Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And I know you did this with your team as well. I said, no, let's get out of the office. We don't want to be here. Let's embed ourselves at the customer level. Let's really understand how they're using it, why they're using it, how many other people they're using, how we could simplify and make their life easier if they were a business owner. How can we make it more operationally efficient for them if they're large? Wells Fargo, MGM casinos and taking the team and moving them out to the point of the customer and becoming part of the customer versus being in the office taking orders, they. I think that was something else that we did that really differentiated our teams.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: I'm Dennis Sorensen and this is the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. This is the podcast for sales leaders and salespeople who know they're capable of more and are looking for a system that is predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable for growth. It's not theories, it's not motivational speeches. It's an ambitious way to operate your business.
Hello and welcome back to the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. I'm Dennis Sorensen and today I'm very pleased to be bringing you episode number 11, the first of a two part series with my good friend and business partner, Lee Paris.
In episode number 10, I introduced strategy as the second pillar of the process driven sales system.
Lee and I will be discussing how we bring strategy to life in the real world in sales. And so let's get started.
Lee and I first met 28 years ago. Hard to believe it's been that long. But 28 years ago at NCR Corporation and we were both first level sales leaders, district managers at NCR. I was leading the Northern California team and Lee was leading the Southwest team. And we were introduced to each other by the head of sales at the time, Hugh McBride. And I think Hugh saw something in both of us that he felt would be a potentially good or even dangerous combination if it were brought together.
I think that, you know, as I look back on it, I think Hugh recognized some important things about both Lee and me early on and that our strengths were complementary and that we both brought strategic thinking to the table. Our operational intensity, I tell you, there's nobody more operationally intense than Lee and the growth mentality that we both brought to our business and to our teams and the learning mindset that each of us had, I think those are all things that Hugh saw and that he wanted to really try to see if he brought those together. What the potential might be. Two years after Lee and I met, I went to Teradata Corporation and Lee later came to Teradata himself. And we were both part of the, what was called then, the dot com sales team. We were both working for a really great guy, Ted Cinemark. One of the interesting things I think about that time for both of us is that when we both left NCR and went to Teradata, we both went from being a sales leader back into being an individual contributor. So we sort of jumped tracks and restarted our sales careers in individual contributor roles at Teradata.
And I think for us both, it was really good experience because we had to sort of take all the skills we had gained through our careers to that point and then now bring those to bear in terms of strategic enterprise selling at Teradata Corporation. And so through our journey at Teradata, we had the opportunity to work together in different roles. I was at a sales leadership role and Lee was part of the team that was working with me. And we had a lot of great success together.
And then Lee later, he left Teradata and he went to work for Astrodata, which was later acquired by Teradata, which sort of was.
Lee sort of found his way back home to Teradata through Astrodata.
And then when he came back to Teradata, Lee was a VP of sales. And so we were operating again as peers together.
And again we continued our collaboration with not only as individual contributors at Teradata, but as sales leaders at Teradata, where we would constantly be work, talking to each other, looking at the challenges that we were facing, our sellers were facing, and running different ideas and things past each other. So we really have had a great partnership together for a lot of years. And then that partnership continued. Lee left Teradata, went to GE Aerospace, worked as part of that organization, led global organizations for ge. And then later Lee and I found our way back together again at Vista Equity Partners at one of the portfolio companies at Allegis. We did that together for about three years. And then I left to start Cove Group. And Lee later left and started his own company, Bell Group. And then we worked together as partners in our across our two companies. And then we later formed Horizons west together, co founders with John Giese of Horizons West. And so we worked together today at Horizons west with the various clients that we had have across a variety, a wide variety of different industries that we work in, which has been one of the most surprising things to me. And I've shared that on this podcast that given our backgrounds in technology, I thought, well, most of our clients will be coming from technology. But the interesting thing is that so many of the challenges that exist for sellers, whether they be in technology or selling commercial roofing or selling personnel services or selling infrastructure construction services, all of those, those different challenges are very much the same. And so I'm really happy to have Lee here with me today. And I want to. Lee, my very best friend and my brother, I want to welcome you to the podcast. Thank you for being here with me.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: No, thank you for having me, Dennis. And that was a great walk down memory lane. I mean, every time I think back about that, it brings back a lot of things we've done, evolved and experienced together and just led us to the point that we are here. So it's fun hearing that and going through that again.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: Very good. I'm really happy to have you here. And so, you know, since. Since you mentioned the walk down memory lane, maybe we go back to that just a little bit and maybe go back to NCR days and when Hugh McBride introduces to each other, maybe talk to me a little bit about that experience from your perspective and what you.
What that was for you.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: I'm going to take you one step before that and how I met Hugh and then leading back into how he introduced us and why I think he introduced us. So when I first got out of college, I was fortunate. It was a tough job market, but the first job I found, somebody took a chance on me, name was Mike Steinberg. And I came out, they offered me a job for 19,000 a year, which ended up being a good thing because at $19,000 a year, you couldn't really do a lot of things, let alone pay your bills. So it really forced you to embrace sales and to make up that difference with commission and bonuses. And it was also a business where it was really to differentiate yourself. It was based on service, it was based on relationship, it was based on, say, do you're going to do what you say you're going to do and you're going to take care of things for customers. Otherwise, it was somewhat commoditized. And I did that. I was pretty successful for about three years working in the healthcare industry. And then Hugh picked me up in my early 20s and he saw certain traits and he promoted me and brought me into being a national account manager for one of the company's larger healthcare conglomerates. And fast forward two and a half years from there. We are $700 million company. And working with Hugh and his mentoring and Guiding, we end up winning a $350 million contract over five years.
So in essence, 50% growth for the company.
What we got rewarded for that is I got promoted, I got to lead a national sales team of my peers, which Hugh again brought me into that. And then our largest competitor acquired us. And at that point, Hugh McBride and went out there and he found NCR and became VP there and gave me a call and said, I want you to move from Chicago and I want you to move to Phoenix and I want you to run the la. The Phoenix, the San Diego, the Las Vegas and El Paso was in there somehow that territory. So being in your mid-20s, that's a great territory. And I said, when do you want me there? And he's like, next week. I thought he was serious. And I showed up that following week and he actually said, what are you doing here? And I said, well, you told me to be here. And he's like, well, it was more of a, I wanted your commitment, but okay, you're here, let's go forward.
And at that point he had said he had been there for a couple months. He's like, there's someone I want you to meet. His name's Dennis Sorensen. And I think there's two reasons that he probably did it. One, he identified me and knew there's personality that we get along and figured you would be a great bridge for me coming into a new organization, new culture and you could help me there on my side. I think because I had worked with him and know what he expected, I could be a bridge to help you do that. But I definitely think he also saw the commonalities of the intense drive that we both have. It wasn't go get this business, it was go get all the business, eliminate all the competition, was our mindset, creative ways, how we went about it and always challenging some processes or legacy processes to hey, we could streamline this, we could do it better. So I think he naturally saw us come together for good and like you said, interesting for both personality and where we were in business.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: I think so too. I think, you know, it's interesting you say, you know, to help you sort of be a bridge into ncr. And you know, one of the things I've talked about, about the things that I learned and I think I got from NCR was really that whole process driven approach to sales and then and really a focus on bringing strategy to what you do in sales. And because one of the things that I know I was taught and kind of grilled into Me was, you know, to do really good strategic account or territory planning in the business. And so like what was your experience coming into ncr? What did you see from, you know, your previous work to when you got to ncr? Maybe some of the things that you saw in NCR in the process there?
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean we are at NCR System Media and we are selling products and somewhat customized products to media, entertainment, to retail, to financial institutions. But when you really step out from there, it was kind of commoditized. People can match some of our supplies we were selling. They could shift some of the other things we were doing. So really the differentiation I think there, it had to be based on earning the trust and relationship with customers. It was being with the customers, not just being order taker and transactional. Because transactional, anybody could just literally they'd fill out some things for supplies and they'd fax it in back then and then you would execute it. I think we saw that to be bigger we had to be different. We had to provide services, we had to build relationships, we had to give them a reason to keep doing business with us, but then to consolidate their three, four other vendors and do it all through us because it was easier and we take care of it for them. One hand to shake, one throat to choke. But you had to earn that. So I think it was common from where I was coming into and even more so you had to rely and lean into that. But the real focus would be to really win the game. You couldn't be transactional selling. You had to be more strategic in what you're selling and very focused on where you're going with that to make a big difference.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: From your perspective then that process driven element of ncr, how do you see that as shaping the way that we did what we did?
[00:11:48] Speaker A: I mean, you had to look at our resources. We were both managing large territories, right. I had seven states, you had California, a large portion there. And we had a pretty limited team and a young team. Right. We were young managers at that point, managing even a younger team and bringing them up to speed. But again helping them focus because a lot of the team was focused on get more transactions. You get enough of them, you add them up and maybe you'll make your quota. Maybe you could get to that 500,000 or 700,000 a year. I think when we started collaborating and looking at it, we realized that you could do more with less. It was about being more intentional about where you spent your time and how you focused. So let other people Go try to tally up all these transactions lets us get in front of customers, really understand their business. And instead of selling boxes and transactional shipments, there was opportunities out there to sell truckloads and freight loads to the companies like Visa and MGM and Wells Fargo and versus 50 other companies just buying boxes of stuff. So again, it was really redirecting your team and having them build the faith and do more with less. And you could get better by strategically going after these bigger opportunities. Let your competition take those individual transactions or let those just be add ons. But your focus is to go after something that's much bigger, that could really impact the customer.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: And one of the things that I talked about in the last episode was that when I went to work at ncr, I had had previous sales experience. In fact, I talked about in the last episode how I had sold beauty supplies door to door in the dorms during college. And so one of the things I knew I had was I had the ability to hustle, right. I had the ability to just go out there and go through the level of activity, put in the work. And I think one of the things that I, you know, I was listening to your. What you said to me there is that, you know, that when we took our teams or when we had our teams, we had a lot of really great people on those teams and those people knew how to hustle. And a lot of times it seemed like it was for us, about, like you said, helping them to focus.
Right. So back to a little bit of Weinberg. Right? Point the team and then arm the team and then monitor the battle, if you will, like the way that Mike talks about it. And so that element of hustle, as we saw a lot of people doing, like you said, a lot of activity. But then really, like you're saying, it was the way that I knew in order to move out of, as an, as a seller for ncr, to get out of selling one or two cases of cash register receipt paper. And then I had to find ways to sell, like you're saying, truckloads or hundreds of thousands of cases of those products to those customers. And that was a different level game.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'd say the other thing we did, again, when I came in, the team was around the fax machine on the phone, taking orders and hoping orders were going to come through on the fax machine. And, and I know you did this with your team as well. I said, no, let's get out of the office. We don't want to be here. Let's embed ourselves at the customer level. Let's really understand how they're using that, why they're using it, how many other people they're using, how we could simplify and make their life easier if they were a business owner, how can we make it more operationally efficient for them if there are large Wells Fargo, MGM casinos or Visa, and taking the team and moving them out to the point of the customer and becoming part of the customer versus being in the office taking orders, I think that was something else that we did that really differentiated our teams and quite honestly, it empowered them and it energized them more than sitting in an office. Right. They enjoyed most of them getting back out, getting in front of customers and interacting with them, which then built a relationship which led to the end result where we wanted to be selling bigger, much larger deals and opportunities.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: One of the parts of the process that I really appreciated and learned, I think at NCR is, you know, I did have that hustle. And one of the things I remember is that we were required as a seller to make at a minimum of 20 face to face customer calls per week.
And I remember at times, even myself on a Friday knowing I was short of my face to face calls is all right, well, I'm going to go find an office park and I'm going to drive my car into that office park and I'm going to go door to door to door to door and get to see if I can meet people and begin to start a conversation that I might be able to finish later. And so I think, you know, that whole level of hustle and then, you know, getting the teams to start to think about growth differently. How did you go about getting your team to think about growth differently and what their potential might be in terms of moving beyond one or two cases to those truckloads you talked about?
[00:16:46] Speaker A: I mean, when you say that, it goes back to a lot of the things we've done now, right?
We've kind of put a label on them now at Horizons west, to things that we've developed, that we evolved, that you and I have shared, that we've tweaked over time, be it processes, tools, mindset. You're starting to get ambition, right? We didn't call it ambition back then. We, I think intuitively thought bigger, going to go after everything and thought beyond that for the most part. When we were back at the days of ncr, teams were just going after the bar that was set for them. I got to get to 500k, I got to get 600k, that's my quota and then I'll get paid X amount and I'll have a job that was such a low bar glass ceiling that I think both of us learned individually. But then getting teams to really open up their mind and see it is the first step, help them realize there's a bigger reality and it can happen, it can be done. So in the case of, you know, at NCR System Media it was getting beyond that transaction and help them see, hey, this company, they buy truckloads, they buy pallets, why not from you? So let's talk about who they're buying from, how they got there, how we could get there and why can't we do that and take over that business.
So a lot of it was helping people remove their limitations, self imposed limitations or sometimes imposed because a company throws a number out there. So hey, that's going to be a hard goal. It's our quarter, let's go get it. Well that's no fun. I mean I'd much rather get to 10, 20x that and make the money that comes with that and really grow a longer business and a bigger business than that. So I think the first step was really helping people remove those self imposed limitations or those company label goals and realize that's fine because companies have to have these goals and put things out and they have to roll it up and meet a number and do different things. But that doesn't mean that's your limitation. It's only your limitation if you impose it on yourself.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: And so if you think about, if you look back to that time and as you, as you came into that, those territories with your sellers, how, how did you think about territory strategy from a sales leader's perspective and then how did you help your reps to think about it in from, from an individual contributor, from a seller perspective.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah, that gets back to how do you optimize and spend your time to make the most of it. And again back then when we come in, teams would have a list of 50, 60 different prospects and customers they were going to target and they try to run around and get to all of those and get some orders going at all of those and not right or wrong, they were doing what was natural to them. Go out there and get as much business as you can and get transactions gone to add it up to a level again it was do more with less, sometimes slow down the speed up, stop, let's look at what you have, let's look at the territory and potential and maybe they're all prospects. But not all prospects are made the same. Right. And maybe same thing with customers. So where can you have the biggest opportunity, help that customer the most? And sometimes that means I'm going to go after these five or seven or ten and the rest really don't make sense or they won't. They'll take up my time that could be going after these larger accounts that have much more potential where again, I could help them as well by streamlining all the things they're doing, which is making a busy work for them to just deal with me and trust in me to handle things.
So it was initially pull that net in and where you're going to focus your time on clients and customers that can have the biggest impact. And then I think I'm sure you're going to go here. How do you maximize that individual customer, which really gets into strategically planning, preparation and embedding at the customer to understand their business at different levels and how you could help them or fit in there?
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's interesting because sometimes one of the things that you just made me think about was sometimes I find that where a seller has this list of prospects or customers that are on their current territory rider and in some ways I feel like they feel like they need to sort of gather in that entire list and spread themselves across that entire list because there's this fear that if they don't, somehow some of those accounts might get carved off and you know, given to another rep or, you know. And I always found it kind of interesting to think about even as, you know, when I was an individual contributor, even later on when we were, when I was a Teradata, like the idea that honestly I didn't really care if a number of opportunities got carved off somewhere else because I could see what you were describing as the tremendous potential that existed in maybe one or two or even just a handful of my accounts was more than enough for me to be able to build a business for myself that, that I could grow and really earn from for a very long period of time.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Well, I'll add a, a personal lesson in here of myself. When we went to Teradata, which was selling data warehousing, storage software solutions and we both came back in as sales reps, we had an opportunity, somebody you had connected with 10 settemar through an NCR connection because Ted used to be there and he said, hey, come join my team. So he moved you from, I believe, from the Bay Area down to Southern California.
And then shortly after that, after he had you move, he's like, hey, do you know anybody that would be good in the bay Area? And you gave him my name. So he brought me in. So again, Ted was another one that saw beyond the fact that we didn't have a technology or software background. But he knew from where we came from, from interactions or just knowing where we came from about relationship selling and value selling. And he anchored on that. So he was anchoring on that and understanding that if people have the aptitude, they could learn and catch up. But some foundational things you needed were those relationship skills and trust and value building skills. So he hired me in there.
So we both had to step back from where we were, back into sales. But as new sellers learning something new. So we had to recreate ourselves. We had to spend time immersing ourselves in learning again and always being a student of learning and being humble to ask people, can you get me up to speed? What does this mean? And people were great. They surround us at that company. They helped elevate us and we both had successful careers going forward.
But to your point on how do you balance and the challenge in the mind of doing that, I actually, even after teaching people to narrow that focus and do more with less, I became my own victim of counter that where I had built up and we had a successful business. If you remember, they started the E business team and there was 23 of us new team goafter.com, this was early 2000s we joined, we had this great team and six months later.com implosion it was gone. And then we were left with 23 down to three sellers. It was yourself, myself and Jeff Adamick. And the question really went, do you guys want a job? And it's like, well, we kind of uplifted our lives and moved and so yeah, kind of hope we would have a job. Great. You got till the end of this year to still hit the goals that you have because they're not changing. Good luck. Go get it. There's got to be stuff out there still.
And we did. We each had to figure out our business, map it out, see what was remaining and go out there. And we each did our own ways. And for myself, I was working between Seattle and the bay area and I was fortunate enough to find some small companies that later became some of the largest in the world in our industry. EBay, PayPal went with separate T Mobile and a couple others. I think I had five or six. And at a point where most people were getting quotas and assigned and quoted trying to achieve two and A half to maybe four million. Right. I had built up a business, same as you, where I was doing 14 to 20 million, which sounds great at a multiple. And then we had a common manager, Dale Glover, who came and he's like, hey, which accounts do you want? And my answer was, all of them. And this went on for I don't know how many conversations until it got escalated. So as it turns out, he's like, no, you can have one or the other and you're not going to Seattle anymore, or you're giving up the Bay Area. Which do you want? And basically, I'm looking at territory that I put my sweat and tears into and built up and survived to a business that was four or five times other common businesses there. So at that point in time, you know, that went back and forth, and I realized why they were doing it. It wasn't to optimize me. It was a little bit. This rep has too many eggs in one basket. We need to divide this up and we have to balance it. So for me, I grudgingly said Bay Area and took eBay and PayPal, which ended up being a great call. And then it allowed me to, instead of traveling back and forth and spending a lot of time with both, but to really immerse myself and get so deep into business at eBay and PayPal. And then they joined businesses, which became more interesting of tying their business and what you could do together to. Then I was doing 35, 50 million. And then when we started working together under that, we were building a plan to get to 100. And before I got the itch and went to a startup, I think our plan was already outlined to be 80, 85 million. So again, even though I preached it to people coming back and doing this, I lived it myself. And that really then fully instantiated with myself what it means to really be immersed and strategically planned and become embedded in a businessweb customer, but also have the customer say, you are part of my team. That is where things really change when you're in this business.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's kind of an important thing, I think, at least for me as a seller, was to have that moment where you're burning the boats, meaning you're no longer able to sort of retreat back to these other accounts because your territory is now a little bit smaller than it used to be. And so now you're sort of forced to look at it and look at it through different eyes and really realize, like, oh, my goodness, like, here's the total potential of this thing. And now I'm going to go really pour my efforts. Like you're saying you didn't have to get on a plane anymore to go to Seattle to grow the business. And at that time I didn't have to get on a plane to keep flying back and forth to Denver. I could focus on really growing what we had right here in in Salt Lake City and turning that into a really big business as well. Not as big as ebay, but it was a good business.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Yeah, we both had good times and good things. And again, it's scary at first, right, because here's all this business you built and you're basically that business is going away. But once you get through that again and step back, it does open up an opportunity even bigger than what you thought before by immersing yourself more and really getting the focus and actually become part of that client's business.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I think one of the things that was an important shift in my mind, I've talked about it on some of the previous episodes, is this idea of, you know, as a seller thinking about the idea of instead of just making sales like build a business.
How did you think about that when you, you know, both as a seller and as a sales leader, how do you think about that shift from just hey, I'm going to make sales to make quot but I'm going to actually build a business.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the catalyst to that was actually when I became narrowed and more focused. You know, in the early years at Teradea when we were there, we were learning new business.
We didn't know the technology, we had to ramp that up and we had some what looked like pretty big numbers at the time. So we were focusing on that a little bit. So I'll admit it was more of a 12 month plan in the first year or two.
But after that I started seeing as I got immersed, I'm not worried about that. I'm looking at the potential here because I'm only in a portion of the business. Most people were selling foundationally storage and you can put your data here and that again was the low bar. That's get to quota. Can I sell enough servers and storage and software licenses and support to get to that number? Well, that was just a bottom line or a baseline. I think what we both learned is when we get with customers, great to have this. But so what you've got in your cheaper, maybe a faster storage and so forth, it was really about how could we change their business now that we have this capability? How do we show the Customer what they have and what they could do with it. And that became a moment of almost every department became a customer and every exec in every department and every director in every department and every line team and project team became a potential customer.
So instead of trying to sell this one time deal that would refresh once a year and so forth, when budgets came, you were now selling and had the opportunity to sell across 12 months. But not just 12 months. In the year that went away, I started looking at a three to five year business plan. Where could we really go? Because if we want to do everything that's here, this is going to be a multi year plan. And oh, by the way, that plan can change over time. As the company change, they acquire PayPal, as executives change, as new demands come, as new solutions that they offer are out there in the marketplace, that is an opportunity to realign and help them optimize that. So it changed from just a sell to this one area, it to sell to the whole company, which opened up all those opportunities, which also meant I got a five year plan. And at that point I never even looked at the 12 month. I knew the 12 month was taken care of usually within the first 4, 5 months of the year. I didn't always tell management that that I had to plan to do that, but I was playing a three to five year game and that was always a rolling thing. It was a business that was continuing.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: So it was really about in that, you know, coming back to the theme of the entire podcast is really about you having a strategy and a strategy that you then looked at. Not only did you have that 12 month strategy, but you had a strategy that went out 36 months, 60 months and then that strategy in your case was formed into an actual written strategic account plan or strategic territory plan that you could then go about executing.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, now you mentioned, I mean this is kind of the basis where again, we didn't call it the four Ps right plan, prepare, practice, play, we kind of just execute against it. But it was by building that five year plan and not just doing it once and throwing away until you're asked to do it again the next year. Which was always interesting because they bring us in these reviews, right? These annual reviews or some annual reviews and people would scramble the weekend before, the week before, the day of trying to put together slides to show management, look what I got and I'm going to sell this amount. Well, we were working on a three year plan, so ours had evolved. So when everybody was scrambling that weekend we didn't have to because we were living something that we built. We had done the research, we had prepared, we had put the outline in place. We have process to go back and Update that. Every Q1 or every results that came out for companies or any changes in the company we would update and keep it live.
So we were running at a different level of three to five year plan and again we'd come into meetings and people were cobbling together five, ten slides and over time, just by doing this, running it, we had a deck that was 150200 slides and was like which area do you want to go and see where I'm going to grow in? Do you want to go in this area? You want to see how we're going to help them in risk? Do you want to see how we're going to help them sell more?
And we had a bigger wider plan in doing that and that's because it was foundational and not a one and done.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Let's touch a little bit for a second on, on strategy and strategy in particular in the area of prospecting. So let's go back to you and I early on early days Teradata, we're both now back as individual contributors. You're in Northern California, I'm in Southern California.
And we're. And we're both thinking about, you know, prospecting and the things that we got to do because we were pure greenfield, we didn't inherit a bunch of accounts. We were living in a pure greenfield environment where it was 100% prospecting. We were, we were going to build a business, but we were going to build that business from the ground up.
Maybe talk to me a little bit about how strategy in your mind played a role for us as sellers that were going about just really a really aggressive prospecting effort.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I thought about this a little bit before I came on here and I kind of laughed because it brought me back to some of the things we collaborated on.
One of the ones when we were trying to get business, we were one of the smaller companies in the business. You had IBM, you had Oracle, you had SAP and then the little engine that could, that was us.
So how do you get into this embedded exec, you know, embedded at the executive level, can't go wrong by buying IBM kind of mentality and insert yourself there. So again I think this is where Hugh connected us and it continued into Teradata. Our collaboration continued but it came to a different level because we're selling something much more technology based, very much ability to differentiate but we are coming into a very mature and lack relationship. So you and I collaborate a lot in how do we get the attention. And we're trying to meet with C level people. So I think one of the things we did, if you remember, was the book veto, how to sell the vetoes, very important top officers. And we would go and do our research, we look at 10ks, we would get into the backgrounds of these execs and then we would come back together and we'd build this letter one pager that would get to exec, get their attention and maybe include something that would get their attention to get a meeting. The right to sit down at a table with them and talk about how you could really make that happen or where it's at and it's differentiated from other people, if you remember that. And then we'd come back and say hey this worked, this one didn't and we'd modify and we had a very good process and we were getting these meetings. But do you remember, I mean one thing I think you have here when you're looking at is you have to be adaptable and you have to be creative.
So we did the research and the work that most didn't and then we get these meetings and it worked fairly well for us. But do you remember when it stopped working as well? Because I think other people started doing that. I think there's a transition more to go online so people weren't reading letters and doing that as much and it went down when we're online. So if you remember how do we get back in there and get these meetings? And out of frustration, you know, we came up with the lunch veto which eventually evolved to a coffee veto. And it was a little bit out of frustration where you just put in the subject line lunch and then you had no more than two paragraphs and asking exec for a meeting. And that had relative success. And the theory when we talked about it was we have to stand out from the crowd and somebody gets an email and has lunch, that's a little different. I'm going to look at it and something you could read on just a screen without having to open up and scroll down, short attention. And we had some success when we got that, but that stopped working. So I think out of frustration we just put coffee which becomes even more interesting if you think back then. Now everybody's inundated with all these emails but one that just said coffee and we called it the coffee veto and joked but that was getting like 85 to 90% accept rate. So again, we adapted and we evolved and to bring it full circle, why coffee's interesting. What's this? Why is somebody sending something that just says coffee is an executive. And in there you'd say, can I have 10 minutes of your time? I'll meet you at your lobby coffee or at Starbucks cross street and I'll buy you a coffee, introduce myself. And that worked because you got their interest, you're different from everybody else. You got their time. It was a committed window of not a launch for an hour or two, but 10 minutes. So it ended up working, but full circle. When you got that meeting, had you not done your research, preparation, planning, and brought that to the table in that condensed window, you just spent money and bought someone a coffee and thank you and that's it. But we were looking for a reason to extend that 10 minute meeting to two hour meeting, which happened, or to here. Call this person and come in and I want to hear more about what you're doing. So again, I think we are creative, we're adaptable, we're aggressive about our approaches that we had all the things I think Hugh saw about us and then we did the work to earn the right to get the bigger meeting and to turn it into something.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: I think one of the things that was so key in my mind about the success of either the lunch veto or the coffee veto was. And you said this, right? You said, we did our research, we understood the story that we wanted to tell, and we put just enough of that story into the lunch veto email to be able to intrigue them. And then one of the other lines I think you came up with that we used in the lunch veto was no sales pitches, just an introductory meeting for future reference was one of the key lines. I think that's right.
And where this got validated really strongly for me was that day when we were doing this together, we were on the phone together and we were sort of drafting this lunch veto. And.
And we sent it off.
And in my case, I sent it off and got a response from Kim. Spent. Do you remember Kim?
[00:38:22] Speaker A: I do. Mgm, yeah.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: So CIO at MGM Studios. And so Kim responded to that email right away. And I got the lunch to go to MGM Studios to have lunch with Kim in the studio lunchroom, which was one of the coolest things that I had ever seen walking into MGM Studios. But, you know, one of the things Kim talked to me about later was, you know, how the email itself, the structure of it, one what you said the lunch stood out because it was different than Anybody else. So that creativity you talked about, the other thing that stood out to him was that even in the very first, you know, couple of paragraphs that we included, he could see enough in there that got his interest in saying, okay, he understands enough about my problems and potentially has some thoughts on how to solve them. But then I think he particularly liked the no sales pitches line that you had come up with as we were building this.
And then when I showed up and we had lunch, I actually had a relevant story because I had done the homework to be able to have that conversation. And then that lunch meeting turned into the next meeting and turned into the next meeting and turned into the next meeting that ultimately that. To mgm, you know, becoming a teradata customer. And so I think, you know, as you were talking about it, it's like, it's all sort of like flowing back into my mind about how, how that all worked in, in that, at least in that case for me, in that opportunity. And I know it worked multiple places for you as well.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Yeah, for our thought process again. And we collaborate. So we evolved this to become some of the things we're calling today, like the 4Ps. But there is no shortcut, right? Sometimes you gotta slow down the speed up.
Had we not done the research and come prepared and just came in there and how's your coffee and days today? And by the way, I have feature, feature, feature, product, that would have been the end of the meeting. But again, because we deliberately went in the way we did, because we did the work and put that time in on the preparation and the planning for that and even practice for even that 10 minute coffee, it led us to opportunities to extend that relationship or to go forward. And again, that worked across many different exec roles, not just in it, it was cmo, cfo, I mean it worked across all different areas. And again, if you do your research and understand what each of those areas or persons at different levels, because, oh, by the way, the C level from the svp, from the vp, from the director to the line, they may be growing in the same common direction and guidance, but I guarantee you at their individual level, there's something more specific to them that's a sign that they have to accomplish or that they aspire to do. So you can't just stop at one level.
You have all these levels across the enterprise that you need to work with. And to me that's exciting, right? That's going after everything there. But that's what makes the day exciting.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: It is very exciting. And I think one of the keys, I think is if you and I had.
If I think about. In that case, even with Kim, if I just said we sell databases, he's like, well, I got that. I got a database, right? What he didn't have was a solution to the problem that we could deliver through a different kind of technology, through a different solution that we could bring or the way that we could bring it.
And so even now where as we work with clients at Horizons west and clients who, regardless, again, of what they sell, if you say, oh, I sell technology or I sell software or I sell AI or I sell this, you know, like, that's. You might as well just get a sandwich board and put it on and go outside and say, I sell this. Right? Like, it's really about what you were saying of understanding their problems and being able to talk to them and have the right kind of story. And Weinberg, I think, does a really good job in the way that he. He teaches us to build bridge statements when he talks about, you know, CIOs turn to us when they have this problem, this problem, this problem, this problem. And it was a little bit of that element of that in that email, I think, that really sparked for Kim was, hey, CIOs buy these guys or work with these guys when they have this problem and I have this problem, so I better see what they've got to say.
[00:42:49] Speaker A: No, I mean, the bridge statement is another prime example of things we've done that, you know, now it's instantiated in that format. And even now, right. I get emails all the time now that we're working together. And I see it all the time where people are reaching out. They're like, product speed feed specs, right? Let me tell you about me. But enough about me, let me tell you about me. And they just focus on themselves, their product, their company, when nothing about that. And it just. It's humorous now, but frustrating, too, because you're not focusing on the client, what they need, you're just telling them about you and throwing brochures out there. You're being transactional, and good luck selling that way these days.
So, yeah, I think we did do a lot of these things even without knowing what we were doing. But in truth, we did it and we deliberately collaborated and evolved a lot of these things and processes and tools to make it more efficient and to do some of the things that we've had success with. And it is repeatable.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: That's a wrap for part one of my conversation with my good friend and business partner, Lee Paris. In Part two, we'll continue the conversation, explore some additional insights around leadership growth and practical application of strategy in today's sales environment.
Thanks for listening to the Think Big, Win Bigger podcast. I'm Dennis Sorensen and until the next episode, just wins. Sam.
