Espresso Insight

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my natural inclination for sales started as a young kid, hanging out with my grandpa. He played a massive role in my desire to pursue a career in sales.

My grandfather was such a cool guy, and I miss him immensely. He always had conversations with me as if I was an adult, and he would share information about stocks, business, sales, and more. He was career a salesman for Kennametal selling manufacturing tooling (not to mention he was also the best golfer I’ve known… he played in the US Senior Open, won NCAA D2 in college, was friends with Arnold Palmer, and even beat him during a friendly round).

My grandfather always encouraged me to have a curious mind — he introduced me to founders of software companies, Partners at investment banks, and even had me shadow his friend where I got to watch over 80 hours of orthopedic surgery.

When I was in middle school, my grandfather gave me a book that changed my life — Warren Buffett’s biography.

In reading that book, I discovered that I have a genuine curiosity about businesses, what they create for the world, their position in the market, how they make money, and how profitable (or not profitable) they are.

Although I didn’t understand everything about the nuances of accounting (and still don’t, but Financial Accounting in college certainly helped), what I did learn was how to consume all the publicly available information about a specific company from an early age.

It became fun for me to read and learn about companies. As an Enterprise Account Executive at a software company, I had a lot of publicly traded companies in my territory. I would dig through their annual reports / 10ks and try to learn everything I could about them.

I knew I enjoyed it, because my spare time, I also read for fun about businesses. I like thinking about different stocks that might be good long term investments.

It was mentally stimulating for me, and it didn’t even feel like work. And the things I learned doing research about the companies in my patch proved invaluable during my conversations with stakeholders at the accounts.

I think this genuine interest helped me understand my customers at a deeper level, ask better questions, and use the right words in my customer conversations that are relevant to their business.

Resources I use as an Account Executive to research my customers:

• Annual report: I always like to start with the annual report if the business is publicly traded. When reading thru 10k / annual reports, you can learn a lot about the company. Looking at general and administrative expenses, you can see where a company buckets their software as a service, and can help you speak to lowering total cost of ownership by moving to the cloud for example. If you know they’re spending X for on premise, and your system can save them money, you can speak to reducing their expenses / TCO.
  • I also like reading about the business and the different segments. The annual report will give you a sense for the vernacular used by the business, so that when you go in as a sales rep you can speak their language.
• Press releases are also great to read, as well as anytime the company is in the news.
• I also like to keep an eye on the Wall Street Journal. You’ll see when different companies either in your patch or potential competitors release earnings, what analysts are saying, learn of important mergers / acquisitions happening in the industry, and also keep an ear to macro-stuff such as what the Fed is doing with interest rates.

Doing this type of reading in the evenings really helps me to understand the businesses in which my customer stakeholders spend their entire working lives building and running.

Ultimately, I’ve become a good sales rep because I have a genuine interest in how the businesses that I sell to work. Since I do find it mentally stimulating to learn about my customers in this way, I have an easy time doing so.