John Goodack
Account Manager, WWT
When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, we were introduced to arguably Sun’s finest, their AT&T account team. I was in the middle of a 15-year run leading Oracle’s AT&T team, so I earned the privilege of reaching out to Stan Bartel, my peer on the Sun team. I use the term “peer” only to communicate the relationship our roles had in each organization. Stan was a legend.
Every member of that Sun team, including John Goodack, was thoroughly vetted by Stan. John had a background in Telco from the customer side before joining Sun and moving into sales. I admired John’s presence and demeanor. He is very credible and earns trust easily.
As we integrated our account teams, I was able to work with John directly and was impressed with his approach to communicating concepts with the customer. He is highly professional and was an excellent addition to the team. His contributions extended to our internal needs, as anything we sold to AT&T required a significant business case and had to pass the scrutiny of our business practices group due to AT&T’s scale and complexity. Salespeople that can handle this environment are a rare breed, and John is one of them.
We won significant business with large transactions in 2012 and 2015. John was vital to each.
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 worked on Jeff’s Telco, Media and Entertainment organization at Oracle where he built a high performing sales team. Our team managed one of the most demanding accounts for Oracle.
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:
Jeff is the most creative sales leader I have ever met. It’s hard to decouple that creativity from his positive attitude - they go hand in hand. It was this combination that drove his team to consistently overachieve. When deals were stuck, when the customer created obstacles, Jeff was never discouraged and turned it into an opportunity to change the narrative with the customer. This led to shorter close cycles while preserving the revenue in the deal.
3. One thing I learned from Jeff that made me better:
The value of constant learning - It was easy to see that Jeff focused on learning every day. I am not referring to heads-down training. In addition to immersing himself in understanding new technologies and how they help solve business problems, Jeff was learning in every conversation he had, in every meeting he attended. You could see it in his organizational skills. He had a focus on documenting all the interactions in meetings. He was learning about the customer and their requirements, about his team and their perspectives. When you couple the focus on learning current technology trends with learning as much as possible about his customer and team, the result is a high performing sales organization.