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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 07:28
Name an impactful sales mentor: 15:41
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 18:09
Most important tip: 33:14
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 37:59
Inspiring thought: 40:57

EPISODE 112: Steve Goldenberg Made Learning Sales a Priority When He Started Interfolio after Graduating from Georgetown and Here’s How it Paid Off

STEVE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “I’ll reiterate one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got. It is that no one likes to be sold, everyone likes to buy and that is the magic that a salesperson can bring to their prospects and clients.”

Steve Goldenberg is the founder and President at Interfolio.

Steve started the company when he was a student at Georgetown University and has been running it ever since.

He is a unique business founder that understands the role sales plays in business growth and has worked hard to understand and implement sales principles to grow his business.

And it worked, because since the interview was conducted, it was reported by the Washingon Business Journal that Interfolio received an investment from Insight Venture Partners for a reported price of $110 million!

We interviewed Interfolio’s VP of Sales Jack Dilanian.

Find Steve on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Steve, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Why don’t you fill in some of the blanks? Tell us a little more about you that we need to know.

Steve Goldenberg: It’s great to be here. I have been in DC since 1995, came here to attend Georgetown as my undergraduate education and I actually started this company after I wrote the business plan the fall of my senior year and this was the idea that we settled on and I incorporated in February of 1999. Three days after I graduated in June of 1999, I was on the road of my first sales conference and 19 years later, it’s been a resounding success. The joke I always like to make is it’s been a heck of a first job.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about what Interfolio sells today, tell us what excites you about that.

Steve Goldenberg: We’re a software as a service company in the higher education market and we help universities with their core academic decision making. These are the most important decisions that universities around the world make, things like who they hire to the faculty, what curriculum they teach, who’s promoted, etc.

The primary way in which they make those decisions today is – for a lack of a better phrase – manual. Email, paper, in person meetings which while effective at making those decisions is not very efficient so there’s a lot of administrative red tape and cost waste that goes into those decisions.

We make software that help the decision maker, specifically faculty and academic leaders, collaborate, act together and then make decisions and that helps them run a better institution as well as pursue their mission. We like to say when individual faculty are successful in their careers, institutions are successful in their missions and that’s what our software enables.

Fred Diamond: You told me that a couple days after you incorporated the company, you were already out there pounding the pavement selling. Tell us about some of those early stories as a business leader and a founder. How did you get the notion that you had to be in sales? Tell us some of the early stories.

Steve Goldenberg: I had a phenomenal education at Georgetown and I actually graduated from the business school. My focus was technology and entrepreneurship so I’m a self-taught software engineer but I’m really more of a business guy. Despite that phenomenal education, the one thing that the business school did not teach me was sales. I knew of course that in order for the company to be successful I had to actually connect buyers to the software that I was building and so I went out and taught myself how to sell.

Believe it or not, I taught myself how to sell from a book on tape, and it was an actual tape. I would listen to it in my car as I was driving back and forth to different universities around the DC area and I remember my first big sale was with University of Virginia. I was driving down to Charlottesville and the 6th tape literally ended as I pulled into the parking lot. It’s not a particular sales course or tape that I’d recommend today, but it taught me the process that I needed to follow. It allowed me to marry my natural instincts to connect with people and to help them see the value in what I was doing with the actual block and tackling steps of a sales process to move from introduction through demo, through qualification and then ultimately through close and it was absolutely invaluable to me.

I didn’t know what I was doing, I knew I had a product that met a need and I liked getting out there and talking to people about it but that process, the science, if you will, of selling, learning that and marrying it to the art, if you will, of my attachment to the market and to people, that was really instrumental to success.

Fred Diamond: Who exactly do you sell to today? Who exactly are your customers that purchase your software?

Steve Goldenberg: We sell to the academic leadership of universities. For those of you listening, if you think back to your university experience if you went to one and you think of who might have been your favorite professor, the person who had the most impact on your career and your life, those faculty become leaders. They become deans, they become provost and they lead the institution through all those critical decisions about who they hire, who gets promoted, etcetera. We sell to what we call academic affair, so it’s academic leadership at universities.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Again, your first big sales call, your first big win was at University of Virginia and for the people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe, it’s about a hundred mile drive from Washington DC. Beautiful drive, you go past the Shenandoah Mountains and as you’re driving there, you’re listening to some tapes helping you understand what the sales process is and you get there and of course you close the University of Virginia. Why don’t you tell us about some of the things that you learned early on that have stuck with you?

Steve Goldenberg: I would say the most important lesson that I learned is that sales is not something that you do to someone, sales is something that you bring people along through. It’s a process of pulling them through the buying process. A mentor of mine early on, he once said to me, “Nobody likes to be sold, everybody likes to buy” and that has really stuck with me. In fact, I think of that even today. It’s so important to develop a high sense of empathy for what matters to the person that I’m talking to and so I spend time understanding what is their need, what is their pain and then attaching my sales activity to that pain or to that emotional connection. That has been instrumental in the success of my career because that has allowed me to walk into a room with antagonistic professors who think that we’re just some corporate shell and I’m able to overcome those objections and thaw the ice of their personality, and get them to say, “You actually understand us and you understand what we need, and that’s not something that we normally see in a vendor.”

That to me is a critical moment, when they acknowledge that we think of sales differently and we think of partnering with these clients differently but at the same time, we’re making money from it. I always like to say that attachment to and understanding of what is important to the buyer, that allows us to do two things which is: be excellent and expensive.

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you a question. Before I ask you about your specific area of brilliance, one of the themes that we’ve learned from the Sales Game Changers podcast, specially talking to people who’ve had 15, 20, 30 years success selling into a marketplace such as federal or education or hospitality, if you will. Your customer base is academic affairs, it’s the academic side of the university. Tell us something about them that they need. Obviously, your company’s been around for almost 20 somewhat years. Tell us something about your customer and how they were being underserved and how Interfolio has come to service them. What are the needs that they had that you were able to fill? 

Steve Goldenberg: Some people don’t see just how large the global higher education market is, it’s about a 2 trillion dollar global market. It’s around 700 billion dollars a year of annual spend in the US. The vast majority of that expense, of course, is spent on human capital so the faculty and staff that run the institutions but in the US, there’s close to 30 billion dollars a year spent on technology. The vast majority of it, nearly all of that investment is in 3 areas: enterprise IT – the core infrastructure – students and administrative functions. The glaring omission there is the faculty.

If you can imagine the analogy of the healthcare market, imagine if all of the technology investment went to the property plant and equipment, the physicians and then the billing. You’re leaving the patients out of that mix, it makes no sense. Higher education is in this very interesting moment where the market is waking up to recognize that they need to invest more directly in the faculty who are half of the equation, of the institutional mission. That was an idea that we helped bring to market and help them uncover and realize, and that’s been instrumental to our success.

It was one of those ideas that is obvious once you hear it, but it was hiding in plain sight so we acknowledged that and then attached to that particular need, and that’s been a real game changer for how we drive our sales.

Fred Diamond: Steve, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Steve Goldenberg: I would say my superpower, if you will, is taking human processes and then using technology to improve them. One of my favorite experiences is when I go on site to visit a university for a sale. I love it when they say, “Can your software also do this for us?” and often times it will be something that is not part of our purview but I love it anyway just because it demonstrates to me that we’re really aligned well with the mission of the institution which is, “What is the #1 most important thing for our sale success?”

I’ll give you a specific example. Tenure at universities is the most important career accolade that exists at universities. Of course, not every university does it but all of the major research institutions and the most prestigious universities in the US offer tenure to a certain percentage of their faculty. These are 30 year multi-million dollar commitments that the university makes to the individuals, these are lifetime career appointments for the scholar to become tenured and so this is a high stakes, high value, high risk and reward decision that the universities make. It’s a complicated decision, it’s a complicated process and in 2013 I decided that we should make that one of the hallmarks of what our software serves.

At the time, no one in the market – no one in the world – had built a product around that. Part of the reason was it’s just so complicated and challenging a process to manage. I went and got on site with a number of our partners and I actually spent time face to face with university academic leadership and learned everything about how those decisions get made, how those processes work. We unpacked the complexity and we built the software to make that complexity more easy to manage. It was being face to face with the people who were going to be interacting with our software and then turning that into technology, or turning that learning, rather, into technology that made it a runaway success.

My expertise is taking those human experiences, identifying how technology can improve them and more important, identifying where technology shouldn’t or can’t improve them and then building systems around that. The value there is it brings a lot of value to the client which means it can be highly valuable to us and again, it can be expensive. One of my career goals is I like building things that are excellent and expensive.

Fred Diamond: Steve, talk to us about a mentor or two who has helped you on the sale side. Helped you really understand the role of sales, the value and how you can be as effective as possible.

Steve Goldenberg: One of my first board members who is still a great friend, we worked together for probably the first 10 years of the business and he was a management consultant. He was remarkable to me because he only worked with the president or provost of the university, so effectively the top 2 people by rank at a university. He would only work with them, he would only sign 5 year contracts with them and his price was as high as anyone else in the market. Anyone that came to him and said, “Look, we don’t sign 5 year contracts” or, “That’s too expensive, we need to negotiate” or, “I want you to work with this assistant provost” his answer was, “No, thanks.”

He consistently got reluctant clients to switch from that resistance to embracing him and he was the one that told me people buy from people and when you understand their needs and desires and challenges deeply, when you have that high degree of empathy, it allows you to break through their resistance or reluctance and you can then identify whether they can be a good client or not.

He said, “Qualification is a critical part of sales. There are times where you have to walk away because that person is not going to be a good buyer and I do that relatively frequently. But more often than not, even the recalcitrant prospect for me, once they see that I am well aligned with what their needs are, our price and our contract terms and our desire to work with the senior most leadership, those become assets rather than liabilities in our sales process.”

People buy from people and that attachment to empathy is something that has affected me for my entire career and will affect me for my entire career so I’m happy to share that.

Fred Diamond: Steve, why don’t you take us back to the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Steve Goldenberg: I would say the most important challenge that we contend with on a day to day basis is sizing up the market and segmenting it appropriately. The reason that’s so important is that when you have a product that is meeting a need and has early sales, I think it’s relatively easy to get – let me back up. It’s hard to get your first sale, but then once you get your first sale it becomes a lot easier to go from say 2 to 10. We sell to enterprises so I’m talking enterprise sales, so this may be different in a consumer business but going from 2 to 10 is pretty easy. To go from 10 to 100 – and I’m just using round numbers, here – it’s going from the 10 to 100 that’s a real challenge and even 19 years in, we still deal with that problem on a day to day basis.

The issue is in our market, not every buyer or not every prospect is the same. They have similar needs and similar decisions but they don’t operate the same way. For example, large research institutions – your state universities, for example – these can be billion dollar budgets or multi-billion dollar budgets. They can have thousands of academic staff working there, they have enormous research budgets and their needs are very different from a small college, let’s say, that is primarily focused on teaching.

The same goes true for a campus that’s in an urban center versus a rural center. The way that they think and the way that they operate and the things that they need to accomplish, they can be very different. We have to segment our market well in order to create the right messages, in order to tailor our sales presentation to their unique needs. We’re constantly talking about how do we do that. That’s probably the most important challenge.

I’ll give you actually a current example: we’re currently working to expand our sales into the UK and there are 300 sum universities in Britain and they operate very similarly to the US but there are some key differences and we are currently working hard to tailor our message and tailor what we do to the UK universities as different from the US universities. It’s a huge sales market for us, a great opportunity but it’s definitely a challenge because even though they are very similar in so many ways, the differences are really critical and understanding those differences is what is our key to success.

The second thing that I would say is a constant challenge is the performance of sales reps at the company, there’s a wide disparity between the best performers and the worst performers. I’m not even talking about outliers like someone who is not coming anywhere close to quota and it’s a bad fit. I’m talking about the people who are delivering on our expectations for them, but some people are just above quota, some people are just below quota. It’s not a narrow range, it’s actually a pretty broad range and I think one of our biggest challenges is how do you manage a team when you have a wide spread of performance around the quota targets.

The advice I would give around that is if you’re struggling to close, if you’re struggling to hit your quota I would communicate early and often with your sales leaders to say, “Listen, I’m having trouble with X and I really want help with this.” What that’s going to do is it’s going to demonstrate your commitment to the outcome and demonstrate your commitment to the company and I find that our sales leadership want to help people that are struggling. Often times if they go radio silent and we don’t hear from them, that’s usually a bad sign and we’re unable to help them. It’s much better when someone is very forth right about what challenges they’re having because then we can roll out support to them and help them be successful.

Fred Diamond: What’s the state of your industry? Is it still early adopters or is it mature, or have you crossed the chasm, so to speak? Give us a brief understanding of where your market is to put a little more of this into context.

Steve Goldenberg: I would characterize our market as just now crossing the chasm of using the cloud as infrastructure rather than on premises infrastructure. There are certainly plenty of web based tools that universities use but their core enterprise technology is still primarily on premises technology. Part of my vision is that there is a missing core enterprise system in the university IT stack and we’re building that. Very specifically, there should be four core enterprise systems at universities and there are currently only three. The current three are the ERP for human capital management, payroll, etcetera, what’s called the Learning Management System or the LMS, those are the in-classroom technologies that help faculty actually do teaching and grading and such.

Then there’s the Student Information System or the SIS and that’s the core data system for student data and the missing system is a faculty information system, there is no faculty information system (FIS). There is no FIS and yet again, the market consists of faculty doing research and teaching, students coming to the institutions to benefit from that knowledge creation and that teaching to learn. That’s the heartbeat of the institution and so the lack of a system of technologies focused on faculty and their work at the institution and how they impact the success of the mission of the institution, that’s a huge opportunity.

Of that $30 billion, very little of it is spent today focused on faculty. It’s primarily focused on the core enterprise systems, the learning systems or the student system and so we believe that there is a ground swell transition where the universities recognize that in order to succeed in today’s environment and to keep higher education a critical part of US competitiveness world-wide, that they need to focus on faculty and specifically focus on technology. I think it’s an exciting time in this market because there is this once in a generation change going on.

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

Steve Goldenberg: I have to admit, it’s hard to pick one that I would say I’m most proud of. I’ll pick a recent one that I’m particularly proud of. I would say 15 years ago, I first visited University of Michigan and I grew up in Ann Arbor which is where University of Michigan is. In fact, my high school was across the street from University of Michigan football stadium so it was my home town school. I wanted to come to a city, so I ended up in DC going to Georgetown but always loved U of M and loved Ann Arbor.

In the course of growing the business, I came home one day and went to the department on campus that was the potential buyer for our product back in 2003 or 4 and they said, “This is really interesting, we really like this but we really build our own technology. It’s rare that we outsource technology to another vendor” and I tried everything I could in my sales playbook to overcome that objection. I probably spent a year or two on it so the lesson there is that I didn’t qualify them well because I didn’t qualify them out soon enough. I should have moved on sooner than I did, but I didn’t and it didn’t kill us.

It wasn’t a fatal mistake but I definitely spent more time than I should have because they didn’t buy. Fast forward to last year, the same department and the same person who I had talked to 15 years prior called us out of the blue and said, “We want to exit this business. We want to shut down this service or at least we don’t want to run it anymore. Do you guys still do it? Because if you do, we’d like you to run it for us.”

Obviously that’s a great inbound lead when you get someone calling like that. Then 6 months later we sold them a system-wide enterprise product. As of now, the University of Michigan will hire all of their faculty using our technology.

Fred Diamond: Here you are presenting in 2003 and fast forward 14, 15 years in 2017 you get that phone call. How did you feel?

Steve Goldenberg: It was phenomenal.

Fred Diamond: Of course it was.

Steve Goldenberg: Knowing that I had made an impact so many years ago and that that impact resonated all those years and that when they were ready they came back, it just felt great. Obviously 15 years is not a good sale cycle, I recognize that. The most important part to me is that sometimes you have to be patient in order to win and I have been very patient in my career. That I think is one of the key skills that a good salesperson has to have is to know when to be patient and to know when to cut bait.

As I said, I’m not proud of it because it took 15 years. I’m proud of it because we eventually had them come back but it’s reflective of our product has a major impact to our clients and they recognize it and we’re able to help them connect the dots and turn that into real value for them. That’s what allows us to close deals and generate great revenue for our business.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question the importance of being on the sales side? Did you ever question being in sales? Of course, you’re the business owner but you also truly get the value of sales. Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, the sales thing is just not for me”?

Steve Goldenberg: No. No qualification around that, sales is the most important thing a business does. It’s not just something you do with your clients, you do it to everyone. As the business owner, sales is important to me because I’m selling when I’m raising capital for an investment, I’m selling when I’m getting a person to join our team as an employee, I’m selling when I’m communicating with partners so it’s not just the traditional definition of sales activity. It’s the art and science of persuasion and moving forward in pursuit of our mission and vision.

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

Steve Goldenberg: I think the most important thing is to learn a sales process and become proficient in how to deploy it in a meeting. Again, I would not recommend a specific sales process. You have solution selling, you have challenger selling, there are a number of different established sales processes that people popularize. I don’t really have an opinion one way or another about which is the best because I think it depends on who your market is and what you’re trying to sell but you must learn a process and you must combine it with your own personality, your own charisma.

This is what I call the art and science of sales, the art is how you are as a person, how charismatic you are, the way you connect with people, the way that you talk, the way that you operate combined with a formal defined process.

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

Steve Goldenberg: My answer may be a little different from a full time sales professional but I think it’s relevant. I stay in the market and stay connected to our customers and our prospects. The way in which I might be a little different is sometimes I’m not selling overtly. So for example I was just in the UK for 10 days and all of the meetings that we had were presented as information gathering. We’re growing our business in this market, we want to learn, could you spend 30 minutes and have a conversation about how the UK university market operates and how it’s different from the US?

We’ll share some stories about our clients in the US who may be peers of yours. It wasn’t an overt sales mission but I’m always selling, and so at the end of every one of these meetings because we were talking about issues that were important and relevant to them, most of those meetings ended up with, “We actually could really use your stuff here, we should talk.” Staying connected to our clients and to our market and really understanding what matters and what the trends are, that’s the #1 way that I stay sharp in terms of driving value to the company.

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

Steve Goldenberg: That’s tough, there’s a lot. Right now we have 3 enterprise modules that we sell and one of the most important ways that we can grow the business is to add additional products to our product suite. I have a dual target when I go out on the road and visit our prospects. One is to help get deals closed and get universities either as clients or have them buying more from us.

The other goal is to learn what else the market needs, what else these university clients need and then bring that knowledge back to the company and share it with the product development organization, with marketing for messaging and with other parts of the company that can make that learning actionable.

Identifying where the new product opportunities are is a corollary to the selling activity that is the primary reason that I go on the road and visit clients.

Fred Diamond: Sales is hard, people don’t return your phone calls, they don’t return your emails anymore. What would be your encouragement for telling people to continue in sales? What is your insight into why sales as a career can be such a special career to pursue?

Steve Goldenberg: One thing I would say – and this is from being on the receiving end of salespeople. Obviously I have a large number of salespeople that contact me because of my role as president and founder. I actually struggle at times to keep up with the volume of inbound inquiries and so if someone only writes me once or twice or calls me once or twice, it slips through the cracks. Not getting a response is not necessarily indicative of a lack of interest and so I think it’s highly beneficial to be aggressive as a salesperson and continue to connect with prospects even if you’re not getting immediate feedback from them. Now, that can be annoying.

Again, I’m speaking from the receiving end of this, it can be really annoying if someone is sending me messages that don’t resonate with me. I’ll give you an example right now. I won’t say who it is because I don’t want to out them, but we have a salesperson that has contacted me. In fact, he called me during this podcast, I saw his number pop up and he has been very consistent about getting in touch with me. I’ve had lunch with him and I’ve talked to him on a number of occasions but I just haven’t had time to pay attention to him for long enough for what he wants to talk about. I actually don’t mind that he continues to contact me because when we have talked he has brought me relevant and tailored information that actually is pretty helpful to me.

I would say that yes, it is extremely hard to get people’s attention but if you believe that what you are delivering to your clients brings them real value, then it is in their benefit for you to get through to them. It’s in their benefit for you to break through the noise and deliver the message to them.

Often times like I said, I will frequently just not have time to deal with all the inbound requests and so having the consistency of someone continuing to come back and say, “I hope I’m not bothering you, but I really want to make sure that I can connect with you and provide this value to you.” Being consistent like that and not giving up makes all the difference in the world.

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

Steve Goldenberg: I’ll reiterate one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got, it is that no one likes to be sold, everyone likes to buy and that is the magic that a salesperson can bring to their prospects and clients.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 112: Steve Goldenberg Made Learning Sales a Priority When He Started Interfolio after Graduating from Georgetown and Here’s How it Paid Off first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 077: Education Technology Sales Leader Jack Dilanian Explains How Believing that What You Sell Really Matters is Critical to Your Success

JACK’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Be proud of your profession.You bring solutions to bear that solve real problems that matter to many, and that should matter to you. I don’t care what the product is, if it’s a solution that actually solves a problem, that helps people…you’re doing good. Be confident in what you do and have that confidence and pride be exemplified in the work and the product that you produce day in and day out.“

Jack Dilanian is the chief commercial officer with Interfolio in Washington DC.

Jack has held senior sales leadership positions in companies such as Blackboard, Intelliworks and Hobsons.

Find Jack on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: You spent a good part of your career at companies such as Blackboard. Who’s your customer now? Tell us a little more about who you actually sell to.

Jack Dilanian: Sure. If you look at the constituent that ultimately we are serving through our technology, it primarily starts with the faculty. We believe that they are at the core so everything that we’ve designed, whether it’s a promotion and tenure review platform or it’s a search and hire solution or it’s a platform that allows for faculty to curate their professional story via a destination environment for them to build out their CV’s, we believe they are the core.

We also believe in order to serve faculty, you’ve got to be able to serve administration so we also obviously service those senior leaders on campus and they know it starts at primarily that provost level who ultimately is the chief academic officer for an institution and it percolates and permeates the entire organization.

We serve HR, we serve institutional research, academic affairs, faculty affairs. I think one of the really unique elements of our platform is that it is so pervasive in terms of the value proposition that we’re bringing to the various constituency across the university campus and so that is another value driver that excites me and makes me feel like we’re doing something compelling in the marketplace.

Fred Diamond: You’ve held senior sales leadership positions along your career. Tell us a little bit about the beginning of your career, how did you first get into sales?

Jack Dilanian: If I search my heart and soul, I really feel like I’ve been selling my whole life. I feel like I’ve been selling myself whether it’s to teachers or it’s to my parents or it’s to coaches or instructors to give me a chance in any given scenario. My first official selling job was probably working for my father’s business. He was a private business owner in Northern Virginia. He owned an automotive repair facility and he brought me in to essentially teach me the business and I gravitated not towards the operational running of the business but rather the marketing and sales arm of the business.

In that capacity, ultimately I was out there trying to build new business relationships with large insurance companies, dealerships in the area that would ultimately send and contract with my dad’s business for repair work. That’s essentially my first foray into the world of sales working for the family business and it’s cultivated and grown from there.

Fred Diamond: The answers we usually get on the Sales Game Changers podcast come in two forms: I’ve been selling my whole life since I was a teenager or at the age of 6 or I accidentally fell into sales, I was a consultant who liked to talk to customers and one thing led to another. You mentioned one of your first sales jobs was working in your father’s auto repair place. Auto repair or supply?

Jack Dilanian: Repair, absolutely.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the key lessons you learned from those jobs that have stuck with you today as you manage people, you manage sales leaders in trying to sell information technology?

Jack Dilanian: If I think about my father, he’s always been an individual that has been proud of what he’s done. He prided himself on being an authentic leader to his organization as well as to the community and so taking pride in what we do as sales professionals I feel is really an important principle that I have to have and embody throughout my career. I’ve been lucky enough to have that as part of my mindset and approach.

I would say it starts with a lot of that, doing the work. Doing the work, really building an intellectual capital, understanding my craft and the community that I’m trying to serve and hopefully that then translates into me coming off as authentic, consultative and knowledgeable about whatever product or problem I’m ultimately trying to solve.

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

Jack Dilanian: As it relates to my area of brilliance, I think I’m just going to be straightforward: people. It’s knowing how to build authentic relationships through honest relationship building tactics with people. I feel like I’m relatively a passionate person, I’m an excitable person when I’m focused and zeroed in on something and I believe in a subject matter and or that problem I’m trying to solve and I believe that translates into a motivational skill set that traditionally permeates to the organizations that I’m lucky enough to serve.

I’m relatively – I hope, humbly – good at getting people excited about a vision, about a north start that we’re all working towards in unison. I guess that speaks to the fact that I’m a sales person at my core and the other element that I will say is I’m relatively good at solving problems by asking thoughtful questions that ultimately lead us to the answer. Those would be some of the skills that I may have.

Fred Diamond: We talked before about how your company, Interfolio, builds a faculty information system and tying that back into your passion about what you do, what are you passionate about faculty? Is it faculty? Is it education? Most of your career has been selling ed-tech. Talk about what your why is, if you will, about the customer who you serve.

Jack Dilanian: I think education is obviously where it all starts. I’ve been in education for 18 years, one could say that I’m a one trick pony but I would argue that I’m lucky enough to serve a specific category that I feel is really important and I’ve been lucky enough to be in positions where I can through leadership and salesmanship impact that category. As it relates to what am I passionate about, I ask myself a couple of questions whenever I look at my career and where I ultimately want to go with it: am I solving a problem that matters to the community I’m trying to serve? Can I get excited about that problem that I’m solving? Do I believe in the people that make up the team? Is what I want to call those individuals my colleagues? The culture that they’ve created, do I want to be a part of that culture? Do I think I can contribute to that culture?

I think if I can answer those questions well while ultimately serving a community like faculty who are candidly underserved in education, I think they don’t necessarily have the technologies and the innovation being brought to them like others IE students and administration, you’ve got something special. I definitely as it relates to answering those questions regarding Interfolio and regarding solving a really unique problem for faculty, yeah. I think I can get passionate about what I do and I am passionate about what I do here.

Fred Diamond: Once again, looking around the floor here as we’ve been walking into the room to do this interview, a lot of energy, lot of commitment to the cause and see people in rooms scribbling on whiteboards so it’s pretty high energy here.

Jack Dilanian: It absolutely is, there’s a vibrant energy and I think everyone is very laser focused on creating this category, making a difference in education. Healthy, positive constructive disruption. That’s what our mantra is.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to your career, who was an impactful sales career mentor and how did they impact you?

Jack Dilanian: The two individuals that really come to mind are a gentleman by the name of Matthew Pittinsky who was the chairman and president of Blackboard. I remember early on when I was I think 23 years old he was essentially selling me on the vision of learning management technologies and the impact that the internet was going to have on education and one slide that he showed me that still to this day makes an impact on me is these two sumo wrestlers about to collide coming together.

Essentially, it was the embodiment of the internet and education and the ripple effect that they were going to basically have on one another relative to how people consume information, how people learn, how people collaborate with each other and 20 years later we’re actually seeing all of this manifest and have for the past many years. I think he in terms of being a visionary and pushing that envelope and thinking about where we want to be not just next year but five years from now was probably one of the biggest impact players in my life.

The other individual, a gentleman by the name of Todd Gibby who was the proverbial COO of Blackboard and then went on to be the CEO of a company called Intelliworks which I also ultimately worked for and worked under his tutelage. I think he probably was one of those authentic, motivational leaders that have really impacted me. He cared about people, he cared about making a difference, he always taught me to listen more than speaking, he helped me to professionally grow up throughout my career and truly understand the difference between leadership and management and be purposeful about understanding those differences and ultimately embodying them day in and day out. I think those two individuals were amazing impact players for me.

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

Jack Dilanian: I have traditionally made it a practice to work with organizations that are in the early stage of their growth career and trajectory. When you’re an early stage organization, you’re scrappy. You are going well beyond your job specification and or description. You’re a Jack of many trades, hopefully a master of as many of them as you possibly can. You’ve got to be constantly thinking about tomorrow making sure that you hit those numbers and those goals within that near sight line but also need to be thinking about how do you build an organization that can scale for the future and how do you balance that near term versus long term planning, and how do you do that, quite frankly, with an environment that’s got to be physically sound and you’ve got to be fiduciary responsible to your shareholders and the dollars that you have need to have some significant ROI behind them.

Every hire matters that much more, every coaching opportunity whether it’s a team member or whatnot is that much more important. Balancing the long term and the short term within an early stage environment is challenging but it’s also equally as rewarding, I would say.

Fred Diamond: Jack, take us back through your career. What is the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? Jack, take us back to that moment.

Jack Dilanian: Without question. It’s been the teams that I’ve been able to build. I think if you looked at the Blackboard sales team in the early 2000 era is one of the biggest, prominent education technology sales teams in the world. It helped build Blackboard to a multi-billion dollar organization. The culture, the comradery, the competitiveness, the transparency. It was amazing, it was actually palpable in terms of the energy that we had and the relationships that we still maintain with one another over the years.

People I remember actually wanted to buy from Blackboard because they were fun, they were fun to interact with, they were fun to work with, they were smart and they wanted to be a part of the family as a result of that. I think if I think about the sales cultures and the teams and the synergy that we were able to build whether it was Blackboard, Interfolio, Intelliworks, it’s the people that I would say is what I’ve been able to be the most proud of over the years.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a very successful career. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you mentioned that you believe you were in sales roles way back from when you worked with your father in his auto repair store. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Jack Dilanian: I would have to say no, for the most part. I think there was a time when I had left Blackboard after about almost 10 years, I felt like it was one of my only opportunities to potentially make a foray outside of education technology and so at that time and currently even today my family was invested in commercial real estate. I figured, “Wow, what a nice opportunity to do something different, push myself, learn.” So I made a run at becoming a commercial real estate agent and I will tell you, that is a tough racket. I was given a desk, I was given a phone book and a phone and maybe a pat on the back but I don’t even know if I got that. I went from, obviously, this amazing group of people, this multi-billion dollar education company that became a powerhouse in the space of learning management to a desk with a phone in a foreign industry that I was trying to learn.

I would say that that was the one time where I felt like that was a bit too tough for me and I will say I veered right back to education shortly thereafter and it’s been an amazing run since. Are there days where it’s hard? I need to motivate myself to get up and get in there. Todd and I in the early days of Intelliworks, we used to call them five slappers, like where you had to just slap yourself a couple of times to get going when we were an early stage scrappy company back then. But when you think about the team, when you think about the mission, what you’re trying to do and all those individuals that are dependent on you, whether it’s the market or your colleagues, you get motivated and you get in there and you get through the grind. That’s been my approach.

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

Jack Dilanian: I would say: assume you don’t know much about the topic and or the industry when you walk in the door. Assume that there are a lot of really smart people, successful people within the organization that you’re ultimately lucky enough to be a part of. Ask questions, listen, learn. Try and learn every day. Push yourself to try and learn something new every day. I was very lucky in my career in that I identified mentors and coaches that I immediately gravitated towards, whether it was Michael Chason or it was Todd Gibby or even Andrew Rosen, our CEO here. I spent time asking them questions, following them around, asking for life lessons and I did my best to listen and talk less.

I think if you can do those things while also being authentic and just doing the work to really build your intellectual capital and build a proficiency, I think you can come off as a consultative expert and leader in your space. But it’s going to take some time, be patient, it’s not going to happen overnight. It takes time to onboard and ramp, that’s why we allocate an onboarding program and we give quarter relief to new sales professionals that are coming on board so don’t get frustrated, continue to do the work and it’s going to happen. Success will be there for you.

Fred Diamond: Ask questions, talk to the mentors, understand and be humble. What are some things that you do, Jack, to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Jack Dilanian: Time away from the job. I will actually be very purposeful about getting first of all my team together outside the walls of the organization. We’ll do off sites and in many cases when we do those off site meetings it’s about building team rapport. It’s about professional development, so I really want to invest both in myself and my people to help us professionally grow. That may not mean sales skill or competency, it could be leadership, it could be other types of skills and competencies and real life experiences that help us become more well-rounded professionals.

Education, I try and whether if I’m lucky enough to have my company supplement that for me and or I do it on my own. I will try and sign up for an executive education class of some sort whether it’s at a local college or somewhere else throughout the country but I really look at topics that I care about and areas where I would like to grow professionally. It could be literally finance 101 and whatever that may be, and I go and will sign up on those courses and do them on my own time and or take some time away from work. I consistently try and take vacations at least twice a year if not three times a year. Every 90 to 120 days I like to take some time off and just recharge.

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

Jack Dilanian: I think we talked about this earlier, we’re an organization called Interfolio. It’s an early stage organization. We’re trying to be mindful of where we’re headed in terms of our north star, in terms of that future that we’re trying to build towards but also tactically executing day in and day out in the near term. It’s working on those initiatives and balancing between the two that’s keeping me up at night and keeping me focused.

Fred Diamond: Jack, 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?

Jack Dilanian: Fundamentally, I believe what I do matters. I believe along with the support of many others that I call my colleagues, I solve problems and that drives me. Making an impact in whatever market I serve, ideally through thoughtful disruption is fun for me. It’s also what I know I’m good at. I believe people should do what they’re good at and so that’s what really keeps me going day in and day out.

Fred Diamond: “I believe what I do matters”. Man, that is pretty powerful. Why don’t you give us one final thought on how the Sales Game Changers listening today can be inspired?

Jack Dilanian: Be proud of your profession.You bring solutions to bear that solve real problems that matter to many, and that should matter to you. I don’t care what the product is, if it’s a solution that actually solves a problem, that helps people and it’s most fundamental whether it’s faculty information or it’s learning management or it’s cell phone technology or whatever that may be, you’re doing good. You’re actually providing a service and helping people, and so you should be as a result proud of your profession. Be confident in what you do and have that confidence and pride be exemplified in the work and the product that you produce day in and day out.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 077: Education Technology Sales Leader Jack Dilanian Explains How Believing that What You Sell Really Matters is Critical to Your Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 021: Sales-Enablement Leader Jen Burns Shares Why Understanding the Buyer Journey Is Critical to Your Success

Jen Burns is the managing director of business intelligence and operations at Interfolio, a D.C.-based education technology firm serving the higher-education market, where she is helping to position the organization for scale and profitable growth. She has been in sales, sales and revenue enablement, and operations for the past 17 years. Jen spent years in various sales and business development capacities, was in human-capital consulting for a few years, and then shifted into enablement and operations, building out teams from the ground up to deliver efficiencies and business-process improvements while driving innovation to the buyer and the customer journey. She is the president of the DC chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.

Find Jen on LinkedIN!

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

Jen Burns: Sure. As you’ve mentioned, I’ve been in various sales capacities over the years, so I’ve certainly been in the role for quite a long time and am happy to share a little bit more about my experience. In addition to my job at Interfolio, I’m currently on the board and the president of the D.C. chapter of the Sales Enablement Society. I’m very, very passionate about this topic, this function, all in support of driving more success to sales and sales leadership, so I’m excited to infuse some of that work into our conversation today.

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

Jen Burns: That is a very good question. I actually got my undergraduate degree in biology, and I spent some time in my latter years in undergrad working for a pharmaceutical company. I was in the lab, and they said, “Wow, you don’t really have a personality for being a lab rat.” I thought, “You’re right about that. What else could I possibly do?” And so, in that process I learned a little bit more about pharmaceutical sales, which I had previously not known much about. I applied to my first sales job right out of college, got a job in my entry to my career with Pfizer as a pharmaceutical sales professional. That’s how I started my career out.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about what you sell today and what excites you about what you’re selling today.

Jen Burns: I’m really glad you asked that question. Obviously, I no longer directly sell. However, we at Interfolio are doing some incredible work in the higher-education community, particularly focused around faculty. Our mantra is “Faculty first,” and we are in the process of diving really deep into understanding how we can better meet all of the needs of our customers around the faculty life cycle, whether it’s directly related to the faculty themselves or the institution.

Our solution set is bringing innovation to the higher-education community, and our sales organization is focused on parsing out a buyer’s journey—and a customer journey on the client’s success side of our business—to ensure that not only are we understanding the unique, evolving needs of our market but also ensuring that our salespeople, our customer-success folks, and our product teams are staying ahead of the curve to drive innovation to our customers, whether it’s from a consultative perspective or from a product perspective. I’m really excited about the great things that we’re doing here at Interfolio, and obviously that coincides with a lot of the work that we’re doing around how we’re supporting our sales organization and client-success organization as well.

Fred Diamond: What is your role here at Interfolio?

Jen Burns: My role is a little bit of a hybrid position. I’m focused on understanding how to drive business improvements to our buyer and customer journeys. That is pretty comprehensive—not only around thinking of something specific to sales like a sales process or sales methodology but how we’re able to support that process through our technology ecosystem… How are we ensuring that we’re bringing all the right support tools not only to our internal customers, our salespeople, but also to our external customers so that we are viewed and seen as consultants in the marketplace versus salespeople or vendors.

Fred Diamond: Think back to some of those first sales jobs you had when they got you out of the lab. What were some of the key lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs that have stuck with you today?

Jen Burns: I think it took me a few years to really recognize some of the things that I was doing right and some of the things I was doing wrong. I would say, and I’m sure everyone listening to this has heard this before, but people buy from people, right? And there’s a lot of things that you can do out there to try to access your market and your prospects, but making sure that you’re understanding why they need to buy from you or how you’re able to help them or consult with them is a critical thing that I think a lot of people skip over. It’s the more time-consuming thing. It’s not just about a blanket need in the marketplace you’re serving or you’re selling into but really down to the specific prospect level, the person you’re speaking to, the person you’re reaching out to.

When I first started, it was kind of a rat race. The pharmaceutical industry is very dynamic, and it’s changed a lot over the years. This was back in 2001; the times are a little bit different now. But the goals that I had were pretty straightforward and standard, and I was focused on hitting my goal. I was focused on quantity over quality because it was important for me to hit my number—the primary driver, obviously.

I lost focus very quickly on the quality piece of it, and so I learned very quickly that that actually can hurt you in the long run. It’s better to build solid relationships not just by being a human but also by understanding what drives the prospect, what do they care about day in and day out, and actually living and breathing that and adjusting my approach and my message around the solution that I’m offering to really help bring value to that individual person. It can carry you a long way if you take the time to do that.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people look at you as a leader and probably seek you out for counsel and guidance. Let’s talk about an impactful sales career mentor that you had and how they were impactful on your career.

Jen Burns: It’s interesting because I’ve had a lot of different mentors along my career. I would say—and this is a little bit of a maverick move here in this conversation—I had a mentor probably about eight years ago now who was an executive in the financial services industry. He was not a previous salesperson. The reason I bring this up in relation to sales is that even though I have my MBA, I got my MBA pretty young, and I hadn’t spent a ton of time in the workplace. He helped me better understand how a business operates.

The reason that was impactful for me from a mentorship perspective is not just for my own professional development, but as I continue to grow my sales career it helped me better serve my customers because I was able to better understand their world. If I’m selling into the C-suite and I’m a 25-year-old, how can I relate to a CIO or a CTO? I can’t really, because I’m 25, I’m early in my career.

Having a mentor, Mike Rowen, helped me tremendously understand what a CEO cares about, what a CSO cares about, what a CTO cares about. Helping frame that for me and helping me build my professional skills, my business acumen skills outside of what I learned in the classroom, made my career much more impactful, made my relationships with my prospects and customers more impactful. And obviously, as I continue to grow my career, it helps me better shape that as well. I think he was a critical component to my success as an executive mentor and gave me a different spin on what I was bringing to the table as a business development professional.

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

Jen Burns: There are probably a couple of different ones. I would say it was when I was in more of a consultative position. It wasn’t frontline sales, so it’s a little bit different. However, I was working with a global organization here in the D.C. area doing human-capital consulting. It was a very niche consulting opportunity, where I was working through learning and development pathways for their employees. This particular organization’s actually a consulting firm, so that made it interesting.

I embedded myself with the stakeholders there, and in terms of their day-to-day I really understood not only what they care about within their organization but, in the context of this conversation today, really understood the customers they were serving. Because of the legwork that I did and the time that I spent understanding both their particular internal world but also their customer’s world, I not only was able to sell my consultative services to them and worked in building out these different learning and development pathways, but they then turned around and were able to further facilitate the work that I had done with them over to their customers. So it essentially doubled my sale. It went from my selling to them to them then selling what I was selling to them to their customers. It was a double win for me, a huge personal win, because as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, taking the time to really care about what you’re doing and learning about customer and what drives them and what drives their customer will position you for tremendous success. For me, it was really about the impact that I had on not only their business but their customer’s business.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been very successful. Sales is hard. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard. It’s just not for me”?

Jen Burns: Yes, many times. I have a very competitive nature to my personality, so that definitely helps in terms of driving you to continue on and not give up, but there are ups and downs in sales, and it certainly can be very stressful. The reason I ended up where I am is twofold.

One, I’m operationally minded, and so a lot of my sales career was spent living in the analytics and managing my territory based off numbers and how much do I need to hit my goal. I was very analytically focused. But also—it deviates a little bit from your question—one of the primary reasons I got out of sales and went into enablement and operations was because I’ve had great training and I’ve had not-so-great training.

I have had great support and bad support, and I’ve learned over the years what it really takes to build out a successful sales organization, whether it’s from a leadership or from a frontline sales perspective. I wanted to go on the other side of the fence and help to make things better and make the buyer’s journey more successful and the customer journey more impactful. That really stemmed from a decision I made to transition out of a sales specific role and move into an operational enablement-focused position so that I could drive more impact from the other side.

Fred Diamond: Jen, what is the most important thing you want to get across to junior or midlevel or senior sales professionals to help them improve their career?

Jen Burns: Good question. This took me a little while to figure out. I would say the biggest thing is to network. Find out how other people succeed in their careers. I did forced networking through, I would say, the first half of my sales career, meaning I went to conferences. I did all the typical things that we do.

But joining professional organizations, those like IES in the D.C. area, the Sales Enablement Society, whatever it is relevant to your specific career, is essential because you meet people who not only can help mentor you or are in the same shoes as you are but you get professional development. You can learn best practices from other people.

There are just things you can’t read in a book. You need to learn from how other people are doing things successfully. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel, because there is someone else out there who has figured out how to do it great, and why not learn from them? Professional networking is hard, and it’s out of a lot of folks’ comfort zone, but I would say that that singlehandedly has been one of the most impactful things in my career, today and in the past. I would encourage anyone, if they’re not doing it, to explore ways that they can get more involved in their professional community through these membership organizations, because it really does add tremendous value.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned the word “profession” a couple of times; this is the “sales profession.” People listening on the call today, on today’s podcast, you are in the sales profession; what are things you should be doing to ensure that you truly are a professional? Jen, today, what are some of the things that you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Jen Burns: A lot of things, actually, kind of what I just mentioned. I think staying engaged in the community is really a big one, probably the biggest. I do try to stay in the loop in social media and LinkedIn and reading articles online and making sure that I’m in touch with what’s actually happening, not only in my profession but also in my market. Regardless of the role you’re in, making sure you’re doing both of those things is pretty critical. I would say to stay fresh and sharpen the saw, there’s the obvious, which is education. We can all go back and get certifications and take courses, but for me, I’m able to stay fresh by engaging in the community as much as I can and networking and being involved.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned the Sales Enablement Society. You mentioned all the things you’re doing at Interfolio. Tell us one major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success as a sales game changer.

Jen Burns: I like this question because it’s relevant to something I just worked through internally at Interfolio here. One of the things we’re focused on as an organization, not just as it relates to supporting our customer in our market but internally as well, we really see the value in supporting our organization, our sales organization, and our other staff across the company to make them successful. So there’s a twofold innovation project happening here.

One part is around the buyer’s journey, so that’s very applicable to this conversation today. One of the things I did when I came into the organization is I aligned very quickly with the marketing organization, the sales organization, and the client-success organization. That’s a very sales-enablement thing to do because you have to serve as a connective tissue there to drive success across all three of those functional areas. We all sat down as functional leaders—sales, marketing, client success, and myself along with our executive leadership team—and realized that some important changes needed to be made to our process. There’s the sales process, but there are also those other influencers that really make it successful.

The buyer’s journey cares about the buyer: “Who are our buyers?” “What matters to them?” We talked about earlier, so I don’t want to deep-dive on that. But also, “how are we going to support that internally?” So we completely revised our sales process. We leveraged the expertise of our marketing organization. We are implementing an account-based marketing approach for the first time, which is exciting, and also ensuring that our technology ecosystem is set up properly and configured properly to support that. I think a lot of organizations fall flat as far as that’s concerned. Unfortunately it’s common because there’s a lot of technology out there. Getting them all to talk to each other and provide the data on the back end to ensure that you can make informed decisions about your business is not easy.

We went through this exhaustive process. It was tremendously successful, and we’re now positioned to fully support not only the buyer’s journey but also the customer journey, both in our process, our people, our structure, and also our systems. We will now have the data analytics that we need to make the right decisions about how to improve our business moving forward and get the insights we need to understand what we’re doing well and what we’re not doing well. I’m superexcited about that. If anyone wants to hear what we did and how we did it, I’d be happy to share.

Fred Diamond: If you don’t mind my asking, what are some of the things you’re doing to continue to ensure that wasn’t just an event that happened at a strategic offsite somewhere? I love the concept and having people conscious of that. It makes you aware of some things you talked about before, which is not just “what is your customer challenged with?” but also “what is your customer’s customer challenged with?” For a couple of moments here, just talk about some of the things that Interfolio is doing to ensure that this isn’t a one-off event, that it continues to permeate the culture.

Jen Burns: I would say it’s getting everybody to the table and doing it together and agreeing on it. Typically and just by nature, most functional units will operate in isolation. They will make decisions in isolation, all for the greater good, of course, always, but that often causes the problem that you just described, which is how do you ensure that it’s sustainable and it actually works long-term and people stay engaged long-term. We have a very collaborative culture here at Interfolio. We’re a small organization, so it’s a little bit easier to do that, but that is our culture here.

We have an open work space; none of us have offices. We’re constantly collaborating, talking, making sure that we’re all on the same page, and documenting things. Our documentation process is very thorough. We have an internal kind of wiki where we document all the processes and workflows that we agree upon as well as make sure that we have full transparency. The transparency of our processes, our data, our successes, our failures, is there, and I think that helps support that type of approach we take here at Interfolio.

Fred Diamond: Very good. I’m very excited to hear more about that, the buyer’s journey and then also the customer journey. Jen, as we bring it down towards the end of today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast, 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?

Jen Burns: That’s a good question. I would say, for me personally, it’s really about the mission of the organization and the impact in the marketplace, so the impact on the end customer, the end user. Especially in education technology, which is the area that Interfolio is in, and some of the previous companies I’ve worked for, it’s a little easier because the value you’re bringing to a student or to a faculty member or to an institution that ultimately impacts the students and the faculty is something that keeps you coming to work on a day-to-day basis. Whether you’re in sales or you’re in engineering, whatever it might be, the mission is just incredible. It has kept me going and kept me so excited and enthused about what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis. And so, for me it’s an easy question to answer. But I think from a sales standpoint, it’s the great wins that you have that keep you going and wanting to continue coming back. And there’s a little bit of competitive nature in there too. But I would say those two things really is what drives me for sure.

Fred Diamond: Jen, you’ve been giving us some tremendous ideas throughout today’s podcast. This has been an absolutely wonderful conversation and a lot of great information for the people listening, the thousands of people in sales across the country. What’s one final thought you can share to inspire our listeners in sales today?

Jen Burns: Learn from others. Learn from successful people, how they were successful. Like I said before—I think I’ve said it a couple of times; so sorry to be redundant, but it’s actually very important—there are a lot of really successful people out there. I certainly don’t know it all. I will continue to learn until I stop working. It’s probably going to be when I’m 80, maybe 90. But I learn every day. I learn from people I report up to. I learn from my peers. I learn from people who are in entry-level roles.

There’s always something you can learn from others, but staying engaged and being willing to learn and grow, I think, is critical for anyone, particularly for sales professionals. There’s a lot happening. The markets change. Everything’s evolving. You need to stay up-to-date with your skills, with your situational fluency. It’s a constant learning process. I think as a salesperson to be successful you have to be willing to evolve yourself and be willing to learn something new every day to make yourself more impactful and successful in your career. That would be my parting thought.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 021: Sales-Enablement Leader Jen Burns Shares Why Understanding the Buyer Journey Is Critical to Your Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.