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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Women in Sales virtual learning session sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on April 28, 2022. It featured an interview with Gerilyn Horan, Vice President of Group Sales and Strategic Accounts for Hilton.]

Find Gerilyn on LinkedIn.

GERILYN’S TIP: “Think about where you want to be, how you’re going to get there, and who you need to know to get there. Think hard about expanding your network. There’s a lot of women on my team, I have regular chats now and again with everybody. I always say to people we hang up, you know, “Hey, put a coffee chat on my calendar and let’s catch up.” A few do, a lot don’t. I would say any opportunity I have to get to know those that have some opportunity to influence your career or help your career, to get to know them, you should do that. To be really intentional about that. It could be somebody in other parts of the business. Think about who you need to know to get to where you want to get to and form relationships. Figure out how to build a relationship with them and get on their radar and eventually, hopefully work that into a sponsor or a mentorship situation.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s great to have you on the podcast.

Gerilyn Horan: This is a topic I am so passionate about, women in leadership. How do we get here? How do we support each other on our individual journeys?

I am the Vice President of Group Sales and Strategic Accounts for Hilton. I’ve been in this role for the last four years and, as Fred mentioned, feel very fortunate to work for Hilton being one of the best places to work. Constantly coming up on the top one, two, and three of that list in Forbes, as was mentioned. There’s a real reason why, it’s an incredible company. The culture is amazing. The team members are some of the best. I feel really fortunate.

The funny thing is I started my career with Hilton. I spent my first 10 years of my hotel career with Hilton starting in college as a restaurant cashier. I was working at an insurance company and they shut down the whole department and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have no job and I need a job quickly.” A friend of mine had just started a job as a cashier at the hotel and she got her boss to give me a job and my entire path changed. I was going to school for communications, hospitality was not even on my radar which is true for many of us. When you talk to hoteliers, most of us didn’t go to school for this, we somehow just fell into it and then we never leave because we love it. That was a great experience because I feel like, working in the hotel and back of the house and front desk and went on to Room Service Manager, which is a very challenging job. Finally worked my way into sales and felt like, “Wow, this is something I could get behind.”

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s interesting. Listening to you talk, a lot of the women that come on the program, when we ask how they get into sales, not just hotels, and in this instance, it’s the same kind of story. They certainly weren’t studying sales in college. They didn’t anticipate going into it, but they found themselves in it and then never left. You’ve done both, you’ve gone into a particular industry and into sales, which is amazing. Hilton always get such high marks. I had some collaboration with your diversity vendor unit, where they try to bring in women-owned companies, and I was representing a company that I was trying to connect you to, so really got to know that program very well. You all just do some amazing stuff.

Let’s guide this conversation along the lines of selling and the opportunities for women. One of the things that you and I hit on, and I think we’re both very passionate about and it’s so topical right now, is what women can do, how they can leverage this unique opportunity that’s in front of us? The importance of lifting others up with us, and not looking at each other as competition. One of the things that you and I talked about is way back in the day when we were coming up, sounds like it was back in the horse and carriage days, but you know what I mean [laughs]. There really was only one seat at the table, and you were quite often pitted against that other woman. There was no collaboration. Let’s talk about how you try to nurture that in your teams and why you feel it’s so important.

Gerilyn Horan: There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, I would just say, coming up, it was a different time, obviously. I was always really fortunate. I had great men that I worked for that helped me and championed my career, and were my mentors and guides. They weren’t necessarily maybe as many women in more senior roles. I had my first management role at 25 or something. We were figuring it out, and there weren’t a lot of women to emulate at that time. We were all just figuring it out on our own, and maybe not necessarily in collaboration or in partnership with each other, which is unfortunate. I don’t know whether there was this intentional mean girl thing. We were all just trying to figure out what we were doing, and how do we get to the next place?

What was missing was people that you could have a conversation with, say, “Boy, I’m going through this, what do you think?” Where it felt safe and comfortable and you didn’t feel like you were exposing any weakness or anything. That was part of it, because I think everyone around you was men. You had to get in there and do your thing. We talked about on the call, one of the hardest things was when you’re in a room and you’re one of the few women, just having the confidence to talk up. There’s that old McKinsey study I always refer to because it so sits with me, of how there would be a job spec that would go out for an open position. Women would have nine of the 10 attributes you needed, but they wouldn’t apply because they’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t have all 10.” Where a man would look at it and be like, “I got three of these, so let me go for it.”

That’s the thing that we just didn’t have. That innate competitive confidence that held us back, certainly held me back across my career a couple of times, I probably could have gone for a higher job. Having other women to talk about this, “Here’s what we’re both going through, how can we help each other to get there and get past these concerns and support one another?” Would have been really helpful.

For today, it’s very different. Obviously, women have come such a long way in partnership, because the only way we’re going to get in significant ways to the C-suite, in my opinion, is together. It’s not one over the other, I’m not going to have to climb over you to get there, but we’ve got to rise, raise each other up to that next level. We talked about examples like being in meetings. Sometimes a woman’s voices is not always heard, or, it’s a little harder to get your point in when there’s a lot of men in the room.

Whether it’s your own confidence, or not being heard, or physically sometimes voice just not being heard. Helping each other to make sure you’re heard. One of the examples is often, if you’re in the middle of saying something, sometimes you may get stepped on, or someone might pick up the thread of your conversation and take it off in a direction and own that conversation. Helping another woman to bring it back to her like, “Gina, I’d love to finish hearing what you had to say about that topic. I loved how you thought of that.”

To bring it back around to the woman to give her a chance. As you said, Gina that, this isn’t male bashing at all. A man might not realize they’re doing that, that they might be stepping on something a woman said, or not giving proper credit where something started. That might also shine a light for them to say, “Oh right, yeah, I should probably pivot back to that.” That sort of thing.

Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely. You hit on something there a second ago, the competitive confidence. I’ve never really thought about it in that way because women are confident, it’s not that we lack confidence. But in a competitive situation, that’s where there’s just this little voice. I just had this conversation yesterday with two of the women that are going to be on the DEI&B panel at the conference. They were talking about how no matter the level of the woman, whether she’s a VP or even sometimes has a C in her title, she still gets plagued by the same – this was a researcher I was speaking with – the same kind of doubt.

The researcher was saying that it’s socialized at such a young age that it just sticks with you. Thinking about it in terms of competitive confidence when you’re in those environments where you are as qualified as anyone else in the room, yet you hold back because of this, whatever it is, this socialization, lack of competitive confidence. You’ve really hit on something and I wonder how, as leaders, as managers, as people who want to help elevate other women, how do we see that? Can we see it happening and can we step in?

Gerilyn Horan: Gina, this is big, seriously. Particularly, the more you’re in a room where there’s fewer women, I think sometimes you tend to get quieter. Part of it is too, women are also sensitive to sounding like a bragger. The tooting your own horn thing or, sounding like you’re bragging about it. We tend to be less overt about announcing and championing our accomplishments. There’s a little bit of that. Some of it is, we just have to own our fabulousness. We do. We have to own the fact that yes, I’m confident, I’m capable, I’m smart. I know this topic. I’m in the room, I should speak. We will regret, because it’s happened to me more than once sitting in a room and I’m thinking something and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know if I should say it.” This is previously. Now I just say what I say. Then I don’t say it, or you don’t say it, and then somebody else says it. Maybe one of the men and everybody’s like, “That’s a great idea, Joe.” You’re sitting there going, “I was thinking that I should have said it.”

You’re going to regret more the things that you don’t say and you don’t do than you will anything you say that doesn’t come out perfectly. Other women, particularly women leaders need to create a safe space where women feel they can say things, what they say is valued, that they want to be heard. I’m famous for some of my leadership calls and things. “Gina, I haven’t heard anything from you, what are you thinking about?” Trying to really pull things out of people, because I know it’s there. In a non-threatening way, try to draw it out or give the space for it to happen.

Gina Stracuzzi: A major panel at the IES Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference will be DEI&B initiatives. Tell us about Hilton and diversity and gender parity?

Gerilyn Horan: Thank you for asking.

“Diversity is at the core of who we are. We are committed to an equitable and inclusive workforce that fully represents all ages, genders, sexual orientation, nationalities, ethnicities, disabilities, military and veteran status, cultures and viewpoints. Grounded in our founding purpose, we foster an environment where Team Members can be their authentic selves.

By the end of 2027, we are committed to achieve global gender parity and 25% US ethnic representation at our corporate leadership levels.

Our Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs) represent the diverse segments of our workforce, including the Women’s TMRG which creates a collective culture to support the advancement of Women at Hilton through a network of engagement, empowerment and development which ensures every woman can thrive. It focuses on providing a support network, promoting allyship, inspiring growth and demonstrating career possibilities”.

Gina Stracuzzi:  Every company is different, so it’s hard to say, but if you have somebody that you know has good ideas but they are very reluctant to speak up in meetings, maybe a little bit of advanced coaching before the meeting. “Look, we’re going to go into this meeting, and I’m going to ask for ideas, and I know you have some about this, and I want you to share them. I’m going to let you go first.” Maybe that’s the way to do it. One of the things that I always like to tell men who say, “I want to help, but I don’t know what to say,” is if you see other people talking over, you can stop it yourself, like, “Hey Bob, give Mary a chance here.”

Gerilyn Horan: Often sometimes you might get cut off or get stepped over. In a lovely and delightful way, to say after they’re finished, “Yeah, Bob, that was great but I’d love to hear what else Gina was going to say.” Or to flick it back to that other person. Sometimes if an idea comes out and somehow it becomes somebody else’s idea, instead of where it started, to circle back and get it back on track of, “That was a great idea Gina had. Gina, how did you think it? What made you come to that idea?” To make sure that, everybody’s being recognized for their contribution. Women are less likely to probably take that extra step to do that for themselves. Often, particularly as you’re in higher ranked situations, there are fewer other women to help do that for you.

Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s talk a little bit about you and your team and what the break-up is. What you would like to see more of, how you try to bring your personal views into your recruiting. If somebody’s listening and they want to get a job with Hilton doing sales, what would you recommend for them?

Gerilyn Horan: First of all, I want to say it’s a great gig. It’s such a good company. I was gone for a long time after Hilton the first round. Four Seasons and Langham and Napa Valley in Meadowood. Then I went to the customer side and was at HelmsBriscoe on their leadership team. Coming back has really been incredible. To see the culture of this company and the way they look after their team members and the real concern for our clients and our purpose. It’s really something. It’s interesting, we don’t have a lot of turnover because people are pretty happy. You mentioned about The Great Resignation and hasn’t hit my team.

I’ve got just about a little over a hundred people on the team right now. It’s a lot of long-time team members. It’s a very coveted role within the company. Whenever there’s an opening, we certainly look at externally as well, because it’s always good to have some new blood but we’ve got a great pipeline of people within the Hilton Worldwide Sales Organization and the hotel community. We’re really intentional about our talent development.

First of all, we want a diverse workforce. I’m so passionate about the fact that having diverse voices at a table is much better for the business. I don’t want to hear a bunch of people that look and sound like me telling me the same thing. That’s not what I need. I need to know what our community is interested in, our planner community, our guests’ community, and that does not look like me. Very intentional about wanting to have lots of different voices at the table. Very intentional about building good talent and growing leaders. For me, that’s obviously men and women, but have a soft spot for the women that we’re trying to help continue to bring up. There’s a lot of ways that we do that.

There’s a lot of one-on-one coaching from their leaders. There are opportunities within the company for different sorts of training and things like looking at, “Here you are as a person, here’s the role that you want to get to. What are the gaps? What do we need to do to fill those in to get you ready for that next role?” We do some official and unofficial mentoring. An example was, there’s a woman on my team who wants to get into a role in one of the other regions, who’s got great potential, and there’s a woman in that region who’s on our leadership team, who I have unofficially mentored, have some good conversations with. I asked her if she would become a mentor to this girl who wants to get into her region.

Now, she’s going to start working with her to figure out where there might be opportunities, what are her gaps? What do we need to fill in? Being intentional about how we’re trying to raise each other up and get each other ready for that next spot. The funny thing is, I have a mentor at Hilton as well. He’s a man, and he’s terrific, and is very supportive of me as is my boss, Frank, who Fred mentioned earlier, who is super mentor and leader of many, many women on his leadership team.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s awesome. I have to say, it’s refreshing to actually hear somebody say, “Yeah, we’re doing great, we’ve got a strong team, don’t need anybody.” So many employers right now are just struggling to find people, to hang on to women. The tech industry got harder hit because it’s very fast-paced, lots of hours. It’s hard anyway. Then everything that transpired over the last two years made it untenable for a number of women. They’re all just scratching their head trying to figure out like, “How do we really attract and retain women?” It sounds like you all have cracked that nut in a big way.

Gerilyn Horan:  Could be luck, but we’ve done well in the Hilton Worldwide Sales world. I will say the hotels, they’re on the property level. They’re still needing to backfill positions that are open. If anywhere, that’s where the challenge is, but we’ve been very, very fortunate. I think about over the pandemic even, some of the things that we did, I was just amazed by the women on my team, how they managed through the pandemic. Many of them have young children. Suddenly, they’re working from home, their partner is working from home, too. They’ve got kids that are now needing to be homeschooled, and they’re keeping it all together.

I would get on our regular huddle calls, and I would say, “I don’t even know how you guys are doing it.” I could tell you, if my son was home, he’s in college now. We’d be killing each other if I was trying to educate him at nine years old. He would get mad that I’m not doing his math, right. I’m like, “Well, that’s how I learned it, I don’t know.”

I had such respect and admiration and empathy for them because it was a tough go. Recognizing what people are going through and giving them a space to do what they need to do and showing some empathy particularly for women, and particularly working moms. Companies really have to think about how do they support them? How do they give them the space in that period of time that they really need the most flexibility?

Which is a relatively small period of time, when you think about a 40-year career. That’s when you’ll build such loyalty if you’re supportive and flexible and continue to work with them to grow their career as they go through that period. It’s not like you stop and stagnate there, you can continue to grow. That’s where a lot of women sometimes get a little behind and it’s harder then to make it.

Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely. It is one of the reasons women get stuck. They might take off time for the reasons you just listed, and then they come back and they get the equivalent job, but it may not be on the same path at all. It really demoralizes sometimes and leaves women with the feeling of being stuck. As you and I discussed, those middle management years really are the make or break. If it takes you 10 years and a guy flies through at three to five, that’s big, that’s huge.

Gerilyn Horan: Totally. That’s the biggest challenge. Companies need to figure out aside from the flexibility and things I’m talking about, how do we really, make sure that we take care of these women when they need that help? That we keep them on the right track? That they still feel inspired and motivated and understand that the world is their oyster? It’s not that they’re stepping back because they’re doing other very important work, raising little people. We’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s still work to be done there.

Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely. As I was telling you, one of the main reasons we started the forum was to help employers bridge that area so that women can be more rapidly advanced. They get over their own internal hesitations, and they leverage opportunities within the company for the much-needed visibility, which is a huge thing. That is a huge thing employers can do is make sure they’re providing those visibility opportunities.

Gerilyn Horan: That’s right. There are people they need to know in the leadership team up, or make sure the leadership team, where they would next go to is aware of them. We’ll organize a coffee chat with somebody.  Go and have a cup of coffee with someone and get to know them, or call. A lot of it is on us. It’s not like this isn’t everybody else’s job to do for you. A lot of it is on us to pick up the thread when we have an opportunity, but the door has to be open for that.

Gina Stracuzzi: Exactly. That is very well said, Gerilyn. We’re ready to unfortunately call an end to this conversation, which is too bad.  I know that you and I will continue. We like to leave our audience with one piece of advice from our guests that they can put into action today to advance their careers or start thinking in a new direction. Something that is just easy to think about, maybe something to read, something to write out. Whatever you’d like.

Gerilyn Horan: Really think about where you want to be, how you’re going to get there, but who you need to know to get there. Really think about expanding your network. There’s a lot of women on my team, I have regular chats now and again with everybody. I always say to people we hang up, you know, “Hey, put a coffee chat on my calendar and let’s catch up.” A few do, a lot don’t. I would say any opportunity I have to get to know those that have some opportunity to influence your career or help your career, to get to know them, you should do that. To be really intentional about that. I’m not saying your direct boss, it could be somebody in other parts of the business. Think about who you need to know to get to where you want to get to and form relationships. Figure out how to build a relationship with them and get on their radar and eventually, hopefully work that into a sponsor or a mentorship situation. That helps.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 506: Opportunities for Women in Hospitality Sales with Hilton’s Gerilyn Horan first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is taken from the Optimal Sales Mindset Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on July 7, 2021. It featured chronic Lyme conquerors JP Davitt, Tanya Hoebel, and Gregg Kirk. All three, after conquering Lyme disease, went on to create mission-driven organizations based on their recovery.]

Register for the IES Women in Sales Programs here.

Find JP on LinkedIn here. Find Gregg on LinkedIn here. Find Tanya on Facebook here.

Tanya’s organization is The Lyme Center. Gregg created the Ticked Off Foundation. JP and Tanya are also two of the founders of the Lyme Conquerors Mentoring Lyme Warriors Facebook Group. JP also created Lymefriends.

JP’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Speak from the heart. Allow your spirit to speak through you. Everyone has their own internal vibration and your vibration resonates in your communication, your tone, your nonverbal and even your endurance. Everyone knows as a salesperson how important endurance is. Meditate on speaking with a pure heart and speak it into existence the same way you do your sales goals. Post on your mirror, use the secret to manifest your goals. The more you can speak freely and with a pure heart, the more opportunities that will appear clearly that were meant just for you. The reward for speaking with a pure heart is the physical, financial and emotional freedom.”

GREGG’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Joseph Campbell has a famous quote, “Follow your bliss.” Follow your passion. The best thing you can do is follow what sets you on fire so that your work is not work, it comes easy and it’s easy to do. That’s basically what I did. If you’re chasing money, that’s all you’re going to get.”

TANYA’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “With whatever you do in your life, you need to be passionate about. You can’t really sell something if you don’t believe in the product. For instance, if I sold cars, my why would be because I want to protect other families from having one of their loved ones be involved in such a horrific accident. That would be my why, so you can protect every human driving so that their loved ones don’t ever get that phone call. That would be your reason to do what you’re doing and it’s so important to have the why and be passionate about it.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: This is a special episode of the Optimal Sales Mindset. Many times over the past year or two we’ve always talked about how sales professionals need to understand their why. Of course, that was made famous in Simon Sinek’s classic TED Talk and we’ve had guests like Lisa McLeod talk about understanding your purpose, understanding your mission. We believe if you understand your why and your mission, it’ll help you grow your professional career substantially.

In addition to helping sales professionals understand how to take their lives to the next level, one of my other passions is helping people recover from chronic illness, specifically chronic Lyme. Many of you know that my significant other has chronic Lyme, so we’re bringing two of my passions together. Helping educate the world more about chronic Lyme and chronic illness, and of course, our audience of sales professionals, how to take your sales career by truly understanding what your mission is and how to get there.

Chronic Lyme is a silent epidemic, it’s an insidious disease, there’s no real cure. It can rip families apart, cause debilitating pain and takes lives off course. But I’m very excited in my journey through helping my significant other understand how we can heal and how we can overcome the disease. I’ve met some amazing leaders who have conquered chronic Lyme and it’s changed their career paths to helping others suffering from chronic illness change their lives as well.

We have three very, very special people on today’s panel. We’re going to talk a little bit about their journey through conquering chronic Lyme and also their journey about really understanding what their life’s mission is. First, we have Gregg Kirk. Gregg’s a digital sales support marketing director by trade, but he switched career paths after his decade-long struggle with Lyme disease. After reaching remission, he offered the book The Gratitude Curve and he founded a nonprofit Lyme patient fund called Ticked Off Foundation. I’ve read The Gratitude Curve, that’s how I got to meet Gregg.

Tanya Hoebel is the vice president of The Lyme Center in Chico, California, as well as the co-founder of the popular Lyme Conquerors Mentoring Lyme Warriors Facebook group. She’s also the cohost of the integrated Lyme Solution’s podcast. I’ve listened to every episode. She and a medical professional bring on someone else who’s conquered Lyme and they go through their journey to healing.

We have JP Davitt, he’s the founder of Lymefriends and the author of LYME BOOK: A Journey to Becoming One Day Better. After overcoming chronic illness, he’s been focused on making each day better and helping others do the same. For our listeners today, I hope you get some value out of this. This is going to be a fantastic conversation, it’s going to be inspiring, it’s going to be uplifting and hopefully it’ll give you some triggers to really understand what your mission is. That will help you as a sales professional.

To our panel, thank you all so much for being here. I really appreciate all of you, I’ve learned a lot from Gregg, your book, and JP, from your book and the webinars that you’ve done, and Tanya, of course, your podcast. I’m a frequent poster on the Lyme Conquerors Mentoring Lyme Warriors Facebook group as well and it’s truly changed my life getting to know you all.

Tanya, why don’t you go first? Why don’t you tell us about your journey with your chronic illness recovery?

Tanya Hoebel: Hi, Fred. I just want to thank you so much for doing this special episode for us to acknowledge and spread awareness about Lyme disease, because it is truly a pandemic. In 2004, I was bit by a tick and I was one of the few who got an actual bullseye rash from the bite. That is a tell-tale sign of a tick bite. Unfortunately, I was not educated so therefore, I did not know that I was bitten by a tick.

Four years later is when my illness came out of nowhere. It all started one day with rapid onset pain in my elbow. Little did I know, that as a beginning of a very long, exhausting journey. The pain managed to creep through every single inch of my body and to my friends, I described that it felt like I’d been run over by a semitruck. I had the worst flu and the worst hangover ever all combined and it was every day, there was no reprieve from it.

As I tried to explain to the doctors, who were not believing me that something was wrong, I would tell them that I felt like I had bone cancer. The pain radiated so deep into my body that it felt like I had bone cancer. That was the only way I could explain to them how painful it was. As if that was not enough, my overall exhaustion finally set in. If that wasn’t enough, then literally I lost my mind trying to navigate through my days of doctors and tests and everyday living.

I had post-it notes throughout my house reminding me of the simple tasks that people do every single day. I had alarms going off on my phone all the time because I had to take medications every so many hours on each day, and that was the only way I could remember it. I took a lot of pills every day and I could take a bottle of pills and I would know if I needed to take it morning or night and how many. Then I had a pill container where you would put them in for the AM or the PM.

My mind was so sick, I could not take the pill from the bottle that I knew how to take, and take it out of the bottle and put it in the proper pill organizer. That is what Lyme does to you neurologically. It was just too overwhelming for my brain. I could no longer pay my own bills, I could no longer write a check, I didn’t know what it was. My amazing life as I knew it quickly turned me bedridden with a caregiver and I didn’t even know my own name.

Fred Diamond: It’s been an amazing journey, and you’ve talked about this journey again on your podcast. I recommend that, it’s really an inspiring podcast and thank you very much for sharing. Gregg Kirk, you go into your story in your book, The Gratitude Curve and you’ve been through some amazing challenges as well to get to the point where you’ve been able to achieve your mission. Tell us a little bit about your journey to chronic illness recovery.

Gregg Kirk: Mine was not classic in any way. I had no tick bite that I ever saw. Literally decades later I realized it may have actually been a spider bite and just so everyone knows, ticks are not the only things that can spread Lyme disease. It’s any insect that can bite you, including horseflies, fleas, lice, even mosquitos in some cases. All of those bugs can cause Lyme disease and the tick doesn’t have to be on you for a full day or whatever the CDC is saying nowadays. It can transfer the disease within an hour.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and the other thing is I didn’t have classic Lyme symptoms. I would say Tanya had pain, usually joint pain is pretty classic and overwhelming fatigue and things like that are classic symptoms. Mine were no those at all, mine came up whenever I would eat. I would eat a meal and then I would feel like I’d been drugged. I’d get completely disoriented. In some cases, depending on what I ate, I’d have to go lie down in the back of a car.

I had some sort of leaky gut intestinal infection, so I went to see a gastroenterologist and it took me two years to get properly diagnosed. At that point, I thought, good, it’s Lyme disease, just take some antibiotics and you’ll get better. That’s really when the odyssey began. I live in Connecticut, this was where Lyme was discovered and you’d think you got the best doctors there. No, the doctors just bludgeoned me with antibiotic upon antibiotic, bicillin injections, picc lines, one picc line insertion jabbed my heart, almost died on the operating table, I had heart damage from it. All kinds of horror stories.

I stayed on antibiotics for almost six straight years until my immune system shot down and I got pneumonia that became untreatable. I stopped listening to my doctors and I left Western medical system and I became my own practitioner. I started using herbal treatments and I started using energy healing. I chronicle a situation where I went to Brazil to see a healer, I had a miraculous healing that actually changed my appearance.

I came back wholly healed but then it wasn’t over. I went right back into my stressful corporate lifestyle where I was doing digital sales support, I ran websites and digital content and it was very high-impact, high-stress. I started experiencing some of my symptoms coming back and at that point I thought, “Why have I gone through all of this?” I’ll talk about my why and my mission later, but at that point I started realizing that the disease wasn’t just something to be conquered, that it was actually giving me information.

Any disease is telling you that you’ve got an imbalance in your life and that’s what I finally realized. I’ll talk more about that later. Thanks for putting this together, Fred. We all really appreciate what you’re doing here.

Fred Diamond: I appreciate you all for coming on and telling us your stories. Like I said, we’re doing this to get the word out. My significant other of 11 years has had Lyme disease and there’s so many aspects to it in so many ways. JP, you’re the author of LYME BOOK, tell us about your journey and tell us how you eventually got to the point where you were able to get to the other side with your chronic illness recovery.

JP Davitt: The one thing I could always count on, whether it was as a financial advisor or whether it was playing lacrosse at a high level was the fact that I would outwork everyone around me. I was blindsided by my illness. The advice that I can share is that you will get sick, it’s not what you see coming that kills you. Up until 2005, I was a great athlete playing lacrosse as a mid-fielder at the Virginia Military Institute, University of Pittsburgh as well.

My mindset was always, if you’re good, I was better. But I was blindsided by my arrogance and at the top of my game, I collapsed on a squat rack. I could no longer outwork anyone. I would’ve given anything for just one day of freedom, every dollar I had for just one day of reprieve from the neurological pain all over my body. I began with alcohol and any type of drugs really started to look good. Not narcotics, but anything to kill the pain from doctors.

The mental pains, it was very humbling. I was humbled by the relentless lack of control that was just pushed onto me. The disease was like a python squeezing the life out of me. Anytime I let my guard down, basically it would just squeeze tighter and tighter. I had to get really rigid in all of my treatments. I begged my doctors to cut my legs off and I surrendered to a life in a wheelchair. I could no longer put on a show in sales meetings and the energy that I put out talking for a few hours like we all do in sales would just cause my body to crash.

I would put myself thinking I was who I used to be, but I’d occasionally become overwhelmed. I had to haul activity immediately, whether it’s speaking or working in front of people because I started to have seizures and just break downs. When you get sick, you learn quickly that you need a team and healthcare is more than what you typically would think. If you want to regain your freedom, it’s sometimes more work than you could ever imagine.

When I was sick, I was desperate to find the answers I needed. I had top CEO level doctors who told me to come back and share my story with them if I ever had any improvements, and these were the top dogs in the industry. To wrap up, at work I was in a competitive industry selling financials competitive against peers, sales numbers and accountable to management in my clients.

Every conversation I had, I now had to be guarded. Not only could you not trust anyone else, I couldn’t even trust myself, to no fault of my own. Once a bull or a lion hunting deals outworking everyone, now a lamb. I was scrambling to save enough deals just to pay the $6,000 to $10,000 every single month necessary for the treatments. Savings went quickly, in sales job you’re 100% commission and when you’re talking about that much money per month of what you need with disability, it really was not an option.

Fred Diamond: Once again, all three of you, you’re very inspirational stories for people who are struggling and suffering. You mentioned a couple things, you mentioned the expense, in a lot of cases insurance doesn’t cover a lot of the expenses. You mentioned alternative types of medicine that you’ve all had to seek out at various times and you also talk about mind, body and spirit. There’s a lot of things that go into the recovery, it’s just not about medicine. Gregg, you mentioned taking antibiotics for a long time and that can only go so far.

Let’s talk a little bit about the shift. We’re talking today about how you’ve overcome a lot of the struggles to understand your why, as we like to call it, or the mission. Let’s talk a little bit about how that transition happened. The disease is nefarious, it’s insidious, it’s indiscriminate and there’s so much that’s horrible about it. But one of the cool things is meeting people like you who have been able to get past it at some level and have been able to find purpose and mission in your life.

Gregg, why don’t you go first? I know you run a not-for-profit, you run a clinic, talk about that a little bit. When did you realize this shift had happened, that your life had shifted and your mission had evolved?

Gregg Kirk: It started when I was at my worst, I was at the point where I wanted to die and I just wasn’t dying. One night I had more or less a heart attack as a result of that picc line jab and at that point I thought, okay. I started to pray to have God take me, I’d led a great life up to that point, I thought. I wasn’t going to do it by my own hand, so it didn’t happen. It was one of these weird situations where I wanted to die but I kept hanging around.

Then I started looking inward. Why am I still here and why have I gone through this? Is this some kind of weird karma thing? Did I deserve this? Did I kill someone in a past life? Why am I going through all this mental and physical punishment? Then after I had that night, I let everything go. There’s a Janis Joplin song, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and I really had nothing left to lose anymore. I just felt like my life had burnt to the ground and I started looking at my life in a different way.

Forest fires are actually really good for forests, believe it or not. They burn away the dead part of the forest and they leave room for new growth. I thought, what if that’s happening to my life? Maybe this disease is pointing me in a direction. Maybe I was going in the wrong direction in my life, as much as I liked my life at the time. I just started to let it happen. It’s a strange feeling, JP talked about feeling out of control and I didn’t like it at first. But then I just thought, “What the hell? Let’s see where this takes me.” And the less I resisted, the more things started changing in very unexpected ways.

I more or less got jettisoned from the corporate world and went through a period of time where I was making quite a bit of money, to I wasn’t. I just decided I’m just going to start doing nonprofit work and fly on the trapeze without a net. It was some wild times, I wasn’t making a lot of money. To being able to make some money, I was actually trained by Dr. Cowden, he has developed a protocol and it’s one of the protocols that helped me get better. I was lucky enough to be invited to be trained with 15 doctors, it just made no sense, it was just one of these weird coincidences.

He trained me with 15 doctors and I learned energy healing before that, so I opened my clinic in Connecticut in 2017 and I started doing that for a living along with the foundation work. The more I started focusing on that type of work, the more I realized this is why I’m here. During the dark days, I thought, why am I going through this? Then a couple of friends talked to me about that and they said, “You know that healers are usually the wounded ones and they’re the ones that need to experience it so that they can better help people heal?” That was when I realized my why right there.

Fred Diamond: That’s excellent. We’ll get a little bit deeper in the next question about specifically some of the things that you’re doing. Tanya, there’s probably a lot there that Gregg said that you could probably relate to as well. You’ve had some unbelievable experiences in your life that have gotten you to this point that have obviously forced you to rethink. When did you make that shift when you realized that your purpose and your mission in life was to help people with chronic illness move forward?

Tanya Hoebel: Like a lot of what Gregg said, I’m a Christian, I’m a good person, I feel like I do the right thing, it just felt like time and time again things were not looking my way. Then once again, here I am, set with this horrible debilitating illness and I had no explanation. When I was nearing the end of my treatment, that was about 9 years into my illness, I could for the first time see the light at the end of the tunnel. I really had some faith that I was going to get better.

By now, my brain had been functioning at a more optimal level than it had been for the last 9 years and I really had some time to sit back and reflect on the last decade of my life. Because of the lack of knowledge of my disease that I had personally, that caused me to get sick, because I was the lucky one who got the bullseye rash but I didn’t know what it meant. I think that there needs to be so much more awareness about it.

I always jokingly say that I can be a therapist, a pharmacist and a doctor, unfortunately, I just don’t have the credentials for that. Because you truly need to be your own advocate when you’re dealing with Lyme, because Western medicine failed me time and time again. Knowing the hundreds of thousands of dollars that I’d spent during this Lyme journey, how it had truly financially ruined me, I didn’t let it physically or emotionally ruin me because I continued to fight back.

I thought, how can I possibly allow another human being go through even one day of what I’ve gone through over the last 9 years? I knew somehow that I had to help. I didn’t know how or what, but I thought all of this knowledge I’ve learned over all these years has to be good for something. That’s when I decided that my new mission in life needed to be to educate and advocate for those that are too sick to do it themselves. That’s why I do what I do.

Fred Diamond: JP, how about you? Tell us a little bit about when that shift happened for you.

JP Davitt: I remember playing golf with a potential client, and this is probably back in 2007 or 2008. He was a retiring dentist and I was attempting to earn his financial advisory account. This account would have been something that would have changed my life, being very sick at that point, just making things a lot easier for me financially. During this time of my life, absolutely nothing was going right for me. Even golf, which for me had been an outlet since I was 12 years old, was now stealing more energy from me than it was providing me with mental freedom. Even the things that I love were taking away more energy than they would typically feed my soul.

During the round, I remember speaking freely with the potential client and I shared with him that I couldn’t believe the lack of support for people with anxiety. Without thinking, I told him that and that I was going to cure my illness and figure out a way to retire early, then build facilities to help other people with anxiety. A retreat where anyone could go for free for a few days to earn the tools so that they could relax, have that mental freedom. I believe that revealing this to my friend was a deal breaker.

I’m not sure whether he saw my anxiety as a weakness or thought maybe I wouldn’t be a financial advisor very long, but I didn’t get the deal. What I did, though, which I believe now is a greater gift was that why. I did realize that for the first time, I was really speaking without a filter. I projected this idea out to the universe and apparently, the universe was holding me accountable. Ever since, I’ve been a man on a mission. I spoke it into existence, I meditated on it, apparently the universe approved and I kept speaking ideas and thoughts to the world no matter how crazy they seemed to be. All the ducks keep lining up whether it’s funding or the tools that I need.

When I was sick, I dreamt of a platform that would allow sick people to connect more easily with one another. Facebook had evolved at this point and it is a helpful tool, but I imagined a social platform that was more like online dating for wellness. This tool I created, it evolved into the idea of Crowd Curing Lyme Disease and Chronic Illness, and eventually evolving again into the Lymefriends Healing app and the Lymefriends platform. I fund my ideas through my financial advisory practice which also helped me to create a sales niche as I was able to converge my two passions.

Right now I moved away from the banks, I was with the banks for 15 years and I opened up my own practice, I’m the President of Good Life Financial of Pittsburgh. I have a big Venn diagram on the front of my building that says health plus wealth equals freedom. I created an interactive health and wealth advisory practice and my passion became my niche.

Fred Diamond: One thing that you all have talked about is if you break an ankle, you go to an orthopedic surgeon, he puts you in a cast, six weeks later, you’re good. With chronic Lyme, there’s no specific answer. Especially if you were infected a long time ago and a very common thing is you don’t get diagnosed with something like chronic Lyme, maybe you get diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome or something related to that which is wrong, then you live for 20, 30 years with the wrong diagnosis for what you have. It’s such a challenge.

Let’s talk a little bit about what you’re doing now. We talked about how you all made this shift, you found your why, now you’re devoting your life to helping people who are struggling. If you go in some of the Facebook groups we’re talking about, so many people are struggling. It’s almost like a hidden disease, people are rallying around people with cancer as they should, it’s pretty obvious when someone has cancer but when someone has Lyme or some other related infections, you can’t see it per se. You don’t know why someone’s bedridden or you don’t know why somebody doesn’t have the energy. We’ve mentioned anxiety, we’ve mentioned depression, there are so many things that relate to this.

Let’s talk a little bit about specifically what you’re doing and how it’s put more meaning in your life. Tanya, why don’t you go first? Talk about exactly what you’re doing today and then we’ll talk about the meaning.

Tanya Hoebel: I can’t thank you enough for doing this, Fred, because there’s just not enough awareness about this. I just have to stress it again. Lyme disease is an absolutely lifechanging illness. The good that did come from it was it gave me the opportunity to make some incredible friendships with people that I otherwise would never have met.

I’ve always considered myself a very chatty girl, a very bubbly girl, very outgoing, never really had a negative thing to say about anything in life because everything happens for a reason. But in my darkest days during my journey, I actually contemplated suicide. I thought there was no other way to end my pain. I’m so thankful that I found another resource to end my suffering. It truly does tend to make you feel a little more grateful for all the little things in life, even though I never felt ungrateful. I think maybe I took the birds chirping outside for granted, whereas I used to not be able to go outside to hear them.

Things like that, it really did change my way of thinking. It proved to me also, that someone on top of the world emotionally, financially, the top of their career like I was prior to Lyme can in one moment lose it all. I could have been one of those people homeless on the streets that you see roaming around and you often wonder why they’re there. That is what Lyme disease does physically, emotionally and financially.

Because of the fact that this positive person contemplated suicide at one point, I thought I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to make a difference. That is when I became so involved in advocating for Lyme. I run a nonprofit organization, it’s called The Lyme Center, it’s based out of Chico, California and our mission is to educate and advocate for Lyme. We do fundraisers to help raise money, this last spring we were able to have a great amount of patients tested through one of the well-known labs, IGeneX in Palo Alto, California and we were able to pay for that by the donations and the fundraisers that we get.

I’m also the cofounder of an incredible mentoring group. This group has proved to be more than I ever dreamt it to be in such a short amount of time. We offer lots of treatment options and just help educate them on so many different levels of Lyme because there are so many facets of it. We do bimonthly Zoom calls, last night we had our first healing concert through vibrations and sound, we’re coming up with new and great ways every week to help all of those that are struggling through Lyme.

I even managed to find time to cohost a weekly podcast, Integrative Lyme Solutions. I do it with an integrative doctor, very generous with his time, Dr. Michael Karlfeldt. Right now, our podcast is leading interviews of those that haven’t beaten Lyme. Where their journey started, when they got sick, how sick, how they treated and where they are now. It’s been another great way to add those relationships into my community, I love it.

This year I also pushed even further and I will continue to do this part of my journey. I went up against congress this year in Washington DC to help push legislature for more money for Lyme research. It’s going to be an annual thing that’s on my calendar every year, because we need it, we need our voices, we need people like you, Fred. We’ve got to keep these people healthy and we’ve got to figure out how to get them better.

Fred Diamond: Tanya, good for you. Those are some amazing things. For people listening today, the Western medical world doesn’t really understand Lyme in many ways. You have to search for what’s called a Lyme literate medical doctor, sometimes they’re hard to find, there aren’t that many. A lot of the doctors out there who are now Lyme doctors started off as OBGYNs or nutritionists, it’s a profession that some have recently moved into in many cases because they were also affected by Lyme and had to figure out a way to solve their own problems.

If you have chronic Lyme, a lot of times you’re the only person who can figure it out. There are so many different factors and things that you’ve done in your life that have led you to this particular moment. The services and resources that you’re providing particularly on the Facebook groups have allowed people to come together to ask questions to get some advice, to get some solace, get a little bit of love and attention that they might not be getting in other places.

Very proud to have met you and I’m very proud of all the great work you’ve done. JP, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now and how it’s allowed you to get more meaning in your life.

JP Davitt: What I’m doing now is I’m at the Interactive Health and WellSpace which took me from having a job to a passion and a purpose. Every single day now coming into my office, I never think about it as work. Historically, when I was a kid carrying golf bags as a caddy or working at McDonalds, I always liked those jobs. Financial advisory for me in a corporate setting became a job as a 9 to 5, and now it is a passion and I’m allowed to split my time.

When it comes to not just the work and helping my clients, over the last year I’ve been able to help three of my close clients very quickly find answers to very large health issues. One of them was actually Lyme disease, another was an urgent situation. They were from out of town, outside of Pittsburgh, they were in Pittsburgh and all of a sudden, the client’s husband has a heart attack. They were flying to go to a hospital and they called me. I diverted them to another hospital where I knew a cardiologist, but the idea is that I was combining these two. My passion with my job and creating that niche.

In regards to healthcare, Lyme disease as a passion, I have Lymefriends, I work tightly and closely with Tanya as a partner in Lyme Conquerors Mentoring Lyme Warriors Facebook page. We host mentoring calls, Lymefriends is a platform that acts like a dashboard for people with Lyme disease to go to, a one-stop-shop for all of the resources. I collect resources without worrying about any competition bringing everything together to help them finance sooner.

Whenever I was sick and having to streamline my efficiency with my body, it really taught me a lot about processes. Learning a lot about this process as I carried that over to healthcare and I was able to them form a goal to not just help with Lyme disease, but my goal really in the grand picture is to change the literacy and vocabulary of healthcare using technology. Right now, I’m testing, retesting, improving technology all the time trying to help people become one day better. It’s certainly high-risk, high-reward but it has certainly given me a very clear purpose.

Fred Diamond: Congratulations on all the great work. The book is fantastic, so congratulations on being published. Speaking of publication, Gregg Kirk, the author of The Gratitude Curve. Why don’t you bring us home on this subject? Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing right now and how it’s helped you get more meaning in life.

Gregg Kirk: After I got better in 2012, my knee-jerk reaction was, being a former musician, long before I got into the corporate world I ran an entertainment magazine in Philadelphia. I had a lot of experience putting music festivals and things together. The first thing I did was create the TikTok Music Fest. We raised money, we held live concerts and the first concert we ever held, the people who showed up, 80% of them were Lyme patients which shocked me. I thought people who were going to show up were people who had the money who wanted to donate money to us.

At the time, we were giving money to research and awareness and things like that. These people came in in walkers, oxygen tanks, they hobbled in and they were really not even there to see the music. They needed information, they didn’t know how to handle their disease. The more we held these, we held these in trouble spots around the country like in Florida, we held one in Hawaii, these are states that are not supposed to have Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is in every state, whether or not people get infected in those states. In a state like Hawaii, it’s a 70% military personnel, they’re getting infected in different parts of the world and coming to Hawaii where they say there’s no Lyme disease but all these people are sick. We raised awareness but instantly within the first year I realized that there’s a bigger problem that my nose is being shoved into. There is a patient care problem, people have no money, they’re not getting diagnosed properly. When they finally are, they’re not getting the proper care. Even going to an LLMD is a better situation but a lot of times, they’re not the best people either.

I took a step back and I thought, if I had a billion dollars, what would I do? I thought I would create a healthcare system, like an insurance system that funded treatment because most of the treatments that worked for me were not covered by insurance, the herbal treatments and so forth. I thought, I don’t need to wait until I’m a billionaire, I can start a foundation, a nonprofit that people come to us, they get qualified through some documentation and we give them monthly stipends.

It started off by us running after some other groups that give thousands of dollars to patients. But we quickly found out that once the word got out, TikTok Foundation was giving away free money, we got overwhelmed. What we do now is we give out what I call microgrants, so we get people who are qualified, we sit down with every single one of those patients for at least an hour-long chat, find out their level of need and agree what’s the best thing for them. Then we give them a microgrant every month. That started.

In the middle of all that, I contacted NutraMedix, the company that made the Cowden protocol and I reached out to them to see if we could form some sort of an alliance. Because we’re a nonprofit and they’re a for-profit, they said, “We can’t donate to you but we can give discounts for people who qualify” so we began that situation. An odd thing happened in then middle of that relationship where the CEO said, “Gregg, would you like to be trained by Dr. Cowden?” He had no idea my background, talk about the universe opening up and landing him at my feet.

I got trained by Dr. Cowden and then within a year, because of my own healing background and everything I’d gone through, I’m a non-certified practitioner. Obviously, I can’t prescribe medicines or anything like that. What I help people with is #1, the Cowden protocol and some other protocols that I learned like the Zhang protocol and some herbal treatments. Along with other detox treatments and things that I had to figure out on my own because the doctors didn’t know about that, and I do energy healing.

On top of all that, I’ve had several patients go into remission using these practices and these protocols. After that, I wrote The Gratitude Curve. Basically, what Tanya said, in the middle of all this I realized that my mission was to help people avoid what I went through or at least guide them through it.

Fred Diamond: Very powerful, very inspiring stories. For the sales professionals listening today, take some lessons here. Figure out what your mission is. Usually, it’s related to what you’re doing for your customer. Why are you serving this particular marketplace and how could you provide even more value to them to help them achieve their goals and help their customers achieve their goals?

I want to thank Tanya Hoebel, I want to thank JP Davitt, I want to thank Gregg Kirk for inspiring us today. There’s a lot of ground-level things that can be done. One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people are struggling, like we said before, it’s an expensive disease to cover, not everybody understands it. A lot of times I’ve met people who their spouse doesn’t understand or their family doesn’t understand and that leads to a lot of challenge as well.

I want to applaud all three of you. As we like to do with all of our Sales Game Changers podcasts, we like to have an action step. You’ve all given us some very inspiring ideas. Give us something brief, something specific that people listening today can do to take their mission to the next level and begin to implement this. Tanya, why don’t you go first? Give us an action step that you recommend people do today to really begin to think about applying their mission to their life.

Tanya Hoebel: With whatever you do in your life, however you choose to support yourself in life, it’s something that you need to be passionate about. You can’t really sell something if you don’t believe in the product. I’m going to give you an example. I always tend to pick on car salesmen [laughs] I don’t know why, but they’re always my #1 pick. Let’s say for example, you have a loved one that was seriously injured or possibly even worse and you know in your heart that if they were in a safer vehicle with more safety features that things would have turned out differently. To me being a salesman, that would be my why, is because I want to protect other families from having one of their loved ones be involved in such a horrific accident. That would be my why, so you can protect every human driving so that their loved ones don’t ever get that phone call. That would be your reason to do what you’re doing and it’s so important to have the why and be passionate about it.

Fred Diamond: Gregg, why don’t you go next?

Gregg Kirk: Joseph Campbell has a famous quote, “Follow your bliss.” It more or less parallels what Tanya was saying, follow your passion. The best thing you can do is follow what sets you on fire so that your work is not work, it comes easy and it’s easy to do. That’s basically what I did. If you’re chasing money, that’s all you’re going to get.

Fred Diamond: Eventually that becomes dry. JP Davitt, bring us home. Give us an action step. You’ve been in sales, so out of all of our panelists, you can probably relate to this the most. Give us a specific action step for the people listening to the podcast today or watching the webinar to take their life to the next level.

JP Davitt: Speak from the heart. Allow your spirit to speak through you. Everyone has their own internal vibration and your vibration resonates in your communication, your tone, your nonverbal and even your endurance. Everyone knows as a salesperson how important endurance is. Meditate on speaking with a pure heart and speak it into existence the same way you do your sales goals. Post on your mirror, use the secret to manifest your goals. The more you can speak freely and with a pure heart, the more opportunities that will appear clearly that were meant just for you. The reward for speaking with a pure heart is the physical, financial and emotional freedom.

Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Tanya Hoebel, I want to thank JP Davitt, I want to thank Gregg Kirk for coming on board and being honest. You’ve published this in your books, in your podcast, but hopefully this message will resonate with a lot of the sales professionals. People out there listening, if you find someone who tells you they have chronic illness, specifically Lyme, take them seriously. Love them, give them the support that they need. Thank you all again, this show is dedicated to Leila, who I love very much. I want to thank you all for being with us today.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 381: How These Leaders Discovered Their “Why” After Conquering Chronic Illness and How It Applies to Sales first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET: Entrepreneurial Habits for High-Achieving Sales Leaders with Melinda Emerson on Thursday, June 25, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in February 2020. Since the show was released during the pandemic, we asked Todd what his advice is for sales professionals now. He offered the following:

• Show empathy in all your communications— As a sales leader, you need to give your teams ample oxygen to sustain life in the new normal. This includes being human. Some tactics to consider might include doing weekly, high-touch videos (that show you with your family) so your team sees all of you, and is reassured that we’re all in this together.  Additionally, be transparent. We’ve found that our employees like to hear from our leadership frequently, and that they appreciate the candor and open lines of communication.
• Remain tech-savvy—As sales professionals, we’re all 100% inside sales reps now and there are incredible technologies we can quickly adopt so that we still can maintain intimacy with our customers, who by the way, are all feeling and experiencing the exact same things we are as sellers and company officers.
• Redefine success—We all want signed orders and uninterrupted revenue flows.  However, we also need to adjust to this unprecedented time by adapt our definitions of success.  Of course, sales is about bookings, but it’s also about the ‘building blocks’ of bookings, including forging new customer contacts, implementing smart outreach campaigns, providing demonstrations of new features, and reminding people of the essence of your product’s value.  It’s basic stuff, but it is authentic, and plants the seeds for eventual growth.
• Be pithy— Right now, people are starved for time, so cut to the chase.  Nobody—not a single professional—can recall a time where you’re simultaneously a) making the kids breakfast, b) responding to a forecast request from the board, all while c) trying to jam in a last-minute home-delivered grocery order (before your window closes).  Be kind, be relevant, be brief.

EPISODE 245: Datasite Global Sales Leader Todd Albright Says These Four Things are Critical for Sales Professionals to Do Right Now to Be Successful

TODD’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “My grandfather once told me, “Don’t get too smart” and that was sage wisdom to say nothing will ever supplant or replace hustle and humility when it comes to being a successful seller. That hustle is staying vigilant day in and day out. You haver to put in the cycle time. If you put in the process and you’re disciplined about it, good things will happen.”

Todd Albright is the Worldwide Chief Revenue Officer at Datasite formerly known as Merrill Corporation.

Prior to coming to Datasite he worked at FIS and a couple other growth stage startups.

Find Todd on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Todd, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. I’m excited to hear your story, why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Todd Albright: Dedicated in sales for the better part of 20 years, had a wonderful ride with great mentors, started like all great sales leaders carrying a bag for 10 years, laddered through that in my career and eventually stepped into some leadership roles, team leads and to regional managers and eventually you take on more responsibility. I’ve been the Chief Revenue Officer of Merrill Corporation/Datasite for about 5 years and prior to that I’ve had a nice ride with some great technology growth stage companies. It’s wonderful to be here today.

Fred Diamond: I’m excited. Have you spent most of your career based out of New York City?

Todd Albright: I was born and raised in northeast Ohio, spent a lot of time in the southeast, I’ve lived in Europe for four years, been in New York for 10 years but a wide geographic experience for sure.

Fred Diamond: Where did you live in Europe?

Todd Albright: I lived in Germany, I lived in Munich, I lived in Berlin, spent some time in London as well.

Fred Diamond: Again, we’re excited to talk to you today. Datasite, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Todd Albright: We’re a growth stage SaaS technology company, we specialize in providing solutions to the M&A community, Mergers and Acquisitions. Most of our customers are large investment banks, private equity firms, corporations, law firms, we do a ton of work with them and our principle job without boring you with M&A jargon is just to provide them with technology that accelerates the completion of a merger or an acquisition. They take about 6 to 9 months and with our technology it happens faster, it’s more secure and you’re assured better outcomes.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people listening to the show like to know who our guests physically sell to, so what type of positions do you sell to? Is it a Chief Technology Officer or someone in the program side or leadership?

Todd Albright: We sell primarily to the business itself so the people that are in the middle of these transactions or advising them, so our clients at corporations are CEOs, Chief Financial Officers, general councils and they have a group of advisers that are typically helping them through a sale process. It could be an investment banker like a managing director or a VP, even an analyst or an associate, law firms, accounting, tax experts, these are the people that we sell to primarily on the business.

Fred Diamond: What excites you about that? Tell us what gets you juiced in the day to come sell more to these organizations.

Todd Albright: There are about 30 thousand M&A transactions that happen each year globally and we’re in 170 countries, our sales team is about 200 people. I bet what excites us the most is that we really assure positive deal outcomes when you use our software, you can be at higher degree of certainty knowing and confident that that deal is going to get done quickly, auditable, safely and certainly securely. In the old days people got on planes, they flew to physical file rooms to actually do this work, it slowed the process, it certainly wasn’t secure. We’ve been making a ton of technology investment to make sure our system is world class for our clients and I have the privilege of leading the sales organization that gets to talk about that day in and day out.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about your career. Tell us how you first got into sales as a career.

Todd Albright: I wanted to make money.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely.

Todd Albright: [Laughs] I started my career in consulting at Ernst & Young and it was a wonderful ride. A lot of that work was learning how to solve customer issues and I really enjoyed that work. At the same time – and this was, I’ll date myself, in the mid-90s – there was this new technology called the internet that was being invented and I lived in Atlanta, Georgia and there was a small growth stage company called Security First Technology which was selling internet banking software. This was software that would allow people to look at their account information on the internet, it was [Inaudible 04:39] technology in 1994 and they were looking for salespeople and they were looking for salespeople and I thought, “I have no sales experience, I know nothing about banking or financial services technology, I’d probably be a good fit.” I’m joking, of course but that was my first sales job, I carried a bag there for nine years and learned a ton.

Fred Diamond: There are guests we’ve had on the show who were management consultants where someone said, “You have good skills in front of the customer, you should move into this side” and then we have a lot of engineers who supported the sales process who wanted to make the shift. Looking back, did you really have the sales skills when you were younger or were you barren to going into sales? When you made that transition, what were you thinking about how you were prior to getting there?

Todd Albright: There are many great paths to successful sales careers so everything that you identified, Fred, is an absolutely bedrock path to being successful, there’s no one-size-fits-all but I must tell you that when I was in elementary school, I got called to the principal’s office because I was selling candy from the deli next door at markup from my fishing tackle box. On the way to school there was this stop and go and I would pop in and buy all kinds of candy, I’d put it in the tackle box and I would get there early and the kids would want to buy the candy. I think I was a born salesperson from the start but eventually you start to understand what you’re good at. You’re curious and wanting to solve people’s problems and maybe you’re okay in front of an audience and maybe you can articulate an argument. That led me down the path of sales but the management consulting background was definitely the first step because what selling is about is solving people’s problems and creating better outcomes for them and that was really the starting point. Then wanting to be on stage promoting that good work to the customers out there.

Fred Diamond: When you made that shift, what were some of the key lessons that you learned that have stuck with you?

Todd Albright: Urgency. When you’re carrying a bag you’ve got a number to hit. There’s a lot of pressure there and learning how to work with that. Second is you may be a salesperson out there but the reality is depending on what you’re selling, you’re recruiting help and resource from all parts of the organization. How do I build internal credibility to get people to ride along with me and to get sponsorship from the top of the organization and all parts of the product and customer service group to be able to create those outcomes? Those are a few of the things that I learned early on.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to you for a little bit. Tell us what you’re an expert in, I’m curious. What do you think your area of brilliance is?

Todd Albright: I think all sales leaders have clarity of vision, good communication, good leadership skills, written and oral but I’d say that two things probably stand out. The ability to identify the objective and to harness the organization focused in that singular direction, I think it’s very easy in sales no matter where you are in the organization to get distracted by extraneous stuff that’s really not going to move the needle or deliver the result you’ve committed, so a clarity of focus. I think the second thing, and this is more to the orchestration work you make or you do as an individual contributor and certainly in the role I’m in now, the word I use is synthesis. It’s more than just having a great sales plan, you’ve got to bring together other parts of the organization from the product expertise, the engineering organization, customer service, marketing, etcetera to make it all happen. Certainly when you’re doing a deal you’re recruiting help from finance and legal. Getting those people on side is part of the learning curve but I would say those are the two things that I might distinguish myself, clarity of vision as well as the ability to synthesize and orchestrate those resources across different functional areas.

Fred Diamond: I just mentioned you’re the Worldwide Chief Revenue Officer. Talk about global sales for a second. What are some of the things that you’re dealing with today as a sales leader globally?

Todd Albright: It’s balance. We have a large sales organization for our space, the largest in the space, about 200 quota carrying reps and then we have a sales enablement organization and certainly a leadership core. There are standard things that we want to do as a company, where do we hunt? It’s pretty consistent from market to market whether you’re in Asia, you’re in Europe, you’re in Latin America, you’re in North America, it’s pretty consistent about where we want to hunt. So, our job at a systemic level is to help guide our sellers in the direction of the customers with the highest propensity to buy, that’s a lot of science, that’s a lot of analytical work. How we incent and how we pay our reps and motivate our reps, that is consistent worldwide but I would say that most successful global sales leaders are highly empowering of their field resources.

The reality is that the VP of mine waking up in Sao Paulo this morning knows a lot more and has an intimate understanding of what’s going to make that person successful in their home market and it  might be very different in Paris, France or Athens, Greece or in Singapore or in Sydney, Australia where I was recently. I think it’s that balance between empowering the field sales force to tailor our approach on the go to market front while also building skill in the organization by having consistent culture, operating principles where we hunt and how we pay our people.

Fred Diamond: Again, you mentioned some mentors before, tell us about an impactful sales career mentor or two and how they impacted your career.

Todd Albright: I have to say that I’ve been really fortunate in working for great leaders and mentors throughout my career and that started at EY and through the various technology companies, I can list them by name but we’ll protect the innocent right now, Fred. I think it was important as well that these mentors didn’t just happen to me, I sought them out and not just above me in the sales organization but you start to look at who’s the head of customer service, who’s the head of product and engineering, let me learn from you. The reality is great leadership having a plan, executing that plan, it’s not like sales has a corner on any of that, it exists everywhere in the organization. I would say that the biggest thing that I learned or the consistency I found among them is you start to realize that whatever you’re selling, you’re selling to the individual needs of the people in the room.

Most of us show up to a sales pitch, maybe there’s three or four people from the customer. We’re not selling to an institution, we’re selling to the individual needs and wants at a personal level of the people in the room. The person from IT operations has a very different set of needs from the person who’s running the business and that person has a very different set of needs from the people in legal and finance and information security that you’re going to talk to through the process. Being really astute and sharp in not reading the room for any purpose other than fulfilling the need of that individual at the point of sale and it could be in some cases of an enterprise sale, 30 people. In a [Inaudible 11:58] might be a couple of people but that was probably the consistency that I found.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, how would you coach some of the salespeople on your team to understand that? That’s actually a great point, you talked about that you’re selling to the individual needs of the people in the room and in the process what might be some of the coaching you would tell your sales team to get better at that?

Todd Albright: It’s not complicated, it’s human. If you’re raising children, for those of you out there you know that your children are a little bit different from one another so your approach is different. We do a lot of work at Datasite around interpersonal style and classically there are four different styles, you have drivers, you have amiables, etc. and we do a lot of work in identifying, “What is my personal style, strengths and weaknesses? What are the typical interpersonal styles that I’m going to deal with either in the seller universe i.e. the buyers that I’m selling to or within the organization that sell for partners of ours?” We spend a lot of time and I think what happens is we start to overcomplicate it, it’s all human but there are some skills that you can develop in terms of understanding that, “I happen to be a driver, my driver style can be endearing in certain capacities for certain people, it can be off-putting if I don’t edit that style.”

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

Todd Albright: Scale, we can’t hire enough people. We are growing like crazy, I believe three times the industry average. I’m not sure we broadcast that but I just did, we feel good about our growth. My obligation to our board and investors is to sustain that growth so a lot of our work right now doesn’t keep me up at night because we’ve received accolades for the growth of our sales organization and we feel good about that. Attracting talent, then the second thing is how can we make the talent that’s in the building as productive as possible? By productive, it sounds like a grownup word but what I really mean is how do we put those people in a position to be as successful as possible? Those are the two things that we focus on, those are wonderful challenges to have, for sure but it’s what we focus on day in and day out.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, you’ve had a great career here. Again, we’re talking to Todd Albright, Worldwide Chief Revenue Officer at Datasite formerly known as Merrill Corporation. Todd, take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win of your career that you’re most proud of.

Todd Albright: I’ve been fortunate to either ride along or lead a few different ones but I’d have to say, when I was a young seller I got the mandate to sell a $10 million dollar order to this large bank who said they wanted to purchase “right now”. Five years later after multiple management changes we finally got that sale done and I think the reason that’s a signature win is it shows that in sales you’ve got to be patient. During that sales process executives changed on the client’s side or technology changed, etcetera. You have to stay vigilant and staying on top of that but eventually we got the deal done. What was most satisfying is that the number of people who were involved in closing that deal – and that was the point earlier I made about orchestration, that’s really the fun of sales, you’re the quarterback in effect bringing all that talent together from your organization to create a result for the customer.

Fred Diamond: Todd, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you started your career as a management consultant with E&Y and then you made the shift over to sales. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Todd Albright: No.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] let’s just leave it at that. Let’s take a short break, we’re going to listen to one of our sponsors. When we come back, even though Todd has given us a lot of great tips, urgency and some other things, we’re going to ask Todd for his tips on how you can take your sales career to the next level. My name is Fred Diamond, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast.

[Sponsor break]

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

Todd Albright: Build your network. I’ve talked a little bit about early in our career and we’ve talked about mentors, seek out mentors. It is very probable that the organization that you are joining, are a part of has a ton of knowledge already in the building, why not tap that knowledge?

The second reason you build your network, and I’ve talked about this, is you’re not out there alone as a lone ranger trying to get deals done. These are complex enterprise sales, it’s going to take an army to get that deal done not only because there are many buyers on the client’s side but the reality is you don’t have a corner on the knowledge required to get that deal done whether it’s process, a particular legal term, certainly deep engineering and product expertise. Build your network for the purposes of learning and accelerating your growth and also build your network because you’re going to need those people to be successful in the field.

Fred Diamond: I have a question, you gave us a great answer before when I asked you about your mentors. I’m sure you get a lot of people who reach out to you about you being a mentor to them. What advice would you give people who are asking you to be a mentor? How can they be a better mentee to you as a mentor?

Todd Albright: That’s a great question. One, I never turn anybody down. If you’re sincere about being successful no matter what your professional goals are, it doesn’t have to be in sales, I love giving back, I’m an adviser at a formal level for a couple of growth stage companies, it just stays fun all with the full support of my existing organization, of course. I enjoy doing it. I guess when you’re recruiting me I would say have a plan, have a vision of where you want to be in five years and map back from that and we can work on that plan together.

I think what doesn’t work – and this is independent if you’re approaching me or you’re approaching anyone that you’d solicit advice from – if it’s open-ended and not fit for purpose, it’s just hard to contribute to your growth unless you feel like there’s a shared plan you can work on together, so that’s a little bit of feedback. By the way, the other reason I never say no is I’m learning too, I’m learning a lot from people at different generations of their career, certainly people from other parts of the organization. I had a young person the other day who approached me and said, “Hey, I’m in the engineering organization, I saw a rec go up for a pre-sales resource. Can you tell me what is it like making that transition?” He’s a C++ expert coder, I don’t know anything about C++ so we’re learning together and I would say don’t be bashful but have a plan, have an idea of what kind of feedback you want.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your continued success?

Todd Albright: Endurance, you’ve got to keep at it. There’s the old adage in sales, what have you done for me lately? For those of you who run a calendar fiscal year, we flip the page on 2019, we’re into 2020 and you’ve got that mountain to climb. I think what allows you to maintain that endurance is you break down the sales process into its amino acids, it is building blocks, pots and pans, etcetera. You’re never going to eat an elephant in one bite, if you’ve got a two million dollar quota you’re not going to sell that quota in one deal. It’s an amalgamation of little steps so I also find that when you have that high cadence, it keeps you fresh, it keeps you vocal. That would be a little bit of feedback in terms of my selling habits.

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

Todd Albright: We are at an incredible pivot point at Datasite right now so I mentioned our growth and success and our core market of supporting data rooms and we’re growing like crazy, we’re taking a ton of market share, revenues are up into the right expanding margins, great free cash flow. Everyone’s really happy but we’re not satisfied because we know within our world there are still lots of problems that we can solve and value we can add to our community of buyers. One of them is a space called asset marketing. What we support today is what’s called due diligence, think about when you buy a house you agree on a price but you do an inspection, a termite inspection, you got to get a loan approved, etc., that’s what due diligence is even if you’re doing a multibillion dollar global transaction.

What there isn’t a lot of technology supporting is the marketing of that asset, how do I assemble a list of potential people who might be interested in this house? How do I market to them? How do I run them through the process? We have this great new product coming out called Datasite marketing but it’s going to be a different sale. We’re going to be selling to a slightly different audience, how we’re selling that is going to be a little bit different, it’ll be an enterprise SaaS sale different from the high velocity transactional sales that we do today but that’s a big project for us as we pivot and learn new muscles for the organization.

Fred Diamond: Todd, before we ask you for your final thought I want to thank you, you’ve given us a lot of great insights today. I love your energy, I love a lot of the thought that you put into your career. We get that a lot with the people who started out their careers in consulting because a lot of what you’re doing is process, helping customers through process. I’m just curious though, you made the move from management consulting, you have global responsibilities, sales is hard, people don’t return your phone calls or your emails. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Todd Albright: I love the action, you love the energy. You’re in many cases at a very young age charged with being the face of your organization and representing that ethically, morally and valuably for the people that you’re selling to. I don’t know a lot of careers and what’s particularly exciting about what we do at Datasite is we’re selling to CEOs and CFOs and white-shoe investment banks and law firms and private equity so we get the opportunity to interact with really smart people on the client side every day. Those are a few of the things that keep us going at Datasite for sure.

Fred Diamond: Todd, again I want to thank you for the great insights today, it was a great interview, I appreciate all your insights. Why don’t you give us one final thought? We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, a lot of them in tech, a lot of them in some of the spaces that we talked about today. Give us one final thought to inspire our listeners today. 

Todd Albright: My grandfather once told me, “Don’t get too smart” and that was sage wisdom to say nothing will ever supplant or replace hustle and humility when it comes to being a successful seller. That hustle is staying vigilant day in and day out, you just got to put in the cycle time. If you put in the process and you’re disciplined about it, good things will happen. The second thing, that humility, you’re never going to sell alone, you’ve got to recruit other talent from all parts of the organization and likely on the customer’s side to make you successful. Bringing those two things together, hustle and humility, will take you a long way.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 245: Datasite Global Sales Leader Todd Albright Says These Four Things are Critical for Sales Professionals to Do Right Now to Be Successful first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on May 20, 2020. It featured sales leaders Gary Milwit (JG Wentworth) and Expert Sales Trainer Bob Greene.]

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

Listen to Gary Milwit’s Podcast .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Greene: Yeah, a little bit [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Greene: Every day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Diamond: Bob, how about you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Milwit: Episode Twenty-two.

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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

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Please register for Creativity in Sales: Mark “The Sales” Hunter Presents Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19 on April 17, 2020 2:00 PM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 15, 2020. It featured sales leaders Susan Lee (MOI), Christopher Ware (NAIOP) and Joe Alvarez (NOS).]

EPISODE 224: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Susan Lee, Christopher Ware and Joe Alvarez

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Susan Lee’s Podcast . Listen to Christopher Ware’s Podcast. Listen to Joe Alvarez’ Podcast.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy starts from the top down. It starts from the president of the company and it goes all the way down. Communicating, connecting, letting people know that we understand, “We’re challenged just like you’re challenged in your business” is everything to the empathetic part of supporting your clients.”

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us what your top priorities are, Joe Alvarez? Why don’t you get us started?

Joe Alvarez: Thanks, Fred. Thanks to everybody listening to this podcast. I’m with a company called National Office Systems, we are a firm that is in a niche product, we do specially storage such as high density storage and specialty lockers, we also have a technology division that does document imaging and asset tracking using RFID technology. We have a division that does installations and installs many of our products, we’ve done a tremendous amount of glass walls so that’s NOS.

When you ask about the priorities right now, aside from being a sales leader in my company I also work in managing the entire firm and my top three priorities have been #1, take care of our #1 asset which is our employees, keep them all employed has been a goal of ours during this crazy time that we’re living making certain that business is running financially sound. It’s a crazy time of year to be doing business where people may be open, may not be open, may be paying you and the third thing that is really important to us is to provide a very safe environment to our employees.

Fred Diamond: Christopher Ware, you’re with NAIOP, why don’t you give us a 20 second overview on NAIOP and tell us what your top priorities are?

Christopher Ware: Thanks for having me on. NAIOP is an international trade association, we have members throughout the United States and Canada and our members develop, own, invest and manage commercial real estate, primarily office, mixed use and industrial. Of course, when we say industrial we talk about warehouse and distribution space so if you’ve ordered something from Amazon, you’ve ordered something that’s passed through one of our members’ buildings. I’ve been with NAIOP for 19 years now and sales career is over 20 years.

As far as our top priorities, of course employee safety as Joe mentioned is extremely important, also keeping people’s spirits up is extremely important as well dealing with the mental aspect of things. Sales is a stressful job anyway and then you add what’s going on now on top of that, it can be overwhelming so that’s a priority. In terms of our customers, for me it’s really about maintaining relationships and reaching out even though we may not have a whole lot to sell right now, the relationship is essential. That’s really the #1 sales priority for me, to keep our connections up with the people that we do business with.

Fred Diamond: Susan Lee, it’s great to have you on today’s webinar as well. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about MOI and tell us what your top three priorities are right now as well. It doesn’t have to be three, what your top priorities are.

Susan Lee: MOI is a company that partners with design, commercial real estate, project management firms and clients. We furnish their spaces, we do everything from the front door to the back door and we do this so that employees are engaged, they can build cultural strength in their organization and businesses can be very productive. I’m happy to be here, happy tax day for me because we don’t have to file taxes so I’m excited about that. Our priorities are staying connected as well with our people, from an executive team communicating and staying transparent with the rest of the organization, everybody is a little worried right now so open communication, open dialogue is important. Also connecting with our clients, we work with a lot of people that are essential businesses so making sure that our employees are safe and our customers are safe as we engage in projects with them.

Fred Diamond: A quick question here. Susan and Joe, you both have worked together. Your companies work together and have worked together frequently over the years. I’m just curious, how are you talking to your partners right now? Again, you’ve both done a lot of business together. Is that also a relationship that partnerships are getting together, talking to each other and trying to figure things out? Susan, why don’t you take that first?

Susan Lee: We do talk on a daily basis. One thing that we are in the business of is providing furniture and furniture comes from states all over the country. As you’ve seen over the last few weeks, we’ve experienced shutdowns of states and shutdowns of businesses so staying in touch with our manufacturing partners is important to understand what products they’re producing, which factories are open. Also, making sure that our design partners, we’re honoring the work that they’ve done making sure that we’re talking to commercial real estate partners to make sure that if they have timelines of projects that need to be done, construction companies we’re connecting with as well. Joe, I know you’re probably experiencing the same thing, aren’t you?

Joe Alvarez: Yes I am, Susan. Interesting you say that, we have a lot of the same issues with our manufacturers, in different states different rules are being set in those different states. One thing we’ve done is also we’ve done a weekly meeting on Zoom with partners to hear what they’re going through and to understand. I want our folks to feel what they’re feeling and it’s a great communication hour that we spend talking to our business partners.

Fred Diamond: What’s something that’s been a big positive surprise that has come out of the last weeks that we’ve been through this situation?

Christopher Ware: I think being an association professional, associations is really about community, it’s about building relationships and the strength of those connections really have shown through recently. To give you a couple of examples, I posted some Zoom chats with regular sponsors and advertisers and other participants and people really appreciate that level of connection and that level of touch, and people really want to reach out, they want to connect. The association industry is uniquely positioned to help us be able to do that.

We also have been on the forefront of getting quality information out to our members so I’m very proud of our organization being able to pivot very quickly from bigger picture trends based type of reporting to information that our members can use right away. We’re providing almost all of that free of charge to the commercial real estate industry and that’s something that we feel is very important for us to do, but it’s also enabling us to reach new customers who maybe haven’t taken a look at NAIOP before. It’s a great opportunity to show our thought leadership, to show our expertise and also to connect people who desperately want to stay connected in this time.

Fred Diamond: One thing that we’re telling people is, “Now’s the time to show leadership to your constituency and bring them things that are going to help them.” How about you, Susan? What are some of the positive results that have happened for you and your company at this time?

Susan Lee: I’ll speak more about talking to the sellers, connecting with them. We run so fast every single day and I rarely get to talk to the sellers, we have about 30 sellers on staff and we rarely get to connect or talk. I’m seeing their kids, I’m seeing their pets, we’re being able to connect. This is a scary time for all of us, it’s so much uncertainty that we’re finding that we’re building strength together through this adversity. I think that’s one of the big things for us that we’re connecting with and also, our baseball hat game is really strong. A lot of baseball caps in these calls, that’s pretty cool.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? Why don’t you tell us something?

Joe Alvarez: It’s funny because a lot of what Susan just described, our companies work a lot together and talk a lot and we mimic a lot of the things that are working for each other so we’re doing a lot of the same things. One of the things in addition to getting to know your folks better, and I’m talking about all the employees, is to see how they come together. When things get tough, people come together and it’s actually awesome to see our folks taking care of each other. They’re sending lunches to the installation guys, they’re taking care of each other asking, they’re doing things that on an everyday situation they don’t have the time, they’re running too fast. It’s one of the good things that’s come out of this, you realize what’s important, Fred.

Fred Diamond: One of the reasons why we brought the three of you together is because you all sell things to customers who have offices.

What has changed for you? The interesting thing here is your customer has changed. I’ll give you an example, I talked to one of our members earlier this week who sells to state and local governments and he said they’re working around the clock because now they’re helping with getting medical supplies, medical devices and things supporting that. We have another member who sells to the entertainment industry and he said there’s nothing going on right now selling to them so they’re having to figure out, but what has changed for all three of you as sales leaders? Again, your customers have offices, in the past four weeks. Joe, why don’t we start with you? Your customers have offices, you excel in helping them optimize their space. What’s changed?

Joe Alvarez: Obviously a lot of our customers are not at their offices so how do you manage your folks and how you connect with them has been different. We’re using a lot of technology, we’re using a lot of Zoom, GoToMeeting, it’s been interesting to me that getting ahold of a client today is so much easier than it’s ever been before. One of the things that I’ve heard someone say, I think it was Susan before the meeting was that you know where they are, they’re available, they’re going to talk to you most of the time which is a wonderful thing. The second piece, there’s no travel time so you can go from meeting to meeting without worrying going from DC to Virginia or whatever. Like I said before, people seem to be willing to talk to you so it’s about building and developing those relationships right now to make sure you have empathy with them and being ready so that when they’re ready to take care of business, you’re going to be there for them.

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? Again, obviously you furnish offices in the real estate as well, so what’s changed for you as a sales leader?

Susan Lee: I believe it’s accessibility, being accessible for questions that come up. Also, we’re starting as an organization, our design team, our project management team, our sales team are all now working together to look at what’s next. We have a new normal, it’s not normal so how do we start looking at going back to work and what does that look like? What are our clients going to expect from us? We work with the federal government, they’re still installing right now, we work with construction companies.

Construction is essential, people are at work, how do we support them in that? We’re looking a lot at, “Where do we go from here where we are?”. I think it was a shock for us over the last four weeks just to figure out what is our new normal but now it’s, “Where do we go from here? What are we looking at two weeks from now to a year from now?” We’re really starting to talk about that and again, coming together, bringing people together to talk about it.

Fred Diamond: Chris, what has changed for you as a sales leader in the past four weeks?

Christopher Ware: Certainly the fact that we can’t meet in person is very impactful for the commercial real estate industry. If you can’t meet with your clients and show them a space that’s available, that certainly is a traditional way of leasing or selling commercial real estate. I’ve been really excited to see how inventive our members have been using virtual platforms, virtual tours, connecting with people online and facilitating transactions. The deals are still happening in the commercial real estate space, obviously things have slowed down and are going to continue to until we find out what our new normal is, but business is still happening and the commercial real estate people in particular are very entrepreneurial, very creative and we’re really seeing the best of that right now within the industry.

Within my own space, not having in-person meetings as we normally would has been a challenge but again, we’ve been able to pivot very quickly, very effectively offering this content online in the near term. I think that’s going to be one of the legacies, additional online engagement as we begin to blend that back in with in-person conferences and events as soon as it’s safe to do so.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I want to follow up with something that you talked about before. Again, if anybody who’s listening to today’s webinar has a question please feel free to submit them via the panel. People are home, as a matter of fact I’m going to guess that 99.9% who are watching today’s webinar are home. How have you responded to that and how has your industry changed?

Joe Alvarez: There’s a lot of schools of thought on that discussion. From my perspective, this has been a huge business disruption and it really has changed the way people think and do things every day. From a sports perspective I look at this almost like a forced tryout in telecommuting. You have to do it and now people are starting to realize what it’s like to be able to work away from the office. The generational divide is becoming closer, you have all the baby boomers that wanted to live a certain way and you have all the Z and X generations being different, this has really forced that divide to come closer.

My perspective is that as we move on, there’ll be a lot more home offices than you have today, there’ll be technology driven towards them, there’s still going to be a lot of offices. A lot of the discussion today is we need to be 6 or 8 feet away so before it was, “How can you densify an office with as many people as possible?” now it’s, “How do you do that and also provide the space?” This new normal is going to be different. I know that Susan probably has a lot of studies about how they’re going to do the furniture but I can tell you this, from our business, our technology division that does digitization of records, we have gotten a spike up in calls saying, “We were thinking about this, now we really need to be completely virtual because we don’t know how we’re going to end up in this new normal moving forward. There’s been a lot of good things for it that are going to happen off of this.

Fred Diamond: Susan, let’s follow up on that. It’s interesting, the first four, five weeks of the pandemic people were getting used to working from home and all those kinds of things. Now what we’re hearing is a lot of people are starting to plan for what might be the return and we don’t want to get into political discussions right now, but back to what Joe was just alluding to, people are looking for advice on how they do go back to the office safely. You are experts on that, what are some things that you’re telling these people?

Susan Lee: What I would like to address is that we’ve spent years selling the open environment and community connections and common areas where people can come together and socialize. Now we are facing a situation where we have to look at the complete opposite. You’ll see articles that are starting to come out that are posted all over social media that are talking about, “What does the office look like coming back?” and we have to start thinking. We were on a call today with our team, with the president of the company. We were talking about you’re starting at hand sanitizer at the front door and then you’re walking into the space and you’re completely open so we’re starting to work with our manufacturers and looking at solutions they may have to separate that open environment.

We’re talking a lot about distancing, we’re talking a lot about alternating days of working but we are going to have to go back into those interior spaces, those common areas that we put where people can socialize and we’re going to have to start reevaluating it. Part of this is – and we talked about this today – it’s going to be a phased type of solution because the challenges that we’re facing today are not going to be the challenges we’re facing a year from now or two years from now. Just like when we faced 9/11 and we had to regroup on how we look at safety and how we looked at international safety, we’re looking worldwide at how people work across the world. This is a situation where we’re really going to be evolving over time and the environment will change as well.

Fred Diamond: Chris, you work with a lot of companies that are very involved with real estate. How do you think real estate will be impacted by this?

Christopher Ware: I think it’s going to have, in the short term, certainly a significant impact but I think you’re going to see an extended impact over time. A statistic that I just read that I think is worth noting is in the 1970s, the average office worker had about 500 square feet of space on average. That was down to about 200 square feet of space a decade ago and most recently it’s 150 square feet of space so that trend I think is going to be halted and maybe reversed as people are going to want to have a little bit more separation than otherwise was the case.

I also think, however, that you are going to see an increased number of people working remotely, as Susan mentioned maybe some staggering out of space in the short to mid-term. Honestly, you also have some businesses that unfortunately just aren’t going to make it through this crisis so I think in the short term there is going to be some vacancy as a result but the long-term health of the industry certainly is very strong. We went into this crisis with very good fundamentals from a commercial real estate market perspective whereas the last downturn there was a lot of over-building, we really didn’t see that this cycle.

Once we get our footing underneath us as an industry, I’m very confident in the long term success. However, like I said, the densification trend I think probably is going to halt and maybe start to unwind a little bit and then of course the work from home options I think you’re going to see more of that.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re sales leaders, we’re talking about how you’re managing your sales team and your customers but how do you find a work-life balance in these times especially as a parent? There is a follow-up question, Susan, the question is how do you tell your other kids that your oldest child, Courtney, is your favorite? [Laughs] obviously thank you, Courtney for that question. Susan can take the second part offline unless you want to tell the world… No, but seriously, how are you managing your lives? Let’s talk about that from a human being perspective. You all live at homes, Joe, you have a beautiful house down in Annapolis and Chris, you’re in Centerville and Susan, you’re in Olney. How are you managing your lives as sales leaders? Susan, since Courtney directed that to you, why don’t you get us started there?

Susan Lee: [Laughs] I will tell you that Courtney is an essential worker so she has to go to work. Courtney, you’re working right now. The second part of this is there is a balance so I’m looking right now and one of my kids is walking around doing like this in the screen, we’ve embraced our sellers that have kids, it’s very stressful to try to balance your kids with your job, you’re constantly on calls, they’re constantly coming up wanting things. We’re letting our sellers know it’s okay, I think that’s one of the things that you feel with your job that you have to be fully engaged but part of the engagement is actually incorporating your family and one of the things that our organization is doing, we have a really good marketing team – shout out to my marketing team – they do webinars for the kids. In the middle of the day they’ve colored masks to symbolize the mask, that it’s okay to wear a mask and masks are good.

We’ve done things like The Price is Right, I am not good at The Price is Right, I actually don’t know anything about pricing but we’ve got employees that are really good at understanding what the prices are at Harris Teeter, Safeway and Giant. We’re also just taking the time to let everybody know we have new sellers out there, people that recently joined the organization. It can be stressful, you try to prove yourself, you come to a new company and you set up the strategic plan and you really want to show them that you can do the job, and then we face a pandemic where you can’t go out and sell.

We’re trying to reassure them that it’s okay, we understand, we hire you for your potential, we understand that it’s going to come in time and we’re trying to find creative ways to sell and connect outside of your traditional being in front of a client. That’s a little bit about how we deal with stress.

Fred Diamond: Chris, how are you balancing things? I know you’re a big sports fan, you’ve gone to a lot of minor league and major league baseball teams. As a matter of fact, on your Sales Game Changers podcast we talked about it at length as well so what are some things that you’re doing to stay sane during this very challenging time?

Christopher Ware: That is one of the challenges of work from home is that you’re technically always at work, so certainly setting boundaries for yourself and saying, “I have office hours and then I have hours where I’m at home” is very critical. I think being creative and reaching out to friends, staying connected with your community even though you’re not able to maybe go out and watch sports with your friends or go out and do what your normal activities would be, but one example that was a lot of fun was my friends and I enjoy playing Golden Tee which is the game at a lot of sports bars.

There’s an online app version of it and we have Golden Tee virtual tournament, we use Zoom so we can do a little trash talk with each other and we’re playing each other in the game. It’s certainly not as good as the real thing but we had a great time, had a couple beers and just had some fun and stayed engaged. Just thinking along this term is maintaining those relationships and those friendships is certainly vital because everybody, no matter what industry they’re in, they’re all having a lot of stress right now and just being there for people I think is essential.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I want to go back to something you mentioned before. Again, we’re calling this a Sales Game Changers webinar where we’re talking to some sales leaders. Of course, you’re a business leader but you mentioned empathy a few moments ago and that was a big theme the first couple of weeks after the pandemic kicked in. This is a sales webinar and I’m looking at the hundreds of people who are watching today’s webinar. I’m going to presume that most of them are sales professionals. How do you be in sales right now? Again, you mentioned empathy in your past answer. Is it okay to sell things right now? Is it okay to ask people for business? Is it okay to prospect or should we just be empathetic and helpful? I’m curious in your thoughts in that and I’m also going to ask that to Susan as well.

Joe Alvarez: That’s a really good question, Fred. I think you’ve got to be good enough to read the client. Some clients today are in dire need of what you have to offer from a service or product. We sell by relationships, we build relationship so we get to know our clients pretty well. The empathy word has been one that is needed for everybody whether you’re selling to them, whether you’re calling your sister or you’re calling anybody. In this time there’s a lot of stress and anxiety in our world right now and it’s important to obviously have empathy but also to be a solutions provider. If somebody’s got issues, you want to be there for them.

One of the things that we’ve asked our folks is not just to sell but also to connect, so for instance if Susan is my client and she’s looking for something that I don’t provide but I know you provide, my job is to connect you, to help Susan get rid of that anxiety. It’s not about me winning, it’s about me helping her get to the point where she can get some result. There’s different ways of addressing empathetic perspective with a client, I think people think of sales like real hard sell kind of thing. Sales to me is you’re a solutions provider, if you can provide a solution that is a win-win for both sides it’s a great scenario, it’s not about pushing or selling something. That’s how we’ve been dealing with this, it’s changed a little bit in that you want to know how that person is first as opposed to talking about what you do or what your solution is. It’s, “How are you doing, Susan?” first. “How’s your family, how’s everybody doing?” and there’s a lot of personal discussion before you get to, “If you need what I do, let me know.”

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? You manage a team of sellers, you need to sell things. You have products and services that you sell so how are you selling right now? Do you feel comfortable selling? What’s your follow up to that?

Susan Lee: What I would tell you is just as we’re all at home working, so are our clients and the ball doesn’t stop bouncing in the process. When you think about a selling cycle there are various points in the selling cycle so a lot of our projects will be in various points in the selling cycle. When we’re looking at our forecasts, when we’re looking at our pipelines, a month ago we stopped but we were already at different points in time in the selling cycle so what we tried to do is continue to provide that information for our clients.

We still have people that are bidding projects, we still have people that are planning for the future, we still have people that are looking for budgeting prices and they’re also starting, as Joe mentioned earlier, to look at what does ‘work from home’ mean and what solutions will you have for that. As Joe mentioned also, those relationships are everything. We’re a trusted resource for our clients and for our partners so making sure that we’re available, making sure that we respond quickly to them, being sensitive, that time is about the essence and understanding that their time is short too, because they’re on conference calls all day as well, making sure they have the information they need to continue to do their job.

Empathy starts from the top down, it starts from the president of the company and it goes all the way down. Communicating, connecting, letting people know that we understand, “We’re challenged just like you’re challenged in your business” is everything to the empathetic part of supporting your clients.

Fred Diamond: Chris, we’ve implemented a lot of new things in the last couple of weeks. Everyone now is an expert on Zoom, at the Institute for Excellence in Sales we’re doing a webinar a day and we’re getting hundreds of people per week who are coming onto our webinars. Joe mentioned before that no one’s really traveling right now. Do you see the pandemic changing the way you sell moving forward? A lot of people are saying ‘the new normal’, whatever that means. Is this the new normal? Are we going to be doing Zoom all day or people are not going to be going to offices, less face to face, travel? Where do you think sales is going?

Christopher Ware: I certainly think in the near term, yes. Until there’s a vaccine, this probably will be what normal is going to look like, it’s going to be more virtual meetings, more phone calls, more emails, that sort of thing. I do think there’s a fundamental need for people to connect and real estate is still a face-to-face business so I think as soon as it’s safe to do so, the in-person connections are going to continue. We look forward to making that happen as soon as it’s safe to do so but I think the legacy of this experience is going to be how we incorporate some of these online technologies with in-person events and with in-person activities. Hosting video meetups in advance of an in-person meeting so you can get to know people ahead of time, things like that, we’re trying to think very strategically about not just coming up with immediate solutions but how we are going to use these tools going forward after it’s safe for everybody to get back together again.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for Joe and for Susan. Once again, if you’re on today’s webinar, if you have a question for Joe Alvarez, Susan Lee or Christopher Ware submit them through your panel. Once again, if you can take a screenshot and send it to me, we’re having a contest, that would be great. Susan and Joe, you both manage sales professionals, you manage sales teams. What are your expectations right now of your salespeople and what are you telling them? You’re also sales leaders, again Joe, you’re managing partner at your company and you both manage large numbers of people, teams that you have expectations of. What do you expect from them right now and what are you telling them to do? Joe, take that first and then Susan, be prepared.

Joe Alvarez: Back to the question, you asked before how they’re working today. I’ve got two thoughts there, one is to stay focused and to stay visible. The focus part is you need to have a daily and weekly plan and follow it, it’s easy to work at home and forget that you have a plan, you get stuck with the kids asking you for something or whatever and you get hooked on something else because you’re not used to working from home. You have a plan that actually tells you what you’re doing hour per hour and at the end of they day you judge yourself whether you accomplished the goals of the day or not or the goals of the week.

The second piece is to stay visible, stay in contact with your clients and your prospects whether it’s through email, Zoom, webinars, social media, LinkedIn, whatever it is. You need to stay in touch with them because if you plant the seeds today, when we go back to the new normal, whatever that means and however that happens you’re going to have projects that are going. If you just sat around and didn’t do that, you won’t have that coming to you so that’s our goal, that’s what we’re trying to get our guys and ladies to do.

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? What are your expectations of your sellers?

Susan Lee: My expectation, Fred, and if my sellers are on this call, keep your forecast updated. The one thing about a company in planning for the future is making sure you have accurate information so keeping the CRMs updated, keeping your forecast updated, as information changes, put it in. You have the time, I’m telling every seller in America and around the world, you have time to put that information in, take the time to do it because that’s how your company plans their resources.

That’s one of the major things that’s critical for sellers, we don’t like to sit in all the time and do because we are busy people, we’re always connecting. If you have time now, stop and take the time to keep your forecast updated, your CRM updated. You can prospect, think of creative ways to do it. We have team calls every week with our sales teams in each of the locations, we talk a lot about what are they doing, what are they hearing, information is power so continuing to bring information back to your sales team that’ll help your teammates as well is very important. It’s just that ongoing communication, idea of sharing and keeping that forecast updated.

Fred Diamond: Chris, I’m curious, are you prospecting for new business right now or are you constantly going back to your existing members and sponsors to make sure they’re okay? How about prospecting? Is it okay to prospect for new business now?

Christopher Ware: That’s a great question and our focus is maintaining existing relationships right now as the situation continues to unfold. We are in effect prospecting for new business in that we’re updating and cleaning up our database, that’s one of the things that constantly we talk about doing and because we are always selling we never get around to actually doing. That’s a priority for us right now, to make sure that our leads pipeline has been cleaned up and people’s contacts are accurate. Maybe they haven’t been in that company for a couple years and we’re just now getting around to updating that information so that’s a key part of it. Then yes, we do have in our plan to start to prospect and start to add some people to the pipeline, if you clean some names out it’s time to add some back to take their place so that definitely is a part of our near term plan.

Fred Diamond: Obviously we’re all doing Zoom now, but what is something else new that you’re doing that you think may have some legs past this pandemic that you’re now doing as a sales leader? Susan, why don’t you go first?

Susan Lee: Fred, to take no attention away from the fact that you do a podcast, we actually have a business developer that started a quick podcast. It’s like 5 to 10 minutes, it’s a young man by the name of Alvarez, his name is Brian Alvarez and he does something called Between Two Screens, it’s a takeoff of Between Two Firms and it’s connecting with industry experts across the area from clients to project managers to designers. He’s getting their feedback, these are thought leaders that are prominent in the Washington DC metropolitan area and he’s connecting with them and asking them questions about what do they see, what’s the forecast out there.

I do believe that’s something we’ll continue to do, he did his first one about a week ago, he did an amazing job and I know we’re going to continue to do that, that’s just something that will keep us all connected not only with our company but with our competitors. One of the things that we’re in the business of doing is helping each other to succeed, we all succeed when one succeeds so I think this is something that’ll be useful in the translate over.

Fred Diamond: Chris, how about you? What’s something new that you’re doing as response to this?

Christopher Ware: Our organization has started a series of online round tables of very specific commercial real estate industry topics and we’re getting groups of 20 to 30 at the most together to be on a Zoom call with an industry expert and of course, the expert leads off the conversation and guides the conversation. It’s an opportunity for people to have very in-depth conversations, to build their networks over the online platform and really learn more about how best to do their job in the process. Its something that we’ve done in person before, we posted similar type events in a live basis, giving this an opportunity to go online and deliver that value to our members and to the industry is something that’s new and it’s something that I very much hope will continue to be successful and that we’ll continue even after we can meet in person again.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? What’s something new that you’ve now implemented as a sales and business leader as a response to the pandemic?

Joe Alvarez: Fred, I think that what we’re seeing is that telecommunications with Zoom and GoToMeeting are going to become bigger and bigger tools for sales. There’s a lot of time saved between me going to your place and meeting with you as opposed to having that conversation remotely specifically when you come to design. You could have a design posted on the screen and the three of us could be talking about changes and it can be done like that instead of me coming to you, going back to design and going back to you. I believe that in the near future you’re going to see a lot more of that. This force tryout is going to make people get smart about how to do business as opposed to the way we’ve been doing it for a long time. One of the things we’re doing is perfecting our ways of communication with all those different pieces of the pie that get involved in a decision to perhaps shorten the sale cycle by having less time between decision makers.

Fred Diamond: What do you think the challenges will be for sales professionals in the next week? Susan, why don’t you go first? What are going to be the key challenges facing sales leaders and sales professionals in the next week?

Susan Lee: I know Christopher mentioned Zoom, you guys have mentioned Zoom quite a bit. I think it’s challenging sometimes as a sales professional to sit in front of the computer all day long and look at screens on a box. I know as a sales leader I’m challenged by that on a daily basis, you get fatigued from that so I think one of the challenges is making sure we can keep our energy up, keep our engagement up, staying hopeful. If we’re listening to the news and it’s telling us we may be 6 weeks out or a year out, we’ve got to continue to stay hopeful. I’ve got some amazing directors that are constantly working with their sellers to keep them engaged.  They’re talking on a daily basis. I think next week we’re going to continue to have to do that because we’re going into week 5 or week 6, we’ve got to continue to do that.

The one thing that I’ll tell you personally that I’m battling with myself is whether or not I’m going to be able to let my husband cut my hair because you guys were mentioning haircuts earlier, I just don’t know if I can do it, though. I’m working on it, I don’t know.

Fred Diamond: If he’s going to do it, let him just go, you know what I’m saying? You’re going to be in your house for another 4, 5 weeks. Chris, how about you? What’s the big challenge for the next 5 days?

Christopher Ware: I’m going to take an even bigger picture approach but we’ll distill it down to five days in that we have an entire generation of sales professionals who have not sold in a down-market, who have not sold in a recession. Sales is a mentally challenging, difficult job to have and when the economy has thrown us for a loop like this it can be very psychologically challenging. I encourage everybody who’s on the call right now to reach out to maybe someone who is newer to the industry than you who doesn’t have the experience of going through a downturn like you may have and just check in on them.

See how they’re doing mentally, see how they’re hanging in because it’s hard right now and it’s okay to admit that, it’s okay to talk about that, it’s okay to say how frustrating things are and I think that is going to be best for the mental health of everybody and it’s going to add to your own resilience. Reach out to folks, let them know that it’s okay to feel the frustration, to feel the discouragement right now but understand that there are things you can be doing to lay the groundwork for your future success.

Fred Diamond: Joe, why don’t you bring us home? What’s going to be the big challenge over the next 5 days that we’re going to need to overcome?

Joe Alvarez: Every day that goes by is one day closer to the end of this thing. You’ve got to keep that perspective, every day is one day closer. Each week is going to bring new challenges and new opportunities, we’ve got to stay flexible, you’ve got to focus on what you can control. You can’t focus on stuff that happens that you can’t do anything about, you can only focus on what you can control and if you take that approach, it’ll be a lot easier to deal with the hard times. Doing what you think you can do, that’s the most important thing. Thank you very much everybody, for having me.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 224: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Susan Lee, Christopher Ware and Joe Alvarez first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Please register for Creativity in Sales: Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19 with Mark Hunter on Friday, April 17, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in January 2020. Since the show was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked Sally what her advice is for sales professionals during the pandemic. She offered the following:

• Take care of yourself and those that are important to you – that includes your customers. What can we deliver now to help during the pandemic? Dun & Bradstreet has offered free access to specific data and analytics to assist with the pandemic response and economic recovery.
• Data and analytics for government are more important now than ever, the opportunity is in uncovering how we are relevant in new ways. Reach out, listen, understand the shifting priorities of your customers.
• Invest in yourself- take time to read/listen to that book you’ve been staring at (mine is John Sculley’s Moonshot), take that online course to sharpen your skills, learn something new that will benefit you and your customers.

EPISODE 221: Dun & Bradstreet Sales Exec Sally Block is Constantly Learning and It’s Helping Her Lead Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

SALLY’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Continue to be a learner but I also want to say that as you advance your career, take time to reach back. Share your knowledge and skills with somebody who’s new to the role. We all came to our success through the help of others. Remember, you’ve got to give back.”

Sally Block is a VP Sales, Dun & Bradstreet Government Solutions.

Prior to coming to Dun & Bradstreet, she held sales leadership positions at CCH Wolters Kluwer and Bloomberg BNA.

Sally can be found on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Your company, Dun and Bradstreet, has been around for what, 178 years now?

Sally Block: Correct.

Fred Diamond: I’m interested in seeing how it’s transformed and how it still stays vital. Thanks for being on the show, why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Sally Block: First, Fred, thank you for this opportunity. I am honored to provide any insights that I can to sales professionals around the world, I really appreciate it. Second, I am the luckiest person in the world. I get to do what I enjoy every day and right now I get to do it surrounded by a smart professional team that are very passionate about what they do. Now, I also get to do it with a company that’s focused on improving public sector performance through data and insight.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you summarize for us? Because a lot of people have probably heard of Dun & Bradstreet, D&B, again I mentioned in the intro the company’s been around for 178 years. Tell us in some more words, what exactly does the company do? Who do you sell to, what do they use your products and services for?

Sally Block: Dun & Bradstreet, we are the global leader in commercial data and analytics. We are the original collector and curator of the world’s largest corporate information data set with over 340 million businesses and 220 countries. For 178, you mentioned, companies of every size and now 90% of US federal agencies rely on Dun & Bradstreet to accelerate their performance, manage their risk and also increase their efficiencies.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people like me to ask who you physically sell to. Again, you’re a VP of Sales, who is the customer of D&B? What type of people do you sell to?

Sally Block: We sell to everyone from Chief Information Officers to risk managers to programs that are developed throughout the federal agencies. I told you that I’m on my way to Kentucky next week because we work very closely with state workforce developments helping them to understand the business landscape and environment so they can attract new employers and help with folks that are looking for jobs within their states.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people who listen to the Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe and some people have begun to ask me, “What exactly does public sector mean?” Tell us again, when you say public sector, what markets does that entail?

Sally Block: That’s our federal government, all of the agencies within our federal government, and our state and local governments. We deal with all of the agencies from the governor’s office down through the employment commissions, the labor commissions as well as the security commissions, law enforcement included. Then on a global scale very similarly we deal with a very large footprint in Ottawa, we have a very large footprint in London where we work, again, with global government agencies.

Fred Diamond: What excites you about what you do? Tell us what really gets you juiced about what D&B is bringing to the market.

Sally Block: What’s really exciting about what we do is our involvement in the mission. We have a direct impact on our ability to help government agencies achieve their mission. Let me give you an example. Most people don’t realize that when you’ve set foot on a commercial airliner that a good portion of what’s being carried on that commercial airliner is cargo that’s being shipped by businesses. That’s regulated by TSA, so it’s prudent for TSA to understand, since there are passengers on that plane, what those businesses are that are shipping in the belly of that plane. TSA established a known shipper program.

There are two million known shippers now, so when a company says, “I want to ship something on a commercial airline” they are vetted and verified by Dun & Bradstreet. We append that information, we make sure that company is who they say they are, we have risk information, we have beneficial ownership. Who are they linked to? It helps TSA make a determination about whether or not that shipper gets to ship on a commercial airline. When you ask me about what’s exciting about what we do, it’s being part of that mission. We help TSA keep the air safe for you to fly.

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you a quick question. We’ve interviewed a whole bunch of people who are VP’s of Sales with public sector groups within large companies and your answer was right on track with most of them. It’s about the mission of the agencies that they serve. Where does that come from for you? Was your family a military family or did you just sense the need overtime? I’m just curious how that starts with you.

Sally Block: My family is very tied to public sector and to service. My father was a postmaster and my mother was an educator and it became something that was really core to what we were raised to do, and it’s about giving back, it’s about being involved in something that’s bigger than yourself.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about the beginning of your career. How did you first move into sales as a career?

Sally Block: I just mentioned that my mother was an educator and I come from a family of educators so I followed that path. I had a degree in education and speech pathology. After three years, I realized that I was not cut out for this and it was a tough pill to swallow. I went to work for a family friend who had a series of boutiques in Virginia, and I started a personalized shopping service. It was great, it was an early innovator in the area. One of my customers happened to be a Senior VP for Donnelly Directory, she’s one of the first people that saw in me something that I didn’t see myself and she convinced me to come to work for her. She took a special interest in training me and coaching me, and after a while I realized, “Wait, I am cut out for this” and I also realized, Fred, that it was not too far afield from education. Think about it: the preparation that a teacher has to go through to “sell”, if you would, a new concept to a student is not unlike the preparation that we go through to make sure that we can communicate new ideas, new thoughts to our customers.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. Donnelly, would that be the yellow pages? We’ve interviewed a number of people on the Sales Game Changers podcast who also started that route as well and for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, that’s sales. Tell us what that was like, take us back to some of your first few months or years as a selling professional selling advertisements for the yellow pages.

Sally Block: The best part about that when you start in new is you don’t know what you don’t know, so there’s no fear. You’re told, “Here’s my list of people” and you are knocking on doors and having conversations. As I said, my first mentor was the one that really taught me to make sure that, “You know what? You’re going to get a lot of rejection. Accept that upfront and move forward” but it was a very wonderful selling track because Donnelly was part of the directory company that had a very specified sales process. Once you learn, Fred, a sales process, certainly it matures over time and you adapt it to what you’re selling but early on in your career when that’s deeply ingrained in you, it’s a very special gift.

Fred Diamond: What were some of those lessons you learned, what were some of the parts of the process that you have gone about and have stuck with you?

Sally Block: They key lessons, two things: #1, be a constant learner, there’s no question about that and the second one is be an attentive listener. My first mentor taught me that you’ve got to evaluate every interaction with a customer. When you’re done, you walk out the door and there’s two questions you ask yourself: one, “What did I learn?” and two, “What did I need to know?” When you’re asking yourself those two questions, I learn something and here’s what I need to know, that gives you confidence and the biggest gift you can give any salesperson is confidence.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. We’ve had so many great Sales Game Changers on the show who have said that they are great listeners and I always ask the follow up question, “Give us something you do, give us a bit of advice for the people listening around the globe to help them become a better listener.” What’s a technique, a trick, a strategy that you do to become a better listener?

Sally Block: I remember I was very excited to get and secure an appointment with Michael Peacock, he was the president of Peacock Buick and I was selling yellow pages. I walked into his office and I’m halfway through my pitch, Fred, when he reaches across the table and he slams on the desk and he says, “Young lady, I said yes five minutes ago and you didn’t hear me because you’re still talking.” He said, “I want you to remember, you’ve got to stop and ask yourself, ‘why am I still talking?'” And we had a great laugh about it and for years I would stop by and have a cup of coffee with Michael Peacock and catch him up on my career, and to this day I still find myself continuing to practice that, “Why am I talking? What’s happening right now and why is there a reason for me to be talking right now?”

Fred Diamond: That is so powerful for two reasons. One is that the customer gave you the advice.

Sally Block: He was a good coach.

Fred Diamond: He was a good coach as a customer. A lot of the great stories that come out of the Sales Game Changers podcast is when the customer gives advice that has stuck with the sales leader that we’re talking to. The second one was that it was a very valuable lesson, we hear that so many times, losing the deal after it’s closed. [Laughs] I wish I could think of one of the examples where then the sale was made and then the sales rep said something like, “Well, of course it won’t work in your environment” so good for you, Michael Peacock?

Sally Block: Michael Peacock.

Fred Diamond: Good for you, and good for you for hustling. Selling yellow pages advertising, that’s pure sales. We’ve had some Sales Game Changers who’ve sold copiers and fax machines back in the day, but the people who told me that they’ve sold yellow pages or advertising back then, good for you. Again, we’re talking to Sally Block, she’s the VP Sales, Dun & Bradstreet Government Solutions. Sally, what are you an expert in? Tell us a little more about your area of brilliance.

Sally Block: I’ve spent over 20 years in information data and analytics and my expertise is still a work in progress, Fred. One of my mentors who impacted me early on, I keep this quote in my head because what he told me was, “Success is more of an issue of who you are than what you know. While knowledge is necessary, sustained success comes to the person who’s driven by strong values and ethics.” The brilliance, if you would, comes from just that: integrity, ethics, drive and the reflection of the team around me. I’m driven by this team, I’m driven to be my best every day for this team to be fair, to be compassionate, to be purposeful and really to be a multiplier.

That’s the skill that I bring into this team and when you’re a multiplier, you’re encouraging collaboration, you’re raising the bar, being a multiplier also consists of investing time individually to my team members. When they sit down and know that they’re getting ready to be coached by me, they know that one of the first things that I’m going to ask them is, “Why are you doing what you’re doing? What inspires you to do it? What skills do you have that we’re not utilizing right now? Where are you going to add the greatest value?” That helps bring out the brilliance of the team, so if you ask me, my brilliance is the reflection of the team that’s around me.

Fred Diamond: I have a question. I’ve actually never asked this question before on the Sales Game Changers podcast. What is it about sales leadership that you love so much? I can get your passion here, but what is it about leadership that really drives you and that really gets you up in the morning, that really excites you?

Sally Block: It’s the educator in me, it’s the need to be that multiplier, it’s the tie back to why I’m in public sector. You’re involved in a mission, you’re involved in something bigger than yourself. When you are a sales leader, you have a direct responsibility for advancing the careers of the people that you work with, for bringing them with you. I was fortunate throughout my career and definitely at BNA to have people there that brought me and taught me and coached me, and that stays with you for a long time. That’s a responsibility, if you’re going to step into sales leadership, it’s something that you’re going to have to take with you.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales mentor and how they impacted your career?

Sally Block: If you’re blessed to have a mentor, you’re really lucky. I’ve been happy to have many, but early on in my career there was a leader and he was the one that actually saw in me, for the first time, my ability to lead. He told me I had traits, I had potential, he taught me by example – trust me, he gave me a lot of lectures. I would walk through walls for that guy and I continue to honor his memory in two ways: one, to every day try to be the person that he thought I could be and two, to make sure that I’m devoting time to coaching emerging leaders.

Fred Diamond: We get that through some of your answers before. The great sales leaders that we interview on the podcast really think about their people and how they can take their people to the next level, that’s very powerful. Do you enjoy the mentoring as well? Do you consider yourself to be a mentor to the people on your team as well?

Sally Block: I do, I encourage and I warn at the same time, “Should you want to be mentored, it may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done because there’s a lot of work that goes into it and if you’re willing to put in the work, I’m willing to mentor.”

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you another question about that. Help prepare our listeners, we have Sales Game Changers around the world listening, you just said it’s going to be hard. Again, we’re talking to Sally Block, VP Sales, Dun & Bradstreet Government Solutions. Give them one or two bits of advice on how they can best be mentored, if they want to be mentored.

Sally Block: #1, if you want to be mentored in this world, you have to be open to failure, you have to be open to learning and you’ve got to be willing to take some risk in your career. If you want to ask me about lessons that I’ve learned across my career to this point, Fred, I’ve got to say many of them were learned through failure and there’s no easy path in sales. We’ve selected this profession and those of us that select it know that there’s not an easy path, but if you want to be mentored you’ve got to be willing to commit the time to learning and to vote yourself to this profession.

Fred Diamond: Speaking about the tough path, why don’t you tell us what the two biggest challenges are that you face as a sales leader?

Sally Block: Hands-down, talent acquisition and talent retention, no question. We’re in a competitive market, attracting talent is always going to be a challenge. The interesting thing that’s involved, however is money is no longer the driving factor and I will tell anybody who I speak with, “Don’t chase the money.” You have to be in a sales environment that gives you a strong confidence in the company, in the products and services that they offer, an environment where you can continue to learn and most importantly, a culture that you can adapt to. Culture is a key driver for us to attract talent.

As you look around this office, you’ll see our corporate objectives. They start with honoring the client and they end with lead developing and supporting our people, it’s a strong part of our culture and that’s one of the drivers that we use to attract top talent. On the retention side of it, I work on a daily basis to continue to recruit my current team members. My mentor Joe told me after my first year of working with him, he walked in the office and he said, “Sally, I want you to go interview for a job outside the company.” I was stunned, I was his top rep. What he said to me was this, “One of two things are going to happen: you’re going to find a better job or you’re going to realize that the job you have is the best one for you right now and you’re going to come back to me with a renewed sense of purpose and commitment.”

For years I followed his advice and for years, I came back to that role with that renewed sense of purpose and commitment. I’ve translated that now to my team so that I want them to know on a daily basis that they’re in the right place for them.

Fred Diamond: I’ll ask you one question here. I’ll give you an opportunity, again we’re interviewing here today at the offices of Dun & Bradstreet in Reston, Virginia. Why would somebody want to come work at Dun & Bradstreet in sales in the public sector side?

Sally Block: In public sector sales in Dun & Bradstreet again, based in mission, you have to be very passionate about it. The best thing right now is that we are a data and analytics company. Data and analytics, articles across the board, Forbes most recently, it is the new oil, we are the new gas, it is the place where it is the most exciting now application within the public sector. It’s not about what data you have, it’s about how you draw insights from that. We’ve been doing this for 178 years, we know how to manage, curate and get insights out of data and that’s exciting, because every day there’s a different mission, there’s a different problem, I talk to you about TSA. We also work very closely with the Food and Drug Administration, 25 cents on every dollar that comes into this US is regulated by FDA, it’s also vetted by Dun & Bradstreet, it’s part of that mission. You have an opportunity to be innovative, you’ve got an opportunity to work in a field of data and analytics which really is driving a lot of our economy right now and we’ve got innovation and fun.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you’ve worked for some great places, you’ve had some great experiences, you’ve had some great mentors along the way. Why don’t you tell us about the #1 specific sales success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Sally Block: You know that’s a tough question, right?

Fred Diamond: I do, but you’re doing a great job with every question so far.

Sally Block: The one I learned the most from actually involved the Department of Labor. It was a difficult situation that I uncovered, there were several senior leaders at Department of Labor and my general counsel at the time were involved. The success came from turning what was an impossible situation on the outside to something that really, in the end benefited not only the agency but the company. The reason that I say that was my biggest success is – you’ll hear me say it many times – it’s what I learned from that. What I learned was impossible situations aren’t impossible, what I learned was you have to involve key influencers early in the process and what I learned was you have to be able to understand that at every situation, there is an opportunity.

Fred Diamond: I love that, impossible situations aren’t impossible. Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, did you ever question being in sales? Again, you went the educator route, your mom was an educator and then somebody who works for Donnelly saw something in you and took you into her company and moved you into sales. Of course, you’ve had a great career since then but Sally Block, did you every say to yourself, “You know what? It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Sally Block: I did. It goes back to ‘this was not what I was trained to do’. So much of sales is the confidence, I was trained to be an educator. When you turn that in your mindset and say, “Wait a minute, isn’t sales being an educator? Isn’t it about communication? Isn’t it about helping your clients understand what you have that is available to offer?” When I got to that point, there was no turning back.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious. Before we take a short break, people who knew you when you were growing up on the education path and now they see you leading public sector with Dun & Bradstreet, a well-known brand, 178 years, are they amazed or are people like, “I knew you were the right person for this type of a career” in retrospect?

Sally Block: You may have talked to my mother.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs]

Sally Block: Yes, it’s odd, it was one of those things where there was this opportunity and it comes down to where you feel passion and where you feel trait wherein I did not have the passion at the time for the classroom. This is where I found my passion so what I say to salespeople is, “It goes back to your why, what’s your passion?”

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Sally, you’ve given us a lot of great tips. What’s the most important thing you want to get across to the selling professionals listening around the globe to help them take their careers to the next level?

Sally Block: You have to invest the time in learning, you’ve got to do the work, the fundamentals of the job are truly important, you have to research what your customer needs, where their initiatives are leading. The best part about selling to the public sector, however is that mission issues and priorities are easily accessible. The most important gift you can give yourself is that knowledge, the knowledge comes in a lot of different forms. You’ve got to ask yourself, again before you get to the presentation – I’ve said it multiple times – what do I know, what do I need to know and thirdly, where do I find the answer?

Our sales have evolved to the point where the effort that you take in knowing what your customer’s world is you’ve got to be prepared to know it better than they know themselves. Your customers many times are looking for what they should be thinking about and they’re looking to you as a sales professional to tell them that. If you’re early in your career, my advice to you is lean on those that are tenured in your environment, they’ll give you some of those insights as you’re gathering your own knowledge.

Fred Diamond: I have a quick question for you. Again, you come from the educators space, your mother was an educator. You’ve said a number of times, Sally, “You need to be a constant learner.” I’m just curious, what are you learning, what are you trying to learn right now? What’s one of the top one or two things that you’re trying to get better educated on?

Sally Block: The world of data and analytics is changing every day so you want to talk about AI, you want to talk about machine learning, it is not what we were talking about 10 years ago. It is the environment that we’re in, I utilize the people that are around me, our data scientists, our staff, I reach out to on a regular basis, “Tell me more.” You know if I ask you if you’ve got five minutes it’s not going to be five minutes, there are places that I continue to try to hone my skills around data and analytics because that’s going to make me a better asset to my customer.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your continued success.

Sally Block: First and foremost to be prepared. The last 20 minutes you’ve heard me say it and you’ve heard me say it over and over again, it’s important to be prepared for the interaction that you’re going to have with your customer, you have to make sure you’re bringing something to this party. Second of all, you’ve got to be present. There was a United Airlines commercial years ago, a sales leader calls everybody in and he starts handing out plane tickets and he says, “We have to get off email, to get off the phone, to get off text, we have to go see our customers.” There is nothing that can take the place of a face to face interaction, but even then what I encourage you in the habit is that when you’re in that face to face reaction, you have to be present. The only person in that room is you and the customer that you have. Third thing, you have to take time to celebrate victories. Whatever form of reward you take to celebrate, celebrate them. This job is hard, this profession is hard, when you take the time to celebrate those victories and the small ones and the success, you’re also going to find out that it just might be contagious.

Fred Diamond: Curiously, how do you celebrate? What’s something you do? Give us an example of what that looks like.

Sally Block: Everybody knows when I’ve had a big success, you’ll hear the elevation in my voice, I’ll take team members out to lunch, I have a list of things that I want to reward myself with for jobs well done. There is a celebration that occurs at the end of every selling period, at the end of every quarter, good, bad or indifferent. Why? Because I’m celebrating what I learned, I’m celebrating what I need to know more about.

Fred Diamond: I think I have a pretty good idea what the title of today’s podcast is going to be.

Sally Block: Yes.

Fred Diamond: Definitely the word ‘learning’ should be in there somewhere. Sally, tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success.

Sally Block: We are aligning our government solutions team to sell to the way our customer buys. Our public sector client has really specific needs that differ from how we’re aligned on the commercial side of Dun & Bradstreet. We’ve undertaken the initiative to ensure that we have the mechanisms, the services, the entry points in places that honor how our customer wants to interact with us.

Secondly, we’re creating an environment for continuous learning, a key component of developing and maintaining our culture is providing an opportunity for our team members to expand their skills and their knowledge. We’ve initiate morning dialogues, lunch and learns, cross functional interactions, we’ve made outside course work available to our team members, they’re multiple avenues of learning.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final thought, I want to thank you for being on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast. You’ve given us so many great things to think about, I keep going back to that interaction you had with Michael Peacock and he said, “Young lady, stop selling. Five minutes ago I gave you the opportunity to close” and that was a very valuable lesson. Along the way, sales is hard, people don’t return your calls or your emails. One of my past guests who also is a VP of Sales in the public sector space said public sector selling is the NFL of sales. Every big company is in there, every startup, there’s rules, there’s regulations, there’s challenges with the customer, there’s actually laws on how they need to purchase you need to be aware of but it’s also one of the most satisfying markets in the world for some of the reasons you mentioned, the mission, if you will. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Sally Block: Tying yourself to a greater purpose is all about what keeps me focused. I may not always be able to control the outcome but Fred, what I can control is my process and my mindset. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve got a chance every day to be innovative, to have an impact and to learn something new. I am a big fan of college basketball and I’ve gotten through this entire interview without a single reference to sports but this is Jimmy V week and Jimmy Valvano said in his ESPY speech, “There are three things that you have to do every day. Number one, laugh. Number two, think, spend some time in deep thought and number three, have your emotions move you to tears.” I’m going to have to say, there’s no other profession in the world than sales that allows me to do that every day and that’s a good day.

Fred Diamond: I know you went to UVA for grad school, where did you go for undergrad?

Sally Block: Mary Washington.

Fred Diamond: Mary Washington, good for you, you kept it in state. Sally Block, thank you so much for being a great guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we learned so much from you today. Why don’t you wrap it up? Give us a final thought to inspire our listeners around the globe.

Sally Block: I would say you’ve got to continue to be a learner but I also want to say that as you advance your career, take time to reach back. Share your knowledge and skills with somebody who’s new to the role. We all came to our success through the help of others. Remember, you’ve got to give back.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 221: Dun & Bradstreet Sales Exec Sally Block is Constantly Learning and It’s Helping Her Lead Through the COVID-19 Pandemic first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Please register for Creativity in Sales: Using Creativity and GRIT to Pivot During Challenging Times on Friday, April 10, 2020 11:00 AM EDT at: here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in January 2020. Since the show was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked Denise what her advice is for sales professionals during the pandemic. She offered the following:

• “This is the perfect time to practice your research, personalization and empathy, all elements of a Sales Done Right approach.
• Business is still getting done, but needs have changed.
• Make sure to take the time to find out what has changed and work to adjust to meet your prospects and customers’ needs. What a great time to create trust and loyalty!

EPISODE 219: Expel Sales Leader Denise Hayman Explains Why It’s the Perfect Time to Apply a Sales Done Right Approach to Be of Service to Your Customers

DENISE’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “It’s Sales Done Right. Nothing takes the place of you doing the work. Athletes practice no matter how great they are, lawyers practice before they go into the courtroom, we have to practice. We have to be good at our elevator pitch, we have to be good and know the questions ahead of time, we have to be prepared with understanding who we’re talking to, we have to know how those people want to be talked to and talked with, what are the best ways. The biggest tip that I would say is do the work, prepare and do the work.”

Denise Hayman is the Chief Revenue Officer at Expel.

Prior to coming to Expel, she was at Neustar and Symantec and was a sales leader for a lot of exciting startup companies in the tech space.

We spoke about the difference between working as a sales leader for a large company and for a small company.

Denise can be found on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: How did you get into sales as a career?

Denise Hayman: I did not come up from a traditional place to get into sales. I have an interesting background, I actually started out as a special education teacher and there are lots of jokes about that as you might imagine, that dealing with salespeople is a lot like dealing with special education people. I think the main thing for me that came out of that is I really understand how to evaluate individual performance. The ability to ask questions and ascertain where someone is in their current state and help them, lead them and motivate them to get to the next place is a key foundation of what has made me be a great sales leader over the years. After that, of course I had to figure out what I wanted to be once I figured out that I wasn’t going to be a special education leader. I sort of fell into it, I think we’ll talk about that in a little bit here.

Fred Diamond: Usually I ask the question, “What are some of the lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs?” and you have eluded to it, what are some of the key things that you learned as a special educations teacher that you apply today?

Denise Hayman: The difference between a special education teacher and a regular teacher in a big classroom is that as a special education teacher you’re dealing with people that are coming at you from all different places. You might have children that have difficulty reading, difficulty with math, dyslexia, attention issues so you’re having to deal with everyone individually and differently. I learned early on that you had to really not look at everything as a whole but look at everything as an individual. The ability to create sales programs, to do motivation by an individual rep, all of that really came from my original teaching experience.

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

Denise Hayman: We’re selling what’s called a transparent managed security solution. Why that is important is because there are millions of open cyber security jobs out there today and organizations that really want to be best-in-class in terms of how they deal with their security internally at their organizations. What we’re doing is bringing that expertise to the masses so we’re able to allow any organization to be able to purchase a service from us that has full on credibility and full on access to the best-in-class kinds of security in their management of their solutions internally.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people, when they listen to the podcast, they want to know who you sell to. What types of positions purchase your solutions?

Denise Hayman: Many people think that what we’re doing here is selling to smaller companies and it’s amazing, every size of company has this issue so it can be smaller companies, it can be huge companies that are either extending their security posture or they are replacing what they’ve got internally already. The primary people that we are selling to, it’s a head of a security operations center, it’s a head of a security architecture type of team, it’s a chief information security officer, the people that are the custodians within an organization of what happens to the security internally and sometimes out to their customer base as well. That’s who we’re selling to.

Fred Diamond: Tell us how you first got into sales, how did you make that transition from special ed to sales?

Denise Hayman: Accidentally. When I knew that I didn’t want to be a teacher anymore, what I really tried to figure out was, “What’s next?” The best opportunity was go figure out some things so I took a job selling advertising, 100% commission selling advertising for a trade show book. This was just testing my skills to see what I wanted to do and what I learned from that has taken me to this day which is, first of all, in a job like that it’s all about you. You’re not making any money until you make a sale so the scenario of having to really grind it out and do the work was very apparent.

Then I also learned that I really loved getting the sale, the aspect of targeting and really going after a specific person, a specific company and the thrill of the chase, the success of what happens when you actually get to that place, that was interesting during that part of my career. Now overtime obviously that has changed and the things that excite me now about sales are more about the building of the team and the impact on the organization both from a company perspective as well as the individual sales rep perspective. I love being able to – maybe this is some of my special education stuff – take an individual and really help motivate them to a new place that they didn’t even think they could accomplish.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious, again at the introduction we talked that you worked at Neustar which is large company and we actually interviewed a couple of the sales leaders from Neustar, we’ll put a link to the show that we did with Dorean Kass who now heads sales there and also Craig Pentz, but you also worked for some exciting startups like we mentioned in the introduction. What do you like better? Tell us what excites you about selling for a large company versus selling for an exciting startup.

Denise Hayman: First of all, the job is very different at both of those companies. The mission when you’re at a small security company sometimes can be about getting those first customers, sometimes it can be about trying to figure out product market fit, you’re in the early stages of trying to decide whether there’s a ‘there’, there, whether that thing that you think is going to be out in the marketplace is going to sell. Then you get some momentum and you start building out the team so it’s very much about proving the theory of the marketplace. When you’re at a larger company it’s much more about scale and about maybe new opportunities, about organizing and operational efficiency, those kinds of things. It’s a lot more about building the management structure and building the capabilities within the team than it is necessarily about finding those first customers.

Fred Diamond: You did both.

Denise Hayman: I have.

Fred Diamond: Did you enjoy both? Now obviously you’re with Expel and we’re doing the interview from your offices today, and by the way, for the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe we’re located about 20 minutes outside of Washington DC, not too far from the Dulles Airport. There’s a lot of tech around here, a lot of cyber companies that we’ve also interviewed for the podcast. Tell us what excites you about working for a large company versus working for a small company like this.

Denise Hayman: They’re both awesome when you get to lead a team of people that is motivated to hit targets and see that growth. To me, again it’s less about the size of the company than it is about the team that I get to lead so it really has to do with the individuals and their motivation to grow and learn. If I can take somebody, like I said before, to a place that they didn’t expect that they could get to, motivate them to get there, that’s a huge win for me. In larger companies I’d say that’s harder to do sometimes than at startup companies. I have tended to lean into startup companies, I think that’s more my wheelhouse around the being able to build and really that intuition of understand when you can find a customer niche and be able to match that niche. It’s a lot harder to do that at a large company although they have their benefits as well, I’ve had a couple of big companies in my career and I’m back at a startup. I think this is my eighth startup now so I seem to lean in this direction [laughs].

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of Sales Game Changers listening around the globe and we get two types of questions – we get a ton of questions, but one of the questions we get from our listeners is, “I work for a small company, how can I work for a larger company?” and then we also get the converse, “I’ve been working for a large company for 20 years, I want to try a startup, a high tech, sky high flying type of company.” What would you tell someone who works for a large company about going into a small company? Not a leader per se, but a rank and file individual contributor who’s been with an Oracle or a Microsoft or an HP for 20 years and now they want to take a shot working in something a little more energetic.

Denise Hayman: I would ask why. The first question is, “What is it that attracts you to this? Is it just because you think there’s some big payout at the end and so you’re just in for that?” Because the work is totally different at a startup than it is at a large company from a rep perspective. What I interview for and what we look for in terms of individual sales reps has to do with, “Have you built a territory from scratch? What would it take? Have you targeted accounts within? Who do you know within those accounts that you get going quickly?” It’s less about, “Is the organizational brand going to help you bring into those customers?” What if you had no customers in your territory at all and you had to start from scratch? We’re lucky enough to not be in that position, we have customers I think in every territory but the building of a territory is totally different than a servicing of a territory, that’s #1. #2 I would say the pace is totally different.

Again, making a generalization here but at a startup company the pace around what happens when a lead comes in, when you’re going to an event, the pressure on ensuring that you’re making the most of every moment, one of the other things that I interview for is a bias for urgency. The whole idea of, “If you had a situation come up that you need to take care of and these other things came in mind, tell me how you would prioritize those.” What happens if the customer is pushing you off? How do you create that urgency? It’s a lot more about the hand-to-hand combat at a small company than at a large company, it’s more about making the organization operationally efficient to be able to deal with that customer.

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

Denise Hayman: Brilliance [laughs] this is always a weird question for me. In talking to my team and hearing from them what they would like to have more of from me as well as what they think I’m good at, what frequently comes up is that they tell me that I am really good at asking questions. It’s sales skill 101 but there is absolutely an art to it to not have it be just a list of questions, to have it have context, to really be curious and it’s not faking curiosity, it’s more, “I am here and I am asking you questions because I am interested and I’ve thought about these other questions that might come up.”

The ability to not only ask an easy close-ended question but a hard, challenging question because our prospects and our customers sometimes need us to do that. They don’t know everything, we’ve seen lots of things that they don’t see. Sometimes we need to be mindful of asking not only the easy questions but the hard questions. What my team tells me is that I am really good at doing that with them as well as with prospects and customers from a place of not putting them on their back feet, not ruffling their feathers. It’s really because I am curious and I think it comes across.

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you a question. You just brought up something that hasn’t really come up all that frequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast. You talked about you asking your team for guidance on what you’re doing well and what you can improve on. Talk about that for a little bit, talk about how you as a sales leader solicit that type of advice and guidance from your team members.

Denise Hayman: As you might imagine, it’s for them maybe not the most comfortable position because they don’t know why I’m asking. To your point, it’s an unusual thing to make sure that is happening but I am their leader. I am not an elected official, I am in a scenario where they are only as good as my ability to serve them and to serve the organization on their behalf. If I don’t know what is going on for them that is working and not working or what I’m doing or not doing well, then they will never be able to be better. I have had to get them used to the fact that I’m asking it genuinely and openly and honestly, I actually just did a round with my team where I asked for some specific feedback and as you might imagine, some people are more comfortable at doing that than others. But again, using my questions I’ll dig in and ask questions and ensure that they’re getting what they need.

Fred Diamond: I really applaud you for that. We talk a lot about the people in the team continuously learning and we also talk about the sales leaders we interview on the podcast continuously learning but we very rarely bring up that aspect of getting input from your team on how you can become a better sales leader. You’ve worked for some great companies, a lot of high flying startups and large companies as well. You must have had some impactful mentors along the way, why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor or two and how they impacted your career?

Denise Hayman: This is personally a very big subject for me because I believe that mentors can be game changers for all of us but really hard to find that person that you really connect with that has your best interest at heart. I was lucky enough early in my career at Symantec, I had two people who I still consider to be mentors although we’ve all scattered into different places, one who was my immediate manager in a sales management role that really taught me about negotiating from a win-win perspective.

You go through a whole bunch of sales training and you learn the textbook thing to say or the question you should ask or make sure you’re getting everything from both sides, but she really did an amazing job at A, asking questions and B, really teaching us all about the importance of making sure everybody wins in a negotiation. It’s not just about us getting what we need, the customer needs to get something out of it as well and as a sales leader I’ve definitely continued on that path with her. Another one also at Symantec, at the time he was my VP of Sales, his name is Phil Dunkelberger.

Do you know Phil?

Fred Diamond: I worked at Apple Computer with Phil.

Denise Hayman: Years ago, absolutely.

Fred Diamond: ‘Dunk’

Denise Hayman: ‘Dunk’, yes. I was in California at the time and Symantec was there and he taught me so many things about sales management, how to interview, what to look for, how to test certain skills. He’s at the time a big person in the Xerox way of selling so there’s a lot of structure in terms of how do you go about the sales process. He did an amazing job at not only teaching but also he would go on the field regularly and make sure that he was taking those same skills and bringing them out to the individual reps. I worked for him again, actually at PGP when he was a CEO and I was a VP of Sales, so I got to do it in a different elevated role but same sort of thing, great mentorship.

Fred Diamond: I have a little Phil story. I was with Apple’s Federal Systems group in the late 80s, early 90s and then I moved to Apple in corporate. Real briefly, Phil was the director of federal marketing at one point, this would have been 1988 through 1991 and I was in field training for the federal marketplace. We had an offsite probably in California and I was off sitting by myself and Phil came up to me and for me, it was my first job so it was like, “Phil Dunkelberger is coming up” and he sat down and he talked to me for an hour and he kept asking me questions like, “How are you doing? What can I help you with?” and I was thinking, “This is the director of marketing for the organization.” I was intimidated at first, but then the way he just came up and started asking me, an average rank and file person who didn’t work for him, questions. Thank you for bringing up Phil’s name, I’m getting chills thinking about that interaction and he definitely had an impact on me as well. What are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Denise Hayman: Let’s talk about the job of sales first. From a sales rep, how do we make sure that we can get through to customers so that they understand what we have to offer? It is such a crowded market out there and it is littered with bad behavior on the sales side so that it does not necessarily engender from a customer’s side that they’re going to be totally open and willing to talk to every salesperson that comes their way. I think the biggest challenge and one of the things that we’ve been doing here is this whole idea of sales done right. I believe that our sales team is one of our differentiators.

Obviously we’re a technology company so the solution, the service and the offering is absolutely one of our differentiators but I’m a believer that in order to truly differentiate ourselves at the beginning, it has to be the website, it has to be the first interaction they have whether it’s an SDR or whether it’s one of our event people. Then the interaction that they have with us on the sales side has to be different, we have to be showing them transparency and openness and we have to be an extension of what’s going on with the service when they actually get the opportunity to indulge in it. I think one of the challenges in that scenario is how do you do that? How do we use some traditional kinds of techniques yet approach it from a different kind of way so that we are seen as being different, consultative, open and transparent? I think that’s a huge challenge in the market and we’re using that as our differentiator, one of the major things to go about with.

Fred Diamond: Do you have another one you want to mention?

Denise Hayman: This is a challenge and an opportunity. There is tons of information out there to be able to utilize. I’m a big believer in doing research and planning your calls, understanding you’ve got a set of things that you’re trying to get to and a set of questions knowing where you’re going not being random in it. How do you figure out what information to believe and not believe and where to go to for it and what’s going to make you most efficient? You could spend all day doing research and not make a single phone call and you have failed.

Fred Diamond: We call those people librarians.

Denise Hayman: Exactly, so balancing the two. I have an early story from my sales career that has informed that position for me, one of my early sales things. Again, when you’re a sales rep you’re taught here the 12 things that you do and I had a targeted account that I was going after and of course I had my list of questions and I had been trying for months to get to this account. Finally, one Friday afternoon they picked up the phone and I was like, “This is awesome, I have the opportunity now to ask all of my questions” and I proceeded down my list of questions with this particular individual and he stopped me in the middle and he said, “Excuse me, is this a survey?” Again, the difference between being able to do the right kind of research but know intuitively what kinds of things you need to do to guide the conversation is the art and the science of what we do.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point because a lot of times we give younger or junior sales professionals a script and it’s interesting, you were so excited when you finally got them on the call 2:00 o’clock on a Friday. You see that a lot with a lot of newer sales reps because people don’t return their phone calls and it’s hard to get through to people. When someone gets on the line they’re thrilled, “My god, we’re halfway there to the sale just because I got someone to pick up the phone” but that must have been such an impactful statement, “Excuse me, is this a survey?”

Denise Hayman: We learn from our mistakes, I’m a big believer on that, I’m a constant learner, I hire people that are like that as well. We learn from our mistakes and we learn from our wins.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, do you remember that prospect at all? Did they become a customer, did you shift or was it just a random example that helped you along the way?

Denise Hayman: I definitely shifted my entire approach based on that. They did eventually become a customer, we laughed about it later. I don’t know where he is right now, but from that perspective I definitely shifted how I thought about the whole sales game.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about the #1 specific sale success or win from your career you’re most proud of?

Denise Hayman: From a sales career perspective I think the things that I am most proud of are not the individual sales. The thing that I am most proud of, as I was saying before, is my ability to impact where a person goes in a sales career. It’s a much bigger impact, they talk about the whole, “Are you impacting for today, are you impacting for the future?” One of the things that I’m most proud of in my career to date is an opportunity that I had years ago at Symantec to create a team from scratch that had never been done before.

I had been doing field sales, I had moved into inside sales, I was doing management on both of those sides and I had an opportunity to build a team wherever I wanted to for inside sales. I chose a location and I got to build a team in Portland, Oregon, I ended up moving up there with it. I started with zero people, just a whole bunch of empty offices and I built it up to a hundred people within six months. It was an amazing build and the impact that it had on people’s lives at that time, it was a while ago but I’m still getting choked up about it because for a lot of them, they felt like they got to rejuvenate a career.

We gave them a place and a set of tools and training and motivation and a team to be a part of that they had never experienced before. It wasn’t one of the things that I set out to do when we set out to create it but we had a tradition where we wrote limericks and poems to each other as part of a Christmas holiday thing. I still have the limerick that was written about me at that time and it was all about rejuvenating careers and filling the hallways and impact on lives and I’m still in touch with some of those people because of the impact I was able to have at that particular point in time. Impact for me is the most important thing.

Fred Diamond: It’s a great point that you brought up because when you think back on a lot of the great parts of your sales careers, it was with the teams. It wasn’t you individually, it wasn’t this one achievement you made but it was being part of the team that built the Symantec inside sales team. You mentioned again, you were with 8 startups so you must have had some successes along the way and when you hit the home run or something you remember the people you worked with, you remember the circumstances. Before we take a short break, again you’ve had a great career, you told us some tremendous stories. I’m still thinking about Phil Dunkelberger and that moment that we had, I think it was somewhere in Santa Cruz or something like that. You started off as a special education teacher. Did you ever question making the move into sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Denise Hayman: I think every sales leader has that question at the end of a quarter or at the end of a year. [Laughs] I had a previous sales manager, we used to sit together and talk about, “Wouldn’t it just be great to be a cashier at a grocery store right now? You don’t have to think about anything, don’t have to bring anything home” but obviously from a choice perspective, that wouldn’t be what we would do. I think there are moments where we have questions. For me, again, as long as the mission is clear about what you’re trying to do in terms of building, growing and impacting, I haven’t wavered from that. Again, we all have moments, those difficult losses that happen occasionally but there’s always a win around the corner.

[Sponsor break]

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

Denise Hayman: One of the things, Fred, that I am seeing more and more is because of the plethora of information and the amount of access to tools and everything that people have, sometimes I’m finding that there are people who think the tools do it for them. I think the biggest thing I would say is nothing takes the place of you doing the work and I know you’ve heard this from lots of other sales leaders, but it’s a profession. This is a profession I’ve chosen, athletes practice no matter how great they are, lawyers practice before they go into the courtroom, we have to practice. We have to be good at our elevator pitch, we have to be good and know the questions ahead of time, we have to be prepared with understanding who we’re talking to, we have to know how those people want to be talked to and talked with, what are the best ways. The biggest tip that I would say is do the work, prepare and do the work.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your continued success?

Denise Hayman: I would say it’s not necessarily a selling habit. If you would mind me going off script for a little bit here, my assistant likes to say I have a lot of fire in me, that means that it can go both ways. Fire can burn hot or it can burn softly so from the standpoint of I have a strong bias for urgency and I need to get things done immediately, anyone who’s listening to this that knows me will be laughing right now because this is what I’m known for. I think the important thing as a leader is not bringing that to bear every day on the team across from you and the team underneath you across the company. So one of the skills that I am learning right now, not necessarily a sales skill but it’s helping me at sales, is really those things that keep me calm and centered and not fiery.

This may be my California time but I do meditation every day, I’ve been doing a lot of things. There’s a training that I just brought to the organization called Pacific Institute that I’ve done that is all around ensuring that you have a growth mindset, retraining your brain on positive thinking and understanding where you’re trying to go to, having goals and that kind of stuff. The thing that I am doing right now that is most impacting my sales leadership are a combination of those things as opposed to a specific sales skill because when I am calm and centered I am my best self, it means I’m able to coach, it means I’m able to work collaboratively, it means all of those things and when I am fiery like Liz tells me sometimes, I’m not my best self. I think that applies to everything.

Fred Diamond: Growth mindset comes up a lot. As a matter of fact, the Sales Game Changers podcast, a lot of times we use the hashtag #GrowthMindset and the podcast always trends on LinkedIn on #GrowthMindset. I want to ask you a specific question, when do you meditate and how do you meditate? It does come up not infrequently on the podcast, we’re not getting too personal into your practice.

Denise Hayman: I’m fine with that.

Fred Diamond: When do you do it, how often do you do it, how long do you do it?

Denise Hayman: Every morning. I get up at 5:30 in the morning and I do 30 minutes in a quiet room. For me, a quiet room means I put my headset on, my Bose headphones and sometimes I do it with music, sometimes I do it just in the quiet with a specific thing that I say to myself. It might be gratitude, it might be a specific thing that I’m working on, compassion or something else but I’ll meditate on that for 30 minutes. I notice now on the days that I don’t do it because I’m a different person, I’m just a better person when I do that.

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

Denise Hayman: Expel, right now we’re in explosive growth and it’s extremely exciting. We’re doing a lot of hiring, we’re doing a lot of expanding the team, I have actually just brought on a sales management team so I now have three brand new sales managers. It used to be about me and the individual team, first line manager and now second line manager and probably soon third line manager based on how much we’re growing here, but the major thing that I’m working on are the things that will allow us to scale.

This is a well-worn topic among leaders that are in high growth companies but I’ve seen it before, again, both at my large companies and my small companies so I know those things that can get in the way of scaling and I know those things that need to be invested in now to ensure that we’ll be able to scale. At Expel we do a lot of investment, we actually just rolled out a brand new first line management program, we have a learning and development person, for our size that’s nearly unheard of and the scenario there is that we are training our first line managers to be the absolute best managers they can be. We’re not doing it accidentally, we have a very specific scenario and I’ve done this over and over again as well with first line managers to ensure that they have the right tools to be able to really impact. Impact, hire in the right people, sales enablement and then impact deals and sales as I go.

Fred Diamond: Why have you continued in sales? Again, you started off as a special education teacher, what is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Denise Hayman: This is one of those things that I meditate on, actually, talking about what are the things that are important to you. Over the years I think I have learned about myself that I love the impact and the influence components of it. There’s no other career that I have found so far where the ability to get paid based on my choices of my actions every day is the difference maker. If I do not apply myself, I will not do as well. If I apply myself, I do extremely well. In my household my husband has been a stay-at-home dad for years, it’s been just me in terms of bringing in the money in the door so that has been really important for us, the ability for me to really impact that.

Fred Diamond: Denise, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. Again, we have listeners around the globe, why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire them today?

Denise Hayman: This sales done right thing that I’ve been talking about, it’s really a great compilation of not only diversification in sales, obviously I’m a female sales leader, I am one of a small percentage of female sales leaders that are in this kind of role. It’s a growing field, thank goodness. We have the most difficulty finding people with diverse backgrounds to be on the sales team and I’m looking for that specifically because we have different people that we’re selling to, we have different talents, I’m a big believer in multiple types of experiences make up the great teams.

The thing that I would say to people is I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing and I am, quite frankly, kind of disgusted with what I hear out there about how companies treat their salespeople. Not everywhere, of course and absolutely we are not that way but the amount of times that I hear that companies have lied about a comp plan, about the stock position, changed the comp plan when a big deal comes in, all of these things, every single person has a story that I’ve interviewed. I’ve probably interviewed 300 people in the last year, every single person has that and the push that I would say is you don’t have to put up with that. You absolutely don’t and this is becoming a bigger and bigger deal for companies to have integrity around how they deal with sales. We absolutely do that, the way that we approached it, set up the comp plan, everything, that is not our culture, we’ll never expand to the sales team but I would just implore people, “Don’t put up with it.”

Fred Diamond: The Institute for Excellence in Sales who is the sponsor of today’s Sales Game Changers podcast, they launched the Premier Sales Employer program at the end of 2019 to reflect companies that do what you just said, that treat their employees right, that are great places to work for people in sales.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 219: Expel Sales Leader Denise Hayman Explains Why It’s the Perfect Time to Apply a Sales Done Right Approach to Be of Service to Your Customers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Please register for Creativity in Sales: Using LinkedIn to Show Empathy and Build Relationships During COVID-19 on Friday, April 3, 2020 11:00 AM EDT at: here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in late 2019. Since the show was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked Jason what his advice is for sales professionals during the pandemic. He offered the following:

• Take special time and attention to care for your internal customers (employees & associates) during this time of unprecedented uncertainty. A real Sales Game Changer is concerned about BOTH internal and external customers right now.
• Many of your customers and prospects may be in distress and will be most receptive to creative solutions that addresses their current situation today charts a path forward in these difficult days.
• Double down on your website and digital marketing strategy as social distancing will likely be the new normal for some time.

EPISODE 218: Detroit Biz Leader Jason Wize Shares Web and Digital Marketing Ideas to Help Transform Your Sales Efforts During COVID-19 Pandemic

JASON’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “You’ve got to be Positive, that goes without saying but you’ve got to be positive, have a positive attitude towards your products, services, your company, your coworkers, your prospects, your customers and just life in general..“

We conducted today’s interview in Detroit, Michigan.

Jason Wize is the president at MediaProNow. He’s a business leader who understands sales.

Prior to becoming the president of MediaProNow and founding the company, he was a sales leader at Radio Shack and JPMorgan Chase.

We did the interview at TechTown, a really exciting co-working place, about 4 miles from Downtown Detroit.

Jason can be found on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Jason, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast, it’s great to be in Detroit, I’m excited to hear your story and get your perspective. You’re an entrepreneur – I can’t pronounce that word, but maybe you can – I’m excited to get your story. I know you come at it from a sales mentality so I’m very happy to have you on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Jason Wize: Thanks, Fred. It’s great to be with you. The first thing I want to say is that I am breathing and I survived the blizzard that fell upon Michigan and the greater Detroit area yesterday. I’ve been a sales professional for my entire life, as you mentioned. I started off in corporate America leading sales teams for both Radio Shack Corporation and JPMorgan Chase. That served me well because in my current role as president of MediaProNow, a lot of those same skills I found to be very transferable and very necessary.

On a personal side, I have two children. I’ve got a son who’s a graduate of the University of Michigan, he’s got a mechanical engineering degree, he’s working in the medical robotics group for Johnson and Johnson and my daughter just started freshman year of high school so my hands are pretty full.

Fred Diamond: I love interviewing athletes on the Sales Game Changers podcast and I believe you also played college football.

Jason Wize: I did, that is very true. It happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I actually played football at Ball State University, played wide receiver for the Cardinals so go Cards.

Fred Diamond: We’ve interviewed some athletes in the past, some lacrosse players and we’ve interviewed a baseball player or two so don’t be surprised if I ask you some questions about applying your athletic skills and background to being a successful sales professional. I always like asking those questions as well. Tell us a little more about MediaProNow. Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Jason Wize: At MediaProNow we provide search engine optimization or SEO, paper click or PPC, social media and web design services. There’s a few other services that we provide to support those efforts, but by a large that’s really our wheelhouse.

Fred Diamond: Who do you sell to? What type of companies purchase your marketing services?

Jason Wize: First I want to dispel the notion that our services are only for business and consumer, our B to C organizations and that’s absolutely not true. We have customers in the B to C space and we also have customers in the B to B space. Most of our customers are for-profit organizations but we work with a lot of non-profits as well.

Fred Diamond: Again, let’s get right to it. You’re a business owner, again you did lead sales teams but tell us, from a day to day perspective, what it means to think about sales as a business owner.

Jason Wize: Thinking about sales is probably not necessarily how I might characterize it. I might characterize sales as more of a lifestyle because when I think about selling activities, when I think about the sales initiatives that we’re putting together at MediaProNow it’s not something that you hit the start button on and then hit the stop button and check in and check out. It’s more of a daily process and it’s that process that gets us to where we want to go.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you do from a sales perspective as the business leader for the company as well? Tell us some of the things you do to grow sales.

Jason Wize: Individually, I spend a lot of time doing some public relations. I’m involved with a lot of organizations not just here locally in the Detroit Metropolitan area but I’m involved with some national organizations as well. With those organizations shaking hands and kissing babies, as I like to say, and just playing head’s up ball. Often times when you give of yourself and of your time and of your talents and treasures, you’ll find opportunities that you didn’t know are in front of you.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you either first get into sales as a career or how did you first get conscious of the fact that you’re really in sales?

Jason Wize: I like to say that I cut my teeth in sales in retail which I think is probably the easiest place to make that happen. Everything I learned in college about marketing and advertising was great but there’s nothing quite like real world experience and I certainly was able to get a lot of that heavy dose of it in the retail space.

Fred Diamond: That was at Radio Shack?

Jason Wize: It was at Radio Shack primarily.

Fred Diamond: What were some of the lessons you learned from some of those first few sales jobs?

Jason Wize: I learned the basic building blocks of sales and of salesmanship. Some of the most important lessons that I look back as key takeaways were how to be a good listener. I always like to use the saying that god gave you two ears and one mouth, you should use those in proportion. I learned how to qualify a customer or prospect properly, I learned also how to tighten up my sales presentations and be able to explain features and benefits of the products and services that I was selling. The last thing I learned but definitely not the least was being able to close more effectively and just asking for the business. Those are probably the major takeaways that I learned from my first early days and years in sales.

Fred Diamond: I have a question about listening, becoming a better listener comes up not infrequently on the Sales Game Changers podcast and actually some of the examples that you used, people say 66% solution, like you just said you have two ears, one mouth, use them in that order. What’s a thing or two that you’ve done, Jason, to be a better listener?

Jason Wize: The biggest thing that I’ve been able to do – and this is something that anyone can do – is being able to parrot back or paraphrase what you just heard. When a customer or prospect makes a statement or even asks a question, for that matter, being able to say, “Hey, Fred what I heard you say is…” and then be able to parrot it back. Not verbatim because that might be received in a negative light, but be able to parrot it back saying, “Hey Fred, what I heard is you said A, I heard you say B and I heard you say C. Did I get that right? Just checking in with you, did I hear you correctly?”

That’s a great way to get an affirmative from your customer or prospect that yes, you did in fact hear them properly and it also is an acknowledgement on their part that, “Listen, Jason thank you for hearing me out because I see that you actually heard what I said.”

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

Jason Wize: I’d say that MediaProNow is an expert at search engine optimization so I guess that makes me an SEO expert by default. I feel like I have expert level knowledge around SEO and how to get a website ranking better and search results and eventually onto that much coveted page 1. I also feel from a sales perspective in terms of what our prospects and customers actually care about, what I truly am an expert in is reducing the cost of customer acquisition and also improving the ROI on advertising and marketing dollars.

Fred Diamond: To get to where you are right now you must have had some great mentors along the way. Why don’t you tell us about a powerful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?

Jason Wize: First I should admit that I’m 100% believer in the power of personal development so I’ve been studying and learning from success and sales coaches since I was young, really in college. Folks like Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, Les Brown, many others I’ve all studied from. With that as a caveat, I must say that the first mentor that I actually worked for that had the biggest impact on me was a district manager I had at Radio Shack, name Ruy Gonzalez. In the world of Fortune 500 big time corporate America, he was the first boss I had who really seemed like he loved his job and he was good at it. In addition to all the technical skills that he taught me, it felt great just to have someone that I could identify with who happened to also be a good manager and producer.

What I learned from Ruy, the biggest lesson is probably the importance of being able to connect with customers and prospects on a human level. Yes, you need to be able to qualify your customers or prospects, yes, you need to do a good job of making presentations. Yes, you’ve got to ask for the business and close but all of that may not matter if you haven’t made a human connection with the other person. It goes back to that old cliché that is people want to do business with others that they know, like and they trust. I think establishing that human connection is critical to making that happen.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned before that you’re involved with some organizations not just in the Detroit area but across the country. Tell us some of the ones that you’re involved with and how have they helped you become more successful?

Jason Wize: Here locally in town I’m involve with the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, I’m also a member of the Detroit Economic Club, I’ve spent a great deal of time working with the Detroit Economic Club. In fact, I’ve been a past Chair of the Detroit Economic Club Young Leader Board of Directors. The Detroit Economic Club has over 1,200 young leaders so it’s a large organization. My work in leading that group has been impactful for me professionally and personally not just for what it takes to actually lead the young leaders but some other opportunities have also come my way as well.

I’ve had the opportunity to attend Harvard Business School for one of their executive leadership development programs as part of the Young American Leaders program, I’ve had a chance to attend the Michigan Mackinac Policy Conference which is a gathering of all the top leaders in business industry and government for the state of Michigan. It takes place once a year on Mackinac Island, that’s a great opportunity as well as many others. Being involved in those two organizations in particular have been incredibly helpful for MediaProNow as a company and for me professionally and personally.

Fred Diamond: We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, they probably don’t know much about Detroit. They might know cars, they might now Motown, maybe something on those lines. Again, I’m broadcasting the show, we’re about 2 miles to Downtown from here, I guess?

Jason Wize: It’s about 3 or 4 miles to Downtown but TechTown is considered mid-town Detroit.

Fred Diamond: Give us your perspective. How’s it going in Detroit right now? For the people listening around the globe, again, you’re not the mayor or anything but maybe one day. Give us a little peak into how you feel it is here in Detroit.

Jason Wize: [Laughs] it’s funny you should ask that question. Before I even answer, let me just give a little backstory so that actually might provide some more appreciation for what I’m about to say. During my travels over the last 5 to 10 years, whenever I’d be on the road in an airport or another city and I’m asked the question, “Where are you from?” I would always say I’m from Troy, Michigan as in T-R-O-Y, the city I grew up in. People would say, “Where’s Troy?” “Troy’s half an hour north of Detroit…” and that’s how that conversation would go. Really I was doing that because there was a little bit of me that wasn’t so proud of Detroit and I wouldn’t have pride in the city. Fast forward to today, now when I’m on the road I’m beaming with pride to say that I’m from Detroit so shame on me for my previous ignorance, but certainly today Detroit is a bustling city. I like to say, “Don’t call it a comeback” because we’ve been here for years and the investment in the Downtown area is second to none certainly as you’ve seen it here in your time in the city. The last time you’ve been to Detroit, I promise you, if you come back you will not recognize the city.

Fred Diamond: It’s quite remarkable. For people listening around the globe. Quicken Loans is based in Detroit and of course, GM is Downtown and all the automobile industry still has a major play here.

Fred Diamond: I would definitely agree. There’s a nice buzz here, there’s a vibe that hasn’t been felt in a long time. Even in TechTown here, there’s a lot of interesting people working together, it’s got a great vibe. This is on Burroughs Drive for people who are students of technology. Burroughs, of course was one of the original seven mainframe companies and it’s really cool to see how this area has regenerated and rejuvenated itself as well. Again, we’re talking to Jason Wize, he’s the president of MediaProNow, a very successful entrepreneur, he also played football. I’ve got to ask you a couple football questions, if you don’t mind.

Jason Wize: Please.

Fred Diamond: Again, you played wide receiver at Ball State, Division 1 school. Tell us about a lesson or two that you took off of the gridiron that has led you to be a more successful businessperson.

Jason Wize: Something from game action or something from non-game action?

Fred Diamond: You tell me. Something that you think about that has led you to become a more successful businessperson.

Jason Wize: I’ll give you a couple quick examples, one from practice, one from a game. My second year at Ball State, we had what all the players thought was the death of a conditioning test and the conditioning test was ten 300’s, you’ve got to run them for a certain time and you had a one minute break in between. This was the conditioning test prior to fall camp starting. Those that did not pass the conditioning test were subject to something called dawn patrol which was essentially conditioning punishment before two-a-day practices started. You didn’t want to be on that lucky list.

I actually arrived at campus a couple weeks early to try and complete the conditioning test prior to. I had two failed attempts, the first day of fall camp was my last attempt to make this thing happen and on my second attempt I think I had gotten up to 5 or 6 of the 10 repetitions that qualified. I had some work to do. Long story short, I was able to complete that conditioning test just barely, but I was able to do it and avoid the whole dawn patrol. Honestly, that was just a situation where I didn’t know that I could physically do it, I had to find something inside of myself to carry me on. All those stories you hear about folks that come up with superhuman strength during times of distress or danger, I’m not going to compare my situation with someone who’s literally in danger but the mentality and the approach is still the same. As a result I was able to pass my conditioning test.

From game action I’ll take you back to my second year, we were playing the University of Minnesota and at that time the Golden Gophers were playing in the Metrodome where the Minnesota Vikings used to play. This was the first time I had a chance to play on television and in an NFL arena or NFL stadium, and it was also my first start as well so I had a lot of butterflies for a lot of reasons. I did not know if I was going to be able, I didn’t know that I deserved to be on the same field as these players from this bigger conference, from this bigger school that are playing in this fancy stadium. It was probably halfway through the first quarter, I had already made a reception, I had also been hit very hard by a couple of their defenders and when I realized that they were athletes no different than me, they put their uniform on the same way I did, they tied their shoes up the same way, etcetera it was then that I got comfortable enough in my own skin that I said, “Okay, let’s play.”

Fred Diamond: How many more catches did you have that game?

Jason Wize: I had five catches that game which was a season high, actually.

Fred Diamond: Good for you, have you caught a touchdown when you played college ball?

Jason Wize: Yes, but not against that team.

Fred Diamond: What does it feel like when you’re a college Division 1 player and you catch a touchdown pass? What was going through your mind?

Jason Wize: “Don’t get flagged for excessive celebration” [Laughs] that’s the main thing. No, it’s just a feeling of euphoria, it’s a feeling of accomplishment and it’s a feeling of collective accomplishment. It’s not just of individual achievement but it’s collective accomplishment. There’s 11 players out there on the field at any one point in time and I’m just the person who happened to touch the ball last on that particular place. There’s 10 other players that I need to go and give high 5’s, hugs and credits to because those folks are just as responsible for any success that I might have as me as an individual.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. This is going to be the corniest question I ever asked, but do you feel the same way when you make a sale?

Jason Wize: Yes, absolutely. I can tell you something right now, I think about all of the customers that we have and it’s the minority of the customers that I can point to and say, “It was 100% due to my efforts” or, “100% due to the efforts of any single individual on our team.” Typically the engagements that we have are a result of teamwork, they’re typically a result of a sales process that lasts weeks, months and in some cases lasts years. Along that way, it takes a group effort to make it happen.

Fred Diamond: What are the two biggest challenges you face today as a business owner from the sales perspective?

Jason Wize: Let me say this first. I mentioned earlier about working with B to B customers as well as B to C customers. That’s definitely a challenge that we face today, helping B to B business owners and decision makers in the sales and marketing departments of these organizations understand that it’s important to have a digital presence in the B to B space.

It’s important to look at your website and other digital marketing efforts as a way to generate leads and it’s also a way to help reduce your cost of customer acquisition. Starting to see some trends in the market turn where these types of organizations are inherently starting to understand how important that is, but it’s certainly a challenge out there to dispel some myths that are out there about SEO and any kind of digital advertising that’s all for direct to consumer. The other thing I might say is setting proper expectations and this might be similar in most industries. In 2019, 2020 and beyond, American pop culture, it’s a microwave society, everybody wants everything by yesterday afternoon and just setting up these proper expectations that anything that’s good is worth waiting for even if it is a relatively short period of time.

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

Jason Wize: That’s an easy one. That would have to be the very first customer that we had at MediaProNow which also happened to be the largest customer that we acquired for the first two years of us being in business. That’s the introduction and the eventual contract that we had with Hansons Remodeling. Your listeners around the nation and around the globe may not be familiar with Hansons Home Improvement and Remodeling but here in Michigan, Hansons is one of two of the largest home improvement remodeling companies.

If you’re familiar with the remodeling industry, you’ll know that Hansons is in the top 50 remodeling companies in the country so certainly a big outfit here in Michigan and certainly well-known and well-respected in the industry. Taking you back to about 6 years ago, I was at a conference center having an internal meeting and simultaneously, unbeknownst to me, Hansons was having a sales meeting. No big deal, it’s a big conference center and plenty of room for everybody but it just so happened that one of our breaks I went to the restroom, went to go get something to drink and I happened to see sitting in the atrium Mr. Brian Elias who at that time was the president and owner of Hansons.

I thought to myself, “Wow, Jason, you should go talk to him” and then as soon as I thought that to myself I said, “What am I going to say? I don’t have anything to say, I’m a brand new company and he’s a multi-millionaire, he’s got a company with hundreds and hundreds of employees and it could go very badly for me.” Once I got the nerve to say, “Yes, I’m going to do this” then I decided to say, “Okay, what’s going to be my approach?” Because if I just walk up to him I’m going to seem like a salesperson and I can’t have that. I decided to carry out my own individual plan which was, “Let me go get myself some water” and while I was at the vending machine I happened to buy two waters. I walked right up to Brian, I handed him a water and I introduced myself and a conversation was born. Three months later we had a signed contract for the biggest deal that the company had in the first two years of its existence.

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you a question about fear. Here you are, again I’ve brought up your football background in the past, you’re a wide receiver and you’re going to get hit on almost every single play. You’ve got to have courage to be out in the football field, you’re jumping for the ball, you know you’re going to get hit every single play yet here you are, your first sales opportunity and you’re nervous to go and approach the guy who’s running Hansons but you got past it.

Talk about that for a second or two, talk about getting rid of fear like when you’re out there on the football field, you said it took you a couple of plays to get comfortable and then you realized, “I belong here, I made it to this Division 1 school, I deserve to be on this field.” Talk about sales the same type of thing, if you will. Fear comes up all the time, I think fear is the #1 block in anything. Here you are in the football field, the Division 1, you’re going to get pounded every single play, you know it’s going to come, I don’t know what you do to prepare against it and here you are on the sales field. How do you get past that fear?

Jason Wize: Overcoming fear is a muscle like anything else. I talked about fear of being on the football field and having some anxiety that way, we’re talking here right now about fear approaching a prospect or a customer but it’s ubiquitous, it’s universal, it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re talking about. Will Smith has a great saying, he says that fear is an acronym that can stand for False Evidence Appearing Real and I’m a believer into that. It takes me often times in present day, if I’m struggling with something, if I’m fearful of something, have anxiety about something, I’ll go back years ago to not just days on the football field but other times when I’ve been playing sports and I’ve had to overcome fear.

There’s nothing like the thrill and the rush of running out of the tunnel onto the football field and there’s 50 thousand fans screaming for you – or booing, cheering against you. Either which way, that’s a large number of folks to be performing in front of and being able to overcome that fear is not something that I can say, “Do this one thing” or, “Do these 10 things”, it’s more of just getting it done however many steps it took you to get done and then once you’ve done it once, go do it again.

[Sponsor break]

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

Jason Wize: If I could give two takeaways, one would be persistence. Persistence pays so be persistent. I know there’s statistics out there that selling attempts are not successful until the 5th, 6th, 7th, the 10th attempt and such is life. Life is beautiful in such a way that if you are persistent at something, whether it’s trying to close a sale or whether it’s trying to lose that last couple pounds or eliminate the weeds in your garden or anything along those lines, persistence pays. I would say absolutely be persistent.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about one or two of your selling habits that has led to your continued success.

Jason Wize: A couple things. I schedule all my sales activities or all the sales activities for MediaProNow, we’ve got a marketing calendar and a sales calendar that dictates all of the marketing and advertising initiatives that we have. The sales folks that are on our teams document all of their activities whether that’s outbound phone calls, whether that’s outbound emails, we’ve got a newsletter that goes out so we look at that distribution and the engagement from that. All of the activities including live events, we track all of that stuff and we measure versus results.

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

Jason Wize: We’re working on a little rebranding but the major initiative for going into next year is going to be growing our sales funnel to source prospects from more outlets, more platforms and then building in some automation into that sales funnel.

Fred Diamond: Jason, I want to thank you for being on the Sales Game Changers podcast today, I loved talking to you, I loved hearing some of your sports analogies and talking about fear and things along those lines. Before I ask you for your final thought, again being on the football field as a wide receiver, you’re out there, you’re exposed, I’ve mentioned that a whole bunch of times as well. You’ve become a successful business owner, your company is six years old, why have you continued and why have you continued to sell? What is it about owning the business and selling your services that has kept you going?

Jason Wize: In general I’ve always been attracted and a lover of the sales industry because it gives me and it gives anyone an opportunity to have an equity stake, to have some ownership in their destiny, in their outcome. I know there’s variables that go along with that but I have not found another profession that allows you to have as much say in your future as does the selling profession.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank you again for being on the Sales Game Changers podcast, again I’m very excited, we’re doing this interview from mid-town Detroit, I called it Downtown before but actually GM’s old headquarters is like a block or two away, right?

Jason Wize: Correct, two blocks to our left.

Fred Diamond: A lot of history in this particular area and I appreciated the way you described it, you said it’s not a comeback, Detroit’s always been here.

Jason Wize: Don’t call it a comeback.

Fred Diamond: It’s showing all the evidence of all the power in this particular town. Give us one final thought to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening around the globe today.

Jason Wize: I know we covered a lot of ground but I guess if I could leave the audience with one key takeaway, I’d say to have PRIIDE in your sales career. Yes, you heard me right, I said pri-ide so that’s pride spelled with two I’s and we’ve got some acronym to go along with that. First you’ve got to be Positive, that goes without saying but you’ve got to be positive, have a positive attitude towards your products, services, your company, your coworkers, your prospects, your customers and just life in general.

You’ve got to have Respect for all of those constituencies as well and as well for yourself. Intelligence, personal development is something that all sales professionals need to take ownership in, you’ve got to sharpen your skills, you’ve got to sharpen the razor blade, you’ve got to become smarter, you’ve got to become better, you’ve got to become faster so that requires some investment in yourself. Don’t leave it up to your boss, don’t leave it up to your company, don’t leave it up to the manufacturer, don’t leave it up to the distributor, don’t leave it up to the customer to tell you, “You know something? Your skills aren’t what we need so unfortunately we’re going to go with the other vendor.”

That’s the call that you don’t want to get so be Intelligent, invest in yourself. Second I is Intensity, got to be intense, D is Desire and E is Enthusiasm. You might say Intensity, Desire and Enthusiasm are synonyms and I guess that could be true, however I think there’s some differentiation between those three. Be Positive, have Respect, be Intelligent, increase your intelligence, be Intense with what it is that you do, you’ve got to have a burning desire to make it happen and please, just do everything with Enthusiasm. If you have PRIDE in your sales career, then I think the future will be bright for you.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 218: Detroit Biz Leader Jason Wize Shares Web and Digital Marketing Ideas to Help Transform Your Sales Efforts During COVID-19 Pandemic first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for Creativity in Sales: Six Things Sales Pros Need to Do for Success During the Coronavirus on Friday, Mar 27, 2020 11:00 AM EDT at: here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on March 25, 2020.]

EPISODE 216: SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE LEARNING EVENT: Sales Transformation and Solutions During the COVID-19 Panel Discussion

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy is the key right now.“

Darrell Gehrt is the Vice President of Sales, Mobile Solutions at Cvent. Listen to his podcast episode here.
Randy Wood is the Vice President of Web America Sales at Akamai Technologies. Find his podcast episode here.
Denise Hayman is the Chief Revenue Officer at Expel. Her show will broadcast in April.

Fred Diamond:  Alright, welcome. This is Fred Diamond of the Sales Game Changers podcast and of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. This is our first Sales Game Changers live learning event, it’s 2:00 o’clock Eastern Time. We’re going to be doing these every week, every Wednesday at 2:00 o’clock featuring Sales Game Changers podcast guests. Because of all the people working from home and because of all the stress being put on the various online networks, there may be a challenge or two with the broadcast. It seems that everything is good from an outage perspective so we’re just going to get going. We’re going to be recording this as well. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this, you’ll get some value out of the next 15 minutes or so. We’re broadcasting from typically Northern Virginia, Washington DC area. Luckily on the Sales Game Changers podcast we’ve had great world-class sales leaders featured twice a week on our podcast which has had over 300,000 downloads. Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to feature three of them discussing what they’re doing to motivate and elevate top tier sales teams.

Today we have three great guests, we have Darrell Gehrt with Cvent, we have Denise Hayman from Expel and Randy Wood from Akamai. Darrell and Randy have both been guests on the Sales Game Changers podcast, Denise’s show is scheduled to come out some time in April so we’re excited about that. Here’s how we’re going to do this, we’re going to get right to the questions so that you can follow along. I’m going to be posting each question in the chat box and I’m going to send that to everybody. We have a couple questions here prepared, we’ve gotten some great questions from our guests on LinkedIn and from IES members around the globe. If you have a question, you can type it in the question box and we’ll try to get to as many as we can. We have a lot of great questions already here that we’re going to get to, we’ll do a poll or two as well.

This webinar will be recorded and transcribed, there’s a good chance we’re also going to offer it as a Sales Game Changers podcast as well. Here’s what we’re going to do first, why don’t we just do this so we can see who’s on the call? We’re going to launch a very simple poll. The question is: how many years have you been in sales? More than 20 years, between 5-20 years, 1-5 years, less than one year and you’re not in sales, just so that we can see who’s on the call here. It looks like tonight’s an even mix between one third of the audience ‘more than 20 years’, one third of the audience ‘between 5-20 years’ and 26% of the audience ‘between 1-5 years’. That being said, let’s get right to it. Once again, I am going to be posting the questions in the chat box, I’m going to be sending them to everybody. First question, let’s get right to it. What are your top priorities right now? This is for the panel. Darrell, why don’t you take us first?

Darrell Gehrt: My name is Darrell Gehrt and I’m the Vice President of Sales at Cvent for our global division. First of all, I hope everybody’s safe and healthy out there and the goal today is just to share some tips. That really is our top priority right now, we really are focused on stabilizing employee base making sure our employees have what they need making sure that they’re comfortable, making sure that they’re stable. We’re prioritizing that even over our customers now. Of course, we have to develop but the focus has to be on our employees and what we’ve told them is, “You have to be able to control what you can control. There’s a lot of things that are out of your control and there are things that you can influence.” That’s been the broad message to our employee base.

Fred Diamond: Randy, you’re with Akamai, you guys are involved with some of the highest performing websites on the planet. Obviously, your customers are impacted but tell us what are your top priorities right now.

Randy Wood: Fred, I would give you that answer in two perspectives. First of all, let’s talk about customers. With respect to the Akamai customers, you said it, we’re the world’s largest content delivery network provider so we’re focused on business continuity, maintaining business continuity for our customers first and foremost. That really boils down to maintaining the integrity and the reliability of our customer’s websites and even things like their mobile application delivery and that’s across all industries.

Then second in the context of customers, to Derrell’s point it’s about keeping our employees safe and productive. Safety first and foremost and then with respect to being productive, obviously we’re in a work from home environment and with that, we’re focused on creating and maintaining successful business outcomes. The business can’t stop but at the same time we’ve got to create a safe environment for our employees. Just a final thought here with respect to a top priority for our customers, back to that first priority, this is really a time to be a friend to our customers and not a vendor. This idea of reasonable person theory really needs to apply, there’s plenty of opportunities to be a vendor and to manage our customers but we really need to focus on being a friend right now and realizing we’re all in this together and these times will pass.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Denise, how about you? What are your top priorities right now?

Denise Hayman: Hey Fred and everyone. I’m Denise Hayman, I’m the CRO at Expel. At Expel we’ve always had a mantra around servant leadership and what that means for us from an overall company values perspective is the idea of leadership takes care of its employees first, always and forever will be. It’s the Richard Branson scenario that says, “If you take care of your employees then your employees take care of your customers and then everything else happens as it should.” Nothing about what’s going on today changes that for us. I think it makes it first and foremost in every single conversation and I’m ensuring that our employees, #1 are safe and psychologically safe, not only physically safe. In lots of different ways we’re doing that and I know we’re going to talk more about that. Certainly that’s #1.

Number 2 is ensuring that we’re doing everything we can for our customers because right now this is not only a stressful time for us in the sales industry but also for a customer to maintain everything that they were doing but in a remote environment. It becomes wildly stressful so what kinds of things can we be doing for them? Then looking forward, what does this mean? Starting to put some theories together about things that we might need to change. Does that mean our go-to-market changes? Does that mean we’re looking at things in a different lens with different types of customers? Lots of forward looking discussions that we’re having right now.

Fred Diamond: One of the words that comes up frequently over the last week or two since everything has shifted is empathy, it comes up a lot as it relates to sales right now. Actually, on the Sales Game Changers podcast ’empathy’ used to come up all the time: be an empathetic seller. Now it’s even more pertinent. How do you be empathetic and move the business forward? DG, why don’t you start with that?

Darrell Gehrt: I’ll start with empathy right now as table stakes, you have to have that. If you’re a sales professional and you can’t wrap your head around that then that’s probably a bigger issue. I had an interesting conversation with one of my reps the other day who said, “All the conversations I’m having right now, they’re empathetic people saying yes, great, thank you and let’s talk again in a couple of months.” In essence, what happens is they’ve gotten stuck in the mud and I think one of the things that we’re seeing right now is decisions and pivots are happening on the hour, not on the day or the month. I think the best way to avoid getting stuck in that mud, first of all you’ve got to have the honest conversation.

I love what Randy said about being a partner and a friend first and a vendor second. For us, Cvent, we’re in the events industry which is arguably, I would say the second hardest hit and the first hardest hit being the hospitality side. Avoiding getting stuck in the mud is really about serving before selling, so you can’t lean into these conversations like, “Hey, can I show you some technology?” or, “Can I talk about how we can help you?” The way that we’re approaching it is, “Hey, we see that in the event industry a lot of people are asking a lot of questions and if you’d like me to share with you what we’re hearing, I’d be happy to do that.”

It’s an empathetic way to continue the conversation because that’s what people want right now, they want to hear from thought leaders, they want to know what their peers are doing. That’s what we’re trying to serve up and if it’s valuable to them, we hope that they’ll invite us in for a further conversation but it’s helping us move conversations along. Maybe they’re not as quick as we’re used to, but we’re able to execute on that friend concept first.

Fred Diamond: Denise, how about you? When we did your podcast we talked about empathy a couple of times, and again your show is going to come out in April. What does it mean to you and how can you be empathetic today while moving your business forward?

Denise Hayman: It’s a big topic and I love, Darrell, what you had to say about how to take it forward with customers. I think I would add to it being authentic, this is a moment in time where you have the opportunity to create more loyalty by not trying to push forward something that is maybe not of the time from a sales perspective, but being relevant about what they are looking for and the kinds of things that are important to them. Just asking a few simple questions up front. “Has anything changed for you? Has anything accelerated? Is there anything going on with your business right now that we might be able to assist you with that maybe even wouldn’t have been thought of before?”

Just being really open and authentic and as Darrell said, recognizing thought leadership right now. “Here’s what other customers are starting to do, here’s the kinds of things that we’re talking to other people around.” In our business we are very much around enabling customer’s security organizations or security operation centers. Right now they went through a huge transformation, everyone working at home not used to having the same tools and elements that they had before so it can be as simple as, “Would you like to hear how we did? We moved our SOC to a totally virtual environment in 36 hours. I can get you on the phone with the person who was in charge of that, that managed that. Would that be interesting?” Thought leadership, educational scenarios without jumping on the opportunity as of right now.

Fred Diamond: Randy, what do you think are the main concerns right now for your people? Actually, all three of you have managed hundreds of people but Randy, why don’t you take this one? What do you think are the main concerns for your people? And let’s break it down, how are your younger people handling this new world and how about some of your more seasoned and senior people?

Randy Wood: Fred, what I’ve seen now in three weeks with respect to people’s concerns boil down to one thing: it’s uncertainty. We can deal with bad news, we can compartmentalize bad news. It’s very difficult to deal with uncertainty. Just last week I had an opportunity to address my sales force, I’m responsible for the business in North America, it was about 350 people, it was an unrelated topic that we were discussing but I took the opportunity for the first 5 minutes to talk about the situation and to try and put things in perspective, and to try and help people deal with the uncertainty. It was remarkable the response from the team back to me in real time on my cellphone, the messages just kept coming in about how comforting that was, how much people needed to hear that.

What I began to understand is what we as leaders need to do right now more than ever before is to create belief in the idea that we’re going to get through this, we’ve got some hard medicine to take along the way and to help deal with the uncertainty. That really provides steady reassurance and it can’t be a one-time thing, it’s got to be something that we do along the way, that we do in a predictable, repeatable, simple and compelling way. With respect to the demographics of age in the workforce, I think older people are more comfortable with things, they’ve seen this before. People in my generation have lived through 9-11 which I think is an obvious and easy comparison here. I think for the younger people in the workforce it is finding ways to help minimize or to deal with the uncertainty that they have and the fear that comes with that. With fear comes some level of paralysis and as leaders we’ve got to work through that to keep people safe like I said, but also productive and working on behalf of our customers to keep moving the business forward.

For me it’s just about dealing with uncertainty.

Fred Diamond: Randy, we’re not going to talk about it on this call but for those listening to the webinar today, a little bit of a trivia there as you’ll hear on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Randy, you actually started your sales career on September 12th, 2001. I don’t want to go into that story right now, you tell it beautifully on the podcast. Everyone on the line, take a listen to Randy’s podcast and talk about being thrown into the fire, you literally started the next day after that tragic event.

Denise, Randy just gave a little bit of a good explanation of what the people are going through. How often are you communicating to your team? Before you might have had remote people and obviously you manage a remote team, people around the country, but you also have people in the office and you would go see them. Now everyone’s at home, I presume, all across the country and the world. How often are you communicating to them and how? Are you using online materials like Zoom or you’re calling? Tell us how you’re going about that today versus how you were a couple weeks ago.

Denise Hayman: We were early to the kicking people out of the office and having everyone move virtual, so we’ve been virtual for a little over three weeks now. The learning that took place with first of all, the isolation, we’re salespeople, we’re used to being out and talking to people, we’re extroverts in the whole, “How do we harness that in this scenario?” recognizing that people needed more communication, not less, in this moment.

As a company we’ve done a couple of things and then I’ve done a couple of things on the sales side as well. We’ve been having an every Monday morning management across the company meeting with our CEO and other executives talking about what the topics are of the day, whether it’s around how to achieve work-life balance, what we’re doing in terms of prioritization, what’s going on with cash flow. Any of those things get discussed in that moment and then a weekly Wednesday Zoom that we’ve been doing, so you can tell we’re using Zoom, where again it’s the CEO talking to the rest of the company.

Again, we’re very transparent, very open culture so it’s a half hour, “Here’s what’s going on this week” kind of scenario. It’s been really fantastic. Then I’ve been doing two other things outside of the regular meetings, I’ve been having sales Hangouts and it’s not meant to be a, “Let’s go over this deal” or, “Let’s talk about this new program.” The first time we did it I had everybody bring a joke and we just sat together and told jokes. The second time we talked about different things and different opportunities that we were seeing in the market where we might be able to reach out to customers in different ways.

Earlier this week we did a session where it was just everybody bring either one personal win or one professional win from the previous week and share it across the team. It’s a half an hour of connection as opposed to a work thing or a specific thing that we’re trying to move forward. We did a Zoom contest where we had fun backgrounds this past week, just trying to add a little bit of fun because everywhere you look, it’s negative so adding a little bit of fun and competition and excitement to the path is what we’re trying to do at the same time.

Fred Diamond: Here’s what’s going on now, we’re getting a whole bunch of questions from our attendees and it’s about to get serious right now. There’s basically two audiences for you as a sales leader, there’s your people – how do you manage and how do you motivate them and keep them elevated today? But we’re getting a slew of questions coming in here asking about how are you dealing with your customers. We’re going to do a very short poll right now and then we’re going to take some questions, we’re going to modify a little bit and ask some questions.

Let’s go off script a little bit here and let’s talk about the real world. Again, there’s managing the people and there’s the real world of customers. Randy, you’re nodding your head. What are you doing? Again, the question was are you making any exceptions or payment plans for customers that have invoices that are past or due?

Randy Wood: This is very timely. This one phenomena is happening at a breathtaking pace. At Akamai we serve some of the biggest brands in the world in commerce, retail, travel, entertainment, the cruise lines, for example and hotels and airlines who are all dramatically impacted by this. At the same time we serve other brands, media streaming brands, online gaming brands which are frankly doing quite well right now for obvious reasons.

With respect to the brands that are impacted, we are being as creative and as good a business partner as we can be by doing things like extending payment terms, in some cases 90, 120 and 180 days by providing other concessions such as contract production on a monthly or quarterly basis. The idea is this, we need to invest with our customers in the good times and celebrate the good times and the joint wins and at the same time we need to make equal commensurate investments in the bad times as they work through these troubles.

There’s no alternatives, this is what it means to be a good partner, to be an essential partner and to make our customer successful. I think this pays dividends along the way and I want to go back to a point Denise made because I think it’s important. The opportunity here is to be nothing but real and authentic, we are all human beings and we’re all in it together. Listen, ethical leadership is important and I think this touches on ethical leadership. At Akamai, ethical leadership means having profits and purpose and not compromising one without the other and we’re in the business to make money, let’s be clear, returning shareholder is important but purposes is important.

Right now I think purpose outweighs profits and just about anything else so stay true to your purpose, let’s be very close to our customers. For us, pricing concessions are top of mind. I’m approving five a day right now for some pretty large brand and pretty large monthly spend.

Fred Diamond: DG, I’m going to ask that question to you as well. Another question came in via LinkedIn which is along the lines of this and I’m going to speak to the question, it’s really about how do you help your customers. A quick note, my apologies, we accidentally hit the poll close button too soon but I’m going to guess the stress level with customers is pretty high. This is for DG, it’s a follow onto the question we just asked and then Denise, I’ll ask you as well. Are there any programs as a company that you’re doing to help your customers that are suffering from anxiety, uncertainty during this time?

This is getting in the way of my productivity at times, for example, when big news is released such as Marriott furloughing or laying off people. Again, DG, we talked about this in the beginning. Your customer serves event planners and actually, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we’re a customer of yours and we do 50 events per year, we don’t do some at the level of some of your big customers but how are you guys helping your customers who are dealing with anxiety, stress, layoffs, furloughs, etcetera?

Darrell Gehrt: I think, Fred, when all of this started to take shape, one of the things that we did was we formed a SWAT team to deal with customers who have requests like Randy was talking about. We serve the hotel industry, we serve event planners and they’re being heavily impacted and they’re coming to us and they’re saying, “How can you help us?” Rather than trying to train up a sales team of 850 people to have those conversations, we created a SWAT team that can help handle those questions. It allows us to be consistent, anytime you do something a lot you get better at it so we’ve done all kinds of things, every situation is different, everybody has different apps. From a business perspective, one of the things that is actually coming out of this is that people are saying, “Can we extend our contract with you? You’re proving to be a great partner, thank you for these concessions.” Purpose before profits, I love that, Randy. I think what happens is when you put purpose before profits you get long-term profits so yes, we have to have these conversations. We are doing things for our customers, they’re all unique. I hope that answers the question, Fred, I’m not sure if there was another component for that or not.

Fred Diamond: Denise, I’ll ask you the next one. The person who asked that question, thank you. It was a two-part question, how are you helping customers and are you doing anything special for employees, your sales team? We’ve talked before and we’ll talk a little more about ways you’re coaching them but how about if your salesperson is selling to Marriott or some of the companies are Disney or some of the companies like that, that are just pure and simple shutting down? They’re not going to reopen for let’s say best case scenario weeks but probably months. You’re selling to the entertainment industry which is almost totally shut down. Denise, is your company or are other companies serving their employees with EAP programs or extra counseling or something?

Denise Hayman: Absolutely, there are a myriad of programs that are being offered to everyone, everything from free class pass stuff for exercising, meditation live, there’s obviously telemedicine options via our healthcare providers for the people who don’t feel like they have to go somewhere. If you need somebody to talk to, you need some stress relief, there’s been really interesting things that have come up across the company as well, people are doing Zoom sessions around happy hour kinds of things or stress relief scenarios. There’s a yoga class that’s happening a couple times a week, meditation classes starting to happen, there’s a lot of people who are pitching in to try to help others where they have time as well as recognizing – I think we’re going to talk about this.

The big thing that we’re seeing right now is the impact to people whose kids are not in school anymore, the scenario of not only being working from home and maybe two parents working from home but maybe two or three little kids who are having to be supervised around a school program means that work has to suffer. We’ve been very implicit about saying family comes first absolutely in this situation, if this means that you’re not going to be able to get all your stuff done, we just want you to have a conversation with your manager and figure out if there are other people that can step in.

Our employee experience team just did a survey around understanding where people are against their full productivity and if they have extra space to be able to offer up to others as well. People offer grocery shopping, people offer, “I could teach this, I could take this thing off your plate” just really coming together as a community and remembering that everyone is in it together is the most important part right now.

Fred Diamond: We have a follow up that came in from LinkedIn as well and I’ll ask this to DG and Randy. DG, by the way, is Darrell Gehrt with Cvent, he’s known as DG. On the Sales Game Changers podcast right before we take a break I say, “Sales is hard, people don’t return your phone calls or your emails, why have you continued?” and most of the Sales Game Changers talk about service. “We’re providing a service, we’re helping our customers achieve their mission, we like the challenge, we like the money” or whatever it might be. Now at this moment in time we’re adding the stress level of this, of having to deal not just with sales being hard but the whole Covid-19 which we don’t know where it’s going to end. DG and Randy, what added things are you having to do or hasn’t kicked in yet to guide your people along? DG, you have a lot of people who are first or second job out of school. Randy, your organization is a little more widespread but are you having to be more of a coach, more of a therapist, if you will, at this time versus just a sales leader? DG.

Darrell Gehrt: I’ll pivot from Denise’s message. We talked about empathy at the top part of this call, yes, we’re doing a lot of programs for employees too but the thing that overrides all of that is the human connection, the empathy, we have to have empathy for our salespeople and understanding that they’re hurting out there, too. Deals are pushed and of course business is still moving forward but you’ve got to have empathy for them and that empathy can come in a lot of forms. Two of my senior managers both just had kids so they’re dealing with that and yes, we have to be flexible, we have to be empathetic to what they’re going through and I think if you’re open and you’re communicating with your people then those problems can all be solved. That really has been a big focus of ours, that’s a message from the top down and something that I’m telling my leaders, too. Get on the phone, get on the Zoom. Get on there, show your face, let them know you’re real. As a senior leader, we need to make sure that we’re talking to our folks one-on-one and hearing them individually.

Fred Diamond: Randy, how about you?

Randy Wood: Fred, as a leader I believe that the role of the leader is to see the organization not as it is but as it can become and to get focused on the future. For me, that’s either creating or in this case reinforcing a vision that you can create by and for, that helps people put this situation into context to deal with the situation again to provide some reassurance in a time of uncertainty. With respect to seeing the organization as it can become, to me that’s certainty. Let’s talk about certainty, there’s a lot of talk about uncertainty here in these times of uncertainty and I sent an email out to this effect earlier this week to my team.

There’s a lot of uncertainty but let’s talk about what’s certain, I’m certain we’re going to come out of this, I’m certain we’re going to be better as people, as a society, I’m certain our customers are going to be better off and in a better position in maybe not too much from now, but I’m certain about that and I’m certain there’s an opportunity here for us to be better advocates for our customer. Let’s focus on what the organization does look like when we come out of this, that’s the role of the leader. Also, just in terms of clear, compelling and simple communications, this is something new that I’ve started doing. For me it’s about creating a rally cry or a mantra for the organization, something that the people can say to themselves as they try and deal with this and take care of themselves and at the same time take care of their customers and get back to work.

What I settled on in Akamai in my role is the idea that tough times don’t last, tough people do and by tough I don’t mean physically tough, let’s get spiritually tough, let’s be mentally tough, let’s be physically tough and let’s be tough for our families, for our customers, for ourselves. That seems to be a rally cry, a mantra that my organization has bought into, it’s the hashtag #ToughTimesDontLast, it’s about creating that vision. I’ll say it again back to Denise’s point, it’s about being authentic. People need authenticity.

Fred Diamond: If you have a question that you’d like to ask the panelists, Denise Hayman from Expel, Darrell Gehrt from Cvent, Randy Wood from Akamai. I want to thank our panelists for giving such great insights here. We’ve got a couple more questions here that have come in through the internet and these are all similar so I’m going to ask all three of these questions. It’s a good question right now and it deals with the whole concept of calling into new prospects.

Do you think cold calling people right now and let’s just say prospecting versus cold calling, cold calling people who don’t know you right now is a good idea or should we ask our team to stop that for the time being? If you do encourage them to be cold calling/prospecting, what guidance are you giving them regarding prospecting right now? DG, why don’t you start with that and then we’ll ask that to the panel? Should you be cold calling, prospecting? We talked about reaching out to your existing customers and seeing how they’re doing, empathy, etcetera. Should you call brand new customers today? If so, what should you be saying?

Darrell Gehrt: Our sales organization is bifurcated into two groups, one that focuses on existing customers, one that is out looking for new customers. Yes, we do still need to do that. Part of that is to Randy’s point, tough times don’t last, tough people do. One of the things I’ve been very bullish on saying is it is not business as usual but it is business moving forward and those cold calls that we’re making have to sound different, everybody has to pivot their message a little bit right now. It comes back with the servitude, I think Denise had mentioned this earlier as well, servant-based management and that’s to our customers, too.

What we’re doing with our cold calls is offering up, “If you want to hear what the industry is saying and what customers are doing with their events, we’ve got 20,000 customers so we’re in a unique position to hear a lot of things. If you’re interested in that then let me know and I’d be happy to schedule some time with you.” I’m not begging them for meetings, I’m offering to share with them. Sometimes with salespeople, we’ve got to think of ourselves as educators and that’s really the cold calls that we’re making, again with an end goal that hopefully they appreciate the relationship that we’re trying to build with them and they invite us back in for further conversations. If they don’t I’m instructing my team to move on and talk with some other folks and it will heal, but I guarantee you, those folks that you’ve cold called if you did it professionally and without the normal push that we might have as aggressive salespeople, they’ll remember that a month or two months from now when you call them again. I guarantee we’ll have people say, “Hey, I got your message before, thanks for reaching out. Timing wasn’t good but yes, I’d love to hear what you have to say.”

Fred Diamond: Denise, how about you?

Denise Hayman: I love the idea of first of all, changing the messaging. Clearly the message has to change, you can’t just do what was done even a month ago and I think it’s really all about selling right now or positioning to the need as opposed to the situation. In our business we’re very much against things that are called ambulance chasers, in the security world when you hear something bad and lots of people swoop in to take advantage of that. In this particular situation we’re doing things like our normal program is an annual program and we’re saying, “Maybe you have shorter term needs that you can’t even see a year out, maybe you can only see a month out. Let’s talk to you about something that you might be able to do for a month or two to get you through with where you are.”

Fred Diamond: Randy, how are you coaching your team right now to have those business conversations to new audiences?

Randy Wood: Good salespeople focus on ways to create and communicate value and positive business outcomes. I think there’s an opportunity here to create very positive business outcomes for our customers using our technology harnessing innovation. The amount of innovation that’s emerging from this situation is breathtaking. If there’s innovation, solutions and technologies that are relevant, that are pertinent to creating positive business outcomes for our customers then we absolutely should bring that to market but we need to do that as Darrell and Denise said, in respectful ways.

We need to be respectful of customer’s priorities and maybe right now it’s not the time to have that conversation but there are even in Akamai very compelling solutions that we can bring to market today, and in some cases in the free scenario that make a real compelling difference to our customers. We’re looking for opportunities to have those conversations but again being very respectful of where our customers find themselves and what their priorities are.

Fred Diamond: Once again, if you’re listening in we have time for a couple more questions, we have a few more questions we want to get to. Again, I want to thank our panel today, Denise Hayman, Darrell Gehrt and Randy Wood for really giving us ideas. We didn’t expect to have to shift our sales approach like this, it wasn’t part of the plans but what’s something new that you’re now doing as a response that is actually working well that you maybe see becoming part of your usual process? Denise, why don’t you get us started?

Denise Hayman: The biggest thing for us is I think the one that I just mentioned, changing our licensing model from an annual only or even a multi-year scenario to shorter terms, and even doing pieces of an architecture that we’re covering versus the entire thing. Really just flexing and as a component of that, I’ve done a thing where we’re putting in a triage sales deal desk because I can tell you, this past week there have been so many that are unusual deals that trying to figure out, “Do we want to do this one? Does this one sound interesting?”

One of our values is meeting customers where they are so trying to meet them where they are means that we need to figure out which things work for us and which don’t so this triage deal desk scenario we’re putting in place to be able to cycle through and filter out the ones that work for us. That’s a big one that we’re doing.

If I could add one other tip to the things that we were talking about in terms of the cold calling and the ways that we’re going about it, one of my sales guys came up with this and I thought it was brilliant. He has been sending out coffee gift certificates or gift cards and asking for a 15-minute coffee with people via Zoom and it’s a light touch, it’s collaborative, it’s different. I don’t know how many of you have gotten those, I actually got one the other day that was meant to support the local community, I thought it was great. Just doing things in a light touch collaborative way and getting our message out, it’s definitely working.

Fred Diamond: Randy, how about you? Anything new you’re doing that’s been responses?

Randy Wood: Good, I want to use that idea, I’ve got a bunch of ideas about that. I think one of the biggest things that’s come out of this for us at Akamai is that we are beginning to really engage customers in a new digital way. Not that we haven’t before, but digital marketing, digital connection, an increase on social marketing is really the focus right now. We cancelled our live events globally through July at this point and it may extend into August and September. There’s a lot of sunk costs there so we’re not flush with cash on recouping that money from those events so we’ve got to find new ways to connect with customers in very relevant and compelling ways.

For example, on April 7th we’re having a digital, virtual Akamai Edge event and right now I think we’ve got about 1,000 customers enrolled and it turns out that it’s a fantastic lightweight, compelling, immersive way to connect with customers and to bring them very timely, very relevant, very useful content that they can apply now in the current situation. I think for us, that’s one of them and I think in terms of transformation, Fred, the world will change dramatically. What we’re doing right here is compelling. I have a college junior home right now who’s doing all course work online and I told her she needed to be off the internet at 2:00 o’clock, she was doing office hours to make sure I had sufficient bandwidth but that’s one example of, “We’re doing work, we’re communicating, we’re collaborating.” I think this is compelling so in a digital way the world will transform to the positive and dramatically.

Fred Diamond: Before we get to our final question, again I want to thank our panelists Denise Hayman, Darrell Gehrt and Randy Wood. Today is March 25th and for a lot of companies that’s what I like to call 6 days away from the end of the quarter. This question came in from the internet for DG and I’m going to ask DG this question, then we’ll go to the final question. I love what DG – Darrell Gehrt – said that business is not the same but there needs to be business continuity. With the end of the quarter approaching us, what are some of the best practices you’re using to bring deals across the finish line?” End of quarter usually this week, a lot of companies are chugging away trying to get some extra things in, obviously it’s a unique situation. DG, why don’t you take that? And then we’re going to ask the panel for their final thoughts.

Darrell Gehrt: I think one of the things that we’re stressing around Cvent is this is also an opportunity for us as sales reps and I’m talking introspectively, here. It’s an opportunity for us to all sharpen our sales skills so Fred, I think what you’re doing with the Sales Game Changers putting this together, giving thought leadership, I too have taken a couple notes, this is great, I’m enjoying the rock stars that I’m sharing the webcam with. But we have to sharpen our skills and I keep telling my reps, “If you want to close deals in Q1 you need to listen better.” I think sometimes we move too fast. Listen, what is it that they really want? What is really in their way? In today’s day, what is really giving them pause? What are you concerned about? Randy is a good example, he’s got events for the first half of the year that are gone, they’re not going to do it anymore and they have to pivot so we’re pivoting on virtual events but we’re also doing some things contractually. We’re allowing our reps to put some line within the agreement that says, “If there is an event you have to move, maybe you have to move that September event that you’re still planning on having today, you want to move it, how can we work with you to get the right kinds of concessions proactively so that you can sign this agreement and still have the comfort level that you need if this should extend out a little bit longer?” We still have to close business but we have to listen to our customers.

Fred Diamond: Again, I want to thank the panelists, I want to give them one final question. Also want to thank all the people listening on today’s webinar, I’m looking at the attendee list, we have people all over the world. A nice mix of IES members and people that have found us via LinkedIn and probably people that are also big fans of Randy, Denise and DG, Darrell Gehrt. Final question here. Last week everyone was dealing with the newness of working from home trying to adjust using Zoom and a lot of other remote technology. Again, we’re going to be doing this webinar every week for the foreseeable future with three different Sales Game Changers podcast guests but what do you think the challenges will be in the next week as we lead up to next Wednesday’s productivity webinar? Denise, why don’t you get us started here? What do you think the challenges are going to be in the next seven days?

Denise Hayman: I think since we’ve been at this as a company for three weeks we might be at the tip of the spear on this. One of the things that we are starting to see is this balance of life spirit. In the beginning it was like, “Mom’s home” or, “Dad’s home” and that’s nice, we can have access to them. Now kids are getting bored and babysitters aren’t showing up, daycare isn’t happening and life has changed. One of the things that we’re talking about regularly as a team is, “What do you need covered for you so that you can take care of your family today?”

This balance thing, making sure we have internet during the time when we need it, that was my biggest thing. I had to read the riot act to my family, “Everybody leave between two and three, you can’t get on, no Netflix, I don’t want the dryer buzzer going” all of that is just different. Balancing and recognizing new rituals and this has really been my mantra this week, talking about rituals. What are those things that you used to be able to count on before that are no longer true? What’s your new ritual for that? What does your new morning look like? What does your new lunch look like? What does your new time that the family knows that you can’t be disturbed? What are those rituals to make it feel more consistent?

Fred Diamond: Randy, how about you? What does the next weekend look like, what are the challenges?

Randy Wood: I think very much in step with Denise and what she communicated. I’m concerned, Fred, that we’re going to migrate, evolve from this idea of exuberance to disillusionment and I’ll give two metaphors here. What I mean by this is last week this was exuberant, this was exciting, the hard times notwithstanding and it’s new. In a week, two weeks from now I think we run the risk of hitting some level of disillusionment. If you remember the Tom Hanks castaway movie, that moment of disillusionment was when he began to talk and interact with a volleyball, with Wilson.

Metaphorically, I think we need to make sure our employees don’t begin to interact with volleyballs and I think that’s a real concern. We need to communicate in predictable repeatable, simple, compelling ways. The final metaphor I would give – and this is for everybody – I’d go back to the continental army and George Washington and the Revolutionary War. In that final winner they set up camp in Valley Forge and that army could have done two things, they could have hunkered down and waited for spring to come or they could have done what they did which is get out of their tents and they brought in, I think it was Baron Von Steuben who drilled that army every day and taught them how to fight. In the third week in June they went on to have their biggest defeat I think in Monmouth, New Jersey and that’s the opportunity. That’s the metaphor, that’s what we can do here.

Let’s not talk to volleyballs, let’s make sure our customers, our employees aren’t doing that and at the same time let’s get out of our tents and let’s prepare ourselves for the summer and the spring that’s ahead of us that’s going to bring the good times back.

Fred Diamond: Darrell Gehrt, DG, why don’t you bring us home here with the same question? What’s the challenges of the next week and what do you think people should be doing?

Darrell Gehrt: I was going to say fatigue, some part of what Randy is saying. Part of running a race, to use a sports analogy, is understanding how long that race is. The way you run a 10K is different than you run a mile sprint and there is some disillusionment I think still that, “Hey, we’re going to have this for a couple weeks and then I’m going to be back in the office” and I don’t know if that’s going to be the case. This might be more like a six week run of work from home.

To Denise’s point, you have to find your routines and I actually sent out a note to the sales team yesterday about, “Here are some tips for working from home.” They weren’t necessarily mine because I don’t normally work from home so I too am having to get educated on how to run this 10K. Finding your own space, finding a way to communicate, getting out and walking. I think people have to pace themselves and be realistic with how long we might be in this situation. Let me pair that with the opportunity which is to try to continue moving business forward. It’s not business as usual, it’s moving business forward and what I’ve been really encouraged by is as we’re talking to customers, they too want to keep moving business forward.

Again, empathy is a table stakes, you have to have that, you have to be authentic. Denise, I love that word as well. What I love about sales and at least I’ve done it for 30 years is that every day is different and everything is different. Our CEO said, “Don’t bite this, embrace this.” This is an opportunity for all of us to learn and to grow and as long as I’ve been around, I’ve never dealt with this and everybody on this phone call is in the same shoes so while I hope we provided nice tips today, understand you too, we’re all trying to figure this thing out. Together we’ll win.

Fred Diamond: Once again, the Institute for Excellence in Sales is going to be holding two webinars per week every Wednesday at 2:00 o’clock Eastern, we’re going to have three Sales Game Changers podcast guests. I want to thank Randy Wood from Akamai, Darrell Gehrt from Cvent and Denise Hayman from Expel who will be on a Sales Game Changers podcast in April. Every Friday we’re going to have a little bit of a different twist at 11:00 o’clock Eastern Time, we’re going to bring one of our Institute for Excellence in Sales sales expert speakers to do a 45 minute webinar on creativity in sales. It’s one of the key themes that just came up from our three leaders, you’re going to have to figure out how to be creative, how do you modify your day, how do you change up your conversations with your customers. We’re going to be talking about how you become more creative in sales especially over the next couple of weeks. Tom Snyder will be the guest on Fridays. First we’re going to be doing those every week, have Andy Miller, Bill Cates and John Asher, people like that on that particular webinar. You could find out how to register on the Institute for Excellence in Sales website, I4ESBD.org. One more time, thank you so much to our esteemed panel for the great insights. My name is Fred Diamond, now go out there and go sell.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 216: SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE LEARNING EVENT: Sales Transformation and Solutions During the COVID-19 Panel Discussion first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for Creativity in Sales: Six Things Sales Pros Need to Do for Success During the Coronavirus on Friday, Mar 27, 2020 11:00 AM EDT at: here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in early 2020. Since the show was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked Donald what his advice is for sales professionals during the pandemic. He offered the following:

• Leading with content – we produce content on a daily basis and have produced some Coronavirus-specific content that has been very useful to our clients who are trying to help the Government respond to the crisis as well as maintain normal business operations during this time.  Our sales teams are making sure that current clients and prospects are aware of everything that Bloomberg Government is doing to provide guidance and information.
• Raising awareness – our account management team is reaching out to our current clients to make them aware of our content and our platform.  In the course of doing that, we are finding opportunities for our current clients to engage with us in a more meaningful way. 
• Focusing on Digital – again, based on content that can help firms in the Government Contracting space, we are moving many live events to digital platforms and adapting the content accordingly all with the aim of reaching as many people as we can with quality content and actionable information. 

EPISODE 215: Bloomberg Gov Sales Chief Donald Thomas Shares How the Strong Relationships You’ve Developed Will Set You Aside – During the Pandemic and Beyond

DONALD’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Sales is really the thing that measures how well our company is doing, you’re selling or you aren’t, you’re winning against the competition or you aren’t. You’re out on the front lines, you’re the engine that drives the growth here and it’s very clear whether we’re doing something right or not because we’re selling and retaining customers.“

Donald Thomas is the VP and General Manager at Bloomberg Government (BGOV).

Prior to coming over to Bloomberg, he held leadership positions at Dell, SRA and Ernst & Young.

Donald can be found on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Donald, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. For people listening around the globe, we’re doing the interview today in Downtown DC, we’re doing it at the offices of Bloomberg Government, a lot of energy, very cool offices here.

Donald Thomas: Thank you.

Fred Diamond: A lot of energy, I like it, it’s a nice buzz, a lot of white backgrounds and beautiful lighting and things like that. It’s probably a pretty good place to come to every day.

Donald Thomas: Absolutely. Every Bloomberg office is an open office environment very similar to this.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Donald Thomas: Quite frankly, I wasn’t really sure you’d want to chat with me in this forum because I’m probably a bit different in that I’ve not had a traditional sales career. My career has been primarily in management consulting and now in more of a general management role. I think the sales connection is I’ve had a number on my head for the last 20 years or so even running these businesses.

I think when I was in consulting I learned you could go one of two ways: one was to become a subject matter expert in a certain area and the other was to be decent in several disciplines but really great at building and leading businesses and that’s the direction I decided to go long ago which means you have a sales or growth number on your head and you do it either yourself or you partner with a sales organization. Here at Bloomberg Government it evolved into a General Manager role, I lead a business that has several dozen salespeople as well as product data, engineering, market analysts, etc.

Fred Diamond: Now you’re running the organization, you’ve been doing it for a number of years and I know you manage a bunch of salespeople, we’ve met a number of them over the years at the Institute for Excellence Sales programs. Walking over here to where we’re doing the interview today we walked past your sales floor and a lot of energy going on right there, I know it’s a lot of interesting things. Tell us what you sell today, though and tell us what excites you about that.

Donald Thomas: The primary thing that we’re selling is marketing competitive intelligence for government contractors. We help them understand the market and we help them gain a competitive edge against their competitors. I think the thing that excites me the most is I feel that we’re using a data driven approach and that’s really changing the way that government contractors go to market in this space.

Fred Diamond: For the people listening around the globe to the podcast, tell them what a government contractor is. We do a lot of Sales Game Changers podcasts, we’ve interviewed people on the GovCon space, of course the show is based in Washington DC but a lot of our listeners are all over the globe. What is a government contractor and what do they do?

Donald Thomas: The government allocates roughly $500 billion a year to purchase everything they need from nuclear submarines – the giant companies like Lockheed and etcetera sell – all the way down to paper and pencils and everything in between, consulting services, IT infrastructure. We work with the companies that sell those products and services to the government and it’s unique because it’s a different type of procurement than what’s done in the commercial sector. We provide a lot of the information, make a lot of the connections that help them understand the market.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you sell. Do you sell subscription based services or reports or consulting?

Donald Thomas: We primarily sell subscription based product, we also license our data so that the customers can put it in and mash it up with their own data and do what they need to do on the back end, but primarily it’s a subscription service.

Fred Diamond: Again, your background as we talked about, you’re the General Manager of the space, you came up through the consulting ranks, if you will so it would be interesting to see how you answer some of the questions. Typically on the podcast we ask the same questions, I’m really curious on how you’re going to answer some of these but let’s talk about the first realization that you were in sales as a career and that you were responsible for these numbers. Tell us about that.

Donald Thomas: Early on when folks would ask what I wanted to do and I was interviewing right out of college, I avoided sales like the plague. I wanted to be an analyst, I was in finance, I wanted to do anything but sales but I think I quickly realized that most every job has a sales component. Particularly as I got into the consulting world, to really advance in that industry you had to be able to work with customers in a way that whether you personally did it or it sold the organization, just your good work, you ultimately had some sort of a sales hat on. That’s how I realized that, by going out and serving customers and realizing that we all had to be sales folks.

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you a quick question. When you became conscious of that, what did you do? What are some of the things that you did to change your being with your customers?

Donald Thomas: I think it’s one of the big lessons I found and it’s things that as I advanced in my career we worked on training more junior folks, is being aware that you’re having a sales conversation even when you’re delivering a project or delivering an end result picking up on key signals or key words that the customer is saying that then you either can capitalize on from a sales perspective or at least bring it back to the people who are responsible for sales and are more senior, more confident in a selling world. I think going through that and seeing it personally and then figuring out how to train others to do that is when I realized that all of it is really sales.

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting because we have a lot of people listening to the show who come from the professional services space and we’ve interviewed some great sales leaders who came from the space as well. What might be some of those signals that you might hear if you’re a services professional on site? What might you want to be listening for?

Donald Thomas: In previous lives I did a lot of strategy consulting work and we would come into typically a situation where a customer had a vexing problem or they were making a big change to the organization and we would help them figure out ways to come up with the strategy itself or how to enact the change. Typically there’s a tale to those types of projects. Our goal became not to just deliver a strategy or a big presentation at the end but also to get the downstream work which usually was managing projects or leading people through complex change efforts.

Customers would say things like, “This is great, this is amazing, I’m not sure I have the people for this” or, “How would you recommend implementing? How would I measure the results?” Things like that. “Well, we can help you with that, we can help you build KPIs, we can help you actually lead some of these projects and bring your people through the end of the tale.”

Fred Diamond: We typically interview a couple different types of sales leaders on the show. A lot of the people we interview sold lemonade when they were in 10th grade type of a thing and they got into sales right after college, they embraced it, etcetera but we’ve interviewed a number of people like yourself who didn’t start in sales and you even said you went in kicking and screaming but you had this transformation because you realized that it was your job at the end of the day. How did you then be when you had that realization, that transformation? Did you all of a sudden embrace the sales process? Tell us a little bit about when that happened and how you shifted.

Donald Thomas: For me it was more about realizing that in the consulting world if we were delivering high quality work solving problems and building relationships with the customers, the selling, I don’t want to say it was easy necessarily, but it came very naturally and you wanted to be a part of it because it led to other interesting projects that you could work on. Then quite frankly I realized that to advance in these companies you had to own a number, you had to own a book, you had to build a business or at least be a big part of that but I never looked at is as I was a bag carrying sales rep. Does that make sense?

Fred Diamond: Absolutely.

Donald Thomas: If you’re doing interesting work, you’re delighting the customer, you’re building relationships that last, they’ll naturally hopefully ask you to do things and that’s really fun and interesting versus, “I have to get to $3 million this year, where do I start?” and go out and do that. It’s just a different type of arrangement.

Fred Diamond: That’s actually a great way to think about it because again, one of the key things that comes up all the time on the podcast is the notion that you’re bringing value to the customer even more so than ever before, and the second thing that’s come up a lot recently, Donald, is the whole notion of putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. Thinking about the customer perspective versus what you want the customer to do, but versus how you could provide more value and help the customer become more successful.

Donald Thomas: Absolutely. I can’t tell you how many times particularly in the space I’m in now where we work with folks who are selling to the government, government customers all the time will say, “I’ve had 15 different technology companies come see me in the last month all of whom have a solution. They walk in with a PowerPoint or a one-pager, they think that they can take whatever they’re selling and it’ll plug right into my environment not technically, but it’ll solve my problem and they don’t know the first thing about my organization.” I think that’s a huge element not just in the industry I’m in but in general, understanding the customer, putting yourself in their shoes, trying to figure out a solution for them versus, “Here’s my product, here’s my service and you, Mr. or Mrs. customer figure out how it’ll work in your environment.” You’ve got to do that leg work.

Fred Diamond: You manage dozens of salespeople, you said.

Donald Thomas: Correct.

Fred Diamond: What are some things you do to help them understand the challenges that their customer faces?

Donald Thomas: We sell to a lot of SVP of Business Development at a government contractor so we’ve had a day in the life of a business development professional. We put together training material, 101, 201, 301. Most government contractors follow a fairly standard structure for going after relatively large acquisitions and we explain how that works, why they do prequalification, why they do capture, why they partner with each other which is a big thing in this industry, they’re frenemies and in a lot of cases why is that? What do they care about on a day to day, month to month basis? How do they get internal money to bid on procurement opportunities with the government? Hopefully that helps our more junior folks understand the market, it’s a complex market, and then prepare them to be able to have those engaging conversations and offer a solution, hopefully to our prospects and customers.

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

Donald Thomas: When I was in the consulting world, my focus was in strategy consulting with some project management, I was a Project Management Professional at one point and I think that’s really how I worked within the consulting world. I think, though that leading people and that sort of thing but really the thing that I think I’ve done a good job at is having emotional intelligence which I know is a big buzz word out there. It gets to what you were saying earlier about putting yourself in other people’s shoes, both customers but also folks here internal. Empathizing, trying to paint a picture of what they’re dealing with so that I can hopefully offer career advice or advice on how to solve a problem internally or with the customers.

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

Donald Thomas: Early in my career I thought I had to perfectly emulate the top leader, for example at a consulting firm and I realized quickly that that’s impossible for various reasons. Their experience level, their personality is different so when I thought about how other leaders have impacted me, there are probably four folks at one of the consulting firms I worked at that was bought by SRA as we mentioned earlier. They all did things very differently, one of them was really the rainmaker, he always had more information than everyone else and you got that from really hard work and he’s very creative.

Another one dug in hard with the client and became a part of that client’s organization and just had a knack for doing that. One was very visual, would create these visual solutions that quickly got clients to understand what we were talking about and I would say the fourth was just very pragmatic and earnest in his approach to helping clients and growing the business. What I try to do is take bits and pieces then fit my own personality into that and try to learn from all of them and create a style and a way of being that worked for me.

Fred Diamond: I’m curious, do you consider yourself to be a mentor to a lot of the people in the organization as well?

Donald Thomas: I think so. Folks tell me that, there’s nothing official. We actually do reverse mentoring here which has been really interesting. I’ve had two where I’m the mentee and a more junior person is the mentor.

Fred Diamond: Really?

Donald Thomas: We’ve done that twice where you have a six month or so relationship, I learned a ton from that, not just the whole millennial thing but both of them happened to be female. What female emerging leaders care about, what is most important when we do big town hall meetings and what they want to hear about. Both of them were actually from another part of the business so what was going on in that business and what they wanted to learn about and how they wanted to grow. That was just as powerful as hopefully me mentoring others.

Fred Diamond: That is a great idea, we run a Women in Sales program and we were thinking that was for the more senior people, if you will, to give advice to the younger professionals as they grow their career and one of the most valuable things that came back was exactly what you just said, which is the people who are a little more senior in their career getting some ideas and assistance on how to work with today’s work force.

Donald Thomas: Absolutely, it was very valuable.

Fred Diamond: How has it helped you become a better leader?

Donald Thomas: In a way we talked about empathizing and being in other people’s shoes, I think it made that a lot easier and we do hire a lot of younger folks here, typically second, third job type folks and it’s a vast portion of our work force. It allowed me to connect on a much deeper level with more of those people.

Fred Diamond: What are the two biggest challenges you face today as that sales leader?

Donald Thomas: Retaining and properly incentivizing top talent, absolutely. It’s a competitive marketplace, DC is very competitive and it’s growing tremendously, as you know, the DC Metro Area. We invest a lot in training, we do that and then I think sometimes we have a hard time keeping folks. We’ve kept some people for multiple years but I think that’s something that we have to revisit every year and get creative of how do we retain and then incentivize properly and think about it all the time.

Fred Diamond: What would make a good sales professional selling subscription based services of the market intelligence that you guys sell?

Donald Thomas: The market is very complex so I think the folks that are willing to dig in, work hard and learn the market, they’re typically talking to people who have been in the industry for 20 or 30 years. If they walk in the door and they don’t understand how the federal budget works, for example, or how the contracting and procurement process works yet they’re pushing a product or a subscription service, that doesn’t work very well. We have conversations where two companies on paper look very similar, they’re both $50 million dollars a year, IT services companies, one goes to market completely differently than the other and you talk to those people back to back. You have to be able to pivot, if you’re not confident in the market and how it works, you can’t pivot into those conversations.

It’s almost like you’re reading off a script that doesn’t work, so getting people up to speed. Then from there it’s general sales skills and they’re not easy but it’s hard work, building relationships, empathizing and being able to solution for the client and explain how we will move the needle forward for that business versus, “Hey, this is some website you can log into and get some information.”

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

Donald Thomas: I think it’s been a couple of examples where for whatever reason, myself, my team, my company broke through a barrier. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I was at a startup in the 90s, we were doing some government work but we knew we needed to diversify and get into commercial. We took what we thought was a really long shot on a commercial RFP, global piece of work, we would have to really expand the team to be able to service it at BMW and we won it. It was this breakthrough moment for our company of expanding into a new market, it was a great blue chip client. I think another one was taking a really small engagement, $200 thousand and then thinking, “We’ll just do this engagement, that’ll be that” but then it turned into a $5 million dollar a year client because we did additional work and built relationships. Here at Bloomberg it was turning what was arguably a struggling business into a consistently double digit year over year growth business that’s hitting our exceeding targets year over year now. It felt like I was a big part of that and that’s been very rewarding so breaking through barriers has been a lot of fun.

Fred Diamond: The sales side, it’s hard especially when you move from the services side and you mentioned in the beginning of the interview that you went in kicking and screaming, if you will. Have you ever said to yourself, “It’s really just too hard and not for me”?

Donald Thomas: All the time, sure.

Fred Diamond: Really?

Donald Thomas: In the consulting side there were times I thought it was really hard to distinguish the firms that I worked for, the service offerings we were providing from other firms. There’s 10 thousand companies in the government space that offer IT solutions, let’s say for example, how do you distinguish yours from someone else? I think when I was selling strategy and change management they’re hard because they’re not tangible products that people understand. I think what makes it work and what made it work then was when we found the right person, articulated a future state vision of how our services would change their organization and really solutioned. Here I think it’s every month we have targets so there are times when you’re like, “This is going to be a slow month” but then you just rebound the next month and the next quarter so it’s still very rewarding but there’s always times when you’re like, “Is this really the right thing?”

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Donald, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the junior sales professionals to help them take their career to the next level? You mentioned you hire a lot of people who are second or third job in so what’s the #1 thing you want to tell them to be successful?

Donald Thomas: When I’m talking to those folks and they ask me a question like this, what I tend to tell them is there’s really three things that if you can do these three things, it’s no magic potion out there but these three things will lead to a lot of success. One is hard work, two is continually learning and three is to be able to develop meaningful relationships with customers and even peers in the industry. Those things have served me well, they’ve served other senior folks above me well and I think the folks that do well here can do those three things.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your continued success.

Donald Thomas: I’ve mentioned relationships, I think that’s really important. Honesty, there’s time when it’s the right thing to tell a customer you can’t help them rather than say yes and then not be able to deliver, I think that’s a big one. We’ve talked about this too, solutioning. Rather than just saying, “This is what we offer” walking the customer through what the actual solution to their problem is and how it’ll look at the end.

Fred Diamond: Give us some advice on relationship building. You mentioned that as one of the three tips but give us a tip for the listeners around the globe. What’s something they can be doing to develop these relationships?

Donald Thomas: I had a colleague from business school before LinkedIn was really a big thing and she basically had her own CRM data base. She was using some sort of software, I’m not sure what it was but an offline CRM software that was just for her own career sales. I’ve never quite gone to that level although I admired that, I think for me it’s thinking of ways that you can keep in touch with people. It can be very simple, I had someone reach out to me today to say, “Happy new year, hope you’re doing well” that I hadn’t seen in six months, so you shoot a quick note back.

We had someone leave Bloomberg Government in December, I shot him a text today to say, “Hey, how’s the new gig going? Love to hear about it in a month or so once you have your feet under you.” Sometimes it’s just really simple things, other times it’s reaching out to offer a piece of information or something that will help them in their career and hopefully most people tend to reciprocate.

Fred Diamond: When you mention these relationships, a lot of it is like the long game. When you think about the customers that you service, the government contractors, some of these government contracts are decades, scores long, if you will and people might be still working on those or you’ve worked with someone 10 years ago and now a new project or they refresh or something along those lines. It’s not about a quick hit type of relationship in this space, the consultative type space especially with the solutioning that we’re talking about here. A lot of these relationships are going to pay off maybe 10, 15 years down the road.

Donald Thomas: Absolutely. I mentioned at the beginning that it’s about a $500 billion per year industry which makes it to just seem gigantic but I found that DC is growing, 7 million people, in the region but it’s a small space. Hopefully doing right by other folks and hopefully walking through town with a good reputation will pay off in the long run.

Fred Diamond: Doing right, that’s a great way to say it. Tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success.

Donald Thomas: This is something that Mike Bloomberg himself really pushes us on. When we meet with him twice a year he asks us two things. One, are we delighting our customers from a customer service perspective? And two, how are we innovating and aggressively innovating regardless of what our competition is doing? Assume you would be innovating even if you had no competition, what does that look like? I think those two things really pervade the culture here and I think they make a lot of sense so we’re always trying to figure out answers to those two things and how we can do better.

Fred Diamond: Of course we mentioned that you’re the General Manager and VP for Bloomberg Government, we hadn’t really mentioned who the Bloomberg is to this point, you just did, Mike Bloomberg, obviously a hugely successful business person. By the time this show goes live he may be a candidate for higher office, of course he was the mayor of New York. I’m just curious, what is his impact, impression been on the organization? You mentioned innovation but what are some of the other things that such a hugely successful and amazing man has led into your organization?

Donald Thomas: I think he exhibits really high character and high standards and he holds people to that, that’s part of the culture. There are four or five core values that we’re actually evaluated on, everybody is in the whole company and I’m not sure because I’ve been here about 5 years and this is a 40 year old company but I’m imagining those come down from Mike. I think we are a sales culture, a sales driven organization even though I think you could argue we’re also the second largest media organization in the world, we’re a technology driven organization, we’re a data driven organization but I think Mike really established early on a big sales culture so that’s a real big driver of this organization. I think when he’s not running for president or serving as the mayor, he’s very active in the business and knows what’s going on, knows our customers, knows our people and is a huge presence. Not that others aren’t, but he’s a huge presence here.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final thought to inspire our listeners today, we talked a lot about your early background being in management consulting and of course you’re not running the whole organization but sales is hard. Again, you’re in a competitive space, media, subscriptions, you have a couple dozen salespeople here, you have a sales driven culture. What would you recommend in sales as a career that has kept you going?

Donald Thomas: I’m quietly one of the most competitive people out there and I love to win, so I think winning is the thing that keeps me going. I mentioned earlier that if you have a bad month it feels really bad but when you have the good month it feels great. I love to win and I think sales is a real arbiter of how you’re doing, winning or losing, but hopefully winning, it’s super motivating.

Fred Diamond: I know you coach a couple of youth sports as well. Who’s your favorite team, just curiously?

Donald Thomas: I went to undergrad at the University of Virginia and I follow college sports, I follow professional too but college sports so UVA basketball, UVA football, lacrosse, soccer, I follow all of it.

Fred Diamond: Last year was a very good year for UVA basketball.

Donald Thomas: Absolutely, and lacrosse, it was great.

Fred Diamond: They won as well?

Donald Thomas: They did.

Fred Diamond: Good for them. Donald, why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire our listeners around the globe?

Donald Thomas: One thing I tell folks on our team is that sales is really the thing that measures how well our company is doing, you’re selling or you aren’t, you’re winning against the competition or you aren’t. There’s lots of things that go into that, the product and the data and how well we do all of those things in the back end which is super important but for the sales folks you’re out on the front lines, you’re the engine that drives the growth here and it’s very clear whether we’re doing something right or not because we’re selling and retaining customers.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 215: Bloomberg Gov Sales Chief Donald Thomas Shares How the Strong Relationships You’ve Developed Will Set You Aside – During the Pandemic and Beyond first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.