Noob School - Episode 12: Tap Haley

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Tap Haley didn't start out in sales—he was in consulting for a while before he joined Datastream (that's code for "he's a really smart dude"). He and John have spent a lot of time together over the years, including a week-long trip in France to try to sell Michelin. Tap's analytical and logical approach to sales is a great model for you Noobs to adopt! Follow John on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/johnsterling_ Facebook: facebook.com/johnsterlingsales Twitter: twitter.com/johnsterling_ TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnsterling_

All right, welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got one of my true all-time favorites, Mr. Tap, Haley. And I've got to tell you a quick story about Tap. We and Tap are just two good old South Carolina guys who got into selling a while back, and we did some selling together. And we spent, believe it or not, a week somewhere in France trying to sell Michelin at one point. So I think this is just proof that, you know, once you get into selling, if you work hard, you know, who knows when you end up.

So we'll have to have TEP tell us a little more about that story. So TAP, welcome to Noob School. Thanks, John. Glad to be here. Yeah, man. Well, why don't you start by telling the Nobs kind of how you got started in sales? Well, I didn't intentionally wind up in sales. I actually started with Data Stream and the AED group, the consulting group, so a lot of training.

Yeah. Which, you know, that's what I thought I really wanted to do. And then after a bit, I decided I would move into sales. I actually started in a consulting group. Okay. And you went to the Citadel. I know that. I did.

Yep. What did you major in? Business. In business. Okay. But your first job before Data Stream was with a textual company in production, right? That's right. Japanese company called TNS Mills.

Yeah. And I worked there for about a year and a half as a shift supervisor before I left there to go into the world of software. Yeah. So, we talked about a little bit earlier, but, you know, I interviewed you, and I remember probably pegging you more on the engineering side of things. Maybe because of where you, I'm like, holy cow,

he worked at a, you know, a textile mill in production. Yeah. He wouldn't fit in well with our salespeople. Right. And then you got your Colby test. Right. And it also came back more on the engineering side. That's right.

Yeah. Okay. Correct. Yeah. In hindsight, that turned out to be a really great experience. And I think it contributed to some of my early success in sales. So it wasn't a bad thing. Yeah, I do too.

And I don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, but drawn conclusions. But we have seen it in other circumstances where part of the Colby said more engineering and the person kind of had a little more engineering bent. But they ended up having the patience to work a much bigger deal. Yeah. Like, you know, like you work Michelin. You work the Michelin account for the whole world. And tell us the name of the little town in France we went to.

Clermont-Ferrón. Clermont-Fer-Moron. Probably didn't do that justice. I'll never forget, like, meeting you, I mean, you had your wife with you too, on Jennifer, but meeting, walking up, you know, in the hotel. And you were walking through an archway or something. And I was like, what are you doing here? It was crazy.

Yeah. And what am I doing here? Yeah. But what a great opportunity. I was probably, what, 23, 24? Really? At the most, I would say. And had an opportunity to go.

And, well, to work on that account, you know, that's a large account. At one point, we had maybe 10 or 12 people, you know, involved in that sales engagement. And here I'm, you know, 24, 25, trying to lead the sales engagement. So it was a great experience. Well, let's go down that path a little further because it is an interesting subject. People want to know. I wanted to know, as a young salesperson, what do you have to do to get to win a monster deal? You know, a multi-million dollar global account?

Well, you know, I think one of the most important things is getting wide, as they say, in the account. You know, you always have your champion that you like to work with. Yeah. But if you put too much faith into a single individual, that can be detrimental because you've spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of resources, and you find out that the person that's your champion doesn't really have the power to get it done. Yeah. And so I think probably one of the most important things certainly is, you know, spread that network of people that you get to know within the organization.

Okay. So you knew, like Michelin, for example, there were 75 production facilities, as I recall. sounds about right. Yeah. So around the world, they have, at the time, they had 75 places

where they made some type of tire. Right. And they had multiple types of software for what you were selling. They were trying to consolidate. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. And so getting them to go to decide they wanted to just pick one vendor and kick out everyone else was a,

what, two-year process? Yeah, at least a two-year process. And, and, you know, and we were told no several times,

you know, where they, they ended their process of evaluation. And so we were trying to do sort of a top-down enterprise deployment. And once they told us they weren't going our direction, we decided, well, let's pivot. And let's get it approved as one of the core software products that they could use the organization.

And let's just go sell it plant by plant. So we just, you know, sometimes you have to pivot and find a different way. You know, let the buyers buy the way they want to buy. That's good. Good point. So back to the beginning of the story. you started in consulting, engineering first with your first company, then consulting with Datastream.

You think that helped you when you were looking at like a bigger deal to put it together when you're talking to the buyers? Well, yeah, I mean, it gave me more credibility, I think. Because it was, you know, I'd spent a year and a half of helping people implement the software and utilize the software. And so that gave me more credibility. So I felt like, you know, one of the things that was important to me is to be able to be as self-sufficient as I could.

Not to say it's not a team cell, it always is, but the further you can take that deal before you have to bring in other resources, the better, because you can move faster. And I think engineering or AED help me do that. I do too. I do too. And why did you, I mean, you had a good college degree

and you had a good first job and a good consulting job, what was that thing that triggered you to keep trying, to get into sales? Money. Money. It's just being able to make more money. Yeah, I'll be more specific. So, you know, to me, I felt like, and this came a little bit from being at TNS Mills

before a year and a half, and we would, it would be competitive with the other shift supervisors. And, you know, and sometimes I would win the month production. Sometimes I wouldn't. But then I realized it doesn't really matter either way. They're going to pay me the same, you know. Maybe that's a greedy way to look at it. And so, you know, sales started to become interesting to me because, you know, you eat what you kill. And if you're willing to put the time and effort in, then, you know, there's no limit to it in many cases.

And so that was really what, even though I had to do a short stint in consulting to get there. Yeah. Well, I applaud you for that because there's no straight line to success. It's very rarely exactly like you'd want it to be. You flowed with the punches nicely. Well, that's good. Tell us something about being in sales that was different than you thought it was going to be. Probably, I thought initially when I went into sales, you know,

I knew I had a great background in terms of understanding our software and understanding how to talk about it to the prospects and customers. And I guess when I first started in sales, there was a sense of, hey, this is going to be easier than consulting. I don't have to know as many things. You know, I don't have to, and there's certainly some differences in the type of travel you do there. But really more so, I didn't feel like, hey, I'm not going to have to know as much. You know, salespeople just sell things.

And they got people to demo it and do all this other stuff. And over time, I realized, you know, that's not the case. I mean, you have to have a different set of skills, but you also have to have range. You have to understand what your products and your solutions are. And I think I was fortunate to have done consulting. Otherwise, you know, it would have been a little tougher for me. Okay. Okay.

Interesting. I want to back up to the Michelin deal, just for the sake of the nobs. So you're in your, let's say, 24, 25, mid-20s, and you get the Michelin account to try to sell. So most of them will wonder, how does that happen, right? I mean, because I would think that's going to be a one-day account for me, meaning one day I'll get a big account. You know, maybe when I'm 40, I could work a Fortune 50 company like that. Yeah, yeah. So how did you get it?

Well, you know, I honestly, I'd have to attribute a lot of that to the data stream culture, partly. I think, you know, the organization gave young people great opportunities. Frankly, I was a little surprised that it didn't get taken out from under me. But it was such a good idea. Yeah, but they, you know, they, you know, Larry yourself and others put the confidence in me to say, hey, this is your deal. Yeah. And so I think it was partly that.

And certainly, you know, there was some level of, you know, demonstrated success up to that point that would, you know, encourage them to let me give it a shot. So it worked out well. I agree. I agree. I think the consulting had something to do with it because, you know, particularly from Larry, you understood more what Michelin might need

than most salespeople. But I would also, I might be remembering this wrong, but you kind of found it, right? I mean, it was, you kind of came to us and said, hey, I've got this opportunity. Yeah, it's been a long time. So I don't remember specifically. But, you know, a lot of times you find deals in the strangest ways. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, you do have to get wide in an account as you, you know,

attempt to grow it into a big piece of business. But at the same time, you can't ignore the front line people, you know, particularly in our industry, which was maintenance management software, which, you know, the, you know, the, The interesting thing there is you've got the users are oftentimes were not the ultimate decision makers. And because it was maintenance software, that's sort of the last thing these companies wanted to spend money on. And so you couldn't ignore some of the folks that you knew weren't going to make the decision,

but you leverage that relationship and you get wide from there and can lead to good things. Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess my point I was kind of making there for the nubes is you know, even if you're young, I mean, if you see the opportunity, if you find something that's very interesting, you can take it to the owner of the company. Sure. And you can say, hey, I'd love to help you make some more money here, boss. You know, and they might say, well, we want to get someone else to help you or maybe you can do it, whatever they say, but you don't assume that you won't get to do it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But you've got to find it. No one's going to come around and say, let me go take the Fortune 50 deal and give it to a 24-year-old out of the blue. they probably won't do that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think so, you know, that sort of sparks a thought on. I think creativity was probably, has probably been one of my strengths of figuring those sort

of things out. Like, everybody else doesn't quite see this maybe yet, but, you know, you've got to stay persistent. You've got to be able to relay that message internally appropriately too so people can get behind you on it. So, yeah, I think creativity is important. So how long were you with DataStream doing your thing there? Oh, let's see.

I started in 906, 10 years, 96 to 2006, yeah. And tell us a little bit, tell the Noobes from there some of the other successes you've had up to now. Sure. So after DataStream, which was acquired by N4, and I stayed there a short period of time, and then went to a startup called Customer Effective. with some former data stream folks, we all know. And we had a really, really good run there. We started from scratch doing implementations of Microsoft CRM product.

And really, we were very small. I think there were five of us. When I came, I was maybe the fifth or sixth person. And really, we just learned, you know, how to sell it, how to sell it through the partner and sell it through Microsoft and how to promote it. And we had a really, really good run there. and grew that business to, you know, probably, I think at one point,

we had about 100 consultants there before that business was acquired. Wow. And I'll just say, again, what young people want to know is how do you do it? How do you become a successful salesperson? How do you become a successful entrepreneur? And in your case, you know, I would say somewhere in your early 30s, you had gotten a lot of experience selling inside, outside, big deals, Fortune 50. deals and you'd been around the world, in some parts of the world doing it, chasing these deals.

And when you had your opportunity, it kind of presented itself, you know, a cluster of your colleagues started a company that you also knew something about, which was CRM, and you kind of knew each other. You took the leap. So it wasn't like you just thought of something and just ran off and said, I'm going to do this startup. You had a kind of a logical move, and it was successful. Yeah.

Yeah, and the logic for me was, you know, partly is the people, you know, knew them and thought the world and still do think the world of them. So they were, that made the leap sort of easier, but specific to what we were doing, you know, it's CRM, customer relationship management. You know, I'd been in sales for a long time and the opportunity to go help other organizations become better at selling, it seemed like a natural thing to do. So, yeah, it was a lot of fun. Good. Good. Well, that was a good run. How long was that?

So that was, I guess that was probably about 10 years. Wow. 10, 10? Yeah. And so where are you now? So now I'm with a company out of Bellevue, Washington, called Launch Consulting. And we're a really a business and technology consultancy firm. It's about, we have about 700 employees.

Yeah. I head up business development in the healthcare life sciences group. And we do a lot of work around data and artificial intelligence and human experience design. So really great company, really enjoying it. Are you selling consultancy into that area? Correct. So selling into health plans like the blue crosses of the world, that sort of thing, and also life sciences organizations.

Right. That's fantastic. That's wonderful. So cool. Such a great story. Tell us, if you would, just a few things you'd like to pass on to the brand new nubes. If you were starting over, like right now, what would you tell them to do or not to do? Well, I think one thing not to do is don't make this assumption that it's easy, right?

Sales is not an easy thing to do. And you can have a great bubbly personality, and people say you're a natural salesperson. That doesn't necessarily equate to success. not to say you can't be successful, but don't just assume that just the personality is all you need to be effective in sales. And I think, you know, if I were to start over again, I probably would have spent more time trying to get deeper in the subject matter that I was working in. So I guess really the message there is you can't stop learning. You know, in particular in the software, in the technology world, it changes so fast. And I think the most successful people that I've been around are the folks that really stay on top of their game and understand the technology and what the new changes are and how it impacts our customers.

Yeah. So become a subject matter expert as fast as you can and then just build on that your whole career. Yeah, absolutely. And just, you know, attend conferences, attend webinars and read. I mean, there's just so much information out there. and there's so much competition out there. The moment you feel like, hey, I'm comfortable, you find out there's another competitor in there taking your business.

So you've got to stay on your game. Yeah, interesting. That's a great point. So, Tav, what's your favorite word? My favorite word? As it relates to sales, I think probably I would say persistence. Persistence. Yeah, persistence is probably right up there for me.

Good work, good work. So, Tapp, that was great. Really appreciate you being here. Absolutely. And you gave some great advice to the new. Great. Enjoyed it. Thank you. My brother. Appreciate it.

Okay.