22 Years Ago
WMMM #033 - This week Win More, Make More is Back in School with a 9/11 tribute.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter September 9, 2023 7 min read
It was a gorgeous Tuesday morning in September, and I was on an early flight headed to Dulles.
Shawn Peters was already waiting in Reston, VA, for me to arrive, as we had a business meeting with the President of XO Communications that day.
My plane was at the halfway mark of its flight plan, just approaching Louisville, KY, 35,000 feet below, when all hell broke loose in the North American airspace.
The First Sign of Trouble
One of our fellow passengers called a flight attendant to his seat to show her what he was seeing on his Blackberry. The person sitting next to me worked for Dell Computers. We watched as the flight attendant knocked on the door of the cockpit. A moment later, the captain announced that our flight was being directed back to Dallas/Ft Worth due to an incident “with a small plane in New York.”
Our first impression was confusion. We weren’t headed to New York, so why turn back?
As our plane circled to retrace the path back to DFW, two flight attendants were now at that guy’s seat, viewing news updates on his Blackberry. This time, that flight attendant’s face indicated a new development in the news that frightened her.
There was no announcement from the pilot, but the news trickled back to us quickly. It wasn’t a small plane; it was a passenger plane that had flown into a skyscraper in downtown NYC.
I’d Rather Have Both Feet on the Ground Right Now
The ride back to DFW seemed to take forever as the updates kept coming, and the news became horrifying.
We learned that two planes crashed into skyscrapers, one of them an American Airlines jet like the one we were on. When the skyscrapers were identified as the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center, the salesperson from Dell began to sob.
She had appointments in NYC at the WTC later that week.
Once the plane landed, it was sequestered on the tarmac for what felt like an eternity.
While we were returning, two more aircraft were hijacked, and one was flown into the Pentagon, near Dulles Airport, our original destination.
Now, the authorities had to suspect every plane in the air that day potentially having terrorists on board. They would not let our aircraft anywhere near the airport and had us park on a remote runway.
We were finally released at around 2:30 p.m., approximately nine (9) hours after boarding.
I cannot remember a time when I was more relieved to be anywhere but on that aircraft.
Let’s Roll
Several Oracle employees lost their lives that day.
Many of you have likely heard of the heroics of Todd Beamer.
Todd Morgan Beamer, 32, was aboard United Airlines Flight 93 when it was hijacked and crashed during the September 11 attacks in 2001. Beamer was one of the passengers who attempted to regain control of the aircraft from the hijackers. During the struggle, the Boeing 757 lost control. It crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board but saving the hijackers’ intended target and additional victims.
“Let’s Roll: The Story of Flight 93” is a documentary of Todd’s flight that morning and a reminder to never forget 9/11/2001 and the innocent victims we lost that day.
I did not know Todd personally but had a loose connection with him through my GTE sales team. Kim, on my team, had copied me on an email to Todd earlier in the year as he had responsibility for a GTE unit in Boston. Ironically, Todd’s famous call from Flight 93 went to a GTE operator.
Beamer was survived by his wife, Lisa, their sons, David and Andrew, who were three and one at the time of Beamer’s death, and their daughter, Morgan, who was born after Beamer’s death.
Those kids are 25, 23, and 21 today.
In another indirect connection, our 25-year-old daughter Hannah went to college in California. She met a girl in her first year who lost her father on 9/11. They became friends and remain so today.
That girl’s name is Anna Clare Burnett. Her father, Tom, Todd, and two others were the passengers who fought back against the hijackers on Flight 93.
My plane landed safely, by the grace of God, back at DFW, and that was my last business trip for quite a while.
Selling in Today’s Economic Environment
We may not be in an official recession, but the economy is sputtering.
Interest rates have tripled since the Spring of 2022.
“Global Startup Funding Remains Subdued.”
“Active Investors have cut back their funding pace at each stage.”
Have you ever sold during a recession?
I have.
2001, 2008-9, and 2020 are the last three recessions, and I remember each of them, the deals our team was chasing, the outcomes, and the lessons we learned.
2001, an outcome of the events on 9/11, is by far the easiest for me to recall.
The year began with the hangover of the dot-com and telco bubbles bursting almost simultaneously.
We had just enjoyed the most extended period of peacetime economic expansion in American history when the bottom fell out of the economy and the stock market. Oracle’s fiscal year-end was May 31. We had 17 deals in our Q4 forecast/upside, and only two closed. Our team wasn’t alone; others across the organization had similar experiences, but that didn’t change how we felt.
Nothing like that had happened before, and we focused our efforts on a course correction to ensure it would never happen again.
The 2001 Recession impacted two fiscal years for those of us with Oracle.
Enterprise behaviors during the 2001 Recession and repeated in 2008 and 2020
Projects canceled or delayed
Hiring slowed or delayed; in some cases, layoffs
Budget cuts
Increase use of temporary staffing
Reduction in the number of employees “in the know”
In some cases, irrational behavior (we had Worldcom as an account in 2001 – does anybody remember them?)
Impossible?
Impossible only defines the degree of difficulty. Don’t expect quota relief. We get paid to make it happen. Failure is not an option.
What was one thing we learned from April 2001 and doing differently now?
Expect surprises from the account. The people who we think are informed are not.
The buying process they have used in the past has changed.
As a result, we increased the number of people “touching” each deal.
Every sales manager had to touch every one of their deals, and in many cases, their manager did, too. So we now had six sets of eyes: the Account Manager, their manager, and their manager’s manager all mapped into the account.
At every step of the sales cycle, we had three views of the deal to help us improve our chances of closing.
If adding more management appears to be more inspection, then this is not what it seems. Each person was put to work (carried a lunch pail, so to speak), had a role, gathered information, and operated entirely in sync with the other two. The Account Managers were the quarterbacks – sales management worked for them. The Account Managers owned this outcome and were responsible for using their influence and salesmanship to choreograph these introductions and mappings.
This approach produced many desirable outcomes. Call them coaches, sponsors, or foxes – we now had at least one for each person touching the account.
It usually got us higher in the account and, indeed, wider.
It enabled us to cross-reference the intelligence we were acquiring.
It also de-risked our deals because there was less chance that all three networks were with employees no longer in the know.
It worked well because there was respect and trust in the chain of command.
It worked well for us for the next 12 years.
Operational Excellence
After I left Oracle, many of the investors I encountered cited the operational excellence of Oracle sales leadership as a desirable trait as they looked for help with their startup portfolios. They were referring to some of the processes that I just shared.
We took them for granted and rarely gave them another thought until we started hearing that.
Okay, that made us better with sales cycle management; what about business development in a recession?
Does your product/service represent new spending or replacement spending?
Is value-based selling the answer?
Doesn’t everyone have a value proposition for their product/service? (They do or they should.)
How do you get your opportunity chosen and done?
The answer is you. You are the value prop.
The salesperson is the value proposition in this equation, helping buyers buy and navigating the new obstacles during a recession. They use their influence to win the prospect’s attention on their value proposition over the dozens of other vendors with their value propositions.
This influence topic deserves a blog of its own (for another day), but allow me to share one component you can use to improve and have influence: your network.
My earliest connections on LinkedIn are from 2008, so it wasn’t an option for me in 2001.
Today, my network is a vital asset as I take stock of the value I bring to any individual. My network allows me to influence by helping others and having a reach far more significant than I could have alone.
Yours is, too.
How do you use your network to make yourself more valuable? More influential? How has somebody helped you?
How has it helped you get a deal done?
My message for this week: Be ready. Use your network.
Do meaningful things now to help your connections and increase your influence.
A tough economic environment will make you a better sales professional if you use it as an excuse to improve yourself.
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
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