Noob School - Episode 30: Selling Runs in the Family with Jack Sterling

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Jack is a very special guest. He means the world to John. They share a lot in common, including a last name—probably because Jack is John's oldest son! Jack's also a salesman, though he got a pretty late start after graduating with a history degree, then joining the Navy to become a SEAL. Now, Jack runs his own security company. Guess what's helped him become successful in this venture? That's right—selling skills! This is a fantastic episodes for any Noobs who aren't convinced of their current career path! Follow John on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/johnsterling_ Facebook: facebook.com/johnsterlingsales Twitter: twitter.com/johnsterling_ TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnsterling_

All right, well, welcome back to Noob School. Noob School is where we find great salespeople and business folks that started in sales, and we back them, we back them back to when they got started. And we try to learn from them what they do well, what helped them, what didn't they do well. Today I have, when I say I have a very special guest, today, I really mean it. This is my oldest son, Jack, who is with me today. and Jack, I don't need my notes really to describe Jack, but he went to Rhodes College in Memphis, and he majored in history, and he was a very fine, fine young man, fine young man to raise.

And when he was graduating from Rhodes after this very, I would say, expensive history degree, he says to me, I'm like, what are you going to do? And he goes, well, I think I'm going to enlist in the Navy and become a seal. I'm like, really. You know, we could have maybe planned this a little bit better, but nonetheless, that's exactly what he did. He went through the process, and he, of course, made it, and it was a seal for almost 10 years. And then when he got out, and we were to talk a little bit more about that later, and one of the causes he promotes here locally in Greenville.

But when he got out, that's when he went into this role of salesperson. So he kind of had almost a 10-year, what do you call that, handicap, not a head start. Yeah, handicap. Handicap. So he started, you know, at, let's say, age 30 as a salesperson versus, like most of you, age 21 or age 22. So we'll talk about that and what he's learned. It's 33. 33.

33 was the age when I started, yeah. Well, don't. Yeah. I like to make numbers up. The little things. Just make the syllabus. So anyway, Jack, thanks for being here today. We appreciate it.

It's great to be here. And thanks for bringing, if you hear any noises, his service dog echoes back here, lapping up some water, maybe doing some yelping later. Might even see. It's all part of the package. That's right. Yeah. So talk to us just a little bit about getting out of college in all seriousness and decided to join the Navy

and that process taking you up until when we started in sales, which was say, age 33. First of all, can we curse on this podcast or is this a family-friendly podcast? I should have asked me. You can't curse. Okay. So I had what's called an oh shit moment when I was maybe 19, sitting in a corporate law office. My entire life, I thought I liked history. I could go to law school, become a lawyer, opening a shut case.

So you were in a corporate law office doing an internship? Yeah, internship at Floor Daniel. Fantastic law office. Loved the law aspect of it. But I was miserable. I had, you know, probably akin to a midlife crime. realizing I don't know what I want to do. Yeah.

And this is not it. I need to get out. Missed being on a team and I missed being outside, working hard. And your teams previously would have been basketball team. Primarily basketball, but any team, didn't really matter. Whatever it was, the team environment, locker room, practice, traveling for trips, wins, losses, all of that. You're battling with your team. And that was something that I'm missing.

The college didn't, you know, play the interreal sports. Didn't really have that kind of focused or controlled environment. And I missed that. And those two combinations of, you know, factors, the missing the teams and wanting to be outside and doing them hard, not sitting, you know, behind a desk in any capacity, let me to the SEAL teams. Buzz warning order, a challenge, laying down anybody that's interested. If you're like-minded, come get a taste.

And that was what set that emotion in my brain. It took about three years from that first spark to actually walking into the Elliceman office. You know, I think I'd do like 10 push-ups at the time and no pull-ups. So for the, you were, we were right to be chagranged at my, well, I remember watching you practice swim. And I was like, I might even go there and get him. Yeah. I mean, because you were going so long. It was long.

Yeah, I was a skinny fat college kid. I was not really doing anything productive other than, you know, drinking beer and making, uh, okay, adequate grades. Yeah. And so it was, you know, it hit me like a ton of breaks. Like I'm kind of on a, you know, I'm coasting toward something. So radically altered course. spent 10 years, almost 10 years, both as a seal team operator and then as an instructor for other team guys going through training, primarily in communication. So that was kind of the crossover from what I was doing then to what I'm doing now, helping people communicate.

It used to be a seal platoon. Now it's businesses in the area. So just so they understand that the story, after almost nine or ten years, that's a normal time for a seal to either get out or stay until 20. Yeah, if you do 20, you get to retire, you know, with the pension. And so that's kind of the last, you know, the last stop. Yeah. If you get out after 10 years, you know, 10, 12, 13, 15 years, it's kind of silly. You know, you just, you know, make it the last couple years.

I had two kids by that point, and I was really not enjoying deploying and traveling as much as you did in Steel Teams with children. You know, you get to know your young kids through Skype is kind of painful. So that was my big why. I decided to make the jump after about nine years. Those two grandchildren. Those two. And you were gone, as I recall, like 80-something percent of the time? That's, give or take, 60 to 80 percent of the time, when a given year, you're traveling.

A lot of domestic travel, a lot of international travel, plus long deployment. I will say his children are well above average. They're okay. They're pretty good. We're pretty lucky. They're pretty good. So, I think the other reason is because I don't think you're hurt that much, your body's not hurt, but I mean, it wears you out, right?

It does. It does. It takes a toll. You can kind of see, you see almost everybody that makes it to 20 is just a walking wreck. Yeah. It's kind of like an NFL athlete or something like that or someone coming off the good iron after a career. Your bodies are messed up. You're putting your body through a lot. I was starting to see, especially with my head, just kind of repetitive, concussive trauma having to take it as toll.

So like you said, I walk around look pretty healthy. But there's plenty of damage there. Well, good. Well, I think you made a good decision to go in and to get out when you did. And, of course, everyone appreciates that. That's not an easy. You did not take the easy route. No.

You no longer smell like hops and bong resin. Well, yeah. Well, forget it. Forget that I brought that up. Well, not hops anyway. Moving on. Okay. Okay.

All right. So, so then, you know, I know that you came to Greenville, you're living in San Diego all that time, moved the family to Greenville, and you had to figure out what you're going to do with yourself. So talk us through that process and how you ended up with your own business and Clemson, the whole, that whole thing. Yeah. So Clemson was a huge part of it. I had moved out of Greenville in 2004, moved to Memphis, and then to San Diego. both great cities and loved Greenville. But it really, when I left in 2004,

it wasn't the kind of place where you wanted to come back and raise a family. There was great community, but there's a lot of things about the city that were just not that appealing. If you were picking Greenville, independent of where your family was, it was not a place that would jump off the map to most people.

But over the course of that 15 or so years where I wasn't living here, every time I came back and got a little snapshot, it was like something changed, always in the positive. There's very rarely, that's gross that used to be there before. It's always a positive change. And so that cumulative effect, you know, kind of coming back and really checking, you know, kicking the tires on Greenville, it was almost overwhelming. It was incredible how much the city had changed.

And not to mention the great business community, great, you know, social community. And then the natural environment being in the middle of where we are, I missed being around seasons in San Diego. San Diego's endless summer. So, but the kind of the final push over the hump was, was Clemson's NBA program being rehoused downtown Greenville. Oh, that's huge. Okay. You know, the idea of going to business school, you know, once or twice a week down in Clemson

is a long drive. So having that really nice new building downtown made a huge difference. Enrolled in Clemson's MBA program, worked on some analytics in addition to the normal business curriculum. Yeah. Great program, finished that last year. And, but before I, you know, was accepted. and had about six months to wait before the program started, was not employed, needed to figure out

something to do. Leaving the military, you have a lot of time to think about what you want to do with your life, you know, when you grow up, quotes. And I wanted to try entrepreneurship. I'd worked for the biggest bureaucracy in the world, the Department of Defense, and I wanted to track kind of the other end of the spectrum, you know, solar operator. Just try that, see how it feels. It would allow me to be any of my kids, pursue education on my own time. Fortunately, the GII bill was putting that bill so I could afford to go to school and start my own thing. And so, you know, we started together in your office, just dumping it out, you know, dumping my life on the table, putting it on the whiteboard and just starting to kind of pick through,

you know, what was there. Yeah. See what made sense. Yeah. And there was around the same time, maybe a year or two before this all transpired, scan source, bought a company called Intellisus and sold telecommunication services. And the advice that I got and you got and we heard was just go to set up. sell circuits. So you figure out what you're good at. Easy's falling off a truck. Okay. I didn't know

what a circuit was. What is the circuit? You know, I thought circuit city, you know, something to do with computers, electronics. It's an internet or a phone line. That's what the industry refers to stuff. Somebody wants to turn up a line. If you want to open a new restaurant or if you want to open a new branch of your bank or something like that, you've got to turn up a circuit. Circuit connects you to the internet. And that's what we were trying to sell. It took me about a year and a half to really fully digest that and internalize what we were trying to do. But that was what we started doing, called it Cloud Hound. I didn't have the dog at that point, but now we have the hound for Cloud Hound.

And we started selling circuits and it was originally all direct prospecting. Didn't really start with a list. Didn't even know we were selling for that matter. It was kind of, you know, start, you know, build the rocket ship once has left the launch pad kind of thing. But we started making some sales, you know, some little sales here. in there. My biggest thing getting out was I wanted to help people. I didn't know who or how. But I felt like, you know, serving in the military is helping others. You're doing something so someone else doesn't have to. And that's helping people. Yeah. So let me just stop for a second. So just for the noobs, he got out of the military. He's got the GI Bill, which pays for your

education. And he got an MBA at Clemson. So he learned, kind of learned business. And I think with SEALs, they did that with you all the time. It's one of the reasons you traveled all the time is you were getting these certifications in different skills. So it was very natural for you to say, I better learn business. Same with learning sales, right? I mean, you need to get certified in all these things or understand them. So you did that, and then you found an opportunity with Cloudhound and with ScanSource

where you could leverage that communications background you have with the SEALs and the data analytics with Clemson to help people. Yep. Okay. So tell them about what it's like going out and making those first sales calls. It's scary. Okay. And I'd be lying if I said it wasn't scary.

And I've talked about this with our sales trainer before, the guy that we worked with Walker McKay, it's kind of scary. And so it's someone that's jumped out of an airplane and been shot at before. It's the same. It feels the same. Yeah. It's okay to acknowledge that it's kind of scary. You got a little butterflies.

You're calling, you know, the big. call or you're calling somebody that's kind of daunting and a big whale client or prospect is scary. It's pretty simple. Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess the message there is it is scary. It's scary for anyone, particularly when you're starting out and it's new, but you just do it anyway. Do it anyway. Get your reps in. Scary stuff shouldn't be a reason to not do it. Yeah. It just is letting you know that it's, you know, you care about it, right? You know, you're scared of feeling out of a plane because you

care about yourself. You don't want to die. Yeah. Same thing. If you're making a phone call, you don't want to look silly. You don't want to, you know, have them tell you to, you know, never call you again. I mean, it's, it's, it's, there are similarities there, even though the, the, the context is different. One of the things I know we did, because we've talked about this obviously before is, you know, if a new, went to work for a big company with lots of sales training on, that's a pretty good way to start. You didn't start that way. You had to start kind of learning much more of it on your own. And we did have some sales training with Walker and others.

But one thing that Jack did consistently was he would do a little bit of prospecting every day. You know, one or two a day he would call and say, hey, I'm Jack. I want to meet you. Right. I want to meet you. Yeah. See if there's anything I can do to help you with your cybersecurity or whatever. And, you know, you get some yeses.

Yeah. We actually had a really good rate of yeses on those first calls. I mean, I was targeting people that were business owners, the CEO of the leadership. I was going as high up the food chain as I can per. per your advice really getting a good hit rate getting getting coffees getting meeting with their office you know going and get connecting with these key leaders and then what i was asking for was introduction to their IT leader and that was where things really started to unravel that was i was talking to a non-it

person who was perceiving me as an IT person introducing me to their IT person and just getting shut down really high rate of shut you know just dead end dead end so um that was that was how we started you know going to market was was just kind of like not really know when we were we were doing they would give you that was getting the introduction yeah their brush off was charlie handles it yeah charlie you know if we need something charl he'll know about it and he'll get it from you yeah that was kind of the answer and they could they could feel good about that they didn't say no um and i felt great about it because it was what i wanted and it really didn't go anywhere for you know 18 months we were doing that dance so what what changed we had a i say we had a

moment um sitting in a in a local IT services company in their office they had about twice as much desk capacities they needed. They just moved into a new space and they were gracious enough to let me desks are there, you know, half a day a week, full day a week. And I overheard a conversation. One of the guys that I sat near was just upset with, you know, one of the local telecommunications providers and I kind of took note, closed my laptop and when he was done with his call, I asked him, well, you know, what's up? And he told me, he said, these, you know, they want to, they cheat us. When our clients need help with the, with the internet circuit or a phone circuit, we call and they they try and poach the business from us like clockwork and so i said you know what you can just

call me instead and realize that as they like oh that's great that'd be good that'd be nice for us you'll be a benefit or a value ad for for those account managers at this IT company to not have to call AT&T or spectrum or windstream or whoever else anymore because nobody likes making that phone call okay that was my light bulb moment that instead of me trying to chase down conversation with the leader and get to the IT manager and then run into a brick wall of trust I can go to these IT companies and they are the idea are Charlie for all of their clients and so if they trust me That's like a you know multiplier but how many number of customers they have and so that's been our strategy since then was We look for partnerships like those IT companies similarly you know commercial real estate companies

Their clients or prospects need what we have and so therefore our value pitch to this will do this thing for you We'll do the legwork for free that way we get a chance to get these inbound referrals and and close them. So it goes from me climbing uphill trying to get over the hump with Charlie to Charlie trust me already. Charlie's got a hundred clients that all come to him and he's got limited amounts of time in the day to call AT&T and get quotes and do that whole dance. And so that's what we do. Now Charlie really likes me. So you found success. You found a way, which was people that are already selling these companies, IT services, they don't sell telecom or cloud service, and you're just tagging on with them.

Yeah, and oftentimes it's kind of, I use the Bruce Lee approach of mine like water. If an IT services company offers, you know, telephones, I don't sell cell phones to their customers. That's not what they're asking me for. I'll sell just whatever they ask for. So if someone needs COD services, we can give them to it. If they need phone or internet service, we can do that.

Cybersecurity, same thing. But I honor that relationship first and foremost, because that's the referral source. They're sending me inbound warm leads on a regular basis. you know if it's if it means i lose one less you want one less new customer so be it so it's it's a good symbiotic relationship and it's always the relationship's more important than any one customer opportunity that's great well you found a way i'm not surprised you found a way to make it work um so so we're talking about cloudhound right now if anybody's watching what are the couple

of things that they could think about that maybe their company has that they might need your help with. They're not all going to need your help, but some might. Chances are, if chances are someone needing our help on a given day is about one and a thousand, right? Typical telecom contracts on a three-year cycle. So the odds of someone today or whoever, when they watch this video, or when I call them out of the blue,

about one of the thousand that they actually want or need to talk to us right then. So the time when someone would want to talk to us would be if they need to move at or change a circuit, right? Move to a new location. Internet and phone needs to be turned up. to be turned up. It's a task on the list when you move. Okay. Opening up a new branch or just want to change providers altogether. So you're sick of X telecom company. You want to see if there's a better, cheaper, faster option out there.

We'll give you the, you know, current industry standards to see what's out there. Just give you a check. So the easy one, if someone's moving a circuit. It's moving when you turn one up, you know, anything like that at the time they might talk to you. Or I know you're doing the cybersecurity training also and you have a very very small product they can use a fishing product? We found, yes, so we work with Hook Security locally. They're a psychological security as a service company, meaning that they offer psychological security training on an ongoing basis.

We use their product to conduct regular social engineering training for our clients. That means we make their users more aware of the threats that are out there and we test them in a blind fashion so they don't know when the test are happening to see how they do. So if you get an email that says,

hey, this is Frank from IT, I need your password and username to update your account. That's not Frank. It's probably not Frank. If you have a question about it, call Frank and see what's going on. But the reason for that is every single company we've talked to on any capacity, telecom, whatever, even some of your customers that I understand, I ask about cybersecurity. It's very top of mind. It's not going away. The threat is growing and evolving and changing on a daily basis. And it's the first thing that really resonated.

with me coming out of the military is the conflict between the world of these bad actors in cyber and enterprise is like a, it's very much a battlefield. It is not that far apart. In many it's the same thing. So, you know, coming from a world where I'm studying the bad guys, learning how to defeat them, it's not that far apart. It really wasn't a big jump to go from what I was doing previously to thinking through, you know, how to reduce the threat to a business. So I would say if somebody has a business that wants maybe a cybersecurity assessment or just to talk to you about it, did that be a good person to talk to? That'd be great. And they could reach you cloudhound.us.

Is that right? And really, if anyone wants to just have a technology conversation, you know, it doesn't cost you anything to talk to us. And we're happy to do it. Okay. All right. Just a few more questions. What's your favorite word? Patience.

I thought it was a tad. Favorite person. So patience. Patience. I mean, like I said, it took me three years from deciding to actually acting on the seal thing. It wasn't for lack of, you know, could. I wanted to finish college first. That's why I did it.

Thanks, by the way. But, you know, patience. I mean, you know, it takes anything worth, worth it, it takes a little time, this effort. It's not going to happen right away. We're in a place now in year four of this business where it's just kind of starting to pay off and show results. you know, the flywheels are starting to kind of turn a little bit. So, but if I had given up after year two or even year three, you know,

pandemic could have come like, well, shut it in. You know, I'll go find a job working for someone else. I didn't want to do that. And so I knew where I wanted to go. I knew that we had seen results start. They were small and takes kind of a long time for them to start paying off. But they start to accumulate and then people start understanding what you're doing. And you start finding more partners.

And as I get better telling the story, people start to understand it better. and then they start knowing how to use us better. And it just starts to kind of pick up steam. I've always like it to prospecting for oil. You don't expect to turn, you know, the pipeline start turning out crude oil on day one or even year one, right? You kind of have a three or five year plan to go prospect and find and drill and cap and then, you know, transport and produce. You got all these different pieces to it to finally, you know, be able to sell a barrel of oil at the end of that. Yeah. So we're kind of at that point right now where we found some, we found some wells.

I know how hard you worked on it. I'm glad you were patient enough to stick with it. It's wonderful. So that's great. So we'll switch gears. So one of the things I know you've done outside of work is work with some great local business folks on the effort to recruit other seals to move to Greenville. And I think that's called the Seal Future Foundation. And you guys are running the Greenville division of that.

Correct. Bob Greenville. Okay. So I'll just tell my version of it, but you know, when Jack was in the Seals, we were talking, he went through a couple of different programs. We were talking about the fact that when seals get out of the service and this is a tough job they have, they typically either stay in San Diego because that's what they were or Virginia Beach, only two really two main seal bases, or maybe they go home. But there wasn't any place that said, hey, look over here. We want to make our own place here for you guys to come that's, you know, in the south and it's mainly warm and it's near the mountains and the beach. And a lot of people want you here

because that's not the case everywhere, unfortunately, right? There's cities in America that wouldn't be real excited about. I wouldn't say it would be real excited. I would say that the, those big markets were already saturated. There's, you know, a couple dozen seals living there. They know who each other are. They're connected. And so it wasn't that they were, they were not welcome. It was that Greenville had a chance to really light up on the map as the first kind of small market in the country that says, hey, we want to actively recruit, you know, SEALs, such and Fortune's guys, guys coming out of the soft community, guys and gals, to, you know, the image I always think about is kind of the, you know, bridge over, you know, you've got to make a bridge across a, you know, river crossing. Someone's got to swim across with a rope and set up on the other side for other people to kind of come behind, make it easier for everybody else. And so we kind of model ourselves after that.

The Steel Future Foundation works on a FOB model, meaning each city or county has their own little FOB. So FOB Greenville supports all the, you know, FAB. FAB, forward operating base. Four. It's a jargon turn. Sorry. Okay.

But there's about a dozen of us locally. We have civilian leadership as well. Phil Walpole has been a fantastic partner in this endeavor. His energy and networking skills are through the roof. Yeah. But we've put together an annual shooting event down in the sawmill in Lawrence County. So this, you've been doing something like this for six years, but the current thing is sawmill. Sawmill, April 23rd.

Last year we had 100 guests, but more than a dozen seals came out, and it's a great day of fun on the range. Yeah. So I remember you get to shoot a 50-calibur sniper rifle for a one-mile target. At a mile, yeah. That's pretty cool. You get to, at least I don't know it was every year, but last year they had a Black Hawk helicopter and people were riding around in shooting things. That's correct. There's other other guns and then do it. I think, I remember that I think Mr. Bauer and I won the house cleaning, clearing, not cleaning, clearing. Two years ago, you were the, you were the champ. Not just to clear the house, but the whole day.

You guys were the one top, top shooting pair. It was very impressive. Yeah. So it is a great fun day. What we found, what I've found as a supporter is that it's the best way to get to know the Seals. We used to, y'all used to have them come to Greenville and like get on stage and give a little talk and, you know, it was really dumb. Fish out of water. I know. You know, that was the man going across the river with the rope.

Yeah, trying to figure out. Yeah, figure out what works. And, you know, Greenville's really, we're leading the country right now in terms of fundraising for the Seal Feal Foundation. Awesome. Just can't put enough of things together. We're getting more interested in we can provide services for us. So it's a great, great thing. I'm making sure to put it out to my network as well.

And, you know, I'm hearing about it from people that I've never met before, seals and otherwise. And so a couple things I think our listeners can do if they're interested. One that will go to where, what website, check this out? You're quizzing me on something that I don't know off the top of my head. I said if you Google the Seal Future Foundation, it'll take you to the page. The Greenville event? The Greenville event is listed on the main website. Okay, so SealFutureFoundation.com or dot work.

The CelfureureFoundation slash events.com or something along those lines. You can find it on that. You can contact me if you can't find it. I'll share it with you. And if you have jobs and you'd like to hire seals that are getting out, you can funnel us directly to me or to Jack. You can get him at cloudhound. You, at us. us and you've got, I think you've got my information. So anyone, if you say, hey, I'd like to

have someone do such and such where I've got these positions open. We'll move it around the community. Yeah, it's great. We're happy to do that. And on the flip side, we get guys that are considering or already committed to moving to Green Bowl that are looking for jobs. So it's a really nice way to help, continue to stay and engage with the community that I love. and the people that I really enjoy working with. Good. We're glad you're back in Greenville for many reasons. That's just one of them, but that's a really good cause.

And anyone thinking about going to the sawmill, that's a really great event. So thank you for being here. We appreciate you. It's good to be here. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Hey, is John here. Thanks for listening today. Please check out noobschool.org. That's my website. That's where we have other videos and content that can help you get started in sales.