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EPISODE 211: Inside Sales Expert Marc Gonyea of memoryBlue Offers Three Must Implement Strategies He Learned from Managing Hundreds of High-Tech Sales Development Reps

MARC’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Some of this might be trite but you must always be continuously improving as a selling professional. Knowing about the technology is key but it’s not nearly as crucial as paying attention to your sales PERFORMANCE. You have to treat your selling profession as a true craft and keep working to get better at it. If you’re not doing that, you’re going to lose.”

Marc Gonyea is the cofounder at memoryBlue.

He’s an expert on inside sales having managed nearly a thousand young SDRs (sales development reps).

We’re talked about how to optimize phone sales and how young sales professionals can optimize their careers.

Marc can be found on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Marc, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. We’ve actually known each other for a long time, I met you and your co-founder before you even founded the firm, you’ve done a lot of work together over the years, you guys have done tremendous work for many companies. Tell us a little more about your journey as a successful sales leader and tell us what memoryBlue does.

Marc Gonyea: Fred, happy to be here. I’ll tell you before we get into me, I remember reading your articles in the Washington Business Journal some time during probably late 2002, early 2003. We started the company April of 2002 right after the dot com bubble burst and I think it was a weekly article. I said, “I got to meet this guy.”

Fred Diamond: Thanks, man.

Marc Gonyea: I cold called you and you agreed to meet me at Silver Diner for… I think we probably had breakfast.

Fred Diamond: We did, we had breakfast.

Marc Gonyea: Let’s say it was 2003, that was nearly 17 years ago.

Fred Diamond: Nearly 17 and actually we’re doing today’s podcast interview at memoryBlue’s offices, it’s in Tysons Corner, Virginia which is about 20 miles outside of Washington DC. There’s a buzz here, you’ve got a palpable buzz going on here. You’ve got tons of people on the phone doing great things, you’ve got a lot of signs, a lot of metrics so congratulations to you and your partner for your success.

Marc Gonyea: Thanks.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about memoryBlue, tell us what you do and let our audience know.

Marc Gonyea: I’ll give you the quick and dirty on the company. The original question, I started off at Computer Associates, C.A., I worked for a gentleman who was a guest on one of your other podcasts, Mike Miller, he’s the VP of Federal now at Veeam Software. I was fortunate enough, he hired me and I worked there for a couple of years on the inside and went to MicroStrategy which was a darling of the internet dot com boom, a great company to this day but they were certainly a high flier. In both those companies I was in an inside sales position and after the dot com bubble burst I wanted to start my own business and so did my co-founder/business partner, Chris Corcoran and we went through a bunch of ideas.

One of the ideas was inspired by what we had done as professionals which was inside sales so we said, “What if we started a company around what we did in the first couple years of our sales career?” Because at MicroStrategy I had graduated to an indirect field sales role. Chris Corcoran, my co-founder was employed at a company called F5 Networks, they’re still around, publicly traded, a little balancing to limited loosely software firm infrastructure company and we started the firm in April of 2002.

Now we’ve got 5 offices, San Jose, Austin, here, in Vienna, McLean or Tysons officially now, they changed the postal service so we all it Tysons, and then we’re going to Denver in February.

Fred Diamond: Good for you, you have a tremendous alumni network, I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn about people who used to work for memoryBlue who have now gone on to greater things in sales leadership. 17 years, that’s pretty incredible, you’ve brought a lot of great value for a lot of companies and we’re going to get to that on today’s podcast. Let’s get started here, what are the two biggest challenges that sales leaders face when managing young sales professionals today?

Marc Gonyea: That’s a great question. I think one of the key elements of managing young professionals is the fact that they’re kind of like Warren Buffet as a value traditional value investor. He likes to invest in assets that he thinks are undervalued as it relates to the stock market, we believe that most college grads today are value stocks with potential ridiculous subside. What I mean by that is you have to recognize that there’s a lot of inherent value there but to get that value you have to put the time and energy into developing and managing them. We hire people from all walks of life but the majority of the people we hire, this might be their first professional endeavor.

Fred Diamond: What might be some of the things that you help them develop? What are some of the high priorities?

Marc Gonyea: We believe that what we primarily do as a service to other companies can be done in-house, can be done by our clients and we believe you should do it in-house assuming you can put into place these key objectives that you need to do to develop folks professionally. Continuous ongoing training, not just training someone when they first start for a week, for a couple days and then never do it again but you’ve got to do it every week, come hell or high water. Every Wednesday we do training whether you like it or not. Continuous improvement around the craft of selling.

We have a technology that we’ve purchased called ExecVision which is a technology you can integrate into your technology sales stack which allows you to require your employees to listen to what they sound like on the phone and what they say and how they’re saying it. Both of these things, having people listen to themselves on the phone and improve each week and providing some rigor and some critical thought to how they sound, people don’t want to do that because nobody likes how they sound on the phone. You’ve got to put a lot of time and energy into that one aspect of ensuring that they break down these calls and listen to them when the managers provide feedback. It takes a lot of work to come up with a training syllabus each and every Wednesday for the majority of the year, time and energy.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious, you’ve hired a lot of people right out of college, you said first, maybe second job out of college. What are some of the things you look for in someone who’s coming out of college that you think will help them be successful?

Marc Gonyea: Two things. Recently – when I say recently I mean maybe in the past 5 years – sales is a much more appreciated value or discipline of study in undergrad business programs nowadays. Many schools have sales teams and they compete in a selling program, you might have a minor in sales, you might have a professor of sales and if you’re recruiting the student out of one of those schools then those are people who’ve already raised their hand and said, “I want to get into sales.” Those are the young professionals, the young adults who’ve recognized that this is a tremendous opportunity in sales and they’ve self-selected in to getting to that profession.

That itself is amazing, not everyone goes to a school where that’s an option and not everyone may have that common affinity for sales. Another one is someone who’s shown some dedication or commitment to something over a longer period of time. Your GPA is important but that’s not necessarily a cutoff to go into sales, it’s not at memoryBlue. It might be someone who’s started off as a reporter at the school newspaper and worked their way up to sports editor and that took 3 or 4 years, or someone who maybe had the same summer job 3 summers in a row. You have to be a responsible, disciplined young adult to show that sort of commitment to the same job or extracurricular activity over the duration of your college career.

Fred Diamond: Interesting, how about athletics? Do you hire athletes?

Marc Gonyea: Absolutely. We love athletes, I love them because certainly they’re used to winning and losing, they’re used to hearing things or things maybe happening, perhaps they get injured or you were a star in high school and you get to the college level and you might not be a star anymore. Particularly the individual sports like swimming, wrestlers, tennis, particularly a sport like swimming, the time is your time and you have to compete with yourself to get better and there aren’t a lot of areas or avenues for excuses. Anyone who certainly plays athletics in college or even high school, not everybody’s gifted enough to play in college, it gives you a level of self-awareness that you may not have otherwise.

Fred Diamond: Again, your company primarily does phone calls for companies, the goal being the outsource inside sales, if you will. You must have made at least millions, maybe tens of millions of phone calls, I guess. Tell us some things you’ve learned over the last couple of years, what are some of your key observations from the millions of phone calls that your people have made?

Marc Gonyea: This is the #1 thing, you have to use other facets of ability to touch someone to get their attention, to get them curious and interested so it’s email, it’s email cadences, it’s voicemails, it’s LinkedIn. To us, it comes down to the phone. Why does it come down to the phone? Primarily because nothing happens until you actually speak with someone, you can’t qualify someone over email, you can’t figure out what’s going on in their environment, you’re not going to get better as a sales professional by just simply emailing and LinkedIn messaging someone, but it’s difficult. The more things change the more they stay the same, it’s very difficult for people – young professionals or mid-stream to more senior – to want to get on the phone and get uncomfortable talking to someone that they don’t know, a stranger.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, you’ve hired over a thousand people to work in memoryBlue, what’s the weed-out like? Once they get here again, you said that you recruit from colleges where they’ve already self-selected, so to speak but once people get out of school or something is there a weed-out type of thing that happens as well?

Marc Gonyea: We try and do a really good job of letting people know what it’s like to work here before you start, and when I say we try, we have folks take a personality assessment based on the DiSC methodology around trying to profile folks who may have a certain aptitude or maybe a mindset to come in and do well. Does it mean that it’s universally right or wrong? It’s a filter to try and pre-screen folks. We’re also very candid, it’s a very difficult job. We do a lot of great things here, we will develop you, you get to work with some of the most intellectually stimulating, game changing technology companies around on the planet but you better be ready to handle the rejection and the no’s. It’s hard to tell before somebody starts if they’ve got the gumption to do that so one of the ways you can do that is by being very transparent during the interview process of what their day to day is going to look like.

That’s one of the ways we do it and we like to develop and bring people along which means that we deal with the failure of people not doing that well but we try and deal with it by getting out in front of it as soon as possible because you can control most of the things in sales. You can control most of the elements in sales to help you be successful.

Fred Diamond:  Typically when I interview a VP of sales I always ask this question, “Sales has gotten harder, people don’t return your phone calls, they don’t answer your emails.” You mentioned before, you said there needs to be not just the phone, although the phone is the most important thing, complemented with LinkedIn and emails and other types of touches. Give us one or two things that you’ve seen over the last year or two that may be of value to our listeners. For example, you should make in every call before 7 o’clock in the morning. You have guys come in at 3 in the morning to make phone calls?

Marc Gonyea: This is gold, what I’m about to drop right now, Fred. We have a young woman who works for us out of our Boston office and her mother is a sales professional. she’s a Vice President of Sales out of a company. One of her clients is a cyber company, an emerging cyber firm and it’s difficult to get folks in cyber on the phone, but you can get them on the phone and they’re very reticent to share with you details of their day in and day out because they’re in the cyber business. She was experiencing some trouble getting folks on the phone so talking with her mom outside of work, her mom suggested that she leave voicemails on a Sunday evening. She left 26-27 voicemails coupled with a LinkedIn message to the prospects two Sundays ago.

I don’t know what day it is today, but of those she got six responses and she booked two meetings, if I remember correctly. That’s a non-traditional approach where you’re calling a prospect on a Sunday evening leaving a short relevant voicemail, hitting them with a short relevant LinkedIn note and that’s the first thing they pick up when they roll into the office on Monday and it says a lot about you as a professional. You’re willing to invest the time and the energy into doing that on a Sunday and then you’re able to stand out from the crowd.

Fred Diamond: That’s good.

Marc Gonyea: That’s not programmatic. It could be programmatic if you wanted it to be but it’s certainly someone who’s trying to be resourceful.

Fred Diamond: You’ve got to be resourceful, my friend, you’ve got to be creative. That came up recently with a podcast we did with Frank Dimina over at Splunk, you’re talking about process, you have your strategies, times to make phone calls, the ways, the embrace, but you’ve got to be creative. Making those 26 calls on a Sunday night to everyone’s voicemail, coming in the next day with the LinkedIn messaging, you’ve got to be thinking about creative ways to do it. You’ve managed, again, we mentioned hundreds of young sales professionals. Where are they excelling today and where are they struggling?

Marc Gonyea: I think the most difficult thing about being a young professional nowadays is probably the culture of being driven to distraction or the culture of interruption. They’re always on in the sense that they’re easy to communicate with. I remember my father was working and if I called him at work I was probably going to get in trouble that night. There was a strict ‘don’t interrupt your dad as long as he was employed with the US Army’ type deal. I think nowadays with the onslaught of social media it’s easier for folks to be interrupted when they’re at work which is good and bad.

The bad thing is in a sales profession what we do here is uncomfortable, it takes people out of their comfort zone. We schedule two calling blitzes each day where you need to be on the phones and if you’re not on the phones, there’s a problem in the sense of how you’re managing your time and your day. It’s easy for that phone to interrupt you when you’re calling a CSO from a major retailer. What would you rather do, text your buddy about your fantasy football result on Monday morning or would you rather call the CSO from the Gap who probably isn’t exactly looking for your phone call on that Monday morning? It’s easy for them to be interrupted and thus in term be distracted, and not just on their phone but the use of the internet.

It almost equates to – I’m dating myself – my father, maybe if he had a TV and a VCR on top of his DVD player, on top of his desk, at lunch he popped in a movie and watched the movie at lunch, that type of stuff wouldn’t have flown where he is but that’s what people do. Younger folks might light up their phone and watch Game of Thrones on their phone at lunch during work but it’s work. It’s lunch time but it’s easy for that distraction to creep into something else later in the day.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious, again working with a lot of young professionals, you mentioned LinkedIn, of course the phone we’re talking about and email. Do you allow them to use other types of social media like Instagram or Snapchat or anything in the sales process or is it pretty much phone, email, LinkedIn?

Marc Gonyea: I would allow them if someone could prove to me or show me that that’s a reliable and repeatable process. Sure, if it’s relevant to the prospect, absolutely. I think you need to build up some credibility but my guess is there are people in high tech who are clients we want to sell to who are pretty active on social media. Twitter probably primarily even though Twitter is not Instagram, it’s not Snapchat. The answer would be yes, but you need to do it with some thought.

Fred Diamond: You’ve listened to and managed millions of phone calls, why don’t you give us the best practice for being successful today at inside sales? You talked about the focus, you talked about call blitzes but give us something today, what are some of the best practices that you need to have being deployed to be successful in inside sales today?

Marc Gonyea: I think one of the key elements – I’ll hit on it again, I’ll just wear this topic out – is treating the profession as a craft and you have to, like any professional – athletes will watch game film and break it down, comedians who develop routines, they harness and fine-tune those routines over hundreds of sets and they record and they listen to themselves. I can’t speak for everyone but I know a great many of them do. If you’re a sales professional you need to review and listen to how you interact with the prospect, how do you sound, what does your tone sound like? Are you comfortable with silence, do you ask questions, do you talk too much, are you not talking enough? It’s usually the opposite in salespeople. I would advocate listening to your sales calls, breaking them down including hand-written commentary like getting down into it and then asking someone else to break down those calls for you, ideally your sales manager. That’s what we do here.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break, how many calls does a typical memoryBlue SDR make on a daily basis?

Marc Gonyea: The minimum is a hundred dials but that’s a leading indicator. It needs to be a hundred.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Marc, you’ve given us some great advice. For lack of repeating, I might get some similar answers here but you’ve given us so many gems already. Again, as an experienced sales and business exec, again you’ve managed nearly a thousand or over a thousand sales development reps, what advice would you give to young professionals starting out their careers particularly in the tech and sales industries? I guess my question is a little bit different. The people that you’re bringing in, you don’t keep them for a long time, a lot of them go to work for some of your clients and you’ve done an amazing job keeping that flow going. What would you tell them to have a long term career, things they should be thinking about? Obviously you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to make almost a hundred phone calls a day or a hundred dials a day but what might be some of the advice you would give them to have longer term careers?

Marc Gonyea: Some of this might be trite but the idea of continuous improvement. You have to try and get better at the role and I don’t want that to be confused with ‘we’re a high-tech sales profession’ but some folks, particularly maybe early on in their career become really obsessed with the technology – and it’s good, knowing about the technology is key but it’s not as crucial as paying attention to the sales performance. I keep going back to this, to the craft of selling. You want to educate yourself along the lines of what the technology is and what it does and the value it brings but in today’s world if you’re a technology company and you want to develop a new feature or function, it’s easier to do that now than it ever was.

You outsource the development to the Ukraine or to India or even Argentina or you can do some of it in-house. The vendors are all saying the same thing about what the technology does for the most part, so what distinguishes you is your ability as a sales professional to separate yourself from the other sales professionals. You have to treat your selling profession as a true craft and you are working to get better at it. If you’re not doing that, you’re going to lose and it doesn’t stop when you’re 22, 25, 30, 35 or 40 – I’m older than all those four, but that’s the difference.

Fred Diamond: The Sales Game Changers that we interview, at least half of the people I interview for the podcast say it’s about continuous improvement, continuing to learn. You mentioned technology changes so much every single year it’s like you’ve got to stay on top of it, but I like what you just said that you really got to get good at the sales process versus the technology. I’m just curious, again we have a whole room here, we’re doing today’s podcast on the floor of memoryBlue in Tysons, Virginia. For our Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, it’s about 20 minutes from Washington DC. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a lot of tech in this area, there’s a lot of history with technology so you have a lot of great companies here. I’m just curious, what would you tell your 22 year old self, Marc, about how to be more successful in sales?

Marc Gonyea: I probably would have told myself to make more calls [Laughs] People back in the days of the dinosaur picked the phone up more. It was harder to get information, I remember driving around Fair Lakes Circle here in Washington DC and I would go door to door in some of the lobbies of some of the buildings trying to figure out who I could call, go back and then call because you were allowed to go. Maybe you could have, I used to go door to door when I was in college painting people’s houses but I didn’t do it in my first professional sales job, but I think you only get better by interacting more with folks. So I would have told myself to make more calls, to talk to more people, to work on developing my game.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, when you’re coaching do you get on the phone as well?

Marc Gonyea: No, I haven’t been on the phone in a little while. I’d like to, but no. I go back and forth with the idea of having one day a year where everyone in the company makes calls. Doesn’t matter if you’re in marketing or if you’re in operations or in recruiting or if you’re Chris or Marc, you’ve got to make calls too to get a slight reminder as to what it’s all really about but we haven’t done that yet. It still takes a lot of man hours.

Fred Diamond: Again, your company is based on that, that’s what companies are hiring you to do and I’ve been running the Institute for Excellence in Sales now for 7 years and people ask me, “What’s the one thing you’ve learned?” and you’ve been reiterating this: it’s about picking up the phone – not texting – it’s about picking up the phone and making phone calls because you need to have engagement with prospects. And you just don’t call once, you sometimes call 10, 15, 20 times and like you also said, you’ve got to be smart about the complementation. Marc, let’s talk about selling habits for a second. What’s one of your selling habits that you’d like to impart upon the audience here to help them take their career to the next level?

Marc Gonyea: One of my selling habits that I think is critical for me – I can’t say it will be for everyone else – is trying to remember the fact that you want to treat people how you want to be treated. I try and keep in mind that if I was on the other side of the table or the other side of the phone, how would I want to be serviced? It’s tough to do that because everyone has competing interests, you’ve got to hit your quota, maybe salespeople are trying to maximize their comp plan or they’re trying to earn a trip to President’s Club or some sort of multiplier in addition to their comp or they’re getting pressure from their boss, who knows what it is? But I think it comes down to how would you like to be treated, and if you can stay with that manifesto along the lines of the other things like delivering.

Fred Diamond: Overpromise and under deliver.

Marc Gonyea: Yeah, and doing what you say you’re going to do, those things are important but I think if you keep that in mind over the long course, that’ll serve you well.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, again you have your people come in the office every day, they’re on the phone, what do you tell them about building networks and what’s some of your advice for the people listening to the podcast?

Marc Gonyea: It’s a small world. The high-tech sales world is very small. You may think it’s big but it’s not that big and this goes back to – it might be an overuse expression – never burn a bridge. Try and never burn a bridge, there’s something to be said for the fact that if everyone loves you, you might not be doing something right. Everyone’s going to have their detractors, no matter who you are and what profession and how you roll, but I think it’s important for folks particularly early in their career to keep in mind the fact that the folks they’re working with now, they may see again or they may work with or they might get a call about their job performance or they might get an employment verification request. A, “What was it like working with them?” type of inquisitive question or nature by folks they’re going to work with down the road or in the high-tech sales world. VP’s of Sales, VP’s of Marketing, they’re not in the job all that long. Hate it or love it, there’s a lot of transition going on and someone you work with at company A you may work again with at maybe not company B, but D, E or F. You’ve got to keep that in mind.

Fred Diamond: We talked today on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Marc Gonyea, the co-founder at memoryBlue. Marc, you’ve given us some great insights today. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, give us a final thought to inspire them today.

Marc Gonyea: That’s a good one. I think if you’re in the high tech sales world in 2019 heading into 2020 in the United States, I heard this morning on CNBC that we’re in the eleventh year of an economic expansion. I think from month to month over growth or expansion it might be the greatest economy ever in terms of expansion growth so you need to recognize that if you’re selling today, it may not get much better than this. You need to lean into it because there’s another recession coming, Fred [Laughs]. I don’t know when it is but if I’m selling high-tech in 2019 to nearly anyone, this is a great profession, it’s a great job to have. You’re in no better job, in no better place, in no better time economically speaking. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, be grateful for that.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 211: Inside Sales Expert Marc Gonyea of memoryBlue Offers Three Must Implement Strategies He Learned from Managing Hundreds of High-Tech Sales Development Reps first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 203: Thomson Reuters Sales Leader Rob Beattie Gives Answers on How to Use Data and Build Skills to Grow Your Centralized Sales Organization

ROB’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Don’t rely on others to motivate you. Take personal responsibility for your own growth and development. That’s bigger than just sales, that’s about building a career. What can you learn that’s new? How do you go out and find something that maybe is that game changer for you?”

Today’s show was recorded in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Thomson Reuters is based. This is the first of two interviews we’ve done with Thomson Reuters sales leaders.

Rob Beattie is the Vice President for Sales and Retention in the Thomson and Reuters Tax Professionals Group.

He was the 2018 American Association of Inside Sales Professionals Executive of the Year. 

Find Rob on LinkedIn!

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

Rob Beattie: I’ve been in sales since 1996, I started as a front line sales rep, worked my way up through various leadership positions and then came to Thomson Reuters, as you said, about 14 years ago. Right now I run a team of about 200 people, we have an obviously significant revenue goal so with that in addition to the retention goals that we have keeps me hopping with that. I’ve been a thought leader within what some people refer to as inside sales (but) I like to call centralized sales, I think sales is sales in today’s world.

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

Rob Beattie: My group in particular sells software and content to tax and accounting professionals. That’s our area, Thomson Reuters is obviously a pretty large sized company, we have a legal division, a corporate’s division and a tax and accounting professionals division and I’m that third one there. What excites me about it is in a lot of ways, product is product. We’re in an industry that doesn’t have high growth but we perform very well in it because we bring an innovative approach. I think we really connect with our customers, got a great team of people that really know the industry and can help them change their game. We’re seeing it’s not just the hard software stuff that you give people today. We’re really helping them change their businesses and their business models and I think that’s the piece that I enjoy the most. I just got back from our Users Conference last week and I’m still buzzing from the energy that brought, it was great.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. A lot of people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast want to know who our guests sell to, but they also want to know the challenges that they face. You just said that the tax professionals industry is changing, is that CPA firm?

Rob Beattie: Yeah, CPA firms.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what some of the big challenges are that that industry is facing.

Rob Beattie: There’s several things that are happening to them. First and foremost is it’s an unprecedented time of regulatory change. You can see that, I know you’re based in Washington, a lot of things come out of Washington that change the game. Last year there was the TCJA – Tax Cutting Jobs Act. Every CPA has to react to that, they have to change how they’re doing tax returns. There’s a goal that’s been stated by the government of getting to a postcard size 10-40 return, that’s going to change what the business that many of these professionals have had for years and where they have made most of their revenue.

They’re looking for new and different ways to innovate how they service their clients in addition to it’s a highly specialized industry. Where do they recruit and retain their staff from? How do they grow their businesses? It’s coming at them from everywhere and that’s one of the most exciting things about working in this particular industry is if you’re a CPA you don’t think, “That’s an exciting group to sell to.” I always say when I meet with new employees I go, “You just signed up to sell to people who are cheap by nature and very good with math, so get ready to negotiate every single thing.”

I ask them, “Who’s excited to sell to CPA’s?” And they’re always like, “Man, I don’t know.” I said, “Alright, who’s excited to sell to entrepreneurs?” and when you really think about small/medium sized accounting firms, they’re really formed by an entrepreneur. They think they have a better way of doing the business, they’re pumped up to do that and they sometimes just need guidance. They’re really good at what they do which is work for people, and sometimes they just need somebody to help inspire them on how to change their business, and that’s where we come in. It’s a lot of fun.

Fred Diamond: My father was actually a CPA for his entire career and I didn’t realize this is what it was, but he’s had a lot of satisfied customers. He was doing it for probably 40, 50 years and he had relationships with business owners that went 30, 40, 50 years and I know he provided a lot of value to them. You’re providing value to him to help him provide more value to his customer.

Rob Beattie: Exactly, no CPA ever retires [laughs]. They threaten it all the time, you’ll hear them say, “I don’t want to make a change to my business, I’m going to retire next year” and I’m like, “Alright, we’ll keep talking because you’ve got at least 9 more years, I know it.”

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

Rob Beattie: I’m a child of the 90’s, so I got done with college in 1992 and I had a degree in history, which at that time we would consider a degree in who knows what? So I didn’t really know what I was going to do, spent a couple of years being a Gen X-er, ended up where I’m working in a bakery and I’m delivering bread to a restaurant. This is a true story, ends up getting robbed at the time I’m there, so I’m in this restaurant as a bakery deliver driver and somebody literally holding a gun to my head and all I could think to myself is, “I need a different job.” I left, I called a buddy of mine and said, “Is your brother-in-law still managing sales over at” – it’s a company called New Horizons, it’s computer learning centers. He says, “Yeah” and I said, “Are they hiring salespeople?”

He said, “Can you fog a glass? I said I’m pretty sure I can do that.”

He said. “Alright, go give him a call.” I ended up doing that and it was funny because I always say that literally somebody held a gun to my head to get into sales and it was never something that I had thought of. People had said it to me because they said, “You’ve got a lot of personality, you’d be great at sales” and I find that ironic now that I’ve been in it for so long because the ability to talk is not great for salespeople, it’s the ability to listen. I really found myself surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did, I did quickly get into some leadership positions, it was a smaller company at the time, that’s really where I found my passion.

Fred Diamond: You made that shift, New Horizons. Did they basically do IT training and leadership training?

Rob Beattie: It was IT training, leadership training, this is 1996 so we were selling computer training as people were making the migration to this amazing new thing called Windows 95. It’s funny because our #1 selling product at that time was 8 hour beginning Windows 95 classes, so just imagine people who are literally learning how to use a mouse. There’s probably many of your listeners that can’t believe that was actually a thing but we made good money doing it, people needed to learn and transform their business, and transform the way they work. It was a lot of fun, it was an emerging market at the time. I remember thinking to myself about three months in because sales is pretty tough and it was emerging, it was growing but it was still a hard game. I remember thinking to myself, “I should take some classes here and I’ll learn how to use Excel and I’ll learn how to be a Microsoft certified systems engineer and I’ll always have a job.” That was my plan, it was my backup plan while I was there. Here I am, twenty some years later and nope. [Laughs]

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

Rob Beattie: I think the thing for me was I already mentioned it a little bit, but stop talking, start listening. It’s not easy to do sometimes, especially as we become more and more removed from seeing our customers face to face. It’s very challenging when you’re on the phone to allow silence to be there, but I’m a big believer in, “Shut up and let them talk.” That was a big thing that I learned fast because I used to try to talk people into things and I realized you can’t talk somebody into buying something, all you can do is listen to their problems and help them self-discover what they really need to do. That was a big one.

Fred Diamond: Listening comes up not infrequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast, people say you have two ears, one mouth, use them in that order, the 66% solution. What’s something that you would tell your team to do to be better at listening?

Rob Beattie: I’ll tell you what I started doing because I literally had to do that, because I’m one of those people that gets distracted easily, especially in the modern world. I can find myself on a call where I’m clicking somewhere else or I’m picking up my phone and checking text messages or whatever.

Take notes, that’s a big one for me. Get a pen in your hand, have a piece of paper in front of you, don’t do it on your computer because you’ll be banging away and you’ll distract yourself with noise and sound. For me, that’s a simple thing. It’s a little bit old school but write down as they go and there’s nothing more powerful than being able to go back to somebody and say, “I wrote this down, I wanted to circle back to this” and it’s a great way to not forget something and show somebody that you’re physically listening to them.

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

Rob Beattie: That’s always tough. I’m a pretty humble guy, I think what my team would say is my area of brilliance, if any is that I connect well with everybody. I don’t know that it’s a tremendous skill, it’s just something you do. I’m not afraid to talk to a CEO or a janitor or whoever about whatever, and then I think I focus very hard on creating a great environment as a leader. That’s probably the thing that people would say I intentionally do very well.

I focus on culture, I take it very seriously, I spend a lot of time thinking about it, I spend a lot of time communicating about it, I like to make sure that what we’re doing as an organization is creating that environment for people who are motivated to have a chance to be successful in it. If I had to rank one thing, that’s probably the thing.

Fred Diamond: I want to follow up on that. Again, your title is the VP of sales and retention. I think you’re the first guest we’ve ever had who actually has the word ‘retention’ in his title, but one of the key themes that has come up from the Sales Game Changers podcast is that the #1 challenge is hiring, retaining and motivating top tier talent. You just mentioned culture, so talk about specifically how culture plays in retention and what do you think a great culture is for sales professionals who would want to stay with a company?

Rob Beattie: Great question. I will say when it comes to retention in my title, it’s about keeping customers but I do take it very seriously about the employees, too. It’s a great observation that you caught on, I use that word specifically when I talk about my title for those, it’s got that nice double entendre. For me, to create that culture, to have that culture first and foremost I think you’ve got to be communicating all the time. I was watching an HBO special, they were interviewing Herm Edwards, the coach of Arizona State and he says you can’t lead from your seat, you’ve got to lead from your feet. I try to spend as much time in the cubes talking to reps, talking to people on the team, I need to learn what’s going on in our business not so much even for our customers but for our people internally.

I think that’s important and if you’re looking for a place that has great culture, how often do you see the sales leadership? How connected are you with the sales leadership hearing their vision and their mission and that kind of thing? We will run every Wednesday what we call a scrum which is an all-hands meeting, so I’ll have all 200 people in my group actually combined with another sales floor here in Ann Arbor that we have. We’ll have about 300 people and we’ll do a stand up in our sales area and talk about where we’re at for the month, what are we trying to achieve, anything important that they’re trying to do and then we’ll reward and recognize. We do that on a weekly basis to keep people motivated. You’re not going to win every month, you’re not going to make every month – I would love that to be the case, but it’s not. I’m not in an industry that grows at a rate where that’s very easy to do. We have growth goals that are 8, 10, 15 times what our industry grows at.

You’ve got to keep people excited and we do our best to do that. I know I spend a lot of time doing that, and if I’m a sales professional that’s one of the key things. The other big one for me is learning. Are you getting opportunities provided by the company to learn? You should be doing that on your own, peak performers take responsibility for their own knowledge, but at the same time if it’s not a culture that is constantly giving you learning and opportunities to grow and stretch yourself, that’s something you want to be looking for because that’s a place that has your long term interest at heart.

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

Rob Beattie: Fred, I’ve had individual people, I’ve had managers, the person who was the VP of Sales that hired me here, his name is Rick Kursik, was a tremendous mentor of mine in a lot of ways around leadership. When I really think about my career, I happen to be in sales but I think my career is in leadership. I also think a lot of the principles that you would learn from leadership are applicable to a sales career because in a lot of ways you’re trying to lead your customer somewhere. I’m a big believer in studying great minds as it relates to leadership.

Rick was a great mentor of mine, but strangely enough there’s another arena that I found to be very helpful for me which is I did a little bit of football coaching. History major, played Division III football so a lot of people thought, “You should be a teacher and coach” and I always said, “I don’t know, that doesn’t pay a lot.” Instead, I was a bakery driver which doesn’t pay anything strangely enough, but one of my close friends is a very successful high school football coach. His name is Clint Alexander, he was actually in the Virginia are for a while, he’s now back in Michigan. That mentorship that I get there is tremendous because it’s somebody who approaches problems from a different mindset. He’s dealing with 15, 16, 17 year old kids, but a lot of what they deal with are the same thing as what my newer employees are like. They’re not that far generationally, they may have experienced college but it’s a great opportunity to talk through how do you do that? How do you demonstrate leadership in that way? Because in a lot of ways we are playing a game, like you said, Sales Game Changers podcast, it’s a game.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely.

Rob Beattie: Why not turn to coaches and other things? I try to study the philosophies of leadership as much as I do anything else so I gain a lot from that. One of his great advice to me and to anybody is always make sure that leadership comes from a place of love. How do you show that love to your team all the time? Back to the culture question, I think that’s one of the tenets that I hold pretty dear. If you’re going to have these people on your team, how do you come at it from a place of love? What does love mean? It’s taking care of somebody, it means making sure that they’re in a position to be successful, all those kind of things. Not to get all mushy, but that’s one of the things I think a lot about.

Fred Diamond: Actually, it’s not mushy at all. I will say that’s probably the first time someone on the podcast has said leadership comes from love. I’m a big believer that the purpose of life is to love and to be loved. I have a question for you, again, football coach, do you use a lot of football metaphors in your day to day leadership of your team?

Rob Beattie: [Laughs] I would say my team says too many.

Fred Diamond: What’s your favorite, what’s your go-to?

Rob Beattie: There was an article that this coach, many people might have heard of him, his name is Belichick, he pushes the line a little bit. When you think about culture and football these days, you do think of the Patriots. There’s some who think they cheat and some who think they push the line and some who think they do everything they can to win, but at the end of the day whatever it is, it’s culture. He had this quote one in an ESPN magazine article where somebody says, “Do you find yourself to be different in your personal life than your professional life?” and I’ll sum it up where his response was, “Yes, I think so, there’s a real difference between who I am outside of business and who I am in the business. We go to camp with 75 people, we’ve got to get down to 53 so no matter what, I know I have to fire 22 people. That’s nothing I like but it’s something I have to do, it’s part of the job, I don’t love it but I accept it.”

In a lot of ways, I think of that a lot. When I talk about loving everybody, sometimes you love them enough that you need to go help them find a new opportunity. Not getting so much there where you’re like, “This person is so important to me, I can’t lose them, they’re performing really badly but maybe I can keep them, maybe I can fix them.” There’s sometimes you just can’t and I think that is love, too in a lot of ways is saying, “How do I find a way to helps somebody go find something that they can be successful at?”

Fred Diamond: Speaking on the love theme, do your sales performers love their customers? That’s kind of a loaded question, but since we’re on the thing and I got to say one quick thing, again, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast, we’re actually doing it in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Speaking of your buddy Bill Belichick, he’s also been quite fortuitous to have a guy not too far from here, didn’t perform a whole lot in college, of course talking about Tom Brady.

Rob Beattie: You know what’s funny about him? Old Tom, they wanted to run out of here. U of M was like, “That guy’s no good, get him out of here.” It’s a fascinating life lesson for new people who are starting off. Just because you start somewhere doesn’t mean that you can’t find success later on, especially great success. You’ve just got to find the right situation, it’s the magic, you’ve got the right coach, the right situation, the right team, everything worked out. When he was in Michigan people were like, “This guy’s a bum, get him out of here, he’s the worst.”

The alumni and Michigan fan base has changed their tune greatly over the last 20 years, now they’re like, “Tom’s the greatest U of M player of all time” and I’m thinking, “You guys don’t remember what you were like back then.” For those of you who are new in your career listening to this, think about the story of Tom Brady. He really did overcome a ton to be successful and it’s persistence and all that stuff. Sorry, I didn’t mean to go off.

Fred Diamond: That’s cool, but also I’ve got a question for you. You mentioned sometimes when you love your people that you love them enough to tell them, “This really isn’t the place for you.” Tom had an innate ability, of course an innate brilliance. Do you seek that? I’m going to go a different route here because of your background, hiring, assessing, what do you look for?

Rob Beattie: That’s a tough one. Bringing people in is always risk, you’re looking at somebody’s resume, you’re never really 100% sure. You also in a lot of times and especially in a sales leadership position, you’re hiring salespeople. If they can’t convince you that they’re very good in an interview, you’ve got a problem but you also have to be aware of the fact that they might really convince you. I’ve made those mistakes, there’s been people I’ve interviewed and what I look for a lot, what I try to find is tangible things that they can describe that they did. If they give a lot of ‘we’ or ‘I sort of’ or this kind of thing, a little wishy washy-ness, there’s a difference between wishy washy and humble. I don’t want somebody who’s a big ego, “I am the greatest of all time, I closed multiple deals.”

That’s usually a little bit of a red flag for me, but at the same time somebody comes in and says, “We as a team did some things and I kind of contributed a little bit”, that person is never going to be confident enough to connect with somebody. I look for that a little bit. I haven’t used a lot of assessments for people and I think that’s actually something that we should be much better at. I think the world is becoming far more data enabled and I think that’s going to help us. There’s been times where I’ve tried to use assessments and what I actually found often is the people who are best don’t fit a profile and when you go to try to profile uniqueness, you miss. I bet I tend to give people more the benefit of the doubt at hiring but I will tell you, I try to be pretty ruthless once I figure out that somebody’s not a great fit.

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

Rob Beattie: Hiring is obviously one of them. Talent is always a challenge, especially when you’re in a centralized sales force, you pretty much get to recruit from who’s around you. That’s a really big one, how do I make sure that happens, what can I do to potentially expand my reach? We’ve done a lot with colleges and recruiting through there, getting veteran people and just trying to onboard them greatly. That’s an area we innovated, let some innovation in a couple years ago where we went from ‘sales manager hires somebody and onboards them’ to a centralized hiring team. I think that really helps us get somebody on board, on board them into the culture and keeps them together, get some sort of a hiring class which for the modern American worker, especially the millennials is really important, somebody they can connect with. Having a friend at work is very important.

The other big challenge is it’s tough because I’m seeing all kinds of data these days about how less than 50% of sales reps are hitting their quotas. Some people say that’s a sales performance issue and I say sometimes it’s a quota setting issue, and sometimes it’s between the both. One of the big challenges I see is when you have great growth expectations – which you should – how do you get there? How do you make sure you can innovate enough? I guess what I would sum it up is what’s the right amount of innovation? When do you change something? The speed of change has accelerated greatly. What would probably have been okay 10 years ago to stick with something for a couple years, now you’re like, “I’m six months in, I better change something up.”

That’s a big challenge for me, that speed of innovation, speed of change, new technologies coming out all the time. Some of my veteran sales reps really do struggle in that area. You’re asking about customers, the people who probably connect with and love their customers the most have such a status quo of the way they work that as goals become greater for them individually, it becomes very hard for them to attain them because they won’t change their status quo. I see this arch of performance now where somebody will rise, rise, rise, rise and fall. What it typically is, is they just didn’t innovate, they didn’t change something about how they approach the sales game. To your Game Changers, that’s important, those words are really important. You’re in the game, sometimes you’ve got to change the game as you go and you’ve got to be open minded for that kind of thing. I try to tell many of my sales reps, “Check yourself, are you using this new technology enough? Are you trying a new approach? What are you doing differently today that’s different than what you were doing six months ago?” I think those that I see do that tend to survive and sometimes thrive and those I see don’t, it’s a matter of time and it’s tough.

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

Rob Beattie: It’s funny, it probably still to this day is maybe my first big sale. When I started at New Horizons we had basically a three month ramp up where you didn’t have much quota of any kind and then suddenly you had a quota. At the time it was a straight commission job, you had a base for the first couple of months and then went to full commission. As a history major, former bakery truck driver that was pretty scary. I’m like, “Straight commission is freaking me out” and I just remember talking to this firm at the time, a business at the time. It was that moment where I realized I got to get far more consultative about what I was doing.

I was kind of scripting, I was too script, I was like, “We can do this, and we can do this, and we can do this.” I’m sure it came across very robotic to that business and the guy on the other line says, “Yeah, we’re kind of struggling in this area over here.” It wasn’t part of the script and I said, “Tell me more about that.” What he was struggling with was recruiting, he wasn’t getting enough new people and I said, “How are you recruiting today? What are you doing and how do you describe your business?” I just started asking questions and what it came down to was he wasn’t feeling like he was technology enabled and it was very different from an area that probably seems obvious at the time. The technology at that time would have made a big difference but I said, “You guys got to figure out a way to become more high tech” and the guy says, “Yeah, I’m just not sure how to do that.”

I said, “Well, I got a solution for you, you could put 20 people into this class and maybe they become better at using Microsoft, Excel and Power Point and that kind of stuff” and the guy goes, “Hey, that’s a great idea” and I’m like, “Alright.” I remember that first moment I said, “Okay, you know what? This is actually something I can do.” It was also a huge lesson of script is important or framework is important, but don’t be afraid to move off quick. If you go into a different spot to have a conversation, have that conversation and what my agenda is in a sales call doesn’t matter at all. It’s everything about uncovering what is the issue that person is having at the time.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever say to yourself along the way, “You know what? Sales is too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Rob Beattie: Probably every day [Laughs] there’s a lot of jobs out there where you show up and there’s a lot of times I’ll watch somebody literally working on something outside the window of my office and I’ll just be like, “Man, that guy looks like he’s just so happy.” [Laughs] I think about it all the time and it’s a challenge because sales has the number and when you carry the number, when you carry the quota that comes with responsibility and performance judgement. Last week I was talking with some people about our sales performance in October and they’re coming to me to ask me those questions, so there’s, “How’d you do? What happened? What went wrong, what went well?” You have that responsibility when you’re in sales and I think that can weigh on a lot of people.

To answer your question, yes, I think about it all the time. It’s a very hard game but at the end of the day it’s also great, you keep score every day. I know if I did well today, I know if I won the day, I know if I won the last hour and that challenge to me, that’s what keeps you coming back. I always tell people that in sales they don’t pay you for what you’re going to do, they pay you to stick around because they know how hard it is. You’ll get a lot of people who think, “Sales is overpaid, sales makes too much money” and I’m like, “Yeah, it’s because you hear no so often.” I always tell people, I had this interaction with somebody who’s in a support role and at one point he goes, “Why do they pay salespeople so much?” I go, “How would you like to hear ‘no’ 95% of the time?” “I’d hate that.” I go, “Exactly, that’s what you deal with when you’re in sales.”

Fred Diamond: And actually there wouldn’t be any need for support if there weren’t people selling the services.

Rob Beattie: Right [Laughs]

[Sponsor Break]

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

Rob Beattie: I said it a little bit earlier, but taking responsibility. Some people call it accountability, responsibility, whatever you want. You’re responsible for your leads, you’re responsible for picking up the phone, you’re the one who makes that decision, nobody else does it for you and that to me is the most important thing for somebody who’s thinking about, “How do I become successful?” Truly at anything, but especially in sales you’ve got to bring effort.

I always say when I talk about leadership and how you create an environment where the motivated can be successful, as a sales manager I can help you get to quota. I can help you if you have pipeline, I can help you if you have opportunities, I can help coach you up, I can get you to club but I can’t help you pick up the phone. That’s something you need to do. Effort is between you and you, so that to me is probably the most important thing. If you find yourself looking around and blaming other people, stop, extreme ownership, you own it for yourself.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about a selling habit that you deploy to continue your success.

Rob Beattie: There’s probably a bunch. First and foremost is keep score throughout the day, set yourself a goal early in the day. “By 10 o’clock I want to have 10 calls in, by noon I want to be at 15, I need to sell something every day.” I coach my people a lot where I talk about you’ve got to sell something every day, you’ve got to put somebody in a seminar – which is really, in a way of saying, a prospect every single day. Then you’ve got to start fast and stay strong. I think those are the simple things that somebody can do, that I try to do, I try to do it in my current job and say, “Alright, I know I need to get this stuff done by this time of the day, I need to weather check myself throughout the day to make sure I’m getting there.”

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

Rob Beattie: Really working on our tech stack. That to me is something that is an area of improvement and it’s not just the gathering of technology for salespeople, it’s the adoption of technology for salespeople. Again, I mentioned it earlier, I was talking about status quo and how comfortable people get in the status quo. The status quo is always your enemy, most people today are not selling something where it’s a pure white space. In our world for sure it’s not like there are accounting firms that are cropping up going, “I never knew there was software.” Every single sale is a takeaway, every single sale is there’s a competitor in place and you have to disrupt that competitor so you’re always fighting somebody’s status quo.

If there’s one thing we know about human beings, they love the status quo. I always say, if we didn’t love the status quo so much I’d eventually stop eating cake and I’d be a nice, thin man and that’s not necessarily the case. We tend to just flow back to it so to me, technology and the use of technology in the sales process is a way that I think people can start to disrupt themselves and continue to get more and more effective. As data, AI and those things are starting to come in, I find it interesting how many sales reps will fight against data. If I come to them and say, “Hey, based on some data we have, this firm should be a good fit for this particular solution.” It’s amazing how often sales reps will say, “I don’t think so, I know that firm really well.”

This is a big challenge and I’m working through it today, I don’t have the answers today but I’m hoping to get them at some point. How do I get sales reps to believe that data is stronger than their intuition? Then apply technology is one of the ways I see is an end around because if I can deploy technology to get a firm, a business to say, “I am kind of interested in this”, maybe that will get the sales reps to believe in it rather than me coming to the sales rep and saying, “Hey, here’s this profile and this thing, you should give them a call.”

Fred Diamond: Speaking about sports, though, we talked about football and obviously baseball, I’m a big baseball fan and analytics have taken over baseball as we know. They’re beginning to talk about how do you mix intuition and baseball skills and 50 years of career with the analytics that there’s so much of today? You also said a second ago that you have data, you go to the sales reps and say, “Here’s data about why this customer will be a good prospect” and you get pushed back. With all your background in sports – again, we talked about football and other related things – is that a major priority of yours? Is that something that you could start using, the sports analogies, to get people to shift?

Rob Beattie: I think there’s definitely something to that but even beyond that, I think the proof is in the pudding side point but also giving them that belief of, “Hey, look I looked in these other industries” and then helping them see, “Yeah, it did work here, I can see why they did that and this team was successful.” There’s a lot of talk. If you have money ball for sales, you hear money ball for sales all the time, people really think about it in terms of hiring but it is also in how you approach your territory, how you approach your data base. I’m a big believer in looking at whatever your territory is and looking for the best opportunities, and then focusing on those best opportunities with a plan.

Not ignore the rest, and again that’s where I think technology can help sales reps is if I can have something over here that’s nurturing this other stuff and I can really focus on the 10 or 15 high impact activities – which is something I learned from a book called Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan, it’s a tremendous read. These high impact activities, I’m going to call in these 15 firms with this particular message, and that’s what I’m going to go and do. That’s a way that you can approach your territory with data and with analytics but it’s believing that when somebody comes to you and says, “Here’s the best opportunity” you can do it. Again, it’s a challenge I’m working on, it’s a great idea on some of the sports stuff, I’m going to think more about how we can do that.

Fred Diamond: That’s also a great book, too. Obviously you have a love of sales and we’ve used the word ‘love’ more in this podcast than we have in the past, which is actually very cool to be honest with you. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Rob Beattie: I alluded to it before, you’re playing a game, I’m keeping score. That part is challenging but I have this tradition. When a month wraps up, I go home and I have a drink mixed with some ginger ale, no matter how we did, I always do that. If we make the month, I’ll go home, walk my dog and I’ll smoke a cigar. I know it’s weird, but that feeling of walking through my neighborhood smoking that cigar and just being able to think about what we did to be successful that day or that month, that’s a great feeling and that chance to win brings you back. It’s strange, but that connection you have when you’re walking around and I’m walking through my neighborhood feeling totally confident and nobody has any idea why I’m walking and smoking a cigar, but I feel like somehow they’re walking by and they recognize, “Something happened good today for that guy.”

That feeling of pride you take in winning, that’s the thing that’s kept me in it for as long as I have. It isn’t easy and I don’t recommend sales to the faint of heart. If you’re only in it to chase the paycheck you’ll fail.

Fred Diamond: We’re doing this podcast in November of 2019 and you said you had just come back from your user conference, your user group and you said you’re still high from that experience. Knowing that you’re providing value, knowing that you’re helping, you said 1700 somewhat people achieve their goals and grow their business. Rob, give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today.

Rob Beattie: I mentioned it earlier about not relying on others to motivate you, taking personal responsibility for your own growth and development. I think at the end of the day what I would say is always be curious. There’s the old ABC’s of sales, right? Always Be Closing, mine is Always Be Curious and I think that’s bigger than just sales, that’s about building a career. What can you learn that’s new? How do you go out and find something that maybe is that game changer for you?

A tactical way to approach that because we’re so busy and it can be so hard, and when you’re carrying quota, the quota sleeps with you, the quota is with you, you breathe it, you feel it, you wake up every single day, quota, quota, quota. One of the things I did several years ago is I blocked an hour on Tuesday as my research time, I actually called it ‘social hour’ because at the time there was this new thing called ‘social selling’ which nobody had ever heard of. I was researching social selling so I called it social hour, so I blocked this hour and I would use that time to hold meetings with people who had products that I might find interesting or go read articles or learn stuff. I put it in the middle of the day and I was sacred about making sure I kept that time, and it was all about ensuring that I got better. At least I knew for one hour a week I was doing something to make myself better.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 203: Thomson Reuters Sales Leader Rob Beattie Gives Answers on How to Use Data and Build Skills to Grow Your Centralized Sales Organization  first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 04:47
Name an impactful sales mentor: 09:19
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 10:28
Most important tip: 15:03
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 18:00
Inspiring thought: 19:43

EPISODE 099: ExecVision Sales Leader Ted Martin Shares the One Thing that Will Improve Your Inside Sales Effectiveness

TED’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “There’s always going to be an excuse. Some people live by the excuse, other people don’t. If you truly want to affect change and if you truly want to make something of your career, in your life in general, don’t accept excuses.”

Ted Martin is the VP of Sales at ExecVision, a leading company in the conversation intelligence space for inside sales teams.

We also did a special episode with Steve Richard, the CRO over at ExecVision.

Prior to coming to ExecVision, Ted was the VP of Sales at Wealth Engine where he grew a team from 0 to 50 in close to three months.

Find Ted on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: We got a little peek into ExecVision when we interviewed Steve Richard, but why don’t you tell us what you sell today.

Ted Martin: ExecVision is conversation intelligence software. What we’re trying to do is fill the gap in the coaching world right now where a lot of times managers aren’t able to do legitimate tactical call coaching and utilizing what is one of your greatest resources, actual call recordings.

What our clients are doing is they’re taking these call recordings, removing the black box and making it to where you can actually do something with them and bring back value to the one on one which for myself it’s personally gratifying about this. In my career I’ve been focused on helping develop sales people and that’s a huge passion of mine. By being able to simplify this process for our clients is personally gratifying to me.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about the beginning of your career – how did you get into sales as a career?

Ted Martin: By mistake! (laughs) When I was in college, I was going in through the ROTC program and was going to be going into the army and last year I was honorably medically discharged out of the blue and I was thinking to myself, “It’s my senior year, what the heck am I going to do?” and ended up getting an outsource cold calling job and pretty much packed up my 99 Dodge Durango, moved up to DC with zero money and gave it a shot.

Fred Diamond: Obviously you enjoyed it, it worked out well for you?

Ted Martin: Yeah, most definitely. What ended up happening was I became partner of Vorsight which is where in business partners with David Stillman and Steve Richard so it was amazing. It was a great opportunity for me.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned Vorsight, what exactly does Vorsight do?

Ted Martin: Vorsight is an outsource appointment setting firm and we were a training business so that’s what I was focused on originally was being one of those guys pounding the phones trying to schedule appointments for our clients.

Fred Diamond: Now you’re helping companies with conversation intelligence, tell us a little bit about some of the lessons that you learned from some of your first few sales experiences and how that’s helping you now as you roll out what ExecVision’s doing.

Ted Martin: Early on in my sales career some of the things that I recognized that were very difficult for me was the idea of there’s always an excuse for something so now in sales management often the excuse is to put off a one on one or something like that because in many cases they can’t be as valuable as you’d like them to be.

In the conversation intelligence space how we’re working with our clients is to make it to where that one on one is more valuable, and it’s valuable not just for the manager where you’re asking questions of your reps but it’s more of a 50-50 reciprocal relationship between the rep and the manager to where both are putting in a lot of effort into the development of the representative.

Fred Diamond: How’s the response been to the technology and to the solution?

Ted Martin: Actually, Jesse (Williams) and I were talking about this earlier, our director of marketing. The category has grown significantly just in the last year so we’re really excited about it. Originally where people were kind of like, “Man, I don’t know how this would apply within our business” now people are coming back saying, “Hey, we know that this is a need” and now it’s just making sure that we fill as many orders as possible.

Fred Diamond: Do you generically or just go on after inside sales teams, inside sales leaders?

Ted Martin: You would think it would just be inside sales leaders but it’s not. It’s anybody that values the conversations that you’re having with either your current clients, your prospective clients or even potential people that might work for you as well. It’s all about being able to understand how your message is getting out there and trying to make it to where you can perfect that as much as possible.

Fred Diamond: Before we go on and talk a little more about what you do, can you define again conversation intelligence for us a little broader?

Ted Martin: Sure. It’s super simple, if you think about the conversations right now it’s more than just being able to say what’s being said but it’s being able to help leadership understand how to affect the way you drive the conversations within your business. Today, like I mentioned before it’s a black box. You have people, you teach your reps how to do the job and you hope that they go out and you use a manually updated tool called the CRM system to ensure that they’re actually executing against the message that you want and now what we’re trying to do is say, “Hold on a second, you don’t have to just rely on those tools and rely on hope to understand what’s happening, conversation intelligence actually allows you to know point blank what’s being said, how it’s being said and the results of that conversation without any manual interference.”

Fred Diamond: For someone who’s new to the concept of conversation intelligence, what is the result? Is it reports, are they a KPI type of a thing or dashboards?

Ted Martin: It depends on where you are in your level of maturity and utilizing something like conversation intelligence. I know right now myself being a sales leader I’ve been pitched so many different sales tools out there and most executives have been pitched anything that’s going to improve, any KPI or conversion ratio that’s out there. The challenge is being able to understand what are you looking to accomplish with it. With conversation intelligence you could be looking for the next KPI but in reality if you think about the very simplest way of using it is can you improve the one on one, can you improve the way your reps are actually executing against the message and in doing so if you can improve that then it’s simple conversion ratios that you will be tracking against to track success.

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

Ted Martin: What I’ve been told – this is not coming from me, jokes aside – first off, it’s around building successful inside sales teams first around prospecting so creating interest, teaching and building reps around the tactics of how to create those opportunities and then I’m a very process oriented individual which drives me to my passion of building inside sales teams so from that perspective I’m very in the sales process, very methodology driven.

Fred Diamond: Take us back to some part of your career when you had a very impactful sales career mentor. Why don’t you tell us somebody who was that mentor for you?

Ted Martin: It’s an easy answer, his name’s Peter Weyman, he was the most recently chief revenue officer at Zoom Info and it’s interesting because when I think of Peter he helped me very early on think about how to structure my career and how to think through as a young, up and coming sales professional. How to look at potential opportunities that otherwise I would have looked at differently being a 25 year old smart guy. Then the other side would be a person name Jill Ulvestad. She helped me truly hone my craft in learning how to sell and if it wasn’t for Jill I would not be where I’m at today.

Fred Diamond: We actually interviewed Jill’s partner, Tom Snyder, for one of our previous episodes. Ted, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Ted Martin: I think for me personally the first one is selling into a market that you are defining which is something that – I’ve experienced this three times in my career so this isn’t new but it’s still a consistent challenge because it’s a different type of market. The second thing is being able to build a repeatable process while doing it with reps that you’re looking to develop. As a consultant as well as a sales leader one of the things that I’m personally passionate in is the development of sales talent. That’s what drives me as a sales leader and trying to do that while also trying to aggressively hit growth numbers is super challenging as you can imagine.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things you’ve done to succeed?

Ted Martin: If you think about on the development of talent side it’s ensuring that your people are bought into (A) their own professional development but (B) tying their professional development to the growth goals of the business and in doing that you’re able to ensure that you’re hitting both of those important goals that you’re driving towards.

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

Ted Martin: Sure. There’s a few, but I will say my first one was the first deal that I ever closed, it was a sales consulting opportunity where I was doing a training for a company called TCMPI but I would say the one that is most memorable which is not a direct selling opportunity but it was when I became business partners with David Stillman and Steve Richard at Vorsight, it was huge for me because I was young at that time. I was 25 years old and it was my first opportunity to really drive and build something which totally gratified me.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you mentioned you were in ROTC in college but then you got a job in sales, you moved up to DC with no money with your 99, was it a Dodge?

Ted Martin: Dodge Durango.

Fred Diamond: Now you’ve been in sales for a while. You’ve achieved some great things in a relatively short amount of time. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Ted Martin: No, honestly. Everyone has the opportunity where they’re probably thinking, “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t be where I’m at” and obviously that’s come up in my career before but not being in sales with the path that I’ve developed for myself with the guidance that I’ve had from my mentors, I’ve never thought that.

Fred Diamond: You dig it, you enjoy it?

Ted Martin: I love it.

Fred Diamond: Every second of the day? Good for you. Ted, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Ted Martin: The one thing is there’s always going to be an excuse, there’s always going to be a reason to not do something. I coach our reps on this all the time, there’s always going to be a reason why someone else didn’t do something that affected a deal or something. Eliminate all the excuses, do self-diagnosis, think about what could I have done better even if you did 99.9% of the steps right, don’t allow room for excuses.

Fred Diamond: That’s very great. I just finished a book called Extreme Ownership. Have you read that?

Ted Martin: I have not.

Fred Diamond: It’s by a couple of Navy Seals that also who were in Iraq and they also have a business now where they work with companies and the nit in it is that you have to eliminate all those excuses, you’re responsible for everything and how do you make things work even when it’s a bad month, when your #1 customer says, “We ain’t going to buy” you still got to perform. The company still has to hit its metrics. That’s great, great answer, eliminate the excuses. Ted, what are some of the things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Ted Martin: I would say it’s spending time with my two and a half year old son. He and I are avid park goers at this point and I’m trying to train him to become a left tackle at Notre Dame so we’re on our way.

Fred Diamond: Is he left handed?

Ted Martin: No, but left tackle’s very important in football.

Fred Diamond: In Notre Dame it is, guarding the blind sight. What’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Ted Martin: I would say with the company itself it’s continuing to understand what the clients want, understand what the prospects want and ensuring that our market understands where they are in their level of maturity with conversation intelligence. One of the things that we’ve recognized with the market is that in many cases you can have a high level of analytics with the amount of data that comes out through conversation intelligence. The challenge is a lot of people don’t know what to do with it yet and that’s a common BI challenge so what we’re doing right now is trying to make sure that we help clients understand where they fit within their market.

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

Ted Martin: I would say short term or more present day I it’s my family. I’m a single dad and full time dad, full time worker so being able to make sure I know I’m doing everything to provide for my son is extremely important but if I were to take a step back ten years ago when I graduated college, the first thing was I needed money but then if you look at that middle part of my career, probably about five years ago, I had identified what I wanted out of my career and it was really important to me to say that I have an effect on another person’s life helping them achieve a goal that in their eyes maybe at one time was not achievable or that they know that they need help getting there and that was interesting that you would think, “Can you find that in sales?” but what’s great about selling is that if you know how to do it, you’re the only person that can get in your way of being successful. If you identify how to become successful and then can teach people and enjoy teaching people how to be successful, that’s what drove me from developing.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought to share to the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast.

Ted Martin: If you’re an up and coming salesperson, up and coming sales leader again, remember in selling you don’t have to just go into upper management. You can be a rock star account executive. I’ll touch on a point that I mentioned before, there’s always going to be an excuse. Some people live by the excuse, other people don’t. If you truly want to affect change and if you truly want to make something of your career, in your life in general, don’t accept excuses.

Fred Diamond: I used to live in Detroit in the late 90’s and I coached Mel Farr, he was a hall of fame football player and I coached his grandson in baseball and Mel had this expression: excuses are for losers. I’m really excited that you brought that up, that aspect there. You’ve got to eliminate those excuses. Everybody has them, everybody has real ones, everyone has little ones but you still got to perform. Your company needs you to perform every single day, every single month and figure out some strategies to be successful.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 099: ExecVision Sales Leader Ted Martin Shares the One Thing that Will Improve Your Inside Sales Effectiveness first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 068: Inside Sales Expert Ivan Gomez Says Committing to the Fundamentals Put Him on the Path to Fantastic Career Success

Ivan Gomez is the president and founder of NextStage, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations leverage inside sales as a powerful go to market strategy.

They help with implementation, best practices, marketing integration and many other things.

Ivan has worked at some great companies in inside sales leadership, such as Ellucian, Echo360, Rosetta Stone, QlikTech and Compuware.

Ivan is also the DC area chapter president for the American Association for Inside Sales Professionals.

Find Ivan on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you’re doing today, what do you sell today? And tell us what excites you about that.

Ivan Gomez: Excellent. After 20 years of practice in leadership in inside sales, I decided to establish my own practice called NextStage, a consultative company that is focused on leveraging the power, the go to market strategy of inside sales, so best practices for go to market, alignment with marketing, hiring individuals, developing playbooks, sales practices and development pipeline. That’s what we do, helping technology companies, CEO’s and sales leaders implement their inside sales strategy or optimize what they currently have in place.

Fred Diamond: Very good, we’re going to be talking about some of the things that you’re specifically doing. You’ve had a very great career to this point, helping a lot of very successful companies implement some fascinating inside sale strategies. Tell us a little bit about your career. How did you first get in to sales as a career?

Ivan Gomez: I first got in to sales over 20 years ago as managing fleet sales for auto industry. I worked on that for about 5 years or so and after being very successful in that particular role, I learned the fundamentals of sales, leadership, follow up, attention to details, focusing in customer needs and one of my clients, Tim, was actually very impressed.

He was on his second round of renewing his fleet of vehicles. He approached me and said, “Hey, Ivan, what would you like to do next? You’re certainly very successful here.” I said, “Well, I don’t know, I like what I’m doing right now but I’m about to finish my MBA and I want to take my career to the next level.” So he mentioned, “Would you be interested in looking into technology sales?” and this was actually over 20 years ago.
I said, “Well, maybe not technology sales, but I love sales.” so one thing led to another, I submitted my resume, I interviewed with a company that was Compuware, actually it was NuMega. You probably know NuMega.

Fred Diamond: Yeah.

Ivan Gomez: NuMega was a technology company, we were actually selling software technology solutions for application developers. We used to describe our product as the speller check for code, regression testing, low testing, performance testing, anything that has to do with code we were selling to software development shops. That’s how I got into sales, especially technology sales.

Fred Diamond: At NuMega were you in inside sales or did you do any outside sales in your career?

Ivan Gomez: Very interesting journey, I actually spent about 9 years at Compuware, great school. I learned some phenomenal fundamentals there in inside sales. I started as an inside sales rep and as I progressed and moved up the chain. I had finished now my MBA and then I was afforded an opportunity to actually move to the Mid Atlantic – Pennsylvania, and I became one of the regional managers in the field, so I have inside sales experience, I have field experience and then I actually moved up to leadership roles.

Fred Diamond: Go back to some of the first lessons when you were working. You said you were selling fleet services, what are some of the things that you learned from some of your first sales jobs that have stuck with you till today?

Ivan Gomez: Undeviated commitment to customer success. That is one of the pillars that I have, I always cherish, from sales. Being able to commit to the customer and being able to – the product that you sell or the services that you sell have to provide value to your client. That’s first and foremost.

The second thing, it is very important to remember the fundamentals. If I might share a little story with you, Fred, I remember doing fleet sales for quite some time. I really got good at that and then after some time, things and sales started to decline and I did a self-assessment saying, “What is going on? Sales are declining. What’s changed?”

I went back to my manager and mentor, his name’s Steve Menard, and I said, “Steve, what is going on? I’ve been in sales for quite some time, you’ve seen my numbers, you’ve seen the stack rankings, you know everything. Things are starting to decline.” and he basically looked at me, looked in the eye and said, “Ivan, go back to basics.”

What I realize now is that I’ve gotten so good that I’ve become a little cocky, a little arrogant, a little pride and then I started taking some corners. Not qualifying as much as I should, trying to short circuit the sale cycle and in reality that was a little wake up call to say, “I need to go back to basics.” The basics will always prevail, and that lesson has always stuck with me for quite some time to the point where we still teach that as part of my practice with NextStage, is the fundamentals of the game remain in place for success. You might have different trends, different technologies, different methodologies but at the end of the day, one of the most important things is learning the fundamentals.

Fred Diamond: Let’s take a second or two, why don’t you tell us what some of those fundamentals are? Tell us the top 3 fundamentals that you either had to go back to at that time or that you want to think about. It’s truly focusing on that and perfecting those things. Tell us like for inside sales, what are the top two or three fundamentals that the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast really need to keep going back to honing in on.

Ivan Gomez: Get to know your customer. There’s two important dynamics: Know your customer, know what is called the buy persona, the second thing is know their pain points, what are their motivations, their challenges, their goals and how you can help them achieve those goals. The other thing is know the industry and translate that not into features but actually what are the benefits, what are the things that they have, what are the before scenarios or the negative consequences and then the after scenarios, when they buy the product, or positive consequences. Those are some of the fundamentals that we have.

The second thing is qualify, qualify, qualify. And as you qualify, qualify, “Do I understand their needs? Do I understand their pain points? Do I have the right person?” There’s many times being in sales leadership that I’ve mentored sales development reps or inside sales reps where you think you have an opportunity and you’re actually stuck with the wrong person. So you’re climbing up the ladder, you get to the top and you realize, “No, I put the ladder on the wrong wall” so you’ve got to come back. That’s one thing and the fundamentals of sales and qualifications are extremely important.

The other final element that going back to basics is if you are really good at prospecting and using the best techniques that you’ve learned, telephone, email, messaging, your persona, leveraging the social media channels, prospecting will make you very wealthy. That’s very important. If it doesn’t make you wealthy, it will actually help you increase your pipeline to help you achieve your goals. Prospecting is a key element, especially when you’re in sales or sales development.

Fred Diamond: Sales Game Changers listening in, as a matter of fact, Ivan and I were speaking before this. A couple books you might want to read: High Profit Prospecting by Mark Hunter, he’s known as the sales hunter. High Profit Prospecting. Jeb Blount came out with a book about two, three years ago called Fanatical Prospecting. I love that quote there, if you want to get very successful and wealthy, keep prospecting. Ivan, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Ivan Gomez: Excellent question. One of the things that’ I’m really passionate – you know when there’s a point in your life when you come and say, “OK, what do I want to do when I grow up?” I had that moment several years ago. I made a commitment to the inside sales profession and I made it a quest to really hone in into inside sales. I learned from the best, I have great mentors, I read great books, listened to great podcast, been associated and shaken hands with great individuals so I made it an undeviated or a relentless passion in my life to learn the art and trade of inside sales.

That’s something that I’ve made a commitment a long time ago, and I believe that I’m good at that.

Fred Diamond: Very good. By the way, if you missed the introduction, Ivan has been the president of the Washington DC chapter of the AA-ISP, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals for what, five years now?

Ivan Gomez: Yeah, a little over five years since I moved to the area and it’s been a fascinating experience to bring a whole community of like-minded people to share and bring best practices and to help them develop their professionalism in inside sales and take their game to the next level.

Fred Diamond: Very good. You mentioned a couple minutes ago about some mentors that you’ve had along the way that helped you fulfill your commitment to the inside sales profession. Tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how did they impact your career.

Ivan Gomez: I’ll mention a couple names and actually one great book that I read some years ago that made a really big impact in me. One of my recent mentors, Wayne Berkowitz. A fantastic individual, he was – I think you’ve met him – a senior vice president of operations, I work under him. He was an individual that really provided great mentorship and empowerment to really see the vision and the capacity of each individual. That was a great mentor.

The other individual that I work under, Paul Cunningham. A great individual, undeviated commitment to sales, to bring amazing success to technology companies.

The last individual was Rosetta Stone, Chuck Friedenberg. He’s now the senior vice president of global sales of a company called Acrolinx. Former alumni of Gartner and really great individual with great lessons that I learned from.

Fred Diamond: As a sales leader, tell us some of the biggest challenges that you face today. 

Ivan Gomez: What I’ve seen right now, Fred, is the notion of the shiny object. There is in technology and sales an array of technologies that are coming to really expedite the process of the front end of the sale cycle. Many organizations are rushing to get to that point and these technologies are extremely useful if used properly. As the quote says, “Use only as directed.” Those are some of the challenges I see as an opportunity, but also see as a challenge because at the end of the day, the human element needs to take place.

All these technologies of sales acceleration basically will put a lead in front of a rep, but the rep still needs to actually sell, hold a conversation, qualify the person, prospect, move the sales to the next stage, gain commitments. That’s one of the things. The other aspect that we see is social media. A lot of aspects is social selling, so there’s a lot of social but very little selling. For young reps say, “I connected with somebody on LinkedIn and followed him on Twitter and doing this and that”, well, you’re seeing the mechanics of the social media but not applying the fundamentals of social selling.

Digital selling as some individuals some actually call it could be very useful if applied in an organized way. That would be the second challenge. I’m not saying those are bad things, they’re actually great tools if properly used and leveraged.

Fred Diamond: A lot of social, very little selling. Let’s take a little diversion here, you’re truly an expert on inside sales. Your firm, NextStage Consulting, helps companies implement, build inside sales teams, do all the things necessary to get them as operationally effective as possible. What are people doing wrong? Tell us some things that you see that people are doing wrong today at inside sales that need to be corrected.

Ivan Gomez: One of the things that we do is actually a gap analysis. A lot of individuals that are doing a lot of small things, right things in a lot of little places is linking the whole thing together. I’ll give you an example: One of them is alignment with marketing. If you see the marketing and if marketing is actually doing all the campaigns, all the events, all the trade shows, all the emails and all that but you’re not aligned with your sales department, that’s a challenge. Alignment between marketing and sales is imperative.

The other thing that I’ve seen is that there’s a lot of measurement on a lot of things for inside sales. I just recently wrote a blog on LinkedIn entitled, “Big Data, Small Data and Meaningful Data.” Basically what it is, is being able to focus on very specific things that are relevant to your organization and to your individual, and using the data for process improvement.

For example, one of the things that we advocate at NextStage is when you look at data, use it to mentor, use it for coaching, use it as a way to foster transparency, accountability and improving your bottom line and your sales results. You can have 20 different data points, the most important part is focusing on very specific data points and what is the meaning of that data point for you, and use that for improvement. That’s things that I’ve seen in the market place.

Fred Diamond: Very good. You’ve worked with a lot of great companies, you’re now consulting with NextStage Consulting, you’re the president and founder of that. Ivan, what’s the #1 sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? Take us back to that moment.

Ivan Gomez: There’s several of them, but I like to highlight one of them at QlikTech being able to start the inside sales organization from early beginnings and be able to take that company IPO. That was a very successful 4-year journey.

Fred Diamond: Ivan, you’ve had a great career in sales, a lot of success, you’re very well known in the inside sale space. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Ivan Gomez: I think every salesperson, every sales leader, if you haven’t questioned that at some point, you’re probably in the wrong business. It’s hard but it’s kind of like the stock market, high risk, high reward and that’s one of the things that I’ve committed myself. But yes, there’s been crossroads where I’ve definitely thought, “Hey, no. This is hard.” But I’ve recommitted myself and I’ve come back to the fundamentals as my mentor mentioned, Steve Menard. I reset, reasoned to myself and keep logging away and success quite often is right around the corner.

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

Ivan Gomez: Alright, I’m going to say one word: commitment. It’s a three step commitment, one of them is commitment to the trade, commitment to your profession, commitment to yourself, to constantly improve, realize that sales can start as a sales development rep and can actually be a launch path to really successful things that will come in the future. I’ve seen many inside sales reps that have actually pivoted to field reps, sales supervisions, marketing and different positions so it’s definitely a great start.

The second commitment is commitment to your clients. You need to be committed to the clients, your customers are expecting you to call because they have problems, they have challenges and guess what? You have the answers.

The third commitment is to your company. So yourself, your client and your company. The company’s counting on you to make your number, to make your calls, to send the emails, to build the pipeline to sell your product and be able to help achieve new revenue targets.

Fred Diamond: Commitment to the trade, yourself as a sales professional, commitment to your client and helping them improve their business and thirdly commitment to your company. What are some of the things that you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Ivan Gomez: I’m a big believer of habits and daily routines, so as I was preparing to come this morning to this beautiful studio right here, I actually followed a routine. Routines are very important, so exercise, eat well, read something or listen to something that can be useful for you each and every day and take some time for meditation. Read something that is uplifting of some sort.

Fred Diamond: I know you’re also a big listener of podcasts.

Ivan Gomez: I do! I’m a big fan. Podcast is actually a great way to leverage your time, especially if you’re driving from one appointment to another or here in DC, we’re faced with commuting time so this is a great way to stay sharp.

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

Ivan Gomez: The big initiative right now is continue to launch to success NextStage, that’s first and foremost, first on my mind. NextStage started this year and that’s my main focus right now.

Fred Diamond: Ivan, we’ve kind of touched on this before, but sales is hard, especially on inside sales. You have to work on strategies and techniques to get through to somebody, first of all just getting through, second of all, once you get through what are you going to say. Sales is hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Ivan Gomez: It is rewarding. It’s being able to see your creating, something that you’ve come from a raw figure and be able to come up with something that is nice at the end. You’re turning a prospect into a customer that is able to see benefit from what you’re actually selling. Whatever your solution is, is helping them address some tangible problems, so that’s one of the things that keeps me going. The other part is actually the rewards that come along with that. At the end of the day it’s, “What’s in it for me?” We’re helping the customer but as byproduct we’re helping ourselves and we’re actually making a pretty good living out of that.

Fred Diamond: Can you just add one more time, if you had one bit of advice to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening today, what would be the thing that you would say? Give us one final thought on how you can inspire people listening to today’s podcast.

Ivan Gomez: That would be the ABL – Always Be Learning. Always be curious. There is so much information right now to take any sales professional to the next level. If you’re not taking advantage of books, blogs, podcasts, videos, the information is tremendous. Take advantage of that and make it a quest to continue to learn, to be the best.

Fred Diamond: And have that relentless passion like you talked about before.

Ivan Gomez: Absolutely.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, you mentioned before when I asked you what are you an expert in, you said you made a decision to be committed to the inside sales profession. What is it about inside sales that really excites you?

Ivan Gomez: Inside sales has grown as an institution over the last 20 years. As I talk to private equity investors, as I talk to capital investment companies, as I talk to sales leaders, more and more the go to market strategy is via inside sales. It’s cost effective, you can provide great coaching, you can provide great coverage and penetration in your accounts so it’s a great industry that I’ve made it my quest to master and to pursue and to make the best I can to not only serve myself but also my customers and my family.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 068: Inside Sales Expert Ivan Gomez Says Committing to the Fundamentals Put Him on the Path to Fantastic Career Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

SPECIAL EPISODE 002: ExecVision’s Steve Richard Tells How to Get More Intelligence from Your Sales Conversations

Steve Richard is the co-founder and chief revenue officer at ExecVision, a leading conversation intelligence platform. He’s also the co-founder of Vorsight, a leading outsourced appointment setting company.

Steve says his mission and life’s work is to help sales professionals become wildly successful. He believes that the quality of sales conversations matters, yet the profession of sales largely misses the mark on teaching sales reps how to have great conversations. After 10 years as a sales trainer Steve learned that the only way to achieve his mission was through the use of technology to help more sales professionals worldwide. 

Outside of entrepreneurship and business, Steve volunteers for Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind and is an avid scuba diver, skier, runner, football watcher, dad to 4 little kids, and husband to the best wife in the world.

Find Steve on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Tell us what ExecVision does. What do you physically sell and tell us who buys it.

Steve Richard: ExecVision sells softwarethat allows managers, reps, leaders to get into the content of the conversation. There is no way that everybody could hear all the sales calls that are happening in your organization, it’s just impossible. So with ExecVision it’s artificial intelligence (AI) assisted call coaching where the AI is helping direct you to what are the meaningful, relevant, coachable moments and then how do you have the intervention with that sales person to help them change behavior and improve their performance so they don’t make the same mistake over and over again.

Fred Diamond: Can people change behavior?

Steve Richard: Yes. It’s hard, though. Adult behavior change is hard and that’s a really good question and that’s really the crux of the whole thing – getting the sales people involved in their own development. I’ve talked to some people who said the reason that ExecVision software is so powerful is because the sales people can also raise their hand virtually to request coaching and then the sales people can also listen to them comment on their own calls as well as their peers, their managers, trainers, third party trainers, other people but that fact of just listening to yourself is probably the most powerful thing that any sales person can do and unfortunately it’s a thing that far too few sales people ever do.

Fred Diamond: Tell us who your customer is. Do you sell to sales managers? Do you talk to marketing? Do you talk to the C suite? Who’s going to buy ExecVision software?

Steve Richard: Yes, yes and yes. Usually it’s going to be the second level leader in sales so it’s going to be the first level managers will be important but it’s the second level, the person who manages the managers will typically be really into that. A big thing they’re trying to figure out too is are my managers coaching and if my managers are coaching, are they coaching the right way? This is a really compelling way that you can actually quantify the coaching acting in the company and then actually quantify the behavior change coming from the coaching in the company.

Fred Diamond: Before we talk about your particular and your specific sales journey, how did you create all the content? How did you create the pieces that bring everything together? I know Vorsight’s done training in the past. Is that where all the data comes from, the information?

Steve Richard: That’s a great question, it’s kind of a long and winding journey but really it started with the appointment setting firm where we were able to at the top of the funnel have about 30 people on the phone making calls on behalf of all these different clients and we were blessed with the ability to AB test what works and what doesn’t so we have this incredible laboratory of sales effectiveness.

From that laboratory, that’s where the training came from because people kept saying, “Teach us your secrets.” And over the course of having that training business trained four thousand sellers along the way. That training business still is there to this day in Funnel Clarity that you know. And then from that, that’s where arose this idea that you cannot scale this mission without having technology. It’s impossible. And what I found in many cases, Fred, is the best ideas, the best practices in any company come within the four walls of the company. They’re there, so I would go work with the sales team of 50 people and in throughout the course of the 2 day training event I’d find out that Bobby over here knows this thing really well and Susy knows this thing and Janet knows this thing and Fred knows this thing but none of them talk to each other so if we just had a way of surfacing the best practices and sharing with each other we can create consistency and accountability and we’ll kind of come back to that theme later on in the sales team.

Fred Diamond: Very good, so you’ve devoted the best part of your career to helping sales professionals optimize their career and get better. Let’s talk about your career, how did you first get into sales as a career?

Steve Richard: Completely accidentally, I had to pay off school loans. I think a lot of people have that answer. So I graduated from Georgetown undergrad finance degree. Everyone went to Wall Street, I went 0 for 22 in interviews so I’m a spiritual guy, I’m a Catholic so that’s God’s way of telling me, “You’re not going to finance.”

I had to pay off 65 grand in school loans, how are you going to do it? Some friend of a friend said, “Hey, you’re pretty good at presentations in the class. You’re not that good at helping build the presentations but once it comes time to deliver them, you’re good at that. Why don’t you go into sales?” I’m like, “Alright, sounds good.” I thought you gave presentations, I don’t know. And that’s when I found myself at the Corporate Executive Board, couldn’t have started my career at a better place.

I know a lot of your guests have come from Corporate Executive Board and you see the authors at the challenger’s sale, they weren’t that at the time and that was just like a sales NBA. And from there, that’s where I was – I was actually failing in the beginning of my sales career so right out of the gate I was just about to get put on a performance plan and my backup plan, Fred, this is no joke, our family business is precast concrete products in the Northwest corner of Connecticut AKA septic tanks.

This is a true story. My backup plan was to go work for my Uncle Jimmy in the septic tank factory and drive the septic tank truck. Nothing wrong with that, right? That’s great, but you know, compared to being at CEB. So I figured out really quickly what it took to be good at particular at the top of the funnel of prospecting, how did I do that? Everything I was doing didn’t work. I went and interviewed and sat with every other person in that company, I kind of did ExecVision the hard way, the old fashioned way and by doing that with my little notepad and none of the calls were recorded so I had no artifact. But with my little notepad I just wrote down all the best practices and I started doing all the things the top people were doing and none of the things that I was doing and I ended up being #1 out of 100 because of it. And one of those guys is David Stillman who’s our CEO and my business partner. So my journey in sales was accidental and I think alike a lot of other people I was not natural and it took a lot of hard work to get to a good place.

Fred Diamond: Very good. What are some of the lessons that you learned?

Steve Richard: If you go back to CEB when I was in a role prospecting, today we call that job sales development, the sales development reps or the BDR’s. What I learned first of all is that the gatekeepers are an incredible source of information if you know how to leverage them the right way and no one did. And I saw how the best people in CEB were doing this, it was really remarkable so I found frequently that the hardest part was just simply getting to the right person.

Once you get to the right person then delivering the message effectively and engaging at conversation sometimes is actually quite easy. That was perhaps the easiest part of the process, so that was a big part of it. Another big part of it is people are programmed to say what they do. You asked me the question before, “What do you do?” don’t answer the question with that, answer the question around what are the challenges that people are seeing, what are the trends in the market, what are the relevant topics.

One of the big challenges that we see is it’s hard to figure out if managers are coaching so we help address that. Another challenge we see is it’s hard to get adult and sales people to change their behavior. They become creatures of habit, they fall in routines, they fall into ruts. As I’m saying these things to you, I can actually see you, you can’t see Fred but he’s nodding. His head is nodding up and down. It’s that type of insight that’s very impactful.

Fred Diamond: What type of companies do you work for?

Steve Richard: Anybody who lives and dies by the phone and or screen sharing meetings is an ideal candidate for this. Now, this is the sad part, there are probably people out there that are listening and I don’t mean to offend you but I’m just going to be real. We find as a general rule of thumb the field sales people, the field sales reps that are out there tend to be a little more resistant to the idea of calls being recorded and, by the way, a legal and compliant way so that people are aware that it’s happening or it’s done in such a way that it complies with state rules but being recorded and then going back and reviewing.

I don’t want big brother, I don’t want anybody looking over my shoulder at what I’m doing and that’s exactly the opposite of the type of culture that we’re trying to create. We find that the inside sales people and or BDR’s, SDR’s, people who live and die by the phone but they typically don’t see a client, they don’t get in front of them, we find that those people are much more open to the cultural idea of, “Hey, I want feedback on my calls. I want to learn and improve.”

I even want feedback, Fred, from my peers which is interesting whereas a lot of sales people will say, “I don’t want my peers to hear what I’m doing.” Or here’s another thing, maybe it’s not just about coaching, maybe it’s also about knowledge sharing. “Hey, my sales engineer did this call and they did such an amazing, remarkable job.

I want to make sure everyone has a chance to learn from it.” This knowledge sharing capability is a very big part of that so I think over time we’re going to see a change just like now everyone gives all their information to Facebook and LinkedIn freely, I think we’re going to see people become more and more open to the idea of transparency and visibility but those are big ideas. You’re basically naked, you can go into our ExecVision instance right now at our company if you had a license and we have ours so everyone accesses everybody else’s calls.

Some of our clients make it so only the reps can access their own or the teams within there, however you want, but for us it’s all open. So someone who just starts at our company today – and we’re a company of about 60 people – can literally access every single sales call I’ve done since 2015. They can hear all the good, bad and ugly. They can watch the founder fall on his face, but that’s the kind of culture I want to create. I want to create a positive, productive culture where a lowly quote unquote entry level sales person will give me feedback, and in many cases I take their feedback and I learn from it.

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of people listening on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast who manage young people, people who are first or second maybe third job into their career. You talked about how a lot of the sales reps want to get coached, they want to know how they’re performing. Is it a generational thing? Tell us a little bit about why there would be an openness to that type of transparency.

Steve Richard: I wish it were that simple, I wish it were a generational thing. I actually don’t think it is based on that based on what I’ve observed. I find a lot of people who are in their 60’s and 70’s that use ExecVision who love it the most. It’s more of a cultural thing usually within whatever group they’re in. I don’t even want to say the company, Fred, because a lot of companies will have one manager will be very culturally resistant to it but another manager will be very culturally open or one individual versus the other.

I find it’s more of a question of there are people who believe – and you’ve probably heard the Japanese word Kaizen – it’s the reason they kicked our but in the 80’s in auto manufacturing, the continuous improvement. There are people who philosophically believe in Kaizen, they live by Kaizen and then there are people who just don’t, who just kind of want their paycheck and they just want everyone to leave them the hell alone and it’s OK. It’s completely OK either way. One of the big findings we had from the software – it’s not actually from the software, it was actually more from how the software is being implemented at our clients.

You think about coaching, the first thing that comes to my mind is I got an orb chart in my head, and you’ve got the VP at the top and the manager’s under the VP and then the reps. And you think in terms of well the VP is telling the managers to coach and the managers have to do all the work to coach all the reps. That paradigm is fundamentally broken because the managers don’t have time, they don’t have time to coach so one of the things that we’ve seen, and we’ve seen and then emulated with our other clients is flip the coaching paradigm on its head so what you do is get the reps to take some ownership of their own development. Get the reps to comment on their own calls, to score their own calls, to share what they see with how they’ve broken down their game tape with the managers.

The managers then do the same, the managers have information being pushed to them. So in our company now, Fred, we’ve got a really unique culture where I’ll share my calls with the whole company in some cases, say, “Hey, listen to this highly. I want you to hear this 4 minute section, it’s just golden.” And then in many cases I have them sharing calls with me even though I’m not their direct manager and the answer to the question, “who coaches in the company?” is everybody. If you have a coaching culture, everyone’s open to that. Everyone knows what good looks like which is a very important part of the whole thing and then everyone knows how to change the behavior to move to a point of good.

Fred Diamond: Steve, take us back to an impactful sales career mentor for you and how they impacted your career.

Steve Richard: You’ve had Vineeta Mooganur on the Podcast, so it’s Vineeta’s husband Praveen. Very impactful, he was the first sales person I scheduled meetings for at the corporate executive board. I was in a slump. After, I got good, so I got good then I went into a little bit of a slump again right after the holidays and I said, “What do I do?” he said, “You know what you need to do already, you sit down in that chair and you just do what you need to do. You just sit there and don’t drink any water, don’t go to the bathroom, don’t eat anything, don’t go talk to anybody, you sit here until you get yourself back right on track.”

And he was right, I sat there for I think 6 hours that day and I had three appointments and I was back. There was a lot of other things too but that was a big one.

Fred Diamond: So you just got on the phone.

Steve Richard: Got on the phone, yeah. The other big mentor is Tom Snyder, a great lesson, you’ll probably have him on.

Fred Diamond: He’ll be on a future episode, yeah.

Steve Richard: Very good. Great lesson he taught is people value more what they conclude for themselves than what they’re told, you hear him say that a lot. People value more what they ask for than what’s freely offered and that is the essence of persuasion, it’s a great lesson.

Fred Diamond: You talk to tons of sales leaders, of course you’ve been talking to sales leaders for pretty much your whole career. What are the two biggest challenges that either you face today or that you see sales leaders face with today?

Steve Richard: I wrote an article on this, it was called, “The 2 Most Important Words in Sales Leadership.” I went back and reviewed my calls, I did some key word searches of my own calls with sales leaders so I was doing what you are doing except I was trying to sell them stuff and it was over 200 calls and the words that kept coming up are consistency and accountability and I said those before.

As you get into that, you’ve heard of Sandler and the Pain Funnel and the asking the questions about challenges and problems and pains and frustrations and when you peel away all the layers of the onion, in the middle every time was, “Boy, if we could just have a culture where we had consistency and accountability at scale all of my problems would go away.” There it is. So how do you do that? I believe you do that through observable moments and visibility.

Fred Diamond: Observable moments. Relevant coachable moments.

Steve Richard: It’s true!

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

Steve Richard: You know what’s funny, Fred? I’m really geeking out over the neuroscience of buying and selling and I can tell you my biggest win ever is ADP, they’re a client of ExecVision, that’s phenomenal. But I couldn’t tell you what happened along the way. I can tell you the 5 most painful losses that I experienced in my career in much more vivid detail than the wins and I go back to the neuroscience, the reason is because when you’re in your waking hours, you’re using your short term memory which is like your RAM in your computer, and then overnight there’s the process where your brain when you sleep transfers that, some portion of it, into your long-term memory.

Unfortunately, there’s something called the forgetting curve where our brains are wired to purge the vast majority of the information we receive so that’s why sales training doesn’t stick mostly, because everyone forgets it if it’s not put into their long-term memory through repetition.

But the thing about painful losses is they are put into the long-term memory so now I’ll tell you a story about it, I’ll tell you two quick stories. One of them I was selling sales training against a guy named John Costigan in North Carolina. Very interesting character, very compelling, very good offering and it was at Rosetta Stone, now at the time I didn’t know he was in the deal and they kept telling me over and over again, “You’re going to get this, you’re going to get this, it’s all you, you’re going to get this.” And I didn’t even know there was anybody else. “Oh, it’s a formality, you’ve got to meet with the new chief revenue officer.”

And after that the new chief revenue officer put me through the ringer on all this stuff that we had to put together, it was 40 hours of my time and my team’s time to put all this stuff together and little did I know, his best friend or one of his best friends, John Costigan, and they play golf together in North Carolina. And the lesson I learned and actually I think about Andy Miller when I say this is you can’t outsell the relationship. You just can’t. And after I got the news we lost, it was inevitable, it was a forgone conclusion.

I looked in LinkedIn and I looked at this guy, this chief revenue officer and how I was connected to him, and there was one connection: John Costigan. And I said, “Dang it!” I wasted a lot of time and I was pitch in dead. I had no chance of winning that business.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned artificial intelligence before. Let’s chat for a second or two, what’s your philosophy on how artificial intelligence will play into the future of sales or sales coaching? We hear from people who say that AI is going to take over sales. There’s not going to be any sales people at any point in the future. Give us your thoughts on that.

Steve Richard: OK. Number one, baloney. Not going to happen because they can’t shape people’s buying visions in the same way, they can’t get to that point of having a consultative dialogue. When it comes to coaching there are some companies out there that are saying that AI is somehow going to make your team be better. We also say BS.

To think that somehow AI is going to make your employees engage is nonsense but we do believe, Fred, is at the same time there’s this problem of the big pile of call recordings for those that record. There’s just far more information out there on buying and selling than anyone can absorb so the whole concept of AI assisting in the process of identifying the coachable moments we believe is going to be a key to unlocking performance.

Fred Diamond: What’s the most important thing you want to get across to the selling professionals listening to today’s podcast to help them improve their career?

Steve Richard: That’s a great question. Aligning with the buyers and understanding where the buyers are in their buying journey and understanding how to react to different situations. I was actually doing a call camp yesterday, Fred. We talk about how every different approach or strategy or tactic that you have in your tool kit as a sales person is kind of like if you’re playing hearts. Have you ever played Hearts or Spades or Bridge?

Fred Diamond: No.

Steve Richard: You throw the card out and you’re playing into your partner’s hand and you don’t know what your partner has and they have to play back into your hand. Or another way of thinking about it as Lego pieces, you want to assemble a conversation with a different set of Legos every single time and what I find is that a lot of sales people don’t understand the buying journey. You ask a very simple question.

An example I use to illustrate this is buying a mattress, it’s almost a perfect example. At any given time you’ve got 3% of the market in an active buying cycle, for a mattress 40% is susceptible to looking. How you approach the actively buying crew is different than how you approach the ones that are susceptible to looking is different than you approach the ones that are not susceptible to looking. And then once you’re in an active buying cycle, how you approach someone who’s at a period where they’re understanding what their needs are is very different than when they’re evaluating options.

So frequently we see sales people that jump ahead too fast and they start talking about features. If the person’s in evaluation mode, the features make a ton of sense, but if the person’s just trying to figure out, “What are we trying to do here? What are we trying to accomplish in the first place?” The features make no sense at all.

Fred Diamond: Steve, I’m going to reflect back to a question I asked you before the break and an answer that you gave on the question about a mentor and you talked about how you were in a slump and your mentor said to you, “Just go figure it out.”

Steve Richard: Yeah.

Fred Diamond: “Go sit, and you know what you need to do.” And you did, six hours later you had three appointments scheduled and you applied yourself. You guys are in the data space, you collect tons of data on sales calls and then analyzing them and then finding trends and giving information back. How can sales professionals take that and get better? Let’s talk about the gap. We talked a little bit before the gap between all this great data, this beautiful data that you’re collecting and then presenting to the customer and then how does the rep take that? The actual rep, and get better.

Steve Richard: You want to know the one thing, the easiest thing that every sales person can change that almost all of them are not good at? And this is shocking, Fred, it really is.

Fred Diamond: I do. Tell me that.

Steve Richard: And we’ve heard a lot of calls or AI’s analyzed a lot of calls, closing for next steps.

Fred Diamond: Next steps.

Steve Richard: It seems like it’s so simple but you’ll hear these people have these great conversations and they don’t ask for the next anything, whatever that anything is, if it’s a meeting, if it’s to get together at an event, a dream forest, if it’s closing to ask for the business, they just don’t close for next steps.

Fred Diamond: What do you ask for, another appointment, a sale?

Steve Richard: OK, so little secret for the people who hear this is the offer is a really interesting thing. What is the thing that you want the buyer to do next and how does it align with their buying journey and then how does it connect with something your product or service can do that’s different, your unique selling proposition, value proposition.

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

Steve Richard: Major initiative to ensure continued success is making sure that people are ready and prepared for the transformation required from transparency and we deliver something called The Sales Coaching Academy for our clients. I’m delivering a lot of Sales Coaching Academies. What we find is most people don’t know how to coach, they don’t know how to create an environment where coaching is positive and productive. One of the things we’re actually able to measure in our software is if the coaching that someone receives is negative versus positive because if the rep is constantly being berated with negative feedback, that’s, you know. Manager might think they’re being constructive but in the reality they’re just being bad and mean, the rep is going to reject the coaching. So getting the leveling up the humans to keep up with the machines on this coaching problem is a big thing I’m thinking about.

Fred Diamond: What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Steve Richard: I love studying, buying and selling. It’s what I’ve committed my career to other than the four kids and my wife and my few hobbies, not that many, the skiing and the scuba diving, it’s all about studying, buying and selling because you learn something new every day. My friend says sales is the school you never graduate from and I believe that’s true.

Fred Diamond: Steve, why don’t you give us one final thought to share with the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast to get them inspired?

Steve Richard: Remember my personal story, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, I would be working for my uncle Jim in the septic tank plant if it wasn’t for the fact that I was humble enough to say, “I don’t have the answers, I’ve got to go learn from the best people and emulate their success” and by doing that, by creating a best of breed of their approaches, I went to #1 and I actually broke the com plan that year, Fred. I made more money than CEB wanted to pay, they said we’re going to change the com plan because of you. They even called it the Steve Richard rule. How do you do that? It wasn’t natural talent, it was learning from other people and being humble.

The post SPECIAL EPISODE 002: ExecVision’s Steve Richard Tells How to Get More Intelligence from Your Sales Conversations first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.