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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 15, 2020. It featured sales leaders Susan Lee (MOI), Christopher Ware (NAIOP) and Joe Alvarez (NOS).]

EPISODE 224: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Susan Lee, Christopher Ware and Joe Alvarez

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Susan Lee’s Podcast . Listen to Christopher Ware’s Podcast. Listen to Joe Alvarez’ Podcast.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy starts from the top down. It starts from the president of the company and it goes all the way down. Communicating, connecting, letting people know that we understand, “We’re challenged just like you’re challenged in your business” is everything to the empathetic part of supporting your clients.”

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us what your top priorities are, Joe Alvarez? Why don’t you get us started?

Joe Alvarez: Thanks, Fred. Thanks to everybody listening to this podcast. I’m with a company called National Office Systems, we are a firm that is in a niche product, we do specially storage such as high density storage and specialty lockers, we also have a technology division that does document imaging and asset tracking using RFID technology. We have a division that does installations and installs many of our products, we’ve done a tremendous amount of glass walls so that’s NOS.

When you ask about the priorities right now, aside from being a sales leader in my company I also work in managing the entire firm and my top three priorities have been #1, take care of our #1 asset which is our employees, keep them all employed has been a goal of ours during this crazy time that we’re living making certain that business is running financially sound. It’s a crazy time of year to be doing business where people may be open, may not be open, may be paying you and the third thing that is really important to us is to provide a very safe environment to our employees.

Fred Diamond: Christopher Ware, you’re with NAIOP, why don’t you give us a 20 second overview on NAIOP and tell us what your top priorities are?

Christopher Ware: Thanks for having me on. NAIOP is an international trade association, we have members throughout the United States and Canada and our members develop, own, invest and manage commercial real estate, primarily office, mixed use and industrial. Of course, when we say industrial we talk about warehouse and distribution space so if you’ve ordered something from Amazon, you’ve ordered something that’s passed through one of our members’ buildings. I’ve been with NAIOP for 19 years now and sales career is over 20 years.

As far as our top priorities, of course employee safety as Joe mentioned is extremely important, also keeping people’s spirits up is extremely important as well dealing with the mental aspect of things. Sales is a stressful job anyway and then you add what’s going on now on top of that, it can be overwhelming so that’s a priority. In terms of our customers, for me it’s really about maintaining relationships and reaching out even though we may not have a whole lot to sell right now, the relationship is essential. That’s really the #1 sales priority for me, to keep our connections up with the people that we do business with.

Fred Diamond: Susan Lee, it’s great to have you on today’s webinar as well. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about MOI and tell us what your top three priorities are right now as well. It doesn’t have to be three, what your top priorities are.

Susan Lee: MOI is a company that partners with design, commercial real estate, project management firms and clients. We furnish their spaces, we do everything from the front door to the back door and we do this so that employees are engaged, they can build cultural strength in their organization and businesses can be very productive. I’m happy to be here, happy tax day for me because we don’t have to file taxes so I’m excited about that. Our priorities are staying connected as well with our people, from an executive team communicating and staying transparent with the rest of the organization, everybody is a little worried right now so open communication, open dialogue is important. Also connecting with our clients, we work with a lot of people that are essential businesses so making sure that our employees are safe and our customers are safe as we engage in projects with them.

Fred Diamond: A quick question here. Susan and Joe, you both have worked together. Your companies work together and have worked together frequently over the years. I’m just curious, how are you talking to your partners right now? Again, you’ve both done a lot of business together. Is that also a relationship that partnerships are getting together, talking to each other and trying to figure things out? Susan, why don’t you take that first?

Susan Lee: We do talk on a daily basis. One thing that we are in the business of is providing furniture and furniture comes from states all over the country. As you’ve seen over the last few weeks, we’ve experienced shutdowns of states and shutdowns of businesses so staying in touch with our manufacturing partners is important to understand what products they’re producing, which factories are open. Also, making sure that our design partners, we’re honoring the work that they’ve done making sure that we’re talking to commercial real estate partners to make sure that if they have timelines of projects that need to be done, construction companies we’re connecting with as well. Joe, I know you’re probably experiencing the same thing, aren’t you?

Joe Alvarez: Yes I am, Susan. Interesting you say that, we have a lot of the same issues with our manufacturers, in different states different rules are being set in those different states. One thing we’ve done is also we’ve done a weekly meeting on Zoom with partners to hear what they’re going through and to understand. I want our folks to feel what they’re feeling and it’s a great communication hour that we spend talking to our business partners.

Fred Diamond: What’s something that’s been a big positive surprise that has come out of the last weeks that we’ve been through this situation?

Christopher Ware: I think being an association professional, associations is really about community, it’s about building relationships and the strength of those connections really have shown through recently. To give you a couple of examples, I posted some Zoom chats with regular sponsors and advertisers and other participants and people really appreciate that level of connection and that level of touch, and people really want to reach out, they want to connect. The association industry is uniquely positioned to help us be able to do that.

We also have been on the forefront of getting quality information out to our members so I’m very proud of our organization being able to pivot very quickly from bigger picture trends based type of reporting to information that our members can use right away. We’re providing almost all of that free of charge to the commercial real estate industry and that’s something that we feel is very important for us to do, but it’s also enabling us to reach new customers who maybe haven’t taken a look at NAIOP before. It’s a great opportunity to show our thought leadership, to show our expertise and also to connect people who desperately want to stay connected in this time.

Fred Diamond: One thing that we’re telling people is, “Now’s the time to show leadership to your constituency and bring them things that are going to help them.” How about you, Susan? What are some of the positive results that have happened for you and your company at this time?

Susan Lee: I’ll speak more about talking to the sellers, connecting with them. We run so fast every single day and I rarely get to talk to the sellers, we have about 30 sellers on staff and we rarely get to connect or talk. I’m seeing their kids, I’m seeing their pets, we’re being able to connect. This is a scary time for all of us, it’s so much uncertainty that we’re finding that we’re building strength together through this adversity. I think that’s one of the big things for us that we’re connecting with and also, our baseball hat game is really strong. A lot of baseball caps in these calls, that’s pretty cool.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? Why don’t you tell us something?

Joe Alvarez: It’s funny because a lot of what Susan just described, our companies work a lot together and talk a lot and we mimic a lot of the things that are working for each other so we’re doing a lot of the same things. One of the things in addition to getting to know your folks better, and I’m talking about all the employees, is to see how they come together. When things get tough, people come together and it’s actually awesome to see our folks taking care of each other. They’re sending lunches to the installation guys, they’re taking care of each other asking, they’re doing things that on an everyday situation they don’t have the time, they’re running too fast. It’s one of the good things that’s come out of this, you realize what’s important, Fred.

Fred Diamond: One of the reasons why we brought the three of you together is because you all sell things to customers who have offices.

What has changed for you? The interesting thing here is your customer has changed. I’ll give you an example, I talked to one of our members earlier this week who sells to state and local governments and he said they’re working around the clock because now they’re helping with getting medical supplies, medical devices and things supporting that. We have another member who sells to the entertainment industry and he said there’s nothing going on right now selling to them so they’re having to figure out, but what has changed for all three of you as sales leaders? Again, your customers have offices, in the past four weeks. Joe, why don’t we start with you? Your customers have offices, you excel in helping them optimize their space. What’s changed?

Joe Alvarez: Obviously a lot of our customers are not at their offices so how do you manage your folks and how you connect with them has been different. We’re using a lot of technology, we’re using a lot of Zoom, GoToMeeting, it’s been interesting to me that getting ahold of a client today is so much easier than it’s ever been before. One of the things that I’ve heard someone say, I think it was Susan before the meeting was that you know where they are, they’re available, they’re going to talk to you most of the time which is a wonderful thing. The second piece, there’s no travel time so you can go from meeting to meeting without worrying going from DC to Virginia or whatever. Like I said before, people seem to be willing to talk to you so it’s about building and developing those relationships right now to make sure you have empathy with them and being ready so that when they’re ready to take care of business, you’re going to be there for them.

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? Again, obviously you furnish offices in the real estate as well, so what’s changed for you as a sales leader?

Susan Lee: I believe it’s accessibility, being accessible for questions that come up. Also, we’re starting as an organization, our design team, our project management team, our sales team are all now working together to look at what’s next. We have a new normal, it’s not normal so how do we start looking at going back to work and what does that look like? What are our clients going to expect from us? We work with the federal government, they’re still installing right now, we work with construction companies.

Construction is essential, people are at work, how do we support them in that? We’re looking a lot at, “Where do we go from here where we are?”. I think it was a shock for us over the last four weeks just to figure out what is our new normal but now it’s, “Where do we go from here? What are we looking at two weeks from now to a year from now?” We’re really starting to talk about that and again, coming together, bringing people together to talk about it.

Fred Diamond: Chris, what has changed for you as a sales leader in the past four weeks?

Christopher Ware: Certainly the fact that we can’t meet in person is very impactful for the commercial real estate industry. If you can’t meet with your clients and show them a space that’s available, that certainly is a traditional way of leasing or selling commercial real estate. I’ve been really excited to see how inventive our members have been using virtual platforms, virtual tours, connecting with people online and facilitating transactions. The deals are still happening in the commercial real estate space, obviously things have slowed down and are going to continue to until we find out what our new normal is, but business is still happening and the commercial real estate people in particular are very entrepreneurial, very creative and we’re really seeing the best of that right now within the industry.

Within my own space, not having in-person meetings as we normally would has been a challenge but again, we’ve been able to pivot very quickly, very effectively offering this content online in the near term. I think that’s going to be one of the legacies, additional online engagement as we begin to blend that back in with in-person conferences and events as soon as it’s safe to do so.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I want to follow up with something that you talked about before. Again, if anybody who’s listening to today’s webinar has a question please feel free to submit them via the panel. People are home, as a matter of fact I’m going to guess that 99.9% who are watching today’s webinar are home. How have you responded to that and how has your industry changed?

Joe Alvarez: There’s a lot of schools of thought on that discussion. From my perspective, this has been a huge business disruption and it really has changed the way people think and do things every day. From a sports perspective I look at this almost like a forced tryout in telecommuting. You have to do it and now people are starting to realize what it’s like to be able to work away from the office. The generational divide is becoming closer, you have all the baby boomers that wanted to live a certain way and you have all the Z and X generations being different, this has really forced that divide to come closer.

My perspective is that as we move on, there’ll be a lot more home offices than you have today, there’ll be technology driven towards them, there’s still going to be a lot of offices. A lot of the discussion today is we need to be 6 or 8 feet away so before it was, “How can you densify an office with as many people as possible?” now it’s, “How do you do that and also provide the space?” This new normal is going to be different. I know that Susan probably has a lot of studies about how they’re going to do the furniture but I can tell you this, from our business, our technology division that does digitization of records, we have gotten a spike up in calls saying, “We were thinking about this, now we really need to be completely virtual because we don’t know how we’re going to end up in this new normal moving forward. There’s been a lot of good things for it that are going to happen off of this.

Fred Diamond: Susan, let’s follow up on that. It’s interesting, the first four, five weeks of the pandemic people were getting used to working from home and all those kinds of things. Now what we’re hearing is a lot of people are starting to plan for what might be the return and we don’t want to get into political discussions right now, but back to what Joe was just alluding to, people are looking for advice on how they do go back to the office safely. You are experts on that, what are some things that you’re telling these people?

Susan Lee: What I would like to address is that we’ve spent years selling the open environment and community connections and common areas where people can come together and socialize. Now we are facing a situation where we have to look at the complete opposite. You’ll see articles that are starting to come out that are posted all over social media that are talking about, “What does the office look like coming back?” and we have to start thinking. We were on a call today with our team, with the president of the company. We were talking about you’re starting at hand sanitizer at the front door and then you’re walking into the space and you’re completely open so we’re starting to work with our manufacturers and looking at solutions they may have to separate that open environment.

We’re talking a lot about distancing, we’re talking a lot about alternating days of working but we are going to have to go back into those interior spaces, those common areas that we put where people can socialize and we’re going to have to start reevaluating it. Part of this is – and we talked about this today – it’s going to be a phased type of solution because the challenges that we’re facing today are not going to be the challenges we’re facing a year from now or two years from now. Just like when we faced 9/11 and we had to regroup on how we look at safety and how we looked at international safety, we’re looking worldwide at how people work across the world. This is a situation where we’re really going to be evolving over time and the environment will change as well.

Fred Diamond: Chris, you work with a lot of companies that are very involved with real estate. How do you think real estate will be impacted by this?

Christopher Ware: I think it’s going to have, in the short term, certainly a significant impact but I think you’re going to see an extended impact over time. A statistic that I just read that I think is worth noting is in the 1970s, the average office worker had about 500 square feet of space on average. That was down to about 200 square feet of space a decade ago and most recently it’s 150 square feet of space so that trend I think is going to be halted and maybe reversed as people are going to want to have a little bit more separation than otherwise was the case.

I also think, however, that you are going to see an increased number of people working remotely, as Susan mentioned maybe some staggering out of space in the short to mid-term. Honestly, you also have some businesses that unfortunately just aren’t going to make it through this crisis so I think in the short term there is going to be some vacancy as a result but the long-term health of the industry certainly is very strong. We went into this crisis with very good fundamentals from a commercial real estate market perspective whereas the last downturn there was a lot of over-building, we really didn’t see that this cycle.

Once we get our footing underneath us as an industry, I’m very confident in the long term success. However, like I said, the densification trend I think probably is going to halt and maybe start to unwind a little bit and then of course the work from home options I think you’re going to see more of that.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re sales leaders, we’re talking about how you’re managing your sales team and your customers but how do you find a work-life balance in these times especially as a parent? There is a follow-up question, Susan, the question is how do you tell your other kids that your oldest child, Courtney, is your favorite? [Laughs] obviously thank you, Courtney for that question. Susan can take the second part offline unless you want to tell the world… No, but seriously, how are you managing your lives? Let’s talk about that from a human being perspective. You all live at homes, Joe, you have a beautiful house down in Annapolis and Chris, you’re in Centerville and Susan, you’re in Olney. How are you managing your lives as sales leaders? Susan, since Courtney directed that to you, why don’t you get us started there?

Susan Lee: [Laughs] I will tell you that Courtney is an essential worker so she has to go to work. Courtney, you’re working right now. The second part of this is there is a balance so I’m looking right now and one of my kids is walking around doing like this in the screen, we’ve embraced our sellers that have kids, it’s very stressful to try to balance your kids with your job, you’re constantly on calls, they’re constantly coming up wanting things. We’re letting our sellers know it’s okay, I think that’s one of the things that you feel with your job that you have to be fully engaged but part of the engagement is actually incorporating your family and one of the things that our organization is doing, we have a really good marketing team – shout out to my marketing team – they do webinars for the kids. In the middle of the day they’ve colored masks to symbolize the mask, that it’s okay to wear a mask and masks are good.

We’ve done things like The Price is Right, I am not good at The Price is Right, I actually don’t know anything about pricing but we’ve got employees that are really good at understanding what the prices are at Harris Teeter, Safeway and Giant. We’re also just taking the time to let everybody know we have new sellers out there, people that recently joined the organization. It can be stressful, you try to prove yourself, you come to a new company and you set up the strategic plan and you really want to show them that you can do the job, and then we face a pandemic where you can’t go out and sell.

We’re trying to reassure them that it’s okay, we understand, we hire you for your potential, we understand that it’s going to come in time and we’re trying to find creative ways to sell and connect outside of your traditional being in front of a client. That’s a little bit about how we deal with stress.

Fred Diamond: Chris, how are you balancing things? I know you’re a big sports fan, you’ve gone to a lot of minor league and major league baseball teams. As a matter of fact, on your Sales Game Changers podcast we talked about it at length as well so what are some things that you’re doing to stay sane during this very challenging time?

Christopher Ware: That is one of the challenges of work from home is that you’re technically always at work, so certainly setting boundaries for yourself and saying, “I have office hours and then I have hours where I’m at home” is very critical. I think being creative and reaching out to friends, staying connected with your community even though you’re not able to maybe go out and watch sports with your friends or go out and do what your normal activities would be, but one example that was a lot of fun was my friends and I enjoy playing Golden Tee which is the game at a lot of sports bars.

There’s an online app version of it and we have Golden Tee virtual tournament, we use Zoom so we can do a little trash talk with each other and we’re playing each other in the game. It’s certainly not as good as the real thing but we had a great time, had a couple beers and just had some fun and stayed engaged. Just thinking along this term is maintaining those relationships and those friendships is certainly vital because everybody, no matter what industry they’re in, they’re all having a lot of stress right now and just being there for people I think is essential.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I want to go back to something you mentioned before. Again, we’re calling this a Sales Game Changers webinar where we’re talking to some sales leaders. Of course, you’re a business leader but you mentioned empathy a few moments ago and that was a big theme the first couple of weeks after the pandemic kicked in. This is a sales webinar and I’m looking at the hundreds of people who are watching today’s webinar. I’m going to presume that most of them are sales professionals. How do you be in sales right now? Again, you mentioned empathy in your past answer. Is it okay to sell things right now? Is it okay to ask people for business? Is it okay to prospect or should we just be empathetic and helpful? I’m curious in your thoughts in that and I’m also going to ask that to Susan as well.

Joe Alvarez: That’s a really good question, Fred. I think you’ve got to be good enough to read the client. Some clients today are in dire need of what you have to offer from a service or product. We sell by relationships, we build relationship so we get to know our clients pretty well. The empathy word has been one that is needed for everybody whether you’re selling to them, whether you’re calling your sister or you’re calling anybody. In this time there’s a lot of stress and anxiety in our world right now and it’s important to obviously have empathy but also to be a solutions provider. If somebody’s got issues, you want to be there for them.

One of the things that we’ve asked our folks is not just to sell but also to connect, so for instance if Susan is my client and she’s looking for something that I don’t provide but I know you provide, my job is to connect you, to help Susan get rid of that anxiety. It’s not about me winning, it’s about me helping her get to the point where she can get some result. There’s different ways of addressing empathetic perspective with a client, I think people think of sales like real hard sell kind of thing. Sales to me is you’re a solutions provider, if you can provide a solution that is a win-win for both sides it’s a great scenario, it’s not about pushing or selling something. That’s how we’ve been dealing with this, it’s changed a little bit in that you want to know how that person is first as opposed to talking about what you do or what your solution is. It’s, “How are you doing, Susan?” first. “How’s your family, how’s everybody doing?” and there’s a lot of personal discussion before you get to, “If you need what I do, let me know.”

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? You manage a team of sellers, you need to sell things. You have products and services that you sell so how are you selling right now? Do you feel comfortable selling? What’s your follow up to that?

Susan Lee: What I would tell you is just as we’re all at home working, so are our clients and the ball doesn’t stop bouncing in the process. When you think about a selling cycle there are various points in the selling cycle so a lot of our projects will be in various points in the selling cycle. When we’re looking at our forecasts, when we’re looking at our pipelines, a month ago we stopped but we were already at different points in time in the selling cycle so what we tried to do is continue to provide that information for our clients.

We still have people that are bidding projects, we still have people that are planning for the future, we still have people that are looking for budgeting prices and they’re also starting, as Joe mentioned earlier, to look at what does ‘work from home’ mean and what solutions will you have for that. As Joe mentioned also, those relationships are everything. We’re a trusted resource for our clients and for our partners so making sure that we’re available, making sure that we respond quickly to them, being sensitive, that time is about the essence and understanding that their time is short too, because they’re on conference calls all day as well, making sure they have the information they need to continue to do their job.

Empathy starts from the top down, it starts from the president of the company and it goes all the way down. Communicating, connecting, letting people know that we understand, “We’re challenged just like you’re challenged in your business” is everything to the empathetic part of supporting your clients.

Fred Diamond: Chris, we’ve implemented a lot of new things in the last couple of weeks. Everyone now is an expert on Zoom, at the Institute for Excellence in Sales we’re doing a webinar a day and we’re getting hundreds of people per week who are coming onto our webinars. Joe mentioned before that no one’s really traveling right now. Do you see the pandemic changing the way you sell moving forward? A lot of people are saying ‘the new normal’, whatever that means. Is this the new normal? Are we going to be doing Zoom all day or people are not going to be going to offices, less face to face, travel? Where do you think sales is going?

Christopher Ware: I certainly think in the near term, yes. Until there’s a vaccine, this probably will be what normal is going to look like, it’s going to be more virtual meetings, more phone calls, more emails, that sort of thing. I do think there’s a fundamental need for people to connect and real estate is still a face-to-face business so I think as soon as it’s safe to do so, the in-person connections are going to continue. We look forward to making that happen as soon as it’s safe to do so but I think the legacy of this experience is going to be how we incorporate some of these online technologies with in-person events and with in-person activities. Hosting video meetups in advance of an in-person meeting so you can get to know people ahead of time, things like that, we’re trying to think very strategically about not just coming up with immediate solutions but how we are going to use these tools going forward after it’s safe for everybody to get back together again.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for Joe and for Susan. Once again, if you’re on today’s webinar, if you have a question for Joe Alvarez, Susan Lee or Christopher Ware submit them through your panel. Once again, if you can take a screenshot and send it to me, we’re having a contest, that would be great. Susan and Joe, you both manage sales professionals, you manage sales teams. What are your expectations right now of your salespeople and what are you telling them? You’re also sales leaders, again Joe, you’re managing partner at your company and you both manage large numbers of people, teams that you have expectations of. What do you expect from them right now and what are you telling them to do? Joe, take that first and then Susan, be prepared.

Joe Alvarez: Back to the question, you asked before how they’re working today. I’ve got two thoughts there, one is to stay focused and to stay visible. The focus part is you need to have a daily and weekly plan and follow it, it’s easy to work at home and forget that you have a plan, you get stuck with the kids asking you for something or whatever and you get hooked on something else because you’re not used to working from home. You have a plan that actually tells you what you’re doing hour per hour and at the end of they day you judge yourself whether you accomplished the goals of the day or not or the goals of the week.

The second piece is to stay visible, stay in contact with your clients and your prospects whether it’s through email, Zoom, webinars, social media, LinkedIn, whatever it is. You need to stay in touch with them because if you plant the seeds today, when we go back to the new normal, whatever that means and however that happens you’re going to have projects that are going. If you just sat around and didn’t do that, you won’t have that coming to you so that’s our goal, that’s what we’re trying to get our guys and ladies to do.

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? What are your expectations of your sellers?

Susan Lee: My expectation, Fred, and if my sellers are on this call, keep your forecast updated. The one thing about a company in planning for the future is making sure you have accurate information so keeping the CRMs updated, keeping your forecast updated, as information changes, put it in. You have the time, I’m telling every seller in America and around the world, you have time to put that information in, take the time to do it because that’s how your company plans their resources.

That’s one of the major things that’s critical for sellers, we don’t like to sit in all the time and do because we are busy people, we’re always connecting. If you have time now, stop and take the time to keep your forecast updated, your CRM updated. You can prospect, think of creative ways to do it. We have team calls every week with our sales teams in each of the locations, we talk a lot about what are they doing, what are they hearing, information is power so continuing to bring information back to your sales team that’ll help your teammates as well is very important. It’s just that ongoing communication, idea of sharing and keeping that forecast updated.

Fred Diamond: Chris, I’m curious, are you prospecting for new business right now or are you constantly going back to your existing members and sponsors to make sure they’re okay? How about prospecting? Is it okay to prospect for new business now?

Christopher Ware: That’s a great question and our focus is maintaining existing relationships right now as the situation continues to unfold. We are in effect prospecting for new business in that we’re updating and cleaning up our database, that’s one of the things that constantly we talk about doing and because we are always selling we never get around to actually doing. That’s a priority for us right now, to make sure that our leads pipeline has been cleaned up and people’s contacts are accurate. Maybe they haven’t been in that company for a couple years and we’re just now getting around to updating that information so that’s a key part of it. Then yes, we do have in our plan to start to prospect and start to add some people to the pipeline, if you clean some names out it’s time to add some back to take their place so that definitely is a part of our near term plan.

Fred Diamond: Obviously we’re all doing Zoom now, but what is something else new that you’re doing that you think may have some legs past this pandemic that you’re now doing as a sales leader? Susan, why don’t you go first?

Susan Lee: Fred, to take no attention away from the fact that you do a podcast, we actually have a business developer that started a quick podcast. It’s like 5 to 10 minutes, it’s a young man by the name of Alvarez, his name is Brian Alvarez and he does something called Between Two Screens, it’s a takeoff of Between Two Firms and it’s connecting with industry experts across the area from clients to project managers to designers. He’s getting their feedback, these are thought leaders that are prominent in the Washington DC metropolitan area and he’s connecting with them and asking them questions about what do they see, what’s the forecast out there.

I do believe that’s something we’ll continue to do, he did his first one about a week ago, he did an amazing job and I know we’re going to continue to do that, that’s just something that will keep us all connected not only with our company but with our competitors. One of the things that we’re in the business of doing is helping each other to succeed, we all succeed when one succeeds so I think this is something that’ll be useful in the translate over.

Fred Diamond: Chris, how about you? What’s something new that you’re doing as response to this?

Christopher Ware: Our organization has started a series of online round tables of very specific commercial real estate industry topics and we’re getting groups of 20 to 30 at the most together to be on a Zoom call with an industry expert and of course, the expert leads off the conversation and guides the conversation. It’s an opportunity for people to have very in-depth conversations, to build their networks over the online platform and really learn more about how best to do their job in the process. Its something that we’ve done in person before, we posted similar type events in a live basis, giving this an opportunity to go online and deliver that value to our members and to the industry is something that’s new and it’s something that I very much hope will continue to be successful and that we’ll continue even after we can meet in person again.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? What’s something new that you’ve now implemented as a sales and business leader as a response to the pandemic?

Joe Alvarez: Fred, I think that what we’re seeing is that telecommunications with Zoom and GoToMeeting are going to become bigger and bigger tools for sales. There’s a lot of time saved between me going to your place and meeting with you as opposed to having that conversation remotely specifically when you come to design. You could have a design posted on the screen and the three of us could be talking about changes and it can be done like that instead of me coming to you, going back to design and going back to you. I believe that in the near future you’re going to see a lot more of that. This force tryout is going to make people get smart about how to do business as opposed to the way we’ve been doing it for a long time. One of the things we’re doing is perfecting our ways of communication with all those different pieces of the pie that get involved in a decision to perhaps shorten the sale cycle by having less time between decision makers.

Fred Diamond: What do you think the challenges will be for sales professionals in the next week? Susan, why don’t you go first? What are going to be the key challenges facing sales leaders and sales professionals in the next week?

Susan Lee: I know Christopher mentioned Zoom, you guys have mentioned Zoom quite a bit. I think it’s challenging sometimes as a sales professional to sit in front of the computer all day long and look at screens on a box. I know as a sales leader I’m challenged by that on a daily basis, you get fatigued from that so I think one of the challenges is making sure we can keep our energy up, keep our engagement up, staying hopeful. If we’re listening to the news and it’s telling us we may be 6 weeks out or a year out, we’ve got to continue to stay hopeful. I’ve got some amazing directors that are constantly working with their sellers to keep them engaged.  They’re talking on a daily basis. I think next week we’re going to continue to have to do that because we’re going into week 5 or week 6, we’ve got to continue to do that.

The one thing that I’ll tell you personally that I’m battling with myself is whether or not I’m going to be able to let my husband cut my hair because you guys were mentioning haircuts earlier, I just don’t know if I can do it, though. I’m working on it, I don’t know.

Fred Diamond: If he’s going to do it, let him just go, you know what I’m saying? You’re going to be in your house for another 4, 5 weeks. Chris, how about you? What’s the big challenge for the next 5 days?

Christopher Ware: I’m going to take an even bigger picture approach but we’ll distill it down to five days in that we have an entire generation of sales professionals who have not sold in a down-market, who have not sold in a recession. Sales is a mentally challenging, difficult job to have and when the economy has thrown us for a loop like this it can be very psychologically challenging. I encourage everybody who’s on the call right now to reach out to maybe someone who is newer to the industry than you who doesn’t have the experience of going through a downturn like you may have and just check in on them.

See how they’re doing mentally, see how they’re hanging in because it’s hard right now and it’s okay to admit that, it’s okay to talk about that, it’s okay to say how frustrating things are and I think that is going to be best for the mental health of everybody and it’s going to add to your own resilience. Reach out to folks, let them know that it’s okay to feel the frustration, to feel the discouragement right now but understand that there are things you can be doing to lay the groundwork for your future success.

Fred Diamond: Joe, why don’t you bring us home? What’s going to be the big challenge over the next 5 days that we’re going to need to overcome?

Joe Alvarez: Every day that goes by is one day closer to the end of this thing. You’ve got to keep that perspective, every day is one day closer. Each week is going to bring new challenges and new opportunities, we’ve got to stay flexible, you’ve got to focus on what you can control. You can’t focus on stuff that happens that you can’t do anything about, you can only focus on what you can control and if you take that approach, it’ll be a lot easier to deal with the hard times. Doing what you think you can do, that’s the most important thing. Thank you very much everybody, for having me.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 224: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Susan Lee, Christopher Ware and Joe Alvarez first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 037: Professional Soccer Player Joe Alvarez Went from the Pitch to the Boardroom by Excelling at these Sales Skills

JOE’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “This is the thought I give my employees and I give my kids, and I really believe in this. Life is short. Every day counts. Whatever you do, do it 100% and do it with passion, and at the end of the day use the mirror test. Look yourself in the mirror, you can’t lie to that guy on the other side, and say, “Did I give everything I could give today?” If the answer is yes, you had a pretty good day. If it isn’t, then you probably didn’t.”

Joe Alvarez is the co-owner and chief sales officer at National Office Systems, also known as NOS. It’s one of the nation’s largest providers of automated storage and retrieval systems, bio-metric asset protection and asset tracking and records management. NOS is headquartered in the DC metro area.

Joe and his partner acquired NOS in 1991 when it was a 5 person firm. Since 1991, Joe’s main focus has been to grow profitable revenues directly overseeing the sales and marketing team. Today NOS employs over 100 employees and has grown revenue on an average growth of 12% per year.

Find Joe on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Joe, you were a professional soccer player at one time. How did you first get into sales as a career.

Joe Alvarez: I’m a different story than your average guy doing this. I came from Mexico when I was 17 years old with a dream to play soccer and then going to college to Virginia to play soccer, and my whole goal was to be a professional soccer player, possibly be a coach somewhere. I went from that to sales and selling copiers so it tells you how life changes very quickly.

Fred Diamond: I’d like to hear some of the stories about maybe how being a professional soccer player made you be successful in sales. One thing we’ve heard is when you play professional sports, the game is maybe one twentieth of it and you practice thousands of hours. One thing we’ve heard from some of our Sales Game Changers is that, is that you need to apply the practice to the selling profession, treat it like a professional. What are some of the things that you’ve carried over from being a professional soccer player?

Joe Alvarez: That’s a great insight, Fred. One of the things that I talk to all my reps and I still follow this today is the fact that you’ve got to always work the basics, you can’t forget the basics no matter how good you are. Just like Michael Jordan would stay after practice to shoot free-throws, every sport and every professional endeavor requires you to be good at the basics and sales is no different.

Playing in sports at a high level teaches you that hard work typically turns into results and the message I have for most of my sales team is, “If you put the time into it and you’re smart about it, most of the time you’ll be successful.”

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

Joe Alvarez: Our company is a niche market company and we are focused on space saving in terms of floor space in an organization. Today, rents are very high so anyone looking to save space will look at, “How do I better organize my items so that I can save space?” We also do asset management, which means making sure that you know where every piece and asset of your firm is at any time.

Fred Diamond: Very good. How did you first get into sales as a career? We talked in the intro about how you first started selling copiers and facsimile machines otherwise known as faxes, but tell us how you made this shift from being a professional soccer player getting into sales.

Joe Alvarez: It’s a funny story. I was playing soccer and tore my ACL Back in the 80’s, when you get an ACL injury your career usually doesn’t turn out to be great after that, not like today, but back then the technology was not what it is today. My agent told me that I may have to move to Seattle to play soccer so I said, “Maybe I should try to get a real job.”

I had graduated with an accounting degree in college and thought, “Well, I’ll go be an accountant.” I worked as an accountant for Chevy Chase Chevy Land in Bethesda, Maryland. I went from signing autographs and working out every day to sitting on a desk with a window that looked at a brick wall, a computer and a calculator next to me and doing deer exchanges.

It didn’t take me long to figure that I was not going to be doing that for a long time so I went to the sales manager or the general manager of the store and I said, “Hey, do you think I could try sales?” And the guy looked at me and said, “Joe, you’re a bean counter. You don’t have a shot at doing it in sales.” And that’s all I needed to say, “Really? OK, I’m going to show you that I can do this.”

Needless to say, with no experience it’s very hard to get a sales job and back then you either sold encyclopedias door to door, or you sold copiers door to door so I chose the latter. The job was really 99% time making cold calls and knocking on doors and most of my co-workers would laugh at me because I would be out there making cold calls at 6 at night and they couldn’t believe that I would like that, and my perspective was, “You have no idea.Being out talking to people is the greatest thing in the world.” Needless to say, I did well in that job and that’s how I got into sales, Fred.

Fred Diamond: Very good. What are some of the key lessons you learned from some of the first sales jobs?

Joe Alvarez: It’s very evident that you’ve got to have thick skin because you get told “no” a lot and it never bothered me because I think one of the assets that I have is I don’t take it personal. When somebody says “no” I know it’s not about me, it’s about my product, my service or perhaps they’re having a bad day, but I never took it personal.

One of the things that I learned from that was prospecting was a key to making things happen. You don’t have enough activity, you can’t sell. The other thing was, what can I do to be different? And that was a major thing, and I always felt that being the most professional person doing what I did would separate me from the rest. When I had an appointment I would personally send a thank you note, I would call and say, “Yes sir”, “No, ma’am”, I was just a different flavor to what they were used to and I think that that actually helped me then and I still practice that today.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Joe, what are you truly an expert in? Tell us some more about your specific area of brilliance.

Joe Alvarez: Our business is a business that actually learns what is it that you’re doing today and how can we make your business more profitable in the future. I’ll give you an example: most law firms today are going from ten thousand square feet to eight thousand square feet of real estate but they want to keep the same amount of people or more in the same space. They’re trying to save money and be more productive.

One of the things they look at is, “OK, we can take partners and put them in an open space but what else can we do? We have all these file cabinets full of records, what can we do? So we assist with specialty storage systems for them, we help them with better asset management of those records and more importantly we help them image those records so reducing the footprint but allowing them to have access to that information at all times has become something that we become an expert on. We have different ways to do it than your average company so I think that we bring a different flavor to it, per se.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about some of your sales career mentors. Mention a mentor for me and tell us how they impacted your career.

Joe Alvarez: That’s an easy question for me to answer. My biggest mentor is my business partner today, his name is Dan Harbison. He is a little older than me but has got probably more energy than I have, even today. He was the vice president of the firm that I started selling copiers with and then he moved on to be president of a different firm and I worked for him there, and one day came to me and said, “Hey, do you want to go in business together?” So we decided to do that, but he still today is my biggest mentor.

Fred Diamond: So what are some of the things that you’ve learned from him?

Joe Alvarez: Positive attitude. No matter what the world throws at you, you got to have a side that looks at the bright side of things. No matter what it is, he finds a way to say, “Hey, it’s not so bad. We can do this, we can do that.” There’s a great life lesson to do that.

The second piece is using the mirror test. At the end of the day you got to ask yourself, “Did I do everything I could do today to be the best that I could be?”

Fred Diamond: Very good. How long have you guys been business partners for?

Joe Alvarez: Since 1991.

Fred Diamond: 1991, good for you. Joe, the world has changed. Your customers have changed. The requirements for space has probably changed. What are two of the biggest challenges you’ve faced today as a sales leader?

Joe Alvarez: I’m sure this is a pretty common pattern you’ve seen with other folks you’ve talked to, but I find that technology has really changed in the world on a daily basis. You look at today and you have a cellphone and you have all this information that 15 years ago only some people had. You started saying, “I sold fax machines.” I was telling one of my kids that I sold fax machines and they asked me, “What is a fax machine?”

Technology really has changed the world, the workforce is changing, millennials is a huge challenge for folks my age because we’ve all been doing business a certain way for a long time and that’s really changing how we do business today, and how we take our company and grow it to that millennial customer and grow with millennial employees. It really changes how you do business.

Fred Diamond: Have you managed millennials in your sales organization?

Joe Alvarez: Yes, I have.

Fred Diamond: So what are some of the observations that you’ve had that have been making it a challenge?

Joe Alvarez: It’s easy for people to complain because they’re not like you, but I take that as a “That’s great, I’m going to learn from you. What do you do well that we can incorporate into our organization?” Our millennials actually love working at NOS because I am always learning. That’s one of the things that I’ve learned since I was a young kid, you can never be good enough, you always got to get better.

Some of these young people, the way they work and the way they think and the way they look at problems is so innovative that the traditional way of looking and solving these issues is actually not good enough any longer. And you really need their expert opinion on it, because the people you’re selling to now, many of them are them, so you better start understanding them or you’re going to have a hard time.

Fred Diamond: Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that most proud of. Joe Alvarez, take us back to that moment.

Joe Alvarez: I have a lot of wins, as many of the folks in my world. When you get to be our age that happens but there’s one that I consider one of the best wins for a lot of reasons. We met with the Prince Georgia’s County Police evidence apartment and this officer that was looking for a way to manage how the evidence was tracked between the crime scene to the core house, was having a hard time with the chain of custody issues.

We went into this office and we’re sitting and he looked behind and there was three pictures of three men and he says, “See these three pictures? This is three guys that got away with murder because our evidence was not tracked properly.” And he said, “I don’t ever want to have another picture here again.”

In working with him and the entire department we implemented a system that was RFID which is radio frequency ID tracking of the original evidence, so when an officer went to a crime scene and he picked up evidence, he would put it in a baggy with a specialty RFID tags and that evidence would be tracked from point 1 to point 2 to point 3 warehouse, attorney’s office, whatever. And the chain of custody was never broken and since we installed our systems in the Prince Georgia’s County Police Department, they have not had another picture on that wall, and that’s a really cool thing.

Fred Diamond: That is a great story and we ask that question in all the Sales Game Changers podcast, and the best stories are the ones where it wasn’t just a big sale, we were trying for five years, the ones that are the best are when there’s a significant value impact to the customer.

Joe Alvarez: Correct.

Fred Diamond: And especially something like this, when the guy said to you, “These three guys have gotten away with murder.”

Joe Alvarez: Literally.

Fred Diamond: Literally! And you were able to put a process in the place to not just help the customer but help society. That’s good stuff.

Joe Alvarez: It’s pretty cool.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you about your career in sales I need to ask you one or two questions about your sports career. A lot of guys who I’ve spoken to have had sports careers. You’re dealing at the highest level, you’re practicing, in order to be a professional athlete, you’re at the top of your game. How has that transition been for you working with people who may not be as committed to being world-class or exceptional? I’m just curious on your thoughts on that.

Joe Alvarez: That is a great question, Fred. That was one of the hardest things for me when I became a manager, a sales manager. When I was a sales person and it was up to me to make it happen I could be the best because sales was what I wanted to do, but when you start managing people and your expectations are that you should work as hard as I do or wanted as much as I wanted, you start realizing that there is different people in the world and you need all of them.

You need every different type of person. Otherwise, there would be all super type A people professional athletes that’d be the only good sales people, and that’s not the case. You just need to understand that people go about a different way and perhaps the way you look at it is not the evidence of, “Oh, did you work hard enough today? Did you make x amount of calls, did you do this?” Those are metrics, but there’s people that do it a different way and one of the maturing pieces for me was that I learned to accept other ways of other people doing it. I think it’s made me a better manager and a better mentor to my people by having that perspective, but yes, it was very hard at first.

Fred Diamond: So you’ve been running this company since 1991, you must have employed if not hundreds at least dozens of sales professionals. Maybe hundreds, I don’t know, what’s something that you’ve seen in them that have been successful?

Joe Alvarez: Let me clarify. When I was in the copier business I probably hired 300 people and fired 295 of them. We called it a crazy business but in our business I’ve been fortunate enough to have people that have been with me for 15 and 18 years at a time and we’re very lucky. I think we provide a great environment for them and that’s why they like that, but part of the situation was when we hire the people they were people that I knew, and I knew what to expect out of them.

And when they came to work for us there was an expectation level and I learned from them, even today, that some of them are very different and as they mature they become different. You have different requirements of live, you become a mom, a dad, a granddad, you have different personal issues and you find different ways of doing the job but you got to be a manager and be understanding of their requirements.

Fred Diamond: Joe Alvarez, was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s not for me.”?

Joe Alvarez: I’m probably the unusual guy to tell you that, did I ever question being in sales? Yes, I questioned being in sales when I was doing all those cold calls and thinking to myself, “Wow, I went to college to just knock on doors, I’m not so sure this was the right thing to do.” But do you ask me if it’s ever been too hard? No. I look at sales as building relationships and I’m providing you with a solution. If I don’t have something valuable to provide to you, I’m not going to waste your time or my time.

My perspective is if I’m trying to sell you something, really I’m trying to help you and perhaps you don’t see that, but that’s OK. No, I never thought it was too hard for me.

Fred Diamond: Joe, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the sales professionals listening to the podcast to help them take their careers to the next level?

Joe Alvarez: First and foremost, sales is a fabulous career. We get a bad rap from a lot of people that says you’re in sales but being in sales is one of the most rewarding careers you can have. One of the things that I would tell a young person – which I tell all my young people – is invest in yourself. Always try to get better. Buy books to help you be better, listen to podcasts, listen to tapes, go to classes, aside from everything you learn in school you always got to find a way to get better. Today you have LinkedIn, that was not available 15 years ago but if you’re not up to date in LinkedIn or technology like that, you’re cheating yourself out of a great opportunity.

Second thing I’d tell them is don’t think anything personal. You need to understand that people are busy, people have personal lives, sometimes they’re going to say no to you and it’s got nothing to do with you. It’s got to do with other issues or perhaps they don’t need your product.

Third, smart, hardworking pays off. Anybody tells you there’s an easy way to succeed I would tell you that they know something that the rest of the world doesn’t know or they’re lying to you. The reality is that hard work pays off. And the last piece that I always tell my guys is you got to have fun. You got to make it fun every day, every time. You can’t do this if you’re always stressed, you got to have fun.

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

Joe Alvarez: Just like I said to you, Fred, I’ll always be learning. I’ve been in this game for a while and I would tell you that I listen to podcasts, I love going to the IES programs just to listen to different perspectives. Just to give you an example: I read books, I’m an avid reader of books, in fact my family makes fun of me that when we’re at the beach I’m always reading some kind of business book and they just can’t believe it. Frankly, I enjoy it. I enjoy it more than reading some other story because as far as I’m concerned, this is making me better.

We laugh about that and we stay connected. You got to stay connected to the world. You need to understand what’s happening to the world, whether it’s the news, reading the business news, talking to other people, you need to understand what’s going on because some of those happenings in the world will come down to affect your specific work life.

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

Joe Alvarez: As I mentioned before, technology has changed in the world and one of the things that I’ve learned through my years of running a business is you can’t put all your eggs in one basket because things can change very quickly. One of the things that we do in NOS is we diversify the business. Diversification has been huge for us.

The second piece that we embrace change, we know the things are changing and there’s always a better way, there’s things that are happening all the time and our motto here is, “Change happens and we need to be on top of it.”

Fred Diamond: Joe, sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? You’ve given us a lot of insights here into your passion and I love the story that Joe talked about in the beginning of the podcast about how he helped the Prince Georgia’s County Police Department. Really make some major transformational changes to make us safer and to make their operations more successful. What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Joe Alvarez: As I mentioned before, I look at sales as relationship building. To me it’s a long term relationship. We’ve gotten away from transactional business and gone into long-term business relationships where if we do business today we’ll hope to be doing business with you 10 and 15 and 20 years from now and we’re going to change our firm to keep supporting your requirements as you grow and we grow.

I mentioned before that I don’t take anything personal. If you say no to me and I know that you could use my service, and I really believe that my products and services are as good or better than anybody else’s, then I’ll look at myself in the mirror and say, “Obviously I have not communicated to you the value of what I have, because if I was good enough to communicate that to you, you would be one to buy from me.”

And that’s how I personally feel about this business.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening today.

Joe Alvarez: This is the thought I give my employees and I give my kids, and I really believe in this: Life is short. Every day counts. Whatever you do, do it 100% and do it with passion, and at the end of the day use the mirror test. Look yourself in the mirror, you can’t lie to that guy on the other side, and say, “Did I give everything I could give today?” If the answer is yes, you had a pretty good day. If it isn’t, then you probably didn’t.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 037: Professional Soccer Player Joe Alvarez Went from the Pitch to the Boardroom by Excelling at these Sales Skills first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 030: Joy Newton Grubb Strives to Anticipate Her Customers’ Office System Needs to Better Help Solve Their Problems

Joy Newton Grubb is a sales leader, a consultant, and a sales mentor at National Office Systems, also known as NOS. She’s had a great career in the office-built environment; she’s sold office storage systems and record-management and relocation services to the government and corporate customers, in particular to law firms across the country.

Find Joy on LinkedIn!

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

Joy Newton Grubb: I’m a sales consultant and a sales mentor here at NOS, and what I focus on is professional services, storage solutions, offsite tracking, digital storage, and scanning. So it’s something that I’ve been doing for over 30 years in various parts of my career, and I really enjoy it.

What excites me about it is I never thought that I would fall into records management or selling storage. A lot of people look at me and go, “That’s something that you can sell?” And it’s something that you can sell and it’s something that you can do very well at because you’re a consultant to your client. You’re solving their problem.

Fred Diamond: What might be some of the problems that you’re solving for the customers you’re working with today?

Joy Newton Grubb: Customers typically don’t realize that the file management world has become very technology-oriented. We’re able to scan documents in and index them and provide them online, and a lot of people still want to have their paper. It’s very important that you establish good practices so that you have a good chain of custody of that material.

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

Joy Newton Grubb: I grew up in sales. My dad owned his own company. He had three salespeople, and they were always on the road. And my dad was a candy salesman, so I always have wanted to be in sales.

Fred Diamond: So did you follow your dad? Did you go with him on calls? You probably had tons of candy around the house.

Joy Newton Grubb: We always had tons of candy. We always had more candy than anybody. The holidays were always great because our holidays were always six months before the holiday; at Halloween you would get Easter candy. I spent a lot of time working in my dad’s office. I never really went on sales calls with my dad, but I was used to that environment. I was used to following his career and what he did. He was very successful.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you learned from that? What are some things that you remember that you’ve been able to apply to your sales career?

Joy Newton Grubb: I think it’s always important to be very genuine and to be very good about your follow-up skills. Follow-up skills, especially in today’s world, makes a big difference. There aren’t a lot of people who follow up. There are a lot of people who hide behind email and voice mail, but I think it’s important to get face time, and I think it’s important to give the customer a solution before you actually tell them maybe they have an issue.

Fred Diamond: So talk about that a little bit, follow-up skills. What are some of the things that you would recommend that sales game changers do today to continue to follow up? You mention people hide behind emails. Give us some of your best examples of what you can be doing to be sure that you’re good at that.

Joy Newton Grubb: I think it’s important that you should never give up on voice mail, number one. You should use that as a tool and learn how to use that. You need to be brief, but you also need to follow up with an email with your contact information, and you need to be short and concise so that you’re not wasting someone’s time. I have a “three times, you’re out” rule: I will call someone who I think is a potential client three times over probably a three-week period, and if I don’t get any feedback from them and I know that there’s somebody else in my industry that I’d like to get to know, I just move that to the back burner and go to the next person.

I’m always working on a target list of who I want to contact. You’ll find that if you leave three voice mails and you follow up, you might want to try calling them at five o’clock at night, and they’ll be at their desk and they’ll go, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to call you, I just haven’t had time.”

Fred Diamond: We mentioned in the introduction that you’ve been in the office-built environment over a very illustrous career. What are you specifically an expert in?

Joy Newton Grubb: The one thing that I do really well is I anticipate a customer’s needs. I think it’s important to anticipate what’s the next step for them. I’m very driven, and I have a good problem-solving set of skills. It’s something that I started in sales. I have found in my sales career that every place I have worked, when they realize that I have the skill set to take an upset customer, meet them, turn them around—I’ve actually turned a lot of those accounts where something has gone wrong; I will turn them into not only a really good account for the company and myself but also a very good friendship.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned you anticipate customer needs. Tell us a little more about the execution of that. What are some of the things that you specifically do to anticipate and understand what the customer’s needs are? Is that before they know or is it you just want to be proactive and go to them with some solutions?

Joy Newton Grubb: First of all, you need to know what it is that you’re selling so that you understand the scope of what you have to offer. But more important, you need to listen to the client, and you need to listen to what their issues are. One of the questions I always like to ask a client, especially when I meet with them the first time, is “What’s the criteria that you’re looking for in a vendor?” The answers are very interesting. They rarely are price. They are customer service.  Someone will say, “Oh, service, service, service. The last person who was in here was a disaster.” And then the client will tell you 3,000 things that were wrong, and you should be jotting them down mentally or on a piece of paper, all those little points of what their pain level was. Then you take that pain level and you turn it into a solution.

Fred Diamond: Joy, take us back to an impactful sales career mentor and hoy they impacted your career. Tell us about that person.

Joy Newton Grubb: That person was actually my first boss in sales. I started as a GSA rep. And I was a single mom, I wanted to make money, and I had done some of the records management prior to joining this team. This person was a female. She was a great teacher. She was very fair, but she could be tough. And I know a couple of times I felt like, “Oh, wow. This is a little tough.” But I always remember that and I always refer to those skill sets. Especially when I’m mentoring someone else, I refer to her all the time.

Fred Diamond: Do you frequently get people come to you looking for mentorship?

Joy Newton Grubb: I do. I’ve led several different sales teams in several different organizations, and I’ve always taken great pride in having a monthly working session with salespeople, not necessarily to be critical but to find out what do they need to make themselves better and what do I need as a boss to make myself better. Through the years instead of micromanaging what a person’s pipeline looked like, I’ve decided to take a different approach and go through that as kind of a team effort and spend one or two hours a month just really going through everything that they were doing. That’s very beneficial.

Fred Diamond: Joy, in the introduction we mentioned that you also have a specific expertise in corporate, but specifically in law firms. Can you tell us a little bit about selling to law firms and some of the things that you’ve had to learn over the years to be successful selling to that vertical?

Joy Newton Grubb: Law firms can be very tough. I think it’s one of the tougher vertical markets that you can sell into. I was very fortunate to work with a gentleman who was able to teach me how to approach a law firm and how to handle some of the rejection in the beginning. You really have to stick with it; you have to prove yourself. We have some pretty big law firms here in D.C., and one of the things that I found was a good way for me to connect with people was to be a problem solver for them.

Fred Diamond: You also mentioned that you’ve had a career selling in the government as well. How does the government work as a customer?

Joy Newton Grubb: Government’s very different. They need to know everything, whereas with commercial you don’t really want to share a lot with them except to tell them what it is that they need to know and what their pain points are. With the government you really have to spell it out, and you have to understand what’s going on with compliance because you can spend a lot of time spinning your wheels if you don’t know what you’re up against. You need to learn how to work. GSA has really changed in the past 20 years, and it continues to evolve, and you got to be on top of that game to understand how you sell to the client.

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

Joy Newton Grubb: I think one of the biggest things is face time. People want you to send them something via email. They don’t want you to drop anything off. “Please don’t come by, please don’t bother me.” They hide behind voice mail, so it’s really tough to get face time.

And then the internet, I think, is a challenge for a lot of salespeople because a lot of people—and I do this myself: I go to the store, I look at it, I try it on, and then I go on to Amazon to order it. So people think they can do that with what I sell, but they really can’t. It really takes a custom solution.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a career selling in the office, what we call the office-built environment, including relocation services, storage, things like that where you’re helping people in a physical location. You’re helping them in their office, typically, and you just mentioned that it’s harder and harder to get face time. What are some of the things that you’ve done to solve that, to accomplish the lack of ability these days to get face time?

Joy Newton Grubb: It’s a challenge. One of the things that I like to do is say, “Hey, I’ll only stop by for 15 minutes.” And I try to stick to my 15 minutes. One of the things that I’ve learnt through the years is to also give them some sort of a takeaway, something that they can have to help them in whatever their issue is.

You’ve got to make it worth their time, and you’ve got to be respectful if you are there and they don’t have time for you or if they’re not interested. To me, it’s a numbers game, and so you just move on to the next person. It took me a long time to figure that out.

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

Joy Newton Grubb: I had a government account; I stepped into it my very first week of sales, my first big sales job. Got a phone call, what the client had ordered was not what was there, so I’m like, Well, I’m new, I don’t really know anything. I don’t know the client, I don’t know what to do. And then I thought, “Okay, well, this is my account, so I need to figure this out.”

By the end of the week I had figured out exactly what to do for the client. The rep before me left out nine workstations, and there was no budget for them. And they’d gotten rid of the furniture, so I had to think really quickly. I assembled together a group of people to provide furniture, and I went down and I worked for the client and set them up. They became one of my biggest clients, and very good friends.

I turned a really bad situation around very quickly, and I made sure every time I got on the phone, I had a solution for what the next hurdle was, because there were several hurdles to overcome.

Fred Diamond: You know, when you deal with those types of customers there’s a lot of complexity. Sometimes there’s many people involved; sometimes you might find at the end that there is someone involved you didn’t think about. So understanding how to navigate through deals like that is something that we’ve heard time and time again from the sales game changers that we’ve interviewed.

We’re talking with Joy Newton Grubb today. Joy, you’ve had a great career in sales. You’ve sold to some great companies, you’ve sold to some big customers. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard” or “It’s just not for me”?

Joy Newton Grubb: No. I’ve never had any regrets. Never. You’ll hit some tough roads, and when I’ve hit those tough roads, I just work a little harder. It makes the difference. I ask a question, or I go seek and get the help.

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

Joy Newton Grubb: Take pride in being professional, and get the training that you need. A good sales training course will help a lot, and so will a good mentor who will take the time to walk you through it. But the other thing too is not to give up too soon. I have worked with reps through the years, and I’ve had really good reps who’ve gotten to 18 months and they really haven’t brought home what I think they thought they should, and I would say, “You need to be patient. You have to build your book of business, you have to build your brand, your style, and your integrity in the marketplace, and it takes a while.” And you have to earn your spot with your competitors.

Fred Diamond: Do you think that everyone can make it in sales? You just mentioned that sometimes people might give up a little bit too soon. Do you think that everyone with the right training and mentorship can have a successful career in sales?

Joy Newton Grubb: I think some salespeople aren’t meant to be salespeople. I’ve seen that. I can pretty much tell that pretty quickly. They’re thinking it’s kind of glamorous. It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s a lot of sleepless nights saying, “Oh, my God, did I put this in? Did I say this? Was I professional enough? Did I speak, have a good presence?” But I have seen introverts do very well in sales.

I think it depends on what it is that they’re selling, and it depends on whether they’re driven and they’re really focused. One of the things that people always tell me is I’m very driven and I’m very passionate. Right now I’m into that driving phase, I want to drive into the next step. If you take it personally, it’s really going to hurt, but if you can hang in there and be tough and drive yourself to help you drive the client, you’ll be fine.

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

Joy Newton Grubb: I do a lot of networking after hours. I do some lead groups, I also really watch what other people’s selling styles are or how they handled a certain situation, because everybody has a different style, everybody brings something different to the table. So I think that’s really important.

I do a lot of reading. I have attended several sales classes and schools along the way. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve taken almost every sales course, and not a lot of people have had that opportunity, so I know that’s really a bit of bonus for me.

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

Joy Newton Grubb: This is the first time in four years that I’ve been back full-time in sales. Prior to that I’ve been in business development, and prior to business development I had always been in sales and management, and I found that my passion really is for sales. Business development is a little bit different; it’s looking for the client.

But what I found is when I found the opportunity, the client that I would pass it off to, maybe the connection wouldn’t be there, they wouldn’t follow up, they didn’t see the same opportunity that I saw. I many times felt very disappointed—not necessarily in what I was doing but in how it was carried across. So I’m glad to be doing my own telemarketing and networking. I can control what I do.

Fred Diamond: Can you define the difference between sales and business development for our audience?

Joy Newton Grubb: With business development you’re way ahead of the sale and you’re looking to make a lot of important relationships. You develop those relationships, and you develop your integrity, but at some point you’re going to probably pass it off into a true sales position. When you do that, pass off, sometimes a client would prefer to work with you than the person you’re passing off to. Business development requires a lot of patience. It’s actually a longer sales cycle than the actual physical sales cycle itself from when you start a project. You’re really developing very cold leads, and you’re making introductions, and you’re doing presentations. It’s very important to educate the community that you sell to about what it is that your company does and what you’re known for.

Fred Diamond: Thanks for clarifying that for us. Joy, sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. You even mentioned before that one of the biggest challenges is getting face time with the customer. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Joy Newton Grubb: I once got an award for being the most persistent sales rep, and it’s because I think of two things. And it took me a long time to learn this, but what’s the worst thing a customer’s going to say? No? So what? So what if they say no? You just kind of go on to the next thing.

I also have that “three times, you’re out” rule, and that helps me manage the targets that I need. It’s a reality check for me. I track that for myself so I know where I’m at, and I think that that’s really helped a lot.

Fred Diamond: Please give us one final thought that you can share with our sales game changers listening to this podcast to help them take their career to the next level.

Joy Newton Grubb: Don’t be afraid to be a true sales professional. Dress like a professional, act like a professional in your personal and your business life. Make sure that you have your integrity and your professionalism in check, and you will develop your own style and you will be a great success.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 030: Joy Newton Grubb Strives to Anticipate Her Customers’ Office System Needs to Better Help Solve Their Problems first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.