6 Lessons from a President’s Club Achiever

Welcome to the Switch Gears Podcast. This is your host, Priy Saka, and today I'm joined by Andy Mello. Andy, thank you so much for joining us.

Priy, thanks for having me.

Let me introduce Andy. So Andy is a seasoned leader and a double-digit club achiever through his career across PeopleSoft, Oracle, NetSuite, Cofax, and Sumo Logic. Recently, he turned around the Cofax ANZ business and achieved club twice during COVID and achieved the highest-performing region globally in 2021. So, Andy, I am so excited to get into everything that you've learned. And thank you again for joining us today.

Awesome. Great to have a chat to you.

So tell me, how did you find yourself into this career way in sales and then leading teams and building companies? So Tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, interesting stories. I'm originally from the UK. I actually studied electronic engineering. My first job offer, I didn't take it, was actually with Marconi designing missile guidance systems. So my conscience wouldn't let me design weapons of mass destruction. So I actually ended up being a systems engineer only for probably 12 to 18 months. And then I moved into sales after that and then started selling manufacturing MRP systems. So I've really since the early '90s been involved in selling enterprise applications.

Wow. I know that we all bring something from our education or past experiences into the roles that we have. How has being an engineer impacted you in terms of being a seller and then a sales leader?

Yeah, that's a really good question. So what it's made me do is I think engineering engineers in general, we're very process-focused. So I think I've always been focused on the sales process, but more importantly, the customers, their own processes, and really how technology can help them streamline operations, drive efficiencies, or drive innovation. I think that's really helped me just from being very process-focused.

Right. And then tell me about the transition from being an individual seller into leading teams. And you've Led teams across some of the best-known names in the industry. So, how did that transition take place?

Yeah, it actually started with my first startup. So, I was quite fortunate that my first startup in 2003 was actually a UK-based software company, which is pretty rare, focused on the telco market. And I actually did my career time sort of deal with Telstra. It was licenses, US, about $19.5 million. And off the back of that, we really built a team across the business. And as we won, or as I won deals as an individual contributor across Asia, we'd put a sales and pre-sales person in country. So in sort of India, Japan, Singapore. So it was quite an organic thing. So it was just over time, as I built out the business that we built a team around it. And that's really how I moved into leadership.

Understood. And now fast forward to this situation where COVID was an unprecedented season that companies have gone through. And in the middle of that, you were able to build an absolute winning team. And I know a number of the people who've worked on your team, they speak highly of you. You achieved Club twice and a number of your team members. So That was quite an astonishing feat at a time where people were hard to get a hold of. There was so much ambiguity and uncertainty. So tell me around how did you build that winning team?

Yeah, I think for me, hiring a winning team, it really comes down to 3 or 4 key things. So it's having industry individuals with strong industry knowledge so that they understand industry challenges. And they really talk about business outcomes. Technology, we all say technology, but it's just an enabler. So having people that can talk to key business stakeholders and articulate the business value that our technology can deliver to them. The other thing for me is really having a strong cultural fit. Sales team is a support. There's no lone wolves and we grow together as a whole through collaborating. And then the other thing I think that's really important is having a diverse team with different experiences and different cultures because they all bring something different, a different angle, and it reduces that groupthink. And I think the last thing, I hire individuals with a stronger focus on like attitude, willingness to learn, and energy over just experience. So try and get people that they'll actually, it'll be a stretch and grow into that role.

Fantastic. And I can see that from the results that you've built. And especially, you could get lucky. Sometimes people do get lucky with one big deal and get it across through to Club. But to get a whole bunch of people to Club as well as repeating it twice, that's pretty amazing. So let's dig a little deeper into some of the key ingredients that you require within your control. So tell me a little bit more about messaging and the value proposition. How do you go about structuring that? And how important is it to actually being able to communicate that with clients?

Yeah, I think people want to— they gravitate towards stories and that's what really resonates with people. So for me, the strongest messaging is really around having case studies that have like tangible business results. And back to that industry focus, it has to be customers that are actually in their industry and talks about specific business value that we've driven. And obviously with value, it's really one of 3 things. It's either process efficiency, or FTE, full-time equivalent savings. It's revenue generation. So that could be a higher rate of sales conversion, launching a new product. And then the final thing is about risk mitigation. So it's really making sure you've got case studies and messaging that resonates at that level. And then it's probably taking that down to the next level in terms of having persona-based messaging because challenges are different for head of digital who's more interested in customer experience outcomes. Someone in DevOps is more around ease of use, productivity of toolset and features and things like that. So you've got to really make sure that you're personalizing that to who you're talking to. And obviously, you need to be engaging 5 to 7 stakeholders in any one individual, in any one deal. So making sure that you're personalizing that. And I think a lot of less experienced salespeople don't tailor their messaging. And what happens, it doesn't resonate, particularly with executive, and then they'll get referred to someone at a lower level. If they're talking technical, they'll get tend to refer to a technical person. So just be aware of who you're talking to and understand their challenges and talk in a language that resonates with them.

Fantastic. So what advice would you give to either a seller who tends to get caught in a technical conversation but wants to be able to scale up to have conversations with— how would— what would you say? What do they need to do?

What would you say? My advice is understanding more from the business perspective. If there's— become more of a specialist in business, maybe do some industry-specific course or an MBA or something like that so that you can actually talk more at a strategic level and about business outcomes, not just the technology. I think the other thing that good salespeople do, they'll tend to leverage their leadership team to engage and obviously have those sort of strategic Discussions with executives within the customer or prospect.

Yeah, that sounds really good. And I think that in terms of therefore that relevance with verticalizing territory, so how important do you see that in terms of a go-to-market strategy?

I think as I've mentioned before, it's really key because if you've got specific industry use cases, case studies, you can quickly build credibility because you're viewed as actually want to help them solve problems versus trying to sell them technology. And clients tend to share more, they open up, and they'll view you more as a partner than a vendor trying to sell them some software. And you can have a much broader discussion in terms of other challenges. So getting them to think about some unconsidered needs or just keep drilling down on your discovery and just opening up sort of other use cases. A good example at Cofax is, you know, they're well known for extracting unstructured data. So an example is they do accounts payable invoicing, where they'll pull data from an invoice and then use that to automate approvals. So they'll actually pull master data from the ERP system, like purchase order information, So once they've got like a PO number, they'll then know based on that master data, you know, these are all the invoice lines. And because of that, there's a high confidence rate of the information they're extracting because they're expecting it to be this, these number of line items, this quantity, this price. So if that all matches, then you can just route that for approval payment straight away. If not, you can obviously have an exception and someone can intervene and review it. But a lot of automation. But What we did when I was at Cofax was looking at other use cases around that. So we had a great example with one of the major banks here who were having a challenge with trade finance. And with trade finance, you can imagine that it's very document heavy. You've got certificates of origin, you've got bills of lading, there's like bank guarantees, a whole lot of stuff. So we found out we could automate that, but we also found that we could master data from The SWIFT payment system, there's a lot of data that we could validate against to help automate a lot of that as well. So it was just by the fact that having people that understand financial services, you can take technology and create sort of new use cases rather than depending upon an existing known use case.

Yeah. And that really resonates because you earlier, you touched upon coming across as a partner who wants to solve a problem rather than a vendor who wants to sell you their technology. And I think That would be such a strong case for verticalization because one good story or a compelling use case could actually get the attention of a decision maker who's probably struggling with something similar. I can see that being a strategy.

The other thing we did at CodeFacts worked quite well. We'd have like automation, we had like swim lanes, we had examples, use cases by functions. You've got sales, finance, and operations. And say, look, these are things we can do. What resonates with you? So it was quite powerful from a discovery perspective to help broaden discussion because you might be talking about accounts payable automation, but you could be saying, what about sales orders? Have you got an issue with that? And we can maybe help automate that. That was quite powerful creating this sort of, yeah, different use cases by different sort of functions within the business.

Right. And how important do you think is discovery as a skill for an account exec? to build on and master in the context of their career?

Yeah, I think it's probably one of the most, if not the most important craft that a salesperson needs to develop because with good discovery, you actually create a compelling event because you're helping quantify their business pain. Don't take, when you're doing discovery, I found a lot of less experienced salespeople will tend to just take like pain on face value. So we've got a challenge with customer onboarding and they go, okay, that's fine. But you really need to double-click on that. So what's the current time? How long does that take? What sort of volumes are we talking about? So look at that current as-is process and then look at how we can automate that through technology and how much time we can reduce that by. And then you've really got an FTE time savings. And there's also, there could be a revenue impact as well, because it could be that they're losing orders because they're not being able to onboard customers fast enough. Go through that whole aspect from a process, revenue, and also risk perspective. What's the risk of that? Obviously, customers could churn or your competition's, if it was a bank, turning around more mortgage applications faster. So they're gonna win probably more business than you are.

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. I've just had a conversation last week with Kian McLaughlin, who's an expert in win-loss reviews. And it's amazing how After the fact, what they do is they go in and companies who've lost deals or won deals, get them to go and talk to their customers as to why they won or why they lost. And the impact of discovery becomes this outsized lever is that if you had great discovery, it's the number one indicator of probability of win. And conversely, if you've had really Yeah. Poor discovery, you're stuck in deals you probably either shouldn't be in in the first place and a whole host of problems. So that really stood out to me in that conversation. Do you think as an industry, we consistently do a good job of training reps on being good at discovery?

I find personally, we focus too much on the technology sometimes. I think a lot of technology companies are like really passionate about the technology and they love about how great the technology is. So they have a tendency to talk about the technology. So yeah, I think there's, as an industry, I think we can become much more effective if we think more about the customer and how that can make a difference, what this feature function, how that can actually have an impact on their business. To provide tangible business benefits. Yeah, I think it's something that— and I think Challenger really helps. I think Challenger Sale really helped change people's mindset in terms of approach. So that was something that, yeah, I thought was really good. But I still think salespeople can be a bit lazy and they just tend to go back to the technology a lot of the time and sometimes too focused maybe on the competition. So trying to understand who the competition is and trying to tie themselves in knots about the competition when really they should be focusing about the customer and like, well, what are their specific issues that they've got? How come we're better at solving their problems than the competition in terms of what they can do?

Right. And look, I speak to a lot of people who've gone through onboarding or specific education from employers. And often, just like you said, number one is product training. Number two, often they can have some new business prospecting, lead gen training, but discovery is not consistently on the menu. And as we're talking about getting to that level of strategic engagement, which comes next, I'd really love to hear your thoughts. We've already talked about messaging. We've talked about verticalization.

Hmm.

But now we're talking about getting in front of the CXOs, the strategic engagement. What do you see are some of the key principles to ensure that you have really good strategic engagement which will set you up for a win?

Yeah, ultimately I learned a hell of a lot. I think when I was at NetSuite, I really understood there, and that was a challenge because we were selling, it was all net new logo, and obviously ERP is like open heart surgery. I learned a lot there really about accountability. And even when you're talking to execs, like we would be speaking to CFOs and they go, this is okay, this is my decision, I've got this. But you actually knew that wasn't the case because there's either an owner or a board that you had to convince because it's not really that you're necessarily competing against other ERP vendors. It's actually competing against other projects. We were selling to wholesale distribution companies and it's, do I buy a fleet of trucks or do I buy a new warehouse? So we actually had to engage the owners or the board and actually educate them on why a cloud ERP solution would allow them to scale and grow their business over time versus buying in bricks and mortar or trucks. For me, it's critical. And I think it's also really good in terms of a qualifier because if whoever you're talking to, if they won't promote you, and again, with my team, I come in as leverage me as the exec sponsor to get to their executive. If they won't do that, then that's a bit of a red flag. It's like, how serious is this problem to you? Or maybe you're not connected enough within the business. So it's like we need to then find other stakeholders who will take us up to the executives. I think it's an awesome qualifier. So I think qualification is everything. As salespeople, all we have is time. And I think if you do like really good discovery, you'll be qualifying in that process whether am I speaking to the right person or do they actually understand some of their business issues? If they don't, who else can you put me in touch with? So I think once you understand that craft, you become very good at qualifying because whether there's a pain point that your solution addresses for that business, or if not, are you talking to the right person in the business? And if, who else do you need to speak to that is aware of those business issues that you can engage with?

Fantastic. And tell me a little bit more about building a roadmap. How do you go about getting people And building a vision in terms of what the future could look like?

Yeah, it was really interesting. I was quite fortunate in that it would have been when I was at PeopleSoft, early 2000s. We actually had the founder, this really interesting character called Art Jacobs, who produced his sales model. It's called Strategy, which actually Siebel actually ended up buying and acquiring and like building. into their platform. So I'm sounding really old now talking about Siebel. But this, uh, Jay, he was a very interesting guy. He was an ex-Vietnam vet. He was like captured behind military lines. And so he just applied a lot of these like military principles to selling. And yeah, so he was captured behind enemy lines and he used to say, oh, camping holds no magic for me. Because the poor guy was imprisoned in Vietnam for a number of years and he managed to escape and work with the jungle anyway. I digress, but a very interesting case. I was very lucky that, yeah, he took me through this strategy. And for me, it was a bit of an epiphany because he really spoke about building this plan. And obviously, you don't get to do this with war because, you know, you're building a plan to try and outthink the enemy. But this is like with a customer is, if this is the business outcome you want to achieve, when do you need to do that buy? And then look at, well, the project's going to take this long. So we need to kick off the project by this time and literally reverse engineer from there, like all the steps that you need to go through and getting them to buy into that plan. You're doing demos and maybe proof of concept and then doing a statement of work, scoping it out, but you're really getting them to buy into the process and influencing a lot of what they're doing. So purely by doing that is actually in itself a really good qualification step as well. And it also enables you to influence that buying process because you're saying what we see engaging most customers, this is like best practice for doing a review. So you're setting it up on your sort of battleground when you do that. But the other thing is it allows you to set up in advance that executive engagement, executive alignment. So who's involved, who signs off what, and then it's, I want to bring in my manager to, he'll be exec sponsor and wants to understand. What the XX challenges are. By building out that plan, getting an agreed engagement plan, again, really increases your conversion rate, but also allows you to hold the customer to account. So if they've not done— because you set actions for yourself and then they have to do stuff. So you can hold them to account and go, actually, you were supposed to do this by this date. You can start calling stuff out early and then you know that the deal's slipping, or you can even qualify out if they're not giving you access to execs or not doing some actions that they've been given to do on their side.

That's fantastic, Andy. I love how you've really presented this mosaic of wisdom that you have collected through all of these companies. And that's how life happens, right? There are people that you meet who impact you at different times.

I've been around for a while now. Yeah.

That's what makes experience more far more valuable, right? Because you hopefully make fewer mistakes. Not that you don't, but fewer mistakes because you've learned from— we all have learned.

You're always learning. That's the other thing. I'm still, yeah, still learning now. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's funny, I reflect when I was like 26 and I closed my first million-pound deal at Oracle. I thought I knew everything. I look back and go, that's just, it's hilarious really, because I'm still learning now.

And I think that's the amazing part of working in an industry that's constantly innovating, right? We're not talking about, you know, what was in the past, but what's going to happen in the future. We can take the lessons of the past.

Exactly.

Meet each new day a little smarter. So I can just see you again are among a rare small club to have achieved double-digit club Achievements is pretty significant. So again, congratulations and thank you for sharing this with us. This has been very enlightening. Thank you.

Thank you. I've loved our discussion. It's awesome. And again, thank you to you, Pri, for helping as a talent acquisition partner and helping me recruit the right talent. Because the challenge is you hire great guys and then they go on to become leaders. Unfortunately, network doesn't work all the time because, yeah, if you do a good job, Your sales guys become leaders themselves, and it's great to see them on that journey themselves and moving into leadership and just progressing their career. So that's what gets me up in the morning to do this job.

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Preen.