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On today’s show, Fred meets with Gina Stracuzzi, President and Chief Revenue Officer of the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership at the IEPS and author of Success was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership, and Tamara Greenspan, Senior Vice President of Government, Defense, and Intelligence, Federal Sales at Oracle.
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Find Gina on LinkedIn. Find Tamara on LinkedIn.
GINA’S TIP: “Being successful isn’t the hard part for women. We can sell, we can lead, we’ve proven that again and again. It’s everything around that, the expectations, the responsibilities, and the roadblocks, that make it harder than it needs to be.”
TAMARA’S TIP: “The most important thing is to raise your hand. Take a risk, even when it feels uncomfortable, because that’s how you gain experience, expand your network, and move your career forward.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Gina, we first met Tamara Greenspan on the Sales Game Changers Podcast before the pandemic. I screwed up the recording a couple of times and we had to redo it. But the third time was a charm, and even more third time being a charm is she’s with us today. We’ve developed such a rewarding relationship with her as truly one of the Women in Sales leaders that we’ve been fortunate to have as part of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling.
The book is called Success Was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks, and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership. Gina, first off, how does it feel to be a published author?
Gina Stracuzzi: It’s beyond exciting. I have to say that I really am humbled because while I have a lot of my thoughts in there, it’s really the stories of the women that I have interviewed on the podcast or have spoken at our conferences or roundtables, any number of places, that shared their stories so honestly and rawly and bravely that really have made this book possible. While it’s got my name on it, they are the heart and soul of it.
Fred Diamond: It’s a great book. I’ve read it, you feature 60 stories of overcoming adversity and setbacks, comebacks. Then the book is also peppered with over 100 insights, ideas, and thoughts that women could use this book as a guideline, and actually, to be frank with you, men, too. There are great stories of sales success.
Tamara, you’ve been a great friend of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. You were our Women in Sales Leadership Award recipient in 2020. The great Jim Peterik actually sang a song to you. You got the Eye of the Tiger. You wrote the foreword to this book. First of all, we’re very honored that you did. It’s a beautiful foreword. Tell us what you were thinking as you submitted the foreword for the book.
Tamara Greenspan: First of all, congratulations, Gina. I’m so proud of you and just so amazed with your stories as well and how you pay it forward and help so many women who are trying to achieve their career goals, and Fred, to you as well. I really appreciate every opportunity you have given me personally to help other women’s journeys to achieve their professional goals, to be part of their journeys, and to tell my own story. But also, I love to say I’m faculty for Gina, but to teach a course in what I’ve learned over the years to help women get the support they need in a way that’s going to make their path easier. I don’t mean by the hard work, but easier by getting the connections and getting the leadership they need and the sponsorship they need to pull them through their career.
It’s been an honor to be part of this organization and to continually help these incredible women who, to be honest, are the successors for all of us. They’re our next generation of leaders. They’re impressive. Like I needed help as I was growing up in the ranks, they need help. I’m so glad that you’ve put together an A-list cast of individuals, and this book, that helps women on that journey.
Fred Diamond: Gina, tell us about the book. Tell us what you hope readers get from the book. What is the outcome that you’re desiring?
Gina Stracuzzi: There’s a couple, really. One, I love giving women the opportunity to be heard and seen. But the really fundamental point of this book is for sales leaders, sales organization leaders, for companies to get with the program, to really understand that being successful isn’t the hard part for women. We can sell, we can lead. That’s not the hard part. We’ve proven it again and again and again. It’s the complexity of being a woman and a wife, and a mother, and a caregiver for older people, and the one that takes the dog to the vet, and all of that. When that is not taken into account and when unnecessary roadblocks are put in the way and those things aren’t taken into consideration, it changes the whole dynamic of someone’s career.
It is the companies that lose out because women can sell like nobody’s business. They are great managers. They build really diverse teams. People stay longer on those teams. Tamara knows all of this to be true and it’s just not necessary. What I want is for everyone to be treated the same, for women to be given opportunities based on what they’re working on, what they’re doing, what they’re delivering, not the idea, “Well, her potential is limited because she might have a baby,” or, “Her potential is limited because I know she has elder parents.” That’s not fair and it’s not serving the companies either. I want this book to be read across the board. I want women to see themselves and say, “If she did it, I can do it.” I want companies to go, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Fred Diamond: One of the great programs from the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership is our Women in Sales Leadership Forum. It’s this extension program held over three months. Gina, you’ve been leading it since 2018. It continues to grow strong, it continues to grow women in sales leaders at blue chip companies like Oracle, Hilton, Salesforce, and Amazon Web Services. We’ve been very fortunate to have Tamara frequently as the opening session at the Women in Sales Leadership Forum. By the way, the next one starts on May 15th. It’s a hybrid program, in person in Reston, Virginia, and virtual all around the world.
Tamara, you’ve been either the opening or one of the first speakers. It’s going on six, seven years now that Tamara has been our kickoff speaker. Why have you taken this on and what is the message that you want to get across to the women in sales who are going through the forum every time you take our stage?
Tamara Greenspan: It’s an honor to be part of that program and meet such impressive women in different stages of their careers and listening to them and their stories. What I focus on is to point out the need to have mentors and sponsors to help advance their careers, and really to have them understand the difference. There’s a big difference in those two roles that are in your professional life and the value of what they can each provide. Sometimes we find that the women don’t understand what the difference is and they don’t understand how they can leverage those professional relationships.
We also focus on the value of networking and continually learning, because that also increases your ability to find the right mentor and to basically keep your sponsorship relationship moving forward, or even gaining a sponsor if you don’t have one. I will tell you, we’re finding, and Gina and I are surprised, more Gina than myself, I’d like to add, most women do not have a sponsor. We work with them to try to figure out who their sponsor could be and how they can actually make that a professional connection that will help them fulfill their professional career advancement, because it’s all about career advancement, getting to that next step.
Fred Diamond: Gina, I’ve read the book. First of all, they’re great ideas, they’re great stories. I’ve seen many of the women on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, and a lot of them have spoken at the Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference that is being held. The one thing I kept getting was your passion to help women achieve what they can achieve in their careers. Where does that come from? Why are you the founder of the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership? Why did you devote all the time and energy at this time in your career to publish this fascinating book?
Gina Stracuzzi: When I broke into sales, it was selling commodities in Texas, convincing them that I could help them hedge their cattle prices and their cotton prices, and whatever else they were growing or building, and that’s a hard sell, as you can imagine. I’m a New Yorker, I was talking fast, I was whatever, but in order to do that, I needed my commodities license. The men were so bad back then, just awful. They put a big board on the wall of the office and took bets that I would fail my commodities license test.
What was interesting is every one of them had failed it at least twice, if not three times, and they had all had special training. I just wasn’t going to have any part of that. I taught myself, I passed with an 86, and I outraised capital three to one with all those Texas boys. It taught me to be really firm and really stand in what I know to be true, that I can do something. I could have either just quit and let them have their fun, or I could show up and take charge.
Fast forward 30 years, I had been out of corporate sales for about a decade and I was running my own business as a business development consultant. I started coming to the IES and meeting all these amazing women. I was listening to their stories and they were dealing, if not with the same overt shenanigans I had, certainly the same they get talked over in meetings, this and that, and I’m like, “How can this be? This can’t be.” I really got talking more to them and I thought, “We need something more profound,” and that’s how the forum was born, just this idea you can’t just go to one day’s conference or a workshop or a panel discussion and change the world.
You need to be with other women who you share an experience, but you also come to the same realization that, “This is about what I do. This is about how I show up. I’m the only one who can fix this,” because there will always be people standing in your way. It’s what you do about it and how you use your voice. That was the impetus for the forum. Then the book just became this rallying cry that more women need to know what the women in the book know, that they had to take charge and they did, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Fred Diamond: Tamara, for people who don’t know, you’re a senior leader in the public sector division of Oracle. I tell people this all the time, Oracle is one of the top five technology companies in the history of technology. You’ve been in the room with some very serious people who are doing very serious things for the health of the country and for the sanctity of the world. You mentioned mentorship, you mentioned sponsorship. What else do you want to get across about what it took you to get to the highest level of Oracle sales? What are some other, maybe a secret or two that has driven you to get to this particular place in your career?
Tamara Greenspan: One of the important things that I like to stress is, and I always say this and I’ll explain it, but raise your hand. The most important thing is to raise your hand. What I mean by that is take a risk. Do something sometimes that could be uncomfortable because you might not feel that you’re best suited to maybe join a task force, or join a different team that’s going to help deliver something special, something out of your norm, but you will learn so much and it actually helps your career because it does two things. It not only gains you valuable experience, but it also lets you connect with people outside your normal management chain, your normal daily engagements. Don’t just do the norm. Just take a risk, and sometimes when you do that, you’ll see that it’s worth it and you’ll keep doing it and continuing, and you’ll learn more. You’ll actually expand your reach across and within and actually globally with your company, and it’s just such a valuable lesson.
It can be hard to do, and scary, because I find that some of the women just are afraid to get out of their box, but I really encourage them to do it. If you’re somebody that doesn’t like to do things by yourself, call somebody else, like me, they’ll meet me in the forum, I’ll introduce them to people in some of these other networking things, but just find someone that will bring you along, because there are folks that will do that. Some people you find are just uncomfortable, but it is the most beneficial lesson that I learned along my career, but just putting myself out there.
Fred Diamond: It’s not just in your company. It’s also externally as well with industry groups or business development groups or charitable type of entities as well, that can definitely not just get you attention to get you attention, but to get you involved with people who are trying to do better things and bigger things.
Once again, thank you for the foreword. Gina, the book, Success Was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks, and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership. What are some of the plans that you have to get the book out there into the hands of people who need to read it?
Gina Stracuzzi: All kinds of things. We’re going to be doing special events, special book signings, going into companies and having panel discussions and some social events, and really highlighting the women that are in the book. We’re going to be putting them back on the podcast and just figuring out every way we can to really bring this book to everybody. I would say, if you’re in a company and you have a women’s group in there, I will be coming. Tamara and I were just talking, I’ll go to see OWL at Oracle. Women in technology groups, women in sales groups, I’m going to be coming to your office and knocking on your doors.
Fred Diamond: Once again, congratulations to Gina Stracuzzi, Success Was Never the Hard Part: Setbacks, Comebacks, and the Rise of Women in Sales Leadership. It’s available on Amazon. If your company has an ERG that focuses on women in sales, Gina would be a great person to have there. Gina, let’s go sell a million books. What do you say?
Gina Stracuzzi: I love that idea. I’ve heard we know some salespeople, so we should be able to get it done.
Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Congratulations, Gina. Tamara, thank you so much. My name is Fred Diamond. This is a special episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo