Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 06:07
Name an impactful sales mentor: 10:55
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 14:40
Most important tip: 23:12
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 29:15
Inspiring thought: 30:48

EPISODE 139: SAP NS2 Business Leader Ron Police Says This Basketball Analogy from His Mentor at Oracle Pushed the Buttons that Fired Up His Sales Leadership Career

RON’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Create a life business plan for yourself and think about it in terms of what do I want to accomplish in life with my family, friends, and the community. At the end of the day, you’re going to have a detailed business plan. I have one and I look at it every now and then. It has helped me with my career because it helped me balance everything so I could have peak performance.”

Ron Police is the President of Customer Operations at SAP National Security Services also known as SAP NS2.

He held sales leadership positions at Apple and at Oracle.

Mark Testoni, the CEO at SAP National Security Services, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Excellence in Sales at the 9th Annual Sales Excellence Award Event on May 31st in Falls Church.

Find Ron on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Ron, tell us a little about you that we need to know.

Ron Police: Thanks, Fred. I grew up in the IT business and I had an opportunity to work with some great logo companies that you mentioned. Oracle was from 1987 to 2004, what’s interesting about Oracle, I was a young guy, junior rep and I will go down in history as the lowest paid base salary rep ever at Oracle. I made $18 thousand dollars based salary but I had the same variable compensation as most senior reps. That first year was a great year, I couldn’t believe it.

When I left Oracle, I joined Apple in 2004 and I was responsible for anything government at Apple, all the business across federal, state and local. I was there during some fabulous times, Steve was sick back door in his time, I went to his funeral and I actually left Apple right after his funeral. I decided to take a couple years off, flip pancakes for the kids while they’re still young and then recharge and decide to get back into the business.

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

Ron Police: First of all, let’s talk about the mission of NS2. We focus on the core national security market in critical infrastructure, Fred. What excites me is doing something that is solving some of the biggest data problems in the world that focus on national security critical infrastructure and it’s playing a small part to actually make it better for future generations. That keeps me motivated, keeps myself and others focused and we also created a nonprofit at NS2 called NS2 Serves. It’s training veterans giving back, and that’s part of the fabric of who we are. As far as what do we do, we take the entire portfolio of SAP, we very much look at requirements across the national security space, we’re very selective on capabilities to solve some of these really critical problems and that itself is pretty exciting.

Fred Diamond: We’ll talk about that more over the course of today’s podcast. How did you first get into sales as a career? 

Ron Police: Good question, you have to go back to Penn State 1982 grad, business logistics, minor in marketing. I had a choice, I could either go into a route of production plan and inventory control, warehousing, supply chain management or I can sell transportation services. I’m glad I went down the path of selling transportation services, that basically not only gave me my first job but I moved from Pittsburgh, from Penn State to Washington DC and I’ve been here ever since.

Fred Diamond: What does it mean, “transportation services”? What exactly did you sell?

Ron Police: I worked for a company called CF AirFreight, a part of Consolidated Freightways and what was interesting about it, a lot of my friends that were in sales, they’d enter the front office, I’d enter the loading dock with donuts, bagels, to basically talk to some of my customers. We competed with Federal Express, Flying Tigers at the time, Emery Worldwide and it was a very competitive business.

Fred Diamond: Again, in your career you’ve worked for three of the biggest brands in the history of technology: Apple, Oracle and SAP. Now of course you’re running with SAP National Security Services NS2. What were some of the lessons, Ron, that you learned from that transportation service being on the loading dock, if you will, that stuck with you?

Ron Police: Fred, it was really interesting. I always think back to, “I get up early, I work late” and it was a direct correlation to getting up early, arriving to my customers and just having face time. It was a direct correlation, I was a young guy, 22-23 years old, I moved to DC when I got involved with government as well and the more calls I made, the more face time interactions, the more damn donuts that I delivered, the more revenue that would be sitting on our dock that evening. There’s a direct correlation to the more face time, the more business.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to ask you a question about that. A lot of sales has moved to inside sales and of course people aren’t sending people on planes as much as they used to. What are some of the things that you tell sales reps today? Because you mentioned you were out there handing out donuts, handing out bagels, you were in Washington so during the winter it does get cold in Washington DC and it gets rainy and snowy. What are some things that you tell young professionals? We have young professionals listening all over the world. “Get out of the office, get off the phone, go to the dock”? How would you give them some advice today?

Ron Police: I think any touch point is a good touch point whether it’s the social media, if you can talk to somebody on the phone but any way you slice it, that’s why there’s associations in your area. That’s where you go to a local deli outside of a big company you want to talk to just to meet somebody because if you’re out there, you’re talking to them, you’re introducing yourself, you’re listening, you’re going to make some connections.

Fred Diamond: Along the lines of that, what are you an expert in? Again, you’ve worked for some of these great brands. What are you an expert in? Tell us about your specific area of brilliance.

Ron Police: Area of brilliance? You figure this has been a 35 or so year career, Oracle I entered as a junior and during that time as well it was a period of growth. They needed folks that can scale the business. I started as a junior guy, I left as a senior Vice President at Oracle I really developed a brilliance, a skill for scaling and organization. In order to scale an organization, Fred, you really need to get to the foundation of creating an environment of success. What does that mean?

There’s so many things that go into creating an environment of success as a leader. First thing is sure, you’ve got to on board great talent, you’ve got to retain your really good talent but you have to empower people, you have to reinforce fundamentals, you have to give folks the leeway, you’ve got to know when to be a little bit more aggressive as a manager, when to give that type of space, you have to know how to incent individuals. If you create that environment of success for the sales team and everybody around them, that creates an environment that you can scale the business.

Whether it was Apple, a small group, turned it into a big group generating lots of revenue, whether it was Oracle, a small team, next thing you know there’s 700 people doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. I would say by creating an environment of success that creates the foundation on how you scale a business would be something that I brought to different companies that I’ve worked for.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, a lot of them work for small companies, a lot of them do work for large companies. You’ve mentioned that you’ve worked for some of the biggest technology brands, Oracle and SAP. If I’m a guy right now working inside sales for a large company like Oracle or SAP or Salesforce or Amazon or something on those lines, what should I be thinking about? What should I be focused on right now if I’m a small fish? You mentioned you came into Oracle as an $18 thousand dollar a year sales rep, what might be some of the things that you would tell someone to be successful in those large organizations?

Ron Police: Whether large organization or small organization, people buy from people. Whether you’re in government, financial services, any sector, there may be some language acronym differences and so forth but at the end of the day you’re doing the same thing. You’re focusing on your market, you’re listening to the customers, you have compassion, you have empathy and that’s some of the foundations that you’ll use across the board. I think it’s exciting for folks working in small companies, I think it’s exciting for people working in big companies because at the end of the day it’s all about what you make of your focus area.

Fred Diamond: You’ve worked for some great companies, you’ve worked for some great people. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?

Ron Police: I’ll point out a mentor of mine that is currently on our advisory board, he was recognized by you with a Lifetime Achievement Award and that’s Mr. Jay Nussbaum. I started working for Jay in 1990 and Jay is a master salesperson, he’s a master negotiator, he could write the book How to Make Friends and Influence People, he’s been able to create this environment of success through people. He’s a big sports guy, he always has these sports analogies. Shortly after he started I threw my hat in the ring, I was a sales director, I wanted to be a VP in state local and in Jay’s mind he knew I wasn’t quite ready or that wasn’t the right position for me, brought me into the office.

I said, “Jay, I’d love to be interviewed for this position please, let’s do the interview right now” and he goes, “Let me start off and tell you what I think you are and I want to hear your response. We’re a championship basketball team and you’re my 6 player. You’re not my starting 5, you’re my 6 player, I think you can get there but you still have to prove it to me.” At the time, super competitive Ron Police right now plus even worse in the earlier days, he knew how to push a button with me that fired me up for the next fiscal year. I overachieved in a big way then I ultimately became a VP in running the DOD business. He just knows how to motivate everyone individually based on the type of person they are and that’s why Jay has always been a mentor of mine.

Fred Diamond: Jay is a tremendous guy. The Institute for Excellence in Sales, one of our sponsors give a lifetime achievement award and Jay was a recipient in 2012, definitely an amazing leader. We also interviewed Mark Testoni who works with you at SAP NS2 and Mark actually listed Jay as a mentor as well. He said Jay taught him how to be bold. I have a quick question for you, Jay Nussbaum knew what to say to you, he didn’t say you were the 12th guy, he said you’re the 6 guy but you said you then took that to heart. What went through your mind and what did you do?

Ron Police: I’m sure I turned beet red. At the time I was really in shape, lifting a lot of weights and my veins were probably bulging out of my neck and I said, “Do I respect him? Is there truth to it, did he hit a chord with me playing sports through high school and other sports in college?” I didn’t know how to take it, I just knew I was going to prove to him that he was wrong. We would always bet, I actually recently won a $250 bet that he actually owes me so if Jay is listening, he owes me $250.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] we’ll make sure he listens. The thing is you acted upon it, that’s one thing that we hear. Maybe give some advice for the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast. Of course you were with Oracle which was a great place to be but you could have said, “He’s wrong, I’m going to take it a different way” but you took it but you responded.

Ron Police: I responded and I proved that I’m part of the starting 5, it took a year to do it but I ultimately hit the objective and Jay ultimately promoted me to a senior vice president a few years after that.

Fred Diamond: A year is not a long time. Ron, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Ron Police: It’s easy to lead when times are great, you’ve got to put a little more heart into it, desire into it and it’s leading in tougher quarters, tougher times. Over my career I had a lot of great times but I had some tough times. In the organization when you really need to know how to motivate folks during those harder quarters, what buttons the push, how to keep people focused? That would be one of them.

Another one probably everyone would say, “How to hire and retain”, I’m not going to say that but that’s important as well. The other one would be, especially right now we’re taking the objectives from the CEO, company objectives, and boiling it into the go to market strategy and how it’s executed by sales is a little art, a little science combined. That’s another tough one because organizations may have sale success but it’s not achieving the strategies and objectives of the CEO of the company.

Another one that goes along with leading in tougher times is how to align strategy and execution from the C suite down to where it’s executed at that vital customer facing component. That is really important, I always have that checklist with aligning plans from the high level down to the execution.

Fred Diamond: You’ve worked for some of the biggest brands in the history of technology: Apple, Oracle, SAP and now SAP NS2. Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Ron Police: Over the years there’s a lot of great successes. Let me give you a generic one and then I’ll give you a specific one. Generic success is when a virtual account team, the salesperson is the maestro managing tech resources inside sales, consulting resources, everybody, the management chain and it’s orchestrated to close something significant. There’s a win celebration and everyone feels that they’ve added value and they’ve accomplished something big. When I say that, it’s just cross-functional success, that’s huge. I’ve seen that all the time but every time I see it I get psyched about it.

A specific one, I’ll mix it up and tell a fun story. Back in 1986, my first tech job, it was a transitional job before Oracle at a little company called CPT. Word processors, early stage office automation, we had this full spring word processor and it was great at doing Arabic. I was the gym rep, government, education and medical in the DC area but part of it was the embassies. Myself and the marketing support rep – Cindy Hardeman, you may know Cindy – we were at the United Arab Emirates embassy in Georgetown at the time. We were there pitching this Arabic word processor, all of a sudden all the doors close, the embassy locks down and we become hostages because there was an outbreak, a terrorist crisis in the Middle East somewhere. The embassy was at a lock down so we were hostages for not quite 24 hours, but long enough through the course of a full day that we had a chance to have more face time with the customer, more bonding time.

They actually felt bad for us, when they finally released us we were able to talk about the business, we did a lot of listening and we closed one of the biggest deals that year with the United Arab Emirates all because of a – we may have closed it anyway, but I like the idea that we were hostages and we turned it into a fun situation.

Fred Diamond: One thing you talked about a few moments ago was face time, you didn’t really plan that whole thing.

Ron Police: No, it wasn’t staged. We didn’t stage the terrorist outbreak in the Middle East. [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Fortuitously. We’re talking to Ron Police today, president of customer operations at SAP NS2. Ron, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you were at Penn State. What was your major again at Penn State?

Ron Police: Business logistics, today it’s called supply chain management.

Fred Diamond: You were making a decision in where you should go in your career and you chose to sell transportation services. You’ve of course worked for some great companies, I’ve mentioned that many times. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s not for me”?

Ron Police: Fred, we’re folks that have been in sales for a career. We all have those weak moments, I haven’t really questioned. The only time I really questioned the change out of sales is after I left Apple. I wanted to take a couple years off, I was a consulted then I was going to be a photographer but I realized I still wanted to get involved with the game of technology so I’m back in it.

One thing I want to bring up is I think we all go through a change of those moments where there’s change and if one thing’s for certain it’s change. A quick little story for the listeners: this was probably around the year 2000, tech markets going crazy right before the bubble burst and I’m not going to say the name of the company but most folks would know this company, I was really questioning a change from Oracle to this other company. I decided to do it because greed set in, they offered me so many stock options and I remember resigning on a Monday to Jay Nussbaum, Jay literally throws me out of his office after he couldn’t convince me to stay, I flew to New York City, big global meeting at the Waldorf Astoria.

Halfway through the meeting I realized the reason, my Ben Franklin pros and cons. The cons came to light so much during this meeting, the afternoon at this big global forecast I went to the bathroom and said, “Jay, I made a grave mistake, please take me back.” He never actually took me out of the HR system by that point, went back the next day and it was a big lesson learned to me by saying we’re all in this business. We want to accomplish a lot, we want to make a lot of money and all this but at the end of the day, when something doesn’t feel right you don’t have to do it. There’s more to sales than a lot of stock options even though that’s important so you’ve got to look at the whole picture.

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

Ron Police: Thanks, Fred. When I look at advice I would give, whether it’s young, old, anyone in sales or anyone in business, there’s a set of fundamentals that you have to always execute. What are those fundamentals? It’s active listening skills, it’s prompt follow up, it’s having empathy with the customer.

All those basic things, as a young salesperson you’re going to look at, you’re going to read books and you’re going to say, “I’m going to execute the following. Let me tell you what I see happens all the time, someone gets a little experience, they become seasoned, you know what’s the first thing they do? They fail to execute the fundamentals. You have to go back and look at it and make sure you just had a meeting, you should do a follow up letter with empathy. Were you really a good listener, did you come such an expert in the area that you’re marketing, that you’re selling that you have two ears and one mouth but you decided to just go on broadcast mode versus really listening and understand the customer’s pain? It’s one of the biggest issues I see with senior, seasoned sales folks, they forget the fundamentals.

If you look at execute fundamentals, the other part is have a great attitude all the time. If you combine fundamentals with a great attitude, a great attitude is contagious. Our HR person here at NS2, when I talk to this person about fundamentals and attitude this person goes, “I read somewhere a little quote that said attitude determines altitude in an organization.” I wrote it on my white board because I loved it and I said, “Absolutely, I totally agree. Fundamentals, attitude, you can take your sales career as far as you want.”

Fred Diamond: What are some of the habits that you’ve deployed over the years to maintain your high level of sales excellence?

Ron Police: I’m going to go right back to what I just said. It doesn’t matter what position you’re in in sales, you’re a front line account executive, some of my best friends have been front line account execs all their life, they’ve been extremely successful. Whether you’re a front line manager, second line manager, third, you always have to have that discipline of you meet somebody, you send them a nice note, you give them a personal touch. I always empower people so I make sure there’s always a respect to that person that has front line accountability to the organization.

I never try to take that and I think if some of the listeners, if you are going on a call and your manager wants to join you, spend time and talk about a pre-plan meeting. Say, “Manager, thanks for joining me but I’d love to kick off the meeting, go through the process of the flow and just ask for your support. I’ll also summarize the meeting.” If the manager is not having that discussion with you, there’s nothing wrong with you having that discussion with the manager because as a sales leader, I like when the account exec takes control of a sales process and has good follow up, I’m like, “What a great rep.”

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

Ron Police: If you’re looking at a major initiative to ensure my success, I’m looking at it in my current role. Something that’s great for me because it’s new and interesting, granted one thing we do as a subsidiary, we can acquire companies, we can invest in companies, it’s neat. A number of years ago, “What do you mean we’re going to get involved with mergers and acquisitions and actually acquire companies in?” You want us to set up a private equity fund and actually invest 5%, 10% ownership?

We do that at NS2 and that was exciting to learn something over the last number of years but what we’re doing now, we just launched what’s called NS2 Labs. It’s the innovation center for NS2, for the company, for all of SAP it’s the innovation center for National Security. What’s cool about it is we have a seat at the table along with all the other labs around the world like the Hasso Plattner Institute, the Palo Alto labs, the Hudson Yards lab and we’re there because we’re NS2 and we have the innovation center for national security focus. The whole company goes, “We need that.”

What’s nice about it is it relates back to the sales reps at NS2. Everything we do at the NS2 labs we monetize. You have a customer requirement we need to do, we need to innovate some additional capabilities? Monetize it, you can go sell more, go solve some mission problems. If there’s a partner, it’s a community for partners to come in to the innovation center and we develop something together to go solve a customer problem. It always goes right back to the customer, their mission, solving a problem that ultimately is going to impact mission.

Fred Diamond: Ron, as we’re talking today just to wrap up before we get to the final question, we definitely get your passion for selling. We get your passion for what you’ve been selling throughout the process but sales is hard. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today, a lot of them are situations that may not be totally appropriate or totally optimized for them. The customers are harder to get to, they don’t return your calls or your emails. You service the public sector space where there’s things like shutdowns and sequestrations and continuing resolutions and things like that. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Ron Police: Fred, that’s a great question. I’ll paint a little picture of our inside sales team to give you an image why. We have inside sales manager, we have a group of inside sales reps in the far corner of this floor and right across the cubicle area we have a little liberty bell. Let me tell you something, I get so excited when an inside rep or junior reps basically bring in a deal and they ring the bell. I’d say, “Text me when you’re ready to ring the bell” and I’ll video tape it and it’s so exciting.

We had our chairman of the board, a big deal came in, we do it for field reps as well, we had Fran Townsend and our chairman of the board. Big deal because you’re going to ring the bell in honor of this opportunity. I get goosebumps just talking about because that in itself, ringing a bell in an opportunity, it’s when the essence of all the hard work and effort, the excitement of executing a sales campaign, a sales play with the ultimate objective, solving a customer problem, generating the revenue and ringing a bell.

Fred Diamond: Solving a customer’s problem, that’s what it’s all about. Again, we talked today with Ron Police, president of customer operations at SAP NS2. Ron, you’ve given us a lot of great content here. Why don’t you give us one final thought for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe to inspire them today?

Ron Police: One final thought for everybody. We all want to have peak professional performance and my final thought would be in order to achieve peak business performance, life becomes a balance. I attended which was the greatest leadership class ever in the early 2000, probably about 2002, 2003, Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor – we had Olympic trainers, it was about 15 executives and it was all about what leadership means and define it. We hiked in the woods in the morning, we had physicals and the whole thing but at the end of the day we got a little button that we could put on a lapel just as a token by saying what did you learn.

We have a nice little pin, it has that same button and the button basically has four little button holes in the middle of gold surrounded by a little round around the edge, another gold button and what it signifies is a balance in life between your family, yourself – the self is so critical, that’s actually first because if you don’t take care of yourself, good diet, workout schedule, the whole thing even with some of our careers, travelling and everything, pack your workout clothes, do that. Self, family, business, community and the circle was spirituality. The key is you have to fire on all cylinders because if you’re not firing all cylinders what’s going to be impacted is probably all of them, but a big one is business peak performance.

My advice would be create a little life business plan for yourself, think about it in terms of what do I want to accomplish with myself. “I’m going to work out so much and all that some hardcore measurable metrics. What I want to do with my family, family time, what I want to do with friends, the community, everyone has their own defining spirituality.

At the end of the day you’re going to have your detailed business plan, I have one of those plans. I look at it every now and then and I think it has actually helped me with my career because it helped me balance everything so I could have peak performance.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 139: SAP NS2 Business Leader Ron Police Says This Basketball Analogy from His Mentor at Oracle Pushed the Buttons that Fired Up His Sales Leadership Career first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Help recognize Mark Testoni’s career achievements and attend the IES Annual Sales Excellence Award Event on May 31!

Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 05:39
Name an impactful sales mentor: 15:12
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 17:39
Most important tip: 27:00
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 35:33
Inspiring thought: 36:59

EPISODE 138: Here’s the One Thing that SAP NS2 CEO Mark Testoni – 2019 IES Lifetime Achievement Award Winner – Attributes to His Notable Career Success

MARK’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “It’s a lesson I learned from my son, Matt, a special needs guy. We need to look at what people can do and not what they can’t do. That was a lesson that is probably the #1 thing that has helped me be successful. What makes a great team work is when you take the strengths and blend them all together.”

Mark Testoni is the CEO at SAP National Security Services, also known as SAP NS2.

Mark is also going to be receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Excellence in Sales at the 9th Annual Sales Excellence Award Event on May 31st in Falls Church.

Prior to coming to SAP NS2, Mark held sales leadership positions at SAP and Oracle. He also spent 20 years in the Air Force.

Find Mark on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Mark, first off congratulations on the acknowledgement with the Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast, why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Mark Testoni: Fred, thanks for first having me today and second for being involved in a process that allowed me to be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award. As I think I’ve mentioned to you in the past, sometimes you don’t know whether a Lifetime Achievement Award means it’s time to retire or you’ve been doing good things, I’m hoping it’s going to be the latter, not the former. It’s interesting, I’m probably one of those guys that would have been voted, “Least likely to succeed” in high school and two time college drop-out.

I’ve somehow gotten myself through a process because some people believed in me and maybe I started believing in myself a little bit, and now run an important company in the national security space, an important company for SAP providing solutions for customers that are near and dear to our national security. I’m proud of what has transpired, it wasn’t always easy but I think probably the lesson I’ve learned from that – and I’ll talk about a little bit more – is you’ve got to believe in yourself first. If you believe in yourself, amazing things can happen.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little more about SAP NS2? Tell us what you sell today and tell us a little bit of what excites you about that.

Mark Testoni: I think many of your listeners have probably heard of the company SAP, one of the largest software companies in the world focused in the enterprise resource planning space, or at least that’s what our mother’s SAP was about. We bring a full portfolio of SAP solutions to our target market which is the US national security space, so we can think of the intelligence community or department of defense and other related activities. Opportunely, because of the cyber threat, in the last 5-6 years we’ve gotten much more focused and supporting SAP customers with some of our capabilities inside commercial spaces like aerospace, defense and financial services.

Basically because of the unique requirements of the US government and SAP’s ownership, a German company, we have effectively set up a separate software company taking SAP to market in the space. Again, it’s being leveraged by customers far broader than we originally had targeted and what we thought they would be.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you made the transition from the Air Force into sales?

Mark Testoni: Fred, it was by accident to some degree. When I was retiring from the Air Force and I knew I was going to be leaving, I started looking around and some friends had introduced me to various companies, one of them happened to be Oracle Corporation. I think a lot of us have admired and I still am a big fan of Oracle, I worked there for 10 years and I was hired for what was called a program manager position. I was just excited to have an offer making much more money than I was making when I was in the military and working for a prestigious company.

When I got there, I found out, “You’re going to be in the sales process.” At first it set me back a little bit, the more I was involved I actually figured out that I’d been selling my entire life in the military ideas, thoughts and programs, I just never got paid commissions for them. That was interesting, by accident I guess would be my description.

Fred Diamond: What were some of the things that you learned? You said again, you were in the Air Force for 20 years. What are some of the things that you took away from that experience that have helped you in your sales career?

Mark Testoni: I mentioned earlier, you have to believe in yourself and your ideas but you can’t be tone deaf either, you need to be a good listener. I had leadership positions in the Air Force that I really learned how to run an organization which translated very well to running a sales organization because people are people and motivating might be slightly different for each individual, but that’s the same whether you’re in government or you’re in the private sector.

You have to find those things that motivate people and creating a sense of teamwork and comradely is awful important. All those really good foundational things, mission focus, teamwork, all apply in the sales organization. Sometimes we think of salespeople W2 focused or coin operated or independently operating, I found it to be far from that. It’s about the team and most of them understand. I think that all translated very well for me.

Fred Diamond: Mark, you’ve mentioned a couple times so I want to discuss this: “believe in yourself and your ideas”, that’s the first thing you said on today’s podcast. Again, we’re interviewing Mark Testoni, CEO at SAP NS2. Talk about that before we go deep further into the interview. You brought it up a couple times, what does that mean? We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, a lot of them are early in their sales career, give us some thoughts on that.

Mark Testoni: That’s a great question, Fred. For me it was when I was younger, I didn’t have a lot of belief in myself. I thought maybe I wasn’t so smart, maybe I wasn’t so capable and early in my military career, actually before I went in my military I had an opportunity when I dropped out of college the second time. My father who was a school principal said, “Mark, we’ve got to find you a job because you don’t have any health insurance.” Back in those days you and I remember when you actually had to worry about that a little bit.

He was sly like a fox, he got me a job as a custodian or janitor in high school and I was in a high school that was neighbor to one I went to and I was working with children who were not much younger than me. I was doing all those things that janitors do, clean toilets, sweeping halls but I learned a lot of valuable lessons and one of them was be on time and do what you say you were going to do. Those were really foundational blocks for me, I started creating self-discipline. After 6 months there, they offered me my own opportunity to run my own school and it was the first time I felt like I had been given some level of recognition, “Somebody thinks enough of me, maybe I need to start thinking more about myself.” I went from a guy that wasn’t really confident and didn’t really believe that I was very good at much of anything to somebody who started to believe, and that was reinforced when I went into the military. That’s why I think it is foundational, there’s a lot of young men and women out here who believe in themselves from the start, but sometimes we all have the doubts creep in, but you still have to be positive and maintain that.

We go through cycles in our lives at this whether like me, very young or maybe in the mid-life career when maybe we didn’t get a promotion we thought we were going to have, we always have to believe in ourselves. That doesn’t mean that we’re tone deaf, we also have to look and maybe self-inspect and make sure that maybe we need to do things differently. Maybe we haven’t been as focused as we needed to be, maybe we’ve not completed things that we said we were going to do. Whatever those things are, we need to be smart enough to self-inspect, but at the same time we need to believe in what we can do.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. As a very successful sales leader, you worked at Oracle as we mentioned, then SAP and now a division called SAP National Security Services, SAP NS2. You’ve worked with some elite sales professionals over your career but sometimes things happen, the government of course had a shutdown recently which cost some companies to rethink and there’s been challenges in markets that happen. What are some things you’ve done as a leader when you’ve noticed that somebody is either in a slump or they’re not performing as well as they have to get back the belief in themselves?

Mark Testoni: As coaches and mentors which is what we really are as leaders as much as anything, we have to help people get to the bottom of what may be the problem and the crisis. I’ve often been accused of giving people too many chances, but I think that’s actually something that’s good because it’s often harder to replace somebody than it is to improve them. I found that it’s worked more often than not for me and I’ll talk a little bit more about that later in the interview, but I think it starts with helping someone get to the core problem and often when people are in a slump they’ll often look for excuses that are outside where the real responsibility is.

They may appear to be feeling victimized by their circumstance or whatever, and it merely starts with, “Let’s look at the problems that we’re facing, let’s get them on a white board. How do we mitigate those? How many of those are things that we can control versus things that we can’t control? Let’s work on the ones we can control and see how we can influence the ones we can’t.” I think communication with your folks is so critical because I don’t care what level you’re at, people always go through these difficult times and our jobs as managers or as leaders is to mentor them through them.

Fred Diamond: That’s true. People have longer careers now for obvious reasons, maybe more stops along the way but if you’ve reached a certain level and you’ve had success, there’s no reason why you can’t get it back.

Mark Testoni: I can tell you that in the last 6 months, I’ve sat down with people even outside the company that I happen to talk with who are far older than 25 or 30 having these kinds of conversations. There’s been times in my life when I’ve turned to other people, so I think we need to use our networks more than just for business. Sometimes we need to use them on a personal level and we also need to help those in the network.

Fred Diamond: Along the lines of that, tell us what you’re an expert in. Tell us about your specific area of brilliance.

Mark Testoni: Brilliance? I don’t know, Fred. That may be a little bit of a reach, I’ll categorize it in a couple of different ways. First, functionally I understand the business of government and how it acquires and buys and figures things probably as well as anybody I know and only because I’m so darn old and I’ve been doing it for 40 something years and I’ve been able to capture it. I think I bring a perspective and ideas sometimes even at a sale cycle with my younger folks that are helpful, I think that’s really good.

I think my real skill, though is I find ways to motivate people and I think it starts with listening to them. I think it transcends age, from the very youngest employees, I love when our interns come in here every summer. I relate and I have great conversations with them, I think I relate to people well and people I can get them surrounding a vision and a mission – which goes back to my military, we create visions and missions around the livelihood that we do today. I think I just have this knack to do this. Why? I think it starts with listening and I think pretty quickly on my feet, those two things are always pretty important in a portfolio.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a quick question for you before we ask you about some of the impactful sales career mentors that you had. Listening comes up not infrequently and some of the Sales Game Changers we’ve interviewed along the way have said that their area of differentiation is that they’re great listeners. Tell us some skills that the people listening to the podcast today can deploy to become a better listener.

Mark Testoni: There’s the old joke about one mouth and two ears proportion. I think there’s a couple of things people can do. First, eye contact and even though you’re on a phone sometimes just by the way that you’re saying expressions and little things, you can give people the fact that they have eye contact, just engaging somebody. You want to make the person that you’re talking with honestly believe that they’re the only person in the world right now in your mind. I think there are people that have skills, I’ve had the good fortune to meet a couple of presidents both President Clinton and President George Bush, and both of them had that skill.

That’s on the extreme level, but I think what that does is it communicates an interest, it communicates empathy and I think often in this fast-paced world we tend to forget those things. I really think little things, eye contact, head nods, really listening just like I’m trying to listen to your questions.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] again, we’re talking to Mark Testoni today, he is the CEO at SAP NS2. He’s going to be the Lifetime Achievement Award recipient from the Institute for Excellence in Sales on May 31st at the Marriott Fairview Park. Mark, you’ve worked at SAP, you’ve worked for Oracle, two of the top technology companies in the history of technology and again you spent 20 years in the Air Force. You must have worked for some amazing people, why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and tell us how they impacted your career?

Mark Testoni: Fred, I’ve got a few that I’d like to talk about very briefly and short verse, and some of them worked for me, actually. I learned a lot from them and I can tell you over the course of the many years I’ve worked with and around thousands of people and I probably learned something from every one of them.

From important and famous names in this business, I’ve had the fortune to work with Jay Nussbaum. Most important lesson I learned from Jay, “Be bold.” We won a couple of pieces of business that I was around largely because we were bold and I learned that in sales from Jay.

Ron Police, who works with us now here, he’s the president of our go to market operations, Ron has more energy than anybody. He is a great energetic leader and I love to be around Ron because how can you not be excited being around him?

I had the good fortune to work with Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP. Bill McDermott is a there’s-always-a-way-to-yes guy. It may not be an immediate yes and I’m not sure he would describe it that way but he is extraordinarily enthusiastic and he’s got ideas, and he’s always trying to move the customer where they need to be.

Linda Zecher hired me and she ran Microsoft for a number of years, government space and she’s been around the industry, she was at Oracle for a while. Linda had great enthusiasm and I never forgot that, she was also a really big believer in her people.

Then Jennifer Morgan who is the president of SAP’s global customer operation or co-president. We all know about the importance of building customer relationships, I watched Jen Morgan build relationships better than probably anybody I’ve ever seen and I had the good opportunity of having her work with me as part of the team at SAP. We did a lot of business together and she was amazing. I’ve hit on a few of them there and there’s probably been countless others but those stick out as really important to me.

Fred Diamond: They’re some amazing people. We’ve had the opportunity to spend time with Jay Nussbaum, he actually was the second recipient of the Lifetime Achievement award, “Be bold”, that’s a good one. I’m going to definitely take that away and maybe we’ll even put that in the title of today’s podcast. Talking to Mark Testoni – Mark, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Mark Testoni: I’ll give you a couple of things here. One, we’re in recruiting and retaining quality, talented people and I don’t say that glibly. It is something that’s a constant theme to me because as a CEO, obviously I’m very concerned about this year’s operations but I also want to make sure that we’re building the company of the future as well. I have a view that goes out several years and in an industry that’s largely been dominated by white males, I think it’s so important that we develop women as part of that and we’re trying to do that very hard here. We have some great, talented women but in general that talent chase is really important.

From a customer perspective, the government customer has a stereotypical view of the government, pace and methodical and all that but I really don’t think it’s so much that. I think the challenge we have with the government customer in general – and this doesn’t really transcend industry – how do you get people to change acquiring things the same old way? In the government space, for many years the systems integration partners have been like a fourth state of government providing a lot of solutions and IT to the government, commercial technologies are usually a small part of the calculus. We think they can be a much larger one, companies like ours, Salesforce, Oracle, there’s a hundred other smaller, thousands. How do we get them to change?

Because our biggest competitor is not Oracle, Salesforce or whatever, it’s inertia, it’s doing it the same way. While we’re trying our best to recruit all these great talented people, we’re trying to get our customers to start thinking that we’re a little differently and create models that they want to embrace by the future. There’s still embracing the old models, there are places where they’re embracing the new ones too which is great and you see it with some of the cloud activity, we’re seeing it and we’re starting to see breakthroughs but to me, we’re starting to get a crack if we create into a crevice, this could be a really important business. It’s not just for selling capability, it’s important to national security which is our space. I honestly believe that our government needs to empower the private sector to empower itself because their adversaries are doing back to us. Long answer, I’m sorry but I’m compassionate about that.

Fred Diamond: That’s actually pretty interesting and you actually mentioned something there a second ago about as you try to bring more people into the sales forces that are selling into the public sector space. Is that a challenge, bringing people into this sector? Again, for the people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe right now, we have listeners all the way in Australia and all over the world who listen for great sales advice and we’ve had a number of people who sell to the government and we’ve heard stories over time. Is that a hindrance, people coming into the marketplace that we’re servicing?

Mark Testoni: I think it’s an educational thing. The government always has a stereotypical, “We do things slow”, methodical, but we eventually do them. It doesn’t have to be that way and I think sometimes the bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward because there’s your financial reward obviously if you sell things, there’s important rewards if we help government do better. There’s psychological ones and there’s patriotism and all that. I don’t think often the first place that people want to come sell is against the government space, but our job is to sell them on that and we’re being pretty successful at that because we think it’s a lucrative market in many ways for young talent.

Often, much like the government didn’t hire a lot of young people for years and they’ve started picking the pace back up, I think a lot of the government sales organizations haven’t always gone after that. Some have, there’s a lot of inside sales teams that a lot of young people start, I admire what Craig Abod’s done over at Carahsoft around that, he’s created a lot of good and young salespeople out of that but we’ve got to recruit them in to want to go into the field and then bring them up. We need to sell them on the importance of government and how it can be lucrative to them.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, it’s still Fortune 1 at the end of the day and also the mission. For people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe, the mission of government agencies is tor really make people’s lives better at the end of the day.

Mark Testoni: When we solve a problem, say, for the department of defense or for the intelligence community, it’s something to be proud of. We can help them do something faster and we are, and it really is.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Mark Testoni: We’ll talk about a specific deal, although I don’t know as it’s turned out ultimately to be the success. When I was in my Oracle days in 2005, myself and a number of people including another guy at SAP right now, Andy Moore and a host of other people. Over a four year period, we won the Air Force supply chain business something called ECSS, we were a vast underdog at Oracle to SAP at the time and we won at largely because we worked it hard for 4 years and we understood what we needed to do to win and I don’t think the other side did as well.

We executed flawlessly and it was a team, there must have been 60 or 80 people involved over a long period of time and the team came together and they believed in what we were doing and it included other software partners. If I had to pick one that still stands out probably is part of the reason that I’m over here in the SAP ecosystem today, because we had a vision when we won that piece of vision in those days and we thought we could maybe expand our footprint into aerospace and defense at Oracle, when the applications business.

We had pitched some of the leadership at Oracle about getting control over that, they decided not to go in that direction, frankly old Mark Testoni started to get a little bored and SAP came knocking on the door and I went over. Thank G-d that happened because it was great at Oracle but it was greater, but I would go back to that one probably as the best.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Mark Testoni: No, Fred. It’s funny, I didn’t really understand what it was when I got hired in the job by accident, but what sales really is to me, and even when I have my days when I may be frustrated or weeks or months even, ultimately it’s about communication, relationship building and helping a customer solve a problem. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling really to a large degree, and I love the customer interaction either directly or indirectly. I love the strategy around putting the wins together and these in the software industry are not simple wins, I mentioned a 4-year sales process around, we also picked up the Air Force’s financial business at the same time, it was a building block similarly here.

I love the intellectual stimulation, I love working with customers when my team allows me to occasionally still, but most importantly if we solve a problem and it makes a difference, it’s just an amazing rush.

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

Mark Testoni: A couple of things, Fred. First, it’s tritely said often but it is focus on the customer. You’ve got to become intimate not only with the customer but what the customer’s challenges are. You don’t have to be the expert, and it goes back to listening which you and I talked about earlier, and researching. We have tools today, back when I started in sales or the internet was around, the vast majority of information that’s available now, any salesperson can be well equipped to go into a customer call and not trying to outsmart the customer but be able to understand the queues from the meeting and then also offer insights even on that first call. I would say focus on the customer and be prepared when you go in to any sales meeting.

A corollary of that is when you’re a sales account executive in your first job or inside sales rep or even in first time VP, I think people tend to worry about where they’re going to be. The one thing I’ve learned in 42 years since I left pushing a broom is I always strive to do the very best in the job I had, I didn’t worry about the next thing. Those things happened for me, maybe I was lucky but you create your own luck. If you do well, you’re going to get more opportunities and if you need help, ask for it. It’s okay to ask for help but kneading it out, be prepared and be focused on the current thing.

Fred Diamond: When they talk about looking to the future, a lot of it depends on what your habits are today. What are some of the sales habits that you’ve deployed or currently deploy to be as optimal as you can be?

Mark Testoni: Preparation is really important on any call and I don’t go on as many, obviously as I did. I want to know a little bit about who’s in the meeting, I want to know what that organization’s role is, I try to do some of that research on my own and not dump it all on my follow up. When you say you’re going to do something, do it. You come out of a meeting, and I don’t care whether it’s an internal employee meeting or with a customer, if you say you’re going to do three things, do all three of them. Then stay focused, we can’t do too many things at once.

What I try to do every morning is one of those two or three things that I need to accomplish today to go into my mental cabinet of things I want to accomplish this week, and then I write those things down. Actually, I’ll put them down electronically in my calendar often because I want to make sure that I get them done. These little discipline things that I really learned back when I was pushing a broom and when I was in basic training still apply today. I was asked one time, “What’s the most important thing that you can do?” In any, do what you say you’re going to do or die trying to get it done. I think that’s a lost art to some degree, I really do.

Fred Diamond: One of the first things you said, “Believe in yourself and your ideas and also be accountable.” Ensure that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do. Mark, what’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Mark Testoni: In the company as I said, Fred, a little bit earlier, our job is to look out or at least the CO beyond the current execution is where do we need to be in 2 or 3 years and what do I need to do from the people perspective? One of the things that’s really interesting that we’ve started – Ron Police brainchild this, but we’ve put some input – we talk about selling SAP capability. We’ve acquired three companies along the way and they’re very much focused in the mission space that I talked about in intel and the defense and we’re trying to take some of the IP they’ve created, intellectual property and some of SAP’s and we’re trying to commercialize a lot of this.

We’ve started something called NS2 Labs, it’s an extension of the SAP development organization. It’s also going to be a place for our customers probably in the next 3 to 6 months to come in and interact with us. I was just down at South by Southwest yesterday and although timing-wise this might not be good for saying that. The reality was that I was recently at South by Southwest and it was interesting to see the amount of engagement capabilities that tech companies are showing now to get customers to do things.

We want to create labs in that form where it’s easy for a government customer or a commercial customer that may have a need to come in and interact with us. We want to make it handy and easy, we want to lead them there, we want to encourage them there in our sales calls because we think there are a lot of these solutions that we’re working on inside the spaces that we are that have broader commercial applicability and that other government customers can be using.

To me, Labs is going to be really important to our future as we develop, as we have these more rapid development cycles where we can on the fly basically do things for our customers, prototype them, show them and then get them into production for them quickly. Ultimately, what’s changed in the software industry for me in the last few years and will change even more is we’ve gone from it takes a period of time to do something, like 2 or 3 years to put a solution in for ERP back in the 90’s, we need to do a more impactful solution in 2 or 3 months now. Hopefully I make sense, but to me this focus around Labs is really important for us.

Fred Diamond: Before we get to the last two questions, I need to bring this up. You mentioned you were at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and this interview is going to run a couple weeks after today’s recording but why were you there? Why is the guy who is the CEO of SAP NS2, why did you go to that particular show and what was your expectation, did it achieve those expectations?

Mark Testoni: It’s interesting, I was only there briefly. We sent a team down there this year because Austin, Texas is becoming a little Silicon Valley satellite anyway, and a lot of it’s around companies that are small startups that are developing security capabilities. Also, the army future’s command has headquartered itself down there, it’s brand new and all the military department, what you would call laboratory environments like DIUX and software are all coalescing to some degree in that area or in the close-by.

We wanted to go down and see, and what started as a music festival back in the 1980’s is now half of a social tech fest first half and then the second half is music. We’re just trying to see if the platform will work for us, we had 6 or 7 people down there that were actually looking at it. Also, SAP had a very big presence down there as a company and they gave us the opportunity to talk about our veteran’s training program.

We did that in front of a large audience, that program is called NS2 Serve. We basically take military vets that may be harder to employ, don’t have degrees and we turn them into SAP IT business consultants over about a 10 to 12 week period. We put about 300 through now and every one of them has had a job opportunity or career opportunity, don’t want to turn this into a pitch for that but we actually had the opportunity. We were fortunate enough to have a celebrity, a former injured combat vet J.R. Martinez down there with us involved with that, it was really good. I think the show has got some potential from a business perspective, more from a branding then probably there’s a lot of people of all ages there and obviously it becomes a celebrity destination. It was interesting.

Fred Diamond: Once again, congratulations. We didn’t really touch too much on NS2 Serves, but we’ll provide a link to that and give people some more exposure for that. Mark, just two quick questions for you. Sales is hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Again, you’re in a very competitive space, you bring a lot of value to your customers, you were in the Air Force for 20 somewhat years and before that you mentioned you were a custodian in a school. Why have you continued in sales? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Mark Testoni: Fred, I go back to helping customers solve problems that sometimes they can’t see the solutions to or even understand the problems. Sales drives the economy, it is the heart of the economy and it’s an important function. Sometimes it’s stereotyped as not being important, it is perhaps the most critical function in business because if people don’t buy things, they don’t solve problems and there’s no revenue generated for the company, and there’s no value generated.

That alone and with a government customer, to me the needs of this customer, I often think why try to sell around some of the apparatus we sometimes have to deal with? We need the customer to get rapid solutions and we need to create business models where they can consume them fast, and that’s the same goals I’ve had for 20 years since I’ve been on this side.

Fred Diamond: Very powerful, once again Mark, thank you so much for the great interview today. A lot of great content, a lot of great things to think about for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. Again, you’re the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Excellence in Sales, it will be bestowed upon you on May 31st at the Marriott Fairview Park in Falls Church. You’ve given us a lot of great things to think about. Mark, give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today.

Mark Testoni: Fred, this is a little different bent but I’m going to take you down a different road. Probably the person I’ve learned more from than anyone in life, and it goes to the point that we can learn from almost everybody that we come in contact, we just need to remember to look to do so.

I have a son by the name of Matt who is 35 years old, Matt’s a special needs guy, he’s development disabled but I would not be a CEO today had he not been my son. I’ve learned probably three important lessons from him, first is patience. I mentioned earlier that I think at times I probably held onto people longer than others thought I should have, but most of the time it’s panned out – not always, but most of the time.

My son taught me patience, he learned an awful lot when we were together when he was young largely because I had to develop patience to give him the time to be able to execute so I learned a lot from him. Enthusiasm, my son is the greatest music fan of all and he is so enthusiastic about the music he likes to hear, but just in life he’s got a smile on his face all the time.

Probably the most important thing that I’ve learned from him – and it’s something I think we all need to take to heart beyond patience and enthusiasm – we need to look at what people can do and not what they can’t do. That was a lesson that is probably the #1 thing that has helped me be successful. I think one of the things I do well is it’s not that you ignore things that people can’t do, but what makes a great teamwork is if you take the strengths and blend them all together because people are all different and try to mitigate the risks.

My son, Matt was probably the most important figure in my life and gave me the opportunity to be so honored to be able to receive the prestigious award that you guys are bestowing me and have the opportunity to be on this podcast today which has been a lot of fun.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 138: Here’s the One Thing that SAP NS2 CEO Mark Testoni – 2019 IES Lifetime Achievement Award Winner – Attributes to His Notable Career Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.