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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 07:34
Name an impactful sales mentor: 20:40
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 27:40
Most important tip: 41:33
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 45:50
Inspiring thought: 47:33

EPISODE 092: Want to Be a Trusted Sales Professional Who Always Beats the Competition? Sales Innovator Shawn Cook Says You Need to Be “Compellevant”

SHAWN’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Start with the customer, it’s all about them. If you’re in sales to help yourself, you have to define what sales means to you. Sales is helping the customer get what they want so that I can get what I want. That’s a definition that you can use and every interaction with the customer should be what is it that they want, how do I understand what they want and how do I make sure that I get them what they want so that I can get what I want. If you focus on that, making sales will be easy.“

At the time of this interview, Shawn Cook was the chief sales officer at Triblio.

Shawn’s had a long career with more than 32 years in sales coaching and leadership.

He’s overseen, managed, directed and supported sales organizations from 5 to 95 people within industries such as healthcare, publishing, higher education and K12 and even within the building and construction industry with Hanley Wood.

More recently, Shawn has spent the past 12 years in software as a service with notable organizations such as Vocus, Eloqua, Oracle and Track Maven.

As a startup sales leader, Shawn has specifically focused on sales methodology and sales process with the intent on replicating high performer behaviors within his sales organizations in a way that makes sales leadership and excellence more of a habit than a dream for his sales organization.

Find Shawn on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond:  Why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and fill in some of the blanks?

Shawn Cook: Excited to be here and thank you for the opportunity. I know we have been trying to connect for quite a while, but I’m certainly glad. Game Changer, I believe I can affect that so I’m glad to be here to share. I am married to the same beautiful lady for 32 years as of April this year. I have three kids and believe it or not, four grandchildren.

All of my career I’ve spent in sales starting at Time Life Books in DC. In fact, I think I shared with you the article that was in the Washington DC city paper back in 1986 and there’s a picture of me on the front page and in the article the guy talks about Time Life and he talks about all the different sales people that are there and he notably throughout the article is ringing bells because actually at that time that’s what you did when you made a sale, “Bing, bing.” Ring the bell, right?

Fred Diamond:  Ring the bell.

Shawn Cook: Somebody would pick up and monitor your call and make sure that you’re closing well and all that kind of thing and this was B to C but that started my career. I bit my teeth, if you will, at Time Life Books and Music calling people. Time Life was so interesting, I’m talking about shift work on the phone, this paper leads, 30 people in the room, a big giant white board end to end, dots on the board for every hour, you change the color of the dots and I’m talking of people from all walks of life. We had shifts from 8 to 12 in the morning, 12 to 4, 4 to 8 and 8 to 12 so around the clock and the whole way that we actually advertised the opportunity for people – I became a manager really fast – but even as a rep, that’s how I actually got into sales.

I know we’re going to talk about that later but this is actually how I got into sales and that repetition in addition to being married to the love of my life, I found the love of my life in sales when I found Time Life. I was going into law enforcement but I found the thing that I actually loved and sales was it.

Fred Diamond:  What were you selling back then?

Shawn Cook: Time Life sold Time Life books, music and videos. This was B to C but I have to tell you, it was some of the best training because if you can imagine, if you call people at 8 o’clock in the morning, they got to remember this was at a time where there was no call waiting. There was no call waiting, there was no internet, if you will so I had a very captive audience and my buyer wasn’t as distracted as today’s buyer.

Today’s buyer has outlets, they have a phone and a computer probably while they’re talking to you on the phone. They have Instagram, Snapchat, they have all kinds of ways to get information and in fact, their phones aren’t phones, those are just mobile computers. How I was able to gain relevance and speak to people, I was the trusted adviser. They didn’t have other sources of information that they could trust above me and so it was easier for me to gain trust as a salesperson but that’s the beginning.

That’s where I started and I stayed with it and 32 years later I’m still doing the same thing. The article anyway, there was a reference to me as the demi-god of sales. It’s kind of true [laughs] I’m not bragging, but it’s what I love. Because it’s what I love, I’m really good at it. It’s my passion, I found my passion.

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

Shawn Cook: Again, fast forward now going from publishing and many days in sales to account based selling and I’m so glad because Triblio provides an account base market engagement platform and essentially we help marketing and sales teams to align by integrating their inbound with their outbound in a way that helps them to execute sales plays and grow revenue – or anything that leads to revenue – within their target accounts. We help them to target, we help them to personalize, we help them to score and we help them to activate their sales teams closer to the point of interest.

What excites me about that is because of what it means for buyers, or for sellers particularly. For marketers and for sales people, I would say. Buyers are so educated, they’re avoiding sales people. They’re on your site, your competitor’s site, they’re in blogs, they’re in forums, by the time you talk to them and in fact more often than not they’re going to trust you least of all the people that they are considering in terms of help in making their decision. Particularly in the B to B space what excites me about Triblio is that we are helping sales teams and marketers to talk to buyers closer to their point of interest and without depending on a form fill because by the time they fill out the form, they’ve already made a whole lot of decisions and you could be Column Fodder.

Fred Diamond:  You talked about you first got into sales by selling Time Life Books. What are some of the things you learned when you had those first few sales jobs?

Shawn Cook: I would say the first thing for us was relevance equals conversion. If I can be relevant to you, then I’m going to be able to align, if you will and if I can align and be – well, today I call it not just relevant, “compelevant” – I have to be both compelling and relevant to what you would agree with and what you would care about and I found that winning in sales is more about eliminating your chance of failure than it is about being successful. If you’re just focused on success then you could miss out on a whole lot of things that keep you from repeating it.

I’m all about repeatable success and I think that’s part of what the early part of my career, Time Life, I’m so thankful for all of the ad bets. I’m talking in a 4 hour period we were talking to 6 to 10 people an hour and in that shift work but it was the repetitiveness and because of what I found in my own love – in fact, in the article in the city paper they asked me what my secret was and I said it was focus. My 19 year old said it was focus. If I lose focus on that customer for one minute, I’ve lost the deal and I was referencing the fact that it was a telemarketing room and that there are lots of people walking around and standing around and on the phone and I was somehow able to picture myself right there with that client.

I focused on my voice and I focused on what they said and because I knew where I was going I could listen for my own tone and their responses. What were their reactions? I’ve always been interested in the prospect’s reactions along the way, not the end result. The end result for me was always anti-climactic because I was so focused on the process that the results would take care of themselves and particularly eliminating my chance of failure.

Fred Diamond:  We had a conversation recently with a guy named John Hicks over a company called InfinityQS and he was talking about how when he prepared for a sales call he would essentially meditate. He would clear everything off, get into the right mode to engage in the conversation. Did you have to put yourself, Shawn, into a different state to participate with your customer?

Shawn Cook: Absolutely. Again, fast forward all these years I call it taking them to lunch. If I’m going to win in a deal, I have to take that prospect to lunch. That is an acronym that I’ve created for myself for: learn them, and that happens before I pick up the phone, before I ever talk to them I need to learn them. I need to know what their persona, their role, their department, what would a person in that role do. In fact, it’s always good to look at someone’s title and then go find resumes and say, “What do people like that actually do? How do they describe themselves?”

Sometimes because they bio on your LinkedIn profile may not give enough detail for you to understand what it is they truly do. I would rather spend a couple extra minutes going to look at a resume or job description of someone who does that to see what success looks like for them because that’s what I’m really after. I got to know what success looks like for you in order for me to be successful so I learn you. I take that L and I turn it into a U, my U is understand you. I take what I’ve learned and when I’ve actually talked to you I turn it into understanding. I confirm what I’ve learned, I either confirm or conform.

So I confirm it and conform it to where I believe this conversation needs to go in order for you to let me know whether you actually care about the things that my most successful customers care about because I find that if you care about the things that my most successful customers care about, my chances of winning are going up. I got to make sure that you care about those things and I got to be able to articulate and see myself in your space. Again, I go back 19 years or 32 years to when I was 19 years old and I’m at Time Life and I’m being interviewed and that’s exactly what I was doing. I pictured myself in the space of the person. In fact, I was just here, my sales rep’s here right now.

We’re a startup and we’re growing fast and so we’re now a little bit on top of each other, we’re supposed to move, we had to delay and my vision and my ideal sales room is that you don’t necessarily do demos – I don’t call them demos, by the way. I call them business briefings. I’ve gotten rid of the word demos because it’s easy for people to blow that out of their calendars, by the way. If you call it a business briefing, that’s a little tip. I’ve gotten rid of it. I actually saw myself having demo rooms, almost like a studio. Like a standing booth where you have a place to put your monitor and your laptops. You could have two screens. By the way, anybody who’s selling product out there if you’re not using two screens you could be hurting yourself because there are things that you need to learn on the fly.

The buyer is so educated that if you don’t have a separate screen where you can access data or try to be more relevant to them then you could be losing. Everything counts now because that buyer has a computer, a phone, news feeds, Google alerts, they have all this other data so you have to be able to know almost more than what they know, certainly and right now the buyer knows more. The buyer is way more educated than we give them credit for and that’s why they’re blocking you out because they don’t think they can learn anything from you.

Fred Diamond:  Finish up with the line. You had learned them, understand them…

Shawn Cook: Know their numbers. The N is for numbers, know their numbers, how do they measure success? Because that’s what people buy. Pause, people do not buy you products, your services or your ideas. What they buy is how they imagine using them will make them feel. Again, we have to tie that to something tangible and that’s numbers. Usually there’s a numerate associated with success whether it’s sales qualified opportunities or whether in the marketing space they need more MQL’s or SQO’s or SAL’s or sales dollars if it’s a sales person. Everybody has a number and there’s the one thing that everybody wants and that’s success. Everybody wants to be successful so you have to find out what their numbers are so learn them, understand them, know their numbers because you can’t challenge them unless you know their numbers and that would be the C, challenge them.

Challenge them versus not changing. 66% of deals are lost to no decision. It’s not to competition, it’s no decision. It means that they choose to not do it, so that means that we should eliminate our chance of failure. To me, being a success is someone who can eliminate their chance of failure then I can challenge someone around that same thing. Is this going to eliminate your chance of failure? Here’s how we can help to do that. I can challenge them and then finally the H is help them buy. Once I challenge them in terms of the fear of loss, by the way, I’m just going to say this. The fear of loss is a much greater motivator than the promise of gain. I get sales people calling me all the time telling me, “We’re going to increase your sales 25%, we’re going to increase that, we’re going to get this, it’s going to be great.”

They’re telling me about this new software that’s going to do all these things for me and that is the promise of gain. Guess what? When somebody buys that, perfect conditions. The only time somebody is going to buy based on all things have to be perfect so I have to have money, the timing has to be perfect, everything has to be perfect and when is everything perfect? Never. That’s why I think it’s more important to push the fear of loss rather than the promise of gain. The example I always give is that I run every day either a 5 K or 5 miles as a part of my workout. I do more running than anything because it just helps me to think but if you came to me and said, “These shoes right here are going to make your times X faster, you’re going to be so much faster, you’re going to be better, 350 bucks for these shoes, your times are going to be greater, more comfortable, you’re going to just fly.”

If the shoes I have on are OK, maybe when I get ready to buy a new pair those are a little expensive, I don’t know. 350 is a lot for a pair of shoes. I’m like, “No, I don’t know.” I have to have gotten a bonus and all conditions be great and maybe I’ll spend the 350 but if you came to me with those shoes and you said, “If you keep running in the shoes that you’re running in, you’re going to need a hip replacement in about 6 months and you’re probably more likely to pop an Achilles’s.” All of a sudden because I run every day that becomes a little bit more important to me.

The fear of loss is a much better motivator than the promise of gain.

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

Shawn Cook: I think it’s the ability to help sales people to know what makes them successful, to help them understand their process. I interview, I talk to so many sales people and I’ve done thousands of interviews, God knows. I talk to sales people and I go, “What makes you successful? What happens when you win, what happens when you lose?” I try to get them to tell me like they have a formula for success and what I find is that salespeople are depending on the organization that they go work to to provide them with a process and that’s a mistake because some of these organizations don’t have a process and if they have them it’s informal. It’s not formal, it’s not repeatable, it’s not scalable.

You see salespeople look over to the next, “What did you do on that one? OK, I’m going to try.” So they’re learning by trial and error and there’ nothing wrong with that except that there’s enough evidence out here that tells what process is, tracks the why you, why now message.  The highest performing CEB has done loads of research on The Challenger and those behaviors, so much out here for what high performers do but no one is taking those things, those behaviors and actually put them into a process so that a lay person can still have movements that are like a high performer. They may not have the muscle of a high performer but they can have the movements of a high performer and with a good system of training on product and enablement as long as they understand the methodology behind it I think you can make them successful.

I would say that that is me, I see the matrix and so I want to help salespeople to take that matrix and put it into a formula and know the difference between a stage and a step because we’re trying to move deals forward to a stage and we’re mixing up what a stage is and what a step is. I find so many sales reps don’t know what to do next. Because they don’t know what to do next they’re less confident, and because they’re less confident the buyer picks it up and blocks them out and that is why they’re seeing sale cycles long. That and the fact that there are more buyers involved so you’re going to have to be the kind of salesperson today who is able to deal with consensus buying and with buyers choosing to remain anonymous. You need data and you also need a process.

Fred Diamond:  You talked here about one of your areas of brilliance as helping salespeople understand how they can be more successful. Take us back to an impactful sales career mentor for you and how they impacted your career.

Shawn Cook: There’s been people and it’s been resources, I listen to a lot of books, there’s wisdom in a multitude of counselors, I live in the DC area and so audible is my way of getting all my counselling in terms of driving up and down the road. The Challenger Sale to me, that book and the research associated with it to me has had the most greatest impact on what I do with salespeople now. I’ve taken those things – The Challenger and the The Challenger Costumer which is all about selling to consensus groups – and I’ve added a formula. I’ve taken them and actually systematized it for myself, for my sales teams and I can’t tell you what it means to now speak the same language because if you’re going to have a high performing sales team, it’s like the tower of battle. We’ve all got to speak the same language, we can’t have different definitions of what a step is and what a stage is and where we’re going to take the buyer to and so today I think what I’m doing is becoming a sales system engineer and I think that sales, because of how fast technology and buyers and all these things are moving, you really need a system that can align and not just chase.

I think sellers are still chasing buyers instead of being ahead of buyers and the only way we’re going to get ahead of buyers is that we have a system that is – I hate the word “artificial intelligence” because I just want to be really intelligent, not artificially intelligent – but sales intelligence is so important now and that would be my tip to anyone who’s in sales. I would say, “Listen, if you’re going to be successful in sales, learn this. We sell more by what we know than what we show, than what we tell, than who we know.

We sell more by what we know and that means that you have to really learn them, understand them, know their numbers, challenge them and then help them buy and you help them by knowing them. You can’t help someone who you don’t know because they’re going to resist it because they don’t know you.”

Fred Diamond:  Shawn, you mentioned The Challenger Sale. Before we talk about some of the biggest challenges that you face as a sales leader, The Challenger Sale gets thrown around a lot and not as many people have read the book to truly understand it. Why don’t you give us a one minute overview on what The Challenger means to you? Again, you said it’s become a big part of your process and it’s the overlay on your methodology. Help us understand your vision of what The Challenger Sale is.

Shawn Cook: It leads to differentiation. The Challenger research is empirical to me because of the volume of people that they did it with. When they first did it I think it was three thousand or so salespeople, now it’s ten thousand or forty thousand or more salespeople, it’s a lot of people that they’ve done this with. They’ve looked at all these people and said they break themselves down into these categories: challenger, the relationship builder, the hard worker, the problem solver, I forget what the other one is but the challenger out-performed. Oh, the lone wolf, that’s why I forget it, I always forget the lone wolf. Why? He’s alone. [Laughs].

I forget the lone wolf but the challenger out-performed in a non-technical sale 13 to 1, the relationship builder which everyone thought would win. In a technical sale, 53 to 1, or 53 to 13, whatever, it was just blazing and very distinct, they lead people to their solutions and not with them. The core of it is you’re leading people to and not with and you’re using what we call a purposeful choreography which is the “Why us, why now” method and it follows a choreography that ties emotionally to that buyer and brings them to a place through inception that they agree.

Again, the whole thing is built in knowing what your most successful customers care about and knowing what your unique strength is, but I would say that for me The Challenger taking those tenants of teaching, and so The Challenger does three things: they teach, they tailor and the assert control. That is built into my entire process, teaching, tailoring and asserting control. Teaching them something that they didn’t know, leading to your most unique strength, tailoring it to their role, their persona, their department, their demand unit, the team and what success looks like for them. Then asserting control by leading them to – and this is where I’ve diverged, added to The Challenger stuff which is because the buyer is so much in control you can’t make a buyer do anything.

I’m just going to say it, you can’t make buyers do anything. “Give me one tip to help me close”, “Know your customer” because you can’t make them do anything. What you can do is facilitate a buying process so I’ve got the title chief sales officer, I don’t believe in selling, I believe in facilitating buying processes and we’ve actually created in my teams meetings, we actually have something called a no-selling zone. We pull up a slide and say, “Listen, we’re not going to try to sell you because you’re in control so what we’re going to do is we’re going to share some insight.

We’re going to help you to avoid landmines, we’re going to educate you on new issues and outcomes. If you decide to continue talking to us, we’re going to help you to get wide spread support within your organization and we’ve created high value meetings. You call them stages, right? We’ve created high value meetings that offer you the ability to choose an alternative ending. That’s the difference. In the assert control before, it was kind of you take them to that one thing that you were trying to get them to do and now because the buyer is so much in control, you can forget about that. I think what you have to do now is make sure that you offer high value meetings, conversations that keep the conversation going and keep you moving to the next thing.

Fred Diamond:  Based on that, what are two of the biggest challenges that you face today as a sales leader?

Shawn Cook: I think it’s the same for all of us, it’s buyers. Buyers are self-educating at a high rate, there are studies that say they engage with 6 to 10 pieces of content before they engage with their brand. CEB says there’s 57% of the way through their sales process before they engage with you so that’ the first thing, we’ve got a buyer who’s highly educated so you better know your stuff. If you just want to talk about your product, you’re going to be in trouble because they don’t care about your product, they care about success so that’s the first thing. The second thing is that there are more buyers.

The average company dealing a B to B is 6.8 people according to CEB up from 5.4 people. IDG I think it is put a study out that says that in a technical purchase it’s 16 people. I used to have sales reps who come and crow and they handed me, “I killed that meeting, 20 people, I had 20 people.” And I’m going, “Do you realize what this means? That there are 20 different personal preferences, 20 different goals, 20 different…” I don’t brag about having a lot of people in a meeting because that means a lot of work that you’re going to have to go back and do and divide and concur.

I call it not divide and conquer but divide and concur because you need to see who within that group now agrees with the things that your most successful customers agree with and who doesn’t and what is the power of that person. I say that because consensus buying, some of those people are going to be known to you and some of them are not. This is what Triblio does, we do account detection so my reps are able to see both the known and the unknown people that are coming from an account and we score both the known and the unknown people that are coming and we personalize for both the known and unknown people and that is important because 85% of the buying team wants to remain anonymous. They don’t want to talk to your salesperson so they’re not going to fill out the form.

They’ll come to your site and they’ll look at the content because I’m part of the decision that’s going to be made but I don’t want to talk to your salesperson and the person who is getting all the calls from the salesperson a lot of times is just the person who’s gathering the information for the real person who is not on a form, who hasn’t filled out anything. Even if you know who they are, they don’t want to talk to you so how do you do that? Those are the biggest challenges, is becoming “compelevant” for a buyer who’s avoiding you and I can tell you that the only thing that I can think of that can help you in that regard is to know them, is to really understand them, is to put yourself in their seat and think about what success looks like for them and talk like they talk.

Fred Diamond:  Shawn, why don’t you take us back to one specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? Take us back to that moment.

Shawn Cook: I was mentioning this earlier that I am so focused on the process that I literally could not think of, when I saw the question I could not think of a win that I got excited about because winning for me is anti-climactic. It really is the process, how do I make it repeatable. The definition of understanding is the ability to do something over and over again at will because you can’t say you’re a success unless you can do it over and over again and that’s what I want for sales leaders. Only 53% of salespeople make their quota, that’s not good so how do we help more people?

We find out what the high performer is doing and we help those people who aren’t high performers to just operate in a system that is designed for them. What it leads to mostly, because I didn’t say this, Fred, but I think this is the truth about everything I do in my process is trust. One of my favorite books and I would highly recommend it, it’s a book called Speed of Trust. It’s a great story behind the book because it’s written by Steven Covey Junior, it’s written by the son of the 7 habits guy. Imagine if your dad is Steven Covey and you’re Steven Covey Junior, getting respect is hard and that’s why he wrote this book. He wrote this book because he realized that people would judge him because he was Steven Covey’s son and have expectations for him because he was Steven Covey’s son and so he had to earn their trust.

Basically when trust is high, cost is low and speed is fast. If you think about 9-11, before 9-11 – I’m old – I could go through the airport for an international flight and be there an hour before and just walk through and for a domestic flight 30 minutes and I could walk right through and get on the plane. Not anymore, trust is low so time is slow. Things are slow. Guess what cost is? High. Now on your ticket there is something called a TSA fee and it keeps going up and so the cost and the time, now it takes me longer to get through and it costs more to fly.

When trust is high, speed is fast and cost is low so if you want to move deals through your pipeline, if you want to get more people to talk to you, if you’re an SDR, a BDR out there and you want to get more people to talk to you, trust. Trust is exchangeable, it’s like money, trust is everything and by the way, Hubspot did a study on the most trusted professions down to the least trusted professions, it’s an awesome study. It says that they trust the firefighter, the doctor, the nurse, their trust rate very high. Guess who are close to the bottom?

Fred Diamond:  Lawyers.

Shawn Cook: Lawyers are actually like 13% trust rate. 3% and 5% respectively, marketing and sales. Guess who’s actually trusted even more than marketing and sales? A barista. A barista is trusted more! So what I’m saying is that noticing this culture exists – politicians, by the way, at the bottom – knowing that trust is already low for sales and marketing you’ve got to take on the persona as a sales person, as an SDR, as a BDR of a firefighter, of a nurse, of a doctor.

Think about that, why do people trust doctors? Educated, so you got to be educated on your buyer. You’ve got to study, they went to school for 8 years. I’m saying just take 8 minutes to stop looking at just surface level stuff and go really research someone instead of, “Hey, I saw you on LinkedIn, I’d like to call you.” Stop it! That is not relevance, that’s ignorance. There’s so much more that you can see about me from my LinkedIn profile and from doing just a little bit more research on me than that and you need to go below the surface and really know who I am before you try to talk to me. That’s what a doctor does, he starts talking to you and he goes, “When did this pain start happening? Was it here first?” and then he doesn’t make a diagnosis, he doesn’t say, “Hey, you need my product right now, we should do a demo.”

No he doesn’t, he says, “Why don’t we do some tests? I’m not sure what this is. I got an idea, why don’t we send out for some tests?” So the doctor even is taking his time. He understands that to make a proper diagnosis or to make you well or whole he has to. The firefighter shows up, he doesn’t just like – just imagine you’re in your car, let’s just say that you got a bad cramp and you called the ambulance to come and the firetruck pulls out the jaws of life and cuts off the roof of your car, you would go, “What in the world? I just had a cramp!”

The firefighter is going to diagnose the situation first, he’s not going to bring out the jaws of life when all he needs to do is open the door and drag you out and stretch your leg out and give you some water. He’s not going to run into a house and just throw water because there could be back draft, that could come on him. What is he going to do? He’s going to first show up at the house and go, “Are there any people in there? Let’s get the people out first, let’s see where the fire is coming from” they’re going to think about how they go in. Salespeople?

Fred Diamond:  Shawn, did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever say to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s not for me”?

Shawn Cook: Never. Never ever wanted to quit. I’m a high performer, in transparency I missed my Q1 number. We blew away the Q4 number and my team laid a I don’t know what in Q1 and all it does is it makes me better. To me, it’s a challenge to be better. When I’m struggling or when we’re going through a difficult sales, I never told my CEO this after my quarter, I said I’ve never had a sales challenge or problem that I couldn’t solve.

There’s never been in my whole career, and you know why? Because I always start with the problems. Training a new sales team, by the way, I’ll just give this as a piece of advice, you want to keep training them on your product, I understand, but what you need to first train them on is why people say no. Start with the objections, why do people say no and do we have a response to that that most people would agree with that allows us to remove or get around that obstacle or that objection. If you can start with why people say no then getting people to say yes will actually be a lot easier. I always had a long commute, my commute is from here in Reston to Port Tobacco, Maryland. Don’t worry, it’s way out there and I told my CEO, “I drive up and down that road trying to eliminate my chance of failure just thinking about why would someone not do this and do I have a reasonable response, a reasonable answer that provides value?”

Not pushiness, I’m not talking about being pushy and I’m not talking about fighting a customer with objections, I’m talking with objection answering because some people turn that into a whole battle and it’s not about the customer, it’s about them trying to prove that they’re right. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about saying something [Inaudible 39:32] that a customer may not have thought about based on what their response was that causes them to go, “Oh, I didn’t think about it like that. I guess that would be OK if I were to see it that way” like, “Have you thought about it from that perspective?” and that doesn’t happen overnight.

Fred Diamond:  Shawn, what’s the one most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals to help them take their career to the next level?

Shawn Cook: Start with the customer, it’s all about them. If you’re in sales to help yourself, you got to define what sales means to you. I think you have to define sales first. Sales is helping the customer get what they want so that I can get what I want. That’s a definition that you can use and every interaction with the customer should be what is it that they want, how do I understand what they want and how do I make sure that I get them what they want so that I can get what I want. If you focus on that, making sales will be easy.

Fred Diamond:  What are some of the things that you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Shawn Cook: Audible, I’m just going to tell you, it’s the best $15 you’ve ever spent a month to get a credit and listen to a book and just get some new ideas on how to approach different situations. I’ve just recently listened to a book by Keith Ferrazi, this guy who wrote the Never Eat Alone. I had actually never read that, I’ve never even listened to that book. I don’t know if it’s the second or third book but Who’s Got Your Back and he’s talking about accountability because I think if you’re going to be good at anything, you need a system of accountability. Not just with your managers and directors but you need a system of accountability within your connections and I learned a very hard lesson from that, I have 8186 hundred connections on LinkedIn and no life lines so I had to do some correction, I needed to bring some people into my circle.

I’ve got 32 years of experience that my best selling has not happened yet. I feel like I could run in this game for 30 more years because I’m so passionate about sales and technology and I stay on top of how it’s advancing and the use of technology. Listen, you can use technology but don’t rely on it, I’m just going to tell you that. Technology does not solve your problem. It can help you to be efficient and effective but it’s not going to solve it. You have to have a system.

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

Shawn Cook: Stuff like this, I think talking about it more and getting and staying connected with people like yourself and others who are doing this, I think there’s a lot of good information out here. I love all of it, for me I want to write now. I’m writing a book called Take Your Team to Lunch, it’s actually two books based on those same acronyms. One is Take Your Prospects to Lunch, that’s for salespeople, and that is just having your own system so that when you go to a new company you’re not depending on them.

You better apply their system but you can use this as an acronym to make sure that you are at every stage of your sales process able to really align and take the buyer to lunch. I’m doing it for salespeople but I’m also doing it for managers because sales leaders need to take their team to lunch. They need to know their people, understand their people, know their people’s numbers, challenge their people but help their people be successful.

Fred Diamond: Tell us, get really succinct here but what is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Shawn Cook: It’s about people. It’s about helping people to be the best them in their role and their job and if you look at it that way instead of selling a product then you’re just helping people. Sales is the highest paid profession, because of sales the economy, everything in this room: those lights, those panels, the floor boards, the carpet, somebody sold it.

The world doesn’t happen without someone making a sale and that’s why sales has to be here. I’ve heard a story and I do believe it’s true that a million people will be out of sales jobs in 2020 and technology will have taken their place but that is salespeople’s fault because buyers don’t want to talk to you because you keep trying to herd them rather than help them.

Fred Diamond:  Give us one final thought. Bring it home with one final succinct thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast.

Shawn Cook: Here’s the answer, I love you said that because I do. I have so many Shawnisms I like to call them. There’s a formula, I always call it the code behind all the stuff that I create for my sales team to help them through their sales process and it’s how I solved every problem I’ve ever had. I’ll give credit to him this time [laughs] it came from an article that I read in Sports Illustrated in the 80’s featuring Lee Trevino who was a golfer who had won the green jacket and Lee Trevino had 5 G’s for success.

I’ve kept those 5 G’s with me for all these years. If you are going to succeed, I always go why someone would not succeed. By the way, for those of you who are going on a job interview, this will help you. You have to have a philosophy of success so whenever I go into something, even when I go into a new company I go, if somebody was in this role and they failed, why would they fail? Well, they would have failed because they didn’t have a goal. That would be the first G. OK, but what if they had a goal and they still failed?

I’d say, well, if they had a goal and they still failed then they didn’t have a game plan. They didn’t actually sit down and go, “Here’s what I think I’m going to do first and second or next” and think through just what could happen. If they did that, let’s say they had a goal, they had a game plan and they still failed, they didn’t have any gages. They couldn’t measure where they were so they couldn’t get to where they were trying to go. It’s got to be measurable, you have to be data driven. I’m going to say that. Sales, everything starts with insight.

You need data, you need to know what your conversion rates are from stage to stage, you need to know your average days and you need to start thinking about things that you can do to improve those things. Driven sales people are going to lead the future, I promise you that. What if I still failed? I had a goal, I had a game plan, I had gages, then they didn’t go and that would be action. You have to have actions and when you have actions – this is important to sales processes today, by the way – don’t just measure sales and marketing actions, measure customer reactions. So for actions you have to have go, take action, get out there, see what’s going on and the last G is give.

Give back, you’ve got to figure out what is making us successful, communicate that. What’s working? If you have peers and again, accountability source like keep track of what’s working for you and that way your ability to do more of what works is going to increase.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 092: Want to Be a Trusted Sales Professional Who Always Beats the Competition? Sales Innovator Shawn Cook Says You Need to Be “Compellevant” first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 079: When it Comes to Managing Millennials in Sales, GoCanvas Sales Leader Tristan Cotter Says Like the Philadelphia 76ers You Need to Trust the Process

TRISTAN’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “You have to take control of your own destiny and success and you have to invest in yourself and even if you feel like you’re having success, you need to continue to stay sharp because things change really quickly. Take ownership, manage your own business like it’s a small business and continue to improve and educate.“

Tristan Cotter is a software sales leader with over 10 years’ experience selling everything from consulting research to software-as-a-service software.

Currently he is the vice president of global sales for GoCanvas, a mobile platform that makes it simple for business to automate how work is done replacing outdated processes and expensive paperwork.

At GoCanvas, he’s almost tripled the size of the sales force over the past year which has led to record breaking revenue performance and growth rates while helping improve the customer experience leading to improved retention and expansion.

Find Tristan on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Tristan Cotter: If you really boil it down, what we do is help businesses better collect information, automate their workflows and processes here at GoCanvas which has a ton of benefit and value to companies of all sizes, in particular small and mid-sized organizations. We allow them to get more done which allows them to do both have the ability to save time and also make more money which everyone loves, while giving them better business insights which then allows them to connect better with internal colleagues and being able to better engage more effectively with their customers which pretty much every organization’s looking to do.

Fred Diamond: Just as a quick note, we’re doing today’s podcast broadcast from the offices of GoCanvas in Reston, Virginia. A lot of energy out there on the sales floor.

Tristan Cotter: Yeah, it’s fantastic. Anytime I’m having a tough day or I get out of a long meeting, the first place I go back is to what we call the sales pit which is where everybody sits in the back corner and you can just feel the energy as soon as you go back there and it’s like plugging in to just a quick zap.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Why don’t you tell us a little about your career? How’d you first get into sales as a career?

Tristan Cotter: I’m probably a pretty classic tale that you’re going to get a lot of. A marketing major in college because there wasn’t such thing as a sales major at that time which I love seeing that change that we’re starting to see within the academic circles. A lot of these sales courses and sales majors that are popping up across the country. I had an influential sales professor at the University of Arizona and it struck me at that point that I might be interested in pursuing that a little bit further.

The funny story, after that I took about a year off, a gap year post college and I was working a couple of different jobs saving up money to go travel and one of the jobs was at Rumors, an institution of DC local watering holes and one evening there was a big corporate event which happened to be a CEB or Corporate Executive Board happy hour and my boss prepped me for that night, said, “This is going to be a crazy evening, you’re going to have 400+ young, wild people coming in this evening to have a corporate event” and after I saw how much fun they had that evening I said, “What the heck do they do?”

And I got an intro and the rest is history and that’s how I got my first job.

Fred Diamond: That was at CEB?

Tristan Cotter: At CEB, yeah.

Fred Diamond: What were you doing?

Tristan Cotter: I did the entry level sales role, it’s classic to most people’s sales career beginning, a business development associate role scheduling demos for the full cycle sales reps.

Fred Diamond: Very good. We actually have had a couple of past CEB people on the Sales Game Changers podcast: Vineeta Mooganur, we’ve had Heather Combs, Steve Richard, Reed Fawell has been on one of the episodes. It seems like a great breeding ground for some of the top sales performers in the mid-Atlantic region.

Tristan Cotter: Absolutely. I couldn’t recommend strongly enough the foundational skills that a place like the Corporate Executive Board can provide and has launched and been a spring board for countless sales executives across the DC metropolitan area and beyond.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you learned there? What are some of the things you learned in your first few sales jobs that eventually lead you here to become the VP of global sales for GoCanvas?

Tristan Cotter: I think the #1 thing that you learn at a place like CEB early on is the importance of hard work and discipline, and it’s about doing the little things right every day that add up. It can be quite a grind as everyone knows and that’s really where I learned. After I left there, you have this institutional knowledge ingrained in you and the foundational skills that you need from prospecting and from objection handling but I think really the thing that sticks with me to this day that I learned that’s been the greatest takeaway has been just the importance of hard work and the discipline of doing the things that aren’t glorified on a day to day basis that ultimately add up to the bigger success points.

Fred Diamond: What might some of those things be?

Tristan Cotter: Showing up early, staying late, managing your day and your white space effectively, carving out the right amount of times to prospect when there may not be as many time zones available to call into, managing strategically time zones, areas in the day where you might hit all three time zones – central, eastern and pacific if you’re focused on a North American territory – all those types of things I think are not the parts of sales that anybody particularly enjoys. Everyone likes when you close the deal, you’re slapping high 5’s but all the hard work is really done prior to that moment and those are the things that really add up to make the difference between a core performing and a high performing, a low performing sales rep in my opinion.

Fred Diamond: Very good. We’re going to talk a little bit about that as we progress, but tell us a little bit about what you specifically are an expert in. Tell us a little more about your area of brilliance.

Tristan Cotter: Those two words, expert and brilliance, especially used in a way to self-describe yourself makes me cringe a little bit. I say two things that are my areas that I’m relatively strong at, though, are people and process. Areas that I focus a lot of my energy and time on is from a people perspective attracting and retaining great people to join our team and then to make sure while they’re here they’re feeling motivated and that this is a place they can grow.

The second thing is process. What are the things that our best reps and people in our team are doing that are predictable and scaleable and repeatable.

Fred Diamond: Talk about the retaining side, there. What are some of the things that you’re conscious of as a sales leader to ensure that your best people are going to stay here? There’s a lot of competition, you guys have to grow so what are some of the things that you’re conscious of that you try to do?

Tristan Cotter: I think one of the things – and we have a majority millennial work force in sales team – one thing that I’ve learned as being one myself and seeing from great organizations prior to coming here, CEB, Vocus, Social Tables, each one of these organizations had very clear career path and opportunities and I think that’s the #1 thing around the motivation for young professionals, is more so than money is that they can see a path that they can professionally grow and that they see that they can do this here and that they’re constantly evolving and learning new things.

One of the things that I’m constantly thinking about is what are the motivations for each person on my team and what do they want to do next and how does being here and the things they’re doing on a day to day basis lead towards that and are they feeling like they’re constantly being challenged in working towards and growing. I think if they are, they’re not looking, they’re turning down those calls and all the LinkedIn messages from other groups. As long as you can provide a place where someone feels they can be successful and they can grow, I thing you have a great opportunity to retain and have a lot of loyalty within your group.

Fred Diamond: Very good. It sounds like you’re also doing some mentoring towards them, kind of giving them some career guidance. I like where you just said you work with them on an individual basis to help them understand what their growth options would be. Tell us a little bit about some of the successful and impactful sales career mentors that you’ve had. Tell us a little bit about how they impacted your career.

Tristan Cotter: I’ve been fortunate, the places I’ve gone prior to here, there’s been really strong leaders in place and folks that I’ve been able to gain a lot from starting with Cathleen Butler who is the first rep that I scheduled for who took me under her wing and taught me a lot directly. Kevin McCartney at Social Tables helping groom me to lead a larger team and then at Vocus it was full of them. It was a great organization in terms of layers of mentors that were available and something they focused heavily on. All the managers that I had there, Shawn Cook, Rob Roots, Chris Cutino, people like this were all really important.

If I had to highlight one, it would be Matt Melnick who was the VP of sales at Vocus during my tenure there and taught me a lot about sales but also took a real human approach and is still somebody I reach out to till today around things in my personal life, professional, ideas I want to bounce off of him. Definitely someone that stands out as someone who’s been very influential in my career.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you do today as a sales leader? When we talked before the show you mentioned that you manage somewhere over 30 people, I guess. What are some of the things that you see in yourself, Tristan Cotter, as a sales leader that you got from the mentors?

Tristan Cotter: I think it’s a people driven approach to management and leadership and looking and humanizing what can be a cold business and making sure that people are the front aspect are the most important parts of a business and really having a human approach to caring about each person on the team and making sure that they are aligned around the goals. I think that’s one thing that I’ve tried to focus on a day to day basis, is taking a human approach to the personnel and to the people while aligning it with the business goals that we have to achieve and explain the why behind those and making sure we’re all marching in the same direction.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Speaking about that, you’ve had to deal with challenges, of course and a lot of things going on in the market. What are two of the biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Tristan Cotter: I think you mentioned one of them, is just the speed at which how quickly things change. Especially in being in the software and tech space, our own product and company is innovating at such a rapid pace so you need to stay on top of and be updated on all the different things that our own product is doing and changing on a monthly and quarterly basis. And then the same way that we’re innovating there’s others in our space that are also doing that so competitively staying on top of the game. Then there’s the sales tools and technology, there’s processes, you have to continue to evolve so I think staying on top of how fast things are moving is certainly one of them.

The second one is staying out of meetings [laughs]. As a sales leader, you can get pulled into a lot of meetings and one of them is protecting your time so you can spend more time with your team and so I think that’s probably one of the other challenges that you face as a sales leader, is how do you balance your strategic responsibilities with making sure you’re staying both customer and also with your team.

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

Tristan Cotter: The first one that comes to mind is the biggest deal that I ever sold up until this point which was a big outlier deal. At the time, this was at Vocus, the average deal size was somewhere between 7 and 10 thousand dollars and I ended up selling and closing a deal that was about $120 thousand. It was at the time the largest deal and that segment of the company’s history and it ended up propelling into a huge year that allowed a lot of doors to open for me and make a name for myself. It’s one of the first deals that comes to mind as the big deal that I still think about to this day.

Fred Diamond: You said the average deal size was about 7 thousand, you sold a deal for about 120 thousand. That’s almost 20 times that, what was it that allowed you to sell such a humongous deal in the company’s history?

Tristan Cotter: With any of these things, some of it’s fortune and good luck that you come across this opportunity and then you’re ready to make the most of it. I think like any great sale it starts with discovery and that’s where you’re going to expand and be able to find the larger opportunity. I don’t believe it started as a $120 thousand deal. It started as something that looked a little bit smaller and then the more questions that you ask, you open up additional opportunity and that’s an important lesson that you learn and you keep with to this day.

I think if you talk to anybody on any of these podcasts, probably most people will relate back to discovery as being the most important part of the process.

Fred Diamond: That’s true. Obviously, everybody loves the rush of the close and things like that and the ability that brings you but most of the Sales Game Changers we talk to, they really do enjoy the process. They love talking to customers, they love the questioning, they love solving the problems, if you will. How does that relate to you?

Tristan Cotter: Agreed.

Fred Diamond: Yeah?

Tristan Cotter: [Laughs] I think that that’s totally true. I think that the fun is in the process and the closing the deal is just the end result that most of the hard work was done on days that you didn’t even see. My favorite days that I felt the most productive were days that I closed no deals because I knew that I had either added something new to my pipeline or I had advanced something in a meaningful way and probably I advanced or introduced several new things and I was extremely busy and productive. The days that I actually had the biggest closing, days may have been my lowest actual level of input and productivity.

Fred Diamond: I got a question for you about that. You mentioned that you manage a lot of millennials in sales. There’s a process that’s going to take for people to purchase your stuff so tell me about how do you continue to motivate your team when they’re not closing deals every day and there’s not a big close along the way and you know with all of your experience that this may be a three month type of a thing. How do you keep them motivated, how do you keep them excited to stay on the path, if you will?

Tristan Cotter: As a Philly guy you may have heard of this phrase which is trust the process.

Fred Diamond: Trust the process.

Tristan Cotter: I really believe in that concept and I have mentioned this many times to our team: anytime somebody’s starting to feel down I can just tell that there is a body language off, I grab them and start to learn a little bit more about it and it’s like, “Look, trust the process. Do the right things day in and day out and those are the things that you can control. Focus on those areas that you can control on a day to day basis and trust that the things that you focus on will expand and that if you do the right things and if you put yourself in the position, you’re here early, you’re staying late good things are going to happen to you and you have to stay positive because as soon as you start going down a negative cycle on it, things start to snowball and avalanche in a really bad way. If you stay positive and you trust the process, things have a way of working themselves out.”

Fred Diamond: Just curiously before we ask you a quick question about your career, what does the ideal sales professional look like for what you sell? What type of personality traits, what type of skills do they need to have to be successful?

Tristan Cotter: I really identify with some of the findings from Hubspot’s big book and it is more of the category or the characteristics of someone you might find in a consultant rather than the sales closing skills, etcetera. I’m looking for somebody that’s first and foremost hardworking which is sometimes hard to identify in an interview process but it’s got that undefined fire in their belly that are not going to be stopped and that they’re determined or disciplined.

Second thing is this is not necessarily the next two characteristics, not necessarily something that most people associate with sales people but are really important to me when I’m identifying talent is people that are really smart and people that are really creative. I don’t mean that to take away from sales professionals but I don’t think that creative and smart are necessarily the first two things that come up on most people’s list but you absolutely need to be both of those things to be great at sales.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? You got into sales relatively quickly. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Tristan Cotter: Of course. I think everyone in sales if you’re being honest has had that moment at some point and this is probably a pretty common answer as well. It’s tough, it’s a grind, it can be tough especially on the first day of a month when it goes back down to 0 after all the hard work and the excitement has worn off. The celebration and the hangover on a Tuesday at 10:15 am when you have to pick up the phone and you have to do the small little things, I think that most people question that. But at the end of the day I love what I do and I’m reminded of that pretty quickly with the people that I work with, the energy, the excitement, the creativity, the strategic nature of seeing you put a plan together and the ownership that you can see with your results from the hard work and also that you can run a small – it’s very entrepreneurial and I love that about sales.

My father is a small business owner and a lot of that entrepreneurial spirit is in myself as well and I love that you feel like you can run your own small business with a lot of the overhead and the research development, the product development all taken care of and you can just run your own business, and I think that’s another great lesson for young people that are just starting down their sales career is to focus on envisioning this as your own small business.

Fred Diamond: That is a great answer. You know what? It’s your career. GoCanvas can do whatever they can do, we’re actually broadcasting today’s podcast from the offices of GoCanvas. There’s a lot of energy, there’s free food, there’s free things that people can eat here during the day, there’s games going on and stuff like that if you will, but you know what? It’s your career. What are you going to do to be successful, how can you think of different things. Tristan mentioned trust the process but at the same time it’s up to you to do the things necessary to be successful.  Tristan, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Tristan Cotter: I mentioned Matt Melnick earlier as one of my mentors, and one of the things that he told me and stuck with me to this day which was the same, which is your 20’s are for learning and your 30’s are for earning. I think that’s a really powerful thought to keep in mind at all times when making career decisions is, “Am I learning in this role? Am I growing? Am I putting things together? Am I experiencing new skills and building for discovering what I am passionate about and getting the skills to then take on greater levels of responsibility?”

These things again, have a way of working themselves out. You’re going to be able to maximize your earning potential. The things that you set yourself up in your 20’s are going to really maximize your earning potential in your 30’s and the great thing about sales as a career is that you don’t have to wait till your 30’s to earn. You can earn and learn in your 20’s but I think it’s a great way of approaching any decision, especially in your 20’s. Learn and experience and try as many different things early on and you’re going to be set up to be in a great place from a financial standpoint in the future.

Fred Diamond: Very good. What are some of the things that you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Tristan Cotter: I’m constantly learning, whether it’s from my team, whether it’s networking with other sales professionals, business professionals. I listen, I have a commute into work every day and I try to maximize that time with podcasts and books on tape, I make a lot of phone calls during that time as well. It’s just constantly looking for self-education and also I subscribe to a lot of E newsletters and on twitter follow a lot of thought leaders and read a lot of blogs. It’s all about constantly learning and staying sharp.

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

Tristan Cotter: We’re doing a lot right now in terms of testing and trying new things and one big area that I recently got involved in was getting more involved inheriting the channel side of our business. The majority of my career has been focused primarily on direct business to business selling and the channel is a really interesting new challenge and opportunity with a lot of the same overlapping characteristics and fundamentals but with some really interesting new nuances that have been a lot of fun digging in over the last couple weeks and months of putting together a good strategy around it.

Fred Diamond: Who’s in your channel? What are some of the channel type of providers that you’re looking for?

Tristan Cotter: Mainly telecom, so in the US Verizon and Sprint and the internationally in the Apec region groups like Telstra, Globe, etc.

Fred Diamond: OK. Tristan, you’ve given us some great insights here and we really appreciate all the things that you contributed to today’s podcast but sales is hard, people don’t return your phone calls or your emails or your texts. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Tristan Cotter: Motivated to be successful, this is one really important question that I ask on every single one of my interviews is a pretty basic one which is are you someone that loves to win and hates to lose? And I’m looking for people that hate to lose and I’m motivated by the fear or the chance of failing and so I’m passionate about helping other people achieve their sales goals and I’m really passionate about helping a business and customers achieve both of their goals. Matching what the impact it is that we can make within these roles with what I’m trying to achieve from a professional level and hating to lose, those two things drive me on a day to day basis.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us a final thought that we can share with the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast?

Tristan Cotter: A last thought is just invest in yourself, that nobody is going to care when you’re in the ocean whether you drown or you swim to the shore, I think that that’s a good analogy here as well. You have to take control of your own destiny and success and you have to invest in yourself and even if you feel like you’re having success, you need to continue to stay sharp because things change really quickly so take ownership, manage your own business like it’s a small business and continue to improve and educate.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 079: When it Comes to Managing Millennials in Sales, GoCanvas Sales Leader Tristan Cotter Says Like the Philadelphia 76ers You Need to Trust the Process first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

EPISODE 056: With Over 18 Years at the Same Company, Cision Sales Leader Chris Cutino Offers a Wealth of Ideas on How to Continually Stay Ahead

CHRIS’ FINAL THOUGHT FOR SALES GAME CHANGERS: “Make everything that you do worth your time. It’s an over-simplification of investing in yourself. It’s very easy to get distracted at work, it’s very easy to get yourself in a position where you feel like you’ve got a good pipeline and it’s easy to go on autopilot. Make everything that you do worth your time and you won’t let yourself down.”

Chris Cutino offers a unique career perspective in sales and sales leadership being that he has spent the last 18 years in the same industry with the same organization.

He’s currently the Vice President of Sales for Cision, a provider of technology solutions and services for communications professionals. During his tenure, he’s seen the organization grow from 40 employees to a public offering on the NASDAC in 2005. In 2014 Vocus was acquired through a private equity firm and merged with Cision.

Prior to his entry into communications technology sales, he held sales leadership positions in the licensed apparel industry as well as the not for profit space at the AIIM international, a technology trade association.

Find Chris on LinkedIN!

Chris Cutino: I’m really glad to be here and be a part of this podcast. I’ve been listening quite a bit lately and some very interesting guests and certainly some great insight. From my perspective, I’m one of those guys who is really kind of a family man at heart. A lot of what I do is not only supported by my family, needs to be, but it’s also done for them as well.

I have two children, I’ve got a lovely wife of 23+ years at this point and they’re very supportive and that’s really important when you kind of dig your head into the sales arena. It takes a lot of time and you have to make sure that what you’re doing is not only something that you want to do but also your family is willing to support as well.

Fred Diamond: That’s actually an interesting point. We interview successful sales leaders from around the globe and so many of them had had very happy and successful private lives as well. Spouses going on, two, three decades and just that continuation and stability which definitely, I found, leads to some of the sales success that we’re going to be talking about today.

Chris Cutino: Absolutely.

Fred Diamond: Let’s get to it. Let’s talk a little bit about your career and get some of your journey and understand how you’ve gotten to this point. Tell us a little bit about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Chris Cutino: Sure. Cision provides solutions for communications professionals, we’ve talked about communications folks for years as PR professionals, communications people but really the tool that we give them just from a tactical perspective gives them the ability to target influencers, to distribute their content to influencers and make sure that they manage their brand properly. It gives them the ability to monitor news and when we talk about news, that’s certainly changed over the years as well from traditional news to online news, social media.

It gives them the ability to track that content not only about themselves, their competitors but also their industry in general. Then they can analyze that content and really make much smarter decisions based on what’s happening in those conversations but what’s really exciting and what we’ve done that’s very different – especially this past year – is we’ve moved into this area that’s always been held by marketing and advertising which is attribution, and there’s always been a struggle in trying to attribute the value of communications and PR to a dollar amount.

They’ve always had kind of a corner on that market and a corner on that budget. We’ve done a really good job this year in incorporating attribution into the communications life cycle. It’s a lot of fun to talk to organizations, teach them how they can do that now, how they can get a bigger slice of that overall attribution pie within an organization.

Fred Diamond: Explain what attribution means for people who don’t know what that means.

Chris Cutino: Absolutely. When you’re putting together an advertising campaign or maybe a campaign where you’re putting up banner ads, people will click through that. There’s content that’s attached to them through the magic of the web that follows them through to your e-commerce site. Once that person buys your product or your content, etcetera, you have the ability to attribute that back to that initial click.

The historical process with communications professionals has been we put out a press release, we communicate with the media, we get all these news clips and you thump this down on the CEO’s desk and raise your hands like, “This is what we’ve been able to accomplish”, but it’s always been really hard to say, “If we spend more money on communications, it’s going to result next number of dollars.” That’s what we’re able to do now, send out a press release, track the content and the people that are actually viewing that content, track their information all the way through to the sell cycle and be able to attribute a dollar value to that.

Fred Diamond: That’s pretty powerful. Who do you sell to? Who are your customers?

Chris Cutino: We don’t focus on one particular industry because everybody really has to focus on that communications life cycle for different reasons. B2C customers, obviously they’re targeting new customers. B2B customers, they want businesses to come in and use their products. You have non-profits that are really trying to find donors or find people that will actually donate their time to help those organizations. Even government agencies, they’re trying to deliver a message and shape the way people are thinking about it so really it’s those communications professionals until recently.

It’s all PR professionals and communications professionals. We’ve raised the game now where CMO’s are getting involved in the process because of that attribution model.

Fred Diamond: Tell us how you first got into a career in sales. We mentioned in the intro that you’ve been with the same company for the past 18 somewhat years, that is definitely remarkable in this day and age, good for you, but tell us how you got started in sales.

Chris Cutino: I think probably 95% of the time, people kind of fall into sales. It’s purely an accident. I don’t know anybody who when they were 9 or 10 years old used to call up their friends and they’d get together and play make believe procurement process or anything along those lines.

I think what happened was initially, if memory serves, a very close friend of mine was a part of a family-run business and they offered me the opportunity to come in and help them coordinate their sales efforts. They had a bunch of independent sales reps and what they sold was licensed apparel. What they would do is they would get these sales reps together who would carry seven or eight other manufacturers’ products going to JC Penny and pull out all of their different brands and items and bring back basically order forms.

They needed somebody to come and manage that process and as I got in there I started to learn from these sales reps but I also realized how little structure there was there and I was very young and these were very grizzled veterans. But what I started to figure out was they needed more than a coordinator, they needed something to put things like goals in place. We had to be able to project what type of revenue we were going to get, set expectations for the reps that aligned with what we were trying to do as a business so it turned into more of a sales management role and it was an accidental sales management role.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the lessons that you learned back then that have stuck with you through today?

Chris Cutino: I think some of it was just watching those sales reps, some of them that had a lot of tenure, some of them that were a family business themselves and learned from the grizzled veterans within their family. You had a lot of smooth-talking, pressure-based sales people, you also had people that really understood the relationship sale. Creating that long term relationship and being able to go back to the well over and over again.

I quickly learned that no one wants to be sold, I learned that business people want to take advantage of an opportunity and if they can find somebody that will help them become successful over the long term as opposed to somebody who’s going to solve a short term issue and maybe they’ll be successful based on that short term, building that trust and building that long-term opportunity was far more successful and it really made an impression on me.

Fred Diamond: We mentioned a couple of times already you’ve been with the same organization for close to 18 years. You just talked about bringing value, long term success, are there customers that you’ve been working with for close to two decades being part of this organization that you saw those relationships with?

Chris Cutino: It’s very interesting, I do have quite a few of those customers. My main focus is on business development and the new business side but a lot of those organizations that I originally sold as an individual rep here are folks that still come back to me when they have questions about new product and I’ll assist the current sales rep to make sure that we align what their needs are with what we have to help them.

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

Chris Cutino: Expertise and brilliance? It’s kind of a heavy word. I’d like to think that if I have any brilliance at all it’s openly admitting and finding comfort in the fact that I can learn from people around me, that I can always continue to hire people and surround myself with people that are much smarter than me and openly embracing that. I think that if you work with really smart team of people and you learn to utilize their strengths and an understanding of all levels of the business that you have long coupled with theirs that’ll put you in the position not only to fool everybody around you to make them think that you’re smarter than you actually are, but to take advantage of this collective identification of potential land mines.

Making certain that what you’re doing is you’re getting all levels of historical knowledge and experience to say, “I’m now two levels, three levels removed from a lot of the direct sales that happens within the organization and it’s terrifying to me to make a decision about what might affect them without really understanding what their day to day is.” Getting the right people around you and constantly gaining that feedback is really important to me.

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting. I’m going to ask you a little different question here: How do you describe your sales management style?

Chris Cutino: It’s a really good question. It’s interesting because what I do know is that I’ve worked for a lot of people that probably have their own self-image and a version of how they believe that they are projecting themselves to their sales team and so I want to be careful of not stepping in that mud puddle. The reality is what I really do is I take a very collaborative approach to making decisions.

Once those decisions are put in place, then it’s all about accountability and it’s not a democracy by any stretch but it is a very collaborative approach. The net result is we have to grow as an organization so when it comes to really focusing on getting that insight, that’s where the collaboration happens and I’m certainly not a “My way or the highway” type manager but what I do believe is that once we sign on for something, it’s our job to go and get it done.

Fred Diamond: Yeah. It’s interesting, you mentioned that when you had that first job selling licenses apparel that there was the high-pressure sales person, if you will, but then there was also the ones who looked to the long term benefit, if you will.

Chris Cutino: That’s correct.

Fred Diamond: That kind of describes how you just described your management style as well. Working with teams that were all here to help the company grow. That makes a lot of sense and maybe some attribution there.

Chris Cutino: If I can add to that, also one of the other things to that as we go through this process, I trust the team that I have around me and I feel like giving them more information gives them the ability to understand their direct impact on the organization as well and I think that’s something that is often missing.

If people understand what they do on a daily basis and how it impacts the overall targets and goals and what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization, it gives them a much easier pass to buy in as to, “Here’s how I’m propping up that table.” It works really well for me and my organization.

Fred Diamond: We took a walk around the office today, it’s very imaginative, very creative place and I saw a lot of engaged people. I’m just curious, a lot of them seemed to be – to throw around the M word – millennials. Is there anything specific that you want to share about managing millennials that you have found to be successful?

Chris Cutino: That’s a great question. I think that’s one that everybody kind of grapples with but I think it still comes back to that human factor in that being a sales manager and being in direct sales, there’s a large portion of that that really relies on psychology. There’s a huge different between psychology and spin and I think a lot of people get those intermingled, they use them interchangeably far too often. I think the psychology, it goes back to exactly what I just talked about which is giving them a reason to be vested in the success of the organization and tying their success back to the organization’s success as well.

I think that if they understand that their success is #1, it absolutely needs to be in place in order for the organization to be successful but #2 recognizing that success on a regular basis, we often say that a pat on the back is only 18 inches above the kick in the butt and it’s very important to make sure that everybody recognizes when those successes are happening and play those up quite a bit. They really want to be recognized for doing a good job.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Take us back to parts of your career when you’ve had an impactful sales career mentor. Tell us about one or two of the mentors that you’ve had and how they specifically have impacted your career.

Chris Cutino: It’s interesting because I’ve been listening to podcasts and trying to pinpoint one or two people that have had a huge impact on my career and I could certainly name a handful of people but it’s turned into this amalgam of probably a half dozen people or so. It’s really the things that I learned from them and in many cases they were the same things from the leaders that I felt were true mentors to me. I’ll be clear that they weren’t formal mentors, I don’t know that I’ve ever put together a formal mentorship with anybody so when I think of mentors, it’s people who have made real impact just in doing what they do on a daily basis and that’s the way that I model my approach.

I’ve never sat down with somebody and said, “I’m going to mentor you”, but look at the way that I’ve done it, here’s what’s happened to me and take that into account when you’re trying to figure out what’s next. When I talk about those areas, the things that I learn from them I think first and foremost it’s trust your own instincts and I think that we typically – as sales people – have either a very narcissistic approach to how great we are and it’s often false or we fall into that impostor syndrome approach where we’re always second guessing ourselves. You’ve got to find a combination of both of those, that narcissism has to turn into confidence and that impostor syndrome has to turn into more of a, “Let’s be introspective and let’s make sure we know what we’re doing well and where we need to get better.”

Great sales people, another great one that I learned was you have to succeed in spite of. In spite of as opposed to failing because of, it’s easy to find excuses, it’s really hard to say, “I know it’s hard but I’m going to succeed anyway.” That’s one that I learned early, I use it all the time and simply don’t let anybody outwork you. I will say that probably my biggest mentor, my father, inadvertently whether he meant to or not probably taught me at a very early age that nobody’s going to outwork you. He’s still the voice in my head when I tell myself, “No one’s going to outwork me. It’s just not going to happen.” I think that’s the key and it’s important that you surround yourself with really smart people along the way.

Fred Diamond: You have to succeed in spite of, not fail because of. Very powerful. Chris, what are two of the biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader? 

Chris Cutino: First and foremost it’s probably training and sales readiness and it’s really more around the way that our products and services continually evolve and the expectations of our client base evolve. With us, again, we have to have very consultative conversations with our clients at every level. That’s the person with six months of tenure and the person with six years of tenure, they have to come across in a very consultative way because our job is to get them to think differently.

People will call us looking for a commodity, looking for a media database, we’ve got to basically pivot that to a conversation about what they could be doing so we have to be able to challenge them. That takes a level of confidence that comes with really understanding all of the new offerings that we’re providing every two or three months, and so that’s one of the challenges.

Second, I think it really is – as you go through a lot of mergers and acquisitions  – it’s taking all of these various sales cultures and sales processes and making certain that we can merge those together and continue to grow and win the hearts and minds of people who aren’t used to doing things a certain way. That’s been a real challenge as well.

Fred Diamond: Chris, why don’t you take us back to one specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of?

Chris Cutino: Sure. Early in my tenure here at Vocus I had moved into an enterprise, new business sales role. I carved out this territory focused specifically on non-profits associations and foundations and I was working with a very large, very high profile charity that had gone through a very lengthy sales process. An RFP profess and a sales process to find a solution for, at the time, was probably about a 40 to 50 person communications team. It was a very large team.

We had put in front of them a 6 figure contract. At the last minute, a competitor which later turned out to be the organization that we merged with had rolled out a brand new product and because they were such a high profile organization they came with them and said, “We’ll give this to you for free if we can tell people that you’re using our services.” It was a decision that they had to make. As a charity, we’re trying to save money every step of the way, we can spend 6 figures plus, get what we believe will work or we can do this for free and we can try it out and if it doesn’t work we can make a decision six months later to spend the money.

But through a combination of reiterating my understanding of what their real needs were, how to line with the products and services that we provided at the time but also challenging them to think about different ways of doing what they were doing to gain better insight and then you certainly sprinkle in quite a bit of fear and uncertainty and doubt associated with being that guinea pig to try a new product. I was able to secure that 100 K plus deal with the charity which was kind of hard to come by at the time.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Just curiously, is the decision making process for not for profit different from what you’ve seen for profit companies?

Chris Cutino: It’s interesting, the decision making process is very different across all industries and certainly the federal government has its own way of buying that certainly keeps us all in therapy [Laughs]. I think that there’s also the bigger challenge is larger organizations have a standardized process when it comes to procurement whereas the smaller the organization or the less sophisticated the organization, typically what happens is you almost have to challenge as a part of the sales process, you have to challenge the buyer to make certain that they understand the process.

A lot of times they’re not used to buying services like ours, so they don’t know the answers to a lot of those challenges. It’s one of the things that we train very heavily around is make sure you partner with them so that they understand the procurement process prior to making a decision because a lot of times if they don’t, once they make that decision we could still be looking at six weeks to another two and a half months out before they can actually sign on the dotted line.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, you mentioned that communications professionals are your main customer, has it ever happened where you’ve really sold the communication customer they get it, they understand and then procurement or the CFO or the controller puts a kibosh not because there’s not budget but for other reasons, is that a challenge or not really?

Chris Cutino: Absolutely a challenge. I will tell you that value is in the eye of the beholder and if the beholder is not the one with the purse strings, it makes it a much more difficult process and there is always risk involved until you actually sign on that dotted line.

The challenge is obviously when you go up the ladder within an organization, pain is less pain if they’re not directly involved in the pain and the outcome is the same so efficiencies aren’t always what sells a product to somebody who actually owns the budget for it. It’s really more around what’s the overall value for the organization so we’ve really had to pivot away from, “We can save you time, we can make you more efficient.”

It’s we have to be able to show them that, “We can get you better results and ultimately you’re going to gain additional revenue for your organization by using these tools.”

Fred Diamond: Chris, you obviously had a great, successful career in sales. You would not have been here for 18 years with these examples and learnings if you hadn’t been successful but did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s not for me.”?

Chris Cutino: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s interesting because I think this answer is pretty universal in that I think any job that is as difficult as sales, you always have second thoughts. Certainly there are tough days, I think another mentor of mine, the old CEO of Vocus used to say all the time, “Some days you’re the windshield, some days you’re the bug.” I think that’s true in any career but with sales it’s black and white. Your success is black and white, you’re either hitting it or you’re not.

It’s the work that you do ahead of time to make sure that you don’t get to that point where you are the bug. The nice thing about it, though, and what I always stress to people and I think what has really kept me in the game is that when you talk about getting targets and the tactical part of sales it’s our job to align our solution with our client’s needs and at the end of the day we have the ability to be creative around that. They give us the easel, they give us the pain and to the same extent I do that with my sales team but it’s your creativity that’s going to give you the ability to be successful within your role.

So if you point a good rep in the right direction, give them the tools but also let them be creative, as long as they’re using the right morals and certainly staying within specific guard rails, it’s amazing what you can learn from the people around you, even the people that work for you. I’m amazed every single day by the creativity of sales people that have been on the job for a year and they come and they said, “I tried this and it’s amazing the response that I’m getting” and I roll it out to the entire team.

Fred Diamond: It’s interesting, one thing that you brought up is that originally your customer for years has been the communication professional, the PR professional if you will, and you said recently because of I guess the analytics and because marketing and communications is getting a lot of boundaries have been crossed, you have mentioned that a lot of your new customer over the last couple of years have been the CMO, the chief marketing officer or other marketing directors and marketing leaders so there’s different mindsets with that type of a professional versus your traditional communications professional.

Different things you need to communicate, different things that are of value, different things that they look for so if you were selling the same way to communications professionals that you are to marketing professionals, you may not be successful.

Chris Cutino: You’re right, it may not convey and I think that the beauty of where we are right now is that communications professionals historically have been involved in buying services. Whereas when you sell a software package combined with services, that’s a more difficult process for them to go through. If you can get to that point where you can show that attribution, that sales process with those marketing professionals, they understand that.

And part of our job really is educating the communications professional and say, “No, I can show you how successful we’re going to be.” I think one of the great things about where we are right now is organizations have always felt that there is a value that’s associated with their communications efforts, managing content and influencer management, but they’ve had a hard time attaching a dollar amount to it. So while they feel good about it, it’s hard to go into the CEO and say, “If we spend more, we’re going to get more.” Now we’re giving them the ability to do that.

Fred Diamond: That’s powerful and that’s become more and more of a demand on the marketing professional to be able to prove their value as well.  Chris, what is the most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Chris Cutino: There’s always a propensity to kind of jump into one of those sales management platitudes when a question like that is asked and that’s always a dangerous thing. So really what I’ve learned over the years, the first thing is surround yourself with people who are successful and figure out what they’re doing that’s successful.

There’s a translation process as well, so what may work for you Fred, when it comes to your sales process may not completely work for me but some of the things that you’re doing are things that will translate really well to my process. I will tell you this, and this is an over-simplification of the sales process, I worked with somebody who was very technical and was very good at going through a discovery process and was almost like an interrogation. That did not work with my style but I understood what he was trying to get to and I turned that into my style. I have more of a bit of a self-deprecating approach when it comes to ingratiating myself with a prospect and it works for me.

I’m trying to get to the same end game which is I need to find out what their challenges are and listening to him and understanding exactly what he was doing well and turning it into my style was really important. I think secondarily, treat your sales goals as the base line of what’s expected of you. Most people come into an organization as a sales person and they say, “If I hit my goal, I’m a success.” That’s true, but from a career perspective if you really want to be successful, treat that as the base line and then to go above and beyond that make yourself useful to everybody you possibly can across the organization.

Learn everything you can about the organization itself and everything that you do make sure that people are seeing you as kind of a go-to and somebody that can help them.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you do, Chris Cutino, to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Chris Cutino: It’s interesting. I think I do a lot of the things that most sales leaders do today, outside of reading. I’ve never been an avid reader of books. I read business publications, I read obviously newspapers, I try to stay up on what’s happening in current events, certainly but from a business perspective, sales podcast, obviously. I spend a lot of time listening to those.

I listen a lot to customer and prospect calls, I also review win-loss data quite a bit and try to figure out, “OK, what are the things and what are the recurring issues that I’m seeing on a regular basis? How can we take advantage of why we’re winning and how can we improve upon why we’re losing.” But I think one of the most important parts of my daily process is it revolves around pure introspection in that I spend a lot of quiet time in my car on the way home trying to figure out what I did well, what could I have done better, what decisions need to be made and what potential land mines are not being considered around those decisions.

Some of it is who do I need to include in making that decision to make sure that I have a full view, 360 degree view of the impact that that’s going to have on all areas of our organization more so than just my sales team. And what would any of my mentors do in this situation? Both it from a knee jerk responsibility, a reaction to what they would do after they put some thought into it. And what are some of the people that have worked for in the past, how would they have responded to it, probably incorrectly and how do I make sure that I don’t do those things. So I think without introspection and that daily review process, the act of ploughing forward without learning becomes a dangerous path.

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

Chris Cutino: From a tactical perspective it’s taking all of these mergers and creating a standardized process and not losing sight of the growth that’s expected out of the sales team. As we’ve merged all of these sales organizations together, my focus has been around maximizing return, identifying duplication and unique processes to each of the legacy organizations as we’ve merged them and creating one go to market strategy that works and it’s based on, like I said, collaboration.

I need to understand why these organizations that we’ve merged with or purchased do things a certain way. Is it because they have to or is it because it’s the way that they’ve always done it? And is there a better way to do it or is there something in there that I hadn’t thought of before that I can incorporate into this merged process that we’re going to go to market with. And it really takes an understanding of the nuances behind each of the businesses so you do have to dig into the weeds and that’s where that collaboration really comes in.

Fred Diamond: That’s good. Chris, 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?

Chris Cutino: It’s funny. I think from a tactical perspective there are things about every single job that are very difficult. I think from a sales perspective – I just had this conversation with one of the mentors we were talking about the other night at dinner and it’s funny, I said to him the hard part about sales is that it’s not like being a construction foreman where you can step back at the end of the day and you could say, “Look, I put that roof on and it’s done.”

It’s a daily grind and you don’t necessarily get to see the results of that daily grind for months to come so it’s staying focused on what needs to be done. That pipeline management, it’s that constant back fill of opportunity and making certain that you’re identifying issues along the way. But we were talking about it and in 18 years here he spent probably about 14 of those 18 years as my boss within the organization. We took a step back and said, “Look at all of the people that we hired, that we moved through the organization that are still here now in a senior director role or in some cases a VP role or have gone onto other roles and have found success as senior vice president or chief revenue officer for other organizations.”

And that’s the stepping back and looking at the roof at the end of the day. It really is that, it’s the people that you work with, it’s the potential in them that I see and to be frank, it’s the potential that they see in me and the fact that they count on me to make sure that I’m helping them be successful. I think that’s what really keeps you going from a sales perspective, it’s the people around you and being able to help them get better and certainly at the end of the day, the money doesn’t hurt as well.

Fred Diamond: I have one more question before we ask you for your final thoughts, here. Again, I’ve mentioned this a number of times on the podcast, you’ve been here for 18 years, it’s quite remarkable. You just talked about various people who have also been here who’ve progressed, who’ve gone to director level, to VP level as well. What does it take to be a good sales professional selling to communications and marketing professionals?

Is there something unique that that person has? Just give us a little bit of an insight to what is it about someone that would make them very good, because we talk to a lot of people who sell to IT professionals or to financial professionals or business people in general. Give us a little peek into what would make you good, that’ll help you do a little recruiting here, if you will. What will help someone who’s good at selling technology to communications professionals?

Chris Cutino: I think that you put that into two different buckets. Everything that makes any typical sales person good we need that characteristic. It’s that tenacity, it’s the ability to wait through a thousand no’s to get to the yes. It’s the recognition of what a good opportunity is and the ability to step away from a bad opportunity and not keep chasing it. I think it’s also a knowledge of how the product works and that’s going to be the case anywhere that you go. You have to be able to make that service a translator between what their needs are and what we provide, and you have to be able to provide that in what we’ve always called the Aunt Betty Pitch. I can overwhelm you with technical specifications and you can walk away and go, “Ugh.” But if I can sit down with you and tell you the same way that I would tell my aunt Betty what we do for companies, not what we do, you have a much better opportunity to simplify the conversation and get to the meet of what’s going to ultimately provide yes.

What’s unique about our sales people, I think the ones that are most successful here, and it’s probably not necessarily unique across other industries but it’s those that find that they come in with that intellectual curiosity. Outside of the standard training process, do I ask a question every time I don’t know the answer or do I go and find it first and learn from that? Because the more that becomes a part of your filing cabinet, your mental knowledge base, you can have much more consultative conversations and there’s a real talent in being able to have that conversation and provide value just through your own knowledge to the prospect. They have to feel like they have a smart partner in you.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast?

Chris Cutino: Sure. I use this all the time and people have worked for me for a while kind of make fun of me because it’s become kind of my catch phrase, but it just means a lot to me and I think that it’s made an impact on others as well. Make everything that you do worth your time. It’s an over-simplification of investing in yourself. It’s very easy to get distracted at work, it’s very easy to get yourself in a position where you feel like you’ve got a good pipeline and it’s easy to go on autopilot.

Some of the things when we talk about investing in ourselves, we often talk about finding ways to invest our money or to make it grow to get a solid return. If you think about that investment from yourself, it comes from education, it comes from knowledge and even from some of the rewards that we give ourselves based on our success. But when we invest in ourselves when it comes to coming in and getting a job done, it really is more along the lines of that work ethic that’s associated with everything that you do on a daily basis.

Is it making me better? Am I putting in enough effort? Am I learning from what I’m doing wrong? So when you’re committed to a job and you have to maximize the time that you’re there as an investment in yourself. That’s my final thought, make everything that you do worth your time and you won’t let yourself down.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 056: With Over 18 Years at the Same Company, Cision Sales Leader Chris Cutino Offers a Wealth of Ideas on How to Continually Stay Ahead first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.