Story Leaders - Clients

Client Stories

Phil Godwin's story: ‘Real Change is Possible’ (Phil Goldwin is VP Sales at Clear Technologies)

Running a Sales organization has proven to be a lot tougher than I had originally anticipated. Two years ago, my company, Clear Technologies, was a stagnate IBM hardware re-seller and I was a frustrated VP of Sales. We talked a big game, but we were still those guys presenting "speeds and feeds" and financial justifications to our install base, getting ‘no-where’.

When I was first promoted to lead our sales organization, I implemented a sales process: Solution Selling™. It was the only thing I knew to do at the time; however, after the implementation – no change. In fact, it was always a fight to get people to adhere to the sales process because everyone felt it was more for my benefit than theirs. I could forecast revenues better with the new process because we had pipeline milestones, but our selling behaviors never changed.

Next, we developed our own Software offerings: a suite of automated storage reporting tools and security management software, as a way to differentiate ourselves from every other I.T. Integrator, - still no change. We simply replaced the word “hardware” with the word “solution”, but the way we sold stayed the same way.

In fact, only our top sellers figured out how to sell these new offerings, while everyone else struggled. I whined about it for a long time. I really thought that by transforming WHAT we sold, combined with the implementation of a sales process (Solution Selling), we would differentiate ourselves from all the noise in the industry, but at the end of the day, nothing really changed. Our top few sellers sold, and everyone else remained the same.

Fast forward to end of 2010: without doing anything else in the business and after years of struggles, I finally figured out a way to transform our approach, our language, the way we think about our offerings and the way we develop deeper connections with our customers.

Here’s how: being a Mike Bosworth (author of Solution Selling) fan my entire career, I got turned onto his recent venture: StoryLeaders and how its based on something that in my career was always conspicuously absent from the sales productivity industry: how to teach real connections, real rapport. Based on new research that validates how people decide to buy, decide to open up, decide to trust, I decided to take a leap of faith myself and try Story Leaders (probably just because it felt new and it was really a last resort to maintain my own sanity as a Sales Executive). At first, it was a pretty big leap for me, however, here is what its done for Clear:

We now have a completely different language in how we communicate to the market. We learned how to stop talking about our products (speeds and feeds) so damn much, and to think about the stories: stories of our company, stories of our clients, help everyone figure out and communicate their own personal stories. I know that sounds weird, but it’s opened up channels that I would have never expected. It wasn’t just storytelling, but the listening to our client’s stories with a real intent to understand that really has transformed our relationships to a much deeper level. The other thing that happened was that everyone at Clear has emotionally stepped into our company story – that is, once we figured out what our real story was.

I’ve learned that by communicating our stories and then searching out our customer’s real stories, we have really changed the company – I would actually use the phrase: transformed the business. We began with Story Leaders in January of 2010 and we closed the year with the biggest year in the company’s history. We had 43% revenue growth in 2010 and in Q1 2011, we were awarded the IBM Mid-Market Leadership Award, without changing anything else in the business.

-Phil Godwin,
VP Sales, Clear Technologies

Reliance GlobalCom, Inc.

Reliance GlobalCom, Inc. is a global provider of fully managed, end-to-end Networking services. Reliance provides services to enterprise customers in and between major metropolitan markets in the United States, Asia Pac and throughout Europe.

Mike McGlone, Reliances' Worldwide VP Sales set out to achieve two primary missions:
Meet aggressive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth targets set by the Board, and to transition what was perceived to be a “transactional sale”, into a more “Solutions-Oriented” model.

At the time Reliance began working with Story Leaders, revenues were growing, however, not on track to meet the aggressive targets set by its Board. Only one-third of the sales force was achieving their quotas. “We anticipated that the experience & skill sets that our sellers brought with them from previous organizations would bring us results. Each quarter, however, it was the same small percentage of our sellers that produce a disproportionate amount of the revenue,” said McGlone. “Even with our CRM system, coaching from front-line sales management and a sales process, only a third of our people produced. It actually seemed that over time, our best got even better, and the gap between our top producers and everyone else, increased. They were doing something that we couldn’t model. For reasons I didn’t know at the time, our best people just had a way to get buyers to open up with them – they were doing it unconsciously.”

“We had trained the sales force on a sales roadmap, solutions-mapping, product training, market knowledge, how to do an ROI, but it finally became clear to me that what separated the best from all the others was an intuitive nature to connect with buyers, to develop rapport and relationships beyond the traditional buyer/seller veneer. In all the sales I had made in my past, it was the relationships I had formed that won the business, not the ROI or solution. I think we lost a bit of that in our business; that human aspect.”

“Story Leaders helped us bring out our real stories and helped us model how to communicate our messages in stories, which we know is a more meaningful way to communicate. Here were the results following the roll out:

—In the two quarters immediately following our first workshops, we increased revenue by 41% compared to the same period the previous fiscal year.

—These two quarters marked the two largest sales quarters in the company’s history, making 2009 a full year of sequential quarter-over-quarter growth. Revenues exceeded the targets set by the Board.

“The pay-off with Story Leaders has been significant; increasing revenues immediately. We have reached sales targets never achieved by our company. The culture has changed for the better, the way we think about our products and the way we communicate has become institutionalized. Our salespeople are more human & more confident, and our messaging is consistent, which has proven to further differentiate us in the marketplace.”

– Mike McGlone, , Vice President of Global Sales.

E•Safe Technologies

E•Safe Technologies is in the business of helping enterprise I.T. organizations respond to their rapidly changing environments, through the use of its Information Technology products and consulting services. In the mid 2000s, E•Safe Technologies recognized its own dramatically changing I.T. environment; their products were becoming commoditized and client needs expanded beyond the company’s capabilities, which included infrastructure hardware and server solutions. The company therefore invested heavily in expanding its offerings in new areas: Security, Data Management & Cloud Services.

Although the company broadened its portfolio, revenues in the mid-to-late 2000’s remained flat. Only a small percent of its sellers figured out a way to sell these new offerings. “The 80/20 Rule was alive and well as the business relied on this small percent of its sellers to produce the lion-share of the revenue.” - Gary Sharp, E•Safe's Vice President of Sales. “We realized, after-the-fact, that once we began to add these newer technologies, the focus became very technology-oriented and therefore, the selling culture ironically went backwards. Even after the company added the products/services they believed the market demanded, revenue results didn’t immediately change. “We became really good at calling on lower level buyers that wanted free education on technology.” — Sharp.

My first reaction to Story Leaders was “Another sales training?” We didn’t move forward with Story Leaders at first, but it hit us like a ton of bricks after our year-end, internal pipeline review that our sales staff was chasing a ton of deals that never moved, and rarely closed as forecasted. The majority was being lost to “No Decision”. “Our reps were targeting lower level, technical buyers “toying” with these product evaluations. The typical sales call led with: “Let me tell you about...” “We’re the world’s leading...” And, “I’d like to show you/demo this new product...” The one obvious piece missing was proof that our salespeople were developing real relationships with the decision making level buyers that they ultimately needed to sell to.”

“The turning point for me occurred while attending a Story Leaders webinar. I head language not previously spoken in Corporate America: how we develop relationships, how we connect with one another at a human level, how we use our whole brains — the left and right hemispheres — to make buying decisions, how trust is formed between two people and last, how stories have been underused to activate these things. We became a left-brain, analytical, product, information & fact-oriented sales force.

We had to learn how to unwire our left brains and explore the right brain. Senior level, strategic thinking buyers are actually RIGHT BRAIN dominant. In December 2008, Gary trained his staff. By the end of 2009, without adding any new salespeople, in the down economy, Gary grew revenues by 174 percent without changing anything else in the business. He got every seller except one above quota.