge that we faced over the last year, you had to be elite to be successful. Here’s your elite sales team and here are maybe your more junior, the middle began to get flushed out for a whole bunch of different reasons. Everybody working from home, it’s hard for a guy like you or your leaders on your team to manage certain people when you’re all looking at the screen, and we talk about that a lot.
I want to get your opinion, what is an elite sales professional doing right now? And I want to ask it in two different questions, what is an elite sales leader doing right now and what is an elite quota-carrying, bag-carrying sales professional doing right now? Let’s start with the leaders. Again, we’ve been using the word elite a lot and I think it makes a lot of resonance because of where we’re coming out of.
The other thing that happened was we talked about the word sales profession, we talked about that every single day. If you’re a professional, maybe you’ve got to know about Dallas. If you’re the guy in Dallas, you’ve got to know everything about Dallas and you’ve got to build your LinkedIn contacts in Dallas. What does it take to be the professional about Dallas selling the type of stuff you’re selling? So, elite sales leaders, elite professionals, what do they need to be doing right now?
Kevin Carr: Let’s start with the elite sales leaders. It’s a brand-new year, they have new teams, they have new territories. What’s most important that they have to do is really explain what their expectations are from that salesperson every day, every week, every month, every quarter and then help them meet those expectations. In this year we have a theme, it’s effort and attitude, it’s the only two things a salesperson can really control because I can’t control the pandemic, I can’t control how fast people can get their vaccine, but I can control my attitude and I can control my effort. We really want to focus on those areas and believe it or not, you can actually measure their attitude based on their effort.
The elite leaders are helping new reps, because they have some of their legacy salespeople but they all have at least 30% to 40% new people on their teams because of reorganization. It’s helping those new folks understand how I make money in this business, how I strategize this territory, how I position these new solutions. What should I be focusing on now early in the year versus what I might focus on later in the year because of where we are with the recovery? That’s what the new leaders are doing, really embracing this rework, rolling it out and then setting expectations and then managing accordingly.
The elite reps, I’ll give you an interesting example. Almost this time last year just before the pandemic really shook us all, I was in Florida at Nats spring training, a bucket list idea that me and some friends did. They had this amazing practice facility down in Palm Beach, it’s like 18 fields. One of the fields that they had, it was beautiful but it was a field that was only an infield so it almost looked odd when you came upon it. This buddy and I were walking to it and we just saw three or four Nats and some Double-A, Triple-A players as well practicing on the stake, they were practicing the ball being overthrown to second base while someone’s stealing. These are the most elite baseball players in the world, they’re the highest paid in the world and they have been doing this in their sleep since they were probably in fifth grade, but they’re practicing the basics of basics as they go into the year, which is what spring training is all about.
The elite reps do the same thing at the beginning of the year, what is their mental and physical spring training? I’ve got a new territory, how do I look at my territory as my franchise? It’s an old cliche, but elite reps do that. I’m looking at my territory, what’s my TAM? What’s my true Total Addressable Market in my space? What products were successful last year and why, what products do I think will be successful this year and how do I prioritize who I call today versus who I call in June? And then build this plan and manage that plan as the year progresses. An elite rep does that every year and we say it all the time to do it, they don’t all do it but the elite ones do and there’s a reason why the elite ones are making so much more money.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. By the way, I went to the Philly spring training in 2009 and it was three of the happiest days of my life. If you’re a baseball fan, go to spring training if you get a chance. Let’s talk about that for a second, again, the professionals, guys who’ve been playing baseball every day since they were five, it takes all these skills to get to that level. Let’s use that analogy for sales and I’ll kind of put you on the spot here a little bit.
If we talk about hitting, throwing and catching as the core skills that every baseball player needs to work on, then you get to the esotery like bunting and stealing bases. Give me your three for sales. If someone asked you, hey, Kevin, I know you’re in sales, I’m thinking about sales as a career, what are the two things, maybe three if you can think of them on the spot, that you would tell sales professionals right now you’ve got to be table stakes great at to even begin to engage the conversation about getting in the game as elite?
Kevin Carr: Let’s begin with the end in mind, the easiest one is hitting, hitting is closing a sale. If I hit 3 out of 10, I’m going to the Hall of Fame so I’m going to fail 70% of the time and I’m going to Cooperstown. That’s very easy to understand that losing is part of the job, it’s part of the business and you need to accept that and understand you only need to get three deals a month depending on your quota. If I’m selling something high tick, I maybe only get three deals a year.
The other thing is when you talk about throwing and pitching, it’s all those kind of intangibles, it’s the practice. Practice for a salesperson, research, it’s the role playing. If I’m going to go on a sales call, I’m going to do a little bit of research about my client, I’m going to strategize this call, I’m going to take some practice swings. You go to a Nats game, again, these guys are making $10 million and they’re hitting ground balls for two and a half hours before the game. Salespeople should be doing that with role playing and practicing.
It’s also effort and attitude, the example, whether you like Barry Bonds or he’s terrible but if Barry Bonds strikes out 20 times in a row, his 21st at bat he’s thinking home run, he’s not thinking, “I’m going to strike out.” When he loses, he forgets it very quick. Great elite athletes have a very short memory, elite salespeople are the same way.
Fred Diamond: A couple weeks ago we had a guest on our Optimal Sales Mindset show, his name is Alan Stein Jr., he’s worked with some elite basketball players and he would say, “Next play.” The great ones, they’d say next play. Like you said, “I just struck out, okay, next play.” Same thing with calls, I was talking to a sales leader who’s an expert on prospecting and we were talking about the number of calls that you might need to make, and a lot of people get turned off after making two. You’ve been selling for a long time, it might take you 30, 40, maybe take years before that customer becomes a customer. Along the lines of that, Kevin, we have a question here that’s coming in from Ninio and he says, “What are reps doing wrong?” It’s been an interesting year. You’ve worked with thousands of sales reps in your leadership career but right now, what are sales reps doing wrong?
Kevin Carr: Of course, none of the reps at Cvent do anything wrong, just want to make sure my team is listening to this podcast. What reps typically do wrong is they wait, they wait for training, they wait for the leads, they wait for the phone to ring, they wait for their SDR to set up a call, they’ve sent out a proposal and they’re waiting for their customer to come back. When you’re waiting, you’re losing. A good salesperson is always leaning in, always in control of the sale in the sales process and you mind the clock whether that clock is the 30 minutes on call or you mind the clock of month-end, quarter-end, year-end. The reps that are waiting are always the ones that are making the biggest mistake.
Fred Diamond: People on your time might have just gotten a quick text because we just got a nice burst of about a dozen people logging into the webinar, so thank you. We actually got a question here that comes from Andres, “What are your thoughts on salespeople talking less and listening more?” That’s something that we brought up a number of times on the Sales Game Changers, one of our rules is if the customer does 90% of the talking, it’s a great call. Now, if it’s a demo you may need to do more so a couple caveats there but great question from Andres. This is the way I usually ask the question because a lot of the sales leaders like you always say you’ve got to be a better listener. Kevin, physically, how do you be a better listener? What are some techniques? If you’re listening to one of your reps doing a call and he’s talking all the way like I’m doing on this question, what would be some of your advice for them to listen more effectively?
Kevin Carr: It’s a great question, it’s something that we practice. We do pure sales training every other Thursday because we’re all remote, it’s a big Zoom meeting with about 50 members of my team and we really do a lot of role playing. You and I might do role play and it might go well but after the call we’ll say, “All right, let’s debrief. What did Kevin miss?” and I usually miss a lot because I’m talking too much. You say, “This problem is costing me a fortune” and I keep talking, “Well, we’ve got all these customers that are buying these products and they’re solving…” You said it’s cost you a fortune but I didn’t ever ask you, Fred, what is a fortune? What do you mean it’s costing you a fortune? A fortune in what? I don’t know.
The junior sales rep says, “He says it’s costing him a fortune.” Is that a fortune in money, is that a fortune in lost opportunity, is that a fortune of wasted time of their staff? It’s really listening and then asking for a clarification, so active listening, as we say in sales training. Really listening, that’s why it’s so important. Let’s be honest, it’s difficult when it’s one-on-one and I’m also maybe demonstrating a product, so I really have to be active. When there’s two people on call, the person who’s not talking is the one whose job is to listen, just listen and then ask the customer or prospect to clarify what they meant. That can take the conversation in any number of directions.
Fred Diamond: I’m curious on that, we had a guest on the show a couple weeks ago, his name is Rob Jolles and he’s a world class sales trainer, a lot of Xerox experience and we talked about questioning and he had a technique that he called “and”. What he would do is he would ask a question and then when the customer was done he would say, “And…?” and then they would say more and that was his technique. I’m just curious, you mentioned clarifying questions, do you have any techniques like that or do you just basically say, “Could you tell me more”? I’m just curious what Kevin Carr does as a sales professional.
Kevin Carr: “And” is a classic. “Fred, your prices are twice as much as your competitor.” “And…?” I’ll say go on, can you tell me more, can you elaborate on that, I’m not sure exactly what you mean, Fred, can you help me out? If I ask for help, you’ll think it’s your fault that you didn’t explain it clearly. I’ll say, “Fred, I’m a little confused. When you said it’s costing you a fortune, what did you mean by that? Do you mind elaborating on that?” “And” is also like the improv tactic, “Yes, and…” so we always use “and” because it keeps the conversation going.
As I stress to my team, sales really is as hard as we make it because all I’m getting paid to do is ask questions. Ultimately, I’m getting paid to ask questions and it’s when I let you self-discover the answers where we have success.
Fred Diamond: I’ve got a question here that comes in from Denise, “Kevin, how have you changed as a sales leader?” Again, you’ve been selling enterprise applications for a large part of your career but it’s been a challenging year. Like you mentioned, all of your customers really went through the negative side of the pandemic, their business went away, their hotels closed down, their monster events that they were scheduling in June, July and August were all canceled, made virtual or whatever, but still. How have you changed as a sales leader? Have you thought about that, about how you view sales leadership differently right now having gone through the last year?
Kevin Carr: As I mentioned, I just passed out quotas and comp plan but I’m not sure my team would agree with me. I would say I’ve become much more compassionate, I think with what our teams have gone through and working remote… At Cvent we have an open floor and there’s a lot of energy that we can feed off of each other, all that went away a year ago. I may have been on a Zoom meeting a year ago with someone who was working from home and the dog’s barking or baby’s crying and you’re like, “Can you put yourself on mute? Please be professional.”
Now I embrace it and I encourage my team that work and life are going on at the same time in your house, so it’s not unusual that a new mom or new dad has got a bouncing baby on a call, it’s not unusual for them to have to pivot very quickly because of COVID. We had employees that had COVID directly impact into their family, that was going to change their calendar literally the next day, “I’ve got to quarantine, I’ve got a sick spouse, a sick son” or, “I’ve got to go visit my grandmother who has got the illness.” It’s trying to be as compassionate as possible, I know in the last year I’ve become much more compassionate with my staff, with my team and certainly with my customers and my market, that’s probably been the biggest change for me personally over the last year.
Fred Diamond: We have time for one more question before I ask you for your final thought and this question comes in from Brent who I’m going to guess is probably on your team or he probably knows you. He says when you took over at Cvent you literally took a seat with the salespeople in the sales pit. What tips would you give to someone who’s a brand-new sales manager taking over a new team? That’s a great question, Brent, thank you so much. The hardest job in sales is first-time sales manager, a lot of people would agree with that. The other challenge is it’s hard enough as it was having to figure out how you manage 8 people and whatever it is, but then COVID kicks in and everybody’s home now and that put all the different challenges right now. But right now today, again, it’s March 17th, it’s St. Patrick’s Day 2021. Kevin Carr, What is your recommendation for brand-new sales managers taking over new teams?
Kevin Carr: Cvent’s a very unique company. In many ways our founder, Reggie and his two co-founders, Chuck and DQ are still here and most of our senior leadership, I think the statistics are like 11 of the first 14 employees at Cvent are still with the company in various departments whether it’s technology, marketing, IT, etc. When I joined the company, I was a very rare outside VP hired in, most of the VPs in the company have come from within so I had to assimilate myself into a culture that was very organic, I’m trying to get my way in but also bring my own style as well.
What I did the first three months, I just sat in a cube right in the middle of the sales floor, I had an office, I never went to my office with a door unless I was having a one-on-one and we needed some level of privacy. It was an open cube, I sat there and it was twofold probably accidentally like, “I want to be one of the team” but it got me the ability to hear right away what’s going on. What’s working, what’s not working? Where can I provide help? Where do they need coaching? I could hear them strategizing a deal, I could stick my head up and say, “Did you think about this, this and this?” “That’s great, I never thought about that.”
Often when people become new leaders and they work very hard to become a manager, they think that now I’m at here and the old adage is that what got you here isn’t going to keep you here, so you have to remember where you came from. My roots is in sales, I like to be in the middle of a sales call, a sales fight, a sales strategy. I’m sitting in an office with the door closed, I’m not going to get any better and my team isn’t going to get any better because they’re not hearing from me so really embrace the role of being a leader and a coach.
Fred Diamond: I want to thank Cvent for being a Platinum Sponsor of the Institute for Excellence in Sales and just a tremendous company for so many professionals looking to take their sales career, and right now a critical company in helping the hospitality world and the association world get back to how they were doing business. A critical role in the ecosystem for a lot of the business that are looking to recover past COVID.
Give us one final action step for people watching the webinar today or listening to the podcast sometime in the future that they must do right now.
Kevin Carr: I’ll give two actions. One, the great thing about Cvent in the recovery is Cvent is hiring, we’re looking for sales execs, SDRs, folks in marketing so we are really leading the charge on this hospitality and event management recovery. If you want to join a great company with awesome culture and great pay, please go to our website under careers and click that in and apply or if you know somebody, please pass it along as well.
When you and I chatted and we discussed what people should be doing right away, I had this great thought about how they should be doing something in sales. I had this epiphany yesterday morning and I’ve been preaching this to my team but I really appreciate the question. Encourage your teams to get out, to get out of their house, to get out of their apartment, to get out of their bedrooms whether it’s once a day or twice a day. The weather’s better, go for a walk, go to Starbucks in the morning, get that routine going.
I think this is not uncommon for a lot of your listeners, they have young sales teams and many of them are in a condo with three other people that are working from home because of this past year. As you said, sales is really tough, it’s a grind, I’m sleeping and working in the same room so I would encourage people to get out, get some fresh air, smell the roses, meditate, whatever it takes to get out of that routine of being stuck in your cubicle of a bedroom and embrace it.
My fear, candidly, is some of the people that are young in sales are going to get burned out and they’re going to give up on a profession that is awesome, you can make more money in sales than any other profession in the world. Fred, you and I have talked about this and you’ve stressed this a lot in some of your events, you make more money in sales so I would hate for someone to give up only because they got a little burned out because of the pandemic. Encourage your teams to get out a couple times a day.
Fred Diamond: Just on the idea of Cvent hiring, I want to acknowledge Cvent is also an IES Premier Sales Employer, that’s a very important designation from the Institute for Excellence in Sales. Kevin Carr, thank you so much, happy St. Patrick’s Day. To all of our listeners, thank you all so much, we appreciate it. The IES is a member organization, if you’re not a member go to the handouts and download our membership brochure. Thanks Kevin, we appreciate it and good luck as Cvent leads the way on this recovery.
Kevin Carr: Fred, thanks again for having me, I appreciate it.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo