Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, the host of Inside Personal Growth and joining from Tucson, Arizona is Helen. How do you say your last name, I don't want to mispronounce it. Fa-nu-cci, a good Italian girl. So we got Helen on Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. And I would say this is not just only just for sales managers, anybody in sales, listening should be listening to Helen and understanding what's going on. But Helen, I'm gonna let them know a little bit about you. She's an international keynote speaker. She's podcast, podcast host, we were just talking about a transformational leader. She was with Microsoft. She's now not. She's passionate about building strong cultures, has a track record of leading sales and marketing teams, for the last 25 years deliver exceptional business results. The foundation of our success stems from focusing on our teams first. And the results second, understanding team members motivations, aspirations and supporting their success drives business performance. None of that would be possible without the underpinnings of a strong collaboration and communication platform. As I said, she recently has retired from Microsoft. But she also was the General Manager at ito device in Accenture sales and general manager for solution sales and complete team before joining Microsoft. And she held numerous sales and marketing roles at IBM Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Valley in London, England. And she earned her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. So go figure, someone with a degree from MIT and mechanical engineering went into sales. That's kind of unusual Hallett. Yeah,

Helen Fanucci
well, you know, I was in Silicon Valley as an engineer, and I wanted to be where the action is. And that's out with customers, helping them use technology, not in the back room making the technology so I transition to sales when I was with IBM.

Greg Voisen
Well tell our listeners a little bit about that. Because you this your background is fascinating. We don't always find people that have gotten degrees in MIT in engineering, kind of going, well, I'm gonna go into sales. You just said a little bit about it. But really about that, and why you wrote this book. Because this book, in essence, didn't take the engineers approach. But in one sense, it did. It broke everything down into a process, which is the way that an engineer thinks that's not always the way a salesperson thinks. But that is the way an engineer thinks and you did break it down into a process.

Helen Fanucci
Yeah. So when I set out to write the book, and we can, you know, talk about why and how for sure, um, but when I set out to write the book, I reflected on what I do as a sales leader. And I realized I have conversations with my team. That might seem obvious, but I got curious and like, what kind of conversations Am I having that have led to my success and capability to empower my team and help them achieve, you know, big results, I've carried multi-billion dollar quotas. I've supported my team with big deals to big customers. And so I did a little research on myself and I broke down over a two month period, the conversations I had with my team and distilled it into 17 core conversations, which is really the guts of the book, I decided to make it a how to book. So my intent was that you're, you know, have a performance management issue, you can go to the performance management chapter. And I break it down consistently. This is how, you know, traditional sales manager would handle performance management. This is how a lot of your team manager does it, how to spot the need for the conversation, how to conduct the conversation, how to assess if it worked. So in that sense, I can see how it's kind of a engineers approach because it's logical and laid out. But first and foremost, it's intended to be helpful to the reader who might be struggling with managing remote teams, accustomed to having people in the office, or just wants to learn maybe some new strategies for empowering their team and delivering high performance and outstanding results

Greg Voisen
in it Does that and I love the way you approached it except especially the process part because for sales managers, they, they need to have that, right. It's, it's a structure. And they're always looking for ways if they're dynamic and curious, as you said, to find better ways to work with their teams. Now, you back in July of 2021, your topic for a talk was sales leadership in a hybrid world. Speak with us about loving your team and the importance of keeping and retaining talented salespeople. In a world where attracting and retaining top talent can be challenging today, whether it's sales or management or whatever it is, and your trepidation at the time, you had a tremendous trepidation about using the term love your team. But it worked out really well. Because the gentleman who wrote the introduction to your book only had huge praise. He was skeptical when you use the term love your team. But then when he saw the results, he flipped over didn't mean?

Helen Fanucci
Yeah, so this was in the midst, if you recall, of the great resignation, where 4 million people were leaving their companies every month. And so it was the end of July 21. And the topic was basically retaining top talent. So when I got to the slide talking about that, I thought, gosh, you know, where do I put care for your team support your team. And what was authentic for me was love your team. And I was nervous. And I told the audience, look, I'm kind of nervous about this, using the love word in a business context in a business conference. But that was what was authentic to me. And so I unpacked it and talked about, you know, the sentiment, but also love as an action. So understanding your team members personally, and what they care about, and figuring out how to help support them achieving what they care about on their terms. And so building trust, and building a relationship with them, because you'll find some team members, they want, you know, flexibility of when and where they work, maybe they have to drop kids off at eight in the morning for school. And so I don't schedule team meetings during that time. Or perhaps, you know, they have other ambitions, like being a manager, and so that I will support that and do some things to help them achieve that goal. So it is honestly it's no different than what I would expect the sellers to do with their customers, because they've got to understand what customers care about on customer's terms, and how are we going to make that happen, and deliver the results that customers are looking for? So it's kind of our harmonious, you know, approach. But at the time, yes, I was nervous. But I got such great response from the audience. And I actually got questions about well, how do I actually go about doing that? And do you have any more information about how you've done it? So that really was a catalyst for me writing the book, because I thought, oh, there's something here that makes sense. And that is resonating. And so that led me in, I guess, September of 21, to hire a book coach to help me organize and structure writing a book because I knew I didn't know what to do.

Greg Voisen
You got it done. And it's an excellent book you did. And, you know, being influenced by being at Microsoft, which now you're not there anymore, but is it Satya Nadella, I don't want to miss produce his name, but he really was somebody who worked on culture and still is. I mean, he even wrote a book about it. I haven't had him on the show yet, but I'm going to just keep pounding at him on the show. But you know, that shift with inside the culture at Microsoft was a huge reason why he was hired. Three that I don't think things were quite the way they are now at Microsoft. And I don't want to just say softer, I want to say more compassionate, more understanding, which somebody like him would be now you speak about the new experiment that he tried which was the power of empathy being practiced in a culture? How, what impact did that have? on you while you were working there with salespeople? Because it had to have actually influence the book as well. And the writing of the book and everything, I'm sure that he's had some impact on you.

Helen Fanucci
Yeah, well, I'm a big fan of his, and I experienced some Microsoft culture before Satya, and it was more a culture of fear, and being the smartest person in the room, and people would as Brene, Brown would say, armor up, you know, before the presentation and like, you know, have a persona about them where, you know, don't ask me questions, I know, a lot. You know, I'm the smartest person in the room. And that was, the thing about that, if you is, it doesn't allow for a conversation about what's really going on. If there's that fear culture. And I think Satya, you know, he had been at Microsoft 20 plus years before he became CEO. And I think he recognize that without a culture, where there's trust, and authentic conversations and transparency, you actually can't get people, you know, to move and adapt when there is a change in the market as there is. So if you're gonna have your troops, if you will follow you or your employees follow you, there's got to be a level of trust and transparency to be able to move more quickly as conditions change. And so that's a pragmatic business approach. And goodness, during COVID, you know, everybody went home. And, you know, we had already or he and his leadership team had already implemented expectations for managers of manage, coach and care for your team. And so that, you know, that kind of approach was really he credits with making it so seamless, if you will, for people to go and work from home, as well as continue on with the needs of the business and needs of customers. So it has become a, I would say, more compassionate and gentler company, in many respects, for example, there is an expectation, at least in the group, I just laughed and managed by, you know, incredible leaders, that we don't send emails at night or after business hours or on weekends. And we get, you know, when we're sending an email, we would get something Well, this is outside the recipients business hours, are you sure you want to send it? Or do you want to do a delay, so it pops into their inbox the next morning, and it was never that way? Previously? Yeah. And it's just again, respecting people's boundaries and work schedules. And then when we work, we work and it's all you know, we have strong financial metrics. And so it's not, you're expected to hit your metrics, of course, whether you're in an engineering organization, or in a sales work organization. So that part hasn't changed. But I think it definitely creates a culture of where people are happier in general, or if there's issues and I mean, gosh, mental health and anxiety particularly during COVID You know, there's space for people to take time off. And I think it's really important, important because work is just human beings getting the job done. And if we can't be human with each other, then I think we miss the opportunity to really have a an amazing work environment and also deliver amazing results.

Greg Voisen
Well, look, loving your team, no matter who you are out there, and what you're selling can only improve the efficiency and the desire for somebody to want to perform for you. Right? Because there's so much of it missing from the world period. When I mean that I mean love, compassion, understanding. And you know, we live in a world which is, you know, moving at high, high speeds. We have other things in our lives besides work. And just keeping kids in a relationship together and keeping things going is challenging for everybody at best. I understand that. And, you know, you mentioned the key to extinction is adaptation. And sales managers are the missing link to optimizing the adaptation to maximize fitness in the what you call the new hybrid world. And I'm not saying that the sales managers are the mothers or the fathers of the, of the operation, but in essence they are, it's, you know, people used to say, Oh, I go to HR, because I could at least get 90% of the time, the person in HR was a woman, it was like having a mother to talk to, it was somebody that I could speak with. And I, you know, I've worked in businesses. So I know, and having a sales manager didn't used to be that way. It wasn't like, oh, well, this sales manager, because they've given me a quota, or they've given me this metrics that I've got to meet is somebody that I want to go talk to what are the attributes of a loved your team sales manager? And why has it shifted so much?

Helen Fanucci
Yeah, great questions. So the attributes have a lot, you know, kind of the principles are building trust with your team, and having some transparency as a way to build trust and like caring for the team members. And one of the things I do when I meet a new team, because often I'll take over as a leader of an existing team, is I tell them a little bit about myself, I have like three slides, PowerPoint slides, I tell them about myself, my family, etc, where I live, what I like to do. And then the second slide is kind of my leadership principles. And one of the principles is, you know, transparency, and, you know, no surprises. And the thing that where I've heard from so many people after reading the book is that there are situations where the seller is in fear of telling their manager that a deal is going to fall out of the pipeline, for fear of getting fired. And it really robs the manager of the opportunity to help that seller get the deal on track. And so that kind of adversarial relationship and a fear relationship. And, you know, you've got to get the deal at all costs, well, are you sacrificing a relationship with a customer to cram something down their throat are you, you know, trying to, you know, it's just, it creates a bad situation at work. And that's the opposite of love your team approach, and I don't think it's effective anymore, particularly because your top talent won't put up with it, they have choice, they can walk out the door without taking a single step and go work for somebody else remotely. And a sales manager literally cannot make their quota without keeping their top talent. If you do the math, it's like three quarters of an annual quota that they're risking, if a top talent walks out the door, because it takes time to hire, and then for that individual to be at full strength, and if the replacement individual even works out. So

Greg Voisen
one of your podcasts, pardon me, Helen, you talk about that. I was watching the podcast. And you were explaining to these other two gentlemen, who were sales leaders that, you know, assume x, which is the factor that the person produces, in a quarter, say, a quarter million dollars, that it literally costs you a quarter million dollars to actually ramp back up again. Because you have to go hire, train, recruit, find somebody, you know, put them in the position. So you know, you need to think twice about losing somebody in a top position, who is producing millions of dollars for your company and sales. Right.

Helen Fanucci
Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And, you know, my the metrics for my team, of course, we all have quota and revenue expectations. But I have non-revenue expectations as well, that they're building stronger relationships with their customers, higher, you know, executives, higher level executives, or more broadly in other parts of the business. So there's a lot of things that I look at and I have conversations with my team to make sure their performance is on track. And equally, you've got to address underperformers otherwise you also can't keep your top talent, they won't stick around. So there's a lot on the manager in terms of enabling facilitate in supporting the team, as well as making sure that people are performing, and if not stepping up and addressing that as well, and being open minded enough to give that person the ability and coaching so that they can step up and perform. And I know that not everyone wants to do that managers sometimes don't address performance, until they're so frustrated, there's kind of no capacity for them to tolerate that individual anymore. And that's also a shame.

Greg Voisen
Well, you know, this comes down to coaching. And, you know, I know that you read coaching habits, Michael has been on the show several times about his books, and where he recommends that you stay curious a bit longer. And I think curiosity is a really big element here. Because as Steven Kotler says, focus is for free. Curiosity is something that we need to have. And then we develop it into a purpose after we're curious about something. And then after that purpose, we can develop our mission vision values and goals and set steps to try and reach that. But the curiosity is something that's really important, how would you help sales leaders learn this important skill of staying curious? Just a little bit longer? Because, you know, look at I've done over 1000 podcasts now, I'm an extremely curious person. I'm always interested in learning more about a topic, right? Or I probably wouldn't do this show. But I see if there's one thing about me, which is an extreme positive, and sometimes they you lose a little bit of focus when you're super curious. But how would you tell leaders to be more curious?

Helen Fanucci
Okay, so I think it goes hand in glove with a value that also sought to introduced called having a growth mindset. If you're familiar with Carol Dweck, and her mindset book, yeah. So when you think about it, you know, having a growth mindset is okay, I'm not, I'm open to learning. I'm not a fixed individual, and neither is my team. And so if someone's doing something, you go, Hey, what, you know, you know, how's that going for you, you might realize you might have a have an assessment, that they're not being as effective as they could be in a conversation and ask them how it's going for them? Are they delivering? Are they getting the outcome they hoped for? Is there any, you know, what kind of support can I give you right now? And asking a few questions. Because I know that when folks from my team bring me issues, or blockers, or things are struggling with that, I don't have all the background information that they have. And so I'm trying to understand and uncover and also help them uncover a step forward. So for example, it might be one of my sales managers had, you know, an executive that just got hired that wanted to come into her account? Well, she's like, wait a minute, he doesn't have any relationships with anybody, he wants me to give him access. I don't feel so good about that. So it's like we kind of talked that through. And she ended up realizing or coming to the conclusion that she needed to have more time with that individual to really understand and dive into what they could offer and be more open to, this is what she decided be more open to the value that an individual could provide. So for sales managers, I think it's really a decision that they're going to how they interact and approach it, are they going to empower their team to come up with their own solutions? Or are they in the mode of telling or you know, if someone brings a problem with this is what you should do? Well, then you actually aren't using collective thinking. It's an approach but I don't think it's as effective. And I also want to grow my team. I can't be all over the place where they are they need to do their job and I expect them to stand on their own two feet. So there's things I do like, if they're doing an important customer presentation. I'm in the back ground, you know, off camera, you know, after the introductions, I take notes and action items for them. So we can debrief and they can be present in the customer presentation.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, I think that's why you were speaking, that old statement came up for me, people or salespeople don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Meaning that, you know, that statement has been around forever. But it's so important as a sales manager. Because you're talking about loving your team, it means you're talking about coaching and caring for them, you know, and you said, you were apprehensive, you didn't weren't apprehensive about using the word caring when you did that first speech, because you said when I could use caring, but in essence, you know, hey, a sales manager may have some solutions. But I think the solutions for the most part are co-created, because they're co created out of that the sales manager being a sounding board, understanding where I'm finding challenges and either moving the prospect toward a conclusion and solution of some type. And also, knowing that I don't have to be in fear, you said that of whether I made that sale, or I didn't make that sale, we'd love for you to, but you don't win them. All. Right. So you know, it's a big world out there, there's a lot of competition, and you have to be at the top of your game. And on top of it, your pricing has to be good as well. So it's all in it's a combination of so many different things. And you have three love your team principles that help make the love your team system that you've created, work in every conversation. What are those? And then you also mentioned the five categories of conversations that build trust. Can you mention those for the listeners as well?

Helen Fanucci
Yeah, so the three principles are trust, transparency, and caring, and I break those down in the book. But those are foundational. And then the 17 conversations are broken into five categories. So the first five, conversation chapters are around conversations of connection. And so that's again, foundational to building trust and relationship. And then conversations of performance, conversations of strategies. So customer strategy, business strategy, conversation, conversations of customer engagement, and then conversations on of internal alignment. Because in a big corporation, like Microsoft sellers have to mobilize extended teams and resources on behalf of the customer. And there's a lot of stakeholders. So getting an alignment across the organization is a foundational skill. And I felt like that was worthy of a couple chapters, because it is such a big topic, and so much time is spent in large organizations.

Greg Voisen
Well keep in mind, too, you are probably selling some pretty high ticket items, right? It wasn't like, Hey, here's the $50,000 sale, it's more like, here's the million dollar sale or something, is that correct?

Helen Fanucci
Hundreds of millions of dollars, yes, some of these contracts, right.

Greg Voisen
And it takes time to evolve the relationship to get there with the client. And then on the client side, if they're going to be buying hundreds of millions of dollars of support from Microsoft, you can imagine the teams they work inside their company. So it's the collaboration from both sides to actually accomplish a very large sale like this. So those conversations of connections are really important to build the transparency to build the knowledge and understanding that's going on. And you mail you mentioned that selling in a world today is a team sport. It's a team sport. In many businesses, I think still I see today. Where it isn't is still a team sport. There's many industries where it's still, hey, if you're going to buy blinds for your house, it's probably someone knocking at your door with the blinds trying to convince you to buy it. And that we must work collaboratively. So anybody out there who's in a team that is collaborative, speak about the importance of conversations of internal alignment and how important they are to these large sales. You did speak about it a bit just now. But there is something much more deep because when I'm managing with inside Microsoft, maybe Do two or three teams to get this thing done? And then I've got the buyer who's doing the same thing, the complexity of that, you know, I know for a fact that many of these sales can take over a year. Sometimes they take two years, you're working on him for a long time. And for the people who are measuring your metrics, they're concerned is when is it going to close? When are we going to get the jack?

Helen Fanucci
Well, you know, I actually think transactions are kind of an outdated concept. Well, in large b2b sales. So we might, you know, we also get paid for the consumption of, for example, our cloud service. So the deal closes. But then the customer success team is helping the customer use that technology. So one of the conversations of connection, one of the examples I give in the book is where, you know, customer success is implementing a project and there's problems. And then my seller comes to me and says, a customer's really upset. But we've closed the deal. And customer success isn't doing their job or what have you. And I see emails go back and forth. So I call a timeout, because email does not equal communication. Let's get on the phone, let's have a team's video call. So I get the, you know, the customer success team, my team engineering happens to be involved because it's an early adopter customers well, and it turns out that while we sold a deal to the customer, they the way that they've implemented, they were running out of storage capacity. So we had to present a choice to the customer, either optimize your storage or buy more. And so customer success was running into that challenge. So that's an example of getting everyone on the same page coming up with a strategy. And, you know, I know that there's a common term of, you know, swim lanes, we're in our swim lane, that's an outdated term to, I think it's more of like a freeway, you move back and forth across lanes, and maybe the whole team needs to lean in on with a customer success person, because we've got to problem solve together for the sake of the customer. And so not all internal alignment is pre sales, of course, there's a lot that is because of the complexity, even get in alignment, on pricing, and deal discounts or investments we might make. There's many layers to that as well, as you might expect.

Greg Voisen
It is it's very complicated. It can get very complicated. But I can imagine, like you said, swim lanes versus freeways, you know that the, the situation for many teams in team selling is really flexibility. You know, it's like you just said, it's not, we can't just box it up and put hard corners on the box, right? And then say, this is what it is. There's a lot of moving parts and pieces that somebody's trying to manage to keep customer satisfaction have high at the same time to when a new element of a contract, maybe it's not a whole new contract, maybe it's an addition to something right that you've got going on that you're working on. And I can only imagine the complexities of all that. Now the book is, in my estimation, a guide for sales managers, right. In it is it's a guide book, this is a great guide book, in your opinion, what are the most important actions that a sales manager could take to build the culture of alignment and understanding? And what three bits of advice would you want to leave our listeners with about that?

Helen Fanucci
Well, first of all, get to know your team. Members, find out what matters to them on their terms, figure out how, how you can help support them what you can do, to make sure that they achieve the goals that they're after. And then also make sure that you have a system for checkpointing with them periodically. So I do a half hour every two weeks, with my team that's outside of the normal forecasting process to check in with them and make sure that, you know, I'm understanding how they're doing personally, but also that they're on track. So finding out what matters to them, figuring out what you can do to support that. And having a process for regular check points and conversation with your team.

Greg Voisen
That's awesome. And I think, most importantly, every day, take a deep breath before you take an action. Because you don't want to regret some of the things you might write in an email or some of the things that you might say to somebody. And I think if you do just take a pause, right, I know, for my listeners, everybody out there, we do enough shows on meditation and mindfulness. But really being a good sales manager is also about being a very mindful sales manager, and somebody who would implement things that they would want to have happened to them if they were in the position as a seller, right. So want to thank you for being on the show. And spending time with us. It was a pleasure having you on. And would you want to leave the listeners with anything else at this point?

Helen Fanucci
I think that that's good. Um, people can reach me on LinkedIn.

Greg Voisen
Yep. And you're going to, we're going to direct them as well, her to the website, which is loveyourteam.com. We're going to direct you to a link to Amazon to buy the book. So you can go there. But you can find everything there. Information about Helen, the book, contacting her, the podcasts, like she was saying earlier, not as current as she would like to be with those podcasts. But we'll see if we can get her going back and doing those again. But at this point, thank you so much, Helen. Namaste to you for being on the show. Spending some time with our listeners to talk about your new book. Love your team, a survival guide for sales managers in a hybrid world. Helen, pleasure having you on.

Helen Fanucci
Thank you so much, Greg.