Noob School - Episode 8: John Harrison

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

John Sterling sits down with another Datastream alum, John Harrison. Soon after graduating college, John Harrison found himself in the same position a lot of Noobs find themselves in: stuck with a low-paying job and a pretty much useless degree. Through his network, he found an opportunity to change his life as a salesman. The rest is history! Follow John on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/johnsterling_ Facebook: facebook.com/johnsterlingsales Twitter: twitter.com/johnsterling_ TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnsterling_

Well, welcome back to Noob School. This week, I've got one of my all-time favorites, another wonderful Citadel grad and baseball player, Mr. John Harrison. Welcome, John. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's start with the basics.

How did you and why did you decide to get into sales? Good, good question, hard one to answer. I was teaching school, as you know, right out of college. college and was a grad assistant at the Citadel for a little while and really enjoyed it. So teaching is something I think has helped me in my career. But when I was applying for jobs, when Brantley and I moved back to Greenville, a couple of guys that you'll probably have on here at some point, Hillman and Corey, those guys said, hey, you need to talk to John Sterling at Datastream.

They're doing some great things, just went public. It's a great opportunity, and you'd be great at it. So that was really what led me to the opportunity. And then I had family members. My aunt was a longtime VP at Builder Marks of America, who, you know, she's the one who encouraged me and said, you know, what your degrees in doesn't matter. You can do whatever you want to do.

So what was it in? It was in health and exercise science. Okay, health, okay. And so I've never made a dime off of that, but I use it every day. Well, you're healthy, yeah. So I try to use it in other ways. But that's what led me to interviewing with Datastream. And we had, I felt like there was a chemistry there with you and some others that I met and exciting time.

Yeah. At Datastream. I mean, it's, you know, my whole career has been trying to find that. same level of fun. Yeah. And so that's what got me into it. Yeah. So in this case, it was networking or influence from some of your friends that kind of

said, hey, we're at a cool place. You ought to come try to get in here. Yeah. Okay. So a lesson there maybe to the noobs would be find those people a couple years older than you that are doing really good, see what they did. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I mean, a lesson from that is, one, don't put yourself in a box from, you know, whatever it is you majored in. Because you might learn halfway through that that's not really what you want to do. But if you're talented and you have the ability to interact with other people and kind of the, I've heard it called the gift of gab, then you can be taught principles that apply to that and help you be a successful salesperson. And the reality is whether you're a salesperson or not, you still have to learn how to sell yourself no matter what you do. Yeah. So good, good, good, good, good, good. And I think I know the answer to this, but what other paths were you considering?

Was it, was it coaching baseball? It was actually, it was the head coaching job at a local high school. school and I'd been offered the job and was on my way to accepting that. So I would have been coaching basketball here actually against my high school, one of my high school rivals. Really? And you had to call the principal? I had to, well, I had a former coach that I was very close with that it kind of lined me up with the opportunity. But he understood. And it was I think the people that were involved there were like, you know, you've got to explore other things. You're early in your career.

You can always come back to this. I'm glad that worked out. That worked out well. It certainly worked out well for us. Well, tell us a little bit about, we know you started when you were 21, just like everybody else, right? And we'll start a little bit with your success when we work together. So how long was that? How many years did we work together?

So I started in 95, June 5th of 95 to be exact, and then we worked all the way through until we sold to end for it. 2006. So 11 years? 11, yeah, just shop 12, yep. Well, I'll say this. I know you started in inside sales. I did. Yeah, like everyone else, and probably all the people watching, that's their first job will be some kind of inside sales job.

And you progressed to go straight to outside sales or manager? So I went, I was in inside sales for the remainder of 95 and then all of 96. And then at the end of that year was offered, that was when we were moving people to the outside and setting up those pods where we would have inside people paired with an outside guy. And that was when I moved to the outside role covering. Texas and I had a part of Louisiana yeah and then almost moved to Texas which is another story and kind of remember yeah I didn't really make the decision on that one as you know and then and then that's when I moved into the role with MP5 which became obviously became data stream 7 yeah yeah interesting well I'll say this you

would never bring it up but John started you know at age 21 a nob like everybody else. And when he started, the company, the revenues with the company were around $10 million a year. Maybe 12, I don't know, but around 10. Before John had left Datastream as a sales rep, he had done a $10 million dollar deal. That's true, yeah. You did a deal. The whole county of Miami, Miami-Dade County, the whole damn thing.

It was more than the revenues from when you started. Which is crazy. It's crazy. Now, how did you do that? Tell the group, this is important that we slow this down because I never could have seen this when I was 21 or 25 even. How do you do, how do you get the whole county of Miami to give you $10 million, which is now probably turned into $25 million to do the software for the whole county?

Well, I think I would like to say that it was some vision. that I had but but I remember how I ended up in that role you know we had a small MP2 implementation within the seaport mm-hmm or in transit actually and there was like buses and stuff it was it wasn't really you know our software at that time wasn't equipped to handle buses or that you know complex of equipment But I remember I was at the time managing a group that sold MP5. And I can't remember we changed the name at that point.

But Larry came to you and said, I want Harrison to go sell Miami Day. So it was moving from managing people back to you need to go sell one deal. And I remember thinking, well, what happens if we lose this deal? I'm going to have to find a new job. But so that was, you know, it was kind of Larry's vision. Let's focus someone on this and go do it. And so it became kind of an obsession of, all right, we're going to go figure out how to do this. And the first step was just go down there and start getting to know people.

And I remember Nelson Pinochet and I going kind of on our road show in Miami. Yeah. and meeting with everyone we possibly could across all the departments, anyone who would let us in. And there were 72, right? 72 different. Well, there were, I think there's more now. I believe there were 72, but there were four big ones that were involved in the big purchase.

Water and wastewater. Airport. There's water, wastewater, transit, aviation, and GSA, which had kind of four underneath it. that was general services. General services, okay. So just for the record, when we say 72, we're talking about 72 county offices or what do you call them, departments. Agencies, departments.

Yeah, like the police department, the fire department, all this stuff. Right. Okay. And they're, you know, they are a top five county, and they're probably, that county is probably on equal footing from a budget perspective as the state of South Carolina to put it in perspective. Right, right. Yeah. So just again, I belabor this a little bit, but I think it's important is to someone listening,

how do you become the John Harrison in this situation? How do you get the CEO to handpick him and say, I want him to take on the biggest opportunity we've ever seen? And, you know, it's showing up on time, it's hard work, and it's really in John's case, and we'll talk about this later with the Colby, is the patience, you know, to follow through and do the detail, work to try to close, you know, 72 different departments plus city council, plus the mayor, you know, and all that, which took at least a year, two years? It was, I think it started in 99 and we closed the deal in 2002, so it was almost three years. Yeah.

And then does that include the legal time? So it was on the back end? Yeah, actually that does. So, I mean, when we actually got the nod was probably six months before we closed it. Yeah. Well, we can close this now because we can talk about this forever. But a couple of things about it is the really important person in this was the CIO. And fortunately, he was a Citadel graduate in Miami, which is kind of the odds are long there. Right.

He was. But we actually talked to him afterwards, you know, maybe a year afterwards, and said, tell us what really happened here. How did we win this? Because it was very competitive. And he said, you know, John Harrison just outworked everybody else. You know, he was here more. It was more trustworthy. He did the follow-ups.

And so that's how you won. He said it wasn't your software, sorry to say. Software is good. Other people's software was good. Right. Right. It was the person they trust. So that's how you do it.

Do what John did. That's good. Give me an idea of something in sales that, turn that to be very different than what you thought it was going to be. That's a tough one. I guess when I got into sales, I didn't really think about, you know, I didn't go to school for business. I grew up in a house with two school teachers. We never talked about a quarter or a bonus or, you know, that's just not, that's not something

that I ever studied or understood. I never really looked at the stock market much. And then, of course, I joined Data Stream, and I'm looking at our stock price every day. Yeah. So I think one of the things that I never considered was kind of the application of my competitive fight, I guess you would call it, and what I did as an athlete and how much that, how much I got of that, which I was missing, you know, I mean, coaching, you get, you get it

to a certain extent, but you're not really the one doing the, you know, you're not in the game, you're not a player. So for me, that kind of filled a void that I didn't have, that I'd had my whole life, you know, playing in college. So that, I didn't think about it. And I guess, it sounds like common sense that you would know that's there. But that competition that we got not only internally, sales reps, you know, the board that we had when we'd write our number. I mean, that drove every day. It was the greatest.

And it was a simple concept, but I still think about that. And I've actually used it as a leader to drive that competitive spirit with reps. But that was something that I didn't. expect or didn't even think about. And then it's been, to me, a huge part of why I want to outwork somebody. I want to achieve something that people say I can't. I want to win a deal that is stacked against us, those types of things. I got it.

So that would be that you didn't think that the whole athletic and sports thing would necessarily carry over to the sales world. And it does. Yeah. And it does. And, of course, you know that now because you probably hire a lot of athletes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Speaking of which, I skipped over one thing, you're currently, I know you're running sales for Keymark.

Tell us about Keymark and what's going on over there. So, yeah, so Keymark is enterprise content management software provider. We've been in business since the late 90s, just a little bit after the time when I joined DataStream. And based over in Liberty, our whole sales team, lives in Greenville. A lot of Clemson grads. I need to get some more Citadel grads over there. Yeah.

But it's a great company. We're about, I mean, we're a little bit bigger. And, of course, it's a different world in terms of how you look at financials now. But, you know, it's very similar culture to what we had at Data Stream in the early years. Really? Like in the mid-90s around that when you join? Yes. Okay.

And of course, that's one of the things that was attractive about going to Keymark to me. Also, being with a company that's building something, we brought on robotic process automation as a part of our technology platform and have a couple of partners that offer technology in that area. And that's a booming, kind of a booming new industry. And so when I look at the parallels to data stream, you know, back to the comment, made earlier that I've always been looking for that thing that brought the same amount of joy and fun, but opportunity and challenge that Datastream did. It's, you know, we've got a very stable, mature market in ECM, but a very new, rapidly growing market and RPA.

And so there's opportunity to continue to grow the core business, but also build something new, which I had the opportunity to do multiple times at Datastream. Yeah. So this has been as close to that as I've ever been in my career. And it's just, it's been a blast. Good. So great group of people. Well, you keep building it, man.

Keep building it. Tell us a couple of things that you would pass on to the new people coming along that you wouldn't do again, things that might have slowed you down or, you know, mistakes or something like that? That's a good question. Sorry to ask. Could be a long list. Just a couple.

Yeah, I would say that if I could go back and the reality is I like where I am right now. And to get here, I had to make some mistakes and learn some valuable lessons. In fact, some of those have been in the recent past five or six years. But I would say never take an opportunity purely because of the financials of the opportunity. If you're good and you pick the right thing, you're going to get to the financial part of that. And so, you know, there have been a couple of opportunities where I made the wrong decision on what would make me happy, what I would enjoy, who I was working with. what the company did, and I made that decision because of that one thing. Yeah.

Financials. And interestingly enough, at Keymark, there were multiple other opportunities that I had and offers at the same time. But I purposely made the decision. I'm not going to make this decision based on money. I'm going to remove that from, you know, obviously there's a, certain level where they have to be to be in the discussion. But that, to me, was a big part of why I've been very successful here is I chose it for the right reasons.

Yeah. That's a great. That's a great one to pass on. It's like, you know, taking a job with some company you don't know very well. It's like, that's got a great package, stock options, company car, but they're a little shaky. You know, that's generally not a good idea. Yeah, there's a reason why they're offering all that other stuff. Right, I got to lure you.

So what, what do you say, what's your favorite word? My favorite word. Now, I have to caveat this by saying that my favorite word probably changes over time. But right now, it's simple. Simple. Yeah. Nice. Life is simple right now, which is just part of happy.

Yeah, I love it. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. That's a real powerful word. A little powerful word. Well, thanks for sharing that. Yeah. Well, John, thanks for being here.

Really appreciate you. I always have had a good relationship for a long time. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So, thank you very much. Yeah. And thank you all for being here on this episode of Noob School. We'll see you next week.