Noob School - Episode 10: Scott Millwood

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Scott's Millwood's journey to successful entrepreneur involved a heck of a lot of detours. He failed as an ad man, accepted a promotion he shouldn't have, and ending up trading cattle futures. Seriously. But, Scott eventually found himself in a good position learning from experts in an awesome environment. You couldn't write a better story if you tried! Follow John on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/johnsterling_ Facebook: facebook.com/johnsterlingsales Twitter: twitter.com/johnsterling_ TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnsterling_

Welcome back to Noob School. Today, I've got one of the all-time greats that I've ever worked with, Mr. Scott Millwood. Welcome, Scott. Glad to be here, John. Thank you to that fine intro. Well, it's true. It's true. So we worked together for a long time, but I'd like to take you back to when you started working in sales, which was before you and I even met.

So talk to the group about how. how you got into sales. Yeah, rather accidentally, really. You know, I initially started out and thought I wanted to be in advertising. Okay. And went down this path, worked for Henderson advertising and an internship, went to New York, got my hopes dashed pretty, you know, pretty handily on that. And came back to do my senior year at Clemson,

and I read this book called The Next Economy. And it struck a nerve kind of, you know, this is back way back, 86. So it struck a nerve about. kind of on a secular basis where everything was going with what turned out to be, you know, information economy and the Internet, and of course we couldn't see any of that. And around that time, a guy came to speak to a class from Dun & Bradstreet. This was at Clemson, right? This was at Clemson.

Right. So he came in from Dun & Bradstreet, and he was talking up how they were selling all this, you know, information. Yeah. Called the guy up, you know, shortly thereafter, went down to Atlanta, interviewed, got a job. shockingly got a job. And, you know, I'd sort of got in my head wrapped around the whole idea of just selling. Yeah.

But I didn't know what that was. Sure. I had no idea what that even meant. But, you know, good training class with those guys, which was really sit in this room and watch these eight hours of videotapes. And then there's the phone. Go get going. Get started. Get started.

And I was the, I was the, you know, the hunter. I was the bird dog, as they called that role. It was just get on the phone, drive around all over Atlanta, and look for prospects to sell this credit services information to. So eight hours of video training and then here's the phone. Cut loose. Yeah. Go get it.

Wow. Yeah. And they turned out to be a great company, right? Well, it was an interesting ride. Okay. I did not spend a lot of time there. Okay. And, you know, a lot of reasons for that.

One, you know, I know one of your thought-provoking questions is, you know, what kind of mistakes is you made? I took a promotion, and that was to move me to Columbia, South Carolina from Atlanta, and I quickly realized, like, I've made a mistake here. You know, there's not the same environment, it's not what I want to be doing, and I ended up leaving the company.

And really, at that point, I was floundering. I had no idea what I wanted to do. But I had a taste for selling. I knew that was the place to go make money. Yeah. And if I really kind of, you know, drill in a little bit, that was a big motivator. You know, I was just making some cash. Right.

Yeah. Right. So did you go to business school then? Actually, I started trading beef cattle futures. So are we suggesting this is the proper path? Absolutely not. But it worked. It's a zigzag path.

So go to New York for advertising and then the beef cattle. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, again, it's a process of elimination. Right. It was some selling. Yeah. It was some speculating, which has been great and kind of, you know, a life as an entrepreneur,

learning how to take risk, hold that risk, deal with that risk every day. And then while I was doing that, I realized, you know what, it's awfully competitive out here. So I need to sharpen the blade a little bit. And I went back to grad school while I was working in Atlanta, Georgia State, got an MBA. Okay. And that sort of opened my eyes up a little bit. little bit wider. But I shortly thereafter took a job as I finished that program with a startup called Harbinger. And that was electronic data interchange. So I was back to information. And a million

dollars in revenue when I came in, a bunch of Harvard guys, McKinsey guys, really smart guys that I just kind of hooked my wagon to and went in as an inside salesperson. So, you know, got my grad degree, MBA. And I'm like, you know what? I just need to work for some smart people and figure out what this is all about. Best thing ever did. Best move every day, you know, because now I'm learning how to sell, but I'm selling with some smart people in the right industry where there's a big wave that's kind of carrying it forward.

So good product, good culture, good company, good leadership, all those things are great. And you just, I think that's probably going to be the point of the whole podcast is you eventually found this combination of great place. places to land. And I would guess it almost doesn't matter how you get in there. Yeah. As long as you get in, inside sales doesn't matter. It didn't matter.

Yeah. It was like, so for me at that point, it was, it was a recognition. I think even then that, A, sales was the right path if you wanted to make more money than the norm at that age. That was important. And two, this kind of, you know, early beginning of realizing that I'm probably going to eventually be an entrepreneur. If those are the people that I admire, well, I better go figure out what that is because I've done the big company thing.

I've done a risky, you know, cattle trading thing. And I knew eventually I wanted to start and run my own business. And so what better thing to do than go to work for them and figure out what they do that's really smart? Okay. Yeah. And then from Harbinger, that's when we started working. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So came to data stream. 95, you know, about 8, 9 million in revenue, a handful of, you know, smart fund people over at Maravan, got in and started swinging. Well, I remember that, you know, we had a bunch of young, including me, crazy, mostly inside sales-oriented people. And you came in and really showed us how to go, sell bigger deals, go outside and created your own outside sales team and basically international and made the, you know, With your help, training the nubes in the Citadel model, you gave me free latitude to go pick the best and brightest to pull them over and teach them how to go do direct sales, getting on airplanes and going out and doing demos in the field and, you know, all that sort of thing.

And when we say big deals, our big deals at that point were, you know, under 100K. That was a big deal. Yeah, 100. I remember that. And then they turned into million-dollar deals later. And that was, you know, a lot of credit to your training on really building that fast. foundation of those nobs that had that solid foundation. So when I picked them up to take them out in the field to give them little wings,

they already knew all the basics. They were ready to go. Yeah, they were ready to go. Well, you're right. You're right. It was a good combination. Good combination, right. A good combination.

Tell us something about just sales in general that's just way different than you thought it was going to be. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Way different. Yeah, I think the leadership learning that you get from being a salesperson is I don't think that gets enough coverage. You know, when you figure out how to do it, which is a great combination of lots of different things, as you know, the one thing that I find is you have to take ownership and. be a leader in the room with your prospect. And that's what they respond to. If you're listening well as you have to to be successful,

you become a problem solver. You become an empathizer. And then you slowly transition that around to just being a leader. And, of course, that goes with my personality type really well. I'm, you know, Briggs-Myers, E-N-T-J, the commander, right? So I like that. I seek that out. And for me, that worked really well of understanding that I could sit at a conference room table and, you know, guide and lead a discussion in an empathetic way around to something that was actually good for us in selling a product or service.

And so we talk a lot about the Colby also. Do you remember your numbers? 5, 4, 7.4. Yeah. No doubt. Quick start, right? It's quick start. But it's also, again, I see this with successful entrepreneurs,

you know, they seem to almost have to have the quick start, but they also have to have the fact finder follow through, you know, over a certain level. Right. Or they're going to, you know, they're going to drop the ball or something like that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. And I figured out I was a pretty good ball dropper.

And, you know, the quick start, 5474, I probably feel more like day-to-day, more like a 5, 4, 9-1. Yeah. Right. You know, it's because over time, I think you evolve in how you do things. And I know how to start fires. And I like starting fires. And I've had to, over time, build a team around me to do the follow through,

to kind of, you know, be part of that. Well, you've done great. And I should lay out a couple of things you've done since we worked together, which we had a nice long run. Did. But you started your own company called Customer. effective, you and Michael Elliott. And tell us about that company and kind of what you're learned from there.

And maybe since you've already been successful entrepreneur three times now, tell these folks, what are the kind of things you look for and if you're going to hire a college grad to enter your company. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, customer effective was really an extension of what we learned at Datastream. And the team was an extension of data stream.

to a large degree. Yeah. We implemented a CRM system at Datastricht and I was very, you know, involved in that and took to that sort of science of, you know, automating processes and figuring out how to help people be more successful, how to be more productive and work smarter. And so I saw this opportunity with Microsoft to go out and take what they were just getting going on and build on top of it, which is what we did with customer effective for 10 plus years. grew that and sold it to Hitachi, as you know, in 2014.

You know, part of that was just building a nice, strong culture, which helped because we had a strong culture at data stream, and we could sort of derive from that. We also got extremely lucky. Microsoft invested heavily in the product. Dynamics took off. You know, all of that worked our favor. Serum became a great category.

Yeah. You know, I think the thing that, we look for when we were hiring salespeople at customer effective is different than the nobs in that we really needed highly consultative people that were that were capable of selling multi-million dollar jobs right away. So you didn't have that job spec? We didn't have that job spec. It didn't fit the profile because we were selling through partner and with partner with Microsoft. But what we looked for is a track record of success. And one of those things that I would advise for noobs is, you know, build that track record of success and don't turn over too quickly.

I saw resume after resume after resume, whether it's a consultant or a salesperson that has a two-year stint, followed by two-year stint, followed by two-year stint. And all it says is yellow flag, red flag, to the point of just, those just get set aside. Yeah. Right? It's like if you can't find a way to be successful in the early part of your career for more than two years, the problem is probably you. And you need to think about how you change you.

Yeah. And we don't need to figure out what that problem is. We don't need to figure out what that problem is. Just move on. So stay with it, stay with it, stay with it. Well, that's great. I mean, and again, you sold it, Hitachi, a huge, one of the best tech victories or exits in Greenville where we live ever.

And then since then, you started another company called Yesflow. Yeah, right. Yes, flow, which I think, and I always describe it to people, I'm like, the sales reps don't want to fill out the CRMs, so they talk to their watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they don't update it, it buzzes them or something. So I don't know if that's true or not. That's close, right.

I mean, we're, again, extension sort of building on top of how do we help people work smart, be more productive. We're automating business processes around primarily field activities like field. like field sales. And we're making that easier by allowing people to do it on a mobile device by speaking. So think Siri or Alexa, but connected to your enterprise information. So a good customer of ours is New Corps, long-time customer of data stream, long-time customer of customer effective and customer at Yesflow.

And we're helping their field salespeople do call reports, which are laborious efforts to collect information after they've done a meeting. now they use our product when they leave the meeting to just get in the car, push a single button, and start talking. Is it like an app on their phone? It's an app on their phone. Okay. Yeah, they just start tick-tick.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, that's very cool. Just to take a little sidebar here for a second, I mean, any nube listening, think back to when Scott was like in his early 20s. First of all, in college, he hadn't really thought it through. Right. Like, he hadn't completely thought that what sales was. and then a couple of experiences that weren't great.

And then, you know, he just kept working at it. And finally, once he found that Harbinger, where it was a good fit for so many reasons, it's just been one happy success after another. It wasn't like you killing yourself. It's like, this is what I ought to be doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were some key things in there that I think I had to change

in my mindset along the way. And one of those, I give a lot of credit to you on being a big, books and tapes guy, you know, I went deep into the Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy, you know, that whole realm of listening to tapes and learning from those tapes and taking them to heart and building my own, I call it the POS, the personal organization system, which also rhymes, which I thought was funny. And really, that was just all about planning the work. work and then work in the plan.

Yeah. You know, and if you don't put those things down on paper and come back to them constantly and remind yourself over and over about what am I trying to achieve, how am I getting there, how am I doing against what I said I was going to do, then you're kind of missing out on it. It's easy work. That is easy work. Yeah.

If you do it, yeah. If you do it. And if you don't do it, I would say if you don't do that, if you don't take control of what your life is going to be and what you want to. work on, then the rest of the world will take care of it for you. Yeah. You're going to wake up and things are just going to happen and there you go. But not Scott Millwood.

No, sir, three, three winners so far. Yes, sir. Love it. Now, I think you were involved with one company. The original company is now worth almost $2 billion is what I hear. Arbinger? No, data stream. Oh, that?

Did you see that? They just sold again? Oh, did they really? No, I did not see it. 1.7. Is that right? So they sold the N4 piece out for 1.7. Yeah.

How did we miss out on that? I don't know. We got to claw back. What did? We got to a billion at one point. We did. For a moment, a brief moment in time. I know.

I thought I was going to 10 easy at that point. I called my brother-in-law. I'm like, now's the time to get in. So what's your favorite word? Yes. Yes. Positive, baby. Yes.

I love it. I mean, who doesn't like to hear the word yes? That is great, Scott. What a great word. Yes, I love it. So, yes, thankful that you're here today. Camera 2. We'll golf clap for Mr. Scott Millwood.

That was awesome. Thank you, John. And we'll see you, see you, new school folks next week. Thank you.