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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on May 6, 2020. It featured sales leaders Patrick Devlin (Meridian) and Jennifer Fisher (WorldStrides).]

EPISODE 232: Sales Transformation and Success Webcast as the World Re-Opens featuring Jennifer Fisher and Patrick Devlin

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Patrick Devlin’s Podcast . Listen to Jennifer Fisher’s Podcast.

PATRICK’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Somebody said we’re all on the same boat with this thing but I’m a sailor and I’ll say that we’re not in the same boat, we’re in the same storm. The situation on anybody else’s boat might be very different than yours so try to really tune into that. You have some customers that are flourishing and you have some that you think might be but they’re not. The economic impact is not equal and you really do need to understand that.”

Fred Diamond: Patrick Devlin, it’s great to have you on today’s webcast. Why don’t you introduce yourself, Patrick and tell us what your top priorities are right now?

Patrick Devlin: Thank you. I think if you had given people an option of ‘all of the above’, it probably would have been the #1 choice [laughs]. My name is Patrick Devlin, I’m the Chief Business Development Officer at Meridian Knowledge Solutions in Reston, Virginia. In terms of what my top priorities are right now, I think like most, it’s our existing clients and the existing opportunities in the pipeline and making sure that you’re spending as much time as possible with those and maximizing the opportunities there.

When I talk about our existing clients, one of the things that we’re seeing as a learning platform is an explosion in utilization. We are seeing in some cases on a same store sales approach from year over year, we’re seeing individuals that are just seeing explosive growth, 3, 4, 500% type of growth. Across the board we’re seeing more like 250, 300% growth across the board with utilization, I think a lot of people are being told, “You’re at home, this is a great time for you to be catching up on your certification training, on your compliance training, that new professional development. You’re here and you’ve always wanted to get here, this is a great time to do it.”

We’re definitely seeing that so making sure that we have the infrastructure in place to make our clients look like superstars as these volumes go through the roof. The other thing that we’ve done is we have waved any licensing restrictions for this period of time so if clients want to bring on new learning communities, the sky is the limit. That’s meant a lot of good background work that we have to do to make sure that the infrastructure is in place to support it.

Fred Diamond: I remember, Patrick, when we interviewed you for the Sales Game Changers podcast, a lot of the people who commented when we posted the show said that you’re The Metaphor King. I’m not sure if you have one or two but I’ll give you a few moments to think about something as well.

Jennifer Fisher, you’re in Charlottesville, Virginia, the company is called WorldStrides. Tell us what your priorities are. You’re obviously servicing a customer that’s going through a lot of challenges right now as we all, but yours particularly so what are your priorities right now?

Jennifer Fisher: We do study abroad at colleges and universities – so yes, it’s a very tough time. However, with that being said, we have exceeded our targets in March and we’ve exceeded our targets in April so right now my top priority is to exceed our targets for May. I feel very confident that our team is going to be able to accomplish this.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, what’s been the biggest surprise? Again, the biggest positive surprise that has happened for you coming out of this situation? I know you just said you had a great March and great April and hoping for a great May but you’ve also had to furlough some people, I guess. But from a positive perspective, again, one thing we’re trying to be here on the weekly webcast is aspirational, we’re also going to talk about some of the challenges that everyone’s dealing with, of course but give us a positive surprise that’s come out of this for you.

Jennifer Fisher: I think that one of the good things that I was very excited about is even when COVID was happening throughout China and Asia, I was keeping a very close eye on that because that does affect our business going through Europe and of course anything that comes into America, so I’m definitely keeping a close eye on it and even by the end of January going into February I was able to put together what I called my COVID Strategy, just thinking ahead, “If this happens, here’s how we’re going to react to it.” We wrote all this up hoping we don’t have to, but we obviously have, but having that all in place when things started to shift we were right on it.
We got the team going, they were motivated, they were behind it, they were excited and we were able to shift, work from home and do this or that and we had the plan, we had the road map in front of us and off we went. Because of that planning ahead of time and the strategic plans in place, that’s how we were able to establish our best March, best April and going into our best May.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you? Again, you’re a pretty aspirational leader, I remember both of you actually when I did the Sales Game Changers podcast, you’re both very high-energy conversations, a lot of optimism. Patrick, for you, tell us about a positive surprise coming out of the situation or perhaps something you’re most proud of.

Patrick Devlin: I think the conversations that we’re having with our clients has probably been the most positive surprise of this whole situation because a lot of times they can be the hardest people to get in touch with, you have these built up agendas over a period of time where you want to get to this, you want to get to that and you want to do more of this and a little less of that, but then the current situation overwhelms you and you never get to these things, they always seem to be just on the back burner.

We’ve had some fantastic dialogue, our clients are so much more accessible than they’ve been in the past because they’re not getting hit from a lot of other angles so plans that we’ve had on the table for a while are now finally starting to move forward. I would say the trust that is evident in these conversations has been really positive and it’s reciprocal, and we’ve seen a lot of evidence that they appreciate the candor, the trust and the empathy that we’re showing for their situations as well. That sort of thing has been fantastic.

Fred Diamond: As a sales leader, I’m curious, for the first time in everybody’s history we know where everybody is. We know where all of our prospects are, they’re most likely at home unless they’re essential and they’re probably going to be in their office, they’re not traveling to a trade show so we know where everybody is. How are you encouraging your people to reach out to people right now knowing that? I guess you still need to be respectful, but Patrick, let’s start with you. A number of people who are listening on today’s webcast and are watching our show today have asked, “Is it okay just to call somebody because we know that they’re at home?” What are some of your thoughts on that?

Patrick Devlin: I think it’s absolutely okay to call people and the interesting thing that I’ve seen is that the ones that seem that might want the call the least, ones that are home schooling three kids or have this issue going on and all these other things, they just seem to be dying to have a conversation with an adult. I just find that you have a much longer lead in before you need to get to the business side and the conversations are longer, deeper, broader and it’s been a great relationship building exercise. I would tell people not to hesitate at all. People have caller ID, if they don’t want to talk to you they won’t pick up the phone but so far that has not been an issue for us at all.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, along those lines, how have you changed as a sales leader? Two months ago when we started doing this webcast of interviewing sales leaders it was not uncommon to hear people say, “I’ve been through 9/11” and, “I was through the recessions of 2007-2008, so this is just another one.” This is not just another one for anyone on the planet but how have you changed as a sales leader?

Jennifer Fisher: What’s interesting, besides the obvious of working from home that everyone in the world is doing right now, in some aspects we really haven’t changed. The basics of selling hasn’t changed, the medium may have changed like we’re not sitting doing this the way we did but the basics are right there. We’re here to support our prospects, we’re here to work with our customers, share resources and again, just like Patrick was saying, we’re that trusted adviser. Again, the basics haven’t changed, we’re just doing it a little differently.

Fred Diamond: How about you, Patrick? You’ve been a sales leader for a long time, what’s changed for you? Has anything changed or do you agree with Jennifer that it’s a continuation as it were besides circumstance?

Patrick Devlin: I do agree that sales is sales and the mediums change, the situations are always different but the basics stay the same. I do think that from a leadership perspective I’m not only a sales leader but one of the corporate leaders of the organization as well. While I’ve always tried to implicitly be there for people – call it the open door policy, everybody can come in and feel comfortable talking to me about anything – I think I can say for myself and the other executive leaders of the company, we’re trying to be more explicit about that right now.

We’re reaching out to people and encouraging the conversations, we’re asking them how they’re doing. Are they having any difficulties at home? Is there anything that we can be helping with? And ensuring especially people that are not used to working at home. The sales reps, that’s not a big issue. Most of them even if they’re not today, they’ve had that experience but it’s the other support people in the organization and the marketing team and the like that aren’t used to this sort of environment, so freeing them up to know that, “If you are home schooling right now or you have a special needs child, you don’t have to be available from 9 to 5.

You need to get your work done but you can be more flexible and you can come to us with stuff.” The reaction has been terrific, the things that we’re learning, the needs that people have and the accommodations that we’ve put in place to try to make them comfortable are building long-term much more loyalty and an understanding that we care more about them than just what they’re doing at work. That’s been great.

Fred Diamond: Again, one out of five people who were polled said they’re having difficulty connecting with customers. We know what’s going on with our companies, we don’t necessarily know everything that’s going on with our customer because they’re dealing with challenges with their customer, we’re dealing with challenges with their customer. Tell us a little more about what you mentioned, the conversations that you’re having, tell us a little more about what you’re directing your people to engage, how are you telling them to have conversations and what are they hearing from their customers? Give us a little bit of a perspective – without getting into obviously intimate type things – what are your customers telling you right now? Are they as stressed as 26% of the people who took our poll? Jennifer, why don’t you go first?

Jennifer Fisher: Yes, I think they are very much stressed out, too. I will say that the biggest shift that we’re seeing and that I’ve been given a directive in working with our team on is the shift to virtual. We’re not even making phone calls, everything is through virtual. We’re doing Zoom calls with everybody, our prospecting calls are Zoom prospecting calls, we’re sending some resource emails out asking someone, “Do you want to chat, have a virtual coffee meeting? We want to see how you’re doing, what’s happening.”

Same things we’re putting with our employees, we’re working with our customers that way, too. I’ll tell you, the response has been phenomenal. Everybody loves it because I think we’re all at home, we’re balancing all sorts of things and they’re like, “I’d love to have a video conference, I’d love to chat with you over a virtual coffee” and they get a kick out of that. Then when we’re working with them over video it’s so deep, we are really building very strong relationships by that. They’re going to see us, they’re seeing our home office or our cat running by and it’s been incredible, there’s been incredible response, the team loves it, our clients love it so it’s been really good.

Fred Diamond: I want to remind people, if you have a question for Jennifer Fisher or for Patrick Devlin just submit it via the question panel, we’ll get to all your questions today. Patrick, how about you? What are you hearing from customers that they’re telling your salespeople and what’s going on with your customer base?

Patrick Devlin: You hit on it, everybody’s dealing with a different situation so if you have clients, for example, that are highly dependent upon, you have to think about their clients, their markets. If they’re highly dependent upon, for example, we have a clients whose clients are exclusively high end radiology and medical solutions, and that industry is really impacted by all this. You need to be sensitive about that and have those conversations and be proactive about it, don’t wait for them to come to you when they really have a problem and need a solution. You can predict these things and I’m learning a lot. I’ll throw out a metaphor, somebody likes to say we’re all on the same boat with this thing but I heard I’m a sailor and I heard somebody else say that we’re not in the same boat, we’re in the same storm.

The situation on anybody else’s boat might be very different than yours so we’re trying to really tune into that and I’m learning how uneven the economic impact is of what’s going on in the economy right now. You have some that are flourishing and you have some that you think might be but they’re not. The economic impact is not equal and you really do need to get to understand that. I’m being very specific right now about customers versus prospects, I said before, customers I have found to be so much easier to get in touch with right now. It’s not the same if you’re making that initial prospecting call, that initial introduction call, that has been more difficult and we’re having to get creative about that but those customer conversations have just been… I’m very curious and I look for intellectual curiosity and people who are genuinely interested in what’s going on with our clients and it’s just been fascinating for me. It’s been like having an MBA program where you’re talking to all these people in different industries and learning so much about how the broader economic drivers impact their individual businesses.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, Patrick just eluded to people are getting almost an MBA. I remember when we interviewed you for the Sales Game Changers podcast, you got your MBA at the age of 40. We talked about –

Jennifer Fisher: [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: You said it, it’s on the transcript right here [Laughs]

Patrick Devlin: Congratulations, you just got it [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: It was last year, she just finished. I want to ask you a question about that right now. This is a unique time, everyone is at home, everyone has these opportunities, Patrick, you mentioned how people are using the opportunity to get certifications or they should be. Jennifer, again, I have an MBA as well, it’s hard work to get an MBA. What would you recommend to your sales professionals right now to get them to take their careers to the next level from a professional development perspective?

Jennifer Fisher: A couple things. One of my teammates actually did just get accepted to an MBA program and she’ll be starting at the end of August so I’m super excited for her. She took that upon herself and said, “This is the direction I want to head.” I am a big sales junkie, if you will, so I love getting my hands on any books, any webinars and I encourage that in my team. I try to lead by example so very much I’m having the team come to me with some of the things that they’ve found and let them present that to our team as a whole. Whether it’s a different strategy or, “We thought about doing this”, these are the times that we can tweak some things a little bit and try something different.

Encouraging them to look for those little nuggets, I just saw one of my other teammates just finish a course on Coursera, she finished her course on there and is super excited. I’m thrilled hearing what the team is doing, a lot of them are taking it upon themselves to use this time to better them, then come back and help us in the business and are coming back with their ideas and saying, “I learned this, can we try this? Can we do this?” Now is the time to be innovative so I’m super excited for the team.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you? You’re also a big professional development guy so specifically, what would you tell some of the people listening to today’s webcast? We have people on today’s show from around the globe, sales professionals, sales leaders. What might be a specific thing or two that you would urge them to do today, May 6th, 2020 to take their careers or lives to the next level?

Patrick Devlin: In that respect, it’s not different than I ever have been with the advice that I give to my people. I often use the example, you find a lot of people in sales that might be into various competitive sports, maybe running, biking, swimming or all three or whatever hobbies, they get pretty intense about it. I ask them to think about the amount of time and effort that they put into that and just ask them to put an equal amount of time into developing what they do for a living.

Think about what magazines do you subscribe to? Do you subscribe to outdoor life and do you do this and do you do that? You need to balance that and be sure that you’re always spending just as much time outside of work with developing your skill set that you use for a profession. I think that’s a reasonable ask and that never changes for me.

Fred Diamond: A question comes in here, again, we have a lot of people here who are in the early stage of their sales career. “I’m dealing with a lot of anxiety right now and stress. What do you suggest I do as a sales professional to balance this?” Patrick, let’s start with you there. Most of the people who answered our poll in the beginning said they have concern about their job and the future of their company and then Jennifer, I’ll ask you as a follow up, what should they be doing to alleviate the stress that they’re going through?

\Again, you mentioned before they may have kids at home, there may be other things, they may have a parent that they’re concerned about. What are some of your advice for people watching today’s webcast to focus on alleviating on some of the stress they’re dealing with?

Patrick Devlin: I’ve had these conversations and part of it is just letting people know it’s okay to be scared, it’s okay to be unsure. You can’t be perfect, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to do things and to not feel like you have to be some Rocket Gibraltar all the time, it’s okay. Then the normal stuff, quit focusing on things you can’t change. If you don’t have any control over it, then just try to put it aside and focus on the things that you can control.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? How are you helping your team deal with the stress or anxiety that they might be going through right now?

Jennifer Fisher: Very similar with Patrick, for me personally the easiest way for focus is to focus on what I can control. Let’s not focus on, “Is college going to be back in session in the fall? When will they start study abroad programs? How is this going to impact?” That stresses me out right now thinking about that, but what I can do today right now are some basic day to day things. I want to lead by example and again, letting the team know, “Hey, we don’t have any control over what’s going to happen on the college campuses. I hope things get better soon, but we don’t have control over that.” What we do have control over right now is that we’re killing it out there with our prospects and with our clients, let’s focus one day at a time, focus on what we can control and let’s just do that one day at a time.

Fred Diamond: One thing that’s come up on the webcast is the fact that I remember the very first show that we did, one of our guests said we all have new jobs and a lot of our customers are changing how they go about their business. Jennifer, a question came in for you. “How do you see your organization, your company pivoting given the possible impacts to post-secondary institutions that may come this fall?” Again, that’s out of your control but what pivots might you see coming? Again, the markets that you serve, every day they see something new. What do you see on that sense?

Jennifer Fisher: Again, I really come back to what it is that we do on the day to day basis but with our business, the study abroad and working with college and universities, we work really far in advance so we’re actually working on programs that are traveling next spring. There’s a lot of concerns like, “Are these programs going to be able to travel in the spring?” I don’t know, we don’t know but we’re still going to work with our colleagues and we’re still going to work on these programs because there’s also a chance that they will travel. Even if they’re not back on campus in the fall which – I have a college age son, he’s home right now so I get that [Laughs] – but again, we have to come back, I’m excited because we also learned this whole virtual thing which is going really well and we’re building those connections. We have a very big industry conference coming up at the end of May so it’ll be good to see people virtually. It’s not the same but again, just focus on that day to day and there are going to be shifts, we know that, that’s part of being flexible, adaptable and being able to persevere through this.

Fred Diamond: I have a senior who’s preparing for the fall as well. Patrick, again, we’ve had to implement a lot of new sales strategies, obviously. Zoom, video, those types of technologies, everybody’s home, etcetera. With this situation we’ve been going through, how do you see that changing the way you sell moving forward? Do you see this being the standard for the next couple years? I know you don’t have a crystal ball, per se but what are some of the techniques that we’ve had to deploy over the last 6-7 weeks and how do you see that changing the way we sell moving forward?

Patrick Devlin: I heard somebody say one time, “I’m terrible at making predictions, especially on things that are going to happen in the future.” The answer is I don’t have any idea what will be permanent and how this will change. The only thing I can reflect back on is what happened after 9/11 and how much more acceptable what we’re doing right now became. It used to be that the virtual meeting were more the exception and it was viewed as somehow that you as a vendor weren’t even committed enough to the process, perhaps, because you didn’t want to come on site or something.

That’s certainly changed but at the end of the day there’s probably still not one of us here that would raise a hand and say they would value an online meeting higher than they would a face-to-face encounter. The answer is I don’t know. I do think that if anybody has ever traveled to different parts of the world that have already adapted to some of these things, I think we’ll see some of that. We all travel for a living, I think we’ll see people wearing masks a lot more often, I think we’ll see people less inclined to go to work sick, I think we’ll see more people sitting down in their plane seat and wiping everything off and just being more conscious about things of that nature, but I don’t know, really. Whenever this is really over, how much of that sticks and how much of it is just in the rear-view mirror, I don’t have any idea.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? What are some of the things that are happening today that you think are going to stick around?

Jennifer Fisher: I spoke a little bit earlier about the basics of selling. It still comes down to me about the medium, these virtual coffees that we’re having. Many of my team members are like, “Can we continue doing this when things are back to normal?” If this is the way it works and our prospects and clients love meeting us this way, absolutely. What I also know is in general when anybody and any team goes through very tough situations like this and very tough challenges, it makes you stronger when you come out of it.

Something like this is going to make me a stronger sales leader and is going to make the sales team a much stronger sales team because we’ve learned about perseverance, flexibility and adapting. Every week we have to pivot a little bit, even on some of the strategies I’ve put in, I wasn’t expecting to go onto week 8 doing this so it’s still flowing. But again, that ability to just persevere and learn, we’re going to come out better and stronger.

Fred Diamond: What are your expectations right now, Jennifer, for your sales teams? What kind of conversations are you having with them today?

Jennifer Fisher: Probably with me and with our sales teams right now, again, it’s a tough field that we’re in right now but I lead with compassion. Compassion, open communication and dialogue, I’m thrilled we had our best March ever, our best April ever, my expectation is to have the best May ever but not at the expense of the team. It’s important that they are feeling good about what we’re doing, everyone’s going through something, they have family members who’ve been laid off or furloughed and kids working at home and home schooling, we’ve got to have that compassion. They know “my door is open”, we do teams, we have videos and if they’re struggling, they come talk to me. We’re going to work through this whether it’s personal or whether it is professional and we’re going to come up with some innovative ways to work through it. That’s the good part about it, we can be flexible, we can be innovative with our teams and I think that’s what’s so important.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you? What are you talking to your team about on a daily basis? What kind of conversations are you having?

Patrick Devlin: I can tell you this, I’m having a lot more conversations. I think we talked about this earlier this week where I said the things that we were doing on a quarterly basis we’re doing on a monthly basis, the team meetings that we were doing on a monthly basis we’re doing weekly, the weeklies are now daily so all of that means that we’re creating more opportunities for collaboration and communication than we’ve ever done before. Whereas it’s more organic maybe in the past, we’re much more structured about creating those opportunities now. I think in general salespeople are resourceful, optimistic people. I expect them to stay that way and you mentioned lead with compassion, I always believe that you have to be able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and I think you have to be a good listener. I think perhaps now people are buying into that a little more so maybe people that were afraid to put themselves out there like that, people are finding it almost like the expectation now and maybe they’ll be more comfortable doing it in the future.

Fred Diamond: We have a question that came in here through the question panel. The question is, “What are you both doing for yourselves right now to stay sane?” You both are pretty sane people as it is but what are you doing as sales leaders? [Laughs] That’s true, there’s definitely a lot of alcohol being consumed in the sales world. Seriously, what are you both doing to keep yourselves sane, to keep yourselves healthy for your people? There’s got to be demands on you from the people who you report to and from your boards, from your C-suite. Patrick, why don’t we start with you? What are some things that you physically are doing on a daily or weekly basis to stay as sane as you can be?

Patrick Devlin: I will say this, you meet people that when they get exhausted can just take a break, I’ve never been that type of person but there’s been moments where I’ve been more fatigued and just exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life. Sometimes I just have to shut everything down and go take a nap, just lay down for a little while and understand that that’s what’s going on right now. I’ve always been very active, I play tennis, do golf, get out, I’m always doing something so I’ve set up a stationary bike and I ride my stationary bike more often, that sort of thing. I’ve actually started playing video games which I’ve never done before. I got a VR headset and I play golf, I do things like that that I’ve never done before. A little bit of everything but just not having unrealistic expectations sometimes.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? What are you doing to take care of yourself?

Jennifer Fisher: What’s funny is obviously before all of this, I’d be at the office and I’m a very high-energy person and I absolutely love what I do, so put those together. I’m the kind of person that’s always coming home late for dinner because I’m like, “I love this, let me finish this up” or, “Let me have one more call with our client or helping our teammate”, I absolutely love it. Now that I came home and I’m working from home, I can easily work 24/7 because I love what I do and I’m so excited, I’m always coming up with ideas. I really did have to put some boundaries on my home time because even now, I’m still working hard and bless my husband, he’s like, “I’m still waiting for you to come to the table” but at the end of the day I have to say, “Okay, let’s step away and walk from my little office into the kitchen. Let’s sit down, have a family dinner and watch TV” and I have to force myself to do it mainly because I just love what I do. You have to put some of those boundaries in there.

Patrick Devlin: Fred, if I could, I also had to because I do a lot of working from home even though I’m in the office. I generally do it on the dining room table and I did find that it was really important to go reestablish an office like when I worked from home full time, have an office, that’s where my work computer is, that’s where everything else is and then to turn it off and get out of there. You were saying the same sort of thing, you do have to establish those boundaries.

Jennifer Fisher: Absolutely.

Fred Diamond: What are going to be the challenges that sales professionals are going to need to deal with over the course of the next week and how do you suggest that they deal with it?

Jennifer Fisher: Again, it’s focus on the basics, focus on what we do day to day, we do it very well, this is what we need to do. Not only focus but now we actually will be making sure that we execute flawlessly. If we stay focused and execute, we’re going to be phenomenal. We’re going to continue to exceed our targets and just continue to be a very strong team. I couldn’t have asked for anything else.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you?

Patrick Devlin: To take it a little outside the box, I think one of the biggest challenges we’re going to be dealing with over the next week is actually the change in the weather. I think everybody has been so restless and I think they’ve been able to put a cap on it, they’ve been able to monitor their behavior and do all the right things and stay home. I think it’s going to be really difficult for them to keep doing that. So far, fingers crossed, we’ve done very well in terms of everybody staying healthy and safe and that’s a big challenge I think that everybody’s going to be dealing with, not just salespeople but I think people are going to want to get out of the house. Hopefully, I want everybody to do it safely and keep their priorities straight.

Fred Diamond: Once again, Jennifer Fisher and Patrick Devlin, thank you so much for the great ideas, the great insights today. My name is Fred Diamond, thank you so much to all the viewers and listeners on today’s webcast, it’s been great talking to you both. Everybody, stay safe and keep focusing on your sales. Thank you so much.

Jennifer Fisher: Thank you, Fred. Thank you, Patrick. Take care.

Patrick Devlin: Thank you.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 232: Sales Transformation and Success Webcast as the World Re-Opens featuring Jennifer Fisher and Patrick Devlin first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 178: Meridian Knowledge Solutions BD Chief Patrick Devlin Shares How to Avoid Selling Through The Close – Metaphorically Speaking

PATRICK’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Your #1 focus is to help the people that you are working with understand the value of what you do. Once you really understand the impact that what you’re proposing can have on their lives and on the organizations that they work for, you almost have a fiduciary responsibility to do your best to make the case for it.”

Patrick Devlin is Chief Business Development Officer at Meridian Knowledge Solutions.

He’s held sales leadership positions at Cornerstone OnDemand, Blackboard and Symplicity.

Find Patrick on LinkedIn!

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

Patrick Devlin: Meridian Knowledge Solutions creates and sells technologies that clients use to manage adult training and learning, and the thing that excites me about it most is the people that we get to work with in the space. If you’re going to get up and do the same thing every day, it’s great to do it with people who have a mission orientation to what they do and it’s not just the education and training mission. A lot of the work that I’ve done over the years has also been with the federal government, a lot of that with the department of defense.

All of those things lead to working with people who are mission oriented and are really committed to getting results. That’s what excites me about what I do and why I get up out of bed every morning and keep doing it.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about what that means, what is adult learning space? 

Patrick Devlin: It’s the learning that happens after you go to work, so most of the people that we work with. It can be everything from basic compliance things that are done to mitigate risk or just create the right sort of culture and environment at the company to – we work with professional continuing education providers – people that provide continuing education to the medical profession or legal profession or the accounting profession, those sorts of things. It can be all of that, it can be in some cases like that, we get continuing education credits, in others it’s purely professional development. Corporations are investing in education and training to boost retention, improve engagement, improve the overall employee experience. Over the years it’s become more and more strategic in the corporate setting.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, a lot of people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast like to know who the person I’m interviewing actually sells to. Is this an IT sale? Do you sell to the CFO, to the CEO? Who are the people that you typically sell to?

Patrick Devlin: The people we sell to tend to be learning and development professionals and that can be different in almost any organization or institution that you’re working with. In some cases the initiatives that we are supporting are driven by HR, in some cases they’re driven by the sales organization, in some cases they’re driven by the marketing organization so it really can be all over the map. It doesn’t tend to be a CIO sale as much, but the CIO and IT department is definitely involved in the process.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you first got into sales as a career?

Patrick Devlin: That’s a good place to start. Essentially when I got out of college I was a techie, I studied industrial engineering but really got into software programming at college and got a programming job right out of college doing both programming and technical support, but I was always the techie who could talk. Even from a very early age in my career I was always the one that was asked to put down the keyboard for a second and go talk to those people, whether that meant being a product evangelist in the very early days. People remember the early days of the PC software business.

User groups were a really big thing, the DC area here had a very active user group and on behalf of that company I would go out and talk to user groups all over the country – in some cases all over the world – as an evangelist for the technology that we were serving then. Then it just evolved from there, so I’ve done pretty much every job you can do outside the finance are and accounting and in a software company I’ve done tech support, I’ve done product management, I’ve done programming.

My first job in sales was as a sales engineer which may make sense as a transition. Literally one day a buddy of mine and I, George Kelly – George, if you’re out there – we were sitting down and we were asking ourselves. There are days that we go to work that we really enjoy what we’re doing and there are days when we don’t. We literally got as basic as, “Let’s sit down and think about what we were doing on the days we were enjoying ourselves” and inevitably we were always in client facing situations when we were enjoying ourselves. Then we did a little research and I didn’t even know this job of a sales engineer existed, even though my father told me all my life as I was growing up that I should be in a technical sales position.

I didn’t know what a sales engineer was and I was fortunate enough to identify it, land a great job with a great company at a great time called Edify – they were based out of Santa Clara – as a sales engineer. I started doing that for a while and was successful at it but eventually the desire to get more involved and be directly responsible for the sale got the best of me, so I made the transition into a field based territory sales rep. From there eventually I became a sales team leader and then an RVP, a VP and it just developed on from there.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the lessons that you learned when you shifted into sales engineering and then into sales?

Patrick Devlin: For those of you that know me, one of my favorite quotes is, “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted” and I certainly got a lot of those sorts of lessons. One of the most important ones that really stuck with me was don’t sell through the close. I can still remember one of my very earliest engagements as a sales engineer, we were in a meeting, I wish I could remember the gentleman’s name, he was a partner of ours. It became abundantly clear quite early on in the conversation that the account was sold and I kept selling and he literally asked for a pause in the meeting, he took me outside and he almost slammed me against the wall. He just said, “You’re selling through the close and if you do that again, I will never work with you again.”

That’s the kind of thing that sticks with you, so don’t sell through the close definitely is one. The other thing is to really know your subject matter inside and out. I find that if you can project that competence, that competence and that confidence that comes from competence can’t be faked. I think that especially in the federal government there’s a lot of people that are very opportunistic about doing business with the federal government. Really understanding your subject matter and being able to provide value was something I learned early on. I’ve also learned over time having a backbone when it comes to negotiating.

I had a really interesting story happening in one of the very first deals I worked on as a sales rep where back in the days of conference calls and voicemails not being done on voice-over IP, I was supposed to dial into a conference call but they called me. They got my voicemail and they didn’t realize they were still on my voicemail. Then they went on to carry on a 30 minute discussion amongst themselves about how the negotiation was going on and everything of that nature and that was just one of the greatest sales experiences I’ve ever had. It let me understand that they’re professional negotiators and they’re negotiating.

What you have to be is a professional negotiator and have a backbone, understand your value and not be afraid to push back because most of the time, especially in the corporate environment, the people that you are negotiating with are not the business owners, they’re not the buyers. I think so many times people are worried about, the relationship cost of being a good negotiator and if I could play that tape for them they would understand the game a lot better. I’m glad I learned that very early on.

Fred Diamond: I want to go back to the “don’t sell through the close.” You were a younger sales rep and you closed the deal essentially, the customer was ready to buy and you just kept on talking. What would you tell someone today, what would you tell a young professional? What was the lesson, how did you adjust your behavior after that? Of course, you were almost slammed against the wall by your senior people, but what would you tell someone today? One thing that comes up not infrequently is the consequence of listening more versus talking, obviously. Tell us how you would suggest to someone who’s at that stage to fight the urge to keep talking once the deal has already been closed?

Patrick Devlin: It’s a very good point and anybody that’s worked with me has had this conversation with me. I think the most recent conversation I can think of, we were talking about the fact that sometimes it’s good to understand where somebody is, what is their position, before you even start to sell. There’s more than just one sale that happens in a sales process, so it’s not only the final close but it’s all the little things that you need to come to an agreement upon during a sales process.

In this case, the rep that I was working with spent 15, 20 minutes setting up a position on something in which the buyer agreed. You could tie that back into the listening, but part of that is just making sure that you even need to sell somebody on something. That 20 minutes turned out to be just wasted time and time is the most important commodity any of us have in sales. I find it may sound overly simplistic but the people that spend their time more efficiently, more effectively than the people that don’t are normally the ones that are successful in sales. If you waste 20 minutes convincing somebody of a position that they already hold, it’s just a waste of time. That was one conversation that I had with him and my coaching was, “Before you try to convince somebody of something, make sure you understand where they’re starting from. If they’re already there, just move on.”

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about you, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Patrick Devlin: My specific area of brilliance? I think for the folks that have worked closely with me, they would probably tell you metaphors. I speak in metaphors a lot, but honestly listening and communicating are the things that I think ultimately are the things that I do the best. It wasn’t always that way, so I would say to people that want to be better at those things, you can get better. These are not innate things that you have to be born with, if you focus on them you can improve.

When I talk about listening it really was getting beyond that, I call it the game of 20 questions where people know I’m supposed to act like I’m consultative and doing a diagnostic process here, so I’m going to ask 20 questions and then I’m going to sell. They don’t really listen to the answers, nobody wants to go through that. It’s really getting beyond that and truly listening. One of the things that I think is really important is early on in an engagement with a prospect, the conversation has to be all about them. It has to be about the problem, not about the solution. Most reps are so prepared to talk about the solution and sell ad position the solution and differentiate, do all those sorts of things that they just don’t take the time upfront to really understand the problem.

When you ask about coaching toward that, that would be one of the things that I focus on with everybody. The way that you do it is if the prospect is veering off and starting to talk about what they want to do or how they want to do it instead of why they want to do it, then you’re heading in the wrong direction and you have to try to steer them back. It’s amazing how many conversations I have had with reps over the years of just, “Why change, why now?” Then they just can’t give answers to that basic question on accounts and opportunities they’ve been working on for 9 months, 12 months, 18 months. These are long sale cycles and yet they still don’t have answers to that question so I’ve made that in my organization, that’s the “do not pass go” until you really have credible answers. It’s created some unusual situations, I’ll be honest.

I think at Blackboard when I was a sales rep, the CEO of the Company, Michael Chasen said for some reason that he got more complaints about me than any other rep and he said the complaints were always the same, that I wouldn’t get engaged in an opportunity. That they wanted us to compete for the business but I couldn’t get the information I needed to do what I felt like I needed to do well. If I didn’t understand why, if I didn’t understand why now or if I couldn’t talk to somebody who could tell me those things, I didn’t proceed. That is again, a very difficult thing for a rep to do, it’s to say, “No, without this information I’m just swinging blindly and I’m not going to waste my time or yours.”

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, as a sales leader you need to report upwards as well so how did you resolve that particular challenge?

Patrick Devlin: Fortunately, I had a very supportive CEO at Blackboard. He thought it was kind of funny [Laughs]. My boss at that time backed me up, didn’t push back on me at all. I’ll tell a story in on situation, this is a dramatic one but it’s true: I had a guy get really upset with me, he was just mad and angry because I wanted to know why now and he kept telling me what they wanted to do, but it was clear he didn’t know why they wanted to do it or why now. Finally, I just said, “I’ve spent enough time with you, you don’t know these answers, I’m done.” He said, “You can’t talk to my boss.”

Sure enough, about 4 hours later that same day I get a call from a guy and this was at the Center for Medicaid, CMS up in Baltimore area. I won’t use his name, but he says, “Hi, my name is George, I understand you want to talk to me.” Once I figured out who it was, we talked for about 15 minutes about why and why now and keep in mind, this was a federal government opportunity, we closed that deal in 30 days. We had a purchase order in 30 days because I got to the right person who understood why. I told people all the time, “If the buyer is left with a couple of choices and one of those choices is working with people who they really think understand why they’re doing this, what’s important, what they’re trying to accomplish, a deal that’s really understood from the buyer’s perspective, they’re going to work with you.

Fred Diamond: That’s one of the powerful themes that’s come through on a number of the Sales Game Changers podcast episodes, the whole concept of really understanding your customer’s why. Not rushing towards the, “Here’s what I offer” type of a thing. I’ve got one quick question for you before I ask you about some of your mentors. A lot of the people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast are in the early stage of their career, first 5 years, and there’s a lot of pressure to make a certain number of phone calls or to schedule a certain number of appointments, if you will. They believe that that’s what they’re being measured on so they don’t believe that they have the time to ask the why, to get them on the phone. What would be some of your suggestions knowing that that’s some of the metrics in play but that you really need to understand the why and the why now?

Patrick Devlin: That’s a great question and I have very direct experience with it because two of my children have recently graduated from college and both of them have worked in inside sales roles. I can give you a perfect example of that. I’ll put in a plug for a company called Vorsight which both of them have worked locally here and they have some of the most fantastic inside sales training that you would ever get exposed to. I think that was a great opportunity for them but then one of them, Patrick, went out to work for a company and he was told he had to send out 700 emails, “Get 700 emails out.” Instead of doing that, he did the research, did a little of what they call 3 by 3 research, found out a little something about each of the people that he was trying to reach out to.

He personalized 30 emails, so that day he was able to get through the 3 by 3 research and send out 30 emails. He got about 10 responses and was able to get 10 conversations set up as a result of that activity. The BDR next to him that sent out 700 got 0 responses. The 700 guy got rewarded and he didn’t. For the young guys or gals out there that are in that position, he asked me what to do about it but I don’t know because you are in a position where you’re a junior level person, you’re reporting up to people and you do have to do the things that they’re asking you to do.

Maybe what my advice would be is how long can it really take you to send out the 700? Get it done, but then if you want to be effective, take the time to do the 30.

Fred Diamond: We actually had Steve Richard who was one of the founders of Vorsight on the podcast, we’ll provide a link to his show. I tell these young or junior people you’re reporting to somebody who’s reporting to somebody and his or her metric might be, “My guys need to make 3,000 phone calls this week.” That’s actually a very good answer, do what they expect you to do and then figure out other ways to be successful.
Patrick Devlin: It goes through that whole thing that people early on gave me the advice that you shouldn’t do the job you have, you should do the job you want and maybe you could expand on that and say, “Do it the way you want to do it.” If you don’t meet those gates, if you don’t do those other things you have to cover your bases at some stage.

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

Patrick Devlin: When I thought about this prior to the interview, I came up with so many different people and I really hope you don’t mind that I’d like to name many of them, because I’ve had so many great mentors. Some of them managers, some clients, some reps I’ve worked with, some reps that worked for me, some competitors have been great mentors. When I think about people like Tim Hill at Blackboard, some of the clients that I met at Blackboard, a guy named Jake Pennington from the US Army, Mike Miller from National Defense University, I think back at Edify where I first got started in sales, people like Patty Bobie and Dave Haskell, Terry Shuff, Andy Gordon, these guys were remarkable people. Edify in particular, just some of the greatest salespeople I’ve ever worked with in my life.

Then at Blackboard there were other reps that I worked with that I learned as much from them as they learned from me, I hope: David Palmer, Tom Holz, I have learned so much – I should say learned/stolen – so much from these people over the time that none of my success could have happened without these people.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about challenges for a little bit. What are the two biggest sales challenges you face as a sales leader today?

Patrick Devlin: As a sales leader today I think the biggest challenges for me have been demand creation and lead generation. Not just quantity but quality, getting the right types of opportunities into the pipeline. I’m a big believer in outbound prospecting and the results there, I think the death of outbound prospecting has been greatly exaggerated by the people who benefit from convincing you you can do this all with digital inbound marketing, you just can’t. However, the quality of inbound leads is just tremendous so I think you have to do both, but I think my biggest challenge is the latter, getting the inbound leads, demand creation and lead generation.

Then I think the other thing is qualification. It’s funny, what I find is the reps who can least afford to be working on unqualified opportunities are always the ones that are more likely to be doing so. The people that are just getting started out who things, “As long as it walks and talks and has a pulse, I need to engage, I need activity, I need to fill my pipeline” when in reality they’re the ones that need to be even more tough with qualification. Again, back to what I said earlier about time, time is your most important commodity. If you don’t have a sustainable pipeline and a track record in your territory and all those things and you’re trying to create that, you can’t waste time with unqualified opportunities.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, what are some things you’re trying to do to solve the problem of demand creation and lead generation?

Patrick Devlin: Just trying to get the right people who really understand who we’re targeting and why, and then how to use today’s digital tools to do that. Not come in to me with all these stats that are independent of actually creating opportunities that convert to revenues to show how successful they’ve been. As I say here, I have the opportunity to run a unified sales and marketing organization and that’s how I refer to it. I don’t say, “This is my marketing team and this is my sales team”, “This is my sales and marketing team.” We’re all tied to the same goals and we all have the same objectives.

Again, go to the metaphors, it would be like being satisfied with losing a basketball game and winning rebounds. You know if your assisted turnover ratio is good, if you’re winning the rebounds, if you’re getting better quality shots, those are things that lead, they’re leading indicators of success but if you’re not successful, who cares?

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

Patrick Devlin: If I have to say one in particular, I think I’ve already mentioned it and that was that even though it was a small deal, that was the manifestation of everything that I’ve tried to instill in the people that I’ve worked with about, “No, you don’t have to engage on their terms, and the sooner you do that the less control you have over an opportunity.” I had a guy that was really angry with me, he hung up the phone on me and 30 days later I got a sale. I don’t mean that you need to be a jerk to be successful, but if you don’t value you, if you don’t value your time, why is anybody else going to value your time?

Another similar example that I can give to that was an opportunity that one of the people that I mentioned earlier was working on, and this was as a manager. This was a big opportunity at Blackboard, it had been going on and on and on as these things do, and it was just getting trapped. Not only trapped, it was sucking up so much of his time that the rest of his pipeline was just not there. I actually stepped in and I said, “Listen, I’m taking over this account for you. It’s still your account but for now I’m taking it over, I need you to focus on other things” and during the very first phone call we had to do that transition. It was about an hour and a half long phone call, and at the end of the call the CIO on the other side said, “Hey Tom, don’t forget to send me the notes from the call.”

Dutifully, he sent me the notes from the call and everything and I sat on them and he said, “I do this every time, I take the notes and I provide them back to them and everything” and I said, “Tom, if you are going to be viewed in his mind as a peer, how do you think that is affected by you taking notes for him at a meeting?” I said, “No, I’m not sending these to him, that’s not how we’re going to do this.” It changed the dynamic, changed the relationship and we were able to immediately get them focused on the things that mattered because we did do the why in that situation.

I was able to scope back after that meeting and say to the CIO, “Listen, we spent an entire meeting today discussing something that I don’t think is aligned to the three things you said were most important about this project, would you agree?” and he said, “Absolutely.” I said, “Would you agree then, we could table this, we could just put this aside until after we close the deal and get the system implemented?” and he said, “A hundred percent.” Tom came back in, we got it going and we got that deal done in about 60 days.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, we’re going to take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors but before we do, just one last question. Again, you started out in engineering, what was your major, by the way, in college?

Patrick Devlin: I started in electrical engineering, so I spent the first two years in electrical but then I realized that wasn’t my passion and I switched over to industrial engineering.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, obviously over the course of this podcast we get your sense of passion for the sales process and doing it right, being a student and all the metaphors, what was your thoughts about sales as a career when you were in college?

Patrick Devlin: As I said, my father always told me that the right thing for me would be a technical sales position. I thought what many people do about sales, it was the farthest thing from my mind of anything I wanted to get involved with. I wanted to be an engineer, I wanted to be a developer, I loved software and that’s what I wanted to do. Sales was the last thing on my mind.

Fred Diamond: What did your father do, just curiously?

Patrick Devlin: He was a training director, for the last 30 years of his life he was a training director. He also taught in college, did some other things but ultimately was an industrial training director and ironically it’s very similar to most of the people that I do business with now.

Sponsor Break

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

Patrick Devlin: I thought about this and I would say treat it like a career. When I say that, give the profession the respect that it deserves. I go back to when I first got promoted to a vice president, my mentor at that time was Tim Hill and I looked him straight in the eye and I shook his hand and said, “I promise you I will spend at least half as much time on this as I do my hobbies now.” I bring that up, a little tongue in cheek obviously, but you think I have this conversation with people all the time. “What are you into? Do you like golf, do you like running? You’re a triathlete? Tell me about…” “Yeah, I get up in the morning and I do this and I go to the gym three times a day and I ride my bike…”

If you add all that up, they’re spending probably an additional 20 hours a week on their hobbies. I said, “Your profession is sales, how much of your free time do you subscribe to a sales magazine, do you listen to podcasts like this one, what do you do to develop yourself professionally as a salesperson?” You get some pretty soft answers when you ask that question to people and they really haven’t thought of it that way. That’s one of the things that I think is critical.

Have respect for the job, I honestly do think that in my career I’ve met some phenomenal salespeople but I will say that they were the exception, not the rule. I think that there are simply a lot of people in sales that either are not that good at it or maybe don’t even respect it. I think it gives you an opportunity to separate yourself from the crowd simply by being really good at what you do.

Fred Diamond: One of the key things here that’s coming through on your podcast, Patrick is the whole question of why and why now. I think when you apply that type of thinking, you’re not thinking about, “I’ve got to make 50 phone calls today, I’ve got to do this, I have to do that.” You’re really putting yourself in the place of the customer and truly understanding what their mission is, what’s driving them. In 200 somewhat podcast interviews that we’ve done, that comes up from almost every Sales Game Changer is put yourself in the customer’s shoes, understand the customer, understand their business, why and why now? Patrick, tell us about some of your selling habits that have led to your sales success.

Patrick Devlin: You’ve just hit on one of them and that is that focus on why. I can tie that into what I said earlier, I came across that because a friend of mine who is a real estate agent who does actually invest a lot of his own time and money in the development of his skills came across a really cool training program. At the time it was this dial-in thing you did and he enjoyed it so he recommended it and I tried it out. I was the only technology sales person in it, it was all real estate people, insurance, people, other people from other walks of life but that’s where I really learned the why, the why now, what’s important about that and really what he called “getting to the criteria.” I think that’s important and this ties into it, it’s selling the problem.

Making sure you’re really selling the problem because there’s a lot of data now out to support this in research but I’ve always believed that the most likely thing when you pick up a phone and talk to somebody is that they’re going to do nothing at all. Your competition is not the other alternative service or solution providers, it’s status quo and it’s doing nothing at all. Therefore, the first thing you need to determine before you engage is, “Is there enough understanding of a problem? Is the current situation bad enough and to the people that are feeling that bad situation, are they important enough in the organization for a change to occur?”

Focusing on that, it’s all wrapped up in that notion of selling the problem and qualifying. If you were to look at a graph and on the Y axis you have “level of effort” and on the X axis you have “time”, I think the best salespeople dedicate a lot of effort upfront, very early on. Whereas I see the ones that are average or below-average salespeople, they spend no time on the opportunity until they’ve been selected or they’re now competing and they’re trying to close and it’s too late.

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

Patrick Devlin: I think the biggest thing that I’m doing right now is I have a tendency to be very hands-off, very much of a coach and a mentor but taking that analogy to the Nth degree in that the coach is on the sideline, the coach doesn’t score, the coach doesn’t win a game. Ultimately it’s up to the players and I think maybe I do that too much because that’s how I wanted to be managed. I think what I’m doing differently right now is I’m getting much more involved on a deal by deal basis, really rolling up my sleeves and getting involved with the deal side by side with the reps. I think that is what the people that I’m working with right now really need and are benefiting from, I think that’s the most important thing that I’m working on personally.

Fred Diamond: Why did you make that shift?

Patrick Devlin: It’s a good question. I made the shift because I wasn’t happy with the results and just listening to the feedback from the reps, I think the reps were asking for it. I think the results speak for themselves so it’s been a good thing, but I need to remind myself to keep engaged with it because it’s not my instinct, my instinct is for them to be the CEO’s of their territories and the owners of their deals and I still believe that. I have to find a way to get engaged without violating that trust and that deal that you have with the reps.

Fred Diamond: But it’s also a good strategy because it’s hard. Speaking about that, before we ask you for you final thoughts and you’ve given us some great insights today, it’s gotten harder. The competition is tougher, people don’t need to do things, people don’t return your calls, they don’t return your emails. Why have you continued, though? Again, you started off not going into sales although your father said you’d be good at it, you were an electrical engineer and then you moved into some other sides, you then became a sales engineer and you’ve been leading sales teams now for a couple of decades. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Patrick Devlin: You say it’s hard and I have an expression that the only work that is easy is the work you’re not doing. Everybody seems to look over and if you’re not doing it, it seems easy. I will say, I’ve performed in a lot of different positions within a software company, I did tech support, tech support is hard, I have a lot of respect for those guys. Product management is impossible, I describe it as all the responsibility in the world with none of the authority and everybody expects the world of you.

I know where you’re coming from, but I just think that sales is a job and it has fantastic rewards. I can’t think of another career choice at scale that presents the opportunity that sales does for people, especially as an individual contributor. When I was in that point of my life where I had four children, when they were growing up I worked a lot of that time from home as an individual contributor. I coached my kids in basketball and lacrosse, I was there for my family and I was still having a very successful career as an individual contributor. I can’t think of many opportunities at scale to do that kind of thing. Yeah, it’s hard but what isn’t?

Fred Diamond: Patrick, before we wrap up here I want to thank you. You’ve given us some great insights, really love the concept of why and why now, whenever that comes up I just go to a different place and it’s so powerful to truly understand that. That’s come up a number of times, so thanks a lot. Patrick, before we wrap up here, give us a final thought. Again, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, give us something to inspire them today.

Patrick Devlin: I would say remember that your #1 focus is to help the people that you are working with understand the value of what you do. Another mentor, a guy named Dave Haskell at Edify taught me this. He said, “Once you really understand the impact that what you’re proposing can have on their lives and on the organizations that they work for, you almost have a fiduciary responsibility to do your best to make the case for it. If you feel you’ve done that, that’s great but if you feel you’re not doing that then rethink what you’re doing and really go after it.

Get passionate about it and get involved, but don’t break the rules. I have an expression that says, “Breaking the rules if you don’t know the rules doesn’t make you innovative, it makes you an idiot.” The first thing you have to do is know the rules and understand them and then if you want to innovate from there, that’s cool. When I say that, what I mean is doing the job with integrity. I think a lot of people feel like you have to check some of that at the door when you’re in sales and I think you can be honest, I think you can be transparent, I think you can do your job with integrity and still be really successful.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely, it’s going to catch up to you if you’re not.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 178: Meridian Knowledge Solutions BD Chief Patrick Devlin Shares How to Avoid Selling Through The Close – Metaphorically Speaking first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.