John Biedebach
Senior Solution Principle Engineer, Inovalon
I was paired with John in 2008. It was a year that saw Oracle acquire BEA. It was also the year of the Global Financial Crisis. John ran the pre-sales technical consulting team that partnered with my sales group. We endured the early challenges to have one of the better seven-year runs in my career.
John is knowledgeable and very creative. He is also optimistic. I witnessed all these traits play out in helping our customers, hiring and motivating his team, contributing to the sales teams, and generating revenue for Oracle.
John is perpetually curious and a constant learner. When we hit a challenge with an account, I would seek his opinion and invariably receive a fresh perspective that would unlock a way forward. Several of my sales stories in “Win More, Make More” involve John in a breakout session offering insights into “98% discount” or “star schemas.”
John is also helpful for understanding how your team views a current situation. When providing feedback, John is refreshingly transparent. I knew exactly what he thought, as it required no translation. Even when John was indifferent, we would tell me why, often using a clever analogy that left nothing to my imagination.
John’s capacity for helping others is also without bounds. Like the other references, John is a person of character.
Jeff asked for us to answer three questions as a helpful guide to revealing him to you through our eyes:
1) How do I know Jeff?
2) If I were you (the personas who would read this are salesperson, sales leader, or business owner) I’d want to know this about Jeff:
3) One thing I learned from Jeff that made me better:
1. How do I know Jeff?
I supported Jeff’s sales division as the Sales Consulting (SC - presales solution engineering) manager from 2008-2015, while in the Enterprise Technology group at Oracle. My SCs were directly tied to the sales reps and accounts in Jeff’s territory. For most of that time, we managed 135 Fortune 500 accounts headquartered in Texas and the Western US.
2. If I were you (the personas who would read this are salesperson, sales leader, or business owner) I’d want to know this about Jeff:
When I think of Jeff, I picture a futuristic heads-up display in a sci-fi movie, where the character is able to take in a broad panorama and suddenly zoom in on something critically important. Jeff is not a cyborg (at least I don’t think so), but I have repeatedly been impressed and grateful for his ability to zoom between the forest and a tree in order to identify and de-risk forecasts and sales opportunities.
Throughout my career, I have worked with dozens of sales executives, and Jeff’s keen intellect and rigor are unrivaled. Pick any metric: revenue growth, win rate, forecast accuracy, and I have seen Jeff exceed it. But the statistic that continually amazes me is the number of people who worked for Jeff, and now are in sales management and executive sales leadership themselves. This tells me that not only do Jeff’s strategies work, but by following them, his results can also be repeated.
3. One thing I learned from Jeff that made me better:
The character trait I respect most in Jeff is his healthy curiosity. In trying to think like Jeff, I found myself mimicking the kind of questions he asks, not only of others, but of himself. I have seen sales managers rip into a forecast like a hungry lion, purely for the joy of devouring, but Jeff is much more precise; looking carefully at the opportunities to test, validate and grow the results.
There are many motivations for leading sales groups: money, power, prestige. But Jeff does it because he likes it; and by pursuing that curiosity, by pursuing the task with intent, the results naturally follow. There are home run hitters who swat violently at the ball and hit one out using chance and physics. But then there are those that study each pitch and discern the right amount of timing and effort to produce the best and most repeatable result. I was privileged to watch Jeff hit the cover off the ball quarter after quarter, and even more fortunate to learn to do it from him.