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EPISODE 185: Red Hat Public Sector GM Paul Smith Details How Ambitious Sales Professionals Can Improve their IQ and EQ and Grow Their Careers

PAUL’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Put your cell phones down. This is a face-to-face business and I think unfortunately the younger generation of folks coming in have grown up with mobile technologies and they really believe that they can communicate in an effective manner by text messaging or social media or even email. The most important thing is networking and get face-to-face. If you’re going to use your cell phone, actually use it as a phone.”

Paul Smith is the General Manager for Red Hat Public Sector.

Prior to that, he held sales leadership positions at Veritas, Netscape and Oracle.

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Excellence in Sales in 2017

Find Paul on LinkedIn!

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

Paul Smith: I grew up in Baltimore, large family, 7 kids, started working very early on, have been in the sales career now for about 38 years. Just to let you know how we’ve matured in the business and how I’ve matured, early on we were always told when interviewing for a sales job, “What’s the most important thing that motivates you?” and it was like, “Money, show me the money.” As we’ve grown, as I’ve grown it’s really more about what makes you passionate about coming to work, what’s your why, money becomes an outcome over time. It’s really important to be associated with companies and with people who you like to work with, and for customers who actually you like to work for.

Fred Diamond: I remember we had a conversation a couple years ago and I asked, “How do you stay competitive and how do you get your people motivated in such a very competitive space that you run?” and you said it’s about understanding the customer’s why. Before I ask you some more questions, can you explain what that means? What does it mean to understand their why?

Paul Smith: We move around a lot in terms of how we think about ourselves and on that first piece I was talking more about me. I think when we talk to our customers we have to translate that into we, and with customers in particular it’s really about getting down and understanding what their mission is, how they define success and how we can relate to that. The passion really becomes about how do we help fix things, how do we identify problems and how do we help them achieve mission. There’s a real sense of accomplishment when we get to that point in our career. The money then from the beginning phrase of “Show me the money”, that’s pretty much an outcome. It comes from work that’s done over time and it becomes an outcome of good works and great accomplishments.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us what you sell today? Tell us a little bit about what excites you about that.

Paul Smith: Of all the jobs I’ve had in the industry I’ve been with Red Hat now for, if you can believe it, 15 years. I just completed my 60th quarter, so to speak and for Red Hat at the heart of everything open-source is Red Hat. We pretty much started this revolution about 26 years ago by making Linux as an operating system the one thing that stays the same so that everything else can be different. It wasn’t really as much about that as it was about a development model, open-source was really something that was all driven around community powered innovation so it wasn’t just Red Hat that was innovating.

The difference between proprietary software and open-source software is proprietary software I like to kid around and say is a problem looking for a solution. In community powered ecosystems it’s really groups of people and company and hobbyists that are actually trying to solve problems. What we do at Red Hat is we monetize that, so fast-forward a couple of years and we’ve actually taken that development model, Red Hat and open-source and turned it into a leadership and business model as well. The tenets that actually make open-source work for in terms of how innovation happens is actually a great leadership model too.

We really focus on things like collaboration, transparency and most importantly, meritocracy so that everyone in the community actually matters. It’s not just what the boss wants, it’s what the rank in file, the folks at the tippy end of the spear really feel and believe, and that’s where all the intel happens. It’s really exciting in that regard to be there. Fast-forward to the future and you look at open-source in the industry, everything that powers modern day clouds is open-source and we maintain very relevant in that space. It’s extraordinarily fun because as the industry has changed, Red Hat’s changed and the type of people that we attract really feel like they’re participative in the process.

Fred Diamond: Obviously your company had a huge announcement about a year ago, you were purchased by IBM so of course there’s a lot of great things happening with Red Hat and its growth. On the Sales Game Changers podcast we’ve actually interviewed a couple people who work in your organization. We’ve interviewed Lynne Chamberlain before, we’ve also interviewed Nathan Jones. You mentioned 38 years in sales, why don’t you take us back to the beginning? How did you first get into sales as a career?

Paul Smith: I think I got lucky [Laughs]. In college I was actually selling shoes to work my way through school and whether or not, that was in retail, if that was really selling or not I’ not sure but people were pretty well qualified when they walked in the store, they know they wanted to buy something. After school I interviewed with a lot of companies and got lucky and found a small company by the name of Exxon Office Systems which at the time in the 80’s was an oil company trying to see if they needed to change because of what might be happening in the future.

That didn’t ultimately succeed but it was actually run by an ex-IBM Office Products Division folks – OPD’s, as they were known – and these were just sales folks extraordinaire, they really focused on training and the sales process. The sale cycle at that time which was word processing and in fact selling the equipment was really a fast cycle so you went from identify, qualify and close very quickly. It was really a good school of hard knocks. I got into it at that point and then over the course of my 20’s moved into about 3 or 4 different jobs as I matured through the industry trying to find what was the right fit for me. Sales seemed to work extraordinarily well.

Fred Diamond: I would say so. It’s interesting, for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe we have a lot of people who are in the beginning stages of their career and they listen to the podcast to learn about how they can take their career to the next level. I’m sure most people are going to be stunned to hear that Exxon was indeed in the Office Products business at one point. Just curiously, the next question is going to be, “What are some of the key lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs” but was it a challenge selling Exxon products as Office Products? Did people expect you to come in and sell them gallons of gas or something like that?

Paul Smith: It’s funny, when you were at Exxon Office Systems I remember my boss telling me, “Listen, when you walk in there I known you’re proud about being from Exxon and we’ve got these great products and services but you might as well say you’re from Texaco. That’s what it sounds like to your customers.” One of the early lessons that I learned was brand matters. When I think about brand I actually think about it in two dimensions. First of all, the company brand and secondly and as importantly, your personal brand. What that really drives down into is things like trust, integrity, skills, capabilities and continuous learning. As a company I think Red Hat as an example has demonstrated a great trust with our customers over the 26 years that we’ve been in business and we’ve shown great capabilities in terms of our ability to change as the industry has changed.

Making use of open-source communities actually helps us out in that way, but as a personal brand you’re not only representing the customer but your reputation follows you forever. I think Warren Buffett talked about the things that he likes to look at for salespeople or people in general when he’s looking at talent and he talks to integrity as #1, intelligence and then he talks to motor. When I say motor I make a colloquialism about how fast you can run or do you have energy, can you really make things happen? Those things really define not only a company brand but also the personal brand. Exxon was probably a good way for me to learn that brand does matter.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about you specifically, tell us what you’re an expert in. Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Paul Smith: I really don’t like to talk about myself and I think in those regards I’m still a work in progress 38 years in. One of the things I think is important for me is to realize there’s a lot that I still don’t know and that brilliance might be knowing what I don’t know and being a continuous learner. Some things that I think people may say about me that they say I’m fairly well skilled at is I pay a lot of attention to not only IQ and IQ is something I think is not god given, it’s something you can actually learn over time.

Also, EQ and I’ve done a lot of reading and a lot of studying over the years in terms of what Emotional Quotient is all about, it’s really how you relate to people. Probably the #1 asset to have there is empathy and empathy is also not a god given skill either, it’s something you actually have to learn. Sometimes you learn it by experience and sometimes you learn it just by living through some tough times. I like to quip sometimes and say empathy is extraordinarily important and until you have it, fake it.

Fred Diamond: Paul, I have a question for you. You say you’re a work in progress, yet you’re leading Red Hat’s public sector, you’re the general manager here, you’ve had a great career, worked for some great brands like Veritas, Netscape, Oracle and you say you’re a continuous learner. What are you trying to learn right now? What’s the focus that you’re trying to get more educated on?

Paul Smith: The industry is just changing at rates we’ve never seen before so just learning all about cloud computing, what it is and what it isn’t, in our industry in the government, cloud smart, what that means, how people define it. Other IOT’s influencing everything, mobiles influencing everything and AI and machine learning are going to be changing everything in terms of what we’re doing, in terms of how information is processed and analyzed and so forth. There’s still plenty to learn and that’s part of keeping it young, at my age it’s just staying fresh on those topics.

Fred Diamond: Again, as I mentioned in the beginning a lot of people asked when we were going to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. A lot of people look up to you as a mentor, you must have had some impactful sales career mentors along the way as well. Why don’t you tell about one or two of them and how they impacted your career?

Paul Smith: Without getting really gushy about this, I’d say there’s two things I rely on in terms of mentors or maybe role models is probably better for me. #1 is I’ve got a very strong faith and I’m a work in progress there, too. I really believe having a strong faith in some regard helps you understand your humility and your vulnerabilities but be strong at the same time. I think it helps me be grounded in terms of hope and as I often say, in industry hope is not a strategy but hope is something that people need to know so that they have a feeling that if they do the right things they do have a chance at success and also a belief that things can happen.

Faith I think is very important for me and a lot of people will define that differently so I won’t go down that path. I think #2 in terms of role models are my parents, a working class family, 7 kids, we never knew we were poor, we all worked hard, we had food on the table but if we wanted something, we had to actually work for it. I learned early on watching my dad work 7 days a week maybe, 12 hours a day, my mom actually helped out a lot as well, she worked part time, she made sure we got through school. Hard work matters and nothing worth achieving comes terribly easy.

I think those two things in terms of high level but I also rely of the wisdom of crowds and the wisdom of other great people. I do have some morning reading that I do and this is stuff you can get through very quickly. Tim Ferris has got that collection of books, of stories called Tools of Titans and I love the one story on Scott Adams. Scott, you may know is the author of Dilbert and you love Dilbert, but Scott actually coaches people in some ways and says, “If you want to have a good life, a successful life, you can go about that without a lot of effort. You just keep your nose clean and work and things will work out moderately well for you, but if you want to be extraordinary in life there’s a couple paths you can take. One is you got to be extraordinarily good at one thing.”

Not many of us can be extraordinarily good at one thing. How many golf professionals actually make a strong living? How many folks can actually make it to the NBA? Without being extraordinarily good at one thing, what’s good for the rest of us? He calls it the Triple Threat and basically he says you just got to be in the top 25% tile of two things. He says for himself as an example, he’s not the best stand-up comic in the world but he’s pretty good, but he also can draw and he’s not the best artist in the world, but he draws well enough and when you put those two together, it put him at the top of an echelon where he can make an extraordinary amount of money.

The Triple Threat with Scott is he’s also got business acumen, so he can draw from that. I take that metaphor and I move it in and I think about people like our Jim Whitehurst who’s the CEO of Red Hat. Triple Threat for Jim is he was a comp-sci major, undergrad so he had an engineering degree. He went on to Boston Consulting Group so he learned consultative selling and problem solving. From there he went to Harvard Business School so he tied an engineering degree with a business degree. The Triple Threat for Jim is he’s got great EQ so he’s really good in terms of the IQ, he’s very good in terms of the EQ and for when I think about how I like to approach my life in terms of mentors or in terms of role models I think of those folks and Jim has just been a great guy to follow throughout the career. He’s created an awesome culture because it’s really focused on empathy, really focused on everyone in the organization achieving success.

Fred Diamond: Paul, I want to ask you a question. Before we ask you about the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader, you’ve brought up EQ a couple of times, Emotional Quotient, emotional intelligence, if you will. Give us a little bit of insight, again we have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, they’re in the first or second stage of their career. You’ve brought it up a number of times, you just related to how your CEO is also so good at that. Talk about what some people listening on the Sales Game Changers podcast could possibly do to get better at growing that component of their personality.

Paul Smith: Again, this is a skill, this is not a gift. This is something that you can learn over time and Harvard Business Review actually wrote a four book series on the emotional intelligence. I already talked about empathy but one of the other key pieces in there was mindfulness which is just knowing who you are, having self-awareness but also happiness. Happiness is one of those things I think early in careers people think, “When I have X I will be happy.” “When I drive this BMW, I will be happy” – or maybe taking it a little further, this Ferrari – “When I have this house, when I have these kids, when my kids go to the school…”

It’s about attaching yourself to possessions but really happiness is an activity. What we find over time in terms of EQ is trying to get a sense of presence in terms of knowing who you are, what you like to do because the happiness is actually a daily activity. Helping people, philanthropic endeavors as well as things you’re doing at work, there’s serotonin, I’ve talked about that before, some of the neurotransmitters that fire off when you actually feel like you’re needed. That’s the happiness I think people need to pay attention to, and these are things that are very well documented in a lot of research and it’s real science. That’s how I try to ground myself.

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

Paul Smith: Just listening in on the radio today about employment in general, in our technology industry we’re close to zero unemployment so keeping, attracting and retaining talent is high on everyone in this industry’s list right now. That’s a huge challenge and that’s not just about the extrinsic stuff. People don’t leave companies just because someone offers them another $25 thousand dollars in on-target earnings, it’s really about their manager, their culture, their career aspirations, their life-work balance and a whole bunch of other things.

We continue to stay very focused on those types of things about how we meet that challenge and making sure the great talent stays here and they have a place to actually grow themselves. The second thing I would say is a challenge is as the company grows, as anybody in any company grows. When you were smaller culture was everything and as you grow keeping culture at scale is an incredible challenge. What you really need to do as a leader and as a manager is make sure that the vision is very well known, it’s communicated often and that people understand it and can be participatory in that so that everyone knows at every level what the vision is. It’s been communicated often and they know what they’re doing actually feeds into that. That’s how you keep the culture growing at scale.

Fred Diamond: Paul, you’ve worked at some great places, take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career you’re most proud of.

Paul Smith: Tough question because if you go back into the extrinsic realm, it could be about the size of the deal, it could be about how much money you made on the deal but when I really take a look at my life in the last 15 years here at Red Hat, my most proud moment was pretty recently. This group of 500 of us here that services public sector which is both federal government customers, the SI community and also state and local communities. The most proud moment I’ve had here was that we were the #1 division in the entire company in terms of growth, retention stats and I would say fun and happiness. Watching and actually being at the helm, so to speak I’ve got a lot of first mates here.

No one gets to drive this big boat without a lot of help but watching the success of this larger organization thrive is actually a very proud moment for me. It’s almost like being a parent and watching your kids do extraordinarily well in sports or in academia or other pursuits that they’re having. That’s where I derive a lot of my good feelings, hoping that I’ve had some impact on people achieving success makes me extraordinarily proud.

Fred Diamond: Paul, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you’ve had a great sales career, you started off selling shoes like we talked about. I want to ask you one quick question, you mentioned your father working 7 days a week, 12 hours, what did he do as a career?

Paul Smith: My dad was a printer. He started off in his teens as a press man and they worked on these large presses that printed corrugated boxes and other packaging and then he moved his way through middle management throughout the rest of his career.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, Paul, you’ve been in sales for 38 years. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Paul Smith: No, actually not. Getting in at an early age took all that fear out. They say the best soldiers are young because you really don’t think about firing bullets, people are firing back and you don’t think about that. On a serious level, I look at sales as an extraordinarily noble profession, nothing in business happens until something is sold. It’s a team sport so all the metaphors work there, we use a lot of military metaphors in terms of training and shared experiences, we use a lot of sports metaphors, it’s really true there.

Nothing happens, anything that we’re wearing, anything that we eat, anything that we drive, anything that we live in, someone is involved in the selling process but I don’t look at it as something where it’s a win-lose. It has to be something where you’ve got something that somebody needs and you’re helping them solve a problem or achieve a great mission.

[Sponsor break]

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

Paul Smith: When I think about talent management or just types of folks you want to have in the organization, the first thing you think about is diversity. A lot of people will want to check the box of diversity inclusion today which makes a lot of sense because you get people from a lot of different race, creed and color, so to speak, you’re going to get a difference of perspective.

When I also think about diversity, I’m thinking about career paths so I think about early-career, mid-career and folks like myself – I don’t say late-career, I say mature-career. For early-career folks, this is a great book that my kids have all read and I’m actually going to sign up and read for, too. I’ve read the book summaries on it, it’s called The Defining Decade and it’s really why the 20’s matter in your career. The 20’s are a time when for the most of us, research will say by the time we get to our 30’s, 70% of whatever we’re doing we actually define that by what we discovered in our 20’s. It’s really important to do a lot of self-introspection, take a look at your work life, take a look at your family life, a lot of us meet our future spouses or significant others in our 20’s, some don’t but a lot do. It’s really important to take a look at that because your 20’s really do matter.

I would say for the early-career people, don’t be afraid to experiment, get out there and try things. Thomas Edison was one of the great inventors of all time but people don’t know that he had thousands of failures for all the big successes that he knows about so failure is not catastrophic but failure in general is actually extraordinarily important. Get out there and in your 20’s do some introspection, experiment, try things and move along.

Fred Diamond: I know you said you do a lot of reading but tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your sales success.

Paul Smith: Early on when the kids were young – I’ve got three of them – I found that my quiet time, my “me” space, I like to speak in the second person most of the time in terms of we but at 5:30 in the morning it’s me time. I try to get my day going by waking up early, the first thing I’ll do is get a cup of tea or coffee, sit down and do some inspirational meditation or reading. While I’m doing that, the gym in my house is actually either heating up in the winter or cooling down in the summer and I get a workout 6 or 7 days a week, that’s part of my routine. It’s a habit that actually helps me keep grounded on all three, spiritual growth, intellectual growth and physical growth because they’re all so deeply intertwined.

That’s a habit that I start at and in terms of how I approach work, as you know, Fred I always prepare for everything. For this conversation I probably put about an hour and a half of introspection sitting down just thinking about things I would like to talk about. I treat customers and my family like the same way. Preparation is key and then you can think about where you want to go in terms of questions you want to ask and be thinking about the outcome. Where would we like to have this conversation end? Those are some of the habits that I practice on a daily and weekly basis.

Fred Diamond: Paul, we’re coming down to the end of the Sales Game Changers podcast, I have a curious question here. How do you think people would define you as a leader? Again, we talked about emotional intelligence a couple times, we talked about happiness, we talked about happiness more on this podcast than any podcast we’ve done before. We talked about fun, we talked about team sports, I’m just curious. How do you think your team would describe you as a leader?

Paul Smith: I hope well, I’d like to project that since I’ve been here a while and we’ve got a really good crew of folks that are tenured, a lot of people have been here 5 years, 8 years, 10 years, a couple like myself, 15 years. I think the main concept I like to use is what I call management by walking around. I do this with customers and I do this with associates at Red Hat, just reach out in the morning, I treat it like doctor’s rounds. If I’m in the office and not on the road, I make a round around the office and just say hi to folks that are here. “What are you up to? How was your weekend? How are your kids? Tell me what’s going on in your life.”

That personal connection really matters and what is it you’re trying to achieve? I also do a lot of reach outs for one-on-ones. I do some mentoring of all three stages, early-career, mid-career and even some mature-career folks just so that we can have that communication. The door always open is a real thing, it’s not a cliché. I would like people to believe that I care, that I’m involved in their success and frankly at a high level if you don’t focus on yourself and you’re focused on the team, you’re focused on your customer, when they’re successful by default you’re successful. All that other good stuff happens, the spoils of victory happen when your team, when your customers actually achieve what they’re trying to achieve.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Paul Smith: I treat my career like my golf game. It’s never as good as I would like it to be and sometimes I get into some bad habits. Right now I’ve actually re-involved myself with executive coaching, this is about the third time in my career I’ve done this. I’ve done a lot of extracurricular course work and things of that sort, but an executive coach is actually like going to the golf courses or the golf range. Look at the PGA tour, if we talk about these folks that do one thing extraordinarily well they’re not the Triple Threat, they’ve got the one thing that works really well.

Why are these folks, these guys that are on the FedEX Cup as an example saying, “I’ve got some work to do this week”? They’re actually going through swing drills and they’re practicing, and I treat an executive coach for leadership and for sales in the same venue. I’m out there trying to see where my gaps are, where I might have gotten a little lazy, what things that I’ve known I’ve actually forgot to do and practice and swing coaches are good for that.

Fred Diamond: We talked today on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Paul Smith. Paul, before I ask you for your final thought, sales is hard. Again, you worked for big brands over your career, your customers go through challenges, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? Tell us a little bit about what sales as a career has meant to you and how it keeps you going.

Paul Smith: Early on some of the learnings were, “Listen, this is what sales is all about: cold calls + demos = sales.” Of course today’s a lot more sophisticated than that because you have to have a lot of cold calls to get to prospects and so forth. Today we’ve actually gotten into using big data as an example and analytics, really sophisticated targeting type of campaigns. I would say for early career folks in sales it’s a lot easier than when I was in sales and I was told to go to that building and start on the 20th floor and work your way down. The sophistication, that targeted marking that we get today with the really scientific marketing approach actually gets us to people who want to be gotten to, so that’s really nice.

Then as we get later on in our career and especially I enjoy at my level, I don’t really think about selling. Some people might think that is a negative connotation as much as consulting and as much as advancing folks’ mission especially in government and what they need to do. I find that it’s fun and there’s no problem with having fun at work. We learn to have fun at a very early age, I think George Bernard Shaw once quoted, “We don’t stop playing when we grow old, we grow old when we stop playing.” This is grownup fun and it’s playing but you have to have that concept.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final one, give us a final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe.

Paul Smith: Thanks, Fred and thanks for having me today, it’s been a lot of fun especially being involved with the organization over the years and our sales team have gotten a lot out of the content that your group delivers. I would say the one final thought I have is a benevolent admonition, which is put your cell phones down. This is a face-to-face business and I think unfortunately the younger generation of folks coming in have grown up with mobile technologies and they really believe that they can communicate in an effective manner by text messaging or social media or even email. Email is not a collaborative type of medium. It’s a good medium to wrap up meetings and so forth, but the most important thing is networking and get face-to-face. If you’re going to use your cell phone, actually use it as a phone.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 185: Red Hat Public Sector GM Paul Smith Details How Ambitious Sales Professionals Can Improve their IQ and EQ and Grow Their Careers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 078: Red Hat Federal Software Chief Nathan Jones Opens Up About How Sales Professionals Can Get Deeper into their Markets

NATHAN’s CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Remember that you are on par with the customer as a business partner and that you’re out there for the long term win, not the short term deal win, and you will set yourself up for a very good career and you will be respected as a business partner, and not disrespected as just somebody who came to try to sell them something. I want everybody in our profession to understand that this professional deserves respect and it’s something that is absolutely essential.“

Nathan Jones is the Vice President of Federal at Red Hat and was one of the first sales reps hired by Red Hat.

Before that, he had sales roles at Mercury Interactive and EMC.

He’s the president of the AFCEA, Washington DC chapter.

Find Nathan on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: You’re episode #78, four episodes ago we did an interview with Lynne Chamberlain who’s also on the team here at Red Hat, one of the sales leaders. I’m very interested to seeing how your story compliments some of the stuff that she has done in her career. Let’s talk about your career. Why don’t you tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that?

Nathan Jones: I joined Red Hat 15 years ago so at this point it’s almost been a career here at Red Hat and we have grown our product in solution portfolio every year I’ve been here. We are the leader in open source software which was a very new thing when I first joined and is now becoming the standard for a lot of the new innovations out there in Silicon Valley as well as elsewhere.

I think there is a lot of value that Red Hat provides and our customers are very happy, they keep coming back to us for more solutions, they see the impact we’re truly making to their business, they truly become partners with Red Hat and so that’s why I’m still here today is that long-term value I’ve seen that we’ve been able to partner with the customers to create and it excites me about continuing my career and my journey here.

Fred Diamond: As the VP of Federal, who are some of the people that you sell to? Do you typically sell at the CIO level, director of IT level, program leadership? Who are your customers?

Nathan Jones: We sell from the CIO down chief architects, program managers, everybody who’s making infrastructure decisions in IT. It’s our job to get out to more of them. When I started, it was a small group of us here and now we have a larger team so one of our challenges is to make sure that we get to more and more of the customers to impact even the line of business.

Red Hat software can impact the mission, Red Hat software can impact certainly the business value that they provide but typically we’re spending time with CIO’s, chief architects and those folks who have for many years made infrastructure decisions which is how we started in the IT world 15 years ago, certainly.

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

Nathan Jones: I started – and I think this is the journey a lot of young folks have – but I started as an intern and my internship choice could have probably defined my career in many ways. I applied for internships near my parent’s home in New England and I could have ended up at Textron, Fidelity, and I ended up at EMC, and I ended up with a great leader there who took me under his wings. He was one of the senior VP’s and I was his personal intern in the customer service department.

Once I started there in technology, I realized that it was an amazing field, there was a lot of opportunity there and it applied my talents well. I ended up deciding that the career path was a junior sales role they had which in today’s world and what we have at Red Hat is kind of an inside sales role. He helped me get that first position as soon as I graduated from college and the rest is history, I’ve been in this career ever since. I love it, couldn’t imagine doing anything different.

Fred Diamond: Starting your sales career at EMC is probably as good as you could be if you’re going to be an IT.

Nathan Jones: They were very small then, so the EMC you know today was not the EMC of that time. I was employee, something like 2,500 or something in the intern range. They were very small then but it turned out that I kind of grew with that company as well, similar to the way I’ve grown with Red Hat so I have had some great blessings in terms of choices, companies that I picked to partner with.

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

Nathan Jones: I think the most important thing is to think about how you’re adding value in the role you’re in today. I never really thought about what I was going to do next, I thought about how I could impact the organization I was assigned to in the role I had at that moment and it’s back to the basics of I worked extra hard. I put in a lot of hours, I was the overachiever, the eager beaver in terms of being there early, being there late, taking on the tough tasks in terms of became territories, became very small customers that nobody else wanted doing creative things and just going the extra mile.

If somebody needed an extra task done, I was raising my hand and jumping in to do it. I think that establishes value and for me, I was having fun doing it. It wasn’t really a chore but of course, it did interfere with the personal life but I think early in your career, that’s the way to do it. I try to convey that to some of the millennials and some of the folks we have in the office today about dedicating yourself to what you’re doing today and whenever there’s a choice about going the extra mile, just do it.

Fred Diamond: That’s great advice. Tell us a little more about yourself. What are you specifically an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Nathan Jones: I don’t use those words but I think what I hear I’m helpful at to the reps and to the team and to the customers is creative problem solving, analysis of the situation, just helping figure out those tough opportunities and rolling up my sleeves to be a part of the problem solving process. I believe that you have to look at the problem, understand the problem, analyze it and when I say problem, the customer’s problem. The opportunity we’re trying to solve for them. And then be a part of creating a solution with your team instead of coming in with some preconceived notion from the past few although clearly I now have some degree of legacy knowledge from best practices of previous similar situations.

But I think it’s really that dedication to the problem solving, that analysis, that persistence and that creativity that I think the team tends to like and use me for. I don’t know if it’s brilliance, but it’s fun to hear that word. If I’m adding value and I’m helpful and they keep asking me to come to the table, then I’m excited and that keeps me going.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about some of the sales career mentors who have impacted your career?

Nathan Jones: Since my early career was at EMC, I have to focus on that being where I really learned the most. There were 3 leaders there that I think I got the most from in my early days and maybe this will spur them to be on your podcast as well, but Aileen Black, Caroline Hyde and Steve Alfieris. All very different individuals and I learned a little bit from each of them. From Aileen, I learned an amazing amount about creativity and problem solving, deal making, just a master at the art of the deal.

From Caroline, I learned a lot about how you can connect with customers, how you can have a great executive presence, how you can build a strategy and a vision and how you can be a very interesting, fun person that your customers want to get to know. She had such a fun personality and an amazing sense of humor that the customers loved and then Steve Alfieris who I was able to see grow in his career became kind of a mentor in terms of what you can do by being absolutely excellent at every step of the way. He did a number of different jobs at EMC, had a number of different groups eventually that reported to him and he figured each one of them out and became a master at each level and each position he was in and everybody looked to him as kind of a great expert adviser.

So in three different ways, those individuals helped form the foundations that I then used at two smaller companies, because when I got to Mercury and then Red Hat there wasn’t a lot of people here for me to lean on. Now, I have a lot of great colleagues that I continue to learn from every day so they’re kind of countless. In fact, Lynne who you mentioned who was a podcast a couple times ago, she’s been an amazing source of leadership and career advice for me but I do hope I beat her in terms of podcast listenership.

Fred Diamond: We’ll definitely let you know, we’ll be keeping a close eye on that. Do you still keep in touch with Steve, Aileen and Caroline?

Nathan Jones: Yes, they’re all busy, they’re all still in this field. I think it’s a field that when you get into it – we were talking about this before, but – you become an expert in this field and it becomes a focus area for you and I think once you become a focused expert, so to listeners who are from outside federal, you want to continue to help those customers because it’s a unique challenge. It’s almost an extra sale cycle when you think about you have the technical win with customers in federal but then you have the whole procurement cycle that you have to be a master of.

So how do you help your customers actually get to the technical solution they want? Once you learn all that, you really want to continue in this market because you can add tremendous value. You can go really deep in this market and create, I believe, a lifelong career which is what I’m in so far in this market. It’s just a great place to be and you have a unique expertise and a unique focus and those 3 individuals are still doing that today and I look to them as probably what I’ll continue doing for my career.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question for you about the federal marketplace which you just started talking about: what is it about the federal customer or the federal market that has attracted you? Again, you’ve devoted your career to serving that particular marketplace. A lot of the people that we interview in the Sales Game Changers podcast have done that, they’re servicing a market, maybe there’s one or two throughout their career. You’re the vice president of federal for Red Hat, what is it about the federal marketplace that has attracted you?

Nathan Jones: The way I get into federal was accidental because I wanted to stay in the DC area so I got assigned to Caroline and her group as a junior sales associate. Then I was enamored with the dot com space and what my friends were doing and looked into that and did a little bit of that but came back to understand that if you’re going to live in the DC area, this is the market to be in and also I think it is a more sophisticated market, no offense to my commercial colleagues.

There’s a whole element of big program mission impact that you’re doing on a day to day basis. You’re helping the nation with its biggest challenges and you’re also helping the customers. It’s not just – again, like I said before – a technical decision. They have to then figure out their way through the procurement maze and if you can help them do that, you truly are not only just helping the customer get to their technical win, you’re helping the customer, meaning the agency, get to their mission objective and that’s just exciting. So once you kind of get hooked on that – and again, my part time job with AFCEA, the industry association for the DOD here in DC, you end up wanting to do it more than just in your day job but helping bring other partners and the community together with the DOD to brainstorm on things and that’s really what I do in my AFCEA job is in a non-profit way bring together my competitors and my colleagues to think about big picture challenges that the DOD has and brainstorm with the customer in a safe environment and where they go next, with big IT challenges.

I love federal for those reasons and I think it becomes, it’s certainly a passion right now and I think it becomes a lifelong mission.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Let’s get back to general sales in general. What are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Nathan Jones: Red Hat’s grown in amazing ways over the past 15 years so the way we went to market when I first got here on a necessity was with a very small team – two guys and a dog as sometimes we talk about. Today, we have many solutions, we’re in many different categories and impacting many different parts of the customer. Today’s challenges are really around, in my organization and so in how I lead the group at Red Hat, is how do we orchestrate better? How do we, in a more sophisticated way, use all the talented people we have and truly make it incremental to more sales? When we get back to the sales results. But really more impact to the customer. With many people all helping the same customer, you have to have different talents, you have to hire differently because we have to hire some folks that really know how to orchestrate, that know how to lead their teams.

Then we have to hire other folks who are experts in a certain product and are very good at focus and very good at adding value to a particular part of a customer. Then technologists and business developers and contract specialists. So how do we pull all of them together to understand the customer’s challenge, understand the customer’s mission, map out a plan for how we help the customer. That is a whole different level of sales excellence that I’m learning on the job today and having fun with because it’s just so different then when it’s David and Goliath and you’re trying to just run from one customer to another, quickly tell your story which is what it was in the early days. I’m evolving with our customer opportunity and that’s the most fun I think challenge I have today.

Fred Diamond: Nathan, let’s go back to one of the big successes of your career. What’s the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? Why don’t you take us back to that moment?

Nathan Jones: I had to think about this question. It’s fun to go back and think about lots of deals so I picked one where I had to pull together early in my Red Hat career at one of the science agencies, I’ll say, where we had to pull together a lot of different stake holders. This is a distributed agency with a lot of different folks who were doing scientific work and they all wanted to use Red Hat in some way, shape or form but the ability for them to come together and create a deal was a challenge. I had to get in front of the CIO council, we had to both sell from the technical level up as well as from the top down, we had to cover a lot of geographic ground and eventually we pulled it together. It was in a way that they all bought separately but they bought against one big agreement.

It was a fun example of herding cats and at the end it just felt like you were impacting so many different small customers with one big deal. That’s the one I think I thought of, but I really do enjoy so many deals, in every quarter there’s always some – there’s the most fun transaction and then there’s also the one that just wears you down so I always try to remember back to the really fun one where we had just an amazing win that maybe was against all odds and the team rallied together and we performed at our best on our best day. Those are the ones I think about, but that one that I talked about with one of the scientific agencies was probably my best from 13, 14 years ago. It was just such an early success and one of the first big deals for Red Hat.

Fred Diamond: You’ve mentioned a couple of times how when you started with Red Hat in federal it was a very small group. You mentioned two guys in a garage type of thing which of course was bigger than that but how do you classify Red Hat in federal right now? Are you a large player, are you still a niche player? Help us understand where Red Hat fits into the federal scheme.

Nathan Jones: The really fun thing about our position today is we are a big player, now. When you look at our Linux portfolio or our platform portfolio, our Jboss app server portfolio in Middleware, we are the standard in a lot of agencies. Every CIO knows Red Hat and the impact we make. However, we have a bunch of small startup portfolios within this corporation and so we have – this is where the go to market becomes sophisticated because in some places people don’t realize the solutions we have when it comes to platform as a service and cloud and container and infrastructure service and storage, and we have to get out there with a startup mentality to go after those markets despite the fact that they may know us as a great partner overall.

The government definitely leans on us for their security posture for cyber and knows us in that way but there are many things that are a well-kept secret that we’re trying to get out. It’s fun that in one part of my day I’m working in startup initiatives for one of our product lines and then in a different part of our day I’m talking about how the government relies on us or mission critical security patches and cyber posture and balancing that with different team members, different personalities and putting those different hats on throughout the day is, again, an amazing source of inspiration.

Fred Diamond: Nathan, you’ve given us a lot of great stories and examples of what it means to be a sales professional, but did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Nathan Jones: There are moments where I’m not having fun, there are moments where I think when you become a manager leader of a larger team, you can get caught up in the spreadsheets. You can get caught up in the business planning and if you do too much of that and too little customer facing, that certainly drains the energy for me. Every time I find myself doing too much in the computer, in the spreadsheets, in the analysis, I try to make sure I’m balancing my time to get in front of a fun customer and absolutely tackle some mission challenge they have.

I am proactive about doing that on my calendar, I have actually a list of all when new folks are joining our team, I try to get out with them in the first quarter, I try to get out with the reps and team members that have been around for a long time once a quarter and if I’m prescriptive about that, I actually manage my time to balance it. Again, the only time I don’t love my job is when I’m back office and stuck in my office doing spreadsheets but they’re important to the planning. You can’t execute in the field without doing planning so it’s about balancing that.

But no, I’ve never reconsidered the profession I’m in or the job I’m in because it absolutely is an amazing source of inspiration for me and I love it but there are parts of it – and there’s parts of every job – that you have to avoid and balance and refocus.

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

Nathan Jones: It goes back to my journey and I’ll just advise that they do what I did which is go the extra mile, double down and dedicate yourself to the position you’re in today. Don’t talk about, “I want to be this next” or “I want this next opportunity, where is it? What is it? Lay it out for me.” Which I do have folks come and ask me about. If you absolutely excel in what you’re doing, you will find opportunities to shine and folks like me will say, “That is absolutely the person we need in that next role.”

I encourage them to do that and that means also doing it outside of their day job, so in things like my passion which is AFCEA right now, go and volunteer. Go and do these things on your free time that get you access to more government customers. Help them solve problems and get you off of the phones and outside touching customers and understanding their challenges. There are lots of volunteer opportunities around the DC area where you can do that. I try to help mentor the folks that come to me by connecting them with those opportunities, especially in AFCEA.

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

Nathan Jones: I talked about it a little while ago too, where I definitely make it a consorted effort to get out with reps on a daily and weekly basis and really go to all types of customer meetings, not just the CIO but also in the trenches so that I can continue to be smart in our technologies, I can continue to understand the grass through its challenges and opportunities that we have.

In that context, I also stretch myself from an AFCEA perspective being out there in the industry talking about things that are even outside the solution portfolio that Red Hat has and then I continue to read up on all the products. Red Hat every year I’ve been here has acquired something or launched a new solution in a new area so every time that happens I dedicate myself to understanding what’s going on in the storage space, in the mobile space, in the infrastructure as a service platform, as a service base. These are things that we never had when I started and yet I need to become a thought leader on it to help my customers navigate.

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

Nathan Jones: I think it’s all around team development where it used to be about execution and sales execution excellence. Now, it’s about how do I develop a team that can go to market in a sophisticated way and so this is where I talked about the orchestration, this is where I talked about strength finders and finding the right people for the right job because we have a lot of different roles and positions now and a lot of different challenges to tackle.

When you look at how all the players and the team can provide value, there’s an art and a science, I think, to this team development and team leadership, team management. That’s a lot of the focus area so we’re bringing in different training opportunities for the teams, we’re bringing in a lot of recognition for the best practices we see, so that’s where I’m dedicating myself these days to helping Red Hat succeed.

Fred Diamond: Sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? Especially in the federal space. Obviously, Red Hat being in a preferred vendor you’re going to get a lot of access but you have to have high level security to even get in the buildings these days. What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Nathan Jones: When I started at Red Hat, we didn’t have any brand access so nobody knew us. Sales is something you have to dedicate yourself to, I don’t call it hard because to me it’s felt natural and I think there are certain people that end up in this career and end up in a career that is really about business partnership with the customer. Yes, the title is sales but we are really trying to help the customer figure out new ways to solve problems that exist in their organizations. New ways to hone their efficiencies. When you think about that mission, I think it energizes you to keep going back to the pieces where you do get obstacles so yes, you have to do cold calling. Yes, you have to go into customers that may be already very entrenched with your competition.

For me, I enjoy those opportunities even when there’s push back because I learn from them and I really am excited to learn from my losses because I put it in my playbook of the next strategy. Again, as a champion debater in college and high school and how I got into this career, I don’t mind some push back. It’s fun. I guess that helps me in terms of the personality but it requires sophistication. It’s not something that you just work hard at and you’re good at it, no, when you do get push back you have to learn why did that push back come, what can I do differently and what’s a new technique because once you get through and then you really impact the customer and then impact revenue, you absolutely feel even better about that win because the easy wins are not as fun as the hard wins.

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

Nathan Jones: The profession we’ve chosen is a very important one and it is a profession. Sales sometimes gets a bad reputation but I like to think about it as we’re running our own businesses. We’re impacting the customer mission and bring it back to that level of sophistication. I think the more we remember that we’re providing them with a service, that we’re adding value to the customer, we’re not just convincing them to buy something for our own revenue generation, the only reason that corporations exist like mine is because we provide a valuable service to the customer.

So remembering that you are on par with the customer as a business partner and that you’re out there for the long term win, not the short term deal win, and you will set yourself up for a very good career and you will be respected as a business partner, not disrespected as just somebody who came to try to sell them something. I think that’s important to me because I want everybody in our profession to understand that this is something that deserves respect and it’s something that is absolutely essential.

No matter what kind of big data and algorithms we have, the art of this profession we’re in is something that’s a human job. It takes humans to convince other humans on how to drive these organizations. It’s not something that any spreadsheet or computer or an online marketplace is going to do. I hope that the listeners out there bring that same level of respect to our industry and continue to add value to their customers so that they help elevate the game of all of ours.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 078: Red Hat Federal Software Chief Nathan Jones Opens Up About How Sales Professionals Can Get Deeper into their Markets first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 074: Red Hat Public Sector Sales Exec Lynne Chamberlain Shares Lessons Learned as a Woman in Tech Sales Pioneer

LYNNE’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do. I truly believe that.“

Lynne Chamberlain is the VP of Business Development for Red Hat’s public sector division.

As the VP of Business Development, her responsibilities include major capture and selling to the system’s integrators.

She’s worked at Unisys and was involved in starting Network Appliance’s public sector division.

She worked at Silicon Graphics where she was involved with the Cray acquisition. She also spent some time at Digital Equipment Corporation, NCR and Tektronics. When she was at Tektronics, she was the very first woman ever hired in sales.

Find Lynne on LinkedIn!

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

Lynne Chamberlain: Red Hat is a great company. I’ve been here 14 years and open source is the wave of the future. If you see 14 years ago, people talked about Linux and what was that.

Today, we have a full breadth of products, from our operating system which everybody knows is Linux all the way up to the cloud. We’ve got a number of cloud software packages all the way into software defined storage, software defined networking and all the way up to our automation product which is called Ansible. What excites me is it’s a culture change for a lot of IT companies to move to open source and every government agency now is open source savvy which is exciting, so I’ve been lucky to be in a company where we’ve seen a lot of change.

Fred Diamond: You’ve worked for some of the hall of fame companies in the history of technology and have you always been in public sector? Has that primarily been the market that you’ve sold to?

Lynne Chamberlain: When I first came to Red Hat, I did go to the commercial side but most my entire career has been public sector. NCR Corporation, which was a great company to get started with, I sold to the officers club worldwide so it was a retail kind of sale but it was also to the government. One of the things I got to do is stay in the corridors, all the military bases and sold to the O clubs. It was a little bit different type of selling because when you go to an O club, they’re very busy till 11 O’clock at night when they close down and that’s when the sale starts. That was kind of an entree into my career.

Fred Diamond: You’ve spent a good part of your career in public sector. What is it about public sector, selling to that specific type of a customer that interests you and makes you passionate?

Lynne Chamberlain: Growing up I lost my dad fairly young, and he was in the military so I went to college and graduate school on the GI bill, MBA. They paid for all my schooling. With that, one of the things I really wanted to do was give back to the government for taking care of me through school, so my first opportunity was to sell into the government, and I’d just gotten real appreciation for what my dad did in the army for all those years and I always felt like I wanted to stay working for the department of defense. I’ve done a lot in the IC community and I’ve had some exposure to civilian but it’s been mostly on that side of the house.

Fred Diamond: Wow. Again, we mentioned some of the companies you’ve been selling to, and we mentioned you were the first woman in sales at Techtronics. How did you first get into sales as a career? You mentioned you went to grad school. What did you major in in grad school, what kind of degree did you get?

Lynne Chamberlain: My masters was in business and I really wanted to work on Wall Street. That was my aspirations all the way through college into graduate school, but then when I worked for NCR Corporations – and I always thought sales was more like a used car salesman, I would never have thought of going into sales – but when I did this audit for the small business and I contacted NCR and they asked me to sell them some cash registers and you could see that they really needed cash registers to keep their back office automation so they could keep their inventory under control and that they could also manage their guest checks, because whether it was a positive for the customer, an error or negative, it was still a problem with how people manually created guest checks.

We put in a cash register, it saved them a lot of money and by doing that I realized that you can sell and it’s not a used car sales type of person. You’re actually bringing value to a customer and bringing value and benefits to that restaurant that I did. With that opportunity was right after I sold that cash register into this restaurant, they came after me, NCR, and said, “Hey, we have this graduate program.” It would be intense training for 6 months and it would be in Ohio where their headquarters were so I got to go up there and I went through 6 months of training and the rest is history.

I loved it and the training that they had actually was more like the Xerox selling and it was the benefits, the right questions to ask and the value selling and I really appreciated that because I learned that there is a real need that customers have, whether it’s IT needs or whatever and by being able to provide them solutions that helps them in their everyday lives and in their businesses, you’re making a change, you’re making a huge difference for them.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you learned in some of your first sales jobs with NCR, for example, that have stuck with you till today?

Lynne Chamberlain: One of the things that’s interesting, there’s a famous quote that I love to say and it’s by Judy Garland, and the reason I always picked up Judy Garland is because when I was a young kid, my grandmother took me to her funeral and I saw the red slippers at the end and it always stuck with me about her. So I read a lot of stories on her, but she had a quote that said, “Always be the first rate version of yourself instead of the second rate version of somebody else” and that is exactly how I’ve always felt. Do the best you possibly can in every job that you do, work hard, make a difference from your standpoint and not anybody else’s and with that my career has developed.

Fred Diamond: Very good. The public sector’s gain is Wall Street’s loss, I guess.

Lynne Chamberlain: thank you.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about yourself. What are you specifically an expert in? Lynne Chamberlain, tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Lynne Chamberlain: I would say in the IT side from the sales perspective, I have grown up through the sales environment where it’s been very tough trying to sell into some companies. Every company I’ve been with as you said that they were all leaders in their industry, but when I started with them, they weren’t. People never even heard of Silicon Graphics. Sun and Digital was the strongest company. When I went to Red Hat, nobody even heard of Linux. It was hard to sell there, we didn’t have an installed base as we have today so selling was critical.

Understanding the customer’s needs, being able to listen is #1 to what they needed and being able to provide them a solution or value and I believe one of the strengths I’ve had as a woman in this industry but not only that but as a IT professional in this industry is being able to listen. That is so critical. There’s so many people that come out and start sell – and I’ve been on many calls with people that have worked for me in the past that day 1 or the moment they walk into that room they’re selling who that company is that they’re working for, and that is not the right choice. You have to be able to listen for a long period of time with that customer and then be able to provide the benefits.

Fred Diamond: Give us a little more insights into how you’ve gotten good at that. That’s one of the threads that’s come up not infrequently in the Sales Game Changers podcast is the need to be a better listener, to be more effective because you really truly do need to bring value to the customer. But tell us some of your strategies and tactics o maybe some techniques on what you’ve learned over years to be a more effective listener.

Lynne Chamberlain: My first training, as I said, back when I was working for NCR Corporation, I had 6 months of training which was almost like the Xerox training school where they brought you through processes, and a process is really important. You learned the benefits of selling, asking the right questions, not accepting no for an answer but even going deeper into what the customer meant, by what that customer said and being able to hold your tongue. There’s so many times you want to throw something out and you just can’t do it. You’ve got to sit there and it’s hard.

It is hard when you first start because we are so excited about the products we have, we’re excited about what we sell, we want to talk to the customer right away because we feel like we have an answer. In more times than ever is when you listen to the customer, all of a sudden you pick up, “That isn’t what I thought the customer was going to say” and so that’s why it’s so important and I think the NCR Corporation’s training really helped me through that.

Then actually being pushed into an environment where at the beginning of my career, I was the only woman in sales for many years and trying to be the best because you’re competing with men and they’re always looking at you thinking, “Eh, she’s just a woman.” I will honestly say that and you wanted to be #1 not just for yourself and everybody wants to be #1 but just to show that women could do this job.
Fred Diamond: You’ve worked for some of the amazing companies like we’ve talked about, you’ve obviously achieved a lot of great stuff in your career. Tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they specifically impacted your career.

Lynne Chamberlain: I had some great mentors growing up through the sales ranks, but one person – we didn’t have social media back then, so when you hired somebody into your organization you really didn’t know a lot about them like you do today because you can Link-In, you can Facebook, you can find out anything. I was asked a digital equipment corporation when I was running BD and the civilian side to help a new person that they just brought in. Her name was Doctor Grace Hopper.

Now, I didn’t know who Doctor Grace – I didn’t sell to the navy so I had really no idea at the time who she was and she was a little petite navy officer, wore her uniform, came in and I was to take her on sales calls and take her out because at that time, she was selling her Nano wire and she would go around and talk to all the navy customers. And I was there to help escort her and educate her on how to sell, but you know what? She ended up educating me on the value of discipline and the value of feeling passionate about something. She was the oldest person in the navy at the time as an officer when she retired. She was passionate about what she did and with that, I learned a lot from her. It wasn’t till years later that I realized who exactly she was and how inspirational she was to whole culture people.

Fred Diamond: It’s interesting. A little bit taking it back by who you mentioned as a mentor, I’ve studied high tech and I’ve been with a lot of great high tech companies. For those of you listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast, take a second, hit pause and go Google Doctor Grace Hopper. She is one of the legends of technology, not just technology in the public sector space. I’m actually getting chills here thinking about it because I’ve spent a little bit of time with things and you were very fortunate to have spent time to take her on sales calls.

Lynne Chamberlain: Can you imagine if I had social media back then? I would have really known who I had at my fingertips.

Fred Diamond: See you driving around, instagramming, hurry eating at McDonalds. No, but seriously, good for you. I’m sure we could probably spend another whole podcast just talking about your sales experiences. Imagine, Sales Game Changers, going on a sales call with a legend. Imagine going on a sales call with Jack Welch or Steve Jobs, do you know what I’m saying?

Lynne Chamberlain: I absolutely know. Then I had a mentor when I went to Silicon Graphics, Bob Henry. Bob was a motivational mentor where there was never a day that he was upset or screamed at you. He never felt that you weren’t a high performer. He only hired high performers, but the thing about Bob, constantly you’d walk in there, “Good morning, Lynne!” and he really motivated you and you wanted to go to work. You don’t find a lot of leaders that do that, I’m fortunate right now to have a leader in Paul Smith that is the same way. He’s very inspirational. I’ve never had a leader that can get up on a stage and have so many quotes and have a recall of things that he had done in the past or recall movies or books and that in itself is inspirational to have a leader that can do something like that.

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

Lynne Chamberlain: Fred, one of the things we talked about is social media. It has really changed the way we do business. You cannot put out a message or a thought without somebody else being able to take that and podcast it, put it on Facebook, put it on Twitter, so you have to be really sensitive exactly about what you say and do anymore. Clearly we see that in what’s happening today. That’s changed the way we even market our products. Before, you used to go knock on – I mean, when I was at Tektonics, I literally knocked on doors for computer aided design companies, and that’s how I sold. And I go, “Hello, I’m Lynne Chamberlain, I’m here to sell.

Today, you don’t do that. We have inside sales reps, we have marketing activities, there’s so much going on that I didn’t have when I first started, so today that’s changed tremendously from when I started. I would say the other thing is just the type of products. We are growing so fast that the products that we have today you wouldn’t even have thought about two years ago. We’re into the cloud. One of the things that Red Hat has done really well that we’re in a subscription model and we created that when we first started as a company where people are trying to catch up in the cloud market selling services by the drink, where we didn’t have that. People are selling perpetual license. Red Hat has been very fortunate that we’ve always been in a subscription model which is very much like that. So even the models are changing and the way you sell.

Fred Diamond: You’ve spoken about some of the places where you’ve worked and you’ve given us some great insights, here. I’m not sure if you’re going to be able to do this or not, but take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. Lynne, take us back to that moment.

Lynne Chamberlain: It goes back a while. I’ve been very blessed with some good wins in my career, but one of the ones I can remember is back in Silicon Graphics. We had a major opportunity with the IC community. It was about a 300 million dollar program.

Fred Diamond: Can you explain what IC means to people who don’t know?

Lynne Chamberlain: Intelligence community, in the IC, intelligence community and it was for one of the agencies in that community. It was 300 million dollars, I had a great team working for me at that time but at the same time we were getting ready to acquire Cray. You can imagine, Cray was competing with us on this program and you have to keep everything separate but you were still trying to win this opportunity. It was for the infrastructure for a major agency. As we worked through it, and we worked with like 3 different system integrators to win this and all system integrators were supporting either Cray or Silicon Graphics so we were heavily competing and yet we knew we were buying Cray Corporation.

The cool thing about this was they looked at our technology, we started from scratch where you did all your proof of concepts. And when you think about Cray and SGI, those systems were basically one offs. You built systems for that customer, not like you build and manufacture a lot of different systems, we build for that customer the networking needs, the storage needs they had, the internal workings of that processor.

The good thing is we started from a proof of concept, we designed the system, we manufactured the system and we had a capture team that went out and sold and developed the solution for that customer, and with that we won a 300 million dollar contract at Silicon Graphics. Cray came in a couple months later, and they were like, “Oh, wow, you guys won.” It was pretty exciting for us and the opportunity was huge and it put us on the map on SGI besides acquiring Cray which was a name brand recognition company, but that really put us on the map.

Fred Diamond: For some of the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast who are starting out in your sales career, Cray was a super computer and when I worked at Apple Computer, they actually made an investment in a Cray Computer to build the next generation of Apple computers and the joke was that we used a Cray to build Apple and Cray used Apples to build Cray.

Lynne Chamberlain:

Fred Diamond: But anyways, good for you.

Lynne Chamberlain: The nice thing, there too is another individual that I met, I got to meet Seymour Cray because we did the acquisition and another name recognition in the industry that was so a game changer as you would say for this industry.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. For the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast, I’m actually getting chills. I’ve been a student of the technology world and we’ve mentioned some amazing names today: Seymour Cray, Doctor Grace Hopper, I’m still a little bit shaken, Lynne, from that. Just thinking about the impact of the people that you’ve spent time with and Paul Smith, you mentioned, as well who’s the general manager for Red Hat’s public sector business and he was the Institute for Excellence in Sales lifetime achievement award recipient in 2017. Obviously, you’ve had a great career in sales, Lynne. Did you ever question being in sales? I know you mentioned that you might have started your career on Wall Street. Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s not for me”?

Lynne Chamberlain: Never, never once, Fred. You know what? Every time you win, it outweighs any of the times that you’ve felt like, “Wow, I didn’t win, I got to keep pursuing.” But just the drive that I have in sales and the success, but also the people. I love the people, they are so passionate about what they’re trying to do in the government, and when you work with the chief information officer and the successes they’re trying to bring to their agency and that you can be part of that and help make changes and then you can actually when you install the software and the hardware, you can actually see those changes. It’s so rewarding. No, I would never say that I wish I hadn’t gone this path.

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

Lynne Chamberlain: I think one of the things that professionals when you get started in sales, is you want to make sure you read as much as you can. There are so many great books out there that give you a really good background on sales and the proficiency of sales and how to become a professional in sales, and I would absolutely say that’s one of the things they should do.

Fred Diamond: Is there a book you’d like to recommend that has had an impact on you?

Lynne Chamberlain: For me, it’s an old book but I still have it. As a sales manager, “The One Minute Manager”. I listen to that and it’s a way I manage my people and it’s such an old book but it’s my bible in managing.

Fred Diamond: Very good. You mentioned reading, but what are some of the other things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Lynne Chamberlain: One of the things that I do at Red Hat, everything we do at Red Hat is Red Hat Open Systems, Red Hat Open Stacks, so it’s RHOS. One of the things I created, a community for women called Red Hat Open Stilettos. I like bringing women together and helping them progress in their careers, so quarterly I have a women’s activity that we go out and get together and we talk about women in this industry. I think that’s very critical, half my team at Red Hat are women and so nurturing women in this industry, showing women both in the sales side as both in the technical side and making sure they can develop in their careers.

Fred Diamond: What is the format of that? How do you do these quarterly programs? Is it at a classroom or is it over lunch? Tell us a little more specifically about what the physical-ness looks like.

Lynne Chamberlain: It’s actually I take them for happy hour and after one drink or just a cup of coffee, everybody has a tendency to open up and talk about things that are on their mind and questions about how they should maybe handle something. It gives them an environment that they feel comfortable with other women getting together.

Also, I’m a mentor for a few women and I really truly enjoy that. Women in this industry, there’s some barriers that still exist and it’s important for them to have mentors for them that they can go to and talk to and help them get through some of the scenarios that they’re dealing with and an area where they can talk to somebody that might have been through the same issues that they’re seeing right now, and how did I cope with some of that stuff.

Fred Diamond: The IES has had a Women in Sales program for the last couple of years. What might be one of the challenges that a woman in sales is facing today?

Lynne Chamberlain: In some cases there’s still the stigma. You’ve got more senior, older men in this industry that have a perception that women shouldn’t be in the positions that they’re in, and you still see that, and that’s in every industry but specially in IT and I see it and the one good thing I see over the years, like I said earlier, I started out being one of the only women in IT and I didn’t have places to go and people to talk to of the issues that I was dealing with.

Today, the fortunate thing, there’s a lot of women in this industry. Women in whether it’s small business, whether it’s resellers, bars. Last night I went to the AFCEA Winter Gala. There were so many women there. 15 years ago when I was at that Gala, you didn’t see the women so it’s very exciting to see how the industry has changed.

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

Lynne Chamberlain: Mentoring any individual that works for me. You always want to build strength in the people that work for you so that when you decide to make a career change or move into something else that those individuals are ready for their next role. For me, it’s really important to ensure that the people that work for me are educated for the next job position that they might want to go after and that they’re successful. My success is only dependent upon the success of my salespeople and it’s important for me to ensure that they’re well trained, that I’m mentoring them all the time, we have one on ones, that I’m giving them feedback. To me, the most important thing as a sales manager is feedback, because you don’t learn unless somebody shares with you the goods, the bads, the uglies and how you can improve.

Fred Diamond: Lynne, sales is hard. People don’t return your phone calls or your emails. We talked about some of the other challenges before with how social media and social marketing have changed your interactions with your customer. You sell to the public sector space, you can’t go into the pentagon anymore and just walk around like you might have done in the past. Obviously, security is a big concern but why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Lynne Chamberlain: Fred, I think we talked about the satisfaction. Yes, if you keep calling somebody over and over again and they don’t return your call it is totally frustrating, but there’s different avenues to get to that individual. With LinkedIn now, you can find somebody that knows that person, you can reach out to that person and say, “Hey, I know you know so and so, can you connect me?”

There’s so many different avenues to try to get to the individual that you’re trying to sell to and so I think the perseverance and the continued drive to go after that individual. You don’t know how many times I’ve had an inside sales rep say to me, “I’ve tried so many times to reach so and so. I can’t get a return phone call.” And we’ll go through the process, “Well, have you tried LinkedIn? Have you tried to connect with somebody? Have you sent a letter?”

It’s so funny, today everybody it’s social media. It’s being on your phone. The good old days, we used to send letters, personalize something. Even when I go on sales calls, I will send thank you notes still. Nobody does that anymore but the personal effort that you make in reaching out to somebody makes a huge difference and it still does today.

Fred Diamond: Lynne, this has been a great interview. She also talked about – I’m still a little bit taken back by some of her mentors, Doctor Grace Hopper and she also spent a lot of time with Seymour Cray who of course created Cray Research, the company that created the Cray super computer. Lynne, this has been amazing. Give us a final thought to help the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast take their career to the next level.

Lynne Chamberlain: I started with a quote from Judy Garland, I’ll end with a quote. When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do. I truly believe that.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 074: Red Hat Public Sector Sales Exec Lynne Chamberlain Shares Lessons Learned as a Woman in Tech Sales Pioneer first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.