Tennis and Presales with Ron Whitson | Beyond Presales Podcast (Ep 5)

Welcome back to Beyond Pre-Sales. This is episode number five. We're going to have Ron Watson on the show. I'm actually very excited. And I first want to say thank you so much to everyone who's given great feedback, taken the time to watch the episodes, and just joined in. It's been very encouraging to say the least to know that people are enjoying the content that's out there, really getting a lot out of it. That's the whole point; that's why we want to go Beyond Pre-Sales with this podcast. And yes, this is the first time I'm calling it by the name. I realized the other four episodes we hadn't quite named the show yet, but it's good to actually have the full introduction with the new name. But today, if you don't know Ron Watson, he was actually on the Demo Jockeys podcast we ran before. But Ron, happy to have him on the show. If you don't know Ron, you should find him on LinkedIn. Absolutely fantastic writer, content creator there on LinkedIn posting a lot of really great things. Also has a book coming out. I'm going to read the full title so I don't have it all memorized. He's got a book coming out very, very soon. It's called A Friendly Human in Pre-Sales: How to Harness the Seven Timeless Behaviors to Drive Success in Technical Sales. I will have a QR code here on the screen with me, and there will also be one during the episode. So if you want to pre-order it, you can check it out when it comes out. We're going to be talking about all kinds of things tennis-related today. So I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for being here; we'll see you at the end of the episode.

Ron, I really appreciate you joining.

But I'm ready to go, Jack. You put something on my calendar today for tennis. Let's go. We're talking about tennis today.

Oh, we're just talking about so this is like pre-sales beyond pre-sales, like what you do outside of work. I know you're into tennis, and so I thought we could sit and talk about tennis. If that's okay with you.

Sure. I'll bring right back. I have my racket here somewhere, but I don't know how we do that virtually. That'd be difficult. But I'll be right back.

Okay, okay, okay. Hang on. All right. Welcome back. That's a little more appropriate. My misunderstanding. But hey, I'm happy to talk about tennis in addition to playing it. I could have been more clear. I could have been more clear.

No. Yeah, well, welcome to the show. I can officially say this: welcome to Beyond Pre-Sales, the Beyond Pre-Sales podcast. The previous episodes we still didn't have a title, so it's just generically speaking Demo Delta podcast, but Beyond Pre-Sales, and we're going Beyond Pre-Sales to tennis today obviously. Yeah, because I think if I had invited you on the show and people thought Ron's going to be on Beyond Pre-Sales talking about hobbies and things he does outside of work, and let's say we decided to talk about glassblowing, which for all I know that's maybe a hobby you actually do enjoy, who knows, people would be a little bit disappointed in that conversation. It's all about expectation setting. Now, we could talk about gardening and flowers, but maybe next time. And who knows where the conversation will go. Maybe tennis has led into gardening, I don't know. Suppose what type of court you're playing on. I don't think the grass courts are much gardening, but you know, maybe a little bit. Has tennis always been a part of your life? Were you one of those like born into it as a tennis person, like you're on the court as a six-year-old picking up the game? Has that been you? Has tennis always been there for you?

No, no, no, not at all. I am not—I don't consider myself an athlete. I was the band geek in school back in the day. But I've always liked playing sports. Back in the day I was playing softball, and then I figured out that you really can't play softball as you get a little bit older. But then I was playing soccer, and my soccer position I like to play as keeper, so I'm out there playing men's soccer and some co-ed. And Jack, I'd be on the ground holding the ball with a save, and some of these women were over there kicking me. And I saw a lot of guys get their knees blown out. Played a lot of racquetball, had fun doing that. And then about 20 years ago I got introduced to tennis. And it was funny because when I first started playing, all the instruction I got was 'you're too close to the ball, you're too close to the ball.' And one day it kind of clicked that my brain had not reset from racquetball to tennis. When I did that reset, all of a sudden my strokes were a lot better and I started improving my game quite a bit. But yeah, it's been about 20 years. And as I've gotten more into tennis, I've met hundreds and hundreds of people who play of all ages. The oldest person I've played singles against was I think he had just actually turned 83, and this was in a tournament where we're playing some competitive tennis. This was when I was first starting out, so my level was still pretty low. The oldest person I've played doubles against was 92. And this is a gentleman who didn't have a lot of mobility, but he could put the ball wherever he wanted to put it. It was fun. It was not super competitive, cutthroat, we're playing for money or anything, but there's four guys out there having some good time outside playing tennis with your buddies. So I don't see a lot of 83- and 92-year-olds playing soccer and some of these other sports. I really enjoy playing tennis. I don't want to blow my knee out, so yeah, it's pretty much my singular sport now. A little bit of running and jogging, but tennis is where I really get the aerobic stuff, where I get my fun, where I get my competitive itch scratched, if you will.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. The competitive piece as well, because you can kind of leave all that on the court from what I've noticed of people who play tennis. Most people who play tennis are highly competitive when playing, but for the most part tend to be pretty cordial post-game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be a sport that you can kind of leave there. You're not going to take it with you as much as maybe some other more highly competitive sports.

Yeah, I don't know why that is. There's a lot of aspects to the game that's been enshrined in the code and all the tradition and history. Up until COVID, the way you formally ended the match was the handshake at the net. I did some officiating, some test officiating as well. If there was a dispute after the match, that was one of the first things you would ask the players: 'Did you all shake hands?' And if the answer was yes, match is over, everything is finished. So I think just that aspect of it, that gentlemanly idea of the sport, certainly persists a lot. Now that doesn't mean I haven't run across some jerks playing tennis in some of the stuff that I've done, but for the most part, just a bunch of good people who like to play. It's certainly not like those pickleballers out there. We'll leave them aside for now.

Well, leave that. I mean, that's a whole separate resurgence that I don't think anyone saw coming until all of a sudden everyone's playing pickleball. Again, it's actually funny because your tennis journey is almost the opposite of mine, because I was the kid at eight who picked up a tennis racket at a birthday party with a friend. They were at tennis courts nearby the park, and he had an extra racket, he threw it to me and we started playing. I'm like, 'I want to take lessons.' My parents, 'I want to take tennis lessons.' And so I did that. What ended my tennis career was a crosscourt shot that I had to reach for. I did a long stride to then pivot and crosscourt, and I stepped on a rogue ball. Rolled over the ball, just shredded the meniscus on my knee. And thus ended both my tennis and my running careers at that point. That's not good. So it's funny you mentioned you quit soccer for the purposes of not blowing out your knee, and I did exactly that on the tennis court. But we weren't being safe about making sure the court was clear, you know.

Yeah, I play mainly with a bunch of people close to my age, so we are very aware of court safety because we don't recover as quickly as we used to.

No, no. And this twice-operated-upon knee now, which will have a replacement I'm sure in about 10 years, is like maybe I should have paid attention to that. But no, I loved the game of tennis, and a lot of things that you're mentioning I thought were great. Like you could have this really competitive thing, but you're right, you go up, you have to shake hands at the end, you have to agree that yep, this match is now over. If we want to play again, we can start a whole other game, but that game is now over with. So that's really great. What's kept you going in the sport all these years? Because it sounds like you used to play pretty competitively. Do you still play competitively, or what is it that's kept you in the sport?

Oh, yeah. That's an interesting question. What I have found in tennis, and maybe there are some parallels to pre-sales, at least for me, but what I have found in tennis is there's always something to measure yourself against, and there's always ways to increase and build your performance. If I talk about that a little bit, I play USTA, United States Tennis Association, and they have leagues, they have tournaments, and they also have a rating system. People can go out and look this up, USTA ratings. College-level players are pretty much 5.0 on that scale, and you get into the professionals and they're like 7.0 and higher. I started off as what's called a 3.0, and then I've worked my way up. In the state of Texas, through playing leagues and tournaments, I was able to work my way up the Texas rankings where I was number one, and then I got bumped—I got bumped to 3.5. I played in tournaments and leagues and worked my way up to number one, I got bumped to 4.0. My great desire is for the USTA to bump me to 4.5 before I depart the planet. I'm very solid 4.0, I'm working on my game, but there are extra things I need to do to improve it enough to be bumped to the next level. Now I've played some 4.5 leagues and went about 500 on my matches and stuff, but it's all this to say: there is a standard to measure yourself against and see how you're doing. That's why the tournaments are important. I'll go and play singles in tournaments and see how I do, and I play doubles in tournaments with my buddy and see how we do. It's not because of all the cool hardware or the money you're bringing home, because it's plastic trophies and there's no money, you're spending money. But to measure yourself against other people in the sport is a lot of fun. That's been a little bit of my journey in pre-sales too. As I kind of got into it many, many years ago, I wanted to be good at it. I wanted to be the person that the sellers wanted to work with. I wanted to close the deals and earn the money for the company and make money for me. But just being technical, just doing the demo wasn't always what won the deal. So then it's like, okay, how do I get better in these other areas to improve my chance to win deals and earn the business? So I think that's the part that's kept me involved in pre-sales. I think that's the part that's kept me involved in tennis: this idea of a continuous journey. There's always something you can work on. Improve my serve. I'm working on my serve right now. My serve is off the rails because I'm trying to do something different. But once I work through that, I'll get glimpses of it. I'm actually playing a little while later tonight, and I'll be working on it tonight. But I get glimpses—I'll get everything just right and it'll be a really nice serve, and the guys are like 'oh wow, you're doing something different.'

Yeah, I can attest to that. Towards the end of my tennis career I was working on a new way of serving, and it was like one out of nine would work. The other times it's like, well, I guess I have to crush my second serve now. So I can feel you on that. I love that idea of being able to have a standard of measurement while you're talking about it. I'm thinking about even our world and our profession. I don't know if it'd be a good or a bad thing, but in some instances it'd be nice to know, what do you mean when you say you're looking for a Senior Solutions Consultant? What are the skill sets you're looking for, and at what quality do they have to be? Because I've certainly talked to people who have been Principal Solution Consultants, and when you've talked to what they've done, it's like that's hardly a Senior Solutions Consultant at another company. I don't know that we would ever get to the point where it would even be possible, because the demands of the job are so very different. But I still like the idea: if I know what I need to do to get to that next level and that's very clear to me, I can work towards that. I think that's what everybody in pre-sales wants: where am I at, a good sense of where am I at, where do I need to go, and what do I have to do to get there.

Yeah, I think it's an intriguing idea. To be fair, we can't decide on a standard set of names, so I think standard levels... we got—we name ourselves the same thing. First, I tell you what would be a lot of fun, and I think this is a perfect opportunity for the Pre-Sales Collective: how cool would it be to have a competition, like an online competition bracket, where people volunteer to deliver a presentation and you go into a bracket and square off? It's online voting for which presentation you know won. You'd have to have some rubric around there as far as communicating the information, technical presentation style and skills, and things like that. I just think that'd be a lot of fun, some competition that pre-sales people could participate in if they wanted to. I know there was just the contest—was it the Dundies? Something like that.

I know what you're speaking of. It was a competition, it wasn't a bracketed tournament style though. Which that does sound kind of intriguing. Actually, to be honest, the first time I had heard of Consensus' Demo Fest, that's what I thought it was. I thought it was like you were signing up to compete in demoing. And when I found out it wasn't, I was both relieved and also a little bit sad that that wasn't exactly what it was.

Well, you know, we did have the Demo Days a couple years with Pre-Sales Collective, where it was... I think I missed that. So that's what that was, actually competing in a sense.

Yeah, it would be fun to have an actual tournament like that. I don't know, maybe we could organize this, Ron. Something we could put together? But we'd have to compete too, so a lot of work.

Yeah, so have to come up with the idea, come up with the rubric, get someone else to run it so that we can compete in the thing we put together. It's not rigged at all. Number one of—there is going to be judging the quality of your video and audio setup. That's going to be one of the criteria.

Hey, you've got a good lead on this too, right? You've improved your setup as well, so you've helped. Thank you for that. Absolutely. I love that, that whole piece of exactly what you're working for. I think that's actually tough in a lot of sports, even competitive sports: how do you know what league you're in? I know chess has a rating system if you're doing chess, but not a lot of other sports have that on an individual competitive level where it's as clear as what you're doing. You have to work your way to the top before you're considered to move on to the next piece.

Yeah, that's a nice piece. And it's interesting too, because there's actually a few different competing systems. There's something called UTR now, Universal Tennis Reporting I believe, and they're looking at a little bit different system. The idea is that it really doesn't matter your age or whatever; if your UTR is the same as an 11-year-old, then you can go out and have a competitive match. So there's a few competing systems, at least here for me in Texas, where you can match up against people and have that idea of a scale and a standard and see how you do.

What other things from tennis have you taken away that have either improved your life personally or something in your own life that you've learned from tennis, or even in the world of pre-sales, something in your job that you've taken away from tennis?

I think personally, it's just an additional set of friends and colleagues to hang out with and do stuff with. Over the course of a year, we've got three different leagues. In two of those leagues, we pretty much have the same group of guys on the team; in the other league, it's a little bit different group of guys. So you get some friends, some extra friends who have a similar interest as far as tennis goes. The mental benefit is one of the biggest ones for me. It's one of the reasons why I try to play as often as I do, which is usually about three times a week. But it's almost a meditation for me. For those two or three hours, I'm not thinking about work. I'm not thinking about things I've got to fix or problems. I'm thinking about that yellow ball and how to hit it properly to the side of the court and try to win the point. It takes a lot of attention and focus. And that's why I'm very careful about who I play with too, because I want to leave that feeling refreshed and like I had a good time and fun. There's some groups I've played in and I would leave angry because of shenanigans that people are doing or stuff like that, so that wasn't healthy. That didn't leave me with the feeling that I wanted, so I stopped playing with those people. I have some different groups now. But that focusing everything on a singular task during the course of playing, I really love that. I really enjoy it. When I have to miss tennis because I'm traveling or something, I can tell because I get a little bit more anxious and I need to work that out. So that's been the biggest one as far as... ties back to what we do on a day-to-day basis. Probably the closest parallel is playing doubles with someone. When you play doubles with someone consistently, you've got to know what they're thinking, you've got to know where they're planning on hitting the ball, you've got to know which way they're moving on the court. And you get that one of two ways: you get that through familiarity of playing with them, or you get that through having conversations and understanding the strategy going into the match. Me and my regular partner who we play together on our team had a very, very good record in the league playoffs that were just a couple of months ago, because we went into each match with a strategy and understanding of what we're going to do. I think that's a great parallel to working with the sellers in our day job. You don't know what the seller is going to do, you don't know what slides they're going to show unless you practice with them and work with them often, or unless you have a conversation with them. And it needs to be that conversation going both ways too. It doesn't just need to be the seller saying 'Hey Ron, I liked when you demoed that, I didn't like when you demoed that.' It needs to be 'Hey seller, you know those three slides at the beginning, that's really repetitive of what I'm showing later on. Let's figure out a way to consolidate that message so we're keeping it simple for the audience.' So I think that concept of partnership, working together, is a really strong parallel.

And one of the probably underrated aspects of being good in pre-sales is taking on great partnerships and really valuing those AE relationships better, and using that as an asset in your game, so to speak. Absolutely. That we're doing. The other piece though, I feel like is very important. I know, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you haven't felt this, I've certainly felt that there's a little bit of a stigma in a lot of corners of B2B sales, software sales, services and consulting, that says if you're not thinking about work specifically, you're probably wasting your time. There's more you could be doing. You should always be on in some way. No one would actually ever come out and say this, but there's a little bit of stigma: 'Oh, you're doing something that's not directly impacting your work.' If you're going out and playing tennis and it's not impacting, or we're recording a podcast and it's not directly impacting your work, or if you're reading a book, or if you're doing anything other than... I suppose watching TV for most people gets a pass for whatever reason. But there's this thought of 'that's bad, why don't I do something that's going to directly impact my work?' But having that space where you can just go and completely focus on something else, not think about work—our brains need that reset.

I firmly believe that, that our brains do need that reset. If I just thought about work all the time, at some point I'm going to burn out and I'm not going to be able to come up with the solutions, I'm not going to have the same approach to the problems I need to solve. If I try to be on all the time, I think that's an impossible ask. I don't think I would be as kind to the people on my team if I was on all the time and didn't have that break. I think that's a real danger in our society, this idea of 'I've got to work so hard to outwork the next person.' If I take time to go play tennis, I could have been doing something on this deal tonight. I think everything really needs to be in balance. Over the course of my career, I'll certainly let the results that I've generated for my company and my personal results speak for themselves. My outside interests certainly fuel that and allow me to perform the way that I perform. As far as I'm concerned, it's a non-negotiable. It's not a big secret on our team that usually when the weather's nice on Friday mornings early, I play tennis for a couple hours. My team knows that, so they try not to disturb me. When I get done playing, I get back online, they know I'm online and I'm there to help them and support them. But it's something that I think is incredibly important.

Yeah, and I love that you've got that sort of defined statement, even within working hours sometimes, that it's like 'you know what, this is an important thing and it can only happen today at 8:00 AM.' Whether that's tennis, for a lot of people that's a workout, meditation, going for a walk. I knew someone that would need to take a break after a long call and they would boot up their favorite video game, sit and play their video game for half an hour after an important customer call, because that's what they needed to completely just kind of do a mental dump, a little bit of a reset. I 100% agree with you. I think that's a part of the reason why this podcast has started, because I've seen a lot of these pushes towards 'always be on' or 'always be improving.' It's like, well, you can't always be improving by constantly going at it. What's the old adage about spending time sharpening the saw? You can't constantly use the saw; you eventually have to sharpen it or it's going to become dull and unusable. Our brains are the same way.

100%. And Jack, I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but sometimes I'll be struggling with a problem and I'll go out and play tennis, and then when I come back there are some extra solutions that were not there before. I think it's truly because I didn't intentionally focus on it; I was focused on other tasks, and some background processes in the brain kind of kicked in and came up to help me. So that happens a lot of time for me.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the advice someone gave me once related to that, it's kind of weird but it's very specific: don't bring your cell phone into the bathroom with you. Give yourself that two minutes to just come up with other ideas or think of something when you're not inputting, just thinking about something. The number of times that I've been working on a problem, can't figure it out, can't figure it out, go just to refill my water, and by the time I'm done refilling my water, I'm like 'oh, I got it.' The other thing I think about is one of the things I really like about when I'm playing tennis is I'm not checking my phone, I'm not seeing Slack messages pop up. I don't have an Apple Watch; I have a real watch because I don't want the notifications going off or my wrist buzzing every five seconds. I think the way we're working today in general, with all the distractions, all the notifications, all the pop-ups, and this feeling like we have to be responsive 24/7, it really makes it difficult to do some of that deeper thinking about problems and consideration. We're training our brains not to do that. We're trying to train our brains to multitask and jump from task to task. I think you actually covered that book on the previous podcast, the one about focus and how it takes so much time to refocus back on the task after you've been distracted. So I think these times of having a nice full block of time devoted to something else is actually really positive.

That wraps up part one. Part two coming up in just a couple of short weeks, or if you're binging them all, just go ahead and hop on there right now. Excited for you to hear the second half, where we get into a little bit more around really digging into tennis and relating to pre-sales and the importance from a mental health perspective of everything else. That's what's coming next. Meanwhile, make sure you check out and pre-order Ron's book if you haven't yet. A Friendly Human in Pre-Sales. I'm just going to leave it at that. I read the full title before, but anyways. Really appreciate you being here for watching this far. If you like today's episode, please do consider to subscribe to the show wherever you're listening to it, give it a like or a five-star rating, whatever it is that your platform allows. That does help the show out a lot. Anyways, we will see you in the next episode. Take care.