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EPISODE 177: McDermott Law Firm Biz Dev Chief Rory Channer Shares an Award-Winning Strategy for Teaching Lawyers to Sell

RORY’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Think of others and put yourself in their shoes. I had a CEO that said to our salesforce many times, “Pull your chair around the side of the table and sit on their side of the table.” Push hard at really understanding others and then doing something with that understanding.”

Rory Channer is the Chief Business Development Officer at the McDermott, Will & Emery Law Firm.

MWE is a 2019 Institute for Excellence in Sales Innovation Award winner.

Previously, he was at Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a marketing services firm.

He was also at CEB, now Gartner.

Find Rory on LinkedIn!

Rory Channer: I have been in about 10 different industries over my career for about 25 years. I started off life as a psychologist and ended up in sales and I’m sure we’ll get to how that happened during the podcast. I’ve worked in all different sized companies, I think my favorite is probably this size, a billion-ish in revenue.

It’s a good size because it’s like goldilocks moment, it gives you just enough resources to get stuff done and at the same time you’re not too big that you’re losing tune with where things are and who people are. I work at McDermott Will & Emery, as you mentioned and it’s a top global law firm headquartered at Chicago but we’re speaking in DC today.

Fred Diamond: We’ve had some people in the services world who have spoken about their career. Just curiously, you’re the Chief Business Development Officer, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast – even though you have BD in your career, do you think of yourself as a sales guy?

Rory Channer: I’m very much a sales guy as all my career has been, it’s a great question, Fred. Inside of law, sales has been a dirty word and part of my job here has been to change that perspective. They hired me a couple years ago to change the way we go to market, this is what this has all been about.

Fred Diamond: Your firm, McDermott was a winner of an IES Sales Excellence Award. Tell us a little bit about what you were nominated for and why it was so special, and how it relates to your overall mission here at McDermott.

Rory Channer: We were nominated for the Sales Innovation Award. Slightly connected to that comment around lawyers and sales don’t really go together, the legal environment is a challenging one. The market is an extremely challenging marketplace but inside a law firm it’s also very challenging. Lawyers are not trained in sales, they’re trained in law, they come with a very healthy level of skepticism to everything they engage upon which is part of their training but also part of their personality.

When you’re working within the world of a billable hour – and that could be $1,000+ dollars a billable hour – any support and system that you bring to the table has to be not only good, it has to be efficient. When we turned our attention to training lawyers how to sell inside of that environment, we had to get the system really good, the content had to obviously be very impactful. We challenged ourselves to not only teach it in a way that was extremely impactful to how they go to market so they could walk out of the room and use it immediately, that every hour that they were in that room had to be a very worthwhile hour.

We brought in very interesting third parties to help us like Second City which is the improv group, as well as taking best practices from our friends at CEB, Gartner and others in legal profession like Harvard Law as well as just taking my experience and the team’s experience in selling. All the while just kind of avoiding the word “sales” throughout the training, so even the title of the program is called Incline Engagement System. It operates at a certain time of week knowing when the legal professional has got more time to pay attention, it’s very specifically delivered in a pretty cunning way.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, was the mission to shift the culture or was the mission to just provide some additional skill set for the attorneys to get them conscious of developing business and creating business?

Rory Channer: It’s a shift in the way they go to market which is predominantly culture in some ways. We’ve invented two ways of looking at this, a client centered selling approach alongside a collaborative buying approach, so we tackle this from both sides. The vision here is that if you can change that moment and the relationship that you’re building in a way that’s constructive, you can do some very good things. Threading throughout the program to a large degree is the concept of empathy and that’s a big hit for the way they rethink their engagement with their clients.

Fred Diamond: Tell us more about that. That concept has come up a couple times, we did a podcast with Connor Marsden, he’s a senior sales leader at a company called Salesforce – which of course most people are familiar with.

Rory Channer: I’ve heard of them.

Fred Diamond: He talked about the empathetic sales profession. Tell us a little more about what that means in this context.

Rory Channer: Let me ask you a question, who invented the term “survival of the fittest”?

Fred Diamond: Charles Darwin.

Rory Channer: It’s interesting, because what you read a lot in sales literature and training and when you listen to others’ podcasts – not necessarily just your podcast, others’ podcast – there’s so much written around how you have to be resilient, how you have to focus on getting past rejection, how you have to stay strong, how you have to defeat the opposition, how you have to win. Darwin never said that, which is interesting.

Most people will say it was Darwin, it was actually a philosopher and I apologize for getting your audience squeamish on philosophy and psychology here. It was the philosopher Herbert Spencer that said it, what Darwin actually said was survival would come from helping others which is a very different perspective. When you take that into the world of sales and if you think of anything you’ve ever bought, getting yourself into that buyer’s shoes which lots of people talk about, but doing something with that knowledge is even more important.

Whether you think through a compassionate approach to your engagement, that’s a very different mindset. Teaching people to think about their engagement style and what they’re trying to get out of the conversation and engineering a conversation that actually gives you not only information because you have something to do with that information, whether it leads back to your products or not is a very large part of the journey that we’re teaching these folks.

Fred Diamond: That makes a lot of sense, you need to build that relationship and they need to trust you and a lot of things like that. It’d be interesting to see how that carried over to what you sell which of course is legal services. You mentioned you were a psychologist in the beginning of your career, tell us about how you first got into sales as a career.

Rory Channer: I was designing computer systems for banks and I was working at a software company. I had spent a lot of my university research time on the interface between humans and software, so it was a human computer design and I was working at a big bank. This system that we were building completely messed up, it was a disaster – I can’t tell you the bank – and I found myself in the middle of a very difficult client situation. I managed to calm everybody down and get us all back working on the problem set and move to solution.

One of the executives at that company said, “You need to be in sales, you seem to have mastered how to navigate tricky conversations, why don’t you go try your hand at sales?” At first I’m like, “I don’t know very much about that, I’m not sure that’s my thing” and the more he talked to me, the more I was like, “I’ll give it a go.” I kind of lucked into it, really. It wasn’t planned, I never set off to be a salesperson and then like anything, once a door opens you step in, you explore what that’s like, you learn more and you like what you learn.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the key things you learned in those first few sales jobs?

Rory Channer: Earlier on notwithstanding now what we know about empathy and understanding others, I think I learned quickly that this concept of building your network and relationships, your network was pretty important. I think I had made enough connection into markets that were good connections, even if I hadn’t sold something and that ability to exit with grace was something I learned early on and I’m glad I did. I very early back in my career made some great connections with folks who have become very senior people, senior executives at organizations now and I draw on these people all the times, even not sending them anything, it’s a really good sounding board. That was a valuable thing to learn early on.

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

Rory Channer: That word though, Fred, is a little tricky, that “brilliance” word. I don’t know if I can quite find a thing that’s that brilliant, but I do think I’m quite strong in leadership, I think I’m quite strong in the psychology behind sales and marketing which has been quite helpful to me over the years. What I’m quite good at, I think is solving challenges and problems and it’s what I do day in and day out. There’s always a challenge and an issue somewhere and there’s always an opportunity behind that challenge and issue. What’s been remarkable to me is over the years how if you think hard enough or you think long enough, you can probably figure it out.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question for you. Going back to what your company does – again, McDermott is a large global law firm – a lot of people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast sell things. They sell software, they sell books, they sell technology, other types of financial services. If you think about a law firm, and we talked about how you were trying to get the attorneys to be more empathetic so they could be more salesy at the end of the day, how does that work in a law firm? The word “rainmaker” keeps coming through my brain here, is that a valid word? Do you have to bring in a couple hundred million to obviously reach partner? Explain a little bit about the sales criteria for the attorneys working in a firm in general, so people understand what that means.

Rory Channer: Great question. When I got here, I actually brought in Matt Dixon to go research these guys and he did a very similar study here for me for those rainmakers. You study the rainmakers and the average performers, if you like.

Fred Diamond: Of course Matt is the author of The Challenger Sale which has come up many times on the podcast.

Rory Channer: Yes, and what he found was a very similar pattern actually inside of these guys as inside of salespeople, so they’re not that dissimilar, actually though they don’t orient themselves to the concept of selling as I mentioned before. People are buying legal services, it’s a very competitive market. In fact, it’s almost impossible for us to sell something that isn’t displacing another provider, so there’s someone that this company is using that’s just like us, it’s very difficult to differentiate legal services often, so it’s a very challenging marketplace.

If you remember, I mentioned that these folks haven’t been trained in sales. They don’t really understand it, don’t really like it so what happens inside of a law firm is you have quite a small set of people who really understand how to go sell, and those are the folks that we studied. It turns out they do know how to go sell, though they might not be calling it sales, they are actually really selling.

What we did here is we took that knowledge and used a lot of that to build out that academy that we talked about and to teach them how to get there. It’s heavily built around inside selling, so we use that. Maybe slightly differently than others have used it and we use it very much to open up conversation, so inside selling is our way to get a very interesting conversation moving with inside our client and prospective client base.

To make partner, to your other part of the question, it’s extremely difficult. In some ways, if you’ve got children who want to become lawyers and they want to work in big law, I would put caution to that because it’s very difficult to make partner. It’s very difficult to get into law school, it’s very difficult to become associate at a law firm, not many associates make it to that middle level of income partner level as we have a middle partner tier and even fewer make it to partner, it’s very difficult. It’s a combination of expertise and actually how much business they generate. In some ways, what we’re doing here is providing them a road map of how to do that and that’s of high value to them.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, out of the 100% of the attorneys who work in the firm, how many bought off on your process? 50%, 100%, 10%?

Rory Channer: Initially zero [Laughs] it was quite the challenging environment. Now I think most people are lined up pretty well behind what we’ve done, we’ve trained several hundred folks inside of McDermott and it’s an employee brand value proposition now for us. You come in, we’ll teach you how to build business and that’s very valuable.

Fred Diamond: You’ve worked for some good firms, again you worked for CEB and now you’re the Chief Business Development Officer at McDermott. You must have had some great mentors along the way, why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Rory Channer: Again, that’s a great question and I don’t mean to dodge it, but I think there’s been many. I learn from everybody around me all the time and that’s a big tip I would give to others. In this role I talk a lot about how people engage me in my team and they either shoot or shape, so I come up with these ideas constantly, they either shoot them down or they shape them. I think that’s super healthy for me, to have others around you that can frame problems in different ways. As I mentioned earlier, my network was one of the things I learned early on about keeping that network and tapping into people who are peers, not peers, more senior than I am and constantly asking them, “What do you think about X, Y?” I recommend that strongly to everybody. I think my mentorship program is constant and always from those around me.

Fred Diamond: What are the two biggest challenges you face as a sales leader today?

Rory Channer: Inside this environment certainly change management is a big issue. We are constantly trying to figure out in a world where folks have very limited attention to go do something different, it’s a little bit of old dog, new trick syndrome going on in professions generally. That’s a big one for us and I think we are constantly sharping our saw on how to do change management.

The second one, and I’ve heard this resonate on other of your podcasts, is talent. It is really hard to find the right talent and I think it was your podcast last week where he said, “It’s very hard to know that you’ve got the right talent when you’re interviewing it before it comes in” and I totally agree with that. People are world trained to interview, everybody makes hiring mistakes, it’s a given but knowing that you have made one and moving swift on it is quite important because it does have ramifications for the rest of the team. It’s really hard to score 100% on hiring, it’s not possible.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’ve sold multiple things in your career, varied things, different things at different industries. Take us back to the #1 specific sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of.

Rory Channer: I think the thing that has made me most proud of my career has been my track record of growth. I have typically found myself in companies where growth was declining or flat and I’ve had to shape it, and it’s no different here. Two years ago it was 0%, first year I was here it was 3%, actually that was pretty good and then last year it was 14% and they’d never seen that before.

Fred Diamond: How long has the firm been around for?

Rory Channer: Since the 1930’s, a good amount of time. We never grew as much as we grew last year in one year, but we never grew that in 5 years so it was a big shift, it was a big takeout. That’s pretty Hallmark for me, I’ve always been very proud of being in those slightly tricky situations and turning it around. I’m waiting for the job one day where it’s this rocketing organization that’s growing at 40%, I just have to sit there and just watch it coming. It’s never happened to me, it’s always been a turnaround. Always with that comes, “How are we going to make the biggest impact? Where’s the leverage?” Then once you find that, that’s awesome.

Fred Diamond: That’s good stuff. Again, on the Sales Game Changers podcast today we’re talking about some things we typically don’t talk about. We’re talking about some strategies about getting people who don’t traditionally like to sell to get them comfortable with the notion of developing your network and growing your business and being conscious of the fact that it’s definitely part of your business. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Rory Channer: I think I’ve always questioned if I’m not adding enough value, if it’s not delivering the return then I question it, and I think that would be the same whether I was in sales or not in sales. I’ve always found sales to be an exceptionally exciting platform because you’re always at the very front of the business, you’re always engaging in the market and that market learning is just tremendous. You can never go wrong with that. I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but I would recommend everybody spending a little time in sales in their careers.

If you’re in marketing and you think it’s sales, it’s not and you should get some time in sales. If you’re in product and you haven’t really spent time in sales, you’d have to go do that, the same with finance or HR. It’s just such a wonderful experience to get that close to the market. Dan Pink wrote a book on Sales is Human and I agree wholeheartedly. Everything we do is ultimately influence, it’s trying to persuade and orient and so long as you don’t see persuasion as an aggressive thing, I think honing your skills and articulating a position and why, and again back to that empathy piece so putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes, there is nothing better.

Fred Diamond: What was the trigger for the firm to make an investment into you to bring you into this type of an environment? Obviously they’ve put resources behind you for you to be successful.

Rory Channer: That’s another great question, Fred. We had a new chairman, Ira Coleman, very agile thinker, very capable of looking at different ways of looking things and he has been very passionate about taking best practice from outside of law. He was a driving force, my boss is the COO, John Yoshimura who came from A.T. Kearney so he’s a professional services guy. He ran A.T. Kearney so he had also a different viewpoint and I think once you put enough people in the cauldron that have come from different perspectives you start to generate momentum.

I think that’s how this really started in the sense of those folks coming together and then bringing folks like me in. Any industry that’s undergoing such change like law is, it’s a huge change platform right now. You have two choices, you can either really try and do something different or you can hunk it down and put your head in the sand and hope. This is clearly a firm that believes there’s a better way to go to market and there’s a better way to operate, there’s a better way to find legal service so that’s why they put their money where their mouth is.

Fred Diamond: Rory, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the selling professionals listening around the globe to help them take their career to the next level?

Rory Channer:  I did mention earlier empathy and it’s such a big topic for us here right now, and I think it’s a big topic for everybody, actually. There was a recent piece in the Atlantic that said that they did the same survey in the 1970’s and they just did it a year or so ago. They asked parents, “If your child were to marry someone from the other party, would you care?” So if your child is a democrat or you’re a democrat, you’d marry the republican and vice-versa and in the 70’s it was 5%. Then a year or so ago it was 40%, so right there we’re in a world where we just have less tolerance for other’s views and that’s a problem but it’s also an opportunity.

I think if we think about differentiation, for example if you’re engaging clients in a way that you really show you’re trying to understand their point of view and you really show you’re trying to do something to help their point of view – back to the Darwin comment earlier – I think that’s a game changer generally in how we orient. Let’s go be more helpful and collaborative generally. Beyond that comment, I do think folks earlier in their careers and throughout their careers should push themselves to get as much diversified experience as they can. I’ve been fortunate enough as I mentioned to work in 9 or 10 different industries, that’s been so helpful. I may not have mastered any of them [Laughs] but for sure I’ve pulled a lot from seeing how different things work in different places.

You’ve got a different set of challenges, you’ve got a different set of solutions and that diversity of thinking can really help. Then surrounding yourself by people who have had different experiences is just vital, I think.

Fred Diamond: What are some of your sales habits that have led to your continued sales success?

Rory Channer: I am always pushing myself to slow down, I try and take on too much and I try and slow down as much as I can, especially now in conversations I try and listen more, make sure I’m really paying attention. It’s an ongoing battle, that’s not my natural default setting. I’m always working on that and making sure I’m really listening to the other. Also, as I take on new problem sets or look at things and find issues and challenges, I mentioned the network that’s very important to me but I really push myself to go broad on research now in order to come down on a problem.

I think that’s a good tactic so rather than generically going out to conference or generically reading, whatever problem I’m working on I go very broad on that problem so I’m channeled in that way. I find that’s quite rewarding because you get to figure something out quite broadly before you’re deep on it without generally experiencing stuff and trying to figure out later, “Can I use that?” That’s been a good tactic for me recently.

Fred Diamond: Help us understand what that means more. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, you’ve brought up of course empathy but you’ve brought up networking and you’ve built a big network over your career which has led you obviously here and other places. Tell us what exactly you mean and how someone listening to today’s podcast can apply that, the broad question you just brought up.

Rory Channer: Even down to the level of planning a territory, if you’re looking at your territory and you find that, “This industry is something that I want to get into”, the challenge there is, “How do I understand that industry?” If that was my problem, I would go very broad on that topic. I’d try and find all the sources I could to figure that out and those sources would start with my network. I would go out and say, “Who knows anything about this place or this type of thing?” and that would lead me on a journey. I would look at conferences but I would go for those conferences for a very specific reason to unearth the answers to the question I had about that industry. I think that to me channels thinking a little bit faster.

Fred Diamond: If you do it with that approach, you can obviously build deeper relationships because you’re talking to people specifically about something that you need. One of the challenges that people face with networking is, “I’m not really quite sure what to say.” Every networking opportunity is two, especially in the beginning of course and you’re young, you don’t have a whole lot of examples in history and things to refer back to, if you will. I like that approach to focus on a particular challenge or a question or something specific, then you can go to people.

Whenever people reach out to me and ask for help, for example I’m very generous with that but I always say, “Be as specific as you can be so that I can provide some value.” The same thing happens if you’re going to people in your network with a specific question or something you’re trying to uncover. Then people can be much more valuable to you and much more helpful. People want to help, in general.

Rory Channer: They do. See? You’re very good at this, Fred you’re very good articulating what I’m saying in a better way than I did [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: We’re talking to VP’s of sales who’ve been in that position for 20, 30 years in a lot of cases and you just didn’t wake up and say, “You know what? I’m going to be a VP of sales today, I’m done delivering burgers or pizza. Tomorrow I’m going to be a VP of sales at Microsoft.” You had to have had that 15, 20, 30 years career and you had to have been thoughtful. That’s been one of the things that I’ve learned through this podcast, everybody I’ve interviewed has given thought to this. Not everybody has a whole shelf of books, if you will but they’ve given thought. Along those lines, tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success.

Rory Channer: There’s been about 12 major things that we’ve been working on here and one of them was the academy that we talked about. One of the things that we’ve got very sharp on is knowing that all these things interrelate together. I think one of the things that can be a real problem in organizations, they often put in a CRM on the left hand side and the often put in a client feedback program on the right hand side and these things don’t integrate together. We’ve been very disciplined with that, we set off 12 programs 2 years ago, those 12 programs still move on but every time we turn a corner and find something new we go back through the others.

Our CRM system which is SalesForce=base system has been a very powerful tool for us and connecting back to the change management comment, just imagine, lawyers aren’t properly going to use that. Working out how to get them to use it, we do a lot of events here so using our CRM to be very helpful inside of our event infrastructure was a great turning point for connecting those two things together. I think our challenges have typically come in waves, “This thing is connected to this thing, let’s go fix that together or go put that out there.” Every week there’s a new set of things that we learn that drives us to an even better level of execution.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to ask the last question before I ask you for your final tip a little bit differently. Typically I ask this next question, “Sales is hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?” but I’m going to ask the question slightly differently. Again, your audience, your attorneys in the firm we mentioned before in the beginning that they don’t use the word sales, it’s a dirty word in some cases. We’ve known that, we’ve talked about that before but why have you continued in this particular role to shift a culture of a profession that typically isn’t interested in sales per se? I’m just curious, it’s been three years now you’ve been here, you’ve been recognized by probably other places besides the Institute for Excellence in Sales. Why have you continued on this journey to shift this mindset, this culture, if you will?

Rory Channer: I’m pretty thick-skinned. I know it can help them and if we’re being super serious for a second, I would say law is the profession that has the largest amount of drug abuse and substance abuse in it than any other profession. It is very tough to be a lawyer, it’s not an easy journey and one of the things that makes it so tough for these folks is they don’t know how to sell which is the irony of ironies. The word they don’t want to use is the thing they really struggle with. In some ways, it’s a bit of a mission now to make sure that they can do it and we’re teaching them how to do it in a way that they’re accepting it.

When you get the feedback from all the programs we’re putting in and you can see that they’re winning and they’re winning in a way that just helps them do better law, society can’t exist without law. It’s not going to be a very good place if it were, so it’s almost a small contribution in my mind to that, to helping them both feel better about the work that they do and evolving us to a better place.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire our listeners around the globe?

Rory Channer: I would say think of others, put yourself in their shoes. I had a CEO once at CEB that said to our salesforce many times, “Pull your chair around the side of the table and sit on their side of the table.” That’s great advice, I would recommend pushing hard at really understanding others and then doing something with that understanding.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 177: McDermott Law Firm Biz Dev Chief Rory Channer Shares an Award-Winning Strategy for Teaching Lawyers to Sell first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

SPECIAL EPISODE 002: ExecVision’s Steve Richard Tells How to Get More Intelligence from Your Sales Conversations

Steve Richard is the co-founder and chief revenue officer at ExecVision, a leading conversation intelligence platform. He’s also the co-founder of Vorsight, a leading outsourced appointment setting company.

Steve says his mission and life’s work is to help sales professionals become wildly successful. He believes that the quality of sales conversations matters, yet the profession of sales largely misses the mark on teaching sales reps how to have great conversations. After 10 years as a sales trainer Steve learned that the only way to achieve his mission was through the use of technology to help more sales professionals worldwide. 

Outside of entrepreneurship and business, Steve volunteers for Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind and is an avid scuba diver, skier, runner, football watcher, dad to 4 little kids, and husband to the best wife in the world.

Find Steve on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Tell us what ExecVision does. What do you physically sell and tell us who buys it.

Steve Richard: ExecVision sells softwarethat allows managers, reps, leaders to get into the content of the conversation. There is no way that everybody could hear all the sales calls that are happening in your organization, it’s just impossible. So with ExecVision it’s artificial intelligence (AI) assisted call coaching where the AI is helping direct you to what are the meaningful, relevant, coachable moments and then how do you have the intervention with that sales person to help them change behavior and improve their performance so they don’t make the same mistake over and over again.

Fred Diamond: Can people change behavior?

Steve Richard: Yes. It’s hard, though. Adult behavior change is hard and that’s a really good question and that’s really the crux of the whole thing – getting the sales people involved in their own development. I’ve talked to some people who said the reason that ExecVision software is so powerful is because the sales people can also raise their hand virtually to request coaching and then the sales people can also listen to them comment on their own calls as well as their peers, their managers, trainers, third party trainers, other people but that fact of just listening to yourself is probably the most powerful thing that any sales person can do and unfortunately it’s a thing that far too few sales people ever do.

Fred Diamond: Tell us who your customer is. Do you sell to sales managers? Do you talk to marketing? Do you talk to the C suite? Who’s going to buy ExecVision software?

Steve Richard: Yes, yes and yes. Usually it’s going to be the second level leader in sales so it’s going to be the first level managers will be important but it’s the second level, the person who manages the managers will typically be really into that. A big thing they’re trying to figure out too is are my managers coaching and if my managers are coaching, are they coaching the right way? This is a really compelling way that you can actually quantify the coaching acting in the company and then actually quantify the behavior change coming from the coaching in the company.

Fred Diamond: Before we talk about your particular and your specific sales journey, how did you create all the content? How did you create the pieces that bring everything together? I know Vorsight’s done training in the past. Is that where all the data comes from, the information?

Steve Richard: That’s a great question, it’s kind of a long and winding journey but really it started with the appointment setting firm where we were able to at the top of the funnel have about 30 people on the phone making calls on behalf of all these different clients and we were blessed with the ability to AB test what works and what doesn’t so we have this incredible laboratory of sales effectiveness.

From that laboratory, that’s where the training came from because people kept saying, “Teach us your secrets.” And over the course of having that training business trained four thousand sellers along the way. That training business still is there to this day in Funnel Clarity that you know. And then from that, that’s where arose this idea that you cannot scale this mission without having technology. It’s impossible. And what I found in many cases, Fred, is the best ideas, the best practices in any company come within the four walls of the company. They’re there, so I would go work with the sales team of 50 people and in throughout the course of the 2 day training event I’d find out that Bobby over here knows this thing really well and Susy knows this thing and Janet knows this thing and Fred knows this thing but none of them talk to each other so if we just had a way of surfacing the best practices and sharing with each other we can create consistency and accountability and we’ll kind of come back to that theme later on in the sales team.

Fred Diamond: Very good, so you’ve devoted the best part of your career to helping sales professionals optimize their career and get better. Let’s talk about your career, how did you first get into sales as a career?

Steve Richard: Completely accidentally, I had to pay off school loans. I think a lot of people have that answer. So I graduated from Georgetown undergrad finance degree. Everyone went to Wall Street, I went 0 for 22 in interviews so I’m a spiritual guy, I’m a Catholic so that’s God’s way of telling me, “You’re not going to finance.”

I had to pay off 65 grand in school loans, how are you going to do it? Some friend of a friend said, “Hey, you’re pretty good at presentations in the class. You’re not that good at helping build the presentations but once it comes time to deliver them, you’re good at that. Why don’t you go into sales?” I’m like, “Alright, sounds good.” I thought you gave presentations, I don’t know. And that’s when I found myself at the Corporate Executive Board, couldn’t have started my career at a better place.

I know a lot of your guests have come from Corporate Executive Board and you see the authors at the challenger’s sale, they weren’t that at the time and that was just like a sales NBA. And from there, that’s where I was – I was actually failing in the beginning of my sales career so right out of the gate I was just about to get put on a performance plan and my backup plan, Fred, this is no joke, our family business is precast concrete products in the Northwest corner of Connecticut AKA septic tanks.

This is a true story. My backup plan was to go work for my Uncle Jimmy in the septic tank factory and drive the septic tank truck. Nothing wrong with that, right? That’s great, but you know, compared to being at CEB. So I figured out really quickly what it took to be good at particular at the top of the funnel of prospecting, how did I do that? Everything I was doing didn’t work. I went and interviewed and sat with every other person in that company, I kind of did ExecVision the hard way, the old fashioned way and by doing that with my little notepad and none of the calls were recorded so I had no artifact. But with my little notepad I just wrote down all the best practices and I started doing all the things the top people were doing and none of the things that I was doing and I ended up being #1 out of 100 because of it. And one of those guys is David Stillman who’s our CEO and my business partner. So my journey in sales was accidental and I think alike a lot of other people I was not natural and it took a lot of hard work to get to a good place.

Fred Diamond: Very good. What are some of the lessons that you learned?

Steve Richard: If you go back to CEB when I was in a role prospecting, today we call that job sales development, the sales development reps or the BDR’s. What I learned first of all is that the gatekeepers are an incredible source of information if you know how to leverage them the right way and no one did. And I saw how the best people in CEB were doing this, it was really remarkable so I found frequently that the hardest part was just simply getting to the right person.

Once you get to the right person then delivering the message effectively and engaging at conversation sometimes is actually quite easy. That was perhaps the easiest part of the process, so that was a big part of it. Another big part of it is people are programmed to say what they do. You asked me the question before, “What do you do?” don’t answer the question with that, answer the question around what are the challenges that people are seeing, what are the trends in the market, what are the relevant topics.

One of the big challenges that we see is it’s hard to figure out if managers are coaching so we help address that. Another challenge we see is it’s hard to get adult and sales people to change their behavior. They become creatures of habit, they fall in routines, they fall into ruts. As I’m saying these things to you, I can actually see you, you can’t see Fred but he’s nodding. His head is nodding up and down. It’s that type of insight that’s very impactful.

Fred Diamond: What type of companies do you work for?

Steve Richard: Anybody who lives and dies by the phone and or screen sharing meetings is an ideal candidate for this. Now, this is the sad part, there are probably people out there that are listening and I don’t mean to offend you but I’m just going to be real. We find as a general rule of thumb the field sales people, the field sales reps that are out there tend to be a little more resistant to the idea of calls being recorded and, by the way, a legal and compliant way so that people are aware that it’s happening or it’s done in such a way that it complies with state rules but being recorded and then going back and reviewing.

I don’t want big brother, I don’t want anybody looking over my shoulder at what I’m doing and that’s exactly the opposite of the type of culture that we’re trying to create. We find that the inside sales people and or BDR’s, SDR’s, people who live and die by the phone but they typically don’t see a client, they don’t get in front of them, we find that those people are much more open to the cultural idea of, “Hey, I want feedback on my calls. I want to learn and improve.”

I even want feedback, Fred, from my peers which is interesting whereas a lot of sales people will say, “I don’t want my peers to hear what I’m doing.” Or here’s another thing, maybe it’s not just about coaching, maybe it’s also about knowledge sharing. “Hey, my sales engineer did this call and they did such an amazing, remarkable job.

I want to make sure everyone has a chance to learn from it.” This knowledge sharing capability is a very big part of that so I think over time we’re going to see a change just like now everyone gives all their information to Facebook and LinkedIn freely, I think we’re going to see people become more and more open to the idea of transparency and visibility but those are big ideas. You’re basically naked, you can go into our ExecVision instance right now at our company if you had a license and we have ours so everyone accesses everybody else’s calls.

Some of our clients make it so only the reps can access their own or the teams within there, however you want, but for us it’s all open. So someone who just starts at our company today – and we’re a company of about 60 people – can literally access every single sales call I’ve done since 2015. They can hear all the good, bad and ugly. They can watch the founder fall on his face, but that’s the kind of culture I want to create. I want to create a positive, productive culture where a lowly quote unquote entry level sales person will give me feedback, and in many cases I take their feedback and I learn from it.

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of people listening on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast who manage young people, people who are first or second maybe third job into their career. You talked about how a lot of the sales reps want to get coached, they want to know how they’re performing. Is it a generational thing? Tell us a little bit about why there would be an openness to that type of transparency.

Steve Richard: I wish it were that simple, I wish it were a generational thing. I actually don’t think it is based on that based on what I’ve observed. I find a lot of people who are in their 60’s and 70’s that use ExecVision who love it the most. It’s more of a cultural thing usually within whatever group they’re in. I don’t even want to say the company, Fred, because a lot of companies will have one manager will be very culturally resistant to it but another manager will be very culturally open or one individual versus the other.

I find it’s more of a question of there are people who believe – and you’ve probably heard the Japanese word Kaizen – it’s the reason they kicked our but in the 80’s in auto manufacturing, the continuous improvement. There are people who philosophically believe in Kaizen, they live by Kaizen and then there are people who just don’t, who just kind of want their paycheck and they just want everyone to leave them the hell alone and it’s OK. It’s completely OK either way. One of the big findings we had from the software – it’s not actually from the software, it was actually more from how the software is being implemented at our clients.

You think about coaching, the first thing that comes to my mind is I got an orb chart in my head, and you’ve got the VP at the top and the manager’s under the VP and then the reps. And you think in terms of well the VP is telling the managers to coach and the managers have to do all the work to coach all the reps. That paradigm is fundamentally broken because the managers don’t have time, they don’t have time to coach so one of the things that we’ve seen, and we’ve seen and then emulated with our other clients is flip the coaching paradigm on its head so what you do is get the reps to take some ownership of their own development. Get the reps to comment on their own calls, to score their own calls, to share what they see with how they’ve broken down their game tape with the managers.

The managers then do the same, the managers have information being pushed to them. So in our company now, Fred, we’ve got a really unique culture where I’ll share my calls with the whole company in some cases, say, “Hey, listen to this highly. I want you to hear this 4 minute section, it’s just golden.” And then in many cases I have them sharing calls with me even though I’m not their direct manager and the answer to the question, “who coaches in the company?” is everybody. If you have a coaching culture, everyone’s open to that. Everyone knows what good looks like which is a very important part of the whole thing and then everyone knows how to change the behavior to move to a point of good.

Fred Diamond: Steve, take us back to an impactful sales career mentor for you and how they impacted your career.

Steve Richard: You’ve had Vineeta Mooganur on the Podcast, so it’s Vineeta’s husband Praveen. Very impactful, he was the first sales person I scheduled meetings for at the corporate executive board. I was in a slump. After, I got good, so I got good then I went into a little bit of a slump again right after the holidays and I said, “What do I do?” he said, “You know what you need to do already, you sit down in that chair and you just do what you need to do. You just sit there and don’t drink any water, don’t go to the bathroom, don’t eat anything, don’t go talk to anybody, you sit here until you get yourself back right on track.”

And he was right, I sat there for I think 6 hours that day and I had three appointments and I was back. There was a lot of other things too but that was a big one.

Fred Diamond: So you just got on the phone.

Steve Richard: Got on the phone, yeah. The other big mentor is Tom Snyder, a great lesson, you’ll probably have him on.

Fred Diamond: He’ll be on a future episode, yeah.

Steve Richard: Very good. Great lesson he taught is people value more what they conclude for themselves than what they’re told, you hear him say that a lot. People value more what they ask for than what’s freely offered and that is the essence of persuasion, it’s a great lesson.

Fred Diamond: You talk to tons of sales leaders, of course you’ve been talking to sales leaders for pretty much your whole career. What are the two biggest challenges that either you face today or that you see sales leaders face with today?

Steve Richard: I wrote an article on this, it was called, “The 2 Most Important Words in Sales Leadership.” I went back and reviewed my calls, I did some key word searches of my own calls with sales leaders so I was doing what you are doing except I was trying to sell them stuff and it was over 200 calls and the words that kept coming up are consistency and accountability and I said those before.

As you get into that, you’ve heard of Sandler and the Pain Funnel and the asking the questions about challenges and problems and pains and frustrations and when you peel away all the layers of the onion, in the middle every time was, “Boy, if we could just have a culture where we had consistency and accountability at scale all of my problems would go away.” There it is. So how do you do that? I believe you do that through observable moments and visibility.

Fred Diamond: Observable moments. Relevant coachable moments.

Steve Richard: It’s true!

Fred Diamond: Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Steve Richard: You know what’s funny, Fred? I’m really geeking out over the neuroscience of buying and selling and I can tell you my biggest win ever is ADP, they’re a client of ExecVision, that’s phenomenal. But I couldn’t tell you what happened along the way. I can tell you the 5 most painful losses that I experienced in my career in much more vivid detail than the wins and I go back to the neuroscience, the reason is because when you’re in your waking hours, you’re using your short term memory which is like your RAM in your computer, and then overnight there’s the process where your brain when you sleep transfers that, some portion of it, into your long-term memory.

Unfortunately, there’s something called the forgetting curve where our brains are wired to purge the vast majority of the information we receive so that’s why sales training doesn’t stick mostly, because everyone forgets it if it’s not put into their long-term memory through repetition.

But the thing about painful losses is they are put into the long-term memory so now I’ll tell you a story about it, I’ll tell you two quick stories. One of them I was selling sales training against a guy named John Costigan in North Carolina. Very interesting character, very compelling, very good offering and it was at Rosetta Stone, now at the time I didn’t know he was in the deal and they kept telling me over and over again, “You’re going to get this, you’re going to get this, it’s all you, you’re going to get this.” And I didn’t even know there was anybody else. “Oh, it’s a formality, you’ve got to meet with the new chief revenue officer.”

And after that the new chief revenue officer put me through the ringer on all this stuff that we had to put together, it was 40 hours of my time and my team’s time to put all this stuff together and little did I know, his best friend or one of his best friends, John Costigan, and they play golf together in North Carolina. And the lesson I learned and actually I think about Andy Miller when I say this is you can’t outsell the relationship. You just can’t. And after I got the news we lost, it was inevitable, it was a forgone conclusion.

I looked in LinkedIn and I looked at this guy, this chief revenue officer and how I was connected to him, and there was one connection: John Costigan. And I said, “Dang it!” I wasted a lot of time and I was pitch in dead. I had no chance of winning that business.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned artificial intelligence before. Let’s chat for a second or two, what’s your philosophy on how artificial intelligence will play into the future of sales or sales coaching? We hear from people who say that AI is going to take over sales. There’s not going to be any sales people at any point in the future. Give us your thoughts on that.

Steve Richard: OK. Number one, baloney. Not going to happen because they can’t shape people’s buying visions in the same way, they can’t get to that point of having a consultative dialogue. When it comes to coaching there are some companies out there that are saying that AI is somehow going to make your team be better. We also say BS.

To think that somehow AI is going to make your employees engage is nonsense but we do believe, Fred, is at the same time there’s this problem of the big pile of call recordings for those that record. There’s just far more information out there on buying and selling than anyone can absorb so the whole concept of AI assisting in the process of identifying the coachable moments we believe is going to be a key to unlocking performance.

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

Steve Richard: That’s a great question. Aligning with the buyers and understanding where the buyers are in their buying journey and understanding how to react to different situations. I was actually doing a call camp yesterday, Fred. We talk about how every different approach or strategy or tactic that you have in your tool kit as a sales person is kind of like if you’re playing hearts. Have you ever played Hearts or Spades or Bridge?

Fred Diamond: No.

Steve Richard: You throw the card out and you’re playing into your partner’s hand and you don’t know what your partner has and they have to play back into your hand. Or another way of thinking about it as Lego pieces, you want to assemble a conversation with a different set of Legos every single time and what I find is that a lot of sales people don’t understand the buying journey. You ask a very simple question.

An example I use to illustrate this is buying a mattress, it’s almost a perfect example. At any given time you’ve got 3% of the market in an active buying cycle, for a mattress 40% is susceptible to looking. How you approach the actively buying crew is different than how you approach the ones that are susceptible to looking is different than you approach the ones that are not susceptible to looking. And then once you’re in an active buying cycle, how you approach someone who’s at a period where they’re understanding what their needs are is very different than when they’re evaluating options.

So frequently we see sales people that jump ahead too fast and they start talking about features. If the person’s in evaluation mode, the features make a ton of sense, but if the person’s just trying to figure out, “What are we trying to do here? What are we trying to accomplish in the first place?” The features make no sense at all.

Fred Diamond: Steve, I’m going to reflect back to a question I asked you before the break and an answer that you gave on the question about a mentor and you talked about how you were in a slump and your mentor said to you, “Just go figure it out.”

Steve Richard: Yeah.

Fred Diamond: “Go sit, and you know what you need to do.” And you did, six hours later you had three appointments scheduled and you applied yourself. You guys are in the data space, you collect tons of data on sales calls and then analyzing them and then finding trends and giving information back. How can sales professionals take that and get better? Let’s talk about the gap. We talked a little bit before the gap between all this great data, this beautiful data that you’re collecting and then presenting to the customer and then how does the rep take that? The actual rep, and get better.

Steve Richard: You want to know the one thing, the easiest thing that every sales person can change that almost all of them are not good at? And this is shocking, Fred, it really is.

Fred Diamond: I do. Tell me that.

Steve Richard: And we’ve heard a lot of calls or AI’s analyzed a lot of calls, closing for next steps.

Fred Diamond: Next steps.

Steve Richard: It seems like it’s so simple but you’ll hear these people have these great conversations and they don’t ask for the next anything, whatever that anything is, if it’s a meeting, if it’s to get together at an event, a dream forest, if it’s closing to ask for the business, they just don’t close for next steps.

Fred Diamond: What do you ask for, another appointment, a sale?

Steve Richard: OK, so little secret for the people who hear this is the offer is a really interesting thing. What is the thing that you want the buyer to do next and how does it align with their buying journey and then how does it connect with something your product or service can do that’s different, your unique selling proposition, value proposition.

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

Steve Richard: Major initiative to ensure continued success is making sure that people are ready and prepared for the transformation required from transparency and we deliver something called The Sales Coaching Academy for our clients. I’m delivering a lot of Sales Coaching Academies. What we find is most people don’t know how to coach, they don’t know how to create an environment where coaching is positive and productive. One of the things we’re actually able to measure in our software is if the coaching that someone receives is negative versus positive because if the rep is constantly being berated with negative feedback, that’s, you know. Manager might think they’re being constructive but in the reality they’re just being bad and mean, the rep is going to reject the coaching. So getting the leveling up the humans to keep up with the machines on this coaching problem is a big thing I’m thinking about.

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

Steve Richard: I love studying, buying and selling. It’s what I’ve committed my career to other than the four kids and my wife and my few hobbies, not that many, the skiing and the scuba diving, it’s all about studying, buying and selling because you learn something new every day. My friend says sales is the school you never graduate from and I believe that’s true.

Fred Diamond: Steve, why don’t you give us one final thought to share with the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast to get them inspired?

Steve Richard: Remember my personal story, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, I would be working for my uncle Jim in the septic tank plant if it wasn’t for the fact that I was humble enough to say, “I don’t have the answers, I’ve got to go learn from the best people and emulate their success” and by doing that, by creating a best of breed of their approaches, I went to #1 and I actually broke the com plan that year, Fred. I made more money than CEB wanted to pay, they said we’re going to change the com plan because of you. They even called it the Steve Richard rule. How do you do that? It wasn’t natural talent, it was learning from other people and being humble.

The post SPECIAL EPISODE 002: ExecVision’s Steve Richard Tells How to Get More Intelligence from Your Sales Conversations first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 044: Vineeta Mooganur Applies Her Engineering Expertise to Help Her Sales Teams Multitask, Manage Their Business, and Grow

VINEETA’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “As sales people, we’re in a unique position of speaking to hundreds of business leaders a year. We are closest to the market and what the market needs, and that’s a powerful and fun place to be. Use it to learn and teach your prospects and your organization what you’re hearing and you will quickly establish yourselves as a thought leader, close more deals and rapidly move up in the organization..”

Vineeta Mooganur is the Chief Growth Officer at Hanover Research. Her responsibility is to spearhead growth across key dimensions for their clients and for their employees.

Hanover Research is an IES Premier Sales Employer (2019).

Prior to Hanover, she served as the VP of sales and partnerships at a healthcare startup. She was a managing director at CEB now Gartner and a case team leader at the management consulting firm Bain & Company.

Find Vineeta on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Tell us exactly what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Vineeta Mooganur: Hanover Research provides tailored insights, insights that are crafted individually for each client, and these insights drive better decisions, improved processes, and intangible growth for our clients. Basically we’re hundreds of thinkers supporting thousands of decisions made by organizations every year, and it excites me for a couple of reasons.

One, we’re disrupting the marketplace. We created an intellectual sharing economy and that’s necessary right now. Our client organizations are lean but their need for analytic decision making is equal to that of their larger competitors. They don’t have resources, they don’t have the time or the money to hire collective capabilities that our talent can deliver so they turn to Hanover to provide the intellectual rigor and level of the information playing field.

The second is the insight we provide comes from some really amazing people that I have the privilege to learn and work with every day. Some have multiple PhD’s, some have started their own companies before they came to Hanover or they’ve been top performing sales people at larger organizations and their experience and drive – but most importantly their ability to collaborate with the team and put the client first – makes me want to get up every morning and see what I can learn and what we can accomplish together.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales as a career? Your title is chief growth officer. Do you consider yourself to be a sales professional?

Vineeta Mooganur: I think the foundation is based on sales but my role has expanded to do a lot more than that. There’s a strategic component to it, there’s a team management component to it, but at the end of the day the buck stops with generating sales. I think like most salespeople I accidentally ended up in sales. I don’t know too many people who set out saying they’re going to be career sales people and that’s too bad because it is the best accident I personally had.

I got into sales when I realized that management consulting was not the path that I wanted to follow for the remainder of my career. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next and CEB now Gartner came knocking at my door looking for someone to help them sell their operation solutions with an engineering and consulting background. I understood the constituency but I had no idea how to sell.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. So take us back to when you made that transition. What were some of the key things that you learned that have stuck with you today?

Vineeta Mooganur: That not everything’s going to go my way and I have to have the strength to bounce back. There are a lot of uncontrollable in sales, contact turnover, budgets, acquisitions, change in strategic objectives of an organization, and for someone like me with an engineering and management consulting background where you control for outcomes it was really important for me to get used to that.

But I also learned that there is a physics to a business – that’s kind of music to an engineer’s ears, right? That the volume of meetings you do times a conversion rate gets you to your goal, so you control the variables you can control to have the best outcome. The other key lesson is sales is not just about being able to ask for the business, it requires you to be good at a lot of things. It requires you to be good at strategy, for example, territory prioritization, or collecting voice of the market to customize your pitch, it requires process skills to be able to multitask the many things you have to do like manage your pipeline or current meetings.

It requires cross-functional work with both product and account management and then it requires engaging your prospects as a thought partner and then having earned the right to ask for the business.

Fred Diamond: So having moved from management consulting and engineering and just listing all the things that you do as a sales leader, what are some of the things that you like best? Now that you’re deep into your career, what do you like best about it?

Vineeta Mooganur: It’s really the team management. It’s watching each individual on my team, coaching them, leading them to meet the objectives that they have for the year.

Fred Diamond: We talked about your management consulting career, talked about how you also began as an engineer as well. Tell us what you specifically are an expert in. Tell us more about your specific area of brilliance.

Vineeta Mooganur: I’m definitely not an expert in anything so area of brilliance isn’t even on the spectrum but I think that in and of itself has helped me in my career. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, looked at kids in school and grouped them as know-it-all’s and learn-it-all’s and those who are learn-it-all’s performed better in school even if the know-it-all’s start out with more innate capabilities. I love learning and I love connecting and learning from people specifically.

I talk to strangers everywhere I go because I’m fascinated by their experience and learn something from each of them. I love listening to the challenges of our clients and teams and working to figure out a solution, so I think the capability that has served me well is my passion for continuing to listen and learn.

Fred Diamond: You refer to Carol Dweck who of course wrote Mindset, which is a book that comes up all the time. Talk about your mindset when you manage sales. How do you describe yourself? Again, with your background in engineering and management consulting, are you type A when it comes to sales? Are you more a thoughtful and pragmatic – I’m just curious on how your mindset is as a sales leader with your background.

Vineeta Mooganur: It’s interesting, we talked a little bit about the physics of the business, you control what you can control in terms of process. If you also look at Jim Collins, he is also said that sales is to some degree luck but those who prepare are able to identify those lucky opportunities so it is a level of preparation that helps you take advantage of some of that luck.

So I try to control the processes that I can control but the market is constantly changing and each person on my team is different, and where I have to have that flexible mindset is being able to understand the change of the market needs as well as the individual needs and where the people on my team are.

Fred Diamond: As you talk about your evolution and your ascent from management consulting into sales leadership I’m sure that there were mentors along the way who have assisted you. Vineeta, can you tell us about a sales mentor and how much they impacted your career?

Vineeta Mooganur: It would be really hard for me, Fred, to pick just one. So if you’ll indulge me, I’ll name a few. At Bain it would have to be Michael Collins and July Coffman who taught me about creating extreme value and trusted relationships with clients. A few at CEB would include Paul Ironside who taught me to love the awkward pauses after asking the hard questions. Mike Archer who was always advocating to put me in bigger and harder roles, Nandini Basu who was my strategic partner, cheerleader and role model of who I still want to be and Martha Piper who taught me how important working collaboratively with product is for sales leaders.

And now at Hanover, Peter Dodge is guiding me on his vision for clients and employees and trusting me to help lead our growth.

Fred Diamond: That’s an A-list of mentors so you’ve been very lucky in your career to have worked at some great companies and had some world class mentors there as well.

Vineeta Mooganur: Extremely lucky.

Fred Diamond: You manage a large team, do a lot of the younger people come to you as a mentor? Do you feel yourself in that role?

Vineeta Mooganur: Quite often, so that’s a little bit of a balance with existing employees as running the day to day operations and them using you as a mentor but I pride myself in the fact that there are a lot of people that I’ve managed at CEB and elsewhere who still today call me for career advice or professional advice.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, let’s talk about some of the challenges that you face as a sales leader. Vineeta, what are two of the biggest challenges you’re facing today as a sales leader?

Vineeta Mooganur: Time and talent. There’s always more you can do to help your team get to goal, more meetings you can support, more collateral you can create, more development and career conversations you can have. As the team gets bigger and bigger I have to find time and ways to connect with the team and that’s a challenge.

Second is talent, as I mentioned I work with a really talented group of people and as we grow we need to continue to hire and find great talent, and that too is a challenge.

Fred Diamond: What do you like best to do? You do a whole bunch of things, you have a lot of responsibilities here as a chief growth officer at Hanover Research. Tell me the thing that you really enjoy the most.

Vineeta Mooganur: The thing I enjoy the most is helping people understand what starts off seeming impossible starts being realized as you keep the pace with what you need to accomplish throughout the year, and we’re at the time of year now where people are starting to realize that at the beginning of the year I didn’t think this was possible but with the guidance that I’ve gotten, with the obstacles that have been removed by the leadership team I’m actually going to get to where I need to be.

Fred Diamond: What are the biggest challenges with specifically selling research, do you think?

Vineeta Mooganur: I think a lot of it is educating the marketplace. Helping them understand the value that they can get from using a service like this that would differentiate them.

Fred Diamond: OK. Let’s go back to your biggest win. Take us back to one specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. Vineeta, take us back to that moment.

Vineeta Mooganur: It was when a person on my team was one deal away from getting to goal at noon on the last day of the year. He and I sat in my office and called every contact he had met with so we could get some people on the phone who would consider making a deal with him to get him to where he needed to be. He had done such a good job at engaging his prospects while earning their respect that we were able to find somebody to make a deal with him before the end of the year. And it’s those moments of helping someone achieve something that they didn’t think was possible that I’m most proud of.

Fred Diamond: So you literally sat in your office, went through his database and just had him get on the phone?

Vineeta Mooganur: Absolutely, dialing for dollars and he had put in the work all year and established the credibility enough and articulated the value proposition that that made my portion of the job easier, but what I needed him to know was that I was there with him and we weren’t going to stop until we figured out that we had done everything we could.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, how has he done since then?

Vineeta Mooganur: Great, he actually followed me to another employer after that, I’ve seen him get married and have two kids, so the example that you were talking about to people come to me as kind of a mentor, he would be a great example of somebody who still continues to talk to me.

Fred Diamond: Vineeta, you’ve had a great career in sales. Did you ever question being in sales? You made that shift again from management consulting, you went to school for engineering and here you are, the chief growth officer for a very successful research company. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s really just not for me.”?

Vineeta Mooganur: No, not really. There have been moments where it’s been hard but I’ve been fortunate to work with some really great people and great organizations who are willing to get in the trenches with me when it got tough. So when those moments did creep up on me it was more like a fleeting thought.

Fred Diamond: Vineeta, what is the most important thing you want to get across to junior sales professionals to help them improve their careers?

Vineeta Mooganur: Make sure you choose the right organization to work for. You want to work for an organization that invests in developing your sales skills and that isn’t just your first week or two on the job, it’s ongoing throughout your tenure. It extends to ongoing development and working in a culture where you have a manager that’s personally dedicated to coaching you day to day and senior leadership that’s looking to move you into greater responsibilities.

Second is sales skills are transferable to anything else you want to do in your career, whether it’s starting your own business and having to bring on new clients or raise money for that business or progressing up to the C-suite at an established company so learn all you can.

Fred Diamond: So how do you learn? What are some of the things that you’re doing today to continue to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Vineeta Mooganur: Couple of things. I support my team in a lot of meetings, it helps me stay in touch with the market and understand trends and I talk to a lot of other business leaders to understand what they’re doing. We’re all going through the same challenges and it helps to hear other approaches. That’s why I’m so excited about the podcast series and thank you for doing this so we can all learn from each other.

Fred Diamond: Every one of the key themes that’s coming across from the Sales Game Changers is the need to continuously learn and evolve and it makes sense, on the Sales Game Changers podcast we’re talking to people who’ve had 15, 20, 30 years of success and to get to the level of chief growth officer, senior VP of sales, chief revenue officer you don’t start your career there. It’s an evolution, you have to have been flexible, you had to have survived past economic challenges. One of our Sales Game Changers that we interviewed recently, Rob DiRocco over at Asurion, even if one of their biggest customers went out of business – it was Sports Authority – well that’s too bad and you need to figure out a way to make up for that revenue that was lost.

Vineeta Mooganur: Absolutely.

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

Vineeta Mooganur: As the chief growth officer the business is going to grow substantially but I need the talent to grow with it so developing talent is my major initiative. We’ll be looking to move current employees into bigger and bigger roles in the organization at faster rates and it’s my job to invest in our teams. Sometimes put them in the role sooner than they might be ready and guide them to success.

Fred Diamond: Very good. It’s interesting as they move into those career, you and I both know sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. People can hide these days. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Vineeta Mooganur: For me it’s the conversation with our prospects and clients, talking to senior business leaders and understanding their challenges is interesting to me and if I have a solution that can support them to address their challenge, great. But if not I’ve established a dialogue and learned something that could lead to a partnership down the road.

Fred Diamond: Vineeta, you’ve given us some tremendous information today. I’m really glad that we had you on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening today?

Vineeta Mooganur: As sales people, we’re in a unique position of speaking to hundreds of business leaders a year. We are closest to the market and what the market needs, that’s a powerful and fun place to be. Use it to learn and teach your prospects and your organization what you’re hearing and you will quickly establish yourselves as a thought leader, close more deals and rapidly move up in the organization.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 044: Vineeta Mooganur Applies Her Engineering Expertise to Help Her Sales Teams Multitask, Manage Their Business, and Grow first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 005, Heather Combs Talks Importance of Mentoring, Passion, and Hard Work in Sales Achievement

Heather Combs is 3Pillar Global’s chief revenue officer. She oversees 3Pillar’s marketing and client services teams. In her role, Heather is responsible for continuing 3Pillar’s double-digit annual revenue growth. Heather believes that success in business depends on a positive client experience. As such, she leads and develops her teams to deliver first-rate services in the digital software product industry. Additionally, Heather works closely with 3Pillar’s delivery organization to ensure 3Pillar customers are receiving quality, cutting-edge software products. Heather has served as chief business development officer at HRCI and Aronson. She was also chief sales officer at Hanover Research. Heather attributes a great deal of her success in sales and business to the 13 years she spent as a consultant for the Corporate Executive Board.

Find Heather on LinkedIn!

Subscribe to this podcast at Apple Podcasts!

Here’s a transcript to the podcast:

Fred Diamond: I’m here today with Heather Combs. She is 3Pillar Global’s chief revenue officer. She overseas 3Pillar’s marketing and client services teams. In her role, Heather is responsible for continuing 3Pillar’s double-digit annual revenue growth. Heather believes that success in business depends on a positive client experience. As such, she leads and develops her teams to deliver first-rate services in the digital software product industry. Additionally, Heather works closely with 3Pillar’s delivery organization to ensure 3Pillar customers are receiving quality cutting-edge software products. Heather has served as chief business development officer at HRCI and Aronson. She was also chief sales officer at Hanover Research. Heather attributes a great deal of her success in sales and business to the 13 years she spent as a leader for the Corporate Executive Board. Heather, I’m thrilled to be with you here today. Why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and fill in some of the blanks?

Heather Combs: Thanks, Fred, for having me. It’s so nice to be here. I really do some other things than just work. I’m also the mom of four awesome little girls, a set of twins in there. So they keep me awfully busy. I’ve recently more or less retired my triathlon past in exchange for much more yoga. So I seek solace and quiet every once in a while between that job and those little girls.

Fred Diamond: Very, very good. So I’m very excited to talk to you. You’ve had a great career of sales success with different types of companies, accounting and research and now with 3Pillar. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Heather Combs: Accidentally. Let’s be clear: I never set out to be in sales originally. I’m from Texas. I went to undergrad there for political science and psychology and started working for a congressman in Texas, and coming up to Washington, D.C. with him I fell in love with the city. When I returned after graduate school expecting a career in the nonprofit space and in politics, I quickly discovered those fields don’t pay back student loans and D.C. rent very easily. And so, like many of my peers at that time, I did the consulting-firm series of interviews and landed at the Corporate Executive Board, right as it was going public from the Advisory Board Company. It was about 400 people and had the mission of growing fast and hard. I started in research but within about six months my talkative personality landed me in account management, and from there I went through a number of roles, increasingly responsible for more and more revenue. Today I certainly think of myself as sales-oriented.

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

Heather Combs: Well, today, I have the honor of being at 3Pillar Global. It is a digital product software company. We build custom applications for companies of all types. So it’s professional services, like much of my career, but is now in this disruptive industry of technology. You probably know 3Pillar more from what we have built than the name. If this morning you parked, you might have used the Parkmobile app. If your kids watched PBS, you got Curious George via 3Pillar. If your high-schooler applied for college through Common App or you talked to Alexa about your Geico insurance, those are all the types of things that 3Pillar does with other companies.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned you started your career in the nonprofit space, and you also worked for a congressman. What key lessons did you learn from your first few jobs that served you as you moved into sales? Or even from your first sales job, what are some of the key lessons that have stuck with you?

Heather Combs: First of all, I think that flexibility and the spirit of leaning in to continuous development over time [are important]. To be passionate about what you do, whether you’re trying to convince a congressman of a position point or a prospect of the value of a product, I think they are all opportunities to speak intelligently and with a level of authority and passion and commitment to the value of what you bring that day, be it a product or a position or a service… What I would say I learned through that is that tenacity is required. That sales is a hard job, we know that. Anybody listening to this one will know that. And so, just having the ability to keep going when it’s difficult, keep learning, keep trying new things, keep embracing new tips and tools and tricks of the trade. In my early days email was not a sales tool, and I think about today how we’ve gone to the process of moving through email to… today, when really thoughtful consultative conversations are probably the best instrument we have, which requires a lot of time and a lot of face-to-face investment.

Fred Diamond: I know you mentor a lot of people today, and we took a nice tour of 3Pillars facilities and saw a lot of high-energy people working there. Take us back to one of your sales mentors. Tell us what lessons you learned from them and how they impacted your career.

Heather Combs: I feel like I get asked this question a lot, and I feel like I should go find Sally Chang and tell her all of the things she taught me. She had a very high standard and really raised my bar, and I hope I’m doing that for others now. Will McKinnon and Paul Ironside were there in the beginning, and then some local favorites are still people I watch and admire to this day: Kara Delvecchio and Richard Perez, both skilled in their craft, and I enjoy seeing the onstage and their increasingly sizable positions at other companies.

Fred Diamond: You have a lot of people who work in your organization in sales and marketing. What kind of questions are they asking you as a mentor?

Heather Combs: Well, there’s always the time-management question. How do you do it all? My response is that you don’t. Put first things first. Decide what it is that you need to get done, and be proactive. When you find yourself in that inevitable position that we all do—where our days and nights and weekends are becoming reactive, we’re trying to keep up with the inbox, we’re trying to keep up with the phone calls, we’re trying to react to everyone who’s bringing us information noise, questions, where we lose control of what it is we need to be doing, what prospect did we need to follow up with, what client did we need to be thoughtful about their business and make a suggestion about what could improve or what you’ve read that they might be interested to by—get back to being proactive and really thinking hard about how to leverage your time for impact versus constantly trying to catch up, because you won’t.

Fred Diamond: Take us back to a specific sales success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. Take us back to that moment.

Heather Combs: I can remember the moment that I had my first contract signed in the moment. I was selling legal services at that time. We were selling a membership to general counsel. And to have someone in my presence that had that level of authority and who had been that persuaded to just sign a contract of tens of thousands of dollars in front of me was just a moment of such elation. And then, to be back in the office when people who had had that experience across the month, we were called out and—I don’t think this is legal anymore, Fred—but they could hand us these crisp $100 bills to congratulate you for that moment, and we would take a marker and write “on the spot” on it and then keep this $100 bill. I still remember the feeling of success and pride so much so that I forget the hundreds of other times that did not happen.

Fred Diamond: That is definitely true. It would be nice if every sales call we did and every interaction led to a contract being signed for tens of thousands of dollars. You know, one of the trends we’ve heard from the sales executives we talked to at Sales Games Changers Podcast is you might be successful three out of a hundred times, you know, and hopefully that those three are going to be so valuable and impactful that they’ll keep you going. Which leads to the next question. You’ve had a great career in sales. We’ve talked about some of your successes. Did you ever question being in sales? Heather, was there ever a moment when you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard” or “It’s just not for me”?

Heather Combs: Does today count?

Fred Diamond: Today does count, and it’s early.

Heather Combs: It is early, and I still have a full agenda today. There’s not a moment when you do something difficult that you don’t question “Can I keep doing it?” Those successes, though, some of the ones we have talked about, are the ones that keep you going. Also, by nature, I am a little competitive, a lot ambitious, and always eager to win. So sales in its various forms, whether it’s renewals or new logos or changing a pricing strategy that meets the needs of new customers or entering a new market, I do think that all of those things feed this level of energy and excitement that I love to get my hands wrapped around and then find the successes. It’s taught me over the years to be pretty risk-tolerant. I realized that when I’m doing my job at its very best, I’m making mistakes because I have to be trying new things and that a one-in-ten return is actually brilliant. If I can get to yes and get to something successful 10 percent of the time, then I’m doing a really good job. And if I can really embrace that thinking and celebrate the one in ten and let those other nine roll off, I’m getting somewhere.

Fred Diamond: Heather, let’s talk now about some of your tips, some of your ideas for sales professionals and how can they optimize their career. What’s the most important thing you want to get across to sales professionals to help them improve their career?

Heather Combs: Put yourself on your calendar and I mean by that register for conferences, read books, go to events, go to networking opportunities, have coffee with the people you haven’t seen in a couple of years who are in your field. Put your time and your attention and your needs to grow on your calendar, and when you do that you will find that it has exponential benefits. You’ll be sitting at a conference. You will learn something from the speaker. You will meet the person next to you. You will have a few minutes to get inspired. You’ll freshen up and you will be a different person when you walk out.

Fred Diamond: So, tell us specifically what are some of the things that you do to sharpen your saw? What are the things that you do on a regular basis to ensure that you’re as successful as possible? Actually, you mentioned that you used to do triathlons, but what do you do now to stay as high-energy and as powerful as you are?

Heather Combs: I‘d like to say this that I’m a voracious reader. It’s not true anymore. I am now a full-time audiobook listener. So, in my car and on airplanes and when stuck in the airport, I’m always listening to something. Every time somebody mentions something to me that they really like I just buy it really quick on Audible and download it and wait until the next one kicks on. So I try to use my downtime to listen and hear. Every once in a while still read in print. I wish I did a little more of that. So I would say that’s one thing. The other is really still interviewing, learning from my mentor group, my peer group, my colleagues in slightly separate fields who have a similar mission. At this point in my career I never think about it as just sales. It’s about growth. It’s really about looking for opportunities to growth. And so, expanding my mind on what that means, whether it’s a one-to-one sales opportunity or a marketing opportunity or a market opportunity, being available for every one of those conversations and opportunities by continuing to learn and be present when the opportunity arises.

Fred Diamond: Is there any book you want to recommend that has had an impact on you on the past year or two?

Heather Combs: Great question. I’m listening to Mindset right now, about making sure that you have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, which is reinforcing a lot of what we’re talking about today. It’s probably a good one to like, I, of course, am attached to some of the classics. I was at CEB when they wrote The Challenger Sale, so I always recommend it along the way.

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

Heather Combs: I would say learning. Being in the technology field now, there’s this tremendous appetite for growth through mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, partner channels. There are some places I have not gotten to learn from and experience as much recently as I had earlier in my career, and I find that the field has really changed. And so I’m really having a good time learning about other companies, learning about how they do things differently today and trying to bring that thinking into both the question of how could we do it together and how can I simply learn from that. This is somewhat of a trend in my professional services background, having gotten to go through the transition of legal services and then accounting services and then the HR field and now seeing this really disruptive explosive moment in technology, moving from a product to a service in many, many ways.

Fred Diamond: Heather, you’ve made it to the top of your organization as a sales leader, but sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Heather Combs: Is this the place where I’m not supposed to say “money”?

Fred Diamond: Nothing wrong with saying “money.” There’s nothing wrong with trying to have a better life for yourself and for your family and for your children. So there’s nothing wrong with saying, “Try to make as much money as you can.”

Heather Combs: It is true that there are different types of reward systems for different parts of careers, and I think those of us who are in sales can be excited about and embrace that what we do directly impacts the growth size of a company and we get directly rewarded for that. Many, many other of our colleagues who do great work have more indirect methods of being repaid. And so, one of the things I love about sales is this ability to work harder to impact ourselves as much as the organization. Being proud that I can decide to make one more call to one more prospect or to serve a client a bit better, and that will result in positive things for them and for me, so for me, it feels like a win-win career.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought to inspire the sales professionals listening in on how they can take their career to the next level?

Heather Combs: Lean in to the suck. Learn more. Work harder. Work longer. Try new things. Experience will build an entire career. So just embrace that it’s hard, that you will have more failure than success, that the technology tips, tools, tricks around you will continuously change, and lean into all of that. Try again and again and again.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 005: Heather Combs Talks Importance of Mentoring, Passion, and Hard Work in Sales Achievement first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.