A conversation with Steve Hernan about using business intelligence to drive Global Sales Growth

Welcome to the Global Sales Mentor Podcast for conversations that drive growth. When you are ready to grow your international sales, join the conversation with your host, Zach Selch.

Steve, welcome. I'm very excited to have my friend Steve Hernan here, who has been a friend of mine for years. We've worked together, uh, we worked together in a previous company, and he has a very The movie says he has a very specific skill set developed over years of work, right? Steve is an international business intelligence expert, and his job really is to help bring in the right information that people would use to make business decisions, both strategic and tactical. So Steve, do you want to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you do? Sure.

It's interesting because when we talked about this, I thought about, well, what would be the best way to like describe what I do? Because it's kind of an unorthodox career path, you know, and it's not one that honestly you just like wake up like a fireman or an astronaut and say, hey, I'm going to do this when I grow up. It's something that because of opportunities and interests and exposure to certain things, you just, you get into and then you get part of this community and then you play different roles, both on the consulting side and the client side. And I talk about both of them, but in essence, what I do is my specialty and background is competitive and market intelligence. In my current role, that comprises researching competitors, getting details on their product details, their pricing, their pipeline, just from a tactical area. And then also on the strategies and of course the industry, movements, everything that impacts us on the strategic part. We're going to focus more on the former because I know that's of high interest to everybody here, the specific, the sales, the tactical. And a lot of it is really, especially on the consulting end, which I did prior to this, that's really focused on that. And that's where you get the highly specific sales intelligence. Some of it's undercover. And there's a lot I can talk about there, but that's just basically my background. Started on the consulting side, got into that, and then worked on the client side. But I'm still involved in this, in this intelligence community in the private sector where I talk with people from both perspectives.

Yep. And we've worked together, and I can say that, you know, more than once we've been in the same city at the same trade show, and we've walked by each other and not said hello because I knew Steve was undercover. And I've used information. Like, so I, you know, if you've read my book, you've read some of my articles, you know that I'm a big proponent of using this type of skill and this type of person. Because what we always say is, well, you know, I know about my competitor, or I know about the industry or whatever. And it's never enough, right? It is never enough.

Yeah.

And not only that, You know, the other part of this is people say, well, ask the distributor or ask the sales guy. And my feeling is, you know, I don't know what— I'll actually ask Steve about this in a second, but my feeling is you really can't trust people, not because they're going to lie, but because intelligence professionals are trained to be very objective if they're any good at what they do. And salespeople, distributors, they always have a little bit of a, you know, they have their own emotional part in it. They have their own pride in it. They have their own, they have something in the game. And if you're talking to a professional intelligence person, what you're going to hope is that they're not, that they are going to be 100% honest with you. Right? Is that— does that sound about right to you, Steve?

Yeah, it's interesting because I'm very involved with— there's a local— there's a trade organization for intelligence professionals, SCIP, Strategic Competitive Intelligence Professionals, and I speak a lot at their conferences. I just did a presentation on analytical thinking for intelligence producers, and it's spot on in this area. in that the whole crux of the issue is that everybody is in their own little relevance bubble and that clouds what they— their opinions, their judgment, how they look at what might be, you know, a simple fact. And it's— you see that not just in intelligence, but when you do like win-loss studies or voice of customer.

Yeah.

And it's so important that when you're getting information from a source, particularly a human source, that not only are you scraping below the first layer of what they know and what's publicly available, but also too is that you're able to sift out the bias where you can that normally if you had a distributor or somebody else that would hear this, they would selectively listen and maybe they wouldn't get the whole picture. So it's— we're trained to do that and even then it's difficult because, you know, We get so much information coming in, we try to process it by what's relevant, and it's a survival mechanism. So we're all on autopilot. I think we're just a little bit more focused on trying to weed that out because it's our job.

Right, right. And I'd like to take a little tangent off of this. I take a look at like a lot of military history, and I think the absolute best example— I don't know if you've heard this story, but in the '73 war between Egypt and Israel, the Israelis had these fortresses on the border with Egypt that were built of sand, packed sand, which was great for taking artillery shells because the shell would hit the sand and it would diffuse the energy. It was a really good structure. The weakness was you could wash them away with water cannons.

Right.

And, but nobody had ever done that before, right? And for about 3, 4 months, the Egyptians were practicing using water cannons on their side of the Suez Canal. And people kept reporting this. And they said, I don't understand what exactly they're doing, but they're practicing with these giant water cannons all day long. And this report went up and people heard it and they knew it. So they had all the information to know what was happening. And then one day they came and they turned these water cannons on, on the fortresses. and were able essentially to destroy the fortresses in a matter of hours. And people had all the info, you know, my point being that they had all the information they needed, but they didn't process it correctly because everybody just said, well, you know, who's going to attack a fortress with a water cannon, right? So it's very interesting.

Yeah.

And in business, I think it's the same thing. You get this all the time. People, you have, In my opinion, you have to have somebody whose job it is, whether it's part-time or full-time, but providing you objective information for use, both tactical and strategic, right? And that's why I like working with people like Steve.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if I could, there's one rule of thumb, it's just look for the assumptions in what everybody, you know, everything's a judgment. I don't care, you know, Look for the assumptions that underlie that, you know, their judgments, their sources, their data, and that, you know, if you would challenge them, then you'll start to see the holes because most people don't. They're, you know, they're in that case, you know, they felt they were invincible, but if somebody had really pushed on it, then they might have said, okay, well, the assumption is that this is meaningless, that they've got these water cannons.

Right.

Right. Yeah, it's interesting.

It is interesting. So let's talk a little bit about, about practicalities and maybe talk about some of the things we've done together and some of the things we haven't done together. I mean, you've helped—

you've—

we've worked together uncovering information specifically about competitive products, right? You've helped design products by coming up with understanding what the competitive environment was like, right? So maybe you could talk about those things.

Sure, at the tactical level, when you're talking about sales intelligence, you ultimately have to think about your end stakeholder. It's like, what do they need? What information do they need that's not just publicly available but non-publicly that's going to help them push a deal over the edge? Because that's what we're looking at. We're looking for immediate. We don't care about, hey, strategy and all that. We want to win. You know, and any competitive intelligence program should, you know, have a 2-pronged goal: win sales and drive strategy. But winning sales is huge because that's their business.

Right, right.

So from a collection standpoint, our focus is on, okay, product details, product capabilities, key differentiators, pricing, discount structures, how flexible they are in this, what are they going to come at us with on a deal? And also, too, pipeline. That's a big thing. It's like, what might be coming to the future that, you know, we have early warning on, we can maybe head off or start to message against or shore up our existing clients so that when this new product or solution comes out, we've already, you know, captured this customer and their market share. And I'll just give you a good example. I think In my previous company where we worked, I know there was a lot of concern about— we were launching a new long-term care product and we were concerned because, well, that's— I shouldn't say we were concerned. We weren't concerned. That was the issue. And it was real interesting. We went to a conference and this was at the HIMSS conference.

Mm-hmm.

And I won't list the company, but I remember I visited the booth and I was undercover. So I ended up talking with the VP of operations, the VP of product development. And this is a fellow, he was from Israel and he was— so, you know, I will say one thing, the pharma companies, particularly the Israeli ones like the Teva, all that, and then people who are in business and that, they are savvy because they understand competitive intelligence and And, you know, counterintelligence better than anything. So they're tough nuts to crack.

Yeah.

But I remember I engaged this guy, I spoke with him and all that. And, you know, there's a process of approaching, managing the conversation, eliciting, you know, knowing when to go in, go out and all that. And I got him to slip because he said, oh yeah, we have a UL 1069 product that's coming out in December, you know. Specifically for this. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And I'm just— and here we were in like February, and I'm like, damn, now we've got like 6, 7 months notice. And that went in the report and everything, all that. But that's the type of stuff that from a sales perspective, you're like, I don't want to get blindsided because this company's all of a sudden, you know, throwing in a bid, and I'm just like, whoa, where did this come from?

Oh yeah, yeah. And that comes down to even things like specific features, right? You basically, if you know what those features are, you can prepare to talk about them, right? And that becomes, you know, your, your, your prep as a salesman. You're able to say, well, yeah, okay, so this might be a threat, but if I, if I know about it and if I know how to talk about it, then it becomes helpful, right? So yeah, those, those are all great, great things that help. Yeah.

One other example, and this is also from a conference because we're talking about international too, is companies, they may have, you know, you talk about pricing, but it's not just, you know, list price. It's also how flexible—

Oh, what they're actually selling for. Yeah.

Right. On discounts, you know, structures and everything like that. What's their level of flexibility, you know? And you know what? Sometimes that's centralized, you know, it's top-down. It's that way, but I'll tell you, in certain markets like international markets, It's a lot of discretionary authority in the field. Yeah, and we found that out at conferences in real time, text the information over to the distributor, and they're like, oh, okay, so, you know, we know what they're going to come at us with.

Right, right. Yep, those type of things are really helpful. And then you also encounter sometimes the weaknesses, right? So I'm, I'm pretty sure I remember you feeding us some things like, okay, I was on their booth and I saw they were having such and such a problem with their demo. And we've actually said to people, to customers, you know, why don't you go by this booth and ask to see this? Because I know they're selling you this feature, but I don't think that feature really works, right? And that's the type of thing that sometimes does come up in— with competitive intelligence at trade shows. So these type of things can be used in a very, very tactical way, right? And that's Very helpful for salespeople.

Very helpful. You talked to— that's basically what's known as the kill points, you know.

Oh yeah.

Where are the areas where it's just— that is going to almost completely nullify the competency of the product in the eyes of the customer. And those are great. We love to find those because, you know, and what's more interesting is you probe for them when you're talking with these various sales, marketing, or VPs, and you try to find out how they're messaging and spinning it too because You know, that way you've got the whole deal and that, and then you quantify that and then you're just like, you know, that goes to a deliverable. It's like, hey, when they say this, you hit them with this and then the whole thing collapses.

Right. Or I remember once your team fed us a couple of hospitals where one of our competitors had had a failure in the installation. And so there were people there very unhappy. And I use that a lot. I'd say to people, well, if you're looking at this particular competitor, I can give you some really good references of ours. And I could also suggest you talk to a reference of theirs, and that turned out to be pretty helpful. So there are a lot of different ways you could use tactical business intelligence for, for, you know, sales, for actual selling. Let's talk a little bit about the strategic side of it, Steve, like some of the strategic wins you've had.

Yeah, you know, a lot— believe it or not, a lot of the tactical intelligence leads into the strategic. Yeah, you know, we talked about the example of getting early warning on a new product launch, but that also indicates a change in the strategy of the company, you know, of maybe they're moving into a market that they typically weren't. And you can triangulate that with other things that you look at from them, maybe at a higher level, like activities they're doing, partnerships that they're engaging with.

I think we all remember one of our big partners made noises of becoming a competitor, right? You know what I'm talking about. And we had some, uh, you know, there was a company that made a product that we worked with very nicely in good cooperation, and then they decided to buy a competitor of ours and directly become a competitor of ours. And, you know, we knew about it, you know, we, we had very strong indicators about that ahead of time from the business intelligence people, and it helped us prepare for that so it didn't blindside us, right? So those are the type of things you're talking about, right?

Yeah, and I think it's important to mention that, you know, executives, we tend to put them on this pedestal that they're these very wise people, uh, and, you know, they're, they're, they're just like— yeah, well, collectively, I mean, you know, right, like, oh, so-and-so's got this title, so they must be smart and have wisdom.

I think, I think, I think the French say something like, uh, no man is a hero to his valet. Right? No CEO is ever a hero to his vice president of sales. I'll tell you that much.

Well, you know, that subset of leadership is really in a relevance bubble. I mean, and, you know, I don't think it's malicious. I think some of it is just the circumstance they're in and who the masters that they report to. So, of course, but, you know, what's incumbent upon us is to have a seat at the table there and then to To alert and guide them on areas that they should be looking at that is going to impact the company as a whole, the direction that they take, who they might partner with or buy, or what product area they might focus on or invest in. And that, you know, those— by getting sound decisions and movements in those areas, that's going to filter down where the sales team, they have a product that's actually innovative, that's what the customer needs and they're willing to purchase versus like something antiquated that doesn't integrate particularly Or is on a standard that's not used anymore, and then it's just, it's a struggle. So it, you know, it feeds in both of them. There's— it's a two-way street. Intelligence is a conduit that feeds both sides.

Yeah, exactly. I think, I think that's a really, really good way of putting it, Steve. And you have— I think you have to be able to use the information. You have to be able to trust your people, and you have to know, you know, yeah, you have to work with it. You can't disregard it. And again, You can go to dozens of really solid cases of military leaders who have disregarded information and intelligence and then, you know, lost because of it. And it's the same thing in business. You know, people can feed you good information, good intelligence. If you don't use it wisely, everything is wasted. Right. So I think that's really interesting. Really interesting.

Yeah. That's another big challenge because you're—

it's—

we're analysts. by our nature, but we're very poor many times at like framing and presenting and persuading. And I think that's, that's a big challenge for us. It's like you can get overruled by somebody that's maybe more persuasive because of their position or influence, even though they're ignorant. So presenting it in a way that they listen and will act on it, I think, is the perpetual challenge that we have.

Right. Now I'm going to talk about something that's a lot smaller. We've been talking about the big picture here, and this is great, but I've used your, your services and people like you for very, very tactical things just You know, if you think about it, you know, salespeople say, well, when I'm going in, I really want to have a nice portfolio of information about my customer, right? And if I prepare that, it might take me 2 hours, whereas I can get somebody as a consultant— not necessarily Steve, because Steve's already been doing this for, you know, 25 years— but I can get somebody as a consultant to do that for me, probably for $40, right? And I've done that a lot. I've used an external business intelligence consultant to do business intelligence consulting, to do things like do a customer portfolio for me. So, you know, instead of me sitting down and scrubbing the internet and looking for information and putting it all together, I put together these files and make sure that all my sales team has them going in, right? I've used people like this just to identify potential customers. I build up a target profile of my customers and I say, well, could you find people like this. And again, this is a very cost-effective way to do it because I guarantee that somebody like this is going to do it faster and more accurately than your salespeople are, right? So why not outsource it to somebody like that? So you can use them really from a very strategic perspective— how do we design our next product, what markets do we want to go into— but also into a very tactical one. Well, on Thursday I have a meeting with somebody Can you prepare me a profile on that person so I know what to talk about? Right. Lots of different things like that. Right, Steve? Yeah.

And you touch upon a very critical point when we talk about intelligence, particularly intelligence collection and analysis. And this, this is an issue that's, it's a real sticking point with me because I have a different background than a lot of people. Most intelligence specialists, they're analysts, you know, they, they've, they're good at collecting research from different sources, collating it, all that other stuff. That's fine. But they're not very good at primary research. And I'm different. I cut my teeth. That's why I have a big soft spot and admire the sales staff, because my foray into competitive intelligence was basically with these agencies where I'm, I mean, you know, I'm actually doing cold calls, calling sources, securing information, non-public. And, you know, that is, you know, I can tell you that most intelligence analysts, particularly heads of CI and these various corporate things, they have never done that. And they have no idea how difficult that is.

Right.

And as such, they don't really understand the perspective of what it's like to approach, you know, a big client for a big business-to-business thing. So—

Right.

I can honestly say that like in this case, I think you need both. You need people that can do stuff like that, but you need to add that primary research component because that adds the more of the non-public perspective, especially if it's with a qualified source.

Right.

And that's kind of like why I maybe diverge and say, you know, hey, I've— I come— I'm cut from a different cloth. I'm not just this desk analyst, you know, in front Right.

No. And that's— and it's very, very valuable stuff, you know, understanding who your competitors are and understanding what they're saying, understanding what they're doing. All of these things is, is really, really helpful. And it could help drive this, this hypergrowth we're talking about, right?

Mm-hmm.

It is really easy to sit back at home and say, yeah, you know, we're growing 5% or 6% a year. Everybody's happy, blah, blah, blah. But if you want to really eat your competitors' lunch, if you want to take over their territories, understanding what they're doing is key to that. And using people who can get that for you, using the right intelligence people is going to be a key element in your ability really to expand internationally, whether or not you could afford to have somebody in-house or you hire somebody outside. Steve, you've worked— you've, you know, you talked about you've been in-house, you've been a consultant, but you've also been in-house hiring consultants, right?

Right. Right.

So you've been sort of like the key contractor. When we went in and people had gotten to the point where they sort of knew your face, you would work with 3 or 4 contractors who would go in, right? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.

And because there's— that's a great point. There's a timestamp that you can do this because, you know, it's like, it's not like I have My name is not John Smith. There aren't a lot of Steve Hearn. So, you know, you—

And it's not like those movies where James Bond goes again and again into Russia and nobody notices, right? You know, it's like, you know, people will notice if you show up at their booth every year. Yeah, right.

And there's this thing called the internet and Google where it's just, right, you know, oh, this guy spoke on a— at a CI conference, maybe I shouldn't talk with him. Yeah, so, right, right. I'm at a point now where I probably couldn't go undercover like I used to be able to, just because now I'm a lot more prominent, particularly in the company. But I do, like you said, there's a lot of agencies, consultant groups, most of whom I've known for years, that I do engage. It's, by the way, it's a very small circle of—

And it's a very relationship-driven thing because anybody I'll tell you what, one thing that I've found is everybody will tell you about, you know, being, you know, about their background as a spy, and then you look into them and like, you were a security guard at Walmart, right? Like, you're, you know, you don't really have that background. So it's having the relationship with people you can trust and you know that they've actually delivered is very helpful, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, just throw out one anecdote. I had, in my— in a previous capacity when I was a consultant, I actually had to collect intelligence from— it was actually from Brazil for— there are 2 projects. One of them is from the company Tupperware to find out their sales and marketing approach in the various, you know, regions and states.

Regions of Brazil, yeah.

Right. And then the second one was interviewing hepatologists on their opinions on, you know, a new Hep C therapy, and I used the same consulting group. I won't name them, but they know they're great. They did a great job. And when we had to cover the conference, the Hospital R conference down in São Paulo, I used them. And I'll tell you, they— there were 3 women, they're very sharp. I call them Charlie's Angels because I'll tell you, they just—

Yeah.

They were hyper-aggressive. They set up appointments with these companies before, during, after the show, got like demos and everything. I mean, really, just, I mean, you talk about like an intelligence, you know, analyst's just like dream. Just, so, you know, these are the types of things that, you know, once you move to the client side, you want to be able to leverage them, but also too, because you've done that work, you know what to look for and how to screen them.

That's exactly it, right? You know, you know what to look for and people can't bullshit you, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, and again, it's It's really a small group of people. And I'll just give you one other example. When I was on the consulting end, I had to do this conference. It was the American Society of Nephrology. Go figure. I was for a pharma conference and I go there and of course, I'm undercover. I'm going to booths, I'm going to posters and all that. And I see this tall, lanky guy look like Buddy Holly with the glasses and everything like that. And he stood out. So I'm just like, oh, that's weird. And lo and behold, like 5 months later, I'm at this Alzheimer's conference in Paris.

Wow.

And I'm doing the same thing undercover. And guess who I see walking in there? And I'm just like, he's with another agency.

He's part of the job. That's funny.

You see that. I mean, you know, we all, you know, you get a sense and you know who's the hired gun for whom.

That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. Great. So one last thing. I can't end this without saying, you have an interesting hobby now, don't you?

Which one?

Oh, I was talking about this swimming. So maybe, maybe just— so one, one thing about Steve, we both live very close to a very cold body of water, right? And talk just a minute about that, if you don't mind, Steve.

Yeah, well, it was a compromise because it's safer than motorcycling and skydiving, which is what I used to do years ago.

Uh-huh.

So, I figured, you know, I need to get a fix. So, no, we swim in the lake year-round and we obviously gear up during the colder months and we've been able to do it for a number of years. And, you know, it's one of these things, it's a challenge, it's a risk, but at the same time, it's just very rewarding. And, you know, you get a small group of people to start doing it and, you know, it's a pretty tight community. So, it's just a lot of fun.

Great. So you have a tight community for your swimming and you have a tight community for your work for the intelligence community.

You know, absolutely. And that's, that's really what it's all about. It's just like finding your tribe and then, you know, just, uh, going from there.

That makes perfect sense. So is there anything that I forgot to ask you, Steve?

I don't know. I mean, you know, it's like we— I've got so many stories, you know. I mean, it's just, it's— I would just probably say if anybody is like curious or interested or, you know, they just Do I need this? It's like, think about like what you don't know from a sales perspective because there are people on the ground that can collect this information from various sources, human sources, and, you know, they can really make a difference in that very tactical. It's like, you know, winning this deal, this project or whatever, because really, I mean, that's the key focus, you know, whether it's win-loss, you know, voice of customer or anything like that, you know, it's like you Look, the idea is you want to win, you don't want to lose, right? Intelligence professionals, particularly, you know, the ones that do everything— the collection, the analysis— we view everything as a big game, as a zero-sum game. So, you know, that's— we look at it in that perspective.

What did the British call it? The greatest game, right?

So yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we're— well, a good one anyways. We'll say, hey, you know, our goal is to help you guys win at this level, and then Help the company win at the strategic level.

And here's the thing, this isn't for you if you're selling, you know, $2,000 aluminum siding, right? If you're, you're selling quarter of a million dollar purchase orders, and my average lifetime purchase order is about a quarter of a million dollars. So if you're, you're selling quarter of a million dollar purchase orders, you're selling, you know, $100K, half a million dollar, million dollar purchase orders around the world, and you're looking at, you know, can I do better in Brazil? Can I do better in Germany? And you invest $30K, $50K, $100K in intelligence, that's peanuts in the end of the day in terms of what you're going to bring in. If somebody like Steve is the guy who, or the person who can turn around Brazil for you, can turn around Germany for you, why not use somebody like that for that process, either as an external consultant or in-house? And again, I've only really been with 2 companies that could afford an in-house person, but I've pretty much always used— when I couldn't afford in-house, I always used external consultants. So it's a really, really powerful tool to have around. And I'm going to say this, if you need somebody like this and you can't find one, reach out to me and I'll hook you up with somebody. And I would say reach out to Steve, but he's trying to keep it quiet. He can't have a lot of people. Uh, reaching out to him, it'll blow his cover. So—

I don't really have much of a cover these days. So, you know, I'm, I'm happy. But I know a lot of people, you know, within the industry that, you know, just operate internationally, all that other stuff. So yeah, you know, happy to help.

Great, great. All right, well, thanks a lot, Steve. This has been a lot of fun. I enjoy this. And I— the other thing that I'll say about Steve and I is we, uh, we live like a 10-minute walk from each other, and we typically— the only time we ever meet is in places places like Dubai and Brazil, right? Because we're, we're in, in cities for trade shows and we'll get together for a drink, but we never get a chance to see each other by home because we all have, you know, family responsibilities and stuff when we're home.

Yeah, weird dynamic. I mean, it's just, it's like, hey, when are you going overseas again so we could get together and chat, you know, for a drink?

Yeah. Anyway, thanks a lot for coming on here, Steve. Really appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun. And if If you're listening and you want more information, please reach out. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out. We can help. Thank you.