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Today’s show featured an interview with Joe Tarulli, GM and Dennis Been, Sales Development Leader at Pyrotek.
Find Joe on LinkedIn. Find Dennis on LinkedIn.
JOE’S ADVICE: “if you want to be successful, model success. Find a mentor in their organization who’s having the type of success that they want to have, invite them to coffee, take them to lunch, pick their brain, ask them good questions. What are they doing? How are they structuring their days? Who are they calling on? What questions are they asking? I’ve looked at people who were already doing what I wanted to do, and I’ve asked, and people are generally very happy to share that with you.”
DENNIS’ ADVICE: “Being one step ahead is a mantra, is a phrase we use continuously in our company. It comes back to being proactive as well. But being one step ahead with everything you do is going to make the difference going forward for you.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re talking with Joe Tarulli with Pyrotek, and Dennis Been as well. If you recognize Joe’s name, it’s because he was on a show with the great Mike Weinberg. Mike Weinberg, of course, the author of The First-Time Manager: Sales. Joe, we did the show towards the end of last year, and it was great. Mike wrote a book and I said, “Mike, I’d love to have you on the show to promote the book. Find a VP of sales, like we typically have on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, and we can talk about some of the things that you’ve done, Mike, at a client,” and he brought you on. I encourage people to go back and look at that show.
Joe, you gave so many great insights. I said, “Let’s get you on the show specifically. Bring on someone from your team,” and you brought on Dennis, and let’s talk some specifics about what you’re doing. I know you spent a lot of time and energy with sales training, with your Sales Leadership Council, and also you’re in the aluminum industry. The first time we had you on the show, it was the first time we had somebody from the aluminum industry, and you talked a little bit about that. I’d love to get a little more detailed on that as well. I’m excited to have you both on the show.
Dennis, why don’t you go first, why don’t you briefly introduce yourself? Then, Joe, you get us caught up with what you’ve been up to. We got some questions, and I’m excited to hear how you guys run your sales organization, what a lot of the changes are, how you go about training and development. Dennis, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Dennis Been: My name is Dennis. I’m in Pyrotek since 2003. I started as an application engineer doing all kinds of work, installations of pump systems that were moving molten metal. But I’ve been in sales afterwards, sales and engineer. I’ve taken various sales management roles as well. In 2019, I moved on to my current role, which is heading the sales development team for Pyrotek. We are a team of five and we are focused on developing sales applications. We’re also focused on training these applications and promoting usage, because if you use it, you gather a lot of data, which is truly powerful. We also provide sales trainings, and like you mentioned, we have a strong focus on the trainer approach by supporting our sales managers with sales management best practices and coaching.
Related to Pyrotek, you can ask me anything about sales, you can ask me anything about sales management. Also recently wrote my own personal little book about sales management best practices, which I gained throughout the years. I want to refer quickly back to the introduction you made with Mike Weinberg. He was life-changing for me in my career, from sales engineer to being a sales manager at the end of the day. His book New Sales. Simplified. and Sales Management. Simplified. were life-changing for me.
Fred Diamond: Joe, before I get to you, so Joe’s based in North Carolina. Of course, I’m based in Washington DC, Northern Virginia. You are in the Netherlands. Talk a little bit about, before we turn it over to Joe, how is it running the organization from there? Obviously you’re a global company, if you’re running it from there, tell us how that goes and how you operate.
Dennis Been: We operate just like we do today. We have Zoom, we have Teams, and we can connect in multiple ways these days. That’s how we do it. We are a team of five, very small, but we are located both in the US, in the UK, and in the Netherlands. From there, we manage to reach out to everybody and to make an impact and contribute to the organization’s success, and that works very well.
Fred Diamond: Joe, tell us what you do for the company and get us caught up.
Joe Tarulli: I’ll give you a quick 30 seconds on Pyrotek just to refresh your audience’s memory. We’re a privately owned company headquartered in Spokane, Washington. We have a little over 3,000 people across 35 countries, so very global in nature. I’ll give Dennis and his team a plug. They’re a team of five, but they’re supporting about 300 sales engineers and 35 sales managers. It’s really a lot of work that they do to support that sales organization globally.
I wear a few hats for Pyrotek. I have executive oversight of the sales training and development team. I also run our operations in Canada, which is primarily focused on the aluminum industry. I run one of our business units which supports the global glass industry, Fred. Beer bottles, wine bottles, cook bottles, iPhone cases, windshields, pretty much anything made of glass we help support that.
Fred Diamond: Give us the introduction to the aluminum industry. What do you sell, who do you sell it to? Most people listening here obviously are familiar with aluminum foil. They’re probably familiar with aluminum bats. Tell us, do you manufacture aluminum products and then sell them to wholesalers or to the end user? Give us a little bit of an insight. Give us a peek into the aluminum sales industry.
Joe Tarulli: We are actually supporting the manufacturers. We sell to the people that make aluminum, the smelters out of aluminum and bauxite actually make the metal itself. We sell to those companies. Some names you may have heard before, Alcoa is a large customer of Pyrotek, Rio Tinto, Alcan, Hydro Aluminum, and then a lot of the secondaries as well that are taking that and making shapes out of it, whether it’s wheels, or guardrails, or airplanes. Our products are designed primarily to help those manufacturers make the metal cleaner, make it more efficiently, reduce costs, reduce waste, reduce their carbon footprint. We’re supporting them in making a better product at the end of the day. That’s what Pyrotek has done over the last 68 years.
Fred Diamond: Just curious, do you compete with other aluminum suppliers or with other metal type of manufacturers? Dennis, how does that work? Who is your main competitive space?
Dennis Been: We are not competing with the aluminum producers. In fact, that could all be our clients, our customers, as well as other industries. We’re not just in aluminum, but it’s the dominant industry that we serve. Our competitors are from different areas. We have a lot of local competitors where we see low-cost materials that we need to fight, for example. But we also have a few global competitors, of course. But let’s be honest, Pyrotek is very strong all around. Many of our customers really like to work with us because of our one step ahead mentality, our research and development support. We are essentially everywhere around the globe. It’s not just the USA, the UK, and the Netherlands, like we mentioned. No, we are essentially everywhere around the globe serving our customers everywhere.
Fred Diamond: What does it take someone to be really good at selling the products that you do? Is it someone who’s been in the, you mentioned the company’s been around for close to 70 years, someone who’s an engineering student, someone who could sell anything to anybody? Joe, give us an insight into what makes someone great at selling aluminum. One of the things I’m thinking about, we talk a lot about how you really need to understand your customer’s mission, and we talk about things like passion. Give us insights about what it takes someone to be great at selling aluminum products.
Joe Tarulli: I think if we look at the demographics of our Salesforce, about 80% of our sales engineers are degreed engineers. Many of them came out of the industry, so they worked at our customers beforehand. They have a very intimate understanding of their process and the products that they’re manufacturing. That’s really helpful because we see it as truly a technical sale where we go in and partner with our customers to, again, help them to drive down cost, reduce scrap rate, increase efficiency. Majority of them do have technical backgrounds, but we have people like myself, I was an econ major at university and started off in industrial sales and found Pyrotek 26 years ago, started off in sales and learned as we went.
As Dennis alluded to earlier, we do have a lot of resources behind us. We have R&D, we’ve got product managers, we’ve got process specialists. We’re not counting on the sales engineers to know everything. We can bring in resources as needed. We’re really looking for people that are curious, that have some technical aptitude that really want to get in and get their hands dirty and work closely with the customers. If you have those attributes, you probably have a good chance of success as a sales engineer at Pyrotek.
Fred Diamond: We talk a lot about how you really need to be one step ahead with your customer now. Because what we used to do in sales, we had the opportunity to spend the day and go through product strategy, and be walking brochures, if you will. Of course, now because of internet and social media, your customers are more advanced than we are in many cases. I’m curious, what do your customers want from you now? What are they expecting from your salespeople right now? Dennis, why don’t you give us a little bit of insight into that?
Dennis Been: Bringing value first of all, and above all, I think customers need to realize you can actually contribute to running their businesses to help them solve their problems. Joe, you mentioned it, being curious. We need to ask a lot of questions to our customers continuously, to signal or to find the value that we can help the customers with. Being proactive, that is something customers are expecting. Nobody wants to wait for an answer. You better pick up the phone, give the answer. Taking initiative, say what you do, do what you say, all elements of what customers from our perspective are waiting for.
Fred Diamond: Joe, what do you think?
Joe Tarulli: I was just going to mention, Fred, that a lot of our customers, they’re getting pretty lean on their own technical resources, for a variety of reasons. They’re really looking for Pyrotek to come in and be that outside resource, be that technical partner that can come in and help them with their process. Obviously, the quid pro quo is that we want to increase our share with that customer and sell more products. But they’re really looking for that assistance on the technical side. It’d be difficult for somebody without the background or the resources behind them to duplicate what we’re doing, I would say.
Fred Diamond: We talked a lot on the previous podcast that we had done about your Sales Leadership Council and some of the ways that you distribute the training across the world, globally. I know, Dennis, you run that program. Why don’t you describe what the Sales Leadership Council is, and then give us some of your general approaches to sales training and ensuring that the entire sales team has these tools that you just alluded to, Joe, to be successful.
I’m just curious, before you go into that, is your customer a difficult customer? Are they a demanding customer? Talk a little bit about, for people who don’t know this industry, give me an insight into your customer, and then Dennis, answer the questions about the Sales Leadership Council.
Joe Tarulli: I would say that they’re probably more or less demanding than any other market. Again, I think, as you mentioned earlier, Fred, the advent of social media and the internet and collaboration across sister plants and companies, the access to information is really significant these days. Plus, a lot of our customers are time starved. As you said before, maybe they could give you three hours before, maybe it’s 30 minutes today. It’s incumbent upon us to really create that value proposition. Why does Fred want to spend two hours with me? Well, I have to bring in something to the table that can help him to achieve his objectives. We try to articulate that on the front end and make sure we have a really compelling agenda, have it articulated, and spec out what we’re trying to accomplish for them and for the customer.
Fred Diamond: Almost every industry that we’re dealing with is strapped for whatever reason right now. We’re doing today’s interview in early May of 2024. To give people a perspective of what’s going on in the world, we’re out of the pandemic, but we’re still dealing with a lot of the stuff that we’ve had to deal with over the last couple years, which means all of our customers are still dealing with that, and our customers’ customers are still dealing with that. The great salespeople out there are ensuring that they are really providing value based on, like you just said, limited amount of time, the various challenges that our customers are dealing with.
Dennis, I alluded to the Sales Leadership Council. Give us an insight onto that and your overall approach to sales training.
Dennis Been: The Sales Leadership Council is our global collective of sales managers, sales leaders within Pyrotek. It is really there to explore best practices, identify best practices, sharpen best practices in how to manage sales, how to manage our teams, and how to drive our company forward, how to move the needle forward. That’s really what the essence of this group is. We get together typically once a year face-to-face in a meeting where we share a lot of these best practices and set the course for the next year.
In these sessions, face-to-face, but also we have some virtual sessions, we focus a lot on all these best practices. We focus on coaching, sales coaching. We have a sales coaching initiative where we ask our sales leaders to self-certify them on a couple criteria, having sales meetings with our teams twice a year, having one-on-one meetings with each sales engineer every month. Doing FaceTime together with our customers. You just mentioned we’re getting out of the pandemic, a while back, of course, but sometimes we still need to push for getting out again. We need to get in front of our customers a lot more. That is so important because that’s essentially where the magic happens, of course, well, being with our customers.
We managed for a while to do it all virtually. But for us, the best way forward is to do that in front of customers. That’s an example topic that we discuss with our sales leaders and how to approach it. We provide them data, we provide them with ideas, and we also discuss these ideas and they come up with ideas, and that’s what we all do with our Sales Leadership Council.
Fred Diamond: Joe, what are some of the big challenges right now with salespeople? I’m going to give you an example. At the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we work with a lot of large business-to-business and business-to-government organizations. One of them is one of the top three technology companies in the world. I was talking to a director level person who manages a couple hundred people, and she said, “My young men don’t know how to talk to people anymore.” She said, “They know how to use their phones and texts and email and communicate that way.” She said, “But when we put them back in front of customers,” she said, “I’ve observed these people,” and they’re all bright people, working for one of the top three technology companies, but she says they stumbled. They didn’t know what to say.
What are some of the specific skills that you’re focusing on as a leader that you believe salespeople need to get better at, or refresh, or whatever it might be right now?
Joe Tarulli: I think for one, it’s good qualification on the front end. Is this a real opportunity with the customer? Is it a real prospect? Then good discovery, asking the right questions. But, Fred, I think discovery happens even before the sales call. We should be doing our research. We should really be understanding what challenges are facing the industry as a whole. Then doing a little research on the customers that we’re calling on to understand if we have products and services that can help. I think a little work on the front end is going to save you time in the long run. I think you’re going to spend more quality time with the right people, talking about the right topics that really are important to them.
It’s interesting. I don’t see the challenge that much as not being able to communicate, although we do see that as well. There’s a lot of texting that goes on between customers and sales engineers at this point. But I think it’s sort of getting back to basics. That’s a topic that Dennis and I have talked about as a topic for our next Sales Leadership Council meeting. We have all these systems and processes in place, but sometimes we drift away from it. That’s human nature. Really getting back to those basics of really doing good qualification, good discovery, asking the right questions, getting all the data before we try to propose solutions, because that can bite you in the rear end as well, if you’re doing that. I really think that’s something that we’re, I won’t say so much struggling with, because we’ve been having very good success lately, but something we really need to focus on to make sure we maintain that level of success.
Fred Diamond: Dennis, do you agree? Is that a big part of it, is getting back to the basics? What does that mean exactly, when we’re talking about getting back to the basics? Joe talked about qualification, et cetera, and the research ahead of time, but talk about some of the things that go into your enablement and training programs that help people get back. It’s interesting, you talked about some of the stuff that Mike Weinberg teaches and things that he includes in his book. A lot of the stuff has been around, of course, we have AI now, which is putting a little bit of a different spin, but a lot of it comes down to doing the right stuff.
Dennis, talk about some of the stuff that you’re trying to get your people to do and how you go about training them to do it.
Dennis Been: It’s very interesting when talking about going back to the fundamentals, going back to the basics. That’s what we do continuously. We ask our people to think and to be aligned with what we call the Pyrotek way of selling. We have our own selling process in Pyrotek, and that’s what we teach. It all starts with connecting. We need to connect to the right people as well, and you need to have something to tell. That’s something that we teach our salespeople around the globe, that they know a story, that they know which customers to focus on. Then to Joe’s point, get into the qualification or discovering together with the customer, what’s on the mind of the customer? What are they struggling with? Where do they need help and where can we be of value? That’s the most basic and essential part in our selling process, of course, to understand what is happening in the customer’s world and how we can help them. If you do that, if you go back to that basic, to that fundamental, everything else gets a little bit easier after that.
Fred Diamond: A lot of times salespeople say to me, what is my advice for them being successful? I like to say, be the leading sales professional for a particular vertical marketplace for the leading company. I’m in Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington DC, and there’s a lot of very wealthy areas here. When younger people or junior people ask me for advice, I say, who lives in those big houses in Potomac, Maryland? It’s the guy who sells Dell computers to the Navy. It’s the guy who sells Cisco routers to the army, whatever it might be. Humongous customer, big brand, et cetera. I’m just curious on if someone asks you the same question, maybe someone who’s a couple years into their sales career, maybe even 10, 15 years into their sales career at Pyrotek, and they said, if they got the opportunity to speak with you, Joe, or if they got the opportunity to have a one-on-one with you, Dennis, curious, what would be your advice for them in order to help them become more successful at Pyrotek and also in the industry?
Joe Tarulli: Fred, my wife is in sales, and we have this conversation quite a bit. Sales, by its nature, is a game of rejection. It’s a game of nos. It’s easy to get discouraged, it’s easy to get down, it’s easy to drift away from what you need to do. We always say, if you consistently do the right behaviors, success is going to come. I think having perseverance is a key attribute for somebody that wants to be successful in sales. Somebody that’s able to take those nos and understand that a well-qualified no is great, because then I can move on to the next opportunity. But it’s really, again, getting back to some of those basics that we’re talking about, but then consistently doing the right behaviors and actually really working hard.
I had a situation years ago when I was in sales, actually. It was four o’clock on a Friday, I’m driving home from eastern part of the state, and there was a prospect that I wanted to call on that I hadn’t yet. I stopped in, cold call, asked to speak to somebody about the products I was selling at the time, this was before Pyrotek, and the president of the company saw me. He said, “You know what? I sure hope my sales guys are out at four o’clock on a Friday making sales calls,” and it turned into a great customer. That’s just one little example where I think having that drive and really wanting to succeed, particularly if you’re a younger person, let’s really get out there and let’s work. That’s a key.
Fred Diamond: Every great sales professional that I’ve met has had that drive. Maybe they just demonstrate it differently. Some are a little more outward, some are a little more inward, doesn’t really matter. But you have to have that drive to be of service and also to be successful for you and for your company.
Dennis, how about you? If someone said to you, “Dennis, what should I do to be successful?” What would be your one bit of advice?
Dennis Been: The one bit of advice that I would give is to be proactive. Because if you are proactive, you create the facts. If you are reactive, waiting for things to happen, somebody else will create effects for you when you are just running behind them. Being proactive in everything you do, that will be the advice from my side to be successful in selling.
Fred Diamond: One of the members of the Institute for Excellence in Sales used to always say to me, “My people were great at aggressively waiting by the phone.” We all were waiting for that phone to ring, hardly ever rings. We all keep looking at our email waiting for the customer to reach out to us. They hardly do.
Gentlemen, I want to thank you both for giving us the great insights into the aluminum industry, which you’re the only ones I’ve ever interviewed, probably the only ones I ever will now that I know you. I appreciate it and also appreciate the insights into how you’re going about training and how you’re managing a global team. For people who didn’t catch it at first, Joe is based in North Carolina, and Dennis is based in the Netherlands. I know, Joe, when you and I were talking, you were talking about the tightness of the organization, even being a couple hours away and obviously a plane ride.
We like to end our show by giving us one final action step. Again, we talked before about being proactive, so you’ve given us a lot of great ideas. Give us something that people should do right now, this moment, after listening to the show or reading the transcript.
Dennis Been: Being one step ahead is a mantra, is a phrase we use continuously in our company. It comes back to being proactive as well. But being one step ahead with everything you do is going to make the difference going forward for you.
Fred Diamond: The concept of thinking a couple steps ahead and what your customer needs, and you talked before about the value and thinking about the customer. Joe, I like what you said before, prospecting doesn’t start when you’re doing discovery. It starts maybe weeks, months before as you’re thinking about what is the best strategy. Because the reality too is that we don’t get 10 times to present to the customer. A lot of times we get the one shot and the customers are not interested in hearing from us if they’re not interested in hearing from us. We need to really bring them value from the start. Thanks, Dennis, for that.
Joe, why don’t you bring us home, give us your final action step that people should do right now after listening to today’s show.
Joe Tarulli: I’m a big believer if you want to be successful, you should model success. I would encourage your listeners in sales to find a mentor in their organization, find somebody who’s having the type of success that they want to have, invite them to coffee, take them to lunch, pick their brain, ask them good questions. What are they doing? How are they structuring their days? Who are they calling on? What questions are they asking? When I’ve had the most success in my career, Fred, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve looked at people who were already doing what I wanted to do, and I’ve asked, and people are generally very happy to share that with you. I think I would find somebody who is having the success and go ask them a lot of questions and implement it and learn and try again. That’s my final takeaway.
Fred Diamond: We’ve talked about mentorship pretty frequently, as you can imagine, on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. One of the things that a lot of the people at your level says is, “I’d be happy to meet with you, but come to me with specific questions.” As compared to, “How can I get better?” It’s kind of like, “Here’s a challenge I faced recently. How would you have handled this?” Or, “I’m trying to get a better relationship with the CTO with this particular customer.” I love that advice and I appreciate it.
Once again, I want to thank Dennis Been and Joe Tarulli from Pyrotek. My name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo