Noob School - Episode 19: Reed Wilson

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Reed was the top cadet at the Citadel when he graduated, making him a top choice for John and Datastream. Just a phone call later, and Reed was on board! He and John talk about his rough start to life as a salesman and how he pushed through with some guidance from other experienced sales pros. Follow John on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/johnsterling_ Facebook: facebook.com/johnsterlingsales Twitter: twitter.com/johnsterling_ TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnsterling_

Hey, welcome back to Noob School. This is where you come to hear stories, sometimes interesting stories, and anecdotes from folks that have crushed it in sales. These are people who have started in sales and they've gone on 10, 15, 20 years later and look where they are now. And we're backing them up to where they started. You know, how did they get their start? What good decisions did they make? What not so good? What would they do different?

it seemed the things you could learn as you figure out your path forward. And today I've got, I would say one of the best examples of that in terms of becoming successful in charting his own path is my longtime friend Reed Wilson. Reid, welcome aboard. Hey, thanks for having me, John. Glad to be here. You're welcome, man.

You're welcome. So, again, I have known Reed for how long? 22, 23 years. 23 years. So, you know, we know each other by now. We know that, you know, it's no funny business. No, that's right, absolutely. Kind of kind of know with each other.

So I know the answer to some of these questions, but I'm going to ask you for everyone's benefit. Tell us, I know you were, I'm sure that you were at the Citadel, and that would have been, when would you have graduated? 1999. 99. Mm-hmm. Okay. And I know that you were, of the 2,000 cadets on campus, you were the number one cadet. That's correct.

That's pretty strong. Well, I mean, I was probably at the bottom of the barrel, and they just chose from the bottom of the barrel. Who knows? They got it upside down. Right, exactly. Who knows, who knows? Well, I do know this. I know that you were an English major, and that they did.

That was helpful that you knew how to express yourself and to speak, because at that time, with all the stuff going on at school, that they wanted someone who could talk to the press and be comfortable on camera. That's right. Yeah, when I was there, my senior year was the first year we had. women really in all four classes. Nancy Mays, who now was in government, was classed to throughout a thousand, which actually graduated with my class in 1999. So charted some interesting times during my four years of the Citadel for sure. Interesting, interesting.

Well, it's great experience, and just a quick side note. I mean, the year before, you were probably near the top of the junior class, and so you renewed the top of the regimental commander before. And I was trying so hard to get that guy on board. Do you keep up with him? I do, as a matter of fact. I do. Tell him, I said, go to hell.

Well, I won't tell him that. He should have come on board. But I try so hard. He's an attorney now. Can you believe that? He's an attorney. He's probably going to sue me. But, I mean, I wanted the number one guy on board because we were hiring so many people from that school.

Right. And I thought if I get the top person, gosh, I'll get, you know, a lot more will come with them. And he ended up being an attorney, which is fine. I'm sure he's doing fine. But the weirdest thing was I spent hours trying to get him. He finally goes the other way. I don't know how much longer it was I get a call out of the blue from this guy, from Reed. Right.

This is Reed Wilson. You know, I'm a rising senior at the Citadel. I let him come work for you. I'm like, why? You're like, well, I'd have heard all those phone calls, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do.

And I thought about law school because that's what seemed like everybody was doing and made sense. But I knew I wanted to get back to Greenville, and I'd heard great things about data stream. And in fact, Alan Gant, I don't know if you remember Alan or not. Alan was influential on me when I was in school at the Citadel. I knew he was there, and I knew he had done amazing things in a very short period of time. Went on to run our office in France, if I remember correctly. And so I wanted to crack at it. And that's why I made the call.

So he was a year? He was three years ahead of me. Three years ahead. He was a senior when I was a freshman. He was Fourth Battalion Commander. Yeah. Only guy from Katz Square, North Carolina, that could speak French as far as on that. And probably English as well.

Sorry to any Katz Square. I think he also went over to, like, Singapore. Correct. He was in Singapore. He was the managing director of Singapore and moved me to Australia. I don't know if you remember that. But I was 22 and living in downtown Melbourne, in Australia, working for Data Stream, Millwood.

22. 22, yeah. I really made some questionable disease. Well, I don't know about that one. That was probably, and I lived across the street from the largest casino in the southern hemisphere at age 22. Let that sink in for just a minute. Well, it worked out. In your case, it worked out.

It didn't always work out, sending people out too early. Right, for sure. I'm not sure how well it worked out when they sent me to Holland for a year. We call that a gap year, I think. We all made it. So you told us, you were thinking about law school, you knew someone who worked with us, and it was kind of an example, and you knew a little bit about the story. You heard me tell the other residential middle commander before you.

But then you did, in fact, come work with us and you started in sales. Tell us about kind of how that went at the beginning. Well, I would say just being totally transparent, it didn't go great. I had no formal sales training. I probably had some misconceived expectations around what the job actually entailed. And I remember being in my office at Datastream, literally day one.

And I remember seeing you, you welcomed me, but then I was quickly released. And it was, here's your phone and here's your customer management software. We sell maintenance software. here's your customers, good luck. And early on, and one of the things I really valued about my time at Data Stream, I think, was it was you've got to make your own way, right? And I saw some folks come through there that built a ton of success

by just getting in there and trying to figure it out and surrounding themselves with people who had been successful. And I also saw some people that just crushed, you know, they just crushed underneath the pressure. Right. And early on, I was crushed, just being really transparent, because I'm not one that reaches out for help. And I learned very early on that to be successful,

you've got to reach out to help, reach out for help. And if I can make a quick plug, Landy Wingerd was somebody who he was very, very influential early on for me and somebody that I leaned on very heavily. Yeah. Well, that's great. That's great. I think we talked about this a little bit before, but I think part of my philosophy was bring on the best people you can get and then put

them out there and let them kind of learn from each other and see it, you know. But I also think that was partly just lazy on my part. You know, I think maybe I may have been lazy either. It might have been I just didn't have as much time as I wanted to do as much work. Right. Because I do think it's really important when noobs start out. You made it through the eye of the needle. You figured it out with some other people's help.

But why not get like basic training, Zig Zig Zigler training, Center training, new school training, somebody that just takes you through and helps you with a jump start. Yeah, no, I agree with that, but I also think that part of being successful in sales, especially as a noob, is if you become too reliant on training, you almost become a little bit robotic. And for my seat and the folks that I've seen that have been successful in sales, you've got to have a good mix, right? You've got to be willing to obviously get training and get help, but ultimately training isn't

everything and at the end of the day you got to put the work in and if you really want to be successful in sales especially early on you have got to put the work in and so few people are willing to put that work in yeah yeah okay so that's how you started it wasn't an easy start and you went through some period of not very long but some period of time as an inside salesperson and then you got your chance to go international and basically our thought was we've got you know a very strong person here who is doing well and inside sales are well enough. And we trust them just to plop them down in another country and do the same thing. Right.

Right. Without anyone looking over your shoulder. Correct. So it wasn't like anything from my perspective that was weird. It was like instead of really sitting here and calling, you know, Missouri, and be sitting there and calling, you know, Australia. Correct. Exactly right.

And it worked out. It did work out. Yeah. You did. Didn't you have one like $5 time when you put $5? Don't know something you want a thousand dollars yes Alan Gant and I were he came down for a sales meeting We had to go see you really did we really had to go see a customer and my now my wife he was my girlfriend at the time came down to visit And you know I was 22 living in a foreign country I had a little bit of money but not a lot of money and I was trying to save

And Alan and Alan loved to gamble. He loved to go play roulette. Yeah, and so we went across the street to the Crown Casino I said now and put five on 13 I'm gonna I'm gonna go use a restaurant we back in a minute and that's I had said it's like five dollars that's all I was going to play and what do you know it hit while I was gone yeah when Shannon came and visited a couple weeks later we had a great time thanks to that five dollars yeah it was a lot of fun a lot of fun like 30 to one 35 to one yeah not not that I've ever played right exactly um okay so after Australia what happened so I came back to the US yeah ran our inside sales team one of our inside sales teams at the time that was the West team and then got the opportunity

to run the West and the Midwest with basically me having the left-hand side of the country and Michael Pace had the other side of the country who's been on this show and has a great, been a great mentor to me as well. Did that for quite some time and then got the opportunity to go into corporate sales or outside sales and gosh, did that for two or three years before the N4 acquisition. Had a lot of fun in that outside sales role. Yeah. I had some of that fun with you.

You did. We had a lot of fun together. We had Texas, right? All in Texas? Most of Texas. Most of Texas. And I mean, you know, when he got a big deal browing after lots and lots of work, I would show up, you know, just for, you know, the dinner, you know, take the guys out to dinner or whatever. But I know, was it American Airlines?

We did American Airlines there. We did Continental Airlines there. We did Dell computers there in Texas. So, so American, I mean, literally, just crazy. These guys from Greenville, you know, these nubes from. Noobes from what six years ago he was a noob he's taken me to meet the CIO of American Airlines and the COO that would have been 2004 or five so I would have been how would I been 27 at the time 20th That's crazy yeah so anyway the point the point for me for the noob starting out is you know once you're down this path

You know if you apply yourself when you work hard and you're bringing value to a big company like American if you identify you know, where they need your software and how it's going to help them, they don't care how old you are. They don't. That's exactly right. And I don't think I ever really brought, like personally, Reed Wilson ever brought a lot of value in those organizations. The one thing I did was listen to what do you need. And I think I was pretty good at marshalling the right resources at Datastream,

guys like Nelson Pinochet, Johnny Bophilios, Marty Osborne, guys who are way 50 times smarter than I'll ever be, brought those folks to the table. So I didn't have to be the expert. And I think, you know, a lot of nobs make the mistake. They talk too much, and they think they have to know it all. Right. And that's not the case.

You just have to be really good at listening, understanding what the core issue is. You don't have to be the guy or the gal that solves that problem. You just got to bring the right people in the room. That's a great point. But again, 27 years old, and I'm a witness. I was there with him. American Airlines, CIO, CFO,

talking to us about, you know, what their maintenance problems are globally. Absolutely. And he closed them and the Continental and some others, but my favorite is Dell. That was a fun one. Dell computers. At the time, Dell, you know, they're still a great company, but they were particularly a hot company at that time. And Reed figured it all out. I mean, that they had seven big production facilities.

And they had to pick software to, you know, provide maintenance software for all of them. Correct. And I mean, it was a monster deal, a multi-million dollar deal. And plus just the panache of having Dell. Absolutely. And so I'm out there for the closing, the closing. I was afraid you were going to tell this. Yeah, the closing demo or whatever.

It was like, this is the last. They're going to look at us and look at the other guys, going to make a decision. I mean, I was so nervous. I went and did yoga that morning. Like no other appointments, no phone just said, did my yoga, put my client. out there. So I'm ready to go, you know, getting the taxi or whatever to go out there to

deal with, with Reid. He comes down. I'm wearing my best clothes, like a jacket, you know, gray pants. He's wearing, it looks like he's selling something on TV or whatever. It's like a polka dot sweater. It was Argyll. Thank you very much. It was Argyle. Argyle board sweater. I'm like, what are you doing with that sweater? And I think he said, don't worry about it. We got this one. Right. Right. Well, it takes a lot of confidence. You're showing a lot of confidence if you show up to that meeting with the Argyls. Yeah, and he just crushed it. So anyway, it was funny. I don't know if you're, I think I've told you the story, but we flew back and we did the demo. Everything went great. And the gentleman who was responsible for awarding, have I ever talked to this

story? Oh, what? He was responsible for awarding the contract. We land and he leaves, he left me a voicemail, and it sounded really bad. He was like, read, call me when you can. It's like, great, we lost this deal. And I remember I was walking down the, you know, the gateway area there at Greenville, Spartanburg, and I called him and he said, hey, you know, I just want to let you know that we've made a decision. And ultimately, we've decided that anybody that's confident enough to wear an Argyle sweater to a meeting that size deserves to win our business. So it worked out. He worked out in our favor. Nice. Well, yeah, you need to take that, do whatever you want with it, okay?

I'm not recommending the Argyll sweater, but it works for real. for me, right. So let's go forward. We know that, you know, we eventually sold the company and a lot of us left. And you started a company. And what year was that? That would have been 2007. 2007. 14 years ago. So that's 14 years ago. So tell us about that company. Yeah, so today I'm the CEO of Palmetta Technology Group. We're what's called a managed service provider. We're based here in Greenville, all of our staffs here in Greenville, but we support companies really around the globe. And so you would work with us if you don't want to have an IT staff or you want us to supplement your IT staff. And we've been on the best places to work in South Carolina, 10 years in a row, always in the top 10.

Inc. 5,000, fastest growing companies. Got a lot of great people working, a lot of great people doing some cool stuff there. Yeah. So known as PTG, right? Correct, correct. And isn't it for people that are Microsoft-centric? Yeah, so we're really more. of what we would call a pure play Microsoft partners.

So if you're trying to get your servers out of your server closet, get them up into the cloud, into Azure. We really don't do anything in the Linux or Amazon space. We're really more of a pure play Microsoft partner. Four gold competencies, too silver. Nobody cares about that. But really deep hooks. Been Microsoft regional partner in a year, a couple years.

So really deep hooks into that Microsoft ecosystem. That's great. That's awesome. Well, congratulations. That's 14 years to that company. And I've worked with a company. with a company and been a customer and you all do a great job and there's nothing like getting your servers out of the closet I can tell you that's a good thing yeah I'm telling you I hated having

my own servers and having people twiging with them and all that stuff so that's cool and so again this is just part of the story for the nobs is you you you know prepared yourself as a leader I would say the citadel and kind of communicating speaking with your English degree and decided to go in sales because you wanted kind of a business career. Correct. And that's the good place to start. Yep. But you wanted to do things beyond sales.

You obviously want to have your own business. 100%. Yeah. So everything before that was kind of in preparation. Yeah. And I think selling gives you the opportunity to see all facets of the business. Yeah. You see accounting, whether you want to or not, right, to get your deal done.

Yeah. You see finance. You see support. You see service delivery. You see marketing. And ultimately nothing happens inside a business until somebody sells something, right? And so I think a career in sales, regardless of where you want to end up, is a great launching pad to really attune yourself and get tuned in to really all the different aspects and facets of a business. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I agree. So if you want to go into business, it's a great place to start. And heck who knows you might like it. I mean, we both have friends that decide they don't want anything to do with managing. They won't just have a number and make a lot of money and be left alone. Well, that's cool. That's cool. Well, and I would say, if I can just add one more thing to that.

I mean, I think selling in and of itself teaches you how to lead people. And you're always, even if you get out of a sales role, if you're in a leadership role, you're selling no matter what, right? And so the skills you can learn early on as to how to be effective at that, how to show integrity in that, how to get people to follow you well, I don't think you learn those skills as well in any other role. I think sales is just a great learning ground for that. I agree. I agree. Is there anything in your path to where you are now that you would have done differently

or maybe you'd say, hey, watch out for this or that to the noops? Oh, there's a lot I would say. maybe there's two big things, I would say. One is don't get lazy. And especially when you start rolling, when you really start getting deals in, I remember you probably don't recall this, but we were in a large sales meeting.

And you called me out in front of everybody, probably 200 salespeople in there. And I had a very large deal that I was counting on closing that fiscal, and it slipped about about three days. And we got in the next fiscal. And I got lazy because I knew that deal was going to close, But I ultimately ended up not hitting my number that year because I was counting on that deal to close in that fiscal and it didn't happen.

So, you know, we're all guilty of sandbagging in sales. There's no doubt about that at all. But I would say really good learning how to manage your pipeline well early in your sales career is really, really important. Yeah. And then the second one, you know, Sotje and Adele at Microsoft said, you know, we don't want to be a bunch of know-it-all. we want to be learned-a-a-a-a-s. And I think if you really want to kick ass in sales, you've got to learn.

You've got to learn your product. You've got to learn your, now you don't need to throw that up on your customers all the time. And that's the mistake a lot of nubs make is, let me tell you all the things that we can do. But, you know, a lot of the things that I did early on that I should have done, excuse me, things that I shouldn't have done is rely too heavily

on the product experts to really understand the product. And I learned later that, the more you know about the product, the better off you're going to be in that sales call. Yeah. Great point. And I'll tell you, you know, it's a double-edged sword because part of me wants to tell the news, don't wait until you know everything to go ahead and sell it, bring in the experts. And I probably did that for 25 years. You know, I mean, I just, I would always bring the help in and never, and I've said this before, I think you should aim to where you really, you understand the, problem. You can diagnose it, you can solve it. You know, so I totally agree with you. That's where

you ought to be aiming. So, but you can start by just bringing in people. Yeah, definitely. And, but I think making sure that you've got good qualification skills. I mean, I remember, especially in a technical cell, right, if you brought in people too early and you hadn't really qualified that prospect, you might lose access to some of those technical resources because they say, hey, I don't know if I want to go on that sales call with Reed. I don't know if that's really, really, really a deal. So I would say if I'm a nub, I would make sure that you're thinking through is this a qualified deal before I just start bringing people in. Yeah. Is there anything else whether you can think of you want to pass on to the news? I mean, again, to me it just comes back

to learning. And that was one thing I think we did a really good job at at Datastream is sharing ideas with one another. We were always going through some sort of training. It seemed like and fine-tuning our craft. And look, even today, I mean, I'm 44 years old, running an organization. I go to training. I still go to sales training every single week. And there was a time of my life when I didn't do that.

And frankly, I lost out. Like, I missed out on some opportunities. So I would say the thing that I would add would be just because you're a noob doesn't mean that at some point you get to stop learning, right? you've always got to be fine-tuning your craft, always. I agree. It should be a steady stream the rest of your life.

Absolutely. Yeah, in everything that you're interested in, I would say. 100%. So, Reed, what's your favorite word? Favorite word? Hmm. I would say my favorite word, I probably can't use the words that I use most frequently. But my favorite word, I think, is discipline.

I mean, if you follow jaco. at all, you know, discipline equals freedom. I really think that's true. We have a saying internally, I'm sure we stole it from somebody that slow is smooth and smooth as fast. And really that comes down to discipline. And to be successful in sales, it's really not that hard. It's just getting a couple of key habits and attributes down, things you mentioned in the book, right? And then being disciplined on those and carrying those through. It is not that hard. And to be successful, you just, you just, You just got to have a ton of discipline and outwork the other folks. And most people, guess what, they just quit way too soon.

So that's probably my favorite word. Discipline, I love it. Well, you're nice to take a little time off this afternoon. Happy to be here. I've always been one of my favorites. So thanks for being on the show. Congratulations to your success. Well, I owe a ton of it to you, and thanks for the opportunity, John.

I'm glad you're not a lawyer. Me too. Amen. Thank you, buddy. Appreciate it. All right.