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EPISODE 235: Economic Development Leader Victor Hoskins Details the Monumental Sales Effort that Brought Amazon’s HQ2 to Northern Virginia

VICTOR’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “First, if you listen to the client you can’t lose. A lot of people do not hear the pain points, a lot of people do not pay attention to the client, they’re so busy selling their product they’re not listening to the client. The client has a need, find that need out. The client has pain, find that pain point and cure it. And second, you do nothing alone. Sales is a team sport. “Do not go out alone, do not pitch alone because you need somebody observing while you’re working and you need somebody working while you’re observing.”

Victor Hoskins is the President CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority.

Prior to taking over this role he had a similar position with Arlington County. 

On today’s program, he details the steps he and the team took to win one the biggest economic deals ever seen.

There are a lot of articles on the topic of the impact of Amazon’s HQ2 to the region including this one.

Find Victor on LinkedIn here.

Victor Hoskins: It was a big sale, biggest in the history of Economic Development at least in my industry.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you get us started? Again, we’re thrilled to have you on the podcast, I’m thrilled to talk about this particular sale but tell us a little more about you that we need to know.

Victor Hoskins: Probably one of the things that I think is important is that I spent half my career in a public sector and half my career in a private sector. When I was in the private sector I worked primarily for real estate development and real estate finance companies and actually, I had found one company with a group of guys called Urban America, a very successful Wall Street real estate investment company. Then I came back to the public sector, I came out of managing consulting, went back into public sector about nine years ago. I’ve been back in the public sector which I consider sales of a different type, selling places as opposed to selling a transaction for the last nine years and it’s been wonderful and I love it.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re the President CEO of the Economic Development Authority. We have people listening all around the globe, what exactly does an Economic Development Authority do?

Victor Hoskins: Primarily what an Economic Development Authority does in most jurisdictions is provide the business team that actually sells the place to companies in order to build their economy. In many cases, many of these organizations like in this case, we specifically sell international and national clients. We go after corporations around the world and we have offices in Bangalore, in Berlin, in Seoul, in London and in Los Angeles.  We have teams out there that are helping us get leads and then we try to bring those leads physically here or in many cases we may go out and pitch them and then get them later and basically sell them on our quality of life and a great place to do business.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to talk about how you brought Amazon to have their HQ2 and again, it was a huge deal. We talk to Sales Game Changers all the time, I would probably classify this as a home run.

Victor Hoskins: [Laughs] thank you.

Fred Diamond: When we were talking before the show you told me there were close to 240 jurisdictions that were looking to bring Amazon to have their HQ2 and eventually got narrowed down to 20 and of course, now they’re building it down in Arlington right on the waterfront. First of all, tell us about the scope of bringing Amazon for their HQ2 to Arlington and then we’ll talk about the sales process. It’s quite a fascinating journey to have gotten them here.

Victor Hoskins: Their original proposal started off surprisingly at 50 thousand new jobs, 4 million square feet and I think it was $5 billion in total investment. That was their original proposal. Ultimately, it ended up 25 thousand jobs that can go up to 37,500,  $2.5 billion dollar investment and a 4 million square feet. It ended up being half of the original proposal but the original proposal was huge. Anyone that’s in Economic Development that is trying to build their economy and diversify their economy wants a company like Amazon. Amazon is probably the ultimate diversification company and its growth has been meteoric, there’s no other way to describe it and everywhere that it is right now, it continues to provide a diversity of jobs for that economy.

That’s why it was so attractive to the jurisdiction so 238 proposals actually went in, I’m sure more than that tried to get a proposal together but the proposal was not easy to do, it was a difficult one. Actually, we did a proposal for all of Northern Virginia, we did it as a group and this is one of the things that I want to emphasize, we did it as a team. You used the phrase ‘home run’, one hitter hits the home run but the team wins the game and this was all about the team, and the way that we looked at it was that we were going to pitch all of Northern Virginia as a place. It included four jurisdictions, it included Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Arlington County and Alexandria. A lot of people do not know that we actually had four jurisdictions in that original proposal.

The proposal that won was actually a joint team proposal from Alexandria and Arlington, we actually did a proposal site together. What we found was that working as a team does a number of things for you. One, it gives you a lot of players on the field at the same time and #2, it gives you really different perspectives on the same problem. Then probably the other team player that I have to mention which was just incredible was the state of Virginia, Virginia Economic Development partnership led by Stephen Moret, he’s the CEO there. He just did a brilliant job of really helping us develop the strategy, we worked with not just our teams but McKinsey consultants and some marketing consultants actually put out package together which ended up being a 250 page, double-sided, full bleed beautiful document that had more information on this region than had ever been assembled in one place ever. For us, it was not just an exercise of making a proposal for an opportunity for a company but also really helping us understand how we work together as an environment, as an economic entity for Northern Virginia.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about this from a sales process. Obviously Amazon’s been around for over 20 somewhat years, everybody knows about their growth, everybody sees the Amazon Prime trucks driving around. How did the notion start 5, 6 years ago that Amazon was looking to build a second HQ? How did the team first become aware of the fact that there was this opportunity?

Victor Hoskins: It was very unconventional for our field. Normally these things are done very quietly, you’re approached by a site location consultant or a real estate developer or broker or even a company directly, you work with them on one-on-one for a while finding sites, discussing those sites, looking at opportunities, putting together an incentive package, that’s the normal process. This was very different, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen this before in history, they actually advertised that they were going to do this and they put it on their website. Of course, you put something like that on a website, everyone sees it and it went around the country pretty quickly. It was very unconventional in that two things were different. One, it was publicly put out there, this was September, 2017. It was publicly put out there but also the local jurisdiction was actually in control of who really applied for the opportunity. Usually it’s the developer or it’s the broker but in this case they actually put the jurisdiction in control because they were looking for incentives as part of it because it was such a big project. That was very different from normal.

Fred Diamond: What did they do? You said they published it publicly, did they put out an RFP?

Victor Hoskins: Yes, they put out an RFP and I think the RFP was 35 pages or so, if I recall correctly and detailed questions, we responded with this 250 page document and I’m sure many jurisdictions did the same. You had to ship it and you had to ship a number of copies, I forgot how many copies we had to ship but once that process was over, it did follow a little bit like our normal process which is shortlist. They got 238 applications, they reviewed all those applications and then I think it was late January of 2018 they announced, “We are looking at these 20 jurisdictions.

Fred Diamond: 238 jurisdictions ranging from New York City all the way through…

Victor Hoskins: Kokomo, Indiana [Laughs] there were some small places in there.

Fred Diamond: You’ve done great work prior to this with the District of Columbia, you’ve done a tremendous job bringing a lot of business into the district. Tell us what’s the thought process internally as they’re considering 238. You’re saying to yourself, “We’re going up against Kokomo and…”

Victor Hoskins: And New York.

Fred Diamond: And New York. A lot of times we hear from the Sales Game Changers where people get over confident because, “We got the proposal, we know we have a great product to offer here.” Tell us about that stage as you know you’re competing with 237 other entities. What is the feeling during that point and from a sales process, how are you going about it?

Victor Hoskins: The feeling is anxious, everybody is anxious because we knew that a lot of people would go after it but we never imagined it would be 238. We didn’t, that was not in our imagination, we were thinking maybe 50, 75, outside maybe a hundred but that was a number that we had never imagined in our mind. Emotionally, that’s how we were feeling but what we were doing was we were really thinking of our strategy because if you’re going to win in sales at this level you have to have a strategy and our strategy was a pretty straightforward one. #1, we wanted to make sure that we answered every question directly. We had a team that answered questions but then we had a review team that reviewed the answers to make sure that the answers were direct to the questions that were asked and if we felt like there was some information that could augment that answer, that team added it.

Then we had a consulting team behind us so we could have primary research done which was unique because usually we don’t do that, that was something that we all actually financially contributed to, to pay for the McKinsey consultants and they did a brilliant job. That’s a little bit normal but never to that extent, strategy but I don’t know how many times we’ve done primary research for our proposal. Thinking through the strategy, answering the questions directly but let me drill down a little bit on the strategy. We know that there are competitors out there that are going to be bigger than us, we knew that. We know our competitors that are in the market that normally compete for the same companies that we compete for because we have a certain talent pool here, so what we did is we set them up on a matrix and we said, “What do we think these guys are going to do?”

We laid it out and we concluded that there would be people in this market that would try to buy this deal and we decided we were not buying this deal. This was not about buying this deal, we were not going to be putting down some crazy number on a table because this is not what they were looking for. If you read the RFP, it was clear that that was not what they were looking for, that was important, but it wasn’t the primary driver. We picked that up pretty early as we reviewed the RFP. Then I have to attribute this to the person who really drove it who was the CEO of Virginia Economic Development Partnership, Stephen Moret. He had work in an academic institution and he, like us, knew the problem was talent but he knew the solution so he had a very creative solution.

He told us all, “We really need to back this up with some strong pipeline of talent” and it was an area that I was deep in and he came up with this recommendation of putting a billion dollars into and behind academic institutions that would raise a billion dollars to create innovation campuses that would support the pipeline of Amazon and other companies, not just Amazon but other companies. That was a stroke of genius. Amazon ended up getting directly $750 million in their incentive package for 37,500 jobs but on the other side of it for our entire educational infrastructure there’s a billion dollars in the pipeline available and out of that came two innovation campuses. That was a really important part of the strategy.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got two other questions for you as we’re in this process part right now. Again, we’re talking to Victor Hoskins, President CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the world to the Sales Game Changers podcast and when a lot of people think of this area maybe they don’t think of Northern Virginia, they think of DC as being the center of government. You know you have this product, tell me about what the product value was for Northern Virginia to go to Amazon because you said 238 companies, originally now it’s down to 20 but did they know? I’m from Northern Virginia, there’s great culture, there’s great universities, you just mentioned the incentive package, there’s great transportation, there’s a great metro system, great restaurants, DC is right across the river, New York is a 3 hour train ride away. Maybe I’m answering your question, but tell us about the product that you had to sell. Again, you’re competing against Kokomo, New York and all these other places.

Victor Hoskins: The value proposition was one that we thought they would embrace just by looking at the RFP. #1, the talent of pipeline and not just here in Virginia but throughout the region. We have 60 universities in this region, there are over 400 thousand people enrolled in those universities and we graduate 90,000 graduates every year, and we have two of the most productive engineering schools in the country in University of Maryland College Park and Virginia Tech. That was a big piece of it, selling that talent and we drilled down deep into the technical fields and how many were being produced and what this additional funding would do, this matching funding for these campuses would do to make that happen.

The other thing that we sold was actually the cultural infrastructure, there are 22 free Smithsonian museums in the District of Columbia and there’s no place else in the United States, and that was primarily our competition. There was a Canadian city and there was Mexico City but basically we were competing against other markets in the United States, no other market had that. In addition to that, Northern Virginia is right on the Potomac River right across the water, one, two stops away from the White House, from Capitol Hill. If you have to lobby, it’s really close and then we have 185 embassies that are located in District of Columbia, there’s no other place like that on the planet.

Then we have all these natural resources like rapids, on the northern part of the Potomac River there are actually rapids and down the stream we have the bay if they wanted to sail and then the bike paths. We really took time to build and show the entire environment that’s here and we have a lot of hip things that are going on in DC, H Street, U Street, The Wharf, Capitol River Front, but then we also have things like gaming at Prince George’s County. Because all of these things are accessible to us, we sold it all as one package because we’re a region, 6 million people in this region, 3 million workers, a half a trillion dollar economy, it’s the fifth largest in the country. We have the second largest concentration of tech workers in the United States and the only place that had more than us is New York and actually Silicon Valley is behind us. These facts we all laid out as a value proposition.

Fred Diamond: I have another question back to the sales process before we get to what you had to do when there were 20 jurisdictions. A big part of sales is knowing what’s going on with the customer. For example, if all you’re doing is responding to an RFP, you’re 99.9% sure you’re going to lose. Let’s talk about the relationship with Amazon during this process and if there’s something you can’t say, just don’t say it. Talk about the team’s relationship with Amazon people, how did you interact, how were you allowed to interact with them as you led up to the final position?

Victor Hoskins: In the beginning before we were down to the shortlist it was very limited, the contact was mostly between Virginia Economic Development Partnership’s CEO, Stephen Moret and Holly Sullivan who runs Global Economic Development for Amazon. There were many of us that got into some of those conversations, myself and a couple of my staff like Christina Winn and of course Stephanie Landrum from Alexandria, there were other people that got into those conversations but it was very limited before we got down to 20. When we got down to 20 it began to expand, we met more of their staff, we started meeting their real estate people, we started meeting the people that were involved in the HR, they came and did site visits but before that list of 20. Before that list of 20 it was very limited, it was like 99% sure we were going to lose [Laughs] like you said because you just don’t know until you get to ask questions. The site visits were really the first place that we got to ask more detailed questions and also get a sense of the company because you understand the company from the outside but when you engage with the people, you begin to see the culture and understand the culture.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, you’re listed as one of the 20. Tell us that moment, I don’t know if it was an email or it was a press release. You find out that Northern Virginia is one of the 20 jurisdictions, what is that moment like and what were the things you brought together to get ready for the next stage?

Victor Hoskins: This was hilarious. We were actually at an event where myself, the previous CEO of this organization, Fairfax County Economic Development, Alexandria’s CEO, Stephanie Landrum and the Deputy Mayor of Economic Development for DC and the Economic Development Director for Montgomery County were all on the stage together an it came across on a text. It was hilarious because we were all like, “Wow, we’ve made the shortlist!” and what was so interesting was that the guy from Montgomery County was happy because he made the list, the Deputy Mayor of Economic Development DC was happy because he made the list and we were happy because Northern Virginia made the list. It was really a euphoric moment because we felt like we all won.

This is the thing that I thought of and this is how I run these things through my head mostly on probabilities. Our chances were 1 in 20 when it got down to the shortlist but really our chance was actually 1 in 7 because there were 3 jurisdictions and all of the sudden when you throw those jurisdictions, because if they win we would have won. Amazon would bring 37,500 jobs if they complete their entire incentive package to Northern Virginia directly to Arlington. However, there will be another 70,000 jobs that will be generated from those 37,000 jobs and those will be other companies like them, tech companies and then other companies that support them and then all the services that everybody consumes every day, your legal services, your tech services, your dry cleaner, your cobbler – I don’t know if you get your shoes fixed, but I do. Everyone that provides services to individuals, dog groomers, there are 3,000 dogs at the headquarters of Amazon in Seattle, there could be a couple of 3,000 dogs here also so there’s a lot of benefit for the whole region.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to take a short break right now, listen to one of our sponsors. Now you’re one of the top 20 and you said you viewed it as being 1 of 7 chances of winning because of the region and for people who are listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast, DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia are pretty close. You could be within one jurisdiction within minutes or an hour depending on the weather and the traffic but nonetheless it’s one contained MSA so everything’s going on here together and there’s a lot of teaming, obviously. We’re going to take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors. When we come back, now you’re 1 of 20 and now what happens? How does the sales game change? What are some of the things that you need to be doing differently to get the deal? Again, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: We’re back on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we’re talking to Victor Hoskins, he’s the President CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority and we’re talking about the home run deal which was bringing Amazon HQ2 to Northern Virginia. Now we’re down to 20 companies – I keep saying companies, my apologies.

Victor Hoskins: It’s alright, we sell them like companies, that’s how we look at it, we’re a company [Laughs].

Fred Diamond: Jurisdiction is the right word, right?

Victor Hoskins: Yes, jurisdictions.

Fred Diamond: So now Amazon has said there’s 20 and now it begins to ramp up, now it’s serious. Now it’s like the Kokomos – no disrespect – are no longer considered for this and also, you’re not competing, even though you said before the break that you’re friends with the guy from Montgomery County and DC, even though it’s going to help the region you kind of want it.

Victor Hoskins: [Laughs] Yeah, you want to win.

Fred Diamond: I’m getting the sense from talking to you here, you did so much great work in bringing business to DC to bring it to Arlington and of course now you’re bringing business to Fairfax County. What happens now? There’s 20 jurisdictions.

Victor Hoskins: As you know in sales, you get on this list of 20 and like you said, the game changes because first of all, you have more information. We were more engaged with not just one player at Amazon but multiple players at Amazon. They did a site visit, we took them on tours, we introduced them to people in the community, our leaders, we wanted to give them a taste of our culture because we were getting a taste of their culture just from engaging with them. We brought the developers to the table and interesting thing, one many people don’t know is that they thought we just brought JBG to the table, that’s not true. We actually brought four different developers to the table, one was JBG because they have one large asset in Crystal City but we also brought four different ones which included JBG, Monday Properties, GOAL Properties and actually another part of Arlington County called Rosslyn for another 8 million square feet because the proposal was for 8 million square feet. What we were doing at that point was we were trying to stay on the shortlist and this is all we talked about in my office, staying on the shortlist.

You get on the shortlist, it’s not win it, it’s stay on the shortlist because if you stay on the shortlist till the end, you will win. There’s a quote that I constantly send around to my people, “Steady wins the race” because I do believe that steady does win the race. The other thing that I said to them is, “Okay, stay on the shortlist but also be steady” and steady in a couple of ways. One, sober-minded, don’t get panicky if they ask a question that you don’t have the answer to, we’ll do research to get the answer. Two, answer directly, don’t evade the question. If you don’t have it, say you don’t have it. If you have it, say you do have it, it doesn’t do the plan any good, it doesn’t do you any good to try to hide a weakness.

They ask about some of the things that we’re weak in, we told them we were weak in those things but these are the things that we will do to strengthen them. There were things that we were extraordinary in and boy, did we play those up. Play your aces, I don’t know how many of you played bid whist out there or rummy, but you’ve got to count your cards and you play to win. You don’t put out weak cards when you’ve got to stay in the game.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got another analogy here. Again, when you’re in a sales organization you have a pipeline so for every home run there’s 20 other deals that you need to win so this is the big one and obviously as we mentioned a number of times, it’s probably not even a home run, it’s probably a grand slam, obviously and it’s already begun to provide so much value to the region. Now you’re with Fairfax, you worked with Arlington at the time but there’s probably another hundred companies besides Amazon that you want to bring to the region so how do you stay focused on this one and the other hundred as a sales leader?

Victor Hoskins: That’s an excellent question because all of us have relatively small sales team for the type of work that we do and we had 8 salespeople basically in Arlington so we shifted the load around the office and I actually ended up recruiting people from my other teams. I also had the tourism team which was 10 people, I had an arts and culture team which were 19 people so I had all these different teams. Some of them temporarily picked up some work that supported the business investment side because we just didn’t have the capacity so we expanded it by cross-training people.

One of the key things were my leadership, Christina Winn was just incredible, she was my Director of Business Investment, she was brilliant in how she executed this. She balanced the load between her team, she saw people couldn’t do a certain task, she moved it to another person, she told me what she needed in order to get the job done and I delivered it. There’s a long process of just getting through the next set of questions, by the way, because they had another hundred questions and we responded with… I’m trying to remember, I think it was about 11 hundred pages if you include all the appendices. It was a long document to answer all those questions coherently and with multiple teams because we had all of a sudden universities involved, we had Virginia Tech involved, that was a different conversation, we had George Mason University involved, we had the State of Virginia Economic Development Partnership involved, we were doing it together with Alexandria so Alexandria and Arlington involved.

You have multiple teams, you have all of this information pouring in and actually, we all had communications teams so we had at least 3 communications teams at the table at one time all the time so all of that was going on simultaneously. Keeping it in order and keeping it coherent and again, being steady and always realizing that you want to stay on the shortlist and that meant answering everything directly and delivering coherent answers.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got another twist for you here before we get down to the award. Again, it’s high profile and now it’s getting exciting, I’m sure that there were people who didn’t want it to happen. You have that in companies too where someone’s like, “Do we really want this deal? Can we handle it?” A company might win a huge bid, it saps up all the resources and all those types of things, again it’s a very public thing, obviously Amazon is such a huge company and citizens, New York won and then they turned it down.

Victor Hoskins: Then they lost, yeah.

Fred Diamond: They turned it down which was unbelievable, nonetheless. Talk about that for a second or two, you’re trying to win this deal, everyone who’s working for the Economic Development Authorities and the state and the EDP, this is like a win-win-win, Virginia Tech and all the universities.

Victor Hoskins: Governor’s office, Commerce department, everybody’s on it.

Fred Diamond: No way this isn’t going to be a win, but there are people who are ignorant,, maybe they don’t know all the facts, maybe they’ll take a certain stand for whatever the reason is. As the sales leader in the whole process, how do you handle that knowing that “steady wins the race, we want to win this thing because we know it’s going to be a big thing”? Was that a big deal? Talk about that little twist.

Victor Hoskins: One of the negative positives about Arlington was that before I arrived there in January 2015 which was two and a half years before this competition, they had lost over 34,000 employees because of sequestration, low utilization of office space, changing GSA requirements, it really hit them hard. Crystal City was hit the hardest and Crystal City had the highest vacancy rate which was almost 30%. For people out there who don’t know commercial real estate, that’s really bad. Their history vacancy rate for the county for almost 20 years was 10% so they went from 10% overall to over 21%. Just that had made everyone aware that it’s important to get companies in town.

There were a lot of people that might have been upset about it that weren’t upset about it because they realized that actually, a lot of small businesses had disappeared, hundreds and hundreds of them had disappeared out of Crystal City that were supported by all those jobs that were there. Bringing those back was important and there was a lot of empty office space, literally millions of square feet of empty office space let alone there were vacant lots that they could build on, so there was an advantage in that. Almost the disadvantage became the advantage. Let’s talk about the elected side, the elected officials, we kept them constantly informed because there were some people that were sensitive to it. You may not know much about Arlington but it’s a very engaging county and the other jurisdictions that weren’t here, there were elements that were outside of here that didn’t want it to happen. They were trying to pierce our goals, they were actually trying to derail what we were trying to achieve so that process, we really counteracted it with information.

Any time there was an objection that came up, we just addressed it directly whether it was true or not. We just dealt with it directly. The great thing about it is that almost everything that they brought up was not a real big issue, like transportation. They were saying transportation was going to be a problem, well ridership was down 29% in Crystal City, excuse me, the metro, subway, they’re built, it was empty. People were telling me they were really enjoying riding in their cars by themselves. Look, that’s not a good thing. The region got together to finance metro maintenance and improvements but the bottom line was that all these objections that came up, we just dealt with them directly.

Fred Diamond: Before we talk about the final award, you raise an interesting point there. For people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast, the DC Metro Region, Fairfax County is a growing area. We’re doing today’s podcast interview in Tysons Corner which is right smack in the middle of Fairfax County, there’s a new metro going through, it’s been going through for a couple years now, there’s nice buildings, condos and office buildings pop up. We’ve got to bring in economic development to the region to fill all these offices and to give people jobs and have young people move in and all those things. How much pressure was there on the team to win?

Victor Hoskins: Quality of life is a big deal and you can’t have a quality of life without revenue. I went through this in the District of Columbia, there were a lot of development projects that we did in District of Columbia that totally transformed the city, the Wharf city center, shops at the Dakotas, Union Market, H Street, these projects transformed the city and they delivered revenue to the city. That city has had nothing but surpluses for the last decade. My first year finished in 2012, they’ve had nothing but surpluses since 2012 so for the last 8 years they’ve had nothing but surpluses and they still argue about surpluses but you’re going to argue about something, so isn’t that what you want to argue about? That’s why we need growth, because that growth really provides, for example, in Fairfax County 53% of the county budget goes to our great schools. We have the most fantastic schools in the entire country.

As a matter of fact, when we were in Arlington County we were selling Fairfax County schools and frankly, they are pretty amazing, the #1 school in the United States, Thomas Jefferson High School is here in Fairfax County but you can’t have that without having growth. The counter-argument is decline because there is no stable state. We are a market-driven economy, you’re either growing or you’re shrinking, there is no stable state. Anybody that says that doesn’t understand economics so let’s look at Detroit. In the 1950s Detroit was at the pinnacle, it was the #1 in technology in its field, it was producing more cars than anybody else and I think they were growing sorghum and soy in Silicon Valley. Fast forward, look at today. One grew, one declined, which would you rather have? There may be a lot of problems with growth, there may be complexity with growth but the bottom line is that decline is worse, decline is more difficult and that’s really why you need the growth. You need the growth to fuel your quality of life.

Fred Diamond: Let’s get to the end here. Again, 20 jurisdictions and you won, you were one of two jurisdictions that were awarded their second HQ. What is that like? How did you know, how did you find out? Again, you talked about getting a text when you were one of those 20 but how did you find out that Northern Virginia is one of the two finalists and what were some of the things that led to the close? We don’t really talk a lot on the Sales Game Changers podcast about the close because so much of it is the process. You talked about steady wins the race, a lot of what the key messages from the Sales Game Changers podcast is preparation, it’s planning, it’s continual learning, those types of things. It’s not about pushing something at the very end, but let’s talk about the last mile, if you will. Talk about some of the things that happened before they made their announcement from a sales process.

Victor Hoskins: A couple of things happened. We had expected them to go from 20 down to 5, that would have been a normal process in our field. They didn’t they never did that but we made some assumptions and we all have relationships in the real estate market as well as the Economic Development environment and we talked to each other and I think people eventually figured out, we figured out without any direct answers, just because of activity we figured out roughly who the five were. We knew one was New York, we knew we were in it and we knew others were in it, I won’t go through those but we had surmised that these are our real competitors. We started forming our position towards the end that last mile against those competitors, how we match up against those competitors and how we exceed those competitors in most categories.

There was really what I would call a last minute positioning. Think of it as the two minute drill of football, I used to play football, we had a two minute drill and whether you were behind or ahead, if you had the ball at the end you were trying to score a touchdown, that’s what it was all about and that’s where we were. We knew the weaknesses of our competitors and we knew our strengths so we were playing those really strong. The second thing was that Amazon was very clear, “Do not reveal anything that they’re doing with you” and no one did. Like I said, no one told us anything directly, we figured things out indirectly and whatever came out in the media had nothing to do with us, we made sure of that. We signed a confidentiality agreement and I got to be honest with you, I think that meant a lot to Amazon, I think for that for them demonstrated the integrity of the organization and the individuals that they were dealing with and we held true to that.

The only people who were informed at any level other than our team directly that signed the NDAs were really the elected officials because they are responsible for the jurisdiction so we had to inform them, but that was done in closed session. I think the positioning of us against who we figured were the other five competitors, continuing to keep our elected and stakeholders involved as much as possible and as informed as possible, that’s what we did towards the end. The last couple of weeks, we were sweating it. There were people saying that we haven’t heard anything, we’ve lost and I said, “You know what? It’s not over till it’s over. When the last singer gets out there and belts out the last lines, then it’s over. We haven’t heard that so let’s just believe that we’ve won until someone tells us otherwise.” We were stunned [Laughs] literally stunned.

Fred Diamond: We talked today with Victor Hoskins on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Victor, two last questions, sum it up. From a sales perspective, tell us the three critical things why you won, why it was a home run, why the deal came to Northern Virginia.

Victor Hoskins: #1, we listened to the client. If you listen to the client you can’t lose, a lot of people do not hear the pain points, a lot of people do not pay attention to the client, they’re so busy selling their product they’re not listening to the client. The client has a need, find that need out. The client has pain, find that pain point and cure it, that’s #1. #2, you do nothing alone. Sales is a team sport, I tell my people all the time, “Do not go out alone, do not pitch alone because you need somebody observing while you’re working and you need somebody working while you’re observing.” Team is probably the second thing that I would say is extraordinarily important. The third is really understanding that you will fail if you do not maintain your pace. If you slow your pace down, if you change your gate you probably are going to lose because as I started, steady wins the race.

If you are steady, I don’t know if you’ve ever run a 440, it’s a long race. The most important thing in a 440 is actually the steady pace for the entire time, not that last 110 kick. Everyone thinks it’s the last 110 kick, it’s actually what you do before you get to that last 110 because you may not have any fuel left because you put too much into your pace but being steady is extraordinarily important. Those are the three most important, I think.

Fred Diamond: Victor, I want to thank you again, this has been a great insight into a huge deal and tying it back, I appreciate you taking the time to tie it back to the sales process. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, this has been a great story. Why don’t you give us one final thought? Again, we talked about Amazon and that was a big deal, it’s probably one of the biggest in your career if not the biggest but you’ve brought hundreds of companies to the DC region. Of course, you also created a successful company as well. Why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast?

Victor Hoskins: If you can learn to collaborate either strategically or directly with people who appear to be your competition, you can overwhelm the real competition and I believe that’s what we did in in Northern Virginia by coming together in a collaborative team, I think that’s really how we won. Someone asked me before, “Victor, what did you think was the most important thing in the whole process?” and I told them the collaboration between all levels, between us, the state government, the other jurisdictions, the private developers, the investors, everybody all the way up and down the scale.

We made sure that there was smooth relationships and if there was a problem, we put it on the table and discussed it. If there was a conflict, we put it on the table and discussed it. You can’t have collaboration without some discomfort, collaboration isn’t automatic, it’s not even natural. [Laughs] I mean I try to pick a movie with my wife, that’s a difficult thing sometimes and that’s just two of us who’ve known each other for years, difficult to collaborate on which movie we’re going to see. Can you imagine how difficult it was to collaborate on a $2.5 billion dollar, 37,500 with two billion dollar and a half a billion dollar innovation campus? It was pretty difficult but if you can do that, you can do anything.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 235: Economic Development Leader Victor Hoskins Details the Monumental Sales Effort that Brought Amazon’s HQ2 to Northern Virginia first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 045: Asurion Sales Leader Rob DiRocco Helps the World’s Leading Brands Support the Tech that Keeps You Connected

Rob DiRocco is the Senior VP and General Manager of Retail Solutions at Asurion, the global leader in technology protection and support sold to the top retailers, manufacturers and carriers. Rob has overall responsibility for growing and managing the retail and manufacturing business including all aspects of sales to drive growth for their client partners.

Rob and his team helped top brands such as Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon sell services that support their sale of technology enabled products to consumers. Prior to Asurion, Rob spent almost 5 years leading sales and marketing at mindSHIFT Technologies which provided cloud based IT management to small and medium sized businesses. He started his career in Federal Sales at Bell Atlantic.

He received an undergraduate degree in finance and marketing from Virginia Tech, and an MBA in finance from George Washington University.

Find Rob on LinkedIN!

Rob DiRocco: Fred, first, let me thank you for the opportunity today to talk to you. I’ve got to tell you, I think your podcast is phenomenal, one of the things I’ll talk about later is I’m a big believer in continuous education and self-study and I can think of no better way than things like podcasts and you’ve had some phenomenal leaders on yours so a lot of great insights there for everyone that listens to them. I live in Vienna, VA and a fun fact my wife is the mayor of Vienna so I’m definitely involved a lot in local Vienna activities and things around the area.

Asurion’s based in Nashville. I have a broad responsibility for the P&L of this business but I always say at heart I’m a sales person and so sales is certainly the biggest thing that I oversee, and I always tell people if you cut me open you’ll see a sales person’s DNA inside through and through. Thrilled to talk today about sales and all the things associated with it and see if I can help share some advice that’s helped me over the years.

Fred Diamond: Rob, what do you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Rob DiRocco: Asurion provides technology support and customer service to consumers but we do it under the brand name of the leading retailers, manufacturers and telecom providers, some of the people that you referenced early on. We help them sell and support the technology enabled products and services that they offer to their customers and so we are the brand behind the brands.

A lot of people don’t know Asurion by name and that’s by choice because we’re really focused on promoting our client’s brand but we actually have 300 million active consumer contracts that we are managing on behalf of those clients so we have a very big private business that we run on behalf of our clients and support them.

And what excites me is that we provide a great service and there’s a high need for it. With all the advancements that we all see in connected products and smart home and internet things, all of that is fantastic but people need more help than ever in interconnecting those devices and getting the most out of their technology and we’re great at this. We have a big focus on customer experience and our net promoter scores are industry leading. What excites me as a sales leader is that we have a product that I believe in, that I know is great, and there’s a high need for it.

Fred Diamond: You definitely represent some of those great brands. You mentioned in your introduction about your DNA that you’re really a sales guy. How did you first get into sales? Tell us a little bit about your entry point into the career.

Rob DiRocco: As you noted early on, my undergraduate was at Virginia Tech and I was a finance and marketing major, that was a double major there. If you’d ask me in college, sales was not even on my radar, something that I wanted to do. I wanted to work in finance or I wanted to work in marketing, I had internships in both of those over the years.

It was not uncommon for big companies like Xerox or Procter and Gamble or IBM, companies that had very strong sales acumen to come onto a campus like Virginia Tech and ask who the student leaders were and then they would actually pursue them directly for sales positions. So I wasn’t looking for sales roles but I started getting solicited and then offers for these great sales positions at some really established companies that I thought a lot of, and it kind of opened my eyes to that as a career that I hadn’t really thought before.

I started thinking of a different lane and I eventually accepted an offer with Bell Atlantic which became Verizon predominantly because they were based in DC area where I was, and they had a great training program out of college. So I thought they had great training, it was in the area that I liked, got to handle large federal clients right away once you got through that training so for all those reasons I was drawn towards that and I really ended up making a great choice.

Fred Diamond: Curiously you mentioned you were a campus leader. How were you a campus leader at Virginia Tech, what did you do?

Rob DiRocco: I was the president of an organization called the Student Alumni Associates. It was about 300 people that supported things like campus tours and various fundraising programs for the school. I was president of my fraternity and chaired the Danceathon we had every year so I just did a lot of things like that. A little fun fact – I was the Greek man of the year.

Fred Diamond: Very good. So you mentioned your first real job in sales was with Bell Atlantic which eventually became Verizon. Tell us, Rob, some of the key lessons you learned from some of your first few jobs in sales.

Rob DiRocco: I will tell you first I was blessed to have a great first boss that I worked for, a guy named Bill McKinney. Bill was just a great coach, great person and a great person to learn from right out of college especially. And there are three things that always stuck out for me, two from Bill and just one from the position as a whole.

One is Bill was an early bird so I got in the habit really early of getting in the office early and planning out my day and that’s something that has stuck with me the whole career. The second thing is I learned is really knowing your product and your service well and knowing your client really well and the industry that you operate in. At the time that for me that was the federal space and I put in a lot of energy and learned a lot about preparing well to know that client extremely well to be successful in working with them.

And then the third one was patient but steady pursuit. That comes as a byproduct of selling to the federal government and what I was selling at Verizon had a long sell cycle. It was a high dollar sale and so one of the things you learn was you’re not going to have a quick sale. A lot of times it was going to be a long sale cycle and you had to patiently work through it but you had to advance the sale so you had to do things to continue to create momentum and move your sale forward even though you knew it was going to be a long sale cycle. So those are three things that always stood out to me that I’ve carried forward.

Fred Diamond: Early bird and getting to the office early, know your product and your services well and your client, and I liked the last one, patient but steady pursuit. It’s a marathon, most of the people I’m interviewing – as a matter of fact all the people I’m interviewing as part of the Sales Game Changers podcast have been in 20, 30 year careers, have lots of great lessons learned along the way and here they are 20, 30 years into their career at a very high level of success. You have to have had that patient but steady pursuit.

Rob DiRocco: That’s right, exactly. That’s a great summary.

Fred Diamond: So tell us more about you specifically. Rob DiRocco, what specifically are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance. 

Rob DiRocco: I hate to disappoint your listeners, I don’t know that I’d say I’m an expert in anything. What I would say is I’m an expert in knowing what I’m good at and leveraging that, and knowing what it is that I need. I work with the great people on my team or great people to work with in adjacent roles to plan a parallel path together and leverage each other’s strengths.

What I’ve learned over the years – and I think that’s important for anyone to really understand what they’re good at and what it is that is something they can improve a little bit but they’re going to always need someone else as a compliment to help them in terms of rounding out their skills – but for me, personally, I’ve always been extremely organized. I’ve always worked on my communication skills so that’s something that I’ve always learned to leverage in building relationship with clients as well as internally. I have always been a fairly decisive person which in running a business unit is something I find is very important to be able to get the facts and make a decision to move forward one way or the other in a direction.

And I’ve always been a very resilient person, that’s something that I’ll talk about I’m sure over the course of this podcast, but that’s an important skill to me and one that I know how to reset myself. So we all have a bad day, a bad meeting, what have you, I know how to reset myself. And the last one is I like to infuse humor. People that I work with would say that we have fun, we laugh and you have to, you have to see the humor in things and be able to enjoy yourselves in working with your peers to make the day one that flies through.

Fred Diamond: Well let’s touch back on that resiliency thing because it struck me as interesting. Tell us a little more about that, what do you mean and what are some of the things you specifically do – you mentioned – to reset yourself?

Rob DiRocco: Yeah. That’s something that over the years I have really worked on and I have a very specific set of ten things that I do every single day, so I have a checklist. So for me I always get up at 5am unless I’m travelling and something changes that. I will always pray, I will always read a verse of the bible, I will always do a little brainstorming in a journal, I will always work out, I will always meditate and then I will always listen to something positive, podcast, something. Whether that’s when I’m working out or I’m coming to the office, depends on what I’m doing that day from a workout perspective but I will always do those things in the morning.

And then at the end of the day I’ll always plan out my next day. So I plan out my week on Sundays and I plan out my next day every evening, and I find that set of things is for me a grounding mechanism and particularly the things I do in the morning. I always start my day productive because I always do those things before my work day even starts and so you almost feel like you already accomplished a lot before the day even begins. For me if something’s bad one day, by the next day when I do that reset, I’m good to go.

Fred Diamond: That is powerful. One thing that I’ve seen over the last year is the whole concept of morning ritual. It has become such a huge thing. Do you follow Tim Ferris at all?

Rob DiRocco: I know exactly, the four hour work week, yes. I’ve listened to his stuff before and I’ve read his books, yes.

Fred Diamond: He’s a student on morning rituals and those are things that you do to keep grounded so that’s impactful. You talked about your first boss, but tell us who was an impactful sales career mentor and how specifically did they impact your career?

Rob DiRocco: The other one that would stick out for me over the last 12 years is Tony Nader. Tony Nader for those who don’t know him was the CEO of NEW, NEW was the company that I worked for originally that got acquired by Asurion. Tony is just an exceptional person. He is the CEO of the Inova Board of Trustees and he now runs an investment firm, SWaN, plus he’s on a bunch of different boards. But what I learned from Tony is number one, having incredible balance. Someone that really stresses balancing business, family, his faith, philanthropy and really stresses that. When he was here as a CEO he always really encouraged people to find that balance and to make sure that they go to their kid’s soccer games, for example. That’s really important but then also did the right things that you do in the business side.

The second one, he is incredible at preparing. He’s a very diligent preparer for a meeting, anything important so I’ve learned a lot from him about how you prepare for an important client meeting or anything you have going on. And then the third one is he couldn’t be more respectful to everyone he meets. I don’t care who they are, what level they are, he’s always interested in them and it’s genuine interest and knows about them, knows about their family and just a genuine person. So I’ve gotten a lot out of observing him over the years and the personal coaching he’s given me.

Fred Diamond: That is great. Rob, I’m going to take you a little bit off course here for a second, because I want to go back to the introduction when we mentioned companies like Walmart, Amazon and Home Depot. For a lot of the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast, they’re striving to work with some of the big companies in the world. I’m going to take a little short detour if you don’t mind. Can you give us some insights into how you work with some of the largest companies in the world like that? What are some of the things that you’ve had to think about as you pursue companies like that from a sales perspective?

Rob DiRocco: Great question, Fred. I would say, I don’t know that it’s any different dealing with a Walmart or an Amazon as it is dealing with a large federal agency or other type of commercial entity. What I find – and some of the principles that I believe in that apply to this – is #1 you have to know your client really well. We spend a lot of time understanding what’s important to our client, understanding their buying structure, who the key decision makers are, all the things you need to do in selling into a very large organization, and when you’re selling into a large organization it’s not one decision maker, not one buyer. There are multiple people, it’s a very complex sale so you have to understand all of that, and you have to understand the arena that they’re working in.

So for us right now, it’s understanding what’s going on in retail, the dynamics of it. How that affects their business and then most importantly, how can we help them to be successful in their arena. It’s paying attention to those kinds of things. And then I also would say for us, we work hard to treat every client differently. I have two clients in sporting goods.  They are both sporting goods retailers, but I can tell you that the way they operate, their cultures, very different and so we ended up having programs that were very unique for them and how we work with them were very unique because they view their marketplace differently. So understanding what’s unique about your client is really important.

Fred Diamond: That’s powerful. So let’s talk about some of the challenges that you face today as a sales leader. Rob, tell us the two biggest challenges you face as a sales leader today.

Rob DiRocco: The two biggest challenges we face as a business and it affects very much on the sales side relates to what I just talked about a little bit which is, retailers first of all, some of them have really struggled the last year. So I mentioned Sports Authority, that was a very big client for us and they went out of business. Now, we can’t control the fact that they went out of business and there’s lots of things that go into that but as a sales person and as an organization we have to find a way to make up that revenue, right? So we have a number to hit and we want to grow our business and so you end up saying, “OK, what am I going to do to compensate for this fact that I can’t control this client going out of business but can I grow other clients, can I bring in some new business?”

So it’s the team looking and saying, “How do we adjust our business model to recognize that this thing outside of our control has happened that impacts our business model?”

The second one is everyone knows that retailers are more and more looking at digital channels so whether that be selling online to apps and different mediums and so we’ve certainly had to adjust our business to make sure that we are a leader there. And that meant we’ve had to add staff that had expertise there but it also means everybody has to raise their knowledge and awareness of working in an Omni-channel world. So those two things are things that we’ve really had to adjust our business for and focus on to be successful.

Fred Diamond: Rob, you’ve had a great career to this point and you’re going to continue having a great career, but tell us the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud us. Rob, take us back to that moment.

Rob DiRocco: Picking out a #1 is hard, I don’t know if I have a clear #1 but what I would tell you is you always remember your first big sale. For me that first big sale was NASA, when I worked at Verizon that was one of the accounts I had early on and it stuck out for me, so it was a first big sale I had. It was an integrated voice and data network that we sold to them, it was several million dollars, long sale cycle.

What really stuck out to me: #1 they were a great client. I really liked working with them, it was an agency that I had a great passion for what they did and I believed in what their mission was and so first and foremost I genuinely felt pride in helping them advance that mission with what we were doing.

Number 2, in having a long sale cycle, lots of competition on the particular business that we went after there had to do a lot of learning and adjusting our stealth strategy and how again you advance the sales I talked about earlier over a very long window in dealing with multiple decision makers.

And then the third thing that stuck out was that was by no means just my sale. That was very much a very large team sale and so a lot of people were involved and you had to really work collaboratively and I remember feeling a lot of pride and again excitement as a team when we not just closed that sale per se but actually implemented it and it was working really well and the client was really happy and that was a great feeling. So it’s something that I’ve carried forward all these years, is how do you adjust your sales approach and then the joy you have in working in team environment. I find that the most fun kind of selling is when you’re working with a cross-functional team and you’re working together to make it happen. There’s a lot of joy in that.

Fred Diamond: So Rob, you’ve had a great career in sales. Did you ever question being in sales? Now again you started off as a finance major. Did you ever question in being in sales, was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me?”

Rob DiRocco: The short answer is no, honestly. I’ve always really enjoyed sales. I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of it and the rewards of it. Now, having said that what I would say is that some point I certainly wanted to move up into sales leadership which I got the opportunity to do at Verizon which is great and then I’ve been able to maintain that throughout my career. And then at some point I started wanting to run other functional disciplines as well, marketing and product and operational things and so again I’ve had those opportunities.

So for me, I’ve been able to move my career but always maintain that sales base, sales is still very much the most important thing that I focus on but I would say that I’ve never thought, “I don’t know if I really enjoy the sales part of it.” That’s actually been the part that I enjoy the most, even when I’ve had these other disciplines and responsibilities. At the end of the day I leverage and lean on my sales experience and I really enjoy that the most at the end of the day. I’m happiest going out and seeing clients and working with clients.

Fred Diamond: Rob, what is the most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals listening to today’s podcast to help them improve their career?

Rob DiRocco: There’s 3 things that I think are really important for anyone in sales and things that I would stress to anyone who wants to really get better and better at it.

One is your work ethic. I always say I would never want to lose because someone out-worked me, so you always want to know that you absolutely put everything you could into winning that sale and to working with that client. So work ethic’s important and never feeling like you’re going to let anyone else out-work you.

Number 2, and I talked about it earlier, but you have to be an expert in your customer. You have to really know their buying organization, the people involved, the processes, what’s important to them, how your product and service can really truly help them but you have to really be an expert in that, and if you’re someone that doesn’t have a set client list, maybe you have an industry. You have to know that industry and what’s important in that, so you’d have to really know the arena that you’re operating in and be an expert in it.

And then the third one is resilience, we talked about a little bit earlier but you’re going to get no’s, you’re in sales. You’re going to have bad days, you’re going to have a bad meeting, you’re going to have a bad presentation and you have to figure out how you reset yourself so it doesn’t carry forward. I like sports analogies and it’s a quarterback in football that gets beat for a touchdown or a quarterback that throws an interception and any of those scenarios they have to be able to bounce back the very next play, right? And so it’s no different in sales. You have to figure out how you can’t ever let one bad day become two bad days.

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting. What are some of the things that you do specifically to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Rob DiRocco: I talked about the routine that I follow, that’s really a big thing for me. What I would say my number onething I would say is exercise. I always tell my kids this, too. It’s like whenever you have a bad day, a bad meeting, whatever, to me nothing recharges me like exercise. It completely changes your perspective and gets you out of your head. The only other thing I would say is I’m big at thinking through if something’s challenging on whether it be with a client or something internally, whatever it is, then I’ll often take a step back and say, “OK, let me brainstorm some of the things that can be done to action on this.”

And so that helps me so that it’s not something that feels outside my control, that I can give myself back some control of, “OK, what can I control here?” or “Here’s some ideas I have, I’m going to take some action on a couple of them.” And that always sort of gives me energy again to sort of deal with whatever the challenge is.

Fred Diamond: So you’ve mentioned routines a couple of time. Just curiously, on your exercise, tell us what you do. What is your exercise routine? What are some of the things that you do?

Rob DiRocco: I mix it up, I have a pretty good gym at home but I also belong to Lifetime. But I’ll do yoga, I’ll run, I’ll lift weights, I’ll do a P90X, I’ll do Stairmaster, I mix it up. My biggest routine is I don’t have a set routine, I constantly change it up.

Fred Diamond: What’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Rob DiRocco: I talked about how with our clients one of their big challenges is being more digital so for retailers in particular they want to be more in a digital arena whether that be online or app-based or other kinds of channels for sales and service and so. For us, that’s a really big focus. It was a big focus this year and it’s a big focus of ours next year, is really making sure that we are leading in that category both in how you sell services online but as importantly how you service consumers online and meet them at the way that they want to be serviced whether that be through an application, through a website, through a portal, different means to be able to do that but really focusing on that digital environment and making sure we’re leaders in it.

Fred Diamond: Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Rob DiRocco: Well sales certainly offers financial rewards if someone does well in sales there’s often great upside potential there, so along with the challenges you get a little higher reward from it. And the second one I think there’s a reward that is a great satisfaction, when you do sell something new into a client and you get it implemented and the client loves it, that is a really rewarding feeling so to me the financial and that personal sort of satisfaction you get.

Those two things are often what drives me, and then I think how you deal with it is you have to view sales as a process and you’re going to get no’s and that’s your way of giving you a sign you have to make some refinements to your approach and figure out a different way to go at things and sometimes the timing thing. I can tell you as a general manager of a business unit, I get someone soliciting me every day, multiple people. And I can’t literally return every phone call, I couldn’t, I would spend all of my time doing that so I tend to look at the ones that really are meeting a need that I’m adjusting in that very moment and I might put them in a folder say for later if they’re intriguing to me and some of it’s timing. So you have to view it as the no’s are some of the process, you just have to keep working at it and know that some of it’s timing.

Fred Diamond: Rob, give us one final thought. What’s a final thought you would like to share to Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast?

Rob DiRocco: I think the only thing we haven’t talked about is I think it’s really important to teach yourself to see threats or challenges as opportunities and it’s something that I genuinely think you have to teach yourself to do and I’ve learned over the years. But we’re all going to face challenges whether it’s a sales situation or other things in your life and one of the things I often do is I’ll take a step back and say, “What good can come out of this and how can I look at this differently so this is actually an opportunity for me or for the business?”

And I think that’s a really important different perspective that has helped me a lot over the years. I also find if I then brainstorm sort of again solutions I could use to tackle that, I talked about it earlier. But I always feel like there’s a counter move so if you always have that mindset there’s always something, some action you can take to address that challenge and I think you can go a long way.

And the last one is to feel 100% accountable so even though I talked about situations like a client going out of business, it’s outside of your control, at the end of the day I’m a big believer in being accountable for your results and your success and dealing with your challenges and so you have to take that 100% accountability and figure out another way around your problem. So those are the things that really stick out for me that I try and stress to my own life.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 045: Asurion Sales Leader Rob DiRocco Helps the World’s Leading Brands Support the Tech that Keeps You Connected first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.