William
WMMM #062 - This week, I share a perspective on a personality with a storied career of success in sales.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter April 27, 2024 9 min read
Everyone seems to know him, but you could not pick him out of a crowd if you hadn't met him.
He's not a "networker," but the size of his personal network exceeds his considerable professional network.
Even while working in the pressure cooker that comes with leading one of Oracle's largest accounts, he always found time to help his peers.
Know anyone like that?
Finding Top Talent
This past week, someone in my network reached out for my advice.
They plan to hire more salespeople and wanted to know how I identify top talent.
I shared some content accumulated over the years.
Then, I pointed them to the intangibles: enthusiasm, coachability, ambition, and attitude.
I told them I look for those who have a process.
Finally, I offered techniques I've used for uncovering these characteristics.
The following day, something made me think of a person I worked with for most of my Oracle career.
How would this guy compare with what I had just shared about identifying sales performers?
The answer that came to mind is the inspiration for this week's edition of Win More, Make More.
First Impression
It was June 1998.
I had just finished my second fiscal year and made Club Excellence.
Club was taking us to Munich in September, but my mind was on what I'd be doing for FY99.
The annual reorg landed me with Matt's applications management team.
I inherited a team of six: Bart in St. Louis, Rob and Shawn in Dallas, two open headcount, and Bill.
I scheduled time to meet with each of them individually.
I had no idea at the time that I'd be working with three of these individuals for most of the next two decades.
Conversation with Bill came easy.
Unassuming, unpretentious, and personable, he possessed a quiet confidence.
Jerry, whom I knew from his MSA days, had hired Bill at Oracle.
Bill had built a small software consulting business in Phoenix, AZ, earlier in his career.
A native of Plano, TX, and a Longhorn alum, Bill was glad to be back in Plano and happy to be working for Oracle.
I rarely hear someone say, "I like being here," or "I think this is a cool company to represent."
People may think it, but they don't often say it.
Likable and friendly, Bill was the kind of person you'd want to meet for coffee.
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Fast-forward to 2007.
Oracle had acquired Metasolv.
Its headquarters were in Plano.
Oracle's Dallas offices had been in Las Colinas for over fifteen years.
Las Colinas was often a 45-minute commute from Plano and was trending longer.
We were presented with the opportunity to move our team to the old Metasolv headquarters.
I was traveling quite a bit, so where my Dallas office was located wasn't important to me.
But most of my Dallas team, including Bill, lived in Plano.
Eliminating a couple of hours in the car was appealing to them.
So we moved.
One Friday morning, I was headed to my new Plano office when I noticed a Starbucks nearby.
This area was new to me, so I took note of the store's location.
I hosted my weekly sales meetings on Fridays, and about halfway through, I suggested we take a break and go out and grab a morning coffee.
As we enter the Starbucks, we are greeted with the familiar aromas of coffee and that coffee house music.
We were not expecting to hear a chorus of "Hi Bill" from the baristas.
Every Starbucks employee in that store knew Bill, and he greeted each of them by name.
There were a couple of customers at a table who also said hello.
Bill liked coffee, but we had just witnessed something else.
Bill likes people.
He's also curious.
His interactions are usually deeper than "How's it going?"
And just like at the Cingular corporate cafeteria in north Atlanta, the 11th floor of the Xerox Tower in Las Colinas, or that Starbucks near Preston Road and Spring Creek Parkway in west Plano, Bill engages with more people than anyone I've ever seen and leaves an impression with them.
William on Commitment
Part of Bill's charm and his ability to connect with people and earn their trust is how ordinary he appears.
I use the term "ordinary" in a positive sense.
He does not speak with a vocabulary of high intellect, though he is quite bright.
He does not appear to be one of the top salespeople in his field, though he was a consistent performer with one of the largest accounts of a top tech company for two decades.
You would likely see him as the guy next door who would have that ⅜ in. drill bit that you need in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.
Bill loves to use idioms when making a point.
And, being that "ordinary" guy, he occasionally forgets the expression and humorously inserts a version of his own.
One morning, on a typical weekday in that sales bullpen in the former Metasolv HQ, then known as Oracle's office on Tennyson Parkway in Plano, Bob and Ross were talking deal strategy when they heard Bill's voice rise a couple of cubicles over.
Bill was speaking with a customer and the conversation was going well.
He was happy and enjoying the discussion.
Apparently, the topic shifted to commitment.
Bill chose to dust off the famous breakfast analogy of the difference between contribution and commitment.
One way to tell the story is to use a riddle:
Question: "In a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, what's the difference between the Chicken and the Pig?"
Answer: "The Chicken was involved, but the Pig was committed."
Bob and Ross heard Bill say to the customer in his "quiet" voice:
"I'm a chicken, and you're a pig.
You're committed, and I like breakfast."
Bob and Ross looked at one another and said, "Wait a minute, that can't be right."
Ross recalls that he had never heard the Chicken and Pig story before but knew something was off.
They wrote Bill's words in the corner of Bob's whiteboard and never let Bill forget it.
Examples like this one reveal how disarming Bill could be.
William on Cost
Bill is a team player.
He offered his help to new hires.
He was also the peer many experienced reps would turn to for help solving difficult challenges.
Bill was an expert in the "backroom" of Oracle: pricing policies, license migrations, terms and conditions, and revenue recognition.
Bill was excellent with written communication and was often called upon to proofread his peers' correspondence for their customers before they sent it.
He was fastidious in preparing customer-facing documents and was famous for printing everything.
In the age of digitization, Bill had stacks of paper in his cubicle.
But his favorite topic was value selling.
I cannot remember Bill sending a price quote to an account in all the years we worked together.
He found that to be dishonorable.
It lacked the customer's perspective.
It wreaked of self-interest.
Bill would always coach others to do what he had been taught years earlier.
Use the formula Cost = Price divided by Value.
Use your skills to educate the customer to evaluate Cost, not Price, as part of their decision process.
Bill would invest considerable effort in identifying the value proposition for the account in their language for any proposal he delivered.
As a result, Bill became an expert in the value proposition that Oracle brought to an enterprise.
William and Trust
Few people know the story I'm about to share.
We agreed to keep it to ourselves.
That was nine years ago.
Enough time has passed, and most of the principal characters have moved on, dimming my reluctance.
And this story comes to mind regarding Bill's signature trait, trust.
Bill used me as his management sponsor with this large account early in our careers.
Later, he was able to name me as his executive sponsor.
We worked closely together, allowing me a first-hand account of Bill's actions, the account's responses, and all of the nuances of selling to a significant enterprise.
Late in our careers, Oracle had changes in its executive personnel.
The new guard decided to bring in a new sales leader whom they knew.
It was May, and we were negotiating a 9-figure deal to expand and extend the agreement we had put in place seven years prior.
Without discussing it with anyone on our team or within our management chain, this new executive spammed our account with an unsolicited proposal.
The account is one of Oracle's most prominent and resides in the top 15 of the Fortune 500.
Bill received a phone call.
The account told him what had happened.
They did not have to ask him if he knew about it.
They knew he could not possibly have been involved.
They told Bill that I would be getting a call similar to this one from their executive sponsor.
They sent Bill a copy and agreed to give him time to digest what had happened.
They wanted his advice on how to proceed.
Bill's face was red, and his voice was unusually soft as he shared with me what had just transpired.
Our initial reaction was, why?
Had we done something that provoked this behavior?
Motives?
We were as honest with ourselves as possible but could not identify anything we had done that would cause Oracle to lose confidence in us.
This new executive did not know us well enough to form an opinion.
So we concluded that there must be something else going on.
We ran a few scenarios and decided the most likely one was that this executive had made some claim to the person who had brought him to Oracle about having a relationship with our account.
And now that he was in charge and there was a 9-figure deal expected to close in his fourth quarter, he was exposed.
He had no relationships with this account.
His actions proved that.
The people he sent his proposal to had found their negotiation team and asked: "Who is this guy from Oracle?"
We decided that under these circumstances, reaching out to our new executive would not be in our best interests.
Doing so would reveal that we knew he had sent that proposal.
If he wanted us to know, he would have informed us.
He would also figure out that we knew what he had told his boss wasn't true.
If we weren't already, confronting him would make us a risk to his fabricated reputation.
The Proposal
So, we turned our attention to his proposal.
We began to understand the feedback our account had given us - I had received a similar call to Bill's.
The proposal was a departure from the sequence of events that we had shared with our account and received concurrence.
It had a one-sided tone, which was very different than what they had come to expect from Bill.
It offered a significant price concession compared to where we were currently.
It contained no value proposition.
It was very strong with the wording for its contingency on closure by May 31st, "because that was Oracle's fiscal year-end," without mentioning why that might benefit the customer.
It threatened to pull all concessions and penalize this customer if the agreement was not signed by May 31st.
It contained multiple errors in grammar and spelling.
Worst of all, he had used a slide deck from his prior employer as a template, and it had the logo of that employer, not Oracle, on every page.
How do we recover from this?
It is impossible until somebody does it.
The proposal had spooked our account.
Who wouldn't want the same thing for less?
But they did not trust that they would receive the same thing for less.
They were suspicious that anyone who behaved like this would not have their best interests in mind when it came time to codify the agreement.
We learned this after the deal was closed.
They told us they wanted to proceed with our mutually agreed SOE.
They wanted to pick up right where we left off in our negotiations.
Bill had been the face of Oracle for this account for the last 15 years, and they trusted him.
We told them to advise the receivers of the proposal to respond to our new sales executive.
Thank him for his proposal.
Point him to work with Bill and Jeff as they were already engaged with their stakeholders.
We never received a phone call from him.
We got an email saying he had been in contact with the account, and they had agreed to terms he wanted us to reflect in our final outcome.
We knew that wasn’t true, but played along.
We accommodated his directive.
We closed that 9-figure deal and made our executive's number for Q4.
We did the impossible only because the account trusted Bill.
Lessons Learned
1) Trust, curiosity, likability, and perseverance are traits of great salespeople.
2) Cost = Price divided by Value
3) Appearances can be deceiving.
4) If you like working for your employer, saying so is okay.
Thank you for reading.
Jeff
When you think “sales leader,” I hope you think of me.
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I offer my help to sales leaders and their teams.
I possess the skills identified in this article and share them as part of my service.
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