Sales Best Practices: Interview with Josh Hoffman

In this month’s blog, we are featuring a long-term technology sales leader, Josh Hoffman, Global VP of Inside Sales at Poly. I’m excited to share his perspective and experiences on sales best practices and lessons learned. Josh, thanks so much for taking the time of your busy schedule to give back to our sales community. 

What Attracted You to Sales?

“To be candid with you, the first thing that attracted me to sales was the idea of making more money. However, my first job in sales was terrible! I started out selling carpet cleaning. Daily, I was handed pages from the phone book, and we had a manager that would just yell at us to make us stay on the phone. It was miserable, and I only lasted a few months in that environment.”

“I didn’t want to give up on sales, though. My next sales job was selling insurance door-to-door in rural Texas. This was the first sales experience that was educational for me because I had to find a way to relate to people. Mind you, I’m a Bostonian, who at that time just moved to Texas, and I was walking to farmhouses in Granger, Hutto, and other small wonderful towns trying to get people to first open their doors and second buy a supplemental insurance plan for driving safely. Some people ran me off their properties. I had guns drawn on me, and dogs chasing me. I also had a lot of great people inviting me to their homes for sandwiches, cookies, and tea. These great people gave me a good lesson in humility and empathy. This was my first taste of enjoying the sales process, and it was also my first taste of realizing that integrity was critical in sales. I quickly concluded that the product that I was selling didn’t have a lot of integrity to it and that was a challenge for me. I ended up stepping away from sales for a little while and then found my way back to it over time, on the phones, in the field and eventually leading sales teams for organizations like Dell, Avaya, Palo Alto Networks, and now Poly.”

Best Practices

Be straightforward with customers: “I developed a pattern of never being shy on the phone about what I was trying to accomplish and being upfront about it. I would tell the customer, ‘My purpose on this call is to make sure you get the solution you want and need and for me to earn my commission, so let’s work together and figure out what’s the right thing to do.’ This transparency took me to another level. I was able to listen to what they wanted and work to find a solution for them. If I didn’t have a solution, I would be honest with them about it, which was refreshing to the customer, and it helped me earn their trust, long-term.”

Listen to help! “Learn the skill of really listening to your customers, not listening to formulate your response or to spit back at them what they said. You need to actively listen. I was always trying to figure out what am I going to do to create a better solution for this customer?”

Face the competition: “I learned to be very aggressive while also being very kind. I worked for companies, where the technology wasn’t number one in the market, and we were fighting against large and strong competitors. So, when the customer would mention the competitor’s name and their offerings, I would suggest inviting the competitor’s rep to a three-way call, so we could determine the right solution for the customer. At first, customers were taken aback with the approach, but many ended up following through and inviting the other sales rep. While the competitors were fixated on defending their products, I was laser-focused on solving the customers’ problems. This helped me develop a solid partnership with my customers.”

Always do the right thing! “As you get into the larger-scale sales environments, one of the best ways to build trust is to acknowledge, when appropriate, that you may not be the right fit for a particular solution. It is during these moments that the customer realizes that you are not just in this for yourself, but you truly care about them and their needs. By earning their trust, together you can evaluate areas where you can add value.”

Lessons Learned

What you sell is important: “It is really important to believe in the product that you sell—to know that you’re doing something good for the customer and good for the world. There is a level of integrity that you must have to be a professional salesperson. It’s not just about closing the sale. I want to be able to go home and look at my family in the eye and tell them what I do and be proud of it! Believing in what I’m selling is one of the key domains that I use to select what I want to do, and who I want to work with.”

Who you work for is critical! “It’s important that you work for a leader that you respect, that you can communicate effectively with, and that is going to help you grow as a professional. These types of leaders challenge you and put you in situations where you learn new skills. You don’t have to be friends with your leader, but there needs to be mutual respect.”

Evaluate your team’s culture. “Culture is incredibly important to the success of the team. Building a culture that has vision and purpose associated with it, as well as having a culture of coaching, passion, and caring is both amazing and infectious. It not only helps you and your team, but it also helps the teams around you because they see something that they can emulate.”

Add rigor to the interview process. “The longer the interview process, the better it is for you as a candidate because you’re getting exposed to more people and the culture. It can help you decide if the company and the position are the right fit for you. Also, during the interview process, use your network to help you understand what it’s like to work in the company. Take advantage of social media tools like LinkedIn and Glassdoor to help you make an informed decision.”

Advice for People Getting into Sales

Persevere through the first few years! “Sales is not for the faint of heart. It can be such an amazing career to have because you can grow your experiences into almost anything you want: You can spend your entire career in sales or you can grow your career into being part of other important teams like enablement, marketing, finance, operations, human resources…sales can open many doors. It’s a great launching pad, but you must be able to get through those grueling first few years successfully. You must be okay with rejection, and you can’t take it personally. And while you have to make your quota and be results-focused, if you’re only about closing a deal, you’re going to miss out on other opportunities, for example, building high trust relationships with customers.”

Learn from others. “Peer development has been an important part of my learning experience and my career. Watching and shamelessly stealing best practices from others, with credit, of course, can help you improve your skillset tremendously. It’s always fun when you say, ‘Wow, look how this person is doing it. I should try that and see if I can make it work for me.’ ”

Get into the details. “Sales is a much more detail-oriented job than many people believe it is. Conduct research to understand your customers’ initiatives; what they are doing and why. Use tools to help you track your deals and manage your sales progress. By being detailed and tracking variables, like conversion rates, for example, you can understand where your process breaks down and then address it. That can exponentially improve your win rate, and it will also make you a better leader if that is the route you choose.”

Be disruptive and open to trying new things. “Take a chance, try new language and try new approaches. Step out of the pattern that you might be in and be disruptive with yourself and your own process.”

Be okay with not knowing all the answers. “Be okay with acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. Tell the customer, ‘I don’t know the answer, but if you permit me the opportunity to do a little research, I’d like to come back to you with the best answer I could give you.’ Customers appreciate that honesty. I think we tend to forget that customers are human beings too—they have emotions, they have needs, they have obstacles, and they also usually understand that we cannot know everything.”

Advice for People Promoted into Sales Leadership

Spend time with your people. “Make sure you spend time with your team so that when you are facing challenges, or when things are terrific, they are right by your side. They may not be able to contribute the first time you expose them to a challenging situation, but they’re going to learn from you and the situation, and hopefully, get energized and expand their knowledge.”

It’s about THEM, not YOU. “A key component of my growth as a leader has been to develop people around me. I don’t care if I ever get thanked or appreciated for anything I do. If my team gets recognized and is successful, we won. I knew I wanted to be a sales leader when the thrill of the kill was no longer closing. The thrill of the kill started to become, ‘Can I get this person to be successful? Can I get them to be hired on full time? Can I give them an opportunity that they never thought was possible? Can I share with them some knowledge, skills, and experiences that are going to help them not just now but in life?’”

Practice the skill of being a good coach. “Engage your team in a dialogue that helps them get better. Sit down with your people, whether it is in a live selling environment or a huddle and coach them. Some of the questions you may ask in your coaching sessions include, ‘What went well or what didn’t go well, what would you keep or where would you change your approach?’”

Articulate the outcomes with each rep. “Take time to articulate the expected outcomes you’re trying to drive together and then figure out what are the steps you both need to take to get there.”

Create a coaching development plan for each rep. “Collaborate with each rep on designing a customized coaching development plan that includes, what you both are going to work on, strategies and tactics you’re going to try, factors you’re going to measure, and agreed-upon outcomes. This is not a single-sided exercise developed and led by you. It is shared accountability to help your rep achieve a new set of results or even a new career path.”

Ask for help! “As a leader, I don’t always have all the answers, and you won’t either. It's okay to engage others to find answers to questions posed by your reps. Reps respect leaders that are vulnerable and that will go out of their ways to find answers.”

Measure! “Especially in sales leadership, it's very hard to manage things that you can’t measure. The more that you can measure, typically the better the results are. Also, the more you can measure, the more you can coach people to get better. With analytics, you will find intricate points where you can alter something that will have a significant change in the outcome.”

Thank you, Josh, for your time and the great insights! I enjoyed our conversation and your perspective.