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EPISODE 200: World Wide Technology Sales VP Shawn Rodriguez Explains Why the Government and Education Markets Excite Him So Much

SHAWN’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If you want to be a sales leader, be sure to really understand why. If you aren’t willing to give up the glory and truly contribute through others, then you should really consider continuing to be the best sales rep you can be. I’ve worked for executives who felt if you didn’t want to be the CEO of the company you’re not motivated enough and I could not disagree more. Be authentic and true to yourself.”

Shawn Rodriguez is the Vice President for State and Local Government and Education at World Wide Technology, also known as WWT.

Previously he held sales leadership positions at NetApp, Splunk and Forescout Technologies.

Find Shawn on LinkedIn!

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

Shawn Rodriguez: I’ve been in IT sales for about 25 years, a little over 25 years. I’ve been SLED-focused, State and Local Government and Education, as you mentioned in my intro, also known as SLED. I’ve been SLED focused for about 21 years of that, so I was very lucky to find my passion for my career very early on in my sales path. Fortunate enough to work my way up to technology stack, as I like to day, stay ahead of the innovation curve. I started my career in the physical lair side of our world when a little thing called 10BASE-T Ethernet was first coming out.

From there I went on to selling network electronic, so hub, switches, routers that led me to data management virtualization with the explosion of data and storage. Finally, I had the opportunity to work with some data analytics, cyber security so it’s really been a great opportunity there but most importantly for me, Fred, careers are important but they don’t define you. I think they facilitate a meaningful life, so for me it’s all about family and what I get to do with them on the weekends. This just affords me the opportunity to do that. Humility and authenticity in all things I do are what I want my legacy to be.

Fred Diamond: We have people listening around the globe. Tell us exactly what state and local means, there’s state, government, obviously. Get deep about what actually the customer is who you’re selling to.

Shawn Rodriguez: If you think about government, it’s many different businesses rolled up under that banner so you’ve got everything from health and human services to transportation to public safety to public utilities. On the education side, you have higher education so you have the academic side of universities, you have research computing, you have academic medical centers and then you have K-12, obviously. There’s approximately 14 thousand school systems across this country so all of them comprise what we know as SLED, State and Local Government and Education.

Fred Diamond: For people listening, something like the state of California might be like the seventh largest economy in the world, so it’s pretty big.

Shawn Rodriguez: It is. 26 states, I believe was the last number I saw would qualify for the Fortune 100 just based on state budget so it’s a very large market. About $130 billion IT addressable IT markets so it’s slightly larger than the federal government in that measurement.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you sell today. You mentioned you were in the state and local marketplace for over 20 years the majority of your career, so tell us what excites you about that.

Shawn Rodriguez: As we mentioned, I work for WWT, at $12 billion it’s one of the largest privately held technology solution providers in the world. We are the largest majority African American owned company in the US, we partner with the most innovative hardware, software, SaaS companies to bring the most promising ideas to reality by unleashing the power of our comprehensive advanced services. Until this year, WWT as large as it is did not have a dedicated SLED vertical team, which is my domain so it really provides me a unique opportunity to be a startup within a wonderful and successful company that focuses on our culture, our people and our communities above all else.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales? Again, you said you were in theater when you were a kid and now you’re in sales so tell us how you got there.

Shawn Rodriguez: I’ve done a little bit of everything. I’d like to say it was some wonderful vision, but I had a very close college friend of mine who was a year older than me, he called me up one day and said, “You’re about to graduate, I’m about to get a promotion so do you want to come over here and interview to get into technology sales?” and I said, “Sure, sounds great.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Fred Diamond: Right out of college you went into technology sales?

Shawn Rodriguez: I did.

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

Shawn Rodriguez: There’s three or four things that really come to mind. I remember my first job walking into the sales leader’s office and he shared a few things with me. One of the things he said was, “We do well because of how we treat people and that begins with how we treat each other” and that has really stuck with me over the 25 years of doing this, no matter what my role is.

Secondly, I try to spend a lot of time shadowing and observing early on everyone that I could in various functions, good reps, not so good reps, technical peers, marketing leaders, etc. I try to pick one thing to emulate, one thing not to do in order to put together a personal tool kit that can adapt to any challenge and situation. Next, I’m a firm believer in don’t expect or ask of someone something you haven’t done or are not willing to do yourself.

Finally, I think the most important thing I’ve learned over the years is respect is the intersection of love and fear. If people love you too much, they won’t respect you, if they fear you too much, they won’t respect you so it’s really about playing between the 40’s, so to say.

Fred Diamond: Again, for people listening to the show, we broadcast out of the Washington DC area, so the nation’s capital but we have listeners all over the globe. People outreach from Australia, from Europe, from the Far East, if you will. We’ve had a number of people on then podcast because we do the shows based out of Washington who are in the government federal market space. Shawn, you’re actually one of the first guys that we’ve had in the state and local or education space. I don’t mean to answer the question for you, but tell us what you’re an expert in, tell us about your area of brilliance.

Shawn Rodriguez: I always felt like trying to be an expert in any one thing really limits you, for me it’s always been about finding true passions and those passions lead you to opportunities for brilliance. You must stay humble in the process, I’m really big on the humility theme, you’ll hear that throughout the questions today. Based on my experience of the last 20+ years, SLED is something I’ve learned a lot about and I know well. I guess proportionately there are not many of me in that respect, which might make me an expert of sorts.

Also, my leadership opportunities over the past 14 years have shown me that I’m a builder of teams and strategy to a point of scale. I manage to find ways to get the most out of everyone including myself and get everyone to work as one team which is one of the three catalysts and pillars that really define me and that I operate by, no matter where I’ve worked.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a question for you, I want to talk about the state and local market place for a little bit. Part of my background, I was the Marketing Director for Compaq in the state and local space and the federal space for that matter as well. I had a conversation once with the Chief Procurement Officer for the city of Philadelphia. Philadelphia was the fourth largest city from an IT perspective at the time and he said he had to make decisions between buying a fire truck, which everybody can see driving down the street, or computers. He said in a lot of cases it was easier to buy the fire truck because everyone sees a fire truck. Tell me some of the challenges that you face as a leader in the state and local space.

Shawn Rodriguez: You’re hitting on a very relevant point there, and it’s really about getting to an understanding of the mission. If you really understand the outcome that the customer is trying to achieve, if you do your research on the customer and learn how to have a conversation in their language, you can find ways to attach yourself to the largest business problem. You typically find ways of probing for that business problem by the pain it causes, what does good look like to them, what does the desired state look like and then asking questions or positioning yourself in a way that differentiates you from your competitors to do it like no one else can and attach to that largest business problem. When you think about, for example, education and how do you go in and tie technology to the student experience or student success? If you think about health and human service, how do you make it easier for citizens to get access to the services they need but also eliminate waste and fraud in the process? It’s ways that you can metric and quantify the ways in which technology impact the business of government.

Fred Diamond: Again, you mentioned that 26 states would be Fortune 100 so let’s say Texas or California, something like that, from a technology perspective, give us a little ball park on what some of their key technology challenges would be.

Shawn Rodriguez: Obviously many of the large states out there are struggling with fiscal challenges, that’s one thing first and foremost, they never have enough money. I’ve done this 20 some years, they’re always broke but certainly I think the biggest problems they’re having are coupled. #1 is keeping up with the pace of innovation. When you look at things out there like the cloud, their citizens and employees are expecting new and innovative ways of doing things that are extremely disruptive to the norm. Government is not one to often change or evolve very quickly. Secondly, probably the elephant in the room, cyber security. That’s a gap that they have from an employment perspective, it’s a gap that they have from a budgeting perspective and quite frankly, it’s the most pervasive risk they have, as we’ve seen countless over the past several months of cities and school systems and even some state entities that have been victims of ransom ware and cost. The case of a couple of major cities in this country, $20-$30 million dollars to fix what could have been done for a fraction of that.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Shawn Rodriguez: One of your most famous from this series is certainly #1 on that list and you mentioned his name earlier, a gentleman named Mark Weber that I had the privilege of working for. Mark is one of the most influential and authentic people I know both inside and beyond the beltway. I think of Mark like a Bill Parcells, if you look at all the great coaches in recent years of the NFL, most of them come from the Bill Parcells system or worked as assistants under him. I think Mark has that similar type of legacy in sales. Mark always demonstrates balance and emotional control, his highs are very high but you never see his lows, he leads from the front and trusts and empowers while inspiring self-accountability, pushes people outside of their comfort zone on how to contribute to the team’s culture.

The other impactful mentor to me was one of those coaches Mark produced, a lady named Regina Kunkle, Regina was my manager for a few years at NetApp and most recently was the Vice President of Sales for SLED at SAP before recently retiring. She taught me the importance of urgency and how you execute, how to stretch yourself beyond your normal expectations and the importance of involving yourself in your career beyond just your day job.

Fred Diamond: I like the way you used the Bill Parcells analogy because I’ve used that before. Mark was the most downloaded podcast we had ever done, we actually recognized him at the Institute for Excellence in Sales in 2015 for our Lifetime Achievement Award and we established a relationship with him. He’s at Catholic University of America now leading their sales program, their sales curriculum. When we posted his show I got emails from all over the world, people who worked for him, worked for someone who worked for him, all over the place people reaching out and shared some of the lessons you have taken away as well.

Shawn Rodriguez: I’ll add to that, Fred, the wonderful thing for me is the things that I experienced with Mark from a professional experience. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know his family and see those same qualities in how he, as a family man and a leader in his personal life, that’s just one of the things that has inspired me the most about Mark.

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

Shawn Rodriguez: For any sales leader, the first one that’s probably there is fairly pervasive. Open sales capacity, open head count makes hitting the mark so hard yet you must practice discipline and patience in making sure to hire right and avoid the temptation to just hire fast. Some companies don’t afford you the opportunity to be patient to hire right, they want you to hire fast so finding that middle ground can be extremely difficult. In SLED specifically, you’ve got a largely remote and geographically dispersed team and finding ways to keep them connected to the mother ship, so to say and feeling part of a tangible team when they only get to see each other a couple times a year, maybe as a larger group can be challenging as well.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. A lot of people reach out to me who listen to the podcast and they ask about the guests that we had and some of the markets. Again, you’re one of the first people that we’ve spoken to who has devoted a good part of your career to the State and Local and Education market place. We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast today who are at the early stage of their career, is that a market you would recommend that people pursue?

Shawn Rodriguez: For me, I think one of the great things that led me to SLED beyond just the serving side of it is there is a tremendous amount of consistency. At the end of the day, government is not going away. It might change, it evolves over time, education is not going away, it changes and evolves over time. The more and more they look to innovate and evolve, the more and more technology is going to be at the forefront of that so it’s been a great career for me. I certainly think it would be a great career for those 20 years from now.

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

Shawn Rodriguez: I thought about this one long and hard, Fred and I’m going to go a little non-traditional on you. Instead of talking about a specific customer win, I’m going to share a small leadership win that means a lot to me. I was making a career change a few years ago, I happened to be at the office the last day of the fiscal year. Everyone was in a jovial mood, we had a great year, we were celebrating, it was my last day, there was obviously some high five’s and tears associated with that. A young lady that was a relatively new, inexperienced manager there asked me if she could talk to me for a moment and we went and sat down.

She said, “I just want to let you know, and I’m kind of embarrassed to say this, but the first year you were here I’d always see you come to our floor, sit among us, the younger crowd, the people doing inside sales and various tasks. I never had any idea that you were the Vice President of Sales for our SLED organization. As I reflected on that, it’s one of the most impactful things I’ve seen because you are a man of the people, so to say. You never came in here with an attitude that you were higher or better than anybody else. I observed that, I learned from that and I just want you to know the impact it has on me as a young leader.” That’s why we do what we do, that meant a tremendous amount to me.

Fred Diamond: We just talked a few questions ago about mentoring, do you enjoy being a mentor? I presume you do, but do you enjoy being a mentor?

Shawn Rodriguez: I do. Candidly, throughout my career I was fortunate enough to always be on the younger side of what I did, whether I was a younger enterprise rep or a younger leader so I think it gave me a real unique opportunity to connect with some of the younger folks coming into our industry. I’ve gotten a little older now, so I don’t necessarily have that particular skill set anymore but I do enjoy mentoring folks that are looking to become leaders and maybe folks that are looking to move from the technical side of what we do to the sale side of what we do. I get calls every week from somebody from a previous team or previous organization asking for my input, my thoughts on something and again, it’s little stuff like that that means a lot to me.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a question before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors. Again, you said you get a lot of calls from people you previously worked with. Give some advice to people listening to the podcast on how to get the best advice from you. Just saying something like, “Shawn, what is your advice?” that’s great, I’m sure you have tons, you’ve already given us tons on the podcast but how would someone make it easier for you to give them advice that they can take advantage of?

Shawn Rodriguez: I think a couple things for me. #1, demonstrating in a command of understanding the situation. People often will ask your opinion and as you probe and ask questions, they haven’t necessarily done any of the leg work perfecting their skills or their discipline on how they go research, understand their customer, understand the challenge. Then the second thing I would say if you’re going to ask for someone’s opinion or help, be open to it. I have over the years had a few people that will come to me and ask for my time and ask for my opinion on something and then turn around and immediately debate me or argue why I said what I said. Just be open minded, if you don’t want to hear a different opinion or different perspective, don’t ask for it but if you do, make sure you do your due diligence on the front end and are educated on what you’re going to ask about.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question going into sales? Again, you had a friend of yours called you right away, right when you graduated and you went right into technology sales. Did you ever think to yourself along the way, “You know what? It’s too hard, it’s just not for me.” Again, you’ve been servicing the state and local market place, a lot of opportunities but it’s a challenging market place like you just mentioned. You have state, you have counties, you have cities, you have localities, you have non-government type organizations you probably serve as well. Did you ever question going into sales?

Shawn Rodriguez: No, never and I’ll give you two very specific reasons why, one of them I’ve touched on a little bit. In SLED, being able to connect to the mission is incredibly motivating whether it’s a HHS project like I mentioned, I was fortunate enough to work with a PHD at Duke University in part of my career on a research project where they were doing sequencing for looking for a cure for HIV, for AIDS. I was fortunate enough to work with another university on taking machine data, IT stuff and making it meaningful and predicting student success. You have these things that are really an ability to attach to the mission and those missions are things that impact everyone’s lives on a daily basis.

Secondly, through that I’ve had the opportunity to associate through that staying ahead of the innovation curve, as I mentioned. I’ve had the opportunity to associate with folks from all walks of life, from the contractor in blue jeans pulling cable to governors, senators, ambassadors and CEO’s. It’s been an amazingly entertaining journey and way too fun to ever exit.

Fred Diamond: Obviously you have a long way to go, and as I’m thinking about this interview, higher education is being so disruptive right now for a whole bunch of different reasons. Of course, the cost of student loans and wanting to prepare people as they post graduate, so some of the opportunities that you’re dealing with must be quite phenomenal. Again, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast, my name is Fred Diamond. We’re talking to Shawn Rodriguez, again he’s the Vice President of State and Local and Education for WWT, World Wide Technology. You said it’s a $12 billion company?

Shawn Rodriguez: $12 billion, yeah.

Fred Diamond: Based in Saint Louis, we’ll learn more about that later on. We’re going to take a short break, listen to one of our sponsors. When we come back, we’re going to ask Shawn for his tips on how you can take your sales career to the next level. This is the Sales Game Changers podcast.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Shawn, you’ve given us a lot of great tips. 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?

Shawn Rodriguez: That’s a great question, Fred, thank you. I always felt it’s great to be ambitious as long as you’re not blind with ambition. Don’t feel entitled, you have to earn your stripes like those before you, I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve seen. We’ve seen generational transitions in our industry here, people have different perspectives and different expectations so really avoiding that sense of entitlement I think is critical. Find your passion and stay disciplined to it, be willing to sacrifice, to make moves that align you to that passion.

I’ve had younger reps approach me and approach every other manager just desperate to getting to field sales, for example whether it was fed, commercial, SLED, it didn’t matter and they came across as desperate. You try to coach people off of that sometimes, it’s very difficult. Don’t get desperate to find stepping stones that appear to take you up but really take you sideways in reality.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about a selling habit or two that has led to your continued success?

Shawn Rodriguez: I’ve touched on this a few times today and I probably still will throughout the interview here. Humility, be a person of your peers and team no matter how important or good others perceive you to be. As Mark Weber would say, don’t be a sales prima donna – he’s got a great article he wrote on that one time. Secondly, your company pays your check but your customers pay your company. As a sales professional, it’s up to you to find every way possible to the win-win, even if that means you have to walk away from business sometimes.

I’ll tell you a brief story: I did a lot of business with my team with a particular university in the south east, they came to me with a large budget to buy a particular solution that I had some insight that my company was probably going to discontinue within the next 6 months and I told them, “I’ll sell it to you if you want us to, but understand there’s the risk of this and I would be doing a disservice if I didn’t advise you to probably look somewhere else.” Those types of things build a lot of trust and credibility.

As I mentioned earlier, research the customer, understand their business and challenges. I’m going to the National Association of State CIO Conference next week, which is the Annual State CIO event and you would be amazed every year how many CIO’s get on stage and talk about the sales reps and professionals that come into their office unprepared, ask them about their goals and objectives when their business plan was posted on their website if they had read it before they ever walked through the door. Just simple blocking and tackling like that. Then finally, don’t be afraid to create healthy tension internally or externally if you’ve earned the right to do so.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. On the federal space the federal government publishes its mission, so if you’re selling to the government it’s still hard but you can understand where they’re going and even what some of their technology investment is going to be. Is that the same for most state and local enterprises as well?

Shawn Rodriguez: Absolutely. I would say that most state and local and education entities are really good about placing strategic plans both from the IT perspective as well as from the administrative perspective. They set their initiatives for a city and then it’s up to IT to align an IT strategic plan that aligns with the initiatives. Not only is it about reading a strategic plan of a CIO or an IT organization, but you also got to stretch beyond that and understand the business objectives of the government or educational entity that you’re serving.

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

Shawn Rodriguez: I’ll tell you, Fred. My initiative today is pretty simple because it’s very personal in nature. Candidly, learning a completely new way of measuring progress and success, working with a privately held company and one that is a technology solution provider versus an OEM. Until 3 months ago, I’ve spent my entire career with public companies and as many of the listeners can attest, it is multiple forecast calls per week, top line revenue success being the most important variable, weekly, monthly, quarterly accuracy being imperative.

Now working for a private company, success is measured in different ways. What is the next contribution I can make to the company and how do I choose at my disposal to invest in people and resources to get us there? Get the right people on the bus then figure out the seat, as we like to say around here. The priorities are different, too. WWT really puts a lot of emphasis on culture and being a great place to work, we have an entire framework dedicated to how we do business called The Path so we’re really focused on building happy and motivated people that are willing to engage in their communities and give back, and if we do that, we find the customers want to do business with us.

Fred Diamond: You’ve given us a lot of great information today but I want to ask one final question, before I get your final thought. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Shawn Rodriguez: In the words of a great leader that Mark and I both had the opportunity to work for, a gentleman named Tom Mendoza, it’s not about what keeps me up at night but about what gets me up in the morning. Seeing others give so much to succeed and celebrating that success really pumps me up and keeps me motivated but also the opportunity to lift someone up when they did all the right things and didn’t win is equally as important and rewarding as a sales leader.

Additionally in SLED, customers really need and want your help in order for them to be successful, they never have enough money or people as you just talked about. If you help them in times of need, you’ll be surprised how often they will advocate for you and connect you to others who share their challenges and goals, but too many in sales never take the opportunity to ask. Look for that rinse and repeat angle and don’t be afraid to ask customers to connect you within their network. It works a whole lot faster than calls and emails.

Fred Diamond: Shawn, thank you so much, this has been a great interview, a lot of great insights. Again, I mentioned at one part of my career I was doing a lot of marketing for Apple Computer and for Compaq in the state and local market place. Went to some of the trade shows that you go to and spent a lot of time with people in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Boise, Idaho.

Shawn Rodriguez: All those great state capitals.

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

Shawn Rodriguez: Thank you, Fred, and again thank you for the time today. I would say this, if you want to be the best sales rep in the world and nothing more, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to be a sales leader, that is great but be sure to really gut check why. If you aren’t willing to give up the glory and truly contribute through others, then you should really consider continuing to be the best sales rep you can be. I’ve worked for executives who felt if you didn’t want to be the CEO of the company you’re not motivated enough and I could not disagree more. Stay true to yourself and your passion and be authentic. Finally, find ways to give to the culture of your company, not just take from it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 200: World Wide Technology Sales VP Shawn Rodriguez Explains Why the Government and Education Markets Excite Him So Much first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 156: WebbMason’s Doug Traxler Tells How an Awkward Negotiation with American Airlines Led to His Sales Success

DOUG’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Be proud of sales as a profession. It’s one of the great careers. There’s a lot of companies that need their problems solved and if it wasn’t for us walking through the door and asking those questions, they couldn’t grow and they couldn’t change. I think it’s one of the finest careers you can aspire to.”

Doug Traxler is the Chief Revenue Officer at WebbMason, a full-service marketing firm based in Hunt Valley, Maryland.

He’s been there for 24 years. He was employee number 11 and now they have over 400 employees.

Find Doug on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about what you sell today, tell us a little bit about WebbMason. Again, you’ve been here for 24 years, tell us what excites you about that.

Doug Traxler: WebbMason is a marketing logistics and marketing operations company, we help companies market. However they’re trying to go to their markets and talk to their potential customers or prospects, that’s what we do and that can be printing, promotional products and branding, websites digital media, social and content.

Right in that answer is why it’s so exciting, this is the golden age of marketing. Channels and media have exploded, marketers have tools that they never had before and they’re all trying to figure it out, we’re all trying to figure it out together. It’s exciting because how to use these tools mixing them together, how to reach consumers and prospects and that thing is really evolving, it’s an evolving science right now. It used to be pretty simple, now it’s pretty complicated.

Fred Diamond: Has WebbMason always been in all these areas of marketing or did you guys start out as something different and evolve to this?

Doug Traxler: We started out mainly in print, direct mail, signage, brochures, those sort of things. As marketing has changed, our company has changed because things like mobile and mobile advertising wasn’t even a thing that was tracked 10 years ago as a channel. We’ve evolved and marketing is changing really fast right now.

Fred Diamond: Who specifically do you sell to, who are your customers that you’re physically getting to buy your products and services?

Doug Traxler: The best way to give that context, call it the Fortune 3000 without the Fortune 200. We really don’t call on those top, massive organizations. We’re going to help middle and upper-middle market companies market better.

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

Doug Traxler: [Laughs] desperation. I was a marketing major at the University of Illinois and coming out in the early 80’s there was what was called a recession. The big people who used to hire all us marketing majors were Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, American Express, and they came to campus that year saying, “We’re not hiring anybody.” I looked around for some interviews and saw a company that was in the computer services space, saw that their sales were growing, they were a public company, about $100 million company at the time and I thought, “I need a job and everybody always used to tell me I’d be good at sales so I’m going to go check this out.” I got the job and never looked back.

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

Doug Traxler: Good question, a couple of things. One, they did a nice job with training and I started to learn very early that sales was a profession and a skill, not just something that you lucked into or had enough charisma to get by on. Good training in the first two years and then in the fifth year they came back and gave us some advanced training. I learned the value of real professional selling and the skill sets that are required. The other thing I learned was to pick mentors and watch the great ones, and pick their brains and learn from them. I could go on about persistence and never giving up but really those two things, get the training, look for the best in your industry. Those were the things that helped me the most early on.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’ve been a Chief Revenue Officer at WebbMason for 24 years, what specifically are you doing today that you learned from those first few sales jobs?

Doug Traxler: To never forget the customer, that the business is all about the customer. When we were front line salespeople we used to ring our hands about how the people in corporate had forgotten what it was like out there on the front line and how to deliver these services, how upset customer was talking to us first. I think we never lost sight of the fact that we’re a customer-first business so rather than a pyramid that’s built from the CEO down, we built this company from the customer back.

Fred Diamond: You’ve mentioned mentors, we’ll talk about them in a second but tell us what you’re an expert in. Let’s get to know a little bit more about Doug Traxler, tell us what you’re an expert in. Give us some insights into your specific area of brilliance.

Doug Traxler: Probably most people you ask that question, we’re going to shoo the word brilliance but I’ll tell you what I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about listening, I’m passionate about teaching young salespeople the art of listening. Active listening is a word within the sales profession I think is overused and under-appreciated. When I teach it, I talk to these guys and gals about passionate curiosity, real empathy when you’re in front of somebody. If I’m good at anything and I’ve learned to be good at anything, it’s to listen first and be curious first before I start talking and before I start evaluating.

Fred Diamond: Doug, listening comes up not infrequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast and a lot of people that we talk to do say that one of their areas of brilliance is they are effective listeners. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, a lot of people who are early in their sales career, in the beginning stages. What are some things you do to specifically become a better listener that the people listening to the podcast should start to practice?

Doug Traxler: It’s to be intentional about it and to have passion about it. The metaphor that I always had when I was young because I had a good friend who went into the law business and he was a great lawyer, we used to talk about this all the time, how a lawyer never presents a case until they’ve done all their due diligence. Gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses and all the stuff that a professional lawyer has to do and will do, and if he’s not ready he’ll as the judge for a continuation. He’ll ask the judge to wait, he’s not ready to present that case.

He won’t ask a question in court he doesn’t already know the answer to, so the lightbulb went off for me saying, “I control the process. If I prepare my case and have interviewed all the witnesses and have learned everything I can learn, by the time I get to court, by the time I get to that final opportunity, I know the outcome already because it’s already been tested.” Approaching it saying I should take all the time I need to be sure that my case is air-tight, that I’ve evaluated everything from every angle, that I’ve talked to everybody I needed to talk to before I step into the room and say, “Here’s what I think you all should to.”

Fred Diamond: What are some things you do? Do you do a lot of research on the internet? You said you talked to people, who do you talk to and how can the people listening to the podcast get better at that, more professional once they start engaging?

Doug Traxler: I’m in the B to B world so it’s a little different than if you’re selling to a consumer like an insurance policy or something, so I can only talk to my area. In B to B, it’s a complex sale. You have a lot of ways to be passionately curious, you can be curious about the company itself. Are they a 2 year old company funded by PE firms? Are they a hundred year old company founded by a family who’s still in charge? Either of those two things are going to tell you something about the environment that you’re in.

There’s the company, then the industry. What industry? Are they the largest in their industry? Are they the fifth largest, are they the smallest? Are they a conglomeration of four companies that got bought? That’s going to tell you something about your situation. Then you have the actual service that they’re going after. How are they doing it now? This is where you get into the pain point stuff, but what’s the reality of their world and why did they even see you in the first place? Which is a crazy question, but people don’t often answer it or ask it in these meetings.

“Why did you see me? Does your elbow hurt, does your knee hurt? What’s that all about?” Then I like to study the individual. Somebody who’s been there three weeks versus somebody who’s been there 15 years is going to tell me a lot about them and their area of expertise, their confidence, whether they’ve brought suppliers along with them from their last job or whether they’re married to the environment, maybe they created the environment that I’m just about to tell them is broken. All of this has to be studied, and then finally the situation. I can’t tell you how many times I go in with reps and I say, “Where are they in this?” “Well, I don’t know, they just said we could come in and present.”

And I’m like, “Are they pre-RFP? Are they RFI? Are they in the final decision? Is this the person making the decision or is it a committee?” So many things you can find out that aren’t necessarily directly interviewing somebody, and I don’t like to make a move until I’ve looked at all these areas, understood them, sized them up with whatever emotional intelligence I have and then decide what the next move should be.

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

Doug Traxler: A couple of things come to mind. First, when I first moved out to Baltimore there was a young man who’s now one of my partners who had just been named “Rookie of the Region.” He was charismatic and successful and was only in it a year and he was just going great guns. I immediately said, “I’ve got to watch this guy, I’ve got to watch what he does because he’s one of the best.” He took me aside one time early on in the first year and he said, “Doug, you’re probably one of the best presenters I’ve ever seen. You really do things technically well, you give great presentations and great proposals that you write, but I’m always going to outsell you.”

I said, “Why is that?” he said, “Because I let people get to know me and you’re trying to be a perfect sales rep in front of them. If you open that up and let them get to know the real you, you’re going to build trust much faster. They’re always going to trust me because I let them know who I am.” I took that to heart, I needed to hear that as a young man because I was trying to be Joe Perfect Salesman at all times, Mr. Professional and really wasn’t bringing Doug to the party.

Fred Diamond: What did you do? What are some of the specific things that you started making available to your customer as you’re engaging?

Doug Traxler: I started to share the real stuff. If I was worried about something, if I had anxiety about a deal, saying maybe, “This is a really important opportunity for me.” Some of those things that are on the more human side. They already know you’re there to sell them something, they’re trying to figure out who you are and if they can trust you.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’ve been here for 24 years with WebbMason. Do you have customers that you’ve been working with for almost the entirety of the 20 somewhat years?

Doug Traxler: That’s a great point, Fred. I tell young salespeople that we’re responsible for building the trust bridge between our company and other companies, that all commerce runs over. Trust bridges are really strong if they’re built well and I have had the privilege of staying with certain people who have moved to do new companies, new opportunities. Sometimes they get there and they say, “I’ve got this problem at new company” and the first person they want to call is Doug because they know that I’m going to help solve the problem in a trustful and integrity way, but also I have a company that can help them solve that problem behind me.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a question for you. You just talked about how you made the shift at some point based on one of your mentors about becoming “more Doug”, being more open with your customer, if you will. We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast who are early on in their career. Social media is huge: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter where people between the ages of 22 and 30 something, they’re very open on their social media. What would you advise on that? You started opening up a little more to your customer. Now with social media, people feel they can pretty much talk about anything. People crossing the line, would you recommend salespeople to pull it back a certain level or go full out?

Doug Traxler: I didn’t grow up in that era and thank god I didn’t, it’s a challenge for these folks and my hats off to them because it’s a whole new world of disclosure and transparency that they have to deal with. I’ve seen it with my children who are all in their 20’s. My initial thought there is just like when I was starting out, it was disingenuous to look at the picture of somebody in their family or him holding a fish behind his desk and say, “Oh, are you a fisherman?” and try to ingratiate too quickly before that friendship or that closeness was really offered as a natural course of your conversations.

I would just say to be very cautious, to not be aggressive. A friendship or trust really needs to be offered by the client based on you earning it with them. It’s much more impactful to me because I get sold to now in my role, I get to meet salesmen now on the other side of the desk which is just a kick, as you can imagine. Do they come on too strong and see the putter in my corner and say, “Oh, you’re a golfer? I’m a golfer, let’s go golfing” or do they send me an article two weeks after they met me and say, “Doug, you were talking about that thing and I saw this article and I thought of you.”

That to me is the approach that I’m talking about here, that professional, respectful approach. Then if I say, “Jim, I really enjoyed the last three articles. By the way, I’m a golfer, perhaps someday we could go golfing together” is a much more normal course of relationship and trust that gets built.”

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

Doug Traxler: The first one that comes to mind is finding people who really want to go into sales as a career in a profession. I don’t get it gets talked about a lot on campuses, there’s not a lot of courses on it in colleges, so I think people think they either fall into sales or get placed into sales but they don’t aspire to it. It’s hard to find those good people. I think the second thing is something we were just talking about and that is the proliferation of social media and its impact on us as consumers.

We as business professionals and us as a marketing company, there used to be rules. In direct mail campaign, you just measured the response and if you liked the response you kept going and if you didn’t, you moved. Now it’s what your mix of media and how do you use digital? Should you be on the phone or should you be on the website or should you send an email? There’s not a lot of data on what works for what, there’s a lot being created right now and it’s very challenging.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been working with WebbMason for 24 years, it’s a marketing company, provide a whole suite of marketing related services. You’re the Chief Revenue Officer. Why don’t you take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Doug Traxler: [Laughs] war stories, okay. I was selling to American Airlines down in Dallas and the buyer there was responsible for a rather large budget. I was getting finally my big break and a chance at the biggest contract I ever had. She was new to her role and I was a junior sales rep, and for some unknown reason, my sales management team says, “We’re just going to send in Doug by himself with this contract.” The night before, I get a call from the CEO – this is a thousand person company and I’m a 26 year old greenhorn – and he says, “Doug, we’re sending you in there tomorrow. Here’s the price we want and here’s as low as you can go. These are your parameters, go get us a good deal.”

I didn’t sleep all night, I got up and I got into my best suit and I went down. I remember the buyer and I had been working together for about a year and a half and I felt comfortable and transparent, you get back to that transparency. She brings me into a room, no windows, we sit down across from each other and I thought, “I’ve never been in a negotiation like this” and it was going to be one of the biggest contracts I’d ever touched in the company. She sits across from me and I said, “Sheryl, here’s the deal. I got a call from my CEO last night, he told me here’s the price we want so here’s the price I’m going to put on this piece of paper.”

I showed it to her and I said, “He also told me ‘here’s the price you can offer her’ so look, if you take the top price you haven’t gotten yourself a good enough deal. If you take the bottom price, I’ve got to go back to the CEO and say ‘she cleaned my clock’ so I’ll leave it to you. Something in between would be good.”

She started to giggle and she got up and said, “I’ll be right back.” She went down the hall and talked to the head of procurement, she came back down with a number right in the middle [Laughs]. It was a huge success for me, but I can’t tell you it was my finest moment as a negotiator, I was just scared to death and wanted something good to happen.

Fred Diamond: You got American Airlines as a customer, but what if she would have come back to you – which she had every right to do – and said, “Okay, we’ll take the low number”?

Doug Traxler: That’s what I had offered and I’d have earned it up. It turned out to be a 10-year contract, we ended up building on that and getting the entire account. I think the fact that I was open and honest with her, I wouldn’t recommend that as a sales technique, but it worked for me that day.

Fred Diamond: Again, we’re talking to Doug Traxler, he’s a Chief Revenue Officer at WebbMason. Doug, did you ever question being in sales? You were a marketing major, unfortunately the day that you were looking to get a job none of the big companies came to the University of Illinois to get you to go work there. University of Illinois, right?

Doug Traxler: That’s right, go Illini.

Fred Diamond: Again, you moved into sales relatively quickly, your first jobs were in sales and now you’re the Chief Revenue Officer here at WebbMason. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself along the way, “It’s too hard, it’s really not for me, I’d rather go back to be on the marketing side”?

Doug Traxler: Fred, I’ve loved it. I’ve never looked back. That’s not to say that sale is not one of the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted, when people go into it or even come to our company from another sales job I say, “At about the 8 to 12 week mark, I call it the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You will hit a wall where nothing’s going right and you’re going to question it” but I had the serendipitous opportunity to go to 5 cities and start over through transfers and then joining this company and starting up.

One thing I realize is no matter how good you are, no matter how well trained, there’s no quick way through the blocking and tackling. Business development is a process, so when I knew nothing it took a certain amount of time to get in front of people and have them get to know me and learn about their problems and try to come up with solutions. Then when I was a 10 year veteran it took the same amount of time because there’s just a process to this that is hard to short-change. I learned, “It’s not me, it’s just this process.” If you’re true to the process, good things happen.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. I asked one of our previous guests the same question and he said, “The reason I keep doing this is because the next phone call can change my life.” It’s not just a random call, it’s because maybe this is the 100th call you’ve made to this customer. That was interesting, you talked about the American Airlines example, you said you had been working with her for a year and a half prior to getting into that dark room in Dallas where you said, “Here’s the lowest we can go, here’s the highest we can go.”

Luckily for you, she came in the middle but this wasn’t your first call with her, you had developed that relationship over a year and a half. Companies like American Airlines, big companies, they don’t make random decisions. They’re very thoughtful usually in how they go about their process. There’s sometimes as many as 6, 10, 15 people involved in a sale so it’s not just selling something to somebody. All the prep that went in to get you into that day 18 months down the road, all the work that had to go into that.

Doug Traxler: I got a call once – you’re talking about phone calls – from a company that we had become a finalist for a contract and we actually finished fourth out of four. I called the head of procurement afterwards and I said, “Would you mind if I came in and you give me 30 minutes on why we lost?” He said, “I’d be happy to, come on in.” We had a nice chat and at the end I wished him luck, I said, “I think you’ve made a good choice, the company you chose is going to do a great job. If you ever need me, please stay in touch.”

Five years later, my phone rings out of the blue. It’s him, he says, “This contract didn’t work out and you made a good impression, I’d like you to come in here. We’re not going to go back on an RFP. If I like what I hear, we’re going to move our business to you.” I finished fourth, he didn’t call the second place guy, he didn’t call the third place guy. This is why I love this profession, because you can make real human connections and people can see who they want to do business with and they know why. In that regard, I’ve loved how a salesperson can make a difference. Not my brochure, not my capabilities but the fact that he and I had that connection and he thought five years later to pick up the phone and call me was something that said, “This is a fun way to make a living.”

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

Doug Traxler: Fred, it’s this whole idea of passionate curiosity. It’s real authentic empathy and curiosity about the people and the situation that you’re talking to. It’s so funny, when I’m on sales calls with young salespeople, to watch them ask a question and then immediately their mind goes to the next question they want to ask. As the person’s trying to answer them and give them information, they’re paying no attention at all. They’re really just gearing up for their next, it’s like shooting free throws and not paying any attention to what’s going on in front of them and reacting to it, making that connection where the person’s giving them the opportunity to do that. The person usually can see that their face has gone blank, they’ve lost their expression and they’re just focusing on what they want to say next.

The power is in real human connection and real passionate curiosity. We psychologically spend 90% of the time thinking about ourselves, it’s just something we do, so as a sales professional one of the skills you can learn is while you’re in that situation, to be entirely focused on trying to think about the other person. That empathy, get out of yourself and think about them. What did he just say, what did she just say? What does that mean? I don’t quite understand, I think I want to ask a follow-up. Soon they’re disclosing things that are just gems and jewels that will help them get their problem solved, which is the whole reason you showed up in the first place.

Fred Diamond: For the people listening, most of the people that you’re selling to, they do have problems. You mentioned a good point before, there’s a reason you’re there. They don’t have to see you but there’s a reason they chose to devote an hour of their time. If you can, let them do the talking. It’s hard.

Doug Traxler: It’s very hard.

Fred Diamond: But eventually when you get more professional, when you get past the first year or two of your career, that’s the reason why you’ve gotten past it, because you’ve made a lot of that shift. You don’t have to show up and throw up and live all your specs and keep saying things, “What do I have to do to get you to buy this chunk of software?” or something like that. Let the customer begin to offer their own solutions that you can solve.

Doug Traxler: I don’t know many of us who say, “I think I want to waste an hour and let a salesman come in and pitch me for no reason.” The appointment is everything, by the time I got the appointment something good is happening. They’ve decided to invest an hour hoping that I’ll solve a problem. If I never even ascertain why that person decided to invest that hour in me, I instantly become curious. I guess that’s a habit I developed over the years because it wasn’t something I started off with. I wanted to talk, I wanted to pitch, I thought that’s what I was being paid to do.

Fred Diamond: In so many of the Sales Game Changers podcasts that we’ve had, when I ask the guest, “Tell us about your area of expertise, where you’re brilliant at”, listening comes up not infrequently. It comes up all the time and I began to think about that trend, to have gotten to the point of the people that we’re interviewing for the podcast. People who are Chief Revenue Officer, Senior VP’s of Sales, Global VP’s of Sales, if you’re the guy who’s doing all the talking you’ve never made it to this point and you had to have made that shift relatively early in your career because it really is all about the customer. Doug, what are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Doug Traxler: I’m an avid reader, I like to finish at least four books a year. Two of those usually are on history and two of those usually on something related to either my spirituality or business. I love sales as a topic so I look at YouTube stuff, I train. Training young salespeople keeps me sharp, those would be the big things.

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

Doug Traxler: We’re continuing to look at the marketplace and say, “What capabilities does WebbMason need to have to be at least tied with, if not ahead of the marketer. That’s a very fast moving water in the middle of the stream, so it’s an exciting challenge but you really need these young people who are out there in these technologies. You need to listen to them, you need to bring them in and say, “What’s happening and what’s going to be happening next year? How do we help our clients be part of that?”

Fred Diamond: Doug, sales is hard. We’ve talked about some of the challenges that sales leaders face along the way and sales professionals in the early part of their career. People don’t return your phone calls, they don’t return your emails, they don’t necessarily even think they need you, especially if you’re not going to provide them value. Why have you continued? Again, you made the shift from being a marketing major in college to a sales professional, now a sales leader, Chief Revenue Officer. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Doug Traxler: What a question. For me, Fred, it’s that process of going from somebody saying, “No thank you, I’ve got that covered” to, “I couldn’t live without you.” Whether that process took three weeks or three years or five years as I’ve described, there’s just something super validating in that. Not that they bought something from me, but that I solved a problem and now I’m one of their most trusted people in their business circle. I just love that process and I get a big kick out of it, it’s the juice.

Fred Diamond: I loved the story, once again you came in fourth out of four in a particular operation you were trying to get a sale for. You went back to the customer and said, “Help me understand, I want to grow, I want to learn to do better next time” and when you left that meeting you probably thought, “That was nice, let’s move on” and five years later, the guy calls you. Was he at the same company?

Doug Traxler: Yes, he’s still there now.

Fred Diamond: Very powerful, do you still keep in touch?

Doug Traxler: Yes.

Fred Diamond: It’s one of the great things, too as you mentioned a few moments ago. The top sales leaders that we talk to, they’ve had these 15, 20 year, 30 year runs with their customer and they’re both trying to help each other and both trying to solve each other’s problems.

Doug Traxler: You’re poking at something interesting there. I think the word there is authenticity. The relationships I’ve built in business over the years,I learned early on, can be very authentic. Yes, they’re based on a transaction or commerce or contract but generally they end up being very authentic relationships and they survive the test of time. Even people who’ve retired, if I become your friend, I’m your friend for life. That also has been one of the great things about sales that I think is different than some other professions. Because you’re in the trenches with people and you have crises, one of the things that I learned early on is you don’t have a customer until you have a problem. Everything’s rosy, we all like each other and then someday you’ve got to call them with some bad news. That’s the day he decides if he really trusts you or not.

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

Doug Traxler: If it would be anything, it would be to just be proud of sales as a profession. It’s one of the great careers, there’s a lot of companies that need their problems solved and if it wasn’t for us walking through the door and asking those questions, they couldn’t grow and they couldn’t change. I think it’s one of the finest careers you can aspire to.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 156: WebbMason’s Doug Traxler Tells How an Awkward Negotiation with American Airlines Led to His Sales Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 07:37
Name an impactful sales mentor: 11:16
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 12:54
Most important tip: 18:08
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 22:01
Inspiring thought: 24:29

EPISODE 143: NetApp Public Sector’s Rob Stein Says This Approach Will Lead to Sales Success in Transforming Industries

ROB’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Find something that you believe in. It could be a cool product, it could be a technology, it could be an industry, it could be a customer set like I’m passionate about serving the Defense customer. Once you find that, put everything you have into it. Just immerse yourself and then finally find somebody to hook your wagon to, to help you, guide you along the way and help bring you along.”

Rob Stein is the VP for US Public Sector at NetApp.

Prior to coming to NetApp, he held sales leadership positions at Oracle and a number of defense contractors.

Nice reference to past Sales Game Changers Podcast guests Mark Weber and Dave Rey.

Find Rob on LinkedIn!

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

Rob Stein: Thank you, Fred. It’s great to be here. Let me start off with the fact that I never really wanted to be in sales. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer growing up, a mathematician, an engineer and when all the people came looking for sales folks at my college I’d refuse to interview with them. That’s how I started out, obviously things have changed since then.

Fred Diamond: I’m looking to see that transition. What happened, what made the shift? Did you start out in engineering after college, and where did you go to school, by the way?

Rob Stein: I went to Washington University in St. Louis and I did start out in an engineering job after college. One of the parts of the job was I worked for a consulting firm and not only did you do engineering work, but you had to write a lot of proposals and I loved writing proposals, I loved the strategy, I loved ultimately the win that you would get out of the proposals. That’s when I started to think, “Maybe sales isn’t a bad place to be.”

Fred Diamond: What happened? Tell us about how you first got into sales, what made that transition?

Rob Stein: As I was writing these proposals early on in my career, I said, “I want to do this more, I want to develop business more than I do the engineering side of things.” What I did was I found a position in a company that I met through writing a proposal and teaming with that company who wanted to bring on a full time business development person. I said, “I’m in” and I went over to that company and I started doing that full time, started doing capture management, going out prospecting and using and actually owning win strategies for the company. When I started doing that, I was hooked and I knew that I wanted to be in sales.

Fred Diamond: We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, what does the term “capture management” mean? You just used that term.

Rob Stein: Capture management is a longer term strategic initiative around a program that a customer has where it’s very complex, you bring in multiple teammates in different functional areas and you manage the effort to go win that program.

Fred Diamond: You’re the VP of US Public Sector at NetApp. Why don’t you tell us what you sell today and give us a little sense of what excites you about that?

Rob Stein: At NetApp we sell data management solutions. We’re known as a data storage company which we have been, but we are evolving now and our evolution is around helping our customers use data to transform digitally. Obviously there’s a lot of data out there, there’s a lot of customers, a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out how to leverage that data whether it’s to increase their effectiveness, to better support their mission for example in the government space or just to go find new markets in the commercial world. NetApp is in the business now of helping our customers leverage their data and become visionaries with their data.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to ask a little bit later on about some of the challenges that you face as a sales leader but you used the word “transform” and you mentioned that NetApp had been a data storage company, now has transformed into data management solutions. Give us a sense, if you don’t mind, from a sales perspective what type of challenges that now means for selling professionals who’ve been selling data storage for 10, 15, 20 years.

Rob Stein: It really is a challenge because we’re asking folks to think differently. Typically selling data storage is about putting a box in the data center, but now data can live anywhere. It can live in the cloud, it can live on a device, it can live anywhere. Now it’s about really understanding how our customers use their data versus understanding how much data they need to store or how fast they need to access it. It’s no longer just speeds and feeds, it’s about what’s the value of this data to you and making that transformation from being able to sell a specification to selling value to support a customer’s or an organization’s business or mission area is a big transformation for some folks.

Fred Diamond: As a sales leader who’s responsible for that, what are some things that you do? Is there a whole lot more training that comes in, do you have to hire different types of people? What does that look like for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe?

Rob Stein: There’s training that the company provides, there’s other sources of training as well but a lot of it is closely inspecting, getting your hands dirty, rolling up your sleeves and getting in there with the sales teams to watch how they’re conducting sales calls, to watch how they’re preparing for their sales calls and offering very constructive feedback to evolve towards what this new way of thinking has to be. It all starts with somebody needs to say, “I need to change” and then they need to get enabled, go out and do the training that’s out there, keep up with where the industry is going as well as have good managers and leaders that are in the trenches with the teams helping them evolve.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to the first part of your career when you made that shift from engineering, you started doing capture, you decided you enjoyed doing proposals and you made more of a shift into BD. What were some of the lessons that you learned from some of those first few sales jobs?

Rob Stein: First thing I had to do is figure out what are the right things to be doing and I wasn’t sure what a salesperson did but I had a manager. I asked that manager frequently what are the right things to be doing. High activity level, calling on new places that currently don’t have our products, cold calling, just getting out there, being able to talk about the breadth of offerings that a company may have. Then ultimately bringing value to that customer, that was the first thing I really thought of from a customer facing standpoint. Being an engineer, I knew how to add value to the customer. I’d bring a technical solution to them and talk technically but being a salesperson, I had to think what are the other ways I can bring value? Early on I figured that out so my customers wanted to see me when I called them up to say I’m coming to make a sales call.

Fred Diamond: Again, as an engineer it’s obvious. You know the technical specs, you know the details, you know how the technology solutions fit in in their environment. What were some of those things that hit you when you moved into sales?

Rob Stein: I think the value piece to me is multiple dimensions. What I really focused a lot on was the business model and cost is a big driver for folks, so what’s the return on the investment that our customers are going to get? I focused a lot on that, I quantified it quite a bit and then the mission benefits. What’s really the mission of an organization? What are they focused on, what are the pressures that they have as well? Figuring out how to address that with the offering that my company had.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little more about what you’re an expert in? Tell us more about your specific area of brilliance.

Rob Stein: I got really good at building business models, and basically I would be able to show a customer in a spreadsheet – I’m pretty good with spreadsheets – what their cost might be over some period of time, say five years, if they did nothing. Then I compared that cost to the cost that they’d have if they took me up on my proposal. I typically would show them a return on that and also I’d couch that in maybe 4, 5, 6 pays proposals that I could put in front of them and brief them at an executive level or on the ground at any kind of level they might need to show that value, not only quantify the value in the business model that I’ve set up, but also articulate the benefits and the risks if they did nothing. I think that’s the skill I really hone was focusing on that business model and then a very concise value proposition.

Fred Diamond: You must have had some great mentors along the way, why don’t you tell us about an impactful mentor and how they impacted your career?

Rob Stein: I don’t think I’d be here if it weren’t for a couple real mentors in my world. First, the person that brought me over to NetApp was Mark Weber who is my predecessor and I’ve known Mark for 30 some years and I knew him since he was an individual sales rep. He very much helped me progress my career from being an engineer into sales and then progressing as I went along.

I also had a great mentor in my last boss at Oracle, a gentleman named Dave Rey who actually runs Public Sector at Salesforce today and Dave was the best at getting in the trenches with me when I was a sales rep. He would help me knock down obstacles, he would set the stage for not giving up on anything and he really brought a high intellect to the sales process that I learned very much from him and thinking through a lot of issues. Again, whether it’s the value that the customer has or its particular problem that’s in the way of closing a deal. Those two folks are most notable to me and I attribute a lot of where I am to their mentorship.

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, we’ve had both of those gentlemen on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we just published one with Mark Weber which was a great episode. Of course, he moved from NetApp and has created a great program at the Catholic University of America. We did interview Dave Ray as well and that was actually one of my favorite interviews. We’ll post a link to both of those podcasts in today’s show notes. Rob, what are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Rob Stein: We talked about transformation, and as a sales leader you’re only as good as your people. Finding the right people that are willing to transform or have transformed and are looking at customers in a very different way who aren’t afraid of disruption, who have maybe disrupted themselves or been in an industry that’s disrupted a lot of what’s going on in IT. Getting the best people in that regard is really a big challenge and then the corollary of that is keeping those people once you have them. Your high performers, it’s very competitive out there for sales roles so keeping your best people, keeping them motivated, incentive to continue to perform where they are is also a big challenge.

Fred Diamond: Is it also a challenge for a company like NetApp? Again, arguably you’re one of the most successful companies in the history of technology, a very well-positioned company, if you will. Is it still a challenge to find good people and to bring them here?

Rob Stein: It is, because the industry is changing so much, there’s so many exciting companies, startups that are coming out of nowhere, cloud companies that are really starting to take over a lot of our business. The grass looks greener in a lot of other places so our challenge is showing the individual that the grass is pretty green here and the shiny object is still at NetApp.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’ve worked for NetApp, of course you’re leading US Public Sector and you worked at Oracle and a couple defense contractors. Why don’t you tell us about the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of?

Rob Stein: I have to think back to probably my first big win when I was at Oracle. It was an enterprise license agreement for one of the navy commands and it took about 3/4 of the year to create the value, to work the sales motion and basically we got the CIO of that command to say yes three days before the end of the quarter. They actually put it in procurement which in a government situation is not always a short time frame and they got it done in a couple three days and I got the order. I felt so excited about this, I literally took my family to Disney World the next quarter.

Fred Diamond: Again, in today’s Sales Game Changers podcast, we’re talking to Rob Stein, VP of US Public Sector at NetApp. Rob, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you made the move from engineering. What was your degree, by the way?

Rob Stein: Called System Science and Mathematics which is basically the math of all the engineering disciplines.

Fred Diamond: When you were in college coming out, you said you had no aspirations to be in sales. Now you’re running one of the top sales teams in companies that are focusing on the US Public Sector marketplace. Did you ever question being in sales? Again, you made the shift, you talked about what happened when you started working on proposals and you started to see the value in what you were doing, but did you ever thing to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Rob Stein: I have, particularly at the beginning I wondered, “Am I too methodical? Am I doing sales like I’ve been an engineer? Am I sociable enough? Do I build enough relationships?” Begin a technical person, I’m used to working on a problem and being very methodical about things so when I finally was able to release myself from having to have perfection every step of the way and having to be methodical on everything I do, I then started to think, “This isn’t a bad thing.” Particularly when you start getting some wins you really are sold on sales as a job.

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

Rob Stein: As I mentioned early on, I think bringing value to the customer is really important. Understand the details of your product, understand the details of what the customer is trying to achieve so you can actually bring that value and be methodical about it. You don’t have to be slow, but there is a process, there is a logic to a sales motion so be methodical if you know the details about all aspects of the customer and your products. I think that’s how you can bring value.

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

Rob Stein: One of the things I do and I love doing is getting out there in front of customers with engineers. Our engineers are critical in the IT industry to talk about our products so I learn every time I go out there with our technical folks about our products, about the value that it brings as well. I also call up and talk to sales reps who have wins or losses and I get details from them as to why they thought they won and why they lost and I ask a lot of questions to fully understand, “Are there new things in our environment that we need to deal with across the whole sales organization or are there specific things that that sales rep needs to better understand that they can learn?”

That helps me learn and helps me stay sharp with things that I have to do around sales. The last thing I do is I try to find things to do outside my sales job so whether it’s helping with a diversity initiative within the company or other change agenda issues that the company is having non sales related, I just learn a lot more about business in general and about other functions.

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

Rob Stein: The major thing we’re doing we’ve touched on a little bit is figuring out how to transform our sales organization from this hardware selling group of folks to the future and what our customers are going to be looking for, the new digital world that our customers are trying to get to. To me, that is the #1 thing on my mind and I’m working on that every day.

Fred Diamond: You talked a lot of things, the whole concept of transformation is one that’s really interesting. Obviously a company like NetApp’s been around 30, 40 years?

Rob Stein: About 25 years, actually.

Fred Diamond: 25 years and of course now with the cloud. A lot of the conversations we’ve had on the Sales Game Changers podcast are people who are either selling into the cloud or trying to figure it out or their customers are trying to figure it out. We’ve interviewed people from Amazon Web Services and IBM and other places like that. The whole notion of transforming, especially if you’ve been successful for 15, 20 years and all of a sudden so much has happened in the last 5 years, it’s got to be such an enormous challenge. That makes sales even more challenging, of course we hear about people not returning your calls or your emails. We’re doing today’s interview in the early part of 2019, the show is going to be broadcast in the winter of 2019. We’re also going through a partial government shutdown right now, so of course you focus on your leading the US Public Sector, there’s macro challenges that come in, there’s micro challenges. Why have you continued? You made that big shift from engineering, you didn’t think you were going to go into sales. For our sales listeners on the podcast today, what is it about sales as a career, even in challenging times like this, that have kept you going?

Rob Stein: I think the primary thing that keeps me going is the people interaction. In a sales role, that’s really what it’s about. It’s about being out there, creating relationships, maintaining those relationships, interacting with all kinds of folks. At the end of the day, to get a deal closed you’re asking somebody to put something at the top of their inbox that may not be there so you have to have a good relationship with those people. Then all the folks you have to collaborate with to go win a deal from a customer, so the people interaction to me is what I really love about sales also. Ultimately, I’m very competitive. I grew up playing sports so I think the thing that really keeps me going is winning and every time I win something, that just gets me excited to go on and try to win the next thing.

Fred Diamond: Rob, I got one last question before we ask you for your final thoughts to inspire our listeners today. We talked before about one of the challenges is hiring people and we talked about there’s a lot of competition, shiny new companies out there, if you will that maybe are just getting funded. Why would someone want to come work at a company like NetApp when there’s plenty of options to even medium performing sales reps, let alone the stars?

Rob Stein: First of all, NetApp has an incredible culture where from the CEO on down people are all involved with the business. We get any kind of help we need from anywhere. Secondly, I think the transformation that NetApp has made from this data storage company to this data management company is very attractive because we’re going to where our customers want to go. We’re understanding that our customers have a lot of different ways to manage and control their data and NetApp’s going to be in the middle of that or not just in the data center anymore or in the cloud. We’re wherever our customers want to be. We’re following one of the biggest shifts we’ve ever seen to the cloud and you can be a part of that if you join NetApp.

Fred Diamond: We have Sales Game Changers listening all around the world, why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire them today?

Rob Stein: I think it’s so important to find something that you believe in, and that something can be a lot of things. It could be a cool product, it could be a technology, it could be an industry, it could be a customer set like I’m passionate about serving the defense customer. Once you find that, that’s the first thing that you need to do, put everything you have into it, 150% put it all into it. Just immerse yourselves and then finally find somebody to hook your wagon to. I was fortunate, I mentioned a couple mentors that I had but make sure you have somebody that’s going to help you, guide you along the way and help bring you along. Find something you love and find somebody that’s going to help you with it, and I think that will be the key to success.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 143: NetApp Public Sector’s Rob Stein Says This Approach Will Lead to Sales Success in Transforming Industries first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 07:19
Name an impactful sales mentor: 09:49
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 13:24
Most important tip: 26:09
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 30:43
Inspiring thought: 33:18

EPISODE 122: Learn How the Marine Corps, Mentors and Sales that Went Awry Shaped M3Com and Virtacore Sales Chief Paul Borror into the Fearless Leader He’s Become

PAUL’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Show up to give. I think too many of us in the sales game show up to get. We need a PO, we need a meeting, we need the next thing – why don’t we show up to give? Make every interaction with your customer and prospect as valuable as possible and leave the folks that you meet better for the time that you spent together. Show up to give.”

Paul Borror is the VP of Sales at M3COM and Virtacore.

He has held sales leadership positions at NetApp and Concur.

Paul served in the US Marine Corps.

Find Paul on LinkedIn!

Paul Borror: I look at sales as a deeply personal endeavor. It’s something I really want to do, it’s something that has really become a part of me. I’ve been at this for a while and the thing that I’ve noticed is that we’re really in the hero-making business. We want to make our company a hero, our boss a hero, our sales teams heroes and really when you think about it, we want to show up and make our customer a hero for choosing to go with the solution that we have.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great way to say it, I don’t think anyone’s ever said it that way before. A lot of people talk about how they want to make their customer successful and most people who’ve reached your level have been very successful in doing that, interested in hearing that story. Why don’t you tell the audience listening today what you sell today? Tell us what excites you about that.

Paul Borror: Thank you, I appreciate that. There are two sides to our business, you introduced me as the VP of sales for M3COM and Virtacore. M3COM has been around since 1998 and essentially we design, engineer and provision and then manage private line, MPLS, DAA, essentially international networks for large companies around the world. We stick to four verticals, basically media, financial, manufacturing and service provider and they’d be names that you would recognize, everyday names across the country and across your daily work. The second side of the business is Virtacore and this is traditional private cloud so think co-location, infrastructures of service, compute storage, disaster recovery and we provide those services to small, medium and large companies.

My favorite of our customers is Cal-Maine, and I hadn’t even heard of Cal-Maine. Cal-Maine is the largest domestic egg producer and they have relationships with several other companies that we traditionally buy eggs for but Cal-Maine has this wonderful business model, they’re a big company. When it gets right down to it and I’m talking to Bob on the phone he goes, “Paul, how many eggs is this going to cost me?” They really do measure things by what they have to produce to be able to pay for a solution. We also do data center migrations, so if you’ve got a big company or a small company and you just want to get out of the hardware/software business and collapse out of where you are, we’re happy to take that from you as well.

Fred Diamond: Very good. You mentioned you were in the Marine Corps; you went to the Naval Academy if I recall. How did you first get into sales as a career? We’ve interviewed a bunch of people who have served the country but you might be the first grad of the naval academy that we’ve had, so thanks for your service first of all and how did you first get into sales as a career?

Paul Borror: That’s interesting, thank you. It was funny, I was in the Marine Corps and I was looking at transitioning out and I got a call from somebody and said, “You’ve got to try this out, this is an opportunity to get started” kind of a ground floor business. I love selling, I had a paper route when I was a kid, it was one of these paper routes that you have to go out and you deliver the paper for free and then you have to go bang on the door and ask for money, so really you’re selling your service all the time. “Listen, I put it up on your porch when it was raining, I put it in a bag” and that’s how you start doing that. You get a little better at that and people say, “Can you mow my lawn? I’ve got some weaving to do.”

I found myself in business for myself and that was neat, I enjoyed that. After the Marine Corps, I was looking for a way to continue along that service and this friend of mine called me up and said, “You’ve got to try this out.” He didn’t tell me what it was. What I found out it was, was selling insurance and investment which wound up being a really difficult but a really eye-opening way to get into sales because there’s this balance between what the customer really needs and you’ve got to make your quota.

Do you do it in one visit, do you do it in two visits, do you do it in three visits? How do you do that? The transition may not have seemed logical, a lot of my friends were going and being airline pilots or transitioning to the beltway bandits or have an aerospace engineering degree – perfect degree for sales. Going into the more traditional fields, I thought I really wanted to do something where I could interact with people more, and sales was going to be that outlet.

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, you sold newspapers, you had a paper route like I did, by the way. You then went to the marines and then you started selling insurance. Interestingly, I usually ask the question, “What are some of the lessons you learned from the first few sales jobs.” I’m going to ask you it slightly different and you can answer however you want. I’m just curious what you learned from the Marines that has suited you in your sales career.

Paul Borror: I tell people all the time I never had a bad day in the Marine Corps. I had some hard days, I had some days that were a real emotional struggle. I never really had a bad day, and the thing I learned in the Marine Corps is that there is a comradery that transcends the day to day. In the Marine Corps, somebody always has your back. In the Marine Corps, it is a true brotherhood and it doesn’t matter what it is you do, it doesn’t matter if you’re a rifleman or if you’re an aircraft mechanic or if you drive a tank or if you’re in logistics. Whatever it is, the Marine Corps is the Marine Corps, you are one team. I’ve tried to bring that to whatever sales team I was on by being a good employee because I think you have to be a good follower to ever be a good leader, and the best way to honor your leader is to be a good follower and I learned that in the Marine Corps as well. I think also if you have the privilege of leading people, that you make sure that you’re worthy of being led.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. Tell us a little more about you specifically, what exactly are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Paul Borror: Thanks, that’s a bit of a loaded question. I made myself some notes and when I read that question, that’s the first thing I thought, “That’s a bit of a loaded question.” I’d like to think, Fred, that I’m good at finding and developing real sales talent. There’s a maxim to let your leaders lead. If you find a good leader – or even if you don’t – to find out what somebody can really do, you have to let them fly a little bit. They can’t be under your thumb all the time. I think it’s the same thing with salespeople, you’ve got to give them a chance to fail. In my house, my wife does a very good job.

We have olders and youngers, we have 6 children, we have 3 out of the house, I’ve got one at UT Knoxville and then I’ve got 2 still in the house, one at Cooper and one at Langley. What my wife has provided is an environment in our home where you always have a soft place to land. Even the olders, if something happens they know that they can always come home. They know that they can tell their mom or me anything and we’re going to love them first and help them solve the problem second so listen first, solve second. Having that compassion I think is extraordinarily important.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. Talking about leading people, you’ve probably had some great mentors along the way. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your sales career?

Paul Borror: There are a couple. One of the things I wanted to mention is I really started paying attention to what it is you had and you have a sharpening the saw thing later, I’m looking forward to that. I really started to watch what you all were doing when you honored a guy that I used to work for, a boss’s boss, a guy by the name of Mark Weber (Mark was also interviewed on this podcast here.) Mark has been one of those guys, he was very clear. You talk about things that you learned, clarity of purpose. What is it you want? I could remember we would go for bring your child to work day, and one of the things that Mark would ask you to ask the kids, “When you go home tonight and tomorrow night and the night after, when your mom or dad comes home you ask them, “Did you sell anything today?”” There’s some joy in that too, but that’s fun. That’s really interesting and I’ve tried to develop that as well to have a fun way to remember the business we’re in and the job we’re doing.

I also worked directly in that same environment. I worked directly for a woman in two different jobs by the name of Regina Kunkle and Regina is one of these great leaders who brings a little bit of everything to the table. She’s smart, she’s dedicated, she’s hard working, compassionate and honestly she’s fearless. She knows what she wants and she’s very clear about making sure that you understand what our mission is, and then she also has the ability to let you go ahead and do the things that you might need to do to win the business, whether that’s building a coalition where I need more support, I need more engineering support, I need pricing support, I need support from headquarters, one of those kinds of things, she’s right there. “I got your back” or if it’s just to say, “Listen, let me get back to you, let me find out what the customer really wants and we’ll come back” and she’ll sit down and challenge you and help you get to the answer that we need.

Most importantly again, all those great attributes: strength, fearlessness, everything else, but remember the Marine Corps. She always had my back, Mark did as well but she always had my back and that’s one of the things that I’ve tried to make sure that I always had for the folks that I was able to work with.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. By the way, Mark Weber has been interviewed for the podcast. You just used the word “fearlessness” and we talk about fearlessness in sales. What does that mean? How does that represent itself in today’s economy?

Paul Borror: I think to be truly fearless you have to be grounded in what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Fear is a word that I think gets a little bit overused. What are you afraid of? I’m afraid of heights, there is a fear there but I can conquer it by working through certain things or just staying away from the ledge. When I mean fearless, what I really mean by that and especially in the example I used with Regina and what I try to do is be confident in what it is that you’re trying to convey to your customer, and be confident in what it is that you’re trying to do with and for your company. Be grounded, know what it is you’re selling, know what it is that your solution does to help your customer. Don’t be shy about letting them know, be fearless.

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

Paul Borror: People – finding the very best and keeping the very best. The hardest thing is finding the right person in the right environment at the right time to do the right thing. You’d think that would be simple, “It’s sales, how hard can this be?” It’s really difficult. Culture gets in the way, life gets in the way, economic pressures get in the way, needs get in the way. You get all the way down the road with something, everybody’s going to be fine and then IBM buys your company [laughs]. I got a note from a friend of mine, “You’re never going to believe this, a buddy of ours from NetApp left, Monday was his first day at Red Hat.” He had no idea he was going to be an IBMer!

You just don’t know what’s going to happen, so with all that lined up against you you need a special kind of person that perseveres, that sets through that. Then I also say there’s two people, there’s the guy you interview and the person that you work with on a day to day basis, and discerning between those two is also very hard.

Fred Diamond: Paul, you’ve worked for some great places, you mentioned you’ve had about a 30 year 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?

Paul Borror: This would probably be almost 15 years ago now. I was in enterprise sales and you know what happens, at the end of the year in enterprise sales maybe you’ve got 5 people and you’ve got 20 accounts. We’ve grown from 5 to 7 so some of us were only going to have one or two. I went from 5 to 2 and I kept my anchor customer and then I got a customer from somebody else. I gave up 4 and got one back so I went from 5 to 2. I went to see my new customer and I was excited because again, a recognized name in the industry, a good long term customer and I had a reasonable quota against them. I’m like, “This is going to be great.”

I get up there and I get in the room and I’m thinking, “There’s an awful lot of people here” and the director of IT gets up and says, “I just want you to know, the reason you’re here is not to sell us anything else, we just want to let you know that we are going to rip everything out of yours. We’ve been a two vendor shop, we’re now going to be a one vendor shop and you’re not the vendor.” Short answer and I’m like, “That’s not what I expected.” I had two customers, now really I’m down to one. I go back, I talk to my team and everything else.

This is the funniest thing, about two weeks later I get a big order from these guys, a seven figure order.

Fred Diamond: Wait a minute, at that meeting they brought you in and they said, “Paul, FYI, we’re getting rid of all your stuff. Nice to know you, let’s validate your parking, take it easy” type of a thing and you left the building. It’s over.

Paul Borror: It’s over, I’m down to one guy and there’s no way I’m making my quota on the one guy, that’s what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking about the greater good when I walked out of there, I’m thinking, “How am I going to tell my wife that we’re going to have to make some changes?” [Laughs] About three weeks later, I get this huge order, seven figures. You have to understand that they had multi-millions of dollars with both us and our competition so a million dollar order may have been 2, 3, 5% of the overall so this was not game changing for them, it was necessary.

I called the guy up and I said, “What’s going on?” and he said, “We need this swing gear so we can offload some things so we can get you guys out of here once and for good.” I’m like, “OK, I’m not selling it to you.” I said, “Just can’t, not doing it.” You can imagine that every alarm bell in the world goes off. He tells his boss, his boss calls my boss before I get a chance to get to them. Now it’s emergency meeting back in the office and we’re at a conference room table. Imagine being at that end at the conference table with no coffee cup and everybody else is at the other end.

You know that things aren’t really going your way. I remember I worked for great people, people who would let you fail as long as you could also, if you could make a good argument for what you were doing, they’d let you try. My argument was, “They don’t really know, we’ve lost control of this account. They’ve taken over, it’s time for us to provide value. They’re already mad at us, it’s time for us to go into that account and show them the value that caused them to buy from us in the first place and I’m just not going to sell them something because they want it. I’ll sell them something if we all agree they need it.” I went back up there, saw my guy who was still pretty angry – but I brought donuts.

Fred Diamond: Again, this was 15 years ago and donuts were OK to bring to a meeting.

Paul Borror: Yes. This was so funny, that became something. Every time I came up there if I showed up without donuts they were like, “Hey.” For two years every Wednesday I showed up with donuts. I talked to them and I told them what I was about and I said, “Here’s the deal, I want to retain your business but if I don’t get to keep you I want you to think this was the greatest transition off of a platform and onto another one that’s ever happened. This guy cares about me more than he cares about sales, that’s what we want to do and here’s my plan.”

I took my SE and I said, “We’re going to make you a hero one way or another” remember the hero making business. “Either you’re going to be a hero because you didn’t spend the million dollars to buy the stuff you didn’t need or you’re going to be a hero because you’re going to say, “These guys should have bought when they did and I’ll take all the blame” but one way or another you come out on top of this thing.” He’s like, “OK, great, sounds good.” We started spending time there digging into their environment, they really didn’t need what they would have bought. It’s just they hadn’t done a good inventory of what they had so we were able to move some stuff around and we were actually able to do the mission without spending the extra money.

While we were doing that, we discovered that they had this huge virtualization project – remember this was 15 years ago – and they needed help, we helped them. They bought some gear for that because our gear was better than their gear. Maybe we’re still going to have a foot hole. We get through that and then there’s a little bit more and next thing  you know, they’re like, “Maybe we better rethink this whole thing and maybe we chose the wrong vendor to have a single vendor strategy.”

Long story short, we had a really good year and the other vendor didn’t. We came up with a 3 year plan that really had their needs first by stepping back, and we did all this within a year. To let you know, I still hit quota that year. By stepping back and putting the customer needs first and then trying to understand the landscape never forgetting that I was hired to sell for a specific company – we never forgot that. By re-prioritizing and helping the customer really understand what we were all about, not just boxes of spinning disk but real things that could make a difference really changed that.

Fred Diamond: Obviously you got the business. Was that a 5, 7, 10 year run of repeatable business that kept going?

Paul Borror: It was a 5-year run, we signed a 5-year deal with them.

Fred Diamond: One last question on this particular story which is quite interesting. Again, they invited you to come so you go back, you leave. Those three weeks before he called you back, how did you get the order? Via email, fax?

Paul Borror: I got an email and it didn’t even come to me, it came to the general mailbox. Sitting around the fax machine in the old days.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about those three weeks. Had you written them off? Basically you came back, you told your boss, “This is what happened.” Did you start planning for the rest of your, “How am I going to make my quota on my one customer now?” or did you send emails back and forth to them? I’m just curious what happened in those three weeks before.

Paul Borror: That’s a great question. The first thing I did was I came back and I found the original rep and said, “What the heck is going on here?” because they were still there. They gave me some background, so I start taking notes. Then I went to the engineer, I said, “What’s really going on here?” Come to find out, remember if we step back about three minutes I said, “We’ve lost control, we’re letting the customer make decisions for us” and that’s what happened.

We as an organization or sales team had lost control of a customer, and what we were doing was we were in the fulfillment business, we weren’t in the value creation business. That’s what I discovered, I will tell you that my other customer I knew I wouldn’t get a whole lot from because I just signed an enterprise license agreement with them. That was going to be good sustainable business for the next three years, it wasn’t going to be high dollar business because I’d be selling hardware only, the software was already paid for. It was going to be impossible to do that and I wasn’t going to get another client.

I had to figure out what to do with these guys and it was in those three weeks of talking amongst the sales team that we discovered if we can turn around, make price no longer an issue, make value an issue – price is always an issue in the absence of value. If we can build value for ourselves, then maybe we have a chance. Maybe we don’t, but back to my point, at least the exit strategy be the best exit these guys ever had, they have to remember that.

Fred Diamond: Paul, before we take a break and listen to one of our sponsors, did you ever question being in sales? Again, you started selling newspapers at an early age, you talked about some of your career success with the Marine Corps, you sold some insurance right after you were for the Marine Corps. Was there ever a moment though where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Paul Borror: Thank you for that great question. Fresh out of the Marine Corps, it’s selling insurance and investments. I went out and I was bound and determined to be the greatest sales guy ever. I read everything, did the Tom Hopkins stuff, did all that. I went out there and the first 17 customers that I saw said no, so I was 0-17 and I was like, “I’ve switched careers, how am I ever going to make any money? This is going to be horrible.” Had a great guy, Paul Gulbronson, still know him, we’re still friends now. Paul is like, “It’s going to be OK, I’ll go with you on the next one.” We went on the next one and I got that sale so I went from 0-17 to 1-18 and getting that first win, I just never looked back after that. There’s just something about persevering through the first 17 then getting that one, it was life changing for me.

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

Paul Borror: I would ask that you provide value to your customers first and foremost. I think it’s less about your product and your solution and more about the people that you’re serving. Remember I mentioned we’re in the hero making business, make your time with the customer count. Don’t show up unprepared, know what it is that they need, know what problem they’re trying to solve and know how you can do it.

Often times customers come up with their, “This is the solution I want.” This isn’t Home Depot, provide value by giving them options, opportunities, alternatives and the ability to be heard. I think the #1 thing of providing value – and I’m not really doing any of it here, we’re all talking – but the #1 thing in providing value is to listen. Ask probing questions because you know the customer’s business, you know your solutions, ask the questions to find the best fit.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things you do today to continue sharpening your saw and staying fresh?

Paul Borror: I listen to your podcast. I can’t believe there’s 122 of them, that’s fantastic. I think there’s right now posted well over 100, so I’ve listened to some great insights by some amazing people and incredibly diverse. I think if you look at that, that really is pretty amazing. I like to listen to professionals in their field, and I’m a better listener. So podcasts, books on tape – forgive me, now they’re books on CD – audible, those kinds of things. I like to listen to how professional athletes overcame certain things, how professional sales guys, somebody who has made their craft their avocation, who has made their business their life. There’s so much to learn from those folks and that’s what I try to listen to.

I also try to remember to stay grounded. We’re a family of faith, I think that helps a tremendous amount but I also like to listen. My wife has my back and I can share things with her and she’ll give me the honest truth. You get honesty and clarity from the people you love and who love you back, so stay grounded with your family. At the pace of life and at the pace we’re often moving, it’s very hard to stay grounded. You have to work at that and I try to.

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

Paul Borror: We have two sides of this business, this business is customer service, customer focused. I have the opportunity now to change the way traditional private cloud and networks are sold and we’re off to a great start. My CEO, Jeff Freitas has built this incredible company. He built the M3COM company starting about 1998 and then Virtacore was an established company. He bought that company, refreshed the environment, refreshed the way we looked at our customers, refreshed the way customers looked at us. It really put a white glove approach onto a very busy, very competitive, very low margin – theoretically or potentially – business.

He’s turned this into a business where his customers don’t leave, and looking at expanding we want to double, triple, quadruple this business here in the foreseeable future. Looking at that, it can’t be sales as usual. We can’t rest on our laurels, we can’t look back and say, “We’ve done this great job.” What we have to do is we have to become as diverse in our approach to our customers as the marketplace has become diverse in its offerings. What that looks like I’m not quite ready to share yet but I’d love to revisit that in a year or so, let you know how it worked out, the goods and the bads.

Fred Diamond: We talked about some of the challenges, we talked about creating value, we talked about helping your customer, your employees, your company become a hero. Great story you told us about your greatest success and how you were basically told to leave and then you helped the customer understand where they really needed to go, took charge and gave them some control. Sales is hard, you’re starting an interesting challenge here, a new organization. People don’t return your calls or your emails anymore, why have you continued? Give us a little more insight into what it is about sales as a career that has kept you going.

Paul Borror: Sales is hard, and I used to tell my sales team. I did a stint at MCI and they were starting MCI WorldCom. I used to say I’m legacy nobody, MCI hired me and my first paycheck came from WorldCom so it was like that Red Hat IBM thing. I walked in one day, interviewed by MCI and hired by WorldCom. The idea was to make mobile phones more accessible to the masses, the same business plan that MCI and WorldCom had had for long distance. That was a hard sell, we were out beating the streets, I had 70 people working for me and you’d go out there and you’d get bloody. I was out every day with them and I used to tell them other people’s opinions don’t change who you are.

Remember I talked about value, to have the value to be fearless and to provide value to your customer, you have to know who you are and what you’re about. My wife’s opinion matters to me, your opinion matters to me, we’re professionals and you have made this your life’s work, of course I’m going to listen to you but I don’t have to listen to everybody. Especially if I’m out trying to get something done and for whatever reason, I can’t get the answer that we all want. This taught me something else: it is hard. Rather than try to get the yes, why not try to get to no quickly? I think we all are supposed to persevere, get the sale, get everything else.

My sense is that for every 100 people you see there’s 2 or 3 or 5 or whatever the number is that you have to dig in and really help. They need some education, they need some understanding, they need whatever and there’s a whole group of people who are ambivalent, they just won’t tell you. Then there’s some people with real clarity who will tell you no, you want people on both ends of that spectrum. You want the numbers right away but the ambivalent people you’ve got to find a way to get to know, get to know quickly so you can spend the time with the people who get it that either have a problem that you can fill right away or with just a little bit of gentle prodding you can get there, but don’t spend time on folks that are just stringing you along. Get to know quickly and that’ll help.

Fred Diamond: Paul, why don’t you give us one final thought? We have Sales Game Changers listening from around the globe, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire them today?

Paul Borror: Thank you. I would say, what do you fill a room with? When you walk into a room, does in the energy in that room go up or does that energy in the room go down? What are you providing? I have my tagline on my email, so if you ever get an email from me you’ll see down at the bottom it says, “Show up to give.” I think too many of us in the sales game show up to get. We need a PO, we need a meeting, we need the next thing, why don’t we show up to give? Make every interaction with your customer, prospect as valuable as possible and leave the folks that you meet better for the time that you spent together. Show up to give.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 122: Learn How the Marine Corps, Mentors and Sales that Went Awry Shaped M3Com and Virtacore Sales Chief Paul Borror into the Fearless Leader He’s Become first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 10:09
Name an impactful sales mentor: 15:04
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 16:59
Most important tip: 24:06
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 28:59
Inspiring thought: 31:52

EPISODE 118: Former NetApp Sales Chief Mark Weber Emphasizes these Critical Points with the Catholic University Students He’s Preparing for High-Tech Sales Careers

MARK’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Be humble. There are a lot of great kids coming out of college. They think they’re good, they think they can set the world on fire and that’s awesome but they have to be humble going into the sales profession. They don’t have the skill set, the knowledge so they have to be sponges. You’ve got to be confident but the definition of cocky is over the edge. That humble feeling but confident is critical so I impress upon them that every time I talk to them.”

Mark Weber heads the Sales Department and is the Executive in Resident at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America.

He’s also a technical adviser to many companies across the country.

Prior to coming to Catholic University, he ran the Americas for NetApp and held sales leadership positions at Sun and HP

He also is a previous winner of the Institute for Excellence in Sales Lifetime Achievement Award.

Find Mark on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: You started the Sales Department at the Catholic University of America. For the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today, the Catholic University is based in Washington DC and it’s a beautiful campus, a lot of beautiful buildings, a lot of high energy students walking around here today. I’m excited as we talk through today’s podcast about the things that you’re teaching them. You of course have had a great career in sales, a lot of success. I’m interested in what they want to learn.

I’m also interested in what you’re teaching them and how they’re advancing their careers, what’s prompting some of these young students today to move into sales. To get started, why don’t you tell us today what you’re doing? Usually I ask the question what do you sell today, of course you’re teaching great kids what you’re learning and you’re also advising the students, but tell us what you’re doing today and tell us what excites you about that.

Mark Weber: Thanks, Fred. It’s just a blessing of an opportunity what I get to do today. I’ve spent 30+ years in the high tech sales business running sales team and a friend of mine said, “Why don’t you teach a sales class? Why don’t you make up a sales class and teach it?” Sometimes things come around and you’ve just got to jump on them, that was one I jumped on three years ago and I made up a sales class. No kids at Catholic University were taking sales jobs and that was not because they didn’t have the skill set, it was purely because they didn’t have knowledge on what the sales industry was about and what sales is about.

Their view typically was not positive of sales and my job in that class is really to explain to them what the sales industry is about and what the profession is about. A lot of it is life skills, Fred, that I’m teaching: networking, preparation, how to ask the right questions, all those skills you can use in any profession. I happen to focus on sales but they could take those skills into any other kind of profession as well. I’m teaching them a lot of fun things and taking the negativity of what they though sales were on to something incredibly positive.

Fred Diamond: It’s interesting, full disclosure here, I’ve actually hired a couple of your kids as interns a couple years ago when you first got this program started and they showed up in suits and they asked the right questions and they came prepared and they showed up on time, it’s pretty good stuff. Also, for some of the people listening the podcast today, are the kids leaving? Are they graduating – I guess I’m going to keep referring to them as kids.

Mark Weber: I do too.

Fred Diamond: Are they graduating with jobs? Are you helping them get placed as well?

Mark Weber: Yes, I would say I’m a professor in the classroom but I spend 90% outside of the classroom with them coaching them, mentoring them and networking them with companies. As you know, you have a great big network and so did I so I get a chance to leverage that network to help these kids. I do not get them jobs, I don’t ask my friends to hire them but I do introduce them probably to opportunities they might not have known about and they have the skill sets to go get, they just didn’t know about them.

Zero kids took sales jobs three years ago, last year 43 kids took high tech sales jobs with an average starting salary significantly higher than what the business school generally would get hired at.

Fred Diamond: Now you’re in your third year of running the sales program here at the Catholic University of America. What are some things that you’ve learned, what are some things that you’ve grown to understand that maybe you didn’t think when you first got started?

Mark Weber: First of all, not everybody should go into sales. You have a lot of kids in your class and you don’t want to force anybody into any profession that they wouldn’t feel comfortable in. You’ve got to put yourself on the line every day in sales and you’ve got to feel comfortable with that. I’ve learned you just can’t force everybody to tell them this is the right profession. You coach them, you give them guidance, you give them all the knowledge and you make sure that they’re choosing, not you. You want them to be successful, you want them to have fun.

Fred Diamond: Why are some of these kids taking your courses? You said there wasn’t a program three years ago, they might have had a misperception of what enterprise, corporate selling was all about. Why are they taking the courses?

Mark Weber: I think it’s a different course. Most of their professors – no disrespect – are academics, they teach books and they teach knowledge and facts and figures and my class isn’t that. My class is much more alive, meaning role-plays, you better be prepared and when you come into class you’re probably going to talk 5, 6, 7 times every single class. Rather than receiving information, you better be giving information out. It’s pretty alive, that’s a pretty different learning method than most of their other classes and you know what? They like to be put on the spot. You’d be shocked, they do.

Fred Diamond: We mentioned at the very beginning you’ve led sales teams across the world in NetApp, Sun and HP, some of the great companies in the history of technology. Tell us about the beginning of your career, how did you first get into sales as a career? What got you into it, what were some of the factors that led you into a career of sales?

Mark Weber: It’s a simple factor, I watched my dad. My dad was a lifelong sales guy and I loved the lifestyle that he had in sales. He was not in a high paying profession like high tech, we get paid pretty well, Fred. He was in the appliance industry still doing B to B sales but not a lot of margin, but I loved the lifestyle he had meaning he never missed any of our sports games. He’d work some days 20 hours but he was always home when he needed to be there for any of our events, that flexibility to be a great family person.

I loved that aspect of it and I loved that he could control his own day. He decided where he was going, what he was doing and every day was different. Every day he was going somewhere different and meeting somebody new, so I loved that aspect of it.

Fred Diamond: You followed him into sales?

Mark Weber: I got an engineering degree at Virginia Tech, I was more of a math and science kid but I got an engineering degree to do one thing, to sell expensive stuff. My dad said, “Don’t get a history degree, get something technical so you can sell something maybe higher end.” I was well coached by him, it was a different path a long time ago to get an engineering degree purposefully to go into sales.

Fred Diamond: What was your first sales job?

Mark Weber: I got hired right off of campus at Virginia Tech by Hewlett-Packard to be a sales rep.

Fred Diamond: Right into HP, what did you sell back in the day?

Mark Weber: I sold their technical computers, HP UX unit computers back in the early 80’s. A lot to engineers at NASA, scientists doing test and measurement, doing things like that, taking data acquisition and data and analyzing it, back then you needed an engineer to do some of that stuff. Nowadays every kid is technical.

Fred Diamond: Not every kid knows UNIX.

Mark Weber: No, but nowadays you think like my students, now they think, “I couldn’t go into high tech sales” but they all can. The greatest people to train you in high tech sales is the company that hires you, so every kid with a business degree can go into tech or into any other industry.

Fred Diamond: For the Sales Game Changers again we have listeners, Mark, all around the world. Going from Virginia Tech which is a very good technology school based in the US in the southern part of Virginia going right into HP which was one of the companies in various times throughout the course of the Sales Game Changers podcast interviews, we’ve interviewed people who’ve been at HP. HP was the quintessential entrepreneurial firm based in Silicon Valley and became one of the most successful companies in the history of technology. You went from Virginia Tech, you had a tech degree, right to HP selling things to the government. What are some of the key things you learned from your first few sales jobs? 

Mark Weber: What I learned was the customer is probably going to be smarter than you. I’m calling on engineers, I’m a 20 year old kid and I’m calling on 40, 50 year old engineers who live, eat and breathe what they do. I am bringing knowledge to them on some kind of topic, I had to have knowledge to bring to them. It could be knowledge of my computer, knowledge of how to take that data off of their instrument and do something with it maybe a little more technical or a little faster than what they were used to.

You couldn’t waste their time and try to act smarter than them and I find that is still true today. Typical sales rep better have knowledge to bring to their clients, you just can’t be a great gripper and grinner, you’ve got to have some kind of competitive knowledge, industry knowledge, product knowledge, knowledge is critical to create value for yourself as a salesperson. I found that as pretty critical a long time ago and that hasn’t changed, I teach that still.

Fred Diamond: That’s good stuff. The whole concept of value, I need to do some more podcasts on specifically what value looks like because it comes up all the time. I liked that you said when you were in your early 20’s that you realized that right away, that you had to bring some significant things to people who were probably – not probably. You’re selling things to rocket scientists.

Mark Weber: They were.

Fred Diamond: Your first customer literally, they were rocket scientists.

Mark Weber: Running wind tunnels, collecting data off of instruments, off of wings and clearly I didn’t know much about vortexes and things like that that they’re doing but I was able to hang with them because I brought some kind of knowledge. I treated them like they were smart and I didn’t try to be smarter than them. Also overly prepared, being totally responsive to people like that who can get lost in their day or in their research but you are consistent and you’re prepared. They respect that, they love when people get back to them and they’re consistent and they’re prepared.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you’re teaching your students today to ensure that they are overly prepared?

Mark Weber: It’s being totally prepared. You come to my class and you’re not prepared, typically what happens is I ask you to go home that day. It only has to happen once, Fred, and everybody comes prepared. It’s like you showing up at a meeting or you showing up for this interview and if you weren’t prepared it wouldn’t go that well. Not many people would want to do this interview again. I teach them how critical that is not just in a sales call but in every situation, every situation is being prepared.

Knowing who you’re going to go meet, doing a little bit of background check up on them, not spoofing them but having some knowledge on them because it’s about building a rapport with people. If you have some knowledge and you can find a linkage with them, you can quickly build rapport with people with a little bit of preparation.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’ve worked in some of the great technology companies: NetApp, Sun, HP. Tell us what you are specifically an expert in, tell us a little bit about your specific area of brilliance.

Mark Weber: I don’t think I have any brilliance but I would tell you I’ve thought about this a lot, why I was so blessed and had a pretty good, successful current. I would tell you the best skill I developed was hiring, I turned that into not just a gut, I treated it as a science. I did a lot of statistics on hiring, a lot of background on people, a lot of reference checking. Sure you had to use your gut, but I took hiring and picking talent as the most critical thing I did.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. What have you learned over the years about hiring? What were some things that have occurred to you that you might not have done well but then you changed over time?

Mark Weber: Don’t use just your gut because a lot of people who are in front of you are salespeople, and they can do a pretty good job selling. You’ve got to use more than your gut, you’ve got to use your network, you’ve got to use a lot of other data other than just your gut.

Fred Diamond: Very good. I mentioned in the very beginning you were one of our Institute for Excellence in Sales lifetime achievement award recipients and one of the factors in being selected for that is someone who has a down chain, people who’ve gone from working for you and then also have led great teams as well, there was a whole large, impressive roster for that. You’re teaching kids now, you’re teaching them how to move into professional sales, enterprise, business to business sales, you’re teaching them the skills, you’re teaching them how to perform, how to prepare, you must have had some great mentors along the way. Again, we’re talking to Mark Weber. Mark, why don’t you tell us about an impactful career sales mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Mark Weber: I’ll go back and tell you my mentor the whole time was my dad. I didn’t think it was just about skill set, it was about how you behaved, how you treated people and my dad was probably the best at treating people with class and dignity and respect no matter how you were performing. I see a lot of that these days and I still advise a bunch of tech companies, Fred. I still see how people bring everybody into company with love and class, “We love you, thanks for joining our company” but then I see people when people need to leave either performance-wise or it’s time for them to go do something else and I see how they treat them on the way out – not so good, Fred.

That’s what I learned from my dad is it doesn’t matter. You treat people with dignity, you leave them with a lot of class and that comes around to you in spades. You’re not doing that so you get something back, it’s the right thing to do. Probably Fred, you’ll find out that when somebody did need to leave maybe that usually they’re still your friend a year later or 6 months later and they’re usually a better person for it. I’m all about treating people with class and dignity no matter where they’re coming, whatever they’re doing and I learned that a lot from my dad. I’d say he was my mentor, he was the guy I looked up to.

Fred Diamond: Mark, you deal with a lot of sales leaders, you’ve trained a lot, you’re helping kids now move into the sales career as their business career begins. What are the two biggest challenges that you think sales leaders face today?

Mark Weber: Like I said, Fred, I advise right now five high tech companies. I’m either on their board or some kind of coach mostly to the sales leader, the go to market team. I do spend a lot of time with the adult side of things too, not just the student side. Their problems haven’t changed, mostly it’s about finding talent. There are so many great jobs out there and finding the right talent is a huge problem right now, as you know. Our economy is humming along right now but finding the right talent, there’s a lot of people out there but not always the right talent, I think that’s the biggest thing they face. I think also people are so quick to expect performance out of some things, there is a ramp in life.

It takes a while to build up. Sometimes guys expect results a little too fast and clearly when I was a sales leader I wanted results but it takes a while to sell some things and to build up your territory, build up your reputation, build up your customer base. A little bit of patience is something that’s missing right now too. By the way, we all got to make our numbers so I’m not advocating not making your numbers, I’m just advocating coaching people, not just expecting them to perform day 1.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a great career, we’ve mentioned you worked for NetApp, Sun, HP, now you’re leading the Sales Department at the Catholic University of America, you’re working with a number of tech firms as an adviser. Take us back to the #1 sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of, take us back to that moment.

Mark Weber: I’ll go back, Fred. It wasn’t a deal, I would say the #1 success was hiring a couple of people. I’m a big believer that if you hire the right people and you – I use this word quite often – empower them, I think that was probably my biggest win. Somehow I was able to feel very comfortable hiring great people and empowering them, so they didn’t have to wake up and call me and ask me what they could do today or why they could do it, it was all about empowerment. It’s amazing when you wake up every day and you’re in charge, you can get coaching from your boss and you can get guidance but you don’t feel like you need permission.

I think that was my biggest success, is being able to feel comfortable empowering people and letting them do their job. You know what happens when people feel empowered? I think you get the best out of them, they show up and they have courage, they feel like they can make the decision. I think you get your best when people are empowered.

Fred Diamond: Mark, I usually don’t ask this question but I know you’ve had such an impressive down chain of people who’ve worked for you. How do you think these people that you said you’ve hired and empowered, how do you think they would describe you as a sales leader?

Mark Weber: I think they would describe me as tough, you bet. I think they’d describe me as involved, I think they’d describe me as fun, I like to have a lot of fun. I treat it as I’m the coach of a baseball team and I tell them that, I’m the general manager of the baseball team and I get to pick the talent, put them in the right positions and sometimes you’ve got to play a lefty at short-stop because that’s all you’ve got even though that’s heresy, but that’s what you have to do some days to win.

I don’t play those positions, I wasn’t the rep so when the ball was hit at a sales rep for a deal, I’m not the one who needs to dive for that ball and throw it to first base, they need to. If they don’t feel empowered and encouraged to do that. I think they’d describe me as somebody they like working for, I’m still best friends with most of them and they don’t have to be my friend anymore. I still play tennis with them, play golf with them, hang out with them, a lot of them hire my students now. I think that would say they’ve enjoyed it.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Just a quick note here, I’m a lefty and I used to love playing short-stop. I loved playing first base more, but whenever I played short-stop – of course, I couldn’t make the turn all that easily and that’s why I didn’t get further than high school.

Mark Weber: You understand what I’m saying, you can’t turn your shoulders fast enough, it’s going to cost you another half a second but sometimes you have to to win.

Fred Diamond: Exactly. With all the analytics now I wonder if we’ll start seeing things like that, probably not. Again, today’s Sales Game Changers podcast, we’re talking to Mark Weber. He heads the Sales Department at the Catholic University of America. He’s had a great career, he’s worked at blue chip companies, led world-wide sales teams at NetApp, Sun, HP and right now he’s doing a lot of advising to technology companies. Mark, we’ve talked a lot about sales today. Again, you were in Virginia tech, you went right into sales, you were selling things to NASA and other government accounts. Do you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Mark Weber: I know you wanted probably a unique answer here but the answer is no, never, Fred, not one day. I never got paid for anything in life except for results and never wanted to, so even in my advising roles they all want to know, “How much do you charge an hour?” I never get paid by the hour, I like to get paid by results for what I do and that’s how sales gets paid. There’s risk reward but you like to keep score, I’m a big time score keeper. I never questioned it, ever. There was a few days that you didn’t like it, I remember a couple of deals that I wish I had done something different but in general, no. It was the greatest career and I still love it.

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

Mark Weber: I’m blessed that I get to hang out with a lot of the young talent, but being humble is probably – there’s a lot of great kids coming out of college. They think they’re good, they think they can set the world on fire and that’s awesome but they have to be humble going into the sales profession. They don’t have the skill set, the knowledge so they have to be sponges and I just impress upon them. You’ve got to be confident but the definition of cocky is over the edge. That humble feeling but confident is critical so I impress upon them that every time I talk to them.

Fred Diamond: Very good. What are some things you do to stay fresh and sharpen your saw?

Mark Weber: I work for five high tech companies now, three of them startups, one’s a very early stage startup, a couple of publicly traded companies so I have a mix of companies I’m working with, that keeps me pretty sharp. One of these companies is going to grow from 5 million three years ago to 500 million next year, so that’s a pretty big growth and you’re advising the sales team, so you stay pretty sharp, you’re in the game.

The other thing I do is I network like crazy still, one to help my students get opportunities. I could tell you I used to hang out with a lot of my peers and interact with them, a lot of the VPs of sales in this town and other places, now I hang out with more the inside sales leaders because they’re the ones that are going to hire my students. I do a lot of networking. I still network with a lot of the VPs but I think networking and hanging out with your peers, you learn a ton, you learn what’s going on with them and what makes them tick.

Fred Diamond: You said that 43 of your students last year graduated into sales jobs?

Mark Weber: They did. The average student at Catholic last year from the business school started in the low 50’s, the average kid started here 20k more than that so in the big range. It’s not just about their starting salary, Fred, it’s more where they’re going to be in a year or two or three and what the progression that company offers them. I try not to get them to worry about that first number, it’s more about what number they’re going to be at and what position they’ll be at in two, three, four years.

Fred Diamond: You get them into the right company and they perform, as we all know, the future is unlimited, possibility is unlimited. Mark, what’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Mark Weber: My whole life, Fred, I’ve owned something. I was the owner of the sales team or the owner of this, I had the number. You go to a role where you’re advising, being on the board, that’s a way different skill set when you’re giving advice and they don’t have to take it, they can do what they want. You really have to learn how to not have 100% of the information because you’re not an insider as much anymore, you’re only around the company so it’s a way different muscle to have to flex to give advice and realize it might not be taken.

You usually were in charge, and it got into play or at least in some form it got put into play so that’s keeping me sharp learning how to coach people and give them counsel. I try not to ever tell anybody what to do even when I owned it, but even less so when you’re an adviser. Different muscle.

Fred Diamond: Mark, sales is hard. Why have you continued and why are you continuing to bring people into the B to B enterprise professional sales world? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Mark Weber: I think it’s the greatest profession in the world, Fred, I just love it. I love that every day is different. You’re going to meet somebody new every day, every situation you might think you’ve figured it out but when you walk in that room, something’s different in that sales situation. Some personality is different and it’s not about facts and figures, it’s not about facts and figures, it’s not about speeds and feeds, you’ve got to have a good product but it’s a lot about personalities and figuring out what is the value you need versus the value somebody else needs out of a product. It might be the same kind of thing but your value you’re looking for is different.

Trying to figure that out is really interesting, it keeps me going, it keeps every situation so different. People don’t have to return my call anymore, I don’t have – like I did at NetApp – 2.000 employees working for me per se, but I still think I get a lot of phone calls for adults asking for advice and I help a lot of students, I help feed their sales teams. One of my networking rules, I told you I like to keep score but that’s more on posting numbers and selling. One thing I don’t keep score on is networking. If I did, I wouldn’t be hanging out with these students because there’s not much they can help me on with my career, I can help them.

There’s still a lot of people out there that probably need my advice because I’ve been there and done some of that. In the networking world, you find out who the really good people are and they don’t keep score on networking. They’re just there to help you when you need help or you help them when they need help. It’ll all balance out, it’ll never balance out networking and helping people at an individual level, it’ll balance out overall but never at an individual’s so don’t keep score on your networking and who you’re helping and who you’re not. That’s what I find and people who don’t call you back, you figured out what their game plan was. Probably not someone I want to hang out with anyways.

Fred Diamond: Mark, you’ve given us some great insights here as I knew you would, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today?

Mark Weber: Fred, we’ve all been blessed to be in this great profession industry of sales. The majority of people that listen to you make a great living, have a great career, I think it’s our responsibility to help the next generation and to coach them on how to get into our profession, how to get started. The hardest thing in the world to do is to get sales experience, that first sales job. Help the youth, take an interest, our profession of sales is only going to get better if we get the best talent in it. The kids that have great virtues, great ethics, we need those kids in our game. That is what your game is about, is building trust with customers so I would just ask you, take an interest in the youth and help the next generation. Invest in them, train them, get them into your company, it’s amazing what your culture will be like when you have multiple generations working there. I love that part of it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 118: Former NetApp Sales Chief Mark Weber Emphasizes these Critical Points with the Catholic University Students He’s Preparing for High-Tech Sales Careers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.