Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch the replay!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on July 29, 2020. It featured sales leader James Yeager.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Tim Riesterer’s Keys to a Great Remote Sales Presentation here.

Find James on LinkedIn here.

Listen to James’ Sales Game Changers episode here.

EPISODE 257: CrowdStrike Public Sector Leader James Yeager Offers Unique and Specific Tips on How to Best Approach Senior Level Prospects Right Now

JAMES’ TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Study your customer, study the prospect, know what their organization stands for, what their mission statement is. If you’re going to be talking to an individual, a CIO for instance, go do your research on the internet. See if they’ve spoken on any webcasts. What’s top of mind for them? Then mash it up against what your company stands for, what your value propositions are, the outcomes that you’re trying to help your customers achieve. Curate your message, train yourself on a message, get a full command of it because when the lights come on and you get in front of that customer, albeit virtually nowadays, they’re going to make a judgement on you. If you don’t have the ability to allow them to differentiate you from your peers, you may never get that second call.”

Fred Diamond: Thank you so much. Alright, let’s get right to it, James. How are things going? Again, you’re a federal sales leader, public sector, not just federal but federal specifically. For people listening who aren’t quite familiar, we’re coming to the end of the federal fiscal year, it ends September 30th, this has obviously been quite a different year but the government seems to be continuing to buy so how are things going for you? How are things going for your sales team right now?

James Yeager: First of all, thanks for having me again, Fred. It was great to be with you last year and I certainly enjoy all the content from the various leaders from across the space. Things are going well, they really are. As hard as it may be for me to say and as hard as it may be to believe, we’re actually busier now than we have been in a very long time and the reason why it’s so crazy is because certainly that doesn’t suggest that I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs before. We’re on a little bit of a rocket ship here at CrowdStrike so we’ve been busy for a long time. With all that’s going on I would say things are going very well personally, everyone’s healthy and safe, the team and the organization, the company are thriving. We’re in a position of luxury, I think, in many ways here at CrowdStrike because cyber-security is very much an essential investment area and topic for conversation. I would say next to whatever organization that we’re partnering with, selling to, talking with, whatever their core function, their mission is, whether it’s defense, civil services, state and local, healthcare, patient care, patient outcomes, I would maintain that cyber-security may be the next largest priority.

Fred Diamond: James, this webcast but also the podcast is going to be going out all over the world. Not everybody understands why the federal marketplace is possibly the most competitive marketplace there is. One of our previous guests on the Sales Game Changers podcast said it’s the NFL of sales, the highest level of competition. Every company that’s anything competes in this space, federal’s known as Fortune 1 to many people. Give us a little bit of insight for people who may not know what’s so unique and what’s so special about the federal marketplace.

James Yeager: First of all, I love the sports analogy, I’m a jock at my core. My team is always giving me a hard time for over-inserting the sports analogies and metaphors but I think you nailed it. First of all, it’s an awfully crowded space and for those of us in this profession, we’re in this profession for various reasons but as you heard me talk about during our original moment together on the podcast last year, for me it’s about the competition. Again, part of that is the athlete in me but part of it is just I love winning and I love winning a heck of a lot more than I hate losing. There’s a lot of talent in this arena, there’s a lot of talent in this town, there’s a lot of great capabilities and offerings out there and if you also go look at what we’re doing – which is one of the reasons why I continue to gravitate to the space, I think I shared this with you over the course of my entire career, this is literally all I’ve done is sell to the public sector for better or worse. I love it, I really can get behind it, I can get into it, I can relate, I can attach myself to their mission and their outcomes, I can develop empathy. I think a lot of people tend to gravitate towards that as well.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned empathy. We’re doing a webcast every single day, we’ve been doing a webcast every day since the middle of March when the whole stay-home order kicked in and everything related to that. There’s three words that come up all the time: mindset, creativity and the e-word, empathy, that you just said. What does empathy mean in the federal space? You’re a federal sales leader, you’re a public sales leader, you’ve been selling your whole career, for the people watching today’s webcast and listening to the podcast, there are a lot of guys and ladies like you who’ve gone their entire career in federal or public sector and are now leading huge sales teams to this unique and interesting and vital marketplace. What does it mean to be empathetic right now to the federal customer or the federal market in general?

James Yeager: I would maintain having empathy in this space was a necessary characteristic or emotion, even pre-COVID, it’s amplified now but we’ll get through this and it will be important for us to maintain empathy even after we get through COVID-19 crisis that we’re all dealing with. I think it comes down to a true appreciation for the work of the men and women, the civil servants all across the globe. I used the word, “This town” a few minutes ago, it’s not restricted to the national capital region, this is a global operation. Day in and day out, men and women put their lives on the line or they make some other form of sacrifice, it’s a very underappreciated profession at times, it’s certainly underfunded in many circumstances.

There’s a lot of talented and capable people in the federal space who could go out and put their interest to be civil servants aside and go chase the high dollars that are out there and available in the private sector. Yet year after year they make the commitment to dig in and do what’s in their heart so I think as a sales professional you have to try and understand that. I say it all the time, I never walked a mile in those shoes necessarily so I can’t say, “I know what it’s like to be that decision maker” or to have to perform that function but I really try and see if I can get behind the veil as frequently as I can to understand what they’re motivated by and what some of the complexities that they have organizationally are, and what some of the stress that they’re dealing with is. I think if you can get ahold of that, it accomplishes a couple things. For one, it allows the customer or the prospect to see the humanity in you but I think it also gets you a little bit closer to distinguishing yourself, I mentioned it’s a very crowded space. There’s a lot of people going after all the big dollars that are in federal and trying to make a splash with their career but you have to always try and find a way to navigate and distinguish yourself from those competitors that are out there that are either competing for mind share, competing for wallet share or to try and drive a certain capability into the space. If you can distinguish yourself and you can do it with empathy, I think you’re going to be in a better position than others who don’t.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk priorities. Again, there’s about two months to go and for the people who may not know, there’s estimates that 40% of the federal budget is spent in the last quarter which would be federal fiscal right now so you’re probably measuring the days. There’s about 62 days left to go, I’m sure a lot of federal teams work around the clock in the summer, a lot of the companies like some of our sponsors, immixGroup and DLT, they’re busting it right now to make sure that they can get as much sold right now so that the government budget will be used. Right now, again it’s the last week in July, what are your top priorities as a sales leader? What are some of the priorities you’re telling your team to focus on?

James Yeager: Certainly everything you just said, we’re approaching the busiest part of the buying season and complicating matters is all the complexity around the Coronavirus and people who are trying to figure out how they’re going to school their kids from home. You’ve got folks that are trying to figure out if their kids are going away to college or not, are they going to be able to get away for vacation? There is a ton going on and that would be the easy answer for me to give you. It also wouldn’t be entirely true right now, we’re on the waning hours of our second fiscal quarter here at CrowdStrike so our fiscal year is February to January.

We’re in our own microcosmic busy season right now, every period the last couple weeks of a quarter are highly intense so we’re dealing with that yet I’ve decided to spend some time with you and our guests so that’s how important you are to me, Fred. [Laughs] it’s good to take a step back from that, by the way, and catch your breath. The other thing that we’re working on is what we call our AOP here at CrowdStrike or our Annual Operating Plan. Another way to describe that is we’re putting together our capacity model and our budget so it may seem a little bit bizarre that six months out we’re starting to look into next year but we take purpose-built planning very seriously here and it’s been a key ingredient for my development over the course of my career. How much time are you spending in the moment opportunistically versus finding balance and looking strategically out?

We’re looking at what key areas of the business need additional investments, what’s the return on those potential investments, do we need to experiment in certain areas? There’s a lot of analysis that me and my operations team are going through each and every day and will, frankly, for the next several months.

Fred Diamond: James, we do have some questions coming through here so let’s go to some of our questions. The first question is from Deborah in Maryland, the question here is, “How has the federal customer changed during COVID?” It’s interesting, one thing that we’ve talked about on the Sales Game Changers and the other webcasts that we do, some of the markets are gone. Obviously entertainment, if you run a chain of movie theaters this has been a horrible time or restaurants, of course and companies that supply things to those types of industries, but the federal government seems to be moving along seemingly the way it was. Is that the case? Is the market just continuing as it was or has the government customer changed over the last four months that we’ve been involved with COVID?

James Yeager: It’s an interesting question, I think there’s great variability in the answer, a lot of that depends on what specific domain of the government you’re in. For example, if you’re on the defense side or the intelligence side it doesn’t matter what the external conditions are, your conditions never change. Same could be said across various aspects of civilian, even the federal contracting world and the defense industrial base. We’ve seen some changes in behavior, certainly government employees are a little bit harder to get ahold of right now and we have to remember that they’re actually contending with a lot of the same challenges that the average worker and employee, regardless of what field you’re in, is having to contend with. Now adjusting to working from home, managing all of the distractions, I’m in my home office right now so you’re not going to see or you shouldn’t see kids running behind me – you might.

There’s a lot of additional chaos that’s been created during COVID but I do give the federal government and the employees of the government a tremendous amount of credit for staying true. Again, if you think about the mindset and the makeup of a federal government employee, they’re generally not in it for the glitz and the glamour. They’re on their own mission and they’re laser-focused so I think capturing their attention may be a little bit more difficult but they have really stayed focused and they’ve had to have some adaptability and improvise to their working environment. I haven’t seen a dramatic shift if that’s the easiest way to answer.

Fred Diamond: We have another question coming in here from Michael and Michael is in Princeton, New Jersey, not too far, there’s obviously stuff going on in New Jersey, thank you, Michael. Michael’s question is, “How are your customer conversations going right now with your federal customers?” That’s interesting. You actually introduced us to Carrie-Anne Mosley who was our guest about three weeks ago on the Sales Game Changers Live and she also was a great guest on the podcast as well, she’s running public sector at DocuSign right now. She talked about how in some of her conversations she’s adding 15, 20 minutes to each conversation to go back to the empathy word we talked before to get a little bit deeper into, “How are you doing? How’s your customer doing? How are the challenges going?” so that she could provide more value to them moving forward. Again, maybe not you but your team perhaps, how are the conversations going? Are they, “Let’s get right to business, we’ve got 15 minutes”, it’s the end of the year for them as well or is there more empathy in the conversations? “Hey, how are you? Let’s talk a little bit.” Are you able to get personal with the federal customer as well? A lot of things thrown in there for you, but what are conversations like right now?

James Yeager: I think it’s fantastic advice from Cam – Carrie-Anne – on trying to get that emotional personal connection. What I would say to that is it’s got to be genuine, it’s got to be authentic. I’ve known Carrie-Anne for a very long time so I know what she’s all about and I know she’s true to that. If you can, I would say again a straight counsel, the customers, because they’re not in their normal operating environment and the continuity of operations have been disrupted and they’re having to manage a lot of the complexity and distractions that didn’t exist when they were working inside the four walls of the federal infrastructure, they may be a little bit shorter and wanting to be a little bit more concise and to the point.

I think you’ve got to be able to on the fly read and make a judgement about your audience. I would make that statement about any conversation with a customer or prospect but going into it in terms of your preparation, if you can do that it’ll help you with a few things. It’ll help the customer maybe let their guard down a little bit and you can have a different conversation that allows you to develop your relationship beyond the supplier/buyer type of relationship. Also what it’s going to do again going back to the comment around humanity is I think it’s going to show the customer what you’re all about because in that conversation it cuts both ways, you’re going to hopefully have an opportunity – and we should always be doing more listening than we are talking – to talk to the customer a little bit about yourself. I think that connection that they can then form with you allows them to maybe distinguish you from others who are just kind of, “Alright, let’s just get into it.” Do it where you can but come in prepared to be able to do it for sure.

Fred Diamond: We have more questions coming in from the audience, we actually have two questions that are coming in here that are similar. The question is from Doran, “What is your advice for people who are interested in working for a company like CrowdStrike in the public sector space?” And we have a similar question that comes in here from Martha and Martha actually is in New York City. Thank you, Martha. Her question is, “What do you, James, look for in salespeople that you bring onto your team?” To expand on that question a little bit, you’ve been in public sector your whole career, a lot of people that we’ve had on the Sales Game Changers podcast and webcast have been in the public sector side. As a matter of fact, in a couple weeks we’re also going to be interviewing a couple other public sector VP’s of sales, Ron Police whose run a couple different organizations and Bill Rowan at VMware and Mike Miller over at Veeam. Again, your whole career has been in public sector, what kind of attributes, what kind of skills do you think you need to have to be successful in sales in the federal marketplace?

James Yeager: First of all, a couple power hitters you have up on deck there that you’ve just mentioned with Ron and Bill so I look forward to those, make sure that the audience dials in for that content. I would break the answer down to two ways. In many cases I’m always trying to when I’m hiring go after a certain profile. Despite the fact that I’m in public sector and public sector only, I’ve got plenty of friends across the aisle in the commercial enterprise space or in global markets and I always say that if you’ve never done public sector whether you’re right out of college and you’re starting your career or you’re making a transition, there is an adjustment. They buying cycles are longer, certainly the vernacular and all the acronyms, getting used to the way the organizations are structured. I always look for someone that’s got some exposure to this space and hopefully extends to the exposure.

Going back to one part of the question which is if someone wants to join CrowdStrike, as I further to find that profile I’m looking for someone that’s in the cyber arena and more specifically in a perfect world it’s someone who’s in the end-point security space or someone that’s in the next generation end-point space. All that being said, no matter how hard we look for the profile it’s harder to find the perfect profile and when you do, often that person is out of reach because they’re talented and capable and they’re busy somewhere and they’re doing well or maybe they’re hard to hire, they’re too expensive, the timing is not right. You have to make trade-offs in the hiring game and one of the initial pieces of advice that I got as a first-time hiring manager – and if Carrie-Anne is listening, she’ll remember getting this advice as well maybe from some of the folks at Oracle – training and retaining and hiring are just some of the key fundamental principles of leadership. If you aren’t going to be able to meet that perfect profile, you have to be willing to make some sacrifices and me, personally where I make the sacrifices is in principles, values and in the culture of the human that I’m talking to.

When I have interviews, a lot of people say this, they don’t feel like the conventional interview where I’m going down the list of questions, it’s very conversational, I’m very much a field person, I’ve got a good gut and instinct about people. If I can’t hire the person that’s selling to the Department of Justice over the last 15 years who’s at one of our competitors for whatever reason, I need to find the next best athlete – here’s another sports analogy – the next, best, most well-rounded individual that’s going to represent the company and me and the culture and values of my organization the best.

Fred Diamond: I have a question related to that. Again, we talked about the federal market space being like the NFL for sales and for sales professionals. Over the course of the last couple of months we’ve been doing the daily webcasts from the Institute for Excellence in Sales we’ve talked about stress. You alluded to it yourself, people had to be homeschool teachers, again we’re doing this webcast in July, people have been camp counselors because every camp has been cancelled. If you have a kid between the ages of 5 and 15 you’re a camp counselor, you can’t go on vacation anywhere so there’s been a lot of stresses. You might have lost a job, maybe your spouse lost a job and now you’re stuck at home, we know all of those things. The question for you is has that also affected your team, the federal side? Are they dealing the same way with the human challenges that we’ve all faced over the last couple of months and if so, for you as a sales leader, how have you coached them? How have you been a human coach, if you will, where you’ve helped your people through if they’ve dealt with that?

First of all, people in the federal sales world, are they dealing with the same things that we are? I’m not asking that from a naivety type of question, I’m asking because we had mentioned that the federal space continues, the mission continues. The federal government hasn’t laid off a whole bunch of people in the last couple of months, they’ve even increased their services with the loans and everything else. Have the world things affected your team and if so, how have you managed and how have you helped your people humanly get through the last couple months?

James Yeager: I think there’s no doubt about it that it’s had an impact on me personally, it’s had an impact on my family, it’s had an impact on the great team that I’m surrounded by each and every day, surrounded by at a distance in today’s world. I think the activity level that we talked about a little bit here this afternoon helps matters. The busier you are, the less you’re going to be concerned with the distractions. You had asked me yesterday when we were doing the tech-check how are things going and I was like, “I’m crazy busy and I love it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” That allows me to not be consumed by all that’s going on in the world today which is unlike I think anything that many of us have seen before, certainly my generation.

The way to solve for it is just to get super close to your people. Pre-health crisis I could do that very easily, I was traveling 250,000 miles a year sometimes so I was always in front of my team, I was always in front of my partners and I could look them in the eye. I could give my team hugs, I could go have a meal, I could go have a beer and that human connectivity was always there and in those moments whether we’re doing windshield time and we’re driving to a customer site or whether we’re having coffee and prepping, some of the formalities get broken down and you can really get to know your people. We don’t have that same advantage right now because I can’t see people face to face or in person, I should say. Now technology has come a long way, we’ve got all these mediums to be able to still interact like we are today, we’re on a GoToMeeting or whether it’s Zoom or Meets or whatever. I have made a conscious effort and I’m constantly employing my leadership team to do the same to make sure you can always make that eye contact, make sure you’re always asking the questions.

Once more, in spite of all the activity and all the work-related stuff that we’re doing and all those connections that we’re having in the professional sense, make some time with all of your people to just ask them the same questions that we talked about asking the customer, “How are you doing? Where is your head at? Are you concerned?” I can’t count how many conversations I’ve had with my team and I’ve got a really big team spread out all over the country now where we won’t talk about work at all. I’ll just be like, “Is there anything that’s on your mind? Can I diffuse any of these misconceptions that are going on around what the company is doing? Are we going to be supportive? Are we doing layoffs? Are you having a hard time trying to make your cold calls? Can I enable you or equip you with anything?” To me there’s tactical stuff and there’s things that we can do, levers that we can pull to get people to be more successful on the execution side but it always goes back to that human element.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit more about how you’re leading your team, let’s talk about you as a leader. What are your expectations right now? Again, it’s the end of July, we’re deep in the federal season and for people who aren’t necessarily familiar with the federal space, some companies work every single day in the end of July and August, September, they have weekend hours. Of course almost everybody is home right now, hardly any company has their people in the building but you have to process all the deals and you have to make sure that they all go through. What are your expectations? You talked about how you have conversations with them but what are your expectations for your sales professionals right now? I’m actually going to ask the question in two ways: what are your expectations of your more senior people, people who maybe have 10, 15, 20 years of experience? And I’m also curious, what are your expectations for some of the more junior people on your team?

James Yeager: I hope this doesn’t come across as cold or insensitive but my expectations don’t change. In fact, I don’t think they ever do or ever will, that’s an internal demon that I have to grapple with [laughs] my wife is always telling me that I need to pump the breaks on expectations and standards. I was put together a certain way and I’ve got high expectations, I think they’re practical but I’ve got high standards for performance and excellence so overtly, I would never come out and say to anyone on my staff, “My expectations need to be reset.” What I would say is the conditions are harsh and we’re going to have to improvise and adapt and if that has an impact on you individually, what I would expect is for you to be honest with me or your direct manager or your peers, be vocal. How can I help you if I don’t know that you’re having a hard time?

We’re investing a lot of energy into training, I talked about my travel, I’m not the only one at the company or at other companies that was used to traveling so frequently. Seemingly now we have a little bit of time back whether we like it that way or not, so we’re working on some training and some enablement stuff. If you look at senior individuals, I’m looking at maybe trying to see if I can put them into some additional roles right now to see if we can do some mentor-protégé stuff, take advantage of their skill set and their expertise. I’m picking their brain, I’m doing a lot of skip levels and for those people that aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s basically me having a conversation with a rep and skipping over a front line manager or VP that works for me. We’re doing a lot of that, I’m asking a lot of questions because we’re in that annual operating plan environment right now where I’m talking about, “If you were me, what would you do?” Then as I go to the individuals that maybe lack some tenure, it’s really about, “Can I get invested in you and your business? Now I’ve got some time, too, can I sit on some phone calls? Do you want to brain storm? What can I do to answer any questions that you may have that maybe you would have been afraid to ask me before for whatever reason?”

Hopefully I’m not intimidating to any of the people that I work around but sometimes there’s a vulnerability about reps that are at an earlier stage in their career because if I ask you a question, Fred, are you going to interpret that as, “James doesn’t have this figured out and he should know the answer to that”? Again, the common thread here is having a lot of different discussions around a lot of different topics but at the core, the expectations really haven’t changed. At least not how I communicate with my team because the moment I communicate expectations that are lower than what they were before, humans are creatures of habit, now they start getting conditioned to, “Maybe I don’t have to have as much pipeline anymore” or, “Maybe I don’t have to prospect as much because James has already conceded the point that he recognizes customers are going to be difficult to get ahold of.” No, I don’t want people moving off that mark at all.

Fred Diamond: We have a couple more questions coming in. This question comes in from Doran again and he asks, “Can you guys comment on what drives people’s empathy shortage?” I’m not sure exactly what he’s asking but this has come up a number of times as well particularly from some of our more junior people. Things like, “Do I still have to be empathetic?” some people have asked over the weeks or, “I’ve been empathetic for the last three weeks, I’m tired.” A lot of people are talking about Zoom fatigue right now, some people are also asking about empathy fatigue. How would you answer that question if someone’s feeling that they’re not quite up to being empathetic at this moment?

James Yeager: It’s like, “Where does it end?” right? Human behavior and psychology are not easy things to have to maneuver your way through as a sales leader but I don’t know that there’s ever any end for empathy and compassion. One of my employees is really struggling to get past where we’re at, they can’t seem to figure out a way especially if you go back to the previous question and answer that we had which was really tenured, experienced salespeople. The further along you get in your career or often times the further up you get in a leadership chain, the further you get away from the front lines of the sales, sometimes the further you get away from the core habits that you developed that made you a talented and successful sales rep in the first place. Sometimes senior reps – and I’ve heard this expressed to me directly from the reps and from some of my leaders – are really struggling to get back to basics.

The managers are losing their patience with their senior reps and not to trivialize it or even oversimplify it, I think you just have to go confront those things. As leaders, we can’t be afraid to have difficult conversations and be artful and judicious with the words that you’re using. I would say if you’re feeling that maybe you don’t have the same empathy or compassion for someone that you once did, first of all, have some introspection. Try and put yourself in their shoes and then go have a dialogue because you could probably figure out that there’s maybe something else going on there that you wouldn’t be able to get your arms around if you don’t have the conversation. I don’t know that there’s an end to empathy. If you’re finding yourself as a leader so frustrated with conversations that you have with individuals in your organization, maybe there’s something else that’s going on between you and that individual. Maybe it’s a chemistry thing or maybe they’re not the right fit for your organization, the culture of your organization or the timing and trajectory of where your company is. By the way, that’s okay, people move on voluntarily from companies all the time just like sometimes a company will elect to move on from an employee and there’s all kinds of reasons for that but it’s about getting to some of the basic fundamental truths. Emotion is an important part of that.

Fred Diamond: James, we have time for one or two more questions and then I’m going to ask you for your final action step for people watching today’s webcast or listening to the podcast. A question comes from Susanne and she’s also from New Jersey so thank you to all the people in the Garden State who are joining us today. The question is, “James, how have you changed as a sales leader during this period?” We’re talking to the great Sales Game Changers who’ve been on our podcast, it’s been life-changing in so many ways, it’s been career-changing. Again you’re in the public sector space, your good fortune is continuing as a marketplace and right now in the depth of the fiscal buying season. Be a little reflective here, how have you changed? Again, you’ve been working from home, you’re seeing your kids more frequently than you probably have in the past, you’re not on planes or anything. How do you think you’ve changed over the last couple of months?

James Yeager: In many ways I’ve changed a lot, in other ways I haven’t changed at all. I think being a model for consistency as a leader is an important trait, it’s okay to expose your emotions and your humanity and your vulnerabilities to your team and have some humble moments. We don’t have it all figured out, just because we’re in a leadership position we don’t always see all the angles but being consistent with what you’re all about, stand for what your expectations are, those things haven’t changed. For me, I think what’s been really helpful is since I’ve put in so much time and effort into getting close with the reps I can actually get in front of more customers and get on more customer calls and get engaged with more partners now than I have been when I was in the normal hustle and bustle.

That’s been really refreshing, at the end of the day I’m just a good old sales guy, same guy I was frankly 20 somewhat years ago. You get away from it and I think you can lose your edge, we often forget how difficult the role of a sales professional is, the individual contributor, all the stuff that they have to juggle, all the stuff that they have to manage or the first line manager. Frankly, I would say this to anyone at any time and I’ve said it before, I think it’s the most difficult job in [Unintelligible 37:41] because you’re having to accommodate and acquiesce to all the pressures that are coming downward from me or your VP or from corporate from the company and you’re having to manage all these multiple personalities and figure out how you can play Doctor Phil, figure out how you can get people to stay focused and get people to execute. I’ve spent a lot of time with my front line managers over the last several months and it’s allowed me to get closer to them.

I spend a lot of time talking about coaching and professional development and these were things that were always important to me but at times you can take them for granted when you get really busy, when you’re out on the road and you’re trying to play catch-up. This has forced me to take a step back and get to some of the grassroots things that were ingrained in me and have always been ingrained in me but maybe were subtleties because I was just so focused on the big picture and what we’re doing. I’ve got a great team and a great leadership team, Fred, so one of the advantages I have is I trust in them implicitly. Sometimes I just take that for granted too and I say, “You guys have this, I’m going to go do these other things that you and the company need me to do.” But now I’m shadowing people, I’m riding shotgun on a lot of calls, sometimes it’s actively engage, sometimes it’s fly-on-the-wall and I think that’s one of the silver linings that I can take away.

Fred Diamond: One thing that we’ve heard from a lot of people – and I wish we had more time to go into this – is it’s a challenge for some of the more junior sales professionals right now because so much of sales is being in the room, seeing how people interact during presentations, seeing how people ask questions, seeing how more senior people interface with the customer. In the federal space there’s 5, 6, 7, 10 customers in any opportunity, you have pyramid, you have IT, you have program of course. It’s a challenge to be able to help people also understand the process as well. James Yeager, VP of Public Sector for CrowdStrike, thank you so much. Give us an action step, again we have a couple dozen people watching today’s webcast. Thank you all so much for giving us an hour of your time. To the people listening on the podcast, we have thousands of people each week who listen to our two podcasts. James, give us an action step, give us an idea, something they can implement today July 29th, 2020 before we say goodbye.

James Yeager: I would make a conscious effort to carve out a dedicated portion of your day whether you want to say, “I’m going to do it first thing in the morning” or, “I’ll wrap it around my lunch break” because you’re sitting at your kitchen counter now, you’re not out entertaining people. Whether you do it at the end of the day or even if you carve it up and do it before your calls, be prepared. Study your customer, study the prospect, know what their organization stands for, what their mission statement is. If you’re going to be talking to an individual, CIO, we talk to a lot of Chief Information Security Officers, go do your research on the internet. See if they’ve spoken on any webcasts or if they’ve been to AMERItalk event or a FedScoop event. What’s top of mind for them?

Mash it up against what your company stands for, what your value propositions are, the outcomes that you’re trying to help your customers achieve. Curate your message, train yourself on a message, get a full command of it because when the lights come on and you get in front of that customer, albeit virtually nowadays, they’re going to make a judgement on you. If you don’t have the ability to allow them to differentiate you from your peers, you may never get that second call. Whether it’s a first impression that could be a lasting one or whether it’s a follow-up call or everything that you do, even in your emails, really put some time. A lot of people get away from this, Fred, because it’s laborious and it becomes a little bit of a chore but we’ve got to stay with that. It’s an important ingredient and it’s a fundamental lesson that I would encourage all of our sales reps and sales leaders to make sure that they maintain.

Fred Diamond: One of the things that we’ve learned over the course of the last four months is in the federal side it’s a little different because right now you’re doing a whole bunch of transactions but a lot of markets weren’t doing a lot of transactions and if you’re not doing transactions but you’re a sales professional, what are some of the things you should be doing? Get better at certain skills, study your customer, really understand what they’re going to be challenged with so you can bring them solutions. James Yeager, our audience thanks you so much. To the audience today, thank you all so much.

James Yeager: Thanks, Fred.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 257: CrowdStrike Public Sector Leader James Yeager Offers Unique and Specific Tips on How to Best Approach Senior Level Prospects Right Now first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

The IES Women in Sales Leadership Forum kicks off November 15. Register now!

EPISODE 189: Sales Star Carrie-Anne Mosley Shares Lessons Learned at Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and Now Amazon Web Services

CAM’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If you start with your customer in the center of everything you do and work backwards from there from a sales process perspective, and you’ve cultivated your partners along the way, your journey will be successful. If you are adding value at all points along the way, your journey will be successful.”

Carrie-Anne Mosley, known as CAM, is a Sales Leader for Amazon Web Services Enterprise Sales.

Prior to coming to Amazon Web Services she held sales leadership positions at SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com.

She was listed as a mentor on James Yeager’s SGC episode.

Find CAM on LinkedIn!

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

CAM: What I sell today is innovation for my customers. Amazon is truly one of the most innovative companies in the world right now, perhaps the most innovative company and I see this role as really the culmination of everything I’ve done in my career. It allows me to bring an affinity for cloud technology and combine that with a value proposition that’s really exceptional for customers. At Amazon, we’re all about customer obsession, that’s our #1 leadership principle and as a company we live by leadership principles which has an amazing result not only on our customers and their businesses, which we add significant value to, but also internally.

It’s an interesting phenomena, the leadership principles aren’t just something that we hang on the wall here. It’s something that every employee – sales, operations, from the person at the front desk to the person on the top floor – we all live by these leadership principles and we really use them in our day to day. What it creates is a very frictionless sales environment which is nice because I’ve been in organizations where you felt like the sales team had one set of goals and various teams within the company were almost working against them. We don’t have that here because we’re all working around these common leadership principles, so it’s a very unique situation. To have the top leadership principle be customer obsession is also a wonderful situation for me because over the years I’ve built great customer relationships and being in an environment where the focus is on positive customer outcomes is truly – I want to end my career here in 12, 15 years.

Fred Diamond: Who are the types of customers specifically within the customer and audiences that you sell to?

CAM: Traditional software customers like the CIO as well as business people within IT. We also work a lot with lines of business like call center, supply chain management, customer innovation to help drive project. One of the great things that cloud computing has unlocked for customers is the ability to fail fast and fail cheap, so customers are willing to experiment more with the products that they take to market and the innovations that they’re bringing because the technology to do those experiments is cheaper and easier and faster than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

That’s what I really love, to see customers have an idea for a new product offering and then prototype that using our solution. Because it’s cloud, if the prototype doesn’t work out they turn it off and they stop paying or if it’s a crazy success they just turn up the volume and the solution scales. It’s a really unique time for our customers in that sense.

Fred Diamond: Why would someone choose Amazon Web Services as their cloud provider as compared to some of the competition?

CAM: It’s really based on that first leadership principle of customer obsession. We have a unique partnership with our customers, we don’t call them at the end of the quarter and offer additional discounts. I just celebrated my first quarter close with Amazon and it was quite uneventful because there was nothing unnatural happening to try to convince people to consume more software or sign purchase orders. This is the first time in my sales career that I can say that, so the day came and went, actually which was very unique. No one was calling a customer on a holiday asking them to sign or take a look at their email and I love that about Amazon. It’s really refreshing, we work with customers in a very partner-focused way and we work with their business. When they’re happy and they’re ready to consume more of our offering, they do that and we allow for that. It’s quite self-service, actually.

Fred Diamond: Take us back to the beginning of your career, how did you first get into sales as a career?

CAM: Quite by accident. I was working in IT at Booz Allen Hamilton and one of my colleagues, Kristin Smith, who went on to have a very significant career at federal sources said to me, “Doesn’t seem like you’re very happy in this role being a developer.” She was absolutely right, not only was I not happy but I don’t think I was particularly skilled at it. She said, “My husband works at Oracle, his name is Mike Smith” she introduced me to him and she helped me get my first interview at Oracle and prepare for that. I was able to secure a role in telesales at Oracle. When I resigned from Booz Allen, my boss said, “I think you’ll be perfect at that role because from what I’ve seen you’re really good at asking your parents for money and you like to talk on the phone.” [Laughs] Little did I know that I had some natural attributes of a salesperson and I went into telesales at Oracle which launched my career.

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

CAM: Interestingly, I was only in a sales role at Oracle for a year because I was actually pretty horrible at it at first. I was uncomfortable calling people and talking with them although at that time, because there was really not much of an internet to speak of, the government certainly wasn’t using it, customers welcomed our phone calls. I think it helped break up their day in the early 90’s, but I wasn’t really a natural at it at first. After a year I became a solutions consultant to sales engineer and worked my way up through the SC ranks at Oracle. What that allowed me to do is it allowed me to work alongside many of the people that you have interviewed for this podcast and see them in action. About 8  years later I transitioned back into sales leadership, so I was a sales rep for a year, then became an SC, became an SC leader and leader of leaders and then I became a sales manager.

Fred Diamond: Obviously right now one of the main themes that comes up all the time is how do you get through? People don’t have to take your calls anymore, people get so many calls from sales professionals. I’m just curious, you were at Booz Allen, you were a developer and then you went into telesales and became a systems engineer. You’ve become a very successful sales leader at some great places. Did you know when you were in college or in high school that sales is something you might excel in? Did it ever occur to you at all or just never?

CAM: Absolutely never, I thought I wanted to be an attorney and business person but I didn’t even know sales was a career option. Perhaps we’re giving people more exposure to sales as a career now, but at least in my world when I was growing up my parents were both in the fire service, so we just didn’t know any salespeople. It didn’t seem like a viable career option and I think a couple colleges now actually offer degrees in sales but for the most part it’s not something that people really perceive as a career path when they’re really young. I’m hoping that podcasts like this are changing that perception in the market.

Fred Diamond: What are you brilliant at? Tell us about your area of expertise. 

CAM: I would say my area of expertise is probably writing, written communication. I’m a very strong writer and I think that goes back to my college days. Government and politics was my undergraduate degree, I had to do a lot of writing and I’ve really worked hard to cultivate that because written communication in this industry is very important. From the first email that you send to a customer to the written proposal that you present to them and business case now that you help them write. Much of what we do is help our customers sell internally the project that they want to work with you on. I found that having really strong written communication skills is a true necessity.

Fred Diamond: Curiously on the cloud side, is everybody now making cloud decisions on which providers to use? Are people still on the fence? What have you seen? Have we made the paradigm shift where everybody is about cloud now or is it still in the early stage where people are still making all the decisions to make the move?

CAM: I think different industries are in different phases of adoptions, highly regulated industries obviously are much more cautious. Healthcare, financial services, government are more cautious about certain workloads going into the cloud. The lower risk workloads seem to make it to the cloud first although ironically many customers tip-toed into the cloud in the HR space, whether it was work day or success factors. I consider HR to be a pretty important workload [Laughs] so I find that a lot of it is a leadership confidence and comfort level with the cloud as well as an economic decision.

Fred Diamond: Again, James Yeager mentioned you as one of his mentors on his Sales Game Changers podcast – James Yeager is VP of Public Sector at CrowdStrike. You must have had some amazing sales mentors as well. Again, you worked at SAP, Oracle, Salesforce. Why don’t you tell us about some of your sales mentors and how they impacted your career?

CAM: When I think about my career, I think about four people that had really significant impact. Two early on at Oracle, one was Gary Newman and the lesson that he taught me which was so valuable for an emerging sales leader was that there’s a big difference between management and leadership. You really have to cultivate your skills in both areas and work to develop a balance between managing and leading. Sales reps in particular are, I think a very generally emotional group. I often call it, I do a little bit of therapy but getting that balance between leadership and management is very important and also cultivating those skills yourself and with your employees.

Even individual contributors – and many good salespeople are individual contributors for their entire career and that’s okay – but making sure that they have some management skills as well as some leadership skills, it’s really important to their long-term success. At the end of the day even an individual contributor is managing a virtual team within your company, so their abilities and your mentoring them on those skills is so important as a sales leader. Plus, it helps to really develop the employee whether they’re an individual contributor or you see them on that management path. All too often, if somebody says, “I want to stay an individual contributor forever” we let them stay in that box and we forget to cultivate these skills so I find that to be very important.

Another great leader at Oracle was a woman named Hilarie Koplow-McAdams and she really pushed me out of my comfort zone. I will tell you that at the time I didn’t like it, there were many times where I can remember hanging up the phone with a scowl on my face because she really pushed me hard on a forecast call. One time I remember I was applying for an internal promotion and she made me interview twice, fly to California and interview twice because it wasn’t good enough the first time. However, looking back I so appreciate everything that she did for me because what she did was push me so far out of my comfort zone and show me that what I was delivering at the time was not the best I had inside of me. It really helped to make me who I am today and helped me really cultivate some of the skills that are hard in sales about asking tough questions and about uncomfortable silence between you and your customer. She really drove me to that and I truly appreciate that.

Fred Diamond: That reminds me of a story, we interviewed Ron Police who also worked at Oracle and he gave a great story about how he felt he was ready for his next move into leadership and his mentor at the time and leader was Jay Nussbaum who of course, ran Oracle Federal for a long time, public sector. Jay just said, “You’re not ready” and Ron had to make a decision on what was he going to do now to be successful to get to that next level. He gave a great story on his podcast about that, so it’s good to hear that you took it for that, you understood, “What do I now need to do?” You probably weren’t very happy about it, Oracle had a culture of a very high achievement and high performance but good for you for looking back and understanding that.

CAM: Yes, those two leaders were very influential early in my career. Then sort of fast-forward a number of years and when I arrived at Salesforce I worked for a gentleman named Barton Phillips who at that point took me as a relationship seller and a relationship manager and helped me make the move and become a business value seller, and helped me take my team which was a group of talented people and produce amazing results. Our average attainment as a team was 140% of our number and it was because Barton really helped us to see that if we weren’t tying the benefits of what we were selling to the customer’s business outcomes, we were not going to be successful in helping the customer make that case to their board of directors or their C-suite to make the purchases. It was such a big pivot for me, partially I’d been selling only to the government previously and this was my first time selling to companies. It really changed the way I look at the selling process and our need to partner with the customers towards success.

Interestingly my fourth sales mentor is my mom. She was a fire chief, she’s now retired but what she did was have to sell a lot within her organization. What we don’t realize is sales is in everybody’s business whether you’re in the government or whether you’re selling products or services to people. What she taught me, the lesson is so valuable and I use it so much today is, “Remember, when you’re a salesperson it’s not just you selling, it’s you have to sell external to your customer but you have to do a lot of internal selling as well.” Those links and connections you make inside of your company will really be valuable.

I’ll give you an example, because a lot of times salespeople, we get into the sale cycle and then we call in groups like legal or operations or contracts and we’re asking them to work nights and weekends to help us with our sales effort and we call them with fire drills. We should be calling them outside of the sale cycle to say, “How are you measured? What’s important to your success?” so that we build those bridges internally and then we can call in those people in our time of needs and they’re much more inclined to help us be successful.

I’ll give you an example of where I did this and it was pretty amazing the results that it had. I realized that many companies including Oracle, SAP, everyone that I’ve worked with had a shared services center somewhere outside of North America. When I got to SAP, the shared services center I think was in Argentina and a lot of our contracts were generated there. At the end of the quarter those folks became very important to us but the problem was, because it was a shared services center, it was just that it was sort of this email address or these people that we couldn’t reach. I got to SAP and I joined in Q4 so I wasn’t as busy as a lot of other people normally would have been in Q4 but I recognize that this group down in Latin America was very important.

What I did was I made an effort to go through the corporate online directory which wasn’t very easy, find all the people down there that supported my team in some way and then I sent them a note saying, “Let me share the results for this year. We didn’t have the success that we wanted, but here were the deals that we closed with your help. By the way, have a happy holiday season.” In doing that I got so many emails back from people saying, “I have never heard that a deal I worked on actually closed.” They got no feedback ever from salespeople, so then I made that a normal progression. If you were someone working on my deal or my team’s deal, I made sure we’d let you know when those deals close.

We built that bond with those folks and where it really helped us was the Saturday at the end of the quarter when my customer’s saying, “I’ll sign it this weekend but I need these 5 changes to the contract” and I needed someone in Argentina to make those changes. I had people then that I could pick up the phone and call who would do me that favor. It’s when you build those bridges during the non-stress times, during the times when you don’t need anything with contracts, operations, legal, it’s amazing how those guys will go out of their way for you when you really need it.

Fred Diamond: A lot of the great sales professionals that we talked to, they understand their internal processes so well. I’m just curious, that’s such a great story. How much work did it take you to start building those relationships to this organization down in Argentina?

CAM: It was a time investment. I remember at the time I think I spent 90 minutes to 2 hours actually doing that which at the end of a fiscal year was a lot of time to invest, but I can remember more than a handful of occasions where I said to myself, “Thank god I did that” or my reps were like, “How did you get that done?” It really made me a hero to my sales team as we went years down the road because we had those people internally that I could just pick up the phone and call where other sales leaders were not having that same. Even in the North America team with SAP in particular, I had built such strong bridges with people across the organization that I was able to pick up that phone a lot and get things done or get somebody’s approver to take a look at the Q a little faster to get an approval pushed through so we could get a contract changed, because I had that credibility and rapport with the internal resource ahead of time.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great story. One thing that a lot of young people ask me for some bits of advice and one thing I tell them is, “Get to know everybody in your company or as many people as you can and understand what drives them and what are their goals and things along those lines.” Just don’t understand your sales process or your manager and your inside sales, but what does finance do? What does the contracts team do? What does your documentation team do if there’s something like that?

CAM: And don’t be afraid to ask, “How are you measured? Can I ask how you’re measured?” When you ask it sincerely like that, people are willing to tell you. It’s not like you’re asking them how much they make, you’re asking them, “How are you measured so that I can make sure that we can reach a point of mutual success?” People really appreciate that thoughtful conversation.

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

CAM: For me personally, I think helping customers sometimes realize that either their process is broken or their trusted adviser is giving them a biased bit of information. Obviously I sell software and services and there’s a group of companies that do implementations and advising and sometimes the goals are not mutually aligned there because the more services you sell, some of those companies that are advising our customers, that’s how they’re measured whereas we’re trying to save customers’ money – which usually means less services.

It’s really aligning the goals of all parties servicing a customer around the customer’s goals. I believe that in every relationship between a software services provider and a professional services organization and a customer, there are mutually beneficial goals. Everyone can win, but getting everyone on that same page can be challenging at times, particularly in this world where people do self-service consume so much information.

I would say that’s one challenge and then certainly we always have a challenge in finding top talent. We’re always hiring, Amazon is currently hiring salespeople but particularly sales engineers, those pre-sales resources. Finding people that can be builders and showers and teach customers, it’s a very amazing skill set, I admire all solutions consultants, SA’s, whatever you call them, architects. Different companies call them different things but they are a valuable commodity in the market and an important part to many selling motions, that team that we have of the technical resource and the salesperson. I would say finding the talent to support the sale cycle is challenging.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, what are some of the things you’re doing to solve that challenge?

CAM: We have a lot of meetups, technology meetups where we bring technical resources together to learn new things and that’s where we find a lot of talent. We’re also looking for talent for our customers as well, so it’s about serving us as well as the customers.
Fred Diamond: Why don’t you take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career you’re most proud of?
CAM: I’m going to talk about a deal that we did at Salesforce and it was actually selling to the government. While I don’t sell to the government anymore, we did a large transaction with the state of Florida and it was one of their first – or it may have been their first – cloud transaction. We went down to Florida and I think that we were only selected as a finalist in this because our cost was so much less than the competition. In fact, there were two other bids from an enterprise software company that I had worked for or I did work for in my career, and we went down there and I can remember talking with the customer and instead of giving an opening pitch that was a technology based pitch, I took a big chance. I could tell that this room full of people, it was a big, huge evaluation committee, probably 15 or 20 people, some technical, some non-technical, but I think they were just so incredulous about the cost of the cloud-based solution versus the other proposals they had received.

Instead of talking technology, I talked to them about why I left my prior employer and went to Salesforce. The epiphany that I had in my career which was I had been with an enterprise software provider, my last deal there we had sold about $2 million worth of software to the airport authority here, WMATA and the bid to implement it was $100 million. Ultimately they paid $58 million to implement $2 million worth of software and I thought to myself, “That is the definition of insanity and companies can’t afford to do that, there’s got to be a better way.”

I looked and at the time, it was 2007, and Salesforce.com was there and they were offering a different option to companies. The government wasn’t quite there yet in terms of adoption but they were slowly getting there on the federal side, not as much as state and local at that point. I joined Salesforce, I quit my 14 year tenure job at this enterprise software company because I just felt like it wasn’t giving the best to customers, it wasn’t offering the best for customers because of that model of high software costs combined with ridiculous implementation costs. I moved to Salesforce and I found a totally different paradigm in the private sector and I did that for a few years working with some big companies in this area and then I moved to public sector and evangelized that for the customers.

I told the story about the $58 million implementation to the state of Florida and why that had changed, and I talked about what some of the commercial customers had been doing in cloud. It took about half hour, but I could see people nodding and starting to say, “Yes, it doesn’t make sense. Yes, there should be another way” and they started to believe. Then my solution consultant came after me and he started his presentation and I’ll never forget it, it’s a gentleman named Ryan Upton. He said, “I used to work in on-premises software as a technology support person and I had two answers and they were no, or 18 months, regardless of the question. Either I couldn’t give it to you or I could give it to you in 18 months” and the point was so well taken by the customers because they realized cloud was a new day for them.

Ultimately we came from behind in that opportunity and the result was we saved Florida tax payers about $50 million with that system.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a question about the sales process there. You said you decided to go with a different route, did you decide that a week before and you were prepared for your presentation or did you decide that in the morning? I’m just curious, think about that from a sales perspective, tell us about that.

CAM: We talked about it internally and there was a lot of debate about this because people were like, “Talk about the technology” but in my heart of hearts I had a gut feeling that this was the way to go and I talked to Barton about it and he said, “You can do it, but it’s really high risk.” I convinced the team that it was the way to go because people buy from people. I could talk about the benefits of the technology all day long but A, it wasn’t a particularly technical crowd and B, it was an emotional thing for them. They were emotionally used to something different so I had to bring them in an emotional way to something totally new. My own personal experience and a major career risk that I had taken was what led them to that. We all walked out of there and we were like, “I can’t believe it worked” but it did. I would encourage salespeople to remember that customers are emotional, it’s their career that’s on the line when you’re selling to them so don’t be afraid to be honest and get emotional and make an emotional appeal to customers if you are really that passionate and they’re not seeing the benefit that your solution or what you’re selling can bring for them and their organization.

Fred Diamond: Of course, the process you took to get that message across was unique and I’m thinking back, it’s 2007. We’re doing this podcast in 2019 so I asked you the question before, has everybody adopted cloud already? In 2007 that was 12 years ago, obviously that was way in the early stage in the Wild West, if you will. You understood the risks that the customer didn’t want to take, especially when you’re talking about markets like government and education and public sector, of course.

The customers will make a mistake, especially places that you’ve worked at before. You mentioned $2 million in software and $50 million of implementation, no customer wants to be the guy who brought in one of those types of technologies that cost $500 million and brought the company down. Knowing what the customer could bear and what the customer was challenged with even though you went with this unique way of getting the message across, that was pretty powerful.

CAM: I think the unique way too is people need to realize, sales professionals, that they have to cultivate their storytelling skills. That is so critical to the role because at those times when you need to make that emotional appeal to someone, it’s your storytelling ability, not only your Rolodex of stories that you have to tell, but the way you present them can make or break your argument.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question the move into sales? Did you ever think back and say to yourself, “This is too hard, this was a bad decision”?

CAM: I can remember having those moments at the end of the quarter when I was a telesales leader for sure and there were certainly a few times where I was asked to, I like to call it force-cast somethings where you get the call saying you must raise your forecast when you know there’s no deals to support it. Only in those moments did I have a regret of moving over. I would say for about the last 10 years I’ve had no regrets at all, I’m really happy that I made the transition and what it has allowed me is the ability to work with some amazing people but also help salespeople make life changing opportunities and success for their families. That is really what’s so unique about this career.

When you fail it’s awful because somebody who has invested a lot of time away from their family has to go home and tell their spouse that they can’t take a vacation or they can’t get that new car that they need, so the heartbreak is really there but when the success happens, it’s so great for the customers but it’s also really great for the salespeople. Some life changing things can happen and I’ve seen that, I’ve had such a wonderful pleasure of seeing people able to buy their dream home or a new car or retire early or give back to the community because they have additional time and money because they’ve made this choice of being in sales.

That’s what I love about sales, is it’s not truly a 9 to 5 job, it’s not a 9 to 5 career, you can take some time out of your day if you manage your schedule well to make it to your kid’s ball game or volunteer. That, I think is a unique opportunity that we have that many people who have a job or they have to be in the office all the time do not have. We do work sometimes extra hours and I would say sales careers are unusually high in stress, but the rewards can be great and that’s what’s such an amazing opportunity for sales professionals.

[Sponsor Break]

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

CAM: A couple things. If you start with the customer in the center and work backwards in your sales strategy development, you’re going to be much more successful. How can you get to know your customer, get to know your customer’s customer and then realize what value, whatever you’re selling has to both of those. Then articulate that to the customer throughout the sale cycle. That will help you help your customer to make an internal business case to buy your solution. A lot of times we don’t realize that we’re selling on features and functions, but it’s really all about the outcomes and if I had realized that earlier in my career I would have been much more successful selling many times.

Couple things: be really smart. I think my time as a sales engineer although my skills became outdated relatively quickly in my role [Laughs], having some competency in the solution that you sell is really important. Even more important is understanding the customer and the customers’ business. As I suggested, asking your internal partners how they’re measured, understanding how your customer is measured is equally important because you can’t be selling something that’s obviously going to cost their company money without understanding the motivation as to why they’re making the investment in the long term example or how it impacts.

I’ll give you an example on this. When I was selling cloud computing it was a different paradigm not only for sellers and consumers of the product but also for the financial element of their company and their CFO because we were shifting CAPEX to OPEX. I remember one year we did a great deal when I was at Salesforce with a company, it was the end of the customer’s fiscal year so a December deal. They were pretty bummed that it wasn’t my end of the fiscal year because it didn’t allow them to negotiate quite the deal they were hoping, but we did do the deal in their time frame which was the end of December. Fast forward 12 months, the customer gets an invoice and it was annual in advance billing so they were being billed for the second year of the three year contract they had signed. I got a call in December and the customer says, “Cam, we can’t pay this” and I said, “Well, why?” and he says, “This is OPEX. Did you know that our executive board has their bonuses based on EBITDA? This is really going to mess us up. What are you going to do for me?”

Crisis was averted, we were able to get net 45 terms so they could pay in their new fiscal year in January without penalty, but that was really eye opening for me because I hadn’t even thought, “In 12 months what’s the impact of these guys’ executive bonuses?” I never even thought about that, so challenging customers to think before they buy. We’re so afraid to ask, I was early in my sales career, so afraid to ask the customer these questions that might derail my deal because I didn’t want to remind somebody of something that might derail it down the road, but now I find that you’ve got to get that stuff on the table so far in advance.

I’ve worked with salespeople who almost scared the customer by telling them, “This is going to cost you X amount really early in the sale cycle, a really huge amount.” Similarly, you want to give the customer all the obstacles and objections that they may hear internally along the buying cycle as early in the sales process as possible so you can get those resolved. Whether you’re selling cloud or on premises, you have to know the financial impact of both of those models for your customer and understand the CFO’s motivation versus the CIO’s motivation.

You really have to understand who you’re selling to and then what the objection is going to be that they’re going to face internally and help address those things early in the sale cycle. You only get that by selling broadly in the account, never being single-threaded, you learn that in your first year of sales. I can’t tell you how many times in my first sales job at Oracle the guy or the gal had told me, “Yes, I’m your person, only talk to me” and we were led down a path of disappointment. That’s the first thing you learn in sales but it’s really understanding the customer’s motivation and their business drivers that could impact your deal at the 11th hour. Then of course if you’re selling technology or really anything at this point to a company, vet it with the customer’s security people early and often. That’s a last minute one that always comes in to derail people, security checks or legal.

A new trend we’re seeing is third party legal, customers hiring third party negotiators to negotiate enterprise agreements and let me tell you, that will push your deal out a quarter or two anytime because those guys are paid to bill hours, so they do. You really have to ask a lot of questions of many people within the organization because sometimes even the highest level person can lead you down the wrong path. I will tell you an example of this, I had a deal at Salesforce and I talked to the CEO and he told me that they were going to do the deal. Everything was great and we were all set but then at the 11th hour, the parent company – hadn’t factored those guys in – came and overruled the CEO. They ultimately did the deal but it was not by the end of February or the end of January when I needed the deal done so we had a little bit of a heartbreak there in terms of missed expectations. You want to check, double check and then really understand the customer’s business to a degree you never thought you needed to so that you can anticipate obstacles.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to ask a slightly different question that we haven’t asked before on the podcast. Again, you’re in enterprise sales with Amazon Web Services, you’ve worked for SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, you just mentioned a second ago the deal you expected to come in this quarter but then the CEO was overruled so it lasted another quarter. What would be some of your advice for some of the young professionals listening to the podcast about that process of sales? The fact that we get a lot of these people, we talked before about the fact that you were able to engage with people when you were in telesales with Oracle. Right now it’s so hard for people to get through and a lot of sales is now on the phone, inside sales, if you will. Sometimes when someone gets a conversation now they think the deal is halfway through because they spoke to a human being, right? What is some of your advice for some of the people, not just the young people, but people on the phone about pacing of your deals and understanding that it’s not going to happen on your time frame (it would be great if it would) and understanding all these other factors that need to come in?

CAM: I think it’s very important to be transparent about the sales process. Customers know that they’re being sold to, so I find that they are more transparent with you the more transparent you are with them. When I wasn’t selling to customers on a specific deal, I was just talking, I started talking about the sales process. Normally we want to build rapport and then we want to not talk about that, but we should. When I was at SAP in particular I started doing what I called proactive education about buying from SAP to the customers I was meeting. I would talk with them about their needs, about what they saw coming down the road but then I would say, “Let me tell you what the process is on our side because you’re going to need us to bring resources to bear, to help you consume and buy and implement what we’re selling you. I have to be able to do some prediction about what your time frame is, so if we could be very transparent with each other about time frames, I’m going to be able to get you the best resources as well as I’m going to be able to ultimately give you the best discount.”

In many environments – this is not true with Amazon, Amazon is very standard pricing – transparency is actually great because organizations are trying to do deals earlier in the year for linearity’s sake so that they don’t end up with 90% of their transactions in December when people are also trying to celebrate the holiday season. What I started telling customers at SAP which was absolutely true is Q2 is the new Q4. “We’ve trained you that we’re going to really deeply discount in Q4 and that’s not the case anymore, we’d like to do deals with you in Q2, in Q3 and when we can work together collaboratively through the process of your buying, we’re going to be able to bring the best resources to bear for you and get you the best discount. I promise.”

Sometimes customers don’t believe you because again, companies have trained them that the end of the quarter means really deep discounts, but if you can really prove to a customer that you’re serious, bring on your leadership, have them talk about it, great things can happen. I will tell you, in my early time at SAP I did a great deal with a company that was having an event, they were breaking their business into two companies. We did a really great deal in Q2 and it was great for the customer and great for SAP from a timing perspective. It was so good for the customer that they felt good about it and that CIO went onto another company and I leveraged him actually several times during my time at SAP. I said to people, “Call Tony, he will tell you what a great deal we did together in Q2 that was good for both of our companies.” I encourage salespeople to be transparent with their customers. If you want me to bring technical resources or if you want us to give you some demonstration or POC type of resources, here’s what I need from you, Mr. or Mrs. Customer, to make that happen.

If you can encourage transparency, I find that really changes the game with customers, but customers are inherently a little skeptical about salespeople so you have to work to build that trust. It usually takes one or two transactions with a given customer to build that trust to prove to them that you’ve done all you can. Then you have to make sure, though that you are negotiating with the right person because sometimes what you find is you did get the best deal for your business buyer and then it goes to procurement and their procurement guy is incented on how many points they can reduce from that price. You have to understand the process and I ask, I’ll ask a procurement agent, “Are you incented to reduce the value of this deal?” Sometimes they tell you, sometimes they don’t. I often will ask the business people if they know how the procurement guy is incented. Surprising to me, many of them haven’t asked the question so I coach my customers, “Ask your procurement guy, ‘how are you measured?'”

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

CAM: I would say two things. First is be educated. A few years ago I started reading the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and Inc, and listening, my favorite radio stations now are XM119 which is Bloomberg News and XM132 which is the Wharton Business School. Those two radio stations have made me smart on topics that I never thought I would be smart on. The great thing is when you have that one chance, you get that one opportunity – I was once invited as a handler of an executive to be in a room full of my customers’ executives and they were talking about bitcoin. Well, thankfully that morning on Bloomberg News as I drove in there they had a whole segment on it and on the competition in the market, so I was able to go up to a CFO and a CIO that I had very little rapport with and engage in the intelligent conversation with them and they were stunned at my knowledge that I had gotten as an auto expert listening to the radio that morning on the way in.

I would say do everything that you can to be well-rounded so that when you have that opportunity to speak with key decision makers you can say something intelligent, and if you can’t say something intelligent, don’t say anything. Silence is golden and don’t miss that opportunity for silence. I find that lifelong learning and knowing things about business and business trends and the fact that the federal service is going to have a big report out today, those are things that are important to your customers’ executives. If you’re not aware of those things you’re going to be at a disadvantage and you’re going to miss that opportunity, and those are habits that I wish I had cultivated earlier in my sales career.

Couple habits that I did cultivate early in my sales career that really helped me also were I’m super into sports, sports is the common conversation piece so it helps you have a common ground with customers. Having something to speak with customers about to break the ice, whether it’s business – which is a hard topic because they sometimes can be pretty knowledgeable depending on who you’re talking about – or sports, those are great, safe topics. Not every customer is into sports but it’s a great safe topic to talk about, or the customer, the customer loves to talk about themselves. Be prepared to ask them questions, always have a clean joke in case you need it.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously on sports, what are some of your favorite sports that you like to talk about?

CAM: Thankfully one of the lures that SAP used to draw me to that job when I took it was the fact that I’d be working with the sports leagues. I’ve had the opportunity to work with the NHL, the NFL and NBA and I’m a huge football gal, I’m a big Cowboys fan and my husband is a big Steelers fan. We’re big hockey family so the NHL again, I used to be a Cubs season ticket holder but my husband’s from Pittsburgh so now we’re Penguins fans. I find that having those conversation starters with customers and being comfortable is really important, it’s really important to have rapport and have cocktail party conversation at your disposal.

The way that over my career I’ve cultivated that is truly by instead of listening, I mean, I love to listen to music and that’s great but listening to the Wharton Business School and hearing about a new startup that’s interesting and might be interesting to your customer. That Wharton Business radio XM132 is incredible. One of the greatest things is they have a lot of different authors and when I was getting my job at Amazon I’d heard about a book that had just come out on building world-class organizations. I sent that book to three executives at Amazon and they really appreciated it and it helped me get into a very difficult company to get into.

I’m a big advocate in hearing things and then making that connection with someone in your network and then cultivating that by either sending a book or sending a copy of the article, something. I really am a big advocate into networking and using this learning platform to have that ability to make connections within your network.

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

CAM: We do a lot of bringing the full value of Amazon to our customers because while we have a great AWS offering, we also thankfully have a wonderful part of our company that is a supply chain machine. One of the big connections that I’m making now for customers is while you’re not selling books or shirts or anything, you are selling something and you’re moving to digital. How did Amazon reimagine business and how did we create a culture of innovation? Right now what I’m working on is bringing that innovation message to my customers and bringing resources from Amazon to help train them.

We’re actually conducting sessions called Innovate like Amazon with some of our technology partners, with some of our customers to say, “What’s something in your business today that we can help you reimagine the way we reimagined selling books?” When you can bring that value of something that you’ve done or your company does, even if it’s in a totally unrelated area, to your customer. If your company, for example, runs great customer conferences, does your customer have a customer conference? How can you bring the team that had this record breaking conference to talk to the customer’s team that does that same thing to be more effective? Or if your company’s website is amazing and now your customer is trying to digitize their offering, how can you help them with that?

I think when you can make connections from either your network or within parts of your company that do things exceptionally and bring that to your customer, you’re adding value and that’s what the customer wants, that’s why they’re going to take your call. For us at Amazon, we’re very fortunate because we have a really unique situation but some people don’t return our calls – it’s not very often – but sometimes a customer is really wedded to a competitive offering and we understand that. The conversation that we can have with customers about how some of our lessons learned along this way of taking a traditional brick and mortar industry and putting them online and then the supply chain that supports that is a really unique value proposition.

We’re going to customers with some of that messaging too and now we have a customer who was one of my customers at SAP, they are a customer of a competitor but they are going to come and take a warehouse tour with us so that they can see how we operate and take some lessons learned from our business to theirs, and we welcome that. How can we drive innovation for customers and help them reimagine things in their business? That’s what I’m working on today.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire our listeners today? You’ve given us so many, give us one deep one to end the podcast with.

CAM: If you start with your customer in the center of everything you do and work backwards from there from sales process perspective and you’ve cultivated your partners along the way, your journey will be successful. Obviously if you are adding value at all points along the way, your journey will be successful. Happy selling.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 189: Sales Star Carrie-Anne Mosley Shares Lessons Learned at Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and Now Amazon Web Services first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.