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EPISODE 198: The Sales Evangelist – Donald Kelly – Says This Approach to Sales Prospecting Will Set You Apart from All Other Sellers

DONALD’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Every organization out there has some kind of problem, your prospects do. Somebody is going to solve that problem for them, so why not you? Take the advantage, go the high road, figure this out first and be the first one to solve the problem. If you do that, you stand out more than anybody else.”

Donald Kelly is known as the Sales Evangelist.

He conducts workshops, keynote presentations, design sales processes, offer sales team training and coach sales individuals and executives.

He’s the host of The Sales Evangelist podcast which is heard in over 155 countries.

Find Donald on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: You’re a celebrity in the sales performance improvement world so I’m thrilled to have you here. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about you that we need to know?

Donald Kelly: I have a podcast, like you mentioned, the Sales Evangelist Podcast and that’s dedicated towards helping new and struggling sellers to improve their sales game because when I started off selling, I had a passion and desire but I sucked at what I was doing. [Laughs] I did well in B to C but when I came to the B to B world it was a different game for me and it was just really difficult. I started the podcast as a means of being able to educate those individuals that were in the same shoes I was and to help them to elevate their game as well. That’s a little bit about me.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about what you offer. I know you have the podcast, of course but do you also do training, consulting? What types of things do you do as a business?

Donald Kelly: Naturally as the podcast started to grow, I started to get individuals that reach out to me for coaching. I started to do individual one-on-one coaching and that was fun doing that with reps, but then obviously when the business side came from it, these reps would bring it back to companies and then I started getting entrepreneurs who wanted to develop their sales. Some of them just were solo-preneurs, those guys who were selling or maybe making $500 thousand a year, close to a mil but they wanted to replicate themselves so they said, “Can you come in and do some consulting for us and show us what we need to do to create a sales force and help set that stuff up?”

So I started doing a couple of those and then that started to grow as well. Naturally, the speaking opportunity came from it and it just started making sense for me after doing this for several years. In 2015 I left the full-time gig to do the podcasting and all of that. The business side of the podcast didn’t make money per se but it led to leads and opportunities for coaching, speaking and consulting. Now the podcast is a means of generating its own income as well and take care of its own expenses.

Fred Diamond: Tell us how you first got into sales as a career.

Donald Kelly: It was in college, even prior to college. Everyone in my family did something towards sales. Growing up as a Jamaican boy, everybody sells something [laughs] so I saw it as in my family and I didn’t see it as sales as a business. “You’re a businessman if you sell something, man.” I’m outgoing and people always said, “Man, you’d be perfect for sales” so then I started doing a little bit of stuff and then went into college, and then that’s where everyone was like, “You definitely need to be in sales.” The universities didn’t have any sales programs.

Fred Diamond: Where did you go to school?

Donald Kelly: Brigham Young, it was the Brigham Young University, Idaho campus, so I ate a lot of potatoes [Laughs]. My friends would tell me I should consider doing this so I went and got a couple sales jobs, I worked in a Dish Network facility office where we called out over the phone and then I started to do time share presentations where we were getting people doing the SDR work and getting people to time share. Then I went and did door to door security sales and did server job as well so all of these things were more like the entertaining the one-on-one with the individual, the consumer and did pretty darn well at that.

In the summer sales I made like $20 thousand in three months doing door to door and that was the low end. That was my first year doing it and I did it for one year, I needed to get money for a non-paid internship. That was the B to C side and I did well with it. Then I worked for IT training company and they dabbled in both sides. We sold to the consumer as well as we sold to the businesses, and that’s when I started to get into the professional world of selling. It was hard.

Fred Diamond: We’ve had a number of Sales Game Changers that we’ve interviewed for the podcast and a couple of them have started in door-to-door, grind-it-out selling various types of things. Why don’t you tell us some of the key lessons you learned from some of those first few sales jobs that have stuck with you?

Donald Kelly: One of the things that I learned especially doing door to door security is not necessarily hard work but working smart. I’ll use hustle, I know that word is tossed around so much now it gets watered down, but I saw people who were working hard and they’re walking around all day but they weren’t doing effective work, they weren’t hustling effectively. They got tired and got burned out and went home. If you’re hustling it means that you’re efficient, you got on a door at a certain time, you knew your messaging, you practiced before you got there and you found out when things are not going to work, and you don’t try to make it. In the door to door security world it’s a one shot hit, it’s a one hit wonder. If I knock on your door, I have 45 minutes.

The idea of me coming back to you, if I was to do that all day long, just go back to all of these houses, I would never make any sales so if it doesn’t work, I need to move onto the next one. It taught me that I just need to be efficient and I need to hustle, that’s one of the biggest things I took. When I came to the B to B side and I started doing some BDR work for a software company and I was in inside sales, I just knew that I needed to not just sit here and loath over, “I’m just going to keep calling this guy over and over again.” It’s like, “I’m going to call them but I need to recognize when something is not going to work and I need to move on, just be efficient and to hustle.” Planning was a key thing, too coming in from that side of the world because it was a full commission job. Your morning time, you do a meeting at 10 o’clock, you drive and you get out by eleven, midday and you’re going till the evening time. During that time period it’s my game time and I’m not going to stop and go on Facebook or sit down and play Angry Birds – maybe I did once in a while – but you’re out there and your time is money because it’s full commission. You need to pay rent.

Fred Diamond: Donald, a lot of people follow you on the internet, on Facebook, LinkedIn and other places, you have a very popular show so a lot of people probably view you as a mentor. Why don’t you tell us about a mentor or two that has impacted your sales career?

Donald Kelly: One of the mentors that helped me is named Steve Hatch, he’s actually local here in Orlando and he took me under his wing at that IT training company. He was the CEO of the company and he had to do the sales. He brought me in, again, my personality, he thought that would help but realize you need a lot more than just personality. Steve brought me in but he taught me not only the sale side but taught me the business, helped me to understand business acumen and threw me into some deep ends.

One of those deep ends was I did a little bit of marketing with him but we were trying to figure out a deal with a local NPR station. He helped me to be able to lead that and to negotiate and to work with NPR as far as this deal. He [Inaudible 09:01] but he was a great mentor and also affiliated with my church as well, so he was a leader in that sense and was a father figure in my life. He helped me to recognize the type of individuals that I could grow up to become. He helped me with that a lot, from the sales to business acumen as well as the individual enough to be a new sense of society [Laughs].

Fred Diamond: Speaking of being an individual, you just became a father as well.

Donald Kelly: I did, yes.

Fred Diamond: Congratulations.

Donald Kelly: Two weeks today after recording, two weeks ago.

Fred Diamond: That’s great, it’s probably been about two months ago when the show comes out. You deal with a lot of sales professionals and a lot of people who aren’t necessarily sales professionals but when you think about the sales professionals that you work with, what are the two biggest challenges that you think they’re faced with right now?

Donald Kelly: I would say the two biggest challenges I feel that sales reps are facing with, a lot of the ones that I meet with in the small companies is prospecting and prospecting effectively. I feel a lot of people are pulled in different worlds. They’re told that cold calling is dead but when you work with a lot of small companies, the CEO’s of those companies, that’s how they built the darned thing so they’re saying, “You need to do cold calling, you need to go that route.”

Then the social aspect, it’s putting yourself out on social media, it’s hard to do that and I think sometimes people don’t have that confidence to do it effectively. They will wait for the inbound leads and we’re taught that if you do the content, an inbound is going to come and it’s true, some of that stuff does happen but I feel that a lot of the sales reps that I work with on a day to day basis, it’s prospecting. I’m constantly trying to give them ideas and to give them training about how to utilize LinkedIn and how to do that effectively or how to take advantage of cadences and set up a flow, we call them the flow process of outreach.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about prospecting for a second, then. Again, you’re an expert on that so a lot of people engage you for it. Give us a tip or two on something that’s top of mind that you believe people should be thinking about as they prospect.

Donald Kelly: It’s the multi-channel outreach or omni-channel approach. What I feel with that, what I teach when I work with these sales reps, I try to encourage them to start to game off on social media to make that interaction and to connect with people, genuine connection. I’m not talking about ‘liking’ somebody’s thing, I’m talking about engagement. For instance, I did a post the other day, actually last night about role play and now I had a couple people that came on to that. I’m taking a conversation from the stream into the inbox and started to say, “Hey, thank you so much, Fred for commenting on my post, loved the comment, would love to connect.”

And once I connect, now I can take that conversation to a phone call because that phone call makes it so much warmer in engaging. Then also I take advantage of utilizing, depending on the type of product the organization is selling – if it’s something that’s going to be simple like a software for $10 dollars a month, it doesn’t make sense to do that – but for some of the bigger things, enterprise sales, what we have seen is to utilize the snail mail in that process as well to grab the attention. I will send something into the snail mail, maybe three days later. That grabs your attention, that cues it up for my cold call.

Fred Diamond: Do you physically mail it or do you Federal Express or what do you do?

Donald Kelly: Physically, USPS, you can take advantage of some of those flat rate boxes depending on what you’re doing. One of the clients – I’ll give you an example with this – they were trying to get demonstration, they were in the behavioral health space and their sales reps were doing a lot of the cold calls alone and they weren’t doing a multi-channel approach and that wasn’t working too well. We said, “Okay, let’s try an experiment.” What we did was we said, “Let’s get a box” and we created a ticket, like a Willy Wonka ticket and it was like, “Join us for demos”, like a movie ticket and then we gave them popcorn.

We wowed them and one of them found out they like Coke products and lucky it didn’t explode, but we sent them a Diet Coke in the mail. Diet Coke, popcorn, the Orville Popcorn and Swedish fish. Then we also found out his receptionist, the one that gave us some information on what kind of stuff he likes, we put two Starbucks $5 dollar gift cards, it was about $12 dollars for this box altogether. We did a bunch of these and then they were able to land 3 of the 12 from this experiment that came on, and that was about $100,000 dollar deal that they were able to close more revenue annually form just doing three boxes.

Fred Diamond: The key issue again is how do you get through? There’s a bigger challenge than ever to get through, as you know. People don’t return your phone calls, they don’t take the calls, it’s very difficult to get through. You’re going back to snail mail to get through to get those meetings. Donald, you’ve had a great career in sales, you’ve had a lot of success. Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, why don’t you tell us about your biggest success that you’re most proud of? Besides your new baby.

Donald Kelly: The biggest success I would share was when I was working in software space, we were selling to city, county, governments, K12, this was large. The average deal size that I was working on was about $30 thousand dollars, maybe $50 thousand dollars. This one client, I went in and it was like the perfect sales situation where you found one individual and then that person was our champion. We worked with that champion for about 6 months and nothing happened, then finally came to an opportunity, we found other people in the organization, he broke it out and then we started to do the consulting type of selling with multiple departments and then we started to uncover a pain and difficulties.

It was the perfect scenario, Fred. Then from that standpoint we created K Study from it because this was going before the board, so it was presentation after presentation and we were able to secure this deal. It was a multi 6-figure deal that I was able to help bring into the organization. It just worked out perfect from the start to building relationship, getting referrals in, networking, all the way down to conversion and then upselling afterwards. It was fantastic.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Donald, why don’t you give us a tip for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe to take their careers to the next level?

Donald Kelly: Great question on this one. I read a lot of books and try to improve my game. One of my favorite books recently is Mike Weinberg’s ‘Sales Management. Simplified.’ and the whole book, for anyone who ever read any of Mike’s books, what he always goes back to is the fundamentals. Always, just go back to the fundamentals. For me, I think right now more than ever as far as sales reps taking their game to the next level is really mastering those things. I feel the biggest part besides prospecting is asking appropriate questions, questions that will get down to the heart and questions that will get to real issues. I feel, especially with the folks who I work with, a lot of them who are coming from the tech space and they’re pushing software, it’s really just like, “Hi, Fred, demo” and try to get something there.

Fred Diamond: Show up and throw up.

Donald Kelly: Yeah, and those demos go nowhere. I have a client right now that I’m working with and it was absolutely amazing, Fred, the amount of frequent demonstrations and did they have a proposal? I’m like, “Yes, this looks amazing looking at their pipeline” but it was all for show because none of those, they knew nothing about the individuals and knew nothing about the problem. I think we’re skipping that process, that part just a little bit. If there’s one thing I feel any sales rep can master is mastering discovery, mastering asking meaningful questions, questions that are going to really show your expertise and coming prepared to ask those questions. I’m not talking about worthless crap like saying you sell time management or…

Fred Diamond: Software, yeah.

Donald Kelly: Yeah, I want to know, understanding that right now, time management is one of the biggest issues going on, blah, blah, blah and especially in your industry, the regulatory changes. What are you guys doing to fix that?

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

Donald Kelly: Planning, planning, planning. I created a book because I couldn’t find a planner that could do it. You and I aren’t doing video right now and people can’t see us, but one side of it was the day to day planner where I broke it down from 6 am, I think about 5 am starting morning to about 8 pm in evening and broken up into 30 minute blocks. I read a book by Kevin Kruse called ’15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management’ and then another book was ‘The 12 week year’, fantastic book.

What I was doing and what I see a lot of sales reps do is we take all of our things in our mind that we need to do, say 15, 20 things that we need to do for today. The ones who plan may just take those and throw as many of them as they can up on a calendar, maybe, but it just wasn’t fitting right for me. What I started to do, I started to break down my day based on categories to see if what I’m doing was effective. In my role as a business owner, I have sales activities and marketing activities, operations and stuff like that so I started to figure out what I was doing on a day to day basis. I track all of those tasks for like a week and I can see where I have commonality, what task I’m doing over and over again and the ones that I don’t need to do. I eliminate the ones that I don’t need to do, get my team to do that and then focus on the sales related one so then now on my day to day task, each morning I sit down or each day before the end of the day, I put down what I need to get done for tomorrow based on categories that I need to focus on.

Then I take those tasks and put them on the planner so then now everything that’s on the planner has to be meaningful towards the end result, and then I have to tie to my KPI’s. At the end of the day now I’m judging my day to say, “I had 5 tasks that I needed to get done today, I got 14 out of the 15 so I had a 90%-ish, 93%, I had a good day, I’m A.” But if I get anything lower than a C, something get really wrong. I feel that many of our sales reps, what happens is that we willy-nilly each day because we follow – and Mike talks a lot about this, too – we follow based on what the CRM tells us to task as opposed to us being in charge and to take control, have meaningful activities for each and every hour of the day.

Fred Diamond: Donald, that’s great. Before we ask you for your final tip for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, I want to go back to something you said before. You mentioned preparation, give us an idea or two on how the Sales Game Changers listening to the podcast need to think about preparation. What’s a tip or two that you would suggest to help them be more prepared as they go in for the sales call?

Donald Kelly: Three minutes, you need to have three minute prep, and don’t try to go too far than that. If at all possible right now, we live in a global world so if you have a focus list of clients that you’re trying to get access to, maybe you can find somebody on Upwork or whatnot to outsource to say, “I want you to go do some research on these people and come back with some information.” Then now you can take that information, also your LinkedIn information to have three understanding how does this company that I’m calling into make money?

What challenges that they may have that I they’re probably not even aware of? Simply you can do that through a Google search through the industry and you can find industry related magazine. Especially if you’re focusing, I like to make our clients have their reps focus on industries so they can become proficient at that and now you can find out what are some of the common challenges that they’re facing and then understanding how does this person’s role, how do they help the company make money? You’re understanding what the company does, challenges the company may face. If you understand the challenges the company or industry may be facing, you can automatically tie your solution probably to that and then you can understand how Fred is affected by that, how Fred’s role makes money for that organization. If I can make Fred look good, solve that problem for that organization, I’m in a good situation.

Fred Diamond: That is such a great bit of advice there, Donald. One thing we keep hearing on the Sales Game Changers podcast is, “If you can help your customer achieve his or her goals, you’re so much further down the path. It’s not about you, it really is about what your customer is trying to do for their customers.” Donald, it’s been great having you on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we’ve been friends for a couple years now, it’s great to talk to you in some more detail. I love following you, I love what you say out there, I love the advice that you’re giving to the sales professionals who are seeking your assistance. Why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today?

Donald Kelly: The final thought that I would give – and it’s something that I believe strongly in – is that everyone has a problem. Every organization out there has some kind of problem, your prospects do. Somebody is going to solve that problem for them, why not you? Why not you take the advantage, go the high road, figure this out first and be the first one to solve the problem? If you do that, you stand out more than anybody else.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 198: The Sales Evangelist – Donald Kelly – Says This Approach to Sales Prospecting Will Set You Apart from All Other Sellers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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KEY MOMENTS
Key lessons from your first few sales jobs: 11:01
Name an impactful sales mentor: 18:16
Two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader: 22:44
Most important tip: 34:09
How do you sharpen your saw and stay fresh: 40:01
Inspiring thought: 43:18

EPISODE 137:  Deltek Global Sales Chief Matt Strazza Encourages His Sales Leaders and Team Members to Take this Type of Entrepreneurial Approach to Their Business

MATT’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Figure out what jazzes you. Figure out what you’re chasing and don’t be afraid to expose some of those goals to your peers or friends or managers so that they become real and you get a little sweat on the brow when you’re trying to move through them. Do it because you want to do it. Do it because you love it.”

Matt Strazza is the Senior VP of Global Sales at Deltek.

Prior to coming over at Deltek, he held sales leadership positions at CA Technologies and Niku Software.

He also owned his own software company for 10 years as well.

Find Matt on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about Deltek. Tell us what you sell today and give us a little bit of an insight into what excites you about that.

Matt Strazza: Deltek is a great company and our portfolio supports people that are in project based businesses. Think about people like architectural firms, engineering firms that have a very specific business model. The software that we provide helps those companies do what they do on a day to day basis and we do that in the government contractor space. We do it, as I just mentioned, in the professional services space, we do it here domestically in the US and we also do it internationally.

I have to say, in terms of what excites me about it, when I look at our portfolio, what our customers do is absolutely extraordinary. We have a customer that builds a mechanism that supplies the maintenance for the hooks. They’d catch fighter jets that land on the decks of aircraft carriers, that’s the sort of thing that our customers are doing and I’m very proud of the fact that we provide them with software and expertise and intelligence that allows them to run the business of their business.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, you mentioned all project types of businesses, project based businesses. Who do you sell to? Project managers, chief technology officers, what type of customers buy Deltek Software?

Matt Strazza: In a lot of cases, we’re dealing with people at the very senior levels of these organizations so if they’re smaller shops it’s the owners or the operators of those outfits.  As those companies grow, we often find ourselves dealing with and selling to chief operating officers, chief executives, chief financial officers. The software that we sell is typically instrumental in how these organizations run their business. There has certainly been an interesting shift in the marketplace in that we also sell suites of solutions to emerging businesses.

While the software we sell is incredibly important to the overall success of the business there are certainly cases also where these are grass roots efforts and our software is flexible and viable enough in those emerging business communities that we have a very robust business model that supports that level of business as well.

Fred Diamond: Again, you mentioned in the introduction that you worked in restaurants, you worked as a bartender, you worked in landscaping, now you’re heading a global sales organization. Take us back to your first official sales job, tell us about that. How did you first get into sales as a career?

Matt Strazza: I’m going to go into the way back machine for that one [laughs]. Wheeling my red wagon around Ridgewood Avenue in Bloomfield, New Jersey selling pumpkins around Halloween was the first thing that I can remember actually selling to people and getting gratitude from having talked about my wares and priced them accordingly. Had a good distribution system which was convincing my dad to fill up the back of our country squire station wagon with pumpkins and bring them to our house which we then would wheel around the street and sell to all of our neighbors. That was my first recollection of actually selling something as a human being.

As a professional, the first thing that I ever sold aside from selling drinks in bars was payrolls working for ADP. ADP is a very successful company, very good marketing in terms of singular purpose and I worked in New York City territories where we had two city blocks as our territory and went around knocking on doors. I don’t think anybody actually believes me when I say this anymore, but sitting down at a desk at my first job at ADP was a phone book and a phone and a filing cabinet. You’d call somebody and get rejected and take that piece of paper and put it in a file a few files down and call them a couple days from them, and you’d do that over and over all day long.

When I think about that, of course now in the modern era of selling, I think it gives me a great appreciation for the tools that we have at our disposal to do what we do because if you understand foundationally and functionally what we’re trying to accomplish, having what we have at our fingertips I think is just absolutely incredible. It also can be daunting at times, but I think it’s incredible what we have available to us.

Fred Diamond: You spent a good part of your career at two companies with tremendous sales culture and history, of course ADP and CA Technologies. What are some of the things that you’ve transferred from those places to now leading Deltek? You lead an international sales organization as well at Deltek?

Matt Strazza: Yes, we’re international. A couple things, I tell you, from ADP I’m very fond although it’s in some ways treacherous of a practice that they did when I was there called role call where every single week you had to stand up in front of a room and tell everybody in the room what you sold. If you sold something, everybody would clap and if you didn’t sell anything then you would just have to go up on the stage and say, “Pass.”

Everyone in the entire room – which in the sales force that I worked on was about 150 people in New York – they’d say absolutely nothing and you’d just walk off the stage. I remember being in there my first week saying, “I am never going to pass, I’m not going to do that” and to this day, it does make me think. Software businesses have evolved to very much in leadership, an end of month or end of quarter’s business, there’s a big hockey stick that happens in the transactions at that time. I want people to contribute every day and contribute doesn’t necessarily mean sell something, but it means move something forward. Do something today that could have been tomorrow, do something this morning instead of this afternoon, get people moving faster. This game that we’re in, the selling profession is so much about speed and flexibility and the ability to get places sooner rather than later.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, on that roll call exercise, obviously you don’t want to say pass in front of 150 of your peers. Would you do that today, would you implement that in places where you’ve worked today?

Matt Strazza: I wouldn’t do it now as I’m not a huge fan of public humiliation, but what I do ask for is analysis of data in terms of looking at activity like did someone contribute adding a new opportunity to sales force in a given week? That I can a ton about, and that I do ask a lot of questions about because regardless of whether you’re a senior person or whether you’re new to the shop, I think everybody has something to contribute. Might be making phone calls, making connections, improving our contact database which improves our ability to market, the more we get our message out there of course the better opportunity we have to sell. While it’s not necessarily public in terms of what the ultimate sale was, I do think that we as managers have to keep our eye on the ball in terms of what people are doing every day to move us all forward collectively.

Fred Diamond: One quick thing, I mentioned in the introduction that you also ran a software company, your own company for 10 years. What were some of the lessons you took away from that being an entrepreneur and that you’ve transferred now to what you’re doing?

Matt Strazza: I’m glad you asked that because I view every role I’m in as entrepreneurial. I think it helps to keep me based, I feel like it gives me perspective especially if I’m dealing with our partners. I ran what I did and my business was a partner organization, we were at the time partners with companies like Mercury Interactive and Sybase and Powersoft that got bought up by Sybase as a value added reseller. Our model was selling software and then making most of our money on the consulting services and education services that were associated with the software. You learn how to be scrappy, you learn the value of hard work.

I don’t know an entrepreneur that doesn’t put in lots of time and lots of effort, but you do it because you know that your involvement influences the outcome and that you have a direct influence over that. The early days are difficult and fun, then you reach a point where that transitions into a larger business. My business ultimately ended up being about 250 employees across 4 offices, about a $25 million dollar business.

Another big learning experience for me in that endeavor was we had great times up to that point and then we had some very difficult times. When you’ve only experienced positive times, you really see what you’re made of when things get a little harder and you have to start talking to people about downsizing offices, changing people’s functions, asking people to perform different roles and that’s where I can recall really gaining what I felt like was an ability to be a more responsible manager dealing with more difficult circumstances. I took that and hopefully added some capability and emotional intelligence and humility into future roles learning from those times then.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you, we’re going to ask you for your tips later on as we get into the podcast but you used the word “entrepreneurial.” You said you’ve always felt yourself being entrepreneurial as a sales professional. Matt, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, a lot of people who are in the early stages of their career. Talk about that for a second, what does that mean? When you’re talking to a young sales professional and you encourage them to be entrepreneurial, what are some things that looks like?

Matt Strazza: I think it starts with a mindset which is while you may rely on other people and you may interact with other people – and certainly I’m encouraging people to be collaborative with others, but at the end of the day you have to take responsibility for your own actions. I tell people all the time, I can’t make you make that one more call. Like I said, I can look at activity and I can see directionally what people are doing but this works much better when you’re self-drive. The lights are going off if you don’t make that sale, that lease payment’s coming up, the heat’s going off and you have that looming pressure on you and I always think about that pressure no matter what size business I’m running.

We’re fortunate enough to be in a larger business at scale, but all of us could benefit from thinking and acting like entrepreneurs where we care about every customer at every level. I think that’s something that at Deltek we do really well, is that there are no barriers across the organization to access to people and communicating with people. I’m maybe getting off topic here a little bit, but we don’t have any offices, people can communicate with people at any level in the company whenever they need at any time and I think it grounds us as people that are all working together in the same end.

To that extent, I think we are very entrepreneurial, we are collaborating on ideas and how to service our clients and how to help each other. At the end of the day, I think that people thinking, “I’m the one who’s got to get this done, I feel responsibility for this, I’m going to make sure that this meeting goes well. I’m going to make sure this customer understands our value proposition and we follow up accordingly like we said we were going to” like you see great entrepreneurs do. Everybody loves dealing with somebody that has great expertise and depth of knowledge and who cares about what they do at a really visceral and deep level. I think that’s what I’m looking for from our team and I tell new sales professionals that all the time.

Fred Diamond: Speaking of expertise, why don’t you tell us a little more about you? Again, we’re talking today with Matt Strazza, senior VP of global sales at Deltek on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Matt, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Matt Strazza: I think this is a really interesting question. For me, personally as I feel fortunate to have greater responsibility in organizations, you start to hear the term “general manager” and “SVP”, you’re spending a lot of time moving or spinning lots of plates keeping a lot of things moving and it’s difficult to maintain a level of depth that a lot of us have had as individual contributors and doing things on a more precise level.

For me, things I do well, I feel like I can communicate well over complexity meaning making acquisition or we’ll change a policy or we’ll change a strategy and it’s my job to figure out how to communicate that to our team so that they understand it. You mentioned earlier, do we do work internationally? We do, so having a conversation with someone in Belgium about a policy that’s emanating from the US might be very different in how I have that conversation. Having a conversation in the govcon space might be very different than how I have that conversation in the professional services space, so thinking about the audience and how we communicate is really important and something that I care a lot about and I feel like I do pretty well.

Another thing is it energizes me to develop people and develop teams and I think it’s a badge of honor to promote somebody. I love hiring really smart people, my hope is that everyone around me is smarter than I [laughs]. I like that that’s going to build the future of our organization. Those are a couple things that I think I do pretty well, but I’ve got a lot to work on, too.

Fred Diamond: Speaking of being a great leader, again you’ve worked for some great companies. You’ve worked for ADP, you’ve worked for CA Technologies, Niku Software. You must have had some great mentors along the way, some people that have guided you and provided some great insight to guide you. Why don’t you tell us a little more about an impactful sales career mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Matt Strazza: I’ll start with my very first inspiration as a seller and that was my dad who passed away a couple years ago. My dad sold cash registers pretty much his whole life, worked for NCR Corporation and started in the days where they were just metal machines and you went around selling them. One of the jobs I didn’t mention, by the way, earlier was for some reason a van that had no air conditioning driving around to the entire northeast dropping off cash registers to various supermarkets around the tri state area. My dad always liked the simplicity of selling and he used to always tell me, even when I was selling things that were more complicated, he always used to say, “Sell what’s in your garage. Sell what you have.”

I just always laugh about it because a lot of what we do in software is we talk about futures, we talk about the next versions but at the end of the day, you’re going to do really well by selling to your customer something that works, something that is proven, something that is practical, that’s referenceable. All of those things are important, I think about my dad a lot in terms of learning about selling and my dad was always very classic in terms of, “Make sure you send a follow up note” at the time, a hand-written follow up note and, “Make sure you do what you say you were going to do. Follow through on what you said you were going to do and you’ll have a great career in sales. He was very happy when I went to work for ADP, loved the sales culture, big company, working for a big sales organization.

As I got into companies like Computer Associates, there was a guy named Adam Elster who actually just took a new job as a CEO, was the president of CA while I was there. He and I worked very well in different functions over many years and had a mutual respect for each other. One of the things I learned from Adam was that ideas can always be improved upon, if you’re walking into a review of some sort with your receptors closed and you’re thinking that your idea is the best idea ever, Adam was one of those guys that could say, “It’s a pretty good idea, but maybe you should try this and that and that would improve it.”

I learned from him about having a cadre of smart people around you that you can bounce ideas off of, still make decisions quickly and efficiently but take the time to get some input. He’s also somebody that was a big fan of completely switching your function in order to gain expertise and also perspective. He’s one of the reasons why inside the same company I ran operations and I ran professionals services as a salesperson having done those things, and then coming back into sales again knowing what professional services organizations deal with I know makes me a better seller. It makes me understand the total cost of ownership and what our professionals in the consulting business go through to help us sell what we sell.

I know how hard it is to run the operations of a business and things that we take for granted in a modern software company like the Salesforce platform or our LinkedIn platform or our compensation plans or our territory planning. That is hard work and going through and understanding all of that I think has really helped round out the way I look at sales teams and the way I managed sales teams. Those two people come to mind as being very influential in my day to day.

Fred Diamond: There have been a couple episodes that we’ve done on the Sales Game Changers podcast, Mark Weber’s episode comes to mind, where he also talked about his father and the role that his father played. You mentioned in the beginning of the interview that your father would drive you around when you were selling those pumpkins. How did you sell in February, any luck selling in February?

Matt Strazza: It was a seasonal business, it was mostly the lead up to the fall time period when we did most of our pumpkin selling [laughs]. Aside from that, you didn’t have much product or much need in the marketplace.

Fred Diamond: Not a very big June fruit, the pumpkin. Matt, you manage a lot of people across the world who work at Deltek, you obviously observe what’s going on in the marketplace. What are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Matt Strazza: One challenge I would say is it is a gift to have people in organizations that have great amount of experience. As you’re growing companies, it’s also very difficult to make sure that you’re maintaining a network of successors. It’s one of the things that as we grow and we look at as we acquire firms, we grow organically, is to keep our eye on the ball and balance that accordingly because I absolutely love having people in roles that are really experienced and really know what they’re doing.

Some of the hardest decisions we make as managers is to go to somebody and say, kind of what I was saying before, “Adam, I’d like you to do something else. I need some help over here.” Whenever you look at, if it’s sports teams or companies, I think they do this really well, this ability to be selfless and do something else, do something different to grow, get out of your comfort zone a little bit and that’s something I think about quite a bit.

Another thing I think about and I mentioned earlier is harnessing the technology that we have available to us in order to sell. I sometimes think we get handcuffed by it, you could sit down at your desk and say, “Should I be looking at RainKing stuff today? Should I be looking at LinkedIn, should I be looking in my Salesforce? Should I be looking at some other contact list?” There was a beauty in the model that I talked about before, the simplicity of opening up the phone book and just banging through it because there was nothing else to do.

Now you could really get caught up in, “Do I email, do I text? Do I get on social media, do I call?” I’m probably not going to get somebody on the other end of that call the first bunch of times. I’m jazzed by and interested in all the tools that we have at our disposal, it also is a big worry for me on a constant basis. Do we have the right set of tools for our sellers to be most effective in the marketplace?

Fred Diamond: I’m just going to go back to the beginning part of your career. You said you had a two block territory in New York City, you’re working for ADP selling payroll related services, if you will. I’m just curious, you talked about the use of technology today and Salesforce and LinkedIn and RainKing and all those types of things. When you were going through the phone book making your prospecting calls, today we spend a lot of time with when should you call, the right time to call, those things. When you had the yellow pages or the white pages in front of you – for the people listening on the Sales Game Changers podcast, that’s what we call the phone book, either white pages or yellow pages – did you think about when you were calling or was it pretty much, “I’m going to get through the B’s today”? Just curiously, take us back to those days.

Matt Strazza: I’m a methodical cat, and I almost always went alphabetical but one of the things I always did to make it a little more fun for myself was I would walk around my territory and I would write down names and sketch out little stories about why I thought someone was going to buy from me. If it was a place that made products for pizzerias or ovens or whatever, I’d say, “Mr. San Antonio is going to buy this because he needs to make 600 pizzas.” It had absolutely nothing to do perhaps with whatever this company even did.

thing, because there was no Google, there was no way to look up what the heck those people did so I would make up these narratives about why I would think it would be fun to sell to them. Sometimes, I’d use that in the conversation that I would have with the person. I’d say, “Fred, this is funny because I thought you made water tanks and as it turns out you make tires.”

We’d get a laugh about it and it would move us on and they’d ask, “Why did you think that?” and I would tell them that story. I’d say, “I’m a seller, I’m trying to keep myself entertained” so I would walk around in my territory and draw pictures of my prospect’s businesses and then make up little stories about what I thought they did and then try to validate whether I was right or wrong.

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting, I want to follow up on that before we ask you about your greatest sales success or win from your career. Your father said, “Sell what’s in the garage” and you told me just a second ago that you were making up these stories. There’s so much information that’s at our disposal, you have a lot of young people who work in your sales organization. What do you do when you see someone who’s just petrified because there’s so much information? First of all, do you see that? Second of all, what do you do, what do you tell them?

Matt Strazza: I worked with a guy for a long time, he used to call it “the 8,000 lb. phone syndrome” and he’d say, “You just have to get over picking up the phone the first time. I haven’t come across the person yet who absolutely loves prospecting the people that they’ve never met before and who are probably going to say no to them, but there are a lot of things you can do to make it a little bit more fun and a little bit more interesting. I always tell people, “Buddy up wherever you can. I do like where you were going a minute ago, try and do things at different times and keep track of your successes. Try to keep it light, be fun about it.”

I do think it’s a great gift to have the power of technology. If I was making up stories in the past, you don’t have to do that anymore. You can actually find out what they do and you can actually find out who they’re connected to and be a lot smarter about warming up that pursuit. At the end of the day, there is just that moment where you have to get going and do it. It’s like exercising, you’ve got to start. Once you start, it sure seems a heck of a lot easier and you feel great when you’re done. I think it’s very similar here.

Fred Diamond:  You must have had some great successes along the way, take us back to the #1 sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.

Matt Strazza: In my early days at ADP, I had a sale that I remember so specifically. I remember everything about the room, the temperature, at the time of course I was wearing a full suit and tie which was mandatory as part of the sales force, a pair of what I’m sure were the most inexpensive wing tip shoes that money could buy at the time because I couldn’t afford anything else. I sold to what was the Mecca of the best possible company you could sell payrolls to which was a parking garage company in New York City.

The reason why they were the best people to sell to was because they had individual corporate ID’s and every individual ID required its own payroll. It would be like selling to 25 businesses at a time and I came across this, prospected it, found it, sold it, ended up selling 28 payrolls in one day in what ended up catapulting me into the President’s Club Awards at ADP 8 months into my career. I sold it on a Tuesday which was the roll call day and I, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, ran back across 34th Street to our office, walked right into the roll call room right before it was my time to go up on stage and talk and deliver the news about the deals that I just sold.

Essentially 28 deals in one day and it just gave me that elation that I think about all the time, and why I love sales, I love that feeling of having done something that has an immediate impact on your business. I think there’s some fun in the recognition of it as well and have been of use to the company on that particular day. Then at ADP the clock would just to the next week and you had to go do something else [laughs].

Fred Diamond: Where are the next 28? Roll call’s coming up again.

Matt Strazza: Right, I should have saved one for the following week, don’t do that.

Fred Diamond: Again, we’re talking to Matt Strazza, he’s the senior VP of global sales at Deltek. Matt, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, did you ever question being in sales? Again, you were selling pumpkins when you were 10 years old leading up to fall – of course you didn’t do it in the middle of winter or summer – but did you ever question, did you ever think to yourself, “This is too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Matt Strazza: Do you mean today have I questioned that? [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Today it’s a rainy day here in Northern Virginia.

Matt Strazza: Of course I have. I’m always balancing what I think the right thing for me to do is. I love what I do and I’ve had a lot of success doing it, I feel very fortunate for it. The things I yearn for are impact on the world, making an impact on my community and the very nice balance that I found as a sales professional is I get access to all those things whether it’s through the efforts of our company doing things that we do with the community – and Deltek does a number of great things with the community – or with clients that we support and the things I mentioned earlier about what those companies are doing for the world.

I think I’m in the right spot, I like doing what I do, I’ve had success doing it, it puts me in a position where I get to interact with very smart people and intelligent people inside of our organization but also the expanded universe of whom we can interact with is endless. I have a reason to talk to anybody, I can go to any company anywhere and the likelihood that they’re going to require some piece of software from our portfolio is pretty darn high. That gives me an opportunity to learn about their business and it’s one of my favorite things to do. Whether it was thinking about those companies in the early days and what they did or actually getting to go in the door and learn about them now, I feel like I’m in the right spot. Do I question it from time to time? Of course, but the very high percentage of the time I’m really happy with what I’m doing.

Fred Diamond: Matt, you’ve been giving us great insights all along but what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the selling professionals listening around the globe to help them take their careers to the next level?

Matt Strazza: I think when I answer here I’m going to be talking mostly about people that are relatively new to entering sales and I’m going to say you can’t fake credibility. If you have it and you do have industry expertise and you have had a lot of experience then of course, talk about that and utilize that. If you don’t, you just can’t pretend that you do and it really works against you when you do that.

What I would prefer those sales professionals do is just be honest and say, “I may not have years of experience in this industry, what I can do is outwork everybody. I can get you answers really quickly, I can bring people to the table that can answer questions and while I’m learning I promise that I’ll go above and beyond and go out of my way to help you get done what you need to get done.” Be prepared for the fact that that may not be OK with them, they might not sign up for that and then you go onto the next one. What you might do is if you don’t get that sale, go back and say, “What did I need to learn here? What did I need to learn more about?” and then drive yourself to build that expertise and be prepared for next time.

Each time, you’re just layering it on, you’re learning more, you’re getting more credibility and each time you become more valuable to the organization you serve. Nobody wants to talk to someone who has very surface level information who’s reading off of a script pretending to know more than they do. Don’t fake it, go natural, go with what you have and you’ll learn a lot from it.

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

Matt Strazza: With our portfolio, that’s tough. There’s a guy named Mike Bourgeois who’s head of one of our SE businesses here, our Sales Engineering teams. Mike and I have a weekly meeting where we talk shop. On topics that I’m interested in that he doesn’t have expertise in he’ll bring someone else in and we’ll talk. The way I learn is I like to learn a little bit about technology and then start asking a bunch of questions and how to apply it practically because most of the conversations that I have with clients are about the practical application of our technology.

I don’t get into a lot of anymore questions about the underlying, what the code is written in, anything about the database or data integrity or security. Most of what I’m talking about is referenceability, capability, scalability, enablement, our company’s trajectory, that sort of thing. I love to know about the technology that we have and I’m fortunate enough to have people on my team that will spend some time with me. Things I would recommend in that regard would be almost every company has lots of things posted online, lots of information available, LinkedIn Learning is a great external resource for people that want to get into some depth on some certain things.

I do that and the other thing of course is I love to consume the written word, I love reading things about what’s going on in business and how companies are doing, interesting and innovative things and then weaving them into conversations that I have with our clients and our prospective clients and testing whether they care about those things or not. Then inevitably I’ll learn something from them as well which is always fun and helpful for the next time you go to sell to somebody.

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

Matt Strazza: When I think about that, I’m thinking about our team and we have a group in our sales organization that we call SDR or Sales Development Representatives and this group of people do hard work for the company. They’re some of the people that in a coordinated effort with our marketing team are often some of the first people that our clients or prospective clients talk to and they gave us feedback.

This is interesting from your last question because they gave us feedback that we need more structured education, we need more structured enablement so we built a 4-part program that in each stage has requirements for their own development and learning. They graduate literally from stage to stage until ultimately they have opportunities to a career path where they are or we open up the aperture to other parts of the organization where they can go to direct sales or indirect sales and other parts of the organization.

It is one of the life bloods of our company now because we need that group really functioning at a very efficient level not only for what they do in building pipeline and building opportunities for us, but also people development and the future as we grow the business of people that will help us to grow our sales profile and get to more market share in the markets we serve.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re leading a global sales organization here, you’ve worked for some of the best sales organizations in the history of technology for that matter. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Matt Strazza: I love that sales evolves. Even that very stark distinction about where we started this conversation with the phone book and as to where it is now, how we sell, whom we sell to. Look at just even the advent of how when we always would sell perpetual software and lifetime software to now SaaS and the tectonic shift that that caused in the marketplace where departments that we never even spoke to in the past can now consume their own software.

They don’t need to talk to anybody because they’re not housing the componentry for the software, they’re just buying a service. You end up selling to strategy departments, you’re selling to individual initiatives, there’s opportunity to open up and sell to different people. I think how we sell and what we sell and how sales organizations are set up absolutely fascinates me. I think it’s fun that there’s not really a right way, one right way anymore. If you can get sales done through self-serve and chat online, do it and that’s obviously no disservice to anybody including myself who is a lifelong sales professional.

I think all of us understand that there’s always value in having great people who understand the sales process and who are going to engage with prospects and clients, but there are some sales that certainly can be done in different and more efficient ways and also can lead to different types of lifestyles that people want to lead. Every sales professional doesn’t have to be traveling all around, you can be very effective, depending on what you’re selling and how you sell it, as an inside sales person selling something using technology, doing demonstrations that way, talking over the phone, people are more accustomed to that.

There are some things we’re going to obviously have to keep going out in front of and selling to people directly. There’s ways to sell things from different countries into these markets. I think the sophistication of what we do has grown and that excites me, it’s really cool how we can continue to evolve and continue to find our place inside of organizations that we serve. I think sales didn’t always historically have – it had a seat at the table, but I don’t know it was always as respected and now I think it’s become much more respected element of just about every organization.

People that I’ve known and certainly here, I think we’ve done a nice job of collaborating with other departments that there used to be some confrontation in. I’ve worked in plenty of organizations where there was confrontation between sales and marketing and sales and finance and you just can’t be effective if you’re doing that. You have to have that collaboration, I think that’s fun.

Fred Diamond: Matt, why don’t you give us one final thought to inspire our listeners around the globe today?

Matt Strazza: I would ask people who are listening to figure out what inspires you. I tell people all the time, I’m not a mind reader. I can help if you tell me what’s going on, so if you tell me you have a problem, I can try to help you out. Figure out what jazzes you. For me, along the way I figured out that I wasn’t necessarily a purist in terms of loving technology, I love what technology does. I love that being successful in selling technology has afforded me more time with my family and doing things that I like to do outside of work, doing things for my community where I live.

I happen to live in an urban area and I also live in a very rural area. The ability to have that juxtaposition in my life is something I feel very fortunate for and that I’ve gotten that opportunity because of sales. Figure out what you’re chasing, don’t be afraid to expose some of those goals to your peers or friends or managers so that they become real and you get a little sweat on the brow when you’re trying to move through them. I’ll finish where I started, I think nothing beats hard work and feeling and working like an entrepreneur, and do it because you want to do it, do it because you love it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 137:  Deltek Global Sales Chief Matt Strazza Encourages His Sales Leaders and Team Members to Take this Type of Entrepreneurial Approach to Their Business first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Episode 000 of the Sales Game Changers Podcast went live on October 6. Each week, we interview 3 sales leaders from across the globe about their careers and get tips on how you can grow your sales and take your career up a notch. I’m excited to have launched the series and I’m sure you’ll learn from some of the great sales leaders I’ve interviewed. Take care and go sell!

The post Episode 000, An Intro to the Podcast from Host Fred Diamond first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.