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EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in February 2020. Since the show was released during the pandemic, we asked Trevor what his advice is for sales professionals now. He offered the following:

• In today’s environment, sellers must be very aware of buyers circumstances and respond with appropriate levels of empathy and patience. This could be both personal (ie. someone who’s loved one is sick) or related to their particular industry (ie. travel & hospitality). While some buyers are willing and able to act as though it’s “business as usual”, sellers should never assume that this is the case for all. The pandemic has effected everyone and every business in different ways. Sellers should be mindful of this and act accordingly.
• Rethinking your key value proposition to ensure it highlights the new world realities. This is critical to grabbing and maintaining buyers attention today. While it is sometimes difficult to change what has worked so well in the past – sellers who do not adjust their messaging to incorporate the new future will look prehistoric. Think hard about what current problems you and your company can help solve for your buyers. Then have meaningful conversations that inform the both of you about what is possible.
• Communicate more than ever with your marketing and product teams. Give them constant intel on what is working … and what needs to change. Over communicate!  The smart companies are willing to alter their strategies and product offerings quickly to respond to changes in the market. Make sure sales has a place at the table to help set the agenda. While everyone can agree that we are in a crisis – opportunity is always available for those who work for it.

EPISODE 239: Diligent Corporation’s Global Sales Chief Trevor Vale Lists Three Fresh Strategies to Lead Sales Teams Beyond the Pandemic

TREVOR’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If you’re going to get into sales, you’ve got to be prepared to handle pressure. If you’re not confident it’s definitely not the career for you. You always must be confident. You must be confident when you’re winning and most importantly you have to be confident when you’re failing. If you’re not believing in yourself you’re just not going to inspire anyone to purchase from you.”

Trevor Vale is the SVP and Global Head of Sales at Diligent.

He worked at Intercontinental Exchange and Thomson Reuters

Find Trevor on LinkedIn here.

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

Trevor Vale: In short, I sell modern governance. What is modern governance? We provide a software suite of services that empowers leaders to simplify, secure and streamline their governance practices leveraging our tech. Our governance solutions offer a range of capabilities including entity management, insights and analytics, secure collaboration and our flagship product, the one we’re known most for is Diligent Boards which is the most widely used board portal in the world used by 50% of the Fortune 1000. Simply put, we provide the right information to the right leaders at the right time.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned in the beginning that it’s a PE backed firm, what does that mean from a selling perspective? Do you have to sell differently if it’s a public company versus privately owned versus private equity based?

Trevor Vale: Big stark difference between selling within a publicly traded company like a Thomson Reuters, for instance and a PE backed company like Diligent. We’re fortunate to have some great PE backers so Insight and ClearLight are two private equity firms. I have a keen understanding of the SaaS space so they get it, they understand the importance of marketing demand generation in that vertical and provide us a ton of support and resources to scale and acquire new companies and assets to expand what we are doing.

It’s a real privilege to align with solid private equity companies like the ones I’m currently working with and it’s a different dynamic, frankly. It’s one of hyper growth so very performance based, expectations are high, that’s why we’re all there but also the support and the vision are super clear. There’s a great sense of purpose and if push comes to shove, I’ll pick that any day of a week because as a seller, someone who’s asked to lead sales teams it’s easy to tap into that energy, it’s easy to leverage that energy to inspire the team. When you’re constantly moving and change is often the order of the day, it’s a fantastic stimulating environment to work in.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales?

Trevor Vale: Like a lot of people, I got my start in an unexpected way in sales. There is no sales university, you don’t go do four years to get your sales degree so my path into sales is unique like I’m sure most folks listening today. After graduating college with a political science degree I took a year off to try and figure out what I wanted to do. Politics was a dirty possibility but I thought I’d pursue law, that’s where a bunch of my friends had moved onto pursuing a law degree somewhere. I decided to take that year and move to Japan where I spent a year teaching English and took the opportunity to learn a little bit about another culture and also make a little bit of money.

After a year when I returned to Toronto, I found myself back at mom and dad’s place – which was great, I love mom and dad, just want to make that clear – but as I quickly ran out of the money I’d saved in Japan I started to think about what I needed to do. One thing I really needed to do was find an apartment, I needed to get back out there and live on my own, I’d done it in college and of course, a year abroad. That was a big catalyst to me, deciding that I’d probably better go make some money and I debated, “Do I keep the band going or do I maybe see if I can get into law school and again make that money and find an apartment?”

In the end, that again was the catalyst and I ended up one day picking up the phone and calling a good friend of mine who I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. As I called him, he picked the phone up and I could sense that he was very busy and there was a lot going on in the background, phones ringing, people screaming and he quickly cut through the pleasantries and said to me, “So what, are you looking for a job? Get a resume over to me tomorrow” and abruptly hung up the phone. [Laughs] I quickly went into mom and dad’s study and tweaked my resume as best I could, and at the time I was a kid fresh out of college, a couple of odd jobs in the summer at a gas station and a little stint as a dishwasher at Denny’s and of course, a year teaching in Japan but tried my darnedest to parlay that into something that could be exciting to a company.

I ended up getting an interview at this company my friend was working for and the company was called SuperCom, I think it’s since defunct but it was essentially a VAR reseller of computer components. After a quick interview I got the job and found myself working at SuperCom which was essentially a boiler room for computer components. Doing that for a year taught me a lot about cold calling, taught me a lot about value selling and really taught me a lot about performance based sales, frankly. What’s the old joke? We’ve got a sales contest this week and the winner gets to participate in the sales contest next week. That’s what this place was about, you were only as good as your quarter and if you didn’t produce, you were out. 70% of what you did was based on commission, we used to have spiff campaigns. Maxtor Hard Drives, for instance would come in and say, “Whoever sells the most hard drives gets $500 bucks.”

Fred Diamond: How many phone calls did you make a day on average?

Trevor Vale: We must have done three dozen calls a day, just to outreach, maybe more. I had a small book of business, was asked to grow that but most of it was just pure straight up cold calling.

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

Trevor Vale: I think the lessons were being comfortable in terms of being able to message something and you had to message lots of different products and you had a short time to do it. You had distracted buyers you were reaching out to, intense competition, this was going back to 1997 so everybody out there was selling computer components so how do you distinguish yourself? How do you differentiate? All those things were quickly instilled into me in the short time I was there.

Fred Diamond: How did you differentiate yourself when you’re selling such commoditized products?

Trevor Vale: That’s a great question because a Maxtor Hard Drive or an Asus Motherboard is a Maxtor Hard Drive or an Asus Motherboard regardless of where it’s coming from. As I sold to these VARs, one of the things we had going for us and that we leveraged in our pitches was that we did some work for IBM. IBM actually outsourced some of their Toronto based PC business to our firm so gravitating towards that and trying to communicate that we were a trusted partner of IBM definitely differentiated us and transcended us from the suburban office mall that we existed in – it was essentially a warehouse. To the buyer on the phone was able to communicate a degree of trust, a degree of legitimacy that frankly our competitors couldn’t do.

Fred Diamond: Who did you sell to? Was it to the home or to corporations or certain verticals?

Trevor Vale: It was a ton of local electronic stores in the Toronto GTA area that happened to sell PCs as well. We sold to VARs who we would sell components to and they would build customized PCs and we also sold to resellers as well. It was a mixed bag of storefronts and this was in the early days of dot com so there wasn’t a ton of online options. Firms like SuperCom were pretty much a go-to for most of these brick and mortar type environments.

Fred Diamond: On today’s Sales Game Changers podcast we’re talking to Trevor Vale, he’s a senior VP of global sales for Diligent. Trevor, get us caught up on you right now. Tell us what you’re an expert in, tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Trevor Vale: I’m sure my wife would have a different answer than the one I’m going to give you and I’m sure some of my team members would also, but I think I’ve become an expert in, it sounds a little strange, but just adapting to change. I think spending 25 years in sales you learn a ton and your experience provides perspective on lots of different scenarios so sales acumen gets refined. You have a good tool box of things that you can utilize in various sales environments but the rapid pace of change that’s going on right now is unprecedented.

My father was a very successful sales and marketing executive, he let a number of large sales teams and marketing teams within the consumer electronic business over his career. When I speak to him about the X’s and O’s of sales, it’s a pretty stark contrast the world that he lived in versus the one I’m living and he can see that when we’re trying to compare accomplishments in a healthy competitive way, by the way. I think the rapid change that we’re going through right now provides a whole ton of opportunity, tons of new ways to unpack analytics, to understand what your close ratios are in different circumstances, how you fair against your competitors. There’s just a deep mind of data that can be accessed in a very quick way and there’s tons of new tools and technologies that are constantly being introduced into not just sales but frankly, every profession whether it’s legal, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s sales, what have you.

Fred Diamond: What’s a good tool that you deploy in your sales organization?

Trevor Vale: We’re a big fan of Salesforce, we’re a big fan of Domo which adds another layer to access that data out of Salesforce and we’ve started to deploy Gong which is an effective tool to see how messaging is going in the marketplace, how reps are positioning new products, etc. and for on-boarding new sales staff. Those are an example of three, we’ve got many more that are used across our customer success groups and within our sales organization. Where I was going with what I’ve become an expert at, I think it’s really managing that new capability on the technology side to empower the sales organization and improve your close rates and generate more bookings ultimately. Also being able to maintain a focus on the sales side so inspiring the team, making sure they’re not distracted with too many new things, making sure we adhere to the old principles of those sales X’s and O’s I referred to earlier. Becoming an expert at just balancing the new world with the old, if that makes any sense, is how I view myself as a nice cross between the two.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, I very rarely ask this question but before I ask you about an impactful sales career mentor, how would you describe yourself as a leader? If someone would say, “Trevor is a ‘blank’ type of leader” how would you fill in the blank? How do you view yourself as a leader?

Trevor Vale: My leadership style is absolutely performance driven, so I spend a lot of time studying coaches. We talked about hockey so hockey is a place I go to a lot and try and read as much as I can about leadership roles in that form as well as other sports. One of my favorite books is Urban Meyers’ Above the Line, I think he’s got a very succinct way of inspiring a team to win. Those things definitely resonate with me on the sports side of the spectrum. I think the constant search to find new ways to inspire has to be part of any successful sales leader. It takes a lot to continue to wake up every day and rally the team and you’ve got to be legitimate about that. I’ve worked for sales leaders who you didn’t buy into what they were doing and similar to sports, if a coach doesn’t really feel that that team can win or that they’re going to do it then that team probably won’t.

Being a constant variable in terms of inspiration and energy I think is something that I aspire to on a daily basis. Also, an important and often overlooked component of sales leadership is trust so being able to gain the trust of your team and having walked into Diligent and inheriting a sales team that I didn’t choose, they didn’t choose me, I didn’t choose them but being able to establish that trust takes time. It has to happen on the individual level so I have a team of just under 50 around the globe and I make an effort every two months to interface with each of them on a 30 minute call or in person when I can but because they’re all over the world, sometimes a call has to happen. Just being able to communicate for 30 minutes with that individual and start to understand what makes them tick and conversely communicating what I’m looking for is extremely valuable. That trust needs to be invested in through time and as sales leaders it’s sometimes difficult to carve that time out but I’d encourage everyone to try and do that and know all of their sellers.

Fred Diamond: That’s an interesting answer. A lot of times trust comes up on the Sales Game Changers podcast from the concept of being a trusted adviser for your customer but this was the first time I believe one of the sales leaders that we’ve interviewed talked about having to build trust. The reason you had to do that was you mentioned you took the job and your sales team was given to you as compared to growing with them type of a thing.

Trevor Vale: Yes, that’s one thing and also we acquire new companies at a fairly rapid rate at Diligent. Our growth is tied into organic and acquisition so we do inherit salespeople from time to time. The trust, I think just needs to be established in a way that the sales reps feel that they can trust their sales leader, that they can speak and communicate to that sales leader, that they can bounce new ideas off that sales leader and feel like they won’t be penalized for it. I’ll take the truth any day of the week so if I understand why a seller is not performing, for instance, if they trust me and I trust them there should be a good back and forth on, “How can we improve this? What you’re telling me in terms of maybe your persona situation in life or otherwise is certainly having an impact. How do we course correct, how do we bring in new resources? Whatever the fix is.”

If you don’t have the trust, I feel like sometimes you just won’t get candid answers around what’s not working and on a more superficial level it’s just like, “This product is not working because of this.” As an example, if I’m a sales rep overseeing a region that’s far away from HQ in the Middle East, for instance and that rep is having problems with a certain product I’d like to know about that sooner rather than later.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been in sales for 25 years. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales mentor and how they impacted your career?

Trevor Vale: I mentioned I was at a bit of a boiler room in terms of SuperCom and during my stint there it quickly became evident to me that I wanted to do more, I knew there was a bigger world out there and felt like I’d established or gotten a foothold in the sales game and was enjoying it, enjoying making money and enjoying communicating with a variety of characters on a daily basis. Sometimes it would be a dramatic phone hanging up with an explicit or sometimes I’d actually establish a bond with a potential client and got connected to sales through that back and forth but I knew SuperCom was not going to be big enough for my aspirations.

In my sixth, seventh month at the firm dialing for dollars I started to establish a shortlist of companies that I felt had the scale to elevate my game and offer maybe a more professional and civilized environment to work in with better options than the strip mall that was just down the street from where SuperCom was located in terms of lunches and things. Ultimately I identified Reuters as a potential company to work in so I took those cold calling skills I’d learned and started to dial for dollars around these firms that I’d earmarked and tried to connect with the sales leaders within those firms and got a couple of bites, one which turned out to be Reuters. I connected with their head of sales who was a bit confused as to why I was calling, I had no background in financial services, I barely had any background in sales but I was able to communicate a bit more about me in terms of what I had accomplished, the experience in Japan, for instance and other things, enough to captivate him to take a meeting.

One evening after working a full day I drove into the city of Toronto and met with that sales leader and I spent about two hours with him. I remember it was a late night meeting, it was probably from 6:30 to 8:30 and had a good back and forth and tried my darnedest to show him that I understood financial services, I knew what investment banks did, I knew the difference between a buy side and a sell side which I didn’t know at the time. I’d done enough research to put together a bit of a story and he was walking me out of the door leading me towards the elevator shaking my hand thanking me for the time and all that. I turned to him just before getting on the elevator and I said, “I really appreciate the meeting and I just wanted to see when would be a good time for you to have a follow up discussion and talk about next steps.”

It was a very stark moment in my life, he grabbed me and pulled me back into the office and sat me down on the couch in reception and said, “I was just about to say goodbye to you and thought you were a great guy and really enjoyed meeting you.” We had a lot in common, he was – surprise, surprise – a hockey guy and happened to grow up in my neighborhood but he said, “I was going to let you go until you asked for the close. Because you did that, I’m going to give you another shot and I’m going to have you actually come back and talk to some other people.”

From that, he actually put me on a trade show floor manning a booth for Reuters product. I had to take a day off work because I was still at SuperCom and he said, “Come on in, I want you to work this booth and I want to see how you do.” He had me stand there for six hours at the booth, I knew nothing about the product, he was taking a big risk although I guess he knew the trade show better than I did, but I still did it for six hours learning about the product as I engaged potential clients. He was barely to be found, he was in the room but he actually had people coming up to me interacting with me and asking me about the product and things and getting feedback on the side. At the end of that day he took me out for a glass of scotch – I don’t think I drank scotch at that time, I think I was a jack and coke guy – but he took me out for a nice glass of scotch in a nice place in Toronto and offered me the job to start at Reuters as an account manager.

Fred Diamond: One of the key things that you just said there which comes up not infrequently is the lack of follow up. We’ve interviewed some people who have managed call centers and they said after analyzing hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of millions of calls, one of the key things that they see wrong is that people don’t do the follow up so good for you for asking that question about what’s the next step and what do we do. I’m just curious, what do you see as the two biggest challenges that you face as a sales leader?

Trevor Vale: I think the challenges today that I have, I think some of your listeners might be a bit envious. If I take a look at my business, I am lucky enough to have a first class marketing organization that I align with on the commercial side. It’s been an extremely pleasurable working experience to work with my colleagues in marketing at Diligent and they’ve developed a first-class demand gen capability for Diligent. The result of that is a big chunk of my bookings are the result of a lot of inbound leads and that’s a good thing. Again, I think a lot of folks would be envious of that.

My challenge is to make sure my sales reps don’t get too lazy, too complacent with that drip which is more than a drip, and y #1 challenge is to motivate, inspire and teach them how to be better sales prospectors. Expect some great inbound leads for sure because my marketing team are great at delivering those, but also to own your book, own your territory. I’ve spent the last couple of years instilling that culture trying to make those changes and I’m happy to report in 2019 we increased our sales prospective contributions to our book, we almost doubled that contribution and it now represents about 20% of our annual bookings. That’s one thing I focus on, the other one is equally enviable in some ways but it’s really about product. I talked about the rate at which we acquire companies, it’s at an accelerated rate, it’s making the modern governance story better and better but for sellers I have to make sure – back to my point on distraction – that I’m very cognoscente of the fact that they need to be able to understand the new products we put into market. They need to be able to message our proposition as it relates to those new products and most importantly, that those products work and are ready for prime time. The go to market strategy as a sales leader, I try and be very active in working with my product team, with my legal team, with my marketing team to ensure that when we release a product it is fully baked, it is ready to go, we can contract for that product, we can create a sales force for that product, that the product works and is ideally integrated into our other offerings. That’s something I spend a lot of time focusing on.

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

Trevor Vale: I’m happy to say there’s a lot of them but if I look back to a sale that I feel leveraged a whole bunch of my skills and brought them all together to realize a successful win, it has to be during my time at a startup company. It was back in 2012, I was working with a San Mateo based company called Xignite, fortunate to work with their CEO, Stephane Dubois. They had brought me in to leverage my relationships within the financial services sector and break out of a model that was API delivered to a lot of startups and try and take a market data cloud concept – remember, this was 2012 so the cloud was not as popular or accepted as it is today – and push that into the financial services space.

At the time most of the major investment banks had server firms, very few of them were open to cloud distribution points and I was asked to try and change that. Stephane and I traveled the world talking to pretty much every bank you can name and I would reach out to my network and do my best to facilitate those meetings. One Canadian bank in particular started to be receptive to what we were talking about and was open to exploring the cloud. After a lot of scrutiny around our security, after a lot of internal product changes to our stack working with my CTO and also CEO, we actually started to gain some traction at this Canadian bank and identified some champions there who we could make look good.

Of course, if it didn’t work they would look bad but we all knew that, they were willing to take that risk and we got access to some of the most senior folks within that Canadian bank. In the end, we ended up papering a multi-million dollar deal, it was a milestone deal for the company, it was a game changer for the industry and it’s certainly one I’m super proud of.

Fred Diamond: You’re a hockey guy, who’s your favorite hockey player of all time?

Trevor Vale: Favorite hockey player of all time? The obvious one is Gretzky and I know he gets a lot of press so I don’t need to give him any more but yes, Wayne Gretzky, definitely my favorite but my favorite Toronto Maple Leafs has got to be Darryl Sittler, #27. He’s a guy I grew up with, inspired me so big Leaf fan, I’ll say those two guys.

Fred Diamond: Those are good, you know who mine is?

Trevor Vale: Who?

Fred Diamond: Bobby Clarke.

Trevor Vale: There you go.

Fred Diamond: I grew up in Philadelphia.

Trevor Vale: He’s a scrapper, he had some great teeth, great chompers.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] he did, from Flin Flon, Manitoba. Have you ever been there, Flin Flon, Manitoba?

Trevor Vale: Never been to Manitoba, no.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Trevor, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. What’s the most important thing you want to get across to them to help them take their careers to the next level?

Trevor Vale: If you’re going to get into sales, you’ve got to be prepared for pressure. The good thing about sales I’ve always said is that it is so quantifiable that you could potentially avoid any corporate politics – I used to say that [laughs] I’m getting older and wiser now. It really is one of the few jobs in the world that performance can be assessed relatively quickly. You know if you’re winning, you know if you’re losing, you know if you’re adding value, you know if you’re not. It’s not abstract in any sense. There are of course other nuances and caveats that you have to be mindful of working together with your colleagues and making sure you interact with your customers in a professional manner, etc.

At the end of the day it’s a results-driven profession so being cognoscente of that, being confident in yourself. I think confidence has to align with that performance based culture, if you’re not confident it’s definitely not the place for you. You always have to be confident, you have to be confident when you’re winning and most importantly you have to be confident when you’re failing. I think confidence is tough to fake, you could fake it for a day or two but when you’re talking about a lifetime profession, sales is all about confidence. If you’re not believing in yourself you’re just not going to inspire anyone to purchase from you.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your sales success.

Trevor Vale: One of my big selling habits is off what you just said there, just being organized and prepared. Those two things I can’t stress enough. Being prepared for a sales meeting is half the battle, being able to demonstrate that you’ve done the research, that you know who you’re meeting with puts you in the driver’s seat and can only fuel your confidence. If you’re under prepared and just winging it, you’re just not going to extract any value from those meetings. You have to set the agenda, you have to be very specific on what you want that outcome to be, the information you’re looking for and be respectful of the people you’re meeting with whether it’s your colleagues or the buyers themselves.

I think that point was driven home to me, I remember my early days at Reuters and I remember accompanying a colleague to a meeting with a large Canadian commodity firm. We were supposed to meet with one person so the senior sales colleague was bringing me, the rookie along. He said, “We have this meeting with one person, he’s very senior but it should be quick, I just have to get some pricing over to him and a proposal and we’re just going to drop it off and leave.”

When we arrived at this lavish office, the receptionist took our coats and then walked us down a long hall and opened two double doors and inside the board room were over a dozen executives all waiting for us. I remember this moment vividly because my senior colleague stood there with her mouth literally open and I could feel the fear, I could feel the shock, this was not what she was prepared for. One of the executives, they were talking amongst themselves, looked up and say, “Okay, you guys can plug in over there for your presentation.” We didn’t have a presentation, we weren’t expecting to give a presentation and I was young and probably stupid, too stupid to understand what was going on but I basically just started talking about Reuters, what we were doing, just pushing out as much information as I knew about that commodities client as I could.

That gave my senior colleague enough time to get it together and we put something together. It was not a successful meeting by any stretch, don’t get me wrong, but it did really emphasize to me the importance of preparation.

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

Trevor Vale: We’re calendar year so we just wrapped up our Q4. Analyzing 2019 or analyzing the prior year is something that I always do just extracting data points around what was working, what wasn’t working, trying to understand what our year over year ratios look like in 2019 versus 2018, what regions need to be focused on and potentially invested in to improve performance. I think right now there’s a global initiative on my end going on to really see where we’re deploying resources and where we might need more of them. This all boils down to new territory planning and taking a look at adjusting certain sales structures in certain regions. Organizationally it’s the main focus right now.

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

Trevor Vale: Finding the right company, that is a big part of it. I talked about passion, I talked about bringing an energy to what you do every day and you’ve got to believe in the company, vis-à-vis the product. That is definitely table stakes in terms of being successful. Like I said earlier, if you don’t believe it it’s going to be difficult to convince your team, it’s going to be difficult to convince your buyer that that product is going to be a game changer. With Diligent being in the corporate governance space, it’s a unique space to be in for sure but I do find a ton of inspiration in the fact that our products are materially impacting businesses in the way that they govern and those things, if you look at the roster of clients that we have – I mentioned earlier 50% of the Fortune 1000 – these are companies that change the world.

These are companies that when they decide to do something, they’re affecting tons of lives. Amazon wants to set up a new corporate office somewhere, that’s going to impact the local economy, that’s going to impact a whole bunch of things. If you look at all the challenges that governance professionals are facing today with ESG, environment sustainability, all those good things, activist investors, diversity in the board room, there’s just a ton going on. I understand intimately that our product and services offers governance professionals a ton of tools to make decisions quicker and address these changes.

I think that’s where I am right now so this is easy for me to inspire my sales team, this is easy for me to get into a conversation with someone in an airplane about what we do or one of the many hockey dads who’ve heard me pitch to them I’m sure one time too many. It’s definitely something I would urge all sales professionals to do. You’ve got to interview the companies as well as they’re interviewing you, some salespeople or sometimes people view sales as, “Anybody can do sales, that’s an easy thing to do, you don’t have to go to Harvard to be a salesperson” but the reality is as we’ve been talking about, Fred, there’s so many variables that are unique to salespeople, there’s so many traits that salespeople have that a lot of other people don’t. I think if you find the right place, if you find the right company and the right product and you can believe in that, that is half the battle.

Fred Diamond: Give us a final thought to inspire them today.

Trevor Vale: Being able to make a difference as you say, Fred, is absolutely key to every salesperson in today’s world. If you look at where brick and mortar has gone, if you look at where Amazon has entered the equation, you can purchase most products or even services online these days. If you look at where buyers go after work, after they’re finished dealing with us on a B to B basis, they’re clicking to get their groceries, they’re clicking to get their TVs, they’re clicking to get whatever it is, dog food, you name it. The buying experience on the consumer side has moved in a very significant way over the past few years. You do not need to go to a car dealership to purchase an automobile, you can do that online and if you don’t like it, you can return it.

There’s very little friction in the sales process so your point on the value that we bring is even more pronounced today than it ever has been and we have to leverage technologies as I mentioned earlier to enable sellers to provide more information to buyers sooner. The buying process is typically 30% completed by the time they make a call to us, so goes some data, sometimes it’s even higher than that. There’s been an internal decision that they need something and by the time they reach out to vendors, a lot of decision have been made. The ability to impact, say 60% or 70% of that process has to be controlled, has to be understood and as salespeople, we need to add that value by keeping things clear, by asking the right questions, by being prepared and by understanding our buyers.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 239: Diligent Corporation’s Global Sales Chief Trevor Vale Lists Three Fresh Strategies to Lead Sales Teams Beyond the Pandemic first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 08:37
Name an impactful sales mentor: 16:43
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 19:50
Most important tip: 31:02
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 36:47
Inspiring thought: 38:18

EPISODE 093: How Nearly a Decade as a Professional Baseball Player Prepared Diligent Corporation’s Liam Healy for Sales Leadership Excellence

LIAM’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Solve problems and look for the fair trade. I live my life by putting things in that lens and thinking through others first. Embrace the challenge – if things were easy everyone would do it. When there’s a challenge run towards it with open arms understanding that it’s never going to be perfect but take the time and dedication to say, “How do I solve this problem to amplify what I’m doing for others?” Finally, look for a reciprocal return.“

Liam Healy is a Senior VP and Managing Director at Diligent.

He’s led commercial operations at Board Effect which was acquired by Diligent.

Before that, he was at Vocus (now Cision) and the Corporate Executive Board.

Interestingly as well, he’s spent 8 years in professional baseball, in the Kansas City Royals and other organizations.

Find Liam on LinkedIn!

Liam Healy: Thanks for having me, Fred. It’s great to connect, I know you’re doing great things, I’ve listened to a bunch of the podcasts so it’s exciting to be a part of it and certainly humbled for the opportunity to speak with you. What else to know about me? I grew up in Baltimore so I am a native “mid-Atlanticker”. Moved down to Virginia as my sales career blossomed after 8 years in professional baseball, live in False Church with my wife and have most recently been spending a lot of time, about 35, 40% of my time internationally so back and forth to London. Heathrow to Dulles is a shorter trip than you would expect.

Fred Diamond: Very good. I’ve done that trip a couple times as well. Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Liam Healy: Diligent is all about governance and so as a software company our mission is to improve governance so good oversight from boards of directors and the individuals that support the work of the board overall to help guide the decisions that are being made for all types of organizations both large and small, so by providing them the right sets of tools whether it’s for the board of directors so applications that take what used to be done in 3 ring binders and now putting that into software all the way through to legal operations technology that help the individuals support the work of the board to get that curated material ready for those types of meetings. Basically take it out of a very manual process and put it into a more efficient effective type software process. The exciting part about that is if we get that right we’re inflecting some of the biggest organizations in the world with the most important missions in the world to influencing their decisions indirectly.

Fred Diamond: You’ve got boards that are running some of the largest companies in the world as well?

Liam Healy: We do. Across our organization with Diligent we have offerings for not for profits, for higher education, healthcare, for profits public and private so everything from the largest financial institutions in the world that are highly regulated and so we can imagine what happens behind the doors of those board meetings as well as not for profits that are local that need to make important decisions around philanthropic missions.

Fred Diamond: Is it a competitive space? Are there a lot of companies that do this as well or with all your acquisitions are you pretty much leading the charge?

Liam Healy: If it’s competitive, yes. We will certainly entertain a meeting with them. No, it’s something that when I got into the space I hadn’t thought twice about. Certainly coming from an athletics background governance probably not the sexiest thing that you talk about or think about but getting into it you realize how important it really is and so from a competitive landscape there are organizations that are doing one piece of what we do. We’ve been fortunate enough and thought leading enough to coin the phrase Governance Cloud which brings it all together for good decision making, good decision making doesn’t happen in a silo but there are certainly worthy organizations out there doing one piece of what we’re doing across the globe.

Fred Diamond: Before we talk a little bit more about your career, who do you sell to? I know what types of companies you mentioned but who specifically purchases the software? What are some of the key titles that you focus on?

Liam Healy: Good question, a couple different questions in there. I think that the users of our product are boards of directors so we’re trending towards the direction of having a million board members using our product. That’s some pretty healthy real estate, and then the individuals that support the work of the board. Listeners that have had direct interaction with the board will know curating materials to get ready for a board meeting, things on page 1 can’t be wrong or the rest of those materials are probably wrong but as a director I don’t think enough individuals think about the travel they have to go through and their fiduciary and philanthropic responsibilities to govern an institution.

Those are the users, but from a purchasing, as a sales leader who are we going after? How are we going after them? I think research would suggest anywhere from 7 to 8 individual stake holders will touch a particular purchase so certainly the general counsel will have a final say a lot of times but we’ll be given direction if it’s top down coming from the board. “Hey, I sit on my Alma Mater and we use Diligent and I also sit on this large financial institution, we should also use Diligent”, top down approach, but from the bottom up approach it’s very much around efficiencies so the individual is doing the work for the board. Legal specialists, general counsel, corporate secretaries, associate general counsels will all have a sometimes tax or compliance or risk leaders will get involved, so a lot of different ways that we could enter.

Fred Diamond: Very good. We mentioned during the introduction that you spent 8 years in professional baseball.

Liam Healy: I did.

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

Liam Healy: Complete happen stance. I think what my peers and athletics would tell you is that they don’t teach you a whole lot of business acumen while you’re taking batting practice.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs]

Liam Healy: So coming out of baseball I was quite ill-prepared for a true professional career as we know it today. I think that’s really hard, I have a really good friend still today who actually now lives in London as well so I get to see him more often now, Ricky Paul was working at CEB and having a fantastic career, he knew that I had just come out of playing and coaching and said, “Why don’t we get you an interview? That’s the best I can do, from there on out it’s yours.”

Then I had an opportunity to work at CEB but getting into CEB, I think they are quite rigorous and probably still today offers a rigorous interview process so reading stall points, a fantastic HBR read from CEB, understanding and digesting that material, pitching it back to the recruiter. You get past that process, you’re going to have another round of interviews over the phone before you ever get in the door and then a multi-step process, three interviews in the same day. Again, complete happen stance and I was fortunate enough to have digested the material and be able to pitch it back which we’ll talk a little bit about later I think, probably, and trick them into hiring me and then it has gone really well since then.

Fred Diamond: Usually at this point I’ll ask the question, “What are some of the key lessons you learned from some of your first few sales jobs” but again, you reached some pretty good levels within professional baseball. Let’s talk about that a little bit, are there things from your baseball career that have helped you become a successful sales leader?

Liam Healy: Yes, it’s really interesting. As I’ve matured in my career and overall, I’ve become quite introspective and reflective of my career. How coming out of baseball 8 years and professional athletics a lot would say, “Wow, that’s amazing.” That’s their first knee jerk reaction, it’s very much my peer set had moved along and were now leading organizations in some cases. It really did feel like a stall point in my career but the intrinsic or inherent values I think that come out of individuals that have gotten to that level of athletics, even humbly saying, things like passion and drive and persistence and hard work, resilience, along with having to learn how to be humble.

Wrap it all up in a band of humility, if you will, is hard but it’s quite transferrable so getting into my professional career I found out quite quickly that it transferred, it helped to drive who I was and how I went about what I did. The level of rigor that I put into achievement and what that meant to me personally, not just for the organization at CEB when I first started what that meant for them, obviously, but how it would move me along. Now as a leader of leaders it’s an opportunity for me to say, “Behavioral characteristics are so much more important than the skill set that someone brings to the table. They can learn a skill set, someone can learn a skill set over the course of time but what sorts of behaviors have they learned over the course of time? Really important.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about what you specifically are an expert in. Now you’re selling governance software for boards of directors. Is that something you knew about a couple years ago?

Liam Healy: It is not, no. When you say governance I feel like eyes glaze over in general which is interesting because my wife is deep in governance. She’s an associate general counsel within her institution.

So no, when I left Vocus – I know we’ll talk a little bit about that as well – and was moving on to my next gig and Board Effect was an opportunity that I was entertaining second to the fact that the people, the leadership was amazing at Board Effect was what they did. The product and its stickiness and how it really helped transform how the customers were using. I still didn’t know what governance meant but I can remember going home after an interview and sitting with my wife and having a discussion, I could see one of two things. Either it wasn’t making sense because I couldn’t explain what governance was but I actually quickly found out that she said, “That’s what I do, that’s my world.”

Which led into a much deeper discussion around the challenges that those users have that to me very quickly unlocked where the future potential of this world could go and we have, we’ve gone quite quickly at Diligent which is great.

Fred Diamond: What are you specifically an expert in? What is your area of brilliance?

Liam Healy: I don’t know that you’d hear many people use the word expert and or brilliance in my company unless talking about others. I think in particular I’ve matched up preparation with opportunity well. I learned early that luck is the residue of design, if you will, and if you’re prepared, if you’re forward thinking in what could happen or how it might happen when opportunity presents itself so you can move a bit more quickly.

With that I would say I marry that with I’m not afraid to take risk, I’m very much a believer in get it 75 to 80% right and keep moving and you’ll learn a lot as you’re going philosophically. You can make changes as you grow and so for me, I would say marrying the opportunity with being prepared, taking some risks, I think solving problems I really enjoy. If you would ask around – and actually, I had someone tell me this the other day – maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. I seek out really tough challenges which I didn’t know by myself but I have come to find that if something seems like it’s a big challenge or broke and I end up gravitating towards it from the business lands and working to make it right, I have also learned about myself that I have a fairly quick learning curve.

I don’t read all that well, I read very slowly actually. It’s one of the things that I have spent more time on, I read quite slowly but I listen and I digest materials quickly so I’ve learned that about myself as well. It has helped me to amplify and shorten my learning curve in a lot of areas. Taking that I’ve been able to take in information, shorten the learning curve and then with some of that risk and moving in 80% of the information, I move pretty quickly.

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you a question back to some of the baseball. Again, I could talk to you about baseball and your career, we could talk for the next 4 or 5 hours or anything.

Liam Healy: It would be boring.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] Not to me! When you think of yourself as a sales leader – and again, when you were a professional baseball player you’ve obviously had managers and coaches and probably ranged all the way from hard nose to rah-rah if you will, how do you position yourself as a sales leader? Are you kind of a rah-rah kind of a guy because of your background baseball or are you more of a hard-nosed, detail-driven sabermetrics kind of a guy? How do you position yourself, Liam?

Liam Healy: It’ll be interesting after I think some of my peers will tune in and listen, it will be interesting to give me the 360 degree review here on this one. To answer the question, from a positioning standpoint I think I lean more towards rah-rah and empowerment and I’m very much on the Bill Parcels kind of mentality of when you’re down you don’t need to be beaten down more but when you’re up you probably don’t need to be as high as you’re probably thinking you are so let’s play ball.

That said, I think at heart where I will gravitate – and again, from an introspective look – is towards the operational metrics. I will get in the weeds and roll my sleeves up and start to figure out what makes this “work” and then how can I replicate it and is that scalable? While I position myself as the happy-go-lucky depending on when you meet me or see me, ra-ra mentality I’m very much operationally mindset.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re selling governance software as well. Talk about a mentor. Again, you’ve worked for some great companies. You started your career at CEB now Gartner, you worked at Vocus which of course has a great sales lineage – we’ve had Chris Cutino on the podcast, he did an absolutely fantastic job. Tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career.

Liam Healy: The list is long, I’ve been very fortunate. Again, coming out of an 8 year professional athletics career and then stumbling across at your first gig is at CEB which is basically your MBA in commercial sales. I was surrounded by individuals like Paul Ironside who I know you’ve spoken with Vineeta (Mooganur) and Reed (Fawell) who have come certainly from CEB. Paul Ironside’s name is one that rings out all the time.

Fred Diamond: Fred Diamond: You’re talking about Vineeta Mooganur who’s now at Hanover Research?

Liam Healy: That’s right, she was instrumental and how I would be more reflective and thinking through and being more qualitative on how I thought and her husband Praveen, Praveen Mooganur who was one of my first interviews which I’m sure we’ll talk about here in a few minutes but Praveen, I see him from time to time and bounce ideas off him. He’s been great and Rick Rudman at Vocus, the CEO, Steve who grew monster.com to what monster.com was at the time and then came to Vocus in his later stages, still a mentor to me.

Tod Gibby who grew sales at Blackboard was my CEO at Board Effect and then I think I have an amazing relationship with our CEO, Brian Stafford and our head of sales, Jeff Hilk, and our head of operations, Laura Gardner who also came from Blackboard now. I’ve just been continually surrounded by really smart people that I’ve been able to continue to learn from. What have I taken away from that? I think if I distilled it all down I would bring it down to one of the things that I think about all the time which is simplifying it to quantity and quality.

Proverbially or philosophically you can do a whole lot of something or you can do it really well, or you can do a mix there of – you can do a whole lot of something and do it really well and you’re a super star. You could do not enough stuff and not do it very well, probably not the right mix. Or something in between and I think boiling it down or distilling it down to that sort of methodology has allowed me to navigate a lot of different issues.

Fred Diamond: As a sales leader, what are two of the biggest challenges you face?

Liam Healy: I would say not just a sales leader but as a leader of leaders, people is my #1, is my sole focus and I have learned that it echoes in my ears day after day that attracting, motivating and retaining the right people beyond a shadow of it out #1 thing that we can do as sales leaders is making sure that we surround ourselves with the right people, we attract those individuals, we keep them, we motivate them and understand them.

That’s #1. #2 I would say the velocity that business has evolved, not just sales but business in general. Email and now there are sales individuals that have relationships with buyers that they text, it’s just the proliferation of the different types of media that are out there has just really sped things up and makes it significantly tougher to do business in today’s environment.

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

Liam Healy: I think for me it wasn’t a deal per se, but for me the biggest win in my career was getting the opportunity at CEB which looking back in hindsight had to be managed like a deal. Finding the opportunity and getting in the door and then obviously managing that through to procuring the role, if you will.

Again, we talked a little bit about it a few minutes ago but coming out of professional athletics, zero business acumen which at the time didn’t quite know that I had no business acumen but it was brought to light very quickly. In the first interview with CEB, again it’s reading Stall Points, a great HBR read if you haven’t read it please read it. It’s a really deep study that highlights when organizations hit stalls in their revenue growths, how many of them if any come out of that. Reading that and digesting that after being a catcher, an outfielder to catcher convert digesting that and then giving that back to the recruiter so that they could judge my level of competence to see if they would continue to push me forward in the process, not easy. The first things I did was I reached out to my brother.

Both of my brothers are highly successful in their worlds, I reached out to my middle brother just above me who is an executive with a big insurance company and I basically said, “I’m going to read through this and I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions” and he said, “Great” and so I spent the next 5 days, day and night reading through the materials and bouncing questions off him so that he could tell me, “That’s wrong, this is wrong, shorten it, don’t be as verbose as you are, get to the crux of it.” Then when I had the interview with the recruiter we got to the end and I thought I had done quite well and she said, “That’s pretty good, I will tell you, you don’t have the level of business acumen that we look for here at CEB but you do remind me a lot of Ricky and Ricky’s done amazing here. I’d like to move you onto the next interview.”

The next interview was again, an hour long in depth interview of understanding who I am and where I come from and how that works and what would I do in certain situations, very behavioral oriented and when I got to the end of that the statement was, “You don’t have the level of business acumen that we look for at CEB but you remind me a lot of Ricky Paul and Ricky’s been very successful here so I’d like to move you on and bring you in for our in face interviews. I got off that call thinking, “I have to figure out how you overcome this business acumen thing.”

So when I went in to do my interviews down in DC – and I was looking in Baltimore at the time so an hour commute down, hour and a half-ish – my three interviews were with Praveen Mooganur, Jason Kid who ended up being my sales leader afterwards and Pat McGlen who ran a business unit within CEB. All fantastic sales leaders. Each interview was tough, it was the proverbial don’t let them see you sweat and I had been in some very large professional championship games with 20 thousand, 30 thousand people in the stands and this was way tougher at the time. In my conversations with them they ended up going quite well and afterwards they said, “Look, you don’t have the level of business acumen we typically look for but we’d like to offer you the position. We think that you could be high beta, you could be really good or you might not work so you’re going to have to come in here and do a great job.”

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you about that as a hiring manager now. You kept mentioning a bunch of times, Liam, that you didn’t have the business acumen, that came up a number of times. You took what was necessary to try to be as prepared as possible and you were able to show them that you were going to figure it out and they were smart enough to realize that. How about you as a hiring manager now? We’re here on the floor at Diligent, beautiful offices in Arlington, Virginia. Lot of energy, beautiful offices, people working hard, it’s early on a Friday morning, but how about you when you’re hiring now? Are you willing to look past certain things? What are some of the things that you look for in a young person who’s looking to get a job in sales with a company like Diligent?

Liam Healy: It shaped my career. I had something to prove at that point, for me coming in, the proverbial chip on your shoulder, I am now going to prove what I can do. That exists, so yeah, absolutely. It has shaped how I spend time with people, my level of curiosity, understanding the who they are, if you will, and why do they do what they do. Getting to the behavioral characteristics of someone: are they passionate, are they driven, are they creative? Do they spend time educating themselves?

Who is this individual versus my resume says this. I’ve never seen a resume, by the way, that says, “I’m not that good at what I do.” Doesn’t exist. Getting to the crux of who that person is because I do think that over the course of time, especially if you’re going to scale, you’re going to hire 80, 150, 200, 500 people a year in an organization as we are growing at Diligent rapidly, you can’t look for just an expertise thing. You have to bet on people and then you have to motivate those individuals and retain them, so that has absolutely shaped how I interview.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever have a moment where you thought to yourself, “They were right, I don’t have that business acumen, maybe I’ll go try to get a job coaching or something like that”?

Liam Healy: I suffer from productive paranoia. It’s that intrinsic motivator. When you wake up or you’re driving back from your job or you’re on the metro and you say, “If I just would have done…” X, Y, Z. I think a lot of people don’t know that they do it but it’s that internal drive. I suffer from that, so for me has it ever been to hard? No. Work ethic and coming in and pushing through being persistent has never been an issue. I think I’d be disingenuous if I said that as a sales leader, any of us as sales leaders didn’t have that fleeting moment that we were like, “I should have been a farmer.” It’s like, “I should do something different” or “I should go back to baseball”.

There is that knee jerk reaction sometimes when things are tough but I know for me it’s been more about what do you do in those moments, so when challenges arise how I step back and become a little bit pensive and thoughtful about where are we going to go, what are we going to do, how do we do that and set ourselves up for future growth. I think those sorts of setbacks are what have driven me in the past to get me where I am today.

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

Liam Healy: I think it’s three things. If I wanted to boil it down, three things: First would be educate yourself, spend time and invest in yourself and also surround yourself with people that invest in you. The more you can learn, the better you’ll be and it’s not just about your trade in sales but that’s globally. Investing the time to better understand how global commerce works. The second would be understand the difference between your behavioral characteristics, who you are as an individual versus the skills you’ve acquired over time.

Skills can be learned, behavioral characteristics most likely cannot be but they can be shaped. If you’re a passionate, drive, assertive, confident, organized, creative, thoughtful person, amplify that. Turn up the volume on that and spend that time learning your trade, the skills, educating yourself.

Finally is keep it simple. It really is about quantity and quality. If you feel like your quality is down, you need to learn about how to do something a bit better, a bit more thoughtful, a bit more qualitative, you have to do more of that to outwork the system. That said, if you’re high quality, just understand the math of that is I probably don’t have to do as much to get a similar result but if you do more you’re really going to blow it out. If you kept it pretty simple like that I think you’d go pretty far.

Fred Diamond: Educate yourself and surround yourself with people who support you in that. Focus on understanding your behavioral characteristics and then optimizing that, then of course keep it simple. What are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Liam Healy: I read. Well, I listen. I listen to a lot. Again, I digest information better audibly so I spend a lot of time whether they’re your podcasts, books through audible, HBR, so I read a lot. About lots of different topics, sales, leadership, global commerce, politics, I spend a lot of time immersing myself in education.

Fred Diamond: You got those 5 hour flights between Dulles and Heathrow.

Liam Healy: It’s probably the best office I think I have in the globe, I get so much done it’s great and I surround myself with people smarter than me. I purposefully choose to spend my time with individuals that I can provide back to but more that I can ask great questions to and get thoughtful 360 degree reviews of the world. I’ve actively chosen to be at a place that invests in me, education. Diligent, we’ve invested in an executive coach and so for me that’s a big opportunity to continue to grow as an individual. I think that’s important.

Fred Diamond: Just a quick question, that hasn’t come up all that frequently in the Sales Game Changers podcast. Would you mind sharing something that your executive coach has helped you understand to make you a more productive and effective sales leader?

Liam Healy: Communication. For me in particular, I sit at a crossroads of upward reporting to a CEO and the CEO reporting into the board and when I am at board meetings as well but then also downward communication. It’s a crossroad where to shorten it you’re being told what to do or given an opportunity to make those choices and then sometimes you’re giving the downward communication of telling people what to do in its short phrase.

I think the communication of simple things like differences of using the right words, can you versus would you. Can you is a favor type question and would you is a will you do this for me type question and by when and how? Simple communication techniques and then upward reporting to the board. They will certainly digest all the information, the board. They want it in the appendix but what they really want is short, to the point information that allows them to have good conversation so that they can ask you the right questions.

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

Liam Healy: Right now it is people focused. It’s not any sort of a reorganization or anything like that but it is more making sure I’ve got the right people in the right place at the right time with the right skills and the right information. For me, again, as a part of the business unit of Diligent it’s working with our executive team so that I can better understand their needs and be a better business partner but then also taking that information and making sure that with my leadership team and individuals across the globe, do they have what they need?

What are the other resources I can provide them? And then as we grow we’re going to hire 80 to 100 people this year alone. We’ll be at 700 people by the end of the year. How am I making sure that we bring in the right types of individuals with the right talent and most importantly retain them? It is all around people.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Liam, as we wind down the podcast, sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or you emails, they’re not really working on your agenda. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Liam Healy: I think the easy answer is you control your own destiny. I think we would hear that a lot if you asked a lot of sales leaders is, “I can control how things, the outcomes, from my effort.” I personally think I embrace challenge, I think I wasn’t the most talented in baseball, I didn’t have enough business acumen to get the roles that I had in the past, I had stretch targets everywhere I’ve ever been and I had an opportunity to grow and build something from CEB all the way through to Diligent that is from sheer persistence and hard work and dedication and a willingness to achieve.

Again, that’s the definition of I control my own outcomes, it is. But again, it is really what I choose to do.

Fred Diamond: Liam, for the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast around the globe, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire them?

Liam Healy: I think the individual that I left off earlier that has been probably most influential for me was my father in sales and he taught me three basic things: others first, solve problems and look for the fair trade. I live my life by putting things in that lens and thinking through others first. How is the energy that I’m going to bring with what I have to offer, how does that make whoever my audience is better? Whether that’s executive, whether that’s the board, whether that’s my leadership team, whether that’s my wife and my friends and my family, how can what I bring to the table make them better?

And listening to identify that opportunity. The second is solve problems. Embrace the challenge, if things were easy everyone would do it. When there’s an opportunity, when there’s a challenge run towards it with open arms understanding that it’s never going to be perfect but I’m going to take the time and dedication to say, “How do I solve this problem to amplify what I’m doing for others?” Then finally the look for the fair trade part took me a long time to better understand and in having conversations with my father about this was if you’re giving, you should be looking for a reciprocal return.

You shouldn’t be looking for more than that return depending on how good of a negotiator you are, more than that return or less than that return but there should be a fair trade and that’s healthy, and that’s OK to ask for that fair trade. If that fair trade is you’re a really talented, high performing individual you should go to an organization that’s going to invest in you and help grow your career. If you are a sales person negotiating a deal, quid pro quo, this for that. I’m going to give you something, you’re going to give me something in return. I think that’s healthy and that’s OK but I don’t think enough people think about if that’s fair, but really all you should be looking for is fair.

Fred Diamond: Others first, solve problems and fair trade. What did your father do for a living?

Liam Healy: Sales [laughs].

Fred Diamond: What did he sell?

Liam Healy: He was in binding so Prentice Hall. If you ever opened a textbook and you saw Prentice Hall at the front of that textbook, that was my father’s account.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 093: How Nearly a Decade as a Professional Baseball Player Prepared Diligent Corporation’s Liam Healy for Sales Leadership Excellence  first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.