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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Fred Diamond on December 8, 2020. It featured sales leaders Brian Egenrieder from SnycDog and Sean Brophy from Alteryx.]

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Learn more about Sean here. Learn more about Brian here.

EPISODE 301: Sales Leaders Sean Brophy and Brian Egenrieder List Ways to Humanize Yourself as a Sales Leader to Help Your Customers and Team Members Achieve More

SEAN’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Celebrate micro victories. On a daily basis, it could be hitting your target for calls, your number of connects, or it could be a campaign that just generated some number of responses. In sales it’s too easy for us to look at the scoreboard as the definition of success and I think that now more than ever there’s a lot of things that we can be celebrating and it’s incumbent on us as leaders to acknowledge and to celebrate those things on a daily basis.”

BRIAN’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Set realistic goals. We’re back to work in a different way so don’t let COVID or work-from-home and all the changes be your excuse. How can I be better than everybody else that is using this as an excuse? Let it drive you to create that value, create that ability to be able to connect because you’re going to strive to do a little bit better than the people you’re competing against.”

Fred Diamond: We’ve got Brian Egenrieder and you might remember his name, he was a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast about a year and a half ago. We have Sean Brophy here today from Alteryx, of course Brian from SyncDog. Gentlemen, it’s great to see you today. Sean, let’s get started with you, tell us how you’re doing and tell us a little bit about Alteryx, and tell us how things are going for your business today. It’s December 9th so we’re 9 months into this new world. How are things going? How’s your sales team going? Just get us introduced.

Sean Brophy: I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you, thanks for having me on today. Alteryx provides an analytics process automation platform, what we have the ability to do is converge pillars of data science, business intelligence, analytics into a single cohesive platform that allows users of all skill sets to take advantage of an analytic application or platform, make data-driven decisions faster. Current environment, we’re doing well, call it the ‘now norm’ which is trying to figure out how you bring sellers of various skill sets – inside sales and outside sales – into a single environment that sets everybody up for success.

One of the things that we’ve realized is those two cohorts of sellers have the ability to actually learn from one another right now so you have a lot of folks that have historically been inside salespeople giving some of the field sales suggestions, tips, tricks on how to actually run a business from the inside. Vice-versa, you’ve got some of the field sellers that are taking an opportunity to help the inside sales team manage their day, their time and all of the things that go into an environment where you typically work from home which is kind of foreign to most of those folks. That being said, business is going great. We definitely have seen an emergence in organizations popping their head up and interested now that the initial work-from-home shock is something of the past. Moving forward looking at, “How do I wrap my arms around a digital transformation initiative and start positioning myself for success?” We’re doing as good as we can and looking forward to putting 2020 behind us and looking ahead at 2021.

Fred Diamond: After I give Brian a chance to introduce himself and answer the same question, I want to follow up on something you just said. You said that the historically outside sales professionals were learning from the inside and the inside people were learning from the outside. After Brian gets a chance to introduce himself, let’s go to that question. I’m curious what both sides have learned from each other.

Brian, it’s good to see you. Again, you were a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast when we were doing all of our shows just audio and I went to your office and spent some time with you. Your company was also a finalist for an Institute for Excellence in Sales Sales Excellence Award a couple years ago so it’s good to see you again. I also recalled as we were dialing that you’re also a Penn State guy.

Brian Egenrieder: We are.

Fred Diamond: Happy to have you here on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what SyncDog does and same thing, how are things going for you and your sales efforts right now?

Brian Egenrieder: Thanks for having me again, Fred, it’s always a joy to join these sessions because it’s great hearing from likeminded people and people in similar roles struggling with the same thing. It’s been a very interesting 2020 for SyncDog who, if anybody recalls listening to the last one, we’re all about mobile security – enabling people to do more on mobile devices but making sure the data that they’re accessing, the apps that they’re utilizing are highly secure and you’re not at risk of losing any of that data with people being so remote these days. It’s been really interesting for us because of the rapid dynamic of change in where people are working, how they’re going about their day, how they’re going about working with clients and getting their work done. The beginning of the year was a little slow because I think everybody really panicked and looked at their network desktops, laptops, things like that. Second half in the year we’ve been busier than we ever have been because I think now people are moving out towards the mobile devices because they’re realizing that’s probably where more of the work’s being done than anywhere else. Tie in that with anybody on the federal side of things that’s listening, some BC, MMC mandates that are coming out which ties directly in with some of the encryption of the data on mobile devices.

We’re in this almost perfect storm which – I hate to say taking advantage of a bad situation, but that’s what security is. It’s always when bad things happen, suddenly we become more prevalent. It’s been a very interesting year, as Sean was alluding to but it’s funny because I was going to say almost the exact same thing. That dynamic around both inside and outside teaching each other and learning how to adapt to this new world, it has been interesting. I’m a career outside sales guy and then I was moved into management now in the CRO role at SyncDog but you’ve got to go back to you roots, you’ve got to go back to the basics of the smile and dial and just continuous outreach, putting in the reminders and following up. As we all know, people are not picking up phones anymore, you’ve got to come to them with information and things that are going to help them and you have to do it several times before they’ll ever call you back or pick up that phone. You’ve got to be delivering value and that’s the hard part for a lot of people unless you’ve got one of those household names of a company you work for. You’ve got to give people a reason to respond to an email or respond to a call because no one’s picking up anymore and very few people are reading all their email so you’ve got to be creative but most importantly bring that value. It’s a new dynamic for everybody.

Fred Diamond: Sean, back to the original question that we were just talking about. What have your outside people learned from the inside people and what have the inside people learned? One quick thing I want to comment on, everybody’s now an “inside sales rep”, the main difference that we’ve found is that every customer for the most part is also inside as well. Even if you were inside, you could be talking to people at their office, at the factory, at the arena, in the government facility, wherever it might be. Now even though the roads are very crowded for some reason – I don’t know where people are going – most people, even our customers are either shut down in some cases or they’re working remotely as well. Sean, I’m just curious, what are some of the things that your outside people learned from inside and what are some of the things that your inside have learned from outside?

Sean Brophy: Good question. The inside folks teaching the outside sellers, inside salespeople traditionally have a plethora of tools that they might use to manage and run campaigns, they’ve got their cold calling scripts locked and loaded so there’s a variety of things that they historically do and they’ve done well because that’s the world they’ve lived in. What I’ve seen take place on our team is those folks are providing the outside sellers with visibility into how to actually leverage those tools to maximize their time, get in front of more people more frequently and just manage an end-to-end or integrated campaign. Just the utilization of those tools and something as simple as LinkedIn, quite honestly, in the specifics of how to get maximum value out of LinkedIn is an area where the inside team is now helping the outside sellers.

The reverse of that, the outside team, you typically have work-from-home environment so you’re either at home on an airplane or in front of customers so prioritization, time management, the ability to disconnect, those are things that an outside seller has traditionally done well because you’re always on, technically. What I’ve found is that a lot of the inside sellers now moving to a home office which is completely foreign to them struggle in those three categories. Prioritizing your day, making sure that you’re taking breaks for yourself, making sure that the off button is actually something that you utilize, it’s okay to say no to certain things, those are all types of things that an outside salesperson is now helping the inside team grapple with. Just a couple quick things.

Fred Diamond: We have questions coming in from the audience. First question comes in from Joe and Joe is in the DC region. Joe says, “How are you guys coaching your sales professionals right now, particularly your younger sales professionals?” That’s an interesting question, that’s something that’s come up a bunch recently is the whole notion of coaching. Brian, let’s go first with you. First of all, do you see yourself as a sales leader, as a coach? How has your coaching been going since the pandemic kicked in and how are you coaching your people right now? Then same question for you, Sean, after Brian.

Brian Egenrieder: I might turn this over to Sean pretty quickly because we are pretty early stage so I’m currently surrounding myself by pretty senior salespeople, so I don’t have a lot of first/second job type of people on my team currently. What is different here is we are a global company for as small as we are and we’re a good bit of channel focus as well so that’s where a lot of my coaching is. Going back to something that Sean said, it’s educating on how to work that system where literally I had a call at 7:30 yesterday morning and 10:30 at night because I’m working with Southeast Asia, that’s 13 hours ahead right now and there’s only one or two hours of the day that really coincide, 7 and 8 am typically. Those are the difficulties and that’s where a lot of the coaching is, is how to manage your time, do things right, understand how the channel works and how to work with a customer who has customers that are going to be interested in what you’re doing. Then really try to again, evangelize in a way that you’re delivering value, that people understand your differentials in order to want to bring that on board and expand that market. That’s where we are, this might be a little more geared towards Sean.

Fred Diamond: Sean, tell us about coaching today and Brian, I want to follow up with you. We actually have a quick question here that comes in from Nicholas and Nicholas asks, “How are you handling global sales?” So let’s move onto that after we get Sean’s answer here about the coaching question.

Sean Brophy: I’ll use coaching and training synonymously. I think it starts with the basics as Brian had just mentioned, I’m a big believer in self-discipline, accountability, goal setting and then routine. I think those key things right now more than ever are critical to a seller’s success because there’s plenty of distractions and there’s plenty opportunities to actually not lift your head up, so if you start thinking about coaching and training from that perspective, that’s a great lead in into some of the specifics. One of the things that’s actually a timely question that we just completed at Alteryx specific in the public sector team was about a 15 week session where we broke down the sale cycle from prospecting all the way through post-sale enablement and adoption.

Then what we ended up doing was a 45 minute session each week led by a sales leader and/or participation from somebody on the sales team. That included both junior and senior sellers so there was an environment that was created which supported learning across the board because when you start thinking about a sale cycle whether you’re a senior seller that can close like no other, you may have a struggle in this new world with prospecting or vice-versa if you’re an inside salesperson that doesn’t get a lot of at-bats and now closing is your gap. What we’ve found is this 15 week session was a way to start filling those gaps, get greater participation from the team.

What I’ll follow that up with is more online video coaching as well, specifically training. One minute video clip on how you debunk this or you how face this type of question, how you position this type of product and then you dive into the weekly one-on-one sessions where it’s peeling the onion back around those specific topics that you didn’t dive into some of the deals as well. I think the culmination of all of those things hopefully creates a rounded individual and creates a cohesive team environment.

Fred Diamond: Brian, a question comes in from Nick, you mentioned global sales. Obviously we’re not traveling, getting on planes, those types of things but how has the pandemic specifically affected your interaction with customers outside of the United States in places like Asia?

Brian Egenrieder: It’s had a tremendous impact because a lot of the various global cultures believe in handshakes, they believe seeing somebody eye-to-eye or looking at them across the table so that’s been rough. I’m one of those guys that was putting 150, 200 thousand miles on a plane each year doing some of these efforts and it’s impacted us negatively. There are several deals that should have been done by now or that it took much longer to close because we’re a US-based company trying to sell in foreign markets and they’re just seeing us in these types of scenarios, a Zoom call at best or a GoToMeeting. That’s been tough but it’s also what has transitioned us mostly to a channel type of a sale in that the resellers and the service providers whom our product just happens to be a natural fit or those types of scenarios are anxious to understand newer technologies and bring new advanced tools into their tool set. Leveraging them, educating them who are much more open to working with US-based companies and then having them be the face-to-face type of scenarios or at least the trusted adviser to their local markets has helped tremendously. That not looking somebody in the eye has had an impact and first couple months I really enjoyed not getting on a plane but I’m missing it now. It’s time to get back and doing this so hopefully there’s a light at the end of that tunnel.

Fred Diamond: We have another question here that comes in from Dina and she’s based up in New York City, she’s been a frequent attendee of our webinars – good to see you, Dina. Her question is, “How about mental health right now and how are you coaching your sales professionals during what’s going to be a challenging time?” That’s interesting, over the 9 months we’ve all gone through a lot, we talked about parents being teachers and then camp counselors and all these types of things but right now we’re in December, we’re going to be going into the dark grey months and most people are at home. Mental health has been coming up on almost every webinar that we’ve done, again, we’re doing a webinar every single day for sales leaders and their teams. Let’s talk about that for a little bit. Sean, I guess you have some younger people on your team who maybe they’re in an apartment by themselves or they’ve been in an apartment with the same two people for the last 9 months or they’re back at their parent’s home in the garage or in the basement. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the things that you’re doing to ensure that people stay as healthy as possible. Sean, why don’t you take it first and then Brian, if you have something to contribute, that’d be great too.

Sean Brophy: I’ve seen this on my team as well which is what we thought was going to be something potentially short-lived has turned out to be a lot longer. Those virtual happy hours everybody came on strong and now they’ve weaned off a little bit and people are looking for new and creative ways to get in front of one another and/or their customers. With my team, constant check-in. Whether you’re front line, second line leader, I think constant check-in is paramount. You lead to the individual and historically what that meant was training, coaching and all of that. What I found is that at the individual level now it’s being a little bit more empathetic and trying to understand what makes either somebody tick a certain way or where and how anxiety is manifested. I think that requires more of a personal connection so the recommendation from a sales leader perspective is actually taking the time to get to know your team, what causes anxiety or what are they into?

One of the things that I’m a big believer in is permission to say no and permission to shut down and that doesn’t necessarily mean if your hours are 8 to 5 or 9 to 5, that means it’s like a 30 minute break mid-day to do what you need to do, maybe later on in the day as well. I’ve got two kids at home so down side of being a fifth grade math teacher right now is I also get to have lunch with them. I make it a point as often as I possibly can to get a lunch break and sit down with my kids which has never happened before. Time at the gym, I think going back to what makes people tick and the gym may not be for everybody. I’m a fan of music so that’s a 30 minute session just throwing the headphones and listening to some music and go on a walk.

I think there’s a variety of things that we can be doing, I think it comes with giving your team permission and then also having trust. I think the tendency is for people not to do those things only because their perception is, “If I’m not doing those things, then my sales leader, my manager doesn’t think I’m working.” All of this is predicated on some level of trust and then from there it’s the check-in. That’s what I’ve recommended and what I’ve seen.

Fred Diamond: Brian, Sean just mentioned getting to know your people better and you mentioned you have mostly seasoned people on your team. For people who are listening to today’s webinar or listening as a Sales Game Changers podcast, some people have reached out to us and said, “It’s still hard for me to ask my sales leader for time because I want to be seen that I’m working all the time.” What would be your advice on how maybe someone who’s more junior in their career or even seasoned should be or can be communicating to their sales leadership that maybe something’s going on? They need a day or maybe there’s a reason why that deal didn’t close because of all the added factors that have happened over the last 9 months.

Brian Egenrieder: Sean touched on it really well, it’s trust and empathy, two of the big things I always coach on and lead with. In this case I think trust is the biggest thing and what I try to do as a sales leader is let my team know, “I’m going to run an errand, I’ll be out for the next half an hour, 45 minutes. Unfortunately, my kids are now taking calculus so I’m no longer their math teacher but to that same thing, “I’m going to shut down here for a little bit to do things.” In a sense, it’s the mental break by example so they know it’s okay to come back to me and say those things. To the more junior rep, if you have confidence that you’re putting in the time, that you’re putting in the effort, lead with that. “I just cranked out 15, 20 calls” or whatever the metrics are that are key. “I worked extra hard to do that but I need to go and run this errand or take this break or hit the gym.” I always say that when things go quiet with your team, there’s something wrong. When somebody’s hiding from you, the numbers aren’t in, there’s something personal and things like that so create that open dialogue and understand the reason most  of us are in sales is for that flexibility of schedule.

The successful people are the ones that take advantage of it but also put in the extra time every time they have the chance to do it. If you can start understanding or going that route where you’re confident that you’re putting the effort in, then it’s easy to build trust with the person you’re reporting to and ask for those breaks because they’ll see it too.

Sean Brophy: I’ll add a little bit to that building exactly where Brian was, I’ll use the word vulnerability. As a sales leader, as a sales manager there’s a tendency to be stoic and to show no weakness, building upon the, “I’m taking 30 minutes to go run an errand” or actually being a little transparent in your own struggles, I think that’s needed and it’s actually wanted by the sales team. It humanizes you as a leader and it actually is another way to give permission to your sales folks that, “It’s okay if you’re feeling X, Y, Z because I’m feeling it as well.”

Fred Diamond: We were talking about empathy and for people who listen to our webinars and the Sales Game Changers podcast every day, there’s a number of words that have continued to come up and one was empathy. Empathy comes up all the time, let’s shift the conversation right now to your customer conversations. Not every industry has recovered, Sean, you’re the VP of Public Sector for Alteryx and it’s been a fortuitous marketplace to serve for a whole bunch of reasons. We all did tremendous work getting the government into the cloud real quickly years ahead of schedule and of course the government buying season kicked in three months after the pandemic kicked in which was great for a lot of companies. Let’s talk about the kinds of conversations you’re encouraging your team to have with your customers right now. Should they be empathetic? Should you be getting to know your customers better right now or do you want to get right to business? Brian mentioned before it’s very difficult to get people on the phone. If that’s true, talk a little bit about some of the conversations and how you’re encouraging your team to have them. Sean, why don’t you go first? Then Brian, I’m interested in your thoughts as well.

Sean Brophy: I used “humanize” in the last topic and I think that is front and center for this as well along with empathetic and the same tone that we’ve been talking about. I think the opportunity to be a human first is a great opportunity for anybody that’s selling right now. As Brian mentioned earlier, our customers are getting inundated with phone calls and emails, they’re struggling with the same things that we’re struggling with. We’re in a high-tech space so we’re already set up for an at-home environment, they struggled for a while just even getting to that point so understanding some of the struggles that they’re going through and putting yourself in their shoes being empathetic is certainly top of mind and I think it’s okay to actually have a human, non-sales, non-product conversation with your prospects. To your point, Fred, this is a perfect opportunity to actually get to know them better and figure out what makes your customer tick as well.

Going back to the earlier point that Brian made as well is value is top of mind. If I can be empathetic, if I can humanize the process and I can actually add value, that’s a triple threat. Those are the things that I’m seeing take hold within our sales team.

Fred Diamond: Brian, how about you? Conversations with customers right now. How are you directing your team? How are they telling you the conversations are going and how are you looking to shift them if need be?

Brian Egenrieder: I think we hit it pretty well, the key is to have a genuine interest in knowing. I always say empathy can’t be faked or it’s very difficult to fake it so you’ve got to want to know how your customers are doing and you start with how the business is, then you ask how they’re doing personally and you humanize it. I think Sean put a great label on it but you have to have the interest in really knowing. Knowing is going to open doors for you because when you’re hearing some of the struggles, that’s where adding value is easier to do, when you understand where their pain points are both as a company and individuals, you can start saying, “Let me help here.”

Maybe they’re in financial struggles and you can give them a couple extra months of a license or whatever your buying metrics and pricing metrics allow you to do. When you open your ears and listen to what they’re asking for, if you’re able to help them you’re going to form a tighter bond, you’re going to create a tighter customer and it’s going to ultimately help you down the road. The key to all this is have a very short-term focus on understanding and a very long-term focus on solving and somehow combining the two to create an environment where you’re building that trust with the customer and you’re going to form a tighter bond.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here from Marty, “How have you guys changed as sales leaders?” Again, you’re both seasoned sales leaders, you’ve been leading teams, leading organizations for decades right now. You probably had your processes prior to March 15th and then of course everything changed. Talk a little bit about how you’ve changed for the better or other things that you’ve had to do to be a more effective sales leader during this challenging time. Brian, why don’t you go first and then Sean? How have you both changed as sales leaders over the last 9 months?

Brian Egenrieder: I’m not going to the drycleaner nearly as much, that’s a good one [laughs]. It’s funny how a lot of that has changed. For me, it’s getting back to my inside sales roots where I started my career and I always tell everybody that I ever mentor into going to sales is start with inside sales, it’s the hardest aspect of the job. It’s pulling yourself back and trying to figure out how to connect, how to add value, how to engage with somebody over the phone and email which I’m assuming everybody’s seeing what we’re seeing where there’s this lack of interest in reading emails and picking up the phone. Our jobs are getting exponentially harder just by the nature of technology and then you throw COVID on top of it. It’s migrated me much more towards the marketing and the PR and the blogs, all that type of stuff that as a CRO fall under my realm as well. We’re putting a much heavier emphasis on just delivering content, putting stuff out there, having SyncDog become a thought leader in all this and then we deliver that as reps and a team. It’s really changed that dynamic a good bit but it’s a hat that I always wore but didn’t have expertise in. It’s really helped me develop it as I’ve been forced to move into that.

Fred Diamond: Sean, how about you? How have you changed as a sales leader over the last couple of months?

Sean Brophy: I consider myself historically pretty transparent with everybody in my sales organization, I’d say that is probably even more so now. I think transparency allows individuals that might be anxious about any given scenario to maybe calm some of the anxiety. Being overly transparent where you’re able to has been important for me, explaining the why, I know that a lot of times decisions get made and passed down and the why is sometimes missing. In the spirit of calming anxiety and bringing individuals into the fold, the why behind certain decisions and/or direction we’re going I think has helped also calm some of the nerves that we’ve seen. Those are the two big ones for me and the other is trying to really establish a sales community inside the team, things that we’ve done historically but we’re putting an exclamation point on that right now.

Any chance we can get to force a bond between inside sellers, outside sellers, sales leaders is something that we’re absolutely doubling down on. Those will be things that when the current situation dissolves or we get into the ‘new norm’, the ‘now norm’, whatever we want to call it, those will be things that I take with me because I think that they’re critically important. If I was to survey my sales team, I think that they found value in those as well.

Fred Diamond: We like to end every Sales Game Changers podcast with an action item, something that our listeners should do today. I’m just curious, what are your expectations right now for your sales team? I know, Brian, you mentioned most of your sales professionals are a little more senior, Sean, it sounds like you have a mix. Brian, why don’t you go first as we come down towards the end of the webinar? What are your expectations for your sales team right now? We’re doing today’s recording in the beginning of December, what are you expecting from them today?

Brian Egenrieder: To be candid, I think it’s just grind through it and understand that nobody’s happy with the situation, we’re all dealing with these crazy nuances and what’s interesting is what Sean pointed out. Leverage some of the things that we’ve been forced to learn and change and adapt to, create a bigger portfolio or create a bigger value set or tool set of what you can bring to the table once this clears out. My kids are in high school and this whole situation of learning from home is going to prepare them so well for college, I think they’re too young to be forced to learn it but it’s going to help them eventually and I think the same is true in all of our professional lives. We’re being forced to adapt but there are some aspects of this that are going to change us all for the better. Keep your head down, keep up with the grind, learn where you can and take advantage of some of the things you’re being forced to adapt to and learn from and leverage it later.

Fred Diamond: Brian, before I come back to you with your final action, Sean, how about you? What are your expectations? It sounds like you have a more diverse sales organization with junior and senior people. What are your expectations from them?

Sean Brophy: To echo some of the comments that Brian made, I think everybody needs to be a learner, I think that everybody needs to embrace and lean in on having a growth mindset. Coming down a level, I mentioned some of these words earlier which is develop a routine, adhere to some form of self-discipline and set goals for yourself. I think it’s easy to blame the current environment and/or lack of the customer picking up a phone or responding to an email. It’s easy to fall back on those things so as I said, I’m a believer in accountability and goal setting and I think if you do nothing else, hold yourself accountable to those goals and coming up a level, become a learner. What are you doing to hone your craft every single day? Now’s a perfect time to actually double down on some of those things.

Fred Diamond: Brian, final action step. People like to end the webinars with an idea or something actionable they can do today – don’t be broad, be specific- what should our listeners do today after 2 o’clock in the afternoon or wherever they’re listening, our tens of thousands of listeners. Give us an action step to wrap up today.

Brian Egenrieder: Sean stole my thunder a little bit on this one in that I think it is set realistic goals. The world is back to work, we’re back to work in a different way so setting realistic goals is don’t let this become a crutch, don’t let COVID or this work-from-home and all the changes be your excuse. Let it be a motivation of, “How can I be better than everybody else that is using this as an excuse?” Let it drive you to create that value, create that ability to be able to connect because you’re going to strive to do a little bit better than the people you’re competing against. There’s no money in taking second place in what we do for a living so you’ve got to be the best. It’s not just being better, you’ve got to be the best and if you use this as a crutch, you’ll never be the best.

Fred Diamond: Sean, bring us home here. What’s an action step, something our listeners should do now to take their sales career to the next level?

Sean Brophy: I’ve started celebrating micro victories. I think on a daily basis there’s an opportunity to celebrate a micro victory, that doesn’t necessarily need to be a sales win, it could be hitting your target for calls, your number of connects, it could be a campaign that just generated some number of responses, it could be developing a new message, whatever it might be. I think that in sales it’s too easy for us to look at the scoreboard as the definition of success and I think that now more than ever there’s a lot of things that we can be celebrating and it’s incumbent on us as leaders to take an opportunity to acknowledge and to celebrate those things on a daily basis. Again, whatever that might be in your given organization, it’s really easy to do. In a lot of instances, that person that’s having a hard day, an “attaboy” or, “attagirl” at the end of the day is enough to make them come back.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 301: Sales Leaders Sean Brophy and Brian Egenrieder List Ways to Humanize Yourself as a Sales Leader to Help Your Customers and Team Members Achieve More first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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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 209: FireEye Public Sector Sales Chief Craig Mueller Says by Focusing on These Specific Skills, You Will Be on the Path to Elite Sales Performance

CRAIG’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Find a coach, find a mentor, find someone that you emulate and understand how they’re being successful and to help you write down goals that you want to achieve. Doing these things will ensure that you will establish and then stay on the right path when times get tough.”

When we interviewed Craig Mueller, he was the VP of Federal Sales at FireEye. He has since been promoted to VP of Public Sector.

Prior to coming to FireEye he held sales leadership positions at Cisco and BMC Software.

He was listed as a mentor of past podcast guest Paul Skurpski with XTIVIA

Craig can be found on LinkedIn here.

Craig Mueller: I’ve lived down in the DC area for over 25 years, I’m married to my lovely wife, Lynne, have two wonderful children, Jack and Nicole, an eighth grade boy, fifth grade girl. I spend most of my time running them from one place to the other for practices and activities and all sorts of stuff which doesn’t allow me to do as much snowboarding as I would really like, but it’s all good and thanks for having me.

Fred Diamond: I’m excited to have you on the show. What are the sports that your kids do that you shuttle them back and forth to?

Craig Mueller: Soccer, basketball, lacrosse, football, rugby, a lot of different things.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about FireEye, we’ve interviewed some other Sales Game Changers who’ve been in the cyber space so tell us a little more about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Craig Mueller: FireEye is a company in the cyber-security space, we’re about a hundred million dollar plus company here in our federal business and the government customers invest in FireEye for three core things: to prevent a security impact, to reduce the impact of a security incident and to improve the productivity and efficiency of those personnel working in that defensive cyber-security operations perspective. What excites me most about the role and the opportunity we have in FireEye are a few things. The first one is the relationship that we have with our customers. I’ve been here 6 years and the visibility that FireEye has into the state of the threat, we pride ourselves in knowing more about the adversary than anyone else. To be working hand in glove with those customers on that important cyber mission really excites me.

The equities we have as a company to help solve those customer challenges are second to none and what really excites me is the sales team that we put together here locally. I’ve got two super first-line sales leaders that run our civilian and DODIC business. They’ve just assembled, in my opinion, the best sales organization, the salespeople that I’ve seen, that I’ve had the pleasure to work with because they’re very customer-centric, they’re mission focused and they recognize that if we can help solve customer problems together, the commissions and the reasons that we’re in sales will follow. I’m just very excited about the opportunity in front of us.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about you, tell us about your career. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Craig Mueller: I grew up in central New York, came from a typewriter town, graduated in the early 90s. There was this little thing called a PC that impacted the local economy, there weren’t any jobs teaching – that’s what I was certified to do – so I got in my car, drove down here, was living underneath a buddy of mine’s dining room table and needed some money. Answered an ad in the paper, next thing I knew I was selling copiers door to door, was successful at that, got promoted and there I was, a sales professional.

Fred Diamond: It’s interesting, on the Sales Game Changers podcast we’ve done over 200 shows by this point and we’re well on our way to 300. We’ve interviewed some people who started out selling copiers and fax machines and things like that door to door, why don’t you tell us some of the key lessons you learned from some of those few sales jobs?

Craig Mueller: That is the first sales job I had, it really taught you a couple things. The first thing was persistence, it was very metrics driven and that was another thing that it taught me. There was a tried and true formula of, “If you have this much activity, eventually it will lead to a sale” and that’s how we got paid. I think persistence, the ability to actually go out there whether it was rain or shine, kind of the same perspective as the US postal service, you need to go out and have that activity no matter what. The ability to handle rejection, to understand that not everybody is going to be completely interested to purchase something from you or even talk to you about something you might want to discuss at all points in time.

Then the idea of helping to emulate other folks that are successful, find somebody in the organization who’s had success, pick their brain, start to build that relationship not necessarily as a true mentor-protégé all the time but just to actually understand, “What is this person doing that makes them successful?” Then to try to incorporate some of those habits in your day to day. I think that was a really good lesson for me to learn as a new sales professional just out of college.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, did you sell door to door, did you go knocking on doors?

Craig Mueller: Knocking on doors, man, yeah.

Fred Diamond: For the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, we’re doing today’s interview in Reston, Virginia. We’ve done some interviews here before, it’s about 20 minutes outside of DC without traffic, not too far from Dulles Airport, there’s a real strong tech corridor here, we’re in a beautiful building, you guys have a real nice vibe about your building here. How do you look back on those days of knocking on doors trying to sell copiers door to door?

Craig Mueller: I look back on them finely in the sense that, like I said, it did instill a work ethic. It’s like Forrest Gump, you never knew what you’re picking out of the box of chocolates, you never really knew what you were getting into until you walked into that door. One of the things that was instilled in me early on was the idea of gathering information about the prospect. We’d go in, we’d have a meeting and then we’ve got to identify who the people are, what the name of the business was, who was the decision maker, what kind of copier they had and then as you start to build this information up about your territory, you can then start to look at where the opportunities are. It just gave me really good fundamentals that I can apply every day and there are anecdotal stories for sure that I can share with some of the folks that work for me that I’ve been able to use for the past 20 years.

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

Craig Mueller: I don’t know if I have any specific area of brilliance, unfortunately. I think one of the things that I’ve been able to leverage very well across my career is sitting down and looking at an opportunity and asking a number of different questions that perhaps the salesperson hasn’t thought of only because of the forest and the trees type of mentality. I’m a huge believer of strategic planning, crawl-walk-run, identifying what the outcome is, how it aligns with what the customer is trying to accomplish. As folks start to put together sales campaigns I like to get involved early on and make sure that we’re looking at all potential ways to influence and drive a sales campaign.

Like myself, everybody is really only influenced by their experiences and impacted by their biases so if you can start to look at your strategic planning and have other voices in there early on, hopefully you’ve got a lot of perspective that you can use. I think that’s probably my largest gift, just to ensure that we’re bringing in the right folks to the table when we’re working all through our strategic planning process here at FireEye.

Fred Diamond: Like I mentioned before, one of our past guests, Paul Skurpski over at XTIVIA had mentioned you as being one of his sales mentors along the way and spoke very finely of you and the role you played in his success. You must have had some impactful sales mentors along the way, too. Why don’t you tell us about one or two and how they impacted your career?

Craig Mueller: I would say that probably the most impactful sales mentor was John McMahon at Parametric Technology. PTC was the second highest performing stock on the NASDAQ behind Dell in the first half of the 90s. What I learned there was sales process, the importance of sales process, the importance of qualifying. It was the idea that yes, there’s an art to sales but there’s also a science behind that art so being able to actually sit down and quantify what the next steps are and actually qualifying process was very beneficial. Then I think what I’ve tried to do from a leadership perspective is just pull bits and pieces from different sales leaders that I’ve had.

My current boss now, Pat Sheridan, one of the things that I really respect about him is his patience and then the way that he works internally with people to actually build stakeholders from corporate folks to ensure that they’re invested in his public sector and my federal business. I think if you talk to a number of my peers you’ll hear often people say, “They just don’t understand federal” or, “They just don’t get it.” It’s really our responsibility, in my opinion, as a federal leader to make sure that those people understand your business. You’ve got to be reaching across the aisle as much as possible and make sure that those important stakeholders in corporate are as vested. I’ve been able to pick and choose, hopefully, some of the best characteristics from some really strong sales leaders and I try to incorporate them into my day to day and how I work with the teams.

Fred Diamond: We have Sales Game Changers listening all over the globe at various countries and various industries selling multiple things at various stages of their career. We’ve interviewed a number of people who lead federal sales teams and gov-con or public sector overall, what is it about the federal marketplace that has inspired you? What is it about selling to the federal market that has kept you going?

Craig Mueller: I think it’s really mission focused, I mentioned earlier about my team having visibility into the customer’s mission. If you think about cyber-security in the situation that’s going on right now, we’re under attack every day by nation state actors as well as crime syndicates, but some of the same folks that we’re reading about and having trade deals in the news are essentially attacking our networks. To be able to sit down and go talk to the United States’ State Department or someone in the intelligence community or the Department of Defense and specifically sit down and say, “These are the observations that we’ve made as a company over in Europe specific to this Russian threat, let’s talk about how we can apply these countermeasures to your organization to ensure that things don’t happen here.” It’s pretty exciting to be at the forefront and the front lines of cyber-security with our customers helping protect the federal government.

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

Craig Mueller: The first one is especially in cyber-security but you could probably expand this out to the rest of the industry, it’s identifying, recruiting, retaining and developing good people. In my perspective there really is no substitute for good people, coachable people, quality people, the kind of folks that you want to make sure you surround yourself with and build that team culture. I think that’s definitely the first one, it’s a huge issue in cyber just because there’s so many different companies so there’s so many different options of where people can go to build their career on.

That piece as a sales leader and as an employer, it’s incumbent upon us to provide guidance to our salespeople as far as, “This is why we want you to commit to the organization, here’s what our plans are, who you’re going to be as you mature through the organization” and show them a career path. I think that’s the first one around people, and once again this is a little bit specific to cyber but maybe it can be brought across the entire industry. It’s really hard for customers to understand how we differentiate versus ABC company and XYZ company, everything just sounds the same.

While I think most companies do a fairly good job of educating their salespeople on whatever widgets we’re going to go to market with, it’s not as easy on the other side from a customer perspective. Everything sounds the same so what extra steps are you taking as a sales leader to ensure that your sales teams can differentiate your capabilities? And not just unique differentiators, “I’ve got this feature and they don’t” but really more of the comparative and holistic differentiators where it’s like, “This is why it’s in the customer’s best interest to do business with FireEye versus someone else.” I think as these marketing messages just get more complex and they all sound the same, what are we doing to cut through the noise and make sure that our customers are really evaluating the capabilities that we have at face value?

Fred Diamond: Take us back, before we take a short break, to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career you’re most proud of.

Craig Mueller: Probably the one I’m most proud of is I helped set up an inside sales function. BladeLogic we got bought by BMC Software and then that sales function turned into something formal where we actually created a career path in capability from newly hired inside sales people that were designed to get meetings to then show them how to become a hybrid inside-outside salesperson to then a fully outside salesperson. Prior to working with some folks on that, there was no career path, we were actually losing key people. There was no ability for somebody to come into the organization and then mature into an outside salesperson so I would say that’s probably my #1 success just because it impacted a number of different people and the company and they were better for it.

Fred Diamond: You’re in a space right now, cyber-security, like you said, the people who are selling cyber-security are even challenged with differentiating and you just made a great point that the customer has a deeper challenge. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Craig Mueller: I’m not sure if I ever questioned if it was too hard and that might have to do with how obtuse I am, but I definitely thought, like many sales professionals I’m sure across their career thing, “Should I be doing this?” I remember when I was at Linear and I’d gotten promoted to run in a sales team and people always thought I should go to law school so I thought, “Why not become an attorney?” Unless you’ve got a support system around you from a sales professional perspective, most folks that come out of college don’t really know what they’re getting into. Unless your parents or some close friend that’s actually been a sales professional can provide you that guidance, it’s really easy to go astray because sales is hard.

You face a lot of rejection, you get paid when you sell something. You might be working for a company that’s wonderful but have a tough territory, there’s all sorts of different nuances that make up the challenge that salespeople face. Luckily for me, I had gotten some good relationships with some folks who I trusted and believed in and wanted to emulate and they helped me through some of those challenges early on so I could look back and say, “This is what they’re telling me, here’s how I’m changing things, this is what the outcome is going to be if I do things a little differently” and kind of arrived here.

[Sponsor break]

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

Craig Mueller: I would say the #1 thing is probably to appreciate, respect and practice your craft. One of the things that I encourage all of our folks to do here at FireEye is they’ll hear me say this ad nauseam, “Be a cyber-security professional” and that means a lot of different things. It’s not just to understand what’s in your portfolio but it’s understand what’s going on in the market, it’s understanding what’s going on with your customer. What are the impediments that they face? What are the initiatives that they have?

If you think about LeBron James, he’s been the best basketball player in the NBA for give or take 10, 15 years but he’s not just resting on his laurels, he’s out there practicing a bunch of different shots. He shows up at the summer every year, now all of the sudden he’s got a new turnaround jump or he’s posting people up differently, so it’s practicing that craft. It isn’t just, ‘let’s learn about what my portfolio is’ but it’s learn about more portfolio, understand what the customer is trying to accomplish, what’s happening in the greater market? What do my competitors actually do, what’s their approach? How about my partners, how are they positioning things?

It’s getting that holistic picture to understand, “I’m a sales professional, I need to be dedicating certain things outside of the 9 to 5 or whatever that time is that I’m going to be in front of the customer to get better. I would suggest to take extra classes, learn how to use Microsoft Excel better so that instead of taking 4 hours to do something it might take 40 minutes. There’s all sorts of different ways that you can be a sales professional and that’s what I would suggest that is probably the best advice for folks looking to get into this market.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer and actually the LeBron analogy is a great thing. Everything that he touches, everything that goes in, everything he eats, he’s constantly thinking to be the greatest and not just to be in the NBA, not just to be a professional ball player but to be one of the three or four greatest players of all time. We did a podcast with a guy named Alan Stein Jr. who’s a performance coach and he spent 18 years helping some of the most elite basketball professionals, everyone from Kevin Durant to Victor Oladipo take their career to the next level and he talked about training with Kobe Bryant at three in the morning.

Craig Mueller: That’s exactly the same thing, it’s that will to win. Everybody wants to win, but who has the will to win? It’s doing those extra things that make those people special. From just a sales professionalism standpoint I agree, there are other things that you can do outside of your normal day to day work and customer experiences that will get you on the right path.

Fred Diamond: Along those lines, tell us one of your selling habits that has led to your continued success.

Craig Mueller: Preparation is key. When I was at Lanier it was very metrics driven. “You do this many calls a day, it will lead to this many demos which will lead to this many trials which will lead to this many sales” and you could take it down the funnel but now I think it’s activity based when you’re talking about enterprise software platforms. Activity based meetings aren’t the way to go, then we’re just measuring quantitative, ’10 calls a week’. We need to really from an enterprise perspective measure qualitative. If we look at quality and we start to sit down, the first piece is preparation. It goes back to what I said earlier, it’s getting to know and understand your customer. What is the fit? How are we going to align to the mission? What are the outcomes that the customer is going to be able to get for this?

It’s that preparation piece that I’m a huge proponent of for the teams and then it’s consistent inspection along the way.

One of the sayings that I’ve picked up along my tenure as a sales professional is ‘inspect what you expect’. If there’s a process that you have in point or even if you’re just going to go ahead and give a suggestion you need to, as a sales leader, follow up on that and then make sure you follow through. To be able to actually sit down and work with the team along the way consistently going in and make sure, “Are we on pace? Are we going at the right direction? Are we at the right point?” I think those are some things that are super important and we do it all in a framework of something called MEDDIC which is part of a sales process that was learned early on to help qualify things at PTC. Try to formalize things, huge planner and then most importantly inspect what you expect because otherwise, if I tell my daughter to clean her room and then I never go check on it, next time she’s not going to clean her room.

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

Craig Mueller: We’re rolling out something a little bit deeper this year, it’s called Command of the Message, it’s a sales methodology and it’s a lot of the stuff that I think people are doing today. This just allows it to formalize it a little bit better and it’s really outcome based. We’re fortunate enough at FireEye to have a large portfolio that’s monetized through our technology, through our threat intelligence or through our expertise. We have the luxury of going in to have a conversation with the customer about where they are, what’s their current state, what are some of the challenges that they have with that and where do they want to go, and then we can prescriptively talk and describe about a plan and path to get them to that future state and those benefits that they’ll derive from that.

I still see sales professionals want to come and talk about their portfolio prior to actually listening and determining from the customer what they want to accomplish. I think too often we end up as salespeople in one sided conversations, you get the, “Wow, that was really informative, thanks for the meeting” and then you don’t get another meeting in there for 90 days or 6 months. One of the things that we’re trying to do is be very conscious of the fact that salespeople have two ears and one mouth, and let’s make sure that we approach things that way.

Fred Diamond: We talked today on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Craig Mueller, VP of Federal Sales at FireEye. Craig, before I ask you for your final thought for the Sales Game Changers around the globe, sales is hard and there’s a lot of challenges. You just mentioned that you may do a great presentation in your mind to a customer, he may thank you for the information but you don’t hear from them again, they don’t return your calls, they don’t respond to your emails but why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Craig Mueller: I really enjoy sales and I’m glad I found it as a career for a few different reasons. One is that you get to meet a whole bunch of different new, exciting and interesting people all the time. You get to actually go out of your office, you’re actually in front of the customer meeting all sorts of different people and creating a relationship with them. Some people that I keep in close touch with are former customers, I would have never had the opportunity to meet them and now I know their children’s name and where they’re going to college and things like that.

The variety of the type of folks that you meet, once again going back to that mission, helping customers understanding what their challenges are and then helping solve a problem, that’s very rewarding. Then I think one of the reasons that people get into sales – although I was more out of it for desperation – we get paid extremely handsomely if we’re successful. I got a number of buddies that are still teachers, I was certified to teach, my dad was a teacher for 30 something years and the amount of money that they get paid for the amount of time and how important their job is versus a sales professional, I think we’re very fortunate to have our compensation weighted as well as it is.

Fred Diamond: But once again, we wouldn’t be in these beautiful offices if things didn’t get sold and everyone who’s been a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast knows that. Actually, the people who are listening to the show know that as well. Why don’t you give us something to inspire our listeners today?

Craig Mueller: I would say that sales, especially for folks that are coming into this as a career and even folks that have been doing it for a while, sometimes you hit the doldrums. I would say practice your craft, find somebody, find a coach, find a mentor, find someone that you emulate and understand how they’re being successful. Then the last piece is help write down some goals that you want. Then by practicing your craft, writing down those goals and objectives that you have and finding a mentor that you can speak to when times are tough, I think what it really will do is ensure that salespeople establish and then stay on the right path when times get tough.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 209: FireEye Public Sector Sales Chief Craig Mueller Says by Focusing on These Specific Skills, You Will Be on the Path to Elite Sales Performance first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 207: Splunk Public Sector Sales Leader Frank Dimina Explains How a Growth Mindset Has Helped Him Tackle Every Sales Challenge He’s Faced Throughout his Career

FRANK’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Embrace the suck. Some of the territories that look really challenging or some of these projects that look really difficult, while hard and while challenging, can be the ones you’re most proud of and produce the greatest results. If you take on one of these challenging roles, if you are successful in that role, you’ll be legendary,”

Frank Dimina is the VP of Public Sector at Splunk.

Prior to coming to Splunk, he held sales leadership positions at Check Point Software and was at a number of startups typically in the cyber space.

Frank can be found on LinkedIn here.

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

Frank Dimina:  Thank you for having me on the podcast. I’ve been in Arlington, VA about 20 years now which is crazy to think because I still consider myself a native New Yorker at heart. I just hit 20 years of marriage, I have two young kids, one middle schooler so life’s changing fast. I’ve been at Splunk about four years, it’s been a really exciting journey here. I would say for folks that know me well, they know my guilty pleasure is 80’s and 90’s hair metal bands, you can see from how my office is decorated.

I think I’ve seen Metallica live at least 20 times so that’s a little bit about me.

Fred Diamond: What’s your go-to song, Enter Sandman or something from Guns & Roses?

Frank Dimina:  I’d say the Injustice for All album, that’s definitely I think when they’re at their peak.

Fred Diamond: That’s good stuff, I’m a big Tom Petty fan and Springsteen is usually where I wind up. What do you sell today? Tell us a little bit about Splunk and tell us what excites you about that.

Frank Dimina:  Splunk is the world’s first data to everything platform and it’s designed to unlock trapped value by bringing data to every question, every decision, every action. Some folks out there said that data is the new oil and that’s a little bit of a stretch but I think there’s some truth there. When you think about data, there’s untapped value. Data’s coming at everyone, every agency, every educational institution from an unpredictable rate, an unprecedented scale and all of these agencies and schools are just awash in this data but their real challenge is turning that data into value.

A perfect example is just the state of threat intelligence today so a lot of noise out there, not a lot of signal. Extracting value from data is what really can make a difference for any organization, it can make the difference in whether you’re accomplishing the mission or not. We talk to organizations all the time about achieving a state of data leverage where they’re getting real insights, real value and actionable outcomes from the data they’re generating. This is not a binary state, this is actually a maturity curve and our goal here at Splunk is to help organizations progress down that curve and learn how they can extract more value and gain more data leverage.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people who listen to the podcast like to know who you sell to. Who is your primary customer? Is it a CTO, a CIO, program leader, who does your team typically try to go after?

Frank Dimina:  It’s all of the above. Out of the box, Splunk is just a blank search bar. It’s an incredibly powerful platform that can help you make informed, confident decisions about cybersecurity, IT ops, de DevOps, application development, application management, cloud migration, even IOT and industrial manufacturing. The power of Splunk is the broad number of use cases and diverse scenarios where it can extract value from data.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little more about you. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Frank Dimina:  Sales leadership is actually my third career. Well, it’s my fourth career if you count a 730 day stint in the retail world as an assistant buyer. I started in government IT contracting, did a short stint at the Pentagon and that’s where I started learning about cyber and quickly got involved in the cyber ops world, worked for some startups there and had a great run learning about what it means to be in a fast-paced, high growth, demanding cyber startup and in a cyber operations world.

After that, moved into a consulting job. In the consulting world got to see other parts of the business, business development, sales, marketing. When I was working as a consultant there was a time where I was helping the CEO go out and earn business and support him in his sales functions. We were traveling together to this large bank, work on a proposal we had submitted and do he oral presentations and on the way to the airport, his house catches fire, it literally catches fire.

His advice to me is, “Look, it’s just the two of us, you need to handle this sales call, you’re a great engineer and a great consultant, you can cover it.” I went down and did the presentation, it’s the whole board, president of the bank, first sales presentation I ever did solo. The customer said two things that I’ll never forget: first, they said that was ‘hands-down the worst presentation we’ve ever seen’ [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Congratulations.

Frank Dimina:  Second, though they said even though it lacked style, it was the most amount of substance of every presentation we had and that’s why they chose us. I actually remember that, I keep that as my North Star today as I lead a sales team and the great team we have here at Splunk. Be a source of value, substance is always more important than style. That was my epiphany and I realized that I enjoyed it and I could be really good at it and even though I had no formal sales training, I decided then to make the leap, took a sales rep role in another company and the rest is history.

Fred Diamond: The ‘value’ word comes up all the time on the Sales Game Changers podcast and we’ve interviewed hundreds of sales leaders around the globe. There’s a lot of themes that have come through the show and probably the #1 theme is that you need to provide more value than you’ve ever had to before and sales has always been about creating value. Just curiously, how do you coach your team, how do you coach your players to bring that value? What does that look like in what you do today?

Frank Dimina:  The different careers I’ve had is what prepped me, it was my training to be successful in the role I’m at today. Working as a practitioner in IT, working in cybersecurity taught me how to use the products that I would one day be recommending to customers. Then the time I spent as a consultant helped me to learn how to be an adviser to a customer, how to understand their problem set and come up with solutions there might be. I talk to the team all the time, “Don’t be a salesperson, be a source of value, be a trusted adviser.” I know it’s an over-used term in our industry. What that means is getting to know your customers, creating a high level of customer intimacy so you can understand their problems before they even do and you can come to them with solutions to their problems before they even know they have the problem. That’s what a trusted adviser or a source of value means here to us.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about you. What are you an expert in? Again, you’ve had a lot of different segments of your career, tell us about your specific area of brilliance.

Frank Dimina:  I’m finishing up my fourth year here and that’s four consecutive years of growth, good run here so far. I’ll tell you, it’s a team sport. It takes hundreds of people here to make it happen so I’m very blessed, I’m very lucky with the team I have supporting me. There’s two answers to this question, if you ask me what my expertise is, I only have one real talent and that is that I’m very good at getting the right person in the right role. That’s about identifying talent, what their future capabilities will be and what that career path looks like for them. I’ll talk about that in a minute.

If you ask my folks, the folks on my team I think they would give you a different answer, I think they would say that I’m a very creative sales leader. When someone wants to brainstorm on a new strategy or they’re dealing with a tough problem or they’re not sure of how to even structure a deal, one of my favorite things is, “Let’s just get in a room and start white boarding” giving them some coaching, helping them work through the decision and that’s when I know I’m adding value as a coach and a leader here. It’s the most enjoyable part of the job.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re the Vice President of Public Sector for Splunk. Again, we’re talking on the Sales Game Changers podcast today to Frank Dimina, you must have had some great mentors along the way to help you get to this point. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?

Frank Dimina:  There’s one leader that I learned a great deal from when I was at Check Point Software. I worked for a gentleman named Chris Scanlan, he was our VP of Sales there at the time. One of the things Chris taught me was about the power of direct feedback. Chris had a philosophy that we didn’t wait for annual performance reviews. After every sales meeting, after every call we discussed the outcome, we discussed how the call went and feedback was given constantly and instantly. I try and adopt that with my team today, it’s something that I think as a salesperson to improve, to hone your craft you need that constant feedback, you need to constantly inspect how each event went, how that sales strategy worked out. Chris taught me a lot about that and I believe his philosophy has been very helpful to this day.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, how do you do that? What is your style? Do you text, do you call, do you tell people to come in the office early? What are some of your recommendations on the best way to get that across?

Frank Dimina:  It’s all of the above. Sometimes it’s silly when you have a Slack message going on and a text message and you get an email sometimes from the same person, it gets a little ridiculous but I think the best method of delivering that is right after a meeting. Like the huddle with the team and it’s out in the street or at a coffee shop, so how did it go? What did we learn, what did we not learn? What do we still have to find out and what sales plays or sales motions were successful in that meeting? What do we need to iterate and tweak for the future? It’s a mindset of continuous improvement and I think it works well for our team here given that we are in such a fast paced environment. What we’re doing, selling a platform for machine data analytics, there’s no recipe book for that so it’s a lot of on-the-job learning and constant iteration.

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

Frank Dimina:  I’ll give you two and I would say both are what we call ‘first world problems’. They’re challenges that I would have killed for at any other organization I’ve been at. As we’ve grown tremendously here at Splunk in the past four years, as our customer base has grown tremendously there’s two things I think about constantly.

The first one is around our customers, how do we ensure our customers how to be trophy customer experience? What that means is that they’re leveraging Splunk in a very successful way, that it’s not shelf ware and that requires us to really understand their mission, to get high levels of customer intimacy so we can make sure that whatever use case they’re using Splunk for is highly successful, it requires brutal focus in sales. In a lot of sales organization you close a deal and you move on and for us customer success is so important, it’s how we learn about the product and get to that next successful use case around the mission space.

The other one is around our employees and our team members. I’m stealing a line from our Chief Human Resources Officer, but we want their experience at Splunk to be a trophy work experience. We want all these folks years from now when we’re all retired or onto our next adventure to be able to say, “I was at Splunk when…”, “I was there when this rocket ship ride happened and it was great from my career and I learned a ton and I had this great coaching and development opportunities.” If we can pull off one of those, that’d be great, if we can pull off both of them then this really is a special place and a legendary experience.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you talk about that for a second? What makes Splunk a trophy place to work at, especially in sales?

Frank Dimina:  I think everyone would give you a different answer. For me, I’ve talked about having a great team. Having a great team is wonderful but having a great team you trust, that’s way better. When you have a great team you trust, it enables risk taking so I know that I can be a little bit over my skis and take some risks because I have such amazing men and women backing me up to make sure that we stay on the right path and that the plan works. I built that trust by being accessible and that gets harder and harder as this organization grows.

One of the things I also think about is how do I continue to leverage being accessible? Because that’s what got me here, but as the organization has grown so much and we’re now 300-400 people, how do we continue that culture and that methodology and keep building that trust? In the end it sounds silly, but just carving more time for one on one’s and understanding all the team members, what they want from their career, what motivates them, it’s a difficult task but it’s important.

Fred Diamond: Frank, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, I’m just curious. Again, you’ve worked at Check Point Software, you’re with a number of startups, you started your career in retail, you worked at the Pentagon. What’s the #1 specific sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Frank Dimina:  I’ve told other people this line often, I can’t remember all the deals we’ve won but I can remember every deal I lost [Laughs]. We take a lot from those ones that we lost. I’ve been in this role about a year now, a little bit more, and what I enjoy the most is being a coach and mentor and seeing other folks succeed. Just even last quarter, we had a very strong quarter, public sector, team contributed a great amount to overall company success.

There’s tons of success stories, there’s individuals where you see them really struggling for a year or two and then the lightbulb pops and they have a great year and they land a big account. The coaching moments really are the fun ones but if I had to pick one, one of the things I’m quite proud of here is we have many young sellers or early sellers we’ve helped kick off their career.

When I got here there wasn’t as many advancement opportunities or coming up for folks that were in inside sales or in more junior roles and in my four years here we’ve promoted at least 12 inside sales representatives into field sales representatives. More than 12, but 12 of the folks that we promoted have already made President’s Club. We’ve seen some folks really advance their career her and do well and other reps that have moved into frontine managers, frontline managers that have moved into AVP’s. The career progression that I’ve helped enable is probably what I’m most proud of.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break, quick question. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you’ve worked in the consulting side as well. Did you ever think to yourself, “You know what? It’s just too hard, it’s not for me.”

Frank Dimina:  I never introduce myself or consider myself a sales guy. Early in my career I would definitely say when I was an engineer I had a very myopic view of sales, sales was a dirty word back then and I couldn’t see myself in that role. Frankly, I thought you went to sales if you couldn’t land a real job, but of course I couldn’t be more wrong. First off, it’s incredibly difficult. It’s one of the hardest jobs in the world. There’s extremely talented, smart people who work here and what’s attracted me to working at Splunk.

Second, what I’ve learned about sales, it’s where you find some of the most creative minds you’ll ever meet in the business world delivering on a very complex mission with limited resources, lots of unknowns, lots of constraints, it’s a challenge and it takes creativity to be successful at it. I’d say third, for the folks here on my team I know working in public sector sales why we don’t question despite all the difficulties is the mission’s important. We get to help brilliant men and women across government, across educational institutions, deliver on some really important things and help this country and help citizens and deliver citizen services. As a son of a World War II vet, the fact that we could contribute to the success of the mission really means a lot here.

Fred Diamond: Again, we based the podcast out of Washington DC although we’ve interviewed sales leaders around the globe so we’ve interviewed a bunch of guys and ladies who run sales teams for public sector and it always comes back to the mission. I also like what you just said, too. There’s no linear path to success in sales, you’ve seen that with entrepreneurs but in sales it’s the same way. You need to know process, you need to know your product and how it works, of course and of course you need that mindset but you also need that creativity because things get thrown your way. Sometimes the company needs you to do something different to generate some things that might not be in your course, but I would agree with you 100%. Sales is easily one of the most creative jobs in a company and as we know because of the podcast, one of the most critical.

[Sponsor break]

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

Frank Dimina:  I could think of two. First off, I think there’s a myth I’d love to dispel that you don’t have to be an extreme extrovert to become a great seller. I’ve met great sellers that come in all shapes and sizes, we have such a diverse team here and some of the best sellers we have are introverts. I think one of the things, when I meet folks outside our industry and they ask about being in sales, they think of the used car salesman, they think of everyone being extreme extroverts and it’s amazing the different types of personalities you see that, if they figure how to leverage their strengths, be successful in sales, especially in enterprise sales.

Second, something I’ll steal from one of my mentors here, our president Susan St. Ledger, is the importance of career pivots. Having a diverse work history is what makes me successful, what makes me better at my job. One of the things that I always employ to my own personal career decision was taking a long-term view. As I said, sales is really my fourth career and each of those other professions I had, I was moving up the management ranks, I was having success but I saw a long-term opportunity often by taking that pivot and moving into a new career field, I took a step down to take a step up. Sometimes everyone’s worried about what’s next and what’s the short-term plan. Having that long-term plan and being able to take a chance with some different types of careers and different types of job opportunities is what led me here today.

Fred Diamond: You said you started your career in retail, has that helped you become a sales leader?

Frank Dimina:  It was interesting. I saw what a slow growth industry was like and I learned about competition, I learned about some of the decisions you must make when resources are constrained which was a great training ground. I worked for a company straight out of college called May Company and they got acquired by Federated, but they had an excellent management training program so straight out of school they put me through a several month long training program where we learned about marketing and pricing and gross margin and how to manage budgets. That training is used today, it was a long time ago but it was very valuable to my career.

Fred Diamond: I actually applied for that same program with a company called Bamberger’s which was purchased and I did not get in, so congratulations to you. Tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your sale success.

Frank Dimina:  First off, I talk about it so much here I think the folks are tired of hearing about it, but I really do believe in the power of a growth mindset. How it came about for me was a little bit naturally through those career pivots. Early in my career I worked in a security operations center and as a cyber consultant. In those environments, very fast-paced, very challenging technologies, constantly adapting, you have to be nimble, you have to be constantly learning and I had to learn technology I had no experience with. You’re going out to do a security assessment of an HPUX system, an operating system never seen before required that I created a discipline, I got very good at teaching myself. I may not know how to tackle this problem but I know I can learn about it, I know I can learn how to tackle this challenge so my skill became being confident enough that I could learn something new quickly.

When I switched over to sales, my first year in sales was okay, I didn’t hit my target but my second year in sales I was the #1 sales rep at my organization worldwide, and that was strictly because I didn’t know how to do it but I had the confidence that I could learn how to be great at sales. The growth mindset to me – and I drive my team crazy talking about it – is knowing that I can take on a tough challenge and I may not know the answers but I will learn how to figure out the answers, I will get smart about it, I will learn to be the best at it.

Fred Diamond: That’s actually a great point. A little twist here, we started using the hashtag #growthmindset when we post the Sales Game Changer podcast episode and almost every episode now trends on the hashtag #growthmindset so good for you.

Frank Dimina:  We talk a lot about it here and I’d say there’s another one too, and it’s something that I think is important for the culture we’re trying to create here at Splunk Public Sector is just be direct. There’s so many folks in this industry that are not authentic, that spend a lot of time on trying to give you the answer you want instead of the answer you need and I think lastly it’s a rule we have here, just don’t be an asshole. Treat people the way you want to be treated, your reputation and brand is important.

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

Frank Dimina:  At the risk of coming off a little cheesy here, everyone at Splunk really does believe that data literacy and data is the next big wave of technology, that we want to actually change the world. If you think about the past 20 years, the big changes in society, in economic opportunity were spurred by ways of technology. Access to the internet, mobile phones, ubiquitous Wi-Fi everywhere. We believe here that next up, that big wave is data literacy. Data literacy is an essential element to individual and global prosperity so we’re committed to creating tools that democratize access to data and make it easier for folks to use data. If you ask folks around here, we do believe that the ability to ask data-driven questions will help with confident decisions whether it’s education, legislation, public investment and to actually create economic opportunities for folks.

I’d end with saying that our goal is that more importantly than data, the tools that help people understand data will be pivotal to new opportunities, overcoming the toughest challenge and creating economic opportunities for all. A great example of that is what we’re doing here with our veterans initiative, right outside the office here we have a veterans wall where we recognize all the Splunkers that are veterans and what we’ve done over the past few years through our Spunk for Good organization is make all of our online training, all of our curriculum free for veterans.

We talk about how can Splunk change the world, how can we raise data literacy? One of the first areas we decided to invest in is the veterans’ community and we have great tools internally, we have great resource groups but externally, creating educational opportunities for folks coming out of service and how can they learn to become a data expert or raise their data literacy.

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you one last question. Sales is hard, it’s gotten tougher, as we talked about. I like your point here about ‘be direct’, there’s not a whole lot of time to waste, if you will but what is it about sales as a career that has kept you going? Again, for the Sales Game Changers podcast listeners around the globe, we’re doing today’s episode from Splunk’s public sector headquarters in Tyson’s, Virginia, it’s right outside of Washington DC. There’s a nice vibe, again we walked through the office, there’s a lot of energy, a lot of stand-up desks, a lot of beautiful colors here, if you will but what is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Frank Dimina:  First off, the diversity of people you meet. As I was talking earlier, we see sellers, customers, partners that come from all walks of life. Even though you’re constantly meeting folks and it is such a diverse, unique crowd, in public sector sales the beltway is a closed community and you get to know everyone, you get to know the customers quite well. In the commercial world I think there’s more attrition and turnover in the customer base so that sense of community and the folks that work in public sector IT are a very interesting group of people.

I think second is just the dynamic nature and constant change of what we do. Talking about it earlier, we’re creating a market here at Splunk, machine data analytics is something that is new to a lot of folks or hasn’t been done before so it’s constantly changing. There’s no model we’re following, there’s no recipe book to do this but what I can tell you about that, the end result, the byproduct is that we never get bored [Laughs]. I’ve never had a day that was like any of my other thousand days here at Splunk and the work is really interesting, it’s really challenging sometimes but it’s really exciting. I never get bored here.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought to inspire our listeners today.

Frank Dimina:  I do talk to a lot of folks here that are mature sellers, that are early sellers and my advice to them is often this: it’s so important to see the long game you’re playing for and to go after that. I think so many folks in sales are by nature short-term focused. They’re looking at a quarter ahead or they want to see the next year ahead and that year lined up. It’s an instant gratification approach sometimes and the folks that do really well consistently over a number of years, and I can think of a few of them here, they can see that they will sacrifice some of that short-term gratification. They have that long-term vision, that long-term plan and a lot of it comes down to just doing the hard work.

Folks, if you do the right things every day, the results will come and that has been my philosophy for the past few years here and it’s worked out very well. When you take that long-term view, the other pivot on that is embrace the suck. Some of these territories that look really challenging or some of these projects that look really difficult, while hard and while challenging, can be the ones you’re most proud of and produce the greatest results. If you’re somewhat early in your career and you take on one of these challenging roles, if you are successful in that role, you’ll be legendary, your resume is set. My advice is to focus on the long-term, don’t always just think about the quarter or year ahead. Where do you really want to go and how do we set you down that path? Take the tough road, take the challenging road.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 207: Splunk Public Sector Sales Leader Frank Dimina Explains How a Growth Mindset Has Helped Him Tackle Every Sales Challenge He’s Faced Throughout his Career first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 195: Forcepoint Government Sales Chief Eric Trexler Says Focusing on this Outcome is Key to Determining Your Sales Success

ERIC’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Everything you do should be geared around results, Focus on your customer, yourself, your business and put a plan together and enjoy the ride. To the leaders out there, focus on your people, be transparent and direct with them. Have a plan, always look at how we make them better.”

Eric Trexler is the VP of Sales for Global Governments at Forcepoint.

He was recommended to us by some of our previous guests, Chris Townsend and James Yeager.

Prior to coming to Forcepoint, he held sales leadership positions at McAfee and served in the US Army.

Find Eric on LinkedIn!

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

Eric Trexler: Fred, thanks for having me, I appreciate the time. I think the most important thing to start with is I’m a husband and a father of three boys. My wife and I have been married since 2006, I’ll do the math, I think it’s 13 years now. Two boys are older, one is 21, the other is 26 and I have a 12 year old at home, he’s in 6th grade right now. My oldest is a doctor and the other is trying to figure out life.

Fred Diamond: Good for you.

Eric Trexler: He’s a doctor in the Army, I’m very proud of all three of them.

Fred Diamond: Thanks again for your service to the Army, you were there for how many years?

Eric Trexler: Four. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, didn’t have anybody paying for college. It was a great opportunity for me to get out of the house and prove that I was the adult that I thought I was – which I wasn’t. It was a great experience and it really set me up for life in the discipline and way of thinking, direction and guidance.

Fred Diamond: I mentioned in the introduction, some of our previous guests, James Yeager at CrowdStrike and Chris Townsend at Symantec said we need to get you on the podcast, “You’ve got to talk to Trexler.” Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Eric Trexler: I work for Forcepoint, one of the best-known secrets in cyber security. We’re about three years old now and we formed in 2016 as a consolidation of a couple of companies that came together basically in three businesses cross-domain – which I won’t go into a lot of detail on this – for multi-domain operations in the US government. Obviously I’m on the government side. User activity monitoring and then finally we have commercial products where we really focus on users and how they interact with their data around user behavior.

The thing I love about it, it’s a very different approach to cyber security. Every security vendor out there pretty much is focused on the malware, the threats coming in, we really focus on you, the individual which as a sales person, obviously, that’s close to heart. Also, how you interact with data and we look at it from an individual perspective as opposed to, “There’s an adversary out here coming to get you and they’ve put this piece of malware on your network or on your system.

Fred Diamond: We’ve interviewed a bunch of people who sell in the cyber security space. You just clearly delineated where you guys fit. Are there so many vendors that it’s hard to get through the noise? Based on all the companies that are emerging in cyber security.

Eric Trexler: Yes, it’s tremendously difficult. There are so many startups if you go to RSA every year as a sales professional, as a business owner, whatever you may be in the industry, how do you cut through the noise? We haven’t seen the consolidation that we need that we have in every other part of information technology. There are usually two or three players and those are the market leaders. In cyber security I’d challenge anybody to determine who the cyber security market leaders are. You’ve got the Cisco’s, the VMWare’s, the Palo Alto’s, you’ve got the mid-tiers which is where I would put us. We’ll hit a billion dollars in the next couple years here.

The government business is a significant part of that. Then you’ve got a couple thousand niche players, the startups. It’s really complicated. The piece I love, we are highly mission focused and to me, that’s what helps cut through the noise. The government business is about a 400 person business, we own organic development on the bulk of our products, consulting and go-to-market. I own the go-to-market component so when we’re dealing with customers, you know what you can deliver on, you can bring in the people who are writing the code, you can bring in the people who are going to implement the solutions. When you’re dealing with cross-domain, you actually have physical equipment with the war fighter in their hands or on a satellite, it matters. It’s a great business.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re the VP of Sales here for Global Governments. Take us back to the beginning of your sales career. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Eric Trexler: I’m the byproduct of salespeople. My mother was a salesperson, she was a secretary back in the day and my parents got divorced when I was five. She became the sole provider for the family, she worked her you-know-what off, I would literally sit there and watch her working until 2 in the morning at many nights. I’m reading, I’m helping her out, I’m running the microfiche for her, I’m filing, I’m giving her pricing, everything was paperback in those days. She took me on sales calls. My dad was in sales. My wife is a lifetime sales rep so I’m a byproduct of sales and I love selling. I fought her, no one wants to do what their parents want them to do, and my mom being a sales rep told me I would be in sales.

Fred Diamond: What did she sell?

Eric Trexler: She sold office products, chairs, pencils, at the corporate level. When she died – it’s a great story – she had 150 or so customers come to her funeral. It was amazing the stories they told. Back in those days she was in Pennsylvania, I grew up in Pennsylvania like you, it was a small area, the Reading-Allentown Philadelphia area, lifelong customers, you didn’t switch jobs a lot. She knew them for decades, 30-40 years. It was really great having that education growing up where you watched a sales professional, an expert at their job and you were part of it.

Fred Diamond: Once again you went into the Army right after high school and then you obviously went into sales. Tell us about some of your first sales jobs, what did you do as a sales person in the beginning?

Eric Trexler: I started as a consultant. When I was in the Army in my last year and a half or so, we’ve got something called a computer and I was an airborne ranger and nobody knew what a computer was, let alone how to use them. I wanted to get a jumpstart on college which is my goal for joining the Army so I picked up the computer and I decided to move into the operations office and figure it out, which was really my start in technology. Got my degree working at the time as a technologist, I was a database expert so I became a consultant and I did a lot of consultative selling.

I moved very quickly into sales engineering and I took that route. I believe there are two tracks primarily for sales, traditional tracks, I should say. You can come up from the technology, the engineering route or you can come up through the traditional inside sales, somehow you get your start. They’re very different but they lead to the same place. I mix technology and I’m a consultant, they moved me into sales engineering because they saw I liked to talk to customers, I like to solve problems and then very quickly I moved into sales because I was a very good technical sales person. That was my path.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question, were you conscious of that sales approach? We’ve interviewed a bunch of people on the Sales Game Changers podcast who started out in engineering or the tech side, and then someone tapped them on the shoulder and said, “You’re really good at explaining this to our customers.” Some of them were taken aback like, “No, maybe I will consider this sales route” and other people identified that’s the route they wanted to take. I’m just curious, you went up through the SE route which is definitely a smart way to go, but were you aware that you wanted to move into sales at some point or was that not part of your plan in the beginning?

Eric Trexler: Remember, I was actively resistant to moving into sales because my mother told me I need to move into sales. My mom was all about the freedom, the flexibility, the money, controlling your own destiny so I was actively resistant. Those were different days, they didn’t pay the same and I was the sole provider for the family. At that point I probably had both of my oldest sons and the first commission check I got, I received as an SE was wow. I was able to buy a kitchen diner room set, I remember it vividly today and I said, “This is good.”

I also remember a class I had with Mike Bosworth of Xerox, Solution Selling and it really opened my eyes to sales and the concept of controlling the deal. I didn’t always agree with my sales reps, but my job was to support them technically and I absolutely did that, but Mike really opened my eyes to the possibility. I overcame the hesitation in fighting back with your parents, I also matured at that point and the money obviously is much better.

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting, we’ve interviewed, obviously, a lot of people on the show and sometimes the guests will refer back to taking a class with someone like Neil Rackham who wrote Spin Selling, and Mike Bosworth, for people who may not know, is one of the founders of Solution Selling which is still around. It’s owned by a company called SPI, Sales Performance International. Attending a class with a guy like that even back in the day, you probably still remember some of the things that were discussed that day.

Eric Trexler: I really do. I remember his statement was, “20% of salespeople are eagles, you let them fly, you get out of their way. The other 80% you need to have a very structured methodology. You need to guide them, you need to monitor activity levels and things like that.” I couldn’t tell you where I am but it was a really good lesson at the time for me. The other thing he taught was understand the customer problem. Back in those days and probably even worse today, we do a really good job of training our people on products, features and functions.

What we don’t do very well today is teaching our people about the customer and listening and understanding the business problem they’re trying to solve. The big buzz word these days is outcomes but I really like it, understanding what outcomes you desire. The industry has even pushed customers to not understand their outcomes in many cases, they just want the biggest, baddest product but they don’t understand why they’re buying it. Mike was really impressionable on me at a very young age, it was a class that was a turning moment. We were talking before the interview, you remember points in time very specifically. For me, I remember that week-long class and it really set me off in understanding the customer, in changing the way I sold.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you’re an expert in, tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Eric Trexler: This is a tough question, I’m like many of your interviewees, I don’t feel I’m an expert in anything. I do enjoy managing more than selling, I love managing sales teams because you get to mix the two. Personally, I believe you’re great at selling or you’re great at managing. One of the things Mike Bosworth always mentioned, typically the best salespeople get promoted into management positions and they usually make the worst managers. I was a good salesperson, I am a good salesperson, I love managing, though.

I love helping out my personnel, I love seeing them win more than me winning – don’t get me wrong, I love winning – but I love watching my teams win. I love nothing better than when a functional team comes together, they solve the customer’s problems, the customer is happy, we’re happy. To me, that’s really the best. What am I an expert in? If I had to pick one word, I’d say learning. I’m a lifelong learner, I believe in education, reading, podcasts, you name it. That’s probably the one thing, I’m always learning and I know I don’t have all the answers.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, what are you trying to learn right now? What’s at the top of your list?

Eric Trexler: It’s interesting as I was thinking about today and preparing for this, this is about me, my background and my experience. Most of the interviews that I do these days are about technology, products or areas or business problems and it was very interesting. That’s where I spend the bulk of my time. How do I optimize a sales team? How do I optimize a business?

Building on my MBA learnings, I read the Wall Street Journal every morning, I listen to a lot of podcasts, I’m a photographer. When I’m out photographing I try to calm my mind and it helps me actually think about the business. I’m always looking at optimization, for me optimization is a key function of a leader’s job. How do you deliver optimized results? How do you deliver greater results, outsized results? How do you get more out of your people? I spend a lot of time there when I’m not working on cloud computing or cyber security or whatever it may be.

Fred Diamond: We didn’t mention this during the introduction but you’re also the host of a successful podcast as well.

Eric Trexler: I am.

Fred Diamond: Real briefly, what do you interview your guests on?

Eric Trexler: It’s a non-denominational, non-Forcepoint advertisement. Obviously we host it, so if you go to our website you can look about Forcepoint but it’s really conversation based. We talked to Chris Krebs about how he manages what he’s doing at CISA but the best part for me was how he cycles every day to work. He’s the director of CISA, probably the largest cyber security component in the world. How he does the separation between his large family and the really important job he has, how he clears his mind, that was fascinating to me.

We do a lot with users and data, I had a behavioral psychologist on the line the other day and we talk about human mind and the human thought. We’ve done a ton on trust and really delving into the concept of trust. We’ve got these topics that are cyber security related but they’re about people because at the end of the day, selling, our jobs, everything we do is about people. We’re trying to do a job.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about people, you’ve worked for some great companies: SalesForce, EMC, Sybase, McAfee, of course now you’re the VP of Sales for Global Government at Forcepoint. You must have had some impactful mentors along the way. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and tell us how they impacted your career?

Eric Trexler: I don’t know that I have a lifelong formal mentor, I really had some people in my life that have changed my direction similar to Mike Bosworth. Dave Rudnitsky at Salesforce.com, he had these 10 rules, he called it the sales playbook which he brought to us. It’s something I’ve continued on, I’m going to read the rules because I think they’re so powerful, if we could link to them in the show notes. Things like, “Think big, have attitude.” It doesn’t mean be arrogant, but be in charge, think bigger than just, “I’m going to sell you a product.” “Get your face in the place.” Go see your customer. ‘No deal is won or lost alone’, work as a team, use all of your resources. ‘Connect the dots’, never cold call, do your research.

Find somebody who knows somebody and get in there. ‘Focus on the ‘why not”, not the why, but why won’t this deal happen? What’s going to prevent it from happening? Then address that. ‘Always take the deal off the table’, when you can. The other one is ‘Be proactive on all your paperwork’, make sure your sales force is up to date, your CRM tool, whatever you may be, make sure your contracts are ready, get your paperwork the quotes, make sure they’re tight. Another one which with the political situation today I almost hesitate to mention but it’s so powerful: ‘Always get quid pro quo.’ Every quarter we go through these compliance mandates where you basically say, “I didn’t give them something in trade that wasn’t documented.” That’s not what Dave was talking about, what Dave was talking about is when you’re in a negotiation with a customer, if they are asking for a lower price that’s okay, but you need to get something back. Maybe you’re getting a video marketing reference, maybe you’re getting three introductions to somewhere else. Always get to give is all we’re saying here, and it doesn’t have to be financial but always get to give. ‘Share best practices’ across the organization and always focus on game changers. When you’re looking at your strategy, how do you go big? How do you change the game?

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. As I listen to your list there, especially the first couple of ones, describe for us what you think the ideal mindset is and maybe what your mindset has been as a sales leader.

Eric Trexler: I think mindset is a huge part of selling. I’m going to tell you a little story that I think will articulate it for our users. When I was at a prior organization we had an account that none of my senior sales reps wanted. It had a low quota but we hadn’t done much there and it was a difficult account – they were all difficult, but it was labeled as a difficult account. I had three sales professionals with 30+ years of experience that turned down that opportunity. I had a junior salesperson came up through the inside sales ranks, used to be a music producer. He didn’t know any better, he just wanted to get into selling, that was what he wanted to do.

He took the account, top sales rep the following year. He ran through walls, he didn’t even know he was running through walls. He did things that the experienced professionals wouldn’t do because he had this, “Never fail, I’m going to get it done, no quit” attitude and he tried things. He was smart, hardworking and we talked about hustle, but it was all about the mindset. “I am going to be successful, I want to be in sales.” I’ll tell you, mindset, I don’t care if you’re an athlete on the ball field, the Nationals just won the World Series, or if you’re a sales professional. So much is in the mind, you’ve got to have that can-do attitude, it’s an open mindset, a growth mindset versus a closed or fixed mindset that I find so important to success.

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

Eric Trexler: I think the two are time and focus. Where do you spend your time? I’ll count that as one, so let me give you three here. Then getting your people to think outside of the box, think outside of the way they’ve traditionally been told to sell. Looking at value selling, I’m working with Steve Thompson right now who’s a value selling coach, essentially and he’s brilliant. He talks about the customer, the value cycle and the deal and how it’s not about a deal, it’s about a relationship. He’s got one phrase that he uses from Theodore Levitt at Harvard University. “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill…”\

Fred Diamond: “…they want to buy a hole.”

Eric Trexler: “They want to buy a quarter inch hole”, right? We sell drills all the time, so one of the biggest challenges is getting the entire sales team – especially the engineers, because they’re trained on drills – what is the outcome the customer is really looking for? Even training the customer to think about, “Do you really care what the product is? Do you really care about how we solve the problem?” Usually they do, but what they really should care about is that quarter inch hole. How do we get the hole at the most cost-effective, most efficient whatever way it may be?

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

Eric Trexler: This is a deal I’m going to have to be very careful because it was in the classified space. The customer had a very unique large scale problem that dealt with nation state activity. They brought us in, they did not in this case want to buy a drill. They had a problem and they didn’t even know if a hole is what they were looking for. In working with them, my team and I were able to collaboratively work with them to define the problem, really to find the problem, brainstorm ideas and options around the problem and then bring some of those capabilities to bear in a multi-partner environment. In fact, we had competitors in the mix that we brought in to solve the problem.

I had a competitor at the time, their consulting was on my paper because I had a contract. I was literally selling my competitors’ consulting implementation services to solve the customer’s problem. The best part of it, it was a multi-year engagement and it resulted in tens of millions of dollars in sales for my company and others. The best part, though was the way we were collaboratively together. The individual I was working with was relatively senior but he didn’t have the entire budget and needed buy-in. We were down on the Hill working collaboratively together, we were in the Pentagon working together, we were within the organization working together. It was just a team effort to solve a national problem that we had, we saved lives, we saved tons of money at the end of the day through that program.

To me, there’s nothing more satisfying than that mission-focused outcome. I don’t care who your customer is, but when you know you’re helping them, when you know you’re doing something that really matters. That’s the best part.

Fred Diamond: Especially in the beginning where you said that they weren’t even quite sure what they needed. They weren’t sure, they definitely needed drill, they weren’t sure what the hole was and here you are coming to them, helping them come up with the solution. Eric, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again, your mother was in sales so you said you went into sales kicking and screaming, so to speak. You even went the engineering route before you actually moved into direct selling. Looking back, do you ever question being in sales? Did you ever say to yourself, “You know what? This is too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Eric Trexler: I never said it was too hard, and after I went into sales I never really questioned it. I have a different approach to sales. I remember reading an article on you, actually, your upbringing in sales and you were an editor. The editor, as the article goes, thought that they were the all-powerful, all-knowing and I think your comment was something a little more pragmatic. “If we weren’t able to sell the content they were creating, it really didn’t matter, did it?” I am so proud to be in sales, I love sales.

Sometimes we get derided as another used guy sales person, whatever, but the reality is from the beginning of time, if we didn’t have sales in some format or fashion, society wouldn’t exist. I see that as an enabler, I love what we do, I love watching my people sell and I really don’t question it. Fortunately in my role I’m able to podcast, I’m able to read, I’m able to write op-ed pieces, I write all of my own content, I’m able to speak. It gives me the ability to really diversify what I do, keep it fresh but also focus on what is really – my mom was right back in those days – it was my calling, it was my lifelong calling.

[Sponsor break]

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

Eric Trexler: We talked a little bit about mindset and attitude. I think the biggest thing, focus on the customer, focus on their outcomes, their needs. In the example I gave, the customer didn’t even know. I was in there working with them every day and I really said, “What if we tried something like this?” Which started the dialogue. Be courageous, you’re never going to be ready but jump in, if you want to be in sales be aggressive, be courageous, go in, be afraid. Don’t be afraid to fail, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. As long as you’re smart and you work your ass off – your hard work is probably another huge component – you’ll be successful.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about some of your selling habits that have led to your sales success.

Eric Trexler: Research is a big part, being prepared before going into a meeting. Too many times I see people go in and they wing it and that is a recipe for disaster. Focusing on the customer and their needs again, understand deal levers, communicate your desires, understand and tease out of the customer what their outcomes are. Know your outcomes, know theirs, communicate them. Then we have something and I’ll credit Steve Thompson again, he calls ‘deal levers’.

Know how you’re going to match your outcomes, your desires as a seller, if you will. You want to close the deal by a certain date, etcetera, you want to grow the size of the deal, you want to retain the size, you want to solve an enterprise problem, not a small departmental problem. Know how to map those with the customer outcomes and go for that win-win. The deal levers are, “Okay, we can do this but I need you to do this” and the deal levers are actually the techniques you use to map those outcomes together.

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you a question about that. I’m thinking here, when I interview the Sales Game Changers for the podcast, we talked about this before the show, typically the people I interview have been in sales leadership for 10, 15, 20, sometimes 30-35 years. There’s a lot of commonalities but one of them is that you’ve had relationships with customers along the way. I remember I interviewed Tamara Greenspan at Oracle, she’s been in the same general job for 30 somewhat years selling to the same customer so she’s had a 30 year journey. You talked about your mother’s funeral where there were 150 of her customers there so it’s not just a transaction like, “One time I went in there and I sold a whole bunch of desks”, Tamara sold something once and then she was out. You’re talking about a lifelong, in a lot of cases, relationship. Talk about that for a second, how critical are those long-term relationships in continuing to be successful? Because people don’t want to be sold and second of all, the customer is in control now. The customer is in so much more control that they make much more of a decision than you selling them, per se. It really is about the relationship and helping them achieve their goals.

Eric Trexler: I think the perception is they’re in control, I don’t know that they are actually in control. They have a lot more access through digital media to, “This is what I want” but I don’t know that they’re fully in control. Going back, it does make it difficult in relationships. I’ve been in the government a good bit of my career now, I have a commercial selling background also. We’ve seen a lot of turnover in the government. I don’t hire people based on their relationships, I hire people based on how they sell and how they build relationships.

You and I haven’t known each other for a long time but this is the start of a relationship. Trustworthiness, hard work, are you going to deliver on what you say you’re going to do? Are you going to overpromise or not? That’s how you build a relationship. I think relationships are at the fundamental basis of selling, but it’s not necessarily, “I go out golfing with Fred every week so he’s going to buy from me” because you may not. I may not have the best product, I may not meet the need. Relationship are important but they’re different. I have always sold on my technical ability and my commitment, my word. What you never want to do is just sell a deal and know it’s not going to work or sell something because you’re just trying to cash a paycheck. Those are the worst relationships, the worst selling experiences, I think and it can tarnish relationships, reputations, really personal and corporate level.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Eric Trexler: I mentioned learning, that’s a big part for me. I do use an executive coach, I’m always trying to get better. I listen to a lot of podcasts, I read a tremendous amount and I’ll read Stan McChrystal’s Team of Teams and how do I take that and apply that to a sales organization. It’s not always sales books, Neil Rackham is not necessarily on my best-seller list although I’ve read his numerous books. Podcasts, Ted Talks, the other thing I think is vacationing is important. I hope my people are listening. In this rat race world we never take time to come back and appreciate what we’ve done, what we’re doing. It’s always about the next deal but you’ve got to take time to reflect. For me, talking about a major initiative, just getting salespeople is a quarter to quarter year engagement and if you allow that, it will chew you up. Enjoy the ride, enjoy a vacation now and then. Take your vacation, it’ll clear your mind and make you a better salesperson, it will make you better for the customer. Learning is my answer.

Fred Diamond: Before we ask you for your final thought, I want to thank you for all the great insights you’ve given us today. I’m glad that James and Chris insisted that we get you on the podcast, you’ve given us a lot of great things here. Sales is hard, people don’t return your calls, again you went in kicking and screaming like you mentioned in the beginning because your mother was in sales and you saw her working till 2 o’clock in the morning every day. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Eric Trexler: I like the challenge, I like winning, I like competing. I feel like I’m repeating myself here, Fred but watching my teams go into battle, the strategy piece, the planning, the execution, the win. What we do when we lose, how do we recover? How do we handle that when a deal slips? For me that’s fascinating, but it’s really about enabling. As a sales leader I think one of the big differences I see from an individual contributor is the span of control allows you to move a larger needle or move a larger problem. For me, the whole strategy is hard, it’s a challenge, it’s fun, it keeps me waking up every day. My commute is an hour and a half on the average day, I’m in the office whenever I’m not in front of customers because I love being around my people, I love being around sales.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought. You’ve given us so many great ones along the way, just give us something, one final thought to inspire our listeners around the globe.

Eric Trexler: I think results matter in sales. Everything we do should be geared around results, that’s what we’re here to do more so than anywhere else, we can measure them but it’s not always about the numbers. To the sales personnel, the individual contributors, the aspiring salesperson out there, focus on you. Don’t be envious of your peers, everybody thinks everybody is making a million bucks a year, it’s not the case. Focus on your customer, yourself, your business, put a plan together and enjoy the ride. To the leaders out there, focus on your people, be transparent and direct with them, have a plan, always look at how we make them better, how we help them. Again, focus on the customer, they are the reason we exist.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 195: Forcepoint Government Sales Chief Eric Trexler Says Focusing on this Outcome is Key to Determining Your Sales Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Attend the December 6 IES Program “Making 2020 Your Best Sales Year Ever: Creating a Compelling Vision for Unlimited Success“

EPISODE 194: Microsoft Federal Sales GM Javier Vasquez Discloses the Transformation Lessons His Sales Organization, Company and Customers Have Learned Together

JAVIER’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Be tenacious. Just try, try, try. You’re going to hear ‘no’ more than you hear ‘yes’ when you first start in your career and I know it sounds painful now, but that is where and how you learn. Get back up and do it again, and practice, practice, practice.”

Javier Vasquez is the General Manager for solutions and technology for Microsoft’s US Federal Government business.

He’s been with Microsoft for 19 years. Prior to coming to Microsoft, he was at Digital Equipment Corporation and a handful of medical startups.

Find Javier on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Javier, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. We previously interviewed a former employee at Microsoft, Christine Barger, who gave us a great interview. We actually did the interview in this office, so it’s a great story and I’m looking forward to the continuation of the story. Why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Javier Vasquez: Thanks, Fred and thank you for selecting me to have a discussion this morning. I’ll begin with a little bit about myself. I’m a father, a husband, I have two lovely children, a 13 and a 16 year old, live here in the Arlington, Virginia area. I’m probably one of those few folks that would consider themselves native to the DC area, I’ve been here since I was about a year old, 1971. I meet many people around the DC area and I guess I’m one of those rare birds that actually has grown up in the area.

Fred Diamond: Microsoft has its arms in a lot of things, obviously, especially now. Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Javier Vasquez: Our mission statement at Microsoft is to empower every person in every organization to do more. How that really relates to the US federal market is pretty clear, I look at us as empowering missions of all of our federal customers, whether that’s in civilian government, defense or in the intelligence community. Folks know us very well for our Windows and Office products, but what they probably know us a lot less for is our cloud products and some of the enablement we do in terms of driving the mission with our customers. I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done, at least in my tenure here in the last 19 years of really helping our customers achieve their mission and helping them do more. I look at our corporate mission as well-aligned to what we do very personally here in the DC area.

Fred Diamond: Have you always sold to the federal marketplace?

Javier Vasquez: No, I’ve done federal, state and local and then healthcare earlier in my career. Pretty much a really deep commitment to the public sector, I get a lot of energy from working with our public sector customers.

Fred Diamond: We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe and we’ve interviewed a number of people who serve the federal marketplace. Tell us why that particular marketplace is interesting to you. You mentioned the mission, what is it about the mission that really resonates with you?

Javier Vasquez: For me, what I really like serving our public sector customers and especially our government customers is just the impact that I see that it makes to everyone more broadly than just the organization itself. I have many stories of us helping child welfare organizations, helping the military with spouses, helping disabled veterans and just being able to see, “Wow, I was part of that.” I’m not one to say that I was the leader or did it, but to be part of an organization that participated in the success and driving success is really heartwarming. There are times when I was from our state and local business to our federal business where I showed my kids and my wife and friends like, “I was part of that, it was really exciting and here’s the backstory of how we really helped the customer out.” That’s what really energizes me. Obviously DC being a government town, lots of examples for us to really make a success in the local as well as the broader community.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to the beginning of your career. Tell us how you first got into sales.

Javier Vasquez: My career is a little bit non-linear. I was kind of pulled into sales. I was pre-med, my father was a surgeon so I was predisposed – if anyone else has a father that’s a medical professional, you’re kind of going to be a doctor and no other career. As it turns out, I took a part-time job in the evening doing technical support for a little local healthcare company and I always had a predilection for working with technology, it was always a lot of fun. In my career there I went from help desk to working with customers more directly. I used to have long hair, earrings, the rock and roll electro lifestyle as it was back in the 90’s.

One day my boss came up to me, a mentor of mine and goes, “Javier, I want to get you on the road, I want you to cut your hair and I’m going to pay you X amount” – which seems like a little bit of money nowadays but it seemed like a lot back then – “and I want to get you in front of customers and we’re going to really drive some success together.” I cut my hair, took on the role, my mother showed up at the office embarrassingly a few days later to give my CEO a cake because she’d been trying to get me to get my hair cut for a while. I kind of got pulled into it, didn’t necessarily think I was going to go into sales, I didn’t think I was going to go into tech. I remember years ago when I told my father that I wasn’t going to go to med school and I wanted to stay in technology he said to me, “Technology? There’s no future in computers, you’re going to sit in a cube all day and work on computers? No, you don’t want to do that, son. There’s no future in tech.”

Before he passed away many years ago, I had the ability to have that conversation with him again and he’s a stubborn old man, so he never fully recanted it, but he said I did alright so I was happy about that.

Fred Diamond: I think Microsoft has made its mark.

Javier Vasquez: It’s done okay.

Fred Diamond: It’s done well. Anyway, you cut your hair, you went on the road with your boss there. What were some of the key lessons that you learned from some of those first few sales jobs that have stuck with you till today?

Javier Vasquez: Listen. I had the privilege of working for a fantastic gentleman, he was a serial entrepreneur, his name was Rick Cameron and he taught me a couple of things. One, listen, listen to what the customer has to say, learn from them. I know especially as younger sales professionals you have the desire to jump in mid-sentence, that you want to interrupt the customer because you have such great ideas you want to share, but the opposite is true. You listen, they want to talk about themselves and their problems and in many ways they want to find the undiscovered truth they’re not aware of that they have a problem with, so let them talk.

The second lesson which I take to heart even to this very day, culture. If you don’t build a good culture within your sales organization, you’re going to be reticent to bring up the hard problems and to brainstorm together to go drive even more sales and try to figure out how we can service our customers even better.

Fred Diamond: Back to listening, that comes up not infrequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Again, we have a lot of emerging sales leaders listening to the podcast around the globe, give us a couple tips on how they can be better listeners.

Javier Vasquez: I would say practice. It’s funny because I’ve had this conversation extremely recently. In your social groups if you’re early in your career, as you and your friends are talking, we all love to talk about our stories. I challenge you as you’re in your social setting, let your friends speak until they’re done speaking and then jump in with your insight. It’s actually very hard to do and I still find myself today even with my children struggling to hold back because I’m the dad and I know best, but it’s practicing that skill of just listening and holding back.

The second thing is be an active listener. We all have a tendency as the customer or as the partner is speaking to think about how to solve their problem. I listen and at least when I speak to customers or partners, repeat back in my head something that I thought was an important point, and repeat that in my head versus practicing what I’m going to respond to the customer with.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great thing. One of the other great lessons I learned that makes you a better listener is ask if you can take notes and ask the question from a positive perspective. “Can I take notes during this meeting?” It does a couple things. Usually the customer is going to say, “Yes, of course.” Don’t say, “Do you mind if I take notes?” Because then they’re going to say no, but say, “Can I take notes in this meeting?” Then that also shows them that you’re interested in what they have to say.

Javier Vasquez: Absolutely correct.

Fred Diamond: What are you an expert in? Again, you’ve been with Microsoft for 19 years. Tell us about your specific area of brilliance.

Javier Vasquez: I would say ‘brilliance’ is funny to me, but something that I think I’m proud of that I do well is culture, building an organization that encourages risk taking, encourages mistakes and learning and encourages honest feedback and honest perspective sharing. I think that so many times it’s such a fast paced environment that we work in, that we neglect the time to think about the people around us and what impacts them, and how we can make them more successful and giving them the space to make mistakes. I think that is absolutely important, especially newer in career, go take a chance, take a risk, see what comes of it. If it doesn’t work, what did you learn?

We have the luxury of being a bit of a larger company so we have probably a little bit more flex in making mistakes, but I tell you, when I look at my newer in career folks, I talk to them 5 to 7 years later, one thing I hear over and over again like, “What did you learn?” they say, “You allowed me to make mistakes and it allowed me to learn. If I didn’t make those mistakes I would have never…” or, “If I wasn’t given the space to make a mistake and recover, I’m not sure I would have had the success that I have today.”

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you about Microsoft for a second here. Again, you’ve been here for 19 years, you’re a general manager, again you run solutions and technology for the US federal business, that’s got to be a huge market that you’re serving.

Javier Vasquez: Yes, it’s significant. [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Talk about Microsoft. Why is someone who is in first or second job that’s looking for the next sales job, why would they want to come to a company like Microsoft?

Javier Vasquez: Breadth of impact. It’s plain and simple for me. We’re uniquely positioned that we have such a broad portfolio of capabilities, everything from hardware devices to cloud to on-premises to consulting to research and development. We’re in a unique position to do things that very few companies in the world can do, so just the breadth of impact you can make. I know that we actively recruit folks out of college, we have a program called Aspire and I actively participate in that and I hear that question, “Why would I come?” I say breadth of impact.

You can go to smaller companies and you’re going to have a lot of fun, do something really specific, you’re going to go to go to our competitors and they’re going to have their offering, but I challenge you to find a company that left to right offers just what we offer in the market. Why that’s important for a young sales professional is sometimes early in your career you’re not sure what you’re really good at or love to sell and coming into a Microsoft allows you to day, “I thought I really was good at product sales, but I want to do more of a consultative services sale” or, “Actually, maybe I want to do something more on the marketing side of the house.” We have that breadth of opportunity that’s, I think, unique for your young sales professionals out there.

Fred Diamond: Again, I’ve mentioned this a number of times, you’ve been with Microsoft for 19 years, almost two decades. You must have worked with some amazing people, why don’t you tell us an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?

Javier Vasquez: Within the company I’ll share a mentor and then I’ll share a mentor that I mentioned earlier. There was a fellow, Michael Donlan, incredible Vice President. He is now at Apple and runs public sector at Apple so I’m really excited for his success over there. He was non-classical, like I was, he came from a technology background mostly and became really good at proving value to others. I came to work for his organization, he ran the state and local business at the time. I came to work in his business and one thing I just learned from him was making sure as a sales leader that you had your operations down tight because tight operations gives you the flexibility to experiment. When you have the ability to say, “Here’s how I’m going to take a risk and I can quantify it”, it gives you the ability to go to your leadership and senior leadership to say, “I want an investment here, here’s why I have my ship run really tightly, take a chance on me.” It really gave you the flexibility to lead.

Second thing that Mike taught me was to be genuine, be yourself. When you go into sales leadership, I think a mistake a lot of folks make is that I have to look and appear a certain way, I have to dress a certain way, I have to speak a certain way and Mike was really good at just, “Be you, you have charisma and it’s different than everyone else, but people follow that.” He was quirky and he was a little different and I just respected the heck out of him for that. Although our styles are different, I took that to heart. He was really important to me in this company.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned there was someone actually outside of the company.\

Javier Vasquez: Yes, a fellow I mentioned earlier, Rick Cameron, a serial entrepreneur. He was for many years, even though I left the company we worked for ages ago, I would check in with him from time to time. He’s just so smart and no matter which business he started up, it really came down to the culture of the company and do what’s right for your customer even if it’s a short term hit. Do what’s right for your customer because in the end, the benefits are just going to be 5x-10x what you get initially.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious, after having been mentored by those two leaders how would you describe yourself as a sales leader? Are you hands-on, are you forceful, do you let things happen? How would you describe yourself?

Javier Vasquez: For me, the way I look at the way I lead sales organizations really comes down to allowing folks the room. Have clear expectations in terms of what I expect out of them, but give them the room and the space to actually figure out how they’re going to get there. I think the world is transforming and evolving so quickly, the way that I sold 5-10 years ago is completely not applicable today, so I don’t have the genius to say what is really going to work 5 or 10 years from now. I give my leaders and give the sales folks the ability to experiment and try new things, but the most important thing coming out of that is, “What did you learn if something didn’t go right?” Then pick yourself back up and go right at it. From a leadership style it’s, “I have a clear set of expectations, this is what we need for success. How you get there is a little bit less important to me, but I want to make sure I see passion and tenacity to reach those results.”

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

Javier Vasquez: Transformation. It’s really interesting, in the federal space I would say in the last 4 to 6 years our customers have started embracing cloud technology really deeply. That’s really created a whole new set of scenarios that I’ve never had a thought about. How do I contract? Which is extremely difficult. How do I contract for labor? What are the new capabilities that I’ve never had in the past? Having that conversation with customers in a transformative perspective is really tough because their mind isn’t quite there yet. Our sales reps are still developing that skill in some cases, so making sure that transformation is top of mind to our customers.

Fred Diamond: Is there another challenge you want to address as well?

Javier Vasquez: We’ve changed our culture quite a bit and using culture as an asset when you go to our customer. “As you’ve transformed, we’ve been through our own internal transformation” and going back to your challenge it’s, “What did we learn from that cultural transformation we’re still in and how do we impart that knowledge to you, customer, in terms of your personal transformation?” As much as it’s a challenge, it’s become an asset for us.

Fred Diamond: Would you mind telling us about that transformation?

Javier Vasquez: Absolutely. In the long history of Microsoft, we’re pretty famous for the Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer era which was pretty much, “Sell as much product to your customer as possible, make sure every desktop, every PC is fully covered with every piece of product.” That works up until a certain point when you’ve had deep success in the market. The problem with that is that we never actually took the time during this period to learn what the customer’s problems were – the best sellers did, but many of our sellers and culturally it was about, “We have the best product, just buy it.” What’s really changed for us and having new leadership with Satya really empowered us to say to ourselves, “The way that we’re going to be successful in the next 10, 20, 50 years is radically different from the last 10-20.” Working backwards from the customer, “Customer, what are your challenges?”

Be empathetic, listen and deeply listen, then from there propose things that we can do to help them. The new way of selling isn’t always about getting the Big Bang deal. It used to be success was the 8-9 figure deal, now I reward success for those initial wins. “Great, we had a customer, we did something really small but it was really impactful.” From there we build the trust and the confidence with our customers to then demand the next piece of business or ask for the next piece of business. That’s a big transformation for our sales force.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, why don’t you take us back to the #1 sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Javier Vasquez: I’d probably pivot on that question away from my successes, but just the number of successes that I’ve had with my teams. I think the thing that I would say I’m most proud of is the culture of the organizations that I’ve been privileged to run, and from success is the things that they actually accomplished out of that in terms of state. When I was in the state and local business being able to reduce transaction costs and times for women and infant children, that meant another 7% or 8% we could cover with the same amount of budget from the state, 7% or 8% more women and infant children that needed benefits. From my work with the Defense Department and the VA being able to really help disabled vets and realize their potential on rehabilitation.

Each one of those are wins, it’s really hard to say which one I’m most proud of, I’m just proud that I was part of a culture that enabled all these great things to happen.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break, I want to ask you one last question. Again, you mentioned that great story when you cut your hair and then you moved into sales. Did you ever think back to yourself, “You know what? It’s too hard, I wish I had the long hair again and go sit in a cube and do tech support” or, “Maybe I made a mistake not going into med school”? What do you think about your sales career? Again, do you think to yourself, “It’s too hard” and do you ever think to yourself, “It’s just not for me”?

Javier Vasquez: Never over a second do I ever think that it’s too hard, I made the wrong choice. I am lucky that I had really great people nudge me and see my inner potential when I didn’t see it and pushed me in the right direction. I’ve absolutely been privileged, I love it, I love the energy, I love how new it is, the challenges every day are different. Like I said, I’m just blessed that someone pushed me in the right direction when I was at a critical point in my life and just having a blast doing it.

[Sponsor break]

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

Javier Vasquez: I would say it really is two things. One is tenacity, just try, try, try. You’re going to hear ‘no’ more than you hear ‘yes’ when you first start in your career and I know it sounds painful now, but that is where you learn, that is how you learn. Just tenacity, get back up and do it again, practice, practice, practice.

The second part of that is as you’re learning, solicit feedback and input. Go into a meeting and ask the folks, whether it’s the pre-sales engineer next to you or your manager or even the customer, “How did I do? What can I do better?” It’s so important, and give yourself the opportunity to take feedback. Some of these things are very subtle, from body posture to the expression on your face saying, “I want to hear feedback” because I know people feel like they’re asking for feedback but if you’re giving the body language that you don’t want to hear feedback, you’re not going to get it. Really receiving and internalizing feedback, those two things, tenacity and being open and creating the space for other people to give you feedback.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about a selling habit that has led to your sales success?

Javier Vasquez: Make sure when you go into a customer, you know the customer and well. I think what’s really important about that is knowing the customer’s mission, knowing what is important to the person on the other side of the table that you’re speaking to. Part of that is really recognizing the fact that people don’t buy anything from Microsoft, people buy from people, people buy from Javier and Fred and Joan and Sally, and they want to buy from someone they trust and they know or feel they have a connection with. Be prepared when you go in a customer conversation whether it’s their mission or knowing a little bit about them. “Their daughter plays in the lacrosse team, my daughter plays in the lacrosse team, how’s that tournament going?” Just making that connection because that allows you to bring barriers down and walls that allow you to have a deeper conversation insight in what’s important to your customer.

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

Javier Vasquez: Obviously cloud is huge everywhere across the board, but I think really for us the pivot on cloud is about what are the things that the customers and our government organizations can do uniquely in the cloud? And I challenge our sales force, I challenge our engineering folks to say, “What is it that they could not do unless they were doing it in the cloud?” We have examples in Department of Energy, we’re doing stuff around artificial intelligence and some other research and engineering because of the scale of what we have and we’re uniquely positioned to do. I’m really proud of those kind of moments, those are the things that we need to do more of that we are uniquely positioned to do in the cloud. That’s a big challenge.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question. Before we ask you for your final thoughts, you just mentioned a few moments ago that people don’t buy from Microsoft, that they buy from you. Is it easier or harder to be a sales professional at Microsoft today? What I mean by that is again, you sell to the government but people are looking for alternative vendors and a lot of vendors have been popping up but again, Microsoft is probably one of the top 3 companies in the history of technology. Tell us a little more about that. Doors obviously get open, again you’re selling to the federal space, I remember hearing that the federal customer was Microsoft’s biggest customer and Ballmer had access to some of the top people in the government. Tell us about that, about selling to Microsoft. It can’t be a hindrance, it’s got to be a helpful thing for you.

Javier Vasquez: Generally it’s helpful. The door does get open, it goes without saying but we have an obligation to our customers to do more. Just because the door is open it doesn’t mean that we can just simply expect the customer to see our value proposition, but as I mentioned, because of the breadth of what we come to the table with, there’s an expectation that we’re really going to offer material value in a very quick time to market for the customer. So is it easier to get the door open? Yes, but it’s also easier to have the door closed on if you don’t come in with your A-game and show value to the customer as quickly as possible. It’s easier to get the door open, easier to get the door closed so you really have that obligation to do the right thing when you talk to the customer.

Fred Diamond: What is it about sales as a career, though that has kept you going?

Javier Vasquez: Energy. It is never constant, it is always changing and I tell you, 10 years ago if I told you what my priorities were today, I couldn’t have predicted them. I’m sure Satya or someone much smarter than I could have, but just the amount of energy and just passion around it. When I look at sales, it’s a push-pull with our customers and our government organizations. We challenge our government customers to do things they normally wouldn’t have thought about which helps them evolve and be more reactive to their end customers and citizens and constituency, so that’s what I really love about it. We make the government better, we help our customers that we work with better because we’re creating a little bit of positive tension from the do some new things.

Fred Diamond: You’ve given us some great insights today, I want to thank you again, Javier Vasquez for being on the Sales Game Changers podcast. You’ve given us so many great ideas here and a lot of clarity, too about what it’s like to sell for Microsoft, again which has got to be one of the top 3 technology companies in history. There’s probably been tens of thousands of people you’ve sold and everybody knows the name but you made a great point. You guys offer so many things now that how does the customer truly understand all the things that you offer, especially with the transformation? Give us one final thought. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, people that are peers of yours and people that want to have your job in 5-10 years. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire them today?

Javier Vasquez: I would say one word, culture. Whether you’re a leader or whether you’re an individual contributor, be part of a positive learning culture to help you and your peers to be more successful. I think that creates the space for new ideas and creativity and I see the rewards. It sounds hokey but I’ve seen it in action, and really that positive learning culture will pay dividends in the medium and long term, for sure.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 194: Microsoft Federal Sales GM Javier Vasquez Discloses the Transformation Lessons His Sales Organization, Company and Customers Have Learned Together first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 176: IBM Federal Capture Leader Clara Conti Says It’s the Growth Mindset That Will Set Your Sales Career Apart and Here’s Why

CLARA’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Never underestimate your growth mindset and constantly check yourself on this. We get bombarded with the media telling you there’s going to be a recession, there’s less opportunity, there’s all kinds of things. You have to tune all of that out and focus on a growth mindset, because without a growth mindset you won’t be able to embrace the new opportunities that are coming your way.”

Clara Conti is a partner at IBM and is an executive on the sales and growth team leading all capture and proposal for all large federal deals at IBM.

She’s held sales leadership positions at Source America and was the CEO at ObjectVideo, IPIX and Aurora.

Find Clara on LinkedIn!

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

Clara Conti: I started my career in Washington DC almost 20 years ago or so arriving at a little known company called SAIC at the time. I was a program manager for a very large distributed simulation program and I had a customer say to me one day, “You’re really great at selling, you ought to go and start your own company.” I had $3,000 dollars in my 401K and I started my first company called Aurora Enterprise Solutions. I sold that in 1999 and then for about 10 years or so I was a CEO for hire mostly for venture capital firms, helping build organizations and raise money for these companies and growing those sales organizations.

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited to talk to you for a couple reasons. Again, my background knowledge of you is as a CEO. You’ve held some nice positions here and you’ve also been a sales leader so it’s going to be a nice interesting twist on your career path and having viewed different aspects of the business. I’m really excited about the advice that you’ll be giving to our listeners around the globe. Why don’t you get us caught up? Tell us what you offer today, what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Clara Conti: IBM is really an exciting place to work simply because it’s a magnificent history here at IBM and all of the products, services and offerings that we have. I’m most excited about our cognitive technologies and AI. What is happening right now in AI and what the federal government is looking for in terms of a cognitive enterprise to me is very exciting, it’s going to fundamentally change the way the federal government works and the way that they relate to their clients and their customers as well.

Fred Diamond: Again, I’ve mentioned that you held some CEO positions and now you’re a partner at IBM, but how did you first get into the sales side? How did that come about?

Clara Conti: Sales has always been part of my DNA, so even when I started my first company I was the salesperson, I was the founder and I was the one that naturally had to figure out how to go to market with my company. Then in the CEO roles, basically they were turnaround roles so I had to come into these organizations and figure out what needs to be fixed. How can we grow this company? How can we grow the revenue here? I naturally fell into sales because of the positions that I had and then when working for Source America I ran a very large sales organization with about 70 sales reps and we also had 4 stand-alone businesses that I had to support as well as an inside sales group and a digital marketing group. It was a very broad position that had to take a look at how do we grow sales for this non-profit that basically had declining revenues over the years, and we had to figure out how to, what they called, “outrunning the bear” – meaning our incumbent contracts were coming to an end and we needed to figure out how to grow sales.

Fred Diamond: What were some of the key lessons that you learned from some of your first few sales jobs?

Clara Conti: You never take no for an answer, of course that’s always the first key and I think the other two is really understanding the space that you’re selling into and understanding what kind of competition is in that space. I think a lot of folks turn a blind eye to competition and think, “They’re just going to love me and they’re going to love our product or they’re going to love our service.” Really understanding what your competitive space looks like I think is really key.

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you a quick question. Now you’re at IBM, we have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening around the globe who are at the early part of their career, so tell us what it means to be in sales for such a monolithic, hugely successful company like IBM.

Clara Conti: It’s really exciting because you’re working for an organization that not only has tremendous technologies and products and services but also, IBM requires you to be up on your game, step up your game every step of the way. I’ve only been at IBM for about a year and a half and one of the things that I realized when I first came to IBM was that we offer thousands of online classes for every employee. You get to learn about block chain, AI, cloud computing, digital analytics, data analytics, etcetera and all of that is available to you. What that does is it compresses the timeline in terms of your experience and knowledge about these particular offerings. To me, that was very exciting coming into the role.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, we have a lot of people who are starting their sales career or they’re at the beginning stage, if you will. Would working for a company like IBM be a good strategy for them to try to do?

Clara Conti: Absolutely. IBM has a program here for recent college graduates, they’re called CBDers and they come on board, and for two years they get to experience all different parts of IBM. Again, they have all of those classes that are online that are available to them, so an early entry employee gets to sample all the offerings of such a large company and gets to understand the business as well.

Fred Diamond: Talk a little more about you, tell us your area of expertise. Tell us what you’re brilliant at.

Clara Conti: What I’m brilliant at? [Laughs] My background has always been in turning around organizations, being a sales organization or a company. My mind has been tuned to what needs to be fixed, so when I come into an organization I look for what’s working, what’s not working, I like to go on a listening tour to be able to get feedback from folks and then I take a look at the processes that are already in place. If it’s a sales process or it’s just a business process, making sure that all of those pieces and parts work together. Then I apply my sales methodologies and growth mindset to that organization, so I don’t know if it’s called brilliance but it is the thing that I do.

Fred Diamond: You’ve probably worked for some amazing people over your career, why don’t you tell us about an impactful mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Clara Conti: I’ve been lucky, I’ve had a lot of great mentors throughout my career even when I first started in Washington DC working at SIAC. Again, I had a customer who at that time was a DARPA program manager who’s Captain Dennis McBride who encouraged me to go and start my own company. Then through the years I belonged to different organizations around town, like NVTC and ACT-IAC, etcetera and within those organizations what you find are folks that are willing to help you in your career along the way. For me personally, I was lucky because Washington DC offers all of those types of networking events.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. Again, you’re a woman CEO, now there are some companies that are being run by women CEO’s like Raytheon for example. On the mentor question, what are some things that you would mentor? Do you mentor other women and what are some of the things that you would mentor them on specifically in sales to take their career to the next level?

Clara Conti: I do mentor a lot of women. Here at IBM I actually run the women’s book club and it’s mostly for the younger female employees here. We usually do a lot of business books so every month we get together and next month we’re going to be doing Sid Fuchs’ book on Get Off the Bench which is about networking in the Washington DC area. It’s actually a pretty insightful read, I would encourage readers to take a look at it simply because it helps people understand that it’s never just about you sitting behind the desk. That’s not your career, your career is relationships and working with others.

I also have done a lot of mentoring with Springboard Enterprises which is a nonprofit that helps women start their own businesses here in Washington DC, but I’ve always found it very impactful for these young folks to have these mentors. You started the question off with the CEO of Raytheon being a woman, 20 years ago that would have never been thought of and it’s one of the reasons why I started my own company out of SAIC 20 years ago, because I didn’t see those role models. I became my own role model, so to speak and now you can look at, I guess there’s maybe 4, 5 women CEO’s of large defense contracting firms right here in this area. That to me has made a great impact in my life and to me personally, it reaffirms what I’ve always believed. I’m the great-grandniece of a suffragette, so it was in my DNA to always push the envelope, so to speak in terms of women and their roles in society and their roles in business. Now I feel like everything has come full circle in my life.

Fred Diamond: Again, we talked about how you’ve run sales for a nonprofit, you’ve also been a business owner with your own company, you’ve been a CEO for a couple turnaround type situations, if you will. Now you’re a partner at IBM, you’re an exec on the sales and growth team, you’re in charge of all the capture and proposals for IBM large business in the federal side. How do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as a sales leader, as a business leader, as an entrepreneur? I’m just curious how that fits into your makeup and how you go about your business day.

Clara Conti: It’s a little bit of everything because I’m a mentor to a lot of young people here. I’m business adviser to some senior folks here because I can bring all that kind of experience, CEO and restructuring experience and transformation experience to some of the senior executives here. I’m a little bit of all of those things which I really enjoy, because it’s a little bit like a mini CEO role in that I’m moving from different disciplines all day long. From an engineering solution meeting to a marketing meeting to a sales meeting and bringing all of that experience to bear to a large organization.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to sales for a second. What are the two biggest challenges you see sales leaders face with today?

Clara Conti: I think a lot of it has to do with the signal to noise ratio. How do you get your signal out there and rise above all of the noise that’s out there with your customers? You have to be fairly surgical about it. You’ve got a number of companies that are offering cloud solutions, a number of companies that are offering AI, what is your unique value proposition and how are you going to message that specifically to your customers? I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we have.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a great career, you’ve worked with some great companies, you’ve had a bunch of wins. Why don’t you take us back to the #1 specific sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Clara Conti: I’ve had a lot of them and I’m very grateful for all of those opportunities. When I was the CEO of ObjectVideo, we won one of the first contracts to secure the northern border with our technology. That was a huge win for us and really an affirmation of what we were doing there. The other that I’m most proud of is I came out of a very large two and a half billion dollar nonprofit as head of sales, and this nonprofit was responsible for finding jobs for people with significant disabilities. One of the things that we were able to do during my time there was to secure a contract with Macy’s, it was a staffing contract to essentially supply folks for them for all the Macy’s distribution centers and all of their stores up to 80,000 people with disabilities, which doubled the size of the number of people we had employed at the time. It was a huge win for the organization, I’m most proud of that.

Fred Diamond: People listening to today’s podcast have heard us mention this non-for-profit you’ve worked for before. Sales and non-for-profit don’t typically go together, is going to work for a non-for-profit in sales a good career decision for someone who’s looking to take their sales career to the next level?

Clara Conti: Yes and no. It all has to do with the mission of the nonprofit and if you are connected to that mission, I believe that it can be a very rewarding career as a salesperson, if you are connected to that mission. It may or may not be financially as rewarding as some other sales positions, but certainly there is a great reward in helping an organization accomplish its mission.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to take a short break in a second, listen to one of our sponsors. Before we do, did you ever question the position of sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “Sales is just too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Clara Conti: “What am I doing”? [Laughs] Did I ever think it was too hard? No, I never thought of it as too hard because I’m a person that likes to solve puzzles, so to me it’s always been very intriguing and it’s sort of a softer side of engineering if you agree. To me it was very exciting to do.

Fred Diamond: Again, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast, we’re talking to Clara Conti. Again, she’s a partner at IBM, she’s an executive on the sales and growth team leading all capture and proposal for all large federal deals at IBM. Clara, before we take a short break I just mentioned capture and proposal. We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening around the globe who may not understand what that means. Can you explain that before we take a short break?

Clara Conti: Capture is fairly unique to the federal space and a capture manager is someone that works with the business development folks to shape an opportunity prior to it hitting the street. They have to be a jack of all trades, they have to understand the technology, they have to understand how to sell, they have to understand acquisition policy and they’re a fairly unique role in the federal space. Our proposal folks are the folks that pull it all together, they look at the requirements, they look at the RFP and make sure that we provide a compelling and compliant response.

[Sponsor break]

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

Clara Conti: This is really going to speak to the younger folks in your audience, and that is never underestimate the power of one-on-one networking, and not to rely solely on electronic networking alone. Sometimes I see a lot of young folks that at the end of the day they turn off and go online and basically don’t go to networking events and aren’t meeting folks one-on-one. Maybe that’s a generational thing where they rely solely on social media, but they really do need to understand the power of one-on-one networking.

Fred Diamond: Just meeting with people, just getting to know them, just talking, just building that relationship base. Especially in a market like you serve, you’re dealing with people you’ve probably been working with for 10, 15, 20, 30 years.

Clara Conti: That’s right, and they remember you. They remember being introduced to you, they remember that you cared about them, you cared about their concerns and their problems and that is really important in sales.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about some of your selling habits that have led to your sales success?

Clara Conti: I like to go to weekly events and sometimes specially in Washington DC it’s a snowy evening or a rainy lunch time and I think, “I don’t want to leave the office” or, “I just want to go home after work, I really don’t want to go to these networking events” and in Washington DC there’s a networking event every night of the week. There is something that you can go to and you will meet new people, and you will meet new potential customers. It’s a habit that I’ve developed over time, it wasn’t easy for me at first because I would go to these network events and I didn’t know a soul and then over the years I would end up going and say, “Yes, I haven’t talked to so and so in 10 months and now we can re-engage.” It has been a very valuable thing to do.

Fred Diamond: What would be your advice if you were to go to a networking event? You said in the beginning you didn’t quite know how to optimize those, what would be a tip for some of the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast to optimize the 6:30 to 8 o’clock meeting of something?

Clara Conti: Understand the art of small talk. Don’t just stand there with a business card and introduce yourself and expect something in return. Have something to offer, be a good listener and be able to say to yourself, “How can I establish a relationship with this person so that way they will trust me and they would want to know a little bit more about my business?”

Fred Diamond: That’s a great bit of advice. A lot of people also are introverts or they’re apprehensive, they don’t know what to do. I make it a point, if I see someone standing by themselves I go right to that person. I also don’t talk too much to my friends because we can meet all the time, and also, don’t grab a plate full of food. That’s one of the first rules, right?

Clara Conti: [Laughs] or too much wine.

Fred Diamond: Don’t even drink wine.

Clara Conti: Right, exactly.

Fred Diamond: You don’t need to drink wine at these networking events.

Clara Conti: Right, and you can be very efficient. You would be very surprised at how many connections you can make at some of these events and you follow up the next week or so and your network starts to expand exponentially doing that.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, when you said you mentor a lot of young professionals, young women in business and in sales, what are some things that they ask for your advice on?

Clara Conti: A lot of the advice that the kids ask are really about leadership. How do I handle a particular situation? How can I be recognized as a leader? How can people take me seriously? Which has always confounded me whenever a young person ask me that, because we have to go back to the fact that you are a leader, you are a natural leader. If you’re here and you’re asking for this advice and you want to move your career forward, you already have it within you. That’s the kind of question that I get asked a lot.

Fred Diamond: Clara, tell us a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success.

Clara Conti: I think Warren Buffett said it best, the best investment you can make is in yourself. For many years I was very hard-charging and working many hours and I still do that, but I also set aside time for learning. I have found that the more time that I spend doing that, the greater my contribution is in my role. I made a deliberate effort the last couple of years to educate myself on the latest technologies and offerings, leadership thinking and what is current in today’s society.

Fred Diamond: Not to put you on the spot, but what’s something you’re trying to learn today? What is top of the list?

Clara Conti: Top of the list right now is really focused on AI and the cognitive enterprise. It’s a fascinating subject, if you get this month’s Harvard Business Review there’s actually a great article in there that talks a lot about the cognitive enterprise and talks about why the basis for a success is really cultural change. We talk a lot about how AI can be applied in businesses, how we need to have digital transformation but the truth in the matter is a lot of organizations are stuck in time. There’s this cultural transformation that has to happen and you have to have leaders that understand how to deliver that cultural transformation.

Fred Diamond: Clara, before we ask you for your final thought to inspire our listeners today, you’ve given us such great insights and great information throughout this podcast. Why have you continued in sales as a career? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Clara Conti: I am a natural extrovert. Sales is just like a great position for me to be in simply because I love working with folks, I love meeting new folks and I love help growing organizations. A lot of discussions online these days about a growth mindset, it’s something that I’ve naturally had my entire life. Sales just naturally became a career path for me.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire them today?

Clara Conti: My final thought today is never underestimate your growth mindset and constantly check yourself on this. We get bombarded in the media telling you there’s going to be a recession, there’s less opportunity, there’s all kinds of things. You have to kind of tune all of that out and focus on a growth mindset, because without a growth mindset you won’t be able to embrace the new opportunities that are coming your way.

Fred Diamond: Of course, the classic book on that by Carol Dweck talking about mindset, we’ll put a link in there as well, it’s a fantastic book. You were speaking about Warren Buffett before, Bill Gates always speaks highly of that book, it’s a classic.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 176: IBM Federal Capture Leader Clara Conti Says It’s the Growth Mindset That Will Set Your Sales Career Apart and Here’s Why first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 164: Akamai Public Sector Sales Leader Randy Wood Tells How His Sales Career Began on Sept. 12, 2001 and Why Your Human Brand is So Critical in Sales

RANDY’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “it’s the importance of giving your best and highest performance every day. Performance and performance alone dictates the predator in every food chain. Sales is no different. Each and every day in sales, people and sales leaders need to commit and understand what it takes to bring our best performance to our customers and to the company and to our teams.”

Randy is the Vice President of Sales Republic Sector at Akamai.

Prior to taking over this role, he’s held leadership positions at F5 Networks, Red Hat, and Cisco.

He spent 8 years in the US Marines.

Find Randy on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Randy, first of all thank you for your service. Second of all, why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Randy Wood: Fred, thanks. A couple things. Pouring it into that, I want to give a little context about that question you asked, “Tell me a little bit more about yourself, what we need to know.” That’s a really important question and I think it’s an important question for sales professionals, sales leaders, even today’s generation of youth to be able to answer.  As simple as it sounds, you’d be surprised as how many people just can’t give you a good compelling answer there and it needs to be compelling, it needs to be relevant in a resonate thing.

With that in mind, I’ll tell you I’m two things: I’m a leader and I’m a storyteller. The importance and the power of story is something that’s part of my sales life and part of my sales career, how I relate to customers. Maybe just two things to keep in mind and we’ll talk hopefully more about just leadership and I’ll have a chance to tell you a story or two. Aside from that, as you mentioned, I started my career as a marine officer. I’m also the son of a marine officer, a marine fighter pilot so that’s how I viewed the world for many years and decided to make that the first job I did. I’m a father of two, I have a 19 year old college sophomore and a 17 year old high school junior and they’re obviously my passion and what’s most important. Aside from that, I’m a Washington Capitals fan.

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

Randy Wood: At Akamai we are in the managed services business, more specifically and increasingly we’re in the managed security services business. That’s not traditionally what Akamai has been known for, for me and the public sector organization that is an enormous opportunity to really lead and drive more security relevance with our customers. That’s what we do, what excites me about it is the fact that we can create real differentiation in what I call customer confidence in a secure architecture which enables better, faster, more reliable, more trustworthy digital experiences.

We’re in the digital experience business, when it comes to cyber security the idea of increasing customer confidence, to have more confidence in the quality, the experiences that they have is what we enable. That is a really exciting thing and a great position to be in based on the platform that Akamai has evolved and brought to market over the past 20 years.

Fred Diamond: Again, you spent some time in the Marines, then you worked for some blue chip companies: Cisco, Red Hat, F5 Networks. We’ve had some guests from Red Hat on the Sales Game Changers before, Nathan Jones and Lynne Chamberlain and mentioned to you that Paul Smith had won the IES Lifetime Achievement Award. Now of course you’re at Akamai, tell us about your transition. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Randy Wood: That’s a great story. Prior to 9/11 I was more of an engineer, I came up through the engineering background, spent a bunch of years at Cisco as an engineer and engineering leader, a director of engineering. On 9/11 all that changed, and specifically the work that Cisco had done in the Pentagon was an obvious focus area on the day after 9/11. I credit my transition from an engineering position into a sales position to the Area Vice President of Cisco, Scott Spehar at the time, who came to me the next day on the 12th of September and said, “I need a Cisco account manager, I need a Cisco sales guy and you may not know it, but you’re a sales guy. You’ve got what we need in terms of differentiated skills to go help rebuild the Pentagon.”

Cisco was and continues to be a mission essential partner to that communications mission and they had a big problem. It was really the 9/11 events that caused a VP of sales, who in some ways at the time was a mentor to me, to recognize what I thought about myself but hadn’t done anything about in terms of a sales career and made it happen. It made me a little bit uncomfortable and put me in that position with an enormous quota and a situation where the stakes were really high based on the time we were in. Boy, did I learn a lot. Just an amazing experience and learned that I’m a pretty good sales guy but I think I have an opportunity to make an even bigger impact in the company in a sales leadership position. That was the start of a sales career now 18 years ago.

Fred Diamond: Randy, I didn’t know that bit of your history and obviously that’s very intriguing so if you don’t mind, I’m going to divert slightly. Can you tell us some of the things that happened shortly after 9/11 down at the Pentagon that you were involved with?

Randy Wood: Remarkable times. For us at Cisco, we’re a sales company and we’re in the business to sell stuff and to grow the business but that mission changed a whole lot that day. It was a commitment to the national mission, it was a commitment to continuity, to try and restore some continuity of operations, communications and data services and it was a do-whatever-it-takes attitude. Airplanes were grounded and we drained our parts depos geographically and brought them however we could into New York City and the Pentagon to do what it took to reestablish some level of mission continuity.

There were a number of former military folks at Cisco at the time, so we set up a 24/7 combat information center command post in Herndon and operated the way the military would to make sure we could get and keep the government and the Department of Defense back in business and up and running. A lot of sleepless nights, my daughter was two at the time and my wife was pregnant with my son who’s now 17. There was a week or two where I didn’t see the family a whole lot, so the level of commitment that we had to that mission and to the partnership was just breathtaking. One of the most impressive things I’ve ever been, the response of Cisco to do whatever it took and to spend whatever it cost to continue to partnership was remarkable.

Fred Diamond: Not to dwell on 9/11, but of course Akamai has a tie to 9/11 as well where one of your founders, Danny Lewin, was on the first plane that hit the Trade Center. Can you just talk for a second or two about his legacy and how that applies at Akamai?

Randy Wood: It’s an amazing story, it’s an amazing legacy. There’s a book called “No Better Time” about the story of Danny Lewin and Tom Leighton who is our CEO, should be required reading by everybody and certainly everybody at Akamai. I read it the first two weeks I was here and the contribution that both Tom and Danny Lewin made to the internet back then and then the irony of Danny Lewin who the 9/11 commission reported was probably the first American killed, he was on the Boston flight. The irony that that day the load that was put on the internet was unlike anything that had ever been seen before and Akamai was supporting and underpinning that load and never gave. It held the demand of the internet, so it’s ironic that it took an event like that to really underscore the importance and the contribution that Akamai has made to the internet in the last 19 or 20 years.

The company today still recognizes and remembers Danny Lewin, we have an annual Danny Lewin community service day. In fact, here in the public sector organization for the last couple years we’ve gone to the USO Wounded Warrior Center at Fort Belvoir and we’ve done all hands on deck landscaping, just giving back to the community. We recognize an annual Danny Lewin of the Year award winner, someone who embodies the qualities and characteristics of Danny Lewin who was a great man.

Fred Diamond: We’ll provide some links to some of that information, thanks for sharing that. September 12th you’re told by your boss, “You’re now in sales, you’re now a sales leader.” Most people listening to this podcast remember what that time was like but you also said you’d learned a bunch of lessons. Talk about being thrown into the fire, if you will, and of course you also experienced a lot of being in the fire when you were in the marines. Tell us some of the key lessons that you took away from that transition when your boss came to you and tapped you on the shoulder and he said, “Randy, you’re actually a sales guy. You’re now our leader.” Tell us some of the things that were going on back then for you specifically.

Randy Wood: Four things stand out, it’s great to think about this because these are the things that define you over time and hopefully the lessons you can pass on. I think the first biggest thing for me, the lesson I learned was just humility, what it takes to do this job. It’s a humble job and you need to bring a level of humility, you earn a level of humility as you make customers successful, as you bring successful positive business outcomes, there’s a humble part of that.

Second is the importance of customer advocacy, we are here to be advocates of our customers, I call this an essential mission partnership. That’s not at the expense of what the company is asking me to do but it’s building trust, it’s building confidence, it’s being an advocate for our customers, being their voice.

The third thing that comes to mind is doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s a simple thought and not a lot of people do, you’ve got to do what you say you’re going to do and see it through with your customers. I guess that’s part and parcel to being a good or a better advocate, but customers take note of that.

Finally, for me I think the biggest thing I learned that I carry with me every day is the importance of influence because what you’re trying to gain and earn with your customer is a level of influence. I want to influence my customer to take action or to do something different or to ultimately buy my product. If you break down influence, a couple things really stand out like what does influence really mean? I want to be relevant, I need to bring a level of relevance to what I’m doing, I need to be competent and most importantly, I need to be credible. I focused on influence but really decomposed that to say what do I need to do, what can I do better? What’s really in a very authentic way important to this customer relationship? That’s the four things that really stick out.

Fred Diamond: One thing that keeps coming through in the Sales Game Changers podcast, again we’re interviewing sales leaders who’ve been in leadership positions for 10, 15, 20, sometimes as many as 35, 40 years and the reason that people like you have gotten to this level is because of your relationships with your customers. It’s not just the ability to sell, typically it’s the ability to be a true partner and especially now the criticalness of value. What really intrigued me about your Cisco 9/11 story – I never really thought about it – how much of a role Cisco played on that day. We had to bring down all the airlines, of course and so many things were going on. You think about the role that a company like Cisco and Akamai played on that day and of course the continuation of weeks and months afterwards to help the country transition to where we needed to get to. Speaking about that, tell us a little more about yourself. Tell us what you’re specifically an expert in, tell us a little more about your area of brilliance.

Randy Wood: This may be a little bit different than something you’ve heard before. I’d say I’m an expert in what I call the importance and subtleties of human brand. I’m a human brand guy, I’m a brand guy in general but I really spend a lot of time thinking about and focusing on the impact, the power of brand. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later I think in the interview here, in terms of maybe my area of brilliance it’s communications and presentation mastery. Back to my original introduction, the role of the story.

Here’s why storytelling is important, here’s why it’s really important in sales, because customers are inundated and overwhelmed with facts and figures. As it turns out, they don’t want more facts and figures. They want to believe, customers just want to authentically, genuinely believe in something, ideally a solution that solves their problem. It’s typically the story, a relevant, compelling, memorable story that helps make that connection with the customer. People are dying to hear a story, people are dying to tell their stories, that’s why social media is so interesting and important whether it’s Instagram or Snapchat which my 17 year old lives on, or Facebook. If you think about what they’re doing, they’re telling their story, they’re hearing a story.

The same stands true in the sales world. If I do my job correctly, my story becomes your story. You become a surrogate of my story, you go back and tell my story and so my story lives on and my story becomes relevant to you and there’s a level of influence. The way you get that done is through what I like to say mastery in communications and presentation. It’s a critical skill, I’m concerned that in today’s younger generation it may be a lost or orphan skill so I’m committed to that back to my first thought about the importance and power and impact of human brand. That’s an important contribution component of human brand.

Fred Diamond: We’ll get to the human brand in a little bit but speaking of stories, again you’ve worked at some great companies and of course you spent some time in the military. Tell us a story or two about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career.

Randy Wood: I’ll go back to my Cisco days. After my tour of duty in the Pentagon, as a sales guy I had an opportunity to move to a national sales level position and we were responsible for what was at the time all the new stuff at Cisco. The things above and beyond routers and switches, security and telephony and all those great things. It was exciting because we were the real growth engine, we were doing lots of acquisitions and there was a lot of uncertainty and chaos. I had an opportunity to work for a guy named Carl Wiese– Carl, I hope you listen to this. Carl is now the President of Sales at Blackberry, he’s the man with the plan that’s going to transform and is transforming Blackberry to this day.

I’ll never forget the impact that Carl had on me. First of all, he’s a very steady hand, very intelligent person, a great sales leader, someone who led from the front but knew when to lead from the middle. Above and beyond all that, the two things that I learned from him is the importance and the impact of clear and simple thinking and communications. He was the clearest and most simplistic thinker and communicator that I’d ever met and I began to understand the power of being clear and simple in how you communicate and how you think. He taught me this idea that I keep with me today which is get out of the noise. In any organization there’s a noise and people love to live in the noise. The noise is fun, it’s entertaining and he was the guy that got me to get above the noise and think and communicate in a clear and simple way which could become very impactful and incredibly resonant. I think I owe a lot of where I am today to Carl Wiese.

Fred Diamond: We talked about a lot of the young people, a lot of the young sales professionals listening today, Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe. We’re going to take a quick diversion here, give us a tip, give us something that they can practice, something they can do today to get above the noise.

Randy Wood: Stay focused on what your mission is, have a plan. Be, what I like to say, flexible with your plan but very stubborn with your vision. Here’s my vision, I’m very stubborn with the vision I have, I’m very flexible with the details but this is what I’m committed to. This is what I’m focused on, this is what gets me out of the noise. An example of the noise is a lot of these sales organizations are organized into cube forms in these buildings in Northern Virginia. Sometimes the sales force gets together and they just create and get in the noise, and if you’re focused on your plan and seeing your plan thought and if you’re flexible with the details and stubborn with the vision I think that keeps you out of the noise. It keeps you focused on what your mission is.

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

Randy Wood: These are two ever-present and I think probably completely different challenges but the big ones for me are first and foremost what I call product and brand resonance. It’s back to the noise, for us it’s competing in the noise and in the cyber security market it’s a noisy market. There’s a lot of things being said and customers are trying to figure out what’s truth, what’s reality, what’s not. That’s product and brand resonance so it’s back to brand, it’s projecting. I’m fond of talking about the toll road brand, up and down the toll road here between the beltway and the airport is where most companies like Akamai sit and there’s a brand there. Trying to get your brand to the top and to stay at the top is a difficult thing to do, so that’s a challenge.

Second is completely different, and for me as a sales leader it’s ensuring that planning – this is territory planning, customer planning, opportunity planning – don’t become lost skills with sales reps. I don’t think we’d live and die by a plan, but let’s have a plan. The skills required to create and communicate a plan are skills that if not reinforced and held accountable by someone like me, I think are lost. Pick your sales methodology, you could be a Miller Heiman person and like the Blue Sheet or something else, there’s real value there. I have seen it again here at Akamai just this year with my direct reports, I took them through a planning exercise and they came back and said, “That was really useful.” It’s not so much the destination, it’s the journey I guess to be a little cliche. If not reinforced and held accountable, that becomes a lost skill, a lost art and I think that’s a big problem for sales professionals.

Fred Diamond: I would agree. Back to the storytelling aspect, again you’ve worked for some great companies, now of course you’re the Vice President for Sales of Public Sector at Akamai. Again, we’re talking to Randy Wood on the Sales Game Changers podcast, you worked at Red Hat, you worked at Cisco, you worked at F5 Networks. Tell us a story about your biggest or your most specific sale success. It doesn’t need to be the biggest, but your #1 most specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. Why don’t you tell us that story?

Randy Wood: I have spent time in some great big companies and I spent a little time in the startup world along the way. I’m one for two in the startup world, I had a successful exit.

Fred Diamond: That’s a very high percentage.

Randy Wood: A very high percentage, catching lighting in a bottle more than a time or two is difficult but a few years back I spent some time at an In-Q-Tel portfolio company, small company, purpose built kind of software company and /I was Vice President of sales and we had great expectations. We elected to hunt elephants versus the hitting singles and doubles, we were going after the big deals. We were pursuing a number of big deals in the intelligence community and one in particular stood out, it was the first big win we had, it was a five and a half million dollar win.

That is game changing, life changing money for a small startup, so I joined the sales campaign sales pursuit fairly well into the process, became completely committed to it. We were in the very final stages of this opportunity and pursuing this thing, and deals like this tend to die 5, 6, 7 times. One thing learned is they’re going to die and you’re going to have to bring it back to life, that’s just part of the job. This one did and this one suffered a particularly near fatal death in that we got the final pricing wrong, and we didn’t get it just a little bit wrong, it was wrong and it was just a mistake that we made.

Budgeting had been set on that, so we were summoned to the customer’s office, it was a local building here in Herndon. It was a dark, cold, wintry December day and on the way in there was someone selling flowers. I was with the account manager and I said, “Buy a bouquet of flowers.” He said, “What are we doing?” I said, “Buy the flowers.” We did and we went up and we went into our customer’s office and with as much humility as we could muster, we presented him with a bouquet of flowers and said, “We made a mistake, we’ve got a plan to make it right.” He said, “What the hell am I going to do with these flowers?” We said, “Take them home to your wife, we don’t know.” It diffused the situation, get everybody laughing, reasonable person theory here.

We made a mistake, we made it better. Anyhow, we got it fixed, it was a five and a half million dollar deal and I said, “One more thing. It’s our holiday party here in two weeks, I need to carry this purchase order into this holiday.” It was in Clyde’s of Tysons Corner and he said, “There’s no way you’re going to get this purchase order.” I said, “I have to have this purchase order, it means that much to this company, to this sales rep.” We picked up that purchase order that morning and carried it into the holiday party, and I think the CEO hugged me with a little tear in his eye. Just a great win, but all aspects if we’re getting customer advocacy and a little bit of humility and doing the right thing, I think maybe the power that a bouquet of flowers can have in a tense sales situation.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself – of course you’re a marine, probably not too many things are hard to you – “was it too hard and just not for me”?

Randy Wood: I did, that was a big career transition to get my head around. As I mentioned, I’m a son of a marine, a fighter pilot, a man who did 3 tours in Vietnam and 750 combat missions. As you can imagine, this is a smart, disciplined, very focused, firm man and I grew up frankly under my father who has little to no tolerance for salespeople. The whole stigma associated with sales was something that he had no appreciation for. That shaped my view of the world for such a long time and I finally determined, “That’s not what sales is, that’s not what selling is.” Selling is some of the things that I’ve described here and the satisfaction that you get from that, but I did question and I almost questioned making that jump and making that transition because of the influence my father had on how I thought about the world, how I saw the world. It’s funny, I have a completely different effect and impact on my kids today who are great communicators, great storytellers and in their own ways, good salespeople.

Fred Diamond: Randy, yalk about that concept of human brand. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, I get inquiries from guys in Australia on a frequent basis. “That was a great interview with Randy Wood, can you introduce me?” I usually say, “Sure, just reach up on LinkedIn.” Talk about what that means, what does the human brand mean especially for people who are looking to become successful in B to B and professional sales?

Randy Wood: Human brand, your brand, my brand is the essence of who we are and a couple things stand out. First of all, you and I don’t own our brands, as people, we don’t own our brands. We can influence our brand but other people own our brands. How we’re seen, what we’re known for, how we’re remembered and I don’t think people think enough about, “What is my brand? What do I want my brand to be? What are the components of my brand?” and focus on that and emphasize that. I’m fond of saying with respect to brand, all people should have an opportunity to give their personal best to their professional lives. What does personal best mean? Personal best as a salesperson is what is your brand, what are you known for.

What do you want to be known for and what are you doing to reinforce that, to strengthen that, to fortify that, to influence other’s opinions about who you are? For me personally, I started out by telling you, “I’m two things: I’m a leader and I’m a storyteller.” In an interview, a hiring manager would ask me that and say, “Two things?” I’d say, “Yes, I’m a leader and a storyteller” and the next thing they do, they ask, “Tell me a story.” I shape their next question, that’s my brand because now you’re giving me an opportunity to talk about myself in a different way through telling a story to get to know who I am and I’m doing a couple of things there.

I’m trying to showcase for you what kind of a storyteller I am and at the same time tell you something about myself. That’s because I spent the time upfront to focus on that aspect of my brand, so brand is the composite of two or three things as to who you want to be, how you want to be remembered. I don’t think as professionals and certainly sales professionals we think enough about it.

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

Randy Wood: If there’s just one thing someone can take away from this podcast – and I think this is just an absolute nugget of gold here – it’s as a salesperson to master the ability to ask for the order. Master the ability to ask for the order and think about what does it take to ask a customer for the order, that purchase order. It’s not an easy thing to do and you’d be surprised at how many salespeople aren’t comfortable doing that. I call that being comfortable in your sales skin bag, that’s the essence of a salesperson, I believe. How do you master that ability? There’s a couple things for me that come to mind, it’s the creation of real authentic trust. I trust what this guy Randy is saying.

Again, it’s back to providing good, consistent advocacy for the customer and it’s showing a customer demonstrably what positive business outcomes look like. What’s the business value? It’s the creation of business value, in my customer’s terms doing what I said I’m going to do. If I can do all that then I’ve earned the right to ask the customer for the order. Said differently, no deal ever closed itself, it just doesn’t happen.

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

Randy Wood: One thing is what I’m doing right now, it’s finding an opportunity to tell my story, to have this conversation with you and project my brand whether it’s radio, it’s this podcast, it’s presentations, it’s panels. Two weeks ago I had an opportunity to keynote a high school leadership conference and do two breakout sessions and touch the minds of 20 or 30 high school juniors and seniors. It’s get out and tell your story.

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

Randy Wood: I’d give you a short-term and long-term. Short-term for me is let’s stand for something, be known for something, be remembered for something at Akamai. Personally that’s what we call the “zero trust security initiative” and in that context I’m trying to become the face and the voice for Akamai. We’re trying to change and influence the brand of this company from content delivery network to being a real cyber security powerhouse. I personally want to own that and drive that, that’s a short-term professional goal. Maybe a little bit longer-term is the creation of what I think would be my next initiative in my career, something I’ve called the Human Brand Collective. It’s ultimately an organization that focuses on improving, building human brand for all levels of professionals. It’s back to the idea that people should be able to give their personal best to their professional lives.

Fred Diamond: Randy, before we wrap up here, sales is hard. We talked about some of the challenges that you face, great point there, mastering the ability to ask for the order. We did an interview with a guy named Steve Richard on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we’ll put a link to that. He’s surveyed millions of phone calls from sales professionals out to customers and he said the one big thing that they noticed as a major trend was the inability to do a follow-up request. Great call, energy, whatever it might have been but there was such a shortcoming in following the agreement for the next step. Of course, making the ability to ask for the purchase orders is the culmination of that, you’ve got to be prepared for the next step and you’ve got to have the courage to do it and the confidence.

Randy Wood: The easiest thing to do in the world is the first greatest sales call, they can do that, that’s great. It’s what do you do next, I said earlier doing what you said you were going to do is following up, it’s customer advocacy. It’s paying attention to that and have a close plan to say, “How do I build a level of relevance to this customer to where I can earn the right to ask for the order?” It’s the little things that I think people trip up on.

Fred Diamond: Also, in the early stage of a career it may not be an order. It may be just scheduling an appointment or getting something to continue building the trust and the customer advocacy. If you talked about some of the companies that you’ve worked for – Red Hat, Cisco, F5 Networks – these aren’t one call sale type things. These are years and years of evolution to get there but sales is still hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? Again, you were an engineer at one point in your career, we talked about how you had a little bit of degree of stigma based on some of your father’s impressions of sales. What is it about sales that has kept you going?

Randy Wood: For me personally there’s no better sense of satisfaction and accomplishment than developing a sales strategy for a market or for an opportunity, creating shared vision and real passion, enthusiasm for pursuing that strategy and taking that plan off the white board, that’s an important concept to me. You can see lots of plans sitting on a white board and that’s where they die, so the ability to take the plan off the white board and put it into action and to execute and then to go do great things and have great success, there’s nothing more satisfying than that. It’s getting an order on the last day of the quarter just before midnight or you know you’re making a difference for me, for the leadership of this team, for the company’s success but ultimately for the success of your customer.

The real difference that you’re making to become an essential mission partner, that’s what differentiates us in the public sector space. I’m fond of telling my leadership that I’m 80% the same but where I differ by 20% I differ dramatically. It’s things like continuing resolution in the far and the fact that I lack one thing that my peers in the commercial side have and that’s a shareholder, I don’t have a shareholder, I have constituency and war fighters. Contributing in a meaningful way to that mission is a very satisfying thing.

Fred Diamond: Randy, you’ve given us some great insights today. The human brand, how to understand that, the ability to be a great storyteller, humility, customer advocacy, the importance of influence and relevance. You’ve given us so many great ideas but give us one final thought. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe at various stages of their career. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire them today?

Randy Wood: Hopefully this is a big thought and something that if you don’t get anything else out of the podcast, this stays with you: for me it’s the importance of giving your best and highest performance every day. It’s all about performance and I have a little saying about performance that my son the hockey player knows, “Performance and performance alone dictates the predator in every food chain.” Sales is no different, each and every day in sales, people and sales leaders, we need to commit and understand what it takes to bring our best performance to our customers and to the company and to our teams. For me, that is the thing that I think about the minute I get out of bed.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 164: Akamai Public Sector Sales Leader Randy Wood Tells How His Sales Career Began on Sept. 12, 2001 and Why Your Human Brand is So Critical in Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 160: Verizon Federal’s Andrea Cohen Says Doing These Other Jobs First Led to Her Sales Leadership Success

ANDREA’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Engage. You have to play to win and you have to really be focused on what you do and how it impacts everyone else, your customer and their customer. If you can get that level of understanding, you’ll be very successful.”

Andrea Cohen is the VP of Civilian Sales for Verizon Federal.

Prior to coming over to Verizon, she worked for Winstar and AT&T.

We also interviewed Verizon Public Sector Chief Mike Maiorana on Episode 100.

Find Andrea on LinkedIn!

Andrea Cohen: While I’ve had a long sales career, I think the biggest thing that helped me through the years is I did a lot of other roles. I did offer management, product management, business development and I ran AT&T’s capture team for a number of years. That’s the group of people that goes after big bids and big business and creates the strategy to win them. I also ran a program and had over 150 people reporting to me, so all of those things have really helped me in my sales career.

Fred Diamond: When did you move into sales as a career?

Andrea Cohen: I actually started in sales and a lot of the other roles I did were later, then I came back into sales in 2008. I was asked to do it because there were some very specific requirements for a contact center for the social security administration and I have a lot of contact center expertise so I came back into sales then.

Fred Diamond: I look forward to hearing your story and look forward to hearing how your background has helped you evolve as a sales leader. Why don’t you tell us what you sell today? Tell us what excites you about that.

Andrea Cohen: I think the most important thing for me today is we sell everything from security services to contact center services to infrastructure to networks and the technology has changed so dramatically. To be able to take all of these different capabilities and truly build a customer specific solution is what I’m passionate about. We serve the government, it’s a higher calling and we really are very focused on delivering capabilities to the government so they can deliver capabilities to our citizens.

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, they may not know what it means to sell to the federal government, specifically the civilian side. Can you tell us what that means? What are some of the agencies that you might sell to?

Andrea Cohen: The way that we have organized the civilian side of the house, it is every cabinet level agency, all of the tribal agencies and a number of our key customers are people like HHS, Social Security Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration. When people talk mission, a lot of times they think DOD and that’s really not the case. Civilian agencies have critical missions that they have to deliver on to protect our health, to protect our safety, to ensure that we’re not ingesting bad food or drugs and you see it in the news all the time. Our civilian agencies have very unique requirements that they have to deliver on to protect the public.

Fred Diamond: Again, we mentioned that you’ve been in sales a couple times in your career so when you made that last shift, how did you get into sales? What were the circumstances that brought you into the sales side?

Andrea Cohen: Originally I started in sales and I started on a management development program and I really never thought of myself as being a salesperson. I actually was going to college for law school and I thought maybe I’d do a career in politics eventually. I found out I was really good at translating what people needed into a solution and so I ended up with a very small account years ago and then I kept parlaying it into bigger and bigger modules and capabilities. I had some of the largest accounts at both AT&T and Verizon hub and it was fun, and it kept being fun.

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

Andrea Cohen: I’ll talk a little bit about my mentor later but one of the key lessons I learned is you are the CEO of your module. You need to know that customer inside and out, you need to know what their pain points are, what their budget is, what their mission is. You can’t create a solution that’s effective if you don’t truly understand them. When I had the postal service, for example, I actually followed the mail for a 24 hour period to watch how mail was processed and it’s critical that you have that level of knowledge and that you remain very customer focused. That lets you make much better sales for both you and for the customer, more importantly.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a little bit. That’s come up a couple times that you own your business and for you to truly excel in sales you truly do need to own your business. What are some of the things that the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast can be doing? Again, you said that you followed a postal carrier, I guess, for 24 hours?

Andrea Cohen: The whole 9 yards, from the time it was picked up to the time it was processed so I understood what the problems were in the sorting facilities and then through to final delivery.

Fred Diamond: What are things you would recommend for some of the people to really truly understand their customer?

Andrea Cohen: A lot of it. First of all, read. When you’re dealing with federal agencies, there’s so much transparency, there’s so many things online. Don’t go in and start asking questions till you’ve actually done some thorough research on those customers. Talk to other accounts and talk to people that have other federal modules and learn what the common problems are because there are a number of common problems. Aging infrastructure, ability to recruit new people, do the baby boomer situation, there are a number of things that are common, licencing issues. The other thing I would say is really sit down and have coffee and go meet with your customers not to try to sell them something but literally to really understand their business and what drives them. You don’t get that unless you’re talking to them and you’re not trying to push a product.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you’re an expert in. Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Andrea Cohen: You always don’t want to say what you’re an expert in because you want other people to say that but fundamentally for me, I have a photographic memory and I am extremely passionately customer focused. I’m really able to figure out what a solution is that hits a key business problem and I’m able to put together a package for that customer to make the pricing right, to make the technical solution right, I’m really an expert at that. I ran a lot of big bids and big capture so I know what the pain points are and what the drivers are, and I also really understand the federal budget.

Actually, one of my summer jobs was I was a budget officer for the veterans administration, so I learned exactly how the budgets got put together, what you had to do internally from an agency perspective. That’s really my true area of brilliance.

Fred Diamond: I have a question, I want to go back to the comment you made before, “Spend time with your customer talking to them, not selling to them per se, but talking to them.” It’s harder than it has ever been before to get to customers for a whole bunch of reason. Their time is less, they can get access to information on the internet of course, because of security some cases you can’t even get into buildings anymore. What might be some of your advice to some of the people listening to the podcast about how to get those types of meetings? “I just want to talk to you about your mission.” Of course, you’re with Verizon so you get tremendous access but how would someone who maybe doesn’t have the huge brand behind them with multi-billions of dollars being spent on the solutions?

Andrea Cohen: I think there are two ways. One is if you know what a problem is and you think you have a potential solution, you really want to give value. People aren’t going to meet with you unless you come across as giving value to them, that’s the first thing. I think the second thing too is the government is even more so than usual really interested in what corporations are doing to automate, to get rid of Asian technology, to recruit personnel, to collaborate.

A lot of times what we actually do is we have a variety of CIO’s and people that we bring in to say what are we doing internally and then agencies tend to really be fascinated by that and they want to take those lessons learned from our experience and apply them to their agency.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?

Andrea Cohen: I did have a lot of great mentors and I would always tell young salespeople that’s the first thing you really need to do. My very first mentor was Bob Gradle at AT&T, Bob ran all of the federal organization and Bob said something that has stuck with me as I mentioned earlier which is you’re the CEO of your module. You need to know it better than anybody, you need to understand that customer better than anybody and you need to make sure you’re adding value every day. Bob was the kind of guy that didn’t care about your level or who you were, he would literally walk the floors. If he got a question or a call from somebody, he would come down and get it from the horse’s mouth, that was a really good lesson there.

The next great mentor I had was Catherine Dunn, and Catherine was all about building great solutions to real problems that were impacting everybody every day. As a matter of fact, with Catherine we built the first 311 service in Baltimore and that was to offload the 911 service and to get people help but not flood the emergency lines. If you truly have someone who understands what the needs are ahead of anybody else understanding what the need is, that’s a great mentor. Grab them and stick with them because you’ll learn a lot.

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

Andrea Cohen: I would say recruiting. I think that there is a really big difference between how we grew up in sales and how the younger generation is coming in now because they have a lot of great collaboration skills and they bring some really great energy and support that I think we can start using more effectively. Getting the right people making sure that they mesh with the account and the people in the account and allowing them to grow and to be promoted instead of going out and searching for new roles.

Then the other big challenge is we are in the cusp of probably the largest technology change we’ve had in my entire career which is 35 years. I think being able to deal with that rate of change and helping customers who have very old legacy systems who have very prescribed budget processes being able to take advantage of that rate of change. The problem is a lot of the solutions they have now are risky and they don’t understand they’re risky. They’re risky because you don’t have people to support them, they’re risky because you can’t get parts to repair them. I think it’s being able to articulate that and then give them a path forward that they can do.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned recruiting and that comes up not infrequently during the Sales Game Changers podcast. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, what might the ideal characteristics look like for someone who would come on to one of the Verizon sales teams?

Andrea Cohen: A couple of things. You want somebody who is very collaborative, we have too many people who have to weigh in on everything that we do. You want somebody who can build those bridges and create a win-win environment. Communication, communication is critical and not just written, there’s oral communication, there’s written communication, it’s the ability to grab mind share. That’s a critical thing that I look for, and then the final thing – we used to joke on my team, I used to have this motto, “Dog with a bone.” A lot of times it doesn’t go right the first time, it doesn’t go right the fourteenth time but you have to have that persistence. You have to have that ability to understand that it may not happen now but it could happen a year from now and how are you going to make it happen?

Fred Diamond: In the beginning of our conversation you mentioned the federal marketplace and why you serve the federal marketplace. Is that a market that you would encourage people who want to move into sales to come into?

Andrea Cohen: Yes, I definitely would, I think that it teaches you great lessons. What’s so unique about the federal marketplace is that while commercial industries have many of the same processes, the outcomes that they’re looking for are life and death outcomes. It dramatically ups your game, you may not want to stay, you may want to move onto commercial accounts but this is a great training round. That’s why I really encourage people to come in and quite frankly it’s a higher calling, it’s a way to give back. For me, that’s incredibly important and I think it is for a lot of people.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a great career here at Verizon, you were also at Winstar and AT&T, you must have had some great successes along the way. Why don’t you tell us about the #1 specific sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Andrea Cohen: Healthcare.gov. Our team was heavily involved in both the compute and the contract center for healthcare.gov and it was something that had to be rolled out quickly, it didn’t have the smoothest roll out, it had to be fixed quickly and I think that it was incredibly impactful. I have a daughter who has a chronic condition, so for me the ability to give affordable care and let people sign up, let people have the information and the knowledge was very important.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break, we’re going to ask you one final question. You moved into sales, you’ve had various other roles, you were in business management, you worked in capture side, I believe you said as well. Did you ever question being in sales? You’ve been in sales a couple times in your career and of course now you’re VP of Civilian Sales for Verizon Federal. Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Andrea Cohen: Everything is sales, no matter what role you have. You either selling to internal customers or you’re selling externally so no, not really, I love sales. It energizes me, it gives me something to be passionate about every day.

Fred Diamond: We tell people if you have a spouse or a child, you’re in sales. I want to ask you one last question before we take a break. Again, you’re working for Verizon, it’s a huge brand, well-known brand, hugely established brand. We’re doing today’s podcast recording in the executive briefing center of Verizon’s headquarters here in Ashburn, Virginia and there’s pictures and there’s technology. It has a great feeling, I know there’s some other briefings going on. What is it like, for the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast around the globe, to work for such an established and huge brand?

Andrea Cohen: We bring tremendous technology to the market and that is really important. When I worked at Winstar, for example we had many layers of approval, it was a smaller business but I think the size and the scale of Verizon and what we’re doing now with 5D and with our other networking capabilities is going to have a significant impact. We are, in essence, the information highway for everybody and it’s critical that that highway be in place because nothing works without it.

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

Andrea Cohen: Three things. Get a really good mentor, that’s the first thing you really need to do. Model the behaviors you want and you’ll learn a lot more quickly, that’s the first thing.

The second thing is inspect what you expect, that’s a lesson you need all the way through. You need to understand that you are doing what you need to do from a funnel perspective, from any perspective, from a deal perspective and you need to make sure that what you’re seeing is actually what you wanted to have happen.

The third thing for me is know that customer really well, you have to balance the corporation with the customer but if you lean on any side, lean on the side of the customer. Your knowledge of them will make you more successful.

Fred Diamond: I want to talk to you about mentor for a second, you gave us some great examples of your mentors before. How should the Sales Game Changers use their mentors? For example, I’m sure you’ve mentored many people along the way in your career as well. What do you expect when someone asks you to be a mentor? How do you optimize that relationship from the mentee perspective?

Andrea Cohen: I think that is a great question. There are a number of ways that you can be a good mentor/mentee. I think it’s not about expecting favoritism or wasting people’s time, it fundamentally is about learning and modeling and watching those behaviors, and then listening to constructive criticism. That is one thing that’s critical for a mentor to give, and I also think that a lot of times it’s literally about what it is that you need to grow into the next position. A lot of people are really good at what they do, they may not be really good at the next level, they have to take certain techniques they have and change them, how you supervise people, how you interact with people. I think that that is a really great thing you can get from a mentor, you can understand not just your role but the next role and then the next role. How do you rise in the corporation and what do you need to do and focus on.

Fred Diamond: Again, one theme that we’ve had throughout today’s Sales Game Changers podcast, you are the CEO of your module and if you’re the CEO of your module you need to understand resources, you need to understand how to get things done, etcetera. What are some of the habits you’ve developed along the way to help you sustain yourself as a sales leader?

Andrea Cohen: Two things really critical to me – three things, actually. The first is always learning. Everything changes, love change, embrace change and continue to learn, that’s the first thing.

The second thing is really understand your business and your constraints, each corporation has a set of rules either written or unwritten that you have to follow and to be successful not only do you have to sell for the customer issue but you have to solve for the corporate issues. You have to know the billing system won’t do this or you have to understand that the network won’t deliver that. Being able to do that balance takes understanding on both sides and that to me is really critical.

The final thing is learning – I’m very passionate about everything, but learning when not to be passionate. I hate losing, I’m a horrible loser [Laughs] so learning that balance is critical, there are some things that you shouldn’t win, but you have to learn that, it’s not something you have right away.

Fred Diamond: We’ve gotten a lot of great insights into your business and why you’re a Sales Game Changer. Just curiously, what else are you passionate about? You said you were a passionate person, anything else that you’re passionate about that would be interesting for our listeners?

Andrea Cohen: I’m very interested in art and architecture and reading. I read 13 books a week, it’s the photographic memory thing. I’m doing good and doing more, I had an upbringing where we did a lot of work for the disadvantaged. My grandfather was a political appointee and we did a lot of organizations that we supported like lung cancer and I worked with battered women, so I’ve had a very wide range of experiences helping other people. One thing my grandfather, who was a wonderful man, always said is everybody puts their pants on the same way, one leg at a time. Going out there and helping in various situations, I’m all on board.

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

Andrea Cohen: We have a major set of recompetes right now for all of our business, we’re literally recompeting all of our business. I have some big bets on top of that for large procurements that are coming out that happen once every 15 years, so a lot of what I’m doing is making sure that we have full customer understanding, we have an architecture that well may forward into the next 15 years and that our pricing is correct.

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

Andrea Cohen: Because I get to do something different every day. I am not someone who wants to do the same thing every day and sales lets me have a very broad perspective on a number of issues and solutions and situations.

Fred Diamond: You answered this question very nicely before with the nature of your customer, the civilian government agencies. They each have different missions, they each have different programs, of course there’s always things going on in the world that civilian agencies are responsible for so being able to serve them and help them achieve their mission has got to be pretty gratifying.

Andrea Cohen: It really is. Everybody needs to understand it’s things like making sure your grandparents get social security on time and have Medicare benefits and are able to live long, productive lives. It’s food safety, I actually worked at USDA on their food safety hotline when I was in grad school and baby formula. Fundamentally it touches every aspect of our lives and I don’t think people have enough of an understanding of that. All of those safety checks that are in place are critical, and making sure that people can deal, one of my major customers for years has been HHS and CDC is now reporting on the outbreak of measles. CDC uses CDC info to track that, where those outbreaks are coming and what people are calling in about. I think that it’s really important and it also is very predictive about what the issues are going to be in the next 5 to 10 years and that’s always good, too.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned before, this is a customer that’s very transparent and you know what their initiatives are, it’s published. You could easily find them and there’s no shortage of testimony out there and documents which describe the strategic plans for the agencies that you serve. Again, today’s Sales Game Changers podcast we talked to Andrea Cohen, she’s the VP of Civilian Sales at Verizon Federal. Andrea, you’ve given us a lot of great insights. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today?

Andrea Cohen: My final thought to you is engage. You have to play to win and you have to engage, and you have to really be focused on what you do and how it impacts everyone else, your customer and their customer. If you can get that level of understanding, I think you’ll be very successful.

Fred Diamond: Along those lines, have you found along the way that customers do want to talk to you if you’re bringing them solutions?

Andrea Cohen: Yes.

Fred Diamond: How often does someone who’s one of the customer of the kinds of things that you sell, do they go home and speak to their spouse about their challenges? Pretty much never, so the opportunity to speak about how they could solve these big problems has got to be pretty gratifying and there’s got to be a lot of openings for those types of conversations.

Andrea Cohen: There really are, I’ve never had that problem even when I was a salesperson. As long as you bring a valuable insight or something that will truly support them. Another big thing today is experience mapping, a lot of insight can be got from journey mapping and experience mapping particularly when you’re talking about public outreach. That is something that everybody can learn about and be able to do because they have experiences from everyone around them.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 160: Verizon Federal’s Andrea Cohen Says Doing These Other Jobs First Led to Her Sales Leadership Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 157: Symantec Federal Sales Chief Chris Townsend Says This Brutal Customer Insight Shifted His Career Forever

CHRIS’ FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “There’s this negative connotation that’s around sales that we’re out there trying to push things on our customers that they don’t want. That’s the furthest thing from the truth. We’re actually in there helping our customers advance their business and we can be relevant to the mission and be a part of some really impactful – especially in federal, because the mission is so important. .”

Chris Townsend is the VP of Symantec Federal.

Prior to coming to Symantec, he held sales leadership positions in Cisco and Blue Code.

He’s an expert on cybersecurity.

Find Chris on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you sell today? Tell us what excites you about that.

Chris Townsend: I’m very excited about the cybersecurity solution that Symantec brings to market today. If you look at the challenges that our federal customers are facing – and our non-federal customers, for that matter – most of their security environments are built out very reactively. They bought a lot of tools over time in reaction to threats that they saw out in the environment and as a result, now they’ve got these very complex, hard to operate, costly environments to maintain.

Symantec is really bringing a consolidated platform approach to that and really driving some common standards and integration there not only across our own solutions but across third party solutions as well. We’re really starting to get control of the costs around security simplifying the operating environment and also helping our customers navigate the increased complexity of the IT environment as they move to mobile, cloud and IOT and how to secure those environments without compounding the complexity that already exists in their environment. We’re making a significant mission impact in our customer’s environment so it’s easy to get excited about.

Fred Diamond: Again, Symantec Federal. Do you sell to the entire US Federal government?

Chris Townsend: I do, all three primary verticals in federal. If you look at the way federal market breaks down, you’ve got Department of Defense, Civilian, the intelligence community and then we also have the systems integrator world as well.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about your sales career. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Chris Townsend: It’s an interesting story, Fred and we could burn probably the entire interview just on that but I’ll give you the quick background. I graduated in accounting degree, realized I probably didn’t have the focus required to be an accountant so wanted to look at doing something else, I knew I wanted to live in Colorado. I’d gone to school in upstate New York and started sending some resumes out in Colorado, talked to a health insurance company that was looking for a healthcare analyst that fit my financial background and they also had a sales position open.

I went in, really wasn’t interested in sales, had some negative connotation of what sales was about but I went and interviewed for the position. It was interesting because it was around health insurance for retirees which made it even less interesting at the time, didn’t really see myself in that role but I sat down with a hired manager and they talked about the flexibility and the schedule. They were giving me a car allowance and a laptop and a cell phone and what the average income was. I’d also looked at working at some of the, back then, big 6 accounting firms in starting a career there and what they were paying in this sales role was double and my schedule was my own. I decided to try my hand at sales and never looked back.

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

Chris Townsend: One, you have to be willing to challenge yourself. One of the great things about being in sales is that you can affect your own destiny and affect your own career more so than just about any other career track that you take on. You’re immediately accountable to how hard you want to work and how hard you want to push yourself to learn and improve your craft. Getting up and doing public speaking in front of groups, that’s a common fear that everybody has, you have to work through that and develop your public speaking ability.

You have to be comfortable learning new topics and new information and going to talk to people that you haven’t met with before, you have to like spending time with people, certainly. Sales from my perspective is all about how hard you’re willing to prepare and how hard you’re willing to work to succeed and be willing to challenge yourself.

Fred Diamond: We’ll get your tips for the younger sales professionals listening across the globe to the podcast. I’m just curious, how do you challenge yourself? Again, you’re the VP for Symantec Federal, it’s a big brand in the federal space, cyber security obviously is of critical importance these days for reasons most of our listeners probably know about. Tell us some things that you do to challenge yourself.

Chris Townsend: Great question. I learned very early in my career that what gets me out of bed every day is the ability to make an impact and challenge myself. I think we’re paid in two ways, we pay in our weekly/monthly paycheck and we’re paid in what we can learn from our positions. Frankly, what we learn is much more valuable than the monthly paycheck we receive. In order to learn, you have to always take on more responsibility and push yourself and challenge yourself.

Certainly you do a lot of that on your own reading and research but if you look at my career and the different roles that I’ve had and for example I’ll hit on this quickly – I shifted from a healthcare career working at Cigna to IT. I was living in Colorado, the Cigna career was clear, I was going to have to leave the area that I wanted to live in, I had some friends that had moved into IT, I didn’t really have an IT background. I didn’t know the difference between, at that time, NT and Unix – dating myself there a little bit. I was willing to learn it, figure it out and push myself to get into a career that I thought would be a better path than the one I was on and did that. You have to be comfortable with taking risk and pushing yourself.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, as a sales leader do you push your people? Do you challenge them as well? If I were to talk to your direct reports, your people a couple levels down and say, “Does Chris challenge you?” is that something that’s common with you that people know about?

Chris Townsend: I would say absolutely, probably more than some of them would like. I’ll give you an example of some of the change that we’re going through right now. Symantec’s gone through a significant evolution over the last 3 years if you’ve seen. We spun out the Veritas business and made a lot of acquisitions in the cyber security space, significantly increased our product portfolio. Earlier when I talked about our value proposition to our customers, we’ve really shifted from a company that was very good at selling products. We were selling end point technologies like antivirus and DLP which are really important technologies but now we’ve got this broad product portfolio that extends everything from end point to network boundary to cloud.

The value proposition is much more relevant at the Chief Information Security officer and the CIO level but it’s a very different conversation. It’s a much more business-focused conversation and less of technology-focused conversation so I’m pushing my team to understand, “What is important to your Chief Information Security Officers?” They’re looking at risk mitigations, they’re looking at cost savings, they’re looking at operational efficiencies. The speeds and feeds of the technology, while they’re still important, aren’t nearly as relevant at that level when you have to challenge yourself to make sure that you’re able to have those conversations, number one.

Number two, that we’re really positioning Symantec as a trusted adviser to our customer to solve problems and not just showing up trying to sell widgets. It’s easy for us here to say that, but it’s a fundamental change in how your approach to your customer is.

Fred Diamond: That’s been one of the key themes over the course of the Sales Game Changers podcast interviews, is that you as a sales professional, to continue to be even valid you need to provide tremendous amount of value to your customers. That’s not in the sense of, “Here’s our top 5 features”, that’s in the sense of, “Here’s how we can help you with your business challenges.” That’s very impactful, I’m sure we’ll talk about that a little more over the course of the podcast. Chris, why don’t you tell us a little more about your specific area of expertise? Tell us about your area of brilliance and what you’re an expert in.

Chris Townsend: I don’t know that I have any areas of brilliance per se. I think I’ve always brought a strong work ethic, I’m big on planning and preparation, I’ve learned that over the years that if you want to be successful you have to have a plan. The old adage, “Fail to plan, plan to fail” certainly applies. I believe going back to my early days in sales, one of my critical areas of success was breaking down my business, understanding where our differentiated value was in whatever particular company or technology that I was representing and making sure that we had a go-to-market plan over the course of the year.

Also, one of my strengths has always been my willingness to challenge myself and to prepare. I think preparation is underrated in sales, I see that all the time where we show up to a meeting with a customer. There’s a lot of research you can go do and be prepared to walk in to your customers with some solutions to their problems rather than showing up and asking them what their problems are, for example. Again, I know that’s kind of mom and apple pie, I’m sure probably most of the folks you have on this interview says the same thing. Preparation is one of the things that I pride myself on.

Fred Diamond: That comes up not infrequently, of course but you have to be able to execute and one thing that we heard over the course is a lot of sales professionals – and I won’t even use the word “professionals” in this regard – will practice in front of the customer. Of course you’re always looking for something that’s going to be an angle per se, but showing up and practicing as compared to preparing for the call, truly understanding. A lot of the great Sales Game Changers that we’ve interviewed have talked about how they put more time into the preparation. One question we usually ask is how do you become a better listener? Something that not infrequently comes out. When I ask that question, a lot of the Sales Game Changers will say, “By preparing” knowing that, understanding the challenge.

Chris Townsend: One more point in that key strength and I guess this is another area that you have to have if you want to go into this career is you just have to enjoy being with people. You have to get excited about helping your customer solve their problems and you have to really enjoy immersing yourself in the challenges your customers have and solving those challenges for them and truly care about it. I think that’s probably the overarching thing that I do is I really like to spend time with my customers understanding what the problems are and how to solve them.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Chris Townsend: The first answer is going to be a little corny but it’s absolutely true. My father was a small business owner, he worked for GE for 20 years and left GE when we were teenagers and bought a small business, an auto part store in a small town in upstate New York. At the time I did not appreciate the courage that that takes to go do something like that with two teenage kids and start your own business, but he bought a business. Talking about the impact of customer service, here we’ve got this nap auto part store in a 2,000 person town in upstate New York and all of our customers – let’s say the local town or village with the guys driving the snow plows or working on the school buses – were also the local police officers.

Everybody wore a lot of different hats working with all the local garages and if you alienated any of those customers, it was a meaningful material impact to my father’s business, number one. On the flip side of that, you build good relationships with all the folks locally in the community and you might get out of a speeding ticket once in a while too as a kid but all kidding aside, I learned the importance of putting the customer first. That was always my dad’s focus as a business owner, continues to be to this day and his business has grown significantly since then, owns a few stores now. It was always about providing the customer top notch service.

Fred Diamond: As a matter of fact, do you know Mark Weber, used to run NetApp? We interviewed him a couple months ago, he also talked about his father, that his father was in sales and the role that his father played so that’s great. Chris, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Chris Townsend: The most important thing we do is hire the best people and it’s increasingly difficult to find great people. Not because there’s not great people out there, it’s because there’s so much competition for top talent, especially in this market. We’re always looking to bring on the best people, hiring the best people makes my job so much easier.

The second challenge I would say, and this may be unique to federal is just the arm’s length relationship, we have to have some times with the federal customer because of procurements and other things. We can work very close with our customer to develop solutions to solve their mission problems but through some of the procurement processes and third party, third order of facts often we can’t bring the best solution to solve our federal customer’s mission problems.

That’s always a challenge and then I’ll add a third, I know you said two but the third is really elevating the team’s focus to being that trusted partner to our customer. I know that again, “trusted adviser” is an overused term but it’s really understanding how to add value beyond the sale. It’s not always about going in and selling our technology but really understanding how to solve the customer’s problems and if you do that, everything else comes along with that. Sometimes there’s not a sale attached to it and you have to think a little bit more strategically and in our instant gratification culture it’s hard to get people to think about that.

Fred Diamond: Symantec of course is a well-known brand in technology, it’s one of the leading companies in the history of technology. What does a great rep look like who would work for a company like Symantec? You mentioned obviously some general things here, but what would a great rep look like? What kind of features, characteristics, etc.?

Chris Townsend: Self-motivated, committed to the success of the customer, good communicator is critically important, disciplined in terms of planning and great self-discipline in terms of how they manage their time and engagement. I had an opportunity in my career about 15 years ago to be in an overlay role and I’d never been a sales overlay before. What that did is it allowed me to work with a lot of different account managers and see different sale styles.

As an individual contributor you often think that the way you do it and you’re successful, everybody else must do it the same way. What I learned was there’s a range of different approaches that account managers take that can be equally successful, some are very technical, some aren’t as technical but the focus on the customer, number one. Number two is the ability to align resources around your business, the best account managers are the ones that have the engineering teams working for them, have their partners working for them, have the business units working for them. Get all these people aligned to their business and aligned to their success by making those folks that are supporting them successful as well. Those are two critical factors that differentiate the best reps from the good reps.

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

Chris Townsend: That’s a great question and that’s an interview question I ask. It’s always a red flag for me when I ask that question in an interview and somebody talks about a renewal that they did, but there’s a number of those in my career. I’ll highlight one during my time at Cisco because it was so impactful to the customer’s mission. Obviously, Cisco provided most of the networking equipment to the department of veteran’s affairs, I ran the healthcare vertical when I was at Cisco. We provided most of the networking equipment to the VA, the VA had a new CIO come in, a guy named Roger Baker at the time. They were very focused on how to leverage IT to support the mission of the VA and at the time we had a lot of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that had post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury.

They lived in rural areas so they didn’t have access to the mental health counselors they needed because most of those were very highly treatable maladies. As a result, we had these rates of substance abuse and suicide, spousal abuse increasing in these rural areas for these vets because they weren’t getting the access to care. We took a look at that and figured out how we could use high definition video to extend the perimeter of care out to the clinics. The VA’s got 150 medical centers where most of the mental health counselors reside but they have about 1,100 clinics to extend care out to these people but they didn’t have the mental health counselors out there.

Long story short, we built a high definition video architecture – and this certainly wasn’t me, it was the entire team effort. We had our partners involved and a lot of folks within Cisco involved in this, and we’d acquired a company called Tandberg that was doing a lot of this stuff already that we expanded on. We essentially implemented this whole rural care initiative by extending the perimeter of care using high definition video. Beyond just the mental health aspect of that, we were also able to do by implementing some IP enabled healthcare telemetry equipment like stethoscopes and dermatology cameras and other things. Really saved a lot of time for the veterans that were having to drive into medical centers to get routine skin cancers removed from their hands, that kind of thing. They can now do that out in the clinics with local support in these high def dermatology camps, for example.

The reason that I highlight that is #1, it was a use of a technology to really impact the mission of an agency but it also dramatically improved the lives of the veterans and it was also leading edge on tele-health and all the healthcare industry. That was something I was really excited about, went up to the Hill, got some funding for that. It was a great team effort, it took a couple of years, they’re still rolling out a lot of that capability and expanding upon it. That was a big one for me.

Fred Diamond: Chris, I want to follow up with that in two regards. One is you talked about the challenge that your customer had with their customer and that’s something that comes up not infrequently at the Sales Game Changers podcast. Not just how I can help you but how I can help you in your regards with your customer where the value comes in. We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening around the globe who are in the early stage or early-middle stage of their career. You just talked about a very specific challenge that you uncovered with your customer and you got very deep with it, it was probably a couple years ago. Give us a tip or two, we talked about preparation before but talk a little bit about getting deep to understand the true challenges of your customer.

Chris Townsend: Great question. When Secretary Shinseki at the time came in to run the VA, he had put out a list of top 10 priorities for the VA. I remember the #1 was getting all the homeless veterans off the street which was a tremendous goal and really impactful, One was these veterans that are returning that are having these issues associated with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, helping reduce the rates of spouse abuse, suicide, substance abuse and all that. As a team, we looked at these top 10 priorities and started to check off, “What do we think we can affect with our technology, with IT? If we bring in some partners, where can we affect these?”

Then we started to hone that down to where we could really have an impact, we brought in some healthcare experts and actually had them shadow some of the clinicians within the VA to understand the work flow of the customer. You asked about folks that would ask if I push them on things, this is one of the things I really push people on is we built a reference architecture.

Think about the amount of time and preparation that went into this ahead of actually the customer investing or buying in any of this technology. It was a year and a half of work where we mapped out the VA’s existing environment, where we think they could go to solve these problems and then this whole approach of how to get there. We did it from an industry best practices vendor agnostic as much as we could because as much as we’d like them to use the technology at the time with Cisco, we really believe that this was an opportunity to solve a problem for the customer, Cisco technology or not. We built a plan and this thing expanded and expanded about a hundred pages by the time we were done with input from the customer. We did it in collaboration with the VA and we delivered it back to the VA as a road map. They didn’t do all of it in the way that we proposed but ended up doing a lot of it and again, it really had a mission impact but back to preparation and thinking through how you solve a problem, much more impactful doing that.

At the Cisco office right down the street we had stood up two high def systems to mock a remote rural care environment and we had the CIO, the VA come in and some other folks on his team. He sat in one room and they sat in the other and we showed how this would all work. We had some folks dressed up in white coats like docs and model the whole thing out and demonstrated this. A lot of preparation went into it, but we brought a lot of value to the customer as a result.

Fred Diamond: What’s interesting about that story also – and that’s a great story – is there’s the old adage that if you help write the proposal as compared to waiting for the proposal to come out. That applies to not just federal but other markets, too. If the customer comes to you and says they need pricing, then there’s no chance you’re going to win the deal. You got in there early on, you wrote that hundred page document you said and you didn’t get every piece of it but obviously you gave the customer the frame work and of course Cisco was one of the only places they could go for the solution.

Chris Townsend: Absolutely right, and that old adage, if you’re not helping structure the requirements then you’re not going to win is absolutely the case. Reps that are out there just responding to RFI’s and RFP’s, you’re too late and with our federal customers you’re probably a year too late.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question to yourself, “Sales is just too hard, it’s really not for me”?

Chris Townsend: No, I haven’t. I really enjoy sales, I enjoy the fact that you’re immediately rewarded by your own work and you’re really in control of your own destiny. I’ve always really enjoyed that about sales, I’ve never really looked back and wish I had gone into another career.

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

Chris Townsend: A couple of things. First, have the courage to take on something that is out of your comfort zone and then when you do it, commit to being successful. Put out of your mind that you could fail and plan what you need to do to be successful and then just execute your plan with passion and commitment. It’s all about hard work and preparation, and if you go into something and say, “I’m going to succeed at this at all cost, I’m going to figure it out, I’m going to do a great job and put a plan in place to do it” in most things you’ll succeed.

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

Chris Townsend: I read a lot. I’m always reading a lot of books, more now on leadership than sales but always read a lot of sales books, learned a lot from that. I try to learn as much as I can from other folks. We were talking earlier, Fred about some of the other people that have been on these broadcasts of yours in the podcast. I’ve worked with a lot of those folks, I always try to learn from other people but it goes back to what I said earlier. We get paid in two ways and if we’re always learning and improving then we’re going to continue to move forward.

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

Chris Townsend: I talked about this a bit earlier. We’re evolving from a product-based company to a solutions-based company and going through that evolution and changing the culture here to ensure that we’re not focused on maintaining our business but expanding it and growing it really shifting into that security trusted adviser that our customers need.

Fred Diamond: Chris, sales is hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Again, why have you continued? What is it specifically about a sales career that has kept you going?

Chris Townsend: I’ll address that quickly. You certainly have to have a level of resilience and commitment to success and not let those things bother you. I will say, if you have a product whether it’s technology or anything else that’s relevant and important to your customers to solve problems, they generally will return your calls. That was a lesson I learned early in my sales career, I had worked for a company – I won’t name them. I was there for about three years, put a lot of time in, we had some initial success but the market had turned and our technology had become less relevant than it was before. I actually had one of my customers, he was a Chief Information Security Officer and he took me out to lunch. This was obviously before I was in fed when I was living in Denver covering enterprise accounts. He said, “Chris, for a change I want to take you out to lunch.”

He took me out and he said, “My team and I all agree you’re the best sales rep we ever worked with and we really appreciate how often you’re here and you know our business. You’re always spending time with us.” I said, “That’s great, but why aren’t you buying more of my stuff? I saw stacks of my competitor’s equipment in the door when we walked out.”

He said, “I’ve got a responsibility to my leadership and you don’t have the best technology. I need to go out and invest in the best technology.” I know I’m a little bit off of your question, Fred but the lesson I had learned there especially in the technology space is if you have the best technology, your customers will return your calls. If you have technology that’s not relevant and it’s not going to make our customers successful, they probably won’t.

Fred Diamond: What’s also impactful about that is that you had this relationship with your customer who was willing to tell you this. You said he took you out to lunch where of course everybody who’s listening to this podcast is thinking, “How can I figure out a way to get more time with my customer so that I can essentially talk to them about what I do or at least continue to develop the relationship?” The moments you have with your customers are gold, obviously so it’s pretty impactful that he took you aside and told you what you’re doing well but, “Here’s why we’re not a customer today.”

Chris Townsend: It changed the course of my career to a degree. After that I started looking for – it seems obvious, now – companies that had leading tech with real differentiated value that could help our customers solve problems. No matter how good you are and how often you’re in front of the customers and how good you are building relationships, if you can’t help them succeed, we’ve all got jobs to do, you have to be able to bring tech that’s really helping them solve a problem.

Fred Diamond: A lot of the Sales Game Changers we’ve spoken about, they’ve worked like you’ve worked for Cisco and now Symantec, these are two of the biggest brands in the history of technology and there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why people return your phone calls when the VP of Federal for Symantec is calling. Again, Chris Townsend, I want to thank you so much for the great content, for the great insights, this was a great interview. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire our listeners today?

Chris Townsend: Take the risk, get into sales, it’s a great career, it’s very rewarding. There’s this negative connotation that’s around sales that we’re out there trying to push things on our customers that they don’t want, that’s the furthest thing from the truth. We’re actually in there helping our customers advance their business and we can be relevant to the mission and be a part of some really impactful – especially in federal, because the mission is so important. We can be really impactful to our customers and helping them be successful, that’s what professional sales is about. It’s not in there trying to sell products that people don’t need.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 157: Symantec Federal Sales Chief Chris Townsend Says This Brutal Customer Insight Shifted His Career Forever first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.