Friday Live with Robert Amezcua

Thanks for having me. It sounds like a lot of pressure building on us here, but I'm glad all the buttons are on your side. You've got more pressure than I do.

How did I make money as a kid? Oh boy. Every which way possible. I had quite a few lemonade stands, peddled some baseball cards, mowed some lawns. I was probably the top seller at every garage sale in the neighborhood. I was always looking for a deal. That was my early youth and early days of learning to be a seller.

No, I walked around with that experience and realized I didn't want to become a seller. I wanted to be a doctor instead. But thankfully Baylor University weeded me out early. They robbed the world of a hell of a doctor but gave him a mediocre sales guy instead.

Well, every loss I've ever taken was an embarrassing moment. There were quite a few. If you don't count my recent stay in a Chicago hotel where the drapes didn't close and there was a gym across the street that could see through my windows, then I'd say most of my embarrassing moments have been treated with grace and forgiveness. Most people have a short memory. I've been able to survive most of them. There's a true story at the Denver airport. A pilot stayed overnight at the Westin, got up getting dressed, didn't realize the sheer curtains were not the full ones. He actually got arrested for flashing. Someone complained. He was standing there getting dressed and it was a curtain, but not the full one. It was in the papers. You got to be careful. Someone will take offense to anything these days.

Oh, great question. I started out as a door-to-door telecom sales guy. After about three months in a suit and tie in the sweltering Texas heat, I quickly realized I was not very good at it, I wasn't passionate about selling long distance door-to-door, and my fingers were sore from getting doors slammed on them. There was a little company called Network Associates starting up a Dallas-based office. I'm still thankful to Tom Jud and Vince Karns for taking a chance on a young guy. I went over for mass interviews. I had a pulse and shoes on my feet. They asked, 'Can you answer a phone?' I said yes. 'Do you know what a fax machine is?' I said no but I can learn. 'Do you know how to pick up POS?' I said I can learn that too. They said, 'You're hired.' That's how I got into cybersecurity. I was blessed and fortunate. I still thank those guys every day. I've never left the business and probably never will.

Much better. I worked for WorldCom if that tells you anything. I don't think they're even around these days, for good reason apparently.

Yeah, those are good days. Kudos to you for remembering all those moving parts. I don't know if you did research or just remember, but that's fantastic. There are two parts to that. One part is funny because you never know how powerful your words can be. We had a sales leader at the time, I'll keep him nameless, who found out I was selling PGP command line. He came to my desk and said, 'You're the guy that sells this PGP command line? You have the most difficult and worst job in this company because you're selling code, one line of code, no UI, nothing sexy about it.' I could have taken that statement one of two ways. I took it as a motivator. I thought, 'I'm going to show this guy that I may have the worst job but I'm going to make the most of it.' I started digging into what people do with this and the value behind it. I started talking to my customers rather than making it a transaction. I asked them to help me understand what they do with it. I learned that a lot of banking entities were batching up high-value transactions, running them on big mainframes, doing big transfers every night. I asked about the nature and value of the transfers. Come to find out, they were transferring millions of dollars worth of EDI transactions, commerce transactions back in the early days when everything was batch encrypted. I thought, 'There's a lot more than a couple hundred bucks worth of value here based on what they're using it for and what's at stake.' This was back when you could sell above list price. I started trying value points. Can I get $1,000? People gladly paid. $1,500? Gladly paid. Next thing, $2,400. Strangely, my quota went by way faster the higher the price point. People were lining up because they needed this thing. There was a lot of value unlocked. I was gracious enough to share that with my peer sellers, and next thing you know, it became a bigger business than anybody ever imagined.

And I remember it was crazy. It didn't require a ton of development. We ported it to a couple different platforms as the transaction landscape changed, but tons of value. Just understanding and asking that question. Had we not asked those questions, it wouldn't have been a big business. No telling where the world would be today. That value exchange was worth way more than we anticipated. It was just a couple lines of code and a cardboard box. I don't even know if there was anything in that box, but I had one on my desk to display that there was something of value. I don't know if I ever reminded that VP of sales how much money I made on that business, but those were good days.

I think it's a binary equation. You either get it or you don't in a lot of cases. The best way to expose and understand that is where the scoreboard matters. If you're not producing a scoreboard of where your customer is today, the exchange of promises, expectations, outcomes, use cases, and then tracking and measuring what changes as a result, that is the value equation. It should be demonstrable. It makes everybody's lives easier when it is. But we all get caught in thinking we know what the value is, but the world is dynamic. Environments, businesses, networks, infrastructure are dynamic. While we might see a value equation in one place, it might be redefined in another. If we're not open to that, not looking, not thinking, not asking, we might not know otherwise. We might be selling ourselves short. It's part of the open conversation and being willing to listen to how people actually derive value from your platform versus you wanting to know how they derive it.

It comes down to knowing how people buy. That's a big part. Oftentimes we get caught up. Feature benefits are for technicians. Feature benefit statements are typically for the company, for the competition in terms of differentiation. But where people see most value in a transaction, especially in a bigger deal, they want to know what they're getting for themselves in return. Are they taking a risk? Is there a significant benefit in the risk they're going to take? Is there a benefit statement with respect to their career, their standing, their stature? In a lot of cases, it comes down to the personal nature, not just the professional. Think about that PGP command line conversation. There was no feature or benefit in that conversation. It was about the business and enablement. The guy on the hook with $40 million worth of transactions needed those things to go successfully and needed to make sure there wasn't a hacker intercepting them. That's all he cared about. If he did that every day and that $40 million grew to $80 million, $120 million, $160 million, that guy was going to be made to look like a hero because he was enabling the business to grow. If you went to him and said, 'This deal is $10,000 a license or $100,000 a license,' as long as he could connect the dots to that trajectory, there would be significant value. You got to broaden the scope a little bit.

Yeah, and it's not always about what you do. It's about what happens if they don't have some of the things and attributes. That's where you get a chance to shift the conversation. People have an inherent nature: if I sense you've got a problem, I want to race to solve it. But I may not fully understand your challenge. Your surface level problem might not be the same as your deep level problem. The value unlock for people who do transactions versus larger deals, people who do deals versus build long-term partnerships, lies deeper than the surface. You got to really dig to uncover that.

Yeah. Well, you and I used to have these conversations about training and enablement. The fine art of curiosity. Most people listen with the intent to respond. Amazing sellers listen with the intent to question. That practice of curiosity leads you to your next question. They make a statement, leads to your next question. They give an answer, leads to your next level of curiosity. You do that insatiably, it gets annoying, but you do it to a point where you really uncover the root of it, where the real challenge lies, where the real value unlock is. You got to get a little deeper. That practice of curiosity makes a big difference. Otherwise, you're just being a passive listener with the intent to respond as quickly as you can, and that's where the buzzwords come in. The moment they say this, you go into your whole pitch, but you might miss most of the message.

Oh man, a lot goes on behind the scenes. These conversations typically start in the planning process, which for most organizations is about October, November, and in some cases lasts all the way into April and May. I'll give both sides. From a sales leadership perspective, a lot of advocacy goes on for the sales organization. As sales leaders, we want everybody to make money. Sometimes people question if the comp plan reflects a desire to allow them to make money. Every sales leader certainly wants you to make money. There's a lot of advocacy. What people often lose sight of is that compensation is a budgeted expense. Most organizations have an idea of what they're going to spend on compensation, and you have to work a model that benefits the company and the sellers and fine-tune that. What really bogs these conversations down is the organization not understanding its true north. Speaking of buzzwords, let's play compensation buzzword bingo. Why don't you play along, Andrew? Throw out some buzzwords associated with a compensation plan that you often hear. All right. PCR.