Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Our team would come in with the mindset that we were not a vendor. We came in with the mindset that we were part of their team. And at first it's a little bit different for customers because they're not used to that. They're used to. You're here, you're trying to sell me something. But once you get beyond that and you show them you've done your research and you're showing them that they could get further along, that changes. So you need to adopt that mentality going in. Otherwise you'll always be a vendor, you always get capped a little bit. They'll always be wondering what's really in it for you. So again, if you put their interests and needs first, sounds easy. People say that, but do they really do it? You have to actually say, do you have to execute and do that to continue and earn that right.
[00:00:41] 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 back here now for episode number 12, part two of my discussion with my very best friend for the past 28 years and business partner, Lee Parise. And so, Lee, thank you for joining me again for part two.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Thanks for having me again.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: And I think where we left off in part one, Lee, you had talked a lot about the difference in the thinking that you had had that separated you from others and separated your team from others when you were working at ncr. And I wondered how you would think about that same thinking, translating beyond what you did at NCR into other areas and other industries that you've worked in.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: No, that's a good question. When you look at kind of where we're talking ambition, how do teams play for 10 or 20x?
That's not really an arbitrary number. That's something that over the decades, across different industries, different size companies, enterprise, smaller startup kind of enterprises, mid sized companies that we found it, that it's applicable and it's able to land in that range from kind of the aspirations that people go after, which we said was their quota, and that just being a low bar to start with, that you could easily get to 10 to 20x if you apply the right execution, planning and strategy. Around that, and we found that to be true.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: So once you have kind of this concept of ambition, which, you know, we talk about it as the real potential of an account, really understanding what that real potential is, how do you go about taking that understanding and then translating it into the how or the action or the strategy that you execute and to go and compete for that real total potential?
[00:02:50] Speaker A: A lot of it came from upfront doing that preparation and that planning. Right. You have to understand what could be possible by looking at the market, by looking at what competitors are doing in there, by looking at your client, what they're doing and the business they're in and how you might apply to it. And that's upfront work that you need to do. You can't get around that. Otherwise you're just kind of blindly going out there and hoping to get to your quota. Once you have a vision of where that could be, then you or you and your teams and extended teams need to go ahead and you have to map and have a strategy and the team has to understand the strategy and you all have to execute against that strategy of getting to what that ambition could be.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: What form does that strategy take for you and how does that form maybe vary from opportunity or account to account or territory to territory? Is.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Take an example. Let's step into the world where we started getting into database and analytics, right into that world in the early 2000s.
Again, that's where a lot of people were playing for their quota, two and a half to four and a half million and playing in a, if you will, a directionally targeting one area, which was usually it to go after more seat, license, more server selling, more capacity. So it was kind of transactional selling directed at a single source, where we'd come in and say there's a much bigger opportunity here. While we know what all the competition, where they're at and they're playing in that it, and there's room to consolidate and gain that and grow and justify going from 2.5 to four and a half million to maybe 14, 16, just playing that game. But then you would step back and the first strategy would be what we do high, wide and deep. We're not just playing with it. There's an enterprise here. How do we map to all the different business units? How do we map to finance? It is already in there. How do you go to finance? Marketing marketplace, very specific business units and how can you help them? And you're playing a much bigger game. So you're mapping to a wider organization and deeper as we had talked about different levels in the organization will have different things that they need to accomplish overall as a company. C levels will have very specific things they want to accomplish. Svp, vp, different level director. You're playing at all those levels and those are all opportunities and all opportunities to build on a relationship and expand. And then you're multiplying against different business units. So really map the organization high, wide and deep. And then as a team, you go into each of those areas with your team and say, here's how we can apply this and help this specific person in this business unit and here's what's most important to them. And you direct a team to start interacting and go out there and execute against it. You're basically taking the power of one, which is an individual, yourself, where you could be successful to a certain level, but you could be much more successful by mapping the wider team, be it sales teams or solution engineers or business consultants or whoever you're bringing in and being on that same page to execute the strategy. Divide, conquer, execute. But you're all working towards that wider and bigger strategy that reaches towards the ambition you're targeting.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: And one of the things that we found is a lot of times we'd get locked into a single use case or single application for the solution that we were bringing to the table. And that has sort of been historically the way that the account had been sold initially or won. And there was this concept oftentimes of saying, well, we'll land and expand.
And one of the things that I found was challenging was that when we landed inside of an account, but we didn't have any real vision at the outset of how we were going to expand or what the broader opportunity might be. It seemed that it was really easy to get locked into that single use case and have that customer thinking about us just through that one and only lens.
And one of the things that we found was effective was to be able to really understand that real potential and then be able to link that real potential to the things that mattered most to that particular customer or that company and then begin to think about how we would link our solution or demonstrate how our solution was going to help them accomplish those most strategic things that they were trying to, they were trying to get done as a company. And then to your point, in the high, wide and deep mapping, mapping ourselves to the highest level executives that we thought would be impacted or have ownership of those key strategic initiatives. And so that when we went in to sell to even a new account, we could talk about that Bigger picture vision for how we would bring value even if we had to start in a single use case, sort of. If we, even though we might have to land in a single use case, we were always trying to sell that bigger picture vision in the customer's mind of what could be done with our solution.
So that once we did land, we weren't sort of pigeonholed into that one particular use case or thought of as just, oh, they're this the vendor that we use for this.
Right. And so how do you think about that broader thinking and strategy inside of the account and how you, how would you approach that in your experience in some of the accounts and not getting yourself pigeonholed into that single use case or vendor for this sort of positioning inside of the account?
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd say some of that is the mindset too, of also limiting mindset that limits going after ambition to land and expand. But you're having that use case and if that's the only trick, you know, you could grow and you could get to maybe your quota. But you always gotta look at it as an opportunity. You gotta land and then you gotta do the work again. You have to do the preparation.
You have to have a strategy to understand, I landed, I'm in a new business unit. Now, here is my land capability and use case. But what's really important to them and how can it be applied? And you got to think beyond that versus some people just land, sell that one use case. Now, like, let's go to another business land, get that one use case. Well, I'd rather look at as a multiplier effect. You land, you're in a new area, get that use case. But now do the work map, do the planning, do the strategy, work with your team and understand where you could go from there. So a lot of it is your mindset, what you bring in, but you have to earn the right and map it to what's important to the client. And then you got to execute and do that. Once you do that, the doors start opening up. That's where things really became transformational for us. Where other people are going in, closing their one deal and then they're gone for months or quarters until the next opportunity comes that they need that seat, license, capacity expansion, whatever.
Meanwhile, our teams, myself or our teams would be getting badged, we'd be getting office space and we'd be in there in meetings as teams almost every hour, working across different units because we had earned the right to be thought of as being part of their team. So we were Being invited by the executives to come to these meetings. We were extended staff. But you got to earn the right, and that means you got to do some of the work upfront. You got to align it. You have to execute, earn that trust. And once you do, that becomes a whole different game.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: How did you find that? You had to think about the messaging and the positioning of yourself in the customer's eyes, had to change in order to do that.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Our team would come in with the mindset that we were not a vendor. We came in with the mindset that we were part of their team. And at first, it's a little bit different for customers because they're not used to that. They're used to you're here, you're trying to sell me something. But once you get beyond that and you show them you've done your research and you're showing them that they could get further along again, that changes. So you need to adopt that mentality going in. Otherwise you'll always be a vendor. You always get capped a little bit. They'll always be wondering what's really in it for you. So again, if you put their interests and needs first, sounds easy. People say that, but do they really do it? You have to actually say, do you have to execute and do that to continue and earn that right. And I had some of the best people aligned with me in that industry when I was working at Teradata. Right. Solution architects, business consultants. And it was incredible. We were able to get being part of the team or our clients, whichever those clients would be.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember you were pretty renowned in your ability to monopolize resources into your opportunities, and it seemed to be part of your secret sauce or part of your strategy inside of those things.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: I was very greedy when we found good people and we put them in customers. And it wasn't just me, because when we put them in customers, they would see that same potential. They would not let them go either, and they would extend those individuals as well. Or some of them would come into meetings and quite honestly, new people would come and they wouldn't even realize our team weren't employees of the client. They go on for months thinking that we're employees because we're at every meeting, we're copied on everything.
But again, you can't just take resources. If you don't deliver for the company, your company, they're going to take those resources away. So just like you have to deliver for your clients, you have to also deliver to that other client, which is your company, to be able to Demand and get those resources. But if you do and you deliver and you're delivering 50, 80 million when everybody else is doing to 4, 6, it's not a tough discussion to try to get that done.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think one of the things that I learned from watching you and tried to model myself in the things that I did was you're monopolizing of the resources. But then the key thing that I saw was that a really important part of your strategy was that your team themselves understood the real potential of the account. They understood the strategy that you had and they all understood really the value proposition or the sales story that was being told in the way that you were trying to position yourself inside of the customer account. But then the messaging you needed them to be taking to the account as well, that echoed then along the same lines of what you were talking about.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean there was a lot of coordination. It was definitely team. When everybody's bought on the vision of where you're going and what the potential is, you still did checkpoints. So we get together in the mornings where the meetings were you going? Where are you going individually? Do we have to go together? And then you trust the team to go execute and do that. But there was very much high coordination across that and the strategy that people knew, but execution then that people were coordinated on and then we'd come back and keep everybody in the loop. So it was very much a highly coordinated team and execution against the strategy that we had built together.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: So your team was really involved and aligned with you. And really all three of the first, you know, of the four Ps that we talk about in plan, prepare and also practice. Right. Because you were practicing together as a team before you would go to these meetings and then you were sinking again later to sort of refine that practice in preparation for the next set of meetings.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: That's correct. And it wasn't a one time thing. This was something we would do intra week, we would do monthly, we would do quarterly. As things changed and they did what your client's business, we would have to come back and relook at that and go through it. So it was a continuum process. Not a one and done or once a quarter or once a year thing. It was just something that you continually do as part of your execution process.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: When I was leading one particular team, one of the things that I, I said to the sales team was that we're gonna, we're gonna reposition ourselves in the eyes of our customers. We're gonna be a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to them. We're gonna unlock ourselves from this, maybe this single use case box that they sort of traditionally viewed us in. And we were going to position ourselves again as a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to them. And one example of that to me was a meeting that I went to. It was the first meeting with this particular customer. They'd been a customer of ours for a long time, but this was my first meeting and this rep's first meeting with this individual. And one of the very first things that he said to me was, your technology is really expensive. And he's like, you know, I'm spending a million and a half a year on your technology, and I don't want to be spending a million and a half a year on your technology.
And I said to him, well, I don't want you spending a million and a half a year on my technology either. I want you spending 15 million a year on my technology.
And I'm going to demonstrate to you that I can be a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to you. And you're going to want to invest that 15 million with us because the ROI that you're going to drive from that investment that you make in our technology is going to more than pay for the investment that you're going to make. And so part of it was just really repositioning in our own minds that we could play a more strategic role with our customer. But then also then having that messaging and sharing that and being a little bit challenging in the way that we approach with them.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, when you look at it, I don't want to spend the money on it. Most of the time when we go in, whatever your quota was, they didn't even have that budget. Right. And they didn't want to spend 2 million or 4 million. But there is a reason why go down the line then next year, 20 million, 30, 50, 80. Because you were delivering value back in multiples. And again, because you're playing high, wide, deep, right. You weren't just playing with one person's budget, which we did find a way to expand that to a multiple because of added value, not just limited kind of mindset of what you're doing.
And then you multiply it across the whole enterprise, across the wide, deep strategy you're executing on. And you're always looking to get high, wide and deep. It's not just a one time and done. Right. That's something that is continual. But I think what's even a better and more interesting thing is when these execs would leave. It was very exciting when they go to another company and they call you and bring you in, and that wasn't because of your solution. There was always good solutions and viable solutions out there, and where they went probably had one. But they were bringing you in not just because they liked you, but because they knew you would deliver for them. And they kind of had seen you as part of their staff, and they're going somewhere else and they brought you in, and they wanted to be successful in their new executive role. So that was very exciting when they bring you along and be a trusted advisor to come in their new role for their next career. And when you look across this, if you execute that way, you or your teams. I could go back three decades of my career, and almost all the customers and clients I've worked for would take a phone call from me. Now, I still stay in touch with a lot of them. We're friends on a friend level, but also respected on a business level because that was earned over the time and over multiple decades together, working together.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: You know, I think it's a really good example.
One of the things that I started to do when I was interviewing sellers was that, you know, a lot of people ask for references. And what I would ask them for is to provide me A list of 6 potential customer References that they could provide of the level of people that I knew that they would have to be selling to inside of the company that I was working for at the time. And it was really impressive. The sellers who could actually come to the table with references from former customers versus references from potentially even former employees or people that they had worked with. And so listening to you talk right there, what I could think about was, well, I could very easily ask Lee for a list of half a dozen former customers that would be willing to speak on his behalf if he were interviewing for a role.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that's, you know, not right or wrong, but that's the difference between how you sell transactionally or to get something done for yourself and for your company versus how you sell to add to value, which that stuff gets taken off the table just by doing that, by focusing on helping the customer. Again, sounds easy. People say that all the time.
But do you execute to it? And that's a true test of what you just said there. If somebody couldn't come up with those references that quick, then you got to step back. Were you actually selling transactionally, or were you selling strategically and adding value to your client?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: You know, the other thing I think is Interesting, and I love your perspective on it is because, you know, not every seller has a major enterprise account that they're calling on. They might be assigned across, say, 5, 10, 15, even 20 different accounts. And. And they may need to think about the way that they approach strategy a little differently across that many accounts. And one of the thoughts that I've had about it is they can apply the same structure of being process driven across the entire system. They can have a view of the total potential of their sales territory and then they can translate that into the right strategy for the territory and not just the account.
And then they can do the same sort of approach that we're talking about in the way that they reposition themselves in the eyes of the many customers in their territory that they have to call on. What thoughts do you have on that approach? Because I know at different times you weren't just focused on a single account as a seller, even as an individual contributor, certainly not as a sales leader. But how do you think about strategy more broadly in terms of applying it across an entire sales territory for that type of a sales motion?
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Regardless if it's your individual sales territory, it's a strategic reason, a national region or even a global team. I think some of the concepts still apply if you want to go deep and execute to the way we've been talking about strategically, there is a bandwidth at some point. So I think you have to be strategic about how you go after the market and the clients. Going after 30, 40 clients, could you be successful transactionally?
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Maybe.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: But can you get to that depth and level, that high, wide and deep strategy across each one as deep and as focused? Doubtful at that level. So you need to balance and understand where's your market best potential, which customers can align the best, what kind of team do you have? And for a team that you have now, where do you want them to focus? As you expand your team, you should have a strategy of where is the next best place they could focus. But this goes a little bit to our conversation we had about do more with less.
Sometimes you have all this and it seems great, but can you really be more successful if you had less and you were focused and were able to actually map that strategy and execute more deeply versus as surface level or level down because you're stretched so thin or your team stretched so thin. So I think the strategy and the mapping applies not only at account level, but step back when you start managing a team or wider teams and how you execute them into the marketplace to be the most effective model.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I think even within a single account, you've got to prioritize the opportunities that you have.
And so I think about it as saying, okay, even within a single account, I've got to sort of stack rank the opportunities that I've got. And then I've got to be able to say, okay, I'm going to dedicate a certain amount of my effort to the way I think about it. And I've taught it with salespeople has been sort of divide everything into three. So top third, middle third, bottom third, and put 80% of your effort into your top third, 15% of your effort into that middle third, and 5% into that bottom third. And opportunities or even accounts can move from that top third, middle third, bottom third. But you want to do that thoughtfully in the way that you're pursuing your opportunities. That way you're not sort of peanut butter spreading yourself so thin that you really don't accomplish anything significant across any of the accounts, but that you're actually making significant progress against those. Those accounts that are getting that 80% of your effort at the top. Is that resonate with you?
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. That. That resonates. And that's what you want to do and map it to that. And again, like anything else that's not set at once and let it go, things change. So you want to continually look at that and balance that. But I think absolutely, being strategic about how you prioritize your resources at that point in time and being flexible enough to know that when things change, your team expands, your team contracts, the market changes, you need to look at that as well and map to that.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah. What I'd like to pivot to here and just in the last kind of section here of this particular episode, is I want to pivot to really horizons west and why we built it, why we decided to do it, why we're doing this every day now. And so I'd love to get your thoughts and ultimately, why we decided to do this and to do it together.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: I think part of it is because we've been connected for 28, 30 years. Right. And we've had points where we've worked together, we've off both went off to different things, and then we got reunited again in a later role. And as we did and we come back, it was interesting to talk to each other and see what we've learned. While you were running all of Europe and I was running Global GE and then come back and what have we added? How have we used what we've done and modified which we still used it, but I think we fine tuned it and even enhanced it over time. As you're working in international, as you're global and then as we came back together, I think just talking about it, it was more the resonation that there's a lot of things that we've learned and things we've labeled now, but it was processes and things we've learned to be consistently successful individually and as running teams that we could help other companies learn how to do this. It is something that could be learned. You got to put in the effort, you got to have some process and if you follow that and execute to it, it is repeatable that you could get to 10 to 20x of business or ambition and there's things you have to do are four Ps right. Prepare, plan, practice, play. We label it that way as stuff we've intuitively done and we've home but doing that happens as well. The high, wide and deep mapping, the slow down, the speed up which enforces all that. There's just stuff that when we came together, there is a lot of knowledge here over the last 30 years between of us running from everything from small stage startup to large enterprise to private equity to global roles to international roles that we could bring it together and accumulate that and help other companies. So I think it was exciting that part and two, being able to be reconnected to do that together and go out there has been what's fun.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it is a lot of fun. And as we've come along and like you said, our thinking has refined the way that I. The way I think about it is sort of like in three different levels. So as a commercial organization or revenue organization within a company, you think about it in terms of the system, you think about the method and then you think about the motion.
So at the system level that's where I think about us. That's plan, prepare, practice, play and that's ambition, strategy and execution. And then when you get to that method level, that's where a lot of the different thinking around is it value, selling, is it the challenger sale, Is it all of the foundational elements that Mike Weinberg teaches and I sort of think about it as a little bit of all of the above sort of at that method level. And then when you get to the motion level or the sales motion level, that in my mind is where you have sort of the steps and stages within a sales execution process that create, advance, close process that Mike Weinberg talks about and that's that where you're really Thinking about maybe some sort of a structure like a medic or a medpic or a bant or some other type, type of. Let's make sure we're sort of taking these consistent steps, you know, steps and stages, following those through our sales motion consistently.
And so like when you think about those three levels and the way that we think about the importance of integration across those three levels, what are the challenges that you think that we help to solve for companies, you know, in the work that we do at Horizons West?
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think the methodology and some of the process and the mindset we bring is applicable across any industry. You have to step back and you have to apply it because different industries are different. Whether it's services, whether it's technical industry, whether it's non technical industry, it's all applicable. You just nomenclatures and things may change. How you arrange are a little bit different because how they do something in that industry or that business may be a little different. But that foundational piece is something that we bring forward at Horizons West. And as we get and we embed and we emerge within, within the client or at the point of friction as we like to understand is then it's mapping it to their business and customizing it. I find that to be fun because we know these things work and it's just again dialing them in to match the business, match the nomenclatures and how they speak. But then once you get that mapped and accelerate, I think that's exciting and to see the results that it could bring to clients and their business. I mean that's what we're here for and that's what makes coming together and doing this and taking out to the marketplace exciting for me?
[00:27:18] Speaker B: What would you like sellers and or sales leaders to take away as sort of the keys from, you know, this discussion of strategy that we've been having?
[00:27:27] Speaker A: The biggest thing to think about from a seller standpoint is again, stop, have that moment of inflection and go in and start thinking about how you're going to execute this strategically. It's too easy to run into a new company and you just start going forward and you start in that transactional mindset and you start just get caught up in the day to day business with everything that goes on, emails and following up on things and the quota and the pressure and all the things that happen with that. Right. To realize, step back, look at things differently from what most people do and plan to where you're going to take that. Have a strategy, have a plan, but be thoughtful about it. And realize there's no shortcuts. You're going to have to do some of preparation, some of the planning if you truly want to be successful. And then you have to map a strategy to all that playing that you have. There's no shortcuts to doing that if you really want to get to the most optimal success you can do.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: I agree. I couldn't agree more. And I think that, you know, as I listened to us over the last couple episodes and recanting some of the history and doing this little bit of walk together down memory lane, I think it solidifies again to me, the reason that we do it and the reason that we enjoy doing it is, is because one, I think we, we believe it. We believe it. So, you know, inside of us, like you said, we know it works and it'll work across industry, across company, you know, across different sales scenarios. We know it works because we've been there, we've done it, and we've, we've learned to adapt it to different industries, to different types of sales situations because it isn't really a one size fit all. And that's, and that's not something that we're prescribing. We actually say we take it and we mold it to fit the particular client that we're working with or the opportunity or the industry that they're in. And so I agree with you wholeheartedly.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the most exciting part. When you come in, some people will give you a side look about ambition and can you get there? Is that too much pie in the sky? But when they start getting it and a light bulb goes off and they start learning and then start applying it and seeing that it's real and even coming up with, well, I think there's even more we could do on top of that.
I think that's when you sit back and it brings a smile on your face. Right. You can see that they're seeing the potential too. And you've changed their mindset and direction, which is fundamentally going to change the direction for the company.
[00:29:51] Speaker B: I really appreciate you being here with me, my brother, my friend, my business partner. I really appreciate you doing this and really helping everybody understand how having a really solid strategy in the way that you're approaching your business, approaching the account, can really change the game. And so, Lee, thank you very much for being here and look forward to having you back at some point.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Well, folks, that's it. And I appreciate you being here. Look forward to having you back on the next episode. Until next time I say just win.
