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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on January 13, 2021. It featured VoiceVibes founder Debra Cancro. VoiceVibes empowers people to be more effective communicators with an AI-powered platform for practice, coaching and onboarding.]

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EPISODE 317: Women in Sales: Voice Communications Expert Debra Cancro Shares 5 Tips for Sales Leaders When Speaking to Customers

DEBRA’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Being natural when you speak is the best approach to take. We see a lot of Ted speakers these days and a lot of different ways that people are presenting. You can follow all the best practices of pausing and pace, but truly being natural and talking like you’re talking to a friend about something that you’re passionate about is the best way to be a speaker in pretty much all context.”

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited to introduce you to the Program Director of the IES Women in Sales Leadership Forum and also your host for today’s webinar, it’s Gina Stracuzzi.

Gina Stracuzzi: Hey, everybody. Thank you, Fred, lovely introduction as always. I’m super excited to get to our guest today, this is something we all struggle with even if we think we’re really good salespeople and we are effective. How we say things, our voice tones, filler words, our pace, all of those things matter and sometimes we just get going and forget to think about it. I’m very excited to bring on my guest here, without further ado let’s get on to our guest, Debra. Welcome. Would you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this? This is your own business and your story is great, I love it.

Debra Cancro: Thank you. I’m the founder and CEO of VoiceVibes, we’re a Maryland based startup focused on helping people be the most successful communicators they can be. I started the idea about 10 years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom for a few years and I’d previously been an engineer at Bell Labs and worked in product marketing at a few companies. The thing that kept me up at night as a stay-at-home mom was guilt about my tone of voice and how I talk to my kids and my husband and how I felt that nobody’s listening to me. I thought if I could be more self-aware and be more controlled about the way I communicate to people, I would be more effective.

As I started my own company, I wanted to address that problem but of course, angry moms isn’t the best market but as I thought about, “Who needs to be self-aware about how they communicate and how they come across?” I realized pretty much everyone, whether you’re teaching or you’re in sales, in leadership, we all need to be self-aware. This idea we applied to VoiceVibes and we made this tool to help people practice and upload even sales calls and get automated feedback and coaching to help them improve.

Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s just back up a hair. When you started using it to detect your tone with your kids and your family, did the communication improve inside the house?

Debra Cancro: Back then when I had the idea we didn’t have the product yet so that was the Genesis of the idea and then as we built the product, we actually built in more for professional speech. There are so many ways that people speak and as an entrepreneur we had to narrow our focus, we really focused on honing in on the properties of professional speaking. That condescending mom voice is something I actually have a patent on but we’re not using that aspect as much and we don’t yet have it in a wearable format where I can capture my conversations all day long, but that’s something that I’ve always wanted to do.

Gina Stracuzzi: When you get that, I would like to test it for you.

Debra Cancro: [Laughs] I don’t think you have a problem with that, Gina.

Gina Stracuzzi: No, but my husband does [laughs].

Debra Cancro: Mine too [laughs]

Gina Stracuzzi: Maybe I’ll have him test it. So, take us through this tool of yours.\

Debra Cancro: I prepared some slides, I don’t want to do death by PowerPoint but I can share a few slides talking about some of the really interesting things we found in developing the product, doing our data collection and doing some of the research. I put together some slides just to share some interesting information and then I’ll show you how the product works if we have time at the end as well.

I like to start out by pointing out that most people don’t realize that when making a first impression – this doesn’t apply to your husband or people that you work with – but when you’re making an impression on a customer, the way you sound is actually five times more important than the words you say. People make these first impressions subconsciously and I like to talk about this, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about this concept about how people just make these subconscious quick decisions they’re not even aware they’re making. There’s one particular study in here about surgeons and malpractice lawsuits and even something as serious as that, in the study they had a group of surgeons that had had three or more malpractice lawsuits filed against them and another group that had none. Just by having people listening to their voices from normal everyday doctor visits, people could predict which group they were in because it all correlates to tone of voice. This idea of subjective decision making influences sales, it influences elections, it influences malpractice lawsuits, it influences all the things in our life where we’re making an impression on others.

Gina Stracuzzi: It goes to that condescension, I’m sure.

Debra Cancro: From a sales perspective and a customer service perspective I’ve listed here on the screen some obvious things that get affected. When you’re not a clear representative and you’re not connecting with your audience and sounding authentic you can miss sales opportunities, you can lose existing customers through churn, you can miss promotions because people don’t think as highly of you as they should, your ideas don’t get heard, you’re not persuading people, all kinds of bad things can happen or all kinds of good things can happen if you improve your speaking skills.

Before I show you the product, this slide is a little bit techy but I like to share it because it shows what we’re doing as a company and how we’re really unique. There are products out there particularly in call centers that look at what I call here sentiment analysis, and a lot of call centers are very good at analyzing voice, analyzing things going on. An example I like to give is if people call in and say, “You people do X, Y, Z” that phrase kind of implies they’re not real happy. You can do some sophisticated analysis on words people use to really get at how they’re feeling about something but that’s not what we set out to do. There’s also technologies that are called emotion detection that truly want to figure out how you’re feeling. Think of a call center doing that, if your customer is angry maybe you route them to one breath where if they’re not angry you send them to another. That’s used a lot as well but when I have this idea and I looked into these technologies, they weren’t addressing the issue I wanted to address about being self-aware about how I’m coming across and helping me to do better. That’s why we coined the phrase VoiceVibes, picture if I’m really nervous right now or I’m having a bad day or I have a headache, my emotion might be negative. I still have the ability to overcome that and put off a positive vibe and that’s what I want to measure, that’s how vibes are different than sentiment or emotion.

Gina Stracuzzi: Is there an inherent bias in this, though?

Debra Cancro: Of course, there’s bias in everything. What’s nice about the way that we built our artificial intelligence is we’re capturing the opinions of lots of people, not just one. If you go to a coach or you get feedback from someone, they have bias. If I gave you feedback, Gina, my bias is going to be inherent in that feedback but the beauty of this AI approach is our models were trained on millions of data points of people’s perceptions and we’re taking the average perceptions of people. Even though there’s bias from every listener, we’re averaging that all into our data that enables us to make that bias a little less extreme. That’s how I think about it, does that make sense?

Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely.

Debra Cancro: To build these models, like I said, we’ve got millions of data points of people listening to actors, listening to samples of speakers on YouTube, listening to all kinds of samples and rating them in 20 areas that we call vibes – captivating, confident, authentic, boring. We take all that data and we take their average scores and that’s what we use to train our models. Some interesting stats we got out of this were to validate that our data was meaningful, we threw in some additional questions. “Do you believe in this person? Would you want to listen to this person? Would you want to buy something from this person? Do they sound like they could be an executive?”

The way that those answers correlate to vibes was really interesting. Here on this slide you can see along the X axis we’re showing the presence of positive vibes. In the far right here it means these positive vibes like these speakers are extremely captivating, extremely confident. The percentage of listeners saying, “Yes, I would want to buy from this person” goes way up, as you’d expect. I expected this curve to be steep but it’s actually even steeper than I expected. Shown another way, people were 13 times more likely to say, “Yes, I’d want to buy something from this person” if they thought the person sounded confident and authentic.

Gina Stracuzzi: That is quite a bar on the extremely confident versus not confident.

Debra Cancro: Exactly, and we don’t presume that people are going to practice and go from a 0 to a 10 and maybe they won’t achieve the 13X but say you make a small delta and you improve your speaking skills even a little bit, maybe you could double your effectiveness, that’s crazy.

One of the more interesting facts we found, this is kind of a fun fact, it’s actually three times worse to be boring than even to be arrogant. Though neither is good, still about 18% said they’d buy from someone who sounded arrogant but only 6% said they’d buy from someone who was boring so go figure.

Gina Stracuzzi: I wonder if it’s possible to be both boring and arrogant.

Debra Cancro: It probably is [laughs].

Gina Stracuzzi: That would be somebody who should not be selling for sure.

Debra Cancro: It’s funny, to that point I think that a lot of salespeople are very good presenters and good speakers but they’re often times bringing others into their selling process. Maybe their junior reps, maybe their engineers, maybe they’re the audit team, sometimes in a bigger sale they’re bringing in a team of experts to help them close and this tool can also help them have an objective way to give some feedback or some coaching to that team of support people that are helping them on the deal.

Gina Stracuzzi: Yes, and I can see that would be very valuable.

Debra Cancro: I come from an engineering background and I don’t like to think engineering people are boring but sometimes people say that we are [laughs].

Gina Stracuzzi: Well, some are and that happens so this could help them.

Debra Cancro: Yes. Some other interesting facts that I wanted to share especially in this Women in Sales episode is the difference between men and women because I often get that question a lot about bias. Is there bias between males and females? The good news is with regard to most of these questions, “Would I want to buy from this person? Do I want to listen to this person? Would I believe in this person?” The data shows that the women and men are scoring pretty much the same. There’s no significant difference, you can see this curve here and again, this is a lot of data but overall, the numbers are pretty similar.

Gina Stracuzzi: It doesn’t appear that way. I imagine there are certain elements of speech that are more pronounced and perhaps we’ll get to that when we actually look at the technology. Some that are more pronounced in men and some that are more pronounced in women like upspeak, for one.

Debra Cancro: Definitely, we’ll talk about that, that’s one thing women struggle with more than men. The one area where we found a gender difference in those questions is this one, sadly. The other three questions were asking about, “Would you buy? Would you believe? Would you want to listen?” Where this question is, “Do they sound like they could be an executive?” The sad news is that the difference is about 10% so when women sound equally confident or equally captivating or equally authentic, there’s still this gap between people perceiving they could be an executive. That’s sad news, it is what it is, people assuming you’re an executive is less if you’re a female but the good takeaway is that our ability to sell or persuade isn’t hindered. This is the only question where I saw this problem.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think it goes to the bias that still exists in society that certain jobs are still male-driven, which is one of the reasons we started the leadership forum. What’s interesting about this is that women are actually more effective across the board in leadership and in sales than men and yet we still have these perceived biases. It is something we have yet to overcome and 2021 is going to be the year we do it. We’re going to come back together, Deb and we’re going to look at this and that 10% is going to start shrinking.

Debra Cancro: I definitely think it’s going to shrink. As more and more people see women in roles of leadership, then they’re going to expect it more and more. That’s a summary of our data and the way we focus on helping people improve is through the product that we developed and the concept behind it is that people learn best by doing. You can go to a class, you can read a book, you can learn about best practices and give people feedback verbally so they can hear that and experience it but if they could actually practice and get a feedback in real time and practice again and iterate on their own experience, we call that active learning. Their retention and their ability to improve is way greater. We do have a practice platform where you can practice ahead of time, you can practice a voicemail, you can practice your company pitch, you can practice your elevator speech or you can upload your real calls. You can upload Zoom calls, we could upload this webinar later and see how we sounded, you can use it for practice and for coaching in the moment.

I gave you an account yesterday and you had the chance to speak. With your permission, maybe we could talk through these dials in the context of your own practice session.

Gina Stracuzzi: Please.

Debra Cancro: Before I do, I should introduce these concepts a little bit more because you mentioned upspeak earlier, that’s one of the things we measure so maybe I should explain that before we jump in. Upspeak is when people inflect at the end of a sentence like they’re asking a question and doing it a bit is okay or if you’re genuinely asking people questions, that’s a good thing but if women tend to do it a lot, it really detracts from our credibility. That’s something that we measure and for all of these dials, when you hover over them and click on them, it’ll highlight in the audio where you did it. Upspeak is a great example, if you hovered over the upspeak counter and if you had done it, it would show you where you did it so you can go hear yourself doing it and that’s the best way to help someone actually improve.

Gina Stracuzzi: I was very taken with the tool when I was using it, it’s gratifying to see things you did well but it also makes you want to fix whatever came up. Like pausing, pausing can be highly effective if used in the right way. If you put a lot, then it makes you sound either ill-prepared or really not believing what you’re saying or you don’t have answers. It really depends on how you’re using the tool or who you’re speaking to and why you’re pausing, all of those things. I find it fascinating.

Debra Cancro: Thank you. To your point, pausing is a big on. Can you see my screen?

Gina Stracuzzi: Yes.

Debra Cancro: This is actually your account that you let me share so thank you, Gina, for letting me log in. Yesterday we made this practice recording, up here this is the one we did yesterday that wasn’t anything, it was just us practicing but we’ll talk through this first to get a sense. You can see that we said “uh” and “um” a few times in our conversation, the vocal delivery score was kind of average and the vibes were okay. We can see where there was energy in the call or things like that but this was just a practice session. Here you see some upspeak and you were asking a question so in these two cases you asked questions and it shows those are some upspeaks.

Gina Stracuzzi: The purple on the screen where it shows the recording of the voice, when you hover over something that shows you where you did those things?

Debra Cancro: Exactly, it says you had some. It wasn’t excessive but it says you had some and if you want to go hear it, you click on this link and then it highlights on the audio where you said it.

Gina Stracuzzi: [Recording playback] we get done.

Debra Cancro: That wasn’t even a question, that was upspeak, you said, “We get done.” Did you hear that?

Gina Stracuzzi: Yes.

Debra Cancro: Then you asked the question. The voice analytics doesn’t know if it’s necessarily a question or not but we’re hearing that upspeak and flagging it so you can hear it.

Gina Stracuzzi: If you’re listening to this as a podcast, Deb is going to make an offer at the end, I would recommend that you take her up on this so that you can really see what this is about. I think it’s fascinating that you can highlight this many pieces of speech in a short recording. What if somebody has an accent or maybe they come from a part of the country that speaks with a drawl or just has a very affected manner of speaking?

Debra Cancro: We get that question a lot. Because we’re looking at the acoustic properties in your voice – the way you’re using your voice – those are okay. When we score this clarity here, we’re looking at if the software can understand and be confident that it understands the words you said. This is an objective way to know if you’re understandable, you could think of Siri that sometimes messes up your words or misunderstands, it’s kind of like that. It’s an objective way to say, “It was hard to understand what you said.” But in terms of the other features, because we’re looking at the vocal patterns thankfully they can be agnostic to the accents that people have.

Gina Stracuzzi: If we’re not coming off clear for whatever reason, whether it’s an accent or speech mannerism or whatever the case is then we’re not clear, it doesn’t matter the reason. We have to figure out what, if anything, we can do about it.

Debra Cancro: Exactly, and VoiceVibes can’t necessarily help fix that. We can refer you to coaches that deal with accent reduction if it’s a problem but in general, like I said, as long as you’re understandable, it’s okay. A lot of times it’s a great thing, sometimes it gets you more respect depending on the audience.

Gina Stracuzzi: People respond to those things quite often, they think they’re charming or interesting or whatever and it can be a topic of conversation that builds some rapport. Not everything is necessarily something that has to be improved or changed, just being aware is probably the best idea. I like the idea of vocal delivery, yesterday when we did this we had a little bit of background interference that we wouldn’t normally have. But tell us exactly what vocal delivery is, is that the pitch or the tone or the volume? What is that?

Debra Cancro: Vocal delivery is our one score that if you’re just going to look at one thing to see if you sound professional and polished, this puts it all together as one score. It’s like an overall, you got a 5.9 out of 10. Then we break it down and tell you up here what one thing you could work on first to get that score to go up. In this case it was filler words, you can click on uh’s and um’s and see the 8 times that uh and um were said, but all of these things, filler words, strength of opening, clarity, pausing, upspeak, vocal variety, all these things are in a weighted algorithm, so to speak, that comes up with this one handy score called vocal delivery.

Gina Stracuzzi: This was our conversation yesterday about this, I was trying to think about what we recorded yesterday but okay.

Debra Cancro: You were talking and I was interrupting you but it was recorded and left in the system.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s right, you were probably interrupting me with those um’s and uh’s [laughs].

Debra Cancro: Yes, I think most of them are me, actually [laughs]. Here we have this ability to score card so I just fill this out to show people that as a coach, you shared with me and then I shared it back with you. This morning you practiced an elevator pitch and you used a tool the way it was meant to be used and look here, the first time you did it you got a 5.7 which is kind of average, it’s not bad but the one thing it tells you to work on first is variety of pitch. We come over here to variety of pitch and it says, “You had a good amount of variety in your voice, but you hit highs and lows in a predictable pattern and it did sound a little bit scripted.” You were just saying your typical pitch so we’ll show you where it lacks that naturalness of a variety.

Gina Stracuzzi: I did that based on our conversation, I did that to make a point so that you would have the standard stuff and then if I put my heart into it.

Debra Cancro: Yes, and I can play it, it’s only 30 seconds but you can see you said the right things, you had a great pitch, you had no uh’s and um’s but what I highlighted here is just where the software is saying you didn’t have this natural variety in your voice that makes you sound natural. Let’s listen.

[Recording playback of Gina]

I won’t play the whole thing but could you hear that? It’s perfectly good, it’s clear so it got a 5.7 but then on your next one, as you mentioned, you said you were speaking from the heart and you just talked very naturally and look at that. Your variety of pitch now is perfect and you also now have captivating in your voice and that wasn’t there before. Captivating goes into this other metric called strength of opening, we look at how captivating you are in the first 30 seconds – which in this case is the entire speech – but you have that captivating sound which comes with naturalness. You sounded like you were talking to a friend over a cup of coffee and that shows in your voice. You got a 9.5 out of 10 which is pretty much perfect and you even had some uh’s and um’s but that’s okay, it was actually part of your sounding natural so it didn’t affect your score or bring it down. The one thing it said you could work on, it said you’re slightly fast but then if you hover over pace it even explains, “If you’re having a conversation, this is good. If it’s public speaking, you might want to slow down a little bit.” Overall you got a 9.5 because it was a very natural sounding speech.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s funny too because I know exactly where the ‘too fast’ was and I was like, “Did someone just hit the accelerator? Why did I speed up there?” before I even looked at this. Consciously, I knew that came out really fast and I’m thinking, why? [Laughs] sometimes we just get talking and especially, at least for myself, I know if I’m speaking about something that really I’m passionate about, I get so excited that I do sometimes speak fast. That’s not usually if I’m giving a speech, it’s when I’m speaking one-on-one with somebody and I think you’re right, if you’re speaking directly to them, if I’m telling you about the forum and I get all excited, you might think that’s really awesome because you’re picking up on my excitement. I think unless you’re explaining something really intricate and complicated, then a little bit of pace is probably okay. Is that right?

Debra Cancro: Exactly, that’s why even though you had speeding up parts, it was part of what you did well. It was very natural, you sped up, slowed down, there’s a natural aspect to this whole recording.

Gina Stracuzzi: No upspeak, yay!

Debra Cancro: [Laughs] I have the top five tips or takeaways that I could share but I don’t even know if we have time.

Gina Stracuzzi: We do, we have about 8 minutes left. The biggest thing that people seem to be interested in is how can you use this in day to day selling? Do teams use this usually? I would hope that sales managers don’t single out a particular person because we can all improve, but how do teams use this? Then I want to hear about your top tips.

Debra Cancro: That was a great question. Typically if teams are using this tool, the manager or the coach can make these little cards that you’re seeing here called assignments and they can have people practice things ahead of time. Say you’ve got some junior reps and you want them to practice voicemails or practice how to handle objections, you can make little assignments and this would be part of an onboarding program or a learning program, rolling out new messaging for the new year, new products, things like that. When there’s new messaging to learn it’s used as a tool from that regard.

Another use case is for more senior people if they’ve got a really high-stakes presentation. When I was doing a lot of investor pitches in the past, I would practice slide by slide. I would pull up on my laptop my first slide, I would practice on VoiceVibes what I’m going to say on that slide and then I’d get the feedback and I could do it again and again just like what you showed us. I might do it five times until I get a really good score, then I move onto the next slide and do it again. I’d practice every slide and in that process I’m not only going through what I want to say making sure it’s concise, iterating on the content but I’m also getting the feedback on how it sounds. Then when I present live which now could be over a recorded Zoom call, it’s even easier. In the past I used to wear a lapel mic and record myself live but then I would get the feedback on my live presentation as well.

One of the interesting things I would get from that would be seeing where I was boring because as I showed you earlier, boring is the worst. When I was doing my pitch, one of the things that I realized is I got really boring on the part where I was talking about my team and it turns out I tended to list their qualifications and talk about them in a list mode and it was boring. By seeing, “My vocal is boring there”, I went and listened to it and then I could change it up, make it more of a story to summarize the team and why the team is great. Then I had more passion in my voice when I got to that team slide so specific things like that can be improved from the feedback as well.

Gina Stracuzzi: I love all these, make your first VoiceVibes sales pitch, practice, 30 second commercial, open practice, all of those assignment cards are great. You bring up a really good point about the video calls now because I think people have gotten more used to it but in the beginning of the pandemic there were a lot of hardcore face-to-face people who were struggling. Most of us aren’t very good in front of the camera and I know even in the beginning when we were doing the first couple of webinars, I was so bothered by looking at myself, I don’t need to see that much me [laughs] but after a while you stop. It does halt your presentation, the way you’re speaking. Now, like I said, we’re a little more used to it but I would think that sales calls over video might be a really great place to use this tool.

Debra Cancro: Absolutely, we have a Zoom integration and also, when people upload video or audio we don’t analyze the video per se but it can be shown in there with the context so like I said, go see where you’re boring or go see where you did upspeak or whatever it is that it’s highlighting and then you can fast-forward, go to that part and get the feedback. We’re also a coaching platform so as you saw in the demo, there’s that area where I used the score card. We have customizable score cards and comments and all that, one of these assignments could be, “Share a call where you dealt with this objection” or, “Share a call where you want coaching” and then the sales rep can just upload a Zoom call into that assignment and the manager can go and listen to it and give them coaching right then and there. For a company that doesn’t have a big call center platform or some sophisticated automated thing that’s routing all their calls and doing a lot, if they just want to coach here and there and give people an easy way to share stuff and comment on stuff and keep connected with each other, this is a very easy way to do that.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have about 5 minutes left, why don’t you take us through those tips and then the offer that you want to make people?

Debra Cancro: I’ll jump to the tips here. Our top 5 tips, I try to think of the things specifically for Women in Sales, things that I struggle with. My #1 issue is slowing down, I always talk too fast especially when I’m excited and what I’ve learned over the years is that by doing that, I’m really causing my audience to not comprehend everything. Because I’m so excited and I’m talking too fast, I’m robbing them of understanding so I’ve learned a lot from the highlights in my own audio that it’s important for me to slow down.

Tip #4 I’d say is pausing more, it’s a very effective tool to help people digest what you’re saying. Slowing down is important but also after you speak, taking a pause lets people digest it a little more. I’ve also learned that professional speakers use the power of a pause before an important point so they might build up to something and then pause and then say it. It breaks the pattern a little bit so that people listen more intently, so pausing can be used as a very effective tool.

As we’ve been talking throughout this conversation, upspeak is a big one for women. Not all women do it, but when they do, being aware and being able to turn it off when people are expecting you to be very professional is an important thing.

Tip #2 is to breathe, a lot of us get nervous when there’s an audience and stakes are high and then we start to speak from our throat rather than from out diaphragm. If you take a minute, take a breath and do some breathing exercises even before a presentation that you’re nervous about, it helps you to calm down, it helps you calm your nerves. Also focus on breathing from those lower parts, not from your throat. One book I read was saying when you think about when you cough or when you sneeze, the power of your sneeze, try to tap into that part of your body, where that’s coming from and that gives you a much stronger, more powerful voice.

Lastly, my #1 tip that I’ve learned from dealing with this for years is that natural is best. We see a lot of Ted speakers these days and a lot of different ways that people are presenting. You can follow all the best practices of pausing and pace and those will get your scores up, but truly being natural and talking like you’re talking to a friend about something that you’re passionate about is the best way to be a speaker in pretty much all context. As you showed today in a perfect example, when you were natural and comfortable and talking casually, that is typically what’s best because there’s passion in your voice, it was authentic and that’s what people want from a speaker. Especially these days, they really want authenticity and naturalness.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s true of sales in particular, people want to know they’re dealing with an authentic person who has their best interest at heart and being your natural self is going to convey that. This has been absolutely awesome and now you have a very kind offer for people, so please share it with us.

Debra Cancro: We would love to give out a free access for people to try this out and practice something. Think about your elevator pitch or personal brand message or something that you’d like to practice and then reach out and request a demo. Make sure you mention either IES or Women in Sales in the comment field. If you go to our website, it’s myvoicevibes.com and there’s buttons everywhere, you can request a demo but please make sure when you do it you mention this podcast or this webinar. Then we’ll reach out back to you and tell you how to access a free day that you can log in and practice. If you don’t want to fill out a request form, you can just email me directly, here’s my email information: debra@myvoicevibes.com. If you reach out, do the same thing, mention this webinar, that you’d like to try it out and we’ll give you a day of access that you can practice something.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 317: Women in Sales: Voice Communications Expert Debra Cancro Shares 5 Tips for Sales Leaders When Speaking to Customers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on January 6, 2021. It featured media relationship expert Susan Apgood.]

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EPISODE 314: Women in Sales: Susan Apgood Shows How Even the Smallest Sales Activity Can Get You on the Sales Success Journey

SUSAN’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Start with one outreach, perhaps to that one person you’ve been thinking about. Drop them an email today and you’ll be amazed about what that can lead to. I can’t stress enough to start small, one or two actions per day but then have that 20-mile framework set up so that you’re able to work within that as you move forward. These tiny little steps, all of a sudden you look back and you’re like, “I’m almost at the South Pole and my 1,400 mile journey is almost over.”

Fred Diamond: It’s the beginning of 2021, hope everybody has a tremendous 2021. It gives me great pleasure and honor to introduce to you the Program Director for the Institute for Excellence in Sales Women in Sales Leadership Forum and the host of the Women in Sales webinar, Gina Stracuzzi.

Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s get started on this really timely topic starting the year off on the right foot, I would like to welcome my guest, Susan Apgood. Susan, hello, how are you?

Susan Apgood: Good.  I am the founder of a company called News Generation, we are a media relations company focusing on broadcast. We work to get our clients on television and radio in news and public affair shows, we work hard for clients that have great issues to tell that need to get into that news programming. I own the company, I started it right out of business school in 1997 and I just sold the company mid-pandemic last April to a company called 4media and what that has allowed us to do is offer more services, we do advise, we do digital outreach, we do surveys, broaden our offerings which has helped stretch my sales muscles. I also am an adjunct professor at the American University here at Washington D.C. and I teach in the business school there two classes per semester, it’s called Intro to Business, the very first class that our students in business school take. Lastly I am a facilitator for a group called Her Corner and that is a group that helps businesses starting out to grow their strategy, their sales, their planning, their elevator pitches, it’s a mindshare group for women that are looking to launch a business or grow a business.

Gina Stracuzzi: When you and I first started talking, I was blown away by your approach to business development and selling and that’s why I wanted you to be on the program, because I love your philosophy, take us into it. I’m going to fess up right away, folks, I put up the title Think Like a Sherpa and Susan reminded me yesterday that it’s really more like an explorer. Talk to us a little bit about what you mean by the explorer aspect of 20 miles or actions a day.

Susan Apgood: This is a constant movement of business development. Let me tell you a little bit of a background story, there were two expeditioners that were looking to reach the South Pole in the early 1900s, in 1911. Amundsen and Scott were the two explorers that led these huge expedition teams to get to the South Pole and they had two very different philosophies. One was Amundsen’s which was, “Every day we’re going to go a certain amount of nautical miles.” It translates into roughly about 20 miles of a journey and the thought was, “We will go for this amount of time so if it takes us 4 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours, we are going to get it done because we have that commitment to this journey.” Whereas Scott and his team, what they did was an easier day of hiking if it was clear, if there were no obstacles, hills, traverses to get over, they would go for as long as they could. What would happen is they would go for as long as they could and the next day they’d be exhausted and so they would stop.

Then they would have a rough day where the terrain was not agreeable so they would then take a day or two off. The two different schools of thought got them both to the South Pole, Amundsen got there much faster and was able to be that explorer that was much more methodical, much more thinking in terms of increments rather than, “This is easy, I’m going to go farther today” or, “This is really hard so I’m going to pull back.” It just became this cadence of planning in which the first team was able to plan out exactly when they would get there whereas the second team wasn’t able to because they didn’t know what the weather would be like 10 days from now. They were playing everything a little bit more by ear so that became this rule that I adopted that I received at the right time.

What I mean by that is I just read the book When by Daniel Pink and this was probably two and a half, three years ago and at the same time in the Her Corner group that I was in, we were talking about this 20 mile journey and how every day you have to be methodical and planned. I looked at when I’m the best and that’s what When is about. When you are at peak performance, if you know you’re not a night person don’t leave harder tasks for the evening, do your harder tasks in the morning. I’m very much a morning person so what I decided to do was I was going to come into the office, work for about 2 hours on, as I call it, the hurricane stuff – emails that have to be answered, responding to internal requests, etc. Then at 11:15 I found that that’s the time when I sit down, I can be really focused, I know I have a couple of hours so I work on my business development for 90 minutes each day.

So from 11:15 to 12:45, that is my time, what I do during that time is I make a list typically a couple days before of when I have to check in with people and I just start working down that list. The reason I do it is because it creates clear performance markers for me, it allows me the opportunity to say, “I need to reach out to Bo today and Lauren on Thursday because they have a project coming up.” It allows me to be more planned in my thinking and get ahead of some of the potential crises that might be coming down the pipe with client engagements.

I also present these self-imposed constraints. It’s not as if Bo or Lauren or whoever I’m reaching out to is saying, “I wish Susan would contact me today.” I am the account executive, I am the one that is driving them to my business so I create this time of day where I’m constantly reaching out to people. The reason I do it in a self-imposed constrained time is because that’s when I’m focused, there’s nothing else on my calendar during that time that I am doing. It has to be appropriate to the individual or to the business itself, the reason I do it at that time is because I’m just a better performer during that time. 90 minutes is a time that is doable each day and it just allows me that time to say, “I’m going to focus right now as hard as I can on these items.” If there’s outfall afterwards where I have to make a client call because I have something scheduled at 4 o’clock, that’s totally fine but that’s my window of, “I just have to keep the train going.” That’s the way I look at it in my head, I’m this explorer trekking 20 miles between 11:15 and 12:45 every day.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s amazing and so simple.

Susan Apgood: It’s simple – not easy, but simple [laughs]. It’s largely within my control. Obviously today we’re doing this during my key time, I shift my times a little bit later during those days.

Gina Stracuzzi: But you still do it.

Susan Apgood: I still do it, it doesn’t give me the excuse or the opportunity to not do it, it just allows me a little bit of a time shift. I’m going to stress this item because in Her Corner when I facilitate groups I talk about this a lot. 90 minutes might seem super overwhelming, I couldn’t sit there for 90 minutes and call people and email people and get on conference calls, that’s too much, start with 10 minutes. We’re at the time where we’re at the beginning of the year, it’s always great to add time, it’s hard to subtract things and what I mean by that is if we start off in the new year and say, “I’m going to run a marathon” and on the first day we go out and we run 10 miles and the most we’ve ever done is 2, we’re never going to get up the gumption to run the next day because we’re going to be so sore. Start off doing that one mile walk, doing two calls a day. I have a member in Her Corner who is like, “I just want to do two engagements a day. Two engagements a day, that’s ten a week, that could be over 500 including vacation time per year.” That’s a lot, so my thought is let’s chunk things out into tiny little but very impressive bursts and then we allow ourselves the opportunity to relax a little bit because we know that that is our “on” time, as we say.

Gina Stracuzzi: I love that thinking and I really applaud your teaching the idea of not starting off so big that you fall back because then you feel defeated and you start beating yourself up like, “There I go again, I’m not going to fulfill it” or whatever it is that you say to yourself, and we all say things. Starting small and working up fulfills so many levels of satisfaction and gets the job done, so that’s great thinking.

Susan Apgood: Doing 10 minutes is much better than doing 0 minutes and that 10 minutes might lead to 15 and like I said, this is very concentrated time where the focus is there and there’s nothing else that matters. It’s not phone calls, it’s not emails, it’s what I’m doing to put out there in my professional development or my business development mindset to put it out to the sales universe and then work for the next 24 hours to reap the benefits of that until it comes up the next business day.

Gina Stracuzzi: I know for myself that once I get a couple calls under my belt I’m done and so eager to talk to the next person. Starting small actually can help you because then you get in the groove and you’re like, “I’ll just do one more.”

Susan Apgood: Right. I used to have a client who has since retired but she was so mean and I hated calling her. What I would do – and this is on my tip sheet – is I would make sure I had a home run right after that because I would always feel very defeated after talking with her. She would question everything and I felt like she was doubting what we did. I know the work we did was good, it was sound and we did great work for her but she was just that type of person. This was early on in my sales career and I thought, “If all people are like this, I’m not built for this.” Then I realized she was an outlier and she was unhappy about a bunch of other things that had nothing to do with me so I didn’t take it personally. I would talk with her but then I would call somebody else who I knew would be delightful to talk to. That’s another mechanism to help with this 20 mile journey on tough dates.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s a good philosophy, if you know you’ve got a tough client, put them in between nice people [laughs] it’ll make you feel a little bit better.

Susan Apgood: Yes. Another thing is this is self-imposed by the individual or the organization depending on if your organization works with this model. You have to be very disciplined to do this, you can’t do it one day and then not do it, it’s a lifestyle, it’s the way that I help to promote myself as a salesperson and just to put things out there. You have to be very consistent, you have to commit to that consistency. One thing is, of course, as a salesperson and juggling may different items we all have a lot going on and this allows me the opportunity to say, “I’m going to take that time”, this is exactly what that time is allotted for. It’s amazing when you’re consistent how much you can achieve in short periods of time. Some days – I’m sure both explorers felt this – you feel like you’re not doing anything, you’re not getting through to anybody but then all of a sudden one day when you’re not really trying that hard, you get three or four sales which is a big day for somebody like me in my environment. There are days when you put it all in and you think, “Today’s going to be a great day” and it’s not, and then there are other days where the opposite happens and you get a great outcome from not a lot of effort. I think it’s weighing those days and that consistency is so key. If you have a great day and go, “That was great, now I can rest for 5 or 6 days” you don’t have to worry about it, but I’m back at it the next day. I think that’s the difference here.

Gina Stracuzzi: Especially in a corporate environment, one of the things that we hear from women a lot is that their time isn’t always respected the way they would like. I think it’s really inherent that we put something on our calendar and it is not changeable. If you let everybody know, “From 10 to 11:30 I’m doing my sales calls, there can’t be meetings, there can’t be budget reviews, any of that stuff. This is my time to do a key function of my job and this is when I’m really good at it.” Use those words to let your bosses or whomever know that this is your time to do this fundamental piece of your position. They will respect it, I’m sure.

Susan Apgood: I try to put certain things on my calendar so people can see and respect the time and sometimes I put things on my calendar where I really have to close my door or shut off my Outlook or whatever it is because I know that there are other distractions going on. People tend to be very respectful of that, with technology we can share each other’s calendars and see what’s going on with other people. It allows you to create that pressure on yourself – pressure is not the right word, but the opportunity to actually do those. “I couldn’t reach out to those clients, I haven’t heard back from them or they haven’t reached out to me”, in sales we have to make things happen. If we’re not making things happen and we’re waiting for the phone to ring or the emails to come, they’re not going to come.

We have to be the driver of that and set that in motion and then if the client is interested, they’ll engage and if they’re not, they won’t. Sales, as we all know, is a numbers game so we have to get out to more people than we actually think we’re going to do business with because not everybody is going to do business with us. It’s really important to make sure that you’re super consistent no matter what your mood is, what your to-do list is and what your schedule is.

The schedules shift, as I had mentioned, doing things a little bit later or a little bit earlier in the day is totally fine. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll have my list of who I’m going to call and if it’s a tough call and I know I’m not in the mood for that call today, I might move it to tomorrow but I have to replace it that day and that’s the important thing. Then when 12:45 hits, I allow myself the opportunity to go, “That’s it for the day, I’m good” and my whole list for tomorrow starts at that 12:45 time and I spend from 12:45 to about 1 o’clock figuring out who my list is to call since everything is fresh in my mind for the next day.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s brilliant, I’m going to start using this.

Susan Apgood: Good. Then I just have a couple of tips, making it fun. I make it like a little game for myself, I have little things that are up, “Put through one order per day, three new prospects per day, 8 proposals per week.” I have things that are little games to me that I can put in the green column, the yellow column or the red column, I need to work on that some more. It’s really fun to think about things – I’m a very data-driven person, I always have been – being able to look at my sales sheet on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to do with the revenue itself, it’s just the acknowledgement that I was able to move this much activity in business doing a super stressful time or doing a pandemic, presidential election, social uprising. There’s a number of different items that you can do to keep yourself motivated and it’s all, like I said, a self-motivation play for sure.

We talked about this, sandwiching the hard things with some of the easy things. I have a call today, I know the client is going to sign on to get something done so I’m going to make a tough call right before that, somebody that I know I need to reach out to but I probably haven’t reached out to them in a long enough time that it’s not going to be one of my easier calls.

Gina Stracuzzi: Those are awkward calls and for some reason we keep pushing them to the right, as if it’s going to get easier somehow.

Susan Apgood: Yes, there’s a book that Mel Robbins wrote a couple years ago called The 5 Second Rule and it’s things that you are procrastinating on and how you have to count them in your head and do it. She talks about it from a personal level, she was having a lot of motivation issues personally and financially and one day she just got up and was like, “I just have to do these things.” The tough calls, the tough employee conversation, the awkward whatever it is even if it’s a doctor’s appointment that you’ve been putting off making, things like that, making sure that you get them done. If it’s on my list, it’s going to get done. I can’t put it in there unless I know in my head I’m actually going to get it done and then we talked about starting small and growing from there, start with two people a day.

One thing I started doing during the pandemic is at the end of my day, usually I try to leave the office because I’m actually physically here in my office and I live just a couple blocks away. One of my last actions of the day is I set a timer and for 15 minutes, I spend time connecting people on LinkedIn, if I know somebody’s looking for a job I look for a couple of opportunities and send them to them, if I know somebody is working on a project I’ll look for an article that might help them. It’s this connection karma and it’s just one of those things where I probably will never do more than 15 minutes because I know if I say, “I’m going to do this for an hour” it just won’t get done. My connection time is I’m starting small and I’m not actually even going to grow from there, that’s just the time I give for that and it’s been very helpful and fulfilling for me and it makes me very grateful for all of the great connections I have. It makes some of those calls that you’re talking about, Gina, a little less awkward. If I know somebody that I haven’t talked to in a while that their firm is hiring, I might reach out to them and say, “My friend Sarah is looking for a job, do you mind if she reaches out to you?” Rather than calling and going, “Hey, do you have any business for me?” Making all of those connections is a way for me to feel like if I’m putting stuff out there, I’m definitely getting way more in return. That’s how my connection karma works.

Gina Stracuzzi: I like that thinking too. We have a question from an audience person, Kelsey would like to know, “What advice do you have for getting the rest of your team aligned with your sales strategies and tactics?”

Susan Apgood: That’s a good question. I think it’s publicizing what your goals are as a salesperson. I have right next to me a bulletin board that has all of my goals and they’re clearly stated so that I can look at them all the time and sharing them with people is really important. I think another thing is also celebrating successes and that is not just at the point of sale but during the way as you’re working on a project. Internally here we use Yammer and we had a Kudos Board. If somebody does an outstanding job on a project or  a client says something about a team member going the extra mile, we post that with a funny GIF – because we’re not together so we have to make ourselves laugh – allowing people the opportunity to know that the client is satisfied. It’s really helpful because it gets people motivated.

I think also just letting people know what you’re looking for. We have a sales brainstorm every Wednesday at 2 o’clock and everybody on our team brings two sales leads, two clients that they think would be a good client for our company. Sometimes we have themes, the one last week was what we’d do for New Year’s, the one before that is as we head into 2021, what are some new political stories that we’ll be hearing? We sometimes have a theme and we sometimes don’t. Then if the sales comes through and that lead is taken up by a client, we have an internal bonus that we provide to people so it makes people feel like they’re part of that process in doing sales, which nobody really ever wants to have to do that job. We all know sales is a tough job but everybody is always selling no matter what role they have in a company, they are a salesperson whether it’s a front line worker who is taking care of a patient or providing somebody with a meal to the CEO. Everybody is always a representation in selling for their company.

Gina Stracuzzi: I would think too, especially if you’re leading a team or even if you’re not and you want to try this and you’d like everybody else to is you could make a little contest out of it. Everybody try it for two weeks and let’s see who’s got the best outcomes and have those little victory dances along the way where you give shout outs and let other people know what your successes are so they see that this strategy works. I think the idea of figuring out what time of the day works best for you, because we all know instinctively when we’re on our best, that could even be fun in a meeting. Who’s on top in the morning and who’s better right after lunch? Which is usually nobody [laughs] but there’s probably somebody out there that’s really best after lunch. Then there’s cover for other activities within the company if not everybody is doing this at the exact same time. It could actually be beneficial in many respects to try it as a team.

Susan Apgood: Absolutely, everybody functions a little bit different so whether you are marketing support or you’re doing operations work, everybody can incorporate this in some way into their work, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the sales initiatives, it can be fill in the blank, writing is a big one. In my industry people are like, “I’m a great writer at 2 o’clock in the morning” or, “I’m a great writer at 5 a.m.” or, “I need you right after lunch.” Whatever it is, finding your time is probably 80% of it and just knowing when you have the most energy to give and the most enthusiasm in your voice, in your outlook, it’s so important.

Gina Stracuzzi: Kelsey, I hope that answers your question. We have another question from Anita, she wants to know how you’ve measured the difference since you’ve started using this system and how your sales has grown since then.

Susan Apgood: I measure by the revenue that comes in. 2020 of course was an anomaly because we were acquired and we had a global pandemic but my sales went up about 14.8% last year. Some of it was because of the acquisition I was able to sell a few more items on the spectrum of sales, I don’t know how it would have gone down if I hadn’t had an acquisition or if it would have gone down. I started this in early 2019, I have about just 2 years of data and then in 2019 I had a big sales year as I was preparing for the acquisition. I just had enthusiasm and people can read that, I had enthusiasm at the thought of after 22 years in business, somebody thought my company was of such great value that they wanted to pay for it and take all of my employees. Many people’s end goal is to have that affirmation so that year my sales went up just under 10%, about 9.8%. The year before that I think part of the reason why this resonated with me was I had a dip from the previous year and it was about 5.6% and at I at the time wholly owned the company and I’ve got all these employees I’m responsible for and they’re now getting married and having kids. I took that responsibility very seriously and that was a driver for me to really make sure that I was able to grow the business in 2019 into 2020.

Gina Stracuzzi: It put you in a good spot to go into a pandemic for sure.

Susan Apgood: It sure did, yes.

Gina Stracuzzi: I have to say kudos to you too that this is a fine piece of selling in my book. You sold your company and maintained control of it, that is some great negotiation, congratulations.

Susan Apgood: Thank you. I think 4media, our parent company understood the value that we had in the industry. As I mentioned, they sell research services and they did some research and found out that our brand name which has been in the US, 4media started over in London but we have a lot more brand recognition so they wholly kept the name and we’re just part of 4media Group. That helped me especially with clients who were like, “What does this exactly mean? Am I going to see you less? Am I going to be passed off to somebody else?” What it allowed me to do was the opportunity to not do any of the back end work, the invoicing, the HR, making pay roll and all of that stuff. It opened up the opportunity to do more business development and sell more, meet with clients on Zoom a lot more and then of course opened up that Her Corner opportunity for me as well.

Gina Stracuzzi: We’re lucky because that brought us to you, or you to us, I should say. We have another question, Kelsey again wonders if you could talk a little bit about mentorship and how your women peers have helped you in your career.

Susan Apgood: I think the biggest thing with mentorship is do it early. That is one thing that I did not do, I started my business in 1997 and there were not a lot of entrepreneurs at that time, period. I was actually just on a call this morning with my American University colleagues and one thing we were talking about is the class, when I got my MBA, used to be called New Venture Management. Entrepreneurship wasn’t really a word that we kicked around at that time, there were very few people starting businesses because the barriers to entry were much higher because of technology not being there yet. There certainly were not female entrepreneurs around. What I did – and I made a mistake – is I did not reach out to women or anybody for help because I thought it looked like I didn’t know what I was doing, that people would say, “Susan reached out to me because she doesn’t know how to handle this employee issue” or, “She doesn’t know how to start a payroll relationship” or whatever it is. I spent a lot of time figuring out all of this stuff for myself, do not do that.

It took me about 7 years into my business which is right around the time I started having my children, I think that was a turning point for me because I realized, “I can’t run a multi-million dollar business and have these very small children at home.” I had one son and then 17 months later I had twin boys, so I had three kids within a very short amount of time and it was right then that I joined up with a group of women. We go to a spot together once a year, there are 8 of us. My twins are just about to turn 14 so I’ve been going for a while and we talk about everything from starting a website to what’s your exit plan to retirement to your will, how to strategically plan for growth. We’re all at different stages of our career and we all mentor each other, there are women who are in this group that are 20 years older than me that are just starting to retire, some forced retirement because of the pandemic. Then I have a lot of students that I work with that I’m mentoring but they’re mentoring me back about other things like social media. I know that’s such a cliche but I learned so much from my younger colleagues about social media, what’s important and what’s not. I think mentorship goes two ways, I don’t think it’s just, “I’m here to mentor you.” I’m on two boards and that has helped a ton as well because those are my go-to people. If I ever need anything, a new contact, a photographer, I go to this board of advisers of people that I trust and it’s not a formal mentor relationship but it certainly is a way for me to get what I need and to get them what they need.

Gina Stracuzzi: It could be hard to find mentors in corporate environments unless somebody offers up. Maybe reaching outside of your company or finding women’s groups, anything where you have some commonality and you feel free to talk honestly and openly is a key to really great mentorship.

Susan Apgood: I think my lack of finding a mentor or thinking it was a sign of weakness I’ve overcompensated for in the last 13 or 14 years to a point where now I’m a facilitator for a female group. I’m actually putting together a course for American University on women in leadership, things like that have kick-started me to say to people, “Reach out.” I have coffees with tons of people, one of my colleagues at American or Washington Women in PR will say, “Will you please have coffee with this person or a 15 minute conversation?” I never say no because I was never that person that asked for that conversation way back when. The fact that we’re even asking for those conversations is a huge kudos to people that are reaching out. I wish more people did it because I always feel great about the chat with somebody to help them get into different directions and open their mind to different ideas or different possibilities.

Gina Stracuzzi: Thinking about the groups that you’re involved with, if somebody’s looking for a mentor there’s a lot of way to find them. Alumni groups might be a great way to start or as you say, I used to be involved with Washington Women in PR many moons ago when I lived in D.C. and I went to American University. Through that whole network I got very involved and got some great gigs out of it. You’ve got to think out of the box a little bit and figure out who it is that you feel like you might have the most in common with to do the first ask and then that can lead you down that path to other people or even just someone you know.

Susan Apgood: My first board ask, when I was asked to be on a board my company was just a year old and I was like, “Oh my gosh!” and now I’m one of the older people on the board. I was on the board and then I went and did a whole bunch of other things with a different group and now I’m back on the board. I left as a newbie and I came back and I’m the one that everybody looks to when a tough decision needs to be made and it’s very empowering. I’m so happy that I’m able to come back into this role because I remember when I was the newer person on the board, the younger out of the spectrum and I used to think, “I want to be like Kate Perrin when I grow up or Sherri Core.”  Now those women are my dear friends and on the retirement track, and here I am working with the next generation of PR professionals coming up that ladder. It’s really exciting to see it all come full circle.

Gina Stracuzzi: We’re just about out of time, is there one piece of advice, one actionable effort that people can use today, put into place today that can get them started down this path?

Susan Apgood: Start with one outreach, that person you’ve been thinking about, drop them an email today before you finish your work day and you’ll be amazed and what that turned around looks like. I can’t stress enough, start small, one or two actions per day but then have that 20 mile framework set up so that you’re able to work within that as you move forward. These tiny little steps, all of a sudden you look back and you’re like, “I’m almost at the South Pole and my 1,400 mile journey is almost over.” Appreciate your successes which is something I did not do early on in my career, I’d succeed at something and then I’d be like, “Okay, here’s our next goal.” Take some time and be very thankful for what you’ve achieved and look ahead with great excitement.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 314: Women in Sales: Susan Apgood Shows How Even the Smallest Sales Activity Can Get You on the Sales Success Journey first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on December 15, 2020. It featured partner execs Karen Cantwell from UiPath and Bethann Pepoli from Splunk.]

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Find Karen on LinkedIn here. Find Bethann on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 311: Women in Sales: UiPath and Splunk Sales Leaders Share Why Partnerships Are the Way to Go

KAREN’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Determine what your comfort level is in terms of speed and pace. What’s typically called channel or VAR sales is much faster than alliances or with systems integrators. If you’re one who is more inclined to the quick hit, it can be very voluminous and active, the speed could be really exciting for you. If you’re more into the strategy with how to leverage the partnership for a multi-million dollar deal, then alliances with larger integrators would be the way to go.

BETHANN’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: ” Follow your passion. If you don’t wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I can’t wait to go to work” or solve a challenge or truly enjoy what you’re doing, you won’t be satisfied, it won’t be a fulfilling career. Always follow your passion and don’t be afraid of the career pivot. It gives you a different lens on the business. So if you aren’t in channel sales yet, come on over, the water’s warm!”

Gina Stracuzzi: Today we have a really special webcast for you because one, we’ve got two guests on today rather than the usual one and we’re going to be talking about careers in partnerships. If you’ve ever thought about going into that kind of role, this is your opportunity to ask whatever questions you might like. We have two fabulous women, Bethann Pepoli and Karen Cantwell, and they’re going to talk to us about how they got into these roles and what you need to take your career there. Bethann, why don’t you go first? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Bethann Pepoli: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here today. I’m currently the AVP for Partners and Alliances as well as business development for public sector at Splunk. I’m actually new to partner sales leadership, just been in my role for about two years now, most of my background is in technology operations. I spent most of my career working for the government running a data center and was a deputy CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts before leaving government service to join the private industry. Most of my comments today will be to encourage you all to continue to take career pivots and if you’re not in partner sales today, there’s always an opportunity around the corner.

Gina Stracuzzi: You wouldn’t be the first one to make those kind of career moves from private sector into government sales and back, people go across the board. Karen, please tell us about yourself.

Karen Cantwell: Thanks very much, Gina, I really appreciate the opportunity to join this forum to share a little bit about partner sales, alliance sales, that indirect model. A little bit about me, I currently work for UiPath, we’re the global leader in robotics process automation and I’ve been in indirect sales for 30 years. I started my career in direct technology sales in the private sector and then moved over into the public sector about halfway through my career. It’s been an exciting journey and I look forward to this discussion.

Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s talk about the difference between channel sales, partner sales and alliance sales. Karen, do you want to go first with this? Then we’ll get Bethann’s answer on it too.

Karen Cantwell: For the folks who are either new or early in their career in tech sales, the model that you might think of first is what is known as direct sales, meaning that a salesperson is directly talking to a customer, to a client, takes an order, etcetera. Indirect sales is through a third party, I think you can call it – whether it’s called partner sales, channel sales or alliance sale – all in the bucket of indirect. In other words, you’re leveraging the skills and investments as well as the resources, the feet on the street of the third party. There can be a couple of different motions whether it’s channel, we’ll talk about that, or alliance, or partner and those roles can be somewhat different but they really fall into the bucket of indirect sales leveraging a third party.

Gina Stracuzzi: Bethann, do you want to add anything to that?

Bethann Pepoli: At Splunk we have for public sector a fully indirect model but I think the corporate strategy is also to set up a route to market and what we refer to as how the transaction is going to flow and what relationships we need to have within our ecosystem to be successful and guide the customer in the right way. We have a cloud route to market, an ISB route to market, distribution and channel as well as systems integrator and man services provider. My org is set up by route to market and we’re focused on relationships and growing the ecosystem in that manner.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting the way different companies set up things. Are there any kind of credentials needed to be in indirect sales or is there a way, if somebody’s coming into this career, that one might establish the wrong personal brand?

Karen Cantwell: I’ll comment on that. I don’t think that there’s a specific credential needed or absolutely required to move into indirect sales. I think that opens it up for anyone who wants to pursue that type of career working with third parties. I will say for alliances – which is a much more broader and strategic approach – there is an association called ASAP which is the Association for Strategic Alliance Professionals. There’s other associations as well, but this is the one I’m most familiar with and they do have a certification process, a certification program for strategic alliance professionals. Everything from the go-to-market to how to craft deals together, what is an alliance and how to leverage each other’s strengths so that one plus one equals three. That’s the one that comes to mind but it’s not required. Bethann, maybe you have a comment on that.

Bethann Pepoli: I would totally agree, it’s absolutely not required. Sometimes it seems a little bit basic but if you are focused on solving the customer problem and you are good at bringing people together to solve a problem, a good mediator sometimes is the #1 skill of this job. Trying to understand what the sales objectives are and who within the partner community can best help us solve that customer problem. A lot of times getting people on the same page working together towards that common goal is the toughest challenge and being a good communicator and being able to bring people together is a skill in and of itself [laughs]. More humanizing the skill than technical skill.

Gina Stracuzzi: Did you have something you wanted to add, Karen?

Karen Cantwell: I just want to concur with Bethann. I think a person in this role, it’s important to have a high emotional intelligence because you’re constantly doing consensus building and putting yourself in the other party’s shoes. What are their drivers? It’s a third party, you may not have the intimate knowledge of the workings of that third party, what their metrics are, it’s a good thing to ask, “What are your metrics to achieve success working with my company?” It’s important to be able to discern and relate, be open-minded to other perspectives. I would say a high emotional intelligence is a good thing to have.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s a great skill anyway, it helps in sales and it clearly would help in a position such as that. Bethann, let me jump back over to you. I know you’ve only been in this role for two years, how do you think your background plays a role in your success?

Bethann Pepoli: I certainly don’t have a long history of managing partners but I do have a lot of experience working as a customer and being in a position where I had to make positions about who we were going to bring in to advise us and consult us on our strategic plan and roadmap and how we were going to solve problems. I try to maintain a customer lens in my role and try to think about, “What would I have wanted as a customer and a partner?” and try to make sure we have the right relationships to bring back to the sales team to address their goals. It compensates for my lack of experience running partner teams, customer success continues to be Splunk’s #1 priority and just try to focus on that.

Gina Stracuzzi: Being able to know what it feels like to be in a person’s shoes gives you so much information and can really help you craft that experience that is your #1 priority. Karen, do you have anything to add to that?

Karen Cantwell: I haven’t been on the customer side but I’ve been in direct sales and that’s something that would be good to touch on. It’s a parallel motion with the direct sales organization normally or in many companies, I would expect so it’s not an entirely different department over here. At the end of the day you’re driving toward success with the sales and revenue generating side of the business so it’s good to be able to see other’s perspective and be able to leverage that in this role. I haven’t been a customer but I have been in direct sales and I think that helps me in the partner sales capacity as well.

Gina Stracuzzi: Between the two of you, you’ve been on both sides of the equation. Let’s talk about maintaining partner relationships, keeping people happy is a skill unto itself. We actually had a woman in the forum that just ended last week, her whole job at her company is to handle irate customers who want to get their money back or trample the name or whatever the cases is and she is just phenomenal at smoothing over situations and hanging onto contracts. It’s a skill, it’s an art form, really. Let’s hear how you all handle that. Bethann, do you want to go first?

Bethann Pepoli: I think that first and foremost, a joint accountability plan with the partner is critical to make sure we’re both going to be successful, and continuous communication and transparency. At the end of the day, I want my partners to feel like I’m always going to do the right thing and the right thing may not be always in their best interest or they may not always win, but if we’re continuing the focus on the customer and making sure it’s a win-together and they feel that they can trust me that I’ll always do the right thing, we can build that trust. A foundation of trust will go a long way and knowing someone’s going to be fair to get to the right answer.

Gina Stracuzzi: Trust is everything so if you’ve got that foundation of trust it’s probably easier to handle these kinds of situations. Karen, what about you?

Karen Cantwell: I think it’s a best practice to have an executive sponsor for the relationship just so that if there comes a point where one party is coming off the rails as to what is really the purpose of this partnership, what’s the win-win, obviously we all want the customer to win. But if something starts to come off the rails, I think it’s great to have an executive sponsor who really understands the vision and the value of the relationship. As an example, if you are working on one project and that’s really falling apart or one party is not contributing what the other party expected, there tends to be emotions associated with that one project and they can become very invested.

The executive sponsor can come at it from a much less specific perspective and really get back to why this partnership is working. Not to mention at the end of the day they might have some authority to get an extra discount or overcome some obstacle that perhaps the partner salesperson or channel salesperson might not have that authority. I think it’s a good practice to have an executive sponsor for the relationship, it really doesn’t even require a lot of work, it’s just to have that person there.

Gina Stracuzzi: How would you identify this person or how would you come to build that relationship?

Karen Cantwell: There’d be an executive sponsor on both sides and it typically would be at a VP level and the VP has a vested interest in the success of the partnership. In my case it might be our AVP for all of federal sales or it might be our AVP for America’s channels, somebody who has a vested interest. I’m in the federal public sector partner group so in either one of those cases, that executive would have a vested interest. It’s really about governance, you’d have governance in terms of this relationship. What are the go-to-market activities we’re going to have? What are our metrics? Are we going to have a quarterly business review? What’s the cadence for that, what’s the cadence for a pipeline? Then over here from an executive level I think it would be great to identify the executive sponsor for the relationship.

Gina Stracuzzi: It seems like it would make things easier if you had one point of contact that you could go to for those times when you might need mediation or somebody to referee the whole thing, that makes sense. We have a question from Trisa, Trisa wants to know, “What do you like best and least about your positions?”

Bethann Pepoli: I’m going to start with what I like least [laughs] and it is the constant reminder to the sales teams about what the partner value is. A lot of times in this job you’re consistently trying to prove yourself, there are a lot of sales reps that say, “I don’t think this partner is bringing any value, I’m not going to pay them.” That’s where a lot of the refereeing and executive sponsorship comes into place and you’re fighting about, “Let’s go back a year and remember they ran a workshop, they invested in training for the customer, they did all of these things along the way to help get this deal to the finish line which is where you are today.” Once you walk through that, usually they say, “I forgot about all those things, sorry.” You find yourself in a situation where you’re back on your heels and fighting back for the partner. That can be a frustrating part of the job but the wins always supersede that.

When you can build a solution with a partner that they’re taking to market and you’re bringing pipeline to the organization, the partner grounds and the sales is doing less work or they’re able to pick up the ball where the partner left off. It’s really just providing more leverage and scale to the organization, we’re always looking for ways to reduce the friction with our partners to make sure our partners are focused on selling into business units that our sales reps aren’t and focused on the full solution to drive pipeline. That is definitely very rewarding.

Karen Cantwell: I too will start with my least favorite. My least favorite is when the partner is all in with our technology and wants to go to market with us but just has decided not to invest on a partner manager on their side. They might have a practice person but not a person who understands go-to-market, pipeline development and quarterly business reviews. Quarterly business reviews and pipeline management are table stakes, these are the foundation of indirect partnering or channel sales but when the company that you’re working with hasn’t assigned anybody, it’s almost like throwing a football and nobody’s there to catch it on the other side. There’s a lot of extra leg work and extra relationship building when you don’t have a counterpart at that partner organization.

As Beth says, the most fulfilling I find is the big wins. Especially when you’ve leveraged a core competency of the partners or in the public sector space a special contract vehicle that we as a technology company never would have been able to succeed without either the contract vehicle or the relationships already established by that partner. When the glue comes together, it can really come together big and I find that very fulfilling as well.

Gina Stracuzzi: Jen wants to know, “If you’re in indirect sales right now and you’re thinking about a new career in partner sales, what would you recommend someone do to move over?”

Karen Cantwell: Jennifer, if you’re already in indirect sales working with partners or alliances or channels then you’re already there. I think that you’d have to look in your own company or in other companies if it’s not a fulfilling role, then maybe there’s a more fulfilling role with go-to-market, solution building, if those things are of interest to you. I hope that answers the question but I think if she’s already in indirect sales, it should be relatively easy to go into partner sales or alliance sales or channel sales.

Gina Stracuzzi: Bethann, do you have anything to add to that?

Bethann Pepoli: I would just say if there’s a particular partner or alliance area you’re particularly passionate about, maybe you like to be on the bleeding edge and to cloud or other bleeding edge technologies, you might want to look for roles with those types of partners that are most exciting to you and managing those partner relationships.

Gina Stracuzzi: That makes me wonder too, how many different aspects of this position are there in terms of potential roles? As you say, there’s the bleeding edge, where else might people look?

Bethann Pepoli: There’s different nuances to each type, for us, we’re what one calls a route to market. Working with systems integrators requires you to be able to play the long game, focus on that consultative-led approach making sure that the systems integrator is going to recommend your technology and architecture or build a solution they’re going to take to market but they are very moved in a calculated way in a very large organization. It requires you to invest a lot of time to make sure that you’re moving the ball forward in every step of the way. Sometimes working with the cloud alliances – AWS, Google – there are some smaller tech companies on integrations, those tend to be faster-paced and more quarter to quarter from a sales alignment perspective. It’s all in where you get more joy, do you like the quick wins? Do you like the long game? Do you like to be more strategic?

Gina Stracuzzi: Karen, did you want to add anything?

Karen Cantwell: I agree. I would say, back to the time frame, the systems integrators are the long game, the consultative approach. If you have the appetite for that as for a career and hopefully your company that you work for has an appetite for the long game, that’s a good spot. If you’re more interested in a short term or a more tactical route to market, those would be the VARs, Value Added Resellers typically, there are some cloud providers who are probably in the middle. From a time perspective those are some options and then there’s also the option if you’re more technically inclined, there might be a role where you can develop or co-develop a solution.

You bring your technology to that systems integrator, the systems integrator builds a managed service so that their offering is a full, as an example, automation as a service. We sell licenses to some systems integrators who develop automations as a service so they just roll that out to the end companies or end agencies and the agencies just sign the contract with the systems integrator, they don’t buy the licenses separately. There’s a couple of those motions which means opportunity for a career path.

Gina Stracuzzi: It seems like there’s a lot of ways to slice this. Jennifer had a follow-up question, “What do you all look for on a resume when you’re hiring in this area?” Bethann, do you want to take a crack at that?

Bethann Pepoli: Being the non-conventional person, you don’t always have to have experience managing partners but what you do need to bring to the table is having another lens, having been in direct sales, in an inside sales role. I’ve promoted a lot of folks within my organization that were in inside sales to the partner channel team, they know a lot about the products, the sales motion and really have proven themselves to be great assets to wanting transactions. Or you have more of a tech background working at a customer or with a systems integrator, again depending on the type of role but I’ve hired a lot of folks that come from systems integrators to go back and work with them, they understand the customer and long term strategy.

Karen Cantwell: I would look for experience with customers or with people, maybe I shouldn’t even say customers. Does he or she have a lot of experience engaging with people whether it’s customer service, inside sales or direct sales? Because that would demonstrate a comfort level of working with people. I would encourage those who want to get into this type of work if they’re not already working with people a good amount to build up to that, if they’re working heads-down in an isolated way, I would promote to look for a position to get yourself out there with people. I think that’s a great stepping stone into this type of career path.

Gina Stracuzzi: This makes me think about one of the areas that we really hit on a lot with the guests on the program, the idea of constant learning. Be continually learning, trying new things, reading, watching webinars, whatever the case is. Can you share with us indirect thought leaders or blogs that you like to read, books or anything that you use to stay current?

Karen Cantwell: I belong to several LinkedIn groups, there are some LinkedIn groups, Alliances and Channels, Federal Partnerships, there’s quite a number if you just search in the group section for either alliances, channels, partners. I would broaden it not just in the DC area, I used to go to LinkedIn groups that were in DC but now with everything being remote it’s just easy to get on board with some very interesting topics that might be specific to, say, the healthcare partnerships or partnerships focused on the government. You can really slice it and dice it as you might.

There are also some organizations on sales enablement or partner enablement because at least my role is to help enable my partner to understand UiPath technology. That’s also a critical component of this type of relationship whether it’s you, the partner, manager who’s leading that effort or your company, it’s hard for that third party to be a force multiplier for your technology if they don’t know your technology. That’s important and that’s where partner enablement comes from. Generally I get involved in the Association for Strategic Alliance Professionals as well as some LinkedIn groups.

Gina Stracuzzi: Bethann, do you have any favorite go-to’s?

Bethann Pepoli: I’m keeping in touch with the industry in groups, as Karen pointed out, where our customers and our partners are all intersecting to really understand how we can come together as a trifecta. Also just trying to keep up with my own learning within my own company, there are a lot of learning requirements internally to make sure that we understand all of the new aspects about Splunk technology and keeping up with that. Again, just industry groups and also women’s leadership groups, contributing back to women’s leadership community and helping develop up and coming female leaders is important to me.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s important to me too. One of the things that I always wonder about is how you stay really engaged in your role and I like to ask this of any women that I talk to because things can be draining, they can be tiring especially in the new world order that we’re in. You’re constantly on screen and little human interaction, how do you stay engaged? Is there something on a personal note that keeps you going, that keeps you wanting to put on something nice to be in front of the camera? What is it that helps you stay part of the game?

Bethann Pepoli: A couple things, pretending you’re getting ready to actually go to work [laughs] do your hair. I can’t say that I do that every day but I do always feel better and try to stay focused, keep focused on what my normal day would be like and try to interact in similar ways to stay engaged. Also, I really look to my team and to my peers to keep myself uplifted. I may have said to many people I work with, “Please hold me accountable for turning on my camera or doing the right thing, doing what I’m supposed to do and I’ll do the same thing in return” just trying to build a support group within your own organization to try and hold each other accountable. To keep things interesting and challenge each other’s brain, my sister says I have COVID brain, I forget everything, I don’t know what’s going on but the more we can stay mentally challenged, the more engaged we can be.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s nice to know that other people have COVID brain because honestly, there are days when I feel like I think I’ve gone insane [laughs]. We’re going to be walking around the streets like, “Wow, what is this new thing? Oh, it’s a building.” Karen, would you like to add anything? How do you stay engaged?

Karen Cantwell: At UiPath I really feel like I’m part of the business, that I’m not on my partner team that’s often left field, we are a contributing part of the business. At least in the public sector our route to market is 95% through partners so we are definitely part of the business and part of the internal sales strategy, the sales calls, that’s rewarding. Then my VP for Channel Partnerships of the Americas, he holds a biweekly happy hour for just us on the partner family. It’s an hour every other week and it’s a little bit of banter, a little bit of work, it’s really just to discuss the best practices. The VP will have heard about something that so-and-so did and that person will present it so then you get stimulation from new ideas and you can apply that to your own work. That helps me to be engaged, to really absorb the best practices and then roll those out into my own market.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think everybody’s in the same boat so the more accepting that we are and the more we share like, “I’ve got COVID brain too”, we’re all suffering a little bit so I think those things really help.

Bethann Pepoli: [Laughs] anything goes, right?

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s right. Is there one piece of advice that you can each give to somebody who either wants to advance in this arena or step into it? Is there one piece of advice you can leave them with? Karen, do you want to go first?

Karen Cantwell: We were earlier talking about your comfort level with the long game or the short game. What’s typically called channel sales or say, with VARs is much faster than alliances or with systems integrators. If you’re one who is more inclined to the quick hit, it can be very voluminous and active, the speed could be really exciting for you. If you’re more into the strategy with how to leverage the partnership for a multi-million dollar deal, my advice would be determine what your comfort level is in terms of speed and pace. It’s a different animal depending on who your partner is.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s good advice. Bethann?

Bethann Pepoli: Follow your passion. You don’t wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I can’t wait to go to work” or solve a challenge or truly enjoy what you’re doing, you won’t be satisfied, it won’t be a fulfilling career. Always follow your passion and if I could add one more, I would say don’t be afraid of the career pivot. That’s something I learned from a mentor of mine here at Splunk, she had made many career pivots, it just continues to give you a different lens on the business. So if you aren’t in channel sales yet, come on over, the water’s warm [laughs].

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 311: Women in Sales: UiPath and Splunk Sales Leaders Share Why Partnerships Are the Way to Go first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on December 8, 2020. It featured SentinelOne Government, Education, and Healthcare Sales Leader Patty Trexler.]

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EPISODE 307: Women in Sales: SentinelOne Government Sales Leader Patty Trexler Lists Five Insights that Have Guided Her Business Career

PATTY’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “It’s really important for women in sales to take time for yourself. That’s what I try to remind myself of every day when I’m in my 6th or 7th hour of Zoom – that’s when you do your best work. That’s when you really reflect on what it is that you need for yourself to move your career forward. Where am I stuck? What am I doing right? Taking time for myself typically means some exercise, a walk with a friend or calling my mom, and connecting with someone that I know needs me.”

Fred Diamond: We’ve got a great show for you today. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce to you the host of the Women in Sales webinar, the Program Director for the Institute for Excellence in Sales Women in Sales Leadership Forum, Gina Stracuzzi.

Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you, Fred, as always, you’re so gracious. Everyone, welcome to our Women in Sales webcast. I’m very excited about our guest, let’s get moving with today’s show because we have a lot of really powerful stuff to cover. I would like to welcome my guest, Patty Trexler. Thank you, Patty, tell us all about yourself.

Patty Trexler: Thanks for having me, Gina. I’m the Vice President for Government, Healthcare and Education at SentinelOne. I am a mother of three, I have three boys, 27, 23 and 13. I live in Frederick, Maryland, I’m from New York originally and I’ve been down here in Maryland for about 15 years. A little bit about my career, I started in IT sales in the copier industry back in 1994 up in New York selling to the legal market, I transitioned to EMC after five years in that market working for Canon to EMC. I started working at EMC in 1999, I was one of the first women sales reps at EMC and I stayed there for about 11 and a half years, and then I went to VMware. I stayed for about a year and a half supporting the commercial vertical down here in the DC area. Then I transitioned into security, I worked for McAfee for a couple of years and then I spent 6 years working at Tanium building their federal civilian business and I started at SentinelOne in March of this year.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s quite a career.

Patty Trexler: It’s definitely keeping me busy, that’s for sure [laughs].

Gina Stracuzzi: That brings us to the topic that we’re going to cover today which is your insights and lessons learned along the way that can help other women as they progress especially into sales leadership. You’ve come up with five things that you think are must-do’s, haves or pay-attention-to’s that you’re going to share with us. Like every podcast these days, there are five things you need to know, that’s how everybody starts these days and that’s easy to manage. Let’s get started with your advice, you and I have discussed some of these and honestly, I think it’s fabulous advice and things that people can do readily for themselves and can search out for help if they need it.

Patty Trexler: In no particular order, I can give you some of my insights. A lot of this is probably not super revolutionary to everybody. For many years in my career I’ve been both an individual contributor and I’ve run large matrix organizations where I’ve run global accounts and things like that or a lot of smaller set or very strategic accounts. I was a manager very early in my career, when I was at Canon I became a manager at like 28 years old and I was running a team of 5 or 6 men and some of them were old enough to be my dad. I have worked with and for men in the IT industry for many years, I actually don’t think I’ve ever reported to a woman which is interesting. You could look at all the things I’m going to talk about as an individual contributor but I also wanted to explore or give people insights into how it’s different if you’re in sales and you are an individual contributor versus a leader. I do think as a woman there are definitely differences and things to be aware of, it’s just a different landscape in my opinion.

One of the things that you and I spoke about which I think a lot of people don’t do, I really think that it’s important no matter where you are in your career to have a mentor or multiple mentors and/or a career coach. Very early on in my career I got a lot of good guidance from my mentors and one of them was like, “You really need to invest in your career.” If you look at a career coach, it may not seem very economically feasible but if you don’t look at getting hours, investing, spending some time and reflecting on where you are with another person that can really understand where you’re trying to take your career, you may not actually get to the place you’re looking to go as efficiently, effectively or in the time that you want to.

It’s really served me well, I started my first career coach when I decided to leave EMC. I got some good advice from one of my women mentors that said, “You might want to look at getting a career coach and having somebody that you meet with on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis to stay on point about what it is that you’re looking to achieve out of your career.” I think that really helped me to move into a leadership role more quickly and decide, understand and reflect on what I want with my career and where I’m looking to go. I probably would have stayed in direct sales a lot longer if I didn’t have a career coach to mentor me.

With regard to the mentors, I think especially as salespeople, one of our gifts is that we build strong relationships. I have great relationships and some of my mentors are customers that were customers of mine 10 years ago that I respect and admire greatly and still keep in touch with. I think it’s different with a mentor, I have mentors that I go to when I’m looking to make a career change that help me dissect the industry or industries that I may be looking at and get their perspective. They may know board members that are on some of the companies I’m looking to go to, they’ll connect me with them. Even in an individual contributor role when I’ve needed guidance on a particular very large strategic deal where maybe some of the team members internally, my leadership internally has maybe not the same goals that I have where I’ve sat down and spent some time to walk through a very strategic large multi-million dollar opportunity and say, “This is what I’m thinking and my gut is that we need to do this.” Having those sounding boards for different things in your career I think is really important and it can be super helpful to get an outside perspective.

Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely, I believe in that philosophy 100%. Did you along the way ever have a sponsor within your company that helped pull you up? Because there is a lot of discussion around the difference between mentors and sponsors, not everyone understands the difference and they have very different roles in our careers. Did you ever have a sponsor along the way?

Patty Trexler: I think some of my mentors were sponsors. I was at EMC for 11 and a half years but I probably had five different positions during the course of those 11 and a half years. When I started with EMC, we only had one product line. We hadn’t made any real strategic acquisitions, we had made one in the server space but really our mid-range product line, backup acquisitions, content management acquisitions, security acquisitions, all of that happened through the course of my career while I was there. When I wanted to do something new, unique or something that would complement the experience that I had, the experience that I felt that I needed moving into a software-only position in one of the acquired businesses, I would go to one of my mentors and leverage them as a sponsor or career coach. Sometimes it worked for me and sometimes it didn’t, the good old boy’s network once in a while would say, “Patty’s looking to go for that global job but I’ve got Jim over here that’s been sitting in the sidelines waiting to take that job so I’m going to go give it to Jim.” I think even when you don’t necessarily get what you want, you can learn from it and eventually get where you need to go. I don’t know that I’ve had a lot of sponsors, I think I’ve really driven my career on my own related to getting jobs within each group. But people have connected me with different people to help me through the interview process, so I guess in some ways they would be considered a sponsor.

Gina Stracuzzi: Some people have very definitive sponsors and it works in a particular type of hierarchy so it really depends on the company too. I think a lot of women don’t necessarily spend the money on themselves, that it takes to find a coach or they don’t take the time because it’s just additional hours, so it’s good advice. You told me a really great story about your dad and about what he taught you and how he got you into sales. Can you share that with us?

Patty Trexler: He was probably my first real mentor. It’s an individual contributor story but I’ll tell it to you. I have a business degree and a concentration in marketing and when you get out of college you don’t know a lot about where to go, at least back in 1991 there wasn’t a lot of coaching or guidance around resume writing or where you go. Once you get this business degree, what do you do with it? I went to my marketing professor, Professor Guzman, and I said, “When I graduate, where do I go get this business marketing job?” I thought I was going to go start creating PowerPoints and start positioning products working inside a big corporation. He was like, “No, you actually have to go sell the product before you can become a marketing person” and I was like, “Sell the product? You mean I have to go talk to people and convince them to give me their money? That does not sound like something I want to do.” I immediately thought of a used car lot, I don’t know why, that I would be selling cars or something like that, I really hadn’t thought a lot about it.

Anyway, my step-father was in sales, he started out as an encyclopedia sales guy and he went to Xerox and had all of that great training back in the 60s and 70s that Xerox was providing at that time. He was a sponsor to me in getting me an interview at the company where he had worked and there were certain criteria I had to meet before I could get that interview at the sales company I was at prior, but he said, “If you meet these sales goals in the first year, I will help you get an interview with the company that I’m at.” One thing led to another, he saw how hard I was working at the job that I had and after 9 months he was like, “I’m not going to make you work the fourth quarter, let’s get you in for an interview.”

When I started working, my step father and I would commute back and forth to work together. From the very beginning he was just so dedicated to really making sure that I had all the right DNA about how to be the best salesperson I could be. Every day on the way home he would ask me, “Who did you meet today?” and I would be like, “Meet?” I basically sat in my cube studying the xerographic process or something and he was like, “The people that are going to support you, you need to meet them, you need to know who they are, you need to go talk to the three service directors, you need to go knock on the door of the divisional vice president’s office and see if you can get some time with him. You should meet and talk to everyone that’s going to support you in the job that you’re going to do, pick up the phone, call Chicago, call corporate, know the people that are going to process your orders.”

I was like, “Okay…” I wouldn’t have thought of that but it really served me well because it’s something that I took with me everywhere that I went and then every day we would go back and forth and I would report back to him on the way home of who I had met, things like that. I think that’s important, I think a lot of people don’t really think to reach out to their support people or get to know them when they start and as you become a leader, that’s even more important. People want to know that you care, you want to form relationships and an emotional connection with the people that report to you as well as the people that support your business.

Gina Stracuzzi: The reason I asked you to share was because there’s great lessons in what your father taught you and you explained it perfectly, the reaching out to people, the letting them know who you are establishing relationships immediately. That is all incredible advice, especially for women. You can’t assume that you’re going to get opportunities to meet people, that somebody’s going to open that door for you, you have to do it yourself. Your father saw that and he instilled it in you which I think is going to make you – and probably has, that’s why you’re in the position you are – a great leader and someone wonderful to work for. You appreciate what individual contributors need to know to really be successful, so thank you for sharing that story with us.

Patty Trexler: Thank you. Tying it back to what we were just talking about, the other thing that my step-father impressed upon me was that you always need to be learning, just because you have a business degree doesn’t really mean that you know everything about selling. Now they actually have degrees that you can get in sales, but when I was in college they really didn’t have a focus on selling, it was about all the other peripheral things but not specifically about the sale, sales methodologies or anything like that. I think it made me want to be the best that I could be, I started taking sales and sales leadership training courses before I even started working.

The company I had worked at prior did a Tom Hopkins sales training and I took a 16-week Dale Carnegie sales training class. I’m a student, I love to be learning so it’s not hard for me and I’m like a sponge, I really like to know everything from the inside-out and be as well-versed on any topic, whatever it is that I’m talking about. Whether it’s the technology that I’m selling or the leadership skills that I need to make sure that I’m investing in, I take it all in and I take it pretty seriously. I really do believe that continual learning and investing in yourself is really important. In all of those things, your coaching session or your internal sales leadership training, I’ve always tried to think about continual learning as like if I can walk away with one or two things that brings value to my customers and makes me better at what I do, then it’s worth it. I’ve always been a fan of making sure that you’re always learning as much as you can be learning.

Gina Stracuzzi: Certainly there’s never been more content, more opportunities to learn without doing much of anything, it’s all at our fingertips so there’s no excuse anymore. It’s not like you have to search it out or go someplace for a couple of hours, you can just do it at your leisure, do it while you’re walking the dogs, anything. It’s so easy now.

Patty Trexler: That’s true, you can listen to an audio book, I’m a big fan of that. Obviously raising three kids and building my career I’ve had to learn to be very efficient – not that I’m always efficient. But use any resource that you can and don’t worry about the fact that you didn’t read the written page, just put the audio book on and get your three miles in whether it’s a walk or a run or whatever, multi-task where you can.

I also find that when you’re running and you’re listening to an audio book you’re pretty laser-focused on the topic. If it’s not interesting then you probably should switch a book.

Gina Stracuzzi: If it’s a good topic and the narration has a good cadence, it can actually help your run.

Patty Trexler: Yes, as far as the information that’s an interesting point, I really feel passionately that our customers, especially now with the pandemic, they’re struggling to get done what they need to get done. I know how many hours I’m putting in at this point, I have to really schedule in time, down time because it’s just back to back zooms, so you need to be mindful of the fact that you need to show up prepared and be the best you can to your customers because they don’t have a lot of cycles to really waste. They can get the information from the internet so by the time you get there, half the time they’ve already pre-determined in their minds what they want, where they’re looking to go and it’s your responsibility to be prepared about their business and understand what their mission is, what they’re struggling with from a ransomware attack. We see that on the rise with healthcare, we see it on the rise with education in our market, all of those things tie back to the continual learning. Learning about your customers, knowing about your industry, knowing what’s top of mind is really important.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have a question from Karen, Karen wants to know what some of your favorite sales books to read are.

Patty Trexler: Most recently – and I’m government-focused so there’s a few things here – I mentioned to you that I read The Confidence Code and it’s a great read written by two women writers for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. It was a great book for women in general but especially women leaders and women that are in a very male-dominated industry, it really talks about how we show up and it was very insightful to me. I thought I was the only one that felt this way but in reading that book it really tied some things together in my mind about how women’s brain work and how we’re just wired differently. It really helped me to catalyst myself to the next level and now that I’m in leadership I’ve read two really good books – again, nothing earth-shattering – The Connector Manager, that was excellent, I thought that had some really good information about different management styles and how they affect the team.

It’s not like I feel like I read the book and I was that management style, I think we all incorporate a bunch of different things from our experiences and who we are as people as well as other managers that we’ve been managed by. I got some good insights into what I’m doing well and maybe some things that I could take a look at and maybe change or modify in my philosophy or the way that I approach management. The third book that I just recently read was one about managers, The Accidental Manager which I think is a really good read especially for people that are looking at getting into management because a lot of us as individual contributors have a certain mindset and this book takes you through how your world is going to change when you become a first line manager which I think is the most difficult position in the company. It talks about some basic things you can do to help get control of this new job responsibility that you have where you may not have a lot of good coaching and guidance from internal resources because maybe your manager is too busy to really spend the time onboarding you properly.

I thought that book was excellent, it had a lot of great nuggets in there about interviewing, how to run your team meetings effectively, those are two big sections that I thought they did a great job with. Again, really practical stuff, just talking about constantly investing a percentage of your time in building your pipeline of candidates so that you’re never in a situation as you’re growing a business that you’re starting from zero in your pool of candidates. My assignment is national, I’ve got to go fill assignments in southern California or Chicago so I think again, building your network, that’s another great area where it can serve you well. As you’re working with your teammates, internal and external mentors always be looking for those outstanding candidates for sales jobs.

Gina Stracuzzi: The Accidental Manager really hits on something that becomes a problem along the way and that’s retaining really good talent and having a strong succession pool. Those are things I think all managers struggle with and it has an effect on individual contributors too and management. That could be a really great thing to be prepared for if you get that opportunity to become a first line manager.

Patty Trexler: Absolutely. I think all of these things tie together. My current career coach, I met him in a leadership training class, he uses this phrase, “Slow down to speed up.” I find myself saying that in my head because I think that we all do our best work when we’re mindful of the fact that there’s only so much that we can take on and do effectively. Again, going back to the pandemic, I think it’s at a whole new level and obviously I’m building a startup within a startup in a world where we’re not open. I think slowing down to speed up in your daily, weekly and monthly cadence of what it is you have on your radar as far as goals is important. What I try to do, for example, is make sure that when I’m looking at my week or my bi-weekly schedule that I’m mapping it back to what my OKRs or my goals for the quarter are. I say, “What things can I finish off?” and I try not to take on too much more or anything at all, I’ll just say I can’t do anything more. We get some of these things like over the goal line and let’s get these metrics met.

I think that in what I do I’m very reliant on other parts of the business whether it be legal, marketing, to meet some of my objectives because of where I am in growing my business. I really like to be mindful that I need to be the best for my team and those other matrix organizations and if I’ve got too much on my plate, I can’t do it all very effectively. I think that saying, slow down to speed up, is not just for whatever role you’re in now but you need to do that on a periodic basis. Tying it back to the career coach or the mentor, looking out 18 to 24 months has always served me well in looking at where I want to go in my career. Is it that I want to make a move within EMC and I don’t have pure play software only experience so I’m going to go do that for three years? Or is it that I want to move into management or I want to shift from being in the infrastructure or cloud business to pure play security?

Always take time, it can be 5 or 10% of your week to do a little investigation on the industry, where it’s going, it’s changing so rapidly that I think it’s important to do that. When I made the moves that I made, I felt very confident that I knew where the markets and the industries were going and where I wanted to be, what my interests were and how they aligned with the adoption we were seeing in that industry. The last thing you want to go do is sell something that’s 24 months ahead of where your market is. I think that’s served me well with the moves that I made when I made them within each organization. I won’t say that everything I did was perfect but I will say that I’m pretty happy with the experiences that I had both internally at EMC, at VMware or McAfee. I think slowing down to speed up is a good thing.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have a question from Carol who says, “How do you learn to say no?” That is something that I hear a lot in the Women in Sales Leadership Forum that we do that a lot of women, especially early in a management career, they often feel like they’re overtasked with things and everyone wants to give them something to do. They don’t necessarily know how to say, “No, right now I need to focus on this” or, “I can’t do that right now.” Do you have any advice for that? And Carol, thank you very much for your question because I think it’s an issue that a lot of women struggle with.

Patty Trexler: It’s definitely hard, I think that book, The Confidence Code, it’s in our DNA. We’re moms, we’re programmed not to say no and I’m married to a sales leader who is German, was an airborne ranger in a long range detachment surveillance unit and sometimes he runs the household like we’re his troops. The guy doesn’t sleep, no one is as productive has him, I don’t know anyone that’s more productive, I tell him he should be president, he’s got so many cycles. He really pushes us to do a lot and saying no to him is not always well-received, so that’s something I’ve had to learn both internally at home as well as with customers or my managers. I think I’ve done a much better job over the last two years defining my boundaries with my husband. Though I spend my entire day and week in an extroverted fashion giving, the way that I recharge – I’m actually an introvert – I really like to be alone. I need that down time to regroup, I’m a runner, I do yoga, that helps keep me balanced and centered and gives me time to reflect on what it is I need.

I do really struggle with saying no but I can give you one example. It’s a lot about boundaries and I think just because you have a career coach doesn’t mean that that’s not something that you can’t put on the table because that’s one of the things you talk about. “Here’s my work load, this is what I’m working on, I feel like this is pretty unrealistic that my manager is asking this of me.” They’ll help coach you through how to ask for what it is that you want and what it is that you need and basically help you with the language that you can use to be effective in trying to get out of that situation, what it is that you need to be successful. You can’t be successful by saying yes to everything and even with my customers, I’m actually texting with a customer today that I’ve known since 2007 who’s become a very dear friend of mine. He was my customer at T Rowe Price and he was a wonderful customer, we did tons of business together but he just kept putting stuff on my plate. I remember talking to my husband, this was before I had a career coach, saying, “I just can’t meet this person’s expectations, there’s so many things he wants me to focus on” and my husband just said, “You just need to go into his office, you need to schedule the time and you need to take him through all the things that he’s giving you and tell him to help you prioritize. It’s not like you don’t want to get to it but you can’t manage these other 6 things effectively if he’s giving you 6 more things to manage.”

Together hopefully whether it’s your customer, your coach, your boss or your reps that work for you that say, “I need to you to do this for me”, we can only focus on so many things and get an effective outcome, so which of these things are the priority? It’s really about prioritization and as a part of that you’re saying no for right now. I think that has to do with not taking more stuff on board, I can’t do anything more. I’m not going to hire the right people or we’re not going to get the effective revenue targets that we want if we start spreading ourselves so thin that we’re reactionary instead of planning and doing things in a methodical way.

Gina Stracuzzi: Asking for your manager or whomever is giving you what they’re giving you to prioritize it for you is good advice because it will illustrate to them better than they understand, “I forgot about that” or, “I didn’t realize I had given you all of those things.” Then it puts the onus back on them which is great advice.

There’s one point that you and I discussed and I think it’s a really important one and that is to ask for what you want. That’s the flip side of saying no, is also asking for what you want and what you need. Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Patty Trexler: I think this is definitely something that has helped me a lot to grow into a sales leadership role and meet the goals and objectives that I’ve set for myself in my career. As women, I think we don’t always set our objectives as high as we could. There are statistics out there that are pretty fascinating where a woman would look at a job description even if it’s internal to a company and if we don’t meet 80% or higher of everything on that list, we will turn around and not interview for that job even though it’s something we may truly think we could do, even if we’re stretching and it may be something that we want to do. What I’ve learned is that you really need to go for it, don’t feel intimidated. I think I’ve felt intimidated in the past, I can give a good example when I was at EMC and I was working up in New York and I had a national role and I decided that I was going to move down to the DC area, I wanted to move into a software-only position that was in a totally different line of business but I was intimidated by the prospect of having to go to my vice president and tell him that I wanted to leave the team that I was on.

As an individual contributor when you’re achieving your numbers, people don’t really want you to move around and EMC has this subculture of, “You never leave the family, you don’t go to VMware, you don’t move into different groups.” I think you have to put your thoughts together, you need to put your justification together of why you meet the criteria to interview for that job and then you need to get the courage and go do that. You need to not cave, just be strong and go do it. In this leadership role that I’m in now, what I’ve learned over the years is all these things that we’re talking about. If you work for a company where there’s great leadership with good management practices, you’re pretty much going to be able to manage your way through any situation with grace and get what it is that you want and need. What I love about where my career is today is the company that I work for and the leadership that I work for allows me to ask for what I want and it’s still intimidating sometimes.

As one of the only women Vice Presidents in the company, when you get on the phone and it’s 15 men sitting on the other side of the Zoom I still sometimes feel a little apprehensive but I do have the support that I need so that I can ask for what I need or want to support my business. As long as you do it in a professional way and you have the data and come to the table with good intentions, if you have those things like a good leader and strong management practices within the company, you will typically get what it is you need or want to support the revenue targets that you have in that business.

Gina Stracuzzi: Can you give our listeners one piece of actionable advice that they could go out and take care of on their lunch hour or think about today that they could put into action to help themselves strengthen their position, further their career, maybe get clear on their career goals?

Patty Trexler: I think this ties into one of the things that I was going to talk about so I’ll just put it into the summary. I think it’s really important, especially this whole ‘saying no’ thing and women leaders, it’s really important to take time for yourself. When you take time for yourself and put yourself on the list – that’s what I try to remind myself of every day when I’m in my 6th or 7th hour of Zoom – that’s when you do your best work. That’s when you really reflect on what it is that you need for yourself to move your career forward. Where am I stuck? What am I doing right? I’m passionate about that and for me, taking time for myself typically means some sort of yoga or exercise or a walk with a friend or calling my mom, connecting with someone that I know needs me. Taking time for yourself is probably one of the things that is most important for all of us, especially now.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 307: Women in Sales: SentinelOne Government Sales Leader Patty Trexler Lists Five Insights that Have Guided Her Business Career first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on December 1, 2020. It featured Sales Mindset expert Jamie Crosbie.]

Register for Tuesday’s ENCORE: WOMEN IN SALES We Can’t Just GO Thru All of This; We Have to GROW Thru It! here.

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EPISODE 305: Women in Sales: Growth Mindset Expert Jamie Crosbie Says This Is a Great Way to Get Past Your Self-Limiting Beliefs

JAMIE’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “One of the biggest challenges we face are limiting beliefs. Ask yourself what is the #1 obstacle that I’m facing right now that’s holding me back from being truly who I was created to be personally or professionally to being my very best self? Then examine the belief that’s associated with that. Ask “When did I start believing that? What happened in my life?” There are a lot of lies that we tell ourselves that you wouldn’t tell your best friend. If you were treating yourself like your own best friend, you would be saying something totally different to yourself. Figure out what that is and go through the exercise of adopting a new belief is very powerful.”

Fred Diamond: Today we have an expert on mindset. Actually Jamie was a guest on one of our first Optimal Sales Mindset webinars way back in the spring, it seems like a decade ago. I’m very excited to bring on the Program Director for the Institute for Excellence in Sales Women in Sales Program including our award-winning Women in Sales Leadership Forum, please join me in welcoming Gina Stracuzzi.

Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you, Fred, nice seeing everybody, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’m super excited to get talking with my guest, Jamie, she’s going to help us get in the right frame of mind and ixnay all those limiting beliefs so we can rock 2021 even if we are all in our houses. Jamie and I are going to dig down and figure out how we can get rid of some of the limiting beliefs that hold us back so Jamie, welcome.

Jamie Crosbie: Thank you so much, Gina, pleasure to be here with you.

Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you. Jamie, tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started.

Jamie Crosbie: I started my company, ProActivate 16 years ago and prior to that served as Vice President of Sales at Career Builder and prior to that, I was in the traditional staffing industry leading sales and operations. On a more personal note, when I was young I remember my mom telling me often in various situations that when I would feel nervous or uncomfortable, that meant I was growing and that to get out of your comfort zone was actually a goal because it meant growth. I was introduced to the concept of peak performance mindset at a young age and then several years ago got certified in the area of high performance mindset. I do workshops and keynotes around the country in this very area and it’s so impactful in the area of sales because sales increase 38% when you’re at your optimal level of mindset

With all that being said, I got certified in that and my company, ProActivate helps sales leaders of revenue generating companies to protect and propel revenue as it relates to talent in the area of sales, sales leadership, marketing and things of that nature. A passion of mine and a purpose is to help others really maximize who they were truly created to be and be able to perform at optimal levels personally and professionally so that’s why I’m so excited to be here in this discussion with you today.

Gina Stracuzzi: First, let me just say yay mom, that is great advice because sometimes we think that if we’re uncomfortable, it just wasn’t meant to be and your mom was right, it’s really the opposite, isn’t it?

Jamie Crosbie: It really is. I have children and of course I teach my children that if you have a gut instinct that something is not right, of course that’s different but if you’re just nervous, you have butterflies, you’ve got that excited scared feeling, that is growth and that is normal when you step outside of your comfort zone. When you do, that means you’re elevating to a new level so you want to do that. It’s really been a game changer as a parent and a professional.

Gina Stracuzzi: The excited piece really needs to be embraced. Let’s talk a little bit about what you think holds us back and how that might hold us back in 2021. This has been an unprecedented time so we’ve got to come up with some new things.

Jamie Crosbie: One of the biggest challenges we have and what really inhibits our performance is our mind. Naturally, Gina, we have 60,000 thoughts a day which is crazy, we’re not aware of all those thoughts. 80% of them are naturally negative so learning to recognize when that happens and flip the script, that really gets in the way. What inhibits our performance is us and more specifically, it’s what’s in our mind and what our thoughts are that lead to certain behaviors and actions and results. Interestingly enough, many of us as sales organizations or individuals or sales leadership, we’re very focused on the skill set of salespeople and aren’t so focused on developing mindset but 80% of sales success – and our success in any role as individuals – is based on mindset and 20% is skill set. Mindset is what often gets in the way and holds us back.

Gina Stracuzzi: What percentage of those 60,000 thoughts are negative?

Jamie Crosbie: 80% naturally unless you learn how to grow your mindset but if you just look at the natural science of it, we have 60,000 thoughts a day and naturally if we’re just in our automatic mindset operating system, 80% go to the negative and we often pass right over those thoughts. I love this example, often when I do a keynote I’ll ask for a volunteer and you can have a room of 500 CEOs or VPs of Sales, it could be thousands, the results is always the same. One or maybe two people stand up to volunteer and when they do, they come up and I’ll say, “What’s your name? Nice to meet you, here’s a hundred dollars in cash, you may have a seat” and everyone’s saying, “I would have volunteered if I knew that.” That’s a really poignant question, I say to everyone else, “In that moment when I said I need a volunteer, what thought went through your mind that you probably didn’t even notice until we’re talking about it now?” The truth that most people come up with – and that really happens to us – is they think, “I don’t want to embarrass myself, I might look stupid, I don’t know what to say.” There’s a myriad of negative thoughts and we do it all the time and we miss the opportunity for the “hundred dollars” or many opportunities because we hold ourselves back with our thoughts.

Gina Stracuzzi: That hundred dollars represents a big fail because if we’re afraid we’re going to fall on our face or make ourselves look stupid or whatever, we hesitate. That hundred dollars is representative of so many things. That’s wild, 80%, they are under the radar but they do affect ourselves and the way we think.

Jamie Crosbie: More importantly, we can learn to flip that script and that’s what I teach in these mindset workshops or we talk about at a higher level in the keynotes but we can learn to change that and think at a higher level so that we don’t have that happen.

Gina Stracuzzi: Considering what we’ve all been going through and the idea that there doesn’t seem to be any end to it on the horizon if anything is going to get extended, what would you suggest for people who run teams to how they might help their teams overcome these limiting beliefs, these challenges that they have right now?

Jamie Crosbie: What I liken this to is helping your team live in the solutions room versus the situations room. What Carol Dweck teaches – she’s one of the pioneers in the field of mindset science and she’s written this book [Mindset: Change the Way You Think to Fulfill Your Potential]. It shows the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and this is as sales leaders, people leading sales teams, our job is to teach our team to embrace a growth mindset especially right now. It’s more challenging than ever, we have to work with the challenges in our mind more so than ever because there’s a lot going on in our world as we all know.

Here’s what happens, often our team says, “Here’s the problem, I’ve got this problem” whether it’s COVID, quota, comp plan, the territory or whatever it is. “These are all the reasons why I’m challenged” and they just only see the problem and that is an example of a fixed mindset or what I say, living in the situation room. You’re just talking about the situation, as leaders we need to teach our teams to embrace a growth mindset which is saying, “Here is an obstacle and here are possible solutions.” People who have a growth mindset live in the solutions room and they are thinking of how to overcome this with anything you can control. Obviously there are things we can’t control.

One of the things as a leader of a team I would throw out there is people can’t come to you with a problem without coming with a few solutions. I tell my team this all the time, you can come and say, “Here’s the issue and here are a couple things I thought of, what else can you think?” and we can brainstorm, but don’t just come and dump the problem. At a lot of companies where we’ve done these workshops, obviously right now it’s a little bit different, it’s a virtual solutions room but they create a solutions room. When someone comes to talk about one of the challenges or one of the hard things, “Let’s go to the solutions room and talk about how we might overcome that.” I would encourage leaders of teams to do this exercise with their teams to say, “What’s the #1 challenge you’re facing right now that would change the trajectory of your success? Living in the situation room you just thought this was the problem, but now let’s move to the solutions room and talk about some solutions.” Pair up in a team or small groups or just even one-on-one with the leader of the team to take that challenge and create solutions that are within our control. What are the things we can control about this?

Gina Stracuzzi: I was thinking about this virtual solutions room, even the act of taking it from a phone call into another Zoom but maybe it’s decorated somehow to jolt people out of their current mindset. A couple of things came to mind as you were talking, Jamie and that’s the intersection between mindset and limiting belief but also right now mental health, I know this is taking things a little out of the business realm but it affects the business.

Jamie Crosbie: It does.

Gina Stracuzzi: Mental health is precarious at best, even the strongest of us who feel the strongest, I think everybody perseveres to the level they can depending on their circumstances, but it plays on you. I think it messes with your mindset in ways that you don’t even imagine so I wonder about the intersection of all those things and what you see with teams

Jamie Crosbie: First of all, it absolutely is more challenging now than ever even if you’re a person who always has that positive high-performance mindset, it’s challenging to sustain that right now. That’s just real, people who are the most positive ever, I’ve talked to several of them and they’re like, “I feel like I might be depressed” or at least this stands out like this. We have to activate peak performance in ourselves differently than ever so self-activation is one of the things we can do to grow our mindset. These are the simple things but right now, the self-activation piece in terms of the mindset growth is one of the simplest things but I feel like they’re obvious but we don’t always do them. For example, eating the right foods or getting enough sleep or listening to music that energizes you or removing negative people from your life or celebrating successes. Those are all things we’re like, “Yeah, sure” but are you really doing that? Are you doing the self-care you need?

One of the most important parts of self-activation which is just one of the growth modalities of mindset is starting your day with positive affirmations. There are days, quite honestly and especially right now, where you don’t feel like it but if you get up and do your positive affirmations, just practice that. I have a practice in the morning of saying three things I’m grateful for and then saying my affirmations. One of them, “I refuse to worry about things that are out of my control” or, “God has a plan and a purpose for my life”, whatever they are, I have a list of like ten, “I choose faith over fear, courage over comfort.” These types of things are reaffirming and sometimes you just have to do it, you have to go through the act of them to believe it again and jolt ourselves. Another part of self-activation is just exercise, there have been studies that show just getting that exercise is as effective as an antidepressant. I think I would say just in the area of how this all intersects, it’s a real thing, people are challenged in the area of mental health right now more than ever and people aren’t alone. Even those individuals who feel like, “This is one of the things I never struggle with”, right now they’re struggling.

Another key to growing our mindset, Gina, and really flipping the script between the thoughts that are negative, the 60,000 thoughts a day and 80% that naturally go negative, one of the keys to changing that is engaging the inner CEO. Our inner CEO is in the prefrontal cortex of our minds and it essentially is what allows us to think at a higher level. The inner CEO is the thing that regulates our mindset so when you notice that you have that negative thought and you’re able to capture it and then think at a higher level, detach from the emotion that you’re feeling at the time, that’s what allows us to view our situation from a higher perspective and perform optimally. One great example of that is Sully Sullenberger who was in a crisis situation and was able to save 155 lives even though he was told to go back to La Guardia. He in a split second had to engage his inner CEO and think at a higher level without emotion and detach and be able to regulate his thinking. Because he did that, he saves 155 lives because he landed on the Hudson River. That’s a great example of doing that.

Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful, Jamie. This is Fred again, we obviously had a bit of technical difficulty. A guy like Sullenberger in the example you just gave, is that something that we all have or do you think a lot of this is innate? I know you teach mindset all over the world, of course now you’re doing it virtually, but are there ways that people can learn and grow to get to his level or are we only going to get so far? I’m curious on your thoughts on that.

Jamie Crosbie: We can and that’s what’s so exciting about this, this is why I feel so passionate about this because first of all, all of us have the inner CEO. It’s when we get out of the amygdala which is what makes us do emotional things and get mad or get angry or say things we don’t mean and we literally get in the prefrontal cortex of our brain where we’re able to think at a higher level. When I teach this, we talk about the stages of mindset development and one of the things we talk about is people feel like they’re stuck. Whatever happened to them as a kid when they were developing their mindset? Whatever bad things have ever happened, “That’s just my life” and that’s more of the victim mentality but we actually get to control what we live with. We can choose to throw certain things out of our mindset guardian, so to speak, throw the rocks out, stop watering the weeds and only water the flowers.

There are specific modalities of growing our mindset and we have to engage our inner CEO in order to do them but things like self-activation like I just spoke about or self-talk management or understanding your bigger why. Doing a true exercise on your dreams and goals, self-regulation, overcoming limiting beliefs, there are six steps that are specific to growing our mindset that we can learn, we learn to take those thoughts captive and flip the script and think at a higher level. The results of that in sales is increasing our sales by 38%.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about sales professionals. We’re doing today’s show, it’s December 1st so we’re nine months into wherever we are right now, there are some bright things on the horizon with vaccination and therapeutics but at the same time, things are spiking. People have spent Thanksgiving with a couple as compared to traveling and seeing each other and it’s probably going to be the same thing for the December holidays as well. What are some of the suggestions that you have right now for some of the sales professionals to end the year strong and then also of course starting the year strong? What are some of your suggestions for sales leaders who are working with their teams to understand where they might be going through right now so they could be as effective as possible?

Jamie Crosbie: For the leaders specifically that are leading teams, I think you asked a really important crucial question. What can they do to better understand? I think one of the things we often miss – and we’re all guilty of it – is as leaders of sales teams or organizations, we’re constantly talking about quota. We’re talking about where we stand according to quota and we have to talk about that, that’s a real issue but the salesperson took the job and wants to hit quota for a bigger reason, they have a bigger reason than just hitting quota. The goal of the company is quota, the commitment of the salesperson is quota but the bigger why behind it for the salesperson is something that as managers we typically don’t know or ask. One of the biggest jobs we have is to understand our team members’ bigger why so that when we’re each setting our own goals we think about the what, why and how. The what is often the specific goal, the how is how they’re going to do it but the why is the bigger purpose behind it, the meaning behind it. The bigger the why, the bigger the try and the better the how. As a sales leader, I would encourage you to go through an exercise with your team members to understand why they’re really there. For some it’s providing for their family, for some it’s building a dream home or a vacation home or helping their kids get through college, whatever it is so then when we do talk about quota, we’re really talking about it according to their bigger purpose. How is this going with your children and reaching this dream or goal or this vacation home? That’s one of the things because it keeps our eye on the prize and the bigger picture.

The other thing I think is helping our team members engage in this growth mindset where we truly take them whether it’s physical or virtual to a solutions room, where we start really talking about what the #1 challenges are, “Let’s talk about what we can control in there and let’s brainstorm some solutions to this.” I would encourage them too to provide mindset development for their teams. Again, 80% of success is based on mindset so to provide some workshops or training or anything in this area of mindset is more impactful than anything in terms of their results.

Fred Diamond: Jamie, let’s talk a little specific. Everybody in the most part in B to B sales and most of our listeners to the Women in Sales webinar and the Sales Game Changers podcast are in B to B sales, most of them aren’t really in offices right now. How do you suggest that they engage in these conversations about mindset knowing that almost everybody is interacting like we are right now? They’re interacting over some type of video conference, there’s a fatigue associated with video conference, you can only see people above the breastplate, if you will. What are your tips and suggestions for having impactful conversations as a sales leader for this particular topic and as a participant, as an individual contributor today? What’s the best way to have those types of conversations?

Jamie Crosbie: I know most everyone is virtual and experiencing a little bit of Zoom fatigue or GoToMeeting fatigue or any of that, but I do think it’s important to have these conversations on camera face-to-face. Do what you can to make it fun. I’ve been delivering these workshops virtually and you can do it in a very engaging way by having polls, by having breakout rooms, exercises and things like that that are truly engaging. I know that if I can do that, the leaders can do that as well but you could also get someone outside, an outside speaker or someone to bring something different to your team so it mixes it up. The other thing is just little things, Fred. We have a theme for next year, I don’t think any of my team is on this so I can say – although one team member. Our theme for next year is going to be gratitude, having gratitude for everything we have because we can’t control everything going on. One of the things we’re going to do on every call is start with a gratitude practice and we’re saying what we’re thankful for or we have a happy hour taking it to a whole other level.

You can make some of this fun, “Bring objects that represent the #1 challenge you’re facing right now and you’re going to show the object on the Zoom to everyone. We’re going to have a happy hour and let the juices flow and brainstorm how to overcome these challenges.” I think we’ve got to do stuff, wear your favorite hat or for example, we’re doing our company kick-off meeting virtually, we are having a live entertainer on their virtually, we’re having a mixologist teach us how to mix a drink, we send a big box to everyone ahead with all these fun things for the meeting. We got to mix it up, add a little spice, make it fun and it depends on your culture but you can use technology in ways to really engage people. I’ve had some virtual meetings, Fred, where we all said, “This was even better than when we were together.” As much as we want to be together, we felt like we were.

Fred Diamond: I have one last question for you and then I’m going to ask you for your final thought. You mentioned gratitude and gratitude comes up frequently. We’re doing four webinars a week, we’re going to be starting our fifth starting January 1st, we’re talking about a lot of topics that sales professionals can implement and should be implementing right now to be successful. Most of the people who are participating or who are watching today’s webinar or listening as a Sales Game Changers podcast, they want to get better, they want to take their sales career to the next level. They want to provide more for their company and for their family. You mentioned gratitude and gratitude comes out a lot and again, Jamie Crosbie, you’re a world-renowned expert on mindset. Why is gratitude so important? You mentioned the gratitude practice, talk about how that can really be positive for the sales professionals listening to today’s webinar. Why is it important and then how can you really make it impactful in your career?

Jamie Crosbie: I think it’s important, Fred, because that practice alone helps us to overcome our automatic mindset operating system, we have all these thoughts every day and they flip negative a lot of the time. We literally can rewire our brains by engaging our inner CEO to think at a higher level. The practice of gratitude actually is part of that rewiring so when we stop every day and just start the day or at some point in the day have a practice of thinking about a few things we’re thankful for, a few great things that happened that day, at a deep level it starts to do that rewiring. All of the challenging things we’re facing right now, it helps us to reframe that and when we can teach ourselves how to reframe, we achieve at much more optimal levels.

There’s lots of fun ways to do this, there’s a gratitude journal on Amazon, it’s called The Five Minute Gratitude Journal and it gives you a little practice to start your day. We have a gratitude jar on the counter in our home and in the mornings I have my kids write down one thing they’re thankful for and sometimes we’ll read those. It’s just doing something that stops you whether it’s just you knowing when you wake up you’re going to say three things that you’re grateful for, you will start wiring your brain accordingly to where the negative thoughts are actually more positive and the script is flipping because of that practice.

Fred Diamond: Jamie, we got a comment here from Marcie and Marcie says, “I write in a gratitude journal every morning before I get out of bed.” Sue says, “This is fantastic, thank you so much, Jamie.” Jamie, you may not realize this but you’ve impacted so many people in your career by helping them get focused on the most optimal mindset to take their sales, their business and their leadership careers to the next level. There’s been so much value in what you’ve done with not just helping individuals but then helping them with their families, with their companies, right now extended families and friendships as well. I want to acknowledge you for all the fantastic work you’ve done in your career presenting these ideas and helping companies and people really take it up a notch.

Jamie Crosbie: Thank you.

Fred Diamond: You’ve given us so many great ideas, give us a final action step. What should people watching the webinar or listening to today’s podcast do? One thing that they should do that’s going to help them take their careers to the next level.

Jamie Crosbie: One of the biggest challenges we have is limiting beliefs and we don’t realize that we really have a few very poignant limiting beliefs that impact us. What I would encourage you to do – and if there’s anyone who’s interested, I have an actual exercise you could do that I’d be happy to send you and you could email me – ask yourself the question, what is the #1 obstacle that I’m facing right now that’s holding me back from being truly who I was created to be personally or professional to being my very best self? Then examine the belief that’s associated with that. There’s a true exercise of going through it thinking, “When did I start believing that? What happened in my life?” Because there’s a lot of lies that we tell ourselves that you wouldn’t tell your best friend. If you were treating yourself like your own best friend, you would be saying something totally different to yourself. We all probably have a really big limiting belief that’s holding us back and to figure out what that is and go through the exercise of adopting a new belief is very powerful. That would be my #1 exercise and tip that I would engage in.

Fred Diamond: You said there’s a few that are on that list, hopefully you’re not going to have like a hundred. As you’re talking about this, I know one that’s my limiting belief and then get deep into it, find out why it’s there and really work to uncover it. On behalf of Gina Stracuzzi, the Program Director for the IES Women in Sales Program and the Institute for Excellence in Sales, I want to thank Jamie Crosbie for being on today’s webinar, thank you so much for everything you do. To everybody else, see you tomorrow on the Sales Game Changers Live.

Jamie Crosbie: Thank you.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 305: Women in Sales: Growth Mindset Expert Jamie Crosbie Says This Is a Great Way to Get Past Your Self-Limiting Beliefs first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on November 10, 2020. It featured author of Beat the Bots Anita Nielsen.]

Register for Tuesday’s Women in Sales: Powerful Suggestions for Growing Your Sales Career with Patty Trexler here.

Find Anita on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 299: Women in Sales: Anita Nielsen Discusses How Focusing on All Aspects of Your Life Can Improve Your Sales Performance

ANITA’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Give yourself some time to just ask yourself, “What could I be doing right now to help me be better at sales?” The one skill that I know that most high-performing sales professional have is they’re always good at is asking good discovery questions so that’s one that I’m constantly harping on, if you need an example. So say to yourself, “I need to get better at asking discovery questions so now I’ll go look online or look on LinkedIn for some ideas on how to do that.”

Gina Stracuzzi: I’m really excited about my guest, Anita Nielsen. She is a sales performance coach, she works with individuals and companies and she and I have been having some great conversations around what’s happening to our will to sell. We’re going to have a great conversation today, in the meantime, Anita why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience?

Anita Nielsen:  Thank you, I’m excited to be here today. I have been in and around sales and sales support for just over 20 years and I like to caveat that would stop doing the math in your head. I’ve been just overjoyed to be able to have the privilege of working with sales professionals one on one as a sales performance coach but I also do sales enablement coaching which is more with sales teams, as an embedded coach I go with them on their customer calls. That’s what I’m focused on right now, I absolutely love what I do and I’m just happy to be here today.

Gina Stracuzzi: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what your coaching looks like? Then take us in normal time and then talk to us a little bit about how that has changed.

Anita Nielsen:  On a regular basis I like to focus on the whole human, I don’t go in and just focus on sales strategy or sales performance or metrics and numbers, I like to go in and focus on a few different things. What can I do to help increase knowledge? What can I do to help them improve their skills? Last and most important, what you alluded to, what can I do about their will? Will basically means their desire, their motivation, what they need, confidence, those things that actually help them be successful at sales. Typically the ratio is 40 minutes on knowledge and scale, maybe 20 minutes tops on the will and that includes understanding what’s going on in their life and what the backdrop is to whatever their sales context is at that point in time. What’s happened since March, I would say, everyone has been going through a lot so my coaching sessions have shifted a little bit. Basically what we’re looking at now is rather than having this 40-20, I’ve got either a 30-30 or 40-20 the other way around because people do have so many things that they want to talk about. That’s what I’ve been working on and it’s interesting because everyone has been impacted by this pandemic and all the other things going on in our world, it’s just a matter of debris and I think that determines what I focus on with any of my given coaching clients.

Gina Stracuzzi: That leads me to a question, what brings people to you? Let’s talk about individuals for a moment and then we can talk about teams because the whole goal of this webcast is to help people think about how they can improve their sales game. I wanted to have a sales coach on for a really long time because I think sometimes drilling down on an individual basis as to what’s holding you back or what gets in your way, where you feel like you get tripped up all the time could be a really important gate to open. I wonder sometimes if people hesitate to reach out to a professional on their own, they might do it for their life and they might do it for their overall career but the idea of saying, “How can you help me up my game?”, what brings people to a sales coach’s door?

Anita Nielsen:  I think it’s this self-awareness that before even the pandemic in modern sales we have to continuously improve. We’re competing with AI computers, bots, all these things so as sales professionals we have to stay sharp in our game and continue to hone our skills. I’m online a lot, I speak on LinkedIn, I do different speaking engagements, I think people hear those types of things and just see that, “This is someone who understands the discipline of sales but also maybe has a style that can help get the best out of me.” That’s what it boils down to, before I became a coach I just am a coach, it took a while for me to go through that journey but coaching is who I am.

When I meet someone I can see almost immediately the potential that they have that they may not even see, so then my goal becomes getting them to see that and figure out how they can improve skills and knowledge to get to the best they can, which we all know is going to change once they get there. To continually improve is the goal and self-awareness is what the trigger is. Once you recognize that there are things you could be doing better, that’s when I think you reach out for help. At least I can say for me when I was earlier on in my career, that’s what led me to get coaching because I knew that I was not having as much success Googling and watching different classes and stuff online. Having that discipline behind what I do to enrich my mind, my skills, that’s where a coach came in handy.

Gina Stracuzzi: What are some of the things that people come to you with? Do they say, “I just choke up on the phone” or, “I’m really not doing well on video”? What are the types of things that they say to you and how do you as a coach start to drill down on if their skill isn’t growing maybe because their will is a little defeated? I would think that that’s particularly true right now so the conversations we’ve had have been around that. When the will is suffering, the skill will suffer and then the sales will suffer so how do you start to unpack that? What are some of the questions that people might ask themselves if they think maybe their will is suffering or their skills are suffering or their sales are suffering? What might they ask themselves?

Anita Nielsen:  What I like to ask them right off the bat is, “Tell me about your plight.” That’s a question that I actually coach sales professionals to use with their customers as well because you open it up to them just sharing what is going on with them. I don’t necessarily marrow in on what’s professionally happening, what’s personally happening, etcetera, I let them go through that exercise of, “What is my plight right now?” It’s amazing to me how people really don’t look at that until they ask the question so right off the bat we’re taking a look at the things that are a struggle for them and inevitably, especially right now because we are all in change, it has been the fact that they’re just anxious. There’s so much going on and they’re not confident with their customers right now because of the environment so any number of things.

Coaching as a rule goes back to how well you ask questions and I’m not going to lie, I think a lot of times the questions that we ask as coaches are very similar to what a psychologist would ask. As coaches, at least for me being someone who’s really focused on the whole human, it’s as important to understand the emotions of our clients as it is to understand their skills and what their day to day sales motion is. That’s where the will comes in so I have to ask the questions to see, “Is their will really being impacted by this or is it something different? Is it really that they just don’t have the knowledge for, for example, how to communicate on video? Is that it or is it a fear that communicating on video isn’t going to be enough?” It’s ascertaining the difference and then going back and continuing to ask questions to help them see it and then figure out how to work on it. It’s a process, you start off with this big question and you narrow down into what the root is of that issue or challenge that they indicated in their plight that I asked about.

Gina Stracuzzi: Is there any question that you might pose to the audience to get them to think about whether or not their will is struggling at this point?

Anita Nielsen:  I think one other question is, “What am I doing different than what I normally do?” and that’s a really good place to start, that would be one. Ask yourself, “Am I doing anything different?” Inevitably as salespeople we’ve moved a lot more to virtual than we had in the past, a lot of people travel and do face-to-face meetings, it’s foundational to the way that we look at selling. That’s been a huge change so ask, “What am I doing differently?” and then work through that and say, “I’m doing this differently, am I doing it well? Could I be doing it better to align with what my sales context is right now?” That self-searching, that self-awareness is really important and I think unless we’re deliberate about it and have some discipline around it, it’s easy to get caught in the day to day but it’s when you pull back and ask those questions. “Am I where I need to be? What should I be learning? Where are my skills lacking?”

What’s interesting is when I ask one of my coaching clients, “Help me understand what some of your challenges are today.” Once they articulate them, it’s almost seen on video that they’re thinking through, “Okay, I can handle this, this is not insurmountable.” Whereas if you’re going through your day to day and you just feel this weight of all these challenges and issues, you don’t even know how big that monster is until you’ve actually sat down and identified it. I think that’s a pretty good place to start and I think sometimes people look at that monster much bigger than it actually is. Once you do get to what the reality is, I think you can work through it.

Gina Stracuzzi: Those are good questions to ask yourself. I would think this type of reflection, do it even if there’s not a pandemic raging around us to maybe on a quarterly basis say, “Has something changed?” or, “What needs to change and what am I doing right, what am I doing wrong?” and think about it that way. It might help you find your problems before they get too big.

Anita Nielsen:  Absolutely, I think that’s what it boils down to. People that sign up for coaching typically they’re every week, every other week depending on what the needs are. I would say if you’re not doing coaching, at a minimum, quarterly sit down and ask yourself, “Where did I grow over the past quarter? Where did I fall behind? What are things that I’m seeing other people around me are doing to great success yet I haven’t adopted?” Critically asking yourself these questions, “How can I do it better?” I’ll give you an example. One of the clients that I work with right now, their sales calls get recorded so I get a transcript of them, I’ve got them now going back and reading that transcript and looking at it with a critical eye and walking through it and saying, “What could I have done better?” The idea is that I come back and I read it and I give them my feedback. Inevitably they come back with far more that they thought they could improve on that I do and that’s the exercise. The fact that when you’re in it, you don’t realize that you’re making these little mistakes or these things that you could be doing better that would completely up your game. I think that’s the beautiful thing about the coaching relationship is you’ve gotten someone to nudge you through it so things that maybe you wouldn’t see, you’re going to be able to see much more clearly. Self-reflection is important.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think the difference in listening to you is there’s someone nurturing, helping you look at it whereas if you go back and look at a video or listen to a recording, all you’re going to do is be critical of yourself but not in a constructive fashion, necessarily and I think that’s probably the difference. It feels like you’ve got a friend at your side that wants to help you so I like that idea.

Anita Nielsen:  That’s a trust relationship, I love the way that you just said that, I like to call myself an advocate for sales professionals whether that’s a sales professional that I work with or a team. My job is to figure out what can make them better and I’ll tell you, something for me when I became a coach that was really difficult was I just love people so I’m genuinely attracted to people and wanting to help them. Part of that is you want to be looked as the person that is helpful, you want to be liked in some way so early on in my coaching career I had to learn a lesson about how my need to be accepted and to be liked has to always take the back seat to the need to push one of my clients out of their own way.

I’ve come to call it tough love but sometimes they can do all the reflection in the world but if they’re not getting it, I’m going to jump in and say, “Listen, here’s what you’re not seeing, this is your blind spot. Go ruminate on it, be angry at me for a day or two and then come back.” Once I started to do that I found that when I did, those are the times when the clients that I work with came back and were more grateful for it than anything because no one else had shared that with them. I believe people genuinely do want to improve so when someone comes from a place of compassion and this desire to help you succeed, it’s a lot easier to take a look at that than it is if it’s on some performance report or something, it’s easier to write that off.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting too, the idea of tough love and our blind spots, nobody wants to see them yet if we’re honest with ourselves, we know they’re there. For myself I can say in all honesty I know what they are and I most days choose to believe that I’ve walked around that and risen above them but the truth is it’s probably not true at all. Let’s talk about that a little bit, when someone has a blind spot that is standing in the way of their success.

Anita Nielsen:  Right now is a case in point, right now I think people are anxious and they don’t necessarily know what weight they’re carrying around and because of that, they’ve moved into this mode of, “I just need to survive every day, everything just needs to be fine for me to get through this” or tomorrow is just Groundhog’s Day and how I’m going to get through it. I think that’s a blind spot for people because I look at resilience which is something that I think is so important especially when you go through a crisis, first of all how much resilience you had going into it and how you build that resilience as you go through it. A lot of times when you think of resilience you get this image of the rubber band snapping back and I disagree. If we look today at what resilience looks like, no one’s going to snap back to exactly what they were before this crisis or pandemic, it’s just not possible because the world has changed. It then becomes a choice, “Do I continue on the way that I’ve been going and keep on dreaming about this world that’s never coming back or do I try to figure out how to step up and go through it?” I think that’s so important but I’m finding a lot of people aren’t so when I speak to my sales clients I give them plenty of space to talk about what their challenges are. If I start to see that they’re not talking about the things that are creating anxiety, I start asking questions about it.

I had a conversation with a client the other day and they were so anxious because they’re working at home, so is their significant other, they’ve got kids that are homeschooled and it takes a toll. Any of us listening that’s been through that knows what that looks like and they were just going on about that but they didn’t acknowledge that that was anything that was impacting their day to day in business. At some point after I let them speak about it I said, “If you think that is not impacting how you bring yourself to work and what you do during work every day, you are sorely mistaken.” We’ve talked enough over the past couple years about mindset but this is even more than that. When you have some level of anxiety which is absolutely the product of living in this type of chaos and crisis, it’s a lot more difficult to see clearly and to see your blind spots. What I think resilience is, is being able to step up and step into that crisis with this idea that, “Not only am I not going to let this break me, I’m going to make it help me be better. What am I going to learn through this?” I think it’s funny, I joke about it but when I say things like that I’m not trying to be Oprah, it is really true [laughs]. If you stop and say, “What am I going to do about this pandemic?” and you adopt this idea of, “I’ve got to grow, where are the nooks and crannies that I can look at right now whether it’s because I have more time or because I need to come up with more creative ways to engage with my customer?” Then go work on those things.

I think that there’s a lot of people out there that tend to just take this chaos and let it diminish them in some way or give that chaos permission to make them less than what they typically are. That’s where my tough love absolutely kicks in because I want to say to them, “Acknowledge that you’re dealing with this, now figure out what you can do to not only cope with it, what can you do to flip it around so that when you come out the other end of this, you’re stronger and you will have learned something?” There’s something in psychology they call post-traumatic stress, I think most people have heard of that so once you go through a crisis after that you’re scarred. I think it should be post-traumatic growth and I feel like the people that go in with that thought process are going to come out on the other end much stronger and of course more resilient than those who are just day to day trying to go through it. I don’t know if that answered your question or not but this is something I’m so passionate about right now. There’ve been so many people wasting this opportunity to relook at how they are going through their day to day and how they process that.

Gina Stracuzzi: That was perfect because that’s the name of our discussion, it’s not just to go through it, it’s to grow through it. We have a question from Supriya, she wants to know, “What do individual coaching plan timelines look like and what are the modules being looked at?”

Anita Nielsen:  That’s a great question. It’s individual but in general what I like to try to do is a six month, “What are your goals and objectives of the six month period?” when I start to work with someone. That’s enough of a time for them to see the impact of a coaching so I like to get their goals down and then check back at six months. Beyond that, the overall plan is the one year, three year and five year is what I try to look at and then I work backwards. If your goal today is that someday you want to start have your own startup and you’re in sales right now, one of the things that I need to do in the next five years is help you amp up your financial skills, help you figure out better how to lead operations. Those are the intervals that I find I’m most comfortable with but what I’ll tell you is that coaches vary vastly in this and it’s really fluid. The last thing you want to do as a coach is have someone put down an objective and have them not attain it. It takes very careful thought before you put those down, especially the three and the five year because that is so far into the future, but that’s how you do it. You create the objectives in the beginning and then you revisit them at least every six months to a year. You want to look out five years ahead, that’s been what I’ve found is the most comfortable.

Gina Stracuzzi: What you would discuss, let’s just say someone worked with you for six months and their one year goal was to start a company and their five year goal was to do X number of sales. What you would discuss over those six months are the steps that’s going to take to reach that goal?

Anita Nielsen:  Yes, big steps. I don’t get into much of the tactical because it’s impossible to know what those tactical steps are that far out, but at a high level as I just mentioned, if you want to start a company then it’s much more than sales. I would look at it as business acumen so the knowledge aspect of it would be, “What does it look like as a business leader, as an entrepreneur?” Then I would go back and I would help to build the knowledge, I would help to build the skill and I would help them with their will. In this situation, the example that you gave, if it is to become somebody who’s going to have their own startup I would then try to figure out how I can help them build their knowledge. I would do some research and I would find some articles that I would share with them and then use to discuss during our sessions. It could be that I know someone who’s working in a startup incubator and I would set up a meeting with that coaching client so they can ask some questions and learn.

Those are the types of things that I’m looking at in terms of knowledge, how do I enrich their base of knowledge, what they need to learn? The second thing would be skill, what are the skills that they need to have in order to be able to be successful for that goal? As I mentioned before, operational efficiency, those types of things have to come into play and what I’ve found with experience is when you’ve got a sales-minded person and they start throwing business, finance and operations are two areas where there’s definitely room for improvement. I help shine a light on that and it’s not the only one so just for the sake of conversation, that’s one of the big ones in this scenario.

Then will, this is the hardest one because I have to ascertain from them, are they putting this goal out there because they truly believe they can achieve it or are they putting it out there because it’s this tie in the sky, it’s nice to have but they haven’t built inside of them yet the confidence to go achieve that goal? I’ll tell you, it’s way more times than I would like it to be is when people maybe think they have a goal but they – I hate to say self-sabotage, but they kind of get in their own way along the way. That’s where the real digging on the coach’s part comes in to figure out, “Where is it that’s making them second-guess themselves?” and work on that. The last part of this all is empowerment, you want to make sure that you’re doing everything you can as a coach to encourage them and empower them and that’s how you address the three areas of knowledge, skill and will. You want to educate them, you want to enable them and you want to empower them, those are the three things that I like to focus on. There’s an honorable mention for things like tools, but I try to stay away from that just because I’m not very good at tools and technology but that’s another area that I would help them figure out if they needed to. It’s a simple framework.

Gina Stracuzzi: We got on the idea of someone starting their own business but what if it was a salesperson whose one year goal was to blow everybody out of the water and be the top salesman but their two-year goal, five-year goal was to get into sales leadership and maybe take a senior VP level? What would you talk to them about?

Anita Nielsen:  Going back to the framework, what are the gaps in their knowledge, what are the gaps in their skill and what are the gaps in their will? This is a conversation so I can’t just in one or two sessions understand these things but working with them I get a feel for where their gaps are. For example, a lot of times you have sales professionals that grow into this role of sales leader yet they’ve never really had the ability or the desire to coach people. They’ve been super successful as a salesperson, they’ve knocked out of the park hundreds and thousands of times but they’ve never had to have that one on one impact with a person. Right off the bat I know that their skill set around coaching is something that I’m going to have to help them get at least a foundation for. Otherwise, when they do get to that point they’re going to struggle very quickly in the beginning.

The other thing is knowledge, one other thing that I found that salespeople just do not love is spreadsheets, doing presentations internally about metrics and numbers. Easing them into that thought process that when you take on a role as a sales leader, your world changes, you’re not an individual contributor anymore, you’re measured on how well your team does. That includes you literally measuring how your team is doing and learning from that data and getting insights that then help you coach and grow them. That’s the kind of thing that would have to happen in order to get to that role. Because that’s something that’s within my industry and I understand, it’s very easy for me to block out the steps of knowledge, skill and will that are needed. If it’s not, I’ll do some research, I’ll bring in somebody else that can help and in this situation, they have to see what their gaps are so part of my job then is, “How do I make this sales professional see that they aren’t necessarily somebody who’s focused on being a good coach throughout?” I make it sound direr than it is but you’ve got to have them see that because when you go in, if you’ve been a great salesperson you have this confidence and this invincibility. In order for that not to be shattered once you go into more of a leadership role, I try to prepare them for, “These are the types of things” and start that mindset shift before that role ever even comes. Then there’s the tactical things like in between now and then what are the specific pieces of knowledge that you need? Is there a book that I think that they should read beforehand? Is there a webinar that I think they should check out? Because I’m a voracious reader and I’m always looking out to learn more things that are valuable potentially to my clients, at any given point in time I’ve got something that I can give to them that’ll help them with that skill or the knowledge.

The will part is the nurturing component of it so once they do see that there’s their gap in their skill, they have to feel that it’s a safe environment. I’m not judging them, my job again is to be devoted to their success and that’s based on what they’ve outlined. It’s a lot easier to try to improve yourself when you feel comfortable sharing your shortcomings and this is why often times as a sales leader it is really hard to be a good coach because your sales professional or your team may not be as open with you as they would potentially be with an outside coach. That will part which is essentially the go or no-go aspect of any goal that you have in this realm, that’s something that I think requires that additional, like you said, the friend that’s with you, the angel on your shoulder – or the devil in some cases, they tell me. In any case, that’s what the coaching creates value with.

Gina Stracuzzi: Amy S. wants to know how you would know if you would be a good leader, and you work with people on that.

Anita Nielsen:  I love this question, there are a few different ways that I would approach that. Luckily, people have their own gifts and one of mine is that I’m able to see leadership skill in people even if they’re not seeing it themselves and I’ve been – knock on a lot of wood here – very successful with that. Part of it is that intuition and that experience that helps you see those characteristics but then there’s also a very deliberate way to go about it and discipline around it like what are the characteristics that you know a leadership position requires? I walk through those with that individual.

I had one coaching client who wanted to move into a leadership role yet I knew that they struggled with being able to communicate in a manner that didn’t make the other person feel like a dummy, I’m just giving a very honest example. I had to work with them to teach them how to communicate and to soften the edge of their communication so that when they approach their team members or whoever they would lead, they’re doing it from a place of compassion and not assuming that everyone understands what they understand. It’s a technical sales leader that I was working with and he was brilliant but he didn’t recognize that everyone around him wasn’t at his level, so that was a process, being able to recognize that you have to meet your people where they’re at. It’s a very powerful leadership skill to have and that’s the kind of thing that we would work on. There are assessments out there that help you determine where you’re at on that leadership scale and I’ll be honest, I don’t love assessments that much just because I feel like there’s room for error and people can game the system a little bit. That is something that I will reach for if I feel like I’m not getting as much input that I need from just that interaction with my client which typically is never an issue.

Gina Stracuzzi: Amy says thank you. Talk to us a little bit more about people, let’s say that they’re hesitant to work with a coach right now or maybe it’s just not in the cards for them. Are there self-coaching tools that they can use to sit themselves in front of a mirror and walk through some thought processes?

Anita Nielsen:  Yes, and the good news is we live in the world of Google so there’s 8,000 different things you could look at for self-improvement out there. What I would say is even if you’re not going to work with a coach, take a look on LinkedIn, for example. See some coaches that are out there talking about what’s going on and what they think is important for sales professionals and then go read it. I’m always on LinkedIn talking about, “This book was really good” or, “You better follow this person” so look for that type of information and then just do it at your own pace. What I will say – this is the hardest part – is a lot of times, part of the thing with coaching and especially with salespeople is the accountability piece of it. I found that salespeople will always put their customer’s need or the need of their job before they’ll put the need of their own development so that always gets put on the back burner.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I give one of my clients homework and they come back and they say they didn’t do it. I can promise you, 95% of them never do that again because they had to come in and say, “I failed at what I committed to do.” That is so powerful, it’s a lot easier to talk yourself out of getting something done than it is to walk up to a coach and say, “I made a commitment and I didn’t complete it.” It’s a very effective way to get your goals. That said, there’s a lot of ways that you can look into that will help you do the same thing, you just have to make sure that you’re really good at holding yourself accountable and don’t back-burner the things that you’re looking at to grow.

Gina Stracuzzi: For women, I think it’s even more so true. We’re already on the back burner when it comes to our own needs so if you add continually educating yourself and adding reflection periods, it’s probably a long list of things that are getting shoved to the back.

Anita Nielsen:  That’s right, but it takes a proactive mindset. You have to be able to take a step back and say, “I’m playing the long game here.” The day to day fires obviously I have to get through, but if I don’t invest a little bit of time each day or each week then I’m going to lose at the long game. If I’m not developing right now, six months to a year from now the world will have changed, will I be left behind? I think that’s one of my biggest fears on behalf of my sales professionals today, that’s what my book is about. There’s so much technology out there that’s rendering salespeople obsolete if they’re doing very transactional type sales so it becomes so much more about differentiating yourself on a more human-to-human level. That is something that you need to be learning how to do right now, some people call it soft skills, emotional intelligence, those are the types of things that you have to be looking at right now because in a year, two years, five years you’re going to need those. The only thing that differentiates you from robots is the things that make you uniquely human so you have to look at the long game. I think that takes self-awareness and I think it takes a commitment to do that, that’s where I think coaches are really helpful. When you’re not self-aware, they help you get there. I think that’s why it’s beneficial.

Gina Stracuzzi: Two things come to mind. One, tell me about your book and I was going to ask you about working with sales teams and the sales enablement piece.

Anita Nielsen:  The book is really about what I just said, it’s called Beat the Bots and basically it’s about how your humanity can future-proof your sales career. What I go into is a lot of basic psychological concepts, I go into soft skills like how do you show empathy, how do you build rapport, how do you create trust? How do you look at your customer as a whole human being and not someone who’s going to wield the pen that signs your deal? Those types of things are covered in the book and it’s really important because what’s in that book are things that robots cannot do yet. I use robot as the hyperbole and it’s funny, Beat the Bots, but the reality is it could be anything. It could be your competitor, it could be changes in the industry, what’s out there that you need to stay ahead of? That’s what this book talks about and in the environment we’re in right now, I joke about it saying this is an idea that’s time has come. Because people are doing so much more virtually, everyone’s feeling a little bit isolated better now than it was earlier on but people crave connection, it’s human, it’s how we’re wired. You cannot minimize the power of that so what are you doing now in this virtual world to ensure that you’re building that connection? That’s the theme of the book.

Gina Stracuzzi: Cindy asks where she can get this.

Anita Nielsen:  The book is on Amazon, it’s called Beat the Bots and you can just do Anita Nielsen and it’ll pop up, thank you.

On working with sales teams, to your other question, Gina is I go and I work with a sales leader and a lot of times, sales leaders will have their own gaps in their skill set and their knowledge. That manifests itself directly within the sales team so part of what I do is interesting how it ends up working out but it’s twofold. One is helping them determine the gaps in their sales team and then developing the education and the enablement and the empowerment programs to help get them there. In the meantime, I’m astute enough to know that the reason that those gaps are there is because there’s something missing at the leadership level so I also can coach that sales leader sometimes completely unbeknownst to them, I will admit.

It becomes a really powerful relationship because they can see that I’m in their corner and their salespeople’s corner. I think that’s one of those places where I really thrive and I’ve found that sometimes even after my sales team work is done, that project is done, I’ll continue on with sales leaders and I’ll work with them regardless of where the go. They’ve figured out that it’s a safe place where I can help them grow and then show them the results in their team without it being judgy or in a way that isn’t going to resonate well with them or make them uncomfortable. Again, back to the safe space and that compassion.

Gina Stracuzzi: Can you leave the audience with one or two tips to really charge up their will and by extension their skills in the coming days of this week?

Anita Nielsen:  Just this week, give yourself some time. Maybe it’s at one morning having your cup of coffee, turn off all the devices and just ask yourself, “What could I be doing right now to help me be better when I come out the other end?” And all the things that we’ve talked about would be helpful. One that I’ll tell you that’s really powerful in general from a sales standpoint, I found that the high performing sales professionals, the one skill that I know that they’re almost always good at is asking good discovery questions so that’s one that I’m constantly harping on. Maybe that’s it, if you need an example. That’s your example of, “I need to get better at asking discovery questions so now I’ll go look online, look on LinkedIn for some ideas on how to do that.” I guarantee there’s hundreds of eBooks out there, one that I’ve even done on discovery questions. Just take a look at that and make it part of your discipline.

The other thing is if you can’t do something like that, I found that there’s apps like Blinkist, for example which gives you bite-size pieces of different books and gets the key main ideas, that’s very easy to be able to listen to when you’re getting ready in the morning and brushing your teeth, etcetera. That’s something that’s really small but can have a much bigger impact because it is growing your knowledge. That’s one thing to do this week and the other thing is maybe sit down and give yourself a plan with some real goals even for just the six months knowing that we’re still going through this. Where do I need to be from a skill or knowledge or will standpoint in six months to ensure that I continue to be successful? It’s evolution and I’ll tell you right now, women especially, we are famous for helping our children, our significant others, our husbands, wives, customers thrive and grow but we are crap at doing it for ourselves [laughs] and I am absolutely guilty of that as well. You can be a coach but you’re still a human so you need to sit down and say, “Take a step back, what do I need?” then work from there.

It’s tough to give you a real solid tip because it is so dependent on who you are in your context but like almost everything else in sales, it starts with just asking those really good questions. Where am I today? Am I going in a direction? Am I getting close to a direction? What do I want to be and how do I let what’s going on right now make me better? Some salespeople have taken classes on how to be better on video, how to be more articulate, conference calls are happening via video and that’s something that they’ve grown. That’s a skill set they never had before and actually probably never thought they would want before but they’ve done it. Those types of questions, what are some things that I’m having to do right now that I can get much better at? Then next time god forbid something happens, I’m ready and I don’t have to go through that again.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 299: Women in Sales: Anita Nielsen Discusses How Focusing on All Aspects of Your Life Can Improve Your Sales Performance first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Fred Diamond on December 1, 2020. It featured sales leaders Monica McEwen from ThoughtSpot and Rosie Corcoran from Datasite.]

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Learn more about Monica here. Learn more about Rosie here.

EPISODE 298: Sales Leaders Monica McEwen and Rosie Corcoran Share Timeless Strategies for Success As We Near Year End

MONICA’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “While we’re all in a pandemic together, there’s a lot of different ways how that’s affecting people. I think that’s equally as important to bring that same empathy to your customers and your prospects so if you get somebody on the phone and they seem distracted, they seem like they might have something else going on, a child walks in the room, offer to take the meeting the next day. Understand that people are going through a lot right now and enter every conversation with empathy, compassion, understanding then preparing for it.”

ROSIE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “First, understand what motivates you and why you want to be successful. Second, find the right balance between seller development, your understanding of the product and the time that you spend with your customers, and your planning and preparation. If you could find the right balance among those three things and take a proactive approach, it’s going to help you with your success. Third, remain positive because we are all fortunate to be in these positions where we can be having conversations like this about how to be successful and it’s important to see the big picture.”

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited, we have Monica McEwen from ThoughtSpot and Rosie Corcoran from Datasite. Monica, you may recognize her, she was a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Monica, it must have been 2017, it was a while ago, thank you so much for being on the show today. Rosie, Datasite, you’re in London today, myself and Monica, we’re in Northern Virginia. First of all, congratulations on all your success, we’re excited to have you, you’re the third leader we’ve had from Datasite. Tell us how things are going for you? How are you going as you lead your team and as you lead your organization?

Rosie Corcoran: Thanks, Fred, I’m happy to be here with Monica as well. It’s been an interesting year for us and given that Datasite is a software as a service M&A technology provider, our applications facilitate deal makers in their M&A transactions on a regular basis anytime, anywhere. Now that anytime and anywhere piece becomes very important because most people are working from home. We’ve actually had a really busy year, in fact, we had our best month this past September and we also had record months in October and November 20% up over last year. Conditions, if they continue to improve and we see some positivity with the vaccine and economic recovery, then we expect this trend to continue.

Fred Diamond: Monica, how are things going for you as a sales leader? How is the pandemic affecting what you’re doing?

Monica McEwen: Great to be here, thanks so much for having me today. I think to pick up the end of Rosie’s comment there, I would say that ThoughtSpot is in the data space and analytics space and data has become even more critical during COVID than ever before and organizations are starting to really accelerate their digital transformations. I think from an overall go to market we haven’t seen much of a change in terms of the interest in our technology and the way that the sales motion is going. I would say one thing that has absolutely changed is we’re all now running meeting to meeting so the Zoom fatigue is really setting in for people. As a result, what I’m seeing is the need to be even crisper and to differentiate your message. If you get a prospect or a customer on the phone, I think it’s really important that the message is delivered in a fashion that brings value to that customer on that first touch. Otherwise, people are just so busy right now I don’t think they’re going to have time to come back for that next meeting. We’re really encouraging our teams to make sure that the messages they’re delivering to their prospecting customers are on point and that they’ve really done their homework before they get online with anybody.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. The whole concept of preparation has come up so many times, we all know that we’re going through whatever the pandemic means, every company that we’re talking to, every prospect is going through the economic challenges that relates to the pandemic as well. If a sales professional is not doing their homework ahead of time to think not just about what I offer but what my customer is going through, then there’s no way they’re going to be successful because customers don’t have that patience. Rosie, you’re based in London, you service a number of different countries, correct?

Rosie Corcoran: Yes, correct.

Fred Diamond: Talk about that a little bit, how has it been to communicate to customers through this pandemic in different locations? Not just in your country but across various parts of Europe, how has that affected your normal sales process?

Rosie Corcoran: I think that’s something that we do on a regular basis regardless of the pandemic. We sell into different markets from the London office and typically we’re able to travel there. At the end of the day we all know that nothing can replace an in-person meeting, that face to face and that relationship that you can form there but what we’ve done, and to Monica’s point is you need to do your homework beforehand and you need to also get creative with the messaging and the conversations that you’re having and the way that you’re approaching clients.

Something that my sellers have done this year which I think has been very effective is not just a virtual coffee or a virtual demo, yes, they focus on the product and they have those conversations but taking it to the next level and hosting webinars in different regions on bringing in thought leaders and having sector spotlights, talking about the different trends that we’re seeing in markets. Those are some of the things that we’ve been focusing on and that really is of value to our clients. It’s separate from the original conversation that you’re having about the technology and what we can offer them but also then talking about the market and some bigger picture thing here.

Fred Diamond: Monica, you talked about how the messaging needs to be crisp and it needs to be tight right now for where we’re going through. I’m just curious, how are you managing your team with that? Are you meeting on a daily basis to review the messaging, are you bringing marketing in, are you leaving it up to them to figure it out? Then Rosie, the same question for you. I’m just curious, as leaders, how are you physically working with your teams to ensure that the messaging is on point, it’s crisp and it’s valuable right now?

Monica McEwen: I think one of the top priorities is sharing best practices and what’s working. We’ve had to pivot a lot moving from being able to meet clients in person to having to do everything remotely. Obviously it’s a different selling motion so trying to get creative like Rosie said and figuring out what message is resonating, how to get in front of new prospects – I think in particular existing customers is a lot easier than trying to get in front of these folks. Sharing the best practices, learning from them, figuring out what’s successful, more importantly what’s not, pivoting away from that and then continuing the sales motion in terms of what’s successful. I think a lot of that has been partnership with marketing, when the pandemic first hit we very rapidly came out with some sales plays that would make our technology more relevant right now as the organizations were trying to deal with the pandemic. Then as we start to think about going back to work, it’s how can we provide a capability that will allow organizations to analyze if it makes sense to bring employees back to work? Things like that to be relevant and have a message that will resonate and stick with the customers.

Fred Diamond: Rosie, how about you? How is that messaging being developed right now? And again, how are you working with organizations like marketing? Are you getting directions from above? Are you meeting a little more frequently? Specifically on the messaging.

Rosie Corcoran: I echo everything that Monica said there, we do work very closely with our partners in marketing and they help us with the language and the content that we’re going to be putting out to our clients. An important thing at the time is to really be adaptable thinking about what we’ve done historically that’s been successful, what we’ve done that maybe we need to shift a little bit, what we can do better. Then taking those things thinking of how I can improve but how do I apply them in this new environment? How are we going to take what we’ve done and make it successful in the new world that we’re living in? We do work closely with marketing but I think the key there is just being able to adapt and to shift the focus that’s going to be a contributing factor in the overall success.

Fred Diamond: We have a question that comes in here from Charlie and Charlie is based up in New York not too far from Rosie, where you’re from, of course you’re in London now. The question is, “How much should we be engaging in personal conversations with our prospects and customers right now? That’s interesting. We’ve talked a lot over the months about empathy, of course every sale professional needs to start with empathy, we’ve been talking about how deep you get from a, “How has the pandemic affected you?” and things related to that. I’m just curious, how are you coaching your people to get a little bit deeper from the personal side or maybe not? Rosie, let’s start with you. Where are those conversations today and how are you either encouraging or coaching to people to get personal or not get personal?

Rosie Corcoran: I think that empathy and business success and relationships, they’re not mutually exclusive. This is something that we want to be focusing on on a regular basis and there’s something right now with everyone being in a similar situation at home where clients are very appreciative and they’re very receptive to the conversations that we’re having with them. Monica mentioned earlier that everybody is back to back in these Zoom meetings which is true, it’s nice to be able to take a break and shut off the screen but at the end of the day, people are also home in their own environment. They’re not on a sales floor, they’re not on an investment banking floor with the other lawyers, wherever it may be so they’re not having that same interaction in person which means that there’s a common ground between the sellers and their prospects.

They’ve been able to connect on a deeper level, they share that commonality of being at home and having the dog run in the room or having the doorbell ring when you’re on the call that allows people to connect on a deeper level. To answer the question to Charlie, I think if the clients are willing to have a conversation about where they stand and how things are going for them, empathy is key in the success there and I would definitely encourage it.

Fred Diamond: Monica, a slightly different question for you. You lead public sector for ThoughtSpot, you’ve been in public sector for a large part of your career. Are you able to have personal conversations with customers in the public sector space? Has the pandemic opened that up? For people watching and listening to the podcast, for the government customer there’s not just rules, there’s laws that you need to follow to engage and to sell and to bring your solutions and how they purchase. I’m curious, has the pandemic opened the door to get a little bit more inside or has it always been like that? I’m just curious how that has changed, if it’s changed.

Monica McEwen: I would echo what Rosie said. The pandemic has provided an equal playing field in terms of a conversation starter and we’re all in this together, as everyone’s been saying but not only our people at home and dealing with kids, pets and people running in, we’re all facing a similar struggle right now. Never before have we been in an identical challenge with somebody else and granted, everybody is facing it slightly differently depending on if they’ve been personally affected and things like that. It provides commonality and I think to some extent, it’s almost become an easy conversation starter which allows  you to get a little bit more persona with the buyers and the customers which sometimes you’re not able to in the government space. Sometimes it’s so rigid that you’re not able to have that conversation to open up the meeting and I found that it’s actually much easier to do via Zoom. To answer Charlie’s question, it’s okay to get personal right now. In fact, I think it makes you human, it makes the person on the other end human and it makes for a more productive conversation when you’re showing that level of empathy to begin the conversation before you jump right into business.

Fred Diamond: It’s the beginning of December, 2020. We’re 9 months in, we’re coming to the end of the year. If this were a normal year there may be some getting ready for some parties, closing some business before the year, planning for 2021. What are some of your priorities right now and have they changed from where you might have thought you would have been back in January? Monica, why don’t we start with you? The follow-up question is going to be how are you working with your senior sales team and how are you working with your junior sales team?

We have a couple questions coming in here from sales professionals who are at the early stage of their career and it’s interesting. You mentioned there’s been some shifts with going back into lockdown and there are some parts of the United States that are going back into lockdown. A number of our younger sales professionals have the challenge where they’ve been in an apartment for nine months with two or three other people, that’s impacted a lot of their lives and here we are almost a year into it. Again, top priorities right now and then I’m curious on how you’re managing your senior and junior salespeople as we move ahead. Monica, why don’t you tackle the first question about priorities? Then we’ll pass over to Rosie as well.

Monica McEwen: The priorities haven’t changed. We’re in sales, we still have to deliver month to month and quarter to quarter so I think it’s important to recognize that we’re working in a global pandemic but we still have to deliver on the numbers. That said, I think one of the things that we’re really focused on or I personally am very focused on as well is recognizing that while we’re all in a pandemic, people are at very different places mentally and emotionally. As I mentioned earlier, the Zoom fatigue is setting in, I started reading articles about why we all get Zoom fatigue and cognitively we cannot process audio and visual with everybody moving and body language all at the same time. Typically if you’re in a conference room you’re focused on the one person speaking so making some small tweaks and changes. If we have one on one meetings now, rather than getting on another Zoom meeting let’s both go out for a walk and talk together and get that mental break. One of my priorities is ensuring that we can avoid the burnout that a lot of people are experiencing and keep the employees working at their optimal while also ensuring that we’re remaining relevant for our customers. As we talked about already, tweaking the messaging and really looking at it on a regular basis to see what is working and what is not and then rapidly pivoting to either introduce new messaging, introduce a new idea, Rosie mentioned trying to do events that are going to further engage your audience. I think at the beginning of the pandemic we saw a huge surge in people attending online events and now I think there’s a little bit of fatigue there as well. How do we create new content that is relevant, that brings some thought leadership to folks that are sitting home all day? Long winded answer but it’s a combination of ensuring we can maintain employee engagement, having that empathy with employees, recognizing they’re all in different places and then ensuring that we’re remaining crisp on our messaging to our clients and customers, that we’re bringing value every time we have a conversation with them.

Fred Diamond: Rosie, how about you? How are you prioritizing your management right now to your senior and junior salespeople on your team?

Rosie Corcoran: Before I jump into that, Monica mentioned the term Zoom fatigue and Deb LaMere, our VP of Human Resources, she actually just did an interview to Fast Company about how you can avoid that. That’s something that we’re obviously focusing on at Datasite and giving that content to our employees to ensure that they are as effective as they can be. To answer your question in terms of top priorities, right now it’s just helping my sellers close up the year strong. As Monica said, we all have targets that we need to hit, there’s goals, that’s very much the most important thing. At the start of the year there’s conversations around what your professional goals are so it’s going to be targets, activity and metrics but there’s also personal goals. I think right now we need to make sure that we reflect on what we’ve done over the course of the last year, we need to take the time to address the things that went well, the good, the bad, the ugly and then take that well-deserved break at the end of December. That’s what I’m having my sellers focus on and then there’s a lot going on at Datasite. We’re bringing new applications to market, it’s making sure that your sellers are up to speed and having the conversations with our partners and product and in marketing to ensure that our clients are aware of what’s available to them right now.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here from Louis, Louis is from the DC area, she’s a frequent attendee of our webinars. She wants to know what you both are doing to stay at the top of your game. Again, this is the Sales Game Changers Live webinar, we interview top sales leaders from around the globe – we could say that because we have Rosie who’s over in London – we talk about how you’re managing your team. Tell us what you’re doing, how are you both staying at the top of your game? You have people who are working for you, you have people at peer level and of course, your leadership is looking for you ladies to lead and to take your teams to the next level. What are you doing to stay on the top of your game? Rosie, why don’t you go first? What are some things you’re doing as a sales leader, as a VP to stay as sharp and crisp as you can be?

Rosie Corcoran: I think this is a great question and it relates back to your question earlier, Fred, that I don’t think we touched on, about what you’re recommending that your junior and senior sellers do. It really is the same that I’m telling myself, it’s having a plan. It’s being very thoughtful in the work that we’re doing and laying out what needs to be done in prioritizing, it allows you to stay organized, to stay focused when there’s so much going on. It’s easy to get distracted no matter what the new environment is for you and the flat that you’re living in or in the apartment in New York City or you’re at home with your parents. Whatever it may be, I think you need a plan and the other piece of it is to do it as a team. I’m in a very fortunate position that my manager, the CRO, Merlin Piscitelli has a very inclusive mindset. He views it as a team sport and we’re all in this together and we need to share the good and the bad and we need to celebrate our wins, we need to talk about our losses as a group so that we can all improve from it. My recommendation to my sellers, to junior, to senior, to myself is to of course lay out a plan for yourself, work with your manager to figure out how you can be the most effective and then do it as a team. Lean on the others around you who are in similar situations who have had that success before.

Fred Diamond: Monica, how about you? You’ve been a sales leader for a lot of great companies and you’ve led a lot of great people. How are you staying at the top of your game?

Monica McEwen: I’ll echo what Rosie said. I think even more so now than ever before, we need a plan. We’re running from meeting to meeting and there’s not as much down time, there’s not as much drive time, there’s not as much thinking time. Part of what I’m doing is really blocking off time that I’m not in a meeting so that I can just start to plan my week, execute on it, have some time to think through and strategize. I found that at the beginning of this pandemic there just wasn’t time for that so actually blocking off periods on the calendar that are really just thinking time so that you can get more creative. That’s part of it and what I’ve had to implement for myself personally which I have always done, I think a little bit more in an ad hoc nature, at the end of every week I literally go through ever meeting I have to make sure that I’ve followed everything up appropriately. I look at my calendar, I ensure that I’ve closed the loop on things that I owed back with somebody and I was finding that there were things that were falling through the cracks more so than before and I shared that with my team. I was a little bit humble in saying, “Guys, I don’t know what happened but I’ve started to drop the ball on a couple things which is not what typically happens with me.” That’s been really important, having that plan and then closing out the week really strong so you don’t leave a bunch of loose ends which I think is easy to happen seeing back to back meetings.

The second thing that I’m doing which is more of a personal thing but I truly believe that if you’re not your best self, you simply can’t perform at your peak performance. ThoughtSpot actually had Mike Robbins who wrote a book called Bring Your Whole Self to Work. He spoke probably back in May to the company and he talks a lot about the importance of bringing your best self to work but also being very empathetic in the workplace. I’ve really encouraged both myself and my team, “If you need a break, go out for a walk. If you need to take an afternoon off because you’re just overwhelmed or your kids need something or there’s something going on that prevents you from being your best, then hit pause for a couple of hours and take that time to rejuvenate. Whether it’s exercise, whether it’s reading a book, whether it’s going out for a walk, take that time.” I personally am making sure I’m exercising every morning, I’m doing a little bit of meditation, I’m doing yoga, I’m doing things just to get my brain in the right mindset to have a great day.

Fred Diamond: Rosie mentioned the good, there’s the good, the bad and the ugly, if you will. What are some positive things that have come out of the last 9 months that you’re going to instantiate as sales leaders? Some things that have really made you proud that maybe we didn’t expect that are now going to be part of your sales leadership processes moving forward. Rosie, why don’t you go first? Something on the positive side, something good that has emerged that you’re going to look to continue or maybe that your company is going to look to continue.

Rosie Corcoran: I’d say first and foremost I’m proud of the way my team has handled themselves through these uncertain times. I think you start to realize how mentally tough some people can be and it’s extremely impressive when they can stay so consistently active in supporting our clients and shifting the operations from online, virtual and ensuring we give that first class support that we always do. I think that’s the biggest thing, I’m just very proud of the way that people have handled themselves professionally, personally, showing empathy, professionalism, being responsive. Then the other piece of it is there’s something that we’ve done right now working with our marketing team, we’re coming out with a video series. It’s called Datasite 21 M&A Unlocked and that’s something that over the course of the last 9 months, a lot of people put their heads together. This goes back to that piece on messaging and content and going out to clients, we put together an on-demand video series and that’s going to be including different keynote addresses from our CEO and different members of the product and sales and marketing teams around best practices.

It goes out to our clients and it’s going to help them understand how to better deal with the whole M&A lifecycle to improve their deal outcomes. I think that’s something that comes out of this pandemic, it likely wouldn’t have been done, thought of or created or had time spent on it if we were not in this environment. Those are the kind of things that people get real creative that make you proud as a seller, as a leader to be part of this organization that people are putting out content like that. It’s impressive.

Fred Diamond: Monica, how about you? What are some of the positive things that have emerged that you’re looking to instantiate moving forward for your team and your organization?

Monica McEwen: I think back to Charlie’s question, some of the connections and the way in which we’ve been able to engage with clients has actually become a lot more personalized than before. We all now expect a child to walk into the room or there might be a pet that hops up on somebody’s lap. It’s humanized the relationships a little bit more than in a traditional selling environment particularly in the government space, that’s something that I do think will continue. We’re all going to come out of this and it’s not going to stop once we all have the vaccine, there’s going to be a muscle memory around, “Remember when we were all in the pandemic together?” I do think the personal connection and one of the ways in which we’ve broadened the personal connections and the network to Rosie’s point on getting creative and trying to have content for our customers in the public sector space, we can’t do wine tasting events, we can’t send somebody a steak dinner for their family and ask them to hop on a webcast.

We’ve created in the public sector space a meetup group that we call DataChampions and we did that with one of our partners, Snowflake. We’ve hosted a monthly DataChampions event for government data enthusiasts and it has really increased in terms of the number of people that attend each month and it’s really a thought leadership event. We bring in a Chief Data Officer from one of the government agencies and then somebody from ThoughtSpot and Snowflake speaking and it shifts around people discussion. It’s not meant to present any content that’s ThoughtSpot nor Snowflake related but really meant to try and bring together a community. Right now doing it in a virtual online forum, hopefully we’ll pivot that to in-person in the future, that’s created some really great connections and some really great conversations across the government data ecosystem.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here from Julie and Julie is also in the DC region, Julie, good to see you. Julie wants to know, “What are your expectations for your sales professionals right now? Again, it’s early December but nonetheless, what are you expecting them to do? We’ve talked about all these changes that have happened, everybody knows what’s going on. What are you expecting from them? We have a lot of sales professionals who are listening to the podcast, what do you expect right now? Rosie, why don’t you go first and then Monica? You’re a sales leader, you manage people. I’m a sales professional out there, what should I be doing?

Rosie Corcoran: I mentioned this earlier but I think it’s important, it’s the time to reflect on the year and be honest about it, speak with your manager and speak with your peers and get a good understanding of things that you had done that worked and were very successful and things that could have been done differently. I think that’s so key because if you don’t spend the time to reflect on it, then it’s likely that the same thing will happen next year and we want them to use and carry that momentum to close out the year strong and then to fuel them going into next year. I’d say the expectation for all sales professionals would be to reflect and to be honest and to figure out where you want to spend time and develop. What areas do you need to improve in? What areas do you need to focus on?

Fred Diamond: How about you, Monica? If I’m a sales professional, what should I be thinking that my sales leaders expect from me?

Monica McEwen: I think the biggest thing for me personally is preparation. We’ve talked about everyone being at home, everyone’s on back to back meetings so you need to show up to the meeting bringing value to the person you’re getting on the other end of the phone with and if you’re not, you’re going to fail. It’s always important to prepare in sales, it’s the #1 thing that people should be doing but I think now so even more than ever before because if you’re not getting somebody’s attention, you’re not crisp, you’re not delivering a message that matters to them personally then you’re not going to get to that next step. Preparation is the most important thing right now in my book.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final action steps, I’m going to give you both an opportunity to talk about what value your products and your solutions bring right now for your customer base. Monica, why don’t you go first? What’s the value that ThoughtSpot is bringing to your customers right now as they go through this challenge as well?

Monica McEwen: ThoughtSpot is in the analytic space and there’s a lot of other vendors in this space, people are probably familiar with Tableau and Quick and Power BI and those solutions are all great if you want a visual dashboard for information. However, right now it is so important that people are able to ask ad hoc questions and be able to rapidly pivot in their business or in their organization and ThoughtSpot allows you to search for the information that you need, get the answer that you need and move on with your day. We’ve seen tremendous number of examples of this throughout COVID where people have literally been able to redistribute their entire supply chain because they had the information at their fingertips when they needed it, and the person that was responsible to take action on it could ask a question and get a result.

Fred Diamond: Rosie, how about you? What’s the value that Datasite is bringing to your customers today?

Rosie Corcoran: Today it’s handling the M&A transactions anytime, anywhere. Everyone’s at home, before COVID times there were a lot of meetings that were taking place in person. When companies were pitching to win a business they would go and they would meet in person, they would have that conversation, they would have management meetings and now that’s all online and it’s virtual. We provide them with the applications to facilitate that and it’s really important that we help them manage the entire lifecycle of it and it’s going to improve their deal outcomes at the end of the day.

Fred Diamond: Let’s wind it down here – Rosie, give us your final action step. What is your one bit of advice for people to do today to take their sales career to the next level?

Rosie Corcoran: Originally when I thought about this I was thinking what would be my messaging for the sales leaders but I think this very much applies to the sellers as well. Break it into three pieces: one would be to try to understand what motivates you. At the end of the day for a sales leader it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach for your sellers and for a seller, you need to understand why it is that you want to be successful because then you’re going to have a better ability to improve your effectiveness. Step 2 is finding the right balance in many ways, it’s going to be on your seller development, it’s going to be with your understanding of the product and the time that you spend with your customers and it’s going to be on your planning and preparation. If you could find the right balance among those three things and take a proactive approach there, it’s going to help you with your success. The last bit is to remain positive because we are all fortunate to be in these positions where we can be having conversations like this about how to be successful and it’s important to see the big picture.

Fred Diamond: Monica, how about you? Bring us home, what is your action step for everybody listening to today’s webinar and podcast?

Monica McEwen: I think it’s a general theme we talked about a lot today, we talked about having empathy and compassion for our employees and the people on our team and understanding that while we’re all in a pandemic together, there’s a lot of different varieties of how that’s affecting people. I think that’s equally as important to bring that same empathy to your customers and your prospects so if you get somebody on the phone and they seem distracted, they seem like they might have something else going on, a child walks in the room, offer to take the meeting the next day. Understand that people are going through a lot right now, enter every conversation with empathy and compassion understanding and most importantly, as I mentioned previously, preparing for it. That’s my key takeaway.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 298: Sales Leaders Monica McEwen and Rosie Corcoran Share Timeless Strategies for Success As We Near Year End first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on October 27, 2020. It featured sales expert Amy Franko.]

Register for Tuesday’s Women in Sales: Best Practices for Optimal Performance in the New Year with Jamie Crosbie here.

Find Amy on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 296: Women in Sales: Agile Selling Expert Amy Franko Explains Why the Jungle Gym Approach to Your Sales Career is the Way to Go

AMY’S INSIGHTS FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “See your career as a jungle gym versus a ladder straight up. Especially for women in sales and women in really any role, our careers take winding paths. There is almost never a straight up type of career path so it’s taking on a different mindset and then set an action that says, “I’m going to see my career as this very holistic thing, it’s not just this small slice point in time here.” You are trying out different things on the jungle gym. You might be going sideways, you might be going up, you might actually be going down, it’s a different visual and a different approach that says, “I’m going to take on different things in my career to build skills and not necessarily just be focused on what’s the next rung up on the ladder.”

Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you, Fred. As always, lovely intro. I’m really excited about our conversation here today, I know Fred has had Amy on his show before but we’re going to take this down the alley of how extraordinarily agile women are and what we can do to really exercise that talent and put it to work for us in sales. I hope you’ll stick around, we have a great conversation coming up. Without any further ado, I would like to welcome my guest Amy Franko. Amy, I have been dying to have you on the program so I can’t tell you how excited I am that you are here, welcome and please tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Amy Franko: Thank you so much, Gina, it’s great to be here with you and with everybody in the audience. About myself, I’m the CEO of Amy Franko Associates and we work primarily with professional services organizations, technology organizations, mid-market on sales strategy and sales skill development. Those are the two areas that I love to spend my time in and a little bit about my background, the first 10 years of my career I spent in tech. I grew up in technology and I worked for companies like IBM and Lenovo and I had all client facing roles and sales roles. That was the first 10 years of my career and then from there I took a pivot into entrepreneurship and for the last nearly 14 years I have run a firm and it has grown and evolved and had to be agile over the years, which is the topic of today’s conversation, what it looks like today is sales strategy and skill development. I love what I get to do every day, I love the conversations I get to have with people like yourself and it’s a real pleasure to be here.

Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you. I love hearing people say that they get such joy out of their work, all too often I think we get into ruts and we just show up and do our job and it doesn’t bring us any joy or excitement. Anything that we can do to help other people gives me a lot of fire and I get very excited, I can tell from the way you speak that you get the same excitement out of lighting people up and helping them excel their careers which is phenomenal.

Amy Franko: I do, and we’ll get into way more of that part of the conversation. Finding what it is that lights us up professionally, personally so we can show up and make an impact, I’m passionate about that and we will share lots of ideas in today’s conversation for everybody watching and listening.

Gina Stracuzzi: Without further ado, why don’t we get started?

Amy Franko: I have some slides here to show everybody and we’ll just use these to guide the conversation. Then Gina will jump in and add extra points as we go or jump in with questions.

This is what I have on the agenda for us to talk about today. For those of you that maybe caught my sales agility conversation with Fred last month, there will be a few things that I pull from that conversation. We’ll talk about what exactly agility means and we’ll put it in the context of your sales career. We’ll start there and then I’m going to talk about this approach. I wish I had coined this term, I learned this term from Pattie Sellers who was the Editor in Chief of Fortune Magazine at the time talking about this idea of a jungle gym approach to our careers. We’ll talk about that, what that means and why it’s better than a ladder approach. Then all throughout the conversation I’ll be sharing some specific ways that you can build your agility and it really doesn’t matter if you are new in your career, this is day 1 or this is day 10,000 of your career. You’ll walk away with some specifics that you can put into your sales life, your personal life to help you build agility. That’s what we have on the docket for today.

The place I’d love to start our conversation is this idea of skills evolution. This was research that was done by the Center for Creative Leadership and it gives some really good food for thought as to how the skills that we need to be building and what we need to be bringing to our organizations, how it’s changed. If we go back about 25 years, the #1 skill that organizations were looking for was technical mastery, you needed to have your technical expertise in your discipline, that was the #1 thing that they were looking for. If you fast-forward about 20 years you see how that has started to change and you see topics like learning agility start to make its way onto the list, you see adaptability and versatility there in the #5 spot and the thing I take away from this is the idea that our technical mastery is somewhat assumed and it’s something we have to continually be focused on. Paying attention to these other really important business skills and personal skills like agility, adaptability and versatility that have made their way onto the scene. Then if we look ahead, we’re almost at 2022, my friends. It’s hard to believe but you see where adaptability and versatility has made its way to the top of the list here and this is a skill that we have to be developing in ourselves if you are in a leadership role hiring for this skill in our teams, it’s really critical.

Gina Stracuzzi: If I may jump in right now with a question, this is something I thought about when you went over this when you were talking with Fred. How do you think that the growth of women in the workplace, especially as it applies to sales, has helped drive these changes in what you see as the top skills?

Amy Franko: That’s an interesting question. I would say that the need for not just women in sales but women in sales leadership and having more diversity of whether it’s gender diversity, ethnic diversity, diversity of thought, skill, having more balanced teams and more diversity on our teams is leading to this need for agility, for some of the other skills that you’ve seen there. When I think back to my career, I probably had the anomaly in my career when I worked at IBM. I was an individual contributor, I was a seller, I had a sales quota, my first, second and third line leaders were all women at a particular point in my career. Even today, I talk to other leaders or other people in the field and that is not necessarily the case so I have to remember that my experience is probably a little different than some other experiences.

We have to raise our hands to be in this field, before we jumped on I would say this is the best field I could have fallen into and we have to really hone and be aware of the path that we want to be taking. We can’t just leave it to chance, we have to think about it strategically and really figure out what we want. When we do that and we get into these leadership roles, these things like agility, relationship building, adaptability, we bring these skills to the table. I’m not saying men don’t bring them too, but these are some of the innate things that we bring to the table that can make teams more high-performing.

Gina Stracuzzi: 2020 was going to be the year of women in sales, things went a little differently than we all planned so now, looking at this list I think we have to make 2022 the year of women in sales where we rocket the number of women in leadership.

Amy Franko: Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about what agility means and I talked about sales agility, I’m going to put this definition of sales agility on the screen here which is the ability to strategically and decisively pivot so you can grow sales and best-serve your clients. Strategically and decisively are very key words here when it comes to agility because when you know how they talk about some of your greatest strengths also being your greatest weaknesses? Agility when it’s productive can have amazing results but agility when it is not done strategically or we are making strong decisions that we are willing to see through for a time, you start to feel like you’re running in circles. That’s the down side of being too agile if there is such a thing. I thing of agility as strategically and decisively pivoting in sales but also in your career, the same definition applies to our careers. As you are thinking about where you’re headed into the future, thinking strategically and also making really strong decisions about the types of projects that you want to take on, the types of roles that you want to be having in the future, the types of networks that you’re building, these are all different ways that you could be thinking strategically and making decisions about where you want to head into the future.

This is a question to be thinking about. I talk about this question quite a bit when it comes to relationship building and strategic networking, “What comes first, mindset or action?” I jokingly say that if you’re waiting to be struck by a motivational lightning bolt, it’s probably not going to happen [laughs]. In order to build a mindset – it’s a little chicken and the egg – often times we have to take action first so if this is something that is a new concept to you, taking the ideas that we talk about today and acting on them will help to build the mindset because they really do go hand in hand, agility mindset and the actions that we take.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s interesting advice, I hadn’t actually thought of it in that respect before. I think we tend to imagine that our mindset leads our actions, how we think about it will drive what we do. I like the idea of stepping back and just going with your first thought about the action and then using your mindset to support it.

Amy Franko: It’s really kind of a paradox because I believe you have to make the decision that you want to do these things. If you don’t quite have the mindset but you know that you want to build it, taking the actions and doing some things differently, seeing the results,  learning from them, what worked, what didn’t work, picking yourself back up, re-applying, trying again, those are all the things that build the mindset. It’s definitely not one or the other, they both go together but if the mindset around agility is a challenge, whether it’s for you individually or maybe you’re already leading a team, look at the action and the behaviors first because if you tweak some behaviors, it can feedback into the mindset.

Let’s talk about some strategies here, what are some things that you can be doing to actually build this agility in your career? The first one is around building business acumen and this is really about what’s your understanding level about the business that you’re in. Are you in a business that you want to be in? Building business acumen, thinking about the industry and the business that you’re in, is it an industry or a business that you love to be in? Like I said, I grew up in tech and I really enjoy being in tech, it was fun, it was fast-paced, it was interesting, I was always learning something and then I took a bit of a pivot into entrepreneurship and that opened up a whole new set of skills that I had to be learning and a whole new set of clients that I was working with. Are you feeling challenged by the industry that you’re in?

Are you passionate about it or interested in it? Then getting to know everything you can about the business that you’re in. Do you know the business that you’re in? Do you understand the clients of the business that you’re in and do you understand what their big challenges are? Building your business acumen is an excellent way to build your agility, not just your sales agility but also your career agility because that will open up other paths of thought, it will open up other opportunities and relationships that might take you on some interesting paths in your career. Let me stop there and see if there are any questions or anything on that that you want to dig into a little bit further.

Gina Stracuzzi: Sharon wonders how not having the business acumen that you’re outlining affects your mindset and then your ability to act.

Amy Franko: That’s a great question. I think those three things are all really tied together, your business acumen ties to your mindset which ties to your actions and again, it’s a little bit of the chicken and the egg. If you’re looking to build the mindset and you want something to focus on, this is an action, focus on learning everything that you can about your industry and really thinking strategically about the industry that you’re in. Do you want to grow your expertise in it? That feeds to your business acumen which can then feed to your mindset. I think they’re all three connected, it’s a great question.

Gina Stracuzzi: Sharon said thank you. As you say that it’s kind of chicken and the egg that if you’re not feeling the drive to learn more about your business and really become an expert in it, then perhaps you’re not in the right industry. The chicken never gets to the egg or vice-versa, you know what I mean? [Laughs]

Amy Franko: I would agree with that and it’s one of those things that if the industry that you’re in drives your interest, you want to keep learning more, that’s also a hallmark of agility too, is you want to dive in and learn more. You want to grow your knowledge because the only way that you are going to grow that knowledge is by diving in and learning more and I’ll talk about some other ways that you can learn more about your career, your industry, etcetera. But if the interest isn’t there then it’s really hard to make the other things go, it’s hard to cultivate the mindset, it’s hard to cultivate the behavior so they’re all very much connected.

I’ll share a couple more things here on acumen and these are all connected as well, this first one is definitely connected to the interest in your industry. To have more agility and mobility in your career, building your skills in things like go-to-market strategy, revenue generation – which is perfect for those of us in sales – or finance disciplines, these are disciplines that if you build your skills in, they round out your resume and can really open up additional opportunities for you. For those of us that are in sales that you have revenue generation as part of your tool kit already or if you aspire to be in sales – there might be some people listening today that aspire or are interested in a sales career – these are skills that will serve you so far beyond just the role that you’re in today. Take a look at where you’re at today, do you have marketable skills in these disciplines? If not, this is an opportunity for you to build your business acumen and therefore your agility.

I’ll share the last one here which is to take an improv class and this one might be a little bit unexpected and I’ll explain more. I do a lot of work or research in executive presence and there are lots of things that make up executive presence and executive presence is a big part of your agility plan as well and helping you to move in your career. Taking an improv class builds these very specific communication skills that you need in order to have that agility. One of the hallmarks of executive presence is strong communication skills, being able to speak off the cuff, being able to be approachable, being able to think quickly on your feet and formulate answers and that confidence that you know it when you see it. Somebody walks into that room whether it’s in person or virtual these days, they have that confidence, they can hear a question or hear a comment and be able to speak off the cuff, that’s being able to improvise.

If this is something that you’d like to get better at, that confidence and speaking off the cuff, this helps you to build agility and build your communication skills, taking an improv class will do wonders for you. This was many years ago now but I actually took an improv class at Second City in Chicago and it was really cool, they had an improv class for people in business and it just caught my attention. This was probably a decade ago that I did this, I went to Chicago and got to spend the day at Second City learning different types of improv techniques and we had to get on the stage with our workshop buddies, we had to do improv. It was so far out of my comfort zone, Gina, not something I was ever used to doing but it really changed my viewpoint and helped me to be so much more confident and to be able to process things quickly and to share my ideas. I highly recommend it if this is something that you’d like to work on, that communication.

Gina Stracuzzi: Gene S. asks if you know of any improv classes online.

Amy Franko: That’s a good question. I don’t have any that come to mind online but I know that improv has become much more mainstream even in the 10 years since I’ve been practicing it. I don’t have any that come to mind online but I think probably with a few searches you can find quite a bit out there.

Gina Stracuzzi: Second City might even have something online at this point.

Amy Franko: That’s what I was just thinking, yes, you might check that but it’s much more mainstream than it was a decade ago.

Gina Stracuzzi: A lot of different trainers will suggest improv for a number of reasons, stage fright or just anything to get over ourselves, have fun and get more relaxed. It’s good advice and it’s fun.

Amy Franko: You reminded me of a statistic, Meridith Elliott Powell – I know she’s been on this show before as well or at least part of this whole programming – she has been doing some research in how to adapt and thrive in uncertainty and your comment just reminded me of something that she shared recently on LinkedIn. I’ll paraphrase it here but the idea being that business leaders and CEOs, they would rather know that something bad is happening versus having to live in uncertainty of not knowing what’s happening. That was so fascinating to me because part of agility is being able to have a comfort level with uncertainty and a confidence in the fact that even though things are uncertain and they always will be, that we have the capability and the relationships and what we need in order to make a good go-forward plan. Your comment just reminded me of that which I thought was so fascinating.

Gina Stracuzzi: It makes me think that everyone should go out and take an improv class right now because we certainly have a lot of uncertainty, it might help us all deal with it and just have a laugh while we’re doing it.=

Amy Franko: [Laughs] great. Are there any other questions or any other comments? I’ll just take a pause here before I share a couple of other things.

Gina Stracuzzi: Lacy would like to know, “When it comes to executive presence, how do you get started or how do you know if you’ve got it or don’t have it, and what can you do about it if you feel like you don’t have it?”

Amy Franko: That’s a good question. Executive presence is one of those things when you know it when you see it but it’s a little hard to define and put concrete terms around it. There’s some great research that was done by the Center for Talent Innovation. Sylvia Hewlett, I believe she’s retired now but she founded and led that organization for a number of years and she does quite a bit of research in the realm of executive presence. That’s a resource to learn more about executive presence that I would definitely recommend but I think of executive presence, it’s this combination of things and when I’m talking with my clients about it, I put it into a few buckets. The first bucket which we’ve talked about a little bit is that business acumen bucket, there is a communication bucket and then there’s also what I call vitality and then there’s impact.

Vitality being the energy with which you show up and do you show up in a way that says, “I am able to take on any of these elevated challenges”? Your impact being, “What are the results that I’m creating? What’s the legacy I’m leaving and how am I actively creating that right now?” There are a lot of things that go into executive presence but I think a short answer to that question is if you want to be honing that set of skills, working on your communication is a great place to start. Like we talked about, taking an improv class or any other type of communication class. Even right now, agility with having to be confident on video, we were talking about that before we went live. Confidence on video, confidence in these virtual environments, those all play into executive presence too but I would say if you’re looking for a place to start, working on your communication skills whether it is in front of people like what we’re doing right now, it is your written communication skills – so critical in the age of texting. That’s where I would start, I’d start with your communication.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have three requests to repeat the name of that book.

Amy Franko: It’s actually an organization, it’s called the Center for Talent Innovation. Actually, Sylvia Hewlett was the founder of it and she does have a book on executive presence. [Executive Presence: The Missing Link between Merit and Success] If you Google Center for Talent Innovation or you Google Sylvia Hewlett, you’ll find her work on EP.

Gina Stracuzzi: I have my own question that came to mind while you were talking about executive presence. People who perhaps have a great deal of executive presence in person, are you finding that some of those people are suffering a little bit in the virtual environment? If any of our listeners are one of those people, do you have advice as to how people can get back their mojo, so to speak?

Amy Franko: There are some people that are just so phenomenal and so engaging in person and then they get into a virtual environment, I see a lot when they have to be on camera, there’s something about that little light coming on on the camera that just freezes them right up [laughs] and it’s like they’ve lost their mojo in that moment. I would say that right now us being forced into these virtual environments a bit and having to build our comfort level with video not having a choice to do it has been fantastic for building these skills. When you have a choice you’re going to do the stuff you’re comfortable with, that’s just our human nature but just by having to be in these virtual environments we’re having to get comfortable with being uncomfortable so I’ve seen improvement by virtue of that. In terms of things to work on, if you’re someone who really excels in in-person, it’s always my personal preference, I love to meet with people. If you’re someone who excels like that but now you’re finding yourself feeling challenged in a virtual environment I would push yourself as much as you can in any meetings that you have to turn the camera on and to use those technology tools and get comfortable with them because they’re here to stay. They’re not going to go away even when we are back in person so this is mindset versus action, you’ve got to make the choice that says, “I know I’m really uncomfortable with this but I’m going to do it anyway” and then you’re going to see that you make it through, the only way out is through. That’s going to start to build your mindset. That’s one thing that I would suggest, you’ve got to get comfortable with the camera and just do it.

I’m doing a quick time check here and I had a couple things I wanted to make sure that I hit on. I want to hit on this jungle gym versus ladder concept so let me flip back over to my slides here.

Gina Stracuzzi: The first time you and I spoke and we talked about that, the visual just worked for me.

Amy Franko: I heard about this phrase, like I mentioned, from Pattie Sellers who was the Editor in Chief at Fortune Magazine at the time, I bet you I heard this phrase a decade ago, Gina and it has always just stuck with me. The idea of seeing your career as a jungle gym versus a ladder straight up. Especially for women in sales and women in really any role, our careers take winding paths. There is almost never a straight up type of career path so it’s taking on a different mindset and then set an action that says, “I’m going to see my career as this very holistic thing, it’s not just this small slice point in time here.” When you look at it as a jungle gym, when you’re playing on the jungle gym you are trying out different things on the jungle gym. You might be going sideways, you might be going up, you might actually be going down, it’s a different visual and a different approach that says, “I’m going to take on different things in my career to build skills and not necessarily just be focused on what’s the next rung up on the ladder.”

I think about myself as an example, very early on in my career I was in tech and I had a role where I was a database administrator and I did some programming. While I could do the job, it wasn’t something that I loved to do, I was not passionate about making this my career. I loved technology but I just did not want to be doing that type of role. A good example of a jungle gym is I actually left my IT consulting job and I took a lower paying role to get into IBM to start my career there. Had I thought about just taking the career ladder on up, I wouldn’t have taken that role but what I saw was the bigger picture of opportunity so I said, “In order to grow my career in the bigger picture I’m going to take this role, it’s a little bit of a lower paying role but it’s going to help me build the skills and it’s going to help me get my foot in the door.” That’s just an example for my own life of taking the jungle gym philosophy and making choices today but thinking big picture about where I wanted to be in the future.

Gina Stracuzzi: Just thinking about it, you have to be much more agile to make your way around a jungle gym than straight up a ladder.

Amy Franko: Yes, that’s awesome.

Gina Stracuzzi: This works for your analogy.

Amy Franko: [Laughs] thank you, that’s perfect. You do have to have agility and maybe some athletic ability on the jungle gym and to delve a little bit further on that, there has to be a little bit of a sense of fearlessness. When you see kids playing on a jungle gym or on a playground like in this image, they’re not worried about who’s watching them, they aren’t worried about trying something and falling down if it doesn’t work, they just get back up and they go right back up the slide, they’ll climb up that slide backwards. I think we can learn something from this jungle gym analogy, a little bit of fearlessness and having to set aside our discomfort of what we should be doing versus what we want to be doing.

Gina Stracuzzi: And I think we get caught up in the “I should be going just up.” It really makes a difference between what you’re trying to achieve, what your life is presenting. I love this analogy.

Amy Franko: Sometimes you have to take a downward step or a sideway step in order to grow upwards and it just opens our eyes maybe a little bit differently to what the opportunities are, we’ll learn something that maybe we didn’t even think that we’d be learning.

With the few minutes that we have left here, let me share a few ideas for everybody listening on what are some things that you can do to build your own jungle gym. One is strategic side projects, are there projects – in your organization ideally would be great – that can help you build skills that you want to be building? Give some thought to what the skills are that you need to be building. Back to our earlier conversation about go-to-market strategy, revenue generation, finance, some of those major skills for building business acumen. Are there some side projects in your organization that you could raise your hand for or side projects in a nonprofit that you volunteer for that you can raise your hand for? Give some thought to what strategic projects you might be interested in taking on and I’ll use myself as an example here in just a moment and it ties to this second point about board service.

I didn’t share this in my intro but I’m the board share for Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartlands and we serve 18,000 girls in central and southern Ohio. I’ve been a part of this organization for 6-7 years now and I’m in my first term as board share. This is a strategic side project and board service all wrapped up into one because it helps me to give back to something I’m really passionate about, we talk about impact when it comes to executive presence. It also helps me to build some really important skills that I want to be building for the future because private company board service is something I want to do more of so I’m laying the foundation now to do that for the future. I’ve had an opportunity to serve on committees that I would not have had, finance being one of them, I don’t have a finance background but being on the finance committee of this organization has helped me to hone some skills. That’s just a quick real-life example for me about blending things I’m passionate about and want to make an impact with, with what I’d like to do in the future and the skills that I want to be building. We all have a finite amount of hours in the day so we have to choose very carefully about where we’re investing our time.

The other one is your relationship building, what relationships are you building inside your organization and outside of your organization? When I left IBM, Lenovo to start my own firm what I realized was I had great relationships inside the organization but what I lacked were community relationships and other types of relationships in my network. I had some big gaps to fill in order to build the right relationships and to advance my new endeavor. I always love to share with people, “Don’t make my mistake, build relationships that you need in your organization and outside your organization now. Always be cultivating that because you will serve your network and your network will serve you in the future.”

Gina Stracuzzi: There’s so much great advice these days that I wish I had starting out my career.

Amy Franko: I know, me too.

Gina Stracuzzi: There are so many things I would have done differently [laughs] but I wouldn’t be sitting here having this great conversation with you so it all ends like it should.

Amy Franko: [Laughs] for sure, and I often get asked, “What’s the one skill that you think has served you really well throughout your career?” and the answer is so easy, it’s my sales skills. Having been in the sales field and continuing to be in the sales field, it looks different today than it did 15 years ago, the type of work that I’m doing but that ability has served me so well in so many capacities. If you’re someone here who’s listening that has an interest in a sales career, I wholeheartedly encourage you to pursue that interest. If you’re in a sales career now, continue on the path and find those things that really light you up about the career because you’ll be so successful with it.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think we have just two or three minutes left, we did have a question along those lines. Carrie wanted to know what you did to help build your career from the beginning and I think you just answered that question. You stayed with sales which offers women so much flexibility and freedom, which is one of the things that was always attractive to me. One of the things that always made selling interesting for me is that if you’re inquisitive – maybe nosy is a better word [laughs] – like, “What are you doing? Tell me about that, are you happy there? Are you making a lot of money?” That’s how I moved into different organizations and different industries, because I just would ask questions. Pretty much what you just laid down there a minute ago, it’s keeping your interest alive and figuring out what lights you up, as you said. It really makes all the difference.

Amy Franko: Curiosity, being curious, asking questions, “What if…? What would this look like?” and always having that curiosity.

Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely. If you could leave our audience with one or two actionable items that they could do today or this week to really get their agile juices going, what would you recommend?

Amy Franko: From our conversation here today, the first thing I would recommend is to think through which of the ideas or strategies really struck you the most. Is there one that really stood out? I would start there with that one that stood out.

The second thing that I would say is look for those strategic side projects or board service opportunities that can help you hone the skills that you want to hone for the future.

Gina Stracuzzi: And it gives you greater exposure too.

Amy Franko: For sure.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 296: Women in Sales: Agile Selling Expert Amy Franko Explains Why the Jungle Gym Approach to Your Sales Career is the Way to Go first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on November 3, 2020. It featured Datasite International Sales Leader Nertila Asani]

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Find Nertila on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 294: Women in Sales: Datasite UK Sales Leader Nertila Asani Tells How a Finance Background Can Help Boost Your Sales Career

NERTILA’S INSIGHTS FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Never be nervous, just believe in yourself, never think there’s anything that you can’t do. Never think of gender or anything as an obstacle. Always think about your successes, your strengths, what you’re good at, what you love, what makes you happy and be confident about it. Talk about it, go for it, there’s really nothing that you can’t achieve. It sounds cheesy but it’s really like that.”

Gina Stracuzzi: I’m really excited about our guest. If you all haven’t voted, make sure right after this you get out there and do it and then we can talk about it next week. We’re super excited, this is our first international guest and she’s wonderful, we’ve been chatting ahead of time here a little bit. Nertila Asani from Datasite, she’s their VP of Sales in the UK. Nertila, I’m going to let you tell us all about yourself, welcome.

Nertila Asani: Thank you so much, Gina, it’s such an honor to be here and to be your first international guest. Thank you for allowing me to be that, I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts now and I’m a big fan so I’m very happy to be participating in this. A little bit more about myself, I’ve been with Datasite for five years now, my background is I’m actually Albanian but more German in a way, I grew up there, my family is over there, went to high school there and then my studies took me to Vienna, Austria where I studied international business administration with a major in finance. Afterwards I moved to London, the most international city in Europe where I started my journey at Datasite.

I started as a junior sales executive and then moved onto a senior sales executive role, I was a director for some of our strategic accounts for two years, last year responsible for our top strategic accounts and then as of February 2020, I’m a VP of Sales in the UK leading our advisory team which is quite an exciting role, especially this year and very nice challenge. A little bit more about myself, I speak four languages fluent, a few others I’m trying to learn and I love to travel as I know you do as well and many others of us. It’s a challenge this year but I also look forward to when we can do that again, I think we’ll appreciate it even more. I love to be active, play tennis, do Pilates, cook and read a lot and spend quality time with family and friends.

Gina Stracuzzi: Before we started, Nertila was telling me that she’s got family in both sides of this country which is really awesome and I hope that next time you come to the area, especially when you visit your friends and family in New York and New Jersey that you’ll stop in and see Fred and I when we can all get out again.

Nertila Asani: Absolutely, I’m very excited for that.

Gina Stracuzzi: Before we get started, we’ve already got a couple questions which is really awesome. The first one comes from Christina, she says, “Any tips for women sales executives looking for international opportunities who do not have what you might describe as a multi-cultural background but who may have studied abroad and have a basic conversational proficiency in a foreign language?”

Nertila Asani: Definitely a yes. There’s a lot of opportunities and as the first year VP at Datasite, this year I’ve been part of the hiring finally which has been very exciting and I actually just hired three new people in my team. I think the most important is the background doesn’t actually matter as much, we’re a very diverse team here, I come from a finance background myself which makes it easier to understand the industry and our client base. I have people in my team from an engineering background, people in my team from a psychology background and that makes the team and the job more exciting because people have different view angles to the situation. As a team we just function so much better so there’s definitely opportunity. I don’t think in order to apply for an international sales role you have to have traveled a lot or already worked for an international sales company, it’s how open you are about things, how empathetic you are towards different cultures and everything, I think that’s what matters. Definitely a yes.

Gina Stracuzzi: I know way back when, when I lived in Europe there were a lot of laws around work permits and the company has to sponsor you, I don’t know where any of that stands now but there are opportunities for people to work for international companies that have offices in many places and then travel being what it is, in the virtual environment it may be easier than ever, who knows?

Nertila Asani: Absolutely, and that’s one of the things I love about Datasite because I really wanted to work for an international company and be able to say, “Maybe I want to spend 5 years in New York or Tokyo or Hong-Kong” and we have had a very strong track record in accommodating that, moving people across. Actually, one of my other colleagues and VPs, she used to be in a New York office and managed a team over there and was a sales rep and now she’s working alongside me in London, so we’ve had a very strong track record where we have moved people across offices. It’s proven to be very successful and I think that’s really great, to know that a company provides you with those opportunities and it’s something that I would be looking out for if I was looking for a job.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s good advice. Andrea says, “It’d be nice to hear from you, thank you for creating this space for everyone.” I think she’s eager to hear what we’ll talk about in the course of this conversation. Yasmine is asking, “What personal skills make a good salesperson according to Nertila?”

Nertila Asani: I think being empathetic is definitely one, being a good listener. If you’re very empathetic, if you have a lot of emotional intelligence and are a good listener, you will be more successful because people buy from people, and people see how genuine you are about them and all of that. Especially this year, I think that became even more so important because out of nowhere we’re not able to meet clients face to face anymore and build that trust relationship, we had to come up with new ways of getting in front of them like virtual happy hours, virtual workout sessions, virtual pop quizzes and all of that. After post-lockdown when we met up with them in person again, they were actually highlighting how much that meant to them and how much they remembered that we were trying and finding our ways to be in front of them. Being empathetic, being a good listener, listening to what motivates them, what drives them, what they’re looking out for, what’s important to them. Even small personal things about them, let’s say their daughter’s birthday or which sports they like, which team they like, what they support, where they travel to, where their holiday house is and all of that.

Another personal skill that I think is important is to be authentic and to be yourself because people feel that, people think that if you are real, if you are genuine they will trust you and they will want to work with you, they will want to buy from you. Also knowing the product that you are in charge of, being an industry expert around that product, being a product expert around that and being able to picture that in front of the client. I think these are some of the skills that are very important and being a team player as we all know. I think that’s one of the things because we can be more successful together.

Gina Stracuzzi: Your background is finance, what made you decide that you wanted to move over into sales?

Nertila Asani: That’s a very interesting question, Gina. Growing up I was writing news articles for a local paper, I wanted to be a journalist and my parents were always like, “Listen, as a journalist you have to run after people all the time” so I thought more about it, I gave that up, then I wanted to be a lawyer but I didn’t want to be stuck in Germany and go after German law. I knew always where my strengths are, it’s languages, people, I love to chat and I thought, “I’m interested in businesses, I want to travel, I want to work with people all across the world” and that’s how I got into international business. I didn’t think that much about sales early on when I was younger but I had people, actually even my own father who’s a sergeant and works for a lot of medical salespeople telling me that I would actually really be good in that and that I have all the soft skills needed to influence people, to work with them and all of that.

Then I started thinking about that during university times, just worked as everyone else in retail and understood I really liked that part of the job, I liked working with people, I loved listening to their problems, to their challenges and finding a way around them. That’s what got me into sales and I think especially coming as a university graduate as I did and if you’re looking to even build your own business or whatever you’re looking for, you gain all the skills that are needed for everything because you have that book of business that you manage, you have people, you have resources, you have product and all of that. Combining the ladders between each, you gain so much knowledge that I would have never thought before. That’s my journey into sales.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have another question, Mary wanted to know what advice you have for young women who might want to move from a specialty area probably like finance into sales. In this area that we’re in there’s a lot of technology people and there’s a lot of selling to the government, it’s very easy to get caught up in a role and not find a way out. Do you have any advice for someone who might want to make that move over?

Nertila Asani: Especially if you’re already in finance – and I only studied finance, I didn’t have any practice in it, I just knew the theoretical background- I think you already know the industry. It’s an easier transfer, I’m not saying that you cannot transfer. As I mentioned before, we have people from engineering, psychology, from real estate from everywhere. I think a move is always possible as long as you believe in yourself, you’re open to new opportunities and you know what you want and you’re up for the challenge. I don’t think it’s any problem at all getting into sales and in particular into our company, from finance into sales it would be easier because our clients are in finance, the people we sell to. Regardless which industry, I think the industry doesn’t really play a big role moving into sales as long as you’re a people person.

Gina Stracuzzi: Jamie would like to know, “Have you had to interact with an inside competition inside any of your jobs?” Perhaps someone wanting your job or presenting things to knock you off balance or how you cope. You and I had a short conversation before and for the audience, let me just say that Nertila has had an enviable career in that she’s always been supported by the men in her organization, by the other women in her organization and honestly, it would be so great if everyone had that level of support. Unfortunately, that is not always the case and sometimes it’s not that anyone means to undermine you, it’s just a particular culture in the company that lends towards a certain kind of behavior or sometimes it sounds like Jamie might have somebody that’s attempting to sabotage her career or maybe they’re going after the same job. A lot of times you know that there’s only a couple of tracks to get to where you want to be and you know that there’s competition, it sounds like maybe Jamie is coming up against some of that and maybe somebody is not playing nice [laughs]. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that in your career or if you’ve seen it or maybe you’ve heard about it from other people. What kind of advice might you have for her?

Nertila Asani: Just so I understand the question correctly, Gina, is it more inside competition from other people or is this more about being a female in a sales leadership role or in a sales role?

Gina Stracuzzi: She says both. I think what she means by both is that it is both inside competition and perhaps that inside competition might be a guy.

Nertila Asani: I’m quite fortunate that I never had to deal with that challenge, I have friends in the venture capital or private equity, I’ve heard stories but myself, it’s been such a nice journey at Datasite. You and I were catching up before and we’re actually four women in our leadership team and five male, it’s such a cool team and especially diverse team. I’ve been part of many different conferences and forums, for example, the Women in Private Equity in London. Three years ago at my first conference they were speaking about how important it is to find a mentor within your company and be guided along, I was quite lucky to have that in my manager who’s actually a male and I don’t think that in my career gender has never played a role. I understand I’m lucky about that and he’s always supported me to speak up and to be quite confident about my ambitions and where I want to bring my career, what I believe in. I would say especially at the start of my career, you’re fresh from university, you’re less confident and maybe a little bit shy and all of that, and he’s actually supported me a lot across my five years and taught me how to get my thoughts together and to be confident, to speak up and not think too much around everything.

I haven’t had to deal with that inside competition, I’ve always felt that everyone is treated based on what they have to offer. If you work hard, I think that comes with success regardless of whether you’re male or female. Success equals more opportunities and that’s what got me here after five years so it’s pretty exciting. I think having a good mentor is really a very important thing in every company and I’m happy I was able to have that.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have so many discussions around the importance of having a sponsor and a mentor which are two different things, and I’ve often wondered for somebody who’s been at a company for a while and maybe now, like Jamie, they find themselves in a situation where they’re on a track, they’re looking for this promotion, they’ve got competition. How do you find a mentor when you’re in that environment and you need to address certain things that are really bothering you? When you come in and maybe you’re new, you approach someone to be a mentor, “I want to know what you think about the company and I really want the support along the way to make sure that I’m capitalizing on this opportunity”, that’s all genuine and fresh and eager. But if you’re there for a while and you don’t have that mentor yet and then things like this start to happen, I think it’s probably a little harder to find a mentor because you’re coming at it with a little bit of concern about who’s side people might be on or what their feelings are about inside competition. I feel for people in Jamie’s situation.

Nertila Asani: I totally feel for that as well. I’ve always focused on myself, where I want to grow my career and I think it’s important to be confident. I’ve read studies about statistics that women usually tend to less ask for promotion than our male colleagues do and I’ve never thought about these things because I’ve always been encouraged to be confident and to lay down my ambitions on the table. When I’ve discussed those type of things or promotion or something where I’m in competition with people internally or externally, I’ve always focused on my strengths, I’ve focused on what I have done so far, the challenges that I managed to overcome and what I achieved and brought them to the table, presented them. I’ve always tried to make it about myself and about my accomplishments and not driving any comparisons to anyone else. I think it’s helped me a lot at least down my career line during my five years here.

Gina Stracuzzi: How many people are on your team?

Nertila Asani: 8 people.

Gina Stracuzzi: What kind of lessons are you learning as a fairly young manager and leader? What are you learning from the people you manage?

Nertila Asani: I’m learning a lot from them. I’m a manager since February 2020, I did that in person for a month and then we all went into a virtual management, I didn’t know that would happen. I’ve been – again, that goes to my background – the top revenue producer in our company for the last two years and all I thought about was myself and my customers and how I can be #1 and super successful and that’s great but I was looking for more rewards. I didn’t want to look after myself, I wanted to build people, build them up, their career lines, help them buy their first house and what drives them, what motivates them, I think there’s no greater reward than seeing the dreams and ambitions that they have and being responsible to support those people. It’s been a challenge, the first month was in person and then I had to come up with ideas not only for our customers but also for my team because I was worried about each person. How they’re doing, what they’re cooking with, which environment they live in, do they have flat mates?

Do they have people or are they living by themselves? Being accommodating, listening to them and where they want to get in their career building out a strategic plan for them if in a year, in two years that’s where they want to get in the company how do we get there? What are the variables that will get me there? Laying that down for them and then coaching them, being able to transfer the success that I’ve had myself. I was coached by my manager and how he managed to lay down his success to myself and how I was learning. Honestly there’s not been a more rewarding thing in my 5 years, it’s been so difficult the last months, this year nothing has been more rewarding than being responsible for people, celebrating with them their first wins when they close a deal, seeing them happy, that their hard work pays off and being there for them.

Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s back up a little bit. You were the top producer and then those successes brought you to where you are now. Talk to us a little bit about how you got to be the top producer and what it is that you think propelled you to that place and then opened doors to get into leadership.

Nertila Asani: There’s many points. First of all, know your market, understand your customers, understand what drives them, what do they live and breathe in, their background and all of that. At Datasite we get provided with a lot of tools and market insights, we get to know a lot about M&A activity, where it’s taking place, the industry, use cases and all of that. We have a lot of help in that respect and myself also, since I’m selling to people from a finance background I knew the industry but again, that’s not a hurdle at all because you learn everything new. That helped me quite a lot as well, then partnering with different divisions across the company like product, being able to work very closely with the product team, get them in front of clients and see what clients have to say, adopt their feedback on the platform, the technology and all of that, partner with our marketing team to deliver thought leadership topics that are important to our clients. Things like our customer service team, across different divisions we work so closely together. In London in normal times we’re in one office but then also globally we work so well and this year showed even more how connected we are and we grew even stronger through the entire crisis together.

Working together on that we shifted very well and our service team is so amazing, that’s #1 what the customers buy and being able to work with them even through a work-from-home scenario, they were so good adapting in that and working closely with us. That’s helped me a lot building my own professional brand, not only externally with clients but building trust with them and also internally being a product expert so you gain respect and trust everywhere around. Then empathy, I think I mentioned earlier how important that is, being empathetic especially this year where we all had to deal with a very new situation that no one ever thought about and being creative in how we keep in front of people, the virtual hours that I mentioned, we’ve done webinars for every region with very strong panelists. Another tip is find a good mentor and sponsor as you mentioned as well, I’ve been attending many conferences where that’s the best advice and I think that’s guided me a lot throughout my career, having a mentor and having someone I can rely on and that knows me, that challenges me every day. I was lucky enough to have that in my manager and staying authentic. That’s one of my #1 things that I love to point out as well and it can mean anything but people feel how honest, how genuine you are and people buy from people so the more you are yourself, the more they will trust you and want to work with you. I think that’s internally, across different divisions in the company and that’s externally as well. You can achieve a lot as a team. Know your market, partner with different divisions, build your network, build your professional brand, be authentic, find a good mentor. I think those are some of the key takeaways.

Gina Stracuzzi: Clearly at Datasite you’ve fallen into an enviable career path with lots of opportunity and lots of support, but there have to be some challenges working across multi-cultural offices. Maybe it’s language, maybe it’s different ways of going about business. It’s funny because in the DC area when you’re dealing primarily with the federal government it is like a little entity unto itself with its own quirks and challenges and benefits. One of the things that we find is that there’s so many people moving from company to company and everybody knows everybody else and it’s very insular in many ways. Your situation is completely different from that in that you probably deal with people that you may never meet even before the pandemic because they’re in a whole different part of the world or in an office that you’re not likely to visit. Are there challenges with working with cross-cultural norms? It’s so much different than it was even 20 years ago, so much of that has melted away as we become one world, as the saying goes.

Nertila Asani: I think it’s one global world in the end. You and I were talking about this earlier as well, my challenges were more like I came from Germany and London is a very international city where you have people from all parts of the world and that’s why I moved here. My culture is to be very direct, to be short in my emails and to say what I think and what I need and that didn’t come across very well with the British people so I had to learn to address that and I had to learn how to express myself in a different way. It’s benefited me as well, now when I go back to Germany and I go to the supermarket and I ask people how their day was, say thank you and have a nice day and all of that, people are so surprised to get a real conversation out of a supermarket chat. I think it’s being open to different cultures, I just love to get to know people, where they’re from and to learn more about different cultures and countries across Europe and different states across America and all of that.

Adapting good things from different cultures, I think that gets you across very well but those were my challenges at the start, I’ve learned a lot to form my emails in a different way, not to be too direct as I used to be. I think no matter where people are in the world, as you said, we’re actually doing a live webinar for our South African market on November 12th to stay close to our customers over there. You just need to know what’s going on in South Africa, what are people going through and the challenges they’re facing and need to address that and need to know about it. Company-wide also, I think the pandemic showed me even more how strong we are as a company and how close we are whether we are in Madrid, Frankfurt, New York, Atlanta or wherever, there’s so many good lesson I’m taking out of this year.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have another question, Andrea wants to know if you could give some examples of how you became more open in your writing thinking about email communication. That is difficult sometimes even within the same culture and it goes a lot to the emotional intelligence that you were talking about earlier, you have to pick up on who the person is that you’re corresponding with.

Nertila Asani: A big shout-out also to our marketing communications team, Martha and Laura, John over in New York who empower us with all the tools in terms of business, email writing and how you approach people from different backgrounds, different cultures. That’s #1, the company supporting us in there and then #2 is learning from mistakes, learning from approaches and people telling you how they actually received that email that you wrote. Being empathetic towards that.

Gina Stracuzzi: And probably open to hearing the feedback on it. I like the fact that you have a marketing department that supports your writing skills, sometimes there can be a fine line between a marketing approach and a highly technical response to something and sales can be somewhere in the middle of it which needs to incorporate both pieces but it is good if you’ve got guidelines and you’ve got someone that will look something over and give you some feedback to be able to craft a more genuine message.

Nertila Asani: Absolutely, it’s just workshops that we do and different things which I think is really great. I’m happy that we have them.

Gina Stracuzzi: You’re going to have a bunch of people sending you resumes when this is over, I think everyone’s going to want to work for Datasite, myself included, I’ll be sending mine [laughs].

Nertila Asani: Please, Gina, I would love to have you part of Datasite [laughs].

Gina Stracuzzi: It would be fun to come back to London. We have just a few more minutes, is there any parting piece of advice that you would like to give the women on the call who just may be nervous about trying something new or branching out into international?

Nertila Asani: Never be nervous, just believe in yourself, never think there’s anything that you can’t do and speaking of myself, this is pretty much my first job and I had the finance background but I didn’t really have the sales background, just during university times as I mentioned, in retail. Never think of gender or anything like that as an obstacle, always think about your successes, your strengths, what you’re good at, what you love, what makes you happy and be confident about it. Talk about it, go for it, there’s really nothing that you can’t achieve. It sounds cheesy but it’s really like that, don’t think too much about it because regardless of which industry you’re in or what you’re doing, there’s never a wrong time to start, a late time to start or an early time to start. Go for it, believe in yourself, speak up, work hard and try it out.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 294: Women in Sales: Datasite UK Sales Leader Nertila Asani Tells How a Finance Background Can Help Boost Your Sales Career first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the WOMEN IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Gina Stracuzzi on August 20, 2020. It featured LinkedIn Sales Leader Alyssa Merwin.]

Register for Tuesday’s Women in Sales: Sales Mindset: Is It Supporting Your Career or Sabotaging Your Success here.

Find Alyssa on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 291: LinkedIn Sales Leader Alyssa Merwin Presents Ways for Women in Sales to Measure Contribution and Value in Times of Uncertainty

ALYSSA’S INSIGHTS FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “There’s never been a better time to be a woman in sales. Women tend to have high emotional intelligence (EQ) and to be empathetic. These are the times when our strengths will really shine through. I think if we can spend time on controlling the controllable and leaning on our strengths, we will get through this and hopefully be in a better position on the other side.”

Fred Diamond: We had a little bit of a technical thing as we sometimes do, where we weren’t able to get the webcast posted with Alyssa but she’s here live. Alyssa, it’s great to have you on the show. Gina, it’s exciting to have you so ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming our host for the Women in Sales webcast, Gina Stracuzzi.

Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you, Fred, as always. Such a gracious introduction. First off, apologies for not being able to do the webcast last week, I found myself – me and my family – in the middle of the hurricane and we lost all power and electricity, internet and everything. Came through it, it was fun, it was exciting and I’m glad to be done with it. We’re back and I can’t wait for our conversation with Alyssa, I would like to tell you that we will be here again next week and I have a great guest coming up, Shelley Smith, she is a corporate culture guru and she’ll be talking to us about how the culture inside a company can make the difference between success and failure, especially as it comes to sales.

It’s unfortunate that we can’t see Alyssa, she’s having some difficulty getting her webcam to work so I’ll be just having a conversation with her via telephone. Alyssa, thank you so much for joining us, I can’t wait to get going. Why don’t you tell us just a little bit about yourself?

Alyssa Merwin: Hi, Gina, thanks so much and it’s great to be with everyone virtually. My apologies as well, it’s not often that we can’t figure out one of these technology clutches, but regardless looking forward to a great conversation. A little bit about myself, I currently am the Vice President of Sales for one of LinkedIn’s businesses, I help to lead the sales solutions business line which, if any of you are familiar, is the Sales Navigator product. I’ve been with LinkedIn almost 10 years, before that I was at a company based in Washington DC called the Corporate Executive Board which is now owned by Gartner. I spent the bulk of my career at two different organizations and recently made the move from San Francisco where I was based for the last 5-6 years back to the east coast, back to Washington DC because I fell in love and made my way back here. It’s been a great trip back to the east coast to my roots and still being able to have a job that I love, happy to talk about it with you today, Gina.

Gina Stracuzzi: Congratulations on the move and falling in love, that’s exciting. I think we’ve got a good array of questions that will cover a number of areas. To start, how are things going generally for you and your business corner of LinkedIn? Has anything been greatly affected – I’m sure – by the pandemic that you can talk about today?

Alyssa Merwin: We, like probably all of the people participating in today’s conversation, have gone through many trying moments over the past few months. It’s really been an evolution when we all realized what was setting in upon us with COVID and the macroeconomic situation. It was a time when had to really reassess everything, we had a pretty strong sales process, a go to market approach and overnight had to rethink everything. #1 was hitting pause, we had conversations with our teams about, “This is not the time to be selling, this is a time to make sure that people are safe, that they’re able to take care of their families and let’s be there to help them, let’s not be there to sell, this is not an appropriate time to be reaching out from a business development standpoint.” We said, “Now everyone is customer success” and that’s the approach that we had to take in the early days. Then as we get further into the lockdown and trying to understand what’s going on in the broader world, it became quite clear that some of our customers were ready to move forward and not everyone was necessarily in a distressed situation. We then had to start to segment our business and understanding which set of our customers are in the distress state, which are frozen and not able to make decisions and move forward and which of our customers are really needing us to double down with them and help them to take advantage of the opportunity? Because perhaps they have a solution that’s really valuable. It’s been hard, no doubt. We can talk about how to lead teams and some of the challenges that come with that in a time like this, but it’s been challenging. On the bright side, we are one of those solutions that especially in a virtual sales environment, we can be more valuable than ever so that’s been good for our business in some ways. But we still have lots of customers that are in a really tough spot and that can be difficult to figure out how to support them and how to make sure that we’re able to achieve our targets while also making sure we can be there to help them. It’s been a lot.

Gina Stracuzzi: It sounds like you’ve come through it pretty well. What are your top priorities right now as a sales leader? Has it changed each week as we’ve been hearing from people?

Alyssa Merwin: We have a June fiscal year end, June was the end of our year which was an interesting time to have an end of year and now we’re really kicking off the start of our new fiscal. Perhaps unlike other sales leaders that might be on a calendar fiscal, today and right now it’s all about how do we get our teams refocused on the priorities, on where we need to go as a business, on what it means to be selling in this environment which is certainly different than it was a few months ago. That’s really where I’m focused with my leaders, to make sure that they each have a very clear set of priorities and a strategy for their particular business segment that we are clear on what we want to go try to accomplish this year, and that we’re still keeping an eye on navigating the delicate balance. We are not through this pandemic and it’s unclear when the end will come, so we need to keep a close eye on balancing the business drivers and business needs with taking care of our people. We’re also about to start schools and a lot of our team members have children and are balancing all of that as well. I think it’s taking care of our people and making sure we’re getting our year off to the right start.

Gina Stracuzzi: That reminds me, one of the questions I was going to be asking you is that with us heading back into the school year and most schools at least at this point staying virtual, have the parents on your team, especially the moms – a lot seems to fall on moms – are they giving you a heads-up that they’re concerned about how to balance all this? How does that affect how you lead them?

Alyssa Merwin: It’s been hard. Back in the earlier part of the year when we thought this might be temporary, I think everyone was willing to try to get through it with bubble gum and tape and just try to make our way through. Now that we know that this is potentially a bit more permanent and we’re starting the school year with almost an exclusively virtual environment, it’s going to require us to be really thoughtful in how we lead and how we manage the business. I think there are a couple of things, #1, LinkedIn has been incredibly thoughtful and generous and we’ve created a program that will allow parents and/or caregivers to take up to 6 weeks off to take care of needs at home. That gives them an opportunity if they want to do some homeschooling or they need to take care of someone who’s sick, so that’s been a really great benefit. That’s one thing that not all companies are in a position to be able to do, but it’s great for those that can take advantage. I think for everyone else, what’s really been helpful and perhaps something that we can all adopt is the total flexibility and allowing people to set very clear boundaries. One of the leaders that works for me, she has two young children and she runs one of my biggest businesses and she was very clear with me. She said, “Alyssa, I’m going to work for a couple of hours in the morning and then I need to take 12 to 3 p.m. off to be with my children and then I’ll get back online for an hour or two.” It’s not a full 8 hour day and that’s totally fine, right now that’s what she needs to be able to take care of her family needs.

I trust her implicitly to be able to get done what she needs to get done or to ask for help where she needs it. I think we all need to be in a position right now where we can be very clear about what we need to do for our families first because we are people first and professionals second, let’s take care of our families and then let’s be clear with the people that we work for and work with about what we need from them in terms of respecting those boundaries or helping us out if it’s pitching in. Hopefully we can have those conversations with the company that we work for.

Gina Stracuzzi: Do you have any advice for someone who maybe doesn’t necessarily work for a company that is as generous or possibly can’t be as generous in understanding and time off as LinkedIn is? What would you recommend that someone do if the need to talk to a boss that’s perhaps less open or less cooperative than you can be?

Alyssa Merwin: That is probably more the reality, we may not work for super progressive individuals or people that really understand the situation that we’re in, or perhaps it’s just not a job that can be done in off hours or condensed hours. I don’t know that I have a perfect solution other than I think it starts with a conversation about, “Here’s what I’m struggling with, I want to do a great job and show up exceptionally well for my day job and for you, I know that I have committed to delivering this as part of my job and at the same time I’m struggling with these dynamics at home. Could we talk about different ways that we could approach either flexible schedules?” I recently had a woman come back from maternity leave and she wasn’t ready to come back full time, we don’t really have a part-time sales role but we got really creative in this case and we figure out a way that she could share a role or help with special projects. I think it’s asking for that flexibility and some creativity as the starting point, and it may not be exactly the outcome we hoped for but right now, any leeway and any creativity is appreciated. Then I think the other thing is there are also people we work with that don’t necessarily have the same constraints or demands so maybe those people can help us out for a brief amount of time while we’re going through a particularly challenging moment. I think there’s the boss element that we can explore and then there’s the, “Who are the people around me that I might be able to lean on for some extra help?”

Gina Stracuzzi: You brought up a good point, if you’re going to have that conversation maybe think about it in advance and come up with some creativity of your own to suggest so that you say, “This is what I’m thinking.”

Alyssa Merwin: Absolutely. Listen, it’s always better to come with some proposed solutions and ideas than to ask for someone to come up with them for us, and it gives them at least something to react to. It’s the art of the negotiation, I think this would probably be one of the most important negotiations is being able to sit down and have that conversation and start with what ideal state would be and then be willing to work backwards to something that’s agreeable to both parties.

Gina Stracuzzi: What has been the biggest positive surprise coming out of this situation or something that you’re most proud of in this challenging time?

Alyssa Merwin: As we all move to a remote virtual environment and our profession has changed pretty radically, I’ve been really inspired by the resilience that I’ve seen not just with my own team but as I talk to our customers and they’re figuring out how to navigate the situation. There’s an element of resilience that’s been pretty inspiring. I think we’re learning that some of the old habits of sales are really having a day of reckoning and I think in this environment where we’re all strapped for time and energy to invest and things that are not mission-critical, the bar is so much higher than it’s ever been so I think it’s causing everyone to up their game a bit. I think that’s a great thing for the profession and something that I’ve been excited to see, we have to prepare more than ever, we have to truly understand what is really going on with our customers both what are they juggling on the personal side and what are the dynamics for them and their company really trying to understand, “Can we help?”

Also, the bar to getting deals done is higher than ever so I think in some cases you might have been able to get away with a proposal that looks great on paper and casts a vision for what the future could be, but that is not meeting the CFO muster these days. Learning that we’ve got to up our game when it comes to ROI projections and talking about value differently, talking about it in real hard-dollar ROI, not softer terms. I think these are all things that have been in some ways really good for us to get sharper and to demand more of us and probably are going to be the things that we’ll take with us even when we go back to a more normal professional environment.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think you’re right. I know that Fred has been hearing that from a lot of his guests that things have changed likely forever, and being able to show your value is really critical. Overall, how is your team doing from a mindset of sales at this point? Are they finding that they can be as effective as they were before or are some of them more challenged than previously?

Alyssa Merwin: It depends on the person and the part of our business. For those team members that are working with our smaller customers, in some ways it’s the most challenging because those smaller customers are really going through a lot of difficult times. They’re just fielding some really challenging discussions about the state of these companies and layoffs that are going through needing to be empathetic and also figuring out how to add value, in some cases not being able to renew those relationships. They’ve really been at the heart of some of the most difficult parts and that can be really trying. The reality is that’s a lot to take on so I think that certain parts of our team have really had to deal with that. In other ways if some of our larger customers are maybe diverse businesses that are doing just fine right now and we’re doing great deals so it’s really been interesting to see whether talking about new business acquisition or existing customers in which part of the market and which industries. That’s one dynamic more on the state of the business. In terms of the state of the mindset, it also is all over the place. We’ve had so much to contend with from the social injustice that we’ve been experiencing and living through and it’s still a front and center conversation that we’re all having. People losing family members and getting sick, all of those dynamics as well as the uncertainty with the macro-economy.

I think it’s been a lot and as a leader it’s a difficult time, I’d argue probably one of the hardest times you could possibly be leading a team is right now. One thing that I think we’ve learned through this is I think we have a very empathetic leadership culture and we want to be there for our people, we want to support them and we want to really understand what they’re going through. I think we’ve learned that that is all really important and we also need to be careful not to take on that pain because sometimes it can be debilitating for the leader if they take it on too much. We want to support and be there and create a space for our team members and we have to have some boundaries ourselves to not be subsumed by all of the challenges that our teams are going through because otherwise, we won’t’ be able to be effective and to lead. That’s been an interesting dynamic that we’re figuring out as we go.

Gina Stracuzzi: We have a question from Deborah related to the first part of what you were saying. It sounds like she’s in this situation being on a smaller team or a team that handles smaller clients and for the larger teams who are still doing well, she wonders if you are switching any of the people from the smaller clients to other opportunities where they might be able to do better.

Alyssa Merwin: We haven’t changed people’s territories or count assignments, we try to focus in our case on continuity of the customer with the rep because for our business I think that’s an important element, but I think it’s an interesting question and maybe something to explore. The reps that work with our smaller customers often times are a bit earlier in their sales career versus those that are working on the really big multi-national accounts, so for us it wouldn’t make a ton of sense to necessarily switch them but there may be other companies. Perhaps she’s at a company where you could move things around and it would make sense so I think it’s an interesting question, I think there are other things you could explore too. There could be quota relief, there could be perhaps other ways of looking at success, I think there are a lot of sales leaders right now that are not necessarily looking at quota attainment as the measure for success but instead are looking at things like customer success metrics, customer retention, NPS. I think there are other ways that you can measure value and contribution in a time of so much uncertainty that can perhaps relieve some of the people that are more in the stress part of the business. Maybe it’s some different things to explore there.

Gina Stracuzzi: She added, “It’s hard when your sales are down and other people’s sales are up.” I’ve heard that from other people, that certain segments of the selling part of a business are actually doing better than ever and others as you say, often the ones that have smaller clients who are suffering. Those salespeople aren’t meeting their numbers which is an added pressure on them and it’s also income they don’t have in a lot of circumstances. Because this has stretched on for so long and continues, there’s a weariness in those efforts to be empathetic. I think there’s a little tug-of-war going on right now that still hasn’t settled.

Alyssa Merwin: One of the things that we did when it was quite clear that the COVID dynamic was just playing out in ways that we just couldn’t predict the future, we’ve done a couple of things that may be helpful and perhaps she can explore this with her team. One is we guarantee that portion of everyone’s variable, we didn’t want to put anyone in a hardship position because there was so much uncertainty. That’s one thing that some companies might be willing to explore. The other thing that we saw which was interesting is that our acquisition business which arguably can be a more challenging business to be in because you’re bringing on new customers that have never worked with you, that has been stronger than it’s ever been through this COVID environment.

We are seeing industries that we hadn’t traditionally thought of as core users of our solution, they’re rethinking their own go to market and Sales Navigator has become a really big part of it. Some of our small business customers are really finding a way to change their approach and their company strategy and are figuring out how to win now too. It’s challenging and there have been some nice bonuses that we wouldn’t have expected that have been a boost for our small business reps. It’s been both sides off the coin but maybe that variable element is something to explore and talking with the team about how do we manage in a time of so much uncertainty. The other thing we’re looking at is instead of trying to set quotas on an annual basis, setting more short term, 6 months and then reevaluating because that might put people in a better position to be able to be successful. Set quotas based on the reality of today and then reserve the right to reevaluate when we know what the world will look like in the future.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s great advice and I hope that helps, Deborah. As a sales leader yourself and especially now that you’ve moved back to the east coast, how have you changed your personal mindset on all of this? Have you had any great big aha moments or realized that you needed to change your own direction as a sales leader or has everything stayed the same for you?

Alyssa Merwin: I’ve absolutely had to change and adapt and I think you learn a lot about yourself in a crisis and how you lead. One of the things that became very clear to me is that I needed to be communicating much more often to my team and I also needed to be much more visible and much more of a direct line. I have a few hundred people in my organization and while I have relationships with them, almost all of them on somewhat of an individual basis, I didn’t have a touch point with them on an ongoing basis where we could really just chat. So, I created weekly office hours both with the individual contributors and then a separate one with managers so that people could just dial in and we could talk about whatever was going on. Sometimes we just chit chatted for a bit about life and fun topics or tough topics and then sometimes they would bring deals that they’d want to talk about and sometimes they’d provide feedback about how things are going or what they needed. It really was an amazing realization of what a difference creating space for those conversations can make and how important it is in a time of crisis and uncertainty and fear, that you need to be available and people need to be able to relate and connect.

That was probably my biggest learning and then the second, I eluded to this a minute ago, is I’ve got a pretty diverse leadership team and some of the leaders are very much, “We’ve got a job to do, no matter what’s going on, let’s charge ahead.” In a crisis that can be a really valuable trait but I also have leaders that are incredibly people-focused and empathetic to a degree that can be really challenging to get people focused on the task ahead. I’ve also started to realize where the value in each of those personality or leadership traits is and how important meeting in the middle is and then balance them. People need direction and focus and prescription, they also need to be supported and to feel safe and have room to share, but one extreme or the other is not necessarily the right approach especially in a time like this. Those are just some of the things that I’ve learned and therefore learned to adapt my style.

Gina Stracuzzi: We’ve heard from all the different sales leaders that Fred’s had on the program and that I’ve had on the Women in Sales program a lot of that same thing, they really come to know their team in a way that they hadn’t had the opportunity to do so previously and how much that’s opened the doors for better communication. I love hearing the positive side of things that have come out of this and one of them is just getting to know people better.

Alyssa Merwin: Real connection. I’d like to think that we mostly have really good relationships with the people we work with, but this has certainly connected people in a much more intimate different way.

Gina Stracuzzi: That’s really been what we’ve heard, “I feel like I personally know people” versus just know who they are and what they do and just a quick water cooler talk. That’s been a silver lining for sure.

Let’s talk a little bit about your team working from home. Have you had to adjust or have you done anything to help them work more efficiently from home?

Alyssa Merwin: We gave everyone an allowance to purchase some desk and chair, the basic elements that they might need and not already own because we’re now all working from home. We’re allowing them the expense, the internet and things like that that are easing the burden of the physical aspect of not being in an office. I think outside of that there are the creative things that we’ve seen so many companies do well which is maybe you’re making your video conference sessions fun or bringing costumes, themes or happy hours, whatever the fun ways are that we’re finding to connect and innovate. The other which we touched on earlier is really being flexible and understanding that people are trying to juggle all of the things going on in their lives. I think we’ve all come to learn that the dog barking in the background or the kids screaming and running by, our kids coming in and jumping onto the video conferences, wave hello to whoever you’re talking to [laughs]. I think it’s more comfort with exposing all sides of what’s really going on and the flexibility. For me, one big adjustment is I started to say to my boss, “I can’t sit in front of the video conference 8 or 10 hours a day, I need to get up and walk” so I started to do walking meetings and I would not necessarily keep myself on video conference. I would decide which meetings can I take just by phone and I’d go for a walk and just have some outdoor time and quiet space for me to be able to dial into an important meeting but do it in a way that worked for me. I think we’re learning that those are all okay.

Gina Stracuzzi: People are growing a little weary of the video piece of it so realizing that you can effectively talk by telephone while still walking, all of those creative pieces that are coming out of this. If we allow them to continue afterwards, I think we will have more engaged teams who are actually more productive.

Alyssa Merwin: Absolutely. I don’t know that my teams are working longer hours per se, I don’t know because I don’t want them to be working longer hours, I’m not monitoring how many hours they’re working but they are absolutely more productive than we’ve ever seen before. I think giving people a little bit of space and flexibility, they will do what they need to do to get the job done and to perform. I think that if we can bring that mindset if and when we go back to the office, that will be great for everyone.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think this has really given everyone, employers especially, the opportunity to see that remote working really can be productive and effective so hopefully companies will allow their employees to keep doing it to the best for everybody. That reminds me of one thing that I wanted to ask. I don’t know how much traveling your sales teams do or did, do you think that the reduction in travel will continue?

Alyssa Merwin: Depending on which part of the business we’re talking about. I either have inside sales teams or teams that are a little bit hybrid or teams that are almost exclusively in the field visiting customers. I think what we will see differently is we will not get on planes for one meeting which is not a great practice anyways, but I think we will be much more thoughtful about, “Is this a critical meeting to do in person and can it not be done almost as effectively over video conference?” I wonder if teaming budgets will change and we won’t want to spend as much time on travel, that’s one thing that I think could be interesting as companies reevaluate.

The other is the personal preference, our employees may not be comfortable getting back on planes at the same rate they used to and our customers may also have their own policies and levels of comfort, whether they want you on site. I think it’s going to be very different depending on which part of the country you’re in, what kind of company you work at and what your own personal situation is. I hope that we’ll get really comfortable again with giving everyone the flexibility to make those decisions for what’s right for them. Like I’ve shared and we’ve seen with lots of our customers, we have been able to do great business in a totally remote environment when no one’s been getting on planes. That’s been a pretty neat thing to see unfold, I don’t know that we would have expected that.

Gina Stracuzzi: I think you’re not alone in that. We have another question, this person says, “I started a new job on the day Minnesota enforced stay-at-home order, have been virtual since day 1. How do you suggest reaching out to clients in a supportive, empathetic fashion when my time to connect with clients has been very minimal?”

Alyssa Merwin: It sounds like it may be in a different version of the world you would have done these meetings in person, but I think everyone understands right now we’re just in a different world. I think start with that honesty, we haven’t had an opportunity to build a relationship in person or to spend a lot of time together, first I want to reach out and make sure you’re doing okay and second, I want to see how I can be of service. I think if you start with truly from that place of caring and being of service, then you can get onto business. If we move too quickly in this environment and just go straight into business as usual, not everyone’s in that head space although I think people are getting back there now that we’ve been in this for a while.

I would start from that place and I often am a fan, I got this from my executive coach, that he says, “Speak your feelings. If that’s how you’re feeling, share it with your prospect or customer and let them know you’re feeling a bit apprehensive about reaching out because you haven’t had a lot of time together. You just want to let them know and see how you can help.” I think that’s a great opening.

Gina Stracuzzi: Basically what you were just describing there, Alyssa, is empathy which is certainly the word of the year. We want our bosses to show empathy, we want our teams to show empathy to each other and I think that’s a good way to ask you how you recommend to your team, how you coach them about being empathetic to their client’s needs too.

Alyssa Merwin: It’s much of what we just talked about in response to that question, it’s being of service. I think we are all in the service business now, sales is all about adding value and it’s more important now than ever, the bar is higher. Again, I think we have to prepare more, I think we have to come to the table with a point of view to share and I think we need to deeply understand what our customers are going through. I don’t think they need us to hold their hand per se, we want to make sure they’re doing okay and be able to connect with them on that personal level but we need to be great partners to them in a time of need and a time of crisis when they’re trying to make sure that their jobs are stable and their teams are performing and their business is doing the best they can. I think that’s how we can be of greater service and we have to be careful to not lean too far in the empathetic at the expense of value.

Gina Stracuzzi: It’s a balancing act that people are working on and there’s really no templates right now, so I think these next few months as we transition into what the fall is going to look like, figuring out that balance is going to be important. As we close out, what would you say you feel like your talent for the next quarter will be?

Alyssa Merwin: I think it’s figuring out exactly that balance, how we continue to support our people in all of the various scenarios they find themselves in, in a personal life dynamic as we’re going back to school. Helping them to be successful in a world that is still very uncertain, trying to give them as much comfort, support and the resources and tools they need to do their jobs and to be there for their customers. I’d like us to get off to a great start because I think we need to be in a position where people are feeling successful, they’re feeling some optimism, I think we could all use that right now. Over the next few months and as we [Unintelligible 41:22] the end of our first quarter I’m really hopeful that we will be able to put people in a position of feeling like they’re winning, they’re adding value. Right now, again we’re in a lucky position to have a solution that’s super helpful in a remote environment so I think helping as many other sales teams be successful right now, that would be a great win.

Gina Stracuzzi: We’ve had multiple guests who speak so highly of LinkedIn Navigator and how they couldn’t do this without that tool so congrats and kudos to you. The last thing I would ask is there seems to be a little more worry effect on people right now where earlier in the year they were like, “This is just something that’s happening, we’ll make the best of it” but as COVID continues with no immediate relief in sight, people seem a little more worried. What are you telling your team for those who might seem a little more fearful than they did say even a month ago?

Alyssa Merwin: This goes back to Deborah’s question but this is about controlling what you can. We can spend time in fear and some of that is okay but we need to pretty quickly move ourselves out of fear and into some more productive energy. I think that’s doing the things that are in your sphere of influence. If we’re talking about from a sales perspective, connecting with your customers. You don’t want to be the person that not only is not hitting quota but you’re not doing the outreach that is expected of you. This would be the time when even if you’re not able to hit quota because customers aren’t buying or whatever the dynamic is, that you’re still able to add value to the customers that you have or the prospects that you’re engaging with and you’re doing everything in your power to be reaching out to be of service, to be helping your team members.

I think that’s all we can ask in a lot of ways right now and that is what we can influence. I think it’s a much more productive and healthy place than to spend a bunch of time worried about the what-if’s. That might be a bit high level but I think the more we can spend time on the things that we can control or influence, the better we’re going to be. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world and I think also just building relationships, I always say you want to have relationships before you need them. Whether that’s networking in your local area or building relationships with people that you might want to work with, work for at some point, that’s also a really savvy and smart thing to do in a world where companies are going through layoffs and challenging times. If that’s your fear, then continue to invest also some of your time in building out those relationships.

Gina Stracuzzi: Karen adds, “That’s good advice for coaching teams to really focus on what you can control.” Thank you so very much, Alyssa, this has been a fabulous conversation, I think you’ve given us a lot to utilize and think about whether we are in a position where we are leading teams or we are on a team and have to come up with some creative ideas of our own. You’ve hit on a number of really important topics and given us great answers, I appreciate that tremendously and I hope that you will stay in touch with Women in Sales and the IES and you’ll come visit us again.

Alyssa Merwin: Thanks, Gina. I would say there’s never been a better time to be a woman in sales, this environment really allows us as women, we tend to have high EQ, to be empathetic, these are the times when our strengths will really shine through. I think if we can spend time on controlling the controllables and leaning on our strengths, we will get through this and hopefully be in a better position on the other side. Thank you, everyone, for the great conversations, questions and contributions. Gina, thank you so much.

Gina Stracuzzi: You’re very welcome and I’ve got a number of thank yous in the chat box here too so they’re thanking you as well. Take care, everybody, stay well, try to stay sane and we’ll see you next week. Bye-bye for now.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 291: LinkedIn Sales Leader Alyssa Merwin Presents Ways for Women in Sales to Measure Contribution and Value in Times of Uncertainty first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.