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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 05:47
Name an impactful sales mentor: 08:33
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 10:29
Most important tip: 16:26
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 21:59
Inspiring thought: 22:51

EPISODE 097: Former Symantec Sales Leader Randy Cochran Offers Tips on How to Hire for Growth and Consistent Performance

RANDY’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “When you get to that point where you feel like you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on because the wind’s going to change, somebody’s going to come along, a call you made six months ago and order a six figure order from you. If you’re out there in the marketplace making the calls and doing what you should be doing every single day and you haven’t had a lick of success but you’re doing all the right things, it will happen. “

Randy Cochran has over 30 years of software, hardware and cloud experiences in direct, indirect and telesales go to market strategies.

He’s well known for leading the partner and channel programs at Symantec.

He also ran the Northern Virginia practice for Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search firm focusing on VP level and above assignments.

He’s had a great career leading sales teams and working with top sales executives.

Find Randy on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Randy, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast, why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and fill in some of the blanks?

Randy Cochran: Thanks for having me, Fred. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. A little bit more about me, as you mentioned, 31 plus years in sales, sales leadership positions, very fortunate to have been with a number of really good companies and really good people, that’s been my career throughout so if it wasn’t sales it was sales leadership and all facets of sales whether it was direct, indirect, telesales, I’ve had a real gambit of experience, if you will. Really enjoyed it and wouldn’t have changed much.

Fred Diamond: Very good. We mentioned 30 years’ experience so obviously you’ve seen a lot of things change and evolve over time, so look forward to chatting about that throughout the podcast. Randy, why don’t you get us caught up, tell us what you’re selling today and tell us what excites you about that.

Randy Cochran: I’m an advisory board member of an early stage company called Secure Home and when most people think about security, they think of physical security – the doors, the windows and such. We’re that next level, we’re a virtual security for all of your IOT devices on your network, a thing that we like to call IDAR. We actually inventory all of your pieces, they’re on the network and then we actually can show detection where we’ve got anomalies going on. We’ll alert you that this is going on and then we’ll remediate. No one’s doing this right now in any great way and we think we’re on to something, Secure Home.

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

Randy Cochran: The first real sales job for me was with Xerox Corporation and looking back on it now, it probably couldn’t have been a better place to start because Xerox spends a lot of time on training down to the basics. I was actually sent out to Leesburg, the Xerox training facility out there for a couple of weeks just to learn how to sell typewriters. Very thorough, videotaping the whole nine yards, it was excellent. When you leave there you are definitely ready for battle and felt equipped to do so, so I got a really good foundation from Xerox in their training facility. After being with Xerox for about 4 years, I went to a company called VM Software, is about an 18 million dollar early stage company right here in Tyson’s Corner and when I left VM Software we were about 160 million and they later got acquired ultimately by CA.

Fred Diamond: Very good. I didn’t know about your Xerox background, a lot of the people who’ve been in sales for 20, 30 years who we had on the Sales Game Changers podcast have gone through Xerox training or IBM training or NCR training a couple people have been through. What about that has stuck with you over the course of your career? Again, for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today, the Xerox training center in Lansdowne I guess not far from Leesburg was a legendary place where all the great sales professionals went, Neil Rackham and all those people put the programs together and help really birth consultative selling as we know in a lot of ways.

Randy Cochran: It’s a great training facility, they’ve captured you, you’re kind of locked in, locked down but there was a lot of expectation as well so they told you was what to be expected and if you didn’t deliver, you went home. Opening day there were tests and that was all based on material they sent you ahead of time. If you weren’t ready, you got sent home so there was a lot of emphasis on being ready and I think one of the overriding principles that Xerox instilled in me and in others was to be prepared and to listen to the customers, the old adage of two ears and one mouth and use them in that proportion. They really drill that in and it’s not a feature’s dump or a feature’s benefit kind of thing, it’s more about listening to the customer, what are they doing today and how can this machine make their life easier, make it better.

Fred Diamond: You’re probably the fifth or sixth Sales Game Changer that we’ve interviewed on the podcast who has exactly said that you’re given two ears and one mouth and use them in that order. As a matter of fact, we had a podcast recently with one of our mutual friends, Gary Newgaard, who actually used that expression as well. I wonder if that came back from the Xerox days, I don’t think he started off at Xerox but one of the themes that has come across from day 1 has been listen versus speak. I’m just curious, what are some of the things that you’ve done over your career to be a more effective, active listener?

Randy Cochran: There are times when you’re listening to somebody that you want to step in, you want to interrupt and stop them and you’ve got to resist the tendency to do that. I usually have a pad of paper and I’ll take notes as I’m listening and I’ll star them if I want to come back to them and reiterate or pound home a particular point but I think more importantly what it shows the customer is that you are paying attention to them, that you’re listening to every word they’re saying and that that’s important to them that you feel that way.

Listening is a skill set, also being prepared about their industry, knowing a little bit more about them than maybe they even knew themselves. It’s a very good thing if you can go back to a potential customer and tell them about two or three thing you learned about their industry, it shows that you care.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Tell us a little more about you, what specifically are you an expert in? Randy Cochran, tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Randy Cochran: Not sure I would use the word brilliance but having said that I think we all have times where we’ve shown or shined a little bit brighter, that something really worked well. I think it really goes back to being a peer to somebody and I learned this very early on from one of my bosses who was clearly my boss and when he introduced me at a work social setting as, “This is Randy Cochran, somebody that I work with”, not work for, and it was that little change in the sentence and I’ve never forgotten that because it made me feel proud and big and I remembered that. People don’t work for you, they work with you and I’ve tried to do that every time I worked with my team as well.

Fred Diamond: You’ve led teams along the way, what are some of the strategies that you had to make the people feel that they were at that level with you?

Randy Cochran: I think knowing them personally, knowing their world, who they’re married to, how many kids they have, all those kinds of things, remembering somebody’s birthday, just little tiny things and if you forget, that’s OK. Go back around and say, “Hey, I forgot last week was your birthday”, noticing little things like that and anniversary just picking up on things. Just talking, maybe you don’t talk about business at this meeting, maybe you talk a little bit about business but we’re going to talk about you, the individual. Where do you want to go? Find out what they’re up to, what their aspirations are.

Fred Diamond: Who was an impactful sales career mentor and how did they impact your career?

Randy Cochran: I’d probably have to say two, come to mind. One was Bob Fitzsimmons at VM Software. Bob was kind of a military crusty curmudgeon kind of guy. Some people liked him, some people loved him, I happened to be the latter and he was a big motivator for me, very down to earth, straight ahead let’s go but also a very soft heart. We were both colleagues and friends and there was probably 12 to 13 years between us in terms of age so felt really good about that.

The other one would have to be John Thompson, CEO of Symantec. I used to describe John as silk, you’d see him in a room, a board room with 20 partners around the table where I’ve got an advisory council meeting and he’d literally go around the room no paper, no pen, no nothing, I had that. And he would sit there and go around the room to each person and ask them or have them ask him questions and then as they went around the room he’d come back and he’d summarize each person’s point as he went around, pure memory, and then loaded up and everybody around the room jaws hitting the table like, “How did you do that?”

Now of course, I had everything described and we were recording the meeting but nonetheless he was just phenomenal and fantastic memory for names. I remember being at a quota club in Hawaii, he’d never met my wife but he knew what her name was when he came up to be introduced, “You must be Noreen” and that stuck with my wife.

Fred Diamond: We interviewed Gigi Schumm for the Sales Game Changers podcast, she’s currently the sales VP at Threat Quotient, I know she spent a good amount of time at Symantec as well and I’m reminded that she also listed him as one of her mentors.

Randy Cochran: He’s that good, definitely is.

Fred Diamond: That would be a great skill to have. Randy, you’ve led sales teams. What are the two biggest challenges that you believe sales leaders face today?

Randy Cochran: First one is people, having the right people in the right chair at the right time. Everybody develops at different speeds but having the right people on demand, if you will, and what that means I think is you’ve got to be interviewing all the time even when you don’t have open reqs. You need to be in the marketplace interviewing who your next hire might be because you never know when somebody’s going to say, “I’m out of here, I’m retired, I’m going to the beach”, whatever.

The second thing I would point out that’s kind of tough to do is do not subscribe to bad breath’s better than no breath. If you’ve got non-performers on your team, either move them up or move them out. Sounds very hardcore but often times what I’ve seen is the person who’s not performing doesn’t really want to be there either so it’s convenient to have a check coming in every two weeks but if you’re not getting the performance it’s pretty obvious in sales so either get them up or move them out.

Fred Diamond: I ask what are the two biggest challenges sales leaders are facing today, you’ve had a 30-year career. Has that always been the #1 challenge?

Randy Cochran: I think so. I think people are what drive the revenue. Sales is a very clear path, you’re either making it or you’re not. You can have up years, down years, up quarters, down quarters but over the long haul there needs to be a consistent level of performance and having the right people to help you do that.

Fred Diamond: Again, we mentioned before you worked at VM Software, you started your career at Xerox, you had a very successful careers working for one of the top recruiting firms, Heidrick & Struggles. And of course you led the partner program at Symantec. Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Randy Cochran: I think it would have to be – and we were fortunate to do it twice, once at VM Software and once at Symantec where my entire team made club that year. Club was not just 100%, you had to be one of the top performers over 100% to be able to go so having your entire team there at VM Software was very cool. We had pictures where we had the broom in front of us – clean sweep, that I think is extremely difficult to do and doesn’t happen very often so it was kind of cool.

Fred Diamond: Randy, you’ve had a great career in sales, you’ve given us some great examples. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you’ve had a 30 year career of success. Right now you’re on the advisory board at a startup firm called Secure Home. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Randy Cochran: I’m sure I did have those moments where like, “Holy moly, what am I into?” but the next sale gets you out of that slump pretty quick. I think like any sport you can go up to the plate and strike out and you’re wondering, “Am I ever going to be able to hit that curve ball again?” or whatever it may be, but I think you just got to step back into the box. It is the one career that I know of that is directly related to how successful you want to be. If you want more money then go sell more stuff, software, whatever it may be and that always intrigued me. You want a raise? Go sell something. It was very directly related to your performance.

Fred Diamond: One question before we take a break and listen to one of our sponsors. Again, you’ve managed direct sales organizations and you also managed indirect of course when you were at Symantec most notably. Are there any distinct differences between leading direct sales efforts and leading channel or indirect efforts that readily become available to you?

Randy Cochran: Having had experience on both sides of that equation I would tell you that they both are very challenging and they both are very rewarding but I would say indirect is more difficult because your partners have alternatives. A direct salesforce has to sell what’s on the menu. A partner can sell your competitor, a partner can sell anything but yours so how do you make sure that they’re always representing or at least a great percentage of the time that they’re always presenting your product? I would say indirect is a little tougher than direct but they’re both a challenge for sure.

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

Randy Cochran: Be a sponge. Go after as much information as you can possibly get. If you’re in a sales organization, seek out the top hitters, who are the best performers, take them to lunch, pick their brain, what are they doing? You don’t have to figure it out, you have to go around to those that already have and pick their brain. I would also be a voracious reader of any of the information you can get your hands on whether it’s sales techniques, whether it’s the feature function list of the products that you’re selling, just continue to invest in yourself every day.

Fred Diamond: I want to take a short break and ask you a certain question. Again, when you’ve been in ground in sales for thirty somewhat years, you worked for some of the best companies, again Xerox had the world class sales training program. A lot of the sales training programs aren’t available anymore, they’re available but they’re not being as deployed by companies.

The sales lifespan of an average sales rep in some cases is much shorter. That’s great advice, how specifically would you tell a young person, would you tell them to spend their own money? Would you tell them to go to the company to put them in a training class? How would you tell someone specifically, what does it mean to invest and how would you encourage them to do so?

Randy Cochran: If the company you’re working for is not making that hard dollar investment in you or in training for the sales teams then I would seek out. I’d probably go online first because I suspect you probably don’t have a whole lot of money to be spending on these kinds of courses and there are online vehicles where you can get information. There are vehicles like what you’re doing, where you’re sharing information from other sales leaders about what works which you might want to try. It’s a constant effort to move the needle so you want to make sure you’re investing in yourself, try to learn something every day. It sounds hokey but I think it’s true, if you make that investment in yourself, over time it’s going to pay off.

Fred Diamond: I was talking to a CEO of a company recently, we were talking about millennials learning how to get better at the art and science of selling and we talked about do they have money to invest in these things and her comment was, “They’re spending 60 bucks a weekend on Uber from going to point A to point B, use some of that money in some of the investments.” So Sales Game Changers listening in, don’t do Uber this weekend, take Randy’s advice. Go online, listen to the podcast, it’s your career, right?

Randy Cochran: It is very much so.

Fred Diamond: Did you always feel that way? That even though again you worked for – again, I keep harping on Xerox because I love talking to people who started their career at Xerox because I know what you were given access to. But did you feel that it was your career, that you really went after it and it was up to you to be successful?

Randy Cochran: A check every two weeks was made out to me, so I think the short answer is yes. That’s the way you have to look at it, this is your career, what are you doing? Don’t rely on the company doing it for you, go out and figure out what you need to do to be better and I think that one piece of advice about knowing who the top hitters are and see if you can fit underneath their wings somehow, see if they can be your mentor.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great advice. They’ll probably answer your questions. You’re here today talking on the podcast because you want to give back, you want to give some of your ideas, you’ve had a great career. A lot of the people who have had careers similar to you who’ve been on the podcast I know that they want to give back. They want to talk about the lessons they’ve learned, they want to see people take their career to the next level. Speaking of that, today, Randy Cochran, what are some of the things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Randy Cochran: Read every day whether it’s online, just trying to stay current on what’s going on both in the world and in this profession. I’m starting a new venture with this Secure Home team and it’s a whole new world where everybody says, “Oh, it’s Secure Home.” It’s not what you think, it’s not physical, it’s virtual. It’s all the IOT devices that are on your network and most people that’s the big thing, you have no idea how many you have on your network and if your kids have somebody to come over, “Hey Mr. Fred, what’s your WiFi password?” that IP address is now on your network even when they’re not there. A lot of these pieces and parts are out there and having to stay current on all that for an old guy like me, I mean, sure I worked at Symantec but most people know it for any virus. It’s not IOT devices, so big difference, trying to stay current in an ever-changing world.

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

Randy Cochran: That’s it, just trying to stay current on my situation with Secure Home, being that sponge that I mentioned earlier trying to absorb as much as I possibly can and still have fun with it. I think the more you can draw analogies when you think about radar and then you think about IDAR, that’s how I put it together is terms of making it simple that I can understand.

Fred Diamond: Randy, you’ve given us some ideas about how sales is hard. Again, you’ve had a great career but I asked you the question about which is harder, direct or indirect and you said they’re both hard. Sales is, people don’t return your calls or emails, people can hide out more now, they don’t think they necessarily need the sales professional in the way they might have when you were back at Symantec and VM Software, but why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going? 

Randy Cochran: I think sales as a career is one of the few – there are others – but it’s one of the few that you can make a very good living at selling something that you understand that customers need and that they want. When those two vectors are there, the need and the want, it makes your job a lot easier. It’s just finding that right person at the right time and as an old boss used to say, when you get a no you’re just that much closer to a yes. Keep plugging away.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us one final thought? Give us one final insight to share with the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast around the globe.

Randy Cochran: I think regardless of what kind of career you’re in but certainly for sales you’re going to get a lot more no’s than yes’s and when you get to that point where you feel like you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on because the wind’s going to change, somebody’s going to come along, a call you made six months ago and order a six figure order from you. If you’re out there in the marketplace making the calls and doing what you should be doing every single day and you haven’t had a lick of success but you’re doing all the right things, it will happen.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 097: Former Symantec Sales Leader Randy Cochran Offers Tips on How to Hire for Growth and Consistent Performance first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 052: Listen to the Tips Pure Storage Public Sector Leader Gary Newgaard Offers to Help You Excel at Sales

Gary Newgaard is the Vice President for Public Sector for Pure Storage.

Gary was previously the vice president of public sector hardware sales for Oracle in North America.

Prior to joining Oracle he served in senior level positions at PIXIA, EMC and Compaq, leading results driven sales divisions with consistent revenue growth. He has also been successful as an entrepreneur building startup organizations such as Paragon Systems and Intelligent Enterprise Solutions.

He’s a multiple recipient of Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 award and the industry advisory council’s prestigious Communications award. He’s also a long standing member of AFCEA’s board of directors.

Find Gary on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: As we heard from the introduction, you worked for some of the biggest brands in technology. You’ve also had some entrepreneurial success as well, so I’m curious to learn a little bit about that. Let’s get right to it, Gary, why don’t you tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Gary Newgaard: Pure Storage has really taken the industry by storm over the last five to six years on its track to a billion dollars which is pretty incredible success – using all flash storage. I think the most interesting piece about Pure is our evergreen storage model which says to the customer, you never have to pay for the same terabyte twice. You can upgrade the systems on the fly with no downtime, your maintenance stream is flat and fair, can only go down, would never go up and protects the customer’s investment. It’s sort of like the iPhone of flash storage which is proven out by the success we’re having in the market.

The product sets of Flash Array and Flash Blade truly are systems that can keep up with the heavy demand of the compute environment in particular around artificial intelligence, ISR workflows where our Department of Defense and Intelligence customers are using video surveillance to identify threats that’s used both commercially and in public sector on a broad sense. And we have so much video that you have to comb through so you need something that’s exceptionally fast and resilient.

We’re at six nines of up time all the time and distributed around the world. We have customers in just about every part of the world. My focus is on public sector which includes all the federal government, the Department of Defense, Intelligence, civilian agencies and also our state local business which is cities, counties, municipalities and obviously state government.

Fred Diamond: We’ve mentioned some of the places where you’ve worked before and you’ve had a tremendous career of success now running Pure Storage’s public sector business. Take us back to beginning, how did you first get into sales as a career?

Gary Newgaard: My first sales job was working for Lanier. Lanier was the leader at the time in dictation sales, also word processors, and my first start was actually selling dictation equipment in telephone answering machines which shows you how old I am [Laughs].

Fred Diamond: Were you selling public sector primarily your whole career?

Gary Newgaard: In those days I had both federal and commercial accounts. It’s 100% commission based. You had your inventory in your car and you were given a zip code and you cold called, kept your tickler file on three by five cards and continued working it, and working it, and working it.

From there I moved into the computer market with Compaq. First, I moved into word processors with Phillips Information Systems and suddenly one day I got a three inch binder that told me how DOS was not the way of the future and that CPM was and we were operating on 8 inch floppies at the time and I lost one of my big accounts to this little known thing called a PC, happened to be at Compaq.

And shortly thereafter I was working for Compaq and we were selling then just PC’s, then notebooks, luggables, then through acquisition Compaq was selling everything from handhelds to super computers.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. So when you think back to that first job you said it was 100% commission, you said you had a territory you had to go explore. Now of course you’ve run some major sales organizations, some in the billions and of course some entrepreneurial stories. What are some of the things that you learned in those first few sales jobs that have continued with you till today?

Gary Newgaard: I think the most important thing for anybody in the sales profession is that God gave you two ears and one mouth, and that you should always use them in those proportions. And that listening is a skill that has to be practiced and if you take the time to listen to what your customer or prospect is telling you, you don’t end up in a feature sales arena, you’re in a solution sales.

Fred Diamond: Talk about that for a second – listening. We’ve heard that a couple of times of course on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Tell us some of your strategies for listening, maybe even some tactics. What are some things that you’ve done to truly listen to your customer?

Gary Newgaard: I think for people that are entering into the sales arena, you have to formulate your game plan and your strategy based on your research of the customer and understanding what challenges they face, not asking closed-end questions, yes no questions, getting the customer to expose to you what the problem they’re trying to solve.

The other thing I think for people that are entering into the sales profession is one, it’s hard work, OK? No longer is it the perception that it’s a three martini lunch of men and golf and cigars and maybe a glass of wine to seal a deal. It takes a lot more than that.

First off, we operate at a very highly competitive arena. I like in it when I interview people that this is the NFL and you have to stay in shape which means you have to understand what’s going on in the market, be a student of the game. You have to do your homework and understand what your competition is doing, understand what your prospect or customer is trying to accomplish and be that person that can earn a position of trust as opposed to being a sales person.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been selling in the public sector space for a large part of your career. We’ve interviewed some people on the Sales Game Changers podcast, Anthony Robbins at NVIDIA comes to mind and Lynne Chamberlain over at Red Hat. How important are relationships into the public sector marketplace and do you have some relationships that have gone on for 20, 25 years?

Gary Newgaard: The sales game is a relationship game. You have to understand what’s going on in the market, you need to understand what your competition’s capable of doing. At the end of the day people like to buy from people they like and it’s going back to earning back that position of trust. We’ve had relationships that go back throughout my career from day 1, Tom Simmons, we worked together at Lanier. He’s still a dear friend of mine, he’s still a business associate of mine, he was at my wedding, that’s how far we go back, 35 years.

Fred Diamond: He’s running Citrix’s public sector still, correct?

Gary Newgaard: He is.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little more about you. Gary, what are you specifically an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Gary Newgaard: I’m not brilliant in any form or fashion, I think the thing that I’m good at is building teams and by that I mean if I’m the smartest guy in the room, whoever I’m working for is in a lot of trouble. The best way to be a success in this industry is to surround yourself with exceptionally bright people and enable them to lead their organizations and be there to coach and mentor, help set the strategy.

Many times at a senior level you’re more like the NFL coach or the guy in the box that’s laying out the strategy, adjusting the game plan as you move through the game. People get hurt, people deal, stretch out, they don’t come in when they’re supposed to come in so you always have to have your plan and your plan B and C to fulfill and meet your obligations that you have to the company you’re working for.

Fred Diamond: To have reached the level of the senior level that you have, especially in a nice, long, successful career, you must have had some successful mentors. Some that have been impactful to you along the way. I just asked you what are you specifically an expert in and you mentioned your ability to build teams. Why don’t you talk about one or two of the impactful sales career mentors that you’ve had along the way, and tell us how they impacted your career.

Gary Newgaard: Well there have been countless but as we were prepping for this interview two came to mind. Both of them worked with me at Compaq. The first was Randy Forster who was my director of the east and actually was the first guy to promote me into management rank. Randy taught be about being a good manager and also a leader, and leading from the front. You don’t lead by sitting in your office, you need to be out, about, working with your business partners, working with your sales teams, working with the marketing, the PR teams. You just have to stay engaged and be willing to be that person that can take out the trash and also stand up and give a speech, but be available, be visible all the time.

The other was another former leader at Compaq Computer and that was Don Weatherson who you remember, and I’ll tell you the thing that Don really taught me is have a plan. Be disciplined in your planning process and he also taught me about running a business at a P&L level because eventually Compaq federal was holding on subsidiary, reporting into internal board of directors and we did operate on our own P&L.

I learned a lot of running a business from Charles Matthews, one of my business partners at Paragon. Brilliant business leader, he and his partner Pat Krause still doing all the SaaS business for public sector.

Fred Diamond: Gary, what are two of the biggest challenges you’ve faced today as a sales leader?

Gary Newgaard: I think anybody in leadership roles the hard part is finding great people and hiring great people and then enabling them to really over achieve and help move them through their careers so staffing is something that you have to do every day. It’s not something you do when you have an open rec, we’re continuously networking, making new friends, getting leads on qualified people, LinkedIn is a great social media way to meet people and stay abreast to where the shakers and the movers are so I think the hardest piece, you’ve got to surround yourself with really strong staff.

The other piece for anybody in public sector, the biggest challenge I have right now is getting a budget passed. We’re going through a change in particular in the federal government like I’ve never seen. The last thing I saw that was this disruptive to federal business was sequestration. We’re definitely in a sea change with this administration.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been selling to public sector for the vast majority of your career, kind of take us off course for a little bit but what is it about this marketplace that has inspired you to continue offering valuable service to them over the years?

Gary Newgaard: The think I love about public sector business is that it’s all about mission, and whether it’s a mission to solve or find a cure for a particular disease or the mission of the department of defense or homeland security of protecting this great nation at the state and local level it’s providing service to the citizens. You’d look at places like Utah which probably has some of the most advanced systems and reach out to their constituency but at the end of the day they’re all about mission.

It’s not necessarily the P&L and the thing I also love about both the federal and the state and local market is that they lead and they are very advanced in adopting new technology which ends up serving all of us with our tax dollars in a better way.

Fred Diamond: Over the course of your career you must have had thousands of sales transactions, of deals that have closed, of customers that you’ve sold to. Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. Gary, take us back to that moment.

Gary Newgaard: One that stands out on my mind was I was a rep selling word processors for Phillips Information System and individual contributor role and I was working on an account, Mackie vending machines which also own the Pepsi bottling up in Maryland and I was competing against Wang. Wang at the time was by far the #1 market leader. And the rep I was competing with was driving up in her beautiful brand new Mercedes two seater coupe.

At the time, I was very new in my career. I was driving 1968 Ford Galaxy 500, that was a gift from my brother because my car had busted and I think for sure I was the underdog and going back to why was I successful, it was a large enough order that it actually helped with the down payment on our first home. The solution’s probably very comparable moving bits around on the screen to form words and rearrange paragraphs but I worked with the customer and I’ll never forget his name, Pablo Ramirez, and earned a position of trust with him.

And at the end of the day I think that’s what carried the win. It was a long sale cycle, it wasn’t a three month campaign, it was probably even more than a year and again, strategizing, working with my peers, working with my management team in particular the customer service reps and the support reps that were helping. It was a team win but it was also probably one of the most gratifying of my career.

Fred Diamond: Do you still keep in touch with anybody who was involved with that sale?

Gary Newgaard: Most of those people have moved on. [Laughs] Wang is gone.

Fred Diamond: It’s kind of interesting, when we ask that question, Gary. In some cases the deals were 30 years ago and the sales leaders that we speak to on Sales Game Changers always remember those people and they often remember them with a debt of gratitude. In a lot of cases the customer guided them through the deal or gave them information or trusted them so much that they helped them become successful.

Gary Newgaard: That’s true, that’s absolutely true. In particular with that account, with that campaign, the marketing support rep, Mary Blair, my manager was Jeff Stilly, the branch manager was Larry Megar, and it was a great team win but it was also one of my most gratifying.

Fred Diamond: Gary, you’ve told us some great stories. You’ve had a great career in sales. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard” or “It’s just not for me”?

Gary Newgaard: Never. This as I said is at the level that we’re playing at. The competition is the best in the world and being able to compete at that level and be successful is probably the most gratifying thing I get to do every day.

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

Gary Newgaard: I think like all of us, time is a very precious commodity and you have to use your time very wisely. Your competition is going to use it very wisely as well so you have to be prepared when you go in. Don’t go in and try and get into a feature war with your competition. Features ebb and flow, you may not have the feature of the day and in 90 days you will. Your competition is going to use that to exploit your vulnerabilities so it’s more if you go in and listen.

Again, listening is critical to the sale world and listening is critical to success in any job so understand what problems your customer is trying to solve and come back with solutions that are not feature oriented. People want to and do buy solutions, not just on features. And unfortunately early in my career they always teach you feature function benefit.

Feature function benefit, which when you add them all up it comes out as a solution but I think your campaigns will be more successful if you focus on the solution piece than you do on the feature function. And when you have a good solution, price is not the most determining factor in the success of a campaign.

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

Gary Newgaard: Well, I said early in the interview, Fred, that you really have to be a student of the game and the IT world changes every day which is why it’s so exciting. People were only talking about artificial intelligence 20 years ago, now people are actually using artificial intelligence to help solve problems.

The other piece is be a willing partner with your channel partners, with your business partners, be engaged, help them all the time. How many times have you and I talked, we reached down and said, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And being available to – again your customer is going to call you and ask you what do you think about that which is probably the ultimate compliment when your customer asks you what do you think about this. And it may not have anything to do with the IT world.

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

Gary Newgaard: The thing that we’re trying to do is really help build out our channel distribution. The channels and many of our business partners have long standing relationships with our competition and obviously they have choices and when you come in and are disruptive to a business relationship, it puts the business partner at risk. And we have to make a compelling event for them both financially in the form of margin, also be a great business partner which we are and supporting the total solution that the customer’s looking for.

Obviously we don’t sell all the compute or all the software that makes it all work but we do make it better. So that is a big focus, working on our channel, the artificial intelligence world we mentioned Anthony over at NVIDIA, we happen to have probably the best and only solution that can keep up with NVIDIA’s high end servers and that sort of leads you into the artificial intelligence. And in particular with the department of defense and intelligence world supporting the ISR missions of keeping track of things that are moving around on the earth.

Fred Diamond: Gary, sales is hard. We talked today about some of the macro challenges, you mentioned sequestration before where the government just shuts down and says, “We’re not going to spend anything right now.” And understanding how the budget processes change. There’s also micro level things, customers don’t return your emails, partners shift, people move on to other places, customers’ demands of change and needs of change. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Gary Newgaard: Touching on this earlier, it is an exceptionally exciting career. It’s not like you go to a hospital every day and do X-rays, the technology moves so fast, the customers are moving so fast, the relationships and new relationships get forged every day. It’s been very rewarding. Sort of like the Jimmy Buffet line, all the people and all the places, I never would have dreamt that I’d have this experience in my life.

Fred Diamond:  Gary, give us a final thought to inspire the listeners of today’s podcast.

Gary Newgaard: My best advice to anybody that’s in the sales capacity or starting on a career or even people that have advanced through the early stages to mid stages is be a trusted partner. Don’t be a sales person. Sales people come and go and customers particularly in public sector they don’t come and go so often.

So again that position of trust and understanding the business, reasons and motivations for our customer set which in public sector is always about the mission is how do you earn that position. It is very difficult to get and it is really easy to lose. And don’t try and compromise a trusted business relationship over a deal. There’s always pressures for quarter end, month end, whatever the end is, the clock is always ticking for any sales person. Don’t compromise your position to get a deal done. It’ll pay you huge dividends in the end.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez
 

The post EPISODE 052: Listen to the Tips Pure Storage Public Sector Leader Gary Newgaard Offers to Help You Excel at Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.