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Please register for SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE PANEL: Sales Transformation and Solutions During COVID-19 With Brian Ludwig and Jeffrey Wolinsky on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 2:00 PM EDT here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview before the Pandemic hit, so it’s pretty impressive how good the social distancing was below. Since the show was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked Amtower what his advice is for sales professionals during the pandemic. He offered the following:

• Make certain your profile is totally up-to-date and accurate. You may want to add your contact info if you want people to reach out;
• Find information worth sharing with those in your 1st network. Post these on you profile. If you go to the Home page (LinkedIn navigation bar top left) you have two options for sharing: as a post or as an article. If you are simply sharing an article, put the link to the article in the “Post” section. You can add a few lines if you want to point out key points in the article. This will be shared with your 1st degree network via their “Home” pages
• It’s a great time for account-based marketing. Reach out to those in your key accounts and personalize the message, which should encourage a response. If possible, then move the conversation to Skype or Zoom.

EPISODE 228: Godfather of Government Marketing Mark Amtower Declares Critical Must-Do’s For Maintaining an Edge When Selling and Marketing to the Federal Government During the Pandemic

MARK’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “The main thing you have is your reputation so maintain that every day. I don’t do things I can’t tell my wife and children, period. Same thing with my customers, I’m not going to say, “Sure, I can do that.” I will say, “No, let me aim you at somebody who can help you who’s much better than I am” or, “That’s just not what I do at all, let me find somebody.” I have a network of experts around me that cover literally every aspect of doing business with the government, I’m comfortable referring them. You should also build that type of network.”

Mark Amtower offers advisory services on all aspects of marketing to the Federal government and training for both companies and individuals on Social Selling via LinkedIn, Building a Subject Matter Expert (SME) Platform (company or individual), Content Marketing for GovCon and more.

He’s also the host of Amtower Off Center on the Federal News Network (WFED, 1500 AM). Listen to my show with Mark here.

Find Mark on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Mark, it’s great to have you here. I’ve worked with you over the last 20 somewhat years when I was the Marketing Director at Compaq Computers Public Sector in the mid-90s. We first met and you were very instrumental in helping us focus on that marketplace so I’m looking forward to getting some ideas from you on how the Sales Game Changers podcast [listeners] around the globe can be more successful. Why don’t you tell us a little more about your journey helping sales organizations sell more to the federal marketplace?

Mark Amtower: Fred, pleasure to be with you on your podcast. I started Amtower & Company in ’85 when I figured out that I really didn’t like working for other people – you know the feeling. I started Amtower & Company largely during the direct marketing era so I was in the 80s the king of direct marketing to the government. I actually visited federal mail rooms to see how mail was distributed, I built mailing lists for people, we had a little debase program we sold them on so we had three label formats.

About three years into that, one of my clients said, “What’s great about talking to you is you never send me a bill.” I had been talking about how they can improve their marketing simply trying to sell my list, not my advice so I started the consulting side around ’88 or so, shortly thereafter ran across you and Al Dickson and others at Apple and then Gary and you at Compaq and a bunch of folks. Mailing lists are lead generators so the better the list, the better the leads. I always prided myself on the quality of the stuff that I sold. This is a relationship-driven market and your reputation has one shot at being real good and if you screw it up, wave goodbye.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, name some of the companies that you’ve helped. Of course, you’ve mentioned Apple and Compaq when I was there but who are some of the other companies you’ve done some work with over the years?

Mark Amtower: I did a lot of work with the B to B catalogue world in the 80s and 90s, companies like CDW, PC Mall, PC Connection, PC Mall Gov, or Connection.gov and CDWG which is a behemoth now. I’ve worked with those companies, I’ve worked with OEMs like Apple, Compaq, Dell. I was instrumental in helping Dendy Young at Falcon Microsystems spring Dell on as its first non-Apple hardware platform. Technically that’s not true because they were also selling Silicon Graphics at the time but that was a work station, not a desktop.

Fred Diamond: Mark, what do you think are the two biggest challenges that sales leaders face today in selling to this particular market?

Mark Amtower: Identifying the right places to get leads and then getting people to follow up on leads, particularly younger people. Another common issue is the seeming inability of some people to pick up the phone and make the phone call which is where the social selling comes in. Before I started my company, in graduate school I was a telemarketer and I worked for a very reputable firm, we renewed magazines for some very high end scientific American Smithsonian, a bunch of really class acts. Their reputation was important, their training was very important but it was a smile and dial operation. You get used to rejection if you do that kind of dialing, 90% of the people you’re going to talk to are going to say, “Thanks but no thanks” and click and some are less polite, but you can engage. That taught me a lot about just picking up the phone and that’s key, you’ve got to talk to people face to face, on the phone, it’s not a message chat kind of gig.

Fred Diamond: We’ve actually interviewed so many people on the Sales Game Changers podcast and we’ve talked about that. Again, I run the Institute for Excellence in Sales, people ask me, “What are the one or two most critical things you’ve learned?” and I always say that the #1 sales tool is the phone. You’ve got to pick up the phone, you’ve got to engage in conversations, you got to get through to them, it’s very hard. A lot of people think that the government is a hard marketplace to sell to. You’ve helped so many companies sell to the federal marketplace, is it a hard marketplace to sell to? Do you need to know things or what are some of your thoughts on that?

Mark Amtower: It’s not an easy market to sell to if you’re not familiar with the landscape. Market knowledge is #1. I got some grief from my most recent book, Selling to the Government, which isn’t that new right now. One of the reviews on Amazon said, “I bought this book hoping to learn, the first thing you tell me is 90% of the companies coming into the market are going to leave within a year and that’s discouraging.” No, that’s not discouraging, that’s a fact and it’s probably 95%. Why? Because they’ve listened to some quasi-educated person who said, “You’re a small business, government buys 25% from small businesses, line up, your phone will ring.”

No, it’s not that easy. You’ve got to understand nuances, you have to understand the contractual vehicles, you’ve got to understand that there’s a ton of competition in front of you, you’ve got to understand that there are intelligent, aggressive salespeople out there selling competitive products to yours. It is not an easy market to break into, it’s not an easy market to succeed in but if you get here and you get traction it is, from my perspective, the coolest game in the world because it’s the biggest market in the world.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely, it’s Fortune 1. You talked about the competition, we interviewed Gary Newgaard who runs Public Sector at PureStorage and Gary referred to selling to the federal marketplace as the NFL of sales, all the big companies are in it, it’s a competitive space, a lot of it is transparent, you know what the contract vehicles are. The customer publishes its budget, what it’s going to spend so it’s a very intense and fierce marketplace. We eluded to the fact that you’ve worked with dozens if not hundreds.

Mark Amtower: I worked with Gary.

Fred Diamond: Right, but you’ve performed dozens if not hundreds of types or marketing tactics along the way and again, you’ve helped hundreds of companies sell to this marketplace and service it. What are you teaching them today? What is your main focus today?

Mark Amtower: The main focus today is – again, go back to the book – one of the major things that you have to do outside of understanding the landscape, understanding the client, understanding the preferred vehicles for each client is you have to understand that you need to differentiate your company, your salespeople, your product, your service somehow to make it more interesting, to make it stand out, to make it more germane to the people that you’re trying to reach. If you don’t do this, if you’re simply selling another USB plug and store data, who cares? It’s liable to be a price point issue but if you’re made in China, that doesn’t even count because they ain’t buying.

I’m teaching people how to differentiate, how to turn their companies or portions of their companies into legitimate subject matter experts, how to use content to support that and all of this is part of what has become known as social selling – leveraging the various social platforms out there. For me, primarily LinkedIn but Facebook plays a role, Twitter plays a role, there’s probably others that I don’t know about that play roles. Snapchat, Pinterest, no, probably not.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about LinkedIn and selling to the federal government specifically. Mark, give us some insights, how do government customers relate to LinkedIn and how do they use it?

Mark Amtower: First, you have to understand that the feds are here. I do a census of feds every year on LinkedIn, I look them up, they’re listed just like your company so they’re agencies, companies or operating divisions for companies. There’s 2.3 million feds on LinkedIn that I can identify by agency, by operating division and obviously by job function if they list that, but every federal agency is on LinkedIn including the intelligence community. Sometimes they don’t identify their employer, but they’re there and mostly that’s the IC so if you work for HHS or a division of HHS, usually you list the agency, your job title, the whole nine yards and you give  a little bit of your history. They’re using it largely the same way that most people are and that is they’re there maybe a couple of times a week, they’re using it to look for key people to vet companies during a procurement process, they may be looking for subject matter experts in particular areas.

When you’re in the government you have all these little fires starting in the background and all those fires revolve around particular skills or lack of skills so you need to bring yourself up to speed. You can Google stuff, come up with some good stuff, some questionable stuff, you can go to LinkedIn, check out the authors. Are they valid? Have they been doing this for 12 minutes or 12 years?

Fred Diamond: Government customers get approached by sales professionals all the time. Do they do the same thing that other customers do? Go to the person’s LinkedIn and see if they’re credible and see if they’re talking to the right person or should they be talking to this sales professional?

Mark Amtower: I’m fortunate, I teach the marketing class at George Washington University’s graduate school in the government contracting master’s program. Half my students are contracting officers in government so I brain pick with them on their social habits and they are vetting these people, they’re checking out their credentials. They key for salespeople is not to post your vitae. Your resume doesn’t mean anything to the buying audience, what do you do? What do you bring to the table? If you’ve been selling to a particular agency for any length of time you’re probably a subject matter expert or close to a subject matter expert on doing business with that agency. You know their preferred vehicles, you know the key players, you know the buying process, you know the buying cycles and you may even have a pretty good handle on the evolving problems. If you focus on, “I advise Department of Energy on data analytics or a particular part of data analytics”, that’s your headline, not your job title so people looking at your profile immediately know what you know, what you do and who you do it for.

Fred Diamond: The main thing you’re talking about here is your headline and your LinkedIn profile, your summary should be very focused on how you’re serving the customer versus, “I worked here, here and here” type of thing.

Mark Amtower: Right, nobody cares if you’ve broken quota 93 quarters in a row except your sales leader, your boss cares, the buyers don’t, all they know is that you’re an aggressive sales guy, take that off your profile unless you’re in a search mode.

Fred Diamond: What else should salespeople be doing? How should they be using LinkedIn to be more successful selling to the marketplace? You’ve mentioned the term subject matter expert before as well so what are some things that you would suggest that they do?

Mark Amtower: Build out that ‘that’s me’ platform for yourself. A lot of salespeople thing their subject matter expertise is selling, no, it’s the knowledge of a particular client that you bring to the table. The more you demonstrate that knowledge, the more you write and speak about that knowledge even on your profile, the more credible you become to that particular audience. That’s key.

Fred Diamond: Mark, that is such a great point. One of the key themes that keeps coming up at the Sales Game Changers podcast is because the customer has access to more information via social media and via the internet is that the more successful sales professionals now are presenting themselves with more value to the customer. How would I present that on LinkedIn? I like the way you just said that, showing that you know solutions, you know the marketplace, you know the customer’s challenges.

Mark Amtower: It doesn’t answer your question directly but the most underutilized space on LinkedIn is that huge banner behind your head in the photo. There’s that pale blue with the lines and dots and yawn, 90% of the profiles have it. I’ve helped people create word clouds around their areas of expertise, I show them where the free tools are, you go there, you size it to fit that background area, make sure your head is not covering up a keyword or phrase. You plug your company logo in there as well and when people go to your profile they immediately resonate if that’s an area that they have a problem in.

A few years ago people didn’t understand what CDM was, Continuing Diagnostics and Mitigation. If you have the issues around CDM as your background graphic, you’re identifying with their pain point and if the content of your profile backs that up and you’re working with particular agencies, DHS, any of the agencies that have a lot of data – which agency doesn’t have a lot of data, right? – we read about violation so that CDM is critical.

Fred Diamond: Mark, should salespeople Link In with government customers?

Mark Amtower: Yes, definitely but always put it in context when you reach out. Don’t send the form letter, say, “You’re with this agency, I see you deal with these issues in the cloud or these issues with big data.” Put it in context, give them a reason to actually go back and look at your profile and here’s the big thing, if your profile is not fully informational and they go back and look at it and there’s nothing there to substantiate what you just told them, you’re toast.

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening to the show who might be in their first or second job in sales and I get emails all the time from Sales Game Changers around the globe. What do you want to tell the young sales professionals about the government customer? It’s an interesting marketplace in that there’s rules and there’s laws, not just rules, there’s literally laws, federal acquisition regulations that the government customer knows about so you have to interface with the customer a certain way. Obviously there’s integrity, etcetera, what would be some of your advice for some of the young sales professionals to know about the government customer that they might not have learned yet?

Mark Amtower: The fact that most government employees are not there for the money, they’re there for the mission. A lot of people in the industry are the same way, there’s money to be made in any market. To understand this market you have to have a passion for it, so if you’re in your third year and you’re still thinking, “God, this is boring” find another place to sell. If you’re developing that passion, start developing your own continuing education on that. You’ve been an example of this but you probably don’t know it. Every touch you make, add value. No cheap shots, no Kumbayas, no cat videos. Those all have its place but we’re business to business and in government you don’t need that stuff, your reputation is really all you have. Lying and misleading people selling second rate products, wrong.

Reading the right stuff, you interview people on the sales process, twice a week you have these wonderful monthly learning sessions, workshops where you have this very well-known guy of the month or woman of the month come in and help people understand their particular slant on the processes. That’s the kind of thing that you need. If you think graduate school stuff, if you went to graduate school you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Fred Diamond: Mark, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, if you’re selling to a B to B and you’re selling to a marketplace like government specifically but also other B to B as well there’s a huge ecosystem of suppliers and partners, not just the customer. This is particularly big in the public sector space with contractors and systems integrators, there are certain requirements and you’re always teaming, in some cases you’re teaming with your competitor, co-opetition, if you will. How should salespeople in this marketplace and related B to B markets be using LinkedIn to position themselves in the ecosystem – not just with the customer, but in the ecosystem with partners as well?

Mark Amtower: You just said it. You’re prime on a contract, you’re sub on a contract, you’re a supplier on a contract. You have to build a network that supports that activity, you have to understand who the people are in the process, who the people are that may be migrating out of the process due to age or maybe it’s a govie who’s going back to industry. That’s a very valuable asset for you potentially but you’ve got to understand where these people are going so monitoring their migration, building that network, nurturing that network and treating it absolutely like the most important thing in your business.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Mark, what advice would you give to the young professionals who are just starting their career in federal sales?

Mark Amtower: A lot of the things that we’ve already talked about but we can look at them again, love what you do. Especially for salespeople, if you do not love what you do, you’re probably never going to be in that top tier because sooner or later it’s going to show. It’s going to show to your peers, it’s going to show to your boss, more importantly it’s going to show to your customers. Love what you do, love what you sell, believe in what you sell. If you can’t believe in what you sell, find a product or service that you can believe in.

Learn to leverage the tools at hand. In your organization there are probably key people in the market who are repositories of great information on your client, on the market in general, on selling a particular product. Suck them dry either formal or informal mentor relationship. Your knowledge of the market overall is important but the further down you get, ultimately for salespeople it matters on that sales process. Not all sales books are designed for this market so learn to pick the parts of those books or those presentations or those workshops that are most germane to what you do, the things that you can leverage and incorporate them. 35 years later I’m still learning literally every day. One of the reasons I love speaking and writing is I get feedback from people like you, Fred who said, “Yeah, but what about this?” and I’m going, “Alright, I didn’t think about that.”

Fred Diamond: 35 years ago, the phone is still the most important thing but you didn’t have LinkedIn to go to. What are some skills that they should be working on to get their careers off to a great start?

Mark Amtower: Listening, #1. You and I have talked about that several times, several of your guests have talked about that. Listening, writing, speaking, picking up the phone. Your ability to speak succinctly, clearly to get to the point quickly, I call it a word per idea ratio. If you go on and on about something you’re going to lose people. The thing that we talked about before, I don’t know if it was Paul or somebody else in one of your other interviews talked about that room where you had the confrontations. Somebody’s being the sales guy, somebody’s being the customer.

That kind of practice, get your pitch down, narrow the scope of what you’re saying to their pain points and how you can help alleviate it. Integrating social selling into the sales process is absolutely key at this point. The art of networking for newbies. Not everybody is a natural networker and we all gravitate to people that we know at those events, that’s not what a networking event is necessarily for, it’s nice to say hello to the people you know but you’re there to meet new people as well.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about building networks for a second or two, let’s get a little bit deeper into that. Again, you’re extremely well networked, you’ve been doing this for a long time, you know a lot of people, you’ve been in the same marketplace for a while so let’s give more specific advice on how young sales professionals should go about making their networks happen. How should they start building their networks?

Mark Amtower: There’s a number of things. Your group, for instance. If you want to, and you should be networking with your peers, networking in IES. If you’re into IT in government, AFCEA, ACT-IAC, Professional Services Council for the services side. If you’re selling military product more like NDIA. There’s a lot of associations out there, there’s a lot of those groups that are off the radar. I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak to a CE Only monthly meeting of companies that do business at Fort Meade, we know the client there but I was a little taken aback because I’m a marketing guy. Most of what I talk about marketing-wise you don’t do in the intelligence community but it was fun, so I met a lot of neat people.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’ve worked with tons of marketing organizations and I don’t want to ask you what should marketing be doing for sales, there’s other podcasts to listen to but let’s talk about it from a sales perspective. First of all, what should salespeople expect today from their marketing organization and what are some of your ideas on how they should be engaging?

Mark Amtower: We’ve talked several times here and elsewhere about the importance of marketing attending sales meetings. It’s also important for sales to attend marketing meetings. When they’re holding their annual budget thing, their plan for the year, you should probably be there and say, “These events paid off good dividends for us, these are dogs, this publication generates more.” Your feedback to the marketing people when they’re planning out their year is key so that perpetual interaction.

Fred Diamond: Mark, you’ve given us some great advice today. Again, on the Sales Game Changers podcast it’s a special episode, we’re talking to Mark Amtower, he’s known as the godfather of government marketplace, he’s helped hundreds if not thousands of companies be more successful in selling and servicing that federal marketplace, the GovCon marketplace. Mark, before I ask you for your final thought we like to ask our guests about some habits that they have that has led to their success so why don’t you tell us about one or two of your habits that has led to your continued success?

Mark Amtower: I have information feeds coming in on a daily basis on the court rulings, all aspects of the government market. I don’t read it all but I scan the headlines and just about everything and when I find something germane, I read it then I share it. I’m not only educating myself, I’m sharing that information with my network but building that network as well reaching out to people cultivating that and touching them whenever possible without being intrusive. If I see a job change on LinkedIn I’m going to say hey, but I’m going to look at their profile first and go back and see and I’ll also look at the company profile because if I know other people there, particularly if I know their boss or the senior executive at the firm I’m going to say, “Congrats on the new position, when you see so-and-so tell them Amtower says hey.”

Fred Diamond: Mark, before I get your final thought I need to ask you, you’ve worked on so many things, you’ve authored books, you’ve ran seminars, you consult, you have a radio show, you’re kind of the renaissance man as it relates to government marketing. What are you working on now? What’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Mark Amtower: Getting better at being a radio host. I’m not natural here, I love it but I don’t know how it comes across on the air or in a podcast.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been doing your show for 10 years now.

Mark Amtower: 14.

Fred Diamond: 14, so people are listening.

Mark Amtower: [Laughs] they’re listening. I’m still working on a couple of books, one on that subject matter expert platform and I’ll either redo Government Marketing Best Practices or do a LinkedIn for GovCon. That’s harder, though because LinkedIn continues to morph, they take stuff away, they add stuff in but the basics remain the same. I’m trying to stay as close to the cutting edge as I can on those social selling tactics to help more and more people.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final thought, I’ve got to go back to something you said before, it was just a brilliant bit of advice. One of the things that keeps coming up again on the Sales Game Changers podcast time and time again is the need for successful sales professionals to provide more value to their customer and you’re the first guy who suggested using your LinkedIn profile not to tout yourself, “I’m great, I worked in these agencies and I worked for these companies” but things that will be of value for the government customer or partners that you’re trying to communicate to to help them move their mission forward. Kudos for you, Mark, on that particular advice. Again, we talked today on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Mark Amtower, the godfather of government marketing.

Mark, give us a final thought. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire them today?

Mark Amtower: This market continues to morph, how the government procures, the rise of OTAs, tons of stuff so staying on top of that, keep learning, have the passion. This is important especially for new salespeople, have patience. This is a glacial market so a customer may tell you that they’re extremely interested in what you sell. If they don’t have the funding for it at that moment, we may be talking 18 months before they call and say, “Hey, can I have it?” by then you may be on version 2 or 3 anyways so patience is a key factor.

The main thing you have in this market is your reputation so maintain that at the front of your mind every day. When you wake up in the morning can you look in the mirror and say you like you? At the end of the day, same thing. I don’t do things I can’t tell my wife and children, period. Same thing with my customers, I’m not going to say, “Sure, I can do that.” I will say, “No, let me aim you at somebody who can help you who’s much better than I am” or, “That’s just not what I do at all, let me find somebody.” I have a network of experts around me that cover literally every aspect of doing business with the government, I’m comfortable referring them.

Fred Diamond: Mark, before we wrap up here, you’ve been in this marketplace for 35 somewhat years like you mentioned, you must have had some great mentors along the way. Why don’t you mention one or two of them and how they impacted your career before we wrap up?

Mark Amtower: Lynn Bateman, #1, going back to the 70s, 80s and 90s Lynn was the mentor, the teacher of all things FAR, DEFAR so all the procurement regs, Lynn taught everybody but she taught me to trust my instincts when it came to writing and speaking. She basically took the cuffs off and said, “Have at ’em but never lie.” Tom Hewitt, founder of Federal Sources now part of the GovWin package. Tom Hewitt is what I had before LinkedIn occurred, Tom knew everybody and everybody knew Tom. If you didn’t know who Tom Hewitt was in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, you weren’t really a significant player in the market. Dendy Young, Falcon Microsystems, GTSI, still a very good friend taught by example and he taught me listening. When you’re talking to Dendy Young, he is 100% focused on you and what you’re saying and he’s processing as you talk, and oddly enough for me, Izzy Feldman. Izzy helped me start my business back in ’85 because he didn’t want me working for him anymore.

Fred Diamond: Izzy Feldman, may he rest in peace. There are four great people there, so thank you so much.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 228: Godfather of Government Marketing Mark Amtower Declares Critical Must-Do’s For Maintaining an Edge When Selling and Marketing to the Federal Government During the Pandemic first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 150: Nextgov Publisher James Hanson Shares the Three Things Marketers Need to Do to Best Serve Government Customers

JAMES’ FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Know your industry and market, get to know the people, the companies, the buyers and sellers. It’s as easy as spending 30 minutes a day reading the trade magazines, combing through LinkedIn or Twitter, or listening to a podcast to get the latest news trends and information.”

James Hanson is the VP and Publisher of Nextgov, the federal technology media division of Government Executive Media Group.

Formerly, he was at Connelly Works and at Defense News.

Find James on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: I’m excited to hear your story. We’ve had a couple publishers on the Sales Game Changers podcast in the past, we’ve had Steve Vito and of course Alex Treadway. We’ll provide links to their shows. I’m excited to hear your evolution, how you got to here and what you’re doing today. Why don’t you tell us? Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

James Hanson: I sell sales and marketing programs for companies providing technology and technology services to public sector organizations. What excites me about it is really our mission, we cover the personnel business and mission of government. As part of this community, we are trying to help government do their job better through independent, credible journalism and research as well as bring government and industry together through events to provide better services to citizens, better healthcare to veterans, protect our first responders and war fighters. Each year Government Executive Media Group brands and sites are ranked by its audience as the go-to news and platform to accomplish this mission. That’s really what gets me excited, ultimately delivering to our audience things that are going to help them in their own careers.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you sell? Of course, you’re a publisher but I guess print has been probably not as big as it was. What are some of the things that you offer to your technology customers?

James Hanson: We actually went away from print 5 years ago and became the first 10% digital news site for the federal government. Since then we’ve built out dedicated defense publication and news site, Defense 1, Nextgov which is our federal technology network and then Route 50 which is our state and local news site and network. Through that, we obviously sell advertising programs to build awareness for contractors and organizations like GEICO or even an educational institute like Harvard University trying to sell MBA programs across that.

We also have an events division as I mentioned, which is helping to bring government and industry together to identify challenges and provide new opportunities and insights. We also have a research division which is dedicated to providing independent research of our audience on trends and challenges, as well as for our clients that are trying to figure out how their solutions fit into the government’s biggest challenges and problems.

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

James Hanson: I guess my first “sales job” was as a waiter and bartender at Kilroy’s. While there was no quota attached to it, it taught me how important relationships are and customer service and delivery for filling my register and my tip bucket. My first career sales job was at Army Times Publishing Company which is now Sightline Media Group in the defense news as an Advertising Coordinator. I actually managed our international sales organization, so we had reps around the globe about 8 total across Europe and a number of other continents. I had a direct sales territory that included Israel, Singapore and Brazil and as my coordinator was to help those reps be the go-between with our headquarter organization in Springfield and there. I think that was a good starting ground for where I am today.

Fred Diamond: You’ve mostly worked in the public sector space helping companies get their message to federal audiences, it sounds like. What is it about that marketplace that has interested you to devote your career to it?

James Hanson: My mother worked for the State Department for 30 years. It was also the first job that I got an interview for and got a job, so that started that trajectory. Throughout the years seeing the work and dedication that our public service people provide to our country is uplifting knowing that while I don’t work directly for a government agency and providing those services, I’m helping companies find the right opportunities to help government do that and to support that mission. It’s rewarding in that way and it’s just a unique technology, advancing our country from an economic and consumer standpoint, that in and of itself is where I’ve stayed in based on interest and growth and opportunity.

Fred Diamond: When you were selling advertising for Army Times, what were some of the key lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs? As a matter of fact, the bartending side might be interesting but let’s focus on when you were selling advertising. What were some of those key lessons that you learned that have stuck with you?

James Hanson: At Defense News I certainly learned a number of key sales lessons. First, successful customer service and delivery equates to sales, my job wasn’t only to sell advertising but ensure we were providing value beyond the signed agreement. Whenever possible I’d look for news that impacted my clients, our international clients and made sure that they were aware of it. When we got an ad into the office I made sure to review it and provide another layer of proofing before it went to print. I can’t tell you how many times I caught an error in the copy, colors didn’t match or somebody just sent in the wrong ad and I think providing that level of value beyond just the sales opportunity helped me build those relationships and continue to grow.

Secondly, I think one of the biggest ones was I learned the value of a win-win relationship. When you’re working with international clients, there is a level of negotiation that goes into everything so both parties have to be willing to walk away from the table if the deal doesn’t provide value and benefit both parties. Every deal has that value whether it’s short term or long term, if it’s revenue or profit, if it’s awareness or engagement, businesses aren’t in the business of giving away things for free. At times we had to walk away from revenue because it just wasn’t profitable and didn’t provide the long-term value to the company. I think those were two of my biggest that I carried on throughout my career.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you’re an expert in, what is your specific area of brilliance?

James Hanson: Honestly, nothing. [Laughs] I’ve always been an inch deep and a mile wide kind of guy when it comes to my expertise and knowledge about anything. If I had to pick anything I’ve been really good at in sales is simply putting myself in the shoes of my client, making their business my business and trying to find that win-win opportunity for the both of us. Part of that is problem solving, looking in the gray areas to find that value for both of us. I think that’s where I have a lot of success.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people on the Sales Game Changers podcast can attribute a lot of their success to having great relationships with mentors who’ve guided them through and helped them understand how to work with some customers. Have you had any impactful sales career mentors? If so, why don’t you tell us how they impacted your career?

James Hanson: My first boss, David Smith, who was at the time Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at Defense News taught me about marketing and branding in the role it plays in sales both from a personal as well as from an organizational perspective. I think what that allowed me to do was put myself in my client’s shoes to better understand what their goals and objectives were so I could come up with the best solution. In my opinion, sales and marketing are a marriage, it’s a partnership, both have to be equally present, engaged and work together to maximize the success of the entire household.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include my former CEO, Joanne Connelly, at the top of that list as well who taught me the difference between taking orders and providing value back to clients. I think not only in sales or marketing but in business and project management we get into a habit of once we get a sale is really checking the boxes as we deliver that. Going back to that customer service and delivery is making sure that throughout that process we’re providing value in terms of additional opportunities from a messaging or audience perspective.

Fred Diamond: I want to probe in that for a second. You talked about how David Smith helped you understand the value of branding in the sales process. Is branding still important today as it might have been 15, 20 years ago?

James Hanson: Absolutely. I think the pure definition of branding is perception and anything that you provide from a product or your own company should have the perception that you’re giving value to your customers. Marketing helps create branding and awareness for the company which trickles down to the salesperson. As salespeople are making calls, is a customer is as aware of your brand, it becomes a lot easier to have the conversation and move it down the funnel versus having to then explain who your company is, what you do and then the value on top of that. Certainly brand from a personal perspective is important, I think any salesperson wants to be seen as credible, have integrity, a thought leader and your personal brand plays into the entire sales process in that.

Fred Diamond: How much time do you spend with your sales team to have them work on their personal brand, is that a big priority of yours?

James Hanson: Yes. We regularly have work-group sessions throughout the year to talk about personal branding. We brought in some sales professionals that have large profiles on LinkedIn and how they do that, how do you create content, how do you create thought leadership. I think especially junior salespeople tend to just try and get to the sale versus really understanding what the marketplace is and what those trends and shifts and challenges are so that they can be better prepared to help their clients have success.

Fred Diamond: When you’re brand new in sales there’s a lot of things you need to learn. We find a lot of younger sales professionals will focus on the technique, getting used to the phone, getting comfortable with the phone but there’s so much more that they need to understand. The business of their customer, how does your customer operate? What is their customer’s customer’s challenge? What are they trying to bring to their customer? We’re talking today with James Hanson, he’s the VP and publisher of Nextgov. James, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

James Hanson: I think that #1 I would put time and scalability together. Everyone is so busy today, we live in an environment that operates 24 hours a day in terms of access and communication and our clients are busy. Everybody’s obviously focused on their business and their customers, so it’s sometimes difficult to get in front of the right people, especially in senior positions because they’re busy and it’s completely understandable.

We move so quickly today although I think in the federal market we move a little bit slower than others. I think time and the ability to scale yourself to get in front of your customers at the right time when they need it. Sales is a lot of timing, overall time stands out as a challenge in general.

Fred Diamond: What are some things you do to solve that?

James Hanson: That’s a great question. I think leveraging social networks is a very important opportunity for salespeople today because you can sit and dial the phone a hundred times, but now we live in an environment where if the name doesn’t come up on the phone you’re not necessarily going to pick it up. I think creating a presence on social media sites whether it be LinkedIn or Twitter, even Facebook for some verticals and markets. Being a thought leader, putting your company’s services or products out there but talking about them in a way that they help customers allows you to reach a much larger audience and begin that brand process so that when you do call or you do see somebody at an industry event, you’re more noticeable.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you take us back to the #1 success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

James Hanson: There certainly are a few and it’s hard to go back to those days at Defense News although there certainly was a lot of wins that at the time seemed big, now seem small working at an international market. I think one recently was in 2016, there was a telecommunications company that had not done really much marketing in the federal space but wanted to build out a partner program that allowed them to leverage partner funds to promote their joint capabilities, subject matter expertise and use cases.

At the time they didn’t have resources or bandwidth to create or execute programs, especially leveraging different third parties. Given my company’s relationship in the community, we engaged a number of different organizations and created an integrated campaign program that leveraged both our expertise as well as multiple third parties that don’t typically work together. We were able to bring them together at the table to help this one client create these programs that met their needs and achieve their goals.

It took about three months to get stood up, but in 2017 we delivered more than 8 integrated partner programs exceeding all metrics within and throughout that year and that campaign. They were at the time the largest marketing client for my company which was certainly a big personal win, but it was a unique opportunity that played to my skills in creating campaigns and strategies for clients to reach their customers.

Fred Diamond: I’ve been a marketing executive in my career and I’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on marketing things. Today in 2019 there’s a lot of challenges, your money has to go further, you need to be able to show return, there’s always great marketing ideas and things to do and I’ve tried them all. What do you think the biggest challenge is that your customer faces right now? What is the big challenge, the big thing that you guys solve for a company that’s trying to pursue technology markets, the federal technology customer? What are they struggling with? Branding is important but it’s different now because there’s so little time to prove results. Exposure, access, what are some of the big challenges that you guys solve?

James Hanson: I think that your comment of making dollars go a lot farther is certainly a big challenge. Recently we’ve talked to a number of marketing executives that are now getting quotas that are responsible for tracking those efforts, those leads, nurturing them down through the pipeline and then into the actual sales process. That’s why I refer back to that marriage between sales and marketing because I think all marketers need to understand what the sales goals are. I think that the best approach for a campaign is three key pillars: one is that awareness, one is that branding and one is thought leadership.

The challenge is how do you build a program that incorporates those three things that ultimately feed into the pipeline and then how do you measure that. I think that is a big challenge that marketers have, that is a challenge that I am actually very excited to help clients solve because certainly for us – and not just us, there are other organizations in the community that have the capabilities, the audience to help marketers achieve that. That’s what gets me excited and up every day in terms of “sales”, is to help marketers go from that top of the funnel down through an actual sale.

Fred Diamond: James, I can tell you have a passion for helping your customers solve their problems but you’ve also got to bring in the revenue, you’ve also got to achieve your quota. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself once you got started, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

James Hanson: Lots of times. To be honest, I don’t really love “sales.” I consider myself more of a business person and more of a market consultant. I love, as I’ve said numerous times already in our conversation, helping my clients identify those opportunities, reach their customer, mapping their customer, understanding who their customer is and then how can my product or my service or my solution help them.

Again, I like the marriage of sales and marketing and how they work together. They’re are a lot more successful salespeople than me including in my own organization, but I really enjoy trying to find that right solution and being creative. It allows me to work with sales professionals, executive leaders, marketing people to help achieve goals, that’s beyond just sales. I think people when they think of sales think of, “Let me get the line signed and the quota marked” but I think it extends. It’s that upfront engagement, it’s that through the process, it’s how do we now take this to yet another level and extend reach for the client?

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

James Hanson: Know your industry and market, get to know the people, the companies, the buyers and sellers. It’s as easy as spending 30 minutes a day reading the trade magazines, coming through LinkedIn or Twitter, listening to a podcast to get the latest news trends and information. Certainly the federal market is a little unique and different, but I think this is true throughout any industry. Don’t just try to sell products, sell a solution to your client’s challenge or potential challenge down the road, that really requires you to understand what your market and industry and clients are facing.

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

James Hanson: I think the previous answer is what I still try to continue to do this day, is stay on top of the industry trends and opportunities for my clients. Reading about my own client’s news and being familiar with where they’re going, trying to create solutions to do that. I listen to other podcasts as well whether that’s my market or my role as a salesperson to how do I better help my clients. At the same time I try and make an effort to spend a little time with family to give me a little break between it all.

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

James Hanson: Personally, I’ve been listening to a number of sales podcasts like yourself. I think my previous role was more business development but I was also very much involved in the operations side of things. Now I’m as much more into the sales, I think my primary role is as a brand evangelist for Nextgov, I have a quota and revenue is ultimately what is going to determine my success at the end of the day.

How do I better understand the sales process and I think listening to podcasts like yourself is very helpful in doing that. From a market perspective and in Nextgov perspective we’re actually growing our podcast network right now. We started Defense 1 podcast last year, we now have 200,000 subscribers, it went from a monthly to a weekly. Nextgov’s Critical Update is now in its second season. The word of the day is podcasts for me.

Fred Diamond: I’m excited to have you on today’s podcast, you’ve given a lot of great answers but sales is hard and actually in your space. Again being a marketer for most of my career, even back in the 90’s and 2000’s we always had to show returns but it was hard to do because there wasn’t as much digital. A lot of it was events, a lot of it was print, those types of things, seminars. If you had a customer there, you could say it was a success but now with digital obviously you can measure everything. There’s tons of analytics coming out with everything so you have to keep proving that your platform and your offerings are optimal. Sales is hard, people don’t return your calls, a customer may know what they want to do already. What is it about sales, James, that has kept you going?

James Hanson: Not to be arrogant, but I’ve been successful at it.

Fred Diamond: There’s nothing wrong with that, my friend.

James Hanson: Success makes it all a little easier. It’s hard, work is hard and I think to be successful you have to work hard at it. That’s what makes it rewarding and going back to your first questions in terms of what excites me about what I’m doing today is the market that I’ve served and grown up in has made it rewarding in and of itself. I think any job, if you want to be successful, it’s going to be hard, you’ve got to work at it. If you find some place that you enjoy doing and supporting I think it makes it a lot easier. I know it’s a kind of cliché answer, but it’s the truth.

Fred Diamond: James, I want to thank you for being on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast. Why don’t you give us a final thought? We have listeners all around the globe, people who are interested in getting better at the science and art of selling, who really want to take their sales career to the next level. Give us a final thought to inspire them today.

James Hanson: Think like a customer. We’re all consumers, we consume different products and services but at the end of the day we want to make sure that we receive the value upfront in the sales process. Be honest, incredible, make sure your client understands what they’re receiving in return throughout the process. Make sure you check in to see how things are going, how they’re feeling, where you can help extend or provide more value afterwards and to thank you for their business and what can we do next. I don’t think sales is a process, I don’t think it’s a one-time transactional engagement, it’s a relationship and if you put yourself in the shoes of your customer, you better understand what that relationship means to them which then helps you build that.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 150: Nextgov Publisher James Hanson Shares the Three Things Marketers Need to Do to Best Serve Government Customers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 07:32
Name an impactful sales mentor: 13:36
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 18:43
Most important tip: 25:42
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 28:35
Inspiring thought: 30:34

EPISODE 146: Iron Mountain Sales Chief Michael Lewis Shares How a Major Failure Early in His Career Led to His Sales Leadership Success

MICHAEL’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Focus on the customer, understand their challenges first and second, try new things. What got you here today to be successful won’t get you where you’re trying to go. The customer landscape, the competition is changing so invariably you have to change and adapt and try new things to be successful in the future.”

Michael Lewis is the General Manager for Iron Mountain’s Public Sector Business.

Prior to Iron Mountain, he held sales leadership positions at IBM, Siemens and General Electric.

Find Mike on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Michael Lewis: Thanks, Fred. Good to be here and appreciate you coming by today. I grew up outside of Philadelphia and went away to college at the University of Massachusetts to play Division 1 lacrosse. I started my career out of the Philadelphia area calling on legal accounts in downtown Philadelphia, and I’ve been very fortunate to move around the country over my sales career to get exposed to various companies and various areas of the IT overall curriculum. Through those experiences, I’ve been exposed to incredible sales leaders throughout the way, incredible training and I feel extremely fortunate to have that opportunity.

I have two sons, my first son was born in California and my second son was born in Texas so they’ve got a feel for various areas of the United States. Right around 2001, I got a call from the president to say, “I’d like you to come to Washington DC and take on a federal organization.” At that point in time, it was post 2001 where working in Silicon Valley was extremely exciting and I was a little bit hesitant at that point to take that leap and come into federal, but it turned out to be one of the best things in my professional career to come to Washington DC and to serve the US federal government. On a personal note, I love reading non-fiction, I love podcasts, I just started listening to your podcast which I’m finding very interesting and I also am a fanatic about golf when I have the time on the weekends as a way to de-stress. That’s a little bit about myself.

Fred Diamond: We did a special episode with Christine Barger, she’s the VP of Federal over at Microsoft. She was a Division 1 lacrosse player at University of Maryland and they won the Women’s Championship in 1992 or ’93 I believe. We did a special episode with her talking about the things that you would see on the lacrosse field and how that related to eventually becoming a top sales leader, so it’s great to have another Division 1 lacrosse player on the podcast. Just curiously, when you came here in 2001, was it before 9-11 or did you come right after 9-11?

Michael Lewis: I came right after 9-11, so right around 2001 – 2002 where the country was pulling together, department of homeland security was merging and got stood up. It was an exciting time and a scary time.

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

Michael Lewis: Iron Mountain, we help federal agencies both civilian and DOD agencies with their information and management of their physical and their digital assets. We have core competencies across compliance storage, digital transformation as well as compliant destruction. These decisions typically fall within the CIO’s office and CTO’s office, often times it’s something that’s not on top of mind until there is an issue so they’re faced with challenges with compliance, governance and protecting their assets.

What excites me about it is while it may not on first appearance be very exciting or sexy, if you will, once we have the opportunity to meet with the government client and understand their current state, invariably we find a value proposition that’s extremely compelling to them. We absolutely find opportunities to reduce their operating expenses or help them with their compliance challenges and information governance. That’s what really excites me. Each opportunity, whether we’re calling on a civilian agency or a DOD component, invariably we find opportunities to help them solve some of their biggest challenges.

Fred Diamond: Tell us again some of the services that Iron Mountain offers.

Michael Lewis: Again, it’s compliance storage. If an agency is currently storing physical or digital assets on premise, we provide an outsourcing capability, many times they’re in a fixed fee situation, we’re able to shift it over to a consumption based model much like cloud services are today just on the physical side. We bring it off site in a compliant facility when and if the government needs to review that document, we provide delivery for that document. We also can provide digital transformation in the even that they want a digital copy of it immediately or they want to capture some of the meta data that’s associated with the image.

Fred Diamond: Tell us how you first got into sales as a career.

Michael Lewis: I entered into the sales profession, I guess it was sophomore or junior year of college, I started doing a research project on various careers. Oddly enough, the first career I was going to pursue was to be a pharmacist and I quickly learned that was not for me, I needed to be outside active and engaged in various opportunities. Once I did the research in terms of what it takes to be a good salesperson, what are the characteristics, I found that it was a good match for my personality and it turned out to be fortuitous in a lot of ways.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about your first sales job. Who was it with again?

Michael Lewis: My first job out of college was with a company by the name of Dictaphone which I’m probably dating myself, in the sense that we called on legal and healthcare providers providing automated recording of devices and then transcribing those so that they could have a record of it. We were offering an alternative to long hand or short hand writing at the time.

Fred Diamond: What were some of the key lessons you learned from that job that have stuck with you till today?

Michael Lewis: There were tons of lessons. The first one I would say is treat everybody with respect, whether you’re talking to the gatekeeper or you’re talking to the office manager, or as you interface with various support resources within the company. Ultimately, it’s about relationships that allow people to open up and to establish a level of trust and by treating people with respect I’ve always found 95% of the time people reciprocated and they opened up, and they were able to tell you about some of their challenges or some of their problems

I’d say that’s the first one, the second one would be to prepare before you make a sales call. Take the time as opposed to coming in thinking you’re trying to sell something, prepare to understand what’s on the other side, what’s happening within your client’s environment, what are the challenges they’re faced with and ultimately that leads to a much more productive, invaluable sales or information exchange. Many times that’s how sales starts out, it’s an exchange of information that ultimately leads to a solution. Those would be the two things early in my career that I learned, I would say a third one would be perseverance because in the early days there was a lot of business development or cold calling prospecting was done, that’s changed in today’s world because information is so readily available to us. At the same time, it’s the question of at bats and being targeted in who you’re calling on and perfecting your opening in terms of trying to secure an initial conversation with a prospect or customer.

Fred Diamond: Michael, we have a lot of people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe, a lot of them are earlier in their career. You mentioned preparation, that comes up not infrequently. Give us an insight, give us something that you do to prepare, that you would recommend they do to ensure that when they get in front of the customer they are as prepared as they need to be.

Michael Lewis: Things that we try to do and instill here at Iron Mountain Government Solutions is we try to instill, first of all, look at the macro issues that the agency or the government is faced with, whether it’s presidential mandates, challenges, budget constraints, etcetera. Start macro and then build down to the agency’s mission to understand what are they in business to do, what is that agency’s purpose and mission. Once you’ve established what that mission is, you can then take a look inside of the agency’s strategic plan, and the strategic plans are all online open public domain.

You will find all kinds of opportunities of the challenges that the agency is faced with and then bring it down to your individual prospect. If you are calling on an executive level person, they have a certain set of challenges that they’re faced with as opposed if you’re calling to an operator who is responsible for operating and maintaining the records management program. I would customize the approach depending on who you’re calling on in order to connect with that individual on their level and what’s most important to them. Historically or from a reaction perspective, I find initially people may go in wanting to tell people about their service and what those benefits are. Invariably, if you’re not connecting you’re not moving the opportunity forward so it’s a question of I would say flipping it around to their perspective as opposed to your perspective on what you have in your portfolio of offering products or services.

Fred Diamond: That makes so much sense especially today where the customer has access to information about your products and services, they don’t need you to tell them that, they need you to help them solve their mission. I liked the way you talked about understanding the customer’s mission. In a lot of cases you’re right, it is published out there for you. Tell us a little more about you, what are you an expert in? Tell us more about your specific area of brilliance.

Michael Lewis: Brilliance is a pretty stout word, I would not characterize these as brilliant areas. I would say there are two things, one is experience. Over the 25 years that I’ve been in the information technology solution selling, I’ve developed an archive of experience that I can draw on from a situational perspective and I would say that’s one value add that I can bring to situations. I’ve seen situations along the way or have reasonable experiences that we can apply in today’s challenges, so I’m able to offer something, a different perspective to maybe change the perspective and help us move an opportunity forward. That was the one area, the second would be in account planning or opportunity development and strategy.

Through the years of formal training and informal experiences at the companies that I’ve worked at, we’ve gone through multiple sales methodology training, solution selling, R3, power based selling, challenger training and so on and so forth. In each of those experiences, you can take something that works for you and apply it to today’s environment and today’s challenges. I would say I’m able to take a look at an opportunity objectively and add some perspectives that helps connect better with the customer, increase our probability of win, differentiate us vis a vis the competition.

Fred Diamond: We’re talking today on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Michael Lewis, general manager of Iron Mountain’s public sector business. Michael, you’ve worked for some great companies, blue chip companies: IBM, Siemens, General Electric. I’m sure along the way there’s been some mentors who have impacted your career, why don’t you tell us about one or two who have impacted your career along the way?

Michael Lewis: There have been several mentors and that’s something that I’m really fortunate to have is that I’ve worked with various leaders with different styles, different approaches. Two people come to mind, the first would be George Nolan who ultimately was my district manager. Ultimately he got promoted to be the CEO of Siemens USA. I’ll never forget I was an individual contributor, new business sales rep working out of the Philadelphia office. We had an RFP due on a Friday, it was due at 9:30am and I misread the due date. I had worked all night, I had a team of people putting the final touches on the RFP, I really felt good about it, I arrived at the client’s site at 12:30pm and I thought it was a 3:30 due date, ultimately it was due at 9:30.

I had to own it, come back to the office, face the disappointment, if you will and George basically accepted that. He allowed me to fail, he allowed me to learn from my mistake and then through that experience, George and I developed a really strong relationship, he promoted me a couple times in my sales career to larger, more diverse responsibilities. To this day, I maintain a friendship with him albeit infrequent, but it was his mentorship that taught me some of the things that I try to instill in my leadership today.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a quick question about that example that you just said there. Again, the proposal was due to the customer at…?

Michael Lewis: It was due at 9:30

Fred Diamond: …and you got there at 12:30…

Michael Lewis: Thinking that it was due at 3:30.

Fred Diamond: You had no chance, so basically the customer said, “Sorry, you’re late, too bad.”

Michael Lewis: That’s exactly right, they would not accept it.

Fred Diamond: What did you do? I know you went back to George and you owned it, but how did you respond to that?

Michael Lewis: I took it back to the office and I owned up to it, I spoke to all the people who supported us through the RFP response process and apologized to those people. Then I learned from it and moved forward, so I didn’t dwell on it, it was a learning opportunity and you move forward, things happen. That was a situation that I’ll never forget. George continues, when I see him, to remind me of that in a comical way so that’s one of the reasons I never forget it.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned there was a second mentor.

Michael Lewis: My second mentor was when I came to Washington DC, a guy by the name of Jim Cantwell. He subsequently passed away and Jim was a federal IT expert, he actually worked for Northern Telecom, a lot of people knew Jim within the industry and he taught me federal. It was overwhelming at first, the acronyms, the buying process was very different than I was used to selling to enterprise Fortune 1000 and Jim took the time to help me understand the perspective of the customer. That really helped me flip from being so excited about all the benefits of our products and services to really thinking about the customer, their perspective and trying to meet their needs. I am eternally indebted to him for helping me understand because that, I thought, was one of the key changes in my personal approach and my approach with leadership today, is to flip it around to the customer’s perspective because ultimately that’s who we’re trying to serve.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. When you serve a vertical marketplace like federal there’s rules, there’s laws literally on how you need to sell and how the customer can buy and how you need to interact with the customer. You mentioned acronyms, there’s like the federal acquisition regulations so you need to understand that and there are certain ways that the customer buys and it’s the same case in a lot of the verticals, so truly understanding it. Just curiously, you moved into federal in 2001, how long did it take you before you really became conversant in the marketplace?

Michael Lewis: I recall in the early sale exchanges that we had along with Jim, I would write down the acronyms, look them up at night and then try to put it in perspective. I would say it took about 9 months before I really felt conversant and I attended various industries’ association meetings to learn from that, I read a number of books, periodicals and quickly got up to speed. While initially it’s somewhat daunting to move from a commercial career into a federal career, it’s something that you can learn. Ultimately I find that 80% of selling is the same whether you’re selling to a commercial customer or a government customer, a public sector customer. As you pointed out, the rules are different, that 20% is significantly different, you do need to know what are the rules that you’re playing by, how does the customer evaluate, etcetera in order to be effective and successful with this customer.

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

Michael Lewis: In the case of records management, it is something that’s not on the forefront of every CIO or CTO’s mind until there is a crisis or until something gets out of control and they have to react to either increased security, compliance or privacy issues that they come across. The challenge is getting mind share, once we are able to share use cases of other successful deployments implementations with the executive, all of a sudden they are much more interested in the things that we’re doing to help other agencies.

That’s a challenge that we have, the second is again changing the perspective from a company perspective to the customer perspective. We try to reinforce that as we prepare for sales calls, as we put our account plans together. That is somewhat of a challenge because human instinct is to be very excited about what you have to offer, perhaps even make a proposal prior to really understanding the customer’s environment or providing a price prematurely in the sales process where you haven’t really understood what problems you’re trying to solve, whether it’s quantitatively or qualitatively.

Fred Diamond: Michael, again you’ve worked for IBM, Siemens, general electric, now you’re running Iron Mountain’s public sector business. Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Michael Lewis: I’m going to name a recent one because this had a lot of lessons and a lot of takeaways from the opportunity. We recently won a 5 year blanket purchase agreement with a large federal civilian agency that is somewhat decentralized in nature. This sales process started by a pilot where our senior business development executive met with, I would call them, mid-level managers within a small component. They were faced with a problem of increased budget, lack of control, poor service levels. What our salesperson was able to do is understand the current environment and he developed a relationship with multiple stake holders across the small component. He also put together a compelling business case that showed a return on investment, a reduction in the agency’s current operating expenses.

This small pilot, this proof of concept ultimately grew into an eventual single award 5 year BPA. There are just so many positives to take away from it, ultimately there were two protests. I think the time period, the ultimate sales process was probably 24 to 32 months – I don’t want to discourage people who are contemplating a sales career in federal, but there are things that are within your control, and others that are outside of your control. There was perseverance, there was a teamwork amongst all of the functional groups within Iron Mountain that came together and worked on solutioning the opportunity, putting together discriminators and it’s something that I’m really proud of in that the team worked together.

As I said, we learned lessons along the way and we also took away several benefits. At the end of the day, we are able to help this agency meet their mission challenges so that feels good, we have a sense of purpose in the sense that we’re protecting people’s individual information. We’re helping this agency with privacy, we’re helping them reduce cost and that’s what we take away from that opportunity.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you pretty much went into sales right after college. You were a lacrosse player, I don’t know how many people really know lacrosse intimately out there in the world but it’s a war, you’re banging the bat at the other players, if you will. My son played hockey, he also played lacrosse a couple years in high school so I know what it’s like out there on the field. I think lacrosse players and hockey players are pretty much the right mindset to move into sales. Did you feel that, just curiously?

Michael Lewis: I did. I guess some of the parallels between approaching a sport and sales is in sales and in sports you have to try new things, you have to get out of your comfort zone. In lacrosse if you learn how to shoot with your right hand and shoot with your left hand, it’s the same in sales. You may try something that’s way outside of your comfort zone ultimately by practice, repetition that we had to do on the athletic field, you can apply those same principals in a professional career in sales. Whether it’s sales qualification, presentation, developing value propositions, helping a customer with a business case, while that may not be your initial comfort level, it is something that you can try and then perfect that area to ultimately improve your overall sales effectiveness.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question going into sales?

Michael Lewis: I never did because actually early in my career I recall I think my first year I made $17 or $18 thousand, the second year I doubled it to 36 and so there was financial reward. I also found that what I put in I was able to get out of it and what it also fulfilled for me was I have an internal curiosity about how different businesses are run. In sales, I was able to get inside of different companies, learn about their businesses, their industries, their challenges and that to me was extremely motivating. Regardless of what the product or service was, it was an opportunity to be outside, interact with people and help them solve problems and that to me is extremely motivating.

Fred Diamond: Michael, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the selling professionals listening around the globe today?

Michael Lewis: Again, back to the perspective of the customer. Putting yourself in the shoes of the customer so that you can meet their challenges and their needs. That involves everything from understanding their role, how they’re measured, what their challenges are, how they stand from a political perspective to know what other stake holders would be involved in the evaluation, the requirements development or receiving some of the benefits and as you break it down, take the time to prepare and meet the customer’s needs. I think you stand a very good chance at being successful and effective in the sales profession.

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

Michael Lewis: I’m constantly reading, listening to podcasts, I have a propensity to read non-fiction and ultimately I mix it up with both sales training books as well as articles that I come across with Harvard Business Review. I try to read three or four papers a day to apply current news and events and challenges to my sales interactions on the executive calls that I make, and that’s the way I keep the saw sharp along the way. Here at Iron Mountain Government Solutions we try to have periodic training sessions to help with that whether it’s a sale skill, whether it’s a technical skill, we bring in industry experts to assist them with broadening their perspective so that when they’re in front of the client they can add value to that customer environment.

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

Michael Lewis: Right now we’re building out a channel strategy. Historically, Iron Mountain has been a direct organization and as everybody knows in the federal space, there are both large integrators, small businesses, etcetera who own and have responsibility for certain contract vehicles so we’re building out our channel strategy where we’ll get used to selling in an indirect model. We’re looking for channel partners that complement Iron Mountain’s portfolio of offering so that it’s a mutual benefit for the channel partner and for Iron Mountain.

Fred Diamond: Sales is hard, people don’t always return your phone calls or your emails. We’re recording this podcast in late January in 2019 and the government is in amidst of a partial shutdown, of course you serve the federal marketplace. There’s been things along the way, sequestration and continuing resolutions and in every industry there’s challenges that happen at macro and micro level, if you will. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that’s kept you going?

Michael Lewis: Again, I think it’s the curiosity to understand how in this case, various government agencies operate, what their challenges are, how they’re serving the public or protecting national assets. To me, it’s a greater sense of purpose that we’re able to fulfill and that’s what keeps me going.

The second thing that keeps me going is by seeing new people coming into our organization or younger people who are early in their career and helping them learn new techniques in solution based selling, and see them successful. Yes, perhaps sometimes people have setbacks, that’s okay but moving forward, learning from it and again, pushing the envelope and trying new things.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious as you’re talking about that, the story that you gave us about showing up late when the proposal was due, how did you feel as you were driving from the government location back to the office? Again, you talked about how you owned up to it, you took care of it and you talked to your boss and everything got straightened out eventually, but what was going through your mind as you were driving back to the office?

Michael Lewis: I felt like I let a lot of people down, so I was embarrassed by it. There was a simple oversight and frankly, I thought that was going to be my last day working for the company. Ultimately that turned out to be a lesson that I took forward with me in all the career moves that I made along the way. That’s part of sales, facing adversity, overcoming challenges that are both within your control and outside of your control. That was within my control but I didn’t dwell on it and I moved forward and persevered.

Fred Diamond: It’s never happened again, right?

Michael Lewis: It has not happened again.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Michael Lewis, general manager of Iron Mountain’s public sector business, for the great insights today and the great content. Michael, before we wrap up here, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe to this podcast?

Michael Lewis: I’m going to maintain the theme that I’ve spoken about today and that is focus on the customer, understand their challenges #1, and #2 try new things. What got you here today to be successful won’t get you where you’re trying to go. The customer landscape, the competition is changing so invariably you have to change and adapt and try new things to be successful in the future.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 146: Iron Mountain Sales Chief Michael Lewis Shares How a Major Failure Early in His Career Led to His Sales Leadership Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 145: Best Practices in Sales to the Government Featuring Leaders from Microsoft, Saleforce, Oracle and MAXIMUS

This is a special episode of the Sales Game Changers Podcast done in partnership with Federal News Network and WTOP Radio in Washington DC.

This episode featured a panel discussion with four leading sales executives in the Federal Market. You can find of them on LinkedIn below.

Christine Barger, General Manager, Microsoft.
Tamara Greenspan, Vice President, Oracle Federal
Joe Markwordt, Area Vice President, Salesforce Federal
Allison Patrick, Vice President, MAXIMUS Federal

My co-host is Jeffrey Wolinsky, WTOP and Federal News Network.

SEGMENT ONE

Fred Diamond: Today’s show brings together sales leaders from the industry’s top suppliers of technology to the Federal Government. We’ll talk about their strategies to impact their government customer’s missions. Jeffrey, why don’t you get us started?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: If you think about the Sales Game Changers podcast, 75% of the folks that have been interviewed on it are selling to the Federal Government. When you look at the opportunity the companies like yours have, there’s 92 billion dollars that the government spends on IT products alone, a lot with companies like yourselves. You think many of you are companies publicly traded, large companies that want sales now and often times when people think of a “sales show”, they think about us focusing on what we do.

The reality is that in the majority of these podcasts people have talked about what the customers do, so I want to start talking about the customer, the Federal Government. We know a lot about it, there’s RFPs and there’s a lot of transparency. There’s also a lot of bureaucracy, there’s a lot of acquisition policy, there’s a lot of different things you have to deal with. I’ll start with Christine coming from one of the largest if not the largest publicly traded company that reports results on a quarterly basis. When you talk about your sales team having to meet numbers but deal with the government process, what is it like in setting up your team to deal with the uniqueness of the Federal Government?

Christine Barger: It’s a great question. Quite frankly, we do struggle with that internally because we are cyclically based and fiscal year based with regards to results as we report to the street. I think it’s really important to make sure that all my sellers always stay focused on the customer, keeping the customer at the center from the mission perspective. The way that we seem to coach our people is to make sure that they stay focused on the mission and help align to customer priorities whether that falls inside or outside the fiscal year, the chips may fall but we always make sure that we keep the customer at the center.

With regards to investments and other things that come in and out of my business from a corporate perspective, it is challenging to make sure that corporate understands the federal priorities and how that business runs and how it is remarkably different to the commercial business and that’s an ever-changing, educational process at least for me in my business. I don’t know if my colleagues feel the same way.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: Tamara, Joe, on that, when you think about in many instances the other part of your company, the commercial side, you might offer incentives or things that make a customer buy now versus just buy at some point. I don’t know that that is something that matches with the government sales process, how do you guys deal with trying to move that sales process along at your speed rather than at the speed of government, if you will?

Joe Markwordt: I really don’t think we can move it along at our speed. I think the point is made that we try to focus on the needs and the mission of the customer, I agree with that 100% but it’s really about working with the customer, understanding their requirements and trying to get to the point where you get an agreement that your product or service is the right product and service and just keep enough pipeline there that you can manage revenue quarter to quarter. It’s a challenge to try to use incentives and things like that to move along that process so most of us have learned that you just have to have a pretty robust pipeline to manage your quarterly and annual revenue.

Tamara Greenspan: I would add that we normally hire folks that have been in a career in a Federal Government both inside and out, and they’re familiar with the process. The need to accurately plan or schedule especially with communications through their management so we can accurately communicate back to the mother ship because that is important. The sale cycle is long, we all know it and we shouldn’t be short-circuiting that by saying something’s going to happen when it’s not because, back to Christine’s original point, it is about the customer, delivering what the customer needs and establishing that long-term relationship with the customer to meet the mission.

Allison Patrick: If I could just add, I think MAXIMUS is a little different on this panel among everyone else because we are a services provider, not a product-based company. While we’re quarterly oriented as well in terms of posting results and publicly traded, your question going full circle was how do we organize a sales team. I would say services, we really are in it for the long haul. We partner and marry up in our sales team to the agencies and have sales representatives who have a real deep understanding of the agency’s mission, their goals, their priorities and I think that’s the only way in the services business to be different and successful because our folks are almost an extension of our customers.

Fred Diamond: You’ve all had great success, decades of success in some cases serving this federal marketplace. You’ve obviously seen changes that have happened over time. What are some of the major changes that you’ve seen since you started in sales over the years till today that have impacted your sales efforts and your team’s sales efforts? Joe, why don’t we start with you?

Joe Markwordt: I think social media has really changed things and I think it’s changed it for the better in a lot of ways. Our customers have vast networks now that they can reach out to to get information on products, information on pricing. When I started in this business many years ago, the consumers weren’t as educated as they are now so they can reach out, they can use their contacts, they can share information across agencies which 10, 15, 20 years ago, that just wasn’t there. I think it’s really good for the federal consumer because they’re much more educated and as long as we focus on their requirements, I think they can make better decisions.

Fred Diamond: What about you, Tamara?

Tamara Greenspan: It flip-flops back and forth over the years. I’ve been at Oracle almost 30 years now and it’s changed. The industry has changed and we’ve transformed ourselves when we go to integrated and that’s what the government is looking for. Now with cloud, I think it’s interesting because we’re going back into more of an integrated solution but we’re also exposing the government to more commercial like practices. With cloud, for the first time it really is going to allow the uptake of that process because a functionality is released on a quarterly basis, this is for most of our product companies and they’re actually going to be able to be more innovative and deliver capability to the services.

Christine Barger: I think I’m most excited about the increasing amount of transparency that’s coming out of the government. What I mean by that specifically is the principles around the PMA and the ability to go ahead and actually consume that information and make it relevant for our sellers to go ahead and provide value back to the government. It’s been amazing for us to go ahead and retool our sellers to think in a different way outside of cloud, outside of product, outside of what we’re going to deliver to them really articulating and translating how our products provide value to them in those three specific areas that they’re looking to transform the government. It does a great job of making sure that we get grounded in the customer’s mission and that we’re aligning our resources to go ahead and attack that to help them be successful.

Then taking that a step further as a business partner to the government to go onto websites like performance.gov and check in with the results of what they’re able to accomplish based on the specific priorities that they set forth. I’m really excited about that and it’s been transformational, at least in my organization, to make sure that we are checking down on the mission every single day with the customers.

Fred Diamond: I want to follow up on that and I’ll ask this question for you, Allison. What are some things that you’re actively doing, that you’re telling your sales team to do to stay in line with the customer’s mission to understand that and to ensure that you truly are a great partner?

Allison Patrick: Absolutely. I think the most monumental change that we’ve seen in the federal market has occurred over the last decade and that’s a decline in budgets year over year. That has certainly forced our sales team to be partnering with their customers in the agencies. The civil servants are doing a magnificent job of doing more with less and that is across the board in the Federal Government. It’s remarkable to see aging technology being shelved and modernization occurring across the board, the use of digital innovation. The sales team is armed with solutions and they’re daily working with their customers on brainstorming, how can in the long-term the customer be modernizing, taking huge systems and scaling in a different way and what are the road maps to get from here to there. I think the partnership model works best certainly in solutions and service delivery, that works well for us.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to follow up with one last point on this topic before I hand it over to Jeffrey to Joe. Again, Tamara is with Oracle, Christine is with Microsoft and Allison is with MAXIMUS. Salesforce is the new kid on the block, essentially. Of course the company is hugely successful, you’ve made a lot of great inroads. What are some of the things that you’re doing now to quickly get in partnership with your government customer?

Joe Markwordt: I have a little mantra on my team is we need to know the customer better than they know themselves. We really need to understand the customer’s business, it’s not about our technology, it’s about the requirements and the business needs of the customer. I’ve really encouraged my teams to be students of their customers. If you know your customer, if you know their business, if you know what their business problems are, it’s a lot easier to communicate with them and to get to a win for the customer.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: When you think about the customer, often times people that aren’t in this industry say “the Federal Government” and it’s all one big thing for them, maybe the common tax payer somewhere in America thinks that. What we know is really there’s thousands of different organizations inside the Federal Government. There’s cabinet level agencies, there’s all kinds of different aspects of this. The marines themselves have 6,000 different titles that people go under, this isn’t like maybe some of your colleagues that might manage the healthcare vertical or the oil and gas industry or the finance vertical. When you think about the business that you run, are you more focused on going deeper inside of one specific agency that you have a track record with or are you more interested in saying, “How can we add logos or flags to our list of clients?”? Joe, do you want to start?

Joe Markwordt: When I hear that question I think it’s really important for everyone to understand that the federal marketplace is not a vertical marketplace, it is many verticals. For example, I manage the healthcare portion of the fed-civ portfolio, we’ve got someone that manages the financial services piece of it, we have another group managing the independents, we have another group, the law enforcement because it is made up of verticals inside of verticals. I’m probably safe to say that most of the large organizations, that’s how they’re organized.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: When you look at MAXIMUS, for example, Allison, B-gov would report that you do a ton of business with health and human services. Are you looking in the sense of health and human services if it by itself would be probably a fortune 10 company? Would you focus your team on, “Let’s grow our business there” or, “Let’s take what we’ve done there and show that to other government agencies”? When you use that strategy, are the government agencies able to see “proof of performance in this one place equals something that we can expect in this other place”?

Allison Patrick: Absolutely. Our capabilities and our quals do translate across the Federal Government. We do a lot of work with health and human services but we also are very strong at the IRS, for instance, and tax modernization in addition to law enforcement agencies, Department of Homeland Security. That being said, we also have teams of experts who understand that what one program may be at the health and human services does not exactly drop into DHS by any means. Every solution has to be tailored to the government’s needs and be a very specific offering which is why I think federal sales is unique and is very complex, and requires teams of subject matter experts that understand the government’s mission.

Fred Diamond: With all the challenges that have happened in this marketplace over the past number of years, there’s been continuing resolutions, shutdowns, budget delays. What keeps you excited about this particular marketplace? What are some of the developments that have inspired you? Tamara, how about you?

Tamara Greenspan: My team and myself focus on the Department of Defense, so we’re basically patriots and we’re committed to the Department of Defense. Many of the folks on my team are former military civil servants and we’re dedicated to the mission. I think you need to be mission focused to have the knowledge. Back to the comments of my colleagues, you have to have the depth of the knowledge to provide solutions to the government and you actually have to understand all the processes. It’s very important that you’re dedicated and entrenched in that environment. That’s what makes us all successful, is because we are dedicated to the mission and wanting to actually help, and we’re actually helping ourselves because we’re all part of this country. People are more mission-focused in our space.

Christine Barger: I think I’m most excited about the uptake in interest in security and the discussions around that and to watch the landscape change across the government about how they look at security, how they define it, how they’re going to embrace it in order to protect this country. It’s been the building block of all our solutions at Microsoft and the willingness to go ahead and engage in those types of deep, meaningful discussions around security has been really enlightening for me and provided and entre for us to talk very deeply and meaningfully about their business and how to propel that forward.

Fred Diamond: When we come back from the break, we’ll ask some specific questions about what your team can do and what your marketing team can do to ensure your company’s success in selling to the Federal Government marketplace. This is the Sales Game Changers podcast, special episode in partnership with Federal News Network.

BREAK

Fred Diamond: Welcome back to a special episode of the award-winning Sales Game Changers podcast in partnership with Federal News Network.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: It’s been said for every Sales Game Changer there’s a marketing game changer at the company that has helped facilitate the process of putting leads in the pipeline. When you look at a federal marketing division, a big part of what the marketers to from the federal government perspective is events and customer interaction. Tamara, I’m going to come to you because Oracle recently held your federal forum. I think you mentioned that 1,600 government guests participated at the Reagan building. When you think about that from a sales perspective, what is your expectation first of the people on your team and how they should be interacting with the customer at a large event like that?

Tamara Greenspan: It was a really great event, it was our 11h, I believe. It was at Downtown DC and it’s a great venue for my sales team to invite their customers and to escort them through the day. We have our big commercial events in California once a year and across the country we have other corporate events which our federal customers do attend, but this event is focused just on the federal government which is exciting for us. The messages and the initiatives are tailored to the federal market space, so it’s a great opportunity for my team to actually escort their customers through the day, to walk them through what’s of interest to them but also to talk about some of their business needs and actually map it to that as they walk through the entire process. Great opportunity for that and to learn more about maybe what a customer needs and how we can help.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: Salesforce does Dreamforce. When you think about who’s responsible for making sure customers get to these events, often times here at Federal News Network WTOP our marketing clients say, “We need you to drive people to these events.” Is your expectations that the salesperson is qualifying who the marketing team drives to those events or vice-versa, that the marketing team drives people there and the salespeople then take it from there? What’s the expectation?

Joe Markwordt: It’s a partnership, it’s both teams working together. One point I wanted to make about this because I think a lot of folks that aren’t familiar with the federal marketplace really don’t understand that especially for technology companies – maybe we’re born in another part of the country, maybe out in California – they want to get into the federal marketplace but all their marketing is designed for commercial companies. The folks that are actually doing federal marketing for technology companies have a challenge to translate the commercial branding and marketing into the federal lexicon.

I know probably for everybody on this panel that grew up in this business, we’ve worked for companies that were just starting to move into the federal marketplace and the marketeers that come to work for the public sector organizations spend a lot of their time taking the commercial branded marketing materials and refashioning them so they resonate with the federal marketplace. For example, Tamara’s talking about marketing events that are targeted to the federal marketplace, when the folks show up, they need to be hearing their language, they need to be hearing their value propositions. It’s a real challenge for the federal marketeers but I think in all of these organizations these folks do a really great job with that. That’s their challenge, though.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I think that’s a great transition to Christine in that if you think about people understanding a product, there’s no product probably that people don’t have an understanding of more than Microsoft. When you look at the way that your salespeople help to market what you want to sell to your customers and/or what the customer might need, how do you translate, “Here’s what Microsoft is saying in the media or the public space, here’s what we should be saying to government”?

Christine Barger: We do spend a lot of time with materials coming out of Redmond and making sure that the relevant pieces of information that need to land with the customer are translated into their language. We do that in a couple of ways and it is a challenge but we found that the most impactful communications are the ones that are translated appropriately so people feel like when they’re showing up in a room or being talked to on a podcast or they’re watching a webcast or whatever it is, that they’re speaking to the actual audience that it’s relevant to. We like to do several different pieces of marketing and it is a partnership with our folks, and we do have a social component of that.

We also have a broad based component of that but we’ve also found that we’re starting to do some more focus groups with 10 to 12 like customers in a room where there are some thread of commonality across a vertical, where folks can come in and actually start to do some groundswell themselves sharing best practices and hearing from their peers about how they’re leveraging technology in order to meet their mission goals. In some senses, from a marketing perspective you don’t think about that as a marketing tool but you actually have folks in a room together sharing best practices, probably the best type of case study and referencing that you can get across the market. It helps them to drive cross-departmental and organizational communication as well.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick follow up to that. We talked about meeting customers in events and Christine, you just talked about bringing customers together in a focus. I want to ask you all about engagement with your customers now, physical engagement. Security has gotten really difficult to get into buildings so the challenge Joe mentioned before about social media where your customer now can go to the internet and get a lot of access to information. I want to talk about how you instruct your teams and yourselves about meeting with your customer. Do you rely on the phone? How do you try to get physical engagement with your customers? Tamara, why don’t we start with you?

Tamara Greenspan: That’s a great question, that’s back to basic sales 101 for my team and I, it’s the personal engagement, creating that relationship because the goal is to have a long standing relationship with your government customer. The government tends to be in place for a long time, they may move from different agencies or services, especially the civil servants, but they’re invested in the government business. Creating that long-term relationships is really only done in person. Going to meetings, basically welcome people in, they do get bothered by all of us sometimes. We have a lot of people on this stage that are trying to call in a customer but if you have a value proposition and you have a reason and you’ve done your homework, they will see you.

Also, I wanted to add another great venue to achieve customer interaction is that some of these trade associations like AFCEA, like ASMC, these associations where they do government to industry exchange, that is a great opportunity for our sales teams to engage with the customer and to hear what their points are. Many times they’ll tell you what they need from industry so your teams can go back and do their homework and then set up a more personal call.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I want to bring Allison into this conversation. You’re sitting with Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce and here you are, MAXIMUS, a massive company but not the consumer brand recognition that those folks might have. When you think about a salesperson on your team or a business development representative trying to get an appointment with a new customer at the government or at one of your prospect agencies, what are you doing to differentiate yourself?

Allison Patrick: MAXIMUS really is different on this panel than my colleagues representing products. We’re a solution services company, so we often times are the consumer of the product vendor’s marketing attempts. We sit literally side by side with our government customers and we are designing the solutions that they need and that incorporate some of the best products that are out there in the market. In terms of events often times we are attending, we’re at the Oracle events, we’re at the Microsoft events or the Salesforce events and we’re actually attending with our customers supporting our customers in designing those solutions.

With regard to personal interaction, most of our business is done inside the agencies. Literally we are seated side by side with our customers, it’s a hand and glove relationship for the most part. Certainly when we’re breaking into new space or new agencies we have the same challenges of how with security, do we get in the buildings and get those relationships going. I would just like to echo Tamara’s conversation about being at the trade associations, so as a board member of the Armed Forces Communication and Electronics Association, AFCEA, board member of the Air Traffic Control Association, it all goes back to how you really embed yourself in the dialogue, in the conversation with your customers and own their mission as if it’s your own.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I’m curious for you as well. You have some younger people on your sales team also, is it easier to bring people to you, can you get through on the phone? What are some of the best strategies that you’re deploying to get through to the customer?

Joe Markwordt: I think it depends on what the relationship is with the customer. We all have very established accounts and customers and getting access to those folks that we’re already in partnership with is relatively straightforward as long as we’re talking about what’s of interest to them. One of the things – and this hasn’t changed in my career in sales – is getting access to the customers about being where the customer is.

For example, if your customer base is at the big FFA show up in Atlantic City every year, you make sure you’re there. If your customers, like for example HIMMS is a huge healthcare conference, a lot of my customers are there so we make sure we’re there for the week. It’s a great opportunity to interface so be where your customer and prospects are, travel in their circles, be a part of their community and you can help bump into them and build relationships with them.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned before one of the main shifts in the marketplace has been the use of social media, so I’m just curious for the panel, how are you using social media to interchange and interact with your customer? What are some ways that you’re seeing, what are some best practices for the audience? Tamara, why don’t we start with you?

Tamara Greenspan: I think social media is used a lot for marketing and also to get some of these events to the trade shows, you see a lot more of associations advertising, showing what they’re going to be discussing, who’s going to be there and again, that drives companies like ours to attend. We want to know who’s going to attend so social media has been great about publicizing that and just the marketing messages. Working in the federal government with procurement you don’t see a lot of that type of activity on there nor do you want to be engaged in that, that’s a hands-off. I don’t recommend my team crossing the line, they need to really step back but to advertise those type of events or interactions or accomplishments is a great way to get those messages out quickly.

Christine Barger: We’re doing a lot with LinkedIn, especially with the newer to workforce people that joined our company, they feel super comfortable with navigating through that tool. We found that if you do your homework, you travel in the circles and then you start to reach out to them proactively with a value proposition that makes sense via LinkedIn we’re using that tool pretty heavily with a great amount of success.

Fred Diamond: Before I turn it back over to Jeffrey, quick survey of the panel, do you LinkedIn to your customers? I’ll start with Christine.

Christine Barger: Yes, absolutely.

Allison Patrick: Absolutely. I have to say that the federal government was maybe slow to adopt, but as we’re seeing the baby boomers begin to retire and the next generation take the reins, I think it’s really exciting. I encourage my team to be social media monsters, there’s no trepidation in promoting the good work that’s being done by our customers and I think the federal government is not often enough applauded for the incredible work that they’re doing. There are so many amazing leaders in the federal government that do the day in and day out of really challenging work. I encourage my team to be social media monsters, to be out there promoting their customers and the good work that’s being done.

Joe Markwordt: Absolutely. LinkedIn in particular and some of the other platforms as well. It’s a way to learn about your customers because most of our customers have social media presence. It’s a great way to learn about them and it’s also a great way to connect with them.

Tamara Greenspan: 100%, I just posted the other day actually because we at Oracle have the privilege of awarding a gunnery sergeant an award for Logistician of the Year at an association and it was an honor. I put it up there and got it out there to show that it was an honor that the association allowed us to be a part of it. It’s an exciting venue and also I’ve been following a lot of more customers on Twitter, they’ve been tweeting out. A lot of the CIO’s will be tweeting out some of their initiatives around cyber and AI and all the new initiatives so it’s neat to see you can actually get up to speed with what they’re doing by following those. Twitter is another one to follow the customers on.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: On the IES Game Changers podcast when we talk about what WTOP and Federal News Network do from a sales perspective it’s three core things that are pretty easy. I want to hear from you which of these things match with your focus for your team. We renew our existing base of customers because people work with us year after year, we grow them through new product offerings that the company has and then we find new customers to bring to that party. When you look at your team, is renew, grow or find the biggest emphasis for what your sales team is working with? Let’s start here with Christine.

Christine Barger: That depends on where the customer is in the life cycle of adoption for our solutions. We tend to look at how we orchestrate and organize our sales force based on the life cycle of what the customer has or doesn’t have or may need or not need. We’ve actually separated our organization out to folks that are what we call cultivate or growers for deployment and we have a whole separate organization now called our Customer Success Organization. Their main mission in life is to make sure that they are using and deploying what they’ve purchased to get value out of it, because we’ve aligned the business objectives to the solution, they’ve now procured the solution and now we need them to get as much value out of it as possible. It depends on the customer environment, but we have folks aligned based on where the customer is in that life cycle at any given time. They’re all super important and I think definitely necessary for success.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: How about at MAXIMUS, Allison?

Allison Patrick: Mostly renew and grow we leave to our delivery teams, they’re on the ground there sitting side by side with the customer and if they’re delivering value then generally there’s a desire to renew that work and that relationship and even continue to grow it. Finding is really what the sales team is all about, it’s looking at the customers that may sit adjacent to where we are currently doing work and we have that good, solid reputation and we’re finding what are the challenges in maybe that adjacent organization and how can we address them.

Fred Diamond: You’re listening to a special episode today of the Sales Game Changers podcast in partnership with Federal News Network. Our guests are Christine Barger, General Manager at Microsoft, Allison Patrick, Senior Vice President of Sales for MAXIMUS, Joe Markwordt, Area Vice President for Salesforce and Tamara Greenspan, Vice President for Oracle. I’m your host, my name is Fred Diamond.

BREAK

Fred Diamond: Tamara and I, when we did our Sales Game Changers podcast, you’ve been doing the same thing for almost three decades now which you have eluded to. You mentioned on the podcast that you’ve grown up with some of your customers, same way you’ve grown in your career in various levels and have achieved the highest levels of sales, you’ve also seen your customers grow. We also talked before about the shrinking nature and the fact that a lot of government employees are retiring and how that’s impacting the federal workforce. Talk about developing relationships today in that type of a marketplace and some of the factors, some of the things that you’re doing to ensure that the relationships are as strong as possible to help you achieve your goals. Tamara, let’s start with you.

Tamara Greenspan: Thank you. One of the things I wanted to talk about that’s been exciting from the federal government is there’s been a focus on talent management and succession planning that I’ve never seen before. It’s exciting that the government is starting to focus on that because you’re correct, as people get older – not us on the panel, though, we’re not getting older. As people get older and they look to retirement, if they haven’t done that, the succession planning and have a plan, some of the major initiatives you worry about because these initiatives in the government can take a long time. From procurement to full deployment to technical refresh, they go on for a long time so that is a worry.

As you mentioned, one example I gave you was early in my sales manager career I had a technical director, he was mad, he threw us out of the office and now he’s in SES leading a major organization with the defense agency at DLA. It’s interesting because at that level they also move around, so you need to also stay in touch with them. They may move to another executive position with an organization, even they’re crossing more DOD and civilian than I’ve ever seen before in the last 5 to 7 years, but they usually will end up  in a place, provide value and also help you guide your career. A lot of these folks have been some of my mentors as I’ve walked through my career and their careers as well. My advice is to always keep in touch with them and to follow their careers because they’re probably going to be in a place that can help you or your colleagues in a different area.

Fred Diamond: You’ve worked at numerous places – Christine and Tamara worked for the most part at the same places – you’ve gone from some great brands along the way as well. How have you been proactive in managing these relationships and especially now where we’re talking about some of the evolution of the relationship?

Joe Markwordt: One of the things that I try to impress upon my sales teams is that we need to focus on the executives in the organization and a lot of us have had relationships with these executives for a while. It’s really the next generation of leaders where I’ve tried to cultivate relationships with two or three layers down in the organization because first of all, these people inform the senior leadership and they will be moving into leadership positions eventually. I’ve seen through my career, to Tamara’s point, folks that have gone the leadership ranks.

If you start with those folks when they’re earlier in their careers, you help them with their careers, you educate them, you provide value to them, folks are going to stick with folks that provide value to them. They’re going to stick with folks that help them to achieve success in their careers. I started in 1984, many of the folks that I originally sold to passed away, I was 24 years old, they were senior folks and I’ve seen two generations of leadership come up through this business. What really impresses me is that each generation is more tech savvy, they’re better building requirement, it’s just amazing to see the talent that is coming in to our customer’s workplaces.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: It’s interesting what you’re talking about, Joe, because earlier in the panel you talked about “be where your customer is”. I think for some of the companies on the panel, it’s easy for the customer to understand what you do. I want to bring this to Allison, often times you hear about government customers giving a 30 minute window for that in-person meeting. You set an in-person meeting at their office, maybe it’s at the Pentagon, maybe it’s at NIH, what have you, and you have 30 minutes. What is your expectation of what you or your business development team is doing in those 30 minutes? Do you have a specific set of outcomes you want to achieve during that time?

Allison Patrick: Absolutely. Basic sales training is think about ahead of time when you’re designing those 30 minutes, how would you measure success? What are the criteria that you would use when you walk out of that engagement to say that was either successful or we didn’t hit the mark? Then my #2 guiding principle is listen. Within the first couple minutes they should know who you are and what the objective of the engagement is and then be quiet [laughs]. The federal government really isn’t interested in you coming in and pitching, that’s not the nature of the sale or the engagement, it’s really about learning. Ask some leading questions about what’s keeping them up at night, what are their challenges, what are they concerned about, what’s their vision. Normally you’ll go way past 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: Christine, for Microsoft there are so many products and so many competitors. Do you have a vision of what that 30 minutes might look like for somebody from Microsoft that gets a new appointment or get account that you’re looking to do business with?

Christine Barger: Absolutely. We’ve focused a significant amount of time since I’ve been in role the last 3 years on retooling the way my sellers are interacting with customers. Everything from preparation and the plethora of tools that we now use in order to prepare, driving the rigor around, preparation calls amongst the team that’s going to go into the appointment to make sure your message is aligned with mine, we know what questions we’re asking, we’re agreed upon on the outcome of what we want to get out of the meeting and then that we’re providing value to the customer in some way, shape or form. We’re coming to them with potential ideas and solutions either from other customers that they may need to consider, what other people are doing from a peer group perspective and come to them with some relevant information. Like you said, if you come with value your meeting will always last longer than 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I want to add to that, one of our cyber-contributors, Sean Kelly, worked at VA as a deputy CISO and he talks about Salesforce’s first interaction with VA. When you think about the 330 thousand people that work with VA, there’s probably not just one person that says, “Yes, let’s spend $10 million with Salesforce.” There’s a lot of influencers to these sales. How does your team, Joe, manage the different influencers not only in the sale but in the entire procurement process?

Joe Markwordt: I think especially in these large agencies that we work in, it’s not like you’re going to one person. There are thousands of influencers across a multitude of opportunities, these are large organizations meaning the VA has 174 hospitals. I think the key is there’s this myth out there that there’s some big difference between selling to large commercial accounts and selling to the government. Both organizations, when you’re going in to do some enterprise transformational sale, you’re going to deal with a lot of people and the key is to make sure that you understand what the requirements, what the hot buns are for whatever that influencer. Technical buyer is going to have a different set of concerns than the economic buyer is going to have, he’s going to have a different set of concerns than the person that’s dealing with security.

Each of these teams are the folks that are dealing with implementation so you have to align and understand what are the folks’ requirements in each of the many different influencers and then it’s a question of how do you pull it all together and get everybody aligned. That’s really a challenge for enterprise selling, is that very point.

Fred Diamond: I want to talk a little bit differently. You’ve given us some great advice about some things that you’ve learned over the years. Because of the changing nature of some of the workforces on your teams, I’m curious about some of the things that you have learned from your sales team. I want to start with Allison, you gave us a great story on your Sales Game Changers podcast about how one of your younger sales team members drew out a picture which basically helped you explain to your customer. I’d like to learn what are you learning from the people who are coming up the ranks on your team.

Allison Patrick: What I have learned in terms of managing a team, we talk a lot about diversity and I think the maturation of how we use that word. For me that means there’s diversity in genders and there’s diversity in races but looking at diversity in everybody’s backgrounds and age demographics, sure gender and race but orientations, geographic locations. For me anyway, I make sure that whenever we have a challenge or we’re designing a solution I bring a real diverse group of diversity of thought around that challenge or issue. That bears out some really fun, innovative, changing dynamics and you do arrive at a more sophisticated solution.

In that example I just made sure I had a couple new college grads and we were churning and grinding away on this really complex engineering diagram. There was – I’ll say this with all due respect – a kid, IV league educated kid sitting next to me and he had an icon drawn on a piece of paper. It was one symbol, he pushed it over to me and he said, “Mrs. Patrick, isn’t that it?” and I went, “Right.” [Laughs] that’s it, in one symbol we communicated very clearly the complexity of what we were trying to do because it was just that simple.

Fred Diamond: Christine, how about you?

Christine Barger: It’s been interesting for me because one of the things we’ve done inside of my organization specifically to federal is we’ve implemented a reverse mentoring program for some of our most senior leaders. People that have been in the workforce for a significant amount of time, we take in many new career hires every year, we take in 10 to 12 and as much as they want the mentoring of the senior leadership team, we reach out to them to get mentoring back. It’s simply amazing just to get you grounded in the language, the messages that you send, how they want to consume different information and data in different ways and it’s been eye-opening for me and helped me grow in tremendous ways to make sure that I’m connected with them.

Let’s take that a step further, those millennials are now going into our customers because I think the statistic is like 60% of the workforce in the federal government is going to be retiring in the next 5 years. Now all of the great things that we learn inside of Microsoft we’re trying to transcend them into different organizations within the government and providing reverse mentoring experiences for them to give the government new ideas on how to attract talent. That’s been really successful for us.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? What’s been going on Salesforce in that regard?

Joe Markwordt: I can say that on my team I obviously have got a much younger team working for me. I’ll be hitting 60 in a year and a half so I’ve been in this business for a long time. The thing that amazes me about the folks in my team, the younger folks is how savvy they are with technology. I think I’m pretty good with technology, I’ve been in technology my entire career but the kind of tools they come up with, “I found this ad on the internet.” “Where’d you come up with that?” “I was out.” It’s just really interesting to see that they’ve been raised with iPhones and social media and they’re so comfortable with it, and I’ve learned a lot from them about how to better connect with my customer by watching the tools that they’re using. I’ve learned a lot from my team about engagement in the 21st century because that’s what they do. That’s who they are and it’s fantastic to watch that.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: We’re coming soon to the end of this. We’d remiss to say we’ve talked so much about the customer – customer in this case referring to the government, but as sales leaders we’re just leaders in general, we have two customers: the people that work on our teams and the clients that we serve. I want to conclude with talking about how you keep the best talents on your teams and best practices as it relates to engaging with the people that work for you and making sure that they feel support both from you but they also see opportunity for advancement and things that they’re interested in having as part of their career. Tamara, can we start with Oracle?

Tamara Greenspan: That’s a great question. At Oracle we’d spend a lot of time investing in our people with a training plan. Back in the early 90’s it was pretty loosey-goosey and now it’s very structured. We have a very structured training plan and we have an ongoing training plan. I think it’s important, people think, “Training is going to be a waste of my time” but when you actually go into this training – and we do it quite often – you actually get something out of it every time. I personally am a big fan, I get some nugget out of a leadership training plan or a complex training plan or some of the other people in the room because usually they’re in classroom styles.

You always get something out of it and I think if you take the time, invest in your people, listen to your people so when you’re in these venues you’ve got people in a room some for two days, listen to what everyone has to say. Everything’s for purpose, if they say something or people want to learn something, actually take action on that. What I’ve learned is do it and take action and move on.

Jeffrey Wolinsky: You make a great point on the listen, that came up multiple times in the panel. I want to go to Christine, you have a hundred people on your team, I believe. Listening to a hundred people A, is hard but B, just because you listen to them doesn’t mean that what they say is actually practical in a Microsoft world. How do you take that listening and make sure that people are heard but it doesn’t mean that you have to do what they say?

Christine Barger: That’s the masterful coaching piece when you’re talking to people and how to maneuver through what’s important to them and what’s the impact to them. Typically when people make suggestions, after you peel back and we have a coaching methodology that we use at Microsoft which is super effective, we call it the Crayon method. Once you use the Crayon method, the initial suggestion that people typically make on the other end comes out to be something completely different and you’re able to coach them along in the meantime. I would just conclude with saying that we’re trying to build a thank you culture in my organization, it’s all about thank you. We try to make sure that we appreciate and extend appreciation on the smallest things all the time, not in a disingenuous way but in a way that makes people feel valued and they want to contribute to the success of the working station

Fred Diamond: I want to thank our guests today and I want to thank my co-host Jeffrey Wolinsky with WTOP News and Fed News Network. Again, our guests were Christine Barger, general manager of Microsoft, Allison Patrick, senior VP of sales for MAXIMUS, Joe Markworkt, area Vice President of sales for Salesforce, Tamara Greenspan, Vice President for Oracle.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 145: Best Practices in Sales to the Government Featuring Leaders from Microsoft, Saleforce, Oracle and MAXIMUS first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 05:30
Name an impactful sales mentor: 09:39
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 12:12
Most important tip: 21:17
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 26:17
Inspiring thought: 28:49

EPISODE 125: Jeff Shen of Red Team Consulting Explains Why Strong Relationships are Still Essential in Rule-Driven Federal Procurement and Sales

JEFF’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Look in your network for a handful of people that you look up to. Start having one-on-one discussions early on because they could help you tremendously in your career. It’s something that might sound easier said than done, but it takes the time and commitment to look up that person, reach out to them and sit down with them and say, “I have three questions I want to ask you.” There could be a lot of value gained and even long-term relationships built that might help that person’s career.”

Jeff Shen is the President and General Manager for Red Team Consulting.

Prior to starting Red Team, he held sales leadership positions at GTSI and EyakTek, an Alaskan native firm.

He also started his career at CSC and he also worked at a dot com.

Find Jeff on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you sell today, tell us about Red Team Consulting and tell us what excites you about that.

Jeff Shen: Primarily what we do is we sell our company’s expertise in helping companies grow in the federal market. What that involves is capture and proposal development services. The way we look at it, it’s really more than just providing resources. We like to think that we understand the federal procurement process, relationship development and how the government buys and makes decisions and we really base our expertise on those particular areas. We do work with over 150 companies a year, both small and large companies and support over 300 proposal submissions a year as well.

Fred Diamond: Jeff, we have listeners to the Sales Game Changers podcast from around the globe and they may not understand some of the uniqueness about the federal government marketplace. Can you summarize what some of the challenges might be for companies as they pursue the federal space?

Jeff Shen: The way I’m going to answer this is it’s what makes it exciting in the market that we’re in. Because of the fact that the government is always changing, modernizing and advancing in certain areas, one of the big hurdles in selling to the government market is the fact that you’re really selling to two distinct groups of customers. The first group are the users or the program managers, they’re the people who execute the day to day actions in running our government.

Then you’re selling to the procurement and contracting officers and these are folks commonly referred to as “the gate keepers”. They’re the contracting officers, contracting specialists who compete and award contracts so for those who sell to the government, you really need to market and influence both sides of those relationships.

Fred Diamond: We’ve had a bunch of people who sell and lead federal teams, selling to the federal government place. There’s laws that you need to follow to be successful. Of course, you want to get the customer to use your technology, your product, your service to enable their mission but there are laws. The Federal Acquisition Regulations – you must be an expert on that.

Jeff Shen: It’s only a thousand pages, something like that.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] so how did you first get into sales as a career?

Jeff Shen: It was really by accident. By background, I have a degree and some training in information technology so I actually started off at CSC as a developer. I coded in COBOL, JCL mainframes and then when the dot com boom came around, I coded in different web languages. To be honest, I was absolutely terrible in coding. Then I thought I would transition over to become a program manager and realized that all the projects I was managing were not meeting deadlines. By default, I realized that I had more of a strength in building relationships even on those projects that I didn’t necessarily deliver on time, I was still building business with these customers because I was able to establish a sense of trust and I was able to find the right people to deliver the work.

From there, I transitioned into sales for those companies that I work with and also jumping into doing sales proposals when the need arose. That was how I first stumbled into sales.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you remember, what are some of the key lessons you learned when you shifted from being a developer to a program manager and now you’re carrying a bag, carrying a quota?

Jeff Shen: It was quite a transition. What I learned was you have to be patient and you have to be persistent. Patient in that you’re not going to convince customers to sign you right away, you have to build the relationship first to establish that trust and you have to be persistent. I’m not just saying not taking no for an answer, but understanding that customers are busy. Whoever you are selling to, they are busy and sometimes you might fall off the radar. It is your job to follow up to make sure that they remember to get back to you on whatever you’re trying to position.

You get used to the no’s, you get used to the ignored phone calls and emails and you just continue to be persistent. I would say one of the other ways or key lessons that I learned is that there’s not one way to sell. You have to adjust how you position your product or service to the customer you’re selling to, taking that time to understand what’s important to them and building that relationship. That’s where it’s paid off over the years in what I’ve learned.

Fred Diamond: Obviously, you founded and now you’re running Red Team Consulting. It’s a company that helps people selling to the government go through some of the procedural things that they need to do. Tell us what you’re an expert in, tell us about your specific area of brilliance.

Jeff Shen: I love that question because I don’t necessarily consider myself brilliant in anything and I think my kids would vouch for that as well. If you were to ask me even 20 years ago what I wanted to do or where I would envision myself, one of them would not be to run a proposal consulting company, to be honest. It’s a necessary step in the entire federal business development life cycle, but I never envisioned myself being in this sort of position. That being said, if I were to ask myself what I consider myself an expert in, I would really say two things: I do consider myself very strong in developing partnerships with people, and trying to understand how to build a relationship with someone, what’s important to them.

I would couple that with my second area is that I feel that I have the ability to get along with anyone, whether you are a college grad, 21, fresh out of school or you’ve been in the industry for over 50 years. Whether you’re a CEO of a Fortune 100 company or an IT developer who is in the back room coding, I feel like I have that ability to establish some common ground with that person and to build that relationship.

Fred Diamond: Is that important in selling to the government, relationships? Help us understand, for the people listening to the podcast around the globe. Again, you mainly help companies get successful in selling to the federal government place. Are relationships important in that marketplace?

Jeff Shen: They are as important as you might imagine even in the commercial market as it is in the federal market. I would classify it as an unspoken truth that the government wants you to abide by the rules and regulations that they’ve established and making sure that when they compete a contract it’s fair, it’s ethical and it abides by those regulations. Buying in general is human nature, it’s subjective and people are going to develop preferences for technologies, for tools, for working with certain companies, certain solutions. It is your job as a salesperson to make that influence positive for that customer. They still have to abide by the rules and regulations, but if you do a good job you will have influenced their evaluation process.

Fred Diamond: You made the shift from developer to program manager to sales in the early part of your career, you worked at GTSI and for the people listening on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast, GTSI was one of the primary resellers of products to the government for 30 somewhat years, probably the largest at its height. You must have had some impactful mentors along the way who helped you make the shift, again from developer, program manager to sales. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?

Jeff Shen: If I may, Fred, I might want to mention more than one, a few different people that have really had an impact in my career in sales. When I look at mentorship, I really look at specific people and what they lend, not necessarily that a mentor can provide everything. To give you a couple of examples, one of my first mentors was when I worked at CSC. His name is Brad Stein, he’s in federal contracting now and Brad was one of my first managers on the delivery side. He taught me a lot about sales, consulting, client management and how to level said expectations with customers.

Another mentor that I had was during the dot com days and his name was Bruce Claybrook. He taught me a lot about relationship development and partnership, and how those partnerships can help you to achieve the sales targets so you’re not just selling on your own.

The final person I want to mention is someone by the name of Jim Dunn who unfortunately is no longer with us, but he taught me a lot about sales management and leadership, and really how to inspire a team to succeed. I’ve picked at different things from each of these different mentors to help me with my career.

Fred Diamond: You must have worked with hundreds of companies with Red Team Consulting. For the people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast, understanding the process that you help companies with is critical to having any success in the federal marketplace. Do people come to you looking for advice and mentorship as well and being successful in the marketplace?

Jeff Shen: All the time. It’s something that we will either do formally for companies or individuals or even informally when they have a specific sales challenge or their companies remain flat over the last several years. What is it that they could be doing better? What do we feel like is their main challenge and how do we help them overcome it? We really have that benefit – that privilege, I would say – of working with all of these different sales leaders and getting to understand them, their customers, their employees. That’s what has energized me over the years, is getting to work in all these different environments with all these different folks.

Fred Diamond: Jeff, you’ve worked with tons of sales leaders, what are two of the biggest sales challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Jeff Shen: There are two and I’m going to preface this answer with the fact that not just me, but we see this in our clients all the time as well. The first one might sound strange, but it’s convincing people not to sell. The #1 challenge is trying to convince people not to sell. I think people are overly eager to position their product, talk about their service, tell why their particular solution is the best solution for a particular customer without taking the time to really understand what is the customer trying to achieve, what are their objectives, what are their goals, what are their pain points and then customizing that particular solution approach around that.

We see this all the time, we’re guilty of it, our clients are sometimes guilty of it and they end up just wanting to pitch something rather than listen. The second is how do we continue to grow and differentiate in a crowded market? Red Team Consulting is not the only company in our industry that does what we do and I would say the same thing with all of our clients that are going after IT contracts, engineering contracts, aerospace contracts. We need to do a better job of continually assessing the direction of where our clients are going, and try and apply that right level of expertise because we want to grow like everyone else. We want to grow smart but also find a way to differentiate what we offer compared to our competitors.

Fred Diamond: I want to go back to the first challenge just to make sure that our audience is clear in what you’re saying. You said, “Convincing people not to sell.” I guess basically what you’re saying is don’t just get a meeting – you’re thrilled to get a meeting, obviously. Everybody wants to meet with the customer and you’re excited, you want to get there and you want to show up and throw up, as we hear people say, and just start listing the features and benefits and the things that you offer.

Basically what you’re saying is the act of restraining yourself and going in as more of a solution provider or as a consultant. Listen to the customer, help understand what their challenges are. It’s interesting, through the Sales Game Changers podcast there have been so many themes that we’ve heard over the 150 somewhat interviews that we’ve done and one of them has been the ability to be a better listener as a key differentiator with a lot of the key top sales people that we’re talking to for the podcast. That’s something you mentioned at the end of that description, so how do you do that? Jeff Shen, how have you been successful at not showing up and, “Hey, customer, prospect, here’s the list of the 5 things that Red Team Consulting can do.” What are some things you’ve done to be more effective at not getting yourself trapped into that?

Jeff Shen: To answer that question in regards to listening, I would like to say that I feel like I’m a very good listener but the area in which I feel like I’m improving and I would say to people in general is that I need to be a better active listener. What I mean by that is obviously you’re asking questions to the customer to understand their challenges and pain points, but I think people tend to have a thought process of, “If I ask this question, I’m going to get ready to ask another question or I’m going to say something else” without actually listening to what they’re trying to explain. It’s one of those things that people and companies need to be better active listeners to truly get to the heart of what is driving this customer’s decision or thought process, or how they might buy. Then be thoughtful in terms of whatever they say, follow it up with something that makes sense.

Fred Diamond: That’s so powerful, you said people are asking questions because they’re asking a question to be ready for the next question or leading questioning, so to speak. A lot of the Sales Game Changers that we’ve interviewed have been very successful in restraining themselves and going in. Of course you want to get sales at the end of the day, that’s why we’re all here but like you said before, you mentioned patience, persistence and partnerships. Eventually you’ll get there if you’re truly providing value and offering things that are going to help the customer achieve their goals.

Jeff Shen: Exactly, it’s a practice. If you talk to any of the sales leaders in our market they’ll probably tell you the same thing. No one’s perfect but it takes so much practice to have that sort of patience, persistence. Then listening and making sure you’re following up, it takes a lot of time. It’s not something you can easily perfect, it’s just something you constantly work at.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about the #1 specific sales success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Jeff Shen: I don’t know if this is embarrassing, Fred, but I struggled with this question because when I hear that question I’m trying to think of what is the biggest win. By dollar amount, maybe by impact for the company or for me individually? I really didn’t have one that stood out. If anything, I get more excited by – I would just call it the regular wins. Regular, everyday wins that we either achieve as a company or the wins that we help our clients achieve. There’s not necessarily one in particular that stands out for me personally.

I will tell you there’s one that has been impactful for me because of a client win, it’s one of our clients that we’ve been supporting for many years now. It’s a company called Long Term Care Partners which, by the way, also New Hampshire. They are a company that essentially runs a benefits portal for the government, they are an enrollment portal where participants use it for dental and vision insurance. Hundreds and thousands of government employees use their portal. They hired us several years ago to win this incumbent contract. They are a subsidiary of John Hancock, but essentially if they don’t win this contract, they’re not business. They didn’t initially hire us, came back to us, brought us some board, we ran their entire proposal and they’ve won it and re-won it again with our support. You find a lot of joy in helping a company to sustain its business from their support. That’s one example I would give.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question making that move into sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself down the road, “You know what? It’s just too hard for me, it’s just not for me”?

Jeff Shen: I’ve never really questioned being in sales. I would tell you probably the only group or only people that have questioned me being in sales are probably my parents. When I made the switch, they said, “Do you want to go unemployed? Why are you making this move?” I’m not a traditional salesperson per se. I’ve never personally questioned being in sales. I would tell you that I have questioned my ability to sell, I’ve even questioned my ability to be a sales leader. Being completely open and frank about it, I would say I don’t feel it as much but during the rise of my sales career I felt that often during the dot com days I would ask myself, “Can I sell? Am I selling enough?”

That was obviously a tumultuous time in the markets. During my last company, EyakTek, I questioned whether I had the chops to run a large sales team and we ended up growing from 10 million to 150 million in 3 years. At Red Team Consulting I question whether we can sustain and grow our business because the livelihood of several people that work here rest on our ability to win and deliver. Fortunately, we’re big enough now where I don’t have as many of those daily concerns but it comes up all the time and I feel like that’s OK. I feel like as salespeople we need to have a constant stress or some of that motivation to push you, so I still feel it sometimes.

Fred Diamond: Jeff, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the junior selling professionals listening to today’s podcast around the globe?

Jeff Shen: I would say there are a couple of things that stand out for those junior salespeople that want to improve their careers. The first thing is you always have to be willing to learn. I think for a lot of people that have sales as a career, you learn about developing relationships, building rapport and all that but you have to take the time to work with the people that are doing the work in your company. If you’re a software company, do you work or get to know the engineers, software developers? If you’re in a services company, are you working with the billable and operational folks and understanding what they go through day to day? Are you spending time reading and learning every day about your industry and trends?

That’s so important and I know you’ve probably heard this before, Fred about the second area where I feel like junior salespeople need to improve. It’s continuing to work harder than your peers. If you are going home every night and opening Netflix and watching the next slate of shows or if on the weekends you are just having a bunch of leisure activities but you’re not checking email, you’re not following up, you’re not doing the next thing on your to-do list, I would argue you’re selling yourself short. You need to continually be learning and working nights, weekends, if you want to get ahead in sales.

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

Jeff Shen: There are a couple of things. To my point earlier in regards to learning, every morning I read at least 10 articles on government contracting trends and I will tell you that they’re not the most exciting articles that are out there but I need to stay ahead and be prepared when those topics come up during discussions with clients. Every morning I’m reading those articles. I also stay in contact with my colleagues in government, I’m taking the time to understand their challenges, their pain points, their projects not only to help our clients but I really want to know what’s on their plate and some of the things that they’re trying to accomplish. It essentially drives what Red Team does day to day, and I listen to my peers all the time, I’m learning from our clients all the time. Even though we’re advising them, I’m getting my nuggets away in terms of what we could do to improve as a company organization as well.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious on that. Your customers, what do they expect from you? Are they experts who are looking for an acceleration of the process or are they looking at you for guidance, expertise on how to be more successful? What is their run the gamut?

Jeff Shen: I would say at the end of the day what they’re looking to do is grow. They’re looking to grow in the federal market, so it comes down to how should we best position ourselves? What are the contract opportunities that are out there that we need to target? How can we be better at responding to RFPs? All these different elements that they’re looking for our support and they come to us because of all the things that I’ve mentioned before. We do stay connected with government, we are experts in the federal procurement process and quite frankly I’d like to think that we are more down to earth and pragmatic than a lot of other folks in our space.

We don’t help everybody, if we find out that the company has unrealistic expectations or if the company hasn’t done the homework or the upfront capture and we don’t think they’re going to win, then we decline the business. That’s something that we learned over the years, you can’t help everybody win so don’t try and just be upfront and honest because in the long run, they will come back to you because you’ve saved them money from not pursuing a low probability of one contract.

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

Jeff Shen: One of the things that we’ve been working on, I would say, the last couple years but we spent a lot of effort this year is really expanding our training. It’s something that is easier said than done and say, “We want to do more training, we want to offer more targeted train to your clients” but it’s a little bit more difficult in practice when you’re an expert in capture and proposal and pricing but now we actually have to put it on paper.

Now we actually have to communicate it in a way where people are excited to come to our training classes on capture and proposal development. It’s allowed me to stay sharp and making sure that rethinking our ideas, “Is this the best way to win business? Is there another way?” Then trying it over and over again until we’ve perfected what is the best way to train our clients in what we do.

Fred Diamond: Jeff, sales is hard, we talked about this before. Especially the marketplace that you serve, people don’t return your calls or your emails, hopefully your customers do but government customers, they don’t have to. There’s so many rules that they need to follow, obviously that’s why you have a very successful business. Why have you continued? Again, you made the shift from development into program management into sales. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Jeff Shen: That’s a great question, I will start off by saying you have to understand that rejection is part of the game. Some people will lose motivation or they’ll feel dejected if they’re not closing all the time, not winning new business but rejection is just part of the game and you have to embrace that as a starting point, understanding that no is just part of the process. For me, the reason why I stay in sales is because I love building new relationships and that’s just honest, I love meeting new people.

Whether you as a company or client decide to work with Red Team or not is almost to me somewhat irrelevant. If I’ve gotten to know you and you’ve gotten to know me and we become friendly as industry colleagues, what have you, I consider that a win because down the road, these companies or these individuals might introduce us to other ones and say, “That company, Red Team, you could trust those guys.” I love that, two years, three years from now we’ll have a company come to us and say, “We spoke briefly for 10 minutes two years ago but I had such a good conversation that I mentioned you to this other company that wants to hire you.” That to me is exciting and it shows that I’m not overselling, I’m not trying to sell, I’m just trying to build relationships and we’ll see where that goes.

Fred Diamond: One term that comes up not infrequently over the course of the Sales Game Changers podcast is trusted advisor. Do you consider yourself to be a trusted advisor? Is that something you’re familiar with and is that a way that you try to position yourself in the firm?

Jeff Shen: I would look at myself – yes, that term comes up a lot – as just a trusted person. Honestly, it’s that you can trust me that I will give you the most honest and candid feedback in regards to a contract you’re pursuing, a decision you’re considering, and you can just trust me to be that person to give you that candid advice. When people want advice I will give it but I’m just someone who holds these relationships so closely that I will never try to steer anyone wrong, even if it means not working with Red Team. I’d rather give you the upfront and honest feedback.

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

Jeff Shen: I would say one final thought, and if this is the one thing that you walk away with from this entire discussion, I will consider this a win. I would say look in your network, reach out to your network, it could be LinkedIn or any other means by which you have this network of folks and look up a handful of people that you look up to. They could be outside of your reach, they could be the president of a company, they could be someone in another industry and try to have some one on one discussions with those people. It doesn’t need to be a long term mentorship that you’re looking for, but maybe you have specific questions that you’d want to ask that person.

Start having those one on one discussions because they could help you tremendously in your career. It’s something that might sound easier said than done, but it takes the time and commitment to look up that person, reach out to them and sit down with them and say, “I have three questions I want to ask you.” Just like you’re talking to me, Fred, I think there could be a lot of value gained and even long term relationships built that might help that person’s career.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 125: Jeff Shen of Red Team Consulting Explains Why Strong Relationships are Still Essential in Rule-Driven Federal Procurement and Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 05:54
Name an impactful sales mentor: 11:25
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 15:29
Most important tip: 22:09
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 25:05
Inspiring thought: 26:33

EPISODE 102: Lookout Federal Sales Exec Bob Stevens Tells How His Competitor at Cisco Became His Mentor and Helped Him Grow as a Leader

BOB’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “I’ll say that a lot of salespeople think, “I can’t ask for the purchase order” or “I can’t ask the difficult questions like do you have the money, do you have the time, what is the timeline?” Frankly, these are not difficult questions. These are questions that our customers expect us to ask. I would say don’t ever be afraid to ask the question, because if you don’t ask the question the answer’s always no.”

Bob Stevens is the Vice President for Public Sector for Lookout Federal Systems.

Prior to coming to Lookout he was at Symantec, Brocade and Juniper Networks.

Find Bob on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little about yourself.

Bob Stevens: Happy to be here. A little bit about myself: I started my career actually in air force, first stationed at Andrew’s air force space which is how I ended up in the Washington DC area. I got lucky enough to have a really good job in the air force, it was basically computer science before anybody knew what computer science really was. Got out of the air force back in 1991 and started out as an engineer but quickly realized that the money was really in sales, not in engineering although the engineers do most of the work and I don’t think that’s changed, really, today. They still continue to do most of the work, sales guys get all the credit.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely true.

Bob Stevens: Works out well for them. I’ve now been in sales for almost 30 years, been a sales leader for about 28 years, 28 of those 30 years which I don’t tell many people so I guess everyone’s going to know now. I only carried a bag for about two years of my sales career but apparently somebody saw something in me that had them promoting me to the management side of things.

Fred Diamond: That’s very good, and again the Sales Game Changers podcast has listeners all around the globe so I’m excited to help you get your story out there. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Lookout Federal Systems? Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Bob Stevens: Lookout is a mobile security company, that is 100% of our focus. We are securing Android and IOS devices, both smartphones and pads. The company’s been around for about 10 years. I enjoy working at Lookout for a couple of reasons, one is the technology – and this is probably going back to my engineering days – the technology is really interesting, it works and it works well and we have the opportunity to protect people’s information and protect people in the government.

One of the things that’s always excited me about sales is not just getting the purchase order – of course, that’s fun for all salespeople – but also the opportunity to help with the mission and I think what we offer potentially helps people secure their mobile device so they can be used in the mission in order to protect the US.

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, again you’ve had most of your career in public sector?

Bob Stevens: All of my career in public sector, yes.

Fred Diamond: We have people listening around the globe who may not know the public sector marketplace, and a lot of the people we’ve interviewed on the Sales Game Changers podcast have devoted their career to serving the federal customer. What is it about the federal or public sector customer that has appealed to you to devote your career to it?

Bob Stevens: I mentioned it a little bit, it’s really about the mission for me. I enjoy helping DOD perform their mission, also homeland security, good, important mission for all of us. Really for me it’s about helping them accomplish their mission in a more effective manner and if you look at some of the companies that I’ve worked at, we’ve been able to provide technology that helps them do just that.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned that you were originally an engineer and then you quickly moved into sales. Did someone notice something about you or did you just happen to notice that the sales guys were having more fun? Tell us a little bit about how you first got into sales as a career.

Bob Stevens: It’s probably a combination of both things you talked about. One, I knew the sales guys were making more money than me and that was kind of appealing but there was a person who’s name is Will McKenney who’s actually an ex colonel in the Air Force, probably the craziest pilot you would have met in your life but he saved a lot of lives during Vietnam, so a really great guy. He noticed some skills of mine like developing relationships and being able to get things done, doing what I say when I say, things like that. He said, “I think you ought to try this sales thing” and he actually made me a sales engineer to being with which is basically an engineer that has a quota. It was a nice transition from engineering into the true bag carrying salesperson.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the lessons that you learned that have stuck with you till today when you made that shift from engineering to sales?

Bob Stevens: It’s probably a few things. One is don’t be stubborn, here’s an example of what I’m talking about there: I was negotiating a contract with a customer and the vice president that I worked for at the time asked me how we were doing and I said, “Hey, we’re stuck on this one thing” and she said, “Bob, is that thing really important to you? Is that thing really that important that you need to dig your heels in and stall this entire contract?” and I said, “You know what? It’s not. We should probably just move on.” We did, we closed the contract and everybody was happy, so that’s one thing.

Try not to be stubborn. Another thing is to develop a strategy. I think salespeople today often just try to wing it and the days of winging it are gone, and I say that because I used to be a person that would wing it as well but I just don’t think you can do that anymore, nobody has time for winging it. You’ve got to lay out your plan and you have to execute on the plan. Those that do I think are a lot more accomplished. The other thing I would say is use all available resources. Another thing that drives me crazy today is that you find too many account managers or salespeople that want to try and go alone and then they can’t figure out why they weren’t able to accomplish what their objective was.

You’ve got to involve all possible resources, and what I tell them is you’ll hear a lot of sales managers saying, “Hey, you need to have ten meetings a week.” I think ten meetings a week is a fine goal, but it doesn’t have to be with customers. It could be with your peers in the industry because you can learn a lot from your peers. It can be from partners because you can learn a lot from the partners. It could be other OEM vendors, it doesn’t have to be customer focused all the time. These are all resources that you have available to you and are willing to help, you need to take advantage of it.

Fred Diamond: I like the point that you just made about not winging it and how the days of winging it are over. I think a large part of that and curiously in your thoughts is because the customer has much more control now with the internet and resources available to the customer. It used to be that the sales rep was basically a walking brochure 15, 20, 25 years ago. Now the customer’s coming with more information accessible to them via social market, social media if you will and just generally the internet.

Bob Stevens: You’re absolutely right. The customers are a lot more educated now than they used to be, which is why the role of the sales person has had to evolve or change over time. I think there’s still a lot of people out there that haven’t figured that out. They do understand the technology before you walk in the door, they understand your competitor before you walk in the door, they understand the differentiators. They understand your buying or selling cycle meaning I know that he’s going to come to me at the end of the quarter and offer me a sweet deal if I just wait it out. You’ve got to know all that in order to change all that.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. Let’s talk a little more about you – Bob Stevens, tell us what you are an expert in. Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Bob Stevens: I hope there’s a couple things. One would be putting together a strategy. I think I’m able to digest information about a particular opportunity very quickly, think a little farther out than most salespeople and help drive towards the end goal. I also think that I’ve been doing federal for so long I think I’m pretty versed at federal and understanding their buying cycles, what drives them, the different value that you can bring, things of that nature.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious on your thoughts, how has federal changed? 28 years ago you had your first job in sales. How has the market changed in federal specifically?

Bob Stevens: I think back when I first started, relationships were unbelievably important and most of the federal customers would take the time to develop a relationship with the vendors they worked for and with. Today, they don’t have the time for that. There’s too many of them for them to be able to develop relationships so I think relationships are still very important but they’re probably not as important as they used to be. I think what’s important today is bringing value to your customer. What can you bring them, whether information or technology that helps them get their job done or makes their job easier? And I think if you understand that, you have an easier job at trying to sell.

Fred Diamond: I think you’re 100% right on target. Great salespeople have always been value creators but even more so – and this comes across on the Sales Game Changers podcast all the time – the need for the sales professional to be successful means that they need to drive significant value more than ever before.

Bob Stevens: That’s true. If you’re not bringing value to the customer then they’re not going to see you. That’s the bottom line. I hear all too often a salesperson saying, “I’ve emailed and I called and I don’t ever hear back from them.” Well, I wonder what your message is, because it’s something that’s not resonating. You might want to think about changing it in order to resonate and provide that value that they need.

Fred Diamond: interesting, that’s very powerful. You mentioned a couple mentors before, I’ve heard that you’re also someone who likes to mentor as well but tell us a little bit about a specific, impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career.
Bob Stevens: I’m going to give you two. One is his name was Jim Lawson – probably not supposed to use names, but that’s OK, I love Jim.

Fred Diamond: You’re more than welcome to use names.

Bob Stevens: He’s retired now, but Jim was the first sales guy I supported at a company called NET back in the day and Jim was just probably one of the best sales guys I’ve ever met. He could develop the relationship, I learned to bring the value part from Jim, he took the time to understand the customer situation and needs before he went and tried to talk to them about any technology that he had. He put in the hours, most salespeople don’t show up when an install was occurring, Jim was always there. I learned a lot from Jim, he was truly a great mentor for me.

The second one hopefully is a little interesting to you, this guy by the name of Wayne Fullerton. Back when I was at Juniper, Wayne was my competitor, he worked at Cisco and I had heard a lot about Wayne through friends and I had heard that he was at a point in his career where he enjoyed mentoring people and he probably did it throughout his career but I reached out to Wayne when he was my competitor and we got together and I asked him if he would help mentor me and he accepted.

We had a lot of great conversations about leadership, he provided me with a lot of great books to read about leadership and still to this day Wayne and I have maintained contact although he’s I think semi-retired now, but he was a great friend and a great mentor.

Fred Diamond: I want to make sure I heard you properly – he was a competitor.

Bob Stevens: That’s correct.

Fred Diamond: You knew him as a competitor, you picked up the phone one day and said, “Wayne, I’m working for your competitor, I’d like you to be my mentor” and he said yes.

Bob Stevens: That is correct, yes. I know it’s kind of hard to believe, but that’s exactly what happened.

Fred Diamond: We hear a lot about the term of co-opetition. Did you help each other? I guess my question really is what drove him to want to mentor. Obviously he was probably from a large company, I guess, he probably had a whole bunch of younger people who he could have mentored. What was attractive to him to spend time with you, Bob Stevens, to mentor you?

Bob Stevens: That’s a great question. Maybe it’s just that somebody had the courage to actually ask him to do that as a competitor, I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to gain some additional knowledge about his competitor at the particular time. We didn’t really talk about business much, it was really about leadership and skills and situations and how to act in a certain situation, things of that nature.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious – give us an example. Something you remember that Wayne had passed on to you, if you can.

Bob Stevens: It’s been a while since those conversations occurred, it was back in 2007. I just remember it was a couple of situations that I was struggling with from a leadership perspective on how to work with particular salespeople and he was able to coach me through those situations so that we had a positive outcome in the end.

Fred Diamond: That is actually a great example and I appreciate you sharing that with us. That is probably the first time that someone had mentioned that a competitor had been a mentor. We’ve had some situations where a customer had been a mentor, Sam McKenna who was one of our previous podcasts was selling into the legal marketplace for the first time and she approached one of her customers who helped her understand the legal marketplace. Thank you very much for the share, I appreciate that. Bob, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Bob Stevens: Hopefully I’m going to give you a couple that others don’t. I’m sure everybody talks about hiring and retention, I don’t really have that issue. I’m fortunate enough to have a very loyal following so that the people that I bring in have been with me for a long time and I hope will continue to be with me for a long time. I don’t really see that one.

One of the bigger ones I see is getting account managers, salespeople to think more than 30, 60, 90. What I see a lot is that they’re so focused on the business that they have to close this particular quarter that they forget that they’ve got to build a pipeline so that there’s business to close the next quarter or the quarter after that. I think we’ve trained them, frankly, to think this way so now we have to un-train them and try and get them to think more long term. It’s only going to benefit them in the end, really.

The second thing – and we talked a little bit about this earlier – is getting salespeople to map out strategies. It’s almost like it’s a dying art or an art that needs to be re-trained. I’m sure that most of them will do something in their head or have something in their head but having them put it in a document so that it can be followed and you can hold people accountable and ensure that it’s executed properly is a challenge today. It probably goes back to time again, how much time do you want me to spend doing this? Well, I want you to spend as much time as it takes because you’ll find that it’s more effective in the end.

Fred Diamond: Bob, 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.

Bob Stevens: There’s been a few in my career as you can’t do 30 years without having a few, but I’m going to go back to probably the first large one which is a program called GIG-BE when I was at Juniper. GIG-BE was basically building an IP backbone for DOD. They had had a TDM network – a time division multiplexing, probably most people don’t even know what that means anymore so I’m dating myself. They wanted to build an IP network, I was competing against Cisco so I had a great competitor, they’re always fun to compete against. It’s a huge win, was over $50 million in the first year which basically put Juniper Federal on the map.

The reason I say that it was probably the best was the team effort that was required to win that deal. There is no one person that could say, “Hey, I won GIG-BE.” There was a team of probably 40 people at the company and our partners that were helping to ensure that we won that opportunity. I’m sure that the competition will tell you today, “Hey, you bought it with discount.” We didn’t. We put together I think a great strategy, we worked with the key people in the customer base, we provided insane value and in the end we won, so it was a great accomplishment.

Fred Diamond: Bob, you’ve had a great career in sales. You’ve given us a lot of things to think about. The word strategy keeps coming up, so maybe we’ll touch up on that on the second half of the podcast. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you started out as an engineer. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “You know what? It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Bob Stevens: Probably every day like every good sales leader will tell you – well, I hope anyway. [Laughs] it is a challenging career, there’s no doubt about that. There’s certain stigmatisms that go along with it, but in the end it’s fun and I’ll tell you why it’s fun: #1 I like to win and you get to win a lot. Yeah, you get a lot of rejection but you can get a lot of great wins and of course winning is fun. A lot of people will tell you that sales people are coin-operated and for the most part they kind of are, we do this for the money but I would argue that before the money comes success and I think we’re all driven by success. We want to win and sales can provide you that opportunity, that feeling, that euphoric feeling on a pretty regular basis.

Fred Diamond: Especially when you work for some of the great brands and get some achievements and you get to see the impact of your work. The sales that you’re providing are to help the customer achieve their mission which is helping all of us as citizens so the work that you’re doing, it’s not just like you’re selling pens or something – no disrespect to pen sellers – but you’re helping critical organizations achieve critical missions.

Bob Stevens: That’s true. Again, as I said earlier, that’s a large part of the reason that I do this. Of course I love getting purchase orders but at the end of the day if I can go home and say, “I may have helped save some lives today” I think that’s a great thing.

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

Bob Stevens: I will say that there’s one thing that no one can take away from you and that’s your hustle. You should never be out-hustled because that’s 100% up to you, 100% in your control. Think about that every day, what can I do to ensure that I’m not being out-hustled? Because as a salesperson there’s a lot of things that are just outside of your control. That’s one thing that is completely within your control and you should think about it every single day. Don’t get out-hustled.

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

Bob Stevens: I like to surround myself with people that are smarter than I am, which isn’t very hard, but we have a federal advisory board here that’s made up of a bunch of great people. We’ve got General Hawkins who used to be the DISA commander and General Napper and Kirsten Todd and several others so I like to spend as much time with them pumping them for information. I also like to spend a lot of time with our CEO who is also a accomplished, he’s been at five different companies and been very successful in his career so I can learn a lot from him. I try and hang out with people that I know are better than me.

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

Bob Stevens: That’s a good question. It’s probably a couple of things. One is like I mentioned, it’s spending time with all the folks that are on the advisory board and others in the industry. I like to do a lot of reading about leadership and how to hone my skills and as an example I was at your event last weekend, there was a book that was mentioned that I want to go out and get and read because it sounded pretty cool.

One of the things I like to do is collaborate a lot, so I like to ask all the time, “How could we do better?” or “How could I do better?” Unfortunately because I’m in the position that I’m in, the answer that you get a lot is, “You did great.” I don’t want to hear I did great, I want to hear how can we be better so collaboration is very important to me in trying to grow my career and my skills.

Fred Diamond: You’ve led some great teams, you’ve worked for some great brands in technology but sales is hard. We talked before about how the customer used to be all about relationships, now the customer doesn’t have time to develop relationships. Sales reps don’t want to be strategic, they don’t have the time for that, if you will. What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Bob Stevens: As a sales manager, it’s the success of the team. I really enjoy their accomplishments and helping them celebrate their accomplishments. As we mentioned earlier, sales is a different, tough career. You have to stop and understand the little things along the way and I don’t know that a lot of salespeople do that, generally they’re like, “Hey, when I get the purchase order that’s when I’m successful.”

How many steps did it take to get there, 10, 15, 20? All of those a little accomplishments. You need to take time to celebrate those, so for me what drives me every day is the success of the team, helping them grow, helping them accomplish their objectives and helping the customer meet their mission. We talked about that earlier.

Fred Diamond: Bob, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe to today’s podcast?

Bob Stevens: I’ll say that a lot of salespeople think, “I can’t ask for the purchase order” or “I can’t ask the difficult questions like do you have the money, do you have the time, what is the timeline?” Frankly, these are not difficult questions. These are questions that our customers expect us to ask. Again, they’re better educated than they used to be. If you don’t ask, are they scratching their heads saying, “Who am I really working with, here?” I would say don’t ever be afraid to ask the question, because if you don’t ask the question the answer’s always no.

Fred Diamond: That is a great point. One of our past guests, Steve Richard with ExecVision, they’ve surveyed millions of phone calls with sales professionals and I’ve always asked him what is the one thing you noticed in the millions of calls you evaluate? And he always says it’s the same thing, they don’t ask for the next step. They don’t take them to schedule an appointment whatever it might be, they leave the conversation without the next step in place.

Bob Stevens: I’ve seen sales people that have been selling for 20, 30 years that’ll leave a meeting with the same thing. There’s no list of actions, there’s no next steps, there’s always got to be some sort of action or some sort of next step. Otherwise, you’re never going to close the business.

Fred Diamond: And your customer wants to be driven, they want you to provide them. Especially you mentioned the need for more value, the customer wants you to bring solutions to them. They want you to help them achieve their mission, give us something we don’t know. If you leave without taking it to the next level, you’re definitely doing a disservice to your customer.

Bob Stevens: You are, as we talked about earlier, out of sight, out of mind. They’re so busy they’re onto the next thing so there has to be some sort of next step. There has to be follow up.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 102: Lookout Federal Sales Exec Bob Stevens Shares How His Competitor at Cisco Became His Mentor and Helped Him Grow as a Leader first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 036: Business Development Leader Raza Latif of Government Services Provider NuAxis Innovations Says Eliminating Fear of Chaos Will Lead to Sales Success

RAZA’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “I think the most important thing is to not be afraid of chaos. The value that we bring as sales people to our organizations is really that ability, that courage to deal with chaos. Know that when you’re out there you’re not always going to have a linear response such as “I have done this, this, this and therefore, I will get that, that, that.” Be able to deal with chaos and take it head on. And, in fact, use it to your advantage.”

Raza Latif serves as the President of NuAxis Innovations, an information technology services firm that supports a variety of major federal government clients.

With over 20 years of experience in the ever changing IT industry, he leads NuAxis’s Business Development and Service Delivery Teams maintaining a sharp focus on creating and delivering IT solutions for the Federal Government that maximize alignment of IT and mission objective.

Raza holds a Master of Science in the Management of Information Technology from the University of Virginia, UVA, The McIntire School of Commerce and a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering from the GIK Institute of Engineering.

Find Raza on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Raza, why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and fill in some of the blanks.

Raza Latif: Thanks, Fred. The one thing that always surprises me these days is the 20 years, I cannot believe that I’ve been working for 20 years. I hope I have something to show for it. I remember the time when I used to look at job openings that required 3 years of experience and I used to think “Well, this is for old people.”

Fred Diamond: Very good. Just a little disclosure to the people listening on today’s podcast. I’ve actually done some work with NuAxis over the years and you guys have really taken this firm to be a substantial player in the government IT space and I’m really excited to hear a little more of the evolution of that. Raza, tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Raza Latif: We are in the business of selling IT services to the federal government. It’s a pretty typical sales model. Our main business is to identify needs within the federal government for IT services and then pursue that work and win that work.

I think the most exciting thing about it is that it’s a very structured environment. For some people, this may not be very attractive but it’s a very well-defined market. I think I find that very exciting because it’s something that is very merit-based and if you check all the boxes, you do the hard work that you’re supposed to do there’s always something at the end of the rainbow.

Fred Diamond: Do you consider yourself to be a sales guy? Do you consider yourself to be a BD professional at this point of your career?

Raza Latif: I would consider myself a sales guy, specially, because I’m one of those people who, depending on the meeting, will call myself an engineer or a sales guy or operations guy and I think that’s a good mark of a sales guy, who can call themselves whatever they need to be called. My primary job is to develop business, is to grow the company and do whatever it takes, whatever role it presents in front of me I jump at it.

Fred Diamond: You have a Master’s of Science in Management of Information Technology, and your Bachelor degree was in Electronic Engineering. How’d you first get into sales? How did you make that shift?

Raza Latif: For my first job, I was fresh out of college having finished my Engineering degree. I was very interested or at least wanted to show interest in configuring CISCO routers and working on servers and all of that. I was working for the first internet service provider, actually, in Pakistan where I grew up. The CEO, it was a smaller company at that time which grew later on, said, “You know, we have enough engineers who can configure CISCO routers but we do not have enough engineers who can put together PowerPoint presentations, who can do pricing models, who can engage with people, communicate with them.”

And, I had been a debater at college and school, and I was in a band so I wasn’t afraid of meeting people. I guess, that’s kind of how I started and I never looked back. I thought that I was very, very excited when that opportunity presented itself and this was, as I said, 20 years ago and I have not looked back.

Fred Diamond: How easy or difficult was it to make that shift?

Raza Latif: I don’t think there was any shift. I think in the technology world the lines are very blurred. At the end of the day, if you’re in a commercial organization, your job is to sell solutions and when you’re selling solutions you have to have the technical background that you need. I think it actually got even more exciting because you actually saw results of what all the work that you did in terms of putting a solution together, putting a design together. Maybe it happened so early in my life that I don’t even remember whether there was a shift in gears. It came pretty naturally to me, the role that was presented to me.

Fred Diamond: What were some of the lessons that you learned from some of the first jobs that you had in sales?

Raza Latif: I think the most important lesson that I have learned and I still try to stick by is that you must have the ability to listen. As clichéd as it may sound, it’s very hard to do. You should be able to really respond to what your market is looking for.

I think the second most important thing is that every pitch that you make has to be really grounded in value. You have to be offering a certain amount of value and I’m not talking about a better price. You should have a very clear value proposition. That’s how I hold myself accountable individually in my organization as well as when I engage with my customers that ‘why would this person engage with me, what is it that I have to offer’.

Fred Diamond: Value is one of the key themes that comes time and time again through the various sales game changers podcast that we do. You sell to the government customer. Tell us a little bit more about what some of the value is that you can bring to the government customer that thousands of other IT service providers won’t do and how do you communicate that?

Raza Latif: My experience has shown me that Government Managers are basically risk managers. Government Managers will have a title such as Program Manager, Portfolio Manager or IT Program Manager. I think at the end of the day the management on the federal side is tasked with managing risks and our value proposition is really a design around that.

It’s not around technology. It’s not around servers. It’s not around products. I think our value proposition is that “We understand your risks. We have managed those risks effectively in other places and, therefore, we would like to engage with you and help you get to where you want to get to.” I think, for me, the core value that any government contracting business should be providing to the government is management of risk.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Raza Latif:  At one time, have been flirting with the idea of building products. (A while ago) there were three of us (in the company) and we asked the same question. “What is one thing that we can really give a two and a half hour or two-hour session on or a lecture on?” I wanted to say product design, product development, market segmentation but it kept coming back to government contracting.

It’s an opportunity that presented itself to us, to me individually and we started learning about it and it’s almost like every deal, every contract that we win we learn something new. Sometimes we learn something contrary to what we had learned the last time so it’s a pretty interesting area.

Fred Diamond: Very good. You’ve had a success growing NuAxis into a very, very successful, well-regarded government contractor, a company that provides valuable IT and related services to various government customers. Who was an impactful sales career mentor to you and how specifically did they impact your career?

Raza Latif: I think I would say there are two. One was my first boss and one is my last boss. The first boss taught me the value of being efficient. Fresh out of college I was very focused on “Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ll take care of this over the weekend. Oh, I’ll work tonight.” And, he would tell me that “Listen, you know, it’s not about working hard, it’s about working smart.” And now, it’s a pretty common theme but for me and fresh out of college, I think it was a very interesting worldview that I kind of took it upon myself and for all the people out there, I mean you do have to put in after hour work. You do have to put in weekend but if that becomes your standard routine then there’s something that needs to be looked at. I think that’s one very impactful thing.

My last boss is Imran Akram, the CEO of NuAxis. I’ve been working with him for the last 17, 18 years and I think his impact has been that you really lead through shared values. You really lead through or motivate someone by shared worldview. I think he’s provided me a lot of respect and a lot of autonomy. Obviously, holding me accountable to certain outputs and I think that’s been really, really impactful, having that kind of a structure. I cannot imagine doing anything else or being in any other kind of an environment. Sometimes mentoring is about really letting people shine and letting them figure their course out and then you standing behind them, making sure that if they fall they’ll catch you. That’s the kind of mentor I have had.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious too since Nu Axis has had a great deal of success. Do people come to you looking for advice and mentorship?

Raza Latif: I think in the general course of things, yes, people do talk to me and I do talk, try to kind of tell them about my experiences. I think also outside the company there are companies that are smaller, that have approached me and I really like talking to them and explaining to them and once again there’s no formula here. All I want to share with them is kind of I did this and this is what happened so you better not do this or I did this and the good outcome happened and therefore you should be looking at doing that. That’s kind of been my approach.

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

Raza Latif: Sales is pretty much the frontlines so there’s a lot of chaos that you have to deal with. Like, you price a proposal a certain way and it’s really successful and then you price it the same way thinking that “Oh, this is how I won the last one” and then you get taken to task. I think the chaos that really uncertainty which is to be expected. If you want to be a sales leader, you have to be really very comfortable with chaos. You have to be very, very comfortable with chaos, but then the payoffs are high as well, right, so you do the same thing and you get a good, good return on it and it’s euphoric.

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

Raza Latif: I think it was recently, we won a contract with the Department of Labor to do their entire Enterprise Service Desk. It’s a totally new requirement where we consolidated all of their department, all of their bureaus except for one under one contract. It was a very, very challenging requirement and from a sales standpoint, this was a time when I had even bigger self-doubts because we were able to win contracts within Department of Interior and we had a strategic goal that we want to get more contracts outside of the Department of Interior.

I was coming to a point where we had done enough proposals where I had started questioning myself that. “Listen, you know what Raza, you are not cutout for this. You understand Interior, you are not capable of getting us out of, out to another agency.”

Then this deal happened. It’s a long story, but I changed my profile picture on LinkedIn, and somebody I know commented on it who hadn’t been in touch with for 3 years. She said, “Oh, that’s a nice picture” and so we got back in touch. And then, I met her at an industry day for the same contract. We had no background on the opportunity. When the RFP came out, she was able to connect me with a company that really helped us out and the rest is history.

I remember, I was actually at an industry event at USPTO and it was a very stressful event because there was like four, five hundred people there and as I was walking in I got a call that we won the Department of Labor contract and I walked into the meeting and I remember I was stopping myself from saying “Hi, I’m Raza and we just won the Department of Labor Enterprise Service Desk.” It was one of the many times when I felt really, really, I felt the wind beneath my wings kind of a thing.

Fred Diamond: For a lot of the sales game changers listening on today’s podcast, a lot of government contractors get well-established within a particular government agency and it’s extremely difficult to move onto the next one and it’s kind of interesting, you talking about some of the fortuitous things that happened along the way to eventually get to the point where you guys had won this contract with the Department of Labor. Should we tell everybody to go change their LinkedIn profile picture?

Raza Latif: No. (laughs). There’s a certain amount of things this taught me. First, you have to be out in the marketplace. Right? You have to be out there. You have to be connecting with people. You never know which interaction is going to lead to something.

Second, as they say, ‘luck only favors the prepared’. Just the fact that I got this connection to get me to this company, if I did not have my brilliant team with me, if I did not have all the capabilities that we have developed to win that contract, I mean that fortuitous thing would not have led to anything.

I think one of the things that’s really, really going for us is that we have a brilliant, brilliant group of people that really, really steps up in terms of intelligence, in terms of hard work and in fact, when I meet somebody and I do. For lunch, I meet a business development person and when they tell me the story that, “You remember that company, you know, they were like five people and I took them to five hundred people?” I always take that as grain of salt because there’s not a single person on this planet who can do any kind of growth with just their brilliance. I mean if they’re out there I need to find one of them and replace me.

Fred Diamond: Right, one of the keywords in government contracting, of course, is past performance. You need to do the work. Raza, you’ve had a very successful career in sales. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself “It’s just too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Raza Latif: Never.

Fred Diamond: Okay.

Raza Latif: I have never had that feeling and I think a reason for that is that I have literally cornered myself into that role and that’s all I know how to do. I mean that’s kind of my thing. I think there’s a certain amount of commitment that is needed for any profession, any line, any role. My friends a few years ago moved to California and they call us and they said, “When are you guys moving to San Francisco?” and I said, “You know what, I can’t even move to Philly because the work that I do is only in Washington, D.C.” This can sound limiting also but it’s also very empowering that I do sales in federal government IT services and that’s kind of who I am. Until, if there’s any some kind of foundational shift, tectonic level shift in my life, that’s all I’m going to be doing.

Fred Diamond: Raza, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Raza Latif: I think the most important thing is to not be afraid of chaos. The value that we bring as sales people to our organizations is really that ability, that courage to deal with chaos. Know that when you’re out there you’re not going to have some kind of a structured like a linear response that “I have done this, this, this and therefore, I will get that, that, that.” I think that is the most important thing, to really be able to deal with chaos and take it head on. And, in fact, use it to your advantage.

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

Raza Latif: I try to surround myself with a lot of smart people. It’s a very precarious kind of approach but my approach is that whoever is joining my team should be able to do what I used to do better than me. It takes a certain amount of being comfortable in your skin. I accept that or I’m bragging about that because at the end of the day if you are, so we have a lot of, I don’t know if I should say this but we have a lot of young people in the company, right? I think the idea there is that I was young once and I think I had a lot of fresh ideas. I still do.

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

Raza Latif: I’ve started volunteering for moderating panels at different events. I want to be attending at least two to three events every morning. There’s a lot of industry events going on in our area. I recently was a moderator at a Wharton Innovation Summit on government contracting and acquisitions. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I feel like that being there on the circuit as a speaker, as a moderator really helps you, first, build relationships and, two, learn about what is going because in order to be a moderator or speaker you have to prepare and that preparation always leads to benefit in your professional life.

Fred Diamond: Sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your e-mails. Why have you continued as a sales game changer? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Raza Latif: That win, I think it’s that hunting analogy. You stalk your prey for days and weeks and then, finally, when you win, when you close, when you get a new contract, that keeps getting you back. I think that’s the only thing. When you’re down and it happens, 99% of the time you’re dealing with a lot of difficult situations but that’s kind of what brings you back up because, you know what, if this thing closes then and that’s going to motivate you and you have to be thinking about that all the time. And, obviously, you have to have a few of those wins to know what a win feels like so that you pursue it with a lot of courage and determination.

Fred Diamond: For a lot of the sales game changers who aren’t familiar with winning government business, winning government business is not easy. There’s a lot of things along the way, not just competition but dealing with the government. It’s a difficult and challenging process. There’s things you need to know. You need to understand laws. There’s something, FYI, sales game changers out there called the Federal Acquisition Regulations. There’s a whole bunch of things you need to know. Let alone, Raza had mention before, creating value for your customer. You need to understand what is the mission of the government customer you’re dealing with and what are some of the challenges and obstacles that are going to get thrown in your way and what is going on in that agency and how can you continue to provide value.

Why don’t you give us one final thought to share with the sales game changers listening today to inspire them to take their careers to the next level?

Raza Latif: Since we are talking to a community of fellow sales people so I can say this, be very proud of the fact that you’re a sales person because you are actually really having the most amount of impact in an organization. For any commercial organization, the sales function is the most important function. You could be building amazing products. You could be delivering services very, very effectively but if you’re not growing, if you’re not getting new customers you’re atrophied.

What you’re doing is extremely important. It’s extremely hard which is why the rewards are high so do not shy away from the challenges and keep dreaming about those wins that will come your way.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 036: Business Development Leader Raza Latif of Government Services Provider NuAxis Innovations Says Eliminating Fear of Chaos Will Lead to Sales Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.