S2E47- 27 years at #7 F500; LisaMarks former SVP/GM, Global Biz Dev at American Express

Okay.

Hey, everybody, it's Richard Harris and Scott Leese with another episode of the Surf and Sales podcast brought to you in part by Vidyard lead411.

Salesforce Sales Cloud and Gong IO, the revolutionary game changer. Is that right, Scott? Is that what I'm supposed to say now?

You got it, you got it.

So please check those folks out. They really do help support us and help us bring some, some great content to you. I'm really excited because we're joined here today by Lisa Marks, who is the former SVP General Manager of Global Business Development at American Express. I think she's probably the most senior person we've had from a real corporate company doing air quotes and she's actually now branching out on her own to LSM advisory. And the part I love about it this the most because it's all about me, Scott, you don't even know this is that she found me really like Googled me and was googling people and she's like, you're supposed to be a smart guy. So that's how our friendship evolved. But anyway, enough about me. Lisa, thanks for coming on.

My pleasure. A lot to live up to, I guess, when biggest company and the longest title, but that's what happens in corporate. So glad to be here and thrilled to join you.

You crack the code on making friends with Richard. You just have to compliment him straight away.

I've been doing it for a while.

It's hard to make friends with Scott because he hates people. This is our banter, by the way. Lisa, this is normal.

No, this is good. I can get into this group pretty quickly, so thanks.

So I think the first question is, you know you were an American Express for 27 years, right? Like, what is that? Like, Like I can't even imagine, you know, more than about three. And where did you even start? Like, what was your original role way back when?

So what might be best is to give you a little background to explain how the heck I got there in the first place. Cause it was a surprise to me too at the time. So after graduating from college, I found myself in Washington D.C. i got a great opportunity, strangely enough, to work in the White House for the then press secretary as that opportunity came to a close. Loved the East Coast. I was originally from the Midwest and took a job at a strange little company.

And I'm saying it the way they made me say it, so forgive me, called Euro Persistence or your persistence. It was a little French company and they had developed a set of services and I helped sell those Services, as it turns out, to American Express as well as to visa and to MasterCard. So at American Express, that service became what is now known as Global Assist or visa 911 or Master Assist, depending on what company you're at. And I really enjoyed selling to American Express, to be honest, because they actually, like, rolled up their sleeves and said, let's figure this out versus some others who honestly treated me kind of like a vendor. And so I remember telling my then boyfriend, now husband of over 25 years, one day, I'd like to go work at American Express. And a few years later, my then boyfriend wanted to move home to New York, to Manhattan in Long Island. I followed him there and began writing American Express. By then I was doing a job in rental car marketing and sales, and they happened to have an opening at American Express for car rental insurance management. And that is how I got my little self in to the big company of American Express. I wasn't a typical hire. They usually took people with masters from very important schools, of which I had none, still don't. But I had a niche and I had something specific that they couldn't find in house and that they were looking for externally. So that's how I got myself in. So a long answer to your question, but I thought it was just an interesting list of contexts to help.

That's great. I think you might also be the first person who's ever followed a significant other somewhere, gotten married and it worked out. Usually everybody follows someone somewhere and they break up, right?

Yeah, some days. Some days they're better than others. No. So.

So what's it like in that corporate world? And it's interesting to me and I think to Scott, because we've never really experienced it, right?

Oh, yeah.

Totally foreign.

And it's probably not foreign to you, right, where it's like we change jobs every 18 to 24 months.

But what is that like when you come in? Is there deep training on corporate things? What's it even like? And I'm sure it's evolved since you first started.

Yeah, when I first started, it was scary, I'll be really honest, because everyone around you just seemed really smart and really knowledgeable and they knew how to use, like, all this technology. I came from smaller companies where we didn't even have Excel word at the time. So the first time I was asked to do an Excel spreadsheet, I freaked out completely. What was interesting to me is that they had things like training on basic stuff like hr, like benefits and signing up and all these phone numbers. You get to call if you don't feel good or you have a problem. But when it came to how to navigate internally, I was floored that there was almost nothing at the time I joined. You kind of learned by doing and tripping and skinning your knee and getting back up again. And if you were lucky and had a cool boss and someone who was willing to show you, you could figure it out.

But it was not. I thought there'd be something more formal in terms of training when I got there on just how everything worked, but there wasn't.

What there was.

I had a good leader who was willing to show me a lot and made me feel not too embarrassed about the stuff I didn't know that everyone else around me seemed to.

That's a really good definition of leadership of, you know, not making. Making sure you're not too embarrassed of what you don't know. I really like that. What, what kind of things weren't there? Like, what would you have expected? Oh, I wish they would have taught me how to do this or this. Like, what are those things?

There are so many things. So what no one ever talked about were things like career pathing or the kind of the three things you want to do, you know, when setting up your goals. Because there you have to remember in corporate, things are very formal. And so you actually write down your goals, right? And they come top down and you're, you know, you have pieces of those goals and you have to sign up for stuff whether you realize you can make it work or not. So someone I know, I wish someone had shown me, and I spent a long time teaching a lot of other people how to work with goals and to set them up so you have a chance of actually being successful. Another one is development planning. They're very big on these forms. A lot of paperwork that's now since gone online, but a lot of paperwork about filling out a development plan and how are you going to improve the next year and be better, and what do you aspire to be here and what are the paths you want to follow to get to those things. It was a little bit of a blank piece of paper activity. And so for many years, I filled them out in a way that actually was very unhelpful to my career. And it took me a long time to figure out how to leverage the tools because there's lots and lots of tools in a big company. Lots. But they don't put them in your lap. You actually have to go seek them out or find people. But what I will tell you is probably the best example of what I wish it took me a while to learn. I did learn, and now I teach a lot of other people how to do it is no one teaches you how to build a network internally. Everyone wants to meet their goals and achieve and beat you because there's ratings at the end of the year and that's how everything's determined. What you're thought of, who looks at you, how much you're paid, what your raises, how big your bonus is if you get stock is all based on your achievement against goals. And what leadership thinks of your. What you are like as a leader or contributor. And yet they don't tell you how to kind of play that game. You kind of have to learn it on your own.

I love that. Here's the leaderboard. Here's how you'll be judged. Figure it out. We're not going to tell you how the game is played.

Yeah. It's a very interesting thing. Now I will tell you things are a little bit better now, but it also depends on who you've got and how long they've been there and if they figured it out. And I spent and in fact, people still call me today on how to kind of work it internally in terms of being noticed, getting in the right room.

Can you give us a couple tips for people listening, like what are one or two things that somebody should do to kind of network internally and do it right?

Yep. And again, this is for people who I guess are in corporate but who are in some kind of formalized organization. There's a couple things. One is when it comes to your leader, you can't be afraid to sit down and ask them honestly. So leader, I'll make it up. Susie, you know, what does success look like for you? It's very similar to the sales process, by the way, that you use with customers or prospects. But Susie, what does success look like and how do I. What's my role in making sure we achieve that? Right. So you look like you're someone who helps your leader get to what they want, which makes them look good and then they take care of you. Right. So that's one tip, is that you have to understand not just what your goal scorecard says, but what your leader scorecard is about. Where are they concerned about meeting their targets? Where's the hole for them? Right. Where is a challenge that's not currently being met by anyone else on the team that you might be able to step up and help handle? So it's kind of like figuring out where you can find the gold for them, but in essence, it gives you gold, too.

So that was one that I found.

That no one actually took time to ask their leader about their success. They were only interested in their own.

And I found that things worked a.

Lot better for me, and I was much better taken care of when I made sure that what I was doing not only fed my scorecard, but helped my boss look good. Yeah, that was big.

Another one that I found very interesting.

Is when you're in a role at a big company, you're not expected to just stay there. So, Richard, to your point, one of the reasons you stay, or I stayed at a big company was I was able to move around to multiple divisions. I did multiple jobs. I learned multiple new things that I never understood before going there, but that only happens when you figure out how to navigate. And so one of the things that I realized was initially, my boss was never going to, in most cases, highly promote me to go work somewhere else in the company. Because they didn't want to lose you to them, right?

They didn't want to lose you. Yeah.

And so what you have to do is start to build that on your own. And so one of the things that I did was every quarter, everything was in quarters. I would make a list of senior people that were two to three levels above me.

Right.

That was the key, because one level.

Above you, they don't want to feel.

Like you could take over their job. People get funky about that. But if you go two to three levels, they're not really worried about you impeding on their success. Right. So I would go two to three levels up, and I'd make contact with different executives around the company every single quarter. I mean, every quarter for probably 10 years, I did it. Wow. I met so many people doing that. And the most interesting part for me was that I would reach out cold and say, this is who I am. Here's a couple of things I've done well, because people don't want to really meet with someone who's terrible.

Just like the sales process, like you said, you're prospecting internally. You're reaching out cold.

Can I be honest? In essence, I'm doing a sales job internally. These are a couple of things that I've done well. So, you know, I don't suck. I'm pretty good, and I've been told my ratings are good. But. But I'm interested in learning about what you do and your area of the company. Could you give me 15 minutes just to tell me? And people Love to talk about themselves.

And I almost never was told no. Almost never. I will tell you just as an aside, several of the people that I.

Did that to, and almost all of.

Them said yes, eventually became very senior people at American Express. In fact, one of the people I did that to, one of the first people I did that to, is now the CEO and a friend of mine. I had a network that few others really had because I actually invested time in growing my community where other people were just so focused on that scorecard that they had blinders on. And I realized that there was more to it than that. And so that, to me, would be another tip that you must invest time in expanding beyond what your job is today to learn about other areas of the company. I'll give you one other example. I spent a lot of time meeting with finance, which was probably the most uncomfortable thing I've ever done, because I'm not a really good finance person. I'm good enough, but not good.

So have you met with engineers ever before? Because that might be a little bit different than finance people.

Yeah. But what I forced myself to do is I. And by the way, every time I met with a senior person, I asked them for two pieces of advice of something, homework to give me, which gave me a reason to follow up with them and stay in touch. And the second thing was I asked them to introduce me an email to two other people they thought I should meet. And so it just kind of flowed from there. But one of the tips that someone gave me was that I should invest a little bit of an inordinate amount of time learning the financial aspects of the company. How does American Express make money? What are the financial levers of our business? Because then you can understand what's really important ultimately, and how you can make sure you're in roles that can contribute to those levers. And that was phenomenal to me.

Richard, how many people in startup land could answer those questions that.

I could barely answer those questions. But it's a piece of advice you give Scott all the time, which is, you know, as you were growing your career. Okay, I need to go talk to this het, the CFO understanding, because there's all those terms that we aren't taught. Right. That matter. And in startup world, Lisa, there's things like the magic number and all these different phrases. So it's just interesting. I have a question, then. I want to shift the subject a little bit. How do you, aside from going to your boss to figure out what their goals are.

To determine your goals, how do you coach people to be accountable to their own goals? I think a lot of people are really good at. Here are my top three goals for the year or this quarter. And then oftentimes they're just not accountable internally. So any suggestions there?

So in the world that I come from, you're continually asked about your targets, right? And where you are against those targets. And I always tell people that that's table sticks. Meeting your targets and your goals is how you get to even stay to play the game.

That if you're not, you know that.

What is acceptable results today, and maybe that isn't meeting, maybe that's 70% next year, that's going to be, that's going to fall further down because we're always hiring up, right? You're always hiring and raising the bar on the talent. And so you can't survive if you're not accountable for your targets. And we make that very clear to people. I will say that corporate is very good. At.

Least some, at least the one I was at was that there's only so long you could hang on without being accountable to achieving your targets unless there was extenuating circumstances, right?

In corporate, people are held to the fire for their numbers. In fact, almost beyond normalcy, right? So until you get to a certain level, I will say there is a level that once you get to it, results actually matter less than who you know and knowing how to play the game internally. But until you get to that level, at least in corporate, those are your table stakes.

That's a big difference between corporate and startup land. Richard. There's no such safe zone like that where it's all about who you know. At least, at least that I know of. At least I've never found the key to that part of the house.

I don't get it all the time, but it's true.

If you, if you, if you had to do this all over, would you, would you go the corporate route again? Or do you find yourself ever daydreaming about, well, shit, it'd be so fun to do this different and go through all the startup stuff and build something from scratch like that, or do you have that conversation with yourself?

I've had it. And it's an interesting answer because. And my husband, who's more, much more like you guys than me, he doesn't understand how I've ever survived. And I've watched thousands of people be let go because you don't walk out, you're pushed out, right? So. And I've done it unfortunately myself, and I'VE watched a lot of people even I even wonder sometimes why I was still. Why I was able to stand the whole time and decide when I wanted to go.

Here's what's funny and this is going to sound strange, but I'm going to say it anyway.

You don't have to incorporate. You don't have to be the smartest person or the most creative person if you understand how to play the game, as I call it, of corporate. I like the game and I don't think I would have done as well to be very honest in a really small company. I'm hopeful I would have figured it out.

But I'm one of those rare birds.

Who I actually think was meant to work in large corporate. I think about I could have been.

And should have been an attorney.

I do think about that sometimes, but just another way to use negotiating skills. But my husband is always thinking about is there a business I can start? Is there something entrepreneurial? I have never ever thought about being.

An entrepreneur or working in a really tiny company.

Until now though. Until now though. Because you started your own thing, right? Does that not count in your mind?

Startup?

I consider it a way for me to share all the lessons I learned and. And on my skin knees with other companies so that they don't have to make all the same mistakes I made.

Well, I would challenge you that you're an entrepreneur now, whether you realize it or not.

I guess I am. I guess I am. And I'm not all that comfortable just yet. I'm getting there.

But.

And it's not about doing the work of what I want to do. It's all that other stuff around it like. And doing a lot of stuff on my own that I never had to incorporate. There's a lot of support in corporate environments and so you don't get involved in administration, logistics, deck writing thing. I didn't have to do that kind of work. And so it's really interesting to have to put your hands on everything now and do all the aspects that are actually outside of the actual work that.

You think you want to do.

So I'm learning.

You should. You should. Scott hasn't created it yet, but you should take a course from Scott about how to make money doing as little work as possible.

When was the last time you built an entrepreneur?

I'd love to be.

When was the last time you had to build a deck?

I don't build decks. I literally say no. Yeah, I say no to those engagements.

Then I do need to talk to you.

That's A whole different conversation.

That's the world I come from, where everything is formal, everything's presented. And I've worked really hard to get my team to not present decks they'll leave behind. If you've done well, you've had a conversation and you really understand what's going on and you've never opened the deck, that's when you have a good meeting and you can leave stuff behind which big, big companies require, but you don't have to go through those.

I'm going to start to incorporate that into my pitch now, Richard.

Yes, that's it.

Yeah. If I've done a good job, you won't need the deck. And I'm pretty good at what I do, so I don't need a deck. There you go.

Lisa, you said something. Because I'm the complete opposite. Like, and Scott knows this is that I can't do politics. Like, I am like my stay away from corporate, Richard. I have.

Even in small businesses, I get myself in trouble. But what do you like about that? Playing that game?

As you said, it's a game, Richard.

It's a game. Well, I also feel like I see things in a room that others don't. And so the way I.

When I walk into a room, what.

I see and what other people see, I guess is different.

So, like, I tell people how you.

Walk in a room matters in corporate, it does. And I make sure I'm noticed when I walk in and how I introduce myself and in every aspect of it, who I make eye contact with. I've done so much research before I ever walk into that room that I understand who actually matters. Right. And I don't figure that out when I'm there. I figure it out before I get there.

Choose your seat wisely at the table, so to speak.

And it's not the end. You don't want to be next to the person you're interested in. You want to be across. Right. So I want eye contact. Right. So it's just, it's an interesting thing.

And I love the non verbal tells.

Me as much or more than the verbal in a room as an example. Right. So. And I just love figuring that out. I like figuring out where the special sauce is, where the. Where the win really is versus what everyone's talking about.

And most people aren't paying attention as closely.

I don't think they're so worried about.

What they're going to say and making sure that the right person acknowledges them, that they're not reading the whole room and figuring out who the influencers are, or who's really important or who will be important one day. I like figuring that out.

How do you navigate the red tape of a corporate world? Right. Which is a little different than the game, I think, right?

Yes.

So how do you. How do you navigate that?

This is the part that always prevented me from. From ever thinking about going down that route. I could see myself getting interested in the game that Lisa's talking about and being pretty good at it. But the red tape thing, I got no patience and no tolerance for that. That would get me in trouble.

And there's a lot of it. I just got tape. I'm not sure if it's red, but it's tape and there's formality and hoops. You have to jump through.

What I have found most interesting. So the first thing I'll tell you is, at least in my last several roles, the position I held while formally being the leader, I always described it to anyone who asked that my role is actually to remove all the obstacles so that my team can actually do their job. Because in corporate, I said, if we just had customers to deal with, we'd be golden. It's the crap internally that stops most of our success.

And so I became the person who could toggle between the two. Leave the field doing the field's job, don't stop, and let me work the internal. And again, I again go back to AMI Network. That network I built served me extremely well when things got complicated and stuck, which they did all the time because.

I could make calls that not everybody.

Else could because I knew some people.

And the other thing I always tell people, and you have to be careful how you do it, is that shit flows down.

It never flows up. It just doesn't.

And so when you get to a place where you're really stuck in that.

Tape, you have two options, right?

One is you. You have to go all the way to the top to unstick it, because people up top can tell people to, you know, move aside.

Right.

And you also have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and do the hard work of reengineering where there's something stuck. So I have found that many, in fact, annually, at least one of the projects I was assigned to outside of my actual job was to re engineer a process that was really broken after I'd shown them it was broken through an actual sales process.

Right?

So the example would be contracts. If you did a global agreement with American Express, on average, it took us two and a half years to get it signed because it was hundreds and hundreds of pages, right?

Two and a half years, you'd be dead.

Which is why I didn't get your contracts right.

Oh, my goodness, it was terrible.

So. But nobody over the years would listen. They say, oh, well, that's just what this is, a requirement in Denmark or this is a legal requirement in Germany. I'd be like, but it can't. Like, it just didn't make sense. And so here's the example I'll give you is we are working on a global agreement with a brand new customer that we had won around the world. A very large oil company.

Very large.

And so they were getting so frustrated with our paperwork and our lack of willingness to negotiate through and make concessions. And I believed that a lot of what they were saying was right because I had done so many of these. I couldn't get anybody, to your point, Richard, to stop the red tape. And so I did something that I.

Would do, which no one else would do.

I went into this, I asked for a meeting with the president of my division. And she was a very nice woman, but had no interest in. She never, 100 times I told her how screwed up our contracts were. She didn't want to talk about it. She wanted to talk about, you know, strategy and marketing. And so one day I walked into.

Her office.

During a meeting she was at with her leader, right? A very, very senior person, like top 10 at the company. And I put down a pile of paper on her cocktail table that was about this high, like literally this high. She said, oh my.

By the way, for people listening, she's holding her hands about a foot apart, just at least.

And she and her leader said, oh my.

You know, being very cordial because it's very formal.

My goodness, what is that? I said, that's what we just asked this company to sign that I printed every single piece of paper. I said, that is what we just asked a new customer, the largest customer we've ever won in the history of our company. That's what we told them. They have to sign before we'll give.

Them a card right now.

That got their attention. Everyone said, oh, that's bullshit. I said, that's what I keep telling everyone, but no one's listening. So now I'm going to leave this pile on. We left it there.

It was there.

And then all of a sudden it became a priority to start working through how to eliminate stacks of paper.

That's great.

And we got it. I'm just going to say this very proudly. We got it down to less than 100 pages, which for a very large agreement across almost 200 markets, is phenomenal. But sometimes, to your point, Richard, doing things the way they'd always been done doesn't get you anywhere. And so what you have to do is, in essence, sell.

Right?

And you have to show people in.

A way where it can't be ignored.

Just like when we went to sell a different company and I got really stuck and we just couldn't get them over the hump. And I finally called the CEO's office and asked for time and said, why is it that when you want to sign a new merchant or you want to do a new airline deal, you get involved, but when I'm putting together a deal, a corporate deal that's worth as much or more to the company, hundreds of millions in profit, I can't get your attention. And that changed too. He actually flew with me to close a deal personally, and it closed overnight.

After he went there.

But it's really just a matter of breaking through and doing things sometimes unexpected, but are still professional.

But.

But that can grab attention in a way that these folks have just not seen before. So that's what worked for me anyway.

These are great F100 sales tips, Richard.

Yep. I think they exist everywhere too. Even in small.

You could reduce the pile size, but it still exists. Right.

If Lisa dropped papers the size of a wedding cake on my desk, I would just get up and leave. I've probably never read that many papers in my life.

But that's the point. And yet you're asking another company to do that. That was my point. That's exactly my point. But yet you're expecting a company who just went through a global bid process for over $10 billion of volume, by the way, to go through all that. It's not going to happen right now.

You were doing virtual selling, if you will, before everybody else was doing virtual selling. I want to know, other than obvious things like there was no zoom back in the day, what is different about what is the differences between virtual then virtual now? Is it harder now? Is it so much easier now? I'm real curious about this.

Yeah. So.

First, the first thing I'll do is clarify.

I managed a group, I was virtually.

Based, and after 9 11, in our case, because our headquarters was in New.

York City, after 9 11, all sales.

And account management went virtual. So for sales and account management individuals, you had to live in the territory in which you managed accounts or managed prospects. And I was virtual also. And so we did all of our meetings online. We did conference calls, things like that. So the management of everything was done virtually. We did get together quarterly, either in regions or in city groups or we knew you can't leave people virtual all the time. So I didn't believe that. So we did get together in small groups in different parts of the country and then I would just do the flying around or in other parts of the world, we'd bring people together regionally.

But we still went out and saw customers. We didn't sell everything virtually, so people were expected to go and be on the road and be seeing customers. We just made sure they were placed within the geography in which they were managing so that it was just more cost effective because they could drive right to a client in some cases.

When it came to global selling, there's.

Just no way you end up flying around the world to sell a global piece of business if you're doing it right. Because you are.

If you were still in that role right now, would you be like, no, we have to get on a plane, we've got to go to Germany, we got to go to. Or would you be like, no, no, no, we can, we can do this, we can do this over zoom.

I think you can do a lot.

Of it over zoom. I don't think you can do all of it. And the example I'll give you is a lot of times when we were selling the American Express services, the bids were run by procurement. Right. But they were on behalf of the business line.

And they involve more than just giving.

Employees credit cards and having them run around. There was a whole back end to that process that I found. We were much more successful winning when we understood the whole process. So not only did we interview people who held the card, we actually went, we actually were walked through physically the accounts payable process. So we would go to regional accounts payable centers and literally say, hi, I'm at the front desk, I'm an invoice. Where do I go? You know, like literally be walk through. Because it gave us insight into where the challenges were. That never showed up in the RFPs. We got the RFPs, talked about the front end, about the spending, where they want to use the card very little.

How would you solve that now if you didn't have that face to face option? Because that's been taken away for the last year and a half and there's a lot of companies who are shooting shifting to be totally virtual. I'm going to cut down on this kind of business travel. But you know, you've got the experience that Says you can't replace some of this shit. But what about if you don't have a choice? What about the seller that's out there like they don't have a choice? What could they do to learn that stuff?

So what I would be doing is some of the breakthrough things that differentiate. So A, I'd be interviewing, even if you did it like this, right, Interviewing the various constituents. So I'd be talking to everyone from accounts payable to the CFO to Treasury to the road warriors to admin assistants. I'd be asking to speak to each of those constituents that are involved in the process in one place or another, because then I can get some insights and try and piece together the whole story.

The other is I'd ask someone to.

Help me process flow the whole thing so that you can do on a shared screen. And the last thing I probably would ask, cause there's still a little piece of me that thinks.

You have to kind of stimulate.

The in person part.

Is I'd ask to do a video call like a FaceTime with someone on their phone where they literally walked me through.

Oh, give me a tour of the office, but stick your phone up. That's a good one.

Okay.

Okay.

For me, there's only a certain amount.

Of time because otherwise people aren't going.

To move forward with the process. But you need to understand what's different. And in order to do that, you have to be talking. In fact, one of the things I probably. To your question, Scott, I probably say, sorry, thinking out loud here is I probably asked to talk to more people than I would have in the past to get a better picture and make sure I was getting it.

And I'd ask people in my side to be calling in and listening to more aspects of the company, like.

When.

They do their quarterly calls, profit sharing calls, and they talk about their earnings. So their quarterly earnings calls and things.

Like that, because they're probably also making.

More available online, right? Shareholder meetings, things like that you probably could get into, whereas historically you might not have been able to. So I also think there's some opportunities. And the last piece, I'll tell you is that virtual or not. The other thing that I have found that has worked for me and my team is that very few good salespeople do their research ahead of time around both the players and the industry that a company is in. So doing industry research and regulatory research has proven to be some of the best stuff on earth for me. So we found. The example I'll give you is we were in the pharmaceutical industry bidding on their business by doing industry and regulatory research. We uncovered some new regulations that we're going to have to start submitting in another year that involves.

Some oversight on their spending with doctors. As it turns out, we as part of our bid, when uncovered that we developed some reporting that was compliant well before it was needed and offered that at no charge. It was really just manipulating the stuff we had into something and we got it pre approved and compliant approved. And so we were able to pitch that as part of our offering as a differentiator. And so while it didn't involve meeting in person, what it did involve was doing enough more research than anyone else to uncover future needs for the company and offering up solutions to those embedded into what we were providing.

That's awesome. It's so interesting because you have so many stories to back up what you're explaining to people and I think that's, that's the part I love about whenever we talk about stuff. We're going to, you know, come to our last question in a second, but just. Scott, I don't even think you know this yet, but Lisa's going to join us again on a surf and sail summit in June.

All right.

Along with our, our surf and sales bonfire with, with our friend Chloe Stewart. And we're actually going to talk about procurement. Like how do you navigate these massive procurement processes as a vendor? Lisa's given me great advice on some deals I've done. So anyway, so for folks who are interested in that, it'll be June 16th so you can find it on our website. But quick shout out to Vidyard lead 411gong IO the ultimate game changer in sales conversation intelligence. There you go. Scott, that sounded really professional. That was for Lisa.

You got it. You got it.

I sounded buttoned up. And of course Salesforce, sales cloud. Lisa, what question can we answer for you? It's always a fun thing to hear.

So the question I have because again, coming from my vantage point is I just love your reaction to some of what we did talk about and I'd like the counterpoint. So how is it different when you're navigating internally at a small company and how do you.

Differentiate yourself? How do you find success in a big company? My vision of it is that it's like a few people hanging out and everybody's doing everything and running around. But I really have no understanding of how that environment works. So I would love on the other side to understand how does this all work at a startup or, or in a More entrepreneurial environment.

And what's the counter to what I say? And maybe something humorous you thought I said, which would never fly.

I'm gonna let you go first on that one.

Well, the game is the same.

It's just.

There's a lot less players, I would say. Right, so you're trying to navigate. I mean, it was very interesting and a good point. You said about going two, three levels above and that's where you try to network. Well at early stage startup, there's no such thing as two, three levels above. There's probably one level above and that's really it. Maybe two if you've got CEO, department head and then whoever you are.

So how do they decide who they listen to? I'm just wondering, like, how does that work?

Well, I think, I think the most common thing is.

Is they listen to whoever spends the most time with them. People are. People are not good about punching above their weight class and kind of asking for, for time. Nobody, nobody reaches out and says, can I have 15 minutes of your time?

Oh, really?

This is.

Or Mr. Kind of CEOs. Not that they shouldn't. They just don't for whatever reason will get.

Because it's one level only two levels up, you know, that VP of sales might get offended or scared.

There's a little bit of that sometimes. Like, okay, I don't want Lisa to go talk to Richard. Like, Lisa should be coming to me. So I can handle this kind of, kind of conversation a little bit. But you know, the rest of it is pretty similar. It's like, you know, if I'm a salesperson, like I need to make nice with people in customer service and the department head and customer service service. I need to make nice with the person in marketing over there. You know, Richard mentioned me making relationships with finance people. I never had salespeople who made relationships with finance people ever. But this is also, you know, to my own horn here for a bit. Like, maybe this is why I got to where I got and other people didn't. Because I put time into some of these relationships, you know, to kind of gain the like political capital, if you will, and the goodwill and all this kind of thing. But everything also moves way, way faster, way faster, you know, so that relationship can be won and lost in like one conversation. Whereas I imagine it in corporate. Maybe it takes a few conversations before there's any kind of like trust given there. It happens like this.

Everyone wants to know what you want. Like what is the. Is there an alternative motive? Does this person really just want to network, Are they looking for a job or. Yes. And then there's an HR aspect to everything in large corporate.

So yeah, I mean, most of the startups, you know, series A or younger, they don't even have HR department at all. You know, so at one point in the conversation you talked about, you know, thousands of people being marched out and that kind of thing. And I was thinking, I've had conversations with people who want to fire people who can't in corporate environments because of HR and red tape and all this kind of thing. And I always think to myself, well, that doesn't happen at early stage startup. If they want you gone, you're gone. Right. So those are the things that I.

Think there's multiple incumbency rules and I mean if someone's not doing their job, then you can work it through. It still takes 90 days, by the way. You have to put them through a whole process, plan, improvement plan, which is painful. Or you can talk into why they don't want to still be here and get them to walk out.

That's the best strategy. Yeah. Richard, go ahead. What would you add? Richard.

You didn't leave much for me.

I mean, I think things can be done faster, I think.

And I agree, I do agree with Scott around why I think he got further and he still does that game. He still plays the game in his career, current role.

But I think you have to be more mindful about how you say things. In some ways you do, in some ways you don't like. The theory in startups is often fail fast.

Which helps.

We say that a lot in corporate. We're just not very good at it.

I can see that. And we fail very fast, very quickly.

I also think that there's a lot of you have to navigate unrealistic expectations. You know, people think you can hire someone and train them in two weeks and they're ramped and they're ready to go. Whereas I think in corporate, I think you guys have a stronger sense of, well, that's really not how it goes for a salesperson. Right. Like there's a lot more to it.

Yeah, but it's still shorter if you're outside of sales. You want to know why Joe didn't produce last year? Well, it was Joe's first year and he didn't have a prospect list to work. And you know, we give people 18 to 24 months and most people in corporate are just like, like, can I be in sales then? Because then I get time.

In startup world, you'd be lucky to get 18 to 24 days as a new sale.

Right. But our sales are longer too.

I think navigating that, particularly as a sales leader, is different. I also think it depends on. I don't know this, but so many startup founders, particularly today, are often more technical minded than business minded. And so it's a different conversation to navigate because they haven't had that experience yet. They haven't been through multiple sales cycles to see seasonality. They're being told by the board that, well, this should be faster. You should be doing this. And so it's in sales, you're having to sort of navigate against those headwinds. And then the biggest difference is that in smaller startup world, the CEO thinks they're the expert at everything, which they are the expert at what they know and what they built. They can read something, interpret it, and execute faster than other people. But they don't necessarily mean they're an expert at it. Right.

So the joke, not great salespeople.

Well, they don't realize that as salespeople, they're great salespeople, but people are buying them because they're the visionary and they realize that they've got the founder, CEO on speed dial if they need it. Right. Your point of the story of the CEO going with you. Right. That probably you said it yourself, it closed in a day and had it not gone, I'd be willing to bet it would take a little longer.

Oh, absolutely.

I know we're at the end of time. And Lisa, thank you so much for joining us, folks. If you don't know Lisa, please find her on LinkedIn and connect with her. She's got, as you can tell, a ridiculous amount of knowledge. I've seen some of the content she puts out for people. It's way prettier than mine and very, very good, whether it's around sales training, process training, and those kinds of things. So please pay attention to what Lisa's up to.

Thank you for having me. This was a blast. I mean, it felt like a conversation and I loved it. So hopefully I did good enough. You'll invite me back?

Only if you make a very fancy slide deck.

I don't do decks anymore. I'm an entrepreneur.

Look how fast she learns, Richard. Look how fast she learns.

She moves quickly. She moves quickly. If you want to hear more. July, June 16, we'll be doing a live surf and sales bonfire quest session with Lisa and Chloe around procurement. So feel free to come and ask a ton of questions.

Thank you, guys.

Thanks, Lisa.