June 2023 - Tyson Group

Introduction to Overcoming Sales Objections

Tyson Group
June 27, 2023
5 min read

In the realm of sales, objections are a natural part of the process. When faced with objections, sales professionals have an opportunity to address customer concerns and build stronger relationships. However, successfully handling objections requires a strategic approach. In this paper, we will explore key factors to consider when handling sales objections. By understanding what to look for and implementing effective strategies, salespeople can navigate objections skillfully, increase customer satisfaction, and improve their chances of closing deals successfully.

Are Your Salespeople Paying Attention to Customer Concerns?

When a customer raises an objection, it’s crucial to pay attention to their concerns. Listen carefully to what they are saying and show understanding and empathy. Sometimes, customers may not express their objections directly, but by actively listening, you can identify the underlying concerns they may have. By using a seven-step process, salespeople can help their potential customers identify their real objections. This helps in addressing objections effectively and building trust with the customer.

Recognizing Different Types of Sales Objections

Objections come in various forms. It’s important to recognize these different types to respond appropriately. Common objection categories include price, product suitability, competition, timing, authority, and trust. But sales objections usuallyfall into 6 distinct classes: genuine, stalling attempts, misconceptions, skepticism, unsolvable, and trivial. By categorizing and classifying objections, you can prepare suitable responses and tailor your approach accordingly. Understanding the type of objection allows you to address the root cause and offer solutions that meet the customer’s needs.

Building Rapport and Gaining Customer Trust

Building rapport and trust is critical when handling sales objections. Sales professionals must establish a connection with customers and demonstrate their expertise. By creating a positive and trustworthy relationship, salespeople can address objections more effectively. Trust-building strategies include active listening, empathizing with customer concerns, providing relevant information, and offering social proof or testimonials. Building rapport and trust enhances the credibility of sales professionals and increases the chances of overcoming objections successfully.

Asking Questions to Understand Sales Objections

Asking questions is a valuable skill when it comes to identifying objections. By asking open-ended questions, you can encourage customers to share more about their concerns and motivations. This helps uncover objections that may not be immediately apparent.Effective questioning techniques enable you to understand the customer’s perspective better and address objections comprehensively.

Seeking Customer Clarification

Sometimes, objections may be unclear or vague. In such cases, it’s important to seek clarification. Ask the customer to explain their concern in more detail. By doing so, you can gain a clearer understanding of the issue and provide targeted solutions. Seeking clarification helps uncover objections that customers may not have expressed clearly initially, ensuring that you can address concerns accurately.

Understanding the Impact of Emotional Triggers

Emotions often play a significant role in objections. That is the reason a salesperson’s EQ can play a major role in how the deal is developed and the sale sis closed. It’s important to pay attention to the customer’s emotions and understand the triggers behind them. Objections driven by fear, uncertainty, or skepticism may be rooted in emotional factors. By identifying these triggers, you can empathize with the customer and provide reassurance or tailored solutions. Addressing the emotional aspect of objections helps build trust and improves your chances of overcoming objections successfully.

Doing Research and Being Prepared for Sales Objections

Research and preparation are key to identifying objections in advance. Take the time to gather information about the prospect, industry trends, competitors, and common objections. Anticipating objections allows you to proactively address concerns even before they are raised. By conducting thorough research, you can demonstrate expertise and position yourself as a trusted advisor. This builds confidence in customers and helps you navigate objections effectively.

Review

Recognizing and understanding sales objections is essential for sales success. By paying attention to customer concerns, recognizing objection types, asking questions, seeking clarification, understanding emotional triggers, and being prepared through research, salespeople can skillfully identify objections and address them with tailored solutions. This approach strengthens customer relationships and increases the likelihood of closing more deals. With a proactive and empathetic mindset, your salespeople can effectively handle any objections they encounter and achieve sales success.

How to Build a Better Brand with Zoomph Co-Founder Amir Zonozi?

Tyson Group
June 13, 2023
5 min read

This episode of Against the Sales Odds podcast is an interview with Amir Zonozi, the President and Co-Founder of Zoomph. Lance Tyson and Amir talk about the intricate details of Zoomph, their partnerships, Amir’s story from college to his current professional career, and everything in between. Throughout this interview, Amir expands on Zoomph’s audience, partnerships, challenges, and day-to-day activities for his role.

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How To Build A Better Brand With Co-Founder & President Of Zoomph: Amir Zonozi

I am pretty excited about this episode of the show. We have with us the President and Cofounder of Zoomph, Amir Zonozi. Our two organizations got together and are collaborating on a partnership with the things that Zoomph and the Tyson Groups do. I was excited to get this interview in play and this episode up and running. Tell the audience about yourself a little bit. What do you do? What’s your day-to-day? Talk about Zoomph for a little bit so everybody understands what it is, how it works, and why it’s important.

I am super pumped about this partnership and can nerd out about that in a little bit here. I am the Cofounder and President of Zoomph and a dad of three boys. With Zoomph, what we’re doing is helping these organizations and sports and entertainment understand what the value is of that branded exposure through the different activations that they’re doing with their partners. We provide these partner insights so that they can improve their partnerships or have better data to go reach out to the right people.

That’s been an exciting ride for us, but we didn’t start there. We had a long journey before we figured out what our product market fit was that allow us to unlock the growth that we have. At the end of the day, I am out here in D.C., enjoying life. I have a great team. I am excited about what we’re doing together for our partnership and having a conversation with you.

Let’s unpack that a little bit, a couple of things. First of all, I’m sure we’ll get to the three boys because I didn’t know that. I am a father of three boys, so that awesome was an interesting play. From a Zoomph standpoint, for the audience, and I want you to break this down for somebody who might not quite understand maybe outside the sports and media realm, Zoomph provides data so organizations can position themselves the right way. Am I saying that correctly? Can you expand that and go into more detail?

100%. What I love is you’re an icon when it comes to sales, sports partnerships, sports hospitality, and all the different interactions in a business that becomes within sports. Where we’ve come in is the sports media size of the business. We’re helping them understand that branded exposure provides partners, whether it’s broadcast on linear that they’re able to look at across these large audiences across the US and how that exposure asset that a brand might have with one of these teams, or we’re looking at YouTube and TikTok.

All of this exposure provides a ton of value, whether it’s making sure they’re right in front of the right audience. It is looking at their social data. If you’re trying to reach soccer moms, it’s about the propensity of soccer moms that you’re trying to reach as a brand. Maybe it’s not the LA Rams. Maybe it’s Angel City FC that you’re trying to align with. Every audience has a story to tell. We try to make it clear how to make those alignments happen. We work on both the brand side and the team side or the league side. We work with the media companies as well.

We’re processing this media content using AI. One, we are looking for logos. Two, we are looking for the assets. We can do auto-attribution. If you’re a Rakuten, you know exactly the value that you’re getting up until game 2 Lakers or game 3 Lakers and Warriors that’s going on that we’re talking. We put that all together so it’s very clear what your performance is. That data can also help you go sell and sold assets or it can help you find the right partners to go after.

Building A Better Brand: Data can help you sell assets or find the right partners to go after.

We provide insights when it comes to any of those questions to make those strong, powerful partnerships that provide value on both sides. Niches get riches. These are all niche pockets and groups of fans. Amir with his 3 boys is very different at 40 than Amir at 25 with his boys at the game trying to have fun. It’s all different in those experiences. We try to show those stories through to digital audiences that you hold.

Let’s unpack that for a second because it’s interesting. What I heard you say is you provide almost this avatar effect for a brand to make a decision on who they would partner with maybe on the sports and entertainment side. It would also help a sports team like Monumental down in D.C. who has the Wizards and the Caps make a better decision on how they would position their brand to certain audiences with other organizations you’re trying to do business with.

Conceptually, it is aim small, miss small with you guys. You’re trying to get whatever side of the business you’re working on, whether it be on the brand side or the sports side, to get them to aim small. That’s going to arm them to make better business decisions, or a salesperson to sell that better. Is that correct?

Yeah, exactly. We live in a business of uncertainty. We put a certain need to the performance that you’re getting and then what that ROI is for these brands. It is by them understanding, “If I’m DoorDash and I’m trying to reach an audience that prefers delivery of goods to me or food to me, maybe I want that differently than the Wizards or differently than how I activate with the Caps.” Each one of those will be able to give a better idea of how to move forward and what content makes sense. At the end of it, we’ll help recap what that valuation looks like, a cold dollar sign.

The event business is huge, but the way we’re looking at it, sports is not the product. It’s the platform. The product is the branded experiences that you build off sports as a platform. You look at the drive to survive and these long-form storytelling pieces and narratives that are allowing fans to understand the human component of these athletes.

These teams are getting smarter. The Jets do a wonderful series. It’s going to be exciting on YouTube with Aaron Rogers coming in and playing for them. These long-form content pieces are incredibly powerful in winning new fans over. We’re helping understand where these brands should be and what the value is of being told in this story. Whether it’s Ted Lasso holding up an iPhone or Eleven crushing a can of Coke, media is a storytelling platform.

Ads are becoming less effective. It’s about how you fit within the story. Think of us as a product placement company. Think of us as a branded exposure company. That’s where we come in. This is why I’m so excited to be talking to you. You inform these amazing people in the space like Al Guido, Scott O’Neill, and different people that have made a profound impact within the business. As media becomes a bigger solution for these iconic properties and organizations, we’re helping provide that infrastructure and framework, allowing us to make deals happen off this and understand what that business impact is.

It is a super exciting space to be in. I love that you’re using D.C. references. As a D.C. guy myself, I still call them the Bullets. It’s a very exciting space. We see fandom as our oxygen. Wherever there’s fandom, it gives us a place to go breathe, whether it’s film, sports, or entertainment. Originally, we didn’t start here. We started in the government connected to our D.C. stuff. We did impact before, during, and after speeches with the state department.

We got first involved with Monumental Sports in our original product. That was our gateway drug into sports. That was what got us so pumped and excited. We worked with all different kinds of projects from Instagram, Twitter, and Coca-Cola, but what we were focused on was fan engagement. We were the asset at that time. Over years of finding not quite takeaway success, we found every way that didn’t work, we learned it got smarter each year.

In 2018, the Cowboys came to us. They were like, “We don’t want to use any of our visuals. We want to use your platform to organize and grab these posts.” We said, “No.” They were like, “We’re the Cowboys. You can’t say no to us.” We’re like, “We’re for marketing. We’re not for partnerships. We’re not for sales.” They were like, “We’ve checked and looked. We think you guys are the best at this we can do in this way.” When we did it in that way, it opened up our eyes. We spun the platform all 2019 to focus on partnerships. The last couple of years for us have been a breakaway success with digital assets being one of the most used platforms out there. I’d be happy to go into more detail. I wanted to give a quick recap.

The bottom line for me is I’m listening to it and knowing what I know and thinking of our customers, sports is a platform. You help storytelling better around those things, if I was ever going to say it in a nutshell. I do know this as long as I’ve been in business. Stories sell and facts tell at the end of the day. Like anything else with the audience, we have execs that tune in to this and we have up-and-comers tuning in to it also. You’re the President and Cofounder. What does your day-to-day look like? I know what a president does. I am the president of my own company. I also know you probably wear a ton of hats. What does that look like? What are you running into every day in your world?

Being cofounder, you do wear a lot of hats. You celebrate every time you can fire yourself in a certain role that you suck at. You find someone better that can champion and grow to the next level. We originally were within an agency, MetroStar out in Reston. They work with all these amazing government entities. The CEO there, Ali Manouchehri, took a big chance on our team on some of the projects that we were doing. He allowed us to have nights and weekends to work on this. Once we split it out, we’ve been running and growing with it.

Being a co-founder, you wear a lot of hats, and you celebrate every time you can fire yourself in a certain role that you suck at and find someone better that can champion and grow to the next level.

There are three cofounders. There is Nick Cronan who’s our Jony Ive. He is our chief design officer. There is Ali Manouchehri who’s our chairman and CEO. He is instrumental in our investor conversations. He influences our product and our vision and where we’re going to go. My role is I flip the work chart upside down. I call myself a customer success for the company. Whatever is needed or whatever obstacle is in their way, it’s my job to understand how quickly we can help them get that out of their way. We hire the best and smartest and brightest people. They know what they’re doing. I’m out here to make sure that they get what they need.

I love interacting and engaging, probably a little too much on that side, with our customers.

I love working with our product team on how we need to get our features out the door and finalize the amazing innovation that they can do there. I am checking with customer success to see what issues we need to prioritize to eliminate obstacles. I am working with finance to make sure that we’re building an infrastructure vehicle that can continuously fund more people coming in, take care of our investors, and grow the current team that we have.

It’s a little all over the place, even the HR-related things I have to jump in on, but nothing gets me more excited to know that we impact 30 families in a better way. The parents of some of our employees engaging with us, retweeting, and sending us DMs and congrats is infectious for me. I love being on the client side. I love selling. I love telling the stories of what we’ve been able to do.

Early on, I used to think I was terrible at sales and would try to shy away from it, but where I found my ability to tell my story in the right way is I nerd out. I have so much passion for what we’re doing. If I’m able to unlock that and share with the customer in their eyes what we’re able to do together, that’s the way that we can grow. I’m constantly looking for what can we be better at and how we beat ourselves yesterday. If I had a theme song that I’m constantly listening to, it’s Eye of the Tiger by Survivor. Rocky Balboa is the main figure in my head of, “Keep getting back up when you keep getting knocked down.”

I love it. Let’s go backward then. Coming out of school when you were getting your first job, your first job was doing what? Let’s hit backward and come back to how you landed here. I’m listening to what you said and you were measuring impact for the state department. I want to get through that. How do you arrive at this? Where’d you start?

Do you see all those crazy guys that are all obsessed with Web3 and NFTs? That was me for social media when social media was becoming a thing. My background is I graduated undergrad with psychology. AIM was what fascinated me. This is a throwback for those that understand and say it is well-referenced. With how you frame certain signals and how the return signal is received, it fascinated me that you can get more responses to an away message first. You put it in one way and you get zero responses. I love playing with that.

I worked in inpatient and outpatient psychology units. I argue social media is more psychology than it is technology. I was lost at the time because social media wasn’t built there, but I did anything. I worked with pest control. I worked with senators, doing their social media community management. I was a freelancer. I was at a bar giving advice.

One of my friends was cousins with Ali. He was like, “We’re growing and building this new media team. You’ve got to come and have a conversation with him.” At that point, to even get into the program that I got into, which was Georgetown Communication, Culture, and Technology, I didn’t have the grades. What I did have was I was a music pirater. We had 200,000 people hit our website a month for pirating music, but we got shut down by the FBI.

That was the Napster time when all that stuff was going on.

Exactly. I was able to show that I knew what I was doing by generating audiences and creating web traffic and demand. I used those insights for the admissions. I had a meeting with them. I was like, “I don’t have the grades. I’m obsessed with social media.”

I’m going to stop you right there. Let’s unpack this for a second. You come out of school. You’re a psychology person. You got a psychology degree. You’re front end with AOL. When it was dialing, you could hear it. We would all wait three minutes. Our hearts would be pounding so we could message somebody. We had this whole friend list.

You were fascinated by people’s reactions when they were using that technology. That’s what I heard you say. That was your thing. You’re freelancing and then giving free advice to people or maybe getting paid to give the advice but probably out there selling yourself a little bit. Is that fair?

Building A Better Brand: The only reason we’re winning is because of our technology services.

100%. It didn’t matter what the job was. If it was around social media, I wanted to be doing it and working on it.

Did people even call it social media at that point? Was it even a thing? I remember Mike Ondrejko is the one that showed me YouTube. I remember I’m bringing the Cavs off. He goes, “This is YouTube.” I’m like, “What’s this?” He was showing me a coach rant and rave with somebody. I can remember the day I signed up for Twitter. I was like, “This is stupid, but I’ll sign up because everybody’s doing it.” Is that time?

Yeah. People were posting pictures of their lunch at the time. What I was looking at this is the next form of the telephone. Instead of one-to-one, it’s one-to-many. I knew that this could be a platform that can be taken to different degrees. The first thing was when I was working all these freelancing gigs, no one took me seriously. I was like, “I need something that makes me look official.”

You need some credibility. I love it. This is the same time when you were pirating music, too, so you had a side hustle going on also. I love it.

You nailed it. I went to Georgetown. I was like, “I know how to do this illegally. I want to do this the right way. I want Georgetown on the side of my rocket ship. No matter where I go, you guys will have that branded exposure if you believe in me.” They said, “You have to get a B-plus or higher.” I got straight A’s the entire time I was there. Every single report, they would roll their eyes and be like, “Let me guess. It’s on social media,” and it was.

In the second year of that, I started getting excited about the different entrepreneurship programs that they have in startup things. That’s when I was connecting with some friends. I was at a bar giving social media advice. Someone within that group knew Ali and connected Ali and me to work together. Ali had this project with the state department that was looking at speeches before, during, and after. Eventually, we got into social walls. For President Obama, we created a tweet wall for him.

Are you still in college at this point?

Yeah. I’m still in grad school. I would go straight from class to MestroStart to work on these different projects. At the time, there was a product there that they had built for the state department that was called MySTANLEY. That’s when I was like, “What could be done with this?” At that time, I was thinking of social listening, but it was like, “I could control this as one of our main users of what’s needed for social.” We started building on that and serving. Quickly, we moved out of federal work and into private work working with Monumental, Orioles, and the Giants. We had a bunch of sports businesses.

I always say I’m a foreigner in sports. I’ve never worked for a team. I have an accent. I don’t know what it’s like to do ticket sales and that grind, dedication, and persistence that you need on it, but I have other ways that I’ve gotten kicked in the ass to learn how to get smart about how I position and frame things. We grew in that. We knew it. Eventually, we kept listening to our customers. We never fully took off. We kept trying to do new things. As we started listening and condensing what we were doing on focusing on key specific things, that unlocked a lot of value for us.

Let’s go timeframe-wise, too. I want the audience to put a couple of things in perspective. You get out. You get your undergrad. You’re doing a side hustle 2 years or 1 year before you go to grad school. You’re doing your mirror slash Napster deal. How long is that time period?

It was about 2 to 3 years when I was working at inpatient and outpatient behavioral clinics. I was working with people with schizophrenia.

I forgot about that. You got a whole human side to you, too. You got to love that work to do it. You got to love people at some level to do that kind of work when you’re working with people that have challenges mentally and with all kinds of things that they’re suffering from.

It’s an audience that necessarily doesn’t want to be helped at times, too. You’ve got to overprepare yourself to embrace any type of thing that might come your way. For that, I loved the ability to be able to connect with somebody where we are even psychologically not as present in the same reality that we’re both in but still find a way to connect with one another.

You have to over-prepare yourself to embrace anything that might come your way.

There’s that connection then with the AOL stuff because you got that connection with people. You like to read them. You like to understand that.

I look at how we connect digitally. The pandemic forced the rest of the world to have this connection. I have friendships with people I’ve never met in real life before. That started back in those AIM days. As a younger shy, introverted dude connecting with friends or talking to significant others, it was easier for me to convey behind a keyboard than in person until I built that confidence where I could do that.

It’s not the same as being in person, but I looked at that connection and the ability to do it. If one is one-to-one, then one is one-to-many. I’m looking at social as this ability to connect with audiences at scale in different ways. That fascinates me. It fascinates me that if you say something that everyone agrees with, you’ll get more likes on social than you’ll get replies. If you say something that you know people will disagree with, you’ll get more replies and fewer likes, engagements, or retweets.

The game of putting a signal out and having someone receive that signal and understand the message, and then how you can tweak the signal to get a different reaction from the receiver fascinates the heck out of me. Whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many, that’s where I nerd out. That’s where I get connected to where I am. That’s the foundation of it.

It sounds like this journey of persuasion and influence with an audience, group, or individual. You figured out, through grad school, “How do I get some credibility and become an expert in this?” From there, you start getting involved in an organization that’s trying to define itself at some level. You talk about what you’re doing with the MySTANLEY thing at some point and then how it started to evolve. What period of time did the product or the technology start to evolve from what you were doing with the state department to where it is? What’s the timeframe there?

The idea originated in 2011-ish. I graduated in 2012. No offense to Georgetown, but I learned more from the experience of MySTANLEY and Zoomph than I did at school. It was addicted to constantly building it and listening. We serve many verticals and many businesses. We went after an MRR in a B2C play where other organizations can use these social tools as social power tools, whether it’s putting stuff on your website like a widget that you’re monitoring in the post or on the jumbotron, what tweets or Instagrams you want to visualize.

2016 is when we split off from MetroStar. Those first early years was very great. We saw how tough it was to work with businesses at a small size. We quickly learned that we have to work with enterprise-based organizations that have the resources and ability to take this data and insights and drive it. We got into people, audience, and first-party data, which is exciting, but then, Cambridge Analytica happened. We were doing the same basic psychographics and understanding these audiences based on the social behavior that people are exhibiting.

If you follow a bunch of breweries, if you talk about an IPA or Saison, and there is a different beer-tasting app store out there, we look at that social behavior and aggregate. We collect these audiences based on their affinities. I already know what brands you’re into based on what you talk about, what you share, and what’s in your bio. My bio says rookie dad of three and lucky husband. As you see dad, you know that I’m a parent. As you see husband, you know I’m married, it’s not as simplistic as that, but we use that self-defined data. We structure people based on their social audience behavior and group it based on that.

That was in 2017 and 2018 that we were like, “This is not taking off the way that we had hoped.” It was 2018 when the Cowboys and MSG were both separate pilots that wanted to work with us on our data in different ways than our other customers did. That was our a-ha moment of like, “This is a no-brainer. We accidentally built a product for a platform for partnerships.”

For example, our platform is an open search engine. If you’re starting a sports partnership, that would be a stupid idea to do because it takes a lot of effort and money to build an open search engine. Since we brought that into the space, it allowed us to disrupt. For example, with WWE, they brought in Logan Paul. Our data helps tell that story. Was Logan Paul the right person to bring in? Does he have a de-duplicated audience? What kind of lookalike audience can you extend to? All of those data points are from past products and features that never took off. We rearranged in an interesting way to solve the challenges that partnerships have that allow all those failures to be a success in the aggregated way that we’ve collated it together, if that makes sense.

Building A Better Brand: It takes a lot of effort and money to build an open search engine, but because we brought that into the space, it allowed us to disrupt.

It does. What I want everybody to hear is through this journey from 2012 to 2018 to where you’re in ‘23, it sounds like you’ve had to define the product and define what the audience is. I want them to see that as a business leader, you’re constantly trying to sell the business and sell yourself and the credibility of it. You’re going through these iterations, and that’s difficult. That’s very hard. That entrepreneurial journey is as hard as any sales journey.

In some cases, they duplicate themselves, too, because there’s this constant fight of fighting the market and who the customer can be, defining the product and what it is and what it isn’t, selling the people who are going to invest in you, and then trying to win customers. It is four lanes at all times. They crisscross a little bit, but it is difficult. I want them to see that. Through that journey there to where you are, did your role change? It sounds like you were very much at the front lines of trying to win business at some level.

100%. My role originally was as a community manager. I kept taking responsibilities and they were kept handed to me because I had a high level of standards that I wanted to deliver, too. This is the way it is at Zoomph. I don’t know if it’s all other organizations. When you want something to get done, people will get out of your way to allow you to get that done if you put the right enough inertia into it.

When you really want something to get done, people will get out of your way to allow you to get it done if you put enough inertia into it.

My role originally was on the marketing side and helping us grow. I was our business development person for some time, too. I was our customer success person for some time. I came into it thinking I had to be a certain thing. I quickly learned that if you’re not authentic to yourself, then it’s a no-brainer you are going to suck. I never went to a business school in this aspect, but I read tons of books that are out there. I was constantly optimizing what I’m doing from different perspectives of, “How do I present this to the different audiences?”

My role is contact switching from 10,000 up to 30,000, up to 50,000, down to 10,000, whether it’s in the product, investor, or on a sales call of like, “I have to switch my context all the time.” That ADHD nature of mine of being able to move and get excited about these different things, it’s a superpower in this opportunity because I don’t get overwhelmed. For a lot of people coming into entrepreneurship, it’s very overwhelming the number of things that are on fire at any given time. You have to have that ability to persevere through and know and prioritize what things need to be done at what time and at what point.

It might seem juvenile, but I look at it all as a video game. When you get to the next level, the bosses get tougher. You’ve got better weapons to go up against. You’ve got a better team. I’m always looking to get to that next level. I have to define in my head what the next level is to organize our group or organize myself. You said it right. There are a lot of different audiences that you’re delivering messages to. I’m constantly translating between those different audiences of what we do, who we are, and what we’re not. You nailed it. What you say no to should make you more proud than what you say yes to.

There’s no doubt. You’re the cofounder. You have been in the trenches with other people. They might have a similar story or a little bit different perspective. What you say no to defines you because that’s not who you want to be. That won’t be great for the long-term growth of the business. The marketplace is fickle. The marketplace has an uncanny way of getting rid of things that don’t work. You’re found out pretty quickly.

You have all kinds of organizations that might not do exactly what you do but might potentially demonstrate that they do similar things. Sometimes, people can’t decipher that. Your opening of describing what Zoomph is and I kept feeding it back to you and you kept going, “Here’s what it is,” the marketplace tries to look at that even more simplistically. People choose to want to work for you. It’s then keeping clients. It’s all those things.

What I want everybody to understand is I don’t think Zoomph got to the spot very easily.

What they don’t see is all the customers lost, the customers that won, the investors that won, and the investors lost. The, “We’re going to decide to go here. It’s not fast enough. It’s not slow enough,” they don’t see all that. On top of that, which is important, you guys have had to build an organization around this. You’ve had to build a company, which in and of itself is trying to pour floaters on in Ocean City, Maryland on the sand sometimes. It moves.

Focus on yourself for a second. With your role inside the organization, you flipped the org chart upside down and said, “This is my role. What’s going on here?” You almost went more servant leader with your approach. What are the next hurdles for you personally? Then, talk about the next hurdles for Zoomph or direction.

It’s so clear the way that you distill the conversation into those actionable points. It takes one to know one. You’ve built these businesses. You understand how difficult it is. It’s weird, but one of the best feelings winning back a client that left you. It’s being able to see like, “We built something so good that someone might have told you something better but you went on the market and realized.” We lean into those obstacles. We ask every customer like, “Go tough on us. Point out what’s wrong. Bonus points if you stump us on a question.” We want them to walk out of it thinking, “This group knows what the heck they’re doing.” What we want out of it is we want you to be comfortable enough so we’re learning where we have to go and deliver, too.

We got humbled in the beginning. Jeff Gordon once quoted and retweeted us and said, “Numbers like these are going to ruin this industry.” At that moment, it’s like, “We’re done.” You’re so passionate and involved in it, but you have to have this emotionless ability to take these things and learn how to optimize them. I also play this external figure on behalf of our organization. What I’m realizing is every organization needs a personality that’s external to the brand itself to drive it where it needs to be. It is that human approach, much like you and your business. For me to be a bigger aspect of that, I need somebody internally to help me with the organizational infrastructure.

Every organization needs a personality that’s external to the brand itself to really drive it where it needs to be.

We have a team of 28. We go up against people of these giant companies that have a team of 72 developers. The reason we’re able to do that is we find the best people that have a chip on their shoulder and tell them, “You’re a gazelle in a grassy field. Go run. This is what you were put on this earth to do.” We allow them to be as good as what they do in what they do.

I would argue there, too, though. It’s small, agile, boutique-y, or however you put it. If that’s who you are, I would argue you guys probably have to have a superior process. People make decisions based on time, cost, and quality. You guys probably can do things at speed, which means you have to have a decent culture. There’s a whole other side to that that that the execs on the team realize, “That’s hard to do.”

If you don’t have the firepower, it’s a little bit like Ukraine’s fight with Russia. I don’t mean to stick my foot in politics. You would think Russia at this point would be crushing Ukraine based on history size and things like that. Being agile, there’s something to it. Having a superior process, there’s something to it. With that being said, you have to hire people and they have to have some freedom. Well done on that end.

Thank you. You nailed it. We’ve got the greatest team in the industry that’s off the field, Thomas Matthew, the Avengers have the Hulk, we have him, he’s our product chief product officer. Nick, our cofounder, is our Jony Ive. We’ve got Lindsey Pacatte who’s our financial person that we call our Joe Pesci. She comes from the Dallas Stars. If I’m a foreigner and I have an accent, we brought a lot of people that are native from the industry itself within our organization so we can connect better with that. We’re constantly reassessing our pipeline. We’re constantly reassessing our product roadmap.

What we’ve gotten great at is trusting one another, but also that ability to adapt. That’s what you nailed. We try to move like a jet ski, not like a crew cruise ship. We’re growing at such an alarming rate. We want to keep retaining that speed of delivery and the speed of innovating on behalf of the customer. We do have a lot of processes that we do around it. A lot of that I credit to Ali by us spinning out. I’m an intrapreneur, not an entrepreneur. Ali has been there from the beginning giving us this ability from the company that we spun out of to think like a much bigger company.

We are doing a series A. When we’re doing this in front of all these investors, they’re like, “You guys are so mature beyond your age. This is insane.” We had that guidance. One of the key things is having these mentors. It is having these people that are investing in you that know what they’re doing and who have had that experience that can be tough on you. Since we had that infrastructure, we should be delivering the way that we do, growing in the way that we do, and having a team that is moving as one. We tell interns if they correct us, that’s awesome. We’re going to high-five them and hug them. We want the idea to be the hierarchy. The top thing in this company is the ideas. We try to be nimble.

One of the key things is having mentors—these people who are investing in you, who know what they’re doing, and who have had that experience that can be tough on you.

There are challenges that we’re looking at. One is growing the team and retaining that culture. Two, what we are looking at in the company is the diversity of media content as it’s growing to other platforms. We’re on social and broadcast and doing some work on OTT with specific providers. We want to expand that view with audio as well. We’re looking for branded exposure.

We look at attention as currency, content as commerce, and audience as assets. How we connect that and understand what that branded value is is helping these organizations take content to the next level. Organic content is the place where product placement, we feel, is ripe for innovation. We’re seeing brands gravitate towards it.

You look at Apple and everything from different shows on Netflix. They have a YouTube premium subscription that removes ads. Twitter, I bet you with Elon and his crazy behavior, they’re going to move away from ads in some way with Twitter Blue as well. Organic content is going to be branded content in there. We got to move quickly to adapt to the new media sources. We hope we’re five minutes ahead and we’re moving and planning in that action. We’re always assessing what that next medium is of how we understand where that value comes from.

Getting to know you on this interview, you know who you are. The other thing is I heard somebody say one time that you better be fired with enthusiasm or you’ll be fired with enthusiasm. You’re enthusiastic about what you do. There’s something else with enthusiasm that people forget. The word enthus comes from the gift of the gods. In Latin, it means God from within. The last four letters of enthusiasm are I Am Sold Myself. Without a shadow of a doubt, you are sold on the mission and vision of where Zoomph is going, which is extremely exciting. As we bring this bird down for landing, I still have a couple of quick questions to get people to know you. If you had to gift a book that you read that had an impact on your life, what book would it be if you had to gift any book?

There are a couple of books. Selling is an Away Game and The Human Sales Factor, I know a good guy that’s written those two books there.

I appreciate the plug.

I’m sure your audience already read it. There are a couple of books. I usually do audiobooks with the boys. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink was something that opened up my eyes that it doesn’t matter if it’s not my responsibility or not. I need to take that responsibility and make it mine and create the vision that I need to see. That opened up my eyes that your ability to make an impact is bigger than what your lane is. It is eliminating that.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

There is also Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference. There is Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand, which sounds like a boring book, but he does a good job of breaking things down. The last book I read is Blue Ocean Strategy. It is about constantly rethinking how to deliver value and innovate on behalf of the customer outside of the product itself and how you deliver and build the product.

You are thinking with the two end caps. With Extreme Ownership, I would say you have extreme ownership. Blue Ocean Strategy is interesting because you’re looking at the business you’re in as a blue ocean. The analogy goes that the red ocean is shallow water, bloody, less fish, and lots of fishermen while the blue ocean is deeper water, more oxygen, and more fish. You are looking at Zoomph as a blue ocean strategy, not a red ocean strategy. There’s still the last question. You said you have kids. They’re all under five, the boys?

Yeah. The oldest is turning five, Hudson. The second one is turning three, Rocky, and then Maverick will be turning one.

There you go. Those are good branded names. At this point, you have three sons under five. Let’s say you have a niece or a nephew right around ten. It is right at that point where they start to understand life, let’s say 10 to 12. They said, “Uncle Amir, what does success mean to a 10 or 12-year-old?” Think about your audience because we’ll be there the whole time. How would you describe success to them?

It is doing what you love to do and being celebrated for it by your friends.

I like the celebration. I hear the doing what you love to do all the time, the celebration is important. Keeping score is important. I love it. This has been a wonderful interview. I’m looking forward to our partnership and getting this post out there. This is great. Thank you for the insight.

The pleasure is mine. Thanks for having me. No worries at all.

Important Links

Zoomph Selling is an Away Game The Human Sales Factor Extreme Ownership Never Split the Difference Building a StoryBrand Blue Ocean Strategy

About Amir Zonozi

Amir Zonozi is the co-founder and President of Zoomph, providing partnership insights across sports and entertainment for organizations like Golden State Warriors, Angel City FC, Invisalign & WWE. Amir is also a member of Ally’s Women’s Sports Club with Sports Innovation Lab and sits on the board for Women in Sports Tech. Outside work, Amir is an expert at crashing drones, recovering sneakerhead, and a proud father of 3 boys under 5.

Sales Leadership And Bringing Value To The Table With Mike Ondrejko

Tyson Group
June 6, 2023
5 min read

Being a great salesperson doesn’t always equate to being a great manager or a great leader. You need to have grit, you need to be selfless, and you need to bring value to everything you do. Your host, Lance Tyson, teams up with Mike Ondrejko, the President of Legends Global Sales. The two have a spirited discussion about what it takes to be successful in sales, the importance of authenticity, and making the transition from an individual contributor to a leadership role. Stay sharp! This episode is packed with information.

Listen to the podcast here.

I’m here with Mike Ondrejko, a dear friend of mine. We’ve been on a long journey in multiple different properties. He’s here to share his story. Michael, give me your title. Tell us who you are.

I’m the President of Legends Global Sales.

Tell everybody about Legends and a little bit about your leadership journey.

We can go in a lot of different directions. We’ll start with Legends. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of the growth of Legends for the last several years. First and foremost, we’ve been partnering with some iconic brands that are taking out world-class projects. We think about the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. We partnered with Notre Dame with their stadium renovation and Manchester City back to the day.

We’ve earned the responsibility and the trust to be stewards of some of the most iconic brands across the world of sport. To help them elevate what they are going to do in terms of generating revenue and making sure that any projects and partnerships they take on, they’re going to be delivered at the highest level. We’ve had that responsibility for several years.

It has grown into a number of different verticals and I would say somewhat organically, we have a team that’s incredibly talented. Part of what they do is they identify new opportunities as they’re on the ground with each one of these partnerships. They will say, “This is what we’re hearing.” It’s probably sprouted off a number of different verticals for us.

Particularly in times like this, we’re super fortunate enough to have significant revenue streams coming in across several different areas of the business and not just relying on one thing from a revenue standpoint. The journey of Legends has been an absolute blast from an overall career standpoint. I still feel challenged and learning every single day. We have the opportunity to go and work on fifteen of these projects that are happening across the globe. It’s an absolute privilege to have the opportunity to do it.

I’ve talked about this where when you advance up into senior leadership, you either come from high finance or you come from sales because you bring something to the table. Backward from Legends, tell everybody where you were from there because the journey is long. Tell people about the journey and how you got to Legends.

I’m sure we’ll break this up into a couple of different parts, but from a starting standpoint for my career, I started working for the Detroit Pistons. The Bad Boys were my favorite team of all time growing up. As a hoop junkie, I might’ve had taken a little style off from Rick Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer. I like the physical style.

Find a team that has the right infrastructure but is awful from a performance standpoint. That’s when you learn.

Were you there when they were there?

No, I wasn’t. The Bad Boys were the early ’90s. Never in my wildest dream as some little kid growing up and been to New York and having Isiah Thomas posters hanging on my wall am I thinking I’m going to go work for this particular NBA organization coming out of college. Coincidentally, through connections of my college basketball coach. I happened to know, he was an assistant at Cleveland State University with a guy named Hal Estis, who is the father of Chad Estis, who at the time was working with the Pistons.

I did not know that connection at all. I’m blown away.

I started working for Chad with the Pistons. I feel extremely fortunate. At the time, I would say Palace Sports & Entertainment was the most forward-thinking, sales-driven organization in all professional sports. What they did and the constant reinvention of The Palace of Auburn Hills, which is now deceased. They tore it down in 2020. Every year, there was a new invention in that building and they were trying something new. They were buying amphitheaters.

As a salesperson there, ‘98 also happened to be the lockout year in the NBA. I’m making $10,000 a year. I have no health benefits, starting in June, leading into an NBA season that didn’t exist. You’re talking about some challenges and adversity. I walked in a confident person. I was like, “I’m going to figure out how to have success in life.” I had no idea about sales, no formal training.

Did you do anything before that? Any kind of sales at all?

No, I get to Detroit. I’ll never forget this. I’m probably three months in now, June, July, the middle of August. It’s about 105 degrees out. This is an absolutely true story. I couldn’t even make this up. I had made zero sales. I’m last on the board. I’m a little nervous. I’m like, “This is fricking hard.” There wasn’t a ton of success being had, but I was zero.

I go and set up this appointment. I go out with a guy named JT Ryan, who was a great salesperson. I asked JT to join me because I wanted to see him in action. I want a little bit of help. I want to learn and pick up some ideas. JT and I are driving to this appointment. We get there. They were already a suite holder. It was the ultimate deflating. I was beyond embarrassed.

You had no clue they were a suite holder at all. You just blew it through there.

There wasn’t a database, a CRM and all that level of sophistication. You were spraying and praying. JT and I were driving back. I already had my head between my tails. I was driving an ’88 Bonneville. We’re going across Telegraph Road and is probably like six lanes, both ways, 105 degrees in our suit. My transmission goes on my car. I had JT in the back of my car pushing my Bonneville across Telegraph Road. We pull into this gas station.

There are payphones at the time. I get on the payphone. I called my dad. I was like, “I’m pretty sure I’m going to get fired here.” I told him the story. This is how I made my first sell though. I called every transmission place in Detroit. As you can imagine, the auto capital of the world, it’s the longest line on the phone, but I called every single transmission place until I found one and I said, “If I bring my car into you, you will buy season tickets for the Pistons.” I finally found a transmission place that would do it. That’s legitimately how I made my first sale in the industry.

I’m coming in and I’m going to give you my transmission business, but I need you to buy tickets.

Yes. What I realized through that process is I was grinding. Todd Lambert was my day-to-day manager.

Todd is still in Detroit right now with the Lions.

Sales Leadership: Have that same level of conversation that you can have with a CEO as you can have with a fan. It’s the same type of dynamic.

I’m like, “I’m going to listen to everything that they are teaching me and I’m going to do it by the script.” If I’m going to fail, if I’m not going to be successful at this, I know I’m going to put everything into it, do it by the book and I can rest easy doing that. I’m like, “If that’s not for me, I’ll go.” I didn’t realize it. I was building up a significant pipeline. I got better. I have more confidence. There was a little momentum of the season’s going to come back.

I had this super robust pipeline built up because I was hustling still. Other people were like, “It’s a lockout. It’s hard.” In my head, it’s a little bit early success. I’m glad that I didn’t because I kept grinding. Once the season came back, I went from last to first on the board. I didn’t know it, but I was ready. I had done the homework and my research. I had some understanding.

It wasn’t a skill thing. It was a hustle thing.

That first job in sports, you don’t have to be smart. You got to be willing to hustle.

A salesperson, what were you bad at? You climbed the hill. What were you bad at and good at? If you had to pick a competency, what would it be?

I go back to I was a Piston fan and I don’t recommend necessarily working for teams that you’re a fan of. I got to talk to fans. I could talk the history. It’s important to be authentic and know the organization inside and out. That was completely comfortable to me from the get-go. This was, again, my own preconceived notion was I can have that same level of conversation with a CEO as I can have with the fan.

At the end of the day, it’s the same type of dynamic. Once I got more comfortable and realized that I could have the same level of comfort going into those meetings, that’s where I became better from a B2C salesperson to be able to understand at least how to have a conversation at that level early on in my career from a corporate standpoint.

I’ve been in a lot of business conversations with you. You and I have negotiated our deals together. If anybody’s reading, I’m not much of a smoke blower. Take it as you will. I never sense you change who you are. If I’m having a beer with you, right before this COVID-19 when we were still skeptical about what it was or what it wasn’t, I don’t feel that conversation changes. I don’t feel you’re any different here. Expand on that a little bit, because you know who you are. You talk about authenticity.

That’s an important thing of every salesperson is different. You’ve got to find your own voice and what you’re comfortable with and a style that fits you. I’ve referenced this all the time within our group internally. Eric Sudol has led the Cowboys sponsorship group into unbelievable heights. There’s first in the NFL and then there’s second. He’s pioneered that. He is the best salesperson that I have ever been around. He’ll say things and he earned the right to say them, but he’ll say the same things where I wouldn’t say it that way or frame it that way. That’s his skillset. That’s his talent.

During a financial meltdown, when it’s hard to have any success, all you can do is prepare to come out of it and be as strong as possible.

If I tried to do what Eric was doing, it wouldn’t feel the right way. I used the example of JT Ryan taking the car. JT was a very different seller than I was, but I wanted to learn from all these people and see how they operated so I could develop who I was going to be. The comfort in your own skin as a salesperson, that’s an important aspect of it too. You’ve got to be able to stop thinking about like, “What am I going to say next? How is this going to happen?” To be able to listen, get the inner voices quiet and listen to who’s on the other side of the table from you. Once you get to that point, then you can have a real conversation.

A lot of times, I’m like everybody has a signature, but everybody has a different signature. We talked about Eric Sudol many times. He’s probably 1 or 2 on my list. There are a lot of things where I see younger salespeople and even people’s coaches like, “You don’t want to be a second-class Eric Sudol,” because sometimes you don’t even know where that radar comes from or why he’s going to say it. Get into a sequence, get into how hard he works too, because there is nobody who outworks Eric Sudol. It’s one of the reasons.

I would say, “Some of you won’t be willing to work that hard either.” You got to find your gear. It’s important and sales leaders who get script boring and things like that, you may be trying to one size fits most and doesn’t work. You’ve got to find out what that strength is. As I said, I never sense that your demeanor changes whether we’re having a drink or whether you’re talking to your team or whether you’re talking to a customer. You’re never acting. You’re being you. You’re in the moment. Everybody reading has to understand that. It’s a hard journey to find. You need to find that. That’s a journey.

It is not a light switch. There’s a lot of trial and error. There’s a lot of mistakes. Being willing to make mistakes too, you’ve got to go through that life cycle. At first, you’re going to be afraid to make mistakes. When you have the right managers and you have the right leadership, you can look over the edge and you can try some things and you can fail knowing that they’re there to help pick you up, clean you off and point you in the right direction again. That’s an important thing to have from a greater standpoint. I’ve had several people play that role for me, which I’m forever grateful for.

Your journey from there, you go to the Cavs or you’re going to Tampa?

The Pistons bought the Tampa Bay Lightning. Living in Detroit in the late ’90s wasn’t great. The moment they bought the franchise, Chris Hibbs, who is part of our licensed family as well. Chris and I were roommates, cubes next to each other. We walked into Chad’s office. We’re like, “We’re moving to Tampa.” The week before we got to Lightning, they were on the cover of Sports Illustrated for the worst team of all professional sports. We’re selling bad hockey to a bunch of Floridians.

Were you still in sales there?

Yes.

When did management start to hit, and after how long? I don’t think sales necessarily prepare you to be a good leader or a good manager. Sometimes it’s horrible because you got to go from being focused on customers to focus on salespeople. It’s not you getting the recognition as you’re giving the recognition. When did you make the change or switch?

I was in Tampa for probably about two years. You and I met in Cleveland. This is the early 2000s. When I got to Cleveland, I was last in attendance, last in revenue in the NBA and you see a common theme there. In every one of those situations, there was good ownership and there was great day-to-day leadership that I was able to be around. If I’m giving advice to my son, I would say, “Don’t go work for a good team.” That’s easy. Anybody can sell in that environment. “Go find a team that has the right infrastructure and is awful from a performance standpoint. That’s when you learn. That’s when you go and involve.”

I was on the phone with an exec from the Ravens and my son sitting here, all this COVID-19 and he said, “Dad, can I listen to some of these calls?” I was like, “Get in.” You’ve talked to my sons before. Kevin said, “You might want to go to Minor League sports and figure it out. Go get your ass kicked a little bit.” Anybody can sell a Stanley Cup winner and NBA championship.

Sales Leadership: If you pick up the phone and set a meeting, you’re going to have a conversation while bringing value to the table. Engage in a different way instead of just asking, “Where’s my contract?”

It’s easy to sell in those environments. Even if you’re outside of pro sports and a name brand, sometimes you’ve got to make some room for yourself. On the earlier day with a tech firm and they don’t have a great name in Europe and it’s different than it is in the US. You got to change your tactics a little bit. You got to be more engaged.

You know I like to read. Angela Duckworth wrote a book called Grit. She was a super smart, super talented person and Harvard-educated. She was like, “There’s something missing from all these successful people that should be on this path, but don’t ever make it.” Her ingredient was grit. That’s what I learned through those first couple of jobs and that will stick with me forever.

She talks about the book. She talks too about prodigies and what you don’t realize about a prodigy, somebody who’s a math prodigy or a pianist. You don’t see all the amount of time and that grit that they put into that, the hours to develop that. You just see this eight-year-old prodigy, but you don’t see all the other stuff. You don’t see their grit. You were an Inside Sales Manager at Cleveland. Your team performed well, and you started developing people. What’s the next piece of your journey?

I was in Cleveland for seven years. It was a great long run. I almost look at Atlanta as three jobs. The first job with the worst team in the NBA, the second job was when in ’03 LeBron was drafted, and our business dynamic changed. The third job was in ‘05, when the ownership changed. Dan Gilbert came in to buy the franchise. I was fortunate enough to have three different jobs and I didn’t have to move around, which that doesn’t happen all the time within the industry.

We were given different opportunities within each of those regimes and the last one with Dan, he was like, “I’ll invest. I’ll go build things in the building. Tell me what’s going to go to make more money.” Through that process, we went from dead last in the League in revenue, when we got LeBron, we got to about the middle of tier and as Dan invested more capital to the building, we got the fourth in the NBA from a revenue standpoint. It was this great journey. At that time, I went to work for Madison Square Garden.

You got to VP Ticket Sales and Service at Cleveland. You got the opportunity and you’re affiliated with a good leader like Chad Estis, who in turn moves down to Dallas, which opens up some opportunities for you. Scott O’Neil, who’s another icon executive, decides to give you a look, recruit you and get you to Madison Square Garden. I’m thinking about that time that the bottom falls out, that’s right around the financial crises.

Being a great salesperson doesn’t always equate to being a great manager and a great leader.

I started my career with a lockout, make the move to New York, and we’re going to sell the highest price sponsorship suites that’s ever been introduced to the industry in the midst of a meltdown of the entire financial industry. You go through and you figure out how to have success in times like that. We’re clear. For a 4 or 5 months stretch, we didn’t have any success. What we did was prepare. We’re prepared to come out of it and be as strong as possible.

I want you to talk about that for a second. Give everybody context. Madison Square Garden decides to upgrade the arena and they make a lot of investment and products, high-end suites, clubs and things like that. Your task is to run a sales team to sell things that have never been priced at that before we hit the financial crisis. The big target lists are Wall Streets and banks. Banks all of a sudden become nontargets because Sarbanes-Oxley and all that stuff there, they’re not spending money. They’re collapsing. You’re forced to do what a salesperson or your sales team that you’re managing. What did you have to find there?

The banks all federal requirements at that time had to take TARP funds from the government to make sure that they were healthy, so there wasn’t a complete collapse of the financial industry. Our job is to turn over every single stone and possibility in the marketplace. One of the amazing things about Madison Square Garden and still to this day my favorite venue to watch a game or a musical act. It’s the low roof. It’s a special place. The number of events that they have there, in many circumstances a benefit, but you can’t be a small company and think about the utilization of 250 events a year.

We found success in other different little pockets, but in terms of the big-ticket items, while TARP funds were out there. It was hard. We started to have conversations in different ways. One of the things we invented was like, “Understanding whoever it was.” Chase couldn’t sign these agreements. Let’s talk about once you’re on the other side, exactly what your intentions are and what you want to do. We walked through the entire sales process. We even, in some circumstances, had some letters signed, but again, an important point was the team that we had hired had the right DNA and they were the ones that going out and did all the groundwork from a day-to-day standpoint.

It was Lisa Banbury, Matt Goodman, Sean Downs, Michael Parker, people that are still making a tremendous impact in the industry. I’ve been fortunate enough to recruit great talent. We kept working, you came in, training development and we were in preparation mode of, “We’re going to go win a championship.” The day the TARP funds got paid back, we signed probably about $50 million in agreements that day the TARP funds came back from having everything lined up the right way.

You almost in sales had to be the master verbal and a handshake. “This is what we’re agreeing to. Let’s take this off the table. ” When the time’s right, we’re going to get it done.

How’s that done, Lance? There’s trust and relationship. I’ll give that team I mentioned a lot of credit. They went in and they asked all the right questions. They understood at a granular level what these organizations were going through and how the buying decisions got to change. In the old day, one person CEO could say, “We’re going to have to buy it.” With all the TARP funds and regulations and all those things, there were 47 heads that you had to get bobbing in the same direction in order to get approval. It takes time to understand how that path is going to work. We did all that recon work, so when we were in a position to win, we’re winning.

For anybody reading and this is important, number one, you have to be credible. You have to have rapport. You got to line up your pieces. You’ve got to know where all those decisions are going to be made. You’ve got to continually follow up and stay engaged with them and then close. What people have to realize now, the landscape’s going to change. Companies that are going to purge, merge and submerge. You’re going to have to understand multiple buyers, going to spend like that. It’s going to be harder to sell. It’s like hunting in winter. You’re not hunting in late spring. You’re hunting in the winter.

I’ll give you a good example. This is probably fast-forwarding a little bit to Legends, but it’s timely to what you said. We’ve got a couple of new partnerships that we’re chasing down. I was talking to our team that leads that from a day-to-day standpoint. I was like, “Were you calling them right now and asking, where’s the contract?” They’ve got a million other things that they’re worried about like if it’s a college of getting their student-athletes home and being safe. They’re not worried about our contract, to be clear.

If we pick up the phone and set up a meeting and we’re having a conversation about something that we’re bringing value to the table with, we’re engaging in a different way. If we said, “We went across the industry and looked at these ten different things that are happening within the development space. Here’s what our thoughts are and how they might apply to you.” Yes, that takes time and a lot of work. We’re probably going to have to do that anyway, but we’re now having an engaging conversation versus, “Where’s my contract?” It’s a completely different dynamic and relationship. That’s how you go out and do it. Bring value.

Sales Leadership: It’s not a good sign if a salesperson is acting selfishly and not thinking about how they work within the entire group dynamic.

What defines a win now is much different than yesterday. You may have to realize as the salesperson, what took you five steps, might take you twelve. You can’t be tone-deaf. It goes to that jagged edge. Every scenario is going to be different. Some scenarios are going to be good. I’m on a board for a construction equipment company. They’re a lagger. They’re doing great because it’s essential business. A few months from now, they might not. You just don’t know.

Let’s change course for a second. You’ve managed hundreds of salespeople over the years. What’s one thing about a salesperson that will piss you off or grind against your values? That’s where the value starts. When something irks you, that means somebody crossed a line. Think about that for a second. What grinds you that you had to coach over time?

This one’s easy for me. You’ve seen it consistently over the years. Maybe some tough decisions in terms of moving on from the leader on the revenue board. We’re big into being a good teammate, helping other people out. You said, “Being a great salesperson, doesn’t always equate to being a great manager and a great leader.”

Part of the reason why at Legends and all the staff before that, that we’ve had much success in growing people from a career standpoint. You can point a million different directions in terms of the individual that they’re responsible for their success. What we do is try to provide a culture and an environment that helps foster that growth as quickly as possible.

If a salesperson is acting selfishly and not thinking about how they work within the dynamic of that entire group, it drives me crazy when someone puts their individual talent above or in replacement of what is best for the team. It’s not an overnight decision. We try to coach on that, but at some point, they don’t get it. That’s okay. They’ve all gone on to have success in their revenue generators. They’ll always have great jobs and make money. It just doesn’t necessarily work for us.

It has to be a fit for you. I get it. That act of selfishness, the challenge as a leader is to describe and show what that means because that word means many different things. Give me an example of an act of selfishness like a person’s doing what? I want people to see this because, culture-wise, you don’t want your culture to be a cult. There’s a difference there. You got to define this stuff. You have to communicate it well.

I’ll go back to like boiler room ticketing type of stuff. You have people that are struggling. Maybe they hadn’t made sales in three months and they had to get the transmission to break down to make the sale happen. You have people that are having a lot of success. They hang up the phone and how they go up to the sales board and ring the bell. All those little things in terms of how you do it and when you’re at the top of the board, all eyes are on you in terms of how you act.

Everyone else is going to follow that. You’ve got to even realize even more when you are already a successful salesperson from a number’s perspective, your actions dictate so much more what happens within the room. We talk, coach and train on that. As a hoop junkie, I look at culture and team.

When you’re a successful salesperson from a numbers perspective, your actions dictate so much more what happens within the room.

I want you to watch how his body language has changed. All of a sudden, he starts talking about values, he’s up, he’s crouched. I want to tell you, this means something to people. You got to know what your values are.

There are reasons why environments and people become successful. I always use the reference of Jr Rider. He was as talented as a kid going to the NBA. He wasn’t in the right environment. He didn’t have the right mindset. He didn’t work. Give me guys that were playing in major colleges and put them in a good system and surround them with a lot of the right things. You go and build great leaders and something special has been individually awesome on his own, outside of the San Antonio system. You build the right structure and the right to give people the opportunity to go and flourish and be amazingly successful from a career standpoint.

Speed round. If you had to pick one college basketball coach that you most behave like or want to behave like, it could be pro too, who’s your guy?

I would say, Brad Stevens. Here’s why. There are two real attributes to Brad that I love. I’m a Bad Boys fan, I hate the Celtics. Let’s be clear. Brad, in a game, rarely stands up. He is done all of his work in practice. His guys know what to do, where to be and how to react. Brad doesn’t have to stand and yell on the sidelines. If you see me coaching my kids, I’m in a stance every possession. I’m like, “Get on the big line.” I’m not doing as good a job as Brad because Brad can sit back and he’s relaxed the whole time.

You got a level to get to.

I got a lot of steps to go to. When you watch his teams, when they come out of timeouts, ATO is common in NBA, After Timeout situations. His teams are the most efficient ATO plays in the League. That goes back to preparation, doing the work, knowing what the situation of the game is, draw them up the right play and putting the right people in a position to execute. That’s what our business is. Brad is the best.

Pick one skill that in this changing environment, if you’re a leader, what are you going to need? If you’re a salesperson, what do you need to do?

It might be the same for both lands. It’s your analogy. I’m going to mess it up. If you give me an hour to chop down a tree, you’re going to have someone that’s going to hammer away. Give me the person that’s over there sharpening their ax and make that thing as sharp as possible.