1. How do I know Jeff?

While working at Oracle I had recently been promoted from Oracle Direct to an Enterprise Field Seller and took a relocation from Boston to Dallas. As part of the move, I was assimilated into Jeff’s org working with our largest Enterprise customers. I happily took on roughly 25 unloved existing customers and new prospects and set off to deploy my master account plan of “drinks with Tom”. I finished my first full year at 368% of quota after completing three 7 figures quarters and finishing with an 8-figure 4th quarter. It was the year I went from a rookie to earning my spot on his team.

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 innately approaches his organization by seeking to help others first. It is a fundamental ethos for his management style. It should also be noted that Jeff often will challenge his leaders on deals referring to previous agreements, structure, and market activity such as M&A to maximize the value of the transaction. At times he makes you uncomfortable with his ambition for deal size as Jeff always goes high. This serves to flush out the deal as real or not, ensure the customer is committed to the project’s success, and our company as a vendor. The engineer in Jeff crafts a plan with the account team often leading to each member assuming their roles all the way through to execution.

A couple of examples come to mind such as while at a Hadoop start-up there was an individual who would have happily taken a more transactional deal with one of the largest banks to make a $100K commission, instead Jeff challenged this individual. By doing so and engineering a more strategic framework that rep made well over 1M dollars. I was the beneficiary of watching and learning as Jeff and team executed a $300M plus commitment with one of the largest telco’s and in doing so the account team made 7 figure commissions. While on his Strategic TME team I did two back-to-back deals with two of the largest cable providers for roughly $100M each and made over $1M for the first time. I could name another 10 individuals who have all made more than $1M in a year while working for Jeff.

All this is a long way of saying Jeff walks the walk and was approaching his teams as a servant leader before it was in vogue. It is just who Jeff is as a person and a leader. Jeff has a loyal army of managers and reps that would gladly follow him anywhere he went because he has earned their trust by first looking out for them before himself. I am happy to call myself one of his disciples.

3. One thing I learned from Jeff that made me better:

To always do things the right way in business. What do I mean by that? You’ll never hear anyone say a bad thing about Jeff Keplar. It’s because he is a man of character, highly ethical, honest, and trustworthy. Jeff consistently took time to coach, mentor and challenge folks who work for him. During sales cycles Jeff took time to and involved himself in the process to add value and involve himself by aligning with customer executives so that you had your best shot at getting a deal done. In my own path to management, I often think of Jeff when looking out for my own directs’ best interests first and taking the highroad when internal politics may arise.

Although we don’t work together any longer, after 13 years of meeting Jeff, I now call him a friend. Jeff is a trusted mentor who I call for advice often. Just as he always has done when I call he picks up and asks “ How Can I help, Tom”. It’s just who Jeff is.