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EPISODE 174: Chris Brady Explains How PRIDE – Passion, Respect, Intelligence, Discipline and Effort – Are at the Root of Learning Tree’s Sales Culture

CHRIS’ FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If we all bring some of those basic elements of PRIDE to our work each and every day – if we’re passionate, respectful, intelligent, we have a disciplined approach and we bring a lot of energy and effort to the job each and every day – we can have successful outcomes.”

Chris Brady is the head of North American Sales at Learning Tree International.

He spent his entire career at Learning Tree International and has held multiple individual and management roles before becoming the head of North American sales.

Find Chris on LinkedIn!

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

Chris Brady: Learning Tree International is an IT training and service company. The exciting thing about Learning Tree and what we sell and provide to our customers is our constantly expanding suite of services. For the first 20 or so years at my time here at Learning Tree we primarily focused on instructor led multi-day training courses, but over the last 4 or 5 years we’ve really evolved quite a bit in terms of the service catalogue that we provide to our customers.

Whether it’s upfront skills assessment, post-course coaching and mentoring, acceleration workshops to ensure that the practical application of skills delivered in the classroom are applied to projects, you name it. It really is about the improvement of an organization rather than just individual training classes.

Fred Diamond: What kind of training do you do, what kind of classes do you do?

Chris Brady: You name it. IT, professional development, business skills, project management, business analysis. We’ve got a suite of over 700 different titles and services that we can provide to customers, it’s really broad and robust on catalogue of services for sure. The exciting thing about this is not only our evolution but in my role of North American sales working with the 60 employees we have on the team to make sure that they’re all focused on servicing our customers in this quickly evolving and dynamic environment.

Fred Diamond: We’ll talk about it through the course of the podcast, obviously your industry has changed over the years so your leadership has had to evolve and how you actually sell to your customer. Curiously before I ask you about your career, who do you sell to? What types of people do your sales team sell to?

Chris Brady: You name it, we’re about 50/50 between commercial customers and government customers, federal, state and local. Typically it’s a collaboration between, if I were to say, the HR suite including learning and development professionals and then the IT organization – a Chief Information Officer in his or her subordinate organization. Typically it’s a combination of the two, it always works best when it’s a collaboration between learning and development HR and IT. If one of those stands out alone in a silo, typically it doesn’t always optimize the outcomes for an organization.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales as a career?

Chris Brady: It’s funny, I was thinking about this and this is a little story I’ve told a couple different times. I graduated from Mary Washington which is now Mary Washington University in 1995 without a clue in the world of what I wanted to do. I had worked through schools so I had a couple bucks in my back pocket, I went to Old Dominion University and got a graduate degree in sports management. I thought for sure I was going to become the general manager of the Boston Celtics or something close to there, maybe selling sponsorships really was what I focused on a little bit later.

Two years later, master’s degree in hand, I was getting $18,000 dollar job offers to go work for the Washington Bullets at the time, as an example. A lot of folks in that industry are working really hard for very low pay. In the meantime, two of my best buddies in the world that I graduated from Mary Washington with were working at Learning Tree in operational roles.

They said, “We’re making a pretty good salary, we’re enjoying life, it’s a great place to work. Why don’t you come on over and interview?” I had an interview with a sales manager who happened to graduate from Old Dominion University where I had just graduated and here we are 24 years later. It really was more a story of a young man that didn’t know exactly where he wanted to go, found a comfortable landing spot more because of the people that were around and a comfortable environment. It has been a very stable successful place for myself and provided me the ability to raise my family as well.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the key lessons you learned from some of those first few sales jobs?

Chris Brady: Thinking back to the early days, it really was about persistence, discipline, learning to cultivate the ability to listen – which at 22, 23 years old I’m not sure I was particularly focused on – but more than anything, it was starting to learn and create a passion not only for the career but for customers and their mission objectives. I think we’ll talk a little bit more about some of the particular accounts that I’ve been working on and success that we’ve had, but what drives me today is sitting down with customers and understanding their mission.

It can be very unique in different sectors, what the organization is really all about, what they’re trying to accomplish but typically if we can gain a good understanding of what that mission objective is and how learning can subsequently support those mission objectives, we’re a lot stickier with customers. Outcomes are a lot more successful and at the end of the day it’s just a heck of a lot more fun, too. Those are the kinds of things that I think we were planting the seeds early in the career and they feel very good and strong at this point.

Fred Diamond: Chris, listening comes up not infrequently in the Sales Game Changers podcast, you talked about how challenging it was when you were in your early stage of your career. What are some things that you do that you could give advice to for the people listening to the podcast to become better listeners and sales professionals?

Chris Brady: I think the #1 thing is just to make yourself slow down a little bit. I think this is something that we in life in general these days, everybody wants instant gratification, we’ve got so much access to information and data. It’s finding the ability to take a deep breath, to pause a little bit, to let others speak and share their perspective and objectives and to just relax and enjoy that moment. I think at 45 years old that’s still something that I’m learning and working very hard on each and every day, especially in this role head of North American sales.

I think just understanding the customers and understanding their perspectives and that’s really what matters and will drive the successful engagement. Getting out sales reps to understand that, to be mindful of that when they’re talking with customers. It’s not about what we want to sell them, it’s about gaining an understanding of what we can do for them to be successful. Just remembering that and taking that deep breath and trying to slow down as much as possible, that’s really what it’s all about. Easier said than done, too for sure.

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

Chris Brady: The word brilliance I think would be a stretch for me in just about every category, so I’ll say that maybe self-awareness is a strength of mine. At this point in my life I’m pretty comfortable with what we’re good at and what we’re not good at. One of the things I enjoy most about my work here at learning tree is being surrounded by good people and having quality teammates. With that self-awareness, it allows me the ability to lean on other people realizing that I don’t have all the answers to all the questions. I think tied closely to self-awareness is also humility.

Once again, understanding that individual success is rarely accomplished, it’s typically a team effort. In all of our successful engagement in the last twenty something years, I think about the collaboration amongst internal Learning Tree team members that created success. In my mind I’m not sure that I’m brilliant in any typical area, fairly humble, fairly self-aware and I think I’ve got a decent ability to make people comfortable. We can sit down with customers, we can talk about their business challenges and hopefully start to stimulate some conversations around potential solutions that we might be able to provide. I’m not so sure that’s really a discernible skill or a competency that they’ll teach, but I feel that that’s part of what drives my role each and every day with learning tree.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been in Learning Tree for about 24 years now, you must have worked for some great people, had some great leaders who helped you along the way. I say 24 years, is it 24?

Chris Brady: Something like that, who’s counting? [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career.

Chris Brady: I think before I even get to sales mentors, I think about my mother and father. That helps shape who we are as human beings and what we do in life. My dad was a career navy officer, used to go on multi-month deployments on submarines so he would get up early in the morning, go out and do really hard work for long periods of time. Just instilling the basics of what a work ethic is really all about, what discipline is really all about I think we started to learn some of that stuff before we really got into the sales field, and that definitely sticks with me and resonates today.

When I think about sales mentorship today and in the last 20 years, the #1 person that I lean on right now is our CEO, Richard Spires. Although I think he would agree that sales isn’t necessarily his focus or something that he’s spent a lot of time on his career, he’s been primarily an IT and systems leader. Understanding his perspective on leadership in general and about how we should engage with our customers in terms of generic leadership qualities. Once again, great listener. The CEO of our organization can ask a question, sit back, listen and absorb an answer effectively. Once again, establishing and demonstrating the real sales acumen and rapport that we’re looking for in our young people. He really carries himself as a sales leader.

It’s funny, I don’t think these people would think about themselves as mentors but one of the gentlemen that I was a graduate with from Mary Washington, his name is David Carey, he’s actually a proprietary of his own business at this point. Owns a training company actually competitor of ours, ROI Training. He at a very young age was more of a peer, but I was observing each and every thing he did every single day. I still observe him from afar, hardest working guy I ever met in my life. Disciplined customer focused approach that is unfailing, it’s always about achieving customer objectives. He’s one person that still provides some mentorship for me.

This is going to be a little bit goofy but my younger brother – who’s my brother in law, actually – a highly successful salesperson in the learning development space, it’s his ability to interact with people and I see how he interacts with customers. He was a long time learning tree employee, he’s moved onto other success but also just how he interacts with people in life in general, he’s a mentor to me each and every time I get to sit down with him just in terms of how he interacts. All of those skills apply in our sales world each and every day, how we interact whether it’s with internal team members or our customers

I’m sure that list of sales mentors was not typical, but I think that’s who I am as a person and how I view the world, and I think all of it has a practical application to my role here at head of North American sales.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great example, a lot of people we’ve interviewed on the podcast refer to their parents, their father who they’ve seen work really hard. Interestingly, a lot of them had fathers who were in sales and your father was a submarine. Actually, one of the people we interviewed for the podcast, John Asher, actually spent a lot of time on submarines and gave us some great insights into that. Again, you’re in an industry right now that has been disrupted over the years, it’s changed. How people get their training has changed, what they expect from a training provider. Why don’t you tell us the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Chris Brady: I think #1 is getting customers to understand that constantly evolving dynamic, not only that they understand that the dynamic has changed in terms of the L&D, Learning and Development industry but also that our portfolio of services has changed and evolved to better support them. A lot of the services that we talk about today we’ve been providing for customers for the entire forty something years we’ve been in existence, but it hasn’t necessarily been front and center in terms of our marketing efforts and the branding of Learning Tree. Richard, our CEO, when he came on board a few years ago that really has been a major initiative for him to make sure that customers get a solid understanding of our entire suite of services that we could provide. That’s #1, just that evolving landscape both on the customer side as well as internally.

Secondarily, as a sales leader I find a constant challenge in terms of the frequency of communication to interact with our North American sales team which might be a little bit unusual, but finding the right balance in a 60 person group in terms of how often do we get together and organize team environments and chat with each other? How often do we break out into individual portfolios or smaller teams? How often is email an effective form of communication? What’s the right balance between getting on a Skype call or leveraging email or going over and walking and shaking somebody’s hand face to face? Finding the right forms of communication, prioritizing appropriately and making sure that the entire 60 person North American sales team knows exactly what we’re working on, why it’s a value to them and subsequently to our customers. Once again, that might be a little bit of a unique challenge for me personally but it’s getting my arms around that leadership role on a 60-person diverse team.

Fred Diamond: That’s a good one that isn’t one that has come up all that frequently. Just curiously, what are your favorite ways or most impactful ways to communicate to your sales team?

Chris Brady: #1, I’ve got a great group of team members, directors, we’ve got four of them in North America that I work with so they lead individual teams contained within that 60 person group making sure and trying to make sure #1 that as a sales leadership team we’re all on the same page. We’ve got clear objectives, we know what we’re trying to accomplish in both the short and long term, making sure that there’s clear consistent message that they can then share with their teams as well. I think then finding the right balance of formal meetings with our team and right now we’ve set alone a happy media of a monthly get-together where the entire group will get together for 30 to 60 minutes and talk about everything that truly matters from a strategic level within North American sales.

There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of things going on that we’re doing to support customers that includes sharing success stories. Where are we seeing success? Where have we won recent awards or contracts? Sometimes making sure that those success stories are shared across portfolios can be ultra-important because we want to repeat those successes with other customers. Once again, making sure that in that monthly session we really got a clear communication about what really matters and sharing some of those successes.

Then we do weekly lunch and learns, we do about two and a half per week and that’s really an opportunity just to get together to talk more about some of the tactical things that are going on that we’re trying to upscale our sales reps on, make sure once again that they’re in tune with all the products and servicing we’re offering our customers as well as things like customer successes, all of the things that go into their business day. It’s a pretty broad suite, I would say of elements that we use to try to tackle those objectives, but we’re finding our way there for sure.

Fred Diamond: Speaking of sales successes, why don’t you take us back to the #1 sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Chris Brady: I thought you were going to say #1 and I can’t pin one down. I’ve had three that I think of so I’ll just run through them really quickly. #1 was we were involved in a multi-year contract with a national security agency for a software engineering program and project management effort. This was back in the early 2000’s and I was at the national security agency on the morning of September 11th which was a day that really changed a lot of our lives. Working with that particular organization, I talked earlier about mission objectives and understanding mission objectives. At that time in my life that gave me more of a global dynamic about what really matters to customers and what mission objectives really mean. That was one that changed my career in terms of perspective.

A handful of years ago we were awarded a multi-year contract with the state of Tennessee which I’ve been intimately involved with for the last 6 years. That really in my opinion is one of the most organized and senior led learning and development programs that I’ve ever seen globally. The state is really focused on providing their IT employees with the knowledge skills and abilities to do their jobs effectively in a 21st Century organization. They are really doing a bang up job and we’re proud to support them. Lastly I’ll just say this bucket of recent wins that we’ve had as a company here at Learning Tree. I say recent wins, it goes back to the evolving dynamic that Richard has created here at Learning Tree in better understanding how we can support our customers and making sure they understand that as well.

We’ve had recent wins with Bayer Corporation, a brand new logo for us. A recent partnership with Suntiva to support FDA, federal government Food and Drug Administration University on a multi-year effort. These are both examples of where we’re not only getting new business with new logos like Bayer but we’re going deeper and wider with government agency as an example with that evolving service portfolio that we have. We’ve got a lot of traction, a lot of good things happening here at Learning Tree across the board.

Fred Diamond: Again, we’re talking on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast to Chris Brady, he’s the head of North American sales at Learning Tree International. Chris, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors you mentioned you originally thought you were going to go into sports management. You thought you were going to be the general manager for the Boston Celtics, interesting for a guy who grew up in DC.

Chris Brady: I was born in Connecticut, my dad was a submariner as I mentioned and we used to go visit New England on the regular. Somehow I found this eclectic mix of teams including the Boston Celtics.

Fred Diamond: It’s interesting because you have a beautiful picture here of the Redskins when they won I guess their second or third Super Bowl right behind us here.

Chris Brady: In his navy career we moved here to Washington DC in the early 80’s right at the prime of the Redskins career. I was here for all three of their Super Bowls, now reside in Ashburn, Virginia, a stone’s throw away from Redskins Park so they are also near and dear to our heart.

Fred Diamond: That’s true. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you made that move into sales, some of your buddies said, “Come work at this company called Learning Tree.” Did you ever question that? Again, you’ve had a great career here, you’ve been here for over 20 years, you’ve held various positions. Of course now you’re heading up North American sales and obviously from this podcast you’re quite passionate about the mission of Learning Tree and how you’re helping your customers. Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Chris Brady: I mentioned that my dad was a submariner and he worked pretty hard. My little brother is a lieutenant coronel in the infantry for the United States Marine Core, I’ve seen him deploy more times than I can count all over the world, I’ve seen the sacrifices that his family is given for that duty. When we say, “It’s too hard” in sales, you can hear the emotion in my voice, I know what hard work is all about and we work really hard here at Learning Tree. We wake up at 4:30 in the morning and get started on our day but I’m not sure it compares to the hard work that some other people put in their mission.

So no, I’ve never questioned the hard work, I’ve never really questioned sales. I’ve thought sometimes about the desire to sell more directly to DOD in support of folks like my dad and my brother and I’m really proud of the work we do here at Learning Tree supporting our department of defense portfolio. All lines of business within the DOD we support very aggressively, so no. I’m pretty comfortable with the hard work we’re putting in right now and I’m very passionate about the future for our sales career.

Fred Diamond: Putting things in perspective obviously there’s challenges with sales and we talk about them on every podcast but being deployed over sees and I presume he’s been places that are quite dangerous so thank your brother and your father for their service.

Chris Brady: No doubt about it.

[Sponsor break]

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

Chris Brady: This year we came up with an acronym for North American sales. We’re really trying to instill some sales culture, make sure we have a clear understanding of who we want to be as a sales organization and we came up with the acronym PRIDE. I’ll just walk through that really quickly because I think this is what really matters for young people.

PRIDE starts with P and that’s Passion, making sure you have some passion in your life. I’m pretty sure that when I was a young person maybe coming out of school and just starting at Learning Tree I wasn’t necessarily passionate right away about the sales career but boy, did I have some passion in other areas of my life. I think it’s really important that you find that passion because even if it’s external, outside of work, will bring you great energy and strength to your sales career. Hopefully over time you will develop that passion, I’ve got quite a bit of passion right now not only as a leader of this sales organization but for the company that I’ve worked for for so long. We try to lead by example in terms of the passion we provide.

R is for Respect. These days I think it’s a little bit of a cultural issue that with some social media platforms and things, respect and basic human decency seems to go out the window sometimes. Not only when we’re dealing with our customers, obviously we want to provide them the ultimate respect, but when you’re dealing with your peers in other departments that are supporting our customers. Whether it’s the operations team supporting the Uni course delivery or the finance team making sure we’re getting our billing squared away. We want to be respectful of all people and that should be a basic standard when you roll out of bed in the morning.

I is for Intelligence, we want to take an intelligent approach to our customer engagements. This is one that I struggle with sometimes, I always want to be quick and that passion sometimes pushes me to get the quickest response. Sometimes like we talked about with listening skills, you have to slow down, take a step backwards, engage with the subject matter experts that you should and make sure you’re crafting the best solution, the optimal solution rather than just the quickest solution. Making sure we’re taking an intelligent approach in everything that we do each and every day.

D is for discipline, talked a little bit earlier about getting up early in the morning, planning your day. I get a little bit bent sometimes when I see folks rolling and they don’t seem to be very well organized and the day just kind of comes to them rather than them dictating how the day is going to go. I think part of discipline even after 20 something years, high levels of activity do not go out the window. I think a blend of activity whether it’s phone, work, email, face to face meetings, we all have different dynamics and activities that go into our day. Making sure you’re managing that volume of activities putting the appropriate energy and perspective, that takes discipline. You have to have that built into each and every day.

Lastly, E is for Effort. It goes without saying, we just said you need high level of activities and that’s a blend of activities for different people but if you don’t show it and bring it each and every day you will not be a successful sales professional. We’ve never seen one and I’m sure Fred, in your 180 something podcasts nobody has ever said, “Yeah, I just kind of laid back and let it come to me.” That just doesn’t happen. When we talk about PRIDE, I think these are some basic elements and competencies that we’re trying to instill in young professionals. Like I said, I’m not sure that I have necessarily that hardcore discernible skill set. We’ve got the ability to talk to people and communicate clearly, but you have to be passionate about it. You have to take an intelligent approach and #1, you’ve got to put the effort into it. I was lucky to be surrounded by people like Dave Carrie at a young age, like my parents, my brother, my dad, my mom. They instilled that hard work and passion into it and I’ve been lucky to build on that over my career.

Fred Diamond: That being said, what are some of the habits that you put into play on a daily basis to ensure your continued success?

Chris Brady: No doubt about it, planning is the #1 thing in my mind. For me it’s become a weekly exercise, I’d like to think I can start doing a little bit better on a monthly basis but we’re still getting there. Making sure that we’ve got the appropriate amount of time planned for the various activities. For me now it’s not only supporting the 60 person sales team and their customers but it’s collaborating with my peers internally making sure marketing and sales have a close collaboration, making sure our leadership team gets everything that they need for us to be successful. I think it’s similar for our high performing sales reps, they’ve got to find a balance between all of these activities in a given work day, work week, work month. I’m really trying to instill the idea of planning to make sure that you’ve got success week over week, month over month, year over year.

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

Chris Brady: We talked about the evolving dynamic here at Learning Tree, in terms of getting in front of our customers we’ve got an entirely new brand that we rolled out just a few months ago. For 40 something years we had one logo under our previous leadership and ownership, this rebranding exercise has been fantastic, even for an old dog like myself it really has revitalized and provided a lot of energy. It’s amazing what a logo can bring in terms of a fresh perspective and energy. Behind that rebranding exercise is that ecosystem of learning services that we provide to customers making sure that that ecosystem is clearly defined for our customers as well as ourselves so that we’re providing an optimal level of service on all of our customer facing engagements. That’s really been a fun project to be involved with, the rebranding exercise itself provided a lot of energy but that really provides a lot of focus in terms of that rebranding initiative and all of the work that goes in behind it in terms of our learning ecosystem.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Chris Brady on the Sales Game Changers podcast today. He’s the head of North American sales at Learning Tree International. Given us a lot of interesting things to think about, the acronym PRIDE, P-R-I-D-E, Passion, Respect, Intelligence, Discipline and Effort. Chris, before I ask you for your final tip for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe tell us why you’ve continued. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Chris Brady: I’ll go back to that mission objective of a customer. There is nothing, there is very few feelings in the world better than when you see a customer have a successful outcome. We all have family and friends that provide us some really good feelings, but in terms of work successful outcomes for customers is what it’s all about. At this point for me it’s not about individual success, it’s about the success of Learning Tree, all of our North American sales reps and subsequently their customers. It’s all about the mission.

Fred Diamond: Give us a final thought, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. Again, you manage North American sales and people listening in Australia, Europe, all across the globe, give us something to inspire them.

Chris Brady: I think if we all bring some of those basic elements of PRIDE to our work each and every day, I know it might sound a little elementary and basic but if we’re passionate, respectful, intelligent, we have a disciplined approach and we bring a lot of energy and effort to the job each and every day, we can have successful outcomes. I’ve been really lucky in my life to be surrounded by great people who all brought those attributes and all of us can be successful in the game of sales if we provide all of those things.

Fred Diamond: You’re one of the first Sales Game Changers we’ve interviewed who had an acronym like PRIDE that has been throughout the organization. When I used to do marketing consulting I used to do that all the time with my clients, I worked with Apple Computer for a long time and we had an acronym called MIETDBWA – Make It Easy To Do Business With Apple. We had signs all over the place, we all knew about it, it’s not a word obviously but it definitely helps keep you focused. You can always say to your people, “Pride” and they get it right away. They get passion, respect, intelligence, discipline and effort.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 174: Chris Brady Explains How PRIDE – Passion, Respect, Intelligence, Discipline and Effort – Are at the Root of Learning Tree’s Sales Culture first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 155: Cricket Media’s Bob Sanregret Says This Insight Took Him From Product Management into Sales Leadership

BOB’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Keep your eye on the metrics that are important. When you determine what the metric is, then focus on the impact that paying attention to those metrics will have on the end user/end customer because if you’re doing your job correctly and you’re doing your job well, you’re having a positive impact on people’s lives.”

Bob Sanregret is the Senior VP of Sales at Cricket Media.

Previously, he held sales leadership positions at Learning Tree International.

He was the co-founder of the Hot Lava Software company that was sold eventually to IBM.

Find Bob on LinkedIn!

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

Bob Sanregret: I grew up in Southern California, Newport Beach, Seal Beach. I went to Loyola Marymount, my first job out of college was at Learning Tree and I was there for 14 years starting off in product development and moving on through to ending up as a VP of sales for about 5 years. That’s where I met Mark LaFleur as well, I think I hired him in his first outside sales job, super good friend today.

Fred Diamond: Very good. He’s a great guy and he’s been a good friend of the Institute. Cricket Media, tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Bob Sanregret: Cricked Media is a 35 year old children’s magazine book publisher. They brought me in, most of my background was in software as a service and educational technology solutions and they brought me in to basically take their 35 years in digital assets and find other things we could do with them. It was an exciting opportunity to take award-winning, super high quality K-8 content and bring it into the world to be reused. Today if your children are in first through eighth grade, 80% of the time they’re using Cricket Media content for any type of testing that they do. They’re reading it, they don’t know it’s Cricket Media content, it’s ETS or one of the other testing companies but that excites me. We improve the lives of children and teachers by bringing them super high quality tested, proven, published content that they can use.

Fred Diamond: For the listeners on the podcast today, who do you sell to? You mentioned that the end user may not know that it’s Cricket Media content, but who do you, who does your team go after, what type of people?

Bob Sanregret: My team is pretty diverse. I have one person who focuses specifically on K-8 and she sells bulk subscriptions to use in classrooms. They use our content, our actual physical magazine as reading material, supplemental reading material, daily reading material. Our content covers science, history and also straight up reading but the more exciting piece of it in a lot of ways to me is we’ll take our same content and we’ll sell it to all the big publishing companies: McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin, Pearson and then the big testing companies like ETS. They’ll use our content to integrate into their straight books that are used for publishing to the classrooms, to their educational technology products or to the testing/reading intervention solutions.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned right after college you went to Learning Tree, did you start in sales? You mentioned product management originally.

Bob Sanregret: My first job was in product management and I pretty much did not like salespeople, I thought sales was an absolute disgusting necessary evil. My first job was in product management and I managed a series of courses that had to do with data technology and all kinds of stuff back in the 80’s and 90’s early days, and moved in after a period of time to helping salespeople design custom programs. Then from there I saw how the sales process worked and absolutely fell in love.

I met some amazing salespeople that were very talented at listening to what customers wanted, sat in a room, I’m taking notes to design the programs but they’re communicating with these customers and they truly cared about what the customers needed. I really fell in love with sales.

Fred Diamond: How did that go, you just went to the boss and say, “I want to move out of product management into sales” and they said, “Sure, here’s your quota, go”?

Bob Sanregret: It was kind of like that. The CEO basically said, “You have management potential, we want to move you back east so that you’re in actual operating unit instead of at corporate and really get more engaged with the people.” I took a position as operations director and I ran all of the physical operations components of Learning Tree in Reston, but that also included helping out the onsite, the custom group. I ended up moving more of my time into the custom group and then they brought me in and said, “You’re going to be our senior sales engineer and basically help for all these deals.” I got positioned into it by going into management and then moving around.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, how long was the transition? You mentioned in the beginning that you weren’t a big fan of sales, but obviously now we’re talking to you on the Sales Game Changers podcast and again you went into a sales role after taking operations. How long was that transition, did it take you a year, two, three, five years before you woke up one day and said, “You know what? This is where I should be”?

Bob Sanregret: It was probably about three years because I did operations, I understood how all of that worked and I flew all around the world, it was the most awesome job out of college you can imagine. I was in London 6 weeks after graduating college for a week, so I loved it. Then I met the salespeople over there and started to really embrace it, and it was probably about two years and then I just fell in love with sales and I haven’t gone back. I had a sales job at Learning Tree for 6 months and then I was promoted to VP of sales.

The nice thing was that the sales team who I developed relationships with, there was like 12 of them, they’re the ones who wanted me to be VP of sales. I was the youngest VP of sales Learning Tree had ever seen, I was like 25 at the time and I was managing. Everybody was older than me, so I was the absolute youngest one on the team but I actually added value to what they did because as a product manager, I was giving them ideas and, “Why don’t you talk to the customer about this? Why don’t you suggest that?” The salespeople loved having a VP of sales that actually helped them instead of a VP of sales that tried to just tell them what to do.

Fred Diamond: When you made that shift, what were some of the key lessons you took away when you moved into sales?

Bob Sanregret: I think one of the biggest things was really focusing energy on the customer, focusing on what the customer needs today and might need tomorrow, and then finding ways to position it to the customer. I learned that through hundreds of hours of sitting with salespeople just listening, listening is the key to sales and the best salespeople I’ve known in my entire life have always been people that had the ability to say one thing and then listen ten times higher. It’s the old adage, “We have two ears and one mouth, use them in that order.”

Fred Diamond: That comes up not infrequently, the recommendation to become a better listener and people talk about the same analogy you just said, “You have two ears, one mouth, use them in that order”, the 66% solution. What are some of the tips that you have for the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast to become a better listener?

Bob Sanregret: I think, Fred, to me one of the biggest challenges that I found in hiring sales reps – and this all goes to that same point – is finding people that actually care about what the customers do, actually truly have an interest in what the customers do. If you truly care about something, you’re going to want to learn more about it, you’re going to want to embrace it, you’re going to want to become a part of it. The only way you’re going to do that if you’re talking to Lockheed Martin and you’re trying to sell him training courses, you want to learn about what that division does, so you ask questions. When you ask questions, people love to talk, everybody loves to talk.

Fred Diamond: Typically people who are buying the type of thing that you’re selling in technology and software are not going to be talking about it at home, so if they find somebody who’s interested they’re always going to be excited to chat about it. Tell us a little more about you, tell us what you’re an expert in. Tell us more about your specific area of brilliance.

Bob Sanregret: I’ve been a VP of sales since I was 26, so that was many years ago, but the last 10 years I’ve really tuned the importance of identifying the correct metrics to measure which in the beginning you talk about relationship development and identifying problems, whether it’s spin selling or disc analysis. Really the metrics to measure for what it is that helps you find more prospects, more leads, how do you measure the success, it’s not just about opportunities and sales forcing. Of course everybody thinks it’s all about closed deals, it’s not about closed deals. It’s about what can you measure that feeds the ability for a rep to have an opportunity added to sales force, so that’s pretty much a very passionate area of mine today. I’m all about finding new lists, finding new prospects, using LinkedIn, using all kinds of other channels to help find replicable and repeatable ways to find new potential prospects.

Fred Diamond: Top of your head, what are some of the key metrics that you believe the sales leaders listening to the podcast today should be checking and thinking about?

Bob Sanregret: You need to get that flow down to say, “If I do an email send to 10 thousand names, how many people respond? Of those people that respond, how many people actually take my call? What have I used as the hook to get them to take the call, what have I used as the incentive to take the call and how many of those become opportunities?” I like to go as far back the funnel as I possibly can to say it’s the activities, whether it’s an email blast or a number of calls or the number of people in an organization that you touch that actually starts the whole ball rolling.

That’s a hard one, because to get more names and to get more activity you have to outsource telemarketing or internal telemarketing or do more email blasts and it costs a lot of money. Then everybody says, “Just tell your people to sell more.” No, to sell more we need to have better prospects and we’ll sell more and we’ll have higher quality opportunities added to sales force.

Fred Diamond: Again, you start out in product management, then you saw what the sales professionals were doing. You had a deeper appreciation as you went along the way, the company tapped you relatively early on, again the first company you were at after college. You must have had a mentor or two who guided you along, why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they helped you along the way on your career?

Bob Sanregret: It’s interesting, I was thinking about that question. The two mentors that I would suggest to everybody, #1 was the CEO of Learning Tree. I was two levels away from him, but I was a young kid out of college and I worked 12 hour days as product manager so I would be there late at night. He’d be there late at night and we would hang out, everybody’d be gone. It’d be me and him and maybe one or two other people. He would sit me down and talk to me, he really drilled into me the importance of caring about the customer. It’s not even the company first, he almost made it like the customer first and that has been a rare situation that I’ve seen CEO’s actually focus on that. I learned a lot from David Collins about how important it is to put the customer and the customer’s needs first and going the next level when you’re involved with education. If you do that, you’re having a huge positive impact on society because if we could bring more technical skills in the hands of engineers and software developers, they’re going to have an impact in helping society move forward. David was a huge mentor to me.

The next one was a sales rep, her name was Marti Lutanski (Sanregret) and she was one of the top sales reps at Learning Tree and I was the sales engineer. We did a deal with Sun Microsystems where she brought me in as the product manager/product developer for a series of courses. It was the largest deal Learning Tree ever did in that realm, it was like $500 thousand a year which was very big for Learning Tree. She showed me the ropes of the deeper side of sales, because I would be in every meeting she was in and she always tells me to this day – because I married her later – she always tells me, “That’s when I had to kick you under the table. She would kick me under the table every time I would start something that would disrupt the flow of the relationship development with the customer. She ended up being a pretty big mentor to me over the years, and then later I was her boss which was ironic. I don’t know if she voted for me or not, but the rest of the team voted and I became VP of sales.

Fred Diamond: Tell us the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader.

Bob Sanregret: I learned a long time ago that as a VP of sales or as a sales manager, it’s not your job to motivate people. It’s your job to not demotivate people and protect them from becoming demotivated. Throughout my years even here, you find that sales reps often times get demotivated by other people in the company who basically say, “No, we can’t do something” which of course we can do, it’s just a matter of being creative. That’s been a continual struggle, is to educate the other executives in any company I’ve worked for as to how important it is to not demotivate the salespeople. Salespeople have to motivate themselves and you could try to understand how they’re happier, but I would say the key is not demotivating them and I found that that’s been a challenge, to get the rest of the company to understand how important it is to not demotivate salespeople.

Other challenge is also continuing the stream of where leads are coming in from, where prospects are coming in from, keeping an eye on the ball with the marketing team, if the marketing team is under you, stay on top of it. I’ve been VP of sales for probably 8 companies now, and the first thing you do is come in and basically milk the existing database that was never very well milked before and work the heck out of it. That’s fine and dandy, and that lasts for about a year or two and you make a ton of money but then after that you need to find new channels.

Here at Cricket it’s been a challenge because how many people need to license children’s magazine content? We had to get creative in who we looked for and how we founded new channels and added International, of course, as the next. Finding new places for your sales reps and new leads for your sales reps and sales team to work is the second challenge.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned you were the sales VP at approximately 8 companies. Why don’t you pinpoint the one success or win from your career that you’re most proud of?

Bob Sanregret: I was VP of Sales at Livemocha, a language learning company out of Seattle, amazing company with amazing people. The CEO, Michael Schutzler is one of the best bosses I’ve had in my entire life, very inspirational person. He basically handed me this team and I fired both the members of the team within probably three months because they were absolutely horrendous and had terrible attitudes. In sales, if you’re a sales manager and people have bad attitude, you want to get rid of them very fast especially if it’s a small team because they will drag everything else down, you will fail and be fired.

What I did was fire those two people immediately, took these two interns that were young kids out of college, made them the salespeople and we ended up creating a $4 million dollar revenue stream in two years from basically zero. That allowed us to then sell the company to Rosetta Stone. During that process, the two things that we did that were huge were create a product that could be sold in corporate and redesign the back end so that there’s administrative panels so you can see the activities that users accomplished, and we went into the library space. We opened up a brand new channel in the library space for Livemocha and that ended up becoming probably a quarter of the revenue and 3/4 was education and corporate.

Fred Diamond: You’ve got to be creative, one thing that comes up not infrequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast is let’s say you’re having a bad month or things aren’t working out or there are issues in your marketplace. Of course, earlier this year the government had a shutdown so a lot of companies had to rethink what they were selling. You’ve got to figure out another place to sell or another market to go into or sell something different to your customer, that’s come up a number of times. Bob, did you ever question being in sales? Again, you made the shift from product management. Right out of school you went to a product management job, you even said in the beginning that you really had a distaste for the whole process of sales but of course now you’ve mentioned that you’ve been the sales leader at 8 different companies. Did you ever question yourself? Did you ever think to yourself along the way, “I’d rather go back into product management, this sales thing, it just ain’t for me”?

Bob Sanregret: Not really. I’ve wanted to go into acting and become a rock star but neither of those really had any possible outcomes [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Do you play an instrument at all?

Bob Sanregret: I play a little guitar, but I’m kidding. From the beginning I loved sales at Learning Tree and did the disk training, did the spin sale training, did a conceptional sale training and the whole concept of sales to me can be whatever you want. You have the ability to be a product manager in sales, you have the ability to be a marketer in sales. You have such freedom in sales that you don’t have in other positions that to me, it’s an ideal vocation for anyone who’s inclined to that. The one thing about sales – I think I could have probably  said this earlier – one of the challenges in sales is you have to be comfortable accepting rejection and a lot of people aren’t comfortable accepting rejection. I don’t have a problem with it, I love coming up with ideas. Sometimes I get mad at customers because I’ve given them a perfect solution and they haven’t agreed with it and I’m like, “You’re the one that’s going to lose out on this.” They’ve rejected me, but I’ve never really had a problem with that.

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

Bob Sanregret: I would say keep your eye on the metrics that are important. Learn and keep your eye on those metrics and pay attention. I’m in sales force probably 20 times a day – which may be a little bit overkill – looking at what’s going on, how deals are moving forward, what’s happening with our opportunities. We have probably 125 opportunities in sales force right now between the teams and I evaluate those and look at those and then dig in once in a while. There’s an old adage to say, “Inspect what you expect or you can expect failure.” Inspection of what you want your sales team to be doing and calling them out, helping them out and saying, “Do you need any help with this?” that’s a huge one.

The second is understanding the customer and understanding what the customer needs, and caring about the customer. That to me has been something that’s helped me in my career. As soon as I come in and I meet a customer and I do, truly, in my heart care but even if you can’t truly in your heart care, at least pretend that you’re caring to the point where they believe you because the more you care about the customer the more success you’re going to have. Then when you’re back talking to the executives in your company which are the ones that’ll determine whether you’re promoted, they will understand that you truly care about the customer and that will help you move up the ladder.

Fred Diamond: I think it’s not just the caring but caring about their business objectives. This has come up a number of times on the podcast as well, for you to really succeed in sales today you need to really earnestly think about what your customer is trying to achieve with their customer so you can bring them as much value as possible. Bob, what are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Bob Sanregret: I do a lot of digging and research into the newer technologies that are coming out in our area. Paying attention to LinkedIn feeds for what’s going on at the top 10 customer base helps me sharpen my saw in the industry and in general just pay more attention to what’s going on. That’s been very valuable, I read, I listen to podcasts, I read a lot of articles, LinkedIn is an amazing source to keep up to date. My LinkedIn, I’ve been there since the very beginning so I probably have 6,000 connections now and they have some great feeds. Some of them are funny, some of them are intellectual but I still love reading the feeds that are in podcasts from the people that I know. A lot of reading and a lot of paying attention to what’s going on in the industry.

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

Bob Sanregret: The marketing plans that we put together for Cricket cover about a two year period of time, and in those marketing plans a lot of what I’m doing is also benefiting the company, of course, and us growing as a company but also benefiting me. If I’m going to go to a trade show and that trade show is going to bring leads to Cricket Media then basically I’ll have the ability to also go to some of the seminars that are there and learn a lot. That will benefit Cricket too, but it also benefits me.

Fred Diamond: Bob, again we talked about your transition. One thing we really didn’t talk about – I just want to touch base before we move onto the last question or two – you were also the co-founder of a company that was quite successful, it was sold to another company and eventually made its way to IBM. Was that a detour along the way? Talk about that, how that impacted your career growth.

Bob Sanregret: I was VP of sales and business development at Global Knowledge and I was on a plane and I had a palm pilot in my hand. Back in the day there’s no cell phones, so you’re putting your calendar in and maybe playing a game of chess or something and I said, “This is really a computer. I wonder if we can do training on this thing.” I came up with this idea and came back and talked to my wife Marti and we basically brainstormed on, “I wonder if there’s a way to actually have education delivered on – back then – palm pilots and pocket PC’s.”

That started a hobby still keeping my VP of sales job. The background we were doing some work, we were working with some outsource contractors spending a bunch of our own money and basically building this thing up, just messing around with it. It all of a sudden took off and we received a large grant from the Kauffman Foundation. Everything else was dropped and all focus was in on Hot Lava. It was a hobby that turned into a business that we sold.

Fred Diamond: We’re talking here on the Sales Game Changers podcast, a lot of our listeners are sales professionals, executives like yourself and people who want to strive in their career to reach your level. Any lessons from that experience that have shifted or crafted you as a better sales leader?

Bob Sanregret: For sure, Fred. One thing that was a really great eye opening lesson is we had an idea and we started with that idea, and that idea didn’t really take off so we pivoted and then we tried another idea, and that idea didn’t really take off. These are all things that we’re doing on the side, we’ve got other things going. Then we pivoted again and the third pivot which was the same core technology but used in a different fashion and basically marketed and promoted in different fashion took off. We had customers all over the world, fortune 500 customers worldwide that basically loved what we did, allowed them to author their own content, put it on their own devices but originally our thought was about content. We shifted and created a content development tool and we turned it over to be, “No, this is about the content development tool and we’re going to give that to other people, let them create content.” Pivoting is the key.

Fred Diamond: Tell us why you’ve continued, what is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Bob Sanregret: In certain positions that I’ve had, the response rate has been worse than others and some of them it’s been really good. Some people you call 20 different people and one person responds and is interested and some people, depending on what the product is, you call five people and one person responds. When that one person responds is the reason I love sales, when they all the sudden embrace it and they engage in it and they say, “If we take this Cricket content and we integrate it into our learning technology product that’s delivered on phones or tablets, we can make a better product for kids.”

I always feel in my own heart that I’m a part of the bigger picture solution that that end customer is bringing to their audience, and that’s why I love sales, Fred. If you look at all of my past positions, it’s always been about that. For instance, let me give you another example. At Livemocha we did a deal with a company called Blue Bunny, ice cream company out of Ohio and they had a large team that spoke Spanish, didn’t speak English and we sold a deal to them to teach them English. I felt we’ve actually done a good job helping people learn English to become better, give them more opportunities and they’re going to end up making better ice cream because now they’ll be able to communicate better. Feeling a part of that solution is what keeps me going.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final tip, one thing you said before which really resonated with me, it was a great answer, when we talked about the position of sales and how it’s one of the only positions that you can really create. Of course you need to achieve your goals, you need to sell, you need to reach your quota if you’re working for a company, of course but you can go about doing that as far away as your creativity will take you. We tell people on the Sales Game Changers podcast that you need to think of your career as if you’re the CEO of Joe Smith Industries, and right now Joe Smith Industries is working for Cricket Media or Learning Tree or IBM, wherever it might be. What do you need to do? How can you be creative to help you take your career as a Sales Game Changer to the next level? Bob, thank you so much for the great content, I love the interview. Thank you Mark LaFleur who was our first guest for getting into our cycle here. Again we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, give us one final thought to inspire them today.

Bob Sanregret: When you determine what the metric is, then focus on the impact that paying attention to those methods will have on the end user/end customer because if you’re doing your job correctly and you’re doing your job well, you’re having a positive impact on people’s lives. Always keep that as the target point of why you’re doing what you’re doing. To me, that really helps you drive, helps you make those extra phone calls, helps you make those extra sales calls, helps you do those extra email sends, whatever it takes, you just need to keep pushing and stay consistent and focus on your own personal metrics as well as the company metrics and use those as your driver every day.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 155: Cricket Media’s Bob Sanregret Says This Insight Took Him From Product Management into Sales Leadership first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 001: Learning Tree Sales Vice President Brian Green Is a Sales Game Changer

Episode 001 of the Sales Game Changers Podcast went live on October 9. We interviewed Brian Green, senior vice president of sales at IT and management training company Learning Tree International. Brian shared great insights into how sales professionals can stay focused on what’s important to grow their careers.

Find Brian on LinkedIn!

Here’s a transcript of the podcast:

Fred Diamond: Today I am thrilled to be with my good friend Brian Green. Brian is the senior VP for sales and solution development at Learning Tree. Tell us how you got started in sales.

Brian Green: For any great sales executive or sales professional, you know there’s a little bit of that DNA in us, right? We are somewhat risk takers, we are somewhat class clowns, we like the center of attention, we like the spotlight. But at the end the day we also have a servant leadership mentality. And I think that is in me through my parents. My parents are both entrepreneurs, and I’ve learned the art of service leadership for a long time and servant leadership for a long time, and as I look back and realize how I got here, it really is that desire to really serve, and what better profession than the sales to be able to do that?

Fred: Where’d you grow up?

Brian: I actually grew up here in Richmond, Virginia. I was born here. But most of my adolescence was spent down in Atlanta, Georgia—more specifically Marietta, East Cobb County—and so I’m a Southern boy. I don’t say “y’all” all that much anymore, but nonetheless I’m a Southern boy and spent a number of years—about a decade—down in Tampa/St. Pete, about a decade in the city of Chicago (go, Cubs!), and now here in Washington for about the last eight years.

Fred: You said that you watched your parents, who are entrepreneurs. So what did you take away from that? What were some of the lessons you remember from that?

Brian: You know, there’s a couple of things. That work ethic was instilled in me at a very young age. I was listening to an interview where Janice Glover Jones, who is the CIO of the DIA, talked about how her career got started, and it was very similar to mine, which is this tenacity that she has. She started in the restaurant business, and her first job was at Wendy’s, and the way in which she got into the job was quite unique and very entrepreneurial, and my early career when I was a teenager I started the same way. I was hired into a restaurant, and I had this mentality that I had not only to be good but I had a lead. I was actually hired as most young teenagers are as a dishwasher, and so on day one of this restaurant—it was a brand-new restaurant—and we got we’d came in and everyone sort of sat around, and the general manager said, Okay, so who are the dishwashers? Who are the grill men? Who’s back of the house? And I said, You know what? I kind of like the title of a grill man, I’m going to sit over there, and it took him about a week and a half to figure out that I was actually a dishwasher not a grill man. And ultimately I proved myself in that position to the point where the heads of the restaurant said, “No, Brian actually works really well here.” So at a very young age I realized I can break the rules a little bit here and actually find these opportunities and do really well. But at the end of day it was performance. You’ve got to perform in the position you’re in, and sales is performance-based, right? You got it. You got to succeed.

Fred: Exactly! At the end of the month you know how well you did.

Brian: That’s right.

Fred: Give us a quick description of some of your sales jobs. I know you’ve been selling training for a good part of your career, so just get us caught up in some of the places you’ve worked.

Brian: Sure. So you know the restaurant business, to me, is such a great proving ground, right? You know immediately if you put out a plate of food and that plate comes back, you get an immediate notification that the client is unhappy. And the restaurant business also taught me about creativity. You can assemble a plate, design a meal, and you have instant gratification that the client loves it, they come back for it and so forth, so the restaurant business really taught me about work ethic, taught me about being creative, and taught me about serving our clients. I almost went to the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America up in Poughkeepsie, New York, because I loved it so much, but then I realized what I really love is the interaction with the customers, and being back of the house would limit that interaction. As my career progressed I primarily have worked for entrepreneurs—very successful entrepreneurs, gentleman who have made millions of dollars as business owners—and I really learned about business at a very young age, in my late teens, early 20s, and I just saw the way that these guys ran their business. It was always customer first; it was this relentless dedication to service. Quality was everything, and ultimately the longevity of that relationship: I really understood that the customer is not a customer today or for a month or for a year; it really is a lifelong commitment, and all of the efforts that you do day in and day out should reflect that. And so early on in my career, sort of echoing what I said earlier about my mother and father both being entrepreneurs, I really gravitated toward entrepreneurs, and they’re not really in sales per se. These are business professionals who know that the relationship of growing their business is with their internal customers as well as their external customers. And ultimately I learned about sales through the business, so many of my techniques I’ve adopted are really business-oriented approaches rather than classic sales.

Fred: So tell us some of the places where you’ve worked.

Brian: My first career move was an organization called Corporate Management Services, a major $50 million to $60 million company at the time. We had major corporate contracts for facility management. So we did everything. We did personnel staffing, we did grounds, we did construction, we did janitorial—anything that it took to maintain a campus—and you could imagine the footprints that we covered in that: multiple customers, multiple points of contact, multiple interests. That was my first introduction to proposals, contracts, contract negotiations, and most of those deals were in and around the range of 600,000 to several million. And that was really my first introduction to big business, if you will, and Rob’s business, Rob Johnson, CEO. Rob continues to thrive today, and then from there the work that I was doing was really project-based work. A firm by the name of ESI international came calling; they found me and they said, Listen, we’re experts in project management; you seem to be very good in managing these large contracts and projects. And I really gravitated toward training. It just was a natural fit. Interacting with the heads of the corporation, really understanding what the business drivers were. It’s not just a training certificate or a training program.

Those individuals—those leaders, if you will—are looking to actually improve their performance: how our organization is performing, how it needs to improve, through not only people but also processing technology and that’s really a place that I have loved and have now stayed through ESI and in Learning Tree international.

Fred: You mentioned you’ve been selling training for a good part of your career now. Are you also involved in training associations? Is that a major part of growing your sales strategy as well?

Brian: As I look at my interaction points, it is certainly not just with the customers themselves; it’s with the ecosystem, and as we say “the ecosystem,” I look at organizations like yours, IES. I look at organizations like ACT-IAC, the American Council for Technology Industry Advisory Council. I look at FSIA, a number of those organizations. That ecosystem is critically important for training, for any business really. But really understanding the customer happens in these associations when you network with members of the organization; you learn so much valuable information because people are a little less guarded, if you will. It’s a personal communication, it’s a personal relationship, you’re developing those sort of personal bonds. You’re establishing trust and confidence in that conversation, and you’re able to learn in many cases much more than you would in a structured, formal, conference-call type arrangement for 60 minutes, and so I think organizations like yours and others are invaluable for extending your network but more important for really learning and understanding the businesses. You have executives who come in, you have folks who are in the trenches coming in, really talking about those challenges, and then for individuals like me, both professionals and executives, it really is dependent on us to look at that and understand how we can identify our products and services as such to support that.

Fred: Talk a little bit about how to become a leader in sales. How deep do you need to be into the business of your customer? How much do you need to know and be involved in the day-to-day business of your customer? How much of a commitment have you made to truly understanding their business to be a more effective professional to them?

Brian: Fred, you just hit on, I think, what is one of the most important cornerstones of business today, and that is if you are not involved in these associations in these ecosystems and you’re not involved in these circles you are not a known entity, and as I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit later about sales strategies, some of my cornerstones in terms of how we position ourselves with our clients really is establishing that trust and in organizations like IES and BD ACT-IAC, FSIA, you are there, folks are seeing you. You’re involved in conversations, you’re engaged in personal help, if you will: Tell me about this, tell me about that, what do you know about this? That process is really establishing this bond if you will. So that when they really do find themselves in a pinch, and as what I call “the sense of urgency,” which is a sort of a philosophy within John Kotter’s book Leading Change… they’re going to go to who they trust, and associations like those that are here in DC—of course, your own as well—that begins to establish that process.

Fred: Brian, we were talking before about four things that you like to get across to the people who’ve worked for you. How many people do you think have worked for you?

Brian: A lot.

Fred: Do you keep in touch with all them?

Brian: As many as I can. It’s tough to do today, but nonetheless a lot.

Fred: When you look back at all the people who’ve worked for you, what do you want to establish in them?

Brian: You know it’s a humbling position to be a leader. There are some leaders who enjoy the role of a leader and the benefits of leadership, but in my mind I’ve always viewed the role of a leader much like I viewed the folks I’ve worked for in the past. There was a sense of humility always that existed from my relationship with Rob, my relationship with Virgil Kelley at an organization back in Florida as well as Joe Capello. There’s always a sense of humility that we have an obligation to our staff, to the families of our staff, and so I’ve always viewed my role as leader much in the same way: that it’s humbling being a leader of an organization. It’s also stressful, right? So I really look at the fundamental of my job, which is a lessons learned that I took away from a conference that I’ve attended where Scott, who at the time was the CEO of Walmart, said, “My single job in life is to make sure that I have the right product on the right shelf at the right time at the right price.” That resonated with me so much, and the reason being is that as a sales leader, I have to make sure that I have the right staff in front of the right customer with the right skills at the right time, and likewise my role as the sales leader within the training industry is to ensure that I’m also emphasizing our role and responsibilities and accountability of ensuring that I’m helping more clients, and at Learning Tree ensuring that their staff have the right people on the right job with the right skills at the right time. And so it’s a humbling role, but it’s an exciting one.

Fred: So let’s get to your advice for emerging selling professionals.

Brian: So I look at sales and, in sort of three buckets, the people themselves, the processes, and the technology that we use. So within there you can break that down and have a daylong conversation, which we don’t have [time for] today. So the four things I came to share with you today are what I call my four cornerstones: trust, confidence, positioning, and momentum. Those are four high-level elements.

Let’s take the trust vertical first. We talked about this in terms of the associations like IES and BD and ACT-IAC and FSIA, and that really is a mechanism for establishing trust, right? You are developing relationships; you’re sharing a commonality in terms of experiences and what one does with the other, and that trust is fundamental and critical to any long-term relationship. Does the customer look at you and understand that you have their best interest in mind and that’s it? That’s a very delicate dance, but a well-earned position to have once you get it.

So we move to confidence. Confidence is really, Okay, I trust you—but does your organization have the capabilities of actually delivering what you’ve told me that it can deliver, and how do we demonstrate that? Here in the federal government there’s a [phrase] that we like to use: past performance. So past performance really drives confidence. Buyers, executives, they’d like to see that I’m dealing with someone who can help me solve my problems, my sense of urgency, my goals.

Third is position. The CEB corporate executive board had a recent survey report that came out, and it said the number of stakeholders who were involved in a decision today is 5.4. So when I go back to my staff and I’m supporting them in their overall development, one of the key questions that I always ask them is “Who’s your best point of contact, and who is not your point of contact today that needs to be?” So we always talk about a four-up, four-down, and four-cross, which is really how are you establishing relationships with multiple stakeholders, in multiple positions within the organization… and finally if you’re doing all three of those things really well, momentum is the key. We need to ensure that the train is still moving, and if anything prevents that momentum, then there’s a risk in that equation. We’ve got to figure out what that risk is, dissect it, fix it, and mitigate it, whatever might be.

Fred: Let’s say you’re mentoring one of the guys on your team or one of the salespeople on your team and it’s apparent to you that they’re missing connecting with a couple of the critical [stakeholders]. Talk a little bit about how you would coach them, mentor, yell, instruct.

Brian: You know a lot of it’s just awareness, right? And as I have this project management blood running through my veins, I look at what we do in client engagement with a project management bent: Do we have the right requirements? Are there risks? Have we mitigated those risks? Do we have a cost benefit in mind? Is the client aware of that cost benefit of mine? And so we look at the complexity of an organization and how organizations, both private sector and public sector, and how they’re buying today.

It is no longer an individual decision in most cases, especially if you’re selling complex solutions like training, human capital, design, and IT solutions. There are multiple stakeholders, so really it is just pulling back that curtain and looking at the organization. So as part of our process internally at Learning Tree we have what’s called a customer profile, and within that customer profile we have a sort of matrix of the organization to really look at the hierarchy, starting from the CEO all the way down to the operational elements. and then we really look at that and say, Where does this decision impact this organization. In training and development we really are touching many people throughout the organization, so if I’m working with an organization at a shared-services level and I recognize that I’m training 1,000 people, that’s not one stakeholder that’s making that decision; there might be four or five or six different divisions. And when you look at true selection criteria, you’ve got to look at each of those stakeholders and say, Are each of these stakeholders already in a position that they understand that our solution is the best? Or is there weakness? Do we have relationships where they already have relationships with other vendors? What are those things that are their sense of urgency for their staff, and have we addressed that? It’s very easy once you start pulling back and really looking at the organization as a whole. You’ll very quickly realize that one is not the right number.

Fred: A lot of people come to us and say that sales is harder today because of some of the things you talked about: competition, pricing challenges. You mentioned CEB of course they published the Challenger study a number of years ago, which said that the customer 57% of the time will have made their decision before they even talk.

Brian: That’s right.

Fred: Conversely, some people have said to us that sales is easier than it’s ever been with tools like LinkedIn, marketing automation, and things like that. So I’m just curious if you think sales today is harder, or do you think sales today is easier that’s ever been?

Brian: Nothing is easy in this world today. We live in a very complex world, and money is very tight, and decisions are all the more difficult, but what I would say, what I think they’re trying to say, is that accessibility to data and contacts is easier, and I would agree with that statement. If you look at LinkedIn and all the social elements that are out there now with Twitter and so on, you can find individuals within organizations fairly rapidly, and with the big-data craze that’s out there, there are now a lot of organizations that have access to these organizational data points. I was just talking with another organization this week: LinkedIn is now selling access to their contacts, Discovery.org is doing this. So access to those folks is certainly much easier today. However, you don’t get away from the core elements of selling: Is there a sense of urgency? Are there requirements? Do they have trust that you can actually deliver what they’re asking for? Is there confidence in your organization? It all gets back to those elements. So yes, data access to individuals is easier, but selling is still just as difficult.

Fred: What do you do to sharpen your saw? What are you doing to stay fresh? What are you doing to stay ahead of the curve to continue to take your career to the next level as a sales leader?

Brian: A great question, and I’d say three things that we’re working on at Learning Tree right now is, number one, we are aligning our product development, our marketing as well as our sales life cycles together as one. Number two, we’re ensuring that we’re still relevant in the marketplace with today’s interests. How people are learning today is much different than how they were learning 10 years ago. And the third component I would say is really what we started off with today, which is a nice way to come full circle, which is understanding that voice of the customer is still the most important component of any sales professional to understand. You [have to] understand what your client needs. You have an infinite responsibility of being accountable to those needs and ultimately designing a solution that, whether it might be yours or in a partnership relationship, is able to deliver. That is still critical today.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 001: Learning Tree Sales Vice President Brian Green Kicks Off Sales Game Changers Podcast! first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.