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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on August 26, 2020. It featured Veeam Public Sector leader Mike Miller and VMWare Public Sector leader Bill Rowan.]

Register for next Tuesday’s Women in Sales: Using LinkedIn to Build a Brand and a Following During Challenging Times with Brynne Tillman here.

Find Bill on LinkedIn here. Find Mike on LinkedIn here.

Listen to Bill’s original Sales Game Changers episode here. Listen to Mike’s original Sales Game Changers episode here.

EPISODE 265: VMWare’s Bill Rowan and Veeam’s Mike Miller Offer This Sage Advice for Sales Professionals Serving Public Sector Customers

BILL’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “You need to figure out a way to celebrate about your successes and your accomplishments in this new world. It used to be again, going back several quarters we were in an office, we would pull everybody together and you’d recognize someone. We still try to do a little bit of that online but I’ve encouraged people, “Listen, you had a great week, you got a big order in, share a bottle of wine with your loved one or significant other. Go make yourself a big dinner, turn stuff off, turn the computer off, put the phone down and use it as a way to celebrate the successes that you’re having along the way.”

MIKE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy is the most important quality that anybody can have whether it’s in sales or in life. I think that the most important thing that we can do as sales professionals as we leave this, as we go into the rest of the week, as we go into next week and as we continue in our career is to bear that in mind. Also, have an athletic approach to how we manage our business. We have to make sure that we’re maximizing the time that we put towards this, that we maximize the amount that we’re able to interact with our customers, the amount of information that we’re able to convey, the amount of information we’re able to get from those customers so we can be respectful of their time and that we can get back to them much more rapidly and quickly with good key answers to help them solve mission problems.”

Fred Diamond: What are the big priorities that you’re working on right now? Again, we’re about six months into the pandemic and everything related to that and you guys both focus on public sector, federal specifically today and the end of the federal fiscal year is coming up in about 30 days so it’s a busy time usually for you, your team and your resellers.

Mike Miller: It is. We’ve got five weeks left till the end of the government fiscal year so we are extraordinarily busy. There’s obviously a balance, all the reps are busy focusing on closing up the pipelines, they’ve been working in some cases multiple years but certainly all year long to build up a pipeline. Those that have done a really good job and have been working really hard are able to reap the rewards and earn the process of doing that. They’re also having to balance that with what is always a key requirement which is making sure that they’re continuing to grow the pipeline. It’s a delicate balance this time of year.

Fred Diamond: We had Mike Durso on your commercial side back on the Sales Game Changers Live, back in early April when things were beginning to get a little bit interesting, I encourage people to go back and watch that.

Bill Rowan, it’s great to have you hear, VMWare. How about you? What are some of the big things that you’re working on right now?

Bill Rowan: Fred, first off, thank you very much for having me, Mike, great to be with you. I will tell you, along the same lines as Mike referenced, it’s been an extraordinarily busy time inside of the sales organization. I think by note we saw one of the largest reprogrammings ever by DoD in getting up here to the end of the government fiscal year. There are still dollars available in some of the agencies so it’s really been a multi-pronged approach not just to try to ensure that you’re satisfying those current requirements, but also we’ve seen a fairly significant shift in the way government is doing business. Much like all of us are working from home, many of them are working from home or if you’re intelligence community you’re working on a colored schedule. You’re not only adapting to what the mission requirements and how those are changed, you have to completely adapt to the way you communicate with your clients on a regular basis. Hats off to the folks in the organization and the industry in general because I think we’ve probably adapted as well as any industry could have possibly adapted. I give credit to maybe one of my competitors from time to time, Microsoft, commented in their earnings release that we’ve seen basically two years’ worth of digital transformation in about two months. I think that’s showing itself in the market right now.

Fred Diamond: What is it like and how has it been to physically work with the government customer? You mentioned a lot of them have gone home as well but talk about some of the interactions and what that’s been like as a sales leader and a sales team.

Bill Rowan: It’s funny, I remember a number of years ago in a major snow storm that we had here in the DC area, and basically it shut everything down in terms of the interaction with the client for a number of days. I probably went into this with the thinking of, “This is going to really be a complex challenge” and for many customers, it was. Many customers are not only trying to do their day job but their kids are at home so they’re trying to do homeschooling, they’re trying to do before and after care and much like us, the days can be very long especially when you’re in front of a screen.

I give a tremendous amount of credit to our public servants who have adapted not just here in the DC area but to be very fair, across the country and across the world. It’s interesting to pivot, I think that the government customer was one of those customers that really enjoyed and thrived on the face-to-face meetings and going through the detailed discussions about how something was going to work. In some cases had not maybe adapted a lot of the technical or the webcast or what have you type interactions, they liked that face-to-face, they liked to understand who they’re working with. That option really wasn’t available in terms of face-to-face so they pivoted very quickly and in many respects, probably were teaching us things and willing to do things maybe a little bit earlier, sometimes later in the day being able to schedule multiple sessions throughout the day.

I think as an industry, again, I only get a chance to hear from my counterparts about what they’re doing in the state and local markets, the healthcare markets and others. I think they’ve done an extraordinary bit of work. The other part too I give them a huge amount of credit, the government is known for a very paper intensive business or industry still, and their adoption to being able to get electronical authorizations and the moving of funds, clearly their internal communication has picked up greatly. If it’s something we’ve learned positive out of the pandemic, it’s that our government, as big as they are and as challenging as they can be from time to time, has really adapted almost a war-type footing in terms of they way they responded to the citizens of the country.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you? How have you seen those interactions going as well?

Mike Miller: I think Bill summed it up really well. I think all of the reputational mindset that is sometimes out there about the government being slow and not being as nimble as you would expect, did an extraordinary job in pivoting to be able to manage the pandemic certainly with regard to their mission support whether it’s supporting the war fighter, whether it’s citizens. From a business interaction standpoint we’ve definitely had to have some unusual shifts because some parts of the government are still whether it’s paper intensive as Bill points out, which is exactly right or having to be in the same room or having to be together intensive. But some of the processes with regards to moving some assistance along and being able to do mission support have been a little bit more complicated and a little bit slower.

We’ve had to be doing a much better job as salespeople and as business consultants being able to help the government to shorten some of their own processes. I’ll give you an example, a person might ask for a quote and they’ve got an environment where they’re used to having half a dozen people that they need to be running things by nearby. For us, if they’re working remotely we have to sometimes think in advance to some of the questions they might need to be thinking about like do they have to have a J&A done? Do they have to be speaking to existing customers? Have they identified small business? We’ve got to be doing a better job from a sales process standpoint of thinking on behalf of some of the things that they might have to do to help them be as efficient as they can be. That’s something that we’re doing better at and it’s something that we’ve had to do a little pivoting ourselves on.

Bill Rowan: I think Mike hits on a great point. That thinking about what are their next steps, the more I think that our professionals have looked at that, they’ve pivoted, it’s making them better, they’re asking those questions up earlier, they’re lining those pieces up which is allowing us to compress the sale cycle over what we might have otherwise expected. So as much as we’re having to think about, the more we can include some of those things in our DNA in terms of the way we manage our opportunities going forth, I think that’s going to lead to a real positive on the back end when all this hopefully calms down a little bit here.

Fred Diamond: Mike, you make a really good point there. We’re doing a webcast every single day with sales leaders such as yourself and sales thought leaders and one of the messages and lessons that’s come through is that for sales professionals to be successful moving forward, you need to be ahead of where the customer is so that you can bring them the solutions before they ask. Questions now like, “Tell me the pain”, you can’t ask those questions anymore because we should know what they’re going through because everyone on the planet is going through the pandemic and things related to that. We have a question that’s come in here, this question comes from another Mike and he’s also in Virginia. I don’t see you texting here.

The question is, “How personal have you been with your customer being that we’re all going through the pandemic and things related to it?” That’s an interesting question. Talk a little bit about maybe empathy and knowing that everybody, like Bill mentioned before, is now a homeschool teacher or they’ve been a counselor for the last two months. Your marketplace is a very structured marketplace in a lot of ways, there are literally laws that your companies have to follow to be able to sell to this marketplace, how they purchase and how they procure and things like that. But at the same time, we’ve all just gone through this human challenge that we’re still going through in so many ways. Bill Rowan, why don’t you talk about that first? Have your people been able to engage on a more personal level knowing that we’re all going through the COVID and things related to that?

Bill Rowan: I think they have. What may have frustrated somebody 5-6 months ago because maybe there was somebody in the background, a dog or whatever the case might be, people are a lot more accepting of that. In fact, probably can relate in many respects to exactly what a client or business partner is going through. One of the changes that we made inside VMWare was we’ve been using technologies like Zoom and Teams for a while prior to the pandemic. We really asked our folks to try to make an effort whenever possible, go on video with your customers and your business partners, create that personal connection because otherwise we’re just a bunch of voices that are going back and forth over a conference call and you don’t really get a chance to understand some of the issues. I’ll tell a funny story that I told to my team, I was doing a call with the CIO of one of the intelligence communities and I had actually forgotten that the call was the next day and it popped up on my calendar and I only had about 10 minutes before the start. I really wasn’t dressed the way I would want to have been dressed so I apologized when I got on the call, I went on video and I said, “I apologize, I meant to get a little bit more  prepared but the call was important and I’ve just been busy throughout the day.”

Then that person said, “Well, then I’m going to go on video also” and there they were wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt and said, “I’m in the exact same boat you’re in.” So, I think that if you’re willing to put yourself out there a little bit with your client, you’ll find that they’re in the exact same boat. I think that while we can’t be in person and share a cup of coffee or something as a result of the meeting, we actually can make almost a different level of a connection and those will ultimately pay us benefits. The listeners who are listening to this podcast, that’s going to pay you benefits over the long haul with your client base.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you? How have you directed your team to go above and have those types of less formal? Are you encouraging your people to break through and talking about, “How are you doing?”? Those kinds of things that as human beings we’re doing.

Mike Miller: Absolutely. In fact, as you may recall although you do an awful lot of Game Changers podcast, so you may not remember mine precisely, one of the things that we talked about, one of the things I think is most important from a skill standpoint in any sales rep is their sense of empathy. It’s actually caring about the mission, it’s caring about the people and it’s not just being empathetic towards the institutions but it’s the people that are part of the institutions. I think Bill is exactly right, I think it’s extremely important and we find ourselves doing much more of this where we’re actually on calls and we go to video. By the way, I look much better on a 4-inch screen than I do face-to-face, just for the record. It’s extremely important to try to have some level of eye contact and it also gives you a chance to have some of the more human moments that Bill’s talking about – the dog barking in the background or my son coming in to give me a high-five when I’m in the middle of a meeting, or their children doing the same thing.

I think that’s great. It also translates a little bit into what we talked about before, being empathetic especially with our government customers who are slammed, they are still doing an extraordinary job meeting some really difficult challenges and they’ve got was always the busy time of the year for them anyway. You compound that with COVID-19, it’s really us doing a better job as sales reps and people, frankly it’s being more respectful of them and their time, that’s being empathetic. If we can knock out, for example, a whole series of questions that we’ve got and understand what customers need better in one phone call, then we have a chance to save them half an hour or 45 minutes or two other phone calls, or trying to pull multiple people together. We do a better job for ourselves, we do a better job for each other and we do a better job for our customers.

Fred Diamond: I want to follow up on something you said a few moments ago, Mike, and Bill, I want to ask this question to you. You talked about how as good and even average salespeople now, you need to be ahead of the curve. You need to bring the customer solutions before they ask you, before they even know that they need it and one of the other key words that comes up not infrequently is preparation. Could you both talk a little bit about how you came up, Mike, for example, with the notion  that you needed to get those forms to the customer before they even knew that they needed them way ahead of the curve? Because that’s where we’re seeing a lot of the distinction and value coming from right now, it’s not just bringing value anymore, that’s like hardly worth it, it’s the added value that you’re bringing by being like 2-3 steps ahead of where the customer is so that they could do their job more effectively. And of course as a sales professional, that will tie you deeper. Bill, if you could talk about preparation a little bit and maybe some of the things that you changed or some of your observations on how the sales professionals watching today’s webcast or listening to the podcast can be much more proactive? Where they’ll need to be, to be successful moving forward.

Bill Rowan: If I replay back to my time in January, February and before this, it wasn’t uncommon that if one of my reps or one of my managers was going to be involved in a briefing with a client or had an important meeting. Maybe we were working on helping a customer shape an RFI before it came out, we would a lot of times sit around the table and say, “Let’s figure out how we’re going to run this, what are we going to say? If we say this, how is this going to play out?” That opportunity really doesn’t present itself anymore, so how do you take those same type of interactions and apply them to this new format that we deal with on webcasts or videocasts – it’s amazing some of the skill sets, by the way. I don’t know of a single person inside of my organization who’s ever taken a class in whether it’s GoToMeeting to Zoom to Teams, but they have figured out how to use these tools and do different things with these tools that quite frankly, I’m blown away with that there are skills they developed.

A lot of it is just playing around but they shifted and started to say, “Okay, let’s make sure we’re really prepped” because the client, much like us, is probably going back to back with a bunch of these meetings. You’ve limited the time that you’re in the car or in the subway going down to visit the account, getting through security to get into the building, sit down, go through your discussion and then again that same process exit. In many cases, all of us have probably picked up at least 30 minutes on the front end and the back end of every single meeting so how are we using that productively? Not just to plan how we’re going to go about the discussion, what we want to be the outcomes but also the debrief afterwards to make certain that we have captured things we did well or things we didn’t do well and feed those back into the process so we’re going to be that much more effective on the next sales call or the follow-up activities that revolve around the opportunity we may be working on.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you? You do a lot of sales training in your career, you’ve taught a lot of people, again you’ve worked in some great companies like Juniper and CA for a long time, you’ve worked with thousands of sales professionals to make them better. What are some of your bits of advice on how to be more prepared to again, not just to show up well but to be 2-3 steps ahead of the curve?

Mike Miller: That’s a great question. Preparation from where I sit comes in a couple different varieties, the first is about sales process, it’s making sure that we have got really good habits and that they are consistently being executed by us on a regular basis. That’s good qualifying, it’s having empathy so that we can have a good rapport with our customers and prospects and our partners. It’s making sure that we understand that piece so that that’s second nature to us going through the discovery process, the qualifying process. If we’ve been doing this for any amount of time in government sales, it’s hard as you said, there are laws you have to follow and as Bill and I know painfully well, it’s the sort of thing that can take a long time to get good at.

But once you do get good at it, once you have done that then you have the ability to start doing the other bits of preparation, the other bits of preparation are understanding our customer’s mission. It’s understanding if we’re working with a systems integrator, what sort of things are important to them? How do we increase their probability of winning for a major program? The same thing with our partners, it’s being able to put ourselves in the place – being empathetic – of  our customers and our partners and making sure that we’re prepared so that when we go in there it’s not to talk about what we do, it’s to be out there relentlessly looking for the kinds of problems that we can solve. And when we find those, making sure that our customers understand that and knowing where to look for it is a key piece of it.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that comes in from Judy and Judy is in New York City, Judy wants to know, “How have you both changed as a sales leader over the past five months?” Again, both of you have worked for great companies, Bill, you were at EMC before you moved over to VMWare with an acquisition, you both are well-known in the public sector space leading great teams, leading great companies. How have you changed? Mike, why don’t you go first? Tell us one or two ways that you’ve changed.

Mike Miller: As a person who’s been selling for my entire career, the last job I had before I was in sales I also was waiting tables so it’s been a long time that I’ve been in sales. My happy place has always been in front of customers, it’s with my team in front of clients whether it’s at events, whether it’s in an AFCEA event, whether it’s in MeriTalk Cyber Smoke, whether it’s at the Pentagon, I like that for multiple reasons. #1, I like the motion of being out solving problems, that’s what gives me a thrill of being in sales in the first place, it’s finding a problem that you can solve. I also like coaching them, one of the things I like about being a sales leader is that you get to teach people how to change their life. I think that’s a pretty amazing job to be able to have and the best way for me to be able to do that I’ve always viewed as being out on the field with them.

Now this is out in the field with them, at least for now so I’ve had to adapt everything and do the same thing that we’re doing with our customers, it’s all online. That doesn’t change how we’re preparing, we still do role plays, as Bill correctly said, we don’t have time to do a pre-call meeting outside and a post-call debrief when you get outside, “What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What did you do right? What did you do wrong and how are we going to follow up?” and doing all those other things. But we have more time to do it in this kind of environment so whether it’s on GoToMeeting or whether it’s on Zoom or whether it’s on Teams, making sure that we’re spending that time and doing the debrief, doing the calls and doing the call prep. I’ve been doing a lot more of that online. I’ve also been doing what I never used to do before, we would have weekly calls from a Webex standpoint, weekly one-on-one’s, I never turned on my video prior to six months ago. In the last six months, my poor team has been suffering with this just like I have.

Fred Diamond: Bill, how about you? How have you changed as a sales leader in the last couple of months?

Bill Rowan: Fred, it’s interesting, much like Mike, if you gave me a choice I would take out in the field with a rep making sales calls every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Being in the office from time to time, the paperwork, some of the meeting stuff, I understand it’s a necessary evil but it’s not really the reason I got into the role and it’s not really what I enjoy. One of the things I really missed a lot was I have a very geographically separated sales organization. They’re in just about every state of the country except I think the Dakotas and Arkansas we don’t have anybody but we’ve got people pretty much all over the place.

One of the things that I really miss was if I was out in San Diego, go out and have dinner with the rep the night before or sometimes with a rep and his significant other or have lunch after the sales call and just talk about them and what’s going on and it not be about a deal. It not be about their forecast, it not be about pipeline, it’s how do you strengthen those relationships with those people that you don’t get a chance to see every day that might be in our home office either corporate or in Reston where the government office is. I miss that, so one of the things that I’ve tried to change is schedule just brief one-on-one’s with those folks and make it clear I don’t want to talk about numbers, I don’t want to talk about what the pipeline looks like, I want to talk about what’s going on with you, your family, I want to understand are there issues that I can help with? One of the things the company has done very well is the CEO has had a couple of days off, September 4th, this upcoming is going to be a company-wide holiday and I make it very clear to my reps. “I don’t want to see you on email, I want you to set stuff down, I want you to disconnect, there’s no excuse, we’re all working plenty of hours.” That’s a difficult thing for me to adapt, I’m one of those guys that if I look down on my phone and I see emails in the inbox, I want to get on and I want to see what’s going on, I want to respond. So I’ve had to adapt myself as well to say, “It’s the end of the day, these people need a break, they’ve been going all day long.” To be fair, it’s been a little bit of a tougher muscle memory for me to do that as well.

Fred Diamond: We have a related question that comes in here from Ken, and Ken is in Kensington, Maryland. Thank you so much, Ken, good to see you again.

Bill Rowan: Represent.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] Bill Rowan just gave you thumbs up, Ken, if you’re listening to the podcast. The question he asks is not just about your team but Mike, you eluded to this before that there are a lot of trade shows and industry type of events where there’s one every day. For people who are watching today’s webcast, listening to the podcast, outside of DC you can pretty much go to an event almost every day and see people in the industry and that’s probably one of the reasons how the two of you have reached the ranks that you did, by participating in a lot of those entities or organizations. I’m not going to ask what you’re doing but what are you encouraging your team to do? The salespeople on your team that aren’t able to go to an AFCEA or a DoDIIS event or any of the other events that are happening all the time around the DC area, Institute for Excellence in Sales programs. How are you coaching your team now?

They’ve missed five months of being in a hotel or a conference center with customers and peers, a lot of the success in the federal space is the co-petition or cooperation, if you will. How are you encouraging them? What are some things you’re telling them to do to build their networks when it’s a challenge and you can’t go meet people now? Nobody’s having events, there’s probably not going to be any in-person events at least through the end of 2020. Mike, how about you? What are you telling your people to do or what are your people telling you that they want to do to build those networks?

Mike Miller: As far as building the networks, there are more events online than you might imagine, probably a few too many. It doesn’t drive as much customer intimacy as we’re used to but there are certainly some that are better than others. All the events that have normally been happening whether it’s AFCEA Augusta or any of the other events that are happening and should have happened all summer long, many of those have had online components. I’ve been going myself and encouraging my team to go as well, I’ve also been setting up adjacent things. One of the advantages, for example, of going to an AFCEA and building those is because it has a much bigger marketing budget so they can afford to sponsor some of these happy hours. But to do something adjacent to that which is a little bit more private and a little bit smaller and you can actually have more realistic conversations. We’ve done several of these that have been adjacent to some of these other events and it’s invitation-only.

We had one that we did in partnership with some folks that you’ve spoken to, Bill Rucker from Trustwave, for example and Sanjay Sardar. We had an event after one of the recent civilian events and we did a private invitation-only cocktail reception and we had a lot of government CIO’s show up, it was really interesting. A lot is a relative term because we only had a dozen total but it was great and it was much more interactive and interesting. I’d encourage being creative, trying to find ways to do that so if there’s something going on and you have a handful of people that you know, reach out to those folks, sponsor an online Zoom thing and then have each commit to bringing three customers or three partners there.

Fred Diamond: Bill, we have a related question and the question comes from Erin in the DC region, I’m going to read out her question. “I work in public sector as well and today I ran into a situation where a customer wanted to meet in person, their whole staff is back at the office, I was very surprised. What are your organizations’ philosophies on in-person meetings right now? My company is saying no in-person meetings through the spring.” How are you handling things like this and what are some of your recommendations?

Bill Rowan: It’s a great question, Erin, and obviously some of this gets down to beyond company policy, there’s obviously an aspect that’s a personal choice. We have a broad blanket approach that says no large gatherings, gatherings of 20 or more do we want employees to attend. However, we have a couple situations where customers have asked us, it’s been only probably the intelligence community where they want us to come on site so we can discuss some matters that are relatively speaking, sensitive. I’ve left it up to the reps and the engineers and asked them if they feel comfortable with this, I’ve made it clear to them I do not want them hanging out in the cafeteria or something like that afterwards. Even though they may see that as a good bonding opportunity, I think that you’re showing your commitment both to the client and the mission as well as the company by doing the meeting in the first place.

I do think at some juncture you have to also appreciate the customer’s asking you specifically, they have a certain amount of trust they’re putting in you as much as you are putting trust in them and that can be something that obviously you’ve worked hard to build that trust level. Do what you feel comfortable, say, “Listen, we can meet in person, maybe we can meet someplace outdoors by your office” if that makes you feel more comfortable than maybe in a confined space. It’s a little bit what Mike spoke about, customers are really missing the interaction they get to have with us on a regular basis. We are in many cases their educational tool where they learn about what’s going on, they get trends not just to what’s going on within their organization but what are other organizations doing? Maybe it’s in logistics, it’s financial services, other areas, they may hear what their competitors are doing, what their competitors are working on so we’re in some cases a source of intelligence in the market industry as much as we are the product piece and they miss that interaction. Hats off to Erin because you have to look at this as you’ve built a certain amount of trust with that client that they’re asking specifically for you to come in and sit down. As with anything, it becomes a personal choice and what you’re comfortable with, at what point you say, “I’m comfortable here but I’m just not comfortable in this particular spot.”

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that comes in from Louisa and Louisa is in Illinois right outside of Chicago. Thank you, Louisa. Her question is, “What are your expectations for your sales professionals right now?” We’ll take that in two chunks: what are your expectations for your more senior sales professionals? I’m not going to put an age there, you can define it yourself, probably where we all are – at least you two [laughs] – and then secondly, what would be your expectations for maybe your more junior salespeople? This has been a really interesting time, we’ve had a nice run for about 10 years in sales especially enterprise and B to B sales and you’re absolutely right, Bill. You just mentioned we’re not with them every day so they’re having to figure things out, there’s a lot to be said by sitting in a conference room and just doing a one-on-one. When you’re looking at the Zoom or GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, there’s a different type of interaction no matter how honest you try to be. Before we get to your final action steps for the day, what are your expectations for your more seasoned people and what are your expectations for your more junior people? Mike, why don’t you go first?

Mike Miller: That’s a really interesting way to look at it and it’s a smart way to look at it. I think one of the challenges across the board is to balance work with burnout. I think what Bill’s company is doing as far as having people take a day off and forcing themselves to unplug is a great idea. I think to take it down to the more granular level of our team, what I would like our more seasoned people to do – again, obviously we have to balance all this with having to do our jobs – I’d like them to make sure that they are doing a really good job of reaching out and encouraging the rest of the team, keeping in touch with the rest of the team. Not just from a ‘how are they doing’ standpoint but making sure that they’re not feeling alone out there, there’s a lot of that where people are feeling isolated and you can get detached from the team.

One of the things with our corporate culture is we really want to be very focused on the team, that’s something both from a federal perspective and from a Veeam at large perspective. It’s really helpful when the more senior sales reps and more senior partner managers and people that have been here for a while do that and reach out and they’re inclusive and they’re part of the team. I think for everybody, especially if you’re new, it’s really important because we can’t work together, we’re not sitting across the desk from each other, it’s important for them to feel comfortable asking for help. Whether it’s help getting up to speed because they’re running into challenges with pipeline growth, whether they’re uncomfortable with some of the mandates that are put in place which is being vigorous with regards to pipeline and making sure that also when they need a break that they’re comfortable saying it.

Fred Diamond: Mike, I’m going to ask you for your final thought in a second, you have a second to think about it. Bill, how about you? What are your expectations for the people on your team right now? Again, it’s August 26th, you’ve got about 35 days left of the federal season and we’re 5 months into this pandemic.

Bill Rowan: Interestingly, I think some of my more senior people are probably more cautious about how this is going to work. We were going to ask them to go back to maybe where they were earlier in their career and become a rep who works the phone or a Zoom session, Teams, whatever the case might be and I think some of them maybe had some self-doubt about that. “That’s never been my skill, my skill has been in front of the client articulating the message.” What I’ve tried to encourage both my most junior people and my more seasoned folks is ask questions, ask your counterparts, we have leadership folks not just on the sales side but the technical side, the partner side. Don’t be afraid to reach out, run by a scenario, watch on the video pieces, watch your client’s body language, they’re giving the same tips often in video they might give you in person. I also think that customers are willing to share sometimes a little bit more insight, they’re a little bit more confused, “I don’t know this.”

I have a rep the other day who said, “We’ve articulated the issue three or four separate times of how they could solve a specific problem” and finally the rep did something I’ve never done, “I sent them a couple YouTube links and said ‘here, there’s a couple YouTubes that describe exactly what you’re trying to do with the technology'” and the customer said, “It was fantastic, it was two minutes, it was visual, I got the message.” People are utilizing different skills than maybe they otherwise realized they could have used or other tools that are out there. So my expectation is probably sometimes lower, a lot of your more senior reps put the bar very high for themselves so they’re trying to come up with new creative ways to continue to move the bar up, that’s what’s always made them A players. I’m sure Mike has got a group of the same sort of things so at some level it’s probably more bringing them in a little bit and going, “We’re going to be in this for the long haul, let’s continue to pace ourselves here.” At the end of the day, we’re always learning, we’re all learning new things so ask questions whenever you can ask questions.”

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Mike Miller from Veeam and Bill Rowan from VMWare. You can go back and you could learn more about Mike and Bill, their careers, go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com/mikemiller to hear Mike’s original interview or salesgamechangerspodcast.com/billrowan to hear bill’s original interview. Gentlemen, give us an action step, give us something that the audience can take away with to be more successful today. We’re beginning to get a lot of nice thoughts, Michael says, “Thank you”, Nick says, “Thank you”, Pam says, “Thank you so much for this.” Give us an action step, something nice, crisp and succinct that our audience can take home to be more successful today. Mike, why don’t you go first? Then Bill, you can bring us home.

Mike Miller: Fred, it seems like the word of the day is empathy and I’m just going to close with that because I think the most important quality that anybody can have whether it’s in sales or in life is to be empathetic. I think that the most important thing that we can do as sales professionals as we leave this, as we go into the rest of the week, as we go into next week and as we continue in our career is to bear that in mind. Also, have an athletic approach to how we manage our business. We have to make sure that we’re maximizing the time that we put towards this, that we maximize the amount that we’re able to interact with our customers, the amount of information that we’re able to convey, the amount of information we’re able to get from those customers so we can be respectful of their time and that we can get back to them much more rapidly and quickly with good key answers to help them solve mission problems. I think the key to remember is that we all own our successes and we all own our failures.

Fred Diamond: Erin says, “Thank you so much, great episode.” Sandy says, “Great episode”, thank you all so much for watching. Bill, give us something to take us home.

Bill Rowan: I couldn’t agree more with Mike on the empathy piece. I think there’s another component to this and this goes back to the actual people themselves. You need to figure out a way to celebrate about your successes and your accomplishments in this new world. It used to be again, going back several quarters we were in an office, we would pull everybody together and you’d recognize someone. We still try to do a little bit of that online but I’ve encouraged people, “Listen, you had a great week, you got a big order in, share a bottle of wine with your loved one or significant other.

Go make yourself a big dinner, turn stuff off, turn the computer off, put the phone down, make yourself a really nice dinner at home and use it as a way to celebrate the successes that you’re having along the way.” This is a stressful time on all of us and I think it’s just as important if not more important to recognize the accomplishments. We’re all using a lot of different muscles that we haven’t had to use before or haven’t had to use in a long time and that’s something to be celebrated that we may not have realized. We have the skills that we’re utilizing day in and day out, we can’t let that opportunity pass without taking the time to recognize those.

Fred Diamond: Once again, Bill Rowan from VMWare, Mike Miller from Veeam, thank you both for the great insights. Thank you both, be well and stay safe.

Bill Rowan: Thank you guys, appreciate it.

Mike Miller: Thanks, Fred. Thanks, Bill.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 265: VMWare’s Bill Rowan and Veeam’s Mike Miller Offer This Sage Advice for Sales Professionals Serving Public Sector Customers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 188: Veeam Enterprise Sales Chief Mike Durso Explains How Strategic Hustle Sets Him and His Sales Teams Apart

MIKE’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Take accountability for your actions and before you look at someone else in your organization, look at what you could have done differently to change the situation.”

Mike Durso is the Vice President for US Enterprise at Veeam Software.

He was actually referred to us by a previous guest, Christian Woodward.

Prior to coming to Veeam, held sales leadership positions at VMware and Dell.

We also interviewed Mike Miller from Veeam for this podcast.

Find Mike on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about you that we need to know.

Mike Durso: In terms of my background, I was born and raised in Philadelphia so I am a product of the City of Brotherly Love. I went to school about 12 blocks away at Drexel, I’m married, I’ve been married for 14 years to my high school sweetheart, believe it or not. We have three wonderful kids, 12, 10 and 2 and a half.

Fred Diamond: You went to Drexel, did you do that co-op program that they have there that’s so good?

Mike Durso: I did, I am a big fan of the co-op program. It was a five year program where you go to school for the entire 5 years, the middle 3 years you actually work for 6 months of the 12 months of the year. The program does a great job preparing you to write resume, to do an intelligent interview and to land a position in the real world ideally in the field that you’re studying so that you get some perspective on what you may do for the next 30 or 40 years. It was a great experience.

Fred Diamond: It’s great to have you on the podcast. Tell us a little more about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Mike Durso: Veeam is a 13-year old privately owned software company that provides a single platform cloud, virtual and physical backup replication and cloud data management. We’ve got over 350 thousand customers worldwide and I lead the team that is responsible for the Fortune 1000 for all intents and purposes in the United States. It’s a relatively new segment that we’ve created, about three years ago when I started Veeam was very focused and very successful in the SMB and commercial market. The interest was to build an enterprise market and really move upstream which is a unique experience for a software company.

I was brought in to build that from the ground up and it’s been an incredible 3 years, an incredible company culture and we’re having a lot of success. In terms of what excites me, I had the benefit of being at Dell at the tail end of the client server shift and then moving to VMware and really creating a market around virtualization was what VMware did. I rode that wave for 9 years and saw that massive transformation in the industry. I think now we’ve shifted to this multi cloud world and Veeam is dead smack in the middle of that, so it’s an exciting time. It’s transformational, Veeam is very disruptive in a market that’s being disrupted so it’s just exciting to get out of bed every morning.

It’s exciting to go be a part of an industry and a company that embraces change and embraces disruption.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people we’ve interviewed on the Sales Game Changers podcast from companies like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are obviously all about the cloud and all about security so we’ll talk about that as we go along there. I’ve got a quick question, a lot of people who listen to the Sales Game Changers podcast like to know specifically who you sell to. You mentioned Fortune 1000 but what type of titles do you sell to? Is it CTO, Director of Storage? Tell us about some of those people.

Mike Durso: We classify it as TDM’s technical decision makers and EDM’s executive decision makers and that really does hit that CTO, VP of Infrastructure, VP of Storage. Our product shows very well technically so we do a lot of work at the technical level. We’re selling backup which is not always the sexiest piece of the data center but it’s an incredibly important one and an incredibly strategic one. We hit the gamut of IT infrastructure, we’re starting to branch out now with some of the newer products around backup for Office 365 into the compliance organizations and into the legal groups. We hit your traditional infrastructure stack with a little bit in the compliance and legal.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales as a career? Take us back to the beginning.

Mike Durso: I was a student at Drexel like I said earlier, and the co-op program landed me a role in a company called Lexmark which was at that time a spin-off of IBM, it was a printer company. It’s a funny story, I went in for the first co-op interview and I sat down with a gentleman who’s still a mentor of mine today. He didn’t ask me a question about anything related to business, to any skill set, he was interested in the fact that I had played football in the Philadelphia Catholic League because he had played football in the Philadelphia Catholic League.

There was an immediate connection there, something as silly as football. You being from Philadelphia, the Catholic League Football program is a fraternity, so to speak and he said, “You got the job because you played for La Salle and you played football.” At that point we had a lot of commonality and he took me under his wing and really helped groom me early on in my sales career. I was watching him and the rest of the people in the office and recognizing, “This is something that I really want to do.” It has that competitive nature, it’s a lot like playing athletics. I was playing lacrosse at Drexel at the time so there was just an immediate attraction to the competitive nature of sales.

Fred Diamond: We’ve actually interviewed some lacrosse players on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Christine Barger was on the Maryland Division, won Championship Team in 1994 and Mike Lewis from Iron Mountain also played in the University of Massachusetts. Just curiously, did you know you were going to go into sales when you were in Drexel? Was that what you were planning on doing or were you thinking about a technical career? I’m just curious.

Mike Durso: It’s a funny question, I’ll give you a real honest answer. My initial major at Drexel was MIS so it was about Management Information Systems and I took my first coding class and I had one of the really bright guys on my team do my homework for me for the first two weeks and I realized, “Maybe this technical side of things isn’t exactly for me.” At that point I shifted over to marketing and had a sales/marketing class and just had some exposure to some people in the business through that co-op program and recognized, “This is really what I want to do.”

Fred Diamond: When you went to Lexmark what were some of the key lessons you learned from some of your first few sales jobs?

Mike Durso: A lot of the basics. They were an IBM spin-off so they had a lot of that fundamental training and a lot of the blocking and tackling of sales, things like being prepared, the importance of networking. I would say what I learned most from Mike was the idea to get up and compete every day. At that point Mike would go in the office every Sunday night and he would plan out his week. He would – I don’t want to say make – strongly encourage that I met him in the office on Sunday nights to help him plan for his week. Just seeing that level of work ethic, seeing that competitive nature that he had and how he prepared was very important to me and very attractive to me.

What I also saw from Mike was he happened to be #1 sales rep in the company at that point. The success he had, the money he was making, the benefits of his hard work was very evident and he talked a lot about that, and that was very attractive to me at that age to say, “It’s important that you can work really hard, but if you work really hard and you put that in, there’s a significant reward on the back end of it.”

Fred Diamond: As you’re playing lacrosse, what are some of the lessons you could shift from being on the field that you shifted into sales leadership?

Mike Durso: I always say I was a football player playing lacrosse. I didn’t really ever become a lacrosse player probably until early in college a little bit. It took me some time, at that point the game had evolved to the point where people were playing it at 5 and 6 years old where it is now, where it’s exploded across the country. I was a football player playing lacrosse, so when you got to college or you got to those higher level of high school programs you were uncomfortable. You were uncomfortable because you may be able to run and you were as strong and as fast as the other players but you weren’t naturally as gifted with a stick or your stick skills weren’t at the caliber they needed to be.

There were some uncomfortable times in playing in some different teams and even getting into college where you couldn’t necessarily rely on your athleticism anymore. That theory of learning to be comfortable in a very uncomfortable situation, I learned that a lot later in life doing some other things outside of other sports. It’s an important factor of adjusting and how to be comfortable in a very uncomfortable situation and then exploring that and going to working your butt off to make sure you’re not uncomfortable the next time.

Fred Diamond: That’s a fascinating answer, did you feel that you had to prove something to Mike when you were starting out? Again, he took a chance on you, you guys both played in the Catholic Leagues in Philly and that automatically gave you the job so good for you, but did you feel you had to prove and did you work extra hard to make sure you proved him right?

Mike Durso: Absolutely. There was a point of that where you did whatever you were asked to do and it didn’t matter what it was, you did it. I describe it very similar to a freshman on a lacrosse team or on a football team, you might have to carry the water and you might have to carry the senior’s helmet and you might have to go through the – I won’t use the word hazing because I think it’s a little taboo these days – but you might have to do some things that are uncomfortable. Same thing when I went there, I had that background.

A quick story: there was a time when we were delivering a multi-function device, a copier/scanner/printer/fax, a big one altogether up to an organization, an office at Lucent in Northern New Jersey and Mike rented a rider truck to deliver this thing up there. We didn’t have the proper ties, he didn’t know how to tie it down so he stuck me in the back of the rider truck and I had to secure this thing for about 50 minutes up to Turnpike to make sure that it wasn’t sliding around in the back of the truck. That was something that you never thought you would do but he asked me to do it, I think he did it as a joke and to haze me a little bit, but I did it and it’s things like that that show your commitment. That’s a very silly example, but I think when you’re young in your career you have to stand out and that was a way that I said, “I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”

Fred Diamond: You’ve got to come in sometimes on the weekend like you mentioned, he suggested you come in on Sunday night, you probably had some other things you would rather have done on Sunday but you came in. We’ve heard some great stories on the Sales Game Changers podcast where young sales professionals did have that kind of guy and if you put your trust in them, they were going to help you get to where they are. You’ve got to do some things that you don’t necessarily want to do, but you do them.

Mike Durso: What’s interesting about that is I didn’t provide any value on those Sunday night meetings. I wasn’t doing anything that was helping Mike plan for his week, what I was doing was learning from him and understanding how he was approaching his week so he was helping me and also testing me to see if I’d make the commitment, if I’d show up at 6 o’clock on a Sunday night.

Fred Diamond: If you’re playing high school football in Catholic League in Philadelphia, you’re out there digging it and you’re pretty gritty and you’re hustling out there, that’s definitely a sign that you’re going to do the things that they’re asking you to do. Again, we’re talking to Mike Durso, he’s the VP for US Enterprise at Veeam Software. Mike, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Mike Durso: I could probably list 10 things that I’m not an expert in, much easier. I’d love to tell you I’m an expert in high school football which I still might be, but I don’t think you want to hear about that. I would say based on the last 10 years of my career, I’ve taken a real interest and had some success around building teams, establishing a culture and then expanding that into hyper-growth. The opportunity I had at VMware to be a part of the original healthcare team and really expand that across the country and then the opportunity I’ve had the last 3 years at Veeam to initiate this enterprise business, it’s been a lot of fun.

I’d like to think based on results and people that have followed me that I’ve done a good job with it, I don’t know that I’d ever go as far as to say I’m brilliant or an expert at it but it’s something that I really enjoy doing and we’ve had some success in two separate areas now.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the big achievements that you’ve had over the last 3 years to make Veeam established in the enterprise base? Because you’re right, it’s completely different in a lot of ways selling to small businesses versus Fortune 1000 – longer sale cycle, there’s more people involved. Tell us some of the things that you’ve had to accomplish to help Veeam get successful in that marketplace.

Mike Durso: First and foremost which I think is the most difficult thing – and I won’t say me, I’ll say we because there’s a handful of people that really helped me build this – we had to hire 55-60 people in probably an 8 month time frame. The beauty of that is working for a private company, I won’t say they wrote me a blank check but they said, “Go build this and build it fast” where in other companies it’s a ramp strategy where you hire 5 and see how it goes and then hire another 10. They let me do this pretty aggressively pretty quickly but there’s a massive challenge that comes with that.

At that point we didn’t really know what the enterprise at Veeam was, we didn’t know what the hiring profile was. We had an idea, but I don’t think we nailed it in the first round. That was a big challenge for us, just to hire that many people and get this off the ground that fast and not be a boat anchor for the rest of the business which had had 25-26 straight double digit growth quarters. Ramping those people and getting people to believe that this was the right place for the next step in their career despite not having a real good enterprise presence.

Fred Diamond: Are you having fun? Have the last 3 years been fun?

Mike Durso: Absolutely, it’s been a ton of fun. Any time you get an opportunity to build something from the ground up. Anytime you have an opportunity to work for great people and for a great set of leadership that has a vision and that has had a tremendous amount of success, they made it very easy to build the organization in terms of funding which again, is a huge challenge for other companies. They’ve made it so easy, the support they’ve given me and the support that the leadership at Veeam has provided in terms of “go get it done.” The hard part is obviously going out there and disrupting 15 year legacy relationships.

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

Mike Durso: I think mentorship is an incredibly important part of every salesperson’s career, every sales leader’s career. I met countless mentors over the years, there’s two or three of them that really stand out. My first management job, my first step into leadership was at VMware and I worked for a gentleman that was fierce, he was incredibly direct and he demanded a certain level of preparation. I tell this story all the time, the forecast calls that he would do were intense and there were tears – not from me, but there were tears from other people – there was a lot of uncomfortableness.

He really wanted to push you to see how committed you were to your business and how well you knew it. That forced a level of preparation for me that was so positive to have early on in my management career, because I would spend hours the night before preparing, I’d be up at 6 am that day making sure I had everything. Whether I did that or not, he still had a few things on that call that he would stump me with but you learn how to react to that, you learn how to think on your feet and you learn how to in certain instances just say, “I don’t know, I’m not sure and I’m going to go get that information.”

I think today a lot of people try to talk around in circles and do the jedi mind trick with folks. With people like that in leadership, my advice would be if you don’t know, say you don’t know. It’s okay not to have every answer but if you try to make something up with him, he sniffed it out and there was blood in the water. He was a tremendous mentor of mine because he demanded such a high standard of preparation, learn that early in your career. There’s other folks, the former COO at VMware is somebody that I consider a mentor and I’ve probably had maybe 5 or 6 live conversations with him in the last 3 or 4 years. He probably didn’t even know he was a mentor of mine, but I was watching him, I was watching how he prepared for his kick-off presentations, I was listening to him, I was watching his manners and how he interacted on analyst calls or on earnings reports calls.

Watching him in front of the sales folks, watching him with customers, I was really studying his behaviors and he may not have even known it but to me, he’s still a huge mentor of mine. I reflect on the things he did and I leverage a lot of what his approaches were today.

Fred Diamond: In your sales management style do you use a lot of sports analogies? I’m just curious.

Mike Durso: I do and sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t simply because it’s so second nature to me, but I don’t know that everybody always can relate to it. In a lot of cases I’ll apologize for them, but I do still find them as a big part of it. There’s a video, I think it came out a couple weeks ago about Nick Saban and I sent it out to my team and I referenced it on a call. It was just about how high performers want to be with high performers and low performers don’t like the high performers, it was a very interesting thing. I use analogies like that all the time.

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

Mike Durso: I have listened to your show, I said I listened to 3 or 4 episodes and Woody said this and I think Bill said it, too. I’ll say the same thing and I’ll go in a little bit of a different direction. Our job as leaders is to hire, develop and retain top talent, flat out that’s what we need to do. I’ve used the phrase a lot in the last month where we need to hire folks with something called “strategic hustle.” When I say that, the idea of hiring a very strategic rep today typically means you’re looking at that person that has gam-like responsibilities, somebody that’s managed the matrix organization maybe with two or three accounts and has gone incredibly deep and wide. That’s such an incredible skill set, it takes a lot of talent and practice to get good at that.

At Veeam we’re not quite there yet where we’re at the point of having two or three accounts, we’ve got 20, 30, 40 accounts. You have to have that strategic ability to build a long term contract, to do a very significant account plan to manage a matrix organization but you have to have that hustle to work the channel, to work the alliances organization, to manage a party or marketing business. It’s still a very wide range of skill sets that you need to be successful here and I think it comes down to finding that person with strategic hustle. It’s a unique skill set and when you find it, there’s a handful of people on our team today that have it and have just mastered it, it is unbelievable.

The other one I would say is that technology is constantly changing and being disrupted, finding people that are comfortable in change and comfortable with disruption and can thrive in that is not an easy thing. People inherently don’t like change and that just doesn’t work for our business, it flies in 17 different directions at any moment so finding people that are able to adapt well and maneuver is important.

Fred Diamond: Strategic hustle makes a lot of sense. Again, especially as a company which is making this big shift or has made this big shift from selling to the SMB into Fortune 1000. Like we eluded to before, there’s so many more people involved, there’s also more people in corporate here involved. Now you have different types of contracts, different types of companies have to purchase a different way, some companies may have 90 day terms, if you will and they have certain types of standards they need to meet that you have to meet now.

To be a successful sales leader into the Fortune 1000 is critically different, you have to manage the team, you have to understand their technology requirements. You guys are also new kids on the block in a lot of ways so they’ve probably had some of your previous VMware potentially already there. There’s so many factors that have to go into it and since you’re working for a new company, a funded company that’s been around for a shorter amount of time you don’t have the time that you did. You have to hustle, I love that expression, strategic hustle. You’re going to trademark it?

Mike Durso: I think I should.

Fred Diamond: You should before Nick Saban does, you better hustle on that.

Mike Durso: [Laughs] I probably stole it from somebody and don’t realize it so I should look before I trademark it.

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

Mike Durso: I’ve got a couple different ways that I can take this question. The first one I’ll give you was an actual win and I was the first line leadership at the time leading a team of sales reps in the Southeast. We’d spent about a year calling on one of the largest healthcare institutions in the country and everything you’ve just described around contracts – difficulty in getting to the executive level, difficulty with the technology – all those things were magnified in this account because it was so big. One of the best sales reps I ever worked with who actually spent some time with me here at Veeam was leading the account at the time. No one had done a $10 million dollar deal in healthcare business at VMware at the time. My old CEO used to use this, Roger Bannister, with the four minute mile. Once he broke the four minute mile which took a long time to do, I think since then 1400 people have done it since the 50’s. It was a little bit of that, we had to break this milestone of a $10 million dollar mega-deal and it took a long time.

I was in Nashville which is one of my favorite cities, probably every other week for 6 months my leadership was there, that COO I referenced was flown in a couple of times. We finally got the deal and it was just so satisfying to break that milestone. A really cool part about it was there’s an argument over whether the deal size was broken but it was about a month later, there was a deal in very similar size that came in and then the floodgates opened and we started to make that a normal part of the business. It was a monumental win at that point. That’s everything I’ll say because I think this is an important one, it’s probably the thing I’m most proud of related to my time at VMware and it’s interesting.

I left VMware in July of 2016, we had built the healthcare business, we had it up and running and it was really in a very positive direction, we had been recognized on two straight earning calls by Pat Gelsinger as pacing North America with our results. I left at the height and when I left I had built a very good management team of incredibly talented leaders. They had success for three straight quarters after I left, it was actually better than what we did when I was there and that was a big feather in my cap and one of those things as a leader you look back and say, “They really didn’t need me at that point.”

That business, we had built it and put it in a position for it to continue to grow, I exited the business to do something else and they kept growing and kept doing really well. What happened after those three quarters is another story, but the three quarters after that they really kept churning and doing a good job which was just satisfying for me to know that you put them in a position and they executed afterwards.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? As you were sitting in the back of those rider trucks holding onto copiers moving up the Jersey Turnpike did you ever say to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Mike Durso: I don’t think I ever said that sales was too hard. I was a basketball coach through college after I stopped playing lacrosse and at one point I had an opportunity to be a graduate assistant for a college basketball program. I thought for a few minutes that that may be something I wanted to explore, I didn’t and at that point I knew that sales was the direction. In my mid 20’s after selling for 3 or 4 years I was working for Dell and I started to train some martial arts. For probably about a 3 day period I was convinced I was going to be a UFC champion [Laughs] I was going to quit my job and sell everything I owned and pick up a move and that dream came crashing down pretty quickly when I got a little smack of reality. At that point I never really considered anything else and at this point in my career I don’t think I ever would consider doing something different other than maybe owning a business and doing something at a little bit of a larger scale, but there’s still a huge sales component to that piece, too.

[Sponsor Break]

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

Mike Durso: I don’t think this is rocket science what I’m about to say, but I do think it’s incredibly important. Be overly prepared, know your business, know it stone cold, know it inside and out but be humble. I think that’s a big piece of being a young sales rep, you need to find a way to stand out but you need to do it with humility and with an understanding of your business that other people look at you and say, “That guy or gal really knows their business. I need to do what they’re doing.”

Fred Diamond: What does it look like, being humble?

Mike Durso: It’s funny in sales when you talk about humility because by nature it’s an individual sport. You have a team that works with you but you’re competing against your peers to be at the top of the quota list. I think it means when you do something really well, being open and sharing it in a positive way that you’re trying to help your team. Sharing those best practices and also not sticking your chest out, it’s the other portion of sales. You’re only as good as your last – whether it be 13 week quarter or annual plan. Not a big fan of the reps that like to pound their chest and tell everyone how great they are because the next day you could lose that next big deal or that next quarter you could be on the bottom of the list. It’s about having that steady humility and really approaching it in a team concept. Yes, you are responsible for your individual quota but if you’re doing something really well and it’s working, share it. Make sure you share it with your peers across the country so that they can be a part of it.

Fred Diamond: Especially in a growth organization when you’re all growing and you’re all learning. Mike, tell us one of your selling habits that has led to your sales success.

Mike Durso: Around leadership and selling habits I believe in honesty, transparency and accountability. It’s very important as a leader to be honest with your leadership team, to let them know the priorities of the company, to let them know the why. If you do that, it leads to building trust which then you can get to the transparency and accountability. If you’re not honest and you don’t build that trust, there will be a blockade between that transparency both ways, from the leader down to the manager down to the sales rep and vice versa.

I think that can not only be ineffective for a sale cycle and ineffective to drive revenue, but it affects the culture of the team you’re trying to build. That transparency, good or bad, is really to me what helps build that positive culture and have people want to be a part of it. The other side of that is you have to hold people accountable for what they say they’re going to do. If you’re honest and you’re transparent about the expectations, there should be no issue with accountability.

Fred Diamond: Mike, tell us a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success.

Mike Durso: Veeam is going through a very interesting time. Again, privately held software company, we’ve been profitable for probably 8 or 9 of the 13 years, we’re in a very strong financial position. We’re also going through a shift in licensing from a perpetual license model to a subscription license model. The question on how to do that and how to do it effectively and not only manage the financials of the company, the cash of the company but also how it affects the reps, how it affects the individual teams, how it affects product development and engineering that is building these product in a different way. They’re going to be consumed differently so it’s a challenge we’re working through right now.

I think like any challenge you work through, communication, transparency, making sure we’re bringing all the people to the table that have experience around these types of things and can really make sure we do it in the right way. It’s a very fun challenge to go through because there’s so many different dynamics to making this shift. Adobe has got a great story about it, they were a publicly traded company, they chose to do it cold turkey and they took a little bit of a hit for a few years – actually, they took a lot of a hit for a few years in their stock price. Now it’s a darling of Wall Street, now they’ve turned it around in the subscription business. We don’t have to do that publicly, it’s something we can do at our own pace but in the long run, I think it’s the right thing for the company and for our customers, which is probably the most important.

Fred Diamond: Why have you continued? Tell us what it is about sales as a career that has kept you going.

Mike Durso: A lot of it is the thrill of the hunt and I think that’s either in your DNA or it isn’t. That’s a big piece of it for me, I think the other piece is there’s very few careers out there where your earnings are directly tied to your performance. My dad worked for Johnson & Johnson for 20 years in finance and tax and he did great, he had an incredible career but I think if you asked him, his career was based on every 5 years you get a promotion and a slight bump and then maybe you get the 2% or 3%. In our world, you can dramatically affect your lifestyle and your income at any given year based on how hard you work, how strategic you are, how smart you are in going after the right accounts and how creative you are building a deal.

Those are fun things to me that you really do control your own destiny, so to speak. That’s a different career than a lot of others, if you have a couple bad years, it can be a challenge. Thankfully we haven’t had that but that thrill of the hunt and that opportunity to really go out and control your earnings is a fun piece of it for me.

Fred Diamond: Again, I want to thank Mike Durso, he’s the VP of US Enterprise at Veeam Software. I also want to make a quick comment, Mike. We’re doing today’s show – I’m not going to say specifically where – but it’s one of your customers, we’re doing this from a conference room at a really nice firm that’s a customer of yours. You must have developed strong relationships with your customers along the way. We really didn’t talk about that too much, but again when you’re selling into the Fortune 1000 there has to be this trust, especially with something like Veeam which is relatively new to that marketplace. Talk about your customer relationships before we ask you for your final thought.

Mike Durso: I mentioned trust, transparency and accountability and I reference it from an internal perspective. If you look at any healthy relationship out there, I’d guess that trust, transparency and accountability are a part of it. That’s been my mantra, I grew up as a sales rep, I think it’s important to say that I have a lot of sales reps that listen to this. When I started, I was a rep at Dell. When I started at VMware I was handed a list of zip codes, this was before they segmented the business and I was a sales rep going out there hustling every day building those relationships. The gentleman that is letting us use the conference room today is a CTO of, like you said, a large firm in Philadelphia. I met him as a Dell sales rep in 2005 and we’ve maintained a relationship for almost 15 years now.

It’s incredibly important, the old theory of people buy from people who they like has been around forever because it’s true. I think that likeability factor, understanding who somebody is, getting to know them as a person, getting to know what makes them tick, first of all it makes people feel comfortable. Second of all, it gives you an insight on how they’re going to operate in a negotiation or in a deal, so there’s no question. Building relationships and just being a regular person, that’s what I try. Don’t try to be somebody you’re not, be yourself and if you’re a likeable, honest, trustworthy person you shouldn’t have an issue building relationships.

Fred Diamond: Again, today’s Sales Game Changers podcast we talked to Mike Durso. I want to thank Christian Woodward who also referred us to Mike and of course, Mike Miller at Veeam. Mike, give us one final thought to inspire. You’ve given us so many great ideas, but give us one final thought to inspire our listeners around the globe today.

Mike Durso: Thanks, Fred. This has been so much fun, I’ve always had a dream – I think I mentioned this in your interview – of being on the Joe Rogan podcast so this is the next best thing to me, so I’m excited to be here. I would say one final thought, I’m a big believer in a theory of extreme ownership, so I love to follow military folks and navy seals. A lot of people read leadership books, those are the books I focus on because I think they are in the most intense situations. They are truly putting their life on the line and they have to do a lot of the things that we have to do every day, obviously on a much more important and much more grandiose scale than what we do.

There’s a book by Jocko Willink called Extreme Ownership, I’m sure it’s probably been referenced on the podcast before. The concept of taking accountability for your actions and before you look at someone else in your organization, what could you have done differently to change that situation? I have that conversation with my daughter who’s 12 all the time to try to avoid blaming other people and look at what you could have done differently to change the situation.

The concept in that book is there’s no bad teams, only bad leaders and I really subscribe to that. My management team will tell you I reference that all the time so I think it’s the concept of really looking at yourself, look at what you could do differently to affect a situation. How can you own it and how can you make a situation – a sales call, a sales process, a sales funnel – better rather than pointing the finger at a bunch of other directions?

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 188: Veeam Enterprise Sales Chief Mike Durso Explains How Strategic Hustle Sets Him and His Sales Teams Apart first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 072: Veeam Software Federal Sales Leader Mike Miller Stresses How Taking an Athletic Approach to Your Sales Efforts Can Lead to Huge Success

MIKE’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “It’s having an athletic approach to managing your business. It’s being driven. And when I say athletic approach, I don’t just mean the physical demands of it. I mean you have to look at what you do as a profession, you have to train for it, you have to be aggressive about it, you have to not take no for an answer and you have to understand that failure is a part of it. “

Mike Miller is a technology sales executive with almost 30 years’ experience in building winning sales and management teams.

His well-rounded background includes experiences in direct sales and leading teams from 6 people to over 1,000.

Mike has been the GM and SVP of North America Sales for CA, has run the public sector sales teams at Juniper Networks, has run world-wide sales for a few interesting startups, owns a sales training and management consulting business and now manages the federal business for Veeam Software.

Find Mike on LinkedIN!

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

Mike Miller: I work with Veeam Software, we sell high performance replication backup and recovery software all across the data management space and we have a lot that sales guys get excited about. From a technology standpoint, our software never breaks and I can tell you for somebody that’s been doing this for 30 years, you can almost never say that. It’s really exciting to have software that’s that reliable.

Our partners are Cisco, HPE, VMWare, IPM, Exagrid, NetApp, PureStorage, the list goes on. They’re all amongst the premier partners in the industry. Many of them sell our software direct and sell them on their own price list which is very exciting. We’re an 827 million dollar company still growing at 30% per year. In fact, in over 30% per year, year over year. One of the things that I’ve always looked for as a sales rep is we have a unique business value, in fact, we have more than one.

We’re the only company in this marketplace that can guarantee that back-ups will actually recover your environment. And as any sales rep knows, if you have a unique business value, that gives you something to sell. You find somebody that needs that and you focus on it.

Fred Diamond: Who typically do you sell to? Is it a peer IT sale or you sell obviously in the federal space. Tell us a little bit about your customer.

Mike Miller: Our customer ranges from somebody who is working at the data management storage level, so at the administrative level all the way up to program managers. The more important it is to have the applications back-up and running, the more mission critical those things are, the further up the food chain we have a tendency to go.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been a career sales person, we mentioned 30 years of technology sales with some great brands such as CA. Tell us about the beginning of your career, how did you first get into sales as a career?

Mike Miller: My first job in sales was with the Washington Bullets selling season tickets. I would drive around the Beltway to the capital center when in 1977, 78, when they were actually on their way to winning a world championship, so it was a lot of fun and it was actually easy to sell so I thought sales was like that. When I got out of college, I tried my hand at utilizing my degree in economics to manage a bank and ultimately because I also had to wait tables to make ends meet I started gravitating back towards sales as a profession.

So I took a job selling first investment products, so I was a stock broker and then I took a job selling home improvements because they gave us leads and then I met my future brother in law who was working for a little start-up at the time 1984 called Oracle, still a very small company, and he told me that they were paying him a base salary of 60 thousand dollars a year which to me was inconceivable at the time.

My biggest goal in life was to make 100 thousand dollars a year. He told me they were paying that in base salary plus commissions, so I knew I was in the wrong business and I wanted to get in that business so I started selling copiers so I could have business experience and reading the want ads every day, and eventually I found a job for software, didn’t say what the company was and that company turned out to be CA.

Fred Diamond: CA of course, was known as Computer Associates at them time and it was a classic technology company with a classic sales environment as well.

Mike Miller: Absolutely. In fact, if Charles (Wang) was still there, I’d probably still be there but Charles was an amazing man. He actually wanted to emulate EMC at the time, so he was very focused on getting the best sales people that he possibly could because he was one of the best sales people that I ever met, if not the best sales person that I ever met. It was a great place to grow up.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned you started your career selling tickets for the Washington bullets or sponsorships? What did you have to sell?

Mike Miller: Season tickets. They would have a stand at the end of the portals in the capital center and sell season tickets, and the team was doing so well that it was easy because we would sell season tickets by getting a deposit from the people that were interested in going to see the team last year and everybody that wanted to buy play-off tickets got first on the list if they were a season ticket holder.

Fred Diamond: We actually interviewed Patrick Duffy who’s the VP of partner sales at Monumental. Mike Miller: Great firm.

Fred Diamond: Yeah, great firm and of course, they actually won an award from the Institute for Excellence in Sales last year. What are some of the things that you remember from that, or even maybe selling some of the investment products you did that have carried with you today?

Mike Miller: The earlier lessons that I had were that sales were hard. It was a very difficult profession and it was something at the time that I found much more intimidating than exciting. The Washington Bullets piece was actually reasonably easy because again, people wanted to get access to the playoff tickets, so I thought sales was just going to be simple, was just a matter of showing up. And as it turned out, a lot of the early sales that we made cancelled, because all they really wanted was access to playoff tickets and they were perfectly happy to give up their 50 dollar deposit on season tickets. Later on, after the season was over I learned that it was much more of a grind, it was much harder getting out there and trying to get people to give you money for a product.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. Did you like selling the sports products?

Mike Miller: I did, I liked everything about being 17 years old and being associated with the world championship basketball team and being able to go out to the capital center and meet great players and ownership and be able to see concerts because I was out there. All that sort of stuff was fun. The job itself was great during the season and became much more challenging during the summer time when once again, we were out going from business to business trying to convince businesses to buy season tickets. And it was back at the time when season tickets weren’t very expensive, they were 9 dollars for center court per game.

Fred Diamond: When along your career path did you make the shift into selling into the federal marketplace?

Mike Miller: That’s a great question. I was at CA for 7 years. I started as a sales rep selling commercial with the worst possible territory which is sort of how things were in most companies and certainly it was how it worked in CA. I did really well in my first year, I did double my annual quota in my first year so I got a good territory. In my second year I did triple my annual quota and then I got moved into management and I was terrible at it. I begged to be demoted and I was.

Eventually, I got a really good mentor who taught me how to manage so I was moved back into management and when I was ready to make the move from regional VP position into a senior VP position, that was when I was moved to commercial from public sector.

Fred Diamond: You just raised up something that comes up once in a while during the Sales Game Changers podcast, the missed notion that you should move your top reps into sales management. Obviously now, you’ve had a great career as a sales leader and you mentor a lot of people, and you’re leading federal sales as you mentioned before and you mentioned during the introduction that you’ve managed as many as a thousand people.

Take us back to that moment, though, because we have a lot of people listening to today’s podcast that are you 20, 30 years ago that want to get into a rich and growth career in sales. What triggered the notion for you that you hated it and you wanted to be demoted out of sales management?

Mike Miller: That’s a great question. When I moved into management, I always felt as a sales rep that it was going to be easier because you get to spread the risk, you get to mitigate the pain a little bit. What I learned when I moved in there was that in fact what you’re doing is you’re not spreading the risk, you’re no longer having one quota, you’re having five quotas. It’s one big quota, but it’s still for five people. what I was finding myself doing was that I was still selling really well with my existing customers and the people that worked for me responded well to the way that I responded from a management standpoint.

They did well, but the people that didn’t respond well to that didn’t do well. So I went from doing double and triple quota to barely scraping by and doing less than half the quota. As it turned out, there were some fundamental lessons that I had not learned and the most important one that one of my mentors taught me later on in my career was you have to get to know individual people.

You have to get to know what drives them, what inspires them and what motivates them and then coach that way. That was a valuable lesson for me because it’s something I didn’t have when I first moved in and the last thing I wanted after a year of making half as much money as I’d made the previous few years was to manage people.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what happened when you went to management and said, “I want to get back into carrying a bag, back into being a solo individual contributor”, if you will. Because a lot of people that listen to today’s podcast, they’re striving for the next position. They believe it’s in management and I’ve seen a lot of the people listen to the podcast kind of hold on a little too long when they’re really not in the right place. What happened when you went to your management and said, “I want to get back into the bag carrying role, I want to pound the pavement again.” What was the response?

Mike Miller: He was nurturing in his response, he actually said that I thought I could do it but he appreciated the fact that I was having a financial impact and maybe now wasn’t the right time. Before he would let me go down and take that position, he made me do one of the hardest things that anybody has to do which was to let somebody go and said that part of the challenge was me not knowing how to do that and part of the challenge was the sales reps not being able to deliver for me and we both were going to pay a price, and that was something that he made me do. It was one of the hardest things I ever did as a sales professional.

Fred Diamond: Thanks for sharing that story, because that’s definitely one that has come up not infrequently and we hear all the time the notion that the best sales professional doesn’t make it into management and a lot of it is timing. A lot of it is you need to learn, you need to mature and then maybe later on in your career, you’re ready. I’m sure we’ll hear some of that story in a little bit. Mike Miller, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Mike Miller: That’s a great question, Fred. My sense is asking really good questions is probably one of your areas of brilliance, fair?

Fred Diamond: Yes, it is.

Mike Miller: Awesome. For me, I’d say it’s two things. We talked about in the pre interview was that one of the key things, one of the most important things from my perspective, from a success standpoint is being apathetic. What I’ve seen from sales reps who are the most successful is they are the ones that listen the most, they are the ones that are the most sympathetic and they are the ones that care about their clients. I genuinely care about my clients, I care about my company, I care about my product, I care about my customer’s mission. I think that’s why I gravitated ultimately towards public sector once I got in there, because I really and truly do get excited about the mission I was supporting at federal government.

The reality is that if you have that characteristic, then your customers know it and they trust you, and one of the hardest things to ever get in sales is that development of trust and that’s something that comes with that sense of empathy. The other things that I’m really good at is that I’m coachable, so at this stage in my career I still look to be coach and I have people that I rely on on a regular basis. I also consider myself to be a good coach whether it’s for sales reps, whether it’s for sales managers, whether it’s for 10 year old baseball players.

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

Mike Miller: I’ll tell you about two of them. One was the person I just mentioned. His name is Mike Guido, he was the president of the Americas for CA back in those days and my senior vice president. These are just over the course of that number of years. The first time that I had a really successful quarter was my second quarter at CA and I had done half of my annual quota in that one quarter. One of the things that he said to me was, “Congratulations”, obviously he gave me the high fives that you would expect, but he also said, “Anybody can do it once. A real sales professional can do it over and over again.”

That made me put a chip on my shoulder and it also made me thing what do I have to do to be that person that can do it over and over again. He was really helpful in that regard. He also had a lot of things that I still incorporate as part of my daily activity. One of the things that we talked about was maximizing your face time and being athletic with the way how you manage your territory, that was something I got from Mike.

The other mentor I had from CA was a guy named Rick Chiarello. He’s done a lot of phenomenal things in his career. What he did for me was he was that person that taught me how to manage. He taught me how to understand individuals, and he didn’t just focus on me managing a team and focusing on a number, but he focused on me as an individual and how to make me better, and taught me ways to do that and I really appreciate that. That’s stood with me through all these years.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Actually, for the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast, when we were walking into the interview someone actually came up to you and you mentioned to me that’s someone that you’re mentoring. Do you get a lot of requests to be mentored yourself? Or to mentor, I should say.

Mike Miller: Yeah, there are people that have gone through sales training with me through the years or people that I just know from my network. I can tell you that when I was coming up early in my career, I relied upon people that were in sales and that were successful and I would pick their brains and ask them their advice, and I had people that would share that with me because there were no degrees in sales when I got out of college.

There are some now, to the credit of some universities, but not many. They still tend to be more focused on marketing, so I’ve always seen that as a whole and I’ve always enjoyed helping people that are choosing this profession, because it really can be life changing to help them to see what it takes to have that kind of life changing success in sales.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the challenges that sales leaders are facing today. What are the two biggest challenges facing you today as a sales leader?

Mike Miller: Mine are going to be personal. It may not apply to all sales leaders, obviously. I have a really good team. In fact, I’d say they’re exceptional. Our company, which is also exceptional growing in at 30 + % per year, year over year, my federal team grew at 60% last year. I believe they’re talented enough to grow at an even faster clip this year. One of the challenges that we have is that we’re all home officed. Almost all of us work remotely, so building that sense of not just a team, which we have really well, but the sense of having a culture where people practice and role play and do the things that really do sharpen the spear. That’s harder to do. You have to be very disciplined about doing that, and that’s definitely a challenge that we face.

That’s something that I think really helps when you’re in close proximity, and as I mentioned as we were talking beforehand, I’m still a big believer in practicing. I do that with good friends of mine like Kevin Carr who was on your program earlier. He and I will hit situations where things didn’t go exactly as we thought they should of and we’ll call each other and role play and say, “What happened? Let’s try it a different way.”

The second biggest challenge, this is something that hasn’t changed much in 25 years of sales management. That’s getting people to move outside their comfort zone. People have a tendency to get into a rut. Sometimes it’s because they thought that the way that they were doing things was the right way and they got a little bit of success, and they think that that’s the way to the bank even though it’s super hard and super restrictive, and getting people to move outside of that sometimes is challenging whether it’s because the fear of not doing it the way that they used to or just because of the lack of comfort.

Fred Diamond: Mike, you’ve had a great career, we’ve mentioned 30 years a number of times here working for some great companies, CA. Take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Mike Miller: That’s a great question. Generally speaking, when I look back over my career I like to think of the people that have moved on and become senior VP’s and CEO’s and COO’s, whatever their vision was for themselves, so I do view that as my biggest success but if you want to think of my single biggest win: I was negotiating a deal – and this was at the time that I was one of three general managers in North American sales for CA. I was in a pre-meeting on a Monday night with my senior VP and his regional vice president and we were negotiating with a fairly large bank on a very significant opportunity, and I had through my career been one of those negotiators that was not always as consistent as I should have been, as far as asking for balanced concessions.

I would do the biggest mistake that you could ever do which is giving unilateral concessions. I had learned through some very good training that I had gone through and some very good experience that I had over the previous year, that I wanted to make sure that I had a really good principle negotiation. So in this particular example, we had what was the biggest deal I ever negotiated at the time. It was the biggest sale that we’d ever proposed at the time and we were going back and forth, and everything that they asked for I asked for something of equal or greater value in return.

Some of the things they asked for seemed insignificant but I wanted them to understand that the way that I approached their partnership was that I respected them enough to give them what I viewed as the best and final offer with the first proposal. So I didn’t give them something with a lot of fat to be able to trim stuff out of, and I wanted to let them know up front that that’s what they had but they were professional negotiators, they go to school. So we were going back and forth and everything they did, everything they asked for I asked for something in return.

There was one thing in particular that they asked for which was a concession on the maintenance side, which for a deal of that size I potentially could have gone to the CEO and asked for it, but I knew what the value that was and they were in heavy acquisition mode and I knew if they acquired more banks or if had had more merchers that it would be worth a lot of money. So I pushed back really hard on that one and I said that was going to be a deal killer if they had to have that. The two people who were in there negotiating who are also people you should probably speak with – Stu Flagel and Van Harmen, they both had looks of horror on their face because this meant a lot to them, this was more than triple Van’s annual quota and this was a big chunk of Stu’s annual quota. In the end they put that aside and we asked for a couple of things, we pushed back for a couple other things and eventually one of the people in the room on their side said, “I give up.” and I was afraid that I had screwed things up horribly and I was getting ready to apologize.

I started apologizing and he said, “No, no, no. We’re OK.” and it turned out that one of the people in the back of the room who was not making any noise was just taking notes on his laptop, was a senior VP of finance and he printed out an addendum to our existing enterprise licence. I took a look at it, confirmed that it had everything in there, it matched all of my notes, I give it back and said, “That was good”, he signed it and handed it to me, asked me to sign it and hand it back and we walked out of there with a contract for 124 million dollars on December 18th. Didn’t even make us wait till the 31st and what makes it sweeter, and what makes it even a bigger win is that they did continue to buy banks and almost 12 months to the day but one year later they did another deal with us for 294 million dollars, and it was all because we saved that one clause.

Fred Diamond: Good for you. Mike, this has been great information. You’ve had a great career in sales, that was a great win that you just told us there, win for you and for the customer, of course for your company. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever say to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Mike Miller: I said that a lot of times. Do you know what my mom told me when I told her I was getting into sales?

Fred Diamond: No.

Mike Miller: She didn’t say anything, she started crying.

Fred Diamond: Oh, jeez.

Mike Miller: After she finished crying, she said, “I can’t believe you’re going to take this good University of Virginia education and you’re going to waste it on a career in sales.”

Fred Diamond: Oh, man.

Mike Miller: She later changed her mind, obviously, because it worked out really well but obviously when you have a career that has you go either every year or every quarter from hero to zero – and that’s if you did well – it’s challenging, you can feel like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up a hill. You get it to the top and you hit your number, then it rolls back down, you got to to it all over again. But I’ve learned over time how to manage the process, I get excited about it and I’ve learned that the better you get at the job, the easier the job gets.

Fred Diamond: The interesting thing there – going back to your mother there, for a second – is if you think about having a 30 year career in sales, especially with the story that you just told us, think of all the value that you provided to that customer. You mentioned the next year, they went off and bought even some more banks which then made the technology that they were purchasing from you even more valuable and helping them grow their business. One thing that great sales professionals get to do is you see how the customers are utilizing what you’re bringing to them and helping them make their jobs easier, and helping them achieve their missions.

Mike Miller: Absolutely.

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

Mike Miller: If you really want to take your career to the next level, and you don’t truly love what you’re selling and you don’t truly love the customers that you’re selling to – and I don’t mean that in any way other than caring about their mission, caring about what they do, caring about their timelines, caring about their success – then you’re never going to be successful. You owe it to yourself to find a product that you do have that level of passion for, and a company and a market that you do have that passion for and a customer base that you have that passion for because when you do, you get excited about your job. You get excited about your profession and frankly it makes the job so much easier.

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

Mike Miller: I believe sales is a learning profession, as I mentioned before. There was no such thing as a sales degree back when I was getting out of college and if there was I probably would not have studied it. That was not what I saw myself doing when I was in college, but the things that I regularly do is I still pick up a sales or a business book every quarter, something new because I want to be able to either learn something new for myself or I want to learn something new that I can teach my sales teams. I think it’s important to do that on a regular basis.

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

Mike Miller: Through the years I’ve been very business plan driven, from the time I was a sales rep I mapped out what it was I was going to do, where I was going to get my revenue from, where there were openings in my customers as far as which products they had from us, which products they didn’t have, which products they had from a competitor. I’ve been doing that from the time I was a sales rep up until the time I was managing senior vice presidency, very much a senior plan focused environment.

One of the things that I’m working on right now – and I’ve just rolled it out to my sales team at Veeam – is a very prescripted business plan. It’s a business plan generator, helps them to plan their year in advance. It also has what’s probably the most important element of every good business plan: it has check points they can see on a month by month basis and on a quarter by quarter basis not just by looking at revenue because that’s an easy gage, but by looking at the things that contribute to revenue to see if they’re on track.

Fred Diamond: What might some of those things be?

Mike Miller: Some of those things would be how big is your pipeline, how fast is your pipeline growth. Are you keeping track of how steadily things are progressing in the sale cycle, and is the sale cycle consistent?

Fred Diamond: Very good. Mike, we talked over the course of today’s podcast about some of the challenges facing sales. Sales is hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? Again, you told your mom that you were going to go into a career in sales and she spent all this money on this beautiful UVA, of course you were in state so it wasn’t really that expensive but what is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Mike Miller: In the beginning, honestly, it was fear. When I started at CA, it was two months before my daughter was born and prior to CA I don’t think I was that successful in sales. I was OK, I was getting by, I was pretty good but I didn’t work as hard as I needed to, and when she was born that lit a fire in me and it really changed how I approached my profession. I made sure that from then on, I was maximizing my customer face time. I was spending my evening with my young family, I would kiss my wife and daughter and then later my wife and son and daughter and put them to bed and then I would stay up and learn and I would take advantage of that time.

Now, I didn’t have to do that all the time, you have to have a life-work balance but I really did make sure that I was maximizing the time I had during the day, maximizing my selling hours because selling hours were money hours. I always found that if I approach my job that way, it became significantly easier and much more rewarding.

Fred Diamond: Mike, I want to ask you one last question before we get your final thought. You just mentioned maximizing customer face time. The more selling hours, of course, the more opportunities to make money. You sell into a federal space. It used to be that you could go into any federal building, you could walk the halls, you could go have your meeting. After 9-11, of course, security significantly ramped up. You can’t get into the pentagon anymore, you can’t get into a lot of federal buildings without an appointment and things related to that and the customer doesn’t want to see you as much as they used to. So what do you do about that? How do you handle that particular challenge and how do you coach your sales team to try to get that customer face time when it continues to get harder and harder to do?

Mike Miller: It definitely does get harder and harder to do. The longer you’ve been doing it, the easier it is for you to have some of the passes that can get you through. You might be badged in the intelligence community which means you can get into the pentagon without an appointment. However, there’s still ways to maximize face time even for those people that don’t have that kind of a clearance. And when I say face time, it’s not just sitting across the desk. It could be doing a Webex, it could be having a phone call.

It’s maximizing your customer interaction. It’s not sending emails, although emails are worthwhile. It’s not sending links to great demos or videos, it’s having a conversation. Ideally, it’s a face to face conversation because then you can see body language and you can see how they’re reacting. You can see whether their eyes are rolling or whether their eyes are staying focused and they’re not in their heads. But we have to find ways to be creative and maximizing that face time, and we also have to be doing some of the things that are old-school and new-school, which is when we’re having those meetings asking, “Who else here should I be meeting with? Would you mind walking me over there and introducing me to them?”

Asking basic questions like that so that you can maximize face time and you can find more people, and you can widen your scope of engagement because at the end of the day if you really want to solve problems, especially in the public sector, you have to talk to a lot of stake holders because it’s a very broad solution set. It’s never going in and selling a product, it’s selling a much more broadly focused solution set.

Fred Diamond: Mike, give us a final thought to share with the Sales Game Changers listening today to help them take their career to the next level and to inspire them.

Mike Miller: The best advice I ever got really does ducktail from that. It’s having an athletic approach to managing your business. It’s being driven. And when I say athletic approach, I don’t just mean the physical demands of it. I mean you have to look at what you do as a profession, you have to train for it, you have to be aggressive about it, you have to not take no for an answer and you have to understand that failure is a part of it. That there’s nothing wrong with no and that it’s not personal. That even the best baseball player hits one out of three. The best sales rep is probably closing one out of three which means that you’re going to fail twice as much as you’re going to win but if you stay engaged and you maintain your integrity, and you maintain your athletic, vigorous sense of work ethic, at the end of the day it’s the only profession I know of that can let somebody like me change my life as dramatically as I was able to.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 072: Veeam Software Federal Sales Leader Mike Miller Stresses How Taking an Athletic Approach to Your Sales Efforts Can Lead to Huge Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.