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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on September 30, 2020. It featured outsourced bookkeeping company Supporting Strategies Chief Evangelist Steve Schultz.]

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EPISODE 275: Supporting Strategies Chief Evangelist Steve Schultz Explains Why Becoming a Technical Expert is Critical for Sales Success in a Challenging Market

STEVE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “I never think of what I’m doing as selling even though I’m a sales professional and all I do is sell. I always approach sales from a technical perspective, when I worked for IBM I approached it as a technical expert.  I’m a technical expert around bookkeeping now so I know what questions to ask them about how they pay their people and how they pay their bills. When they’re sitting there, they’re thinking, “This doesn’t sound like a sales call.” Become a technical expert in what you sell. The other thing to think about when you’re selling is that no one’s driving the cheapest car made, there are cheap cars but everyone buys for value, it depends on who they are and how they define value. Sales is never about money, it’s always about problems so as you go forward, if you can solve the problems of your clients, you’ll sell in any market, in a good market and in a bad market.”

Fred Diamond: I’m thrilled for our guest, Steve Schultz with Supporting Strategies. Steve, it’s great to see you, you’re the Chief Evangelist for Supporting Strategies. What does that mean?

Steve Schultz: It’s nice to meet you, thank you so much for having me today. I often get questions about my title. I think Chief generally indicates that I’m an owner of the business and in some ways I think that’s important for people to know when they’re talking to me that I’m a founder and owner of Supporting Strategies. I’m a sales guy, I’ve been in sales and business development since we got started and I have many different roles. I’m selling franchises, different value proposition, I’m selling bookkeeping services, we still retain in on the Boston Office and I coach our franchisees on how to sell services. I’m always shouting our name from the rooftops, I will talk to you for hours upon hours about Supporting Strategies, about why we’re good for the world, about why we’re good for people and I love the brand, I’m passionate about it. That’s what Chief Evangelist means – regardless of what role I’m in, I’m selling.

Fred Diamond: I do want to let people know that I’m also a customer of Supporting Strategies and the services that your company provides are amazing and have been a great benefit to me and to my company as well, so thank you for that.

Steve Schultz: Thank you for that.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] I want to thank Indie also, Indie and Indre who are the Supporting Strategies NOVA franchise and Stacey who is the actual person who does the work, they’ve been tremendous. Thank you all for supporting the Institute for Excellence in Sales. Steve, let’s get started. Again, you mentioned you have two hats, you sell franchises for the company and you also help your franchise companies be more productive and sell things. As we know, it’s the end of September, the world changed about 6-7 months ago, the whole value proposition has changed so let’s talk about that. How are things going for you as the sales leader for the company and how are things going for the franchisees as well?

Steve Schultz: That’s a great question. Our CEO, Leslie Jorgensen founded our company in 2004, she says that the goals didn’t change. COVID doesn’t know anything about the direction in our strategy, the goals didn’t change but our tactics have had to change. It’s a very different world that we find ourselves in and as I mentioned, I really wear two hats so form a bookkeeping perspective, what our franchisees do, we’re growing. You can imagine we had 500+ employees when COVID hit, we didn’t have to tell any of them to stay home, that’s in our DNA, that’s what we do each and every day. We’ve been working virtually delivering services virtually since 2004, we know how to do this. That made the transition very easy for us and we grow approximately 30% annually, that’s a nice growth for a company our size. When you’re growing about 30% annually, it’s good consistent growth, they call that the hockey stick because you double every couple years. Twice in our history we’ve grown by more than 30%, in 2008 and today. Why?

In 2008 when you were scared and the financial crisis hit us, you were looking for ways to save money and our virtual service delivery model while also giving you a better service because of our technology, because of our people, our process controls, it generally saves people money. We can typically say we’re faster, better and cheaper than hiring your own employee and when times get tough, people want to maximize everything and maximize every dollar so they look to save. We grew in ’08 and now you can imagine that if you have a business and you can’t get to your office but your bookkeeping is on that computer, what are you doing? Even if you can get the work done virtually, how are you running your business virtually? It was always a certain segment of the potential clients that said, “No, I want someone in house.” That’s disappeared, no one’s saying that anymore so our core business is up.

That being said, I had a bunch of people in the pipeline to buy franchises and COVID hits, and do you want to invest in a business right now? I lost almost every one of those deals, but a whole new pool of people got pushed into, “I’m looking for my next gig” because they lost their gig due to COVID. These people are coming into it looking at, “What am I going to do next?” They weren’t scared away by COVID, in many ways they were mobilized by it and there’s a lot of people who had good jobs that don’t have good jobs anymore because the industry didn’t survive it if you were in the restaurant field or the educational field or many other fields. That all being said, there’s a new crop of people who are coming up and really energizing my pipeline. The world changed, how we sell has changed, our tactics have had to change but our goals haven’t, I still need to sell X amount of franchises a year and every franchisee needs to sell X amount of bookkeeping services a year.

Fred Diamond: We actually did a session about a month ago on goal setting, we had a speaker named Shawn Doyle who actually came to the IES back in January and talked about setting your goals for the year. We brought him back in the end of August and he said the same thing. He said, “Your goals haven’t changed but how you get to them needs to change for obvious reasons.” I’m curious, what’s the value proposition right now for someone to become a franchise? Help me understand that, franchisee or franchiser?

Steve Schultz: I’m a franchiser and when you buy a franchise you become the franchisee. By the way, we’re in a hundred locations across the United States, it took McDonald’s eleven years to do it, we did it in six because of the answer to the question that you just asked, it’s our business model. People buy franchises because they’re looking for an established system to get into business for whatever reasons, maybe they were forced into it, maybe they’re an entrepreneur at heart because their parents were entrepreneurs and they want to give it a shot. Maybe they’re a corporate CFO, in my case and they’ve been transitioned out of a job way too many times in their life. If I do a good job, they sell it, if I don’t do a good job, they dump it, either way I’m  out of a job in two years and I’m looking for my next gig, it’s time for me to look for myself. What we’re selling is a variable cost recurring revenue business model, that’s interesting, variable cost recurring revenue. We pay our employees when they work, when they don’t work we don’t have a lot of cost associated with them because they all work from home.

We hire what I think of as MBA moms although they’re not all moms or MBAs, when I say that it tells a story, an advanced accounting professional who works for us because we let them work from home. Maybe it’s because they want to put their kid on the school bus, maybe they like to golf but the business model that I’m selling is very attractive. It’s not like a consulting gig where you’re always hunting and killing and hunting and killing, this is a recurring revenue model. We get a client, as long as they can see value in what we do, you’ve been with us for a number of years now, you stay with us. You don’t stop needing a bookkeeper, as long as you’re in business you do need a bookkeeper and we have to prove our value every day, we don’t have long-term contracts with our clients. They can cut us anytime they want, we feel like we’ve got to earn our stripes. What we’re selling is a variable cost recurring revenue engine that acts like an annuity and that’s why people are interested in buying our franchise today, because it’s an earning vehicle for them.

Fred Diamond: We had spoken about your pipeline had gone away, so let’s talk about your top priorities right now. Again, it’s the end of September, Steve, what are your top priorities right now? From the Supporting Strategy side, what are your main goals right now?

Steve Schultz: Sales is about the numbers and Fred, I’m always amazed that colleges don’t offer a major in sales, they call it business and they focus in on Procter and Gamble and stuff like that, if you’ve ever been to business school. But sales is a process and like anything else, this process can be learned so what we’re really focusing in on are the numbers and those numbers are not goals, I’m not saying you need 24 clients a year or I need 12 franchisees a year, those are goals, that’s different. Sales is about the numbers, it’s about the close rate, it’s the amount of engagements, how many one-on-one calls are you having? How many new people are you meeting in your community? What type of people are there? We’ve really been able to identify both the activities and the people that our franchisees need to meet in order to get clients. As I mentioned, my title is called Chief Evangelist, our business development philosophy is called Evangelist Development.

We’re selling our franchises to finance people who have never been salespeople, Fred so it’s a challenge for them but what I tell them – and you know this about your government work – it’s about a technical sale. I used to work for IBM as a salesman and I wasn’t a good salesman because I was a good salesman, I was a good salesman because I was a good engineer and the people I was talking to, I could solve their problems. That’s what sales really is, so for us, we look at the process of selling. The engagements, the activities, the programs they should be running and if they’re running those pre or post COVID, they’re being successful. Again, the goals didn’t change. If I say you needed to meet 300 people a year and you used to do that by going to physical events and you can’t go to physical events, you need to change your philosophy or your strategy around it, where you used to shoot broad, now you shoot narrow – LinkedIn invites, asking people for connections. But the goals didn’t change so if we monitor the numbers and make sure people achieve according to the numbers, we’re going to see their growth. That’s our priority.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned that a lot of the people that you work with, the ones who own the franchisees maybe aren’t necessarily salespeople, you mentioned they are retired CFOs or something along those lines so they come from the accounting, the finance or the bookkeeping side, I presume. Again, pandemic hits and like you mentioned, we actually met Supporting Strategy at an event, the local person was at a networking event and we got to see her not infrequently, and one day it occurred to me that we needed some help with our bookkeeping and made the connection and it’s been a great relationship since. How have you gone about thinking about the shift that your franchisees need to have now that we’ve kicked into the pandemic?

Steve Schultz: I’m not educating you here but maybe for some of your attendees, sales is all about funnel, even the girl selling perfume at Macy’s knows how many faces she needs to squirt with perfume to get one person to stop. We know our numbers, we studied them for 17 years specific to our business, we know that only 15% of the people you meet will eventually give you a referral. We don’t ask our franchisees to do cold calling – you don’t like to be cold called – to knock on doors, “Hey, do you want to fire your bookkeeper and hire us?” Not only would that not work, people wouldn’t enjoy the process of selling, that’s not professional selling. The process of professional selling in our world is to build relationships with other trusted advisers who are currently working with the same customers you want so that’s about playing in the right sandbox. If you know your typical client is a 1 to 40 million dollar business, hang out with other people who service 1 to 40 million dollar businesses.

Who is that? CPA firms, CFOs, bankers, lawyers, payroll guys, benefits brokers, it’s web developers, PR, IT services guys, it’s everything that a business owner needs that they don’t have. No business owner in that 1 to 40 million dollar space has their own lawyer, they use a local law firm. They don’t have their own CPA to do taxes or audits or local CPA firm, it would not be effective to hire those roles themselves so in the pre-COVID world, go to event after event and we used to define it. Go to two events a week, meet three people at each event, enter that data into a CRM system and then nurture those relationships. Do the math, 2×2 is 6, 6×4 is 24 or 30 if it’s a 5 week month, that’s 300 people you meet a year. If 15% of those people properly nurtured – which is the next step in the process – will give you a lead, you’ll get 45 to 60 leads a year. Now COVID hits, no events, can’t go to events, I can’t meet people randomly so we can’t shoot broad anymore, so now we put on our sniper barrel and we shoot narrow. I tell my franchisees, “Go to the business bureau, the Business Journal, every major market has one and get their book of lists. You might have to pay for it, who cares?

That’ll tell you your top 50 CPAs.” By the way, a CPA, we get them every year, we love them, get it out of that bag. We know the top 5 CPAs every market, Ernst & Young, PWC, forget about them, they deal with publicly traded companies. It’s the midmarket guy I want so I can find out numbers 50 through 150. Now, how do you meet them? Okay, you can link in, LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools ay salesperson ever had, it’s a tactical tool that says, “I want to meet Travis Drouin from MFA CPA, I’m not connected to him but I’m connected to someone who is, Jim. I would have told you, Fred, six months ago that the phone was dead. I never called anyone without an appointment and if you did call people, they didn’t answer. Today, I know exactly where you are, Fred you’re in your house, same as me, I’m in my house, I can call anyone I want today so I can call Steve Schneider and say, “Steve, can you connect me with Travis Drouin?” If I just reach out to Travis, it’s spam but if Steve connects me to Travis, that’s one thing. Use your business journal, you can go to your local library and get a listing of every major CPA, every major banker. What industry is still in the office? Bankers. Walk into an office today and say, “I want to meet your commercial banker.” Any commercial banker, if you tell them a story that I could tell you to tell, will say absolutely. They recognize businesses that are not run right, they’re loaning you money, they want to make sure you can pay it back, they want to make sure you know how to run your business. They’re so frustrated when people ask to borrow money and say, “Here’s my tax return”, they’re like, “Give me a balance sheet.” We shoot narrow today.

Any good organization is still doing Zoom meetings or Zoom events so you still got to get out there. I don’t care if it’s boring, I don’t care if you love the topic but in most of those sessions you can get a list of the attendees, you might have a chance to talk to them if they’re using Zoom. You can still connect with people, the goals didn’t change I’ve got to have you meet six new people a week. So now you’ve got to put your sniper’s cap on and identify. I once heard a guy say you’re the CEO of your life so if I told you your #1 referral source is CPA, go meet a lot of them but I know my #2, CFOs, commercial bankers. You can look at your database in a CRM and see, “How many CPAs have I met? Not enough, I’ve got to be strategic and identify and then meet those people.” That’s what we’re doing now, we’ve gone from the broad to the narrow.

Fred Diamond: You made a couple great points there, one is that the goals haven’t changed so if you’re a franchise, you still need to get customers who need bookkeeping services. The process that you’re going to be taking has probably shifted and Sporting Strategies as the franchiser is coming to them with some ideas, you’re thinking this for them. They also need to take responsibility as well, they also need to be thinking, “How do I get really great at some of these things?” We have a question here, Steve, it comes from Sue in New Jersey. Sue wants to know, “Have any positive surprises come out of the pandemic for you either that you’re most proud of or that has helped you grow the business?” It’s interesting, you’re right, in the first four months everybody was figuring out what was going on and then things got a little bit solid. Things are still in flux for a whole bunch of different reasons that we all know about but at the same time we’re back into what it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. One thing that you mentioned before is that people are now looking for other employment opportunities as a lot of companies have downsized for obvious reasons. Obviously that’s probably one but are there any other major positive surprises that have come out for you?

Steve Schultz: First and foremost, almost all of our customers are small businesses, almost all of those small businesses needed PPP loans in order to survive and almost all of those small businesses needed a company like us to tell them and to manage that process for them. The initial impact for us was lessened compared to most companies because we had an immediate surge early with companies saying, “Help us, I need this.” For our customers, doing a PPP loan was easy because there was nothing hot about a PPP loan if the data was all in the right columns and rows and for our customers, they’re always in the right columns and rows. What’s your employment? What did you spend for employment last year? What are you going to spend going forward? What other expenses? It’s just categorizations and we’re very good at that.

The other interesting thing that happened as opposed to that more focused view was we started doing email marketing campaigns. Email marketing campaigns are very different than cold calling because we’re not doing it, it’s a said it and forget it easy bake oven, we buy data that says, “I want the name and email address of every nonprofit with revenue of X to Y” or, “Every new business that started in my region in the last 6 months” or every law firm which is a particularly good vertical for us. We can write a well-crafted email working the local marketing company, we can set it on a sequence where they’ll get a series of emails from us over the course of the next three months and we’ll set it in to get it, and we’ve gotten some really good accounts because right now, what used to not work, today you have business owners who recognize, “I can’t get in my office, I need to do my work.” They don’t know there’s this outsourced opportunity available so email marketing can help educate them about what we do and we’ve gotten some really nice accounts from that.

Fred Diamond: I have a couple questions about your conversations with your franchisees. It sounds like you guys do a lot of work to help them be successful, I know you provide webinars for them and you offer counsel and ideas and tips and all those kinds of things, how have those conversations changed? You’re dealing with people who aren’t traditionally salespeople but if they’re a business owner now, they’re in sales so I presume that it sounds like you, being a guy with a lot of sales background, have been able to get that message across to your franchisees that, “For you to be successful we’re going to help you as much as we can but you need to grow your business, you need to develop leads” and all those kinds of things. I’m just curious, how have your customer conversations shifted with these people not being salespeople to begin with? And now it’s even gotten harder because of COVID and everything else.

Steve Schultz: Business is hard, it’s real hard. I think whenever you have a customer and an employee, you’ve got a headache and we’re all about customers and employees. First of all, franchisee or not, a business owner is a business owner. These are entrepreneurs, they may be buying into a system but their success or their failure is 100% on their shoulders. You don’t sit in your house and cry because COVID hit and say, “I’m not getting the leads the same way I used to get leads.” Steve Jobs who everyone in the world knows, most people know him strictly as a sales guy, I don’t think many people have many interactions with him outside of sales, that’s not his background. Every business owner should be concerned where their next client is coming from, it’s not secondary to success, it’s primary to success if you’re running a business.

In the sales process I tell my franchisees, “This is the job. I haven’t asked for you to be a salesperson.” We learned early in this game if I get salespeople as franchisees, they fail because this is a technical sale and if you don’t know your debits and your credits, you’re not going to be able to survive in my world. If I do find the rare sales guy who has a finance background, all the better but almost all of my franchisees have no sales background, so we trian them. I hold a weekly coaching session called talking sales, we do that every single Monday from one to two and we say, “What’s your problem?”

We started something unique post-COVID, every Monday I ring the bell as a group, I read the name of everyone who sold every deal. I’m the owner of a company with over 500 people and a hundred markets and we sell a lot of deals, I personally do a shout out to every single deal that’s sold. I send a congratulatory ring-the-bell with a funny GIF of somebody ringing a bell in some funny way or screaming or excitement. I get excited every time that bell rings so we said, “Let’s try to share that excitement because I want someone who’s sitting there saying, ‘I can’t get business’ seeing somebody every single week ringing the bell for a big deal.” And I call out every big deal so we start out every sales call and I read the names and I ring the bell. There’s a bell [rings bell]. I’m a sales guy and I love to celebrate success so in tough times, I want to celebrate success louder and more vibrant than anyone else so I’m screaming it and we’re encouraging people. If you see his name every single week in our sales report, you might be asking yourself, “Maybe I need to speak to him. Why is he ringing the bell twice a week every week and I can’t do it twice a year?”

Fred Diamond: That’s an interesting point, the concept of celebrating. It’s something that being frank with you, it doesn’t come up all the time on the Sales Game Changers webinars that we do, the concept of ringing the bell, acknowledging any degree of success that has happened. Success might be three meetings today, three conversations or things like that, like you said, the way that you’re going to get your leads has changed but you still need the process to sell, especially for what you do. It probably hasn’t changed too much, you need to find small businesses having a challenge with keeping its books, that’s how I became a customer of yours, because I had that challenge. We have a question here, a question comes in here from Gene and Gene is in Northern Virginia. Gene wants to know, “Steve, how have you changed as a sales leader?” We mentioned you’re the Chief Evangelist, you do two things, you have to sell franchisees as a franchiser to people who want to become a Supporting Strategies franchisee and you also work with your franchisees to get them better at sales, but how have you changed over the last couple of months? What have you noticed about yourself as a salesman?

Steve Schultz: The first and foremost to that question is I am screaming from the rooftops about every sale more than ever before because I want people to see that we’re growing right now. I see the numbers every day, but we’re a business made up of individual performers, we have a hundred franchisees each doing their own thing and I want them to see it. I’ve been trying to be more empathetic and humble over the course of the last couple months and I’m trying to understand that, “Okay, you’re scared, but how can I help you? You just bought this business and then COVID hit, you don’t have the big network yet, so what can I do for you? Can I be on a sales call with you?” I’ll do that in a heartbeat with any one of my franchisees, I’ll lead a sales call, I’ll take a back seat on a sales call, I’ll play any role they want to play. I’m very humble in that I know a lot of people who own restaurants that are out of business today, no two fields are going to feel COVID more than education and hospitality.

There were people who had great businesses, they did nothing wrong and they’re out of business today or they’re making a fraction of what they made and there’s no end in sight for them and the winter is coming, and the outdoor seating is going away. There’s big change coming and this is going to accelerate change in a positive direction for many years to come, we will never go backwards in terms of telemedicine, we will never go backwards in terms of online education. People now find it regular to share their face, I could not get people to share their face during a sales call, now they all do, they’re all willing to do what we’re doing right now. I’m humbled by the fact that there’s a lot of fragility in business and that you can do everything right and still have things happen to you and I don’t want you to think that everything’s out of your control either.

There are things you can do to make yourself a better business, a more resilient business to recognize change, to anticipate change, to position yourself for downturn, to manage your cash. I’m trying really hard to respect business owners for the challenges that they face to be proactive and offering discounts if I think they’re struggling because of the pandemic to be gracious and thoughtful and thankful for every new client that we get during this tough time.

Fred Diamond: We have a comment here from Gina, Gina says, “Celebrating the big victories and small is really important right now.” Steve, I want to ask you a question specifically about Supporting Strategies and how people can become successful taking on a franchise right now. The reason I’m asking is like you mentioned, we deal in the Institute for Excellence in Sales typically with a lot of people who are business-to-business enterprise or corporate type sales and even some of the best companies that we work with have had some downsizing for all the reasons that we’re familiar with. They might be looking into moving into a franchise type of a model or something like this, I know it varies for everybody and we don’t know all the answers because of circumstance and the world, but how long does it take for somebody to be successful if they become a Supporting Strategies franchisee? If that’s something that makes sense for them right now for all the obvious reasons, give us a little bit of an insight into how they would be successful.

Steve Schultz: It’s a growth business, it’s a recurring revenue model and I tell people our shared goal is for you to get to a million dollars in revenue in five years. Our model has 40% gross margin, 25 to 35% net, you can do that math, it’s a nice model. Beyond, I’ve got examples of offices up to 4.5 million in sales, 3 million in sales and those margins hold so 5 years to 250 to 350 earning path that acts like an annuity, there’s value there, that’s a nice value. Halfway through that number 2.5 years, 500 thousand, 40%, 25. It’s going to take you at least one year so in addition to our franchise free, people need to be able to support themselves for 12 months. I don’t care if you’re opening a McDonald’s, it’s going to take you 12 months to get it built. I’m amazed that kids today change their jobs every two years, I don’t get good at anything for two years, it’s no different in this business, you’re not going to hit the ground running, there’s lots to learn as a franchisee, the way I sell it is it’s a discovery process, I don’t try to sell, I try to educate.

My personal sales philosophy is get to no as fast as possible, most people think that’s counter-intuitive but I feel like if I can say something that makes you say no today, I’d rather have you say no today than wait 6 months to get you to say no. Because I know my numbers, the faster I get to the no’s, the quicker I’m left with the yes’s. It’s a discovery process, that’s what I call it and I’ve got a website, supportingstrategies.com, there’s a button right on there that says franchise opportunity and anybody that’s interested in learning about Supporting Strategies either from a bookkeeping perspective or from a franchise perspective could simply go to our website. You’ll learn a lot about what we do and if you’re looking for bookkeeping, we’ll connect you with the right franchisee, and if you’re looking to learn about how this might be a good path for you, I will tell you, we do personality in depth profiles, we do application. We’re looking at you as hard as you’re looking at us, at the end of the day we won’t sell a franchise to someone who we don’t think will be successful, we only sell franchises to people who we think will be successful.

Fred Diamond: One of our mottos as well is that the second best thing is a fast no right behind a fast yes, we actually had the author of Go for No, Andrea Waltz on the Optimal Sales Mindset show a couple weeks ago. We have time for one more question and then, Steve, I’m going to ask you for your final thought. The question comes from Renee and Renee is in Pittsburgh, Renee wants to know, “Steve, what do you think the challenges will be for sales professionals in the weeks to come?” Again, it’s the end of September when we’re doing this, we got Q4 coming up, you alluded to a couple of things. One is the restaurants that have been open, winter is going to be here soon, it’s going to be tough to sit outside and enjoy your meals. What do you think some of the challenges are that are going to be affecting sales professionals in the coming months? Then wind us down with your final thought on what our listeners can do today to be successful.

Steve Schultz: I want to do both of those in a single thread. Maybe sales is a bad word, I don’t know, I never think of what I’m doing as selling even though I’m a sales professional and all I do is sell. I always approach sales from a technical perspective, when I worked for IBM I approached it as a technical expert. In this world when you’re selling bookkeeping services, if it’s a 30 minute sales call, the first 25 minutes is me asking the customer about their business. What are their problems? How do they do things? What are the challenges in accomplishing their goals? I’m a technical expert around bookkeeping so I know what questions to ask them about how they pay their people and how they pay their bills. When they’re sitting there, they’re thinking, “This doesn’t sound like a sales call.” Don’t ever show up and throw up, don’t ever walk into a place and think that you’re so special because no one walks into a sales call and says, “I have the worst bookkeeping services ever.”

Everyone says they’re the best so saying you’re the best is hollow and if you approach it as a consultant or as a technical expert and that your real goal is there to solve their problems, then you wouldn’t be sitting there. I’ll tell you something else that’s a misnomer about sales, it’s never about money and everyone thinks it’s about money, even the clients who are talking to you are always going to ask the money question. They’re always going to say, “How much?” but you’re never sitting there because of money. No one ever fired a bookkeeper that was doing a really good job because they were too expensive, it just doesn’t happen. They either got fired because they weren’t doing a good job or the reports weren’t being delivered on time or they were always taking time off. There was a reason that they were sitting there and those are the things that we need to understand.

The other thing to think about when you’re selling is that no one’s driving the cheapest car made, there are cheap cars but everyone buys for value, it depends on who they are and how they define value but I’ve never met anyone who just says, “No, I bought the cheapest car possible.” I’m still looking for it but it doesn’t exist. People drive a Volvo because they want a safe car or an SUV or whatever. Sales is never about money, it’s always about problems so as you go forward, if you can solve the problems of your clients, you’ll sell in any market, in a good market and in a bad market. As you venture forth in this tough market, celebrate your successes and let your customer do it with you. I tell all prospective franchisees, “Don’t be afraid to tell them yes because all I’m going to do is jump up and down and celebrate because I’ve worked with you now for three months and I’m going to do a fist pump and I’m going to celebrate.” Be passionate and be excited, be an evangelist for your brand and be passionate and thoughtful, and you’ll be successful.

Fred Diamond: Steve Schultz of Supporting Strategies, I want to thank you again for being on the Sales Game Changers Live today. I want to thank all of our listeners today, I want to thank Indie and Indre and the team at Supporting Strategies Northern Virginia for connecting us with Steve. Steve, thank you so much, best of luck in Q4.

Steve Schultz: You’re welcome, thank you.

Fred Diamond: Thanks for all the insights, have a great, new, prosperous and healthy year as well. To all our listeners, thank you so much.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 275: Supporting Strategies Chief Evangelist Steve Schultz Explains Why Becoming a Technical Expert is Critical for Sales Success in a Challenging Market first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 210: International Sales Strategist Andy Miller Gives Pertinent Advice on Hiring, Motivating and Retaining Top Tier Sales Talent

ANDY’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Get curious about everything, get curious about your customer, get curious about their industry, get curious about their business model. I find curiosity to be a really great habit for a salesperson.”

Andy Miller is president of Big Swift Kick, a top sales consultancy and training company.

On today’s show, we talked about acquiring, motivating and retaining top tier sales talent.

Andy gives some tips on how you can acquire and retain your top tier talent and how you as a sales professional can take your career to the next level.

Andy can be found on LinkedIn here.

Andy Miller: Thanks, Fred. In a nutshell, my first sales job was when I was 13, I had a paper route. A lot of entrepreneurial skills are learned there, collections, customer service, if you want to expand your paper route you’ve got to knock on doors and you’ve got to sell. That was really my entry into sales and then when I was 27 I jumped into entrepreneurship, I started a software company in Holland. I’d been in software sales for a couple years before then, but that was my journey.

It was open up an office in Amsterdam and then expand throughout the world and the challenge there was hiring salespeople who worked the way that I wanted them to work but in different cultures and different languages. At that start, I made a fatal mistake, hired somebody I should have not hired and in Holland you cannot fire somebody at will, you have to get government permission so I had to keep her for 8 months while she didn’t show up. That started me on the, “How do we identify top talent, how do we attract them, how do we motivate them, retain them and how do we get rid of them [Laughs] if we thought they were going to be top but they’re not proving out that way?”

Fred Diamond: You’re also an expert on sales professional assessment and that’ll come up over the course of the podcast. You and I have had many conversations about what it takes to be a great sales professional in the right situation and we’ll get to that over the course but do you agree? What do you think are the biggest challenges that sales leaders face today?

Andy Miller: The biggest one at least that I hear about hiring is people don’t even know where to find talent. We want to interview some people, they’re going, “We can’t even find people to interview.” That’s a big one, another one that I hear once they’re hired is, “How do we motivate them?” We’ll get into that in a little bit but, “I know somebody has some talent, I’m just not seeing them give their all” that’s another one. I think a third one would be shifting, the shift that’s happening from baby boomers to millennials, it’s a different mindset even though I don’t think it’s as different as people make it out to be, but there are differences. Then how to retain your top talent when there are so many openings and people are trying to get them to switch and come join their company? How do you make sure that you keep them? That, to me, I see as the biggest challenges.

Fred Diamond: You just used the M word – mindset – what is a sales mindset? What does that mean to you?

Andy Miller: There’s mindsets that support you in sales and there’s mindsets that sabotage you in sales. To me, the mindset predetermines the outcome before you even begin so if you think that picking up the phone and doing cold calling – and yes, people still cold call and yes, cold calling still works. You have to do a lot of smiling and dialing but if you think nobody wants to talk to you then you’re going to act that way, your words are going to come across that way. If you think people do want to talk to you then that matters, too.

Today, we’re right before a holiday and a lot of people are taking off. My experience is today is a great day for cold calling because the folks who are in working are relaxed and have time to talk. That to me is a mindset, the mindset is, “Nobody wants to talk to me” or, “Everybody’s on vacation” or, “There aren’t that many in, but the ones that are in are going to want to talk.” Those are two different mindsets and really the question becomes I can’t tell you which mindset is right or wrong but which mindset serves me better.

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s podcast interview about 15 miles outside of Washington DC in Alexandria, it’s the nation’s capital. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. Andy, what are some of the challenges with attracting A players? The top performers, if you will.

Andy Miller: Everybody I talk to says they want A players but the question I ask them is, “Are you a company that an A player wants to be?” What people don’t realize is I just saw an article a week ago that said 50% of candidates or potential candidates when they hear there’s an opening, first thing they do is they go to Glass Door to see what your ratings are. My question for you is, whether it’s Glass Door or an equivalent, what’s your rating on Glass Door? Because if you have poor ratings you’re not even going to get a chance to talk to somebody.

I was actually talking to a young kid a couple weeks ago and he said, “I heard of a company, they had an opening, I went and saw the ad, went to Glass Door, their ratings were terrible and I didn’t even try to apply.” I think that’s very true for where things are today, we know Glass Door is a little bit jaded because people who get on and write reviews are typically folks who are disgruntled so it’s a little bit skewed but let me give you some comparative data. Google has a rating of 4.5 out of 5, Slack has a rating of 4.7 out of 5, Amazon has a rating of 3.8 out of 5 and do you think they have problems attracting top talent? No, they don’t. People are lined up and they don’t have the space for all the folks that want to work there.

That’s what you’re competing with, if your Glass Door ratings aren’t up among that range then either A, you’ve got to find a way to improve your ratings or B, you need to lower your expectations and think about how do we get B players or C players or how do we hire diamonds in the rough that we can develop?

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, you also said in the very beginning of today’s interview that companies are struggling with even knowing how to find these people. Let’s say a company decides to advertise to get some top people to come to their company in sales. How should they go about that? What’s the best way to do an advertisement?

Andy Miller: Before we get into advertisement, the strongest thing they can do is pay for referrals, pay their employees for referrals. If you say, “We sent a program, we pay them 200 bucks.” Your best new hires will come from your employees, so increase the referral fee. It’s not uncommon to say they’ve got to be there for 3 or 6 months before the referral fee is paid out, but take it up to 500 or 750 or a thousand because that’s where your best referrals are going to come from. If that’s not working or you’re not getting enough, then you need to run some ads.

Typically they’re on Job Boards nowadays, Indeed, things like that but we like the Ernest Shackleton ad and we can talk about that. Shackleton was a British explorer in a race to Antarctica and there’s some debate about whether he actually wrote the ad or not, but let’s not get into the historic of it, let’s get into the psychology of it. Here’s what the ad basically said. The ad said, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success.” That was the whole ad, they claimed they got 5,000 respondents, who knows? But if you look at the psychology of it, it talks about the hardest part, the scariest part of the journey and then it talks about the vision or the dream. That’s the power of it, and when you look at most ads that people run it’s kind of vanilla, it’s kind of boring, they don’t talk about the dream and they certainly don’t talk about the heavy lifting that has to occur.

Fred Diamond: What do you want to talk about when you do your ads? Do you want to be honest? Do you want to say it’s going to be tough or, “We’re in a tough marketplace”? How honest do you want to be when you create these ads?

Andy Miller: You need to be honest. What scares some people off inspires and motivates others, some folks are like, “Goodie, sounds like a challenge, I love a good challenge” and that’s what you want. You want people who are inspired by your situation or your scenario so tell them upfront the ugliest, hardest part and then also sell the dream because they still want to know, “What’s in it for me? Why should I take the job? I just don’t want to be a pack animal or a beast of burden.”

I’ll give an example, two years ago I was a interim sales VP for a software company out in the Midwest. They had a brand new product that they were getting ready to release but the product wasn’t finished, they needed to hire some additional top talent so we wrote a Shackleton ad and we went out there and we got a number of applicants. Basically the ad said, “Our product isn’t released yet, we have an idea of who the target market is but we haven’t tested it yet, we haven’t priced the product, we don’t have a commission plan.

Basically it’s a startup with a company that’s been around for a very long time but if we’re successful, you get stock in the company and you have a chance to make a lot of money and it’s not just talk because this CEO has done it twice before.” That’s what we did, we tried to scare them off.

Fred Diamond: Andy, I have a slightly different question here. You’ve worked with hundreds if not thousands of companies over your career, you’ve been doing sales performance improvement for over 25 years, you’ve written great articles, you have some great publications coming out on assessment. We have a lot of Sales Game Changers who are at the earlier part of their career, I’m just curious, I’m going to ask you a couple scenarios and I’m interested in your thoughts on the advantages of working for this situation. Let’s say someone’s in the early part of their career, you mentioned some large, successful companies before. What would be the advantages of working for a Microsoft or an Oracle or a huge technology company that’s already been around for 30, 40, 50 years and is already established?

Andy Miller: I think there’s two scenarios worth looking at. One is do they have a training and development program? When I say training and development I’m not just talking about product knowledge or industry knowledge. Do they really train you? Back in the 80s if you wanted to get a job in sales you would go to somebody like HP, IBM, something like that and they would put you through a year, year and a half mentorship programming. You got a lot of classroom training, you got time out in the field behind the windshield ride-alongs, you’d come back, you get more classroom training, you’d have objectives that you had to hit before you could go to the next level but they really developed their people. Those days are gone but there are still companies out there, for example, memoryBlue who’s somebody I think you interviewed recently. They really believe in developing people so that’s one advantage.

The other advantage is when you work for a big company it gives you some cache but if you want to go from big company to big company to big company, the downside is I’ve seen a lot of salespeople who’ve gone from big brand to big brand and they can’t sell. The reason for that is the brand carried them, they were never developed to meet their potential so they rode the brand and there’s nothing wrong with that as a career path if that’s the way you want to go. For me personally as an entrepreneur I’d prefer the smaller companies, that has a lot more challenge, it’s more interesting for me.

Fred Diamond: For a sales professional out there let’s say in the beginning part of their career, 25, 26 if you will and they want a great sales career, a great sales experience, what would be the advantage of working for that smaller company? Maybe there’s up to a hundred salespeople or 20 or 30, what would be the career advantages of going that route?

Andy Miller: Again, maybe they do development but I really think it comes down to knowing who you are and how you’re wired as a person. If you like places like the bigger companies where you can specialize and they have lots of resources, know that you’re going to be a very focused, almost like a subject matter expert and if you like that specialization, you’re going to be better off at a big company. If you like to wear multiple hats knowing that the smaller companies won’t have the resources and you’re going to have to help figure it out but you’re also going to get to participate more in direction, decisions and shaping things then you’re going to be better off at a small company. I really think it comes down to how you’re wired and in which environment will you thrive, not just get by but how and where will you thrive.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again we’re going to move into talking about motivation. Why are people struggling today? Again, you’ve worked with thousands of sales professionals at this point of your career. Why are salespeople struggling today?

Andy Miller: I think there’s two reasons, I think they don’t know their why, what drives them. A lot of people don’t get out of bed with fire in their belly, they just kind of get through life and then the second thing is I don’t think they’ve been mentored or developed. We over time seem to have gotten away from that at a time when it’s actually more and more important, and we can talk about that after the break.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second, though. You mentioned why, is it important for a sales leader to know his people’s why and what does that mean?

Andy Miller: Absolutely, a lot of sales leaders that I see out there are more managers of data and people and processes, particularly pipeline towards the end of the month and end of the quarter but they don’t know what puts fire in their people’s belly and why they come to work. The goal here is to tie together what does this person want to accomplish personally and how can we help them do that by working with us? I’ll give you an example, sales rep a couple years ago, they had a tiered compensation plan, she was about a thousand dollars away from the next year at which they paid retroactively and we had a week left in the quarter and I said to her, “You’re a thousand dollars short, let’s do the math. Here’s what a thousand dollars does to your commission in your pocket. I know you’re not that money motivated but if you had that money, what could you do with it that you find inspiring?”

She said, “Well, that’s actually a good question and you made me realize I’ve got a leak in our roof that’s leaking into the baby’s room, I’ve had to move the baby in with me so I’m not sleeping that well and that money would pay for a roof repair so I will go out and find the thousand” and she did. You had to connect what was in it for her with why I would like her to produce more and just tie the two together. You need to know their why, what inspires them.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to put you on the spot here before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors. What’s your why? You’ve worked with sales leaders around the world, you’ve worked with thousands, you’ve been in this game for a long time, you’re a studier, you’re a reader, you’ve written some amazing things, you’re easily one of the most thoughtful people that I’ve ever spoken to about sales. I’ve seen you speak on grit and topics like that. Just curiously for the audience here, a lot of people know you probably listening to the show, what gets you up in the morning, what gets you motivated, what is your why?

Andy Miller: I love challenge, I love the impossible. If you tell me it can’t be done, tell me what can’t be done, when you want it done by and then get out of my way. My first job out of college was a special ed teacher, I worked with the toughest of the toughest. When I moved a year up to start a software company everybody told me it couldn’t be done. I had a health issue where I fell six floors down an elevator and was paralyzed for three months, they told me I’d never walk right again and five years later I ran a marathon and same in the sales training business. I like the ugliest, messiest most difficult scenarios because that’s my sport, that’s my why. I love the challenge, give me the impossible.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to throw you off again before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors. I just mentioned grit and you’ve spoken to me about grit many times. Can you just give us a 30 second, 50 second overview on what grit means for sales professionals?

Andy Miller: GRIT to me is an acronym, some people may know the library definition of hard work or gritting up kind of thing but to me, grit’s an acronym and the G stands for growth mindset. Always be learning, always be studying, be curious, learn from your mistakes. The difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, the growth mindset is always asking, “How do I do this? How do I make this happen? What resources do I need?”

The fixed mindset is always looking at why it won’t work so to me, that growth mindset is critical and that’s something I’ve done my whole life by accident. The R is resilience, it’s your ability to weather the storm, your ability to bounce back. You’ll see that in cold calling and rejection. If you get rejected and you take it personally and it wounds you, you may be paralyzed for half the day or the day or the week but you need to be a duck and let it just roll off your back. I don’t know if you remember the little kid’s toys, the weeble wobbles, I want you to be a weeble wobble, we get knocked over but we don’t fall down. The faster you recover, the more successful you’ll be.

I stands for intuition, it’s really about how well you can navigate situations whether that’s intuitively or you get helped to do that, I think of it more as navigation and then T is tenacity. How badly do you want it? How hard are you willing to work for it? That to me really is GRIT.

[Sponsor Break]

Fred Diamond: Andy, what are sales people usually motivated by? Is it money?

Andy Miller: It’s not. It used to be, I have access to data on 1.9 million salespeople and when we look at the trends, somewhere between 2007 and 2011 it actually shifted from money to intrinsic. Intrinsic is basically their own reason, their own internal which goes back to us discussing what’s their why and you’ll see a lot in millennials now, millennials want to work for something that has a social cause or a social justice, that helps them find a why if they don’t have one but they want to work for a cause. There’s something that’s happened in 2011 so that’s been 8-9 years as that shifted so we’ve got to find out what is their reason.

Fred Diamond: How can sales leadership get better? Again, on the Sales Game Changers podcast it comes up that the biggest challenge is acquiring, retaining and motivating top-tier talent. What should sales leaders be doing to get better at motivating their salespeople?

Andy Miller: I think they need to sit down and get to know them. I’m just not seeing that people know their people that much because they’re busy managing the funnel and the forecast – and not doing a very good job at it, by the way. CEO’s #1 complaint is “our forecasts aren’t accurate” so what are we really doing? You need to take time, you need to sit down, you need to get to know your people, you need to get to know what’s going on in their life. There’s that old cliché of people caring, so they need to know that you care.

Once you do that and you can figure out what they’re trying to accomplish in life, they will work for managers that care and you will know how to guide them. We don’t live in a society anymore where people work for a company cradle to grave, they’re going to be with you for a couple years, there’s going to be a point where you outgrow them or they outgrow you and when it’s time for somebody to leave, the employees watch how you handle that. If you’re helping the move out and onto something better, that’s noticed. If you’re brutal and mercenary about it, that’s also noticed and then we’re back to, “Is that an A player culture or not?”

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, you mentioned people aren’t really going to places cradle to grave anymore, it’s very rare to see that for a lot of reasons that our guests know. The younger sales professionals out there, what would be some of the specific things that you might do to retain them, to show them that you really do care?

Andy Miller: I think it comes through in the interview, from the very beginning. There’s a term that’s out there now about the candidate experience, I think that candidate experience starts from the very beginning and it comes from the interview, especially if you’re the interviewing/hiring manager that they’re going to work for, I would want to get to know them. That’s the first thing, as a younger person I’d also want to look for, “Do they develop their people?” and when I say develop it’s not just a three day event on how to enter stuff into our order entry system or our CRM, it’s ongoing repetition, reinforcement, coaching, mentoring, development.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a really good career, I’m just curious, what would you tell the 25 year old Andy Miller about how to become a better sales professional?

Andy Miller: Two things. We talked about grit already and to me it’s the grit part. Sometimes at 25 you don’t know what you want out of life and there’s people in their 50s and 60s that don’t know what they want out of life [Laughs] so welcome to the club. I think it’s pick a goal even if it’s just going to be a goal for the next couple years, follow the GRIT acronym that we talked about and there’s a book that I read – I was thinking about all the books that I’ve read because I’ve read a lot – the one book that sticks in my mind of really making a difference is a book called The Aladdin Factor like Aladdin and his magic lamp. That was written by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, the guys who did the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, but before that.

The book is focused on salespeople, it was a study on salespeople and the book was about asking. How often do we ask for what we want? Why don’t we ask, why do we ask, how frequently do we do it? It made a profound difference on me because when I read the book I thought, “Is this true?” Let’s experiment, let’s assume what I’m reading in this book is true and I’m going to pretend for one week that I’m an alien that’s beamed down from outer space and I don’t know the culture, I don’t know the language, I don’t know the taboos or the values or the mores so why don’t I just try for one week and ask for everything that I want?

I was dumbfounded on how easy it was, there were famous people I always wanted to meet, I just picked up the phone and tracked them down and got a conversation with all of them. I was shocked at how easily accessible they were. Another one, I was looking for a list of all the computers and I was living in Europe at the time, you could not buy a list of the companies that had the kind of computers we were targeting so I actually called up the manufacturer, sat down with the product manager, asked if I could get access to the list. He said no, we had a great lunch, great time talking and then a week later a list showed up at my office with no name or no return address of all the computers in Europe that I’d been asking for. It’s really amazing how easy it is to get access to what you want if you just ask. What I would tell my younger self: go read The Aladdin Factor and be gritty about what you want.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to check that, that’s pretty powerful. Before I ask you for your final thought to inspire our listeners today, again, I’ve said this many times, you’re a student of sales. As a matter of fact, we actually just spent a little bit of time in your office and you must have had close to a thousand books just on sales and leadership so it’s a pretty enviable bookshelf there that I would like to have at some point. Tell us about one of your selling habits, a selling habit or two that you feel have led to your sales success.

Andy Miller: I’ve got a couple thoughts on that. One is get curious about everything, get curious about your customer, get curious about their industry, get curious about their business model. I find curiosity to be a really great habit for a salesperson. Second thing is always be learning and improving. What I love about sales is you’re either growing or you’re dying, you’ve got to constantly be studying, researching and I don’t care whether it’s about sales or psychology or influence or human relations but always be improving.

Another one, ask for what you want, we already talked about that, asking is a whole lot easier than we make it out to be. The last two thoughts are know your industry better than anybody else, you need to know your industry better than the client knows the industry which now establishes you as a subject matter expert. The last part is outwork everybody. Right now I’ve got an assessment that I sell amongst many different assessments that I sell and I’m ranked in the top 10 out of about 140 and I’m shocked because I’m only doing it part time and they’re all doing it full time. The point I’m trying to make is outwork everybody.

Fred Diamond: We talked today with Andy Miller from Big Swift Kick on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we talked about acquiring, motivating and retaining top tier talent. Andy, I hope I didn’t confuse you and you just gave us your final thought [Laughs] but we’ve got Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, we’re very lucky, we have people all over the world listening to the podcast. Why don’t you give us one final thought? Pick out one, give us one final thought to inspire them today.

Andy Miller: I think professional sales is amazing. Somebody says, “What do you do for a living?” and sometimes I see people shy away from, “I’m in sales” or I look at their business card and it says “business development” or it’s got some fancy term and I go, “Oh, you’re in sales” and they kind of turn red and shy away a little bit. I think professional sales is amazing. The difference you can make for people, the lifestyle that you can have, the learning that you get to make, I think it’s an amazing career. We don’t need to go through all the schooling that a doctor or lawyer has and yet we can live as well, if not better. Yee-haw for professional sales.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 210: International Sales Strategist Andy Miller Gives Pertinent Advice on Hiring, Motivating and Retaining Top Tier Sales Talent first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

SPECIAL EPISODE 008: Advice, Insights, and Wisdom from Past Episodes with World-Class Women in Sales Leaders Featuring Gigi Schumm

GIGI’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “They need to take care of themselves by exercising, meditating, whatever helps them to stay energetic and grounded and motivated. Also invest in yourselves from a learning perspective.”

This is a special show. The Institute for Excellence in Sales is launching our Women in Sales Leadership Forum for women who are looking to move into management and leadership. In honor of that program being launched, we asked Gigi Schumm to share some of her insights on how women in sales can grow into leaders.

Gigi is the Senior VP of Sales at Threat Quotient and was a guest on one of the most downloaded episodes of the Sales Game Changers podcast. What we’re going to do today in honor of the launch is we’re going to reflect back on some of the past episodes that we’ve done with some of our great guests, some of our Women in Sales leaders who have been on the Sales Game Changers.

I encourage you to go back and listen to our episode with Gigi.

Find Gigi on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Hey, this is Fred Diamond, host of the Sales Game Changers podcast. Thanks for listening and thanks to FeedSpot for naming the podcast as one of the top 15 sales podcasts on the internet. Today’s episode features highlights from some of our past episodes with some amazing Women in Sales leaders. We’ll get to that episode in a second. First, this episode complements a new program from one of our sponsors, the Institute for Excellence in Sales. The IES announced the launch of its Women in Sales Leadership Forum which will kick off in November. Go to I4ESBD.org/womeninsales for more information.

The number of Women in Sales Leadership has remained flat for over a decade, only 1 in 5 leadership positions are held by women. The leadership forum was designed to provide new opportunities for young women aspiring to sales leadership. Its transformative experience will help companies motivate, elevate and retain your most promising young Women in Sales leaders. Again, go to I4ESBD.org/womeninsales for more info. That’s http://www.I4ESBD.org/womeninsales for more info.

Now to our episode, I want to thank Gigi Schumm who is our co-host for today’s episode.

Gigi, I’m excited to get some of your insights in color as we go through some of these critical questions that Women in Sales are dealing with.

Gigi Schumm: Thanks, Fred. Thanks so much for having me on the first time on Sales Game Changers and again today, and I am excited to hear what some other women sales leaders had to say to answer these questions.

How’d you first get into sales as a career?

Fred Diamond: We’ve gotten some great answers and I went back and as you know we transcribe all of the episodes that we do and we put them into a report that’s available for people around the globe to get access to, and when I went back and started re-reading the transcripts and listening to some of the shows I was personally really inspired by some of the journeys and that’s been one of the great gifts of the Sales Game Changers podcast is listening to people’s stories, how they started, as we’ll talk about here in a few minutes. Not everybody started in leadership roles at great companies.

You of course worked for some tremendous brands, but a lot of the women we’ve interviewed came from different backgrounds. As a matter of fact, when we asked the question, “How did you first get into sales as a career?” there’s usually two different types of answers we’ve gotten. There’s the first answer which is, “I’ve been selling lemonade since I was 10 years old” or, “I found myself in sales on a consultant, a finance analyst, some case as a techy and I was tapped on the shoulder or I began to realize that I’m probably better off being in sales.” If I recall, you were an English major.

Gigi Schumm: I was an English major and had no idea that I would end up in sales. I was definitely in that second category you talked about and even though I was an English major, I started out my career on the technical side. First writing technical documentation and then I moved into being a developer for a while, I actually wrote software and then onto the pre-sale side on the technical side as an SE and it was really there that my eyes got open to, “Oh, this is sales. This is what it’s all about” and I began to get attracted to it. Luckily for me, some other people there thought that I might be better in sales as well, so I made the leap and never looked back.

Fred Diamond: Very good, and you’ve held some great positions. Threat Quotient is a high-flying company now, it’s got a nice infusion of cash and I’m looking forward to hearing more of your stories about your interpretation of some of the answers. What we’re going to do on the podcast is we’re going to listen to some of the previous interviews and then we’ll get some of Gigi’s thoughts.

Let’s take a listen to a quote that came from Leticia Proctor. Leticia is a senior VP of sales, revenue management and digital strategies at PM Hotel Group. Her podcast got a lot of great interaction. She came from the operation side, she has a wonderful personality, a personality that you would really attribute to someone in sales and she made that shift from operation into sales. Let’s take a listen to what Leticia had to say and then, Gigi, I want to get your thoughts about making the move from a back office role like operations into sales.

Leticia Proctor: It’s funny, I actually started in operations and because of my personality I kept getting asked, “Why aren’t you in sales?” and I thought, “That’s interesting.” That kind of started my path towards the sales environment so prior to being in this space I was an assistant general manager for a hotel for a little while. The great thing about my experience is that I understand the operation’s component as well. For me, it’s not just about top line revenue, for me it’s about that full cycle of business. How does it flow to GOP? How does it flow to that gross operating profit? How does it flow to that net operating income? It’s not just about, “It looks good on paper, have we collected the funds that we thought we would to ensure that we’re a profitable company?”

Fred Diamond: So what do you think, Gigi? Making the move from operations, is that common? Is that an easy shift for a woman in sales?

Gigi Schumm: I think whenever you make a shift from one kind of role to another it’s going to have its challenges. There’s going to be a lot to learn but in some ways, Leticia probably had some experience that the other salespeople didn’t have understanding – she said it, right? – all the operations, how the whole process works and that can be a huge advantage, too. So I think that women tend to underestimate the knowledge that we’ve picked up along the way and we may or may not really think we’re ready for that next leap but as Leticia proved, she was ready and she’s done a great job with it.

Fred Diamond: You were telling me something as we were doing the interview before, during the pre-work about in some cases if a woman is applying for a job she has to be fully qualified before she’ll even consider as compared to a man who may have one of the characteristics they’re looking for and will think that he’s perfectly suited.

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. No question, that’s a study that was done and it gets quoted a lot, that women tend to need to meet all 5 of the criteria and even then, and I will tell you, I’ve seen it again and again as I’ve mentored young women and I might suggest to them, “Well, how about this? Have you thought about that?” “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t done this” or, “I haven’t done that” or, “I’m not sure I could do that” and it’s a shame because it’s one of the ways that we hold ourselves back.

Women have faced real challenges, we don’t need to pile extra ones on ourselves by not having confidence. I’m really proud that Leticia made that leap, she did a great job with it and in a lot of ways I think her background in operations gave her probably a step up over a lot of other people.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, how would you coach a young professional, a young woman who may not have all 5 of the criteria, if you will? Again, you’ve held leadership positions at Symantec, Oracle, Sun, of course now Threat Quotient. Those are three of the biggest names in the history of technology. It’s the NFL of sales, if you will, especially in public sector and other markets that you’ve served. What are some of the things that you would say to a young woman who is hesitant about her abilities to take on the job?

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. It’s a great question and I have been super fortunate about the places that I’ve worked and the people that I’ve been able to watch and learn from. One of the things that I say is let’s say one of the jobs is that a woman needs to have a background in – this is a little bit off-track but I was just talking to somebody who has just become a female CEO and she had never had the experience in fundraising before. Super common that if you’re going to be a CEO they’re going to want you to be able to go out and raise funds, it’s a big part of the job but what she knew was that she hadn’t personally done fundraising before but she had a very good network of people who had done that that she could call on.

One of the pieces of advice that I give to young women who may be aspiring to be a sales leader but think that they don’t have a piece of it because they haven’t done it before is, “Do you know other people who have? Can you call on them, can you get their advice, will they help you?” and their answers to those questions are, “Absolutely, of course I can. Of course I do.” Well then, that’s the important thing. You don’t have to have experienced it personally yourself if you can call on a network of people that you know who are willing to help you.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. If you think about it, a woman who’s applying for a job in sales leadership or even enterprise type sales, she definitely has a bigger background, a bigger network than she probably thinks. She probably came from a decent school, probably is making good use of social media as compared to maybe a woman who is in a back office job who may not have the social networks per se, so being able to tap into that network of people that you know is a critical thing to think about. The other thing that we’ve heard from some of the women who didn’t necessarily start in sales but realized after being in a consulting job or something like that, they realized that they really enjoyed working with the customer.

Let’s take a listen to an interview we did with Monica McEwen. Monica’s the VP of Federal at a company called MapD. She was a consultant, she worked for the American Management Systems and then she started dealing with customers and she began to notice that she really enjoyed it and not only did she really enjoy it, she was also very good at it. She was helping the customers achieve their goals and she really saw value. She made the shift eventually becoming a VP. Let’s listen to what Monica had to say.

Monica McEwen: Honestly, I stumbled into it, which is a little bit embarrassing to admit but I started my career as a consultant at America Management Systems now CGI and realized the part of that job I liked the most was the direct engagement with the client. From there I got a job as a pre-sales architect and really didn’t even know what that was when I took the job but had been told by the recruiter it was very client facing so that intrigued me. When I joined Cognos at the time I was able to pick up the technology and learn it but really I’m not a technologist at heart in terms of really deeply understand technology. I can certainly talk to it and consider myself relatively technical. So I was in pre-sales a couple of years at Cognos and realized that while I was technical enough to give a demo I probably wasn’t going to be able to make an entire career of being a pre-sales architect and so I started looking around at the other roles within the organization and realizing that sales was really where I thought my skills might be in terms of that direct client engagement. From there I had a sales leader who took a chance on me, I put my hand up and said I want to move out of pre-sales and into sales and they took a chance on me and I’m glad they did.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, the thing we just heard that Monica mentioned at the end is that she had someone who took a chance on her, someone who saw that she had this ability to be good in front of customers.

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. I get to talk to a lot of leaders, sales leaders, technical leaders who say to me, “Gigi, how do we recruit more women?” They know they’ve got a diversity problem and they want to do the right thing. First of all, I don’t have all the answers but one of the things that I tell them is, “Sometimes you’re going to have to take a little bit of a chance, a little bit of a leap of faith and you’re going to have to hire somebody based on what you believe they’re potential to be rather than what they’ve already done or proven.”

That sounds like it might have been the case with Monica and I hear stories like hers often and it’s a great one because she had demonstrated all the baseline skills to be good in sales, so even though she had not carried the bag and had the quota herself, somebody – in this case it was a manager, a leader – saw that she had the potential and was willing to take that leap of faith and may have chosen her over somebody else who they could have hired either internally or from the outside who had done it before but that was a pretty great decision on that leader’s part because Monica has proven to be a huge success.

Fred Diamond: I have a follow up question for you on that, you’ve managed hundreds of people, very successful sales professionals over time. Let’s say you noticed a young lady or an emerging female sales professional who has those types of skills that you just talked about, and you’ve noticed that maybe they’re an SE, systems engineer or consultant. Do you ever get pushed back as a sales leader when you’ve noticed someone who has the ability to be exceptional in sales that you have said, “Hey, I think you’d be good in sales.” Do you ever get pushed back on that or historically have they jumped at the chance? Or what have you seen on that?

Gigi Schumm: I think there’s two possible areas of push back. One is from the person themselves who as we talked about when we were talking about Leticia may not have recognized that they are really ready for the leap. In that case I can encourage, I can point out some things that they may not have seen but they also have to get themselves to the point that they’re ready. You can’t drag somebody into a role like sales because it’s hard and there’s going to be great times and there’s going to be tough times and so they have to be mentally ready but you can help them overcome any insecurities or concerns that they may be worrying about. The other place that you can get push back is from your leadership.

You’re now going to make a hire that’s a little bit of a risky hire because it’s somebody who doesn’t have that track record and so I have gotten questioned about, “Oh, OK. Why are you hiring this person as opposed to finding somebody who has done the job?” And I welcome those kind of conversations and those kind of challenges because I if I’m going to take a risk on this person, I should be able to articulate exactly why I do believe that they are worth the risk and that it’s the right decision from a business vantage point.

What are you an expert in?
Tell us a little more about your area of brilliance?

Fred Diamond: Very good. One of the questions that I’ve asked on the Sales Game Changers podcast that I’ve always enjoyed asking is, “What are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your area of brilliance” and when I start asking that question I expected people to say, “Oh, I’m an expert in federal procurement” or, “I’m an expert in helping hospitals with their security concerns” or something, and frequently the answer I get is, “That’s a word that people don’t usually say about me, brilliant or expert, if you will.” But I’m going to play here a clip from Sam McKenna. Sam is a sales leader now at LinkedIn. When we did the interview, she was a sales leader at a company called On24, it’s a webinar company and she talked about emotional intelligence. Let’s take a listen to what Sam’s comment is and then Gigi I want to get your thoughts on the whole concept of emotional intelligence, not just, “Are women better than men” but how can a woman really take advantage of the concept of emotional intelligence to move her career into sales leadership. Let’s take a listen to Sam McKenna.

Sam McKenna: I think in terms of what makes me so successful at sales is I really understand people. I have a high emotional intelligence they say and I think that I’m able to really understand people, their needs, their fears, their problems, which I know sounds a little psychologist of me but it’s just something that I innately get and I think if you understand people, you understand the dynamics of their company, their teams, their challenges, what they’re measured by, right, how what you’re selling is going to impact them. You can really start to build a story of how you’re going to help them, how you’re going to get them to their goals. The thing that I think is important to you is you are doing something that’s going to advance them in one way or another and don’t be afraid to have those conversations with them. Right, “How are you measured annually and here’s how I can help get you to your goals.” Just understanding people and understanding relationships, how people are connected, how they connect the dots, “Do you know people within my network? Have you worked in and purchased from us before?” Understanding the dynamics of those and how to connect the dots is also really important.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, what do you think about that? She said understanding the dynamics of those and how to connect the dots is really important. It’s definitely emotional intelligence, talk to me about emotional intelligence and how much that’s played in your ascent and how can a woman optimize that to really help her grow her career?

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. I think Sam has hit the nail right on the head. She talked about emotional intelligence, the full range of it, because sometimes when you say emotional intelligence people think that just means being able to connect with people or being a good listener and those are certainly a piece of it but they’re not the whole thing. I love how she talked about connecting the dots because when you think about it, sales is really about that. It is about understanding the needs of the business or organization or person you’re selling to and then how what you have to offer – whether that be a product or whether that be a service’s offering – how that can help meet those needs or alleviate the problem that the customer is dealing with.

Being able to engage in those conversations, recognize those needs and have that bridging or translating conversation – what Sam is calling connecting all the dots – is really the essence of what being a good salesperson is. The other components of emotional intelligence like persistence and resilience and the ability to bounce back, the ability to take some criticism are hugely important when it comes to having a long career in sales and so it’s something that if you don’t have it, you probably won’t have a career in sales. If you do have a high emotional intelligence, it will help you a lot and you need to continue to hone those skills over time.

Who was an impactful sales career mentor
and how did they impact your career?

Fred Diamond: Very good. For the listeners to the Sales Game Changers podcast, a book I’d like to recommend, one of our past speakers at the Institute for Excellence in Sales and a member of the Sales Speaker Bureau at the IES, Colleen Stanley. Colleen wrote the book, “Emotional Intelligence for Sales.” It’s a great read to understand some of the concepts and further thoughts on what Gigi talked about. Let’s talk a little bit about mentoring. One of my favorite questions on the podcast is, “Talk about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career” and we’ve heard some great stories, we’ve heard stories about someone’s first boss and the first person who took them under their wing and you actually had a great story about some really impactful business leaders who guided you along that you were gifted with.

I want to provide a clip from Lynne Chamberlain. Lynne Chamberlain was at Red Hat and this was an amazing story. I was a history major in college and I’m always very attentive to business history. One of the champions of technology was doctor Grace Hopper and as Lynne’s telling us this story, she talked about how she spent two years taking doctor Grace Hopper around the beltway to customers and that she spent two years supporting her. Did you know Doctor Grace Hopper, did you ever deal with her at all?

Gigi Schumm: I did not, no, but certainly her reputation is fantastic and serves as an inspiration to so many young women in the computer field.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great story. Let’s listen to Lynne Chamberlain at Red Hat, let’s listen to her talk about her relationship with Doctor Grace Hopper. Then we’re going to come back and Gigi, I want to get some of your thoughts on how a growing woman in sales, an emerging sales leader should be mentored. What should they expect out of a mentor and how should they make that relationship as optimal for them.

Lynne Chamberlain: I had some great mentors growing up through the sales ranks, but one person – we didn’t have social media back then, so when you hired somebody into your organization you really didn’t know a lot about them like you do today because you can Link-In, you can Facebook, you can find out anything. I was asked a digital equipment corporation when I was running BD and the civilian side to help a new person that they just brought in. Her name was Doctor Grace Hopper. Now, I didn’t know who Doctor Grace – I didn’t sell to the navy so I had really no idea at the time who she was and she was a little petite navy officer, wore her uniform, came in and I was to take her on sales calls and take her out because at that time, she was selling her Nano wire and she would go around and talk to all the navy customers. And I was there to help escort her and educate her on how to sell, but you know what? She ended up educating me on the value of discipline and the value of feeling passionate about something. She was the oldest person in the navy at the time as an officer when she retired. She was passionate about what she did and with that, I learned a lot from her. It wasn’t till years later that I realized who exactly she was and how inspirational she was to whole culture people.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, what are some of your thoughts? How should women out there be using mentors, what should they be expecting, how should they be interfacing with their mentors to help both cases, the mentor and the mentee, optimize the relationship?

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. First, I just have to say wow, what a great story. I cannot believe that Lynn, who I know and who is great had the chance to work with Doctor Grace Hopper. I am super jealous and what a lucky coincidence that she had that. Mentoring I think can be hugely impactful but it’s one of those terms that probably just gets overused to the point that I think all young people, men and women, think, “Oh my gosh, I have to go find myself a mentor because I know it’s going to help my career.”

I think the advice that I gave when you asked me this on the podcast but I’ll give you here for short is I think the best way to make a mentor-mentee relationship work is if as the mentor – first of all there has to be a personal connection in the sense that you have to get along well and feel free to talk to each other and things like that, if you can bring a particular problem or scenario or situation, maybe a skill set that you’re trying to build, bring something tangible to the mentor to help with.

I have had many young women who come to me and say, “Will you mentor me?” and sure, absolutely. What can I do for you? “Well, I don’t know, I need a mentor.” Well, that’s a little broad, what do you need help with? So what I would say is it is very helpful to the mentor as a mentee if you bring them something, “I’m trying to work on my presentation skills”, “I have a tough negotiation I’m about to embark on”, “There’s this job that I’m aspiring to and I’m not sure if I’m qualified or I’m not sure the best way to go get that job.” Those are all topics that are perfect for a mentoring conversation and so don’t be afraid to bring those to the situation.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned that you have been approached many times to mentor young professionals. Do most women of your stature and your management level, do you think they’re willing to mentor, they want to mentor? Do you think it’s a prevailing attitude that they want to help younger women who might have been themselves a couple years ago get to the next level of their career? Is it ubiquitous, do you think? What are the general terms?

Gigi Schumm: I think so absolutely. You mentioned my other radio show and we talk about mentoring on that show all the time and I ask women guests. I’ve never met anybody who said, “I’d rather not” or, “I don’t have time” or, “I don’t have the appetite for that for one reason or another.” I think most women and particularly when – I’ll just speak for myself – when you have had the good fortune and the success to be mentored by great people and be helped and coached and sponsored by people who have helped me, I want to give back now to young women or men. I’m happy to take the time.

Now, I still have a day job and I have to get that done but my kids are grown, I’ve got a little bit more time in my life now and I am always happy. I find that to be absolutely the prevailing thought among women and men, frankly, who if they are asked for help are usually very happy to jump in and give help.

What are the 2 biggest challenges
you face today as a sales leader?

Fred Diamond: Alright. Gigi, thank you so much for all the insights you’ve given us so far. One of my favorite questions that we’ve been asking on the Sales Game Changers podcast are, “What are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?” The #1 answer by far is hiring, retaining, motivating and elevating top tier talent. As a matter of fact, the Institute for Excellence in Sales has shifted its mission to helping sales leaders address those challenges: hiring, retaining, motivating and elevating top tier talent.

But there are a couple other challenges that we’ve heard. I want to listen to a clip here from Christine Barger. Christine’s had a long career of success at Microsoft, she’s at the general manager level, she’s been there for a long time, she’s spent time with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer over her career and has really brought great things to Microsoft. She talked about the challenge of finding clarity, the challenges of finding clarity around goals, clarity in distilling messages and clarity in removing obstacles to your success. Let’s take a listen to what Christine had to say.

Christine Barger: I think just making sure that people have clarity around goals. There’s so much information and different priorities that come from every which way. It’s very much a priority for me. I’m a simple person, I like three to five things to be good at, I feel like that’s the best way to show impact and the greatest impact is to make sure that you figure out what your three to five things are that are important and you just hunker down on them and be the best at those things. I spend a lot of my time trying to distill down messages and priorities that come from fourteen different directions into the top three to five things to provide clarity for my people so they feel like they’re making impact.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, that’s a challenge that we’ve heard frequently. There’s so much noise out there, there’s so many possibilities of distraction. Things happen, you get asked by management to take you off course a little bit, how do you stay focused? What is some of your guidance for some of the sales leaders who are emerging here to really get focused and understand the clarity so they can perform as optimally as possible?

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. I think Christine made a great point, she talked about information and priorities and messages coming from 14 different directions and then trying to distill those into the 3 to 5 that are really going to be impactful and boy, do I relate to that because my mind spins at a thousand miles an hour about all the things like, “Oh, we have to do this and we need to do a better job at that and we can’t forget this other thing” and I have to be careful that I’m not just giving that information unfiltered to my people who are not only hearing from me, they’re hearing from their customers, they’re hearing from other people in our business.

You can only focus on so many things, you can only be impactful if you are really focused and you can only focus on probably three things, right? So I absolutely view that part of my job, I 100% agree with what Christine said is to just try to bring clarity amid all the noise and try to help people. Sure, there’s all of these different distractions, there’s all fo these different demands for your time, there’s all of these different tiny things you can think about but let’s start to break through that and break it up into bite sized chunks of what are going to be the three top ones that are going to yield the most impact today.

Fred Diamond: I want to talk about another thing here as it relates to challenges. Sales has always been the most honorable position. A lot of people who aren’t in sales or aren’t in enterprise business, a lot of times they might gravitate towards the used car salesperson, if you will, and I believe you even dealt with that as a challenge when you made your move from being a writer and writing documentation for the companies that you started your career out with.

We’re going to take a listen here to Tina Fox. Tina runs a program called Women on Course. She works with business leaders, typically business owners to help them get networking, to help them get community, to help them be more successful as professionals. She talks about the notion of sales being an honorable profession. Let’s take a listen and let’s talk about that.

Tina Fox: And then, the other thing, this is something that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, is really convincing people that sales is not a dirty word. That sales actually is an honorable, one of the most ancient careers anybody could ever have and it can actually be done in an elegant manner. And I don’t think anybody relates elegance with sales, but you know those people in your life that you didn’t want to be sold to but somehow you bought from them because you trusted them, and that person is an elegant sales person. They identified the need and they did it in a way that didn’t make you feel like you needed to purchase but you purchased anyways because it was the right thing for you at the time.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, one of our past guests at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, Lisa Earle McLeod wrote a book called, “Selling as a Noble Profession” and again you’ve worked at Symantec, Oracle, Sun, now Threat Quotient. Sales is a profession that requires intellect, it requires intelligence, requires perseverance, requires strategy, planning. If it can give it as an honorable profession is probably something that comes second-nature to you and to people that you’ve dealt with, but is there a stigma with some young women in moving into sales?

Gigi Schumm: I related to that clip that you just played from Tina because I remember when I was young and went into sales and told my parents, and I come from a scientific engineering focused family and my mother’s reaction was, “You’re going to be in sales?” like to your point, used car sales, and I had to help her to understand. Later she became very proud of what I did and my accomplishments and she totally understood it, but there were the early days where she didn’t. I think these days most people understand, but it’s funny.

Every now and then you will still run into that stigma or you’ll run into somebody who feels like, “Well, I didn’t buy this” whatever it may be, a house, a car, an enterprise class software, “Because of the salesperson, I bought it because it was the best one out there.” And I always chuckle to myself when I hear that because everybody always thinks that they’re buying something for purely logical, rational reasons but we all know that they buy things for emotional reasons and then back them up with logic.

We also know, because we’ve had great experiences when we’ve bought something in our lives, or terrible experiences when we bought something that the experience that you have colors the way you feel about not only the salesperson but also the product or service that you’re buying as well. It is an important job. I had an old boss who was the CEO of Symantec who used to tell me and used to tell everybody, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something” and that’s true. You can have all the engineers in the world that create the greatest products, you can have super finance people in HR and marketing and everything else but unless you’ve got a sales team that’s going to sell that stuff, none of the others have a role to play.

What is the most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Fred Diamond: Yeah. We’re going to talk about some of the tips that we’ve gotten over the course of the Sales Game Changers podcast. One of the great things about the podcast is we’ve talked to so many exceptional sales leaders and they’ve given us great tips. I get emails and text messages and LinkedIn messages from Sales Game Changers around the globe who are thankful for some of the great advice that’s been passed on. I want to hit on a couple of these and get some of your insights.

We’re going to listen to a quote here from Telesa Via. Telesa runs sales for Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants, she’s a hospitality executive, she’s had a great career. A thing she talked about was finding someone who’s going to provide constructive feedback. Of course she also talked about advancing your learning, but listen to her quote here where she talks about how she found someone who was honest with her and how that helped her take her career to the next level.

Telesa Via: The most important thing I would say is to find someone that is going to provide constructive feedback to them and I think what happens when you’re starting out in the industry, you want to continue to hear “You’re doing great, you’re doing great, you’re doing great” and what happens is that may not be the way where you can actually learn from your, either mistakes and or areas that you may not be perfecting. While you could simply say mentorship, I will go a step further and I would say find someone that you can connect with that is always going to do a reality check and provide you with a different way of looking at things because the one lens or the one way is not always the best way. That is one and I actually will add another one and that is always continue to find avenues to advance your learning. Sometimes in a professional setting they may have areas of training, things of that sort but not all sales companies offer that so I would just say push yourself, go out and reach out to see what tools are out there to educate yourself on how to continue to sharpen your saw because you cannot rely a hundred percent on the company that you work with as the only way.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, what do you think about that? She talked about finding someone who will be honest with you. It’s very easy to find people who are like, “Great job” and, “Wow, you’re going to do great at this.” But to really take your career up a notch and to the next level you need the hard feedback. Talk about that as it relates to coaching women in sales and how do you cross the line – how do you balance the line, I should say – with being appreciative of hard feedback versus being resentful and not taking it properly?

Gigi Schumm: This is maybe a little bit controversial, Fred, but I’m going to tell you that one of the things that I think… First of all, I think Telesa’s advice is right on point but one of the tough things about it, and particularly for women, is you have to make yourself somebody who invites feedback. That doesn’t just mean saying, “I would really like your honest feedback” but it really means that you have to open yourself up to it and take it well if somebody gives you feedback. You really do have to. It’s a little bit of a cliché to say feedback is a gift, but it truly is.

I think that a lot of times if you have a male manager and a female salesperson, the dynamic can be that they’re afraid to be too tough on the female, they’re afraid to be too tough on that woman salesperson and so first of all, to all the male sales leaders listening to this, I want you to know that most of the women that I’ve come across in this industry are as tough if not tougher than the men. Believe me, they can take it. To the women I would say make sure your boss knows that, make sure they know that they can give you the good news and the bad news, the brutal facts and that you are not going to cry, you are not going to crumple up, you’re not going to slink out of their office. You’re going to take that feedback, internalize it, maybe agree with some of it, maybe not agree with some of it and then learn from it.

Fred Diamond: Gigi, for the women and men listening to today’s Sales Game Changers podcast, again we have people all around the globe listening. You’ve again reached the pinnacle of your career in sales, you’ve worked for Symantec, you’ve led teams at Oracle and Sun, now you’re the senior VP of a high flying cyber security startup called Threat Quotient. What do you do? Tell us some of the things. Again, on your podcast we asked the question, “What do you do to stay fresh” but give us some insights. What should the young women listening to today’s podcast who are looking to move into sales leadership roles, tell us some things that they should be doing to help themselves advance their career.

Gigi Schumm: Absolutely. I love what Christine said that she has picked up from both Warren Buffet and Bill Gates about the fact that how much time they spend reading and reading all kinds of different things. This I think is a particular challenge for women who are in those years where they’re having children and they’ve got families. There’s lots of studies that show that women still even with supportive spouses that they end up carrying a lot of the brunt of doing the work at home with the house and the families and the kids, and then their job. So the first thing to go usually is themselves whether it’s taking care o themselves, exercising, meditating, whatever helps you to stay energetic and grounded and motivated but also this concept that we’ve been talking about, investing in yourselves from a learning perspective.

I start out the day by getting up early and I watch the financial news. Most of it is about where interest rates are going and is the dollar weak or strong and it’s got a little bit of the political news built in there but also the companies are releasing earnings and is the Dow up or down and to me, it’s a way to start the day with a broader perspective than just my job and my company. I also am a big reader, I have a pretty voracious appetite for reading all kinds of things from… I just came back from a week at the beach where reading novels and frothy kind of things all the way to reading biographies and just different books of interest, self-help books and things like that.

There’s lots and lots of different ways you can learn and I love the point that Christine made about don’t just think about specifically those resources that are going to help you get better skills for your job, just to help you more broadly to understand what’s going on in the world and frankly make you a more interesting person. That will help you in sales because it’ll help you relate to all different kinds of people.

Fred Diamond: Once again, the Institute for Excellence in Sales is going to be launching our Women in Sales Leadership Forum. Actually, if you listen to this podcast after it came out, our program is underway. We’re going to be holding at least two consorts per year. I want to thank Gigi Schumm for the great insights today. Again, I’ve mentioned this a number o times through the podcast, Gigi is at the top of her game as a sales leader after a great career running sales teams at Symantec, Oracle and Sun. Right now she’s the senior VP of sales for Threat Quotient, she’s based here in Reston, Virginia. Listen to her previous podcast on Sales Game Changers, you can find it at salesgamechangerspodcast.com/gigischumm.

The post SPECIAL EPISODE 008: Advice, Insights, and Wisdom from Past Episodes with World-Class Women in Sales Leaders Featuring Gigi Schumm first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 061: Chris Tully Brings Lessons Learned at Xerox, Dell and CoStar to Emerging Firms Looking to Get their Sales Programs Going

CHRIS’ CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Don’t spend your time trying to fix all the things that you can’t do. Find out what you can do, what you’re good at, what you’re repetitively good at and do the very best you can to do that thing. If you do that, good things happen.“

Chris Tully has had a 30 year history of leading sales teams at public tech companies such as Xerox and Dell and CoStar.

He also moved into the commercial remote sensing industry at GOI.

Currently he’s an outsourced VP of Sales with Sales Acceleration.

Find Chris on LinkedIN!

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

Chris Tully: I do something I think is pretty unique. I’m an outsourced VP of sales with an organization called Sales Acceleration and what we do is we work with owners, founders of mid-sized growth oriented companies to help them scale their top line revenue. We do sales projections, we assess and re-organize sales teams, we design and implement compensation plans, we work to hire needed sales resources, we build and document a customized sales process for their business, we work to integrate that sales process with a CRM system so they can more effectively manage their opportunities and on a fractional basis we operate to help them manage the sales team.

What I think is really exciting about this is that the diversity of the client assignments is just remarkable. There are people doing things out there in this market I had no idea or actually they’re doing those things, there’s some very unique businesses out there so the diversity is important to me, the opportunity to work very closely with business owners and CEO’s of growth oriented companies to make an impact on their growth strategy and to help them realize whatever their growth ambitions are. Often times they’re driven by personal desires to grow the business in a certain way and I just love that.

Fred Diamond: Very good. We mentioned some of the brand named tech companies that you worked at, some of the biggest in the industry, of course Xerox and Dell. How’d you first get into sales as a career? Again, we mentioned you have a 30 year sales career, tell us about your beginning. What first got you into sales?

Chris Tully: I was an English major in college and while I learned a lot about how to learn and how to be adaptable, I wasn’t going to teach and I wasn’t going to be a journalist and I wasn’t going to go into some of the pre-professional things – a lot of English majors became lawyers. I needed to find a way to eat and pay the rent so I did a lot of people facing jobs to do that. I moved to Houston in the early 80’s after college and I really needed a job. The time the oil and gas market was really starting to boom and I was about halfway through an MBA in finance and I ended up as basically the subject matter expert for a computer services company that needed some help supporting their clients and some of their financial planning applications, so I spent probably 6 or 8 months with this company and I realized that the sales reps were having a whole lot more fun than I was having.

They had more freedom of movement, they were making more money and I talked to my boss at the time and said, “You know? I’m sure I could really help you as a sales person” and he started asking me all the questions and things that I had done before in my life and where I had served people in a variety of different positions. He finally said, “Well, OK. On a provisional basis we’ll let you take a crack at this.” so I ended up getting partnered with the #1 sales rep in the district at the time who was overworked and was unable to properly cover his accounts.

I honestly didn’t really know what I was doing, I put my hand in this guy’s shoulder and kind of followed him around for 6 or 8 months and learned how to interact with clients on an effective basis, how to develop an account, how to overcome objections, how to teach clients what they could do with our products and services. We had together a couple of really good years, after which I got recruited away to join Xerox where I got what I would consider to be an exceptional grounding in fundamental sales training, management development practices and had an opportunity to be there for 16 years.

Fred Diamond: Were you with Xerox in Houston or did you move here to Virginia?

Chris Tully: I started in Houston, I was in a division that married up very high speed reprographic engines with laser technology and it was a printing system’s division product that effectively was high speed output devices for big computing systems.

Fred Diamond: We actually have a number of people who’ve been on the podcast who were either consultants or engineers and they said, “I can do that. I can be in front of the customer, I know more about them, I can help bring some of the solutions to them.” I didn’t know that you started in finance but it makes a lot of sense because you’ve had a great career. Again, moving into Xerox of course at the time was the gold standard for sales and of course they had some of the world class sales training. What are some of the lessons you learned from some of your first few sales jobs that have stuck with you today and that you impart on some of the people that you lead?

Chris Tully: Sales is really not about you or your company. It’s really about whatever wonderful widget it is that you have. It’s really about learning enough about the client’s pain and their problems to be able to actually help them and so when you learn that, if you’re not asking questions to understand what’s really at the root of the customer’s problem, you can have what you think is the greatest solution in the world and it won’t be any good at all. It would be very difficult to advance that sale. That was one thing that stuck with me for a lot of years.

Another one is that for me, at least, and I think for a lot of people the most difficult part of the sales process is really not prospecting. It’s not finding people to talk to, it’s qualifying properly. I think and I certainly have experienced this, that sales get lost when we don’t qualify properly. We spend time talking to people who can say no but they can’t say yes and then we wonder why the deal never closes. For me, really learning was go figure out who the right people are that can actually make a decision and spend your time with them and try to cut through the ones that are not able to help you.

Nobody wins every deal, so to some degree the numbers game that we talk about and are taught from time to time, “You have to have x number of opportunities in order to get to some that are qualified in order to get to some that close” that is absolutely relevant, and in my own practice, it’s something that I look at today to try to make sure that I’m on track for what I’m trying to accomplish. You should have a sales process that’s repeatable. In other words, there should be some ability to follow a road map that gets you to the end of the road with the right result. CRM systems are your friend, it’s very difficult for you to manage things in your head.

I didn’t have a CRM system when I was a sales rep at Xerox in 1980 or whatever year it was and so the tools that are out there today are much of a help to help you stay on track. Probably the last thing is in terms of lessons that Arnold Palmer quote that people always repeat about that golf is a game of inches and the most important ones are the six inches in between your ears, that’s true about sales, it absolutely is. Sales can be very lonely and you have to believe in and trust yourself. I went through a couple of tough patches early in my sales career we’ll talk about at some point later on where you really have to believe in yourself or things just go off the rails.

Fred Diamond: Yeah. A couple things you said there, if you don’t have the pipeline, pipeline’s got to be constantly rich and fresh. One of the words that keeps coming through on the Sales Game Changers podcast is mindset. There’s going to be times when you’re down, there’s going to be time when you have things to deal with at home, things at the company, if you will, but that’s no excuse. You need to continue being focused. Chris, tell us a little more about yourself. What are you specifically an expert in? Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Chris Tully: Sure. One thing that I have in my background that’s a bit unique is that I haven’t actually worked in two businesses that are the same from one job to the next, if that makes sense. In other words, I’ve been in the document production and solutions business, I’ve been in the hardware and software sales business, I’ve been in the remote sensing business, I’ve been in the commercial real estate information services business, I’ve spent some time and managed security services and each of them has something really unique about it.

What I learned early on is that for me at least, it was less important to be a subject matter expert in the technology and much more important to figure out how to connect the dots between the businesses to figure out what they have in common. I’m really curious, so in a client engagement I ask a lot of questions. I was taught early on that you shouldn’t talk about your product until you absolutely had to and until you knew enough about the client to know if you could help them. What I focus on is I need to know first if I’m capable in my offerings at actually helping a client or not and then if I can’t, who is? Because I’ve come to believe that there’s a lot of value in introducing a client to somebody that can help them and be of service to them whether I get the business or not. I’ve also learned in the process of some of these different roles I’ve been in to connect the lessons learned from one engagement and bring them into the next.

I have made, Fred, every mistake in the book over 30 years and I’m really good at avoiding them now so I know what doesn’t work. In terms of adjusting strategy, I think that people that I work with or have worked with would say, “Chris can figure out pretty quickly whether we’re capable of winning and adjusting strategy accordingly.” There was a time in my career where I had written down Jack Welch’s six rules and one of them stuck with me which is that if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

Understanding your competitive advantage and figuring out very quickly whether or not it’s applicable in the situation that you’re in, because honestly if you’re in sales, you have your time, you have your relationships, you have your intellectual horsepower, your persistence, all that sort of capital. You have to spend all that stuff as wisely as you can.

Fred Diamond: I‘m sure you’ve had some impactful sales career mentors who have helped you and guided you to your career of sales leadership. Talk about one or two of the sales mentors and how they impacted your career.

Chris Tully: I’ll give you a couple of them, they’re actually both from Xerox. When I left the field sales organization in Houston, my aspiration was to become a district sales manager and at the time, if you wanted to do that with Xerox you had to take a trip through US headquarters up in Rochester, New York and you had to demonstrate that you had more than one or two skills. When I was there I had the experience of working for a woman named Linda Becker who ran the printing systems marketing organization and she taught me an enormous amount about persistence in the face of long odds.

She was the smartest, hardest working, most articulate and creative person I had ever come in contact with up to that point and together against very long odds we developed and implemented the most successful, competitive attack program that that business had had up to that point. I appreciated very much the energy and enthusiasm, the spirit that she brought into the workplace every single day. It was one of these people that had never seen a problem that couldn’t be overcome and so she was a tremendous mentor for me in sort of helping me through some of the issues we were having at the time in the business. We’ve remained friends ever since.

I also worked for a while for a guy named Joe Mulcahy who ran the major accounts program for Xerox for many years and he taught me of the value of long term customer relationships. Joe with responsibility for the major account program for Xerox at the time had long standing, deep relationships with many customers and many people in the business that turned out to be tremendous supporters, both of him and our district over time so it was a pleasure to work for people like that.

Fred Diamond: For the Sales Game Changers listening on today’s podcast, Chris, we have a lot of younger professionals. People who are just getting started in sales or have come to the realization that they’re pretty good, they want to take their career to the next level. Again, we’ve referred to Xerox a number of times before. A lot of the people listening to the podcast may not have known about Xerox’s history but for people in the 70’s and 80’s Xerox was probably the best place to work for in technology sales.

Chris Tully: Certainly at the time, they also made an enormous investment in sales and marketing training which is, as you know, as leader at Institute for Excellence in Sales, is very difficult to find in big companies. They took it seriously, they put a lot of time, energy, effort and money into it and they also spent a lot of time building future sales leaders so there was a very disciplined process to figure out who are the future sales leaders in this company, what do they need to know in order to make them successful, how can we challenge them by giving them stretch assignments and then what can we do to support them once they get into the role. For me, at the time as a young sales leader and certainly as a young sales person in both of those roles it was a wonderful place to work and I learned a ton.

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

Chris Tully: I think the first one relates a little bit to pipeline management and prospect management. When you have a sales team and your pipeline as a business leader is the roll up of all of the opportunities that people are working on and you happen to be looking at your report in sales force or whatever other CRM system you use, you’re taking the information that your sales team has populated upwards and you’re essentially saying, “OK, our business is going to develop and deliver this amount of revenue in the next quarter or for the year or what have you.

It’s great to be able to have that summary view but in other things, the devil is very much in the details so as a sales leader, really ringing out the truth about each of those opportunities whether they are actually closeable, whether they can be closed in the time frame that the salesperson has said they can be closed and whether they’re worth as much as the sales rep has said that they believe that they’re worth is a huge challenge and you spend a lot of time on it. At the same time, if you get it right, it’s really reassuring to know that the pipeline quality is actually really good. It just takes a while to get to that point and a sales leader can really struggle when their sales pipeline quality is not good.

For me, it’s worth spending a lot of time on. The second one relates to people and adaptability and I think it’s difficult to find really good sales candidates that are adaptable across industries. In other words, if you have somebody that may be selling in the healthcare sector, is it possible to get that individual to move across into an adjacent market or a completely different market and have them succeed? It’s that part of the recruiting matrix has been challenging for me and I think a lot of other sales leaders probably wrestled with that, too.

Fred Diamond: I’m glad you brought up the first one about the honesty in the pipeline. As a consultant, as a marketing leader and a sales leader I’ve sat in many meetings where I know that the rep had no chance of making a deal, “Oh, it’s 60%. They responded to my email.” It’s either 0 or 100 so…

Chris Tully: You bring up a really good point. I won’t pick on sales force but CRM systems have gotten us used to thinking that the weighted value of the pipeline is actually what we should be looking at and the reality is it’s binary. You either won the deal or you didn’t win the deal. You can’t win 60% of the deal, there’s no way to get to that. Using CRM systems, it’s gotten a lot easier.

They’re tremendously powerful systems, they’re very easy to use and I would tell my own clients, “You have to have one, you also have to understand what it’s not going to do for you, which is not going to replace the due diligence around the opportunity that you need to do as a sales leader with your rep to understand what the chances of that thing actually happening really are.”

Fred Diamond: One of the things that we see, too, with marketing automation type software is you mentioned at the very beginning sales is hard and you got a lot of rejection, you have a lot of rejection, you’ve got a lot of no’s, if you will. For a lot of the people if they see that someone has done something, opens an email, downloaded a white paper, there’s a tendency to celebrate that as if it’s really critically important in the sales process and bump up the pipeline without realizing that it might take you 50 touches to get to the prospect as their need, you mentioned pain in the very beginning, are you talking to the right people, etcetera.

One thing that I’m proud about with the Sales Game Changers podcast is we’ve had a lot of feedback from younger sales professionals who were kind of like, “Gee, I didn’t realize that there’s all these steps involved, and I didn’t realize that that really isn’t 50% because they downloaded a white paper. It’s nice but I didn’t realize I still need to do this, this, this times 20 to get to the point of a new deal.”

Chris Tully: What we teach as Sales Acceleration advisers is this: you have to have a repeatable sales process, yes. You have to have a sales process that’s tie to your CRM system so that you can see a sale unfold over a period of time. Most importantly, you have to have a set of gating questions inside each of those steps that will enable you to know if you’ve really cleared it or not. It could be as simple as, “OK, did you identify the decision maker.” “Yes, I did.” “Well, who is it?” “It’s Fred Diamond” “Did you meet Fred Diamond?” “No, I didn’t meet Fred Diamond.” “OK. Well, you can’t get out of that qualification phase until you go meet Fred Diamond.” Does that make sense?

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

Chris Tully: I was working as the head of sales for a commercial satellite imagery company. For those that don’t know what that is, they’re commercial satellites that fly around the earth and take pictures of every spot on the earth and sell the imagery back to government customers, they sell them to mapping companies, people that do the maps that are on your phone, that imagery is commercial imagery. It’s not classified, it’s sharable, it’s very high quality.

GOI at the time was the gold standard for the most accurate, best quality commercial satellite imagery available in the market and over a period of a year or so, I was very involved with one of our sales managers who was responsible for our commercial sector as opposed to government or international to renegotiate a multi-year agreement with a commercial client that you know and many others know that increased the value of the deal from somewhere in the neighborhood of about 60 million to well over 100 million so at the time it was the biggest deal that I had ever worked on and he had ever worked on, that the company had seen, and we over what felt like 5 years but was probably more like about 13 or 14 months renegotiated the most complicated and longest negotiation cycle to the point where at the end of it, everybody inside the company and with the client was very happy with the deal, they felt like they both won despite the complexity of the deal.

These things, as they unfold, you don’t know from one day to the next are you making progress, are you stepping backward or what. For us at the time it was a marquee win, can’t tell you the company name but it was just an exceptionally valuable win for the company and one that required not only the customer to agree to all of the things that they agreed to but for the executive team and our company to agree that yes, in fact, we’re really going to do this deal which was the biggest one we paid attention to at the time.

Fred Diamond: Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Chris Tully: I don’t know if spending time as a financial application specialist and an English major is like a double whammy or not but I was pretty convinced I could do anything and I found out at 25 or so that this was a lot harder than I had given it credit for. I was selling high speed laser printing solutions, these things were 400 thousand bucks a piece and up, the sale cycle was very long, it was complicated. It required you to sell essentially to the CFO, the CIO, the CEO depending on the type of company and certainly through the data center operations organizations and I hit a patch probably in my 3rd year of doing this where absolutely nothing was working and it was hard to get up every morning and go because I’d spent my time trying to develop prospects, I’d gotten them developed, I thought I had one and things would stop.

“Sorry, the funding went away.” “Sorry, we decided not to upgrade.” “Sorry, we bought your comp-” all the objections that you could hear in the world and I was kind of shaken. My head had gone, “Boy, am I in the right spot, yes or no?” and things eventually did turn although that third year it took a while. It took probably three quarters for things to kind of resell. Some of it was external circumstances but we talked about earlier this game is in your head a lot and if you lose confidence in your ability, even for a brief period of time, the fly will affect meaning it takes you a while to get restarted. I was reading everything I could get my hands on, I was listening to tapes in the car, I was going to networking opportunities to try and learn from people. I was role playing sales situations, I was doing all that and it was for a little while, not working.

When it finally started to turn, I was like, “Hallelujah! This is actually the right career.” I still remember, I was reading Zig Ziglar, I was reading Tom Hopkins, I was reading all the books I could get my hands on and I still remember this affirmation that Tom Hopkins was espousing at the time and it went something like, “Today I will win. Why? I’ll tell you why. I have faith, courage and enthusiasm, success and happiness will be mine because I walk, talk, act, think and believe like the successful person I am becoming.”

I was like, I needed to do that every day to kind of get up and rolling, and eventually things did turn.

Fred Diamond: That is a great story and I actually just made some notes here. Affirmations are big, visualization’s big. The reality is if you’re talking about working with a company like Xerox, Dell, CoStar, a lot of the people listening to today’s Sales Game Changers podcast are working for great companies. You’re in the big leagues, so you have a lot of competition. Customers are changing – we’ll talk about that in a little bit, but the whole concept about how the customer gets his or her information has changed so you’ve got to compete at a high level and you can’t take off because your competition’s not taken off, and your company expects a lot from you to be working for those types of blue chip companies and even a mid-sized company that’s growing or emerging.

One thing that we’ve learned in the Sales Game Changers podcast is your company is making a big investment in you. There’s a lot of expectations of how you’re going to achieve and you are an athlete. Gary Newgard was one of our guests and he said this is the selling for big brand name and technology, it’s the NFL of sales. I was talking to Anthony Robbins today who was also a guest on episode #09 and we talked about that, that when you’re selling for big brands and markets that are competitive like government or healthcare, it’s equivalent to the NFL etcetera.

Chris Tully, what is the most important thing you want to get across to junior selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Chris Tully: Fred, I wish I could distill it to the one thing, but for me it’s not been one thing, it’s been several so I’ll go with several. I think the first thing is particularly for a young sales rep, whatever comfort zone you have, get out of it. Go figure out something different, a different approach. Don’t be afraid to take what I would call a smart risk. Try something that you’re not sure is going to work and see if it does. There are lots of creative ways to reach prospects, your presenters at IES talk about these things a lot, and so what you find is that there are many different ways to communicate.

You actually have to find a way to be good at several of them, but try something you haven’t tried before particularly when you’re looking for new business. Don’t be afraid to learn from people that are smarter and more experienced than you are. You have a mentor program that you’ve run at IES over time, there are plenty of people out there that are willing and able to share what they know, particularly if you’re a young sales person or sales manager especially take them up on it. Becoming a sales manager is a really tough transition to make, particularly if you are taking on a leadership role on a team that used to be on the team and now you’re the leader on the team. Go find somebody who’s done that, ask them what the hard spots were in that. Probably the last thing is really fundamental.

It’s a little bit like saying, “Do your homework.” You have to do the work, you have to make the calls and above all, this came from a guy that was telling me yesterday that starting up in commercial real estate is a two year period where not much happens, don’t quit. Don’t give up. If you’re doing the right things – first of all, make sure you’re doing the right things but do not give up because persistence will trump strategy most of the time.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned in the early part of your career when you hit the three year mark and you were trying to get past an abyss that you were in and you started reading some of the classic sales motivators like Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. What are some things you do today to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Chris Tully: I think there’s plenty out there in the world. You know this because I’ve been part of IES for a while, I like going to the Institute for Excellence in Sales. I think that you bring content to people who have made professional sales, business development, sales leadership their thing and it’s difficult to find the kind of world-class content in one place. I like digging in a little bit with John Asher as an example, as presented a couple of times. John’s got some books out there that are terrific to read.

Mark Hunter does a regular program on prospecting, paying attention to Mark’s newsletter, digging into the links he’s got there to find out what’s new in his mind. There’s a guy named Keith Rosen who has a sales coaching practice, he’s written a book on really learning how to coach and making that your skill set if you’re a sales leader. I like to read a lot, I’m recently re reading The Challenger Sale again, there’s a lot in The Challenger Sale that’s applicable across a lot of different industries.

I’m also reading The Strength Based Leadership book, many people have taken The Strength Finders. There’s a version of that out called Strength Based Leadership which talks about the strengths that you really need to lead businesses. Lastly, networking with people who are at the top of their game if there are industry organizations that you can join that will expose you to other people who are subject matter experts or top performers in their particular field. The time that I invest with those types of people to me is very valuable.

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

Chris Tully: LinkedIn is an exceptional tool and I’m working in 2018 to really be very intentional about my LinkedIn relationships to see where my strongest connections are and see if I can find a way to make them stronger. I’m also focused on very deliberately trying to leverage a CEO outreach program. What I do in the end really helps the CEO or the founder of a small to mid-sized company and the more that I can interact with those folks directly, I think the more easily and quickly I can help them.

Fred Diamond: Why have you continued in a career in sales? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Chris Tully: If you’re involved in a long and complex sale cycle, after you have either overcome or eliminated all the obstacles associated with trying to get that deal and you’ve managed to handle all of the objections associated with it and you finally actually get ink on paper for several million dollar transaction or whatever the size of it is that happens to be big for your business and your product line, there’s absolutely nothing like the feeling that you have when the thing finally gets done. I think that’s been an exciting thing that’s kept me around and has kept me involved.

There’s nothing like it. I also really like to lead people and I fundamentally believe that a sales leader exists to help his team become stronger and better prepared and more effective. Some of us are wired such that it’s almost more rewarding for us to see someone that we’re responsible for succeed than it is to do it ourselves and for me, that’s been the case. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to lead sales teams and see somebody that came in with a certain set of skills get better and achieve their own goals and do what they wanted to do with their life, so that’s been a motivator for me.

I guess in the end I kind of like the fact that despite all the difficulties and some of the issues that you have to deal with, sales is still one of the few professions out there where your creativity and your desire and your persistence are the only limiters, really the only ones that limit your income and your career growth. That’s getting me around for a while.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought to share to the Sales Game Changers listening around the world to inspire them today.

Chris Tully: I believe in the end that the lord has put us on this earth to do the very best we can with our time and our talents for his glory and for the betterment of others. I really fundamentally believe that. What that translates to for me is figure out what you’re really good at, not all the things you’re not good at but figure out what you’re really good at and go do more of that. Don’t spend your time trying to fix all the things that you can’t do, find out what you can do, what you’re good at, what you’re repetitively good at and do the very best you can to do that thing. If you do that, good things happen.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 061: Chris Tully Brings Lessons Learned at Xerox, Dell and CoStar to Emerging Firms Looking to Get their Sales Programs Going first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

EPISODE 038: Outreach’s Pleasant Rich Applied These Skills Learned as an Educator into World-Class SaaS Sales Success

Pleasant Rich is the regional vice president of sales with Outreach IO. As the enterprise account executive for Outreach, her goal is to uncover the needs of clients within their sales workflow, develop a plan to meet their goals and objectives and ensure that the plan is executed effectively. Pleasant’s had a great experience in her career originally starting out as a teacher and then eventually moving into sales with a long list of accomplishments.

Pleasant says, “I’ve had the great privilege of growing up in a family of people that loved fiercely, worked hard, and taught me the value of the life well-lived. These 3 things have influenced me in every stage of my life, especially in the roles I have had in my career in education, as well as sales.”

She also says, “I like to think of myself as a doctor (without the extensive college career or knowledge of any sort in medicine), as the philosophy of any good sales person should be to discover the ailments, and partner with the patient in treatment that leads to optimal health.”

Find Pleasant on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Pleasant, I’m thrilled to have you here on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Why don’t you fill in the blanks, tell us a little more about you that we need to know.

Pleasant Rich: I’m incredibly humbled to be here today because as I said in my intro, 5 years ago I was a teacher. This was the most unlikely spot for me to be in, sitting here. But what I really realized and I think what people ask me about all the time is how in the world I made this jump from teaching. I’ve seen more parallels between the two careers than I think more people do.

It’s been an incredible journey to learn about the selling process and to become an expert on that, but also to see how much it’s been applied from the things that I learned in the classroom as well.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales? How did you make that transition from teaching into sales as a career?

Pleasant Rich: It was close to the end of the school year. I was five years into my career, I just finished my masters, I was thinking about an administration position because I had my post-grad degree. A couple of the teachers were talking about retirement and how they had either 8 more years, they had 12 more years and they were all just looking forward to retirement and I thought, “Man, is this what I can do? Is this my lifeline calling for the next 25 years or do I need more? Do I need more change, do I need more fast pace?”

And that’s always what I’d been about, so that’s when I really started deciding, “Is this what I want to stay in, education? As much as I love the profession, I love the kids and I did really well, did I want to try my hand with something different?”

So poked around and found a job with an education company. I was still supporting education, I was still involved in the school system, involved with kids, involved with teachers and training them and supporting them, but I was also selling and travelling and like all sales people, making a little more money, too. That was really what drove me to change out of my profession originally.

Fred Diamond: Very good. You’re the regional vice-president for Outreach. Tell us a little more about Outreach, tell us specifically what you sell today and then tell us a little bit about what excites you about that.

Pleasant Rich: I’m incredibly passionate about what we sell, and I think that’s the reason why we’ve grown so much. A little story to tell you what we sell: when I first got into my selling path and my selling career my biggest challenge was organization. I was that teacher that had all of the papers stacked up on the desk, I had all of the things, it was a challenge for me. Getting into my sales career I realized it was still a challenge for me. Organization, being able to keep up on top of everything, all the tasks, all the things I need to do, all the prospecting, all the pipeline management.

I actually found Outreach, or it came to me through my old manager and I loved it, I fell in love with it, I realized how much it helped me, how much it solved the challenge for me. That’s really what we sell – a solution that enables sales people to be more productive. To manage their pipelines, to manage their day-to-day to make them more effective, to give more visibility within that black box of “what to do you” to get to certain results, and it has been game changing for so many organizations that it keeps us growing, it keeps people passionate, it creates addicts of the product. It’s been a phenomenal career move to go here.

Fred Diamond: Tell us some of the companies you sell to. What types of companies are customers of yours at Outreach?

Pleasant Rich: It’s a wide variety. We have old-school selling companies that have been doing the same thing forever and they’re very technology-hesitant and this is a brand new way of thinking to insert something into their tool stack that helps them manage their workflow, manage their pipeline outside of their CRM.

We have large Fortune 500 companies, we have very small startups. We have the whole gamut, all different verticals and different channels. We work with AE’s, SDR’s, account managers, all different types of people within the organizations. Anyone that has a process that they need to follow.

Fred Diamond: Who’s your primary customer, is it the CMO or the chief revenue officer or VP of sales?

Pleasant Rich: That’s a great question. The VP’s of sales are typically our entry point because they are the ones that are most focused on driving that productivity and driving the revenue for their team. Sign off is usually Chief Revenue Officers but marketing also really comes into play because the sales marketing alignment’s always a conversation that you hear come up. When you give someone access to build that alignment even further then more hands want to come in the pot, so they’re always a part of the conversation, too.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned in your introduction that you had been a teacher and you’ve noticed a lot of things in common with being a teacher and being in sales. What were some of the key lessons that you learned when you first made it into sales that you took back from your career as a teacher?

Pleasant Rich: I will tell you one of the things that I think has made me the most successful but was the biggest thing to learn: I had to treat each person like I did a student in my classroom in the sense that I was not just looking at the classroom as a whole, I’m not just looking at the market as a whole. I’m looking at each person and understanding where their challenges lie, where their gaps are, where I need to adjust my conversation level and adjust my level of education to them to get them to where they need to be, and some are further along than others.

I would have a classroom that was filled with gifted kids and special needs kids and people that were on level and so it was totally differentiated with the way that I approached every student. That’s how I approach every conversation that I have now, and while it’s easy to fall into a pattern and the same script and the same demos and the same discoveries, it’s really easy for us to fall into those patters of sales professionals.

It’s really important to make sure that we’re differentiating based on who we’re talking to and making sure that we’re adjusting specific needs. That comes, of course, with great discovery. That comes with understanding the market, understanding the vertical that you’re in and really being able to identify what the challenge is that your customer is having.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Pleasant Rich: Mine is definitely being able to diagnose challenges and problems and situations. I’ve seen that in my sales career when it comes to working with specific clients but I also see it now with the teams that I manage. Being able to really listen and to hone in on the pieces that I know can be changed, modified or tweaked, and I think that that’s a really important key characteristic because especially for sellers that are top, you look at your top performers that often times are doing really well, you can always diagnose something and identify an area of weakness that you can support, change and optimize.

That’s going to make you even more successful. That’s really where I’ve been able to hone in my skills, is talking with customers, identifying with their needs, even with ones that I’m building relationships with to continue to add value by understanding where they’re at by supporting them and growing even further.

Fred Diamond: Based on your background as a teacher and how you talked about customizing or focusing on the individual, how you approach each individual, do you find people are responsive to that? Do you find that your customers are willing to interact with you that way?

Pleasant Rich: I think that you have to be up front with people. I hear a lot of conversations. I do a lot of coaching with my team, I do a lot of coaching with other sellers and you sometimes find these conversations, especially in this world that we have now with inside sales and the SDR world and the AE world where people will get on conversations and try to just jump into this, “I’m going to figure everything out about you.”

And I think you have to be very respectful of people that are taking time to talk to you to set the stage for what those conversations are going to be about. What your questions are going to be about, what the goal is because you have to know what level of understanding someone’s coming to the conversation, coming to the table with before you start digging into, “tell me all about your deepest, darkest secrets within your organization.” I think they are responsive when you set the tone in that way of, “I’m doing this to maximize the time that we have and to be the most beneficial to you.”

Fred Diamond: Based on your teaching background I’m sure you’ve had many people who’ve helped you along the way. Tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career.

Pleasant Rich: I’ve had the privilege of having two people that I think have been probably the most influential in my career path. The first one is my VP of sales, his name is Mark Kosoglow and he’s actually the one that hired me straight from teaching without any selling background to link to my name. He’s a super competitive person and he always wants to hire top people and he wants to be the top, which is one of the things I love about him, but he hired me straight out of the classroom.

He’s invested so much time into supporting me and growing me as a professional, providing opportunities which I think is a really key thing for a leader to do, is actually provide your team with opportunities to grow, to expand their area of expertise, because we’re very focused on protecting sales time which is obviously key because that’s what our revenue’s tied to. But opening up those doors of opportunity to experience different things outside of a person’s sales role is going to grow them as an individual.

The second person that I really attribute a lot of my success to is a man named Stan Hansen and he has been phenomenal. He comes from a lot of companies that we worked for, he’s led huge numbers of sales teams and grown and been super successful. Stan was now at Outreach – he doesn’t work for Outreach but when I was first starting in Outreach he was my first big client that I pulled on, over a hundred seats. I remember our first conversation, I was super nervous but he was so upfront with my in the type of person he was and we built a relationship throughout this long deal cycle.

That is the kind of person – and this kind of ties into some of the advice later on – but being able to find someone that is willing to invest in you outside of your current job is a key thing because they provide so much more valuable insight and a whole wealth of resources that you would never had access to. He and I had a great relationship, we talk and we’ll talk shop and that’s one of the best experiences to, “What are you doing? How can I learn from you in what you’re being successful with?”

Fred Diamond: That’s great, having two mentors. Curiously you mentioned your team. Do you provide mentoring to your team? Do you feel of yourself as being a coach or a mentor to your people?

Pleasant Rich: I absolutely do. I think it’s an incredibly valuable thing to have a manager that provides coaching insight so I make it a point each week to have a coaching session with my team. One of my other bosses, he likes to say, “You treat your team as a hospital. Your hospital is filled with people that are in intensive care that need lots of attention and coaching and support, but then you also have people that are coming in for maintenance and so you have to balance the time that you’re coaching and supporting with them, like a hospital.”

And so that’s what I like to do. Everyone gets a week. Once a week we touch base, we talk about discoveries, because especially in our industry everything’s changing all the time and so we’re constantly evolving, constantly moving forward and as things grow needs change, new products come out, we’re addressing the market a little bit differently, so coaching is always a valuable part of a conversation.

Fred Diamond: What are the two biggest challenges you faced today as a sales leader? What are two of the challenges that you deal with either facing customers or internally?

Pleasant Rich: There are a couple of things, so I think the first thing is the – especially the industry that I’m in. I think that there’s a challenge with the way that buyers buy, so when you have a conversation with someone that’s in a SaaS company, out in San Francisco or Seattle that’s just inundated with technology companies, tool stacks, tool technology, they buy these things every single day and so that’s not a challenge.

But where we’re really trying to go and get into more of the greenfield area, it’s a new experience for a lot of people. So being able to coach them through the buying process especially when it’s not a light item thing in their budget, it’s not a CRM tool, it’s something that we’re creating a space in. I think it’s a unique time that we’re in because we’re creating that space, but that still is a challenge, helping buyers to understand the process and being able to help my team, coach them through that as well. I think that’s one.

The second thing is that it’s always about competition, right? So competition and market saturation and buyer education. We face a lot of that as well, really educating buyers in what we are, what space we address. I think you have to be really clear cut in your vision and your value propositions which some companies are really good at, some have a real big challenge of honing it in and tailoring it to be very direct specifics so that way it’s easy for your buyers to understand what you are, what space you fill and so that you’re not being compared to other parts of the market.

Fred Diamond: Pleasant, what is the number one specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? Pleasant, take us back to that moment.

Pleasant Rich: The moment that I specifically remember is when we were a smaller company. Even still now we have these is separate pods but we used to have something called “Boot” and we’d have it once a week and everyone would get together as a company and we’d talk about the high and the low of the week. I remember it was January 2016 and all of us flew up to Seattle, we were maybe 40 people at the time and we’re standing around the room doing the “boot” and one of the founders said – and I won’t say the name of the company – but they said, “The high was Pleasant closing this deal.”

And it was the largest deal still in the Outreach history, which I’m still proud about. One of the things that it did is it changed really the product vision that we had, the movement and the momentum that we did, the infrastructure, it helped us to be prepared more for enterprise companies and it helped to move us along in a way that we weren’t necessarily planning for but it was such a great way because it built a better infrastructure to be able to support this large company coming on. It was especially valuable and especially killer for me to have that win because when I first got hired on, I was hired on as the enterprise sales rep with this 10 person company and a year before we were sitting around a room with 10 people and having these big dreams of the wins that we would have and the growth that we would have and as a small town teacher, I’m sitting here thinking, “Holy crap, they just hired me to do this. This is really a huge deal.”

And so I remember standing in that “boot” and hearing that excitement and the win and knowing that the hard work had paid off, the company was the right company and what we were doing mattered.

Fred Diamond: Pleasant Rich, was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Pleasant Rich: [Laughs] I will tell you I have that thought once a month and it’s always the last day of the month because we go on monthly quotas. I hate the last day of the month, every single month, because it is so stressful. We are so competitive, we are always charging after big lofty goals, I am not a loser at all so I don’t lose on my quotas so that was never an option for me.

Every last day of the month was always a stressful day in thinking, “Oh my gosh, if I was just out of sales I wouldn’t have to deal with this.” But then the first day of the month comes and we hit our goal and I’m like, “Oh, I love sales!” [Laughs] so every last day of the month I have that thought process because you are creating revenue for a company which is supporting hundreds of people, right?

That’s your job. If you fail and the rest of your team fails then you’re hurting the company and you’re hurting the livelihoods of other people so it’s a big deal to me, that last day with end of quota.

Fred Diamond: You take the responsibility on the company and that’s the role of sales. Nothing happens until something gets sold, the last person out the door is the sales person, the lights are on because something was sold. That’s a great story, there. Pleasant, what is the most important thing you want to get across to junior sales professionals to help them take their career to the next level?

Pleasant Rich: I would say that the biggest thing they can remember is that your relationships are directly tied to your wallet. Everyone wants to impact their wallet and I’ve met a lot of lone wolves that are out there killing it every single day, but your relationship skills inside your company and outside your company are directly tied to your wallet. I will tell you, there’s things that I see and certain patters. There are sales people that will make the sale, move on and they’re good to go, they move onto the next sale. That’s not good relationship building.

I’ve always made it a point in my career to make sure I maintain and show a level of appreciation to my customers whether I’ve passed them off to a CSM person or an account manager because those people become your champions. And one of the biggest things that you can do for yourself is grow a referral network, and the way you do that is by staying in touch and making sure that even if there are challenges – we don’t like to handle conflicts a lot when we’re done with the sale – but if there are challenges showing that they have a champion inside your organization to make sure that things get handled.

I would also say relationships with inside your organization are so keen important. I make it a point to talk with the CSM’s, to talk with our solutions consultants, to make sure that my relationships within the company are not just based on when I have a problem and I need something fixed but that I’m building this because we’re a team and we are partner within this organization.

That’s a key thing because people want to help out their teammates, they don’t want to fix the problems of the sales people all the time, so if you can build your relationships on the internal level and make sure you maintain that and then make sure that with the relationship with your clients – even ones that don’t become your clients – to show that you’re still going to provide them value outside of getting the contract signed, that’s going to be one of your biggest wins.

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

Pleasant Rich: I read the books, listen to the podcasts, I go to the conferences but I think the best thing I do and the one thing I enjoy the most is talking shop. And talking shop is one of the most valuable learning experiences you can have. You can talk shop with people that are your customers, you can talk shop with people that are within your organization but actually setting aside time to have conversations outside of, “Let’s talk about the product and let’s talk about what we sell.” to “Let’s talk about things that we’re seeing. Let’s talk about things that are working for other people.”

We look at – specifically from my industry – our success managers, they work with our companies all the time who are building out processes, they’re building out playbooks. They’re a great resource to talk shop, “What are you guys seeing that other companies are doing that are successful?” Because then that’s going to help me as a sales professional and it’s going to give me knowledge to be able to pass along to other people that I’m talking to. I think talk shop is a huge piece to growth and sharpening your saw with all varieties of people.

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

Pleasant Rich: I want to solve a problem. I want to solve pipeline problems. [Laughs] because I think that’s one of the things that we see all the time. There’s a challenge of people having lots of opportunities, are they managing those effectively, how effective are they doing it, what are best practices outside of setting meetings, things like that, being able to scale.

Within our own organization that’s the challenge that we’re solving. Using our product, using some best practices, but I want to be able to make it to where an AE can step in and have the playbook that’s going to enable them to be successful from start to finish whether it’s at the initial demo start to sending out the contract, what are the best practices to get these things closed.

That’s a challenge that I see because sales people are pretty disorganized, most of them are. A lot of them are really good at it, depends on the level of your sales person but I want to be able to help and give a playbook to people that are coming into the industry, be able to scale those best practices for being successful.

Fred Diamond: Pleasant, sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Pleasant Rich: You have got to believe in what you sell to stay in this profession and to love it, and to not become complacent. There are people all across sales organizations that are doing what’s necessary, take it the pay checks and we all know those kinds of sellers. But in order to really love it, you have to believe it and you have to really love your job. You have to love your company, you love what you sell.

What keeps me going is when I actually have a problem to solve. I think that’s what I loved about the classroom, was the fulfillment in the relationships that I built. I still walk around, it’s been years since I taught, but now the kids that I used to teach are all adults and it makes me feel terribly old but you have to find fulfillment in that. I get really excited when I know that we’re driving market change, when we’re driving value for our customers, when we’re solving problems because I myself experience those things, problems as a seller. I get it really fulfilled when I’ve built a relationship with someone that they trust me not as a sales person but as a partner with them.

When you achieve that partner status with a person that’s a fulfilling piece. That’s what keeps me going about sales, I think as long as I’m keeping myself in a place where I believe in the company, I believe in what I’m selling and I enjoy the relationships and the partnerships I have then I’m going to be driving to continue to go on this path.

Fred Diamond: Give us one final thought. Give us one final idea for the Sales Game Changers listening today to help them be inspired.

Pleasant Rich: Sales needs diversity. That’s what we need, we need diversity and the diversity that we need is pulling from the experiences that everyone has that are different from everybody else. Because if we have a bunch of sales people that are all focused on the same things and do the same techniques and the same types of scripts, and the same types of processes then people are going to get bored. Our customers are going to get bored, sales is going to become even harder.

I think I’ve been successful because I’ve understood the diversity that I bring to the table and the unique aspects that I have from my teaching background and I can pull those out and apply them to a sales cycle, I can apply them to conversations and it keeps my customers interested. It keeps them thinking, “This is new value that I can now gain from this conversation outside of just learning about this product that they want to sell me.”

And so each person has a unique background. We do have a lot of sales people that come from different careers that are switching over, and while the career might be completely different the skill set that you have can very easily be applied to sales. I think that that’s the key thing, understand what your diversity is, understand what makes you unique from all of the other people in your organization and enhancing those and amplifying those in your sales cycle, in your conversations, to bring more value to someone that doesn’t have that type of diversity within them.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 038: Outreach’s Pleasant Rich Applied These Skills Learned as an Educator into World-Class SaaS Sales Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

EPISODE 026: PennWell’s Paul Andrews Says Becoming Your Industry’s Go-To Expert Is Critical for Sales Success

Paul Andrews is the PennWell Corporation’s chief revenue officer. He oversees the marketing solutions division, sales, and training and development and looks at all companywide revenue streams for growth opportunities, may they be in media, research, data, or live events.

Paul has been in B2B sales for more than 30 years, specializing in online advertising and marketing since 1997. PennWell is a family-owned media business that has been operating for more than 100 years. It has 650 employees worldwide and serves industries such as public safety, oil and gas, and power generation.

Find Paul on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: Tell us some things about you that we need to know.

Paul Andrews: Sure, thanks so much for having me, Fred. I’ve been in B2B sales for the vast majority of my career, recently moved into the chief revenue officer role at PennWell. I’ve been with PennWell a little over four and a half years now, all B2B sales experience, with the focus on online marketing since ’97. I’ve seen a lot of shiny new coins over the past 20 years or so and really just try to stick to the blocking and tackling that I look forward to sharing with you and your listeners today.

Fred Diamond: We’ve had some guests before who’ve been in the media space. You have the role of chief revenue officer, CRO, a relatively new title out there in the marketplace. We’ll talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned, some of the things that you’ve gathered, and how that’s changed over time. But let’s talk about your career in sales. How’d you get into sales as a career?

Paul Andrews: My first position in sales was at that time Bell Atlantic, now Verizon. I helped start the direct marketing listing service. If you were a Direct Marketer, if you wanted to buy listings from the phone company, you came to me. You’re taking me back. I can share that prior to then, I was told I was a natural-born salesperson, but I was in a lot of product and administrative-type roles. I finally took the plunge, and I never looked back.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Tell us a little more about what exactly you’re doing today and what excites you about that.

Paul Andrews: About four and a half years ago I started with PennWell. I created a new division literally from the ground up. Think of [my team] as an in-house ad agency. Everything from web design development to brand identity, anything relating to marketing as well as consulting, helping folks build their business, that’s what my team is all about.

Fred Diamond: And that, I presume, has become an offshoot because of the shifts in media.

Paul Andrews: As a matter of fact, there is a seismic shift in what’s happening in the media industry today. Historically, many media companies relied on the advertising business model, and that’s just getting thrown out the door or seeing everything move to digital versus print advertising. As a result, publishers are looking at diversifying their revenue streams. One major stream are these marketing services. I’m proud to say we’re now in the multimillion-dollar range after less than four years. We’ve been surrounded by really good folks.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Let’s go back to some of your first jobs in sales as a career. Tell us some of the lessons that you’ve carried through in your career based on those first few jobs.

Paul Andrews: The number-one lesson I’ve had, I keep telling people that there are good salespeople and then there are great salespeople, and I think the thing what distinguishes the great from the others is becoming a subject matter expert. Be the go-to person and really be a resource way beyond your own products and services. If somebody’s got a challenge, a question, a problem, I want them to call me, regardless if it’s something that I can sell them. I’ll find someone who can help them. I think it’s important that sales reps, especially folks coming up through the ranks now, start building their own brand. Why should people buy from them? I had a guy call me one day out of the blue and he said, “Paul, you’ve been recommended to me. I understand you’re the guy that gets stuff done,” and it was like, You know what, that is my brand. How do you want to be thought of in your particular industry?

Fred Diamond: Tell us about a person or two if you’d like, a true mentor, how they helped you and how they’ve helped you become more successful.

Paul Andrews: There are two mentors I quote almost on a daily basis. The first person really relates to when I was a sales rep as opposed to getting into sales management. Peg Reca, she was a vice president of sales at Bell Atlantic at that time, and what she taught me was for strategic account planning, to think of that opportunity as a Broadway play. I was scratching my head the first time I heard that, but what it was all about was the team selling approach. I Act 1 with this particular client, what are we going to do? Are we going to bring in the engineer? Are we going to bring in the CFO? How are we going to deal with this particular client versus in Act 2, the second phase of what we’re going to be doing from a planning perspective. So we laid a game plan for the next year in terms of how are we going to interact with this client and, obviously, grow our business.

The second person, who I still speak with today, his name is Paul Mackler. He was the CEO of another media company I worked under. From a sales management perspective, he said, “Paul, never believe the salespeople. Believe the sales numbers.” It’s kind of cold, but when you’re in that role, you hear it all, and at the end of the day there are no surprises in sales—or there shouldn’t be. It has helped me really maintain not only revenue growth but profitability as well. I think that’s a critical element you can’t forget about, profitability, as a salesperson and to really understand the numbers.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about your first sale and a critical lesson from it.

Paul Andrews: It was a $50 sale, and at that time our average revenue per sale was probably anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for advertising orders. This woman called me; she had a coin, and she wanted to promote it on our auction site. I’m going back to 2004, 2005. She was a T-shirt vendor and she had this new coin, wanted to promote it. I could tell just from my interaction with her that she had already run a business, sold it, was entering a new market, she had a business plan, and I was absolutely going to help her grow her business.

I took it, and it was no big deal. That account within two years turned into a quarter of a million dollars, and it was because we helped her build her business. It didn’t feel really good at that time, but looking back it was huge.

Fred Diamond: Did you have any indication that this going to potentially become such a large client for you?

Paul Andrews: I trusted her, and I invested a lot of time. It gets back to becoming that subject matter expert. She had dabbled in online advertising and knew a little bit, and I took it upon myself and my team to really educate her on e-commerce and how she could really grow her business, and as a result it did pay off handsomely for both of us.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to go a little bit off script here. You mentioned that one should become a subject matter expert, become someone who’s truly a resource, if you will. Tell us a little more about your area of expertise. Obviously, you’re a sales game changer or else you won’t be on today’s podcast, and you’ve had a very, very successful career, but tell us a little more about what you’re an expert in.

Paul Andrews: As part of my career I’ve had to reinvent myself quite a few times. Back in 1996 I was actually in the pay-phone division, and there was this thing called cellular usage at that time that was just eating our lunch. Pay phones were going away, so I knew real fast I had to reinvent myself. I could either go into the mobile side of the business at Bell Atlantic or I could go into this thing called the internet. It took me, oh my goodness, like six months to really figure out what the heck I was even selling.

I was actually selling pixels. I couldn’t believe it. I was the person who was selling banner ads in 1997. And the sales process—every time I was across the table, I would get this glazed look. I still get that glazed look depending on how complex a program we’re putting together. But what I realized way back then was that I’m selling a product and a service to people who have no idea what it can do for them, so I had to become expert not only in my own product and service, but just as important, in how do I create this bridge and get them to the point where, not only do they trust in me but, more important, trust in the product and services I was offering.

If I take a step back, what all these means is I always have to be one step ahead, at least one step ahead of my client base. Recently because there’s so much going on in the online arena it’s becoming very, very difficult to keep up. And again, it gets back to those shiny new coins: You have to remember the fundamentals of sales and marketing and stick to it.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment when you thought to yourself “It’s just too hard” or “It’s just not for me”?

Paul Andrews: It took a while. I was scared to death at the beginning of my career. When people were telling me “Hey, you’re an actual born salesperson,” I was afraid to take the plunge. I was making that base pay. Things were feeling good and all of a sudden, “Oh, you’re telling me I have to put money at risk.” Once I took the plunge I never looked back. It’s in my blood.

However, talking about earlier how I reinvented myself, I did question myself. I guess it was about seven years ago. What happened seven years ago? This company called Facebook. We were selling online advertising for years and years and years, and all of a sudden, we started seeing people’s behaviors change. I realized immediately that even online advertising could be jeopardized by all these other platforms from a social media environment. That’s when I made another change in my career, where I really started getting into the marketing side and started working with the manufacturers in the industry and said, ”Okay, you’re struggling with these concepts. How can I help you?” What I found out was, it was really the marriage of sales and marketing, in that I started selling marketing services.

It’s ironic because my customers, my customer base, they are marketers. One of the things I tell all our sales reps and in all our training is that you have to think like a CEO, think like a marketer. I get that sales training is so critical to becoming a truly effective salesperson, but you also have to walk in the shoes of the people you’re selling to. As much as our sales team is reading all of the sales-training manuals, going through training, etc., I have them doing as much of that on the marketing side as well.

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

Paul Andrews: There are so many things. Pay attention to the details. They do make a difference. Stay as close as possible to your customer. One of the things that we do on an institutional basis is every time we win business, I want to know why we won it. Every time we lose business, I want to know why we lose it. In as much as we do all of our training from the consultative approach about “What keeps you up at night?”, “What are your marketing objectives?”, “What are your challenges?”, one of the things that I really like to focus in on at this C-level suite with my customer base is asking them about what’s on their radar screen, what are they looking at in three to five years down the road. The reason we do that is I want to be able to figure out solutions to help them get there.

What we have found is a lot of our competition, they’re dealing with the problems of today. Believe it or not, that’s the easy part. I mean, you have to be creative. You have to do a lot of hard work. But how do we figure out to get ahead of the competition and to ensure that our customer base has success in their markets?

Fred Diamond: Paul, how do you sharpen your saw? What are some of the things you do today to stay fresh and to stay at the top of your game? 

Paul Andrews: The higher you get up in the corporate ladder, the easier it is to stay away from the street and to not carry that bag. The younger sales folks, they get a kick when I will tell them, “Get me into the streets. Get me into the streets. I’ll get on an airplane any time to meet with a customer.” Toward that end is to stay as close as possible, as I said earlier. We had a companywide sales meeting less than a month ago, and one of the things we did was brought in a panel of customers to get feedback, “How are we doing?”

We should have brought in customers who no longer do business with us. It was too much of a love fest. Stay sharp. Don’t hesitate to ask the hard questions, and never tell people what they want to hear. Your competition, there’s a good chance they’re doing that. How are you going to help your customer grow his or her business? If it means telling them some difficult things—two weeks ago, we have a very large customer out of Montreal, and we’re doing all these videos, and I basically had to tell the owner, “You cannot be on videos if you’re thinking of entering the market, because we’re going to be selling your product in the hinterlands of southern Virginia and they are not going to understand your Quebecois accent.” I said, “We will find someone with an Oklahoman accent like the Marlboro Man.”

They get it. They appreciate it. Don’t ever assume. Sometimes you just really have to guide and steer the customer, because that’s what they’re looking for. That’s why they’re hiring you: “Tell me what I need to do.”

Fred Diamond: That’s great advice. You’ve got to take your game up. The customer has so much information or access to information now with social media networks and the internet itself. They probably know more about you before you even get in the door… The other I like that you just said is “Get back on the streets.” There’s so much being done. We talk to a lot of sales leaders who manage young professionals and marketing automation for all its benefits. But just because somebody opened up a white paper doesn’t mean they’re halfway through the track to become a customer. But getting back out on the street, being with the customer, some of the traditional ways that you need to be engaging, are just so important.

Paul Andrews: It could be very daunting, living behind a monitor and looking at spreadsheets, but all those numbers truly come to life when you’re in front of a customer and they’re telling you of the pain points and what you guys are doing well. Do your homework, be prepared, understand their business. Last week I was in Houston, and I was meeting with this company that produces a type of drill for offshore drilling, and in the middle of the lunch he looked at me and he was like, “How do you know that?” I said, “Well, because you just had an IPO and everything about your company is public information.”

And the sales rep who joined me was looking at me. After the meeting I did some coaching. I said, “Don’t be surprised that I knew it. Why didn’t you know it? You have to be prepared.”  Based on those probing questions and open-ended questions, that you don’t necessarily know where a conversation is going to go. At least you need enough information to relate and to understand their business.

Fred Diamond: You’ve got to provide value. There’s no excuse for showing up and not understanding at least what industry the customer’s in and having some critical data points. Paul, what’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Paul Andrews: Tomorrow I’m heading up to New York to accept an award for this initiative on behalf of my team. What we did about a little over a year ago was initiated what we call the PennWell Sales Academy. We are taking recent college grads and putting them through a four-month sales-training program. We bring in outside trainers. We have a ton of volunteers. We have a training and development manager. We’ve graduated 10 reps so far, and about a month from now we have another six graduating.

They’ve brought in the reps who have graduated, have already brought in more than a million dollars in revenue, and it’s really changed the complexion of our sales force. Not only have they done really well, but it has lit a fire under the folks who are in the ranks and may have become what I’ll say is complacent.

Fred Diamond: Sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. You are in an industry that’s totally having to rethink its purpose and how you make money and how you continue to provide value from customers. But why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Paul Andrews: Two reasons. One is I get my energy from people. I love the social interaction. Couple that with growing up in a household where I’m first-generation American and what we did was never good enough. You always had to be better. You always had to strive to succeed. My sister and I, whatever we did, no one was ever satisfied. When you marry the never-being-satisfied with that social interaction, sales was the perfect fit for me. It’s been an absolute passion. One of the things I do when I interview salespeople, to ensure that they’re really in the right career, I ask them what’s more important to them: “Is it more important for you to win the business or to go through the process of selling?” The folks who enjoy the proverbial journey, those are the ones I hire because what I found, for at least myself, is by the time I make the close, it’s almost anticlimactic because I’m already onto the next one. I want people who love the hunt. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take the closer any day of the week, but I like the people who just have the passion running through the blood.

Fred Diamond: What’s a final thought you want to share with the sales professionals listening to today’s podcast?

Paul Andrews: I would tell you all out there to own it. Whatever it is, make it yours so that when you are selling your product or service it is genuine, you believe in it. That’s how you can really start building the trust with your client base. And that’s a wrap.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 026: PennWell’s Paul Andrews Says Becoming Your Industry’s Go-To Expert Is Critical for Sales Success first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 019: Cvent Sales Leader Darrell Gehrt Learned That Simplifying the Message Would Lead Him to Major Sales Gains

DG’s FINAL THOUGHT FOR SALES GAME CHANGERS: I’m going to go back to where it all started, which is you’ve got to work hard. But you can’t just work hard; you have to work smart too. You hear that all the time, and I think as a sales professional you’ve got to sharpen that saw. Doctors go get continuing credits, same with a lot of other professions; why not in sales? Our business changes every single day. You just don’t notice it. The tactics that I use today are radically different than the tactics I used just three to five years ago. It’s massively different. So you have to kind of keep up with it.

Darrell Gehrt, affectionately known as DG, is currently a vice president of sales at Cvent, the largest event technology company in the world, headquartered in the D.C. Metro area. Cvent has several U.S. offices including Dallas, Portland, and Atlanta and a burgeoning international business that boasts offices in London, Singapore, Australia, and India in which DG has direct reports. DG joined Cvent as a senior director of sales in 2013 and has been given increased responsibility each year. Today he sits with senior management and owns all sales efforts for the mobile app division within Cvent and has heavy influence in marketing, product roadmap, and postsales activities. Prior to joining Cvent, DG engaged in sales and entrepreneurial endeavors with the focus on emerging CRM technologies. His first true sales position was selling cell phones on a straight commission basis in the early 1990s.

Find DG on LinkedIN!

Fred Diamond: Darrell, tell us a little more about you that we need to know.

Darrell Gehrt: First of all, I have to say I’m honored to be number 19. Nineteen was my son’s first hockey number. As you know, we share that love and passion, but my wife and I, my beautiful bride, we spent tremendous amount of time at hockey rinks all around the East Coast. And so I have to escape the hockey rinks and come do what I do every day that I love, which is helping customers with their event technology.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk first about your career. I know you’ve had a lot of success, and I’m really excited to get into this. How’d you get into sales as a career?

Darrell Gehrt: It’s strange, Fred. I always thought of sales as a career, and I think part of that was I like people. I like talking to people, and secondly, I saw a lot of successful people who started their careers in sales. And so, even though both my parents were computer programmers and had nothing to do with sales, I knew from high school through college that’s what I wanted to do.

Fred Diamond: How many people do you have reporting to you here at Cvent?

Darrell Gehrt: Direct and indirect, over a hundred.

Fred Diamond: Good for you. Tell us exactly what you sell today and what excites you about that.

Darrell Gehrt: Cvent’s in the event technology space, and the division that I run focuses on mobile apps. If you think about going to a conference, if you’re an event planner, you want to encourage people to get the content to network with one another. We have technology that drives that. That’s our mobile app. We also do some other things all centered around the day-of experience. Maybe it’s checking people into a session for CMP credits. Maybe you just want to keep attendance or you want to charge for sessions. We do that. We do onsite badge printing, and the last thing that we really focus on for day-of experience is leave capture—if you’ve ever been to a conference and somebody says, “Hey, can I scan you?” We’ve got new slick technology that makes it easy for people to collect that data, ask custom questions, and then do the proper follow-up. We have a lot of great ROI tools for planners who are spending millions of dollars on their live events.

Fred Diamond: Cvent has been a great entrepreneurial success story. I encourage people, just Google Cvent history you could probably find [founder/CEO] Reggie [Aggarwal]’s story and the great experiences that he took to create this company and make it a huge success.

Darrell Gehrt: Reggie’s been a great leader, and you’re right: If you search for “Reggie Aggarwal” you’ll find his story, and it’s definitely worth reading.

Fred Diamond: You’ve mentioned in the introduction that one of your first jobs was selling cell phones door-to-door. Tell us about some of the key lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs.

Darrell Gehrt: I’m glad you brought up the cell phone job because that is really where I learned. Let me just take you back to 1992. Cell phones, nobody had them. Nobody wanted them. They were expensive. They didn’t work. In fact, people were downright ornery for you even asking if they wanted a phone in their car. And here I am, young kid, straight out of college, straight commission job, and I had to figure this thing out. And there’s two great lessons I learned that I still apply to this day.

The first one was hard work. Think about it as a straight commission salesperson. There’s no boss breathing down your neck to ask why you weren’t in at nine o’clock, how come you haven’t made 50 calls today. You really decide what you want to do, and I learned that I could just outwork people and make a lot more money.

The second one, which is a little bit more strategic but interesting lesson to learn, is that as cell phones were coming up, a lot of new phones were coming out, and I saw my colleagues trying to explain 10, 15 different phones to people who didn’t even know what a cell phone was, and they got confused and they would say “Great, let me think about this.” I went and said, “Listen, you either need this free phone or you need this expensive phone with bells and whistles, and you can always move out of it later.” I learned a very important lesson of simplifying. Where people would get distracted and have analysis paralysis, I would be able to cut right through the clutter. I literally ended up outselling the entire office of 10 people put together on a month-in, month-out basis because of those two things.

Fred Diamond: You outworked the other people on the team, and you simplified the message.

Darrell Gehrt: Simplify.

Fred Diamond: You made that simple, helped them understand the value, why they would invest at that time.

Darrell Gehrt: That’s exactly right. I’m glad you mentioned value because that’s a big thing. So again, go back to 1992, and you’re always pitching value. For us back then, our biggest customers were construction workers, contractors, because there was an ROI for them going from job site to job site and being able to talk the entire way. Today’s sales are no different. There has to be an ROI. There has to be a compelling business case.

Fred Diamond: Think back to your career. Who was an impactful sales mentor to you, and how did they impact your career?

Darrell Gehrt: The first one’s a little unconventional. I’d say the first one was myself, and you go, “How can you be a mentor to yourself at 22, 23, 24?” I didn’t have any sales training. I had to go out and figure it out myself. I am sure that there are listeners to this podcast, same thing, maybe you don’t have a mentor. Don’t let that be an excuse. If you’re out in the market and you’re just playing, you will learn. You’ll self-educate. There was a big impact point in my career in 1997. I went to go work for a guy who grew up out of the telecom industry. He had a sales system, and I never heard of a sales system before: “What’s this?” The whole process of the prospecting and the qualifying and the different questions you would ask. It was what a lot of people know today. I was amazed. Totally changed my career and put my game on a new trajectory. That was 1997.

The second person who really had major impact on my career was when I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2001 and got into the technology space, the software space. I had a boss who would just constantly challenge me. What he would do is, he would ask me qualifying questions like I was the customer every time we had a pipeline review. I remember the first couple of times coming away going, “Man, I should have answers to these questions, and I need to ask these questions on my prospects.”

And so, the next one-on-one, I would come in. I would be all proud of myself. I got answers to all these questions, and sure enough Ross would have another 15 questions that I hadn’t thought of before. It really made me stretch and grow because to learn the answers to the questions that he was asking me, I had to ask the market, and then that would help guide me.

Fred Diamond: What is the number-one specific sales success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? DG, take us back to that moment.

Darrell Gehrt: This is an easy one because it was a massively impactful moment for me. I told you, I moved here to D.C. in 2001, worked for a company called TARGUSinfo. I’m interviewing with the CEO, George Moore, and he tells me, “Listen, Darrell, you need to be following four deals: Domino’s, FedEx, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and McLeodUSA.”

He said, “If you close those four deals this year, we can talk about you keeping your job, and if you don’t, there’s no need to have a conversation.” And says it with his Irish air that he has, but he was somewhat serious about that statement. That year I closed all four of those deals and it took me on another career trajectory.

I went on at TARGUSinfo to run five or six different divisions. I got to start several things, including our government practice, our inside sales practice. But it was definitely that success that got me on the map in radar with everybody inside the company.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment when you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard” or “Just not for me”?

Darrell Gehrt: I think everybody in sales has had that moment. If you do straight commission sales you’ve definitely had that moment because you’re worried about putting food on the table. I think the thing that happened for me is, like a lot of other people, I had my back up against the wall. I had to make that call to my parents and ask for money, and my mom said, “Look, come on home, and we’ll help you.” I remember sitting in my living room, a TV in front of me with rabbit ears, no sofa, crying and going “I just can’t do it.” And that was kind of my perseverance: How do I push through this and be successful?

The second thing, and I think this is really, really important for people out there listening, Fred, is that you have to find passion. I had several jobs right out of school, but I got into the cellular business, and for me, I found sales religion. It was something that I really believed in. I loved it, and it just made it easy to get up and get out the door every day. I think as a sales professional you have to have that passion. If you don’t have it, you unfortunately have to look for a different job. Hopefully not a new career, but you’ve got to love what you do, or everybody around you will notice.

Fred Diamond: That is absolutely true. I recently attended a workshop from Jack Daly, one of the top sales speakers in the country, and the first thing he focused on was passion. You are absolutely correct. If you have negative energy, it comes through. In sales you’ve got to be energized. You had to love what you’re doing. You’ve got to love the benefit that you’re helping your customers with. It’s an amazing story. You’re sitting on the ground, watching TV with rabbit ears, questioning your career. Here you are today, 25 years later, I guess, managing sales teams in London, Singapore, all around the world with one of the top technology companies in the country right now. Great stories from Darrell Gehrt, DG. This is Fred Diamond with the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Listen to one of our sponsors right now, and then we come back, DG, I’m going to ask you for some tips for sales professionals who want to get ahead.

Darrell, what is the most important thing you want to get across to selling professionals to help them improve their career?

Darrell Gehrt: I’ve got a good one that I think people will appreciate. Sales could be stressful. You get a lot of nos. You get people hanging up on you. You get people not returning your phone calls. I told you earlier, I got into sales because I liked people, and what I realize, that was a really bad reason, because people will let you down.

But here’s the thing: If you go into sales with the mindset of “I have to sell something,” “I need to set this meeting,” you will fail. You have to go into it looking at “how do I educate the market.” Not everybody’s going to want what you have. But if you can educate the market in a meaningful way about what your product has—and this kind of goes to The Challenger Sale, Brent Adamson, who I know is a regular for you—you have to be able to go in and educate people about things that they aren’t even thinking about. That takes some of the sting out of the pressure of “how do I close this deal?”

Fred Diamond: DG, you’re at the top of your game. You’re a sales game changer. What are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Darrell Gehrt: I used to be an avid reader. Two kids later and hockey and figure skating and a career, I do struggle with that, but what I do have is a 45-minute commute to work every single day. And so I love listening to podcasts just like this one. There’s a lot of great information out there.

The other is I network a lot with my peers. They’re seeing things that I’m not seeing, and these are people who are much more junior than me. There’s so much to learn, especially with the advent of millennials in the workplace. How do you understand them? And third, I listen a lot on the phone. I consider myself a very active sales leader, meaning I’m not just sitting in an ivory tower and pushing spreadsheets around. I get on a lot of phone calls. Every day I’m on two, three, four phone calls. I get on airplanes. I travel. If you understand what the market is reacting to, that in and of itself is sharpening the saw.

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

Darrell Gehrt: I was thinking about this, and I don’t know that I have a major initiative. I feel it’s kind of like a business trying to pivot. Hopefully, if you’re a business owner, you never have to pivot. You may make adjustments along the way, and that’s kind of the way that I feel. But I’ll tell you a couple of things that are on my radar right now that I’m teaching the sales reps. One is how you get higher in an organization.

Marketing drives a lot of leads, and at every company I’ve seen it’s kind of the same. Somebody sees something, maybe they’re at the senior level, and they like it, and they say to one of their supporters, “Will you please go look into this? I think it will be good for my business.” You have to be skilled at how to go from that midlevel or front lineup into the executive C-suite because that’s where they’re thinking strategically. If your product is really good you should be impacting at both the strategic level and the tactical level. That’s what we’re working on today as a team.

Fred Diamond: What are you doing to train your team? For people listening who aren’t familiar with Cvent, Darrell mentioned he manages close to 100, if not 100, sales professionals. Walking around the facility before meeting Darrell for this interview, there were a lot of young people here, and I see a lot of banners for colleges, a lot of young people who’ve come from good schools. How do you get them to understand that when it’s their first or second job out of school?

Darrell Gehrt: Actually one of the most rewarding things is seeing people grow so much in their first year or two out of college. There’s no such thing as a silver bullet, right? You go to do multiple things. And so, there’s always two or three things for me. On this one I would say that there’s three.

Number one is a great onboarding program. It’s very structured, how we get them involved, teaching them sales best practices and then also the products, which is really important because you have to understand your products to be able to consult out in the marketplace.

The second thing is engaged leadership. I think Cvent does a great job at that. I’m better at teaching in the moment than I am trying to teach in a classroom. It’s not my strength.

Which brings me to number three. There are people out there that are great at [teaching], and so we supplement, including groups like IES where we can go in. We can get them trained. It’s always funny because Neil Rackham or Jill will come in and say the same thing that I’ve said, but they say it better than I did apparently because [attendees] are like, “She said the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Fred Diamond: DG, you’ve given us some great information: the value of hard work, simplify, engage leadership, sale professionals learning how to sell higher in the organization, knowing your customer’s business. But you mentioned this before, sales is hard. To be successful at sales, you have to put a lot of the work in. It’s not just about showing up and just kind of winging it. People don’t return your phone calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Darrell Gehrt: First of all, it goes back to the passion and just believing in the mission. I wake up every day and I feel like I’m helping people. If I get to a point where I feel like what I’m doing is not impactful, then I need to change. I don’t feel that way today. We literally change the professional lives of event planners every single day.

The second thing is, I think it’s one of the most well-respected professions. Sometimes we get made fun of, but so do lawyers. I’m proud to say I’m a salesperson. I’m proud to say I’m a sales executive. I make a great living. I have a lot of fun. I help people. I don’t know what else you could ask for in a career other than those things.

Fred Diamond: What’s a final thought you can share to inspire our listeners today?

Darrell Gehrt: I’m going to go back to where it all started, which is you’ve got to work hard. But you can’t just work hard; you have to work smart too. You hear that all the time, and I think as a sales professional you’ve got to sharpen that saw. Doctors go get continuing credits, same with a lot of other professions; why not in sales? Our business changes every single day. You just don’t notice it. The tactics that I use today are radically different than the tactics I used just three to five years ago. It’s massively different. So you have to kind of keep up with it.

And then, the other thing I would say is, “Man, get up there and talk to your peers.” It’s a hard business. We get that. Sales is tough. People are out there fighting the same battles that you are. But you’ll win more than you’ll lose if you’re paying attention to the market.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 019: Cvent Sales Leader Darrell Gehrt Learned That Simplifying the Message Would Lead Him to Major Sales Gains first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.