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EPISODE 151: Cvent’s Alex Rolfe Said Taking this One Big Risk Propelled His Sales Leadership Career To New Heights

ALEX’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Time how much you speak on a demo. Are you speaking for 70% of the time and the prospect is speaking for 30%? What can you do to speak less and let your prospect or your client speak more? What can you do to listen more?”

Alex Rolfe is a senior director for event solution sales at Cvent and been with Cvent for 13 years holding various sales and sales leadership positions.

He is the third person that we’ve interviewed from Cvent. We’ve interviewed Darrell Gehrt, the VP of Sales for Cvent Mobile and Brian Ludwig, Senior VP of sales for the company.

Find Alex on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: I’m excited to hear your story today. Cvent is a great success in a lot of ways. Tell us what you sell today, Alex and tell us what excites you about that.

Alex Rolfe: Cvent is an event technology company, so we sell a platform of solutions that allow event organizers to provide a fantastic experience for their attendees as well as drive operational efficiencies and at the same time help to prove the ROI of their events. We’re selling a whole platform of solutions, everything from registration to mobile apps to onsite solutions for checking and badging. I think most folks probably don’t realize everything that goes into an event, certainly an event planner does and it’s a very challenging job, it’s incredibly exciting to be able to speak with them and uncover some of the challenges that they’re facing and how our technology can really help them and help elevate their careers within their organization as well.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales as a career?

Alex Rolfe: Interesting story, they’re probably not the same path that many of the other folks you’ve spoken with have taken. My passion started with events so we talked about sports a second ago, I was always fascinated with how events brought people together. I remember going to events at Madison Square Garden and watching UConn versus Syracuse, I think was the first game that I went to. I don’t remember who won the game but I do remember the scene and the setting, and just how passionate everybody was that was there. I think from there it led me to follow down that path of events can really bring people together and drive these connections so much so that running Madison Square Garden was my dream job if you asked me what I wanted to do. I ended up going to the University of Massachusetts, graduated from their business school and then pursued a career in event management.

I was an event manager for several years out of school, and then I started to get more involved in the production side of events seeing how technology impacted it. At that point I came across a small company at the time named Cvent, and was really enthralled with what they were doing and their vision for how technology can impact. This was obviously not consumer events but B to B events and joined on board, this was May of 2006, the company was about maybe 75 people at the time and I’ve been there ever since.

Fred Diamond: Alex, talk about your passion for events, I like the way you said that, and talked how that has helped you become a successful sales leader.

Alex Rolfe: I think it means a lot, I think you have to have passion about what you’re selling no matter what it is. When I made that decision that I was looking to change my career, after being in that event manager role running Madison Square Garden quickly became not my dream job after getting that insight too. Again, I did have that passion for events. I think once I knew that and as I started to look what was out there in the market, I actually heard of Cvent from some of the clients that had actually come to our building to rent meeting space. I think it was mutually a great fit at the time, but it was my first entry in sales.

As I came down and interviewed with Cvent, I knew I wanted an opportunity with them and moving into sales made a lot of sense. Cvent, I think, was pretty early with their SDR program and this was 2006. They had a pretty decent SDR program in place at that time so it was also a place that I knew I could step in and learn how to sell. That was something that was very attractive to me as well, looking to make that change in career path.

Fred Diamond: What were some things you learned? What were some of the lessons you learned from some of those first few sales jobs?

Alex Rolfe: My first sales job was at Cvent as an SDR and I think what I learned the most was that we were calling folks and talking to people and at that point we were really trying to get them to use online registration. It wasn’t this broad platform that we had today, it was a single product that has since evolved from there, and I learned that people have a tremendous amount of pain. We think about the opportunities that our solutions have to help them not only as an organization but also as individuals, and I think it was the individual part that I learned the most in that SDR role is how can our solutions help that individual and impact not only their day to day but also help them grow in their career because if they brought something like Cvent in and were successful with it, that would reflect really well on them.

Fred Diamond: We talked about events, the next question we usually ask is “tell us what you’re an expert in, tell us about your area of brilliance.” I shouldn’t answer the question for you, but it probably has something to do with events.

Alex Rolfe: It does, I think I’m incredibly strong in relation to events is really events and event marketing and the impact that events can have on a business. I think a lot of folks look at events as a call center often of yes, it costs money to rent our events but why are we running them? What’s the outcome that we’re trying to achieve? What’s the ROI that we’re looking to gather, why are we spending all this time, effort, energy and money to produce an event whether it be a user conference, whether it be a sales kick-off meeting, whether it be a meeting for our customers or our prospects?

A lot of effort goes into that, so helping organizations really understand and identify, and sometimes they forget what’s that core purpose of our event, all the pieces of technology that we need to hook to align with it as well as what’s the business outcomes that we’re trying to achieve and then how do we measure it. I think that’s probably where I would call myself the strongest from an event sales standpoint.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question for you. Again, before you came to Cvent you were managing events, you’ve always been fascinated by events like you talked about and of course you said your area of brilliance is events and events marketing, but I presume a lot of people who came to a company like Cvent didn’t have that background. Either they came right out of college or they had another job before they got here, before they took an SDR or one of those inside sales roles. Not just Cvent, but what would you recommend obviously knowing that and understanding the operations of your customer gave you an advantage to be successful in selling to the audience that you already knew? What would be some things you would recommend to the people listening to the podcast to get that knowledge if they didn’t come to the job with that knowledge?

Alex Rolfe: I think it’s just having a deep industry understanding, there’s a lot of ways that you can get that. While I had that passion for events, I didn’t understand the B to B events industry when I joined it, that was completely different. How does a corporate event marketer work? How does an association event manager, what makes them tick? What are the challenges that they face? Somebody who’s running events at a nonprofit is very different than somebody who’s running events at a state government agency. Being able to understand that buyer persona, being able to understand the industry, who the key players are, competitors, I’ve really tried to immerse myself in that and I do that to this day because it’s constantly changing and evolving.

I think regardless of what industry it is, regardless of whether you think you know it when you move into it or whether you move into a new career and a new vertical, I think just taking the time to deeply understand it is probably the most critical aspect of it so that you can have educated conversations with your clients and prospects. Without that, they may have the upper hand on you because they’ll know more about the industry than you do. I think being able to position yourself as an industry expert even more so sometimes than your product is important.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career.

Alex Rolfe: Probably the most impactful mentor of my sales career was on your podcast, Brian Ludwig. I’ve worked for Brian my entire career at Cvent, so certainly he’s somebody that I’ve learned from, that I’ve looked up to. Our career paths have always been intertwined here in a very positive way. When I started at Cvent, Brian was a sales executive and I was his SDR, and then as Brian continued to move up, he became VP of sales and then an SVP of sales, when he needed help I was somebody that he turned to.

We haven’t had a sales manager on our team prior to Brian moving into a VP role, he was doing that as a director/sales executive and then we had a VP of sales that Brian reported into but as we grew, the need for Brian to run this part of the organization opened up that opportunity for him. It also opened up the opportunity for me to come underneath him as a sales manager and he’s certainly taken up more responsibility over the years as have I. Our careers have always been aligned and I’ve always looked to him for guidance, leadership, mentorship, the ability to bat ideas off him, good and bad. I think we’ve done a lot of good things, we’ve certainly made some mistakes along the way but I think having a mentor that I’m able to work so closely with, that I understand well and he understands me has been a very strong part of our mutual success here at Cvent.

Fred Diamond: Of course as a sales leader there’s a lot of challenges that you face as well. What are the two biggest challenges that you face today as a sales leader?

Alex Rolfe: I think one of the biggest challenges that we face in my team specifically is our platform is quite complex, so how do we take what can be a complex platform and sell it and simplify it to our buyers? Because they have a lot of challenges and we have a lot of solutions for them, but how do we take a broad ranging platform set, boil it down and show our prospects and buyers that they can easily adopt, implement and be successful with our solutions. Beyond that, I’ve thought about a couple other challenges that we face. It’s about getting the right leads to our team at the right time, so how can we leverage a lot of new technologies that are out there? I wouldn’t call them new anymore, but ABM, AI, lead scoring, what can we do to be smarter about the leads that our team is getting versus just sending them a list and saying, “Start calling”?

Fred Diamond: Cvent’s had a great run. You must have had some great successes along the way for the company to have gotten to this point, why don’t you take us back to your #1 sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of?

Alex Rolfe: Most proud was my first year as a sales manager that my team had budget. I think that was probably the most proud moment because it was the first time that I got the opportunity to feel what it was like to be a leader and to hit that number as a leader versus an individual contributor and see what it took to motivate, inspire and work with our team in order to get there. I think hitting budget every year is a challenge as it should be, but that first time I think was pretty special.

As an individual contributor I’d have to go back to 2008 in the recession, that was probably a challenging time for a lot of folks that were selling then and we were able to close some pretty significant deals with some pretty significant enterprise organizations during that time. I was most proud of that because we were selling a solution that wasn’t fully ready at the time, but they were aligning their vision and their goals to where our product was going. I think at that time during the recession being able to work with them, we had to be able to show that our visions were aligned together and that if they were placing their bet on us that it would pay out for them in the long run, which it has.

There were two particular customers I’m thinking of when I say that and we’re almost 10 years past that, both of them are still customers today doing extremely well and their event programs have continued to flourish.

Fred Diamond: Again, we’re talking to Alex Rolfe today. Alex is the senior director for event solution sales at Cvent, he’s been with the company for 13 years. Talking about some of the successes he’s had along the way. Alex, as we mentioned in the beginning, you were an event guy, you loved events. One of your passions was to one day run the Madison Square Garden and then you moved into sales. You’ve had a great mentor, you’ve had a great run, Cvent’s a growing company. It’s a lot of energy, we’re doing today’s Sales Game Changers podcast from the sales floor at Cvent. A lot of energy, a lot of people on stand-up desks, everybody I’ve noticed has two monitors and there’s a lot of buzz, there’s a lot of interesting high energy people here today. You made that shift from events into sales, did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “You know what, Alex? It’s too hard, it really isn’t for me”?

Alex Rolfe: Truthfully, no. I’ve loved it from day 1, I think the competitiveness of it has always brought me to it. Frankly, I think in my previous career I didn’t like the fact that while it was a lot of hours, it was a slower pace and there wasn’t as much of a challenge. It was very similar day to day, so I was looking for a change of pace and something that did operate at a different speed and that would challenge me intellectually more than what I was doing in the event manager role.

Just from day 1 moving into sales I was absolutely motivated by it and I think a lot of it came back to not feeling that we were going in with a product that wasn’t ready for our buyers or that wasn’t ready for the market. It was ready, there was a clear challenge in the market and we were building and developing solutions and had them in place that helped them solve those challenges. It was just a matter of we’ve got a great story to tell, what can I do to get in front of the right people to tell our story? Once we do, I felt very confident that there’d be at least an opportunity for us to do business together, but of course getting in front of somebody to tell that story is not always easy as well and that’s where I think a lot of that energy and action and passion really comes into play.

Fred Diamond: It’s also great to be working with a company that’s doing well, a company that’s grown over the last two decades and has really become the leader in its space and is a place where people want to go, with nice, bright, attractive people who want to come work here.

Alex Rolfe: It is, and that’s been a hallmark of Cvent for quite a while. There’s certainly other companies out there like that too. As I think about my career and I think about Cvent, you of course always have the opportunity to grow your career internally or to look at other opportunities externally in order to do that. I think for my career path I’ve been fortunate where every several years where I felt I was hitting a ceiling, that ceiling was raised because of the growth that we were having here and the opportunity for new challenges.

Also, if you are in a growing company, that company is changing quite often. When I started we were a private company, we went through some several significant funding rounds, we went public, we were public for several years, we became private again. Even being at a company for 13 years hasn’t been the same, it changes in ownership, changes in strategy, product development. I would say if anybody has that opportunity to grow within an organization, it gives you that opportunity to experience new challenges along the way. The challenges I face today are very different than the challenges I faced even a couple of years ago as we continue to grow.

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

Alex Rolfe: One would be to take risks, and especially take risks early in your career. I remember when I had the opportunity to move from an SDR role to a sales executive role, it was me and one other person at the time and we were with our CEO and we were looking at territory, who’s going to get what territory. I had the option of getting a bunch of states in the US, North Carolina and Illinois, Massachusetts or whatever they were at the time or I could have taken a few less states in the US and also try to help grow our business in the UK and Europe which we didn’t have presence in at all, but we knew we wanted to start trying to sell there. I immediately raised my hand and said, “I want to do that” and it was probably the best thing that I ever did.

It was challenging, if you think about it from a personal standpoint I probably made 20% of my earnings selling into the UK and Europe but I probably spent 50% to 60% of my time on it, but it helped me as a business individual to grow my acumen, understand a new market, understand how to sell to a different market while at the same time being able to sell in the US. I also had a chance to travel there a couple times a year to meet customers and do presentations, and I think that opportunity helped me to the point where I am today, but I could have easily just said no.

Fred Diamond: “Give me the gravy accounts.”

Alex Rolfe: “Give me the gravy one where I know it’s there, it’s proven, it’s going to work” but I didn’t and there were challenging times but it was absolutely the right decision. Anybody who has an opportunity to take a risk early in your career, put yourself out of your comfort zone, it will pay off in the long run even if it doesn’t potentially pay as much in the short run.

Fred Diamond: I’ve had a couple jobs in my career where I’ve done international travel and great experience. I reflect back on a lot of those trips and what I’ve learned, being able to just meet different people really gives you a richer understanding as you grow your career. I urge the people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast, take those risks, take an international job every once in a while, it’s going to definitely change your life.

Alex Rolfe: It might not even be international, it could be a different vertical that your company is not in today or just a different market that they’re trying to get into. Take that risk and you can become the leader and the expert in that, in whatever it is, international, vertical, etc.

Fred Diamond: Lead your company into some new markets, that’s a great idea. What are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Alex Rolfe: I read a lot, I want to make sure that I’m up to date, what some of the trends are out there, I read a lot of biographies and nonfiction, I like to learn from other leaders both internally and externally so as Cvent’s grown we’ve brought more external leaders in as well. Sometimes it’s as simple as saying, “Let’s grab a cup of coffee, let’s go downstairs, I’d love to pick your brain about how you approach sales at whatever company you came from before.”

As somebody who’s been at Cvent and really grown my career here, I want that outside perspective. I want to be able to take in what some of those best practices are that somebody else might be bringing to the table as well as internal folks that we have here. Then I mentioned it earlier but I subscribe to a lot of blogs, both sales blogs like yours and others, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I’m following a number of websites both for sales knowledge but also to make sure that I’m up to date on our industry trends, what our buyers are thinking about and then I also pay close attention to our competition, what are they doing. Those are just some of the things I’m doing to make sure that I’m staying fresh.

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

Alex Rolfe: One of the things that we’re thinking a lot about is verticalization. We sell into a variety of different verticals, you have the opportunity as you grow to potentially segment out those verticals and get a little bit more focused on it. For example right now we’re planning out how to focus more specifically on our higher education vertical and what are some of the specific needs that higher education needs that might be different from others and what should our go to market plan be as we want to continue to grow in the higher education space. That’s an area that we’re thinking about as well as just being able to get more scientific, I would say with our approach to lead scoring and delivering the right leads to our sales team.

Fred Diamond: Alex, again you moved from event management, event marketing, you ran some event venues and of course you moved into sales. Sales is hard, there’s a lot of challenges, of course you told me you made a move to covering the international space and all the things that come with finding new markets and building those and getting a territory that’s tough but eventually you succeed. People don’t return your calls, they don’t return your emails, why have you continued? Again, you made that shift 13 years ago when you came to Cvent. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Alex Rolfe: Every day is different, being able to wake up with a new challenge every single day, being able to know that there’s a whole bunch of folks out there that we haven’t even spoken with yet that need our solutions and thinking about how we can get in front of them, how we can educate them on what we do. Then once we have the opportunity, it’s really about learning about them. That’s my favorite part of it, is how can we get in there, how can we talk to organizations, learn about the challenges that they’re facing and be able to provide a solution that’s going to bring tremendous value to the organization.

As I look ahead, I think one of the exciting things about sales is the not knowing and if you’re at an organization that’s evolving and changing and developing new products, it’s not static. It’s also just not having that crystal ball of where you’re going to be three to five years from now, that’s one of my favorite things about sales, especially about sales at Cvent.

Fred Diamond: You’ve given us a lot of great things to think about, we have Sales Game Changers around the globe that listen to the podcast, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire them?

Alex Rolfe: I’ll go back to what I said earlier, take risks, that’s #1. Think the more that you can take risks, and that doesn’t mean just international or anything like that, it’s challenging yourself thinking about what your weaknesses are and focusing on them.

I’ll bring it back to a sports example, I was a basketball player growing up, I was too scrawny to ever make it beyond high school but man, could I shoot a basketball. I still can today, I could pour in points like nothing else but I couldn’t play defense very well so I remember going into my junior year of high school saying, “I can score, I know that. My shot’s not going anywhere, I’m going to spend a little more time focusing on my defense and really trying to work on my footwork and where I need to be and make that a point of emphasis.” I became one of the best defenders on our team where I was matching up with the other team’s leading score on the other team and trying to shut that person down.

I think about that from a sales standpoint as well of what are areas that you need to improve on? We have our strengths and I think those are great, but more importantly what are our weaknesses and what can we do to focus on those to really improve our skills?

Fred Diamond: Alex, not everyone listening to the podcast is going to have the opportunity to break into international markets for the company. As we close down here, just give us one risk. Give us one thing that you’ve seen that you challenge your people with, one simple out of your comfort zone type of thing that you would recommend to the Sales Game Changers listening today.

Alex Rolfe: How much time they speak on a demo, really make them time it. How long are you speaking? Are you speaking for 70% of the time and the prospect is speaking for 30%? What can you do to speak less and let your prospect or your client speak more? Part of that is simply being quiet sometimes, asking a question and letting somebody respond. I think the easiest thing to do is we want to talk so much about what we do because we have so much to say, but getting someone to open up and talking, letting them speak on the call is something that I really like to challenge my team with, so very easy thing to do. What can you do to listen more?

Fred Diamond: Listen more and talk less.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 151: Cvent’s Alex Rolfe Said Taking this One Big Risk Propelled His Sales Leadership Career To New Heights first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 06:59
Name an impactful sales mentor: 10:05
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 13:06
Most important tip: 19:51
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 23:31
Inspiring thought: 25:12

EPISODE 141: Cvent Sales Leader Brian Ludwig Says This One Thing Will Help You Connect with and Have Much More Fruitful Conversations with Your Customers

BRIAN’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “The best of sales reps are always going to know their product and solution cold. They’re going to know and appreciate the types of pains and issues that businesses have and because they have that passion, they’re going to be able to connect that and have much more fruitful conversations.”

Brian Ludwig is the Senior VP of Sales at Cvent.

He’s been with Cvent for 19 years and took over sales leadership in 2007.

Like Podcast host Fred Diamond, Brian is a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Emory University.

Find Brian on LinkedIn!

Brian Ludwig: Thanks, Fred. What do you need to know about me? I am a lifetime sales guy, my entire career I’ve been a sales guy or sales leader. I fundamentally love it, I actually can’t imagine what I would do otherwise. Part of what I like most is that my role stretches across sales and other areas so I get to be very involved in product development, in sales enablement, in marketing initiatives, in finance and collections. Literally in my world sales touches the full life cycle of business which really gets me going.

Fred Diamond: I mentioned in the intro you’ve been here for 19 years. How long has Cvent been around?

Brian Ludwig: About 19 and a half, so I missed about the first half year.

Fred Diamond: You’ve seen this tremendous rise. For the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast around the globe, Cvent is one of the star companies in the DC region, the company’s done great, had a lot of success, had a lot of interesting movements along the way. We’re doing today’s Sales Game Changers podcast on the floor at Cvent, a lot of energy as you walk through the floor and get here for the interview. Why don’t you tell people what you sell today? Tell us a little bit about what excites you about that.

Brian Ludwig: Cvent is a full-end-to-end event management software tool set. We enable those that organize or market events to find a venue, to manage their budget, to invite the right type of audience and bring them into a registration experience and capture key details, session choices and travel requirements in your name. Then we have on site tools, so someone gets to the event, we can check them in, track their attendance and their interest, they can interact with exhibitors and sponsors, we can give them a mobile app so they can collaborate with other key folks at the event.

Full cradle to grave event management that empowers organizers, but maybe more importantly fosters engagement and a great experience for the attendees because live events and the power of human connection helps drive business. That’s what we’re seeing people are investing in, live face to face meetings because of the ROI that meetings deliver. That’s frankly what excites me the most about the business, that our technology helps empower organizations for profit and not for profit drive results and create more engaging experiences for their attendees which fosters community, pipeline, fundraising, all of the things that a business is trying to accomplish.

Fred Diamond: Give us a spectrum of what type of events would use Cvent software, everything from huge conferences to weddings? Do you guys do personal stuff as well?

Brian Ludwig: We don’t get too involved in consumer style events or weddings, but that’s not to say that we haven’t had a bride or two use our Cvent supplier network to find a venue to host their event. Having said that, I think that the gamut is more of business style events, but it could be anything from 20 person internal meetings straight up to the hundred thousand person Dreamforce that Salesforce puts on, which I’m sure you’re aware of. We power the whole on site technology experience of Dreamforce.

Fred Diamond: Salesforce takes over the entire city and it’s tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, that’s a monster event. They use your software for the entire process?

Brian Ludwig: No, they don’t. That’s a work in progress, they use us for part of the process. Part of that is because they’re Salesforce and they build some of that tech themselves, so they have their own mobile app, as an example and it’s tied into Chatter and other tools on the Salesforce side, but RFID, tracking, who’s going where, what sessions are most attended, where the interest levels lie, badging and credentialing people when they get there with kiosks, etcetera that’s all through Cvent.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned that you consider yourself to be a lifelong sales guy. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Brian Ludwig: I think my first sales job is one of those semi embarrassing sounding jobs, but for me it was foundational. I sold vacuum cleaners door to door, I worked for a company named Kirby, their owned by Berkshire Hathaway which is Warren Buffet’s. I would go and pitch you, Fred on a $1,300 dollar vacuum cleaner or what we would call a home maintenance system. I would dazzle you, I’d pull a hundred dirt pads during the hour, hour and a half demo and then I’d get you to give me friends and family of people that might also have an interest and if you did that, I’d give you a free car vacuum cleaner.

I then had a telemarketing team that would call your 16 friends and colleagues and set the appointments for me, so then I would go out on the road and go door to door. This was a summer job, but I was really good at it and I loved it and had a lot of success, and I think that got my eyes open to a career in sales, to be frank.

Fred Diamond: We’ve had a couple Sales Game Changers on the podcast who’ve started out their career door to door selling encyclopedias, I think we had someone who sold bibles door to door. What are some of the things that you learned? Of course, now you’re the senior VP of sales at Cvent, I know you have hundreds of sales professionals reporting up through you. What are some of the things you learned selling vacuums door to door, or I should say, home maintenance systems door to door?

Brian Ludwig: [Laughs] thank you for correcting that. They had some – I don’t want to use the word “shady”, but let’s just say they had some sales tactics and strategies that you could argue weren’t as professional as you envision a sales professional being. To find point on that, I was very good at selling the woman of the household during the business day and maybe the man of the household wasn’t there, and they would train us to use very sexist lines to entice her to make the decision without the husband’s input.

Invariably, I would end up getting a call one, two, three days later that they can’t keep the unit, I need to come back and pick it up. In the end, that shortcut or that strategy worked sometimes but it didn’t work every time, but more so, I didn’t feel good about it. I felt that taking those kinds of shortcuts and preying on stereotypes wasn’t the right way to go about business. I think early on that helped me take a more noble path in the way that I approach sales, in the way that I manage my team.

Fred Diamond: Again, Cvent is an event management software technology company. Tell us a little bit about you, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Brian Ludwig: I think if you would ask folks on my team about what are the things that make me tick and what do I care about the most, sales obviously is art and science but a big part of it, it’s a numbers game. If a rep can figure out a way to be more efficient in the same 8 to 10 hour day, we’re going to get more out of them. Saying the right thing and being compelling and solving a pain with a key value proposition, we train to all of that, all of that is critical but if someone was able to make 80 calls versus 40 calls, they’ll probably be doubly successful.

We really pride ourselves on the blocking and tackling and removing impediments so our sales reps can move quickly. As you walk around the sales floor you’ll notice little things like everyone’s got two monitors, sales force is on one side and then outlook and doing research on that prospect via the web, that’s on the other screen. Wireless headphones so everyone can sync in and coach each other, standing desks so everyone can go up and down and be most comfortable.

We put teams together so every single direct seller has an SDR that’s partnered with him or her to help them be successful. We put in a lot of infrastructure so they can get more done, so I pride myself on being a guy that puts efficiency at the forefront.

Fred Diamond: Along the way, you’ve probably had some mentors that have helped you out. Again, you’ve been with Cvent for 19 years so tell us about a mentor who’s impacted your career and tell us how they impacted it.

Brian Ludwig: It’s a little bit ass-kissy, but I think I’ll say my current boss. He’s the president of worldwide sales and marketing, his name is Chuck Ghoorah. He’s the co-founder, he was here since the start and he’s a debate stud. He was debate guy at Duke and he’s a tremendous speaker, and I think I’ve always been a good speaker but frankly when I compare myself to him, he’s a notch ahead. What I’ve taken from him is having a beginning, a middle and a close, having key transitions and taking people on a roller coaster ride, and that has really helped me in pitches directly to prospects and clients, but in public speaking in general to the sales team, to the company at large, lots of speaking opportunities here at Cvent. I think I’m a better manager and leader because of what I’ve taken from him.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question for you. As we’re walking through the floor to get to today’s interview, I’ve noticed you have tons of young people here. You mentioned Chuck went to Duke, I know you and I both went to Emory, I’ve seen a lot of pennants around the office, different universities where people have gone to that’s obviously a big part of the collegial culture, but you have a lot of younger people here. You mentioned SDR so you have to hire a lot of younger people to take some of those roles. What are some of the things that you’ve noticed to be successful in managing a younger workforce like Cvent has?

Brian Ludwig: That’s a great question, it is a challenge. Part of the problem when you hire young folks straight out of school is they don’t know that the grass is maybe not greener. We run the risk, we are very heavy trainers so we bring people in for a full month, they go through this Cvent Ignite program which is very thorough. We put them through a very rigorous model here, they hit the ground running, we do a really great job of bringing them up and then maybe someone flashes $5,000 dollars more in front of them, so they’re quick to think that that opportunity might be better when in fact they could grow their career if they stayed the path here.

Keeping them inspired and motivated despite it being their first job is probably one of the biggest challenges but what we love about it, Fred is that they really are moldable, if you will. We have more success in bringing people in to a direct selling or account management position which is, say, the next step for an SDR in many cases. The folks that have grown up within Cvent that make it to those next stages often outperform lateral hires that we bring into direct selling or account management positions and we think it’s because we’ve gotten them with great habits and great training and great work ethic, and a great way of understanding business early on in the culture that we inculcate.

Fred Diamond: We mentioned that a second ago, some of the challenges, this being a challenge. What are the two biggest sales challenges you face as a sales leader?

Brian Ludwig: I think we just hit on it, frankly. Keeping the team – and not just SDR’s, keeping the entire team motivated. Maybe it’s a little bit more of a problem with the veterans, to be honest. I have a lot of sales guys that have been with me for 7, 10, 12 years, they’ve been on this team, some 15 years. The challenge is how do I keep them inspired and excited? We’re building new products, we’re acquiring tools, there are a basket of things that they can sell, continue to evolve but their sales game, their story, the value proposition, the way they’re connecting with the buyers for some, they’re a little slower to change. I’m having a struggle with getting some of my veterans to evolve as our business and our platform and the buyer are all evolving.

That’s one challenge, I think another challenge is that I’m human and like anyone, there’s frustration in the business. I think sometimes when I get frustrated with product road map or marketing initiatives or other things that are stressing me out that I need to solve, maybe I’m not keeping that as internal. I want to keep the troops motivated and inspired but at the same time I’m a very passionate leader and I wear everything on my sleeve, and maybe sometimes keeping those two things separated I’m not great at. I find it challenging to separate those two hats that I need to wear at times.

Fred Diamond: Again, Cvent’s had a great ride, a lot of success all around the world with managing events. Of course, you have people all over the world now on your sales organization. Take us to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. 

Brian Ludwig: Cvent was a one trick pony, we had an event registration solution so you need to market an event and send emails and have people walk through to register, that was our game from ’99 to 2006. We then built a survey solution, we built a supplier network so people could find venues for an event, we built some budgeting and strategic meetings management stuff, I won’t bore you with the details, all that was built internally. In 2012 was the first time that we acquired technology from the outside and we didn’t know how it was going to go.

I led that charge, I was the leader in sales and really served as more of a GM position for a CrowdCompass which is a mobile app for conference attendees so they can see the content and they can collaborate with each other. At the time, that was a $2 million dollar business. We have now built that to a $60 million business in 6 years.

You know (Sales Game Changer) Darrell Gehrt, I think he’s on your board, he is the leader of that sales division for me now. What I’m most proud of is that A, it grew at that rate but B, I put a controversial model in place where I created a slight channel conflict within our business and I have one team that can sell our entire platform, including something like CrowdCompass and I have another team that focused solely on mobile technology because there are certain competitors in that space.

People challenge that and they thought, “You’re going to set up a model that potentially fails.” It is in my mind no doubt about it, we would not be where we are today in terms of gross sales of that product line if it wasn’t for the model. We’d literally be probably half the size, if that. I’m very proud that I pushed that through, that it stuck and that my gut was right, and that the business grew the way that it did.

Fred Diamond: Brian, you mentioned a couple times along the way that you’re a lifetime sales guy. Of course, you were selling home maintenance systems back in the day door to door in the summer, carrying vacuums up and down long pathways. Good for you for knocking on those doors.

Brian Ludwig: And they weren’t on wheels.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s really not for me”?

Brian Ludwig: I sure did. My first real job post Emory was I worked for Lutron Electronics, they’re a lighting dimmer manufacturer and I liked it. I worked there for 2, 2 and a half years but then I went to get my MBA. When I went to get my MBA, I was thinking when I came out of the MBA program I wasn’t going to stay in sales. In fact, I interviewed for a whole bunch of different types of jobs in marketing and project management, all sorts of opportunities that I was weighing and I honestly didn’t want to be a sales guy.

Someone in my business school program was already set to start working at Cvent, she had done an internship the second year of the business school program and she said, “You’ve got to go talk to these guys, they’re building something special. The management team is top notch and I love the space. I’m going to go work there full time, why don’t you go scope them out?”

I came in, met with Reggie Aggarwal who was our CEO then, he’s our CEO now and other key members of the management team and I was blown away. They didn’t have a sales leader, they didn’t have a commission structure, they didn’t have web conferencing software, we didn’t have a CRM like Salesforce, it was nothing. No infrastructure in place at all, but honestly nothing else was blowing me away and I was so inspired by the leaders that I met that I was willing to take a chance and go back into a sales role. I’m glad I did, because at the end of the day I’ve loved my career over the last 19 years but at that point in time I was looking elsewhere, to be honest with you.

Fred Diamond: You took a risk, good for you, it’s paid off. Brian, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the junior selling professionals listening around the globe to help them improve their sales career?

Brian Ludwig: That’s a great question, Fred. When I do a pull up with all the junior reps which I do three months after they start, I ask them what they believe is the most important thing to be successful in sales. You get a myriad of responses, “It’s confidence and perseverance and efficiency”, “knowing your solution” all this things are true but I then sum it up this way. I say, “At the end of the day, more important than all of that if you’ve got to have a personality, you’ve got to relate to your buyer, you’ve got to be someone that they want to talk to. Be gregarious, have fun with it, connect on a personal level, you’ll get people to open up, share their pain at which point you can then share a solution.”

Too many people focus on the other aspects, but get in the door with personality. The best salespeople here at Cvent are the ones with the most engaging personality and I challenge them. I say, “If you notice colleagues of yours that seem to be better in social settings, in conversations, in storytelling, pay attention to that. Try to pick up things from them, that’s going to be the core tenant of having success in sales.” All the other things matter, don’t get me wrong, but that’s the foundation that everyone needs.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. If you’re going to require them to do 80 phone calls a day they’ve got to have something to say and they have to be creative in the conversations that they do. What are some of the things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Brian Ludwig: I’m reading blogs and articles on either my industry which is event and event technology or on innovation in general, or on sale strategy, things of that nature. I attend a bunch of conferences especially around my industry and sales enablement, I go to Dreamforce each year, I go to Sirius Decisions, we’re owned by Vista Private Equity, they do a sales and marketing best practice summit which I’ve attended. I think just staying in touch with other leaders, reading their thoughts, how they’re inspiring and motivating a team, we can all learn and I’m always open-minded to new ideas.

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

Brian Ludwig: I think as we’ve gotten bit – and we’re a large organization now – I’ve gotten a little detached from the junior level reps and they are the future. As I mentioned earlier, they are the ones that have the best success when we get them into quota carrying roles. I’ve got to reengage with them, so I’ve instituted these new meetings that I’m holding with them, I’m attending their events and contests, I’m doing one on one meetings with them, skip levels, those sorts of things. I got away from that because there was so many direct sellers to pay attention to which is important too, it’s tough, it’s all important but I feel I have felt detached from our most junior levels.

My 2019 resolution, and I started it in the latter half of Q4, is to reengage with the troops so that I’m truly getting the best out of them now and then helping them get to that next level.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned something that was interesting where you bring in some people at the young stage and then they look at the grass on the other side, if you will and move off to something for a couple thousand bucks and realize the grass wasn’t really as greener. Sales is also hard, you’re selling to an audience where there’s a lot of competition, you’re selling to an audience that has a lot of challenges as well and a lot of options available to them. People don’t always return your phone calls, they don’t always return your emails. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Brian Ludwig: I think it’s a balance of so many things and that’s what gets me excited. You’re right, it’s a tough business and it’s not for everyone, I get that speech all the time. I go, “Not everyone should be in sales and not everyone is going to be good in sales. Just because you chose this as your first job out of college, if this isn’t for you, do not stay in this role.” What keeps me excited is again, it touches so many facets of business. It’s an art and a science as we’ve discussed and it’s figuring out all of those pieces to understand your solution, to understand an organization’s business and what makes them tick, to understand pricing, to understand how to connect with a buyer, how to mirror them, how to work within the confines of an organization, how to push the right buttons internally and externally.

There’s so much to balance to be good at that art and science side of sales and it’s always evolving and changing. Things that worked in 2008 don’t work in 2019 and that’s what keeps it fun for me, that we’re always changing, we’re always evolving. For me, on a personal level we’re buying companies, we’re selling companies, we’re going public, we’re going private, we’re opening international offices. I’ve stayed in sales all this time because no two days are the same for me.

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

Brian Ludwig: I think one of the key things that’s lost especially in junior reps is they’re told about a product that they need to sell and they get it, they learn up on it a little bit and then they go out into the field and talk about it. What’s missing is the belief, the true passion around the product or solution that they’re selling, it’s infectious. If the sales rep believes and cares and truly thinks that we can transform their business and bring results, that will be so apparent in the conversations and you’ll take that buyer along on that journey. I don’t want to say reps here are going through demotions because they’re not, but any rep that tells the story without that passion is going to miss the boat and they’re not going to take that buyer on the journey. That takes deeply knowing the product and solution, not relying on other people to know it for you. The best of sales reps are always going to know their product and solution cold, they’re going to know and appreciate the types of pains and issues that businesses have and because they have that passion, they’re going to be able to connect that and have much more fruitful conversations.

Fred Diamond: One last question. I think you’re absolutely right, I think the high performing sales reps that are moving up in their career truly understand the challenges their customers face. What are some things that you’ve done or that you recommend that people do to really get deep into the business of their customer so that they can share that passion and bring new ideas?

Brian Ludwig: It’s a great question. At the end of the day, it’s relying on colleagues that have had success in the same industries. If we sold successfully to a law firm, those stories need to be shared so the same compelling arguments can be made to the next law form or tech company or a manufacturing company or financial services, whatever it is. It’s learning from each other, so I’m very big on sharing success stories. We have a Chatter group in Salesforce where everyone is required to share success stories and those are segmented by industry.

We have meetings where we share those, it’s opening your eyes and having conversations with colleagues that have been there and done that and not keeping your strategies secret and to yourself. We all learn from each other, and for me that’s one of the most important things we can be doing, but on top of that there’s so many great resources under people’s noses. We have so much great data in Salesforce, as an example, just looking at other accounts that we’ve already closed. Who are they? How are they using it? Using that in your conversations, leveraging LinkedIn, leveraging the company’s website, leveraging Hoovers, leveraging other assets that we’ve given them.

There’s a part of me that says, “If you do too much research before a call, it’s paralyzing.” I’ve seen too many reps stare at the screen for 10 minutes before they make a phone call because they’re doing all of the research. I want them to move fast, it’s a double edge sword. I want the efficiency but I want them to know enough to be dangerous but they can’t paralyze themselves with research before each and every call. It is that balancing act that I want them at 80% comfort level over what’s the value proposition, what’s the story, who else have we worked with that’s similar that we solved a similar pain and moving fast.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 141: Cvent Sales Leader Brian Ludwig Says This One Thing Will Help You Connect with and Have Much More Fruitful Conversations with Your Customers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 019: Cvent Sales Leader Darrell Gehrt Learned That Simplifying the Message Would Lead Him to Major Sales Gains

DG’s FINAL THOUGHT FOR SALES GAME CHANGERS: I’m going to go back to where it all started, which is you’ve got to work hard. But you can’t just work hard; you have to work smart too. You hear that all the time, and I think as a sales professional you’ve got to sharpen that saw. Doctors go get continuing credits, same with a lot of other professions; why not in sales? Our business changes every single day. You just don’t notice it. The tactics that I use today are radically different than the tactics I used just three to five years ago. It’s massively different. So you have to kind of keep up with it.

Darrell Gehrt, affectionately known as DG, is currently a vice president of sales at Cvent, the largest event technology company in the world, headquartered in the D.C. Metro area. Cvent has several U.S. offices including Dallas, Portland, and Atlanta and a burgeoning international business that boasts offices in London, Singapore, Australia, and India in which DG has direct reports. DG joined Cvent as a senior director of sales in 2013 and has been given increased responsibility each year. Today he sits with senior management and owns all sales efforts for the mobile app division within Cvent and has heavy influence in marketing, product roadmap, and postsales activities. Prior to joining Cvent, DG engaged in sales and entrepreneurial endeavors with the focus on emerging CRM technologies. His first true sales position was selling cell phones on a straight commission basis in the early 1990s.

Find DG on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Darrell, tell us a little more about you that we need to know.

Darrell Gehrt: First of all, I have to say I’m honored to be number 19. Nineteen was my son’s first hockey number. As you know, we share that love and passion, but my wife and I, my beautiful bride, we spent tremendous amount of time at hockey rinks all around the East Coast. And so I have to escape the hockey rinks and come do what I do every day that I love, which is helping customers with their event technology.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk first about your career. I know you’ve had a lot of success, and I’m really excited to get into this. How’d you get into sales as a career?

Darrell Gehrt: It’s strange, Fred. I always thought of sales as a career, and I think part of that was I like people. I like talking to people, and secondly, I saw a lot of successful people who started their careers in sales. And so, even though both my parents were computer programmers and had nothing to do with sales, I knew from high school through college that’s what I wanted to do.

Fred Diamond: How many people do you have reporting to you here at Cvent?

Darrell Gehrt: Direct and indirect, over a hundred.

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

Darrell Gehrt: Cvent’s in the event technology space, and the division that I run focuses on mobile apps. If you think about going to a conference, if you’re an event planner, you want to encourage people to get the content to network with one another. We have technology that drives that. That’s our mobile app. We also do some other things all centered around the day-of experience. Maybe it’s checking people into a session for CMP credits. Maybe you just want to keep attendance or you want to charge for sessions. We do that. We do onsite badge printing, and the last thing that we really focus on for day-of experience is leave capture—if you’ve ever been to a conference and somebody says, “Hey, can I scan you?” We’ve got new slick technology that makes it easy for people to collect that data, ask custom questions, and then do the proper follow-up. We have a lot of great ROI tools for planners who are spending millions of dollars on their live events.

Fred Diamond: Cvent has been a great entrepreneurial success story. I encourage people, just Google Cvent history you could probably find [founder/CEO] Reggie [Aggarwal]’s story and the great experiences that he took to create this company and make it a huge success.

Darrell Gehrt: Reggie’s been a great leader, and you’re right: If you search for “Reggie Aggarwal” you’ll find his story, and it’s definitely worth reading.

Fred Diamond: You’ve mentioned in the introduction that one of your first jobs was selling cell phones door-to-door. Tell us about some of the key lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs.

Darrell Gehrt: I’m glad you brought up the cell phone job because that is really where I learned. Let me just take you back to 1992. Cell phones, nobody had them. Nobody wanted them. They were expensive. They didn’t work. In fact, people were downright ornery for you even asking if they wanted a phone in their car. And here I am, young kid, straight out of college, straight commission job, and I had to figure this thing out. And there’s two great lessons I learned that I still apply to this day.

The first one was hard work. Think about it as a straight commission salesperson. There’s no boss breathing down your neck to ask why you weren’t in at nine o’clock, how come you haven’t made 50 calls today. You really decide what you want to do, and I learned that I could just outwork people and make a lot more money.

The second one, which is a little bit more strategic but interesting lesson to learn, is that as cell phones were coming up, a lot of new phones were coming out, and I saw my colleagues trying to explain 10, 15 different phones to people who didn’t even know what a cell phone was, and they got confused and they would say “Great, let me think about this.” I went and said, “Listen, you either need this free phone or you need this expensive phone with bells and whistles, and you can always move out of it later.” I learned a very important lesson of simplifying. Where people would get distracted and have analysis paralysis, I would be able to cut right through the clutter. I literally ended up outselling the entire office of 10 people put together on a month-in, month-out basis because of those two things.

Fred Diamond: You outworked the other people on the team, and you simplified the message.

Darrell Gehrt: Simplify.

Fred Diamond: You made that simple, helped them understand the value, why they would invest at that time.

Darrell Gehrt: That’s exactly right. I’m glad you mentioned value because that’s a big thing. So again, go back to 1992, and you’re always pitching value. For us back then, our biggest customers were construction workers, contractors, because there was an ROI for them going from job site to job site and being able to talk the entire way. Today’s sales are no different. There has to be an ROI. There has to be a compelling business case.

Fred Diamond: Think back to your career. Who was an impactful sales mentor to you, and how did they impact your career?

Darrell Gehrt: The first one’s a little unconventional. I’d say the first one was myself, and you go, “How can you be a mentor to yourself at 22, 23, 24?” I didn’t have any sales training. I had to go out and figure it out myself. I am sure that there are listeners to this podcast, same thing, maybe you don’t have a mentor. Don’t let that be an excuse. If you’re out in the market and you’re just playing, you will learn. You’ll self-educate. There was a big impact point in my career in 1997. I went to go work for a guy who grew up out of the telecom industry. He had a sales system, and I never heard of a sales system before: “What’s this?” The whole process of the prospecting and the qualifying and the different questions you would ask. It was what a lot of people know today. I was amazed. Totally changed my career and put my game on a new trajectory. That was 1997.

The second person who really had major impact on my career was when I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2001 and got into the technology space, the software space. I had a boss who would just constantly challenge me. What he would do is, he would ask me qualifying questions like I was the customer every time we had a pipeline review. I remember the first couple of times coming away going, “Man, I should have answers to these questions, and I need to ask these questions on my prospects.”

And so, the next one-on-one, I would come in. I would be all proud of myself. I got answers to all these questions, and sure enough Ross would have another 15 questions that I hadn’t thought of before. It really made me stretch and grow because to learn the answers to the questions that he was asking me, I had to ask the market, and then that would help guide me.

Fred Diamond: What is the number-one specific sales success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? DG, take us back to that moment.

Darrell Gehrt: This is an easy one because it was a massively impactful moment for me. I told you, I moved here to D.C. in 2001, worked for a company called TARGUSinfo. I’m interviewing with the CEO, George Moore, and he tells me, “Listen, Darrell, you need to be following four deals: Domino’s, FedEx, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and McLeodUSA.”

He said, “If you close those four deals this year, we can talk about you keeping your job, and if you don’t, there’s no need to have a conversation.” And says it with his Irish air that he has, but he was somewhat serious about that statement. That year I closed all four of those deals and it took me on another career trajectory.

I went on at TARGUSinfo to run five or six different divisions. I got to start several things, including our government practice, our inside sales practice. But it was definitely that success that got me on the map in radar with everybody inside the company.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment when you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard” or “Just not for me”?

Darrell Gehrt: I think everybody in sales has had that moment. If you do straight commission sales you’ve definitely had that moment because you’re worried about putting food on the table. I think the thing that happened for me is, like a lot of other people, I had my back up against the wall. I had to make that call to my parents and ask for money, and my mom said, “Look, come on home, and we’ll help you.” I remember sitting in my living room, a TV in front of me with rabbit ears, no sofa, crying and going “I just can’t do it.” And that was kind of my perseverance: How do I push through this and be successful?

The second thing, and I think this is really, really important for people out there listening, Fred, is that you have to find passion. I had several jobs right out of school, but I got into the cellular business, and for me, I found sales religion. It was something that I really believed in. I loved it, and it just made it easy to get up and get out the door every day. I think as a sales professional you have to have that passion. If you don’t have it, you unfortunately have to look for a different job. Hopefully not a new career, but you’ve got to love what you do, or everybody around you will notice.

Fred Diamond: That is absolutely true. I recently attended a workshop from Jack Daly, one of the top sales speakers in the country, and the first thing he focused on was passion. You are absolutely correct. If you have negative energy, it comes through. In sales you’ve got to be energized. You had to love what you’re doing. You’ve got to love the benefit that you’re helping your customers with. It’s an amazing story. You’re sitting on the ground, watching TV with rabbit ears, questioning your career. Here you are today, 25 years later, I guess, managing sales teams in London, Singapore, all around the world with one of the top technology companies in the country right now. Great stories from Darrell Gehrt, DG. This is Fred Diamond with the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Listen to one of our sponsors right now, and then we come back, DG, I’m going to ask you for some tips for sales professionals who want to get ahead.

Darrell, what is the most important thing you want to get across to selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Darrell Gehrt: I’ve got a good one that I think people will appreciate. Sales could be stressful. You get a lot of nos. You get people hanging up on you. You get people not returning your phone calls. I told you earlier, I got into sales because I liked people, and what I realize, that was a really bad reason, because people will let you down.

But here’s the thing: If you go into sales with the mindset of “I have to sell something,” “I need to set this meeting,” you will fail. You have to go into it looking at “how do I educate the market.” Not everybody’s going to want what you have. But if you can educate the market in a meaningful way about what your product has—and this kind of goes to The Challenger Sale, Brent Adamson, who I know is a regular for you—you have to be able to go in and educate people about things that they aren’t even thinking about. That takes some of the sting out of the pressure of “how do I close this deal?”

Fred Diamond: DG, you’re at the top of your game. You’re a sales game changer. What are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Darrell Gehrt: I used to be an avid reader. Two kids later and hockey and figure skating and a career, I do struggle with that, but what I do have is a 45-minute commute to work every single day. And so I love listening to podcasts just like this one. There’s a lot of great information out there.

The other is I network a lot with my peers. They’re seeing things that I’m not seeing, and these are people who are much more junior than me. There’s so much to learn, especially with the advent of millennials in the workplace. How do you understand them? And third, I listen a lot on the phone. I consider myself a very active sales leader, meaning I’m not just sitting in an ivory tower and pushing spreadsheets around. I get on a lot of phone calls. Every day I’m on two, three, four phone calls. I get on airplanes. I travel. If you understand what the market is reacting to, that in and of itself is sharpening the saw.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success.

Darrell Gehrt: I was thinking about this, and I don’t know that I have a major initiative. I feel it’s kind of like a business trying to pivot. Hopefully, if you’re a business owner, you never have to pivot. You may make adjustments along the way, and that’s kind of the way that I feel. But I’ll tell you a couple of things that are on my radar right now that I’m teaching the sales reps. One is how you get higher in an organization.

Marketing drives a lot of leads, and at every company I’ve seen it’s kind of the same. Somebody sees something, maybe they’re at the senior level, and they like it, and they say to one of their supporters, “Will you please go look into this? I think it will be good for my business.” You have to be skilled at how to go from that midlevel or front lineup into the executive C-suite because that’s where they’re thinking strategically. If your product is really good you should be impacting at both the strategic level and the tactical level. That’s what we’re working on today as a team.

Fred Diamond: What are you doing to train your team? For people listening who aren’t familiar with Cvent, Darrell mentioned he manages close to 100, if not 100, sales professionals. Walking around the facility before meeting Darrell for this interview, there were a lot of young people here, and I see a lot of banners for colleges, a lot of young people who’ve come from good schools. How do you get them to understand that when it’s their first or second job out of school?

Darrell Gehrt: Actually one of the most rewarding things is seeing people grow so much in their first year or two out of college. There’s no such thing as a silver bullet, right? You go to do multiple things. And so, there’s always two or three things for me. On this one I would say that there’s three.

Number one is a great onboarding program. It’s very structured, how we get them involved, teaching them sales best practices and then also the products, which is really important because you have to understand your products to be able to consult out in the marketplace.

The second thing is engaged leadership. I think Cvent does a great job at that. I’m better at teaching in the moment than I am trying to teach in a classroom. It’s not my strength.

Which brings me to number three. There are people out there that are great at [teaching], and so we supplement, including groups like IES where we can go in. We can get them trained. It’s always funny because Neil Rackham or Jill will come in and say the same thing that I’ve said, but they say it better than I did apparently because [attendees] are like, “She said the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Fred Diamond: DG, you’ve given us some great information: the value of hard work, simplify, engage leadership, sale professionals learning how to sell higher in the organization, knowing your customer’s business. But you mentioned this before, sales is hard. To be successful at sales, you have to put a lot of the work in. It’s not just about showing up and just kind of winging it. People don’t return your phone calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Darrell Gehrt: First of all, it goes back to the passion and just believing in the mission. I wake up every day and I feel like I’m helping people. If I get to a point where I feel like what I’m doing is not impactful, then I need to change. I don’t feel that way today. We literally change the professional lives of event planners every single day.

The second thing is, I think it’s one of the most well-respected professions. Sometimes we get made fun of, but so do lawyers. I’m proud to say I’m a salesperson. I’m proud to say I’m a sales executive. I make a great living. I have a lot of fun. I help people. I don’t know what else you could ask for in a career other than those things.

Fred Diamond: What’s a final thought you can share to inspire our listeners today?

Darrell Gehrt: I’m going to go back to where it all started, which is you’ve got to work hard. But you can’t just work hard; you have to work smart too. You hear that all the time, and I think as a sales professional you’ve got to sharpen that saw. Doctors go get continuing credits, same with a lot of other professions; why not in sales? Our business changes every single day. You just don’t notice it. The tactics that I use today are radically different than the tactics I used just three to five years ago. It’s massively different. So you have to kind of keep up with it.

And then, the other thing I would say is, “Man, get up there and talk to your peers.” It’s a hard business. We get that. Sales is tough. People are out there fighting the same battles that you are. But you’ll win more than you’ll lose if you’re paying attention to the market.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 019: Cvent Sales Leader Darrell Gehrt Learned That Simplifying the Message Would Lead Him to Major Sales Gains first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.