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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on July 29, 2020. It featured sales leader James Yeager.]

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EPISODE 257: CrowdStrike Public Sector Leader James Yeager Offers Unique and Specific Tips on How to Best Approach Senior Level Prospects Right Now

JAMES’ TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Study your customer, study the prospect, know what their organization stands for, what their mission statement is. If you’re going to be talking to an individual, a CIO for instance, go do your research on the internet. See if they’ve spoken on any webcasts. What’s top of mind for them? Then mash it up against what your company stands for, what your value propositions are, the outcomes that you’re trying to help your customers achieve. Curate your message, train yourself on a message, get a full command of it because when the lights come on and you get in front of that customer, albeit virtually nowadays, they’re going to make a judgement on you. If you don’t have the ability to allow them to differentiate you from your peers, you may never get that second call.”

Fred Diamond: Thank you so much. Alright, let’s get right to it, James. How are things going? Again, you’re a federal sales leader, public sector, not just federal but federal specifically. For people listening who aren’t quite familiar, we’re coming to the end of the federal fiscal year, it ends September 30th, this has obviously been quite a different year but the government seems to be continuing to buy so how are things going for you? How are things going for your sales team right now?

James Yeager: First of all, thanks for having me again, Fred. It was great to be with you last year and I certainly enjoy all the content from the various leaders from across the space. Things are going well, they really are. As hard as it may be for me to say and as hard as it may be to believe, we’re actually busier now than we have been in a very long time and the reason why it’s so crazy is because certainly that doesn’t suggest that I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs before. We’re on a little bit of a rocket ship here at CrowdStrike so we’ve been busy for a long time. With all that’s going on I would say things are going very well personally, everyone’s healthy and safe, the team and the organization, the company are thriving. We’re in a position of luxury, I think, in many ways here at CrowdStrike because cyber-security is very much an essential investment area and topic for conversation. I would say next to whatever organization that we’re partnering with, selling to, talking with, whatever their core function, their mission is, whether it’s defense, civil services, state and local, healthcare, patient care, patient outcomes, I would maintain that cyber-security may be the next largest priority.

Fred Diamond: James, this webcast but also the podcast is going to be going out all over the world. Not everybody understands why the federal marketplace is possibly the most competitive marketplace there is. One of our previous guests on the Sales Game Changers podcast said it’s the NFL of sales, the highest level of competition. Every company that’s anything competes in this space, federal’s known as Fortune 1 to many people. Give us a little bit of insight for people who may not know what’s so unique and what’s so special about the federal marketplace.

James Yeager: First of all, I love the sports analogy, I’m a jock at my core. My team is always giving me a hard time for over-inserting the sports analogies and metaphors but I think you nailed it. First of all, it’s an awfully crowded space and for those of us in this profession, we’re in this profession for various reasons but as you heard me talk about during our original moment together on the podcast last year, for me it’s about the competition. Again, part of that is the athlete in me but part of it is just I love winning and I love winning a heck of a lot more than I hate losing. There’s a lot of talent in this arena, there’s a lot of talent in this town, there’s a lot of great capabilities and offerings out there and if you also go look at what we’re doing – which is one of the reasons why I continue to gravitate to the space, I think I shared this with you over the course of my entire career, this is literally all I’ve done is sell to the public sector for better or worse. I love it, I really can get behind it, I can get into it, I can relate, I can attach myself to their mission and their outcomes, I can develop empathy. I think a lot of people tend to gravitate towards that as well.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned empathy. We’re doing a webcast every single day, we’ve been doing a webcast every day since the middle of March when the whole stay-home order kicked in and everything related to that. There’s three words that come up all the time: mindset, creativity and the e-word, empathy, that you just said. What does empathy mean in the federal space? You’re a federal sales leader, you’re a public sales leader, you’ve been selling your whole career, for the people watching today’s webcast and listening to the podcast, there are a lot of guys and ladies like you who’ve gone their entire career in federal or public sector and are now leading huge sales teams to this unique and interesting and vital marketplace. What does it mean to be empathetic right now to the federal customer or the federal market in general?

James Yeager: I would maintain having empathy in this space was a necessary characteristic or emotion, even pre-COVID, it’s amplified now but we’ll get through this and it will be important for us to maintain empathy even after we get through COVID-19 crisis that we’re all dealing with. I think it comes down to a true appreciation for the work of the men and women, the civil servants all across the globe. I used the word, “This town” a few minutes ago, it’s not restricted to the national capital region, this is a global operation. Day in and day out, men and women put their lives on the line or they make some other form of sacrifice, it’s a very underappreciated profession at times, it’s certainly underfunded in many circumstances.

There’s a lot of talented and capable people in the federal space who could go out and put their interest to be civil servants aside and go chase the high dollars that are out there and available in the private sector. Yet year after year they make the commitment to dig in and do what’s in their heart so I think as a sales professional you have to try and understand that. I say it all the time, I never walked a mile in those shoes necessarily so I can’t say, “I know what it’s like to be that decision maker” or to have to perform that function but I really try and see if I can get behind the veil as frequently as I can to understand what they’re motivated by and what some of the complexities that they have organizationally are, and what some of the stress that they’re dealing with is. I think if you can get ahold of that, it accomplishes a couple things. For one, it allows the customer or the prospect to see the humanity in you but I think it also gets you a little bit closer to distinguishing yourself, I mentioned it’s a very crowded space. There’s a lot of people going after all the big dollars that are in federal and trying to make a splash with their career but you have to always try and find a way to navigate and distinguish yourself from those competitors that are out there that are either competing for mind share, competing for wallet share or to try and drive a certain capability into the space. If you can distinguish yourself and you can do it with empathy, I think you’re going to be in a better position than others who don’t.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk priorities. Again, there’s about two months to go and for the people who may not know, there’s estimates that 40% of the federal budget is spent in the last quarter which would be federal fiscal right now so you’re probably measuring the days. There’s about 62 days left to go, I’m sure a lot of federal teams work around the clock in the summer, a lot of the companies like some of our sponsors, immixGroup and DLT, they’re busting it right now to make sure that they can get as much sold right now so that the government budget will be used. Right now, again it’s the last week in July, what are your top priorities as a sales leader? What are some of the priorities you’re telling your team to focus on?

James Yeager: Certainly everything you just said, we’re approaching the busiest part of the buying season and complicating matters is all the complexity around the Coronavirus and people who are trying to figure out how they’re going to school their kids from home. You’ve got folks that are trying to figure out if their kids are going away to college or not, are they going to be able to get away for vacation? There is a ton going on and that would be the easy answer for me to give you. It also wouldn’t be entirely true right now, we’re on the waning hours of our second fiscal quarter here at CrowdStrike so our fiscal year is February to January.

We’re in our own microcosmic busy season right now, every period the last couple weeks of a quarter are highly intense so we’re dealing with that yet I’ve decided to spend some time with you and our guests so that’s how important you are to me, Fred. [Laughs] it’s good to take a step back from that, by the way, and catch your breath. The other thing that we’re working on is what we call our AOP here at CrowdStrike or our Annual Operating Plan. Another way to describe that is we’re putting together our capacity model and our budget so it may seem a little bit bizarre that six months out we’re starting to look into next year but we take purpose-built planning very seriously here and it’s been a key ingredient for my development over the course of my career. How much time are you spending in the moment opportunistically versus finding balance and looking strategically out?

We’re looking at what key areas of the business need additional investments, what’s the return on those potential investments, do we need to experiment in certain areas? There’s a lot of analysis that me and my operations team are going through each and every day and will, frankly, for the next several months.

Fred Diamond: James, we do have some questions coming through here so let’s go to some of our questions. The first question is from Deborah in Maryland, the question here is, “How has the federal customer changed during COVID?” It’s interesting, one thing that we’ve talked about on the Sales Game Changers and the other webcasts that we do, some of the markets are gone. Obviously entertainment, if you run a chain of movie theaters this has been a horrible time or restaurants, of course and companies that supply things to those types of industries, but the federal government seems to be moving along seemingly the way it was. Is that the case? Is the market just continuing as it was or has the government customer changed over the last four months that we’ve been involved with COVID?

James Yeager: It’s an interesting question, I think there’s great variability in the answer, a lot of that depends on what specific domain of the government you’re in. For example, if you’re on the defense side or the intelligence side it doesn’t matter what the external conditions are, your conditions never change. Same could be said across various aspects of civilian, even the federal contracting world and the defense industrial base. We’ve seen some changes in behavior, certainly government employees are a little bit harder to get ahold of right now and we have to remember that they’re actually contending with a lot of the same challenges that the average worker and employee, regardless of what field you’re in, is having to contend with. Now adjusting to working from home, managing all of the distractions, I’m in my home office right now so you’re not going to see or you shouldn’t see kids running behind me – you might.

There’s a lot of additional chaos that’s been created during COVID but I do give the federal government and the employees of the government a tremendous amount of credit for staying true. Again, if you think about the mindset and the makeup of a federal government employee, they’re generally not in it for the glitz and the glamour. They’re on their own mission and they’re laser-focused so I think capturing their attention may be a little bit more difficult but they have really stayed focused and they’ve had to have some adaptability and improvise to their working environment. I haven’t seen a dramatic shift if that’s the easiest way to answer.

Fred Diamond: We have another question coming in here from Michael and Michael is in Princeton, New Jersey, not too far, there’s obviously stuff going on in New Jersey, thank you, Michael. Michael’s question is, “How are your customer conversations going right now with your federal customers?” That’s interesting. You actually introduced us to Carrie-Anne Mosley who was our guest about three weeks ago on the Sales Game Changers Live and she also was a great guest on the podcast as well, she’s running public sector at DocuSign right now. She talked about how in some of her conversations she’s adding 15, 20 minutes to each conversation to go back to the empathy word we talked before to get a little bit deeper into, “How are you doing? How’s your customer doing? How are the challenges going?” so that she could provide more value to them moving forward. Again, maybe not you but your team perhaps, how are the conversations going? Are they, “Let’s get right to business, we’ve got 15 minutes”, it’s the end of the year for them as well or is there more empathy in the conversations? “Hey, how are you? Let’s talk a little bit.” Are you able to get personal with the federal customer as well? A lot of things thrown in there for you, but what are conversations like right now?

James Yeager: I think it’s fantastic advice from Cam – Carrie-Anne – on trying to get that emotional personal connection. What I would say to that is it’s got to be genuine, it’s got to be authentic. I’ve known Carrie-Anne for a very long time so I know what she’s all about and I know she’s true to that. If you can, I would say again a straight counsel, the customers, because they’re not in their normal operating environment and the continuity of operations have been disrupted and they’re having to manage a lot of the complexity and distractions that didn’t exist when they were working inside the four walls of the federal infrastructure, they may be a little bit shorter and wanting to be a little bit more concise and to the point.

I think you’ve got to be able to on the fly read and make a judgement about your audience. I would make that statement about any conversation with a customer or prospect but going into it in terms of your preparation, if you can do that it’ll help you with a few things. It’ll help the customer maybe let their guard down a little bit and you can have a different conversation that allows you to develop your relationship beyond the supplier/buyer type of relationship. Also what it’s going to do again going back to the comment around humanity is I think it’s going to show the customer what you’re all about because in that conversation it cuts both ways, you’re going to hopefully have an opportunity – and we should always be doing more listening than we are talking – to talk to the customer a little bit about yourself. I think that connection that they can then form with you allows them to maybe distinguish you from others who are just kind of, “Alright, let’s just get into it.” Do it where you can but come in prepared to be able to do it for sure.

Fred Diamond: We have more questions coming in from the audience, we actually have two questions that are coming in here that are similar. The question is from Doran, “What is your advice for people who are interested in working for a company like CrowdStrike in the public sector space?” And we have a similar question that comes in here from Martha and Martha actually is in New York City. Thank you, Martha. Her question is, “What do you, James, look for in salespeople that you bring onto your team?” To expand on that question a little bit, you’ve been in public sector your whole career, a lot of people that we’ve had on the Sales Game Changers podcast and webcast have been in the public sector side. As a matter of fact, in a couple weeks we’re also going to be interviewing a couple other public sector VP’s of sales, Ron Police whose run a couple different organizations and Bill Rowan at VMware and Mike Miller over at Veeam. Again, your whole career has been in public sector, what kind of attributes, what kind of skills do you think you need to have to be successful in sales in the federal marketplace?

James Yeager: First of all, a couple power hitters you have up on deck there that you’ve just mentioned with Ron and Bill so I look forward to those, make sure that the audience dials in for that content. I would break the answer down to two ways. In many cases I’m always trying to when I’m hiring go after a certain profile. Despite the fact that I’m in public sector and public sector only, I’ve got plenty of friends across the aisle in the commercial enterprise space or in global markets and I always say that if you’ve never done public sector whether you’re right out of college and you’re starting your career or you’re making a transition, there is an adjustment. They buying cycles are longer, certainly the vernacular and all the acronyms, getting used to the way the organizations are structured. I always look for someone that’s got some exposure to this space and hopefully extends to the exposure.

Going back to one part of the question which is if someone wants to join CrowdStrike, as I further to find that profile I’m looking for someone that’s in the cyber arena and more specifically in a perfect world it’s someone who’s in the end-point security space or someone that’s in the next generation end-point space. All that being said, no matter how hard we look for the profile it’s harder to find the perfect profile and when you do, often that person is out of reach because they’re talented and capable and they’re busy somewhere and they’re doing well or maybe they’re hard to hire, they’re too expensive, the timing is not right. You have to make trade-offs in the hiring game and one of the initial pieces of advice that I got as a first-time hiring manager – and if Carrie-Anne is listening, she’ll remember getting this advice as well maybe from some of the folks at Oracle – training and retaining and hiring are just some of the key fundamental principles of leadership. If you aren’t going to be able to meet that perfect profile, you have to be willing to make some sacrifices and me, personally where I make the sacrifices is in principles, values and in the culture of the human that I’m talking to.

When I have interviews, a lot of people say this, they don’t feel like the conventional interview where I’m going down the list of questions, it’s very conversational, I’m very much a field person, I’ve got a good gut and instinct about people. If I can’t hire the person that’s selling to the Department of Justice over the last 15 years who’s at one of our competitors for whatever reason, I need to find the next best athlete – here’s another sports analogy – the next, best, most well-rounded individual that’s going to represent the company and me and the culture and values of my organization the best.

Fred Diamond: I have a question related to that. Again, we talked about the federal market space being like the NFL for sales and for sales professionals. Over the course of the last couple of months we’ve been doing the daily webcasts from the Institute for Excellence in Sales we’ve talked about stress. You alluded to it yourself, people had to be homeschool teachers, again we’re doing this webcast in July, people have been camp counselors because every camp has been cancelled. If you have a kid between the ages of 5 and 15 you’re a camp counselor, you can’t go on vacation anywhere so there’s been a lot of stresses. You might have lost a job, maybe your spouse lost a job and now you’re stuck at home, we know all of those things. The question for you is has that also affected your team, the federal side? Are they dealing the same way with the human challenges that we’ve all faced over the last couple of months and if so, for you as a sales leader, how have you coached them? How have you been a human coach, if you will, where you’ve helped your people through if they’ve dealt with that?

First of all, people in the federal sales world, are they dealing with the same things that we are? I’m not asking that from a naivety type of question, I’m asking because we had mentioned that the federal space continues, the mission continues. The federal government hasn’t laid off a whole bunch of people in the last couple of months, they’ve even increased their services with the loans and everything else. Have the world things affected your team and if so, how have you managed and how have you helped your people humanly get through the last couple months?

James Yeager: I think there’s no doubt about it that it’s had an impact on me personally, it’s had an impact on my family, it’s had an impact on the great team that I’m surrounded by each and every day, surrounded by at a distance in today’s world. I think the activity level that we talked about a little bit here this afternoon helps matters. The busier you are, the less you’re going to be concerned with the distractions. You had asked me yesterday when we were doing the tech-check how are things going and I was like, “I’m crazy busy and I love it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” That allows me to not be consumed by all that’s going on in the world today which is unlike I think anything that many of us have seen before, certainly my generation.

The way to solve for it is just to get super close to your people. Pre-health crisis I could do that very easily, I was traveling 250,000 miles a year sometimes so I was always in front of my team, I was always in front of my partners and I could look them in the eye. I could give my team hugs, I could go have a meal, I could go have a beer and that human connectivity was always there and in those moments whether we’re doing windshield time and we’re driving to a customer site or whether we’re having coffee and prepping, some of the formalities get broken down and you can really get to know your people. We don’t have that same advantage right now because I can’t see people face to face or in person, I should say. Now technology has come a long way, we’ve got all these mediums to be able to still interact like we are today, we’re on a GoToMeeting or whether it’s Zoom or Meets or whatever. I have made a conscious effort and I’m constantly employing my leadership team to do the same to make sure you can always make that eye contact, make sure you’re always asking the questions.

Once more, in spite of all the activity and all the work-related stuff that we’re doing and all those connections that we’re having in the professional sense, make some time with all of your people to just ask them the same questions that we talked about asking the customer, “How are you doing? Where is your head at? Are you concerned?” I can’t count how many conversations I’ve had with my team and I’ve got a really big team spread out all over the country now where we won’t talk about work at all. I’ll just be like, “Is there anything that’s on your mind? Can I diffuse any of these misconceptions that are going on around what the company is doing? Are we going to be supportive? Are we doing layoffs? Are you having a hard time trying to make your cold calls? Can I enable you or equip you with anything?” To me there’s tactical stuff and there’s things that we can do, levers that we can pull to get people to be more successful on the execution side but it always goes back to that human element.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit more about how you’re leading your team, let’s talk about you as a leader. What are your expectations right now? Again, it’s the end of July, we’re deep in the federal season and for people who aren’t necessarily familiar with the federal space, some companies work every single day in the end of July and August, September, they have weekend hours. Of course almost everybody is home right now, hardly any company has their people in the building but you have to process all the deals and you have to make sure that they all go through. What are your expectations? You talked about how you have conversations with them but what are your expectations for your sales professionals right now? I’m actually going to ask the question in two ways: what are your expectations of your more senior people, people who maybe have 10, 15, 20 years of experience? And I’m also curious, what are your expectations for some of the more junior people on your team?

James Yeager: I hope this doesn’t come across as cold or insensitive but my expectations don’t change. In fact, I don’t think they ever do or ever will, that’s an internal demon that I have to grapple with [laughs] my wife is always telling me that I need to pump the breaks on expectations and standards. I was put together a certain way and I’ve got high expectations, I think they’re practical but I’ve got high standards for performance and excellence so overtly, I would never come out and say to anyone on my staff, “My expectations need to be reset.” What I would say is the conditions are harsh and we’re going to have to improvise and adapt and if that has an impact on you individually, what I would expect is for you to be honest with me or your direct manager or your peers, be vocal. How can I help you if I don’t know that you’re having a hard time?

We’re investing a lot of energy into training, I talked about my travel, I’m not the only one at the company or at other companies that was used to traveling so frequently. Seemingly now we have a little bit of time back whether we like it that way or not, so we’re working on some training and some enablement stuff. If you look at senior individuals, I’m looking at maybe trying to see if I can put them into some additional roles right now to see if we can do some mentor-protégé stuff, take advantage of their skill set and their expertise. I’m picking their brain, I’m doing a lot of skip levels and for those people that aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s basically me having a conversation with a rep and skipping over a front line manager or VP that works for me. We’re doing a lot of that, I’m asking a lot of questions because we’re in that annual operating plan environment right now where I’m talking about, “If you were me, what would you do?” Then as I go to the individuals that maybe lack some tenure, it’s really about, “Can I get invested in you and your business? Now I’ve got some time, too, can I sit on some phone calls? Do you want to brain storm? What can I do to answer any questions that you may have that maybe you would have been afraid to ask me before for whatever reason?”

Hopefully I’m not intimidating to any of the people that I work around but sometimes there’s a vulnerability about reps that are at an earlier stage in their career because if I ask you a question, Fred, are you going to interpret that as, “James doesn’t have this figured out and he should know the answer to that”? Again, the common thread here is having a lot of different discussions around a lot of different topics but at the core, the expectations really haven’t changed. At least not how I communicate with my team because the moment I communicate expectations that are lower than what they were before, humans are creatures of habit, now they start getting conditioned to, “Maybe I don’t have to have as much pipeline anymore” or, “Maybe I don’t have to prospect as much because James has already conceded the point that he recognizes customers are going to be difficult to get ahold of.” No, I don’t want people moving off that mark at all.

Fred Diamond: We have a couple more questions coming in. This question comes in from Doran again and he asks, “Can you guys comment on what drives people’s empathy shortage?” I’m not sure exactly what he’s asking but this has come up a number of times as well particularly from some of our more junior people. Things like, “Do I still have to be empathetic?” some people have asked over the weeks or, “I’ve been empathetic for the last three weeks, I’m tired.” A lot of people are talking about Zoom fatigue right now, some people are also asking about empathy fatigue. How would you answer that question if someone’s feeling that they’re not quite up to being empathetic at this moment?

James Yeager: It’s like, “Where does it end?” right? Human behavior and psychology are not easy things to have to maneuver your way through as a sales leader but I don’t know that there’s ever any end for empathy and compassion. One of my employees is really struggling to get past where we’re at, they can’t seem to figure out a way especially if you go back to the previous question and answer that we had which was really tenured, experienced salespeople. The further along you get in your career or often times the further up you get in a leadership chain, the further you get away from the front lines of the sales, sometimes the further you get away from the core habits that you developed that made you a talented and successful sales rep in the first place. Sometimes senior reps – and I’ve heard this expressed to me directly from the reps and from some of my leaders – are really struggling to get back to basics.

The managers are losing their patience with their senior reps and not to trivialize it or even oversimplify it, I think you just have to go confront those things. As leaders, we can’t be afraid to have difficult conversations and be artful and judicious with the words that you’re using. I would say if you’re feeling that maybe you don’t have the same empathy or compassion for someone that you once did, first of all, have some introspection. Try and put yourself in their shoes and then go have a dialogue because you could probably figure out that there’s maybe something else going on there that you wouldn’t be able to get your arms around if you don’t have the conversation. I don’t know that there’s an end to empathy. If you’re finding yourself as a leader so frustrated with conversations that you have with individuals in your organization, maybe there’s something else that’s going on between you and that individual. Maybe it’s a chemistry thing or maybe they’re not the right fit for your organization, the culture of your organization or the timing and trajectory of where your company is. By the way, that’s okay, people move on voluntarily from companies all the time just like sometimes a company will elect to move on from an employee and there’s all kinds of reasons for that but it’s about getting to some of the basic fundamental truths. Emotion is an important part of that.

Fred Diamond: James, we have time for one or two more questions and then I’m going to ask you for your final action step for people watching today’s webcast or listening to the podcast. A question comes from Susanne and she’s also from New Jersey so thank you to all the people in the Garden State who are joining us today. The question is, “James, how have you changed as a sales leader during this period?” We’re talking to the great Sales Game Changers who’ve been on our podcast, it’s been life-changing in so many ways, it’s been career-changing. Again you’re in the public sector space, your good fortune is continuing as a marketplace and right now in the depth of the fiscal buying season. Be a little reflective here, how have you changed? Again, you’ve been working from home, you’re seeing your kids more frequently than you probably have in the past, you’re not on planes or anything. How do you think you’ve changed over the last couple of months?

James Yeager: In many ways I’ve changed a lot, in other ways I haven’t changed at all. I think being a model for consistency as a leader is an important trait, it’s okay to expose your emotions and your humanity and your vulnerabilities to your team and have some humble moments. We don’t have it all figured out, just because we’re in a leadership position we don’t always see all the angles but being consistent with what you’re all about, stand for what your expectations are, those things haven’t changed. For me, I think what’s been really helpful is since I’ve put in so much time and effort into getting close with the reps I can actually get in front of more customers and get on more customer calls and get engaged with more partners now than I have been when I was in the normal hustle and bustle.

That’s been really refreshing, at the end of the day I’m just a good old sales guy, same guy I was frankly 20 somewhat years ago. You get away from it and I think you can lose your edge, we often forget how difficult the role of a sales professional is, the individual contributor, all the stuff that they have to juggle, all the stuff that they have to manage or the first line manager. Frankly, I would say this to anyone at any time and I’ve said it before, I think it’s the most difficult job in [Unintelligible 37:41] because you’re having to accommodate and acquiesce to all the pressures that are coming downward from me or your VP or from corporate from the company and you’re having to manage all these multiple personalities and figure out how you can play Doctor Phil, figure out how you can get people to stay focused and get people to execute. I’ve spent a lot of time with my front line managers over the last several months and it’s allowed me to get closer to them.

I spend a lot of time talking about coaching and professional development and these were things that were always important to me but at times you can take them for granted when you get really busy, when you’re out on the road and you’re trying to play catch-up. This has forced me to take a step back and get to some of the grassroots things that were ingrained in me and have always been ingrained in me but maybe were subtleties because I was just so focused on the big picture and what we’re doing. I’ve got a great team and a great leadership team, Fred, so one of the advantages I have is I trust in them implicitly. Sometimes I just take that for granted too and I say, “You guys have this, I’m going to go do these other things that you and the company need me to do.” But now I’m shadowing people, I’m riding shotgun on a lot of calls, sometimes it’s actively engage, sometimes it’s fly-on-the-wall and I think that’s one of the silver linings that I can take away.

Fred Diamond: One thing that we’ve heard from a lot of people – and I wish we had more time to go into this – is it’s a challenge for some of the more junior sales professionals right now because so much of sales is being in the room, seeing how people interact during presentations, seeing how people ask questions, seeing how more senior people interface with the customer. In the federal space there’s 5, 6, 7, 10 customers in any opportunity, you have pyramid, you have IT, you have program of course. It’s a challenge to be able to help people also understand the process as well. James Yeager, VP of Public Sector for CrowdStrike, thank you so much. Give us an action step, again we have a couple dozen people watching today’s webcast. Thank you all so much for giving us an hour of your time. To the people listening on the podcast, we have thousands of people each week who listen to our two podcasts. James, give us an action step, give us an idea, something they can implement today July 29th, 2020 before we say goodbye.

James Yeager: I would make a conscious effort to carve out a dedicated portion of your day whether you want to say, “I’m going to do it first thing in the morning” or, “I’ll wrap it around my lunch break” because you’re sitting at your kitchen counter now, you’re not out entertaining people. Whether you do it at the end of the day or even if you carve it up and do it before your calls, be prepared. Study your customer, study the prospect, know what their organization stands for, what their mission statement is. If you’re going to be talking to an individual, CIO, we talk to a lot of Chief Information Security Officers, go do your research on the internet. See if they’ve spoken on any webcasts or if they’ve been to AMERItalk event or a FedScoop event. What’s top of mind for them?

Mash it up against what your company stands for, what your value propositions are, the outcomes that you’re trying to help your customers achieve. Curate your message, train yourself on a message, get a full command of it because when the lights come on and you get in front of that customer, albeit virtually nowadays, they’re going to make a judgement on you. If you don’t have the ability to allow them to differentiate you from your peers, you may never get that second call. Whether it’s a first impression that could be a lasting one or whether it’s a follow-up call or everything that you do, even in your emails, really put some time. A lot of people get away from this, Fred, because it’s laborious and it becomes a little bit of a chore but we’ve got to stay with that. It’s an important ingredient and it’s a fundamental lesson that I would encourage all of our sales reps and sales leaders to make sure that they maintain.

Fred Diamond: One of the things that we’ve learned over the course of the last four months is in the federal side it’s a little different because right now you’re doing a whole bunch of transactions but a lot of markets weren’t doing a lot of transactions and if you’re not doing transactions but you’re a sales professional, what are some of the things you should be doing? Get better at certain skills, study your customer, really understand what they’re going to be challenged with so you can bring them solutions. James Yeager, our audience thanks you so much. To the audience today, thank you all so much.

James Yeager: Thanks, Fred.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 257: CrowdStrike Public Sector Leader James Yeager Offers Unique and Specific Tips on How to Best Approach Senior Level Prospects Right Now first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on June 26, 2020. It featured sales leaders Carrie-Anne Mosley, known readily as CAM.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Tom Snyder’s Six Keys to Thriving in Transition here.

Find CAM on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 247: Carrie-Anne Mosley Gives Sales Professionals Suggestions on How to Turn Negative Energy into Positive Long-Term Opportunities

CAM’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “One actionable thing sales professionals should take it is to reach back out to their last 3 managers to thank them. Check in and ask them for one bit of advice. Ask them, “You know me, if I am working to improve myself, what do you think I should do?” Since they’re not your managers anymore they’ll probably tell you what that area of opportunity is. I’ve done that recently [laughs] it was quite insightful. I got a lot of good feedback.”

Fred Diamond: First, thanks again, you’re now with DocuSign, you’re the VP of Federal Business, you were with Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, also Amazon Web Services, you’ve worked for some of the great technology companies, you’re known around the globe as one of the top sales leaders as well and you say it like it is, too. Were very excited to talk to you, you also have some great stories. First off, it’s June 24th, it’s a little after 2 o’clock Eastern time. How are you doing and what are some of the priorities that you’re working on right now?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: Thank you so much for this opportunity, it’s really nice to talk with everyone. Things are going very well, I’m very fortunate to work for a company that has an offering that is really helping the government and organizations around the globe to be more successful in what I think is the new normal in this work-from-home, work-from-anywhere model. In fact, I was listening to the CEO of CrowdStrike speak yesterday on Bloomberg News and he was talking about this work-from-anywhere model because it’s not just about being at home and being sequestered but what is life going to look like in 12, 24 months?

I think companies are seeing this opportunity to have workers all over the globe in successfully supporting roles that may have been logistically limited to an office geography before. I feel so pleased to be working with DocuSign because we have a great solution for that, not unlike the CrowdStrike solution, where we’re helping those companies and specifically my team is helping the government to eliminate paper processes so that they can move to this new virtual world. For us, thankfully and I feel very blessed, we’ve been very busy to work on some very exciting programs with the government customers to get them through this, to be a bridge to that new normal.

Fred Diamond: We’ve interviewed a number of Sales Game Changers on the webcast over the last couple of months and because we’re based just outside of Washington D.C., a number of them like you are in the public sector and we’re nearing the end of the government fiscal year but a lot of companies were fortunate in that they accelerated the government’s path to the cloud and work-from-home and virtual, and your company is like that. I have a quick question, you just started with DocuSign during this pandemic, during this situation. You were at Amazon Web Services when we interviewed you for the podcast, how has the transition been during this situation, during this time? 

Carrie-Anne Mosley: I applaud the onboarding team at DocuSign, they’ve done a great job, they sent the laptops out before we all started the new hires and they’ve done a lot of really good sales focused training remotely, they know salespeople well because they’ve kept it very interactive, they call on us, it’s almost like live over Zoom. It’s really been good to recreate the in-person experience, the challenge has been, when I think about it, most of my team, I’ve never actually met in-person. I’ve got one team member who is containing at his home but he’s by himself and I can tell it’s particularly difficult for him, he wants to get together in person so we are planning to have lunch outdoors sometime here in the next week or so. Having that interpersonal breaking bread with your employees I think is a really important thing and one of the benefits of being logistically close, we’re being able to travel together periodically or at least quarterly so that is not lost. We did a virtual happy hour where we had a wine tasting event and we all had wine sent to the houses and stuff but it’s not quite the same as being in person [laughs] so I do look forward to a time very soon where at least we can do some social distance interaction but in person.

Fred Diamond: We’ve been doing this webcast where we interview past Sales Game Changers podcast guests. In the beginning people were adjusting to at-home and even though a lot of our sales professionals were used to working from home it still is a huge adjustment, then kids were sent home, schools were cancelled so there was a lot of that through the end of May. Now, and we talked about this during the pre-show, things are beginning to not really even but get a little more regular even though everybody is for the most part still at home. What are your priorities today? What are the two or three things that you as a global sales leader are spending most of your time on?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: We are doing a lot of hiring and onboarding, as I mentioned. With COVID and the pandemic it has been a tough situation for many companies and they’ve had to furlough employees or let people go, so that has resulted in a very high quantity of top talent to become available for companies like DocuSign who can make an investment now. We have been interviewing a tremendous number of people and trying to really get to know people because sometimes talent that’s available doesn’t always match with the roles that you have but you want to take advantage of those top talent people being available in the market. We’re really being thoughtful and taking a lot of time in trying to assess what roles we have today, what roles can we pull forward from next fiscal year into this year so that we can really take advantage of top talent that’s available in the market today.

That and then onboarding the people that we are hiring, I had one new hire start yesterday, I had someone starting on Monday, I had two people start just a few weeks back. It’s how can we onboard them and get folks to be productive while virtual, and how to give them that experience and give them the training and mentoring that they need. I think mentoring is a very tough thing under normal circumstances where you’re in the office sharing feedback, but now that it’s remote and sometimes the salespeople mentoring one another have never met in person, it just adds a new layer. We’re really trying to be thoughtful and coach our coaches, so to speak and really help set expectations with new hires but help their mentors to have the tools that they need to get them up to speed and help shorten the onboarding process.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, we’ve expanded our market, I know someone here is from England, I know someone here is from Belgium and I recognize one or two names that might be from Australia. What’s been a positive surprise for you or something purely positive? We’ve all had to adjust, when I talk to the sales leaders that we interview for the podcast and for the webcast we’re all aspirational people. It was only three months ago that everyone was having an amazing year, 2020 was going to be the best year for so many companies but what’s been a positive response or a positive surprise that’s happened for you during this whole situation?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: One of the things that I’ve experienced like so many other people is being at home. I have not been at home for this long in a row since I was on chemotherapy in 2016 and quite ill, but just like that experience it’s all about mindset. There are certainly days where I am really struggling, my kids interrupting me, my dogs are being bad, I am not able to focus the way I want to on this job but we have to look at the bright side. If we weren’t in this same situation we might be traveling, on the road, missing those opportunities to have those nighttime adventures with our families. I’ve had so many more dinners with my family in the last three months than I had had probably in multiple years prior to that just with crazy schedules.

For me, the biggest positive of this has been a desire and a thoughtfulness around shutting down the computer at 6:30 at night and dedicating the two hours after that to the family. We’ve done some fun things like my husband bought us all scooters, each of us have scooters, my husband’s is really souped up, of course, it’s almost like a motorcycle [laughs]. Mine is like a granny, it has a little basket in the back, we take nighttime rides on the scooters and we just are trying to have as much fun as we can as a family unit and those are happy memories that we would probably not otherwise be making if it weren’t for this COVID situation. It’s really helped me to try to compartmentalize the job and shut down at a specific time so that I have some additional family time because before we know it, as salespeople we’re all going to be back on airplanes and traveling a lot more and then we’re going to lose those opportunities and we’ll be doing Zooms with our family instead.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. We were talking before this about some of the big words that we’ve heard and over the 40 somewhat webcasts that we’ve done since everything started there have been some common words, empathy and creativity. You just said mindset, forgetting about the mindset right now you’ve been a sales leader for a long time. I first met you, I believe you were at SAP at the time, then I interviewed you for the Sales Game Changers podcast when you were at Amazon Web Services. Talk about your mindset, again you’re a very successful sales leader, you’ve been with some of the biggest brands in technology. You’d be amazed, when we posted your show – that was a year ago, I guess – we got like 10,000 views on our LinkedIn post so everybody knows Cam and you have this great reputation. Talk about your mindset as a sales leader, how do you go about your day as a sales leader from a mindset perspective?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: For me, I am thinking constantly about customers and secondarily about employees but those two groups really occupy the bulk of my day and my mindset and how can I help my customers to be as successful as possible in their mission. I try to be a very positive person, I’m always a “glass is half full” person and I think if you keep that top of mind for yourselves and you put that customer emphasis first in everything you do, that really helps you to be successful. People around you feel it and hear it in everything that you say and then they embrace that mindset as well. For me, it’s not something that I really do consciously but I am a generally happy person and I think that does make a big difference in the way that you interact with people.

One thing I’ll tell you is the way you see me today would be the way you saw me yesterday or tomorrow on Zoom meetings. I think that it’s very important that despite the fact that I’m working in my home office and I could be in pajamas right now I’m not, I get up every day and I do my hair and I get camera ready with the make up because I want my customers to know that I am focused on them and they are my focus from 8:00 o’clock in the morning until 6:30 at night. My employees, that I take them seriously too, for me that’s a professional mindset, that positive focus on the customer is what has worked for me through this whole thing. Just dressing the part and my neighbors always ask me, “Are you going somewhere?” and some of my employees tease me because I’m in dresses or whatever on the workday but to me, being on this GoToMeeting is no different than us being across the table from each other. I have to be in that mental mindset of, “We’re here to work” so I do that as part of my normal course of my day.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, in the very beginning a lot of people were getting used to Zoom and they were getting used to, “Where do we stand?” and those kinds of things. Over the last month there’s been a lot more of an adherence to, “This is sales and this is business and we’re helping our customers and we need to help our company emerge through this.” You’re dressed the part, I’m dressed the part and every day we’re dressing the part. We have a question that came in here through the panel and the question is, “Cam, how have you changed as a sales leader over the past three months?” You talked about you’re spending more time obviously at home, we all are but have you seen yourself evolve or emerge over the last three months as a sales leader?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: Yes. People are busy and sales leaders are very busy so sometimes we forget to stop and say hello. I can’t tell you how many text messages I sent where it’s question first and then, “Good morning” [laughs] so I’ve tried to be intentional and take a few extra minutes at the beginning of every call whether it’s an internal call or customer call just to acknowledge and say, “Hello, how are you?” 9 times out of 10, the customer reciprocates. They want to talk about how they’re doing and I opt to lean in because I want to have that conversation with them to really understand how they are and how’s their family doing during this whole situation, understand their personal challenges because some of them do have work-from-home issues, legitimate ones. I’ve leaned into those asking a little bit more and having maybe a little more personal dialogue. I’ve tried to be scheduling conference calls to be 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes so that I can accommodate a few minutes of social on the beginning and really have a warmer and genuine dialogue, but we’re not constrained by the 30 minute time window. For me, that’s one little thing that I’ve been doing a lot more, scheduling 45 minute meetings instead of 30 minute meetings.

Fred Diamond: How have your people adjusted to virtual? A lot of people who are in sales who work remotely, they’re used to it but it’s different. Things are opening up now, of course, it’s June 24th, 2020 so places are now open, you can go to a Starbucks and sit outside, for two months you really had to stay in your home or just very sparsely go out for places. How has your team responded and what are some of the things you see sticking around moving forward?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: My team I think has done a really nice job although again, I had to remind a few of them that pajama attire was not appropriate and they couldn’t always have just their photo on the screen because customers were showing up on the Zoom meetings and I could tell they wanted to have that connection with us because just like we were at home, they were at home. I had to remind folks, “Let’s come to work, brush the hair, I know it’s a little longer, gentlemen, than it normally is [laughs] but I’m sure you have some gel somewhere in the cabinet, get it going.” Once we got past that, I really challenge people to manage their schedules very similar to the way they did pre-COVID.

You’ve got to schedule time in for customer meetings and Zoom meetings but you also have to schedule time for the other things that are a big part of our job like customer prep, research, all the things that we do to be great sales professionals, we have to schedule time for those. I even find sometimes myself, you get this back to back Zoom meeting cycle and you get to the end of the day and I haven’t looked at my email and I feel like I really haven’t gotten a whole lot done. So, I’ve challenged people let’s be as critical about meeting attendance as we were before COVID. If it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t move your personal mission, don’t attend the meeting. Let’s meet where we have to but let’s also be blocking off times on our calendar to get some other things done.

One of the positive opportunities that we’ve had is that some of the government customers have been readily available to meet but some of the private sector customers have not had as much availability to meet, particularly in organizations where people are furloughed or they’re temporarily reassigned to a different role. I told my guys to really try to manage their time so they can make good use of that time, so a number of our team members have signed up for Masterclass and they’re trying to sharpen the saw for themselves and really use this time for self-improvement. I’ve encouraged people to do that and manage the schedule that way, I think for me it’s, “Let’s try to take some additional time to get to know our customers a little bit on personal perspective and then let’s also manage the schedule so that we can do some of that self-improvement.”

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that came in from Martin, thank you, Martin. You talked about managing your time, what is your recommendation for your team? Do you recommend from 9 to 5 that they be in front of their computer or do you recommend that everybody be available from 1 to 3? I’m just curious, and how do you manage your time? You mentioned before you’re done at 6 for dinner, is the computer on all the time? And I know you’re hard worker, you’ve always been a hard worker traveling and things like that. Are you chunking out your time more specifically now that everybody is pretty much at home? No one’s really gone back to the office yet, a couple people have started to go back to the office but some of the larger companies are saying, “Wait till September.” I heard even that some are saying January. Are you helping your people physically blocking out the time and how are you blocking out your time?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: Great question because normally we have commute time which is a little down time, I miss my Bloomberg News that I used to listen to driving to the office. When you’re meeting in person or you’re at an office you’re never really back to back and I find that in this new norm of working remotely the calendar gets that full. I intentionally try to block off at least a half hour in the morning, a half hour around the mid-point of the day and then certainly a half hour towards the end of the day every day, if I can, to stay current on email, eat [laughs]. I find one of the bigger challenges is just getting downstairs to grab some lunch. I keep some nuts in my office desk drawer here behind me but you really have to do that and I encourage my guys to schedule time during the day to do a little exercising, I find that helps.

When you’re sitting all day, particularly because we’re not walking from office to office or we’re not walking very far to go to the restroom – it was quite a walk for me at Amazon – we’re not walking into conference rooms, we’re just sitting. I’ve encouraged my team to get off, a lot of them to Peloton, take 20 minute, 40 minute Peloton break during the day. It’s really important that you take care of the body as well as the mind throughout this whole process and then just take a little refresh time. For me, sometimes that 30 minutes I literally go downstairs and turn on Ellen or whatever happens to be on TV at noon and grab a sandwich and take a mental break and time out for 30 minutes. I find that you really have to do that here because we don’t have that commute time which was for a lot of us a really good mental break to be thinking about the day, planning the day.

When your commute is walking upstairs that’s pretty quick and then you’re right into it. A lot of people have said that their boundaries for work hours have been difficult and they’re working late into the night so it’s really important that you schedule that stop time and respect that.

Fred Diamond: Cam, we have another question here. You talked before about starting to have more conversations with your customers so how are you coaching your people to have those conversations right now? In the beginning of this it was a challenge because everybody was getting used to what the new world was like and everybody was figuring out how to work at home and what their new jobs are going to be and how they were going to make all these shifts. Now we’re getting back to a little more normal, business is beginning to start up again but like you mentioned before, there are some customers that have had big challenges.

One of our frequent guests of our podcasts sells to the entertainment space and there aren’t many people going to arenas at the end of 2020 so they’ve had to shift to doing other things as sales professionals. How have your customer conversations been going? You mentioned you schedule them now for 45 minutes but are they getting back to business? How much of the conversation are you using for the empathy or, “How are you?” What’s the tenor and tone and how are you directing your people right now to start having those conversations?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: The big group meetings – and there seems to be a lot of those – are business as usual, no small talk and just jump right into it, manage it like you manage a meeting in person. One of the things I’ve noticed about these large group meetings is less agendas which is a problem. I really stress to my team, “Just because there’s 13 people on the phone, that’s a great Zoom meeting but we’ve got to have an agenda published that everyone agrees to.” That I think is really important with these large groups because now it seems like because people aren’t having to travel from meeting to meeting in person, we’re getting bigger groups on the phone for virtual meeting which can be both plus and minus so got to have a set agenda for those. What I like, the interpersonal, the lean in are those smaller group opportunities where it’s you and one or two customers in person because sometimes they don’t want to be vulnerable in front of their coworkers. I’ve encouraged my team to reach out one-on-one a little bit separate from the scheduled meetings and calls for those people with whom they feel like there may have been some undertone of challenge that they’re having, to lean into that but privately.

The other thing is there are some customers that I know, some of my best customers from AWS who are in the hospitality space who have been furloughed. I’ve reached out to them on LinkedIn because many of them cannot check their corporate email right now but I’ve reached out to many of them on LinkedIn regularly just to say, “I’m thinking about you.” You don’t have a really great thing to say to them, “I’m sorry you were furloughed, I hope you can pay your mortgage” but just the whole thought that you’re checking in on them really makes a difference and makes people feel great. In fact, just this week one of my mentors who is one of the leaders at NEA at California Hilarie-Koplow-McAdams sent me a note just saying, “Wanted to see how the family was doing with COVID, my girls are with me.” Very brave note, took her two minutes to write but just receiving that made me feel super special. I’ve really tried to be intentional and take time out of my day to make some of those outreaches particularly to those customers that I know are affected negatively by this. My customers at Marriott and Hilton, just to let them know that I’m sorry they’re going through this, I know it’s probably really hard but I’m thinking about them and their families. I really believe that when you lean into these moments versus shy away from that communication, it is so much more impactful for folks.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about what your expectations are for your salespeople right now. We talked a little bit about showing up and we talked about, “Don’t wear the pajamas and come to work” but for a lot of people now what’s happening is the stresses have changed. In the beginning no one knew anything, then of course over the last couple weeks as a country, as a world we’ve been more conscious of how to interact with other nationalities and how to interact with other people that we might be working with after the George Floyd and the protest, everything related to that. There’s different stresses that have happened, kids aren’t going away for the summer now, every camp is being cancelled. Like you just said, imagine if Marriott was your biggest client and you were booking your number on Marriott, ain’t going to happen this year but you should be doing things. What are your expectations for your salespeople and what are some of the specific ways that you’re coaching them through?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: I try to lean into it with my team to try to understand how these events of the world are impacting them because particularly for African-American employees, everything that’s happened over the last month has had quite a significant impact. Thankfully my company, DocuSign has put in place some great support networks, some great resources, we’ve had some wonderful speakers but I think you really need to lean in with employees and coworkers and just let them know, “I’m sure this is tough for you. If you ever want to talk, I’m here.” It feels awkward to say because you’re like, “I’m not sure” but I think saying something is better than saying nothing. That’s what I’m doing with my employees and I’m encouraging them to do that across our ecosystem with both our customers as well as our coworkers in other groups because I think it is important to let people know in general that we’re thinking about them in the whole scope of everything happening in the world. Not just COVID, not just with some of the racial issues that have been happening here but the confluence of those things really is impacting people and causing a lot of stress.

We want to make sure that we’re helping people to identify that they’re impacted by those stressors and then if they need help we’re directing them to resources to get that help and just letting them know that we’re here to be a sympathetic ear if they want to talk through things. I think that is really important and then also helping people to see that we’re going to get past this time, we’re going to get to a place, I think it is going to be a new normal and you want to me taking the time to do today things that will make you better when that new normal, we’re in it. I think it’s one of those things that’s going to happen and we’re going to ease into it and we’re just going to wake up one day and think, “We’ve arrived, now how do I proceed and how can I continue with my career?”

I’ve got folks doing things, a big one that I’ve taught to a number of people about lately is take this time to work on your own personal resume. Maybe you’re not applying for a job today but you’re thinking about where you’re going in your sales career, you’re thinking about your next role. Right now there’s all sorts of new interview methods in the marketplace, the STAR situational interview seems to be the big thing, Amazon started it but even at DocuSign we had training on it. I tell people, “Train yourself up on that now because whether you’re applying for a promotion in your current company or you’re looking for a job down the road, you’re going to be needing to be aware of that so take this time today to focus on you. Put some of the negative energy you might be feeling into positive things.” The other thing that I’ve seen a lot lately that I’m really surprised about is that sales professionals, in addition to your resume you should have a second document and that document is all about you. It should have your W2’s, it should have by year your quota, your base pay and what you actually earn, your OTE, and what percentage of your quota you were.

You should have this for 10 years at least because in 10 years someone is going to ask you that and you will have forgotten. Some people include it and update their resume as a working document but I can’t tell you how many candidates I’ve seen that have been with the same company for 5 years and haven’t updated their resume regularly, and they’ve forgotten that information. I say, take this time, start your spreadsheet about you, I have it so it has how much I’ve earned, my W2’s, I went and got all my old tax forms out and looked at it and then where I could find the quota sheets and quota letters, I put, “This was my quota for this fiscal year, here was my attainment and here’s how much I actually made.” As well as I went and gathered quotes that people had sent and emails to complement me and other significant things I had done that in three years I might not remember but when I’m going for a promotion or I’m going for that next job I’ll need to reference those stories. Particularly in this day of situational interviewing, those things become very important so turning some of the negative energy we’re feeling into the positive long term I think is something people should be doing.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great bit of advice. We’ve had on the Sales Game Changers webcast sales leaders of very stable successful companies but there’s changes going about everywhere. We’ve found that even sales professionals who’ve had 20 years of success and have created the document like you talked about are also kind of nervous right now. This is a new situation, when we first started the webcast people said things like, “I’ve been through 9/11, I’ve been through October 1987 and I’ve been through the banking crisis, this will pass as well” and it will, like you said. There’ll be different things but it’s taking longer, it’s a lot of additional things. I have two more questions here that have come from the audience and then I’ll ask you for your final thoughts. I love the, “Work on your resume and work on that second document” which is a genius idea. A question comes in here, what are you doing? You’ve talked about how you’ve changed as a sales leader, is there anything specific that you’ve worked on, Carrie-Anne Mosley, over the last three months to improve yourself as a sales leader?

Carrie-Anne Mosley: I’m a big self-educator so I take a Masterclass, I love the art of negotiations topic with Chris Voss, he was an FBI hostage negotiator, they just had one that I started watching which is Robin Roberts, the woman from the television and hers is about authentic communication. I think particularly in the Zoom age authentic communication is really important and then David Sedaris, he’s a writer, he did one on storytelling, a bit part of what we do is tell stories so I found that to be really interesting. I’m also a big reader, I’m reading this book called The Expansion Sale: Four Must-Win Conversations to Keep and Grow Your Customers, came out just this year, it’s been a very interesting book to read.

Fred Diamond: FYI, the very last live program that we did at the IES was with Tim Riesterer who’s the author of that book, he was a guest at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we’re going to have him on our Friday morning webcast I believe towards the end of July.

Carrie-Anne Mosley: Wow, I threw you that soft ball but that may have been where I saw his name and got the book. I have since actually bought some used books on Amazon, his first couple books so I have the whole series that I’ve been working through, pretty good stuff. Another thing that I’ve been doing is reaching out to people that I haven’t talked with in my network in a while, going on LinkedIn and just dropping people a note. I find whether I’m having to check a reference from someone, keeping those contacts is always valuable and I try to add a little value when I reach out but sometimes it’s just a, “Hi, missed you, was thinking about you.” I’m not a big person to thank people for their time because yes, it’s a gift but it implies that your time isn’t as valuable.

What I love to do is thank people for what they told you, what specific advice they gave you, how a conversation that you had with them impacted your actions in some way. I’d like to try to make it a little more personalized, the thank you, so I’ve gone back to some people lately and just said, “You probably don’t remember but this is what you told me and it’s really impacted me in these three ways and shaped some decisions that I’ve made” and I think people really appreciate hearing that, at least that’s what they indicate. I’ve been going back and reconnecting.

Fred Diamond: I’ll go back one second, thank you so much for all the great information you’ve given us, the great ideas, the great insights, how you’re working with your team, how you’re working with your customers. We have about a minute left, you’ve given us so many things, we like to end all the IES webcasts and live programs with one thing that peoples should do today. It’s June 24th, it’s a little before 3:00 o’clock Eastern time, give us one thing that the listeners should do now or in the next hour to be more successful as a sales professional, one actionable thing that they should do.

Carrie-Anne Mosley: One actionable thing is I think they should reach back out to their last 3 managers to thank them, check in and ask them for one bit of advice. Ask them, “You know me, if I am working to improve myself, what do you think I should do?” Since they’re not your managers anymore they’ll probably tell you what that area of opportunity is and I’ve done that recently [laughs] it was quite insightful. I got a lot of good feedback.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 247: Carrie-Anne Mosley Gives Sales Professionals Suggestions on How to Turn Negative Energy into Positive Long-Term Opportunities first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Optimal Sales Mindset Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 9, 2020. It featured sales leaders Diane Cashin and Mike Schmidtmann.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Tom Snyder’s Six Keys to Thriving in Transition here.

Find Mike on LinkedIn here. Find Diane on LinkedIn here.

Mike’s presentation begins at the 4 minute mark. Diane takes over at minute 26.

EPISODE 246: Sales Leaders Diane Cashin and Mike Schmidtmann Offer Rich Insights as Re-Opening Accelerates for Sales Teams Across the Globe

MIKE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Every successful person I know has been defined by difficulty at some point in their career that they fought through, that’s without exception. These times are opportunities for us to power through it, to learn from it, to profit from it, this is an opportunity. It is a gift for us so don’t squander it, take advantage of it.”

DIANE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Awareness is the most important pivotal moment for you. When you notice something showing up for you just take a moment and notice it. That observing capacity makes it easier for you then to move and in these moments I’d just invite you to say, “What is one thing that you would do to move yourself forward?”

Fred Diamond: Alright, thank you so much. Welcome to the Thursday Institute for Excellence in Sales, Sales Game Changers webinar, it’s on mindset. We have two great mindset experts, we have Mike Schmidtmann, sales expert and world-renowned sales coach and Diane Cashin who’s the author of Squeeze More Life out of Time.

Mike Schmidtmann: Alright, everyone. Thank you, welcome and thank you Fred, Diane, I’m very excited to hear your session in just a minute. I’m here to talk about five ways to make your mindset your competitive advantage. First of all, Fred set this up, you have age before beauty so I’m the guy who’s lived through a few recessions. I want to talk first about economic cycles having been through a few of these my day. I first got into sales in the 80s and you can see over the past 50 years we’ve had about 6 recessions.

What’s interesting about these recessions is what’s happened, who are the groups and what are the companies that were formed out of this? You’ll see in the 70s, Apple was formed. In the 80s, Dell, in the 90s, Google, in the 2000s, YouTube and then in the last recession, Facebook, Airbnb and Uber. Why is it that some of the biggest, greatest, most profitable, fastest-growing, most influential companies in the world were all formed during recessions? That’s because it forces people to do things differently, it creates opportunities so first and foremost, recessions are opportunities for us. It forces our customers and clients to think differently, act differently and it presents opportunities all the time. This pandemic, as terrible as it is, will have winners and losers so we can choose to take advantage of this then turn this to our advantage.

As Andy Grove says, “Bad companies are ruined by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.” Andy Grove, the founder of Intel. Every time we have an economic recession like this, there are winners or losers but some of the best companies were formed in the last recessions and 10 years from now we’ll be looking back at this pandemic as why some companies came to the forefront. Similarly, in the last 10 or 12 years this has been the longest uninterrupted growth period in the last 100 years. If ever there were a time that we could withstand a recession, it’s now. Companies have 12 years of profits salted away in many cases, the companies are doing okay and nobody is enjoying this difficult time but having said that, there’s never been a better time for companies to withstand it.

Overall, we’re actually in very good shape to withstand a downturn like this. As a matter of fact, it was going to probably happen whether this pandemic happened or not. First of all, economic cycles can work to your advantage. Secondly, what’s the biggest problem we in sales have all the time? That status quo, urgency. “How do I get my customers to take action? How do I get them to move? I think I’ll just think about it.” Your biggest problem just went away because your customers and clients need to do something now so urgency is working in your favor. People just can’t sit still, they can’t do the status quo. Look at it this way, this is maybe a typical buying cycle so think of an iPhone. I’ve got daughters and they’ll get an iPhone and they love it, and that’s the peak here, they’re happy and then overtime the iPhone gets older, the case cracks a little bit. Within a couple years their friends all have cooler iPhones and now they can’t stand their iPhone anymore, they’ve got to get a new one. Then they’re happy again, then it cracks again and the newer phones have cooler features and once again, so this is a typical cycle. The problem with this from a sales perspective, this is what I call the order taking zone which means all you’re doing is when people get a little bit upset they buy stuff but it’s something easy to postpone. If for any reason you don’t have money, there’s nothing really urgent and critical about what you’re doing and it’s easy to postpone it.

These sales jobs, if you’re in the order taking zone, you’re not making much money because there’s no reason any company would pay you a lot of money to do something that anybody can do. The challenge is for sales, the sales zone amps up the customer expectations higher and when they’re down in despair they’re also more motivated to act. The sales zone is where your customers are more excited than usual, more anticipatory, more opportunistic about the new technologies and services that you offer and the down is when they’ve got to do something. This sales zone actually cures your biggest problem which is status quo, “I think I’ll think about it”, fat, dumb and happy. Your customers’ clients cannot be fat, dumb and happy now so having said that, Fred, I’m just curious from your perspective since you deal with dozens and dozens of sales leaders and hundreds of companies, is this something you’re seeing as well?

Fred Diamond: We are, but we’re seeing a couple different things. By the way, anyone listening to the webinar, watching the webinar’s questions, just go to your questions panel and submit them. We’re basically seeing three things, Mike. We’re seeing some of our members of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, let’s say those who are servicing state and local government, they’re working around the clock right now because medical supplies and things like that are in such high demand. They’re looking for ways for those vendors to supply them, they’re working around the clock and then you have the companies, we have one member that services the entertainment industry so they’re not really buying a whole lot right now, what they’re doing is they’re flipping it to talk to them about planning and things that you might look in the future and they’re beginning to move back into sales.

Then there’s the other 70% that are in the land where you’re talking about right now where the phones aren’t ringing off the hook, the customer is figuring out what they’re going to be doing because their customers are figuring out what they’re going to be doing as well. It looks like that 70% is beginning to get a little bit tighter because people want to get back to business and work. What would you say to those people? The ones where the phones aren’t ringing off the hook and the business hasn’t gone out of business but their normal, standard, “We still have customers, we need to service them”?

Mike Schmidtmann: I’m going to get to that, Fred and that is a great point. At the end of this we’re going to raise that very issue, when people slow down purchases. Again, my message here to everyone on this session is to turn this to your advantage and that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about. If times are slow, how can we turn that to a competitive advantage for us? That’s exactly what I’m going to be talking about. One thing that forces us to do, Fred, when businesses slow down, when they’re scared, when they’re afraid to take risk, they’re forced to innovate. This is where we can come in handy as well, again, the order taking zone for salespeople is when they’re just collecting orders. We’re not in the order taking zone anymore, nobody’s order taking but there are, as you said, pockets of growth and opportunity always. The challenge for us in sales, we’re experts on our services, our products, our solutions and our benefits, the customers aren’t so when customers are saying, “How am I going to deal with this? How am I going to adapt? How am I going to keep my business stable?”

We can be providing them answers and solutions by marrying our solutions, technologies and offers to what the customers need. It’s up to us to do that, the customers are not experts on our business, we are. We’ve got to go to them with ideas and say, “Okay, you’ve got this business problem.” I was just dealing this morning, Fred, with a company that has a big software package for nonprofits, and what’s the big problem with nonprofits? Nonprofits rely on big events with people to raise money.

Guess what? There aren’t any more big events with lots of people to raise money, so the nonprofits are freaking out. Our story to this software company is, “You need to show your nonprofit clients how to raise money apart from group events” and that’s an opportunity for this company to supply technology for that. There’s always opportunity when there’s a challenge so here’s an example of one from years ago, we can use this in illustration. We’re all familiar with Southwest Airlines and many of you have maybe heard the story of how they came up with the idea for Southwest Airlines in Denny’s restaurant. It was on the back of a napkin and they said, “Okay, we’ve got three cities in Texas, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. We’re not going to compete with American Airlines, Delta and United, we’re going to compete with the bus companies. People that want to go from point A to point B fast and cheap, let’s do it.” Southwest Airlines bought four airplanes and they did this.

They had two airplanes going clockwise from San Antonio to Dallas to Houston, and they had two airplanes going counter-clockwise from Houston to Dallas to San Antonio so everybody’s happy. Then the recession hit. At this point, Southwest was doing business pretty much like American and Delta which means that they had a first class, they had a business class, they had assigned seating and they said, “Okay, recession” and they lost one of their planes so they went from four planes to three. They said, “We can’t do our routes with three planes. If we cut back our trips, they’re cut our revenues and we’re going to lose the third plane, then we’ll be down to two, then there’ll be the one, it’s a death spiral.” They realized they couldn’t do business the way they did any further, they had to make a change, so how do we do it? They asked the question, “What if we do the same number of flights with only three planes instead of four?” In doing so, they had to get rid of the old status quo, they had to get rid of business class, coach and first class and they pretty much said, “We have to do the turnarounds instead of an hour and a half at the airport, it has to be 25 minutes.” So instead of assigning all these seats and taking all this time, they said, “Get in line, get in, buckle up and let’s get going” and they would do this again and again.

They were able to do just as many flights with three planes as they had with four and because of this, it lowered the cost structure and the rest is history, they’re now the largest US provider of air travel and they’ve maintained that seating policy to this day. In fact, Herb Kelleher, at the time the president of Southwest said, “If we hadn’t had the recession we never would have been forced to make the changes that transformed our company.” This is an example where a business challenge forces you to innovate and try new things, that’s #3. #4, guess what? Fat, dumb and happy is no longer a choice for us, we’ve got to focus so what do we focus on? As Fred said, there are always pockets of the economy even in tough times that are busy so these are what’s called the essential industries and there are 17 of them, and all of these people are essential, they’re busy. If you’ve been to a grocery store you see how busy it is and try and buy toilet paper somewhere, you can’t. I was at a Home Depot over the weekend and they had a line out the door for people going in doing home improvement construction projects. There are sectors of the economy and as you said, Fred, there are several other ones as well that are busy right now.

In any economic decline there are people who are profiting and yes, restaurants are down, catering down, hotels down, travel down. I get that, but food is up. Many categories, there’s a hundred of fast growing industries and then stay away from the ones like apparel or accessories that aren’t essential, they’re down. There’s always opportunity and for those of us in sales, focus on the opportunity that’s ahead of us. That’s four, I’m just wondering, Fred. That ties back to your comment before about focusing on hot industries, anything to add to that?

Fred Diamond: Mike, I have a question for you. Innovation, as we think about our mindset right now, innovation’s a great one and you gave us a great example. Everyone right now is seeing Zoom and other types of technologies that are just killing it right now. I’d like to ask you for two brief examples. Give us a way that a sales manager can be innovative right now, and how about the individual rep? The person who’s the account manager who has a quota, has a territory. Give us one or two ideas on how the sales manager could be innovative. We get it with the companies coming and creating new ideas, but we’ve got a whole bunch of salespeople from around the globe on today’s webinar and they’re giving us an hour of their time thinking about, “How can I thrive, how can I transform?” In some cases, “How can I survive, how can I get better?” Give us one of your ideas, your sales expertise.

Mike Schmidtmann: I think first of all, Fred, that is a great question. That’s actually the last point. How do we take action, what do we do? I’ll just answer it this way, for most people on this call, your biggest problem in the past year or two, whatever, has been, “I wish I could do this but I don’t have time.” You’ve got time now. In my industry, I’m in information technology and I see people running around with their hair on fire all the time. If you’ve been running around with your hair on fire, I’m guessing it’s slowing down a little bit treat that as a gift. Nobody is wishing this on anybody but think of it as a gift, you’ve been given the gift of time. You’ve never had time to do these things, how many people have books on the book shelf that you haven’t read? What can you do with that time?

One is you can learn your market better, you can take that time that you never had before to learn your customers and applications better than ever. You can be profiling people to call, you can be profiling hot applications, hot businesses, you can be spending your time doing research that you never had time for before. Think of all the books on your shelf that you wanted to read, all the books that people have recommended. Guess what? You’ve got time so don’t devote your whole day to reading but maybe an hour a day like Warren Buffet does or Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey. Devote time every day to knocking down that backlog of books or even audio books that you wanted to read. How about a certification? What if you say, “I’d really like to have a sales certification, a products certification, a service. How many of you have certifications that would help you be more credible in your industry but you’ve never had time to do it? Well, you’ve got time now, you’ve been given the gift of time. Use it to get those certifications that will pay of dividends for you down the road. We talked to Fred about the quarantine 15, how about personal habits? All the, “I have been too busy to do this”, now you’ve got time maybe to do the workouts that you always wanted to do, maybe it’s time to implement new habits with your diet, exercise, lifestyle. All these things you didn’t have time for, you’ve got time for now and if you have these small wins, maybe if you lose a few pounds, you get in a little bit better shape when we come out of this recession your head is going to be in a better place because you’ve applied yourself, you’ve achieved something, you haven’t lost ground at all.

You’ve used that time productively to help yourself and your career be more effective so you’ve got that option. You can use this as a gift to do all the things you never had time for before and do it or you can be roadkill and none of us want that so let’s take action and do some things. Fred, we did our podcast a while back on salespeople that earn a million dollars a year or more so how do you earn a million dollars? They have great success habits and if you want to get to that million dollar a year income territory, what better time to start implementing better habits for yourself? Learning your product, learning your applications, learning your market, doing the spade work so when we come out of this you can take advantage of it. It’s a great time to build your network because other people like yourself need the support and your positive example and you can feed from that and find other people who are in the same boat you are, maybe even are going after the same kind of customer you are and you can collaborate and trade leads. It’s a great time to build your network virtually, of course.

My last final thought is think of the economy like bears in hibernation. Yes, they’re not as active but they’re healthy. Yes, they’re not buying as much, they’re not active as much but when the winter is over they’re going to climb out of that cave and they are going to be hungry, and they’re going to want to eat and eat, and they want to get active. If you’re there in the right place at the right time you can take advantage of that when that economy comes back. Who’s going to benefit from it? You will. That’s my sermon for the day, Fred. Economic cycles can work to your advantage, this cures the biggest problem you’d have which is urgency, it forces not just yourself but your customers to be innovative and that provides opportunities. This forces you to focus on what’s important and it’s a great time to take action on all those things you never had time for before. With that, I’ll pass it back to you.

Fred Diamond: Mike, thank you so much. Alright, speaking about Mike’s last point which was you could use this opportunity to read a book, we’re very fortunate to have Diane Cashin. She’s a coach, she’s a consultant, she’s worked for great companies like Cisco, she is the author of a fantastic book called Squeeze More Life out of Time, you can see it over my back shoulder. By the way, Mike was a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast about a year and a half ago, Diane is also a future guest, her show will be live sometime in the next four weeks. Diane, it’s great to have you on the sales mindset webinar and I’m excited for what you’re going to tell us. Once again, if anybody has a question submit them via your panel. After Diane completes, we’re going to open up the floor for questions for Mike and Diane.

Diane Cashin: Thank you so much for the opportunity and I know that your listeners are getting wonderful sage advice from all of the thought leaders in the sales industry. I have 25 years in sales and business development as a manager and a front line contributor so I can bring that lens but I thought, “How can I really make a difference for them today?” We really want to focus on optimal mindset. Fred knows this about me but a lot of you guys don’t. How can I bring real insight on what an optimal mindset can do? I’ll share with you that last May I was in a near death car accident. After jaws of life and a helicopter ride, a month in the hospital and six months to learn to walk again optimal mindset is how I lived every minute of every day and I did apply the techniques in the book which was great but it really came down to just being in the moment of what is one little thing we can do to keep moving forward. It gets harder to do when there’s so many complexities and things are coming at you from all these different directions and you don’t feel like you have control.

I now live in Delaware and that wasn’t a part of my plan but my whole world imploded in July especially of last year and I’ve had to take a moment to say everything I thought to be true, everything I was working for would change but it’s simply a change. It was big change so my mindset really mattered so what I wanted to do to talk with you a little bit today is I’m going to share some pieces of a multi-day workshop that I do for sales executives and leaders on creating big transformation. A lot of it is we traditionally are looking at what we do every day. What I want to do is take a moment to really go to the mushy marshmallow center of the human experience and what you do every day more from who you are.

We have four parts that we’re going to come through today, we’re going to do it super-fast so buckle up, here we go. I wanted to make it a little fun because the last year for me has been very serious so playful, fun, a little bit of levity but we want to look at four spaces. Who are you being, how are you expanding what you know, from this place of awareness and knowing, how are you continuing to grow? And as we all know, in order to keep growing you have to be in action to do it. We’re talking about this in the context of what’s happening right now in sales. What we’re going to talk about today you can use every single day so uncertainty is always going to be with us, just like Mike shared.

There’s day and there’s night, there’s up and there’s down, the fluctuations are always going to be there so the question is who are you going to be when it’s hard and how do you tap into it? Because we’re all trained with our genius and there’s a lot of people who are excellent in sales but what makes you so unique? I want to share a context to change your perspective of it. When you think about who you are, a lot of our days we get up, we lead with our mind, we’re looking at what we’ve got to do, how we’ve got to do it so we go into thinking about it, creating those to-do lists and then we get into action with our bodies and then we spend most of the day there. 80% of our time, our mind is running our show and we spend a lot of time wishing that we could just find love, peace, calm, quiet, we think about those vacations. How do we find some happiness? Often times when we start our days from this place of ‘what do I need to do’ as a human doing and you’re thinking about that and then you’re in action with your body, you’re creating a place of continual churn.

Sometimes it’s pushing, persevering, striving. You’re in action yet it doesn’t always feel good so sometimes you have to stop for a second and say, “Wait a minute, what if the order is wrong?” We hear all the time we’re body, mind and spirit or body, mind and soul and I intentionally call out four categories. You are body, mind and soul but what if the order is wrong? What if it’s soul, mind and body? If you were to think of the places when we really have the human connection, where humanity, love, peace and joy come from, it’s usually from somewhere like in your heart center area. People can relate to this as your soul, your essence, yourself, your heart, your being, yourself and it’s really what makes you very unique. Some people refer to it as divine spark but this is where we really wake up every morning saying, “I want to create more love, peace, joy, wealth, health, happiness, I want to have a good life” and at the same time we have these fears, pain, sadness and loss. A lot of times our soul, when it gets depleted – this is where our personality, our animation comes from – when it gets depleted we reach to something bigger than us through spirit.

A lot of people through religion, we’ll reach to the creator, their divine source to refill them back up. This is what we look at, who are you, who are you being and what if your soul could then guide your mind? If you think of it this way, your soul is focused on your desires and your purpose in your life. Your mind is in action to create and imagine and then your body is in action to do it but if you just let your mind run on automatic and you step over what your soul truly desires, craves, you can then just become that human doing. When you think about this, the best way to think of your soul is if you were to write down 5 adjectives that really describe who you are when you are your best and your greatest, that’s your unique attributes and talents.

From that place, if you’re not sure of who you are, call five friends and ask them, “Who am I being when I’m my best and greatest?” Write those things down and then keep them handy. I’m going to move to the next part but before I jump there I know, Fred, this is a topic that takes people to the mushy marshmallow center, it’s kind of uncomfortable because we always relate to this part as, “Oh, that’s where your emotions are” and actually, it’s not. It’s where your power is, it’s where your uniqueness is because we can all be great at knowing our product portfolio or being great at selling our solution and competitive knowledge as we all have to do in what we do for our profession every day, but who are you being and what makes you so unique? Are you tapping into that and bringing that to the show when you show up in life and in business? Anything you’re hearing out there and seeing, Fred?

Fred Diamond: Once again, if anybody has any question, submit them. We have a question here. I know that you coach sales leaders and CEOs around the world on how to get the most out of themselves. Again, your book is called Squeeze More Life out of Time and one of the challenges right now is everybody’s home so you’re with yourself 24 hours a day. Of course, we’re always with ourselves 24 hours a day but now you’re really with yourself 24 hours a day and we have this whole world of uncertainty of the world and we have this whole uncertainty about me and my family and then we have this whole uncertainty about my company and me as a sales professional. A lot of times when we coach sales professionals on mindset like Mike does, it’s about how do you get the most out of yourself, how do you stay at a high level, how do you remove things? Right now we have so much time with ourselves so the ability to do what you just said which is to understand that is something that’s quite critical.

Diane Cashin: It’s true and I always think of ourselves as 360 degrees views of our lives. I know we’re talking about the sales aspect of us but most of us are doing some sales profession because we want to support our dreams, our children, our family, our goals, our adventures and such. When you think of 360 degree view of who you are and you are to stand in the circle at the center of your universe, of your own life, what is it you truly want to create? That can come from anything so in this category of knowing there’s only one you in the whole universe and it took all time and centuries and every alignment of the gene pool of your parent’s side that had to come together for you to be created. You’re truly unique and truly miraculous not just when you’re a baby but right now, you’re truly miraculous but you know what is best for you so while you can take all this input and guidance from all these different people as gifts, you have to try them on to see what fits because you have your own superpowers.

You know you have your intuition, your purpose, your dreams, your goals and your unique talents so from that place of knowing, this is usually what is calling to us whispering or sometimes yelling at us what we should be doing. In the midst of all of that 360 degree view of creation we get afraid. Let’s talk about fear because it’s the biggest disruptor that I face with all of my clients no matter how powerful, it could be a solo entrepreneur. We all get afraid, it’s a human natural way of experiencing this and I probably should have made this a poll but often times when we lead with our minds it creates these fears about us, the stories that we have. We have had life experiences, some of it didn’t go so well so we learned to survive and adapt and from these places of fear it will get in your way. I wanted to put a list up of a few things and take a look for yourself.

What are the fears that you have and especially now, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of losing your job or a reduction in force? Are you afraid you just can’t get a client on the phone? It creates these stories and these narratives that then have you switch out of being your best and greatest. You start getting into hyper performance, you might over-prepare, you might get nervous or anxious, you might be really distracted or not present and you start not being in service to your best and greatest because your fear is now modifying how you can behave. You might talk to people differently, you might get competitive or controlling, you might start micromanaging. There’s all these different ways that we switch from being our best and greatest when fear shows up. Fred, any questions that people are sharing around what their fears might be or what’s showing up for them now especially with the Coronavirus and the economy? There’s a lot going on politically, we’re in the election year so the world is complicated, there’s a lot that can trigger fear that might be getting in the way. Anybody sharing anything?

Fred Diamond: A couple people here chimed in that they agree and you could probably add another 20 things specifically as it relates to the moments that we’re going through right now, so keep going. How do we get beyond this? That’s the whole point.

Diane Cashin: Here’s the secret sauce, this is the recipe. Awareness is the most important pivotal moment for you. When you notice something showing up for you just take a moment and notice it. “I’m afraid of being judged” or, “I’m afraid of losing my job”, “I’m afraid that I might be wrong.” Whatever it is for you and it doesn’t necessarily even need to be fear, it could be, “I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling depressed, I’m feeling frustrated.” It’s usually a negative emotion that we really want to pay attention to because that’s not serving us any longer, it’s an emotion that isn’t going to be in support of what you want to create and you being your best and greatest. Noticing is really important. “Look at that, look what’s showing up right now, I’m afraid of being judged because I’m going to present right now for IES.” I’m aware that I’m afraid of maybe hyper-performance or a fear of being judged. From that place of awareness I can move to the next part and say, “Okay Diane, what are you winning by feeling like that?”

Usually when it’s something negative that’s in our head creating anxiety, depression, fear or frustration we’re not winning anything. Then you ask yourself the next question, “What’s the cost that I’m paying?” I may not be able to give my gift to the world, I may isolate, I may avoid, I may drink too much. What is the price you pay when this fear or this emotion is showing up? You can also get really clear of what’s missing in the way of what I want so if I can come through this and address that gap or obstacle, then I can really get focused on what it is I need right now. A lot of times it’s easy to step out of it like if you’re on the court or in the storm, whichever way you want to look at it, and you have this sense of awareness, if you extract yourself out and pretend you’re observing your role model with the same situation, “I wonder what my role model would do.”

That observing capacity makes it easier for you then to move forward and often times as sales professionals we are superstars singing for the fences, we are the fearless leaders but sometimes we can over-complicate it and in these moments I’d just invite you to say, “What is one thing that you would do to move yourself forward?” Sometimes it’s a really small thing and I’ll share a little funny story here. Before the accident I used to travel all over the world and jump in helicopters and photograph things but after the accident I had to sleep pretty much in the same position for about three months, I had a commode in my room and it was a simple thing. What was one thing I could do today to make my life feel extraordinary? It didn’t mean make a million dollars. Wherever you find yourself, you can do one thing to move yourself forward and that day the funny story was, “Today my big travel adventure is I’m not going to use the commode, I’m going to try to use the actual bathroom.” That would have been a big win for me and it’s that kind of optimal mindset when you set that intention, my mind would then get into action to get my body to do that. I could create it from that context and leaders are especially good at this, they’re always aware, they’re always noticing but they do this very silently and they stay in this place of these attributes: honesty, sense of humor, ability to delegate and trust people, they’re really great communicators, they’re confident, they’re committed, they’ve got this great positive attitude, they apply a lot of creativity, they trust their intuition and they inspire others. That’s a list from Forbes and I wanted to bring that up here because when we are coming from a place of fear it’s really easy to switch away from those leadership attributes to some of the things I talked about before.

Fred Diamond: Diane, we’re getting a lot of questions coming in from the audience here and we want to be respectful, we told people we would wind down at 2:50. If you want to give your final thought, then I want to get to some of these questions because we’ve got a couple great ones coming in.

Diane Cashin: The last part of this piece because the rest is more how-to stuff I’ll share, but every moment of every day you’re standing at this place of choice. You can do this automatic predictable thing that feels comfortable and sometimes that can create worry, fear, stories, more control because you might be afraid. If you want to really create this future state, as Mike is sharing, of where you’re going, understanding all the things that are happening, the goal is in those moments. What is the most ideal or empowering choice? It doesn’t have to be a big one. When you make the ideal choice it is in service of your best and greatest, you can accept exactly where you are, believe in yourself. It creates more trust and a more peaceful and confident way of being. That’s in the knowing piece and then the growing piece we can answer probably during the Q&A as some of the examples of how to apply these things in addition to the stuff that Mike shared.

Fred Diamond: I want to move to the questions here, I’m going to make myself the presenter. I want to thank again Diane, Mike, we’ve got a couple great questions here. If you can keep your answers relatively brief, what am I losing out by not taking advantage of this time? Interesting question. Mike, you deal with a lot of high-performing sales professionals so what am I losing out if I don’t take advantage of some of the suggestions you had on your last line?

Mike Schmidtmann: What do they lose by not doing this? I think status quo is a recipe for mediocrity and loss, fails. I think if there’s ever a time to change the status quo, now is the time.

Fred Diamond: Diane, I have a question from you that comes in from the audience here. Since emotion is so driving our current lives, jobs and personal situations, how do we project calm to our customers to gain trust and not come off as ambulance-chasing? Mike, you can give your thoughts on that, too. We just ended the quarter two weeks ago which is traditionally a time when a lot of people try to get as many sales as possible but how do we maintain calm? How do we get out mindset focus so that we’re not like, “Please, we’re going out of business, I need you.” How do we focus on that?

Diane Cashin: I’ll do this quick like a bunny but it’s up to you to set your intentions in the morning. Lots of breaths, be excited about what lies ahead in the day and then set your intentions. “Today I need to be confident, today I need to be patient” and then focus on three things only you can do today to move that forward. From that place, when you show up with your clients, I’m going to boldly say it’s not about you at all. It’s not about your number, I know that’s in your head, I know you had a forecast to do but really what it is is you’ve got to show up and just care. You’re hearing this everywhere but when you connect with them, try to do it on voice, try to do it on video, see them, make a connection.

Empathy, patience, kindness all matter, acknowledge them, ask them good questions that start with ‘what’, that’s what your best leaders do, they ask questions. Then what do they need? What can I do to make any difference for you today? What is your biggest challenge today or what do you see on the other side of this? What can I do to begin planning for you? Show them respect for their time because they’re trying to do all kinds of stuff as well as manage their stuff at home, make sure you’re focusing about them and then when you are engaging take any action you can to support them. Understand their bigger context in addition to the deal but you do have situations and you have a relationship where you do have to ask questions because you have to let your managers know about forecast. I would just say you can ask them specifically, “What do you need in terms of this particular sales opportunity in terms of timeline?” Create that respect between each other because they need to understand what you’re dealing with as well. Then if you have a space to say to them, “I hear you want to slide this to the right”, you can start asking curiosity questions of, “What if this…?” or, “What would be different?” and then just be very respectful. Like Mike said, innovate with them. It’s not a push, it’s collaborate and innovate with them and if it does come down that it needs to slide you can have a real honest conversation with your management team. Also, again take good care of your managers as well because they’ve got a lot coming at them. What do they need each day? What do your clients need, what do you need, what does your management team as well as your family?

Fred Diamond: Mike, we have a question for you. I know you’ve worked with a lot of sales managers who manage people who are relatively new to sales and of course people who are senior in their sales career. What would you tell someone who’s in their first or second job? They’re still learning sales, they haven’t been through 9/11, they haven’t been through the 2008 recession, they haven’t been through that whole thing, they’re new to sales. They’re in their first or second job, they’re still trying to figure out their process, their flow, what they’re good at. What would be some of your recommendations for them today to help them take their sales mindset to an optimal level?

Mike Schmidtmann: That is a great question. A high percentage of people get into sales and quit out of frustration so that’s an occupational hazard. The mantra I have for all new salespeople is this and this is exactly your topic today, Fred, it’s a mindset issue. My statement is purely this profession pays a lot of money because it’s hard. If it were not hard we wouldn’t need to pay you a lot of money, we’d pay you minimum wage so the fact that it’s hard is good. The fact that it’s difficult is good, if it were easy it wouldn’t pay much, folks. If you want to earn a lot of money you need to get good at what you do so embrace the difficulty and be glad it’s hard, that’s my mindset issue. If you give up you’re not going to succeed not just in sales but anything, anybody who wants to succeed needs to stick with it and get really good at what they do. The nice thing about sales, there’s nothing that pays more, better, faster than sales if you’re good at what you do.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Diane Cashin, the author of Squeeze More Life out of Time and Mike Schmidtmann who’s a sales trainer to the many companies around the world, he’s also spoken at the Institute for Excellence in Sales many times, his podcast is available at salesgamechangerspodcast.com/mikeschmidtmann and Diane’s will be available probably in early May. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, we had a lot of people from around the globe watching today. Briefly, just give us one final thought to inspire the people watching the webinar today. Again, this will also be a Sales Game Changers podcast. Diane, give us something positive to leave on.

Diane Cashin: I would just say keep taking exquisite care of yourself, be your best and greatest. I know that’s two, but go out there and love up – not literally – but love up your clients and let them know you care.

Fred Diamond: Mike, why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire our webinars watchers today?

Mike Schmidtmann: Every successful person I know has been defined by difficulty at some point in their career that they fought through, that’s without exception. These times are opportunities for us to power through it, to learn from it, to profit from it, this is an opportunity. It is a gift for us so don’t squander it, take advantage of it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 246: Sales Leaders Diane Cashin and Mike Schmidtmann Offer Rich Insights as Re-Opening Accelerates for Sales Teams Across the Globe first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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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 June 17 2020. It featured sales leaders Ivy Savoy-Smith (Entercom) and Christine Barger (Salesforce.)]

EPISODE 244: Having Empathetic Customer, Sales and Employee Conversations featuring Christine Barger from Salesforce and Radio Sales Executive Ivy Savoy-Smith

Listen to Christine’s Podcast. Listen to Ivy’s Podcast .

CHRISTINE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “The biggest thing I’ve learned is an increased appreciation for being empathetic and really trying to understand where people are in their journey in life and how that impacts how they show up and what they can actually produce at work.”

IVY’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “A lot of what we’re dealing with starts with a conversation. The issues that are going on in the country and how we deal with them personally and as a business in society and again, it starts with a conversation. When you understand people a little bit more, it takes a lot of that off the table of how we make decisions or not. That’s part of what we’ve been doing more and more the past few months.”

Fred Diamond: It’s Wednesday afternoon, we have two of the best guests we’ve ever had on the Sales Game Changers podcast, they both have done multiple things for the Institute for Excellence in Sales. We have Christine Barger, she’s the Senior VP of US Retail at Salesforce and we have Ivy Savoy-Smith, she’s the Senior VP and Market Manager for Entercom DC. Ivy Savoy-Smith, it’s great to have you here today. Close to 60% of the people who are watching today’s webcast and listening to the podcast said they are having difficulty connecting with customers, that is the biggest answer by far. First of all, how are you doing? Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about you? Then we’ll start getting into some questions and we’ll do the same with Christine.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: Thank you so much, Fred. I am doing well considering everything. Thanks for the introduction, I have been with Entercom for 19 years but been in radio for 26 years in different sales capacities from being a salesperson myself to being sales manager, DOS and now market manager. Even starting out I was a sales assistant, worked in the promotions department on the street team so did everything just about. The only thing I think I didn’t do was in the traffic department because I even had a short stint in the business office [laughs] in my career. It’s a lot but I think it’s good to wear a lot of hats because then you understand what other people are doing and what they go through and how everyone contributes at the end of the day at your job.

Fred Diamond: We have people joining us today on the webcast from around the globe, you’re the manager for the DC market. What are some of the stations? Again, I sued to be a DJ so when we did our Sales Game Changers podcast interview with you we got really geeky about this at various points. I encourage people to go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com/ivysavoysmith and you can see some of the geekiness that we got into, but what are some of the properties that your team sells radio space for?

Ivy Savoy-Smith: We have a very diverse [team], I’m proud of our stations, we have a very diverse mix of stations so I like to say that we represent the DMV – DC, Maryland and Virginia – we have 106.7 The Fan which is our sports talk radio station so we’re the flagship station for the champion Washington Nationals, please come back, baseball [laughs]. We also have Washington Capitals play by play as well, Virginia Tech so we are all sports home with the sports junkies. We also have our music stations, we have also a Spanish sports station which is 1580 AM, it’s on the AM dial and that’s all Spanish, we work with ESPN on that, they are our partner. We have the Washington Redskins games in Spanish on the station, we are the home station for the Skins games in Spanish. Then our music stations, we have WPGC 95.5 which is our heritage urban that is a huge staple in the community, we have El Zol 107.9 which is our Spanish hits station which is a huge staple in the Latino community 15 years in the format. Then we have 94.7 The Drive which is our classic hits radio station, fun music nostalgia that you remember from the 70s, 80s and 90s, that’s our 94.7 The Drive. Look at you, you have your [Inaudible 06:11], I told you I don’t even have one [laughs]

Fred Diamond: After we talk to Christine for a second, one thing I’m curious about and a couple of people have asked here about the role of local radio during the pandemic that we just came through. We’ll talk about that in a few minutes and how that’s affected what you do. Christine Barger, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers live.

Christine Barger: Thank you, so good to be here.

Fred Diamond: We’ve actually interviewed you at least three times so far, we of course did our Sales Game Changers podcast and you were a collegiate champion lacrosse player so we did a follow-up episode just talking about that and now you’re at Salesforce. How are things for you right now, how are things going? You mentioned that you’ve been at the beach in quarantine at Ocean City since everything started here so how are things going for you right now as a sales leader and in general?

Christine Barger: Fred, I’m so… I guess honored would be the right word for me to choose that you invited me back. It’s been great to be able to do several of these with you, I always enjoy spending time just chatting. To be completely authentic and honest it’s been a little tough around Salesforce and I think just generally in the world in terms of trying to process and grieve some of the lives that have been taken at the hands of racism and hate across the country. It’s been with a heavy heart across my organization that we’ve been very reflective and talking a lot about equality, diversity and inclusion across our company which has been great, Marc has been driving a lot of that along with Brent Hyder from an organizational perspective.

I would say that’s been a little bit tough for all of us to process across the world, Friday is a big day for everyone, it’s the oldest national holiday commemorating the end of slavery so we’re just trying to take a little bit of a pause and a breath to consume what’s going on in the world. Our hearts and minds are with all of those who are going through struggles like this with their families and for anyone who’s had loved ones affected with any of this, my hearts go out to them. From a world perspective I would say it’s, to be authentic, a little bit challenging. From a business perspective my organization is fairing pretty well, we are a digital-first organization at Salesforce and we partner with our customers to help digitally transform their businesses. In a lot of cases this pandemic, as horrible as it’s been, has accelerated a lot of their plans around digital transformation.

We have found it very engaging with our customers now, people need a lot of help and support so we are approaching every customer conversation with a significant amount of empathy. My specific segment of the business although it’s retail as my title, I do have two micro verticals which are restaurants and quick-serve restaurants as well as grocery. If you think about those in terms of how people are surviving through this pandemic, we have retail customers that were well-positioned to take advantage of being digital-first and there’s the have and have-not’s in that segment. We have grocery that’s completely surging and have supply chain issues because they can’t get product to their constituency fast enough in the stores. We have restaurants where we have the big ones that will survive and some of the big ones that didn’t have digital-first mindsets will not survive so it’s been very interesting, enlightening to be able to work with a whole set of customers that have basically the same goal but are in different stages of their transformation.

Fred Diamond: We started doing these webcasts the day everybody started working from home and we’ve done over 40 of them and we’ve had thousands of people register. Like you said, there’s been silver linings throughout but at the end of the day we’re in this situation because of the pandemic. Ivy, what’s the role of radio? A little bit of a different question here but what’s the role of radio right now? Again, for people listening to the podcast and watching the webcast I’m based in Northern Virginia, you’re based in suburban Maryland, Christine is also on the eastern side of Maryland. We’re near some of the center of a lot that’s been going on over the last couple of weeks. Tell us about the role of radio and then tell us about, from a sales perspective, how is your team being in this moment?

Ivy Savoy-Smith: The role of radio which is huge right now, radio is your friend so our listeners rely on radio, especially local radio and that’s what we do very well at Entercom. People depend on us or their personalities for their friends in the morning, in the afternoon to hear them for information, we’re providing them with education, with information of what’s going on as well as then entertaining them with a balance. I like to say we’re ‘edutainment’, we educate you but then we entertain you because you do need that balance, sometimes the news is just too much, all day long it’s just too long, you need to decompress, you need to turn it off sometimes. I said to my team I watch the news once a day because if you watch it all day long, it’s too much.

Our goal here is to have a balance with radio so we educate and we inform and we make sure that our listeners know about everything that’s going on, the services that are available, the different things that are available for them in their community. That’s the great thing about local radio because we’re focusing on where you live, where you work and what’s important to you and then we also want to entertain you to make it light so that we do make you laugh and we do make you feel good and we are going to play a great song that maybe takes you back to a more fun time in your life. That’s what radio has always been, that’s what it will always be and especially in these times right now, it’s definitely necessary and definitely needed, we’re getting that feedback from our listeners.

We’re getting some of the best feedback that I’ve ever seen in my 26 years of radio that’s coming through from listeners that are saying thank you, “Thank you for this lighthearted story” or, “Thank you for some good news, thank you for giving us something nice that’s going on talking about some local people who are making a difference and who want change.” We’re getting that a lot and when we get those types of stories it really does resonate, it makes you feel good about what you do because it is more than just sales.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, we got our first question from the audience. What are your top priorities right now? There are so many things going on and you both manage a lot of people, you both represent your senior leaders at your company. What are your top priorities as a sales leader right now? Ivy, let’s start with you and then we’ll go to Christine.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: My top priority right now is morale, it is making sure that my people know that we’re here, that the management team is here to support them, that we appreciate what they do each and every day especially during these challenging times because there is no playbook for what we’re going through right now on how to work. You work the best that you can with the hand that you’ve been given so my main thing is morale and retention, I have a lot of good people on my team that aren’t doing so well and sometimes people think, especially in sales, that we’re only as good as our numbers. You look at it and you start to feel bad about yourself when you see your percentages and your confidence goes down. I’ve had senior people on my team who’ve been selling radio for 20+ years that are second-guessing themselves when they shouldn’t be but these are the times that we’re in.

My goal and the goal of my executive team as I meet with them and as we go over it, it is to make sure that our staff are our #1 customers and we need to make sure like I preach them about your key clients and how you should be on top of them and what you need to do, our staff are our key clients. To make sure that they are taken care of and to make sure that they know that we are here to support them through everything that is going on and to work with them, you’ve got to meet people where they are and where we are right now is a little uncomfortable for some. So, you’ve got to hold their hand and walk some people through it, it’s managing a little differently but that is my main thing to make sure that people know that we are here to support them. It is morale and retention is critical.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask Christine for that question, a quick follow-up for you, Ivy. A lot of local radio, you’re selling to restaurants, your events, “This week at the convention center”, the car show and sports obviously, those types of things. Your people do a lot of historically face-to-face, they go to the restaurant, the retail, the mall, those kinds of things. You mentioned it’s been tough on your team, how have they adjusted? Because now it’s opening up a little bit, people are now going places with masks but for the last three months people didn’t leave their houses. Then, Christine, we’ll get to what you’re focused on.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: It is an adjustment for people, I will say that there have been some good adjustments that we have worked through. Yes, you’re not meeting people face-to-face as you did, we’re a medium that is face-to-face, we’re judged on face-to-face that it is about relationship, relationship is key in sales and how do you build a relationship? It’s face-to-face rapport, it’s getting to know your client and their hot buttons and all that, that’s the basis of what we do so you take that away from people, the ability to not see someone, not to physically be in touch with them, it makes it very tough for a lot of salespeople when that went away. I will say that the Zoom and GoToMeetings and all that have been beneficial because they have shown salespeople as well that they can do this, they can adapt and they can transition and you can get more done.

Here in the DMV with the traffic pattern you’d be lucky if you were able to see two or three clients in a day, you would really have to geographically schedule them, don’t try Northern Virginia and a DC or a Montgomery County, forget it, you’re in traffic two hours going each way. So, the ability to see three or four people was gone in a car physically but the ability to do that now with Zoom Meetings and to be able to do that has taught them, “I can do more, I’m doing it differently, I can be efficient, I can get this done” and I do think that has benefited us greatly. We will continue to do that even when there is some type of normalcy back, we’ve learned how to do it, we know we can do it and I think that has worked well for us.

Fred Diamond: Christine, how about you? What are the big priorities you’re working on right now?

Christine Barger: I’m very simple, I only do three to five things at one time. We have three C’s, my first is culture, pretty much everything that Ivy talked about with regards to employee wellness, retention, well-being, all of that falls under the cultural aspect of that. The second C for me is all about coaching and what I’ve been really working with my leaders on is modeling the correct behavior, model, coach and care is my framework. Model the behavior that you want, coach to the behavior that you want and doing it in an empathetic way, really over-indexing on the coaching to give them really clear direction and then the third C would be clarity. Clarity around everything from how priorities are shifting to what’s important to customers to how they should feel empowered to take time in the middle of the day to go take a walk, whatever that is. That’s pretty much how I have my leaders rallied to keep them really focused on what matters and we just continue to revolve around those three C’s.

Fred Diamond: How have you changed? You’re with Salesforce right now, Salesforce is known as one of the most socially conscious companies on the planet from day one, it takes care of its people, I know in some of your offices you have mediation rooms and things for people to get mindful and grounded, but I’m curious. Again, you gave a great opening remark about where we are as a country right now. How have you changed? Then Ivy, the same question for you. How do you think you’ve changed as a sales leader over the last three months?

Christine Barger: It’s definitely an appreciation for where people are in their careers. I have some folks that were living in New York and flew across the country and now have moved back in with their family in San Francisco. I have other folks that just got married, came back from their honeymoon and their husband got COVID. Then I have other people that are coming back from maternity leave and they’ve had their second child and I have the people that have a four and a six year old at home and they’re trying to home school and be mommy, daddy, teacher, cook and clean and entertain and all of that. Then I have people later in their careers where I would say I am, that have older kids. Coming from Microsoft, we embrace Microsoft teams and I have for a long times so I’ve done a lot of my work on video for a long time.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is an increased appreciation for being empathetic and really trying to understand where people are in their journey in life and how that impacts how they show up and what they can actually produce at work. It’s been enlightening and couple on top of that, I have an organization that’s relatively new and when I say new, that’s new in terms of less than a year at Salesforce. Put all of those factors in with trying to get comfortable where you’re so uncomfortable because you’re starting a new job, there’s a learning curve so the stress and the well-being and that first sea of culture has been really important to me because I’ve gained that appreciation for the whole set of diversity that comes with my org in terms of work styles, stress mitigation, whatever that is.

That’s been my biggest takeaway, it’s made me probably even more empathetic as a leader, I’m very much a cultural leader at heart, I always lead with culture but I think even now it’s become even more apparent that every day every one of us needs to take a pause to reflect on however someone answers or how they show up at work. There are circumstances outside of work that play into their performance, that would be what I’m really focused on right now.

Fred Diamond: Ivy, I want to ask you again how have you changed as a sales leader. Christine, you mentioned the word empathy. We’ve been doing this webcast for almost 12 weeks and we’ve gone through an evolution of empathy and it’s interesting, prior to the pandemic very frequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast and in our conversations with sales leaders you had to be an empathetic sales leader. That was just a statement, like a table stake if you will, empathy has been one of the big words of the last 12 weeks. Ivy, how have you changed as a sales leader? Then I want to ask you both about empathy. For example, the first couple weeks we talked about, “Now you need to be empathetic to your customer as they’re going through all these changes” and then 8 weeks in we had people say, “Do I still need to be empathetic? I’ve been empathetic for the last 8 weeks.” I want to define that but Ivy, how have you changed and evolved as a sales leader? Then we’ll talk about empathy.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: I agree 100% with everything that Christine was saying because I do think that is key and something that we’ve been doing, too. Again, I stress it with my senior leadership team, from the top down it has to happen, it starts with me but listening more because you do, you have such a diverse group of people that have different backgrounds that you’re dealing with and it is a lot for a lot of people. I have an employee who last week, her husband’s dad passed away, she’s pregnant and then on Sunday her brother passes away. How do you deal with that? How does she deal with that? We have to absolutely meet people where they are because it is a balance of work, life and home and it does fill over. You can say what you want when people say, “Leave that at home and when you come to work, you come to work.” No, it spills over, it spilled over before COVID, it spills over after COVID so you do have to meet people where they are and know what’s going on with them.

I always say that is our goal, I say it all the time with my team, we must know our people, get to know them outside of work. Who are they? What are their hot buttons? What do they enjoy? So that we know more about them just like we ask them to do that with their clients, to get to know them. Do they like to golf? Were they on the lacrosse team? What school did they go to? What common interests, what do we do here? We have an obligation to do the same thing with our team to get to know people and it helps us better to understand decisions that are made then and why they’re reacting sometimes when something happens when you have a personal connection and when you get to know people. Even when I share that with some of my team, yesterday I shared about this employee and what she was going through because I said she’s going to be out all week and please don’t call her or try to be in contact with her, let’s have some empathy here.

People were like, “We had no idea, we didn’t know she was pregnant” because we’ve been gone since March so you haven’t seen her to see that she’s pregnant, people didn’t know. Again, it’s having those conversations, it starts obviously with a conversation. A lot of what we’re dealing with starts with a conversation, even Christine, you spoke so well about the issues that are going on in the country and how we deal with them personally and as a business in society and again, it starts with a conversation. When you understand people a little bit more, it takes a lot of that off the table of how we make decisions or not. That’s part of what we’ve been doing.

Fred Diamond: I have a slightly different question here, it comes from the audience, thank you so much. This question comes from Greg and it’s a follow-up to what you both just said. “What are your expectations right now for your sales professionals?” Again, we talk about empathy and then all the things that are happening but you’re still leading sales organizations and your company is still looking to you to sell and to drive revenue. Ivy, why don’t you start and then Christine? What are your expectations right now for your sales professionals?

Ivy Savoy-Smith: My expectation is for them to try, you have to go out and you have to do it. We’re not going to win every single game, we’re not going to get every single client on the air but if you don’t go out and do the work then you’re not going to get them either. My conversation with them is to do the best that you can, when you’ve done that, when you’ve worked with your managers, use us to strategize, I always say keep a manager involved, you never want to lose by yourself. Don’t lose the game by yourself, make sure that they were involved with it so you lost together.

That is my expectation, obviously it is a numbers game, we’re in sales and obviously we look at them and I’m not pleased at where we are right now with COVID, nor is half the country but again, it’s doing the work and trying. I’m not micromanaging people on a number right now in saying, “You must hit that number”, that would be totally unfair and again, that takes empathy right off the window. It is about, “What are you doing? Let’s talk about what you’re doing, let’s talk about what we can do better.” My whole thing all the time is, “One more thing.” What one more thing can we do? What one more thing can you do today that you didn’t do yesterday? If you’re able to say that you did that, I feel like we’re taking the baby steps and that’s what we have to do right now, taking the steps, putting in the work. It’s not always going to reflect in the numbers unfortunately right now and that’s the tough thing about sales because we are judged by a number and salespeople are, that’s why I said I have vets that have been doing this for years that are second-guessing themselves that shouldn’t be, they’re good sellers.

You’ve been great for all these years and you’re still great so let’s not judge ourselves by the numbers, let’s judge ourselves by the work that we’re putting forth the effort and that eventually it will come back, this too shall pass. It’s taken a little longer than we’ve thought but just continue to do the work and you’ll be fine. That’s been my mantra and not so much as focusing on their individual number because that can be tough right now, that can set someone back.

Fred Diamond: Christine, how about you? You run a large sales organization as well, you’ve managed great sales performers over your career, high performing sales professionals. What do you expect from them today?

Christine Barger: I liked the “one more thing you can do”, I’m probably going to steal that. [Laughs] I’ll give you all the creds for it, but I’ll probably take that.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: It’s all good, I actually probably stole it from someone [laughs] but I’ve said it so long I don’t remember.

Christine Barger: I think that’s great. For me, I’ve had to re-pivot and re-frame people being generally scared, re-pivot that from just being generally scared of what’s going on in the world to, “What can we do?” In terms of Ivy’s, “What one more thing can you do?” we’ve re-pivoted and we’ve started to coach our folks to focus on what we can do. In terms of some of the great comments Ivy made, sometimes it doesn’t show up in the numbers right away but there are key activities that you can be doing to set yourself up for later success whether that be increased pipe gen and demand. We’ve been very blessed because my group was one of the only groups that grew the business in Q1 and we will grow in Q2. I think one of the things we did really well at the onset of this was we took a look at our accounts and for the ones that were publicly traded companies we looked at their balance sheets and classified them as surging and non-surging in terms of surging to actually do business or non-surging.

We had two sets of strategies that applied for the sellers in terms of trying to get their head around how they should communicate and show empathy to their customers. For those customers that were surging it was all about, “How can I transform faster? How can I bring to market faster? What are the great ideas? Let’s keep going.” Then for those non-surging customers it could be anything from, “I’ve furloughed all my workers” to, “I think I’m going to go out of business” to, “I need to rewrite my contract because I want to keep Salesforce but I can’t financially handle the load of what’s coming.” I’ve worked at other organizations across my career.

One of the things, because I’m fairly new to Salesforce, that made me super proud to work there is the way that Marc led the market in terms of embracing with empathy people that worked for this company in terms of all different ways of empathy, family, world events, wellness, how to treat our customers to how we actually engage with customers in terms of being so creative, in terms of contract rewrites and some other things that we did to alleviate some of the financial pain for those customers that really needed it. It was really humbling to see someone at that level of the organization really leading the charge passionately around that. We are still marching to a number, we are focusing on what we can do, we’re focusing on different messaging to our customers on where they sit in the spectrum of how COVID is affecting them and it was a strategy that worked in Q1 for us and continues to provide benefit for us in Q2.

Fred Diamond: We’re getting some questions from the audience here. Aaron, you talked about customer communications and customer conversations. Talk a little bit about how you’re coaching your people to engage in these conversations. Everyone in the world is going through the response to COVID, everyone’s been quarantined, people may have some people that have gone through some of the challenges that Ivy had described before but how are you telling your people today? Again, it’s the middle of June, we’re still in whatever phase one of the pandemic might be and companies are going through the challenges like you just mentioned, Christine. Some of your customers are okay but some of them, you’ve mentioned restaurants and retail, we just heard today on the news that J.C. Penney just closed like 150 stores. How are your people engaging with your customer? Is it, “Let’s get right to business”? Are you spending 30 minutes on empathy and then let’s talk about business? Ivy, why don’t you go first and then Christine. Tell us a little about some of the ways that you’re coaching your people to talk to their customers.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: When you’re calling your customers again it’s empathy because they’re people just like you, they’re going through stuff with their families on top of their business so you don’t know what they’re going through as well. Again, checking on them, seeing what we can do, “How can we help you?” and then having the conversation with them about, “Your business has changed, our business has changed.” Having a candid conversation. “Both of our businesses have changed dramatically right now, let’s have a conversation about as we are moving back into the various phases, how has your business changed and how are you going to adapt to it?”

Asking the questions, “What systems have you put in place for safety measures where people can feel safe when they come into” – if you are brick and mortar – “where they feel comfortable coming into your location? Do you have those systems in place and how can we help you tell people that you have those systems in place? How are you protecting your employees? Are you supplying them with the things that they need to work and to feel safe and to be safe when they come to work?” It’s having different conversations with them. You’re having conversations with some automotive dealers who don’t have inventory, they would love to be able to do something but they don’t have inventory so having a different conversation with them.

Are we talking about your service department now? Is that a way that we can help you? Because people still need to get their car serviced so it’s, “Let’s have a conversation, let’s see where you are and how your business has changed and how we can help you change with it because all of our business has changed.” I think being very candid and transparent about that and how it has changed for you too and not coming in there with a sales pitch, this is not the time for that. It is the time to try to help someone, to try to see where they are in their business, how their business has changed and to have real conversation about how we can help them and we can. 9 times out of 10 we have tools in place that we can help you but the challenge has changed for you.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Christine Barger and Ivy Savoy-Smith, this conversation has flown by. We have time for two more quick questions before I ask you for your final thoughts. Some people have said, “What should I be doing right now?” We have questions coming in, “How have you dealt with this?” In the very beginning when we started doing these webcasts people said, “Well, I’ve been through 9/11 and I’ve been through 2008, we’ll get through this.” It’s been a bigger challenge and of course everything that’s happened over the last couple weeks has made it even a bigger challenge.

How have you grown? I asked how you changed as a sales leader but how have you dealt with the last couple weeks as sales professionals, as leaders? We have a number of people here who have asked that same question so tell us one or two things that you’re doing to keep yourself sane. A number of the sales leaders we’ve had on the webcast have said, “I never took an MBA class on leading salespeople through a pandemic” but tell us one or two things that you’re both doing and then I’ll ask you for your final thoughts. It could be personal or it could be business related. Christine, why don’t you go first and then Ivy? Then Ivy, you’ll give us your final thought for what people should do today and the same thing with Christine.

Christine Barger: I might say what I’m grateful for going through this pandemic which dovetails into change. It’s definitely made me become more reflective on how much time I’m working because my kids tell me that I work all the time, “Mom, you’re always working” and Ivy made this comment earlier. This work and home blend with this pandemic and being at home, I definitely have been working more so that would be one thing. I’ve had to be more regimented with my time and I think more selfish with my time so I’ve been trying to make sure that I’m getting up and working out every morning and spending some time for myself. I’m a spiritual person so I put on praise music when I get dressed for my workout and as I’m walking, before I warm up for my run I’m listening to my praise music to get myself in a good mindset for the day.

I talk about three legs of the stool because I’m a three to five person and obviously you see that in every answer I give. It’s the stool of being sound from a work perspective, being sound from a family perspective and then faith. Family, friends and faith, those three F’s are important and I think those are the things that I’ve been rallied around and as we go through this I become grateful for the time. Like I said, I have older kids and I’ve gotten to spend so much time with my 19 year old who’s in college because she’s around and I think once the kids get older they actually like their parents [laughs] so she wants to hang out with my husband and I which has been such a blessing. Just to be super succinct, Fred, I think it’s me growing as a person in terms of awareness and general gratitude.

Whatever you’re doing for work is going to come and go, I’m not going to work for Salesforce for the rest of my life and the only thing that I have when I leave there are those three pieces: my family, my friends and my faith. It’s really amplified that I know what’s important and I really try to make a consorted effort to stay focused on them daily.

Fred Diamond: Ivy, how about you? What’s something you’ve been doing for yourself to keep yourself motivated, sane, just make it through the day?

Ivy Savoy-Smith: That is awesome, what Christine said is point on how I definitely feel. One of my clichés is, “Your headstone will not say ‘devoted employee'” I have never seen one that says that. I am a devoted employee, I am a loyal employee but that is not how I hang my head. I hang my head on being a good mother, wife, friend and god-fearing person, that’s how I look at myself. I’m a very positive person, I always try to see the positive in everything, I’m glass half full. You walk into my office, everyone always says that because my entire office has different quotes on the wall, different positive messages because I want to surround myself with that throughout the day so I think it’s necessary for myself during this time.

I’ve also encouraged my staff mental health days, to take them because I’ve had that question where people are like, “This was my vacation week, why take it? I can’t go anywhere, I can’t have fun.” You still should take those days because you need those days to decompress, that’s your time not to have to get on a Zoom call. If I’m emailing you, you won’t have to email me back because you are on vacation or you are taking your mental health day and it’s critical now more than ever for people to decompress. Because we are working remotely, you work more because you’ll get an email or you’ll get a call after your normal hours if you were working your regular 9 to 5 because people know that you’re home, they know that you’re accessible so they take it for granted. You are working more, you’re working differently definitely but you’re working more because it isn’t set hours so much anymore.

I encourage my folks to take those mental health days as I call them, for your own mental well-being. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t physically going anywhere, if you just want to sit in your backyard and do absolutely nothing but look at the trees, that is a great day. [Laughs] I’ve had some great days just doing absolutely nothing but just looking out at the sun so I encourage my folks to do that and I try to do that myself to decompress. Again, I surround myself with positive energy, I get up, I look at my positive quotes, I think about what’s going to inspire me today and that today is going to be a better day than yesterday. If you don’t claim it and if you don’t put that energy out into the air, then you’re not going to get it. I always say if you think positive, positive will happen but if you think negative, you’re going to get negative. Make a choice to choose positive thoughts and I try to encourage my people to think that way, too.

Fred Diamond: We have about a minute left, I just want to read something from one of our attendees. “Fred, thank you, two great speakers. I appreciate this talk so much and love how REAL both Ivy and Christine are. Mother, wife, friend and god-fearing person, you both are awesome.” Thank you, Jill, for that.

Christine Barger: Can that person just follow me around for the next couple of months? That would be awesome [laughs]. Thank you, Jill, that’s so sweet.

Fred Diamond: And thank you, Aaron, for the questions and everyone who’s watched today’s webcast and is listening. Ladies, thank you so much for all your service to your customers. We have less than a minute left, give us something people should do today and don’t say, “Be a better god-fearing person”, say a specific thing that everybody should do today, June 17th, to take their lives and their career to the next level. Ivy, why don’t you go first? Christine, then you’ll bring us home.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: Be kind. It doesn’t cost you a thing to be kind to someone else to make their day but I always say focus on a goal, too. In personal life being kind is critical for folks because you never know how their day is going so that’s my mantra. In business I always say focus on something and have a strategy with that. Have your to-do steps and stick to them, habits are important and you have to get in the habit of having good habits. When you get in the habit of doing things, it doesn’t become a chore so having a goal, focusing on that goal, whatever it may be, even the small goals add up.

I’m a huge Rocky fan so another one of my sayings at work – and they tease me about this all the time – is it’s one step, one punch, one round t a time because you’ve got to take it day by day, especially now. You can’t think of the 12 rounds in a fight, if you think of the 12 rounds in the first round, you’re done because you’re thinking, “How am I going to get to the 12th round? This guy just beat me up, it’s round 3.” Don’t think about the 12th round, just think about getting out of round 3.

Fred Diamond: Make it through the day.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: Make it through each one and you’ll look up and you’ll be at round 12. It’s one step, one punch, one round at a time, that’s my mantra for my people and that’s what I want them to do, just take it day by day.

Fred Diamond: Christine, thank you so much, give us one… [Laughs]

Christine Barger: I’m going to be fast and two.

Fred Diamond: Ivy, Kurt wants to know if you drink eggs for breakfast, he thought that was very strong.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Rocky of course drank eggs. Thanks, Kurt. Thank you, Erin, again. Christine, give us something to bring us home.

Christine Barger: Two things. #1, get out and exercise because mental and physical health is important. #2, make sure you write in your gratitude journal all the things you are grateful for today.

Fred Diamond: Ladies, thank you so much for being on the show and for all your support, I want to thank all of our watchers today.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: Thank you.

Christine Barger: You’re welcome, thanks, everybody.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: Have a great day, be safe.

Christine Barger: Thanks, you too.

Ivy Savoy-Smith: No eggs in the morning, Kurt, sorry.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs]

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 244: Having Empathetic Customer, Sales and Employee Conversations featuring Christine Barger from Salesforce and Radio Sales Executive Ivy Savoy-Smith first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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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 20, 2020. It featured sales leaders Gary Milwit (JG Wentworth) and Expert Sales Trainer Bob Greene.]

EPISODE 236: Great Ideas for Leading Sales Teams and Customers Forward from Wentworth’s Gary Milwit and Sales Training Expert Bob Greene

Listen to Gary Milwit’s Podcast .

BOB’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “What’s my advice for sales professionals today? First thing I would do is pick up the phone. When you’re having a conversation with your prospects, just pick up the phone and say, “I’m calling to see how you’re doing. I want to understand your business and what challenges you’re facing.” Once your prospect realizes that it’s not a sales call and that it’s a caring call that’s huge because now you have an opportunity to hone your phone skills and build rapport the same time.”

Fred Diamond: Gary Milwit, it’s great to see you today, thank you so much for being here. Wentworth, you guys are an IES member, you’re also an IES Premier Sales Employer so congratulations on that, it’s a great place to work. I know that you’ve been very busy over the last two months, you’re hiring a bunch of people getting them on boarded. Why don’t you tell us what’s going on with you? Tell us what your big priorities are right now.

Gary Milwit: It’s great to be here, thanks. That is right, we are hiring a lot of people. Since we went remote we’ve had 39 newly hired salespeople graduate from our onboarding program and we have 31 that are in the program currently. They’ve never been to the office, not one of our offices, never been there so it’s a huge priority to make sure they’re trained up and to make sure they’re sales ready when they get to the virtual sales floor.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things you’re doing if you’re onboarding people right now in this virtual world? They’re not going to see their coworkers or maybe they’ll see them on a Zoom screen or something. What are some of the things you’re doing to get these people acclimated to the company?

Gary Milwit: That’s the challenge, the challenge is getting them acclimated to the company, they’ve barely even been inside of it. We have to have people come to visit us, we have to have a lot of meetings, we have to be short, we have to be very productive in what we do and we have to be organized. One of the things that we’re doing to make sure the people are engaged is we have to add value every time we have a meeting and we have a lot of meetings. If they don’t add value we’re no good.

Fred Diamond: It’s great that you’re hiring because a lot of places aren’t. Introduce the people to what your company does, they might have seen your company on commercials or something but tell us again what Wentworth does for the people who don’t know.

Gary Milwit: We have two different divisions, we have one division that deals with debt release, debt settlement so we help people settle their credit card and secure debts which is a brand new organization for us, brand new division. Then we also have a division that buys future payment streams, so structured settlements, annuities, lottery wins. Bob knows all about this, Bob had a structured settlement from a company that he sold and is a former Stone Street Capital client, actually. We buy future payments for present value money and we usually deal with consumers.

Fred Diamond: What do your salespeople do? Before we went into this “new world” if you will, constantly prospecting, making phone calls, is it a hundred call a day type of a job or what type of things do people do who work for your company?

Gary Milwit: It’s a huge sales force. We have three different offices, huge sales force, lots of inbound leads, you see the commercials, we’re on TV, direct response television, TBC advertising. You have to earn your way to that lead floor so we have an inbound team and we also have an outbound team. The people that are onboarding are learning how to onboard and sell through outbound calling which for those of you that are on this call, that’s a 2% close rate on average on outbound call, not easy so you’ve got to learn how to leave the voicemail, got to learn how to receive that and engage quickly. We have inbound and outbound all inside sales.

Fred Diamond: Bob Greene, I’ve known you for a while. You’re a sales trainer extraordinaire, you’ve trained thousands if not tens of thousands of people in many industries, association world, the financial services world, if you will. You’re a pretty upbeat and positive guy, why don’t you give us a positive surprise that’s come out of this? Again, from the sales and business world what’s something positive that we can reflect back on today?

Bob Greene: It’s funny, one of my clients have to use a call center and I’m training them similar to what Gary is experiencing, we’re doing national recruiting, we’re hiring, we’re figuring out onboarding protocols and a pleasant surprise I found is we’ve gone from a physical to a virtual call center, productivity has increased. We’re getting people spending more time focused on their job, taking less breaks, not showing up for work late, not calling in sick and the actual productivity, their actual workflow is better now that they’re working virtually because they feel that we’ve invested in them and they’re returning the investment to us.

Fred Diamond: Gary, how about with you as well? What’s a positive thing? We’ll get deep into some of the challenges that sales professionals are having to overcome right now and we’re going to be aspirational.

Gary Milwit: I think the best thing that could ever come out of this is that you can’t manage by proxy, you can’t manage just because you’re there, it doesn’t mean you’re managing, it doesn’t mean you’re leading just because you’re present. The virtual presence is real, you’ve got to be on time, you’ve got to be prepared, you’ve got to actually plan your day and if you do that, it gives you the chance to be a little more flexible with other people, understand that things are going to happen and I think we’re being flexible for the right reasons now. It’s because we’re planning, because we’re doing more managing and more leading by being in the fire, basically, we have to be there.

What’s present? Believe it or not, by being virtual. It’s a whole different game and I think it’s going to change when we get back to work in that you can’t just think that you’re managing when you’re there, just because you’re talking to someone doesn’t mean anything more than you’re nicely mentoring. We’ve got to manage hard and lead better and we do that by being more organized. The biggest surprise is how disorganized, really, we might have been. That’s the biggest thing, we were disorganized, now we’re organized.

Fred Diamond: Gary talked about his day. What does an ideal day look like for both of you? Bob, as a sales leader, sales trainer, no one’s driving anymore, no one’s having to go from meeting to meeting or driving to the office. We’re all getting up, we’re eating breakfast, taking a shower, whatever but what do you think the ideal day today looks like for sales professionals?

Bob Greene: The ideal day starts the night before, you have to do your planning of what you want to accomplish the night before, you have to have that plan in place. I typically put together at least 10 things I want to accomplish the following day whether it’s scheduled meetings or activities I want to pursue and then I start my day at 5:00 in the morning and I use that time because it’s quiet. That’s when I do my reading, I’ll check the periodicals, I’ll check the internet and then around 7:00 o’clock I’m working from home. I’ve got my family that I’m working in making sure my kids are getting up for their online school and things like that. Starting the work day it’s a structured day, I’m at my desk every day by 9:00 o’clock sharp engaging with clients, reaching out to prospects, I actually block out a time around lunch time where I’ll do my prospecting for an hour or two and then it’s a standard work day. Then I shut it off by 5:30, 6:00 o’clock I turn off the switch and it’s now time for my family.

Fred Diamond: Gary, how about you? Again, you manage a lot of people who are maybe in their first or second job, maybe their third job in sales. What do you think the ideal day looks like today?

Gary Milwit: The ideal day looks like hour blocks. If you take your day and you block it off by every hour, the ideal day looks like a 45 minutes to an hour of work and then at least 15 minute break, a real break. The distractions that we get in the office weren’t so bad because we need distractions, we need to get our brain settled down so the ideal day is blocked out every hour. My day every day starts at 6:00 o’clock in the morning and then I make the schedules and do all that stuff and my first call is 8:30 in the morning and then it goes from there. I do a lot of training now, I didn’t used to do a lot of training before and really it’s not training, it’s teaching, there’s a difference because we’re teaching and teaching is the foundation. If you can’t coach then you can’t train till someone actually knows what the hell you’re talking about. Teaching is different, I used to be a high school teacher but I haven’t taught sales in a long time so it’s new for me and we’re learning. My ideal day is 12 hours [laughs].

Fred Diamond: That leads to the next question here, what’s changed for you? Again, over the last 7 weeks how have you changed as a sales leader? Both you guys are really instrumental in helping sales professionals. Now, obviously Gary you’re helping a lot of people get started in their career, you’re also helping people get started, be more effective. Think about yourself, how have you changed as a sales leader in the past 7 weeks? Gary, why don’t you go first on that?

Gary Milwit: The biggest change for me is that I stopped thinking about what to do and started doing it, or telling somebody else what to do. We only have one other person, it’s me and my Director of Learning Development, it’s just two of us doing all the stuff. What we know is that everyone forgets quickly so repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s changed, I’m never going to forget that, I’m always going to do it and I’m practicing now because when I talked to you last week I assume that you’re going to remember something and the assumptions are what kills every sale. I’m treating this like I’m selling every day, earn trust, build rapport, engage, add value. That’s what we have to do, that’s how it’s changed, I’ve always done it but now I’m really doing it, I’m in the game. We’re going to be better afterwards, I think.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you, how have you changed? Again, you’ve worked with tens of thousands of sales professionals, maybe hundreds. You’re also a pretty reflective guy, we see the reflection in your dome up there.

Bob Greene: Yeah, a little bit [laughs]

Fred Diamond: But seriously, how have you changed over the last 7 weeks?

Bob Greene: Outside of the beard, my Corona beard, I think it’s a change of messaging. The outreach for me is still sales focused but it’s not sales oriented. My goal is not to move a sale forward or to close and earn business right now, it’s to maintain relationships and to establish myself as somebody who is there for them when they’re not buying so that when my customers are again ready to buy I’ll be top of mind and they think of me first. I employ a concept called gifting which I spoke about earlier of communicating value. If I see an article that is relevant to a customer, whether it’s to their business needs or maybe I know that their kids play sports or something like that, I forward it with a little note.

I’ll write personal handwritten notes and put them in the mail because that’s a point of differentiation, people aren’t getting physical mail and it goes to their office and then it migrates to their home and they eventually get it but again, the thought is recognizing how to communicate differently. Everybody is using email so another tool is how to write effective emails and how to write them in a way that people will respond so it’s not a long involved email, it’s short, no more than 125 words, easy to read on their phone screen, simple things like that. The messaging has changed to one of care and concern rather than sales.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second. We’ve been doing four webcasts a week, I mentioned before we’re actually doing a new one on sales mindset every Thursday. One of the key things that’s come across for me is that if you’re a sales professional now may not be the easiest time to “sell” but you’re still a sales professional. What are some things you should be doing today as a sales professional? You may not be closing but what are some of the attributes that you should be thinking about? Gary, you mentioned preparation before, let’s be real specific today. Again, it’s May 20th, 2020, what are some things sales professionals if they’re in a space where their customers are not buying the way they might normally have in the last 5, 7, 10 years, what are some things they should be working on? Gary, why don’t you get us started with that?

Gary Milwit: They should be working on meeting their objectives, not the goals. The goals are to sell, every salesperson’s goal is to sell and close business. Stop the nonsense, that’s not your prospect’s goal, prospect’s goal has nothing to do with that so you have to see what are the objectives of the sales process. The first thing you have to be is engaging and there’s only three ways for someone to engage, you’re going to make them curious, they’re going to be familiar with you or there’s something there for them. Figure out what it is for them, why are you calling? To give them something. Be interested in the people that you talk to, not interesting, no one cares. No one cares about you right now but you have to care about them, that’s how you’re going to be a pro with or without the virus, that’s how you become a sales pro, engage with the objective and then go for each objective after that. Build rapport, earn trust, then you can start to talk about what it is that you want to talk about, but not until then.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you? What are the top two or three things that sales professionals should be working on right now to become the deeper, richer professional?

Bob Greene: I always say that sales is the closest thing you can get to sports without having to lace up a pair of cleats. I’m a huge baseball fan and the Washington Nationals which is the team I follow, they’re not playing baseball but what are those baseball players doing? They’re still practicing, they’re still honing their skills, they’re still working out, they’re still keeping their bodies in shape so that when the season starts, they’ll be able to start playing. It’s the same thing for us, we’re professionals, we have a job to do. Yes, we might not be on the field to play right now, we might not be closing business but we still have to do all the preparation that will enable us to be successful when we do step on the field so we’re ready to play.

Fred Diamond: Let’s get specific, Bob. What are three things if someone said to you, “Bob, I’m a sales professional, my customers aren’t buying right now, tell me three specific things that I should do today, May 20th, to improve myself as a professional”?

Bob Greene: First thing I would do is pick up the phone. When you’re calling somebody and you’re having a conversation with them, you just pick up the phone and say, “I’m calling to see how you’re doing. I want to understand your business and what challenges you’re facing” and once your prospect realizes that it’s not a sales call, it’s a caring call that’s huge because now you have an opportunity to hone your phone skills and build rapport the same time.

The second thing I would do is look at how you write an email, and I talked about this before. You have to have clarity of purpose, you have to have a bottom line upfront approach and I think now is a great time, there’s lots of resources out there. I know I provide resources to help people write better emails, their communication skills should be improved, now’s a really great time to hone those skills.

Finally, I would do reading, I would read either sales books, periodicals, understand what’s going on in the economy so that you have interesting things to talk about when you get on the phone or when you’re sending an email so that you can be engaging. If all you have to talk about is your company and software, you’re boring, there’s no curiosity there but if you can engage someone in a conversation that’s of interest to them, now you have a dialogue which can lead to a relationship.

Fred Diamond: Get on the phone, read. Gary, how about you? Three specific things people could do when they leave today’s webinar in about 45 minutes.

Gary Milwit: Practice this: how, why, tell me more about that. That’s the way you build rapport, ask those questions and you win every time. How…? Anything after that is fine. How are you? Wait for the answer. Tell me more about that, and why. Those are questions that build rapport, practice those questions, practice with whoever you can. If you’re on the phone or whenever you pick up the phone if you ask, “How are you?” wait for the answer, just don’t blow over it. How questions work, why questions work and tell me more about that. I tell my people that all the time, it’s what we practice and then to what Bob’s point was, NBA players are in the lay-up lines every day until they retire. Every day from the start of their junior leagues until they retire they go to the lay-up line mark and do lay-ups. NFL players practice every day for their entire careers until they retire. Salespeople stop working at it, you stop working at it after each training session. Work at it every day.

Bob Greene: Every day.

Fred Diamond: Bob, you mentioned some books. Look behind me, people, you see I’ve got bookshelves, every sales book, there’s great ones out there, coming out there, some of the people we’ve had on our past webinars have written some tremendous things. If you have a question for Bob and Gary, send it via the question panel or if there’s a point that you want to get across. Gary, you were talking about engagement a few moments ago, I want to talk about the other big E word which is empathy. As a matter of fact, the first two, three weeks we were doing the webcast everybody was saying, you need to be empathetic. You talked about, “How are you?” the how questions to get started. We’ve gotten some questions from people over the last couple of webcasts who have said, “I’m getting empathy fatigued, what do I do now that I’m done being empathetic?” Bob, what does empathy really mean in the sales process and how do we avoid what some people are now referring to as ’empathy fatigue’?

Bob Greene: Empathy is a buzz word. As sales professionals we’re trained to be active listeners, the action of active listening is empathetic. You’re hearing what somebody says, you’re responding to it in a way that shows them that you care but you have to be careful because a sales professional is not to let empathy devolve into sympathy where you feel sorry for your customer and you don’t ask for the sale and you step away from the sales process. Empathy is what we do every day, as a sales professional it shouldn’t be a scary word, it’s active listening.

Fred Diamond: I want to talk about listening for a second. Gary, what’s your take on empathy? Bob, I want to follow up with you after Gary talks about listening. Listening comes up all the time on the Sales Game Changers podcast. How do you physically become a better active listener? It’s easy to say, “Be a better listener” but give us some of your ideas on how you get better at listening. Gary, why don’t you give us your thoughts on empathy and how can people be more empathetic today when maybe this empathy fatigue is setting in?

Gary Milwit: I agree with Bob 100%, empathy is a buzz word, it’s like morale used to be back in the old days, “our morale”. This is how you’re empathetic: listen, be interested and ask the question and wait for the answer and then ask again and follow up with it and stop talking. The way you stop talking, I’ll just jump in on that, listen for the buzz words from your customers. Okay, yes, right, uh-huh, all those things, whenever they say that they’re not listening anymore, stop talking. We call it the reverse play, run the reverse play as soon as you start talking and you start hearing, “Right, uh-huh, yeah” you’ve got to reverse the field beyond talking too much and then ask the next question. Hopefully it starts with a how or why.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you? Give us some thoughts on how you become a better listener.

Bob Greene: Basically when you’re asking questions – and before you go in to talk to a client you should prepare a question tree so that you have understanding of what you want to uncover and the questions you want to ask and you’re anticipating the response. Here’s the important thing, when you ask a question and you’re hearing the answer are you hearing it to ask your next question or are you hearing it to understand? Hearing and listening are two different things. Hearing is the physical noise, listening is the conceptual understanding of what’s being said so when you ask a question, listen to understand and then pause and then ask your next question.

Don’t just check a box, “Okay, I asked that question, here’s my next question” and you’re not processing the information. To be an active listener is simply using your listening skills to process the information that’s being shared and not to stay on a scripted response sheet that, “Okay, I asked this question, what’s my next question?” and you’re not even listening to the answer because you want to go down the checklist.

Fred Diamond: Again, if you have a question for Gary or for Bob, submit them via your question panel. Gary, you mentioned recently that your company has one a whole bunch of new hires. A question comes in, “In the remote environment which we’re all in today and it looks like it’s going to be this way for quite possibly through at least the end of the summer, what’s the #1 thing you’re looking for in a new hire knowing that there’s this new environment? What should they be prepared for before joining your team?” Gary, you just mentioned you hired a whole bunch of new people. Bob, I know you help your clients with a lot of recruiting. What are some of those things that you’re looking for in a new hire in today’s environment?

Gary Milwit: We’re looking for people that are eager to learn and especially now because they’re teachable, they’re actually learning more so they have to want to learn more. People that are coming right out of school are used to learning so it’s a good time to get them and if they’re not, this is their second or third job or they’re a little more veteran, be willing to learn. We don’t know everything, just be willing to learn. Outside of that I think you’re a winner.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you? What are some of the things we should be looking for in our new hires?

Bob Greene: Gary summed it up really well, I look to hire the smartest people who are willing to learn how to learn and who don’t come in with any preconceived notion of, “I know this” because that shows me that they don’t. The main thing is – again, it’s a coaching philosophy – I hire the best athletes and then I find the right position. If somebody has good cognitive skill and they’re smart and they’re bright, if I’m hiring somebody entry level I’m not hiring them for that position, I want them to move up into the organization, I’m hiring them for the next level position and I’m seeing if they have the capability to move up into that position. They might start off a little bit lower than they’d want to but now they have the experience of working within the company and moving themselves up through the ranks.

One of the things I like about this call center that is one of my clients now is I’m training their call center personnel but in order to train them I have to be on the call center, I have to be on the phone. I’m functioning as a screener, I’m functioning as a closer, I’m living that life, I’m eating my own dog food because if I’m going to train somebody how to do the job,  have to know how to do the job. I have tremendous respect for anybody who takes inbound calls because my career has always been outbound calling. Inbound calling is a whole different talent and a whole different mindset, kudos to people who do it well.

Fred Diamond: Question says, “I am one of the people who’s concerned about the future of my company. What are your suggestions for me?” That’s an interesting question, we’re in a stressful time, a lot of us have gotten “used to” whatever we are today. If you’ve never worked from home you’ve gotten used to Zoom, you’ve gotten used to a schedule. This is two months into whatever we’re in so people have gotten acclimated and accustomed but what’s happening right now is customers are struggling and customer’s customers are struggling, people have been laid off, people have been furloughed.

We have some members that are in the hospitality space and 90% of the people in the hospitality space at some of the larger companies, let alone the hotels themselves, have been furloughed. How would you help a sales professional that’s dealing with stress right now? We also have salespeople who are working home with kids and a spouse and you can’t travel, we talked about this before, we’re doing today’s broadcast from Northern Virginia, Bob and I are both in Northern Virginia and Gary is across the river in Montgomery County. People can’t travel, you’re scared to death about going into a restaurant still. What’s your advice for your sales professionals on how to deal with the anxiety and stress that we’re seeing today? Bob Greene, why don’t you get us started?

Bob Greene: I like talking to other sales professionals. I think LinkedIn is a great network for me, I reach out to people daily just to touch base, to get a pulse, get a temperature, how they’re doing across the country, across the world, I have global contacts. The other thing I find very interesting is I’ve been getting a lot of people reaching out to me who have been laid off and asking me to introduce them to other people within my network. I do have an extensive network within LinkedIn and I’m always happy to provide those introductions and connections, I think you have to pay it forward, you have to take care of each other, we are a community of professionals.

I think it’s really essential that if you reach out to somebody in earnest for help that we extend the helping hand and assist because it might be us the next day and if you can demonstrate kindness and you can demonstrate caring and you can help people, you don’t know where they’re going to end up but they’re going to think of you. They’re going to remember what you did for them so down the road if you need something from them in terms of a contact or a lead or something like that it becomes reciprocated. I think the most important thing we can do as sales professionals right now is to care for ourselves as a community.

Fred Diamond: Gary, for you. Once again, Wentworth is a IES Premier Sales Employer, congratulations for that, you do a lot of great things for your team. How are you helping them deal with the stress right now?

Gary Milwit: I’m more flexible, I listen to find out not necessarily what’s wrong but I understand if there’s anxiety, I try to give positivity every day, I try to stay positive, I’m pretty optimistic as it is. I always give the same advice here, make sure that your manager knows what you’re doing, you’re remote, don’t assume that they know. Manage up a little bit, let people know what you’re doing every day. If you have a good idea, share it with people, call your colleagues, call for a Zoom meeting or a Lifesize meeting, whatever tools you use, get together with people. Don’t wait for somebody to do it for you because when you’re out there and you put yourself out there and you get a little uncomfortable you’re going to grow and people are going to recognize it and you’re not going to be the one, it’s the other guy. Don’t let someone make a decision for you, it’s like the umpire, don’t let the umpire make the call for the third strike, go down swinging, get aggressive. Don’t let somebody else make the call for you.

Fred Diamond: I always love that bit of advice which is, “Don’t think for your customer, don’t give your customer the answers.” We’ve got a couple great questions here about prospecting. The question was, “What is your biggest challenge?” and 42% said it’s difficult to connect with customers so let’s talk about the concept of new business prospecting. We know where everybody is, some people are going to start going back to the office in a couple of weeks, we’re seeing a little bit of that but for the most part people are going to be home, we know where people are.

Bob Greene, what are some of your thoughts? Should people be prospecting right now new business? We know people are home, we know that they’re home almost 7/24, is it okay to call somebody at 7:00 o’clock in the morning on their cellphone because we know that they’re home? In most cases too, there aren’t the gatekeepers that we have historically been aware of because they’re also at home so we know where people are. Let’s talk about prospecting for new business today. Again, we’re doing today’s webcast, it’s May 20th, we’re 7 weeks into whatever we’re into here. Let’s talk about that for a little bit and then Gary, you’re going to get that same question as well. Let’s talk about prospecting for new business today, not talking to existing customers. What are your suggestions on that? Bob Greene.

Bob Greene: I like to use a soft touch right now, I wouldn’t demonstrate cold calling per se but what I do, I post a lot of content on LinkedIn and then when people like and comment on my content, on what I posted I look to see who these people are and if their company is aligned with my ideal customer profile. If they do, I reach out and I thank them for liking or commenting on my content and I start the conversation in that regard and I say, “How are things going?” Much like Gary says, how are you doing? Tell me more, why is that? You do it virtually through LinkedIn and it’s a way of establishing rapport and it becomes an organic way of actually prospect because now you’ve qualified a customer and they’re not even being qualified. You’re just having a conversation but at the same time you’re building up the ability to say, “Who would I talk to in your company or what’s your process for becoming a vendor, or how do I get started working with you guys? Is this something that could be of value?” and you do it incrementally over the course of several conversations, it’s not a sales pitch.

Fred Diamond: Gary, how about you? Prospecting new business. Do you guys do a lot of prospecting as it is normally?

Gary Milwit: We have a ginormous database so we actually make tons and tons of outbound calls, people are on this thing today, they’re averaging in 175 calls a day. In some of them we’re doing more, in some of them we’re doing 140, 120. What you need to know on prospecting, when you call somebody they don’t need anything, you’ve got to unlock the want, you’ve got to unlock what they want. They don’t need anything, they call you when they need something so know the difference.

I can separate that easily with the inbound/outbound mentality because we have a lot of inbound leads but when you’re calling outbound you have a 2% chance to close and a 5% chance someone’s going to pick up, leave a great voicemail, that close rate goes to 6% because they’re calling you because you’ve spurred something on. You have to be engaging, you’re calling out and when they say pick up the phone you thankfully pick up the phone and get into it with engagement. What’s in it for them? Absolutely you can prospect, just know that you’re dealing with a different animal when you start making those outbound calls, they don’t need anything, you’ve got to unlock wants.

Fred Diamond: If you have any more questions for Gary or for Bob, we’re going to go till about 45 minutes after the hour, thank you so much for the great questions. The question comes in here, “If you’ve only been working remote, what’s the best way to get acclimated to the office once all this clears?” I have a slight variation of that question, “How do you see the pandemic” – I hate using the word – “How do you see this situation changing the way we sell moving forward?” Again, you all don’t have crystal balls but is it going to be all Zoom? Is everybody going to be home? From a sales perspective, what do you think we’re going to be once this clears up? Gary, why don’t you get us started?

Gary Milwit: If I were to bet all my money I’d say we’re going to be exactly the same as we were before, just better at it. I think we as humans revert back to the way we were but we’re going to be stronger and better and we’re going to be more flexible. Our company had three people work remote in the history of the company before we went on this pandemic, we’re a pretty big company, 400 in change people were remote so it’s going to change everything and it’s going to be better but people are going to be people, we’ve still got to train and we’ve still got to repeat, we still got to do everything we’ve done and we’ve got to be better at it. I don’t look for anything crazy, it’s crazy now, it’s not going to be crazy when we get back to work.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you?

Bob Greene: I used to do a lot of international travel for business and I think that’s going to be diminished, I think that organizations are going to recognize the efficiency and cost savings that can be derived from virtual meetings and I think there’s still going to be business travel but it’s not going to be with the frequency or the relationship building that it used to be. I feel sad for that because it was probably the best part of my job was building the relationships and cultivating those lifetime friendships that I have with some of my former clients and current clients. I think that you’re going to see, Gary was talking about blocking off certain parts of the day in a schedule and I think you’re going to see Zoom meetings or similar type of video conferencing become part of everybody’s daily routine, the challenge is how to avoid the Zoom fatigue. I don’t have an answer for that and I don’t know how you differentiate one teleconference from the next whereas when you’re going to meet with somebody, there’s a lot of energy that you bring into a physical office when you’re going to meet with a client that’s gone now. You don’t have that so how do you reach through the screen and create that sort of comradery and rapport? It’s a challenge, I think people are still figuring that out so I hope Gary is right that it does resume and that people go back to their normal workflow but once an organization realizes the cost savings that they can derive from not having to travel sales personnel, I think you’re going to see a diminished travel budget.

Fred Diamond: We have time for a couple more questions if you have a last question you want to get in. A good question here from the audience, “What are these guys doing to stay fresh?” We talked about what the sales professionals can be doing. Bob, you look good, your beard has been trimmed, you look healthy. Gary, you look great, too. What are you guys both doing? You talked about when you get up and what your day looks like but you guys are hard-charging, Gary, you’re a classic hard-charging sales professional. What are some things you both are doing right now to stay sane, to get yourselves better as sales leaders and professionals?

Bob Greene: Gary, you want to take this one first?

Gary Milwit: I do yoga once or twice, believe it or not. Actually, I make sure that I at least do some exercise every day and I have done some yoga with my wife in front of the TV which I never would have done that before [laughs]. You stay fresh by being comfortable, getting comfortable being uncomfortable, do different things and that’s how you grow. This whole thing has been great for me personally, believe it or not because I meet more people in different meetings, I see different people in a company I never saw before. I see them virtually but I was in Rockville and they were in Pennsylvania anyway so I can tell you definitively that I have relationships with people I’ve never seen in person and they are deep relationships. I just got off a session with six people that are sales reps force that just finished our training, I’m close with all of them and I hope they feel the same way and I’ve never seen them in person.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you? You look good, what are you doing?

Bob Greene: I’m practicing cooking, actually. Not that I’m the best but I did lamb the other night which came out really good. The other thing is I’m probably an eternal optimist so I always want to keep things in perspective and with this COVID-19, my sons and I, our four boys still at home, we’ve been binge watching The Walking Dead on Netflix and it kind of put things in perspective.

Fred Diamond: That is true. Besides, obviously some of the financial stuff that most people we’ve been working with are dealing with because of the economic issues, a lot of people are developing relationships. I agree with you, Gary. I’ve connected with people on LinkedIn that I just knew from LinkedIn and a 30 minute Zoom call takes those relationships so far ahead. We have time for two more questions here, a lot of questions come flying in here. What are your expectations for your salespeople? Again, we know that in certain cases the economy is challenged right now but Gary, your company helps people, you get them cash right now when they need it with the settlements, why don’t you answer that question? What are your expectations for the salespeople today? Then we’ll ask you for some of your final thoughts. Gary, why don’t you go first?

Gary Milwit: We haven’t changed what we expect, we expect people to do what they’re supposed to do every day, make the calls, close the calls that come to you and write business, that’s what we expect and we are not compromising on that. I’m not compromising on putting people on the sales floor, they’re not ready so it’s ratcheting it up a little bit. We know that what we’re doing is the right thing, we want to be good for our customers and to do that you’ve got to be sharp every day. We’re not compromising, our expectations are you’ve got to be on your A game every day.

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you? What are your expectations right now?

Bob Greene: I would say the same. Be professional, do your job, you know what you have to do. As management you look at the KPIs to make sure that they’re aligned with the outreach you want to achieve, be professional.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Bob Greene, I want to thank Gary Milwit, you both have been great friends and supporters of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. By the way, Gary has been a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast, just go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com/garymilwit, you see his name there and you’ll find his episode.

Gary Milwit: Episode Twenty-two.

Fred Diamond: Yeah, you were way back. [Laughs] Bob, we’ll obviously get you on the show. We’ve already recorded today’s webcast as a Sales Game Changers podcast, it’ll be available on Friday, we’re also going to post this on LinkedIn as a replay. I want to thank you both for the great ideas, the great insights. Why don’t you give us one final thought? We ask this question at the end of every webcast. Things are happening every single day, we’re not asking, “What do you think things are going to be like in the next year?” We’re asking, “What are things that people should be working on today?” You’ve given us some great ideas, just to wrap up here, Bob Greene, get us started. What do you think the challenges will be the next week as we get to next week’s programs? What are the challenges for the next week and once again, how do you suggest that people overcome them listening to today’s webcast?

Bob Greene: I think the most important thing is like when you get on an airplane and they tell you when the oxygen masks drop, “Take care of yourself first before you take care of your children or anybody else in your family”, I think as sales professionals we have to take care of ourselves first. We have to make sure mentally that we’re in a good place, physically we’re taking care of ourselves, we really have to invest that time because if we’re not taking care of ourselves we can’t be there for anybody else whether our company is going to rely on us, whether our customers are going to rely on us. It’s not going to mean anything if we’re not there to be dependable, we’re not able to be relied on because we haven’t taken care of ourselves. Get enough sleep, exercise, eat right, do the basics, be professional, have an intellectual curiosity about the world around you and otherwise, the economy hasn’t opened up yet so basically it’s Groundhog Day but do these things every day.

Fred Diamond: Thanks, Bob. Gary, bring us home.

Gary Milwit: I think everyone needs to recognize that everyone is partially correct, no one is ever wrong 100%. Find out what’s right, find out what’s good, ask the question, “What good has come out of this? How do you improve because of this?” The bad stuff will come out in the wash. Find out what’s good, there’s good in everything, find the 1% that’s good if it’s only 1% and then capitalize on it, nothing else matters.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank you both once again for the great insights. Bob Greene, thank you so much. Gary Milwit, thank you so much. I want to thank all the people from around the world who’ve listened to today’s webcast and who are listening to this episode as a future Sales Game Changers podcast. My name is Fred Diamond, thank you so much.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 236: Great Ideas for Leading Sales Teams and Customers Forward from Wentworth’s Gary Milwit and Sales Training Expert Bob Greene first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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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 April 28, 2020. It featured sales leaders Jeffrey Wolinsky (WTOP) and Brian Ludwig (Cvent).]

EPISODE 229: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Brian Ludwig and Jeffrey Wolinsky

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Jeffrey Wolinsky’s Podcast . Listen to Brian Ludwig’s Podcast.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “What are you doing to be a good friend to the people that you have relationships in life that are mutually beneficial? Think about that and apply that to sales. Friendships are built on like experiences – we’ve had like experiences with our clients that continue to renew from us year after year. How do we continue those like experiences – by having some version of contact, touching, relationship talking, whatever it is, continuing like experiences that take place through situations like this. You get value out of spending time with somebody, you get value out of advice from a friend, you get value out of laughter from a friend, you get value out of something that a friend does. Apply that to business, they get value out of what they buy from you so first, apply the friendship method of like experiences, create lasting friendships.”

Fred Diamond: Brian Ludwig, introduce yourself and why don’t you tell us what your top priorities are right now?

Brian Ludwig: Thanks, Fred. I’m Brian Ludwig, I’m SVP of Sales at Cvent which is an event management software company. You should have put ‘wild hair’ as one of the choices in the poll, I’m struggling. In any case, some of the things we’re really working on right now, Fred, is lead flow. Obviously bringing in warmer prospects into the team is more troubling so we’re getting creative with how we maintain that lead flow, we’re trying to keep activity levels up so we’re closely monitoring that everyone is in the trenches, a lot of training of the team, our talk track has changed, what our value proposition to an event organizer or event marketer is, that value proposition has shifted a little bit.

The team needs to know how to talk about many organizers pivoting to virtual events like this one. Last, retaining top talent is pretty important to me right now. In this industry it is easy for someone to maybe think about options, we want to make sure that we’re keeping them motivated and inspired and heads down in strong collaboration with the rest of the team.

Fred Diamond: Just a note, the Institute for Excellence in Sales publishes our Premier Sales Employer Guide every quarter and Cvent is an IES Premier Sales Employer so congratulations on that. Jeffrey Wolinsky, WTOP, what are your top priorities right now?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I look at the poll that we had and it was almost split 50-50 between motivation and connecting with clients. I tell you, they’re connected so the people that are motivated are connecting with clients, the people that are lacking motivation right now are having trouble connecting with clients. One of the interesting things that we’ve found is that current clients and prospects that we had connected with before all of this started are relatively easy to connect with. Getting second meetings with those people is happening at a faster pace because thing about this, you had a meeting and whatever the result of that meeting dictated, both parties agreeing that a second meeting would make sense. The end of that meeting you’d say, “Let’s pick a time for the next meeting” and you would say, “How about next Tuesday?”

One person would say, “That works for me” and another person says, “No, that doesn’t.” Now you say, “Let’s pick a time” and you could say, “How about tomorrow?” and the people’s schedules have changed and opened up so that you can expedite that second meeting significantly faster. You can have those conversations with existing customers and existing prospects. Where we’re finding the challenge is connecting with new prospects, to Brian’s point, the talk track has changed, perfecting what that talk track is to get new prospects into the pipeline is where I’d go with the #1 challenge right now.

Fred Diamond: Jeffrey, real curiously before we get back to Brian. WTOP, I believe you’re the largest terrestrial radio station in the country. Half of our attendees here are from the DC area and it looks like half of them are from outside the area so everybody knows about the Glass-Enclosed Nerve Center (NOTE: This it studio where WTOP broadcasts from). DC is historically a huge commute town so people listen to you all throughout the day. What’s going on with the Glass-Enclosed Nerve Center? Is your talent still going to Bethesda or Chevy Chase to do the radio shows or is your talent producing from home? What’s that like?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: We have almost 200 people that are gathering, collecting, delivering, editing and providing news and information. Right now based off of the local aspect of people wanting news and information we’re at an all-time high when it comes to total engagement from audience wanting our news. Interestingly, we just put in a massive investment into having a state-of-the-art facility that all those people could gather in and work together with hoteling stations, open concept workspace.

On a normal day, back before when we had normal days, you could have anywhere from 30 to 50 people in that newsroom at one time. Today, right now at this second there’s probably 5 people there. We’ve outfitted our anchors, our reporters, editors, writers all with the ability to work remotely because ultimately the #1 thing is keeping the virus out of your workspace, keeping it out of the building because what would seem with these healthcare facilities, specifically some of these assisted living places is that once the virus gets inside of a space, it really exposes everybody to it. So, our first priority is safety for our employees and that comes even before delivering the news but when you look at the news that we’re delivering, we’re seeing organic growths in newsletter signups, in website visits, in app downloads. Getting that information to the audience is really important.

Fred Diamond: Brian, you manage a sales team around the world. Cvent has been a great success story, you guys are the leaders in your space. Before we start getting a little deep into some of the things you’re doing, has there been any positive surprises? Again, we’re all dealing with the global pandemic, we know what’s going on, we all see the same news but what positive has come out of this for you? Tell us something that you’re proud of.

Brian Ludwig: Most of our folks are based in-office than out of the office so our concern was, “Are we going to be able to maintain our activity levels and be as connected and in the marketplace talking to our customers, talking to our prospects?” I’m really pleased to see that our levels have stayed high despite being remote. Part of the reason that’s the case is because we use Zoom, we already had that culture, we don’t do a meeting that doesn’t have Zoom option at least so for anyone that wasn’t going to physically be in that space, they could join via Zoom. Literally every single meeting I have, I don’t touch my phone all day because every meeting I have is via Zoom, I have a mechanism for making calls from the computer so Zoom has helped us stay really connected despite being far apart from each other.

The work ethics maintain and I’m really impressed with my marketing team who’s done a tremendous job drawing prospects into the funnel, maybe a little more the top of the funnel because we’re bringing people in with thought leadership. We’re getting them in and that’s yielding a lot of opportunities for us to build a connection which might lead to something shorter term, but at the very least is setting us up for relationships that will yield some dividends hopefully in Q4 and Q1.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, again you manage a sales organization that’s global, you have people all over the world. Is everybody dealing with the same thing pretty much from a sales perspective? People in Australia, people in the United States, I know you have sales teams in Europe as well. Are you seeing basically the same thing as a sales leader for the most part around the globe? What are you seeing?

Brian Ludwig: It’s similar but there’s varying degrees. Australia, as an example, we have a 32 person office down in Australia and they were just dealing with the bushfires so you come out of one crisis where it’s hard to connect with people and people aren’t working and then they’ve just come out of that and then this happens. Singapore was on the earlier curve of this so they were coming out of it and people were starting to go to their office but now they’ve had a second wave and now they’re as strict, if not stricter, than what we’re doing here – well, definitely stricter than what we’re doing here in the United States. Everyone’s in a different stage of the pandemic but all in all it’s the same for now with our buyers but most of them are realizing that instead of postponing events, the play is to go virtual and still connect with their buyers. They’ll still get deal flow and an impact on their pipeline if they do events so we’re very active in those conversations anywhere in the world, frankly.

Fred Diamond: We’ll touch on that in a second as we begin to talk about how you’re dealing with your customers and their business. Jeffrey, how about you? What’s been the biggest positive surprise that you’ve seen come out of this situation so far?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I’m not ready to look back and say that there is a silver lining yet to this because I still think that too many people feel like this is a V type of, “This started, we went down, we bottomed out and we’re right back to normal.” I personally believe that this is different than the financial crisis that we went through in 2007-2008 where it impacted businesses but we were still able to operate as a society. There’s too much unknown still to come. To point to a specific silver lining, I guess if posed to say, “What specifically is going to be a positive?” the positive is going to be that the resilience within the way that businesses have rebounded so far to know that they have to figure out ways to continue to operate and that you haven’t seen, for our part, anybody crack.

What we’re seeing is ways to continue to operate in the short term. What’s next and what’s to be determined, which hasn’t been written, is what that looks like in the long term because while the financial crisis changed the world, it didn’t change all aspects of the world. There’s so many pieces of this that are yet to be written. What does it look like when we come back to reengage? What does it look like 6 months from now, 18 months from now? Both Brian and I’s business do result on people spending so what happens when large businesses look at the aspect of GDP in Q2? I think there’s still a lot of unknown, not to throw the wet blanket here but I’m reserving judgement on what the positive that comes out of this is so far.

Fred Diamond: I would agree. This is the seventh Sales Game Changers webcast that we’ve done and we started the week after everybody had the stay at home mandate. One thing that we see is the evolution of change. In the very beginning, the first couple weeks a lot of the response was, “I’ve been through 9/11”, “I was through 2007-2008.” We know that there will be something on the other side of this and you’re absolutely right, we’re not quite sure, it’s almost on a weekly basis that things change. Brian, from that perspective, what’s changed for you as a sales leader in the last 5-6 weeks? Again, you manage a team, they’re out there trying to sell event software and related products to event directors, companies that have large events. We’re a customer, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we depend upon your software for the 50+ events that we do every year. How have you changed as a sales leader?

Brian Ludwig: In many ways. It’s just different, we have to look at things that we didn’t really have to focus on before, it’s little things like Jeffrey was saying. Setting meetings is actually easy because people have time but just catching people on the phone is harder. We used to have a lot of success with cold calling but many people aren’t forwarding their office line to their cell or they don’t have setups like we do where their office phone rings on a computer, a lot of organizations aren’t instrumented that way so we’re relying more  on email. I don’t like that, we’re still making a lot of calls but it’s not yielding as much.

We need to change the conversation, we’re getting a lot of people that aren’t as connected to their bosses and their approval processes so we’ll have a great conversation where someone says, “Sounds great, ready to proceed, it’s exactly what I need” and internally we’re high-fiving, we’re ready to close the deal. They move it to the powers, the B, and all the sudden the bosses are like, “Are you out of your mind? I’m not buying this right now.” What used to be a verbal isn’t so what we’re doing is changing our lens and our champion, we’re forcing the conversation like, “Have you really taken this forward yet and gotten all of your approvals? Have you taken your bosses and others through the business case? Because you might not be aware of restrictions that are being put in place on your business around procurement and purchasing.”

Really just not trusting those early signals and maybe relying on email a little more than we have in the past, that’s some of the moves that we’re having the team make. Moderating those things and staying tight has been a big change for us.

Fred Diamond: Jeffrey, how about you? You deal with a lot of companies, WTOP is a huge place for people to advertise messages and you guys have been historically extremely successful. What’s changed for you? Are you able to get to the marketing leaders that you typically try to engage with? We’ve actually had the opportunity to be at your location to do a special episode of the Sales Game Changers podcast which was absolutely fabulous and it was a great way to get four great companies in the room at that point. How have you changed as a sales leader? Obviously you’re home, we’ve already addressed a couple of those things but the marketing people that you typically deal with, how are they being right now as you try to engage with them?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I think when you look at our business, a significant amount of it results on three things. One is the renewal business and we rely on customers day after day, year after year to continue to buy more from us growing that business and then finding new business. I break everything down into those three categories: renew, grow and find. I think the biggest thing from leading a sales team that’s changed, one of the exercises I took a group of my folks through this morning was, “Let’s close our eyes for a second and imagine what it looks like the next time we are able to be in front of one of our clients and then think back to what’s happening right now. Instead of thinking about our agenda, lets think about what that client, who we want repeat business from, is in need of from us right now.”

Maybe a better answer to your previous question, “What’s the silver lining here?” The silver lining here is we are pushing our people to understand how to better put themselves in their client’s shoes and I think that often times in great economies where sales are happening relatively frequently and easily we quickly get into, “Who can I close? Who can I sell?” and move onto the next person. I understand that’s the nature of sales. At this time we’re stepping back and saying, “What can I do now to make sure that I’m securing my long-term relationship with my client?” What can I do now so that 6 months from now when my client looks back on this time says, “You guys really did right by me in a time that I might have had an issue or might have been in need and I appreciate that?” That’s created additional loyalty, that’s created additional relationship that pays itself forward in the future versus trying to close them or sell them on something right now.

Fred Diamond: I have another question for you. You’re both very motivational sales leaders. Jeffrey, right behind you, “Just be Awesome”, before we got on today’s call we talked about how everything comes down to mindset hence why we added another webcast every week just on mindset, because it was coming up time and time again.

Brian, you have a lot of people on your sales team who are new to sales, your company has been on a huge upward trajectory and a lot of people are fresh out of college, maybe it’s their first or second job. I’ve been on your sales floor in Tysons Corner, there’s always energy, there’s always a lot of great vibe and things like that but as Jeffrey alluded to before, it’s an anxious time right now, different level of stress. All the great successes that people were having has slowed down.

How are you helping your sales team with the anxiety and stress caused by the changes of their customer? We don’t really need to talk about the changes in the world but from a business perspective, what are some of the things that you guys are doing to help them manage that level of stress and anxiety?

Brian Ludwig: It’s a really good question and it’s a difficult one to tackle because everyone’s stressed at every level. We are rolling out, in fact, we’re doing it this week. We’re rolling out Q2 quota relief so we’re going to be holding our team members to a lowered quota which they’re going to learn the details of that this week and we’re committing to a lowered quota in Q3 as well. We don’t know what it will be in Q3, we don’t want to make those commitments because we’ve got to see how Q2 plays out but the fact that it will be something so they can bank on that at the very least. We’re also going to roll out a commission floor so even if they’re way below even the modified quota and they’re going to fall short of their expected on-target earnings for Q2, there’s at least going to be a floor so they wouldn’t earn zero or five dollars or something like that.

But we’re going to put some metrics around earning that floor so if you didn’t have the sales numbers and we’re going to pay you the floor, we at least expect to see certain activities that show that you’ve been active in the marketplace. The last thing that we’re doing is we’re talking about the long game. We’re going to be impacted but all of the organizations in our industry are going to be impacted. Other tech providers for event tech are going to be impacted, they’ll probably be impacted five times, ten times, a hundred times greater than us and there’s a lot of confidence that we’re instilling in the team, I think they believe it as well, that events are going to come back. Yes, there’ll be some hybrid events perhaps in the future, there’ll be some concerns on social distancing but everyone understands the power of live connection, the power of meeting face to face and it can’t be replaced. It’s more of a, “The position we’re going to be in knowing that the industry is going to bounce back and knowing maybe our competitive set has been cleared a little bit, we’re going to be in a great position to do awesome things on behalf of our customers and the industry on the backside of this.” I’m using that as motivation for the team as well.

Fred Diamond: Jeffrey, why don’t you talk about some of the things that you’re doing to help your sales team deal with the anxiety and stress of selling in this particular circumstance?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: Obviously everybody works for a variety of reasons, one of the massive ones being money, I’m lucky and so are my salespeople that our company also instituted a floor. They did that early on so they took that off the table and I positioned myself as, “What can I do to be the right leader for my salespeople so they do the right thing for their clients?” I’ll take you on a different path, the path would be what are you doing to stay in touch with your friends? Just like you can’t see your friends right now, what are you doing to stay in touch with them? What are you doing to be a good friend to the people that you have relationships in life that are mutually beneficial? Think about that and apply that to sales.

First, friendships are built on like experiences, we’ve had like experiences with our clients that continue to renew from us year after year. How do we continue those like experiences? Some version of contact, touching, relationship talking, whatever it is, continuing like experiences that take place through this. Next, what happens from those like experiences that make your connection take place and happen further? You get value out of spending time with somebody, you get value out of advice from a friend, you get value out of laughter from a friend, you get value out of something that a friend does. Apply that to business, they get value out of what they buy from you so first, apply the friendship method of like experiences, create lasting friendships.

Next is the value you get from your friends you’re not paying for but the value your clients get from you help them to identify it. “I work with Fred because of X, I buy from Brian because of Y.” Through those like experiences, how can our salespeople make sure that their customers understand the value that they’re getting from them and feel more connected to them than ever before? So that when we are in a place where it makes sense for them to continue to invest and invest at newer or greater levels and newer or different products or just renewing the same that we have, they feel comfortable with our friendship, our relationship, our mutual experiences and they can easily pinpoint the value that they’ve derived from their relationship with me and the organization that I represent because the organization that I represent is part of their relationship with me whether I’m friends with the client – which plenty of them are – or its just a business relationship.

Fred Diamond: Brian, a follow-up on what Jeffrey just talked about. What’s your advice for companies that rely upon channel or partner sales? I’m not sure how much channel work Cvent is involved with, but what might be some of your advice?

Brian Ludwig: We don’t rely on it too heavily. We do have a channel and we do have lots of partners. We have built a portal for them to gain access to all of the decks, collateral, talk tracks, a community where they can talk to others in the portal so that’s not going to change, we’re going to continue to invest in our partnerships. They have deep relationships and as we maybe struggle to find new buyers and are relying maybe a little bit more on growing and building the relationships that we have with current customers to get more in the top of the funnel, partners are going to be more important than ever. Status quo, we’ve been supporting them pretty heavily as is and that’s not going to change because more than ever, flow from them is going to be critical and they have relationships in pockets of the country or the world that we frankly don’t have and that’s why they’re so critical to our business.

Fred Diamond: Jeffrey, do you want to answer that?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I was going to say that a lot of our customers and many of the technology companies that are members of the IES use the channel to create marketing funds. What I’d answer that question with is that when you think about the word partner, it’s pretty clear what you should do – get closer to them. You have more time on your hands because you’re not driving around the beltway or spending two hours a day in your car.

Get closer to the partners, make sure you understand the value that your companies have together so that you’re able to better clarify that to the target audience that you’re trying to sell to. Get closer to them, clarify the value proposition of why your companies are partners together and spend more time together so that as we move forward, you can actually enunciate that better to the audience than maybe in the past.

Fred Diamond: The question comes in from the audience here. Again, if you have any questions submit them via your panel. This is for Brian first, how has the interaction between your sales and client success teams changed in this time? I know you mentioned the relationship with marketing has gotten stronger. In what ways are they working differently? By the way, the person who submitted this question gives kudos to you both on the quota relief and the commission’s floor. How has the interaction between your sales and – I don’t know if he used the term ‘client success’ but if there is, how has that interaction changed over the last 6-7 weeks?

Brian Ludwig: Both have the same goal of allaying fears that our customers might have helping them figure out a path forward. We have an account manager assigned to an account and we have what we call a CSC, a Client Success Consultant or a CSM, a Client Success Manager. The point of the story is they together manage the overall health and path for our customer so more calls together than ever before, there might have been previous QBRs – Quarterly Business Reviews – that the CSC would run. Now the sales executive, the account manager wants to be a part of that because there are some new elements that we might want to add into their account to help them optimize.

There’s more brainstorming over the best things to bring forward to a customer without the customer so more game planning between the CS side and the account management side to come in with a compelling story or path for that customer. More of the same, we’ve been doing that forever on behalf of our customers but I would say we’ve ratcheted it up by 50% to 75% in this time because there is bandwidth. Our CSCs are not getting as many inbound calls from customers so we can be more proactive and spend the time to fashion something more tailored for that upcoming call with the customer.

Fred Diamond: Jeffrey, do you want to take that one?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: Think about this, in the past the customer success team would contact the person who had bought and they would say, “Here’s how this works” and they would walk them through what was about to come next. Because what is about to come next might be different than in the past, I actually wrote down yesterday on a piece of paper, “Tell me your vision of success” should be the first question that happens every time we get to one of those meetings where the sale has been made and it’s passed over to the implementation team on our side. I want to hear from the client’s mouth what a vision of success is before I start saying, “Here’s how this works” even though they’ve already signed a contract that has a statement of work and says all the things that we’re going to deliver to them.

I want to hear them say what success looks like to them before we take any of those other steps. It’s a simple question to ask but the answer that they give us can really dictate a lot of the way that we interpret the next steps and the things that we’re required to do as delivering whatever it is that they bought.

Fred Diamond: We’re getting some great questions that are coming in through the audience here. You guys had very demanding jobs prior to this. Brian, you mentioned a global sales leader for a very fast-growing successful company, you own the event software space, travel around the world managing organizations. Jeffrey, you’re leading sales for one of the top radio stations and networks in the world. How are you guys dealing with this? What are you guys doing from a personal perspective to maintain your health, your sanity during this particular time? The question comes in from the audience. Jeff, how about you first? Again, you have a couple kids at home under the age of 12, I believe so what are you doing to stay healthy? What are some of the things that you are doing as a sales leader to maintain your mindset and your health?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I know that my wife hates me for this, but I’ve actually lost weight during this time because I’ve increased the amount that I’m working out. I highly recommend the Nike training club app, all of the premium classes are free for sure. That’s part of it, absolutely staying healthy and letting out the level of stress or anxiety that you might have through exercise I believe is huge, yoga is also a part of that. The mental side of that is having conversations where you actually say how you feel, you actually talk about the things that are on your mind and you’re open and honest versus trying to guard against something that you might be thinking about.

Allow yourself to be vulnerable and saying what your concerns are. Think about this, the audience just gave us kudos for allowing the sales floor and the minimum amount, how long can a company offer that? We don’t know the answer to that. How long is a company going to need to offer that? We don’t know. It depends on how you are as a person, where your own personal anxieties rely but allowing yourself to be present, allowing yourself to let out the things that bother you and making sure that you don’t bottle anything up and just be real with both yourself and people that you can trust.

Fred Diamond: Brian, I have a question for you about how you’re dealing with your customers but before, what are some things you’re doing to maintain your health, your mindset and your sanity?

Brian Ludwig: I think I’m the opposite of Jeffrey, frankly. I’m doing a terrible job of it, it’s the honest truth, I’m working too much, I’m not working out because I played racquetball which is a two-man sport. I’m eating poorly, I would say. I’ve got a terrible chair, I just ordered a new office chair last night on Amazon because I think I pinched a nerve which has hurt my arm, I can’t sleep on my right side and it’s hurting my jaw so I’m a disaster, Fred [Laughs] That’s the truth but I’ll tell you, mentally I think I’m okay.

We’re doing a lot of things at the office to keep people connected outside of just work conversation so I have a lot of different sub-sales teams and each of them is doing happy hours, some of them have lunch together every day, they’re doing breakfast. During some of the happy hours we’re doing different games, we played Jeopardy the other day, we’re coming in with different themes where people are showing something that’s important to them or their favorite movie and we’re just talking about stuff non-work related at the end of the business day. I think that’s keeping everyone grounded and connected to each other on a personal level. But the rest, I’m a disaster.

Fred Diamond: You guys have got to be superbly empathetic to your customers right now because they’re going through a huge amount of transition from where they were. What are some ways that you’re instructing your team to be with your customers? You guys are experts in this space, what are some things that you’re doing to help them right now? Again, it’s 7 weeks in, no one expected this to flip but what are some of the ways that you’re working with your sales teams to be empathetic to customers and how are you being with them right now?

Brian Ludwig: I think it starts with that first conversation. We’re opening the conversation, we’re not asking for anything, we’re checking how they’re doing, we understand that their business, their core mission is going to be hit hard because they organize events and clearly that has shifted. Every other week, we host what we call a mix-and-meet and we invite people from local areas, we do them all around the world, actually. We invite event organizers and marketers to come in, no sales pitch, there’s no deck, it’s to have a conversation with us but maybe more importantly, with each other to talk about how they’re pivoting, what are they doing in terms of postponing events, how are they working with hotels and partners, all of these things. I personally ran one last week and they’re great conversations, we have 15 people max on each one deliberately to keep the conversation personal, and really awesome connections have been made.

I know a lot of these people are keeping in touch with each other afterwards and they’ve even said, “No one else is giving us an opportunity to just talk to other people versus generally for a sales pitch or a webinar.” They like that. A last thing that we’re doing is we’re offering free certification, it means something for many in that event industry to be Cvent certified. That’s a training program followed by a test and we traditionally charge a lot of money for it, $900. You don’t even have to be a customer so even if you’re out of work and you want to come back to work, being Cvent certified may make you more marketable so we’re offering that for free for any of our clients or prospects so that they are in a really good position on the backside of this.

Fred Diamond: We’re getting great questions from the audience here, we have about another 10 minutes left with Brian Ludwig from Cvent and Jeffrey Wolinsky from WTOP and Fed News Radio. By the way, someone here just said he loves the fact that you guys are both being authentic, so thank you so much. It’s a challenging time for a lot of people in sales, especially with the industries that you both serve.

Jeffrey, you bring in tons of new customers. As a matter of fact, when we had you on the Sales Game Changers podcast we talked about how you were shifting your business model to offer more online services and digital marketing and things like that. Let’s talk about prospecting for new business right now, you alluded to this before. A question that comes in right now is how are you instructing your organization to the hunters, the team of people who are focused on new business? How are you directing them right now? Again, it’s April 29th, we’re 7 weeks into wherever we are. What are some of the directions you’re giving to the people who are responsible for being out there hustling finding new accounts, getting them onto the WTOP and Fed News Radio platforms?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: One of the things that we do is we go back to what our mission is. Our mission is to be a trusted extension of our clients’ marketing team and then second part of that is we think to ourselves, “Where does this meet up with our existing customer base?” If you think about where you find new customers, you look at the success stories you have and what I’ve liked most about my career in the media industry is that we’re able to deal with so many different customers whether it be a jewelry store, a roofing company or somebody that’s one of the largest technology companies selling to the Department of Defense. I’m able to educate myself on so many different things so our salespeople are naturally curious. The people that we’re looking to hire to be part of our team, they’re naturally curious.

I want you to go out and be curious, if you’re curious about how this is affecting this type of industry or that is affecting that type of company, set yourself up with the ability to do, what I would consider, an informational call versus a sales call. Put yourself in position to learn and be curious. When more curious, we find opportunities that we can present solutions to and deliver results for so if you create an environment of curiosity, you’ll get yourself in a situation where you’re having conversations, where interesting things come up and that will lead you to opportunities. Let’s not say that they have to be for right now, the opportunities might be for somewhere down the road but let’s start those conversations right now. That’s the little tweak or difference as to how I’m talking to our people about those things now versus maybe in the past, we weren’t as able to take it as slowly and we were looking to speed that sales cycle up a little bit and ask what is your most important need right now. If the client doesn’t know what their most important need right now is, let’s not ask that question. Let’s just talk, let’s be curious.

Fred Diamond: Brian, we’ve got time for a couple more questions here. Again, I want to thank the people in the audience for submitting some tremendous questions. You mentioned before that you offer your sales team and your company to be home for a day during the week, you said it may change to two or something. What do you think some of the things are that are going to change as a standard with how you go about from a sales process moving forward, whenever we at some point normalize, if we ever do? You were talking about the leading edge of Zoom and you’ve been doing that for years. Whenever I talk to your sales team it’s always via Zoom or whatever the platform is you use. What are some of the other things that you see will become standard practice?

Brian Ludwig: I don’t think we’re going to change that much, Fred. At the end of the day we’re still going to do live events. Live events for us, it’s us drinking our own champagne, we believe very heavily in live events as to our customers. We do a big event called Cvent Connect, we do client success groups where we get 50-60 people in each local market, we do product seminars at steak restaurants where we get 20-30 people to join us to talk with other colleagues about event tech and we give our dog and pony show. I don’t think we’re going to change that, a lot of people are trying to say, “You’re probably going to move to all virtual for that kind of stuff.” Absolutely not, we believe in the power of human connection and live and that is not going to change.

I think if anything, maybe we’ll show a little more flexibility with business terms, approvals, we’ve loosened things up in this trying time and it’s working so maybe we’ll be a little more open to different deal models in the future. I think our story is going to change forever because as I eluded to earlier, people have gone virtual now. When we come out of this, people are going to go to live events but they’re going to turn and say, “I want to have a virtual component” potentially. I want to do what we’re going to call a hybrid event so we need to change our solution to better handle hybrid events where there’s in-person live stuff plus things being broadcasted over the internet simultaneously and allow for collaboration across all of those people. That part of our story is going to need to change, our product is going to need to change so we’ll evolve based on this but how we go to market and how my team is organized and our regular cadence, that will remain unchanged.

Fred Diamond: We’ll make that available. We have time for one or two more questions. Again, I want to thank Brian Ludwig and Jeffrey Wolinsky, I encourage everybody to go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com to find their answers. By the way, Leslie just said it’s cvent.com/cvent/certification. Thank you, Leslie, for jumping on that. Again, if you haven’t taken a screenshot yet, please take a quick screenshot and email it to me at fdiamond@i4esbd.org. Tomorrow we’re featuring John Asher, it’s the Sales Mindset every Thursday at 2:00, we’re talking about 9 strategies for longer life, how to be more healthy. This Friday at 11:00 o’clock we’re going to be talking about building stronger teams. Time for one more question. Do you want to say something, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: Earlier in the conversation you asked about the silver lining, what’s the positive that came out of this and I said I wasn’t ready to answer it yet, I’m ready to answer it now based off of something Brian just said. Two things he just said are the silver lining, one, we will all value in-person meetings more so than we ever did before. Our organization always put a premium on in-person meetings but our salespeople and our management and everybody will understand the value of in-person meetings is going to be more important because they’re going to be harder to get so that somebody grants you the ability to come to their office. You will prepare for those meetings better, you will make better use of those meetings and you will make sure that if and when you get that in-person meeting you value it at a higher level than you did in the past because it was never a time that we would take an in-person meeting in the past for granted.

Today, based off of what we’ve gone through we will not take in-person meetings for granted in the same way. That’s number one, I’ll credit Brian to sparking that for me. Number two is because those in-person meetings are going to be harder to get and because the value of time in front of client is going to be more valuable we will sell deeper into organizations. One of our organization’s goals is to sell more options of how we can help them with marketing. I know you’ve mentioned WTOP a lot but we offer other significant opportunities within WTOP, within Federal News Network and with 2060 Digital, our external marketing opportunities are far more than many of our clients currently take advantage of. When we have those in-person engagements, when we have those clients who are friends, when we have those clients who trust us we will sell deeper. In-person experiences, more valuable, selling deeper brings us more value from each engagement. Those are my silver linings so I make up for the poor answer I had previously.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] very good, we’ll edit that answer out – no we won’t, we’re actually not going to do any editing for this. By the way, as it relates to Federal News Network, actually on the Sales Game Changers podcast, yesterday’s show featured one of your on-air talents, Mark Amtower talking about some strategies for marketing and selling to the federal government. Once again, go check out the Sales Game Changers podcast for Jeffrey Wolinsky and for Brian Ludwig and for Mark Amtower. Time for one more question, I want to thank you both, I want to thank the audience as well. Final question, here we are, week 7, whatever it is. Every week things are changing, things are evolving, we’re learning more things. What do you think the challenges are going to be for sales in the next week?

Jeffrey Wolinsky: I think the key challenges, until we have more clear guidance on when the phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 of coming out of the stay at home orders are is preparing ourselves for what that looks like. The #1 thing that any leader – not just a sales leader – needs to do is help to mitigate the nerves of the unknown and once we can start those three phases, the unknown starts to mitigate and people can prosper. During this time of unknown we have to just stay the course of making sure they see a progression to get to a place where those phases can start so any leader, sales or otherwise, has to keep their people engaged and ready to come back to whatever these phases bring for our companies and to make them feel comfortable and confident because people thrive when they’re comfortable and confident.

Fred Diamond: Brian Ludwig, thank you so much for being here, why don’t you bring us on home? What do you think the challenges are for sales leaders over the next week?

Brian Ludwig: I think you’re asking the question at a very unique time, it’s April 29th so I have half a day and then all of tomorrow to end the month. We organize our business quarterly but really down to the month as well so it’s going to be the first full month post-crisis. The last couple weeks of March were impacted but to have a full month in the bag, it’s really going to stress test our first pass at a new budget. We’ve devised new budget, made a lot of assumptions and I think as this week ends specifically, we will look to see how accurate we were. Is it better or worse than we thought? And then that’s going to guide at least through Q2 and probably part of Q3 how we forecast. I’ll tell you, we have a lot of business still out there, I don’t know how April’s going to end even when there’s only 12 business hours left. For us, forecasting, quotas, thinking about the overall impact on the business is an evolving thing. Every day, every week we get more information and we can get a little more precise so we’re going to be in the middle of that on Thursday and Friday as the month ends.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 229: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Brian Ludwig and Jeffrey Wolinsky 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.