Selling in a Time of Corona – S1E7 – The Sales Leaders | Michael Alp

Creative intro -  Kids on Leadership clip

Kid #1:                         Well, I think to be a good leader, you have to be responsible and try to lead the group well.

Kid #2:                        Well I think that a leader has to have an open mind, always has to be able to absorb new ideas.

Kid #3:                        I think of a person who knows what he's doing …. or she.

Kid #4:                        If he, or she says, they'll do something, they'll do it.

Kid #5:                        If someone like thinks up, like want to build a clubhouse, right. And they think they can do it, try to help them.

Kid #6:                        Encourage with imagination. Because if you say, if someone says, “I'm going to build a sandcastle” and you say, “Oh, that could be really big and wonderful. And that might be even as big as the whole beach”, that would make them feel better. And that would make them know that they can do it.

Kid #7:                        And show the people the right ways and lead them. If they're new to the school or something.

Kid #8:                        I will probably choose a person who would not be mean.

Kid #9:                        I think they should take time off to at least listen to the people that they're leading over.

Kid #10                        Well, it's sort of like honour to be like a leader. Cause like, it sort of means that you're pretty important.

Elliot Epstein - intro: So, someone ate a bat apparently and the world turned upside down. Hi, I'm Elliot Epstein. And I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life coaching, consulting, training, and speaking about all facets of sales development, pitching, presentations, negotiation, the C-suite sales calls and all of the various components in the sales cycle in between. And now we find ourselves in a world that's very foreign. Welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona.

Elliot Epstein:             The kids in that opening clip certainly had a good handle on what leadership is all about. In this podcast, I'm delighted to introduce you to the first person in our episodes on sales leaders, the people who are responsible for leading their teams through COVID-19 and beyond. Having coached hundreds of sales directors and CEOs, you wouldn't be surprised to know there is a wide spectrum ranging from the emotionally intelligent achiever for whom people will literally walk over hot coals, through to the narcissistic insecure psychopath, technically known in academic psychology as … an asshole.

Elliot Epstein:             So when you meet someone who is a consistent high achiever, an all-round great guy and described by many in his team as “the best sales leader that I've ever had”, you can't help but want to be around them. My guest today is that guy you want to have a be with, if we ever open up bars and restaurants again. Michael Alp is the VP of Australia, New Zealand for Pure Storage, a company that has disrupted its market going from zero to under $2 billion in less than a dozen years. Michael has had decades of success in the IT industry. Having led teams throughout the Asia Pac region. He's also played representative rugby, he’s highly skilled in martial arts, kayaking and ocean surf skiing. So yes, it makes you feel like you've wasted your life, doesn't it?  I've coached his executive team and a big chunk of the sales and presales team in Singapore and Australia. So I really wanted Michael's insights. Here is my chat with Pure Storage’s Michael Alp on Selling in a Time of Corona.

Hello, Michael, and welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona. It's great to have you on board and given the vast experience you have in the IT industry primarily, I thought it would be good for my clients and listeners to hear a little about what real sales leaders are doing right now in the middle of COVID-19 to cope with all the wonderful worlds of budgets, forecasts, winning deals, managing stuff, and, and all the expectations. So, so tell me what your life looks like right now.

Michael Alp:               Thanks Elliott. Well, my life right now seems to be a sitting behind a camera on a Zoom or GoToMeeting or Teams, or one of the myriad of video conferencing tools that we have at our disposal now, either talking to my own staff, our partners, customers. And I'm starting to really use the digital footprint of what we do in terms of webinars versus real events and other things to try and sort of build business and close business and make sure we're operating the business correctly.

Elliot Epstein:             So, tell me what you're noticing in terms of engagement, is the difference between having a beer or a coffee with a business partner? Because Pure Storage is renowned for being 100% channel focused. Doesn't go direct at all, which is a fairly unique and strong value proposition in the market. So, what's the key difference that you see right now that was not in place a couple of months ago when you could have a beer with someone?

Michael Alp:               I've got a couple of hours back every day, I'm finding. Because I'm not spending much time lounging around in coffee shops, talking shop as we usually do. I must say it's become pretty abrupt sort of a communication. So, to your point, we're not in front of each other a lot of the time, and we're not doing a lot of social niceties, that seems to sort have gone out of the whole curriculum. So it's  become very transactional, but I guess everybody's sort of sitting here waiting for the other shoe to drop as well, which is, you know, how do we just get through the next couple of months and make sure we don't throw the baby out with the bath water in terms of relationships, and getting deals done and  making sure that we're there and present all the time.

Elliot Epstein:             Yes. So, you've got unique experience because when you were running Asia-Pac, you've been through SARS and swine flu in a sales leadership role before. So, what did you learn out of that that perhaps could apply to us?

Michael Alp:               It was really different. I was living in Singapore through SARS and the one thing that never stopped is that we didn't ever really shut down any of the travel. So, we sort of policied out travel. I was working for a large, another American, sort of large IT vendor at the time. And they told us not to travel, but they didn't restrict us at all. So, we were still going into the office every day. But actually, in Singapore, even though it was the hotspot of SARS, Singapore Airlines started offering everybody travel deals because no one was actually that worried about people bringing SARS back to Singapore and Hong Kong. People were more worried about Singapore and the other places exporting it. So, you know, I went off to the Maldives and went surfing for two weeks in the middle of SARS because Singapore Airlines sent me an email at lunchtime saying for $300, there was a return airfare for two to the Maldives. And I didn't have any kids at that stage. I rang up the surf resort and found out everyone's cancelled. So literally that evening my fiancé at the time and I went to the Maldives for two weeks. So, it was much, much less serious than this has been in terms of the shutdown and the actual policy commitments around isolation. So, this one's by far, by far and away the most serious.

Elliot Epstein:             Yes. Now you can't even walk on Bondi beach without getting a fine, right?

Michael Alp:               We can as of yesterday, we've opened up the beaches as you know, in Sydney. So, with any luck, you Victorians will open up the golf courses, which you should do. I don't quite understand how it's possible that Sydney closes the beaches and leaves the golf courses open, and then Melbourne leaves the beaches open and closes the golf courses. It seems like the opposite should be happening to me.

Elliot Epstein:             Well, that's because this is the People's Republic of Victoria,

Michael Alp:               But it would be good to get back in the water. I’ve always said to people that it's highly unlikely to catch coronavirus while I'm getting salt water stuffed up my nose at a high rate of surfing. I think everyone's going to be a little bit more relaxed that they can go for a swim.

Elliot Epstein:             Absolutely. So, when you talk to your sales teams here in Australia, and you also obviously lead the team that looks after the channels, who've got their own principals and directors. So what are your key messages you're giving them?

Michael Alp:               Well, it's an interesting thing is when we're saying we're talking and, you know, again, it's so much on video conferencing and, you know, Zoom especially. And we were a very early adopter of Zoom about four, four and a half years ago. So, we've been set-up around video conferencing right since the inception of the company. We are all extremely used to doing everything on video conferencing. That's quarterly business reviews, account reviews, performance reviews, you know, interviews, client QBRs, executive briefing centre sections. We're often getting some of our best technologists globally, wherever, out of Mountain View on Zoom sessions with customers anyway. And we've been doing that for quite a long time. So, no one's really stressing about not seeing each other. Because it just seems like an extended time working from home and using the tools. And the tools were already very well set up. Our infrastructure, albeit a new company has actually been using tools like Okta and Zoom and Salesforce and Gmail.

It's actually stood up incredibly well under the strain. So, I'm telling them to pick up things and work on things like Sales Navigator from LinkedIn to increase your digital footprint. To use the tools that you all have at your disposal. Do all the things that you’re probably actually not quite doing while you're actually out, telling me you're seeing customers. So all the things that are falling through the cracks before in terms of building contact lists and making sure CRM is right and, you know, really making progress around a lot of that hygiene stuff. Because that in itself actually creates a lot of good quality contacts with customers and partners. So, you know, I've got a couple of quality, quite progressive or aggressive projects around, adopting a couple of new tools around contact information, increasing our CRM database, both in numbers and the quality. And then a whole bunch of executive contacts that we're doing digitally, both through our own work, through using some of the third-party tools and also with our inside sales reps.

Elliot Epstein:             That's great. So, you're using the time wisely and you’ve thought ahead about how you can cope with a situation like this. In terms of pitching, as you know, I've coached a huge chunk of your team to present the value proposition of Pure and their using this technology to get that message across. What have you noticed if anything that's different, in terms of the way that pitches are presented to either new or existing customers?

Michael Alp:               A lot of the stuff that you and I work on, and we work on with our teams is around  being really authentic, and about making sure that there's a lot of you in the statements, and the people get a strong memory footprint of both the individual and the content. And it's interesting watching people, especially some of the, we've had a lot of technical webinars and a lot of the people you've coached, I've noticed how well they're actually doing it over camera now. And I'm using, I've got two sets of technical specialists, one being sort of more generalists and others being more specialists. And you know, the specialists,  we're getting a lot of attendance to, when we advertise digitally say a particular specialist is going to talk on a topic, because one of the things we've found is that people do have spare time, right?

Michael Alp:               As you know, I mentioned that I'm not spending hours in coffee shops and that customers and our partners the same. Everybody's got a few more hours in the day to go and attend a workshop with someone that's got an impressive CV, that's talking about something that they need to know. But they generally just don't get to it in their workday. But you know, they're home, they've got an hour free in their calendar, they'll come and attend watching, okay, this guy from Pure Storage talking about a specific subject area. It might be, you know, how to optimize large scale VMware implementations for an enterprise customer. These types of specialist topics are getting a fair bit of play. So, we’ve actually got increased numbers of people attending those, which is great. And again, the quality of the presentations has really lifted, you know, thanks to you partly, very, very much, you know, through your coaching.

Michael Alp:               And also because I think people are really thinking about what they can present for maximum impact. So being very mindful of what they're saying and how, and then collating and collecting all the tools. And then they're all very familiar with using Zoom say, how they can use actually multiple windows and sharing their screens. And they're sort of rehearsing and practicing that process to make sure that someone, if someone comes on for a 45-minute webinar, they want to learn something, they really are learning something. They're not just coming on and looking at some blank technology pitch. They're actually engaging with the presenter and actually learning what we're doing or what the possibilities are.

Elliot Epstein:             That's great. So you’re saying then that your customers are more open now, not just because they've got time, but because obviously they've got a real need to build infrastructure that delivers all the things that is going to keep them on track. And if you're getting more numbers to these webinars and online sessions, that's terrific. And I think it's a great lesson to everyone.

I'm still seeing … while everyone's talking about being on video conferencing, Michael, I'm still seeing people saying people are over at, people are sick of it, you need to be careful about how many times we ask clients to engage with us…. And it's just rubbish. You know, we've got to be on this every day, just as sales activity needs to be done every day. This is the new sales activity for this period of time. And what you've described is proof of exactly that, and I'll be interested to know how C-level has reacted. So, you talked about people not being around and working from home. How has C-level, CIOs, CTOs, how have they responded to this, if any different?

Michael Alp:               Not too bad. I mean, I think the only thing I'd say is that a lot of the C-level people are also involved in coronavirus teams and there's a whole bunch of activity going on around dealing with their own staff and dealing with the own issues. So, there's been some sort of cases of people getting lost in the chaos and there's a couple of customers we have, or potential customers that have really had some challenging IT issues. So, you know, we've watched, what was it, a Queensland e-learning system went down yesterday. And I think we had it in Victoria, last week or wherever it was. There's a lot of these incidents where the infrastructure is actually cracking. So there have been a couple of customers that have gone look, I've got big issues, you know, basically around end-user computing and access points and security and a lot of the front end.

Michael Alp:               We've had a lot of the banks globally, you know, who thought they had great video capability until actually they sent everybody home. And so, I know several global banks that literally just broke their networks and what they thought was good virtual desktop, was terrible. So they've had a lot of, there's been a lot of interesting, quite fast buying, but also a lot of scouring around, but on basic infrastructure things, email, access to systems, a lot of trading systems, security issues, home devices not being capable. So there's been a hell of a lot of end-user compute work. And a lot of our C-level people have really been under the gun to actually make sure that people can operate in this sort of new mode. And I will call it a new mode. Because I think this might be a bit persistent.

Elliot Epstein:             That is the prediction, that it's not going to be over in five minutes. So let me finish off by throwing you a curly one, given your vast experience in the IT industry. You've probably got mates there that you either surf with or occasionally have a lemonade with, that are not in the industry, what would your main advice be to companies where perhaps IT infrastructure is not their thing? That's not what they're selling. And so the demand may not be as strong or there might be some logistical issues. If you think back through all of your sales leadership experience, what would you say to people in a non-booming industry or non-IT, that potentially could help them through this period?

Michael Alp:               I think the main thing is; go and look for the technology software tools to grow your business and to get in contact with people. We use LinkedIn a lot, in terms of actual conversations and finding people. I think there are a lot of tools out there like that, that you can actually go and use either as platforms or third parties to go and create and build business that you didn't have before. And it's a time to do it. Obviously if you're Virgin Airways, you've got some real issues about the cost of your infrastructure. For most people out there, that are trying to maintain a business, I think every customer you get now is worth five next year.

Michael Alp:               And so, I'd say it's a time for investing in your digital growth and on making sure that you can get to decision makers and plant the seeds now for coming out of it. I'd probably think that this mode of working that we're in now, is probably going to be persistent forever. I mean, now that we've worked out that the kids can actually school from home, guess what everybody's going to do? They're going to be saying fine, that clarinet lesson, you can do it from home. I think the same is with work environment. I think we're all going to go, “Oh, we've got used to working at home, we've got infrastructure set up, the offices are better. We've got a better technology. The systems are working.”

Michael Alp:               I think when I say this is a sort of persistent way of working, I think it's beyond the coronavirus. I think this is probably going to change office and office use and tools and attendance forever. And I think people will get much more used to using these types of tools that you we're using today. And I think building some competencies around things like presenting on video, using LinkedIn, using digital contact tools, advertising your profile, learning how to do what you do well through this digital footprint is really important. And so for anybody that's not in the tech industry, I'd say it's a time for you to actually, it's time to take a bit of time and actually see what you can do technically.

Elliot Epstein:                 If you don't do it now, you never will.

Michael Alp:                    That's right. You got time now, you know?

Elliot Epstein:            Yes, that's right. All you can do is get a takeaway coffee and walk the dog a second time.

Michael Alp:               That's right. People not as technically capable as yourself, Elliot, often think that it's probably a bit daunting, but actually I've got quite a few friends with small businesses and others that are just say, you know, the availability and the ease of use of most of these tools to act, to advertise, to contact, to pitch, are so good now . It's really no excuse not to get set up and do it well.

Elliot Epstein:             That's great. Michael, thank you for sharing those ideas. I'm not sure if you're going to go out for a surf today because you're probably still restricted.

Michael Alp:               Tomorrow morning, all free! Maroubra and Bronte and Coogee. We're all able to get in the water again.

Elliot Epstein:             The wonderful world of New South Wales. God love you.

Michael Alp:               It’s still summer here, don't forget that!

Elliot Epstein:             Thanks again, Michael. That's been terrific to hear your ideas and your background. And good to see you're doing well, and we'll catch up with you soon.

Michael Alp:               Thanks, Elliot, bye bye.

Elliot Epstein:             See, I told you, Michael will be brilliant. He might be one of the industry's great overachievers, but at least I have more hair than him.

Next episode, I catch up with Rachel Sakurai, GM of Sales for Computershare. One of Australia's greatest homegrown global success stories, as she shares her excellent thoughts on keeping the sales team connected and focused on the right thing … clients.

Stay safe, stay positive. Remember your ears are safe, Michael and I were on separate kayaks during this entire podcast.

Take care of yourselves, till next time.