Are You Taking Enough Risks? – Gene Villeneuve

 

 

Transcript:

Mon, Jul 18, 2022

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

customer , sales , product , ibm , crm , lead , people , business , deal , year , drive , pipeline , buy , team , role , sell , leader , career , capabilities , vcs

SPEAKERS

Gene Villeneuve & Christopher Smith

Intro

Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith, talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack. Listen to find out how the best of the best achieve success with their team and CRM technology. And remember, unless you are the lead dog, the view never changes.

Christopher Smith

Welcome to sales lead dog. Today I have joined me on sales lead dog, Gene Villeneuve. Gene, welcome to sales lead dog.

Gene Villeneuve

Great. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on the sales lead dog podcast.

Christopher Smith

Yeah. Oh, it’s good to have you on here. And one thing I’m excited about having on Gene is, you know, we typically have on sales leaders, you’ve held that position in the past, but now you’re working as a mentor and advisor, leveraging your skill set. So, we definitely want to dive into all of that. When you check out Gene’s LinkedIn profile, one of the things that’s really gonna grab you is he is a mentor, advisor, and then endurance athlete. I immediately have to start with that gene. How did you get into being, you know, this path of being an endurance athlete?

Gene Villeneuve

Yeah, well, thank you. I’ve always been an athlete in the sense that, like, when I was like a young kid, a bicycle, for me, it was an escape was an escape from some chaos on the home front, which I don’t need to get into. But it became a passion for me, because it was like, that safe spot for me, where not only did I be, was able to get out of the house and go explore for hours on end, but I made incredible friends. And then in my early teens, it became sort of the passion for me and it would kind of drove me and taught me discipline taught me endurance taught me focus, it taught me that you had to work and put the hours in, in order to achieve something. And it also created an incredible community. And it taught me that, you know, for me to be successful, I need to surround myself by other people who have a shared past, shared discipline and can and where I can learn a lot from. So that’s how I got into cycling, and endurance sports back in my teenage years. But that’s always been a core aspect of my personality. And something that’s been very important to me, throughout my entire career, just, you know, not only is it a way to de stress after a long day, or a tough day, or somehow, sometimes in the middle of the day. But it just becomes something else, in addition to family. And in addition to work, and it is something else, that’s your own. Right. And, you know, when you’re out with your friends, and on these long bike rides, it gets, they can have these like meaningless conversations. Or not stressful, you can talk about tire pressure, you can talk about like new frame materials, you could talk about seeds, he could talk about powered wattage and heart rate, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like you’re like being grilled by the board on like, you know, what’s your pipeline? What’s your pipeline conversion? What’s your pipeline coverage? Right, or, you know, dealing with, you know, familial issues, like, you know, what are kids like, you know, are they over programmed, or the, in too many swimming competitions, or horseback riding competitions or other things, right. So, it’s just, it’s an escape from all of that, but at the same time, it’s a way to maintain this, this passion in community and in fitness. And, you know, I love being able to just have that little thing on the side, which is actually now that I’m semi-retired, it’s becoming more and more important to me actually spending more time and I’m fitter now on my bike than I’ve ever been, and setting some personal records that, you know, at age 51, you know, 10 years ago, I couldn’t ride my bike as fast as I ride now.

Christopher Smith

That’s pretty great. That’s pretty cool. I find for me that exercise is just a key component of maintaining sanity, alleviating some of the stress and letting that stuff go. And, and also to have that time where, you know, you, you can clear your head, which I think is really important to have that release.

Gene Villeneuve

So, and then also on top of that, when your head is cleared, and you’re not kind of deep in thought on something, a just kind of enjoying the atmosphere, enjoying the environment. Sometimes these new ideas will come into your mind that are right, like at work or about family, but it’s something you’re grappling with, like on the professional side, but it’s like, oh, it’s a new idea or suddenly come to you, and then putting your back in the office or back at work, so to speak. You could, you know, pursue that idea and see if it works. And so yeah, it does open up your mind that to other things.

Christopher Smith

So, when you look back over your career Before you became semi-retired, what were the three things that really drove your success?

Gene Villeneuve

I think this is probably something that sounds trite. But I think everybody will, will, will say this is curiosity. The Curiosity is something that’s always driven by passion, and my ability to become successful in my career. I think the other one too, is just like the, the ability to take risks, and the willingness to take risks, because I’ve moved overseas twice for my career. And the second time I did it with my family. So that’s also a challenge. I think the third thing to in terms of just like having an extremely supportive family, that is 100%, behind, like our shared objective, as, as a family, you know, that we want to have adventures, we want to be continuously pursuing our passions and our curiosity, and not wanting to just live a normal life. Like for me, a normal life was you graduate from university, you get a job, you buy a house, you get a mortgage, you buy a car, you get a car payment. And I was never what drove us, right? I mean, I, by not having a mortgage, not having car payments, I didn’t have my first car till I was in my 30s. And we didn’t buy a house until I think after we came back from Paris the first time. And because we weren’t tied down to mortgages, we weren’t tied down to car payments, he was very easy for us to make these decisions. And I think that kind of drove a lot. I mean, that’s kind of on the periphery. But I think when it comes to the professional sort of things, it’s always, you know, the curiosity, the willingness to take risks. And I think the other third one family aside, maybe a fourth one is just I’ve always been driven by helping others be successful as well. Like, for me, it’s not about me, it’s about like, Can the team be successful? Can we win this opportunity together? Can we deliver something really innovative to market together? And did I enable or somehow contribute to this team becoming successful in a new product launch or in you know, blowing out our quota for that year, that quarter? You know, I always felt myself as a as an enabler, and somebody who would kind of surround the team or work with the team and enable the team to be successful.

Christopher Smith

That’s great. Now, you didn’t start out in sales, you started out with more of a product focus, can you talk about your level of evolution from your product, focus, focus into sales?

Gene Villeneuve

Yeah. So out of university, I was finding things I started working for a software company called Cognos back in the early 1990s. And it was in actually a pre-sales role, but it was more of a sales education role. But they wanted me to become more technical on the sales side. But I’ve had a business degree and wasn’t very technically competent. So as the products were becoming more mature and more complex, I decided about just being in a pre-sales technical role wasn’t really the thing for me. But I was always passionate about the product and trying to make the product better and respond to product requirements. So, I wanted to get into the corporate team. So, I moved into the corporate team and started working in product management and alliances. And I learned, I mean, the interesting thing is that even though it wasn’t really in a sales role, back then, I was in what’s called like a field support product liaison. Well, I wasn’t really product management or product marketing. But I was assigned to work and partner with the field on all of the big opportunities that we were working back then. And some of these were like, multimillion dollar deals, and I was like the liaison person between the field team, the sales team and the product team, and making sure that we were evolving the product in order to respond to those larger market opportunities and those larger customer requirements. As a result of doing that, I became very intimate with product and product management and driving a product that was market centric and delivering on large customer opportunities. So, from there, I ended up going to a start up in 99. And was doing everything kind of customer facing so Product Manager product marketing, customer success, presales training. So, they very quickly, like learnt a lot about everything that has to do with like the customer experience to the customer journey from the initial kind of once they’re onboard as a customer, how do you make sure that they’re successful, and that they expand and use more of the product. Then from there, we were acquired by a company in France and ended up moving to France and then that was just spent all my time in that company from 2000 till 2006 in a product management global role, where I was just introducing new products to market but always looking at how do we to expand the either expand the customer base or sell more into an existing customer. So, I always looked at the product role in the context of how do I help the seller sell more, and how to help our customers get more value out of that capability and become sticky with our capabilities. So, I always felt like I had like a sales mentality towards product management. And some people will say, that’s actually bad product management, because you should be market centric and not sales driven. But when you’re in a very high fast paced growth environment, where you’ve got a highly competitive market, we have three or four kind of big players, you’re competing against these three or four big players all the time, it comes down to like a product strategy that has to be sales focus, because that’s how you’re going to end up winning against these, these other large competitors. And I started doing it kept doing product management for quite a while. And then I ended up moving back to Canada and then took a product management or product leadership role, a global leadership role for Cognos where I ran actually their BI practice, or their BI product line, which was at the time around, just made 100 million a year. And I think that I tell him, I love who’s touching a billion. But I love doing that. But at IBM and be interesting, but IBM and IBM is a phenomenal organization for this is that they had tagged me as this is somebody who can actually go on and do other things in the business, but he’s kind of grown up in product, we really need to get into other things so that we can round him out as a as an executive. So, they had an opportunity for me to move to Europe. And it was actually kind of career wise, it might look like a step backwards. But this is like, you know, the BI practice, you know, the business intelligence and business analytics market quite well. You know, we need somebody in Europe to help that team become successful and competing and selling that product in Europe. So, they said, hey, would you be willing to take a job back and you’re leading a sales team? And it was just a sales team, like 120 people at the time? And I said, Yeah, sure, why not? It’s an opportunity. My wife and I wanted to move back, we had two young kids, we thought it’d be a great opportunity for us to go do something different. And again, to spare the, like taking a risk, but also this curiosity, and doing something which, like, I lost all sleep over this role thinking, I’m not sure if I’m going to be successful or not, but it’s worth trying. And I remember there was a new global GM sales leader, who is somebody that was phenomenal at leading sales. And she’s now seen over another company. But I remember like, you know, reporting into her and, and she, like one on one, she was really, really hard on me, but in a positive way. She says, look, Jean, one of things that like nobody told you this, but your sales rule, it’s not about product, it’s all about, like pipeline coverage, you know, velocity of the sales, and you know, how are you going to make your number, and you need to be able to have very crisp answers for the management team within IBM. And you need to get like, behind the numbers and understand each and every one these deals. And what’s unique about these deals, who are the players are the deals, you know, you need to understand all that stuff. And then she coached me behind the scenes. And she was phenomenal. I still somebody that I I think very highly of but that was like, you know, learning, like stepping kind of into that role, sort of like stepping into a hot seat, especially in the IBM context. Because like, every week, this is a very senior folks and GMs and SVPs and CFOs. At IBM were in your shorts, like, what’s this deal? How’s that deal going? What’s this? Like? What, how’s that deal? progressing? Did you talk to the actual customer? Oh, it’s in negotiation. Okay. Well, who’s the guy? Who’s the buyer over at that? Deal? Right? And have you spoken to the guy who actually owns the PIO process, who’s gonna get the PIO signed for us. And, you know, when you’ve got that kind of pressure on you, you’re constantly on the phone constantly on the, you know, trying to figure things out, but, but very quickly, what I learned is that, you know, if you’ve got a strong sort of sales team around you, and a strong sales admin and sales ops person, a lot of those numbers can be just collected through sales ops, but really, where I became unique and different is, is that I became an enabler for those sellers. Like, like, I think, I would have people telling me, it’s like, Hey, do you hear a different sales leader than we’ve had before? Like all the sales leaders we’ve had before? We’re just like, you know, where’s the deal? What’s the number? What are you committing to? And like, how are you going to when you’re going to get into the Fed, don’t deliver on it. They’ll just yell and scream at me. It’s like, But you’re different. You actually want to know what’s going on to the deal. And you want to help like you actually get on the plane, kind of the Customer meet with the customer and like present or if there’s a problem with legal or if there’s a problem with product or if there’s a problem with X, Y Zed, you’re actually on the phone or in people’s offices trying to get those issues resolved within IBM, and other sales leaders didn’t actually do that for us. I’m not saying that’s true of all sales leader, IBM. But that’s one thing that there’s some most sales leaders at IBM are enablers, and they help but for some reason, this is the feedback I got at the time. And so, I realized that, you know, for me to be successful as a sales leader, one of things that just to fall back on one of my personality traits, just always around being an enabler, and being somebody who wants to help people become successful. So, I always looked at how, like, looked at every deal. And the opportunity in the context of those deals is how do we enable the team to successfully get to the signature? And then in that, in, in the plans evolved around that? You know, of course, it’s only one side of sales and one side of being a sales leader, because the other side of being the sales leaders, how do you get the pipeline coverage? And how do you get the pipeline growth year in or quarter after month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year? Yeah. So. So I don’t know if that answers the question. But yeah, I mean, this is long sort of answer, like product journey to sales leadership. And then in that was like six months of like, you know, leading a small team. In a very quickly, I’ll just say that, like, in in early 2015, IBM shuffled a whole bunch of organizations, and they created this team called analytic solutions. And it was a big step up, and I said, well, you know, like, like, for two or three months, nobody put their hat in the ring to lead the analytic solutions team, because there’s 12 different divisions. It was about 700 people across IBM Europe, and my manager in Europe at the time keeps saying, look, you should as he was Andrew, you should keep doing this, you should put your hat in the ring. And if you do, they’ll support you. And I did a massive step up, because now it was leaving a team of almost 700 People across IBM Europe and, and that we ended up doing quite well as a two-year gig leading that team. And I’ve learned a ton about just the IBM machinery, large, large organization, deal machinery, you know about how CIOs and some organizations because it’s IBM, they’ll only buy to the CIO and they won’t buy within a business unit. So, there’s all these things you need to do to get creative around. How do you sell into an organization where, you know, the CIO is only going to make the decision because it’s IBM versus if it’s some other small company, the HR team or the finance team can buy it, because it’s not IBM, all sorts of creative things we need to do? Anyway, I’ll pause there. I’ve been saying a lot.

Christopher Smith

No, that’s great. That’s the whole point of a podcast, right, is that we want to hear your story. It’s a pretty wild story. You’re there a couple of things in there, I wanted to unpack a little bit more. And that is you mentioned customer success. You’re I’m a big believer that sales, you know, true sales, long term sales begins with winning that first deal. After that. It’s all about delivering and managing that customer relationship. So, you’re driving more revenue. Can you talk about your strategy around that? And because it’s it? To me, it sounds like you’re completely aligned with that, I believe, is that correct?

Gene Villeneuve

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, it’s like, like later on in my career, selling SAS capabilities when I after I left it and went to small company was leaving everything from development to go to market to customer success and everything except for finance and HR. But really, I mean, to me, I, I never thought about just the initial sale, right? Just like they drive by selling doesn’t work. And because you have to make sure that there’s the right product market fit with what the customers market problem is or what the customers actual problem is and have the capability will resolve it. And if it doesn’t, then it reflects badly on the company badly on the product reputation. So, I’ve always thought about any deal is, well, not just any deal, but just I’ve always thought of any relationship with a customer. As a lifecycle relationship. It’s like five to seven years and hopefully longer, right? So, when you’re selling software to b2b, it’s you should be thinking, five to seven year time horizon. Some b2b sales cycles, or lifetime cycles are shorter. But when you’re selling large enterprise software, reality is that you’ll sell something that if it becomes sticky, and people used, it should be used for five-to-seven-year period. And hopefully you can renew and extend so I’ve always thought of it from a you know; how do you ensure that the customers pay that we’re meeting the requirements out of the gate so then be when you’re actually installing it that you’re surrounding the customer with a team that will and understand how to ensure that there’s the proper adaption? And then how do you get that expansion within the account? It’s a lead to the annual renewals. So, you have to look at that buyer journey, right? And what are all the things that need to have in place to ensure that success, you need to have a strong customer success team need to have a strong customer support team, the successes board are different, right? Success is about training people how to use it, identifying other opportunities to expand within it, ensuring that the users that are using it understand that features understand how to get the votes, the most optimal use out of that platform, and then success or support stories, you know, there’s a bug or the products down, you need to like a firefighters to go in and like, bring the like, take the fire, you put the fire out, or bring the product back to life or, you know, fix a bug or escalate the issue with engineering. So, engineering can fix the bug. She needs to make sure they have the right team in place around that. But then also, it’s around. How do you build a relationship with a customer so that that customer has a voice in terms of where that product is going. So strong advocate not only customer advisory boards, but also in partner advisory boards, because partners are using the product as well, or they’re reselling on your behalf. But every customer that that’s large, I’ve always been an advocate of how do you create that customer relationship with them so that that customer has a strong voice? And how do you also enable them to become champions within their respective businesses. Because any customer makes a even a $30,000 decision, or a multimillion dollar decision. It’s a career decision they’re making never be on their side too. So, they’re taking a bet on you, just as you’re in, there’s a vested interest for them to be successful. And because they, they want to be successful in their careers, they don’t want to look bad in front of their teams and their users and their managers on making a decision and going with this company. And this company’s product, right, they want to know that the company is behind them. So, when you have a customer who’s a champion, and a raving champion, you know who’s got the right tool, so you want to give them like a use case, material, you want to give them other reference material you want to give them make sure that they’re knowledgeable and that they’re also networking with others. So, one of the things I did as part of the sales leadership role, but also as part of my product leadership role, is make sure that these customer advisory boards would be able to network with each other. I think there’s some tools on the market today, it actually kind of do that, like out of a click, there’s some of these like, like community building platforms you actually buy, if you’re selling enterprise software, because you buy these capabilities where you could have like, all these enterprise customers get together and have a community about how they talked about the use of product. But we ended up doing a lot of that just through some grassroots stuff. So it’s about investing time in the customer, understanding sort of their customer network, like who’s the influencer, who’s the buyer, who are the key stakeholders, doing like a network map a little bit like a customer map.

Gene Villeneuve

And just kind of working that. Because I think, ultimately, the end of the day, if you’ve got to have the customer who can also tell prospects, that they’re happy, it also helps you sell, but so it’s like they’re doing us a favor, but at the same time, you’re also helping them with their careers. And some customers love that. I mean, there’s some customers that I remember my time at IBM Cognos that these customers are now like, I’m seeing them with their careers. They’re now industry analysts. And like, you know, because I got them introduced to other people, they became quite well known within the circle of people making decisions, right analytics capabilities, and they’re now industry analysts or they’re in roles where they’re advising other organizations. And as a result of being a member of the customer advisory board, they were able to build some of those relationships.

Christopher Smith

That’s really cool. I’m a huge believer in that, that. You know, it’s one of the frustrations I have been in the software business is that a lot? I really think a lot of the companies out there that deliver product, they’re very product focused. And they’re always about what’s the new features what’s in the next release, but they forget about the people that have to use this and how am I going to best leverage, and I bought this tool or this package because I was expecting a certain result. But you vendor, Mr. vendor or miss vendor, you’re not helping me drive that result. And so that ends up being frustration and in in struggle and in, you know, my world with CRM. That’s a huge problem in the CRM world. Yeah, a lot of companies are very product focused, and they Just fall on their face when it comes to supporting the customer and really leveraging that tool. So, from that perspective, when you think about CRM in your role as a sales leader, did you love it? Or did you hate it?

Gene Villeneuve

Are you referring to the CRM tools?

Christopher Smith

CRM and Joe?

Gene Villeneuve

Good idea? Yeah. I think I love it. You have to live and breathe by your customers, right? I’ve been giving your key stakeholders in any business, right? You’ve got your shareholders, you’ve got your customers, your partners, your employees. Right? And, you know what? shareholders? Yeah, sure, they’ve got money in the business, they’ve got a vested interest in the business doing well, employees, customers, partners, employees, and customers or customers number one, right? Because the customers are the ones that at the end of the day, pay the employees’ salaries. And, you know, they’re the ones whose jobs are on the line, and the use of product is on the line if it fails, right. So, I’ve always been probably more customer focused and CRM focused, then, you know, caring about, you know, care about, like, you know, EBIT and gross margins, and all those things that, like your investors and VCs care about. But, you know, a VC can say, look, you know, hey, I’m not making a lot of margin on this sale, but I’ve got, like, 20 customers that have landed, and they’re all expanding at 30% month over month. And you know, right now, we might be a 60% margin, but like, you know, here’s the margin journey we’re on, and maybe in a year, we’ll be at an 80% margin, but we’re growing at 30% year, on year, or month on month, VCs care about that. But at the same time, though, the customers are happy, and they’re expanding and growing and retaining E or renewing with you, then that’s where really the focus should come from. And what things have also learned to last several years is that as you move to a SaaS business, right, you could turn things off quickly with SAS. Right, and, you know, so VCs, you know, historically have us two or three years, or maybe three or four years ago, we’re looking at kind of what’s your ARR number, right? And is the ARR growing. But in some usage models, where you’re just trying, if you’re doing something innovative in the enterprise network, it’s really hard to get a customer to commit to an AR out of the gate, you often need to first prove the value of what is sell. And that customer needs to prove the value internally. So, like a pay as you go model, as long as you could show month over month growth. That’s good. The problem there with VCs, what they don’t like is it it’s a pay as you go contract. And if 90% your customers are Pay as You Go contract. In theory, they could all say, you know, at the end of the next month that, you know, they don’t want to use it and they’re not committed to an MRR or an AR. But if you’re seeing consistent growth and renew and then growing and continuing to use it month over month, then that means you’re doing well tense back to the point around the CRM focus, you have to be focused on that customer success, especially in a lot of these pays you go models now that most of the businesses are moving towards a, like a pay as you go or usage based model and SAS, so you have no choice but to focus on that customer success and adoption.

Christopher Smith

I think people forget that the CNC Rundas customer, they get so wrapped around the axle with the technology, they forget technology, it’s just a tool. And we’re just going to leverage this tool to drive a specific outcome we’re seeking. And, you know, it’s about your people, your processes and the customer. You know, that’s where the focus should be. And the tool is just there to enable and to drive that conversation.

Gene Villeneuve

Yeah, and there, there are all sorts of CRM tools out there, I mean, really, you have to remember as a sales leader, or a customer success leader or a business leader or CEO, it’s really, it’s a tool that enables you to get visibility into, like, you’ve got 1000s of customers, you need to know kind of where each of them are at. And if you have a pipeline, you need to be able to triangulate the pipeline, because in the SAS world, too, right? The pipeline is, is not just your new prospects coming in. It’s your existing prospects. It’s or it’s your prospects, it’s or existing customers. And then it’s the expansion and renewals. So, you’ve got multiple facets that you need to look at a CRM tool should at any given time, give you that insight, but then also give you a good insight into what’s your risk profile around these right so or, like how many tickets are being raised across the board? Is there a pattern of success or support tickets being raised? You know, why have sales suddenly stalled in this segment versus the other segment? Why is the pipeline growing here? But not here? Or how can the pipeline and marketing lead initiatives like Eliza drive up? Right? I mean, is our marketing no longer working? You know, because, because, because the other the other thing is when you’re looking at sales and sales pipeline, you’re looking at kind of where’s the pipeline coming from? Right yet, product Lead Pipeline, you got a marketing lead pipeline, you got Sales Lead Pipeline, you got SDR Lead Pipeline, you’ve got partner Lead Pipeline. So, you need to have visibility in all of those, but also you, you can’t fragment like your, your pipeline, growth strategy. across all of those, you need to be able to figure out okay, which one is were you going to focus on. And not all products are, are good for product lead growth. Because sometimes they’re just like, you can’t agree on every feature in a product, right? Or, you know, or take them all on a journey. You know, ideally, you know, you want to get there, but a lot of the b2b products and a lot of the enterprise products, it’s not really how they buy, it’s more, you know, we’re solving a problem here. But a lot of the b2c products are more product LED. But we’re seeing more and more b2b capabilities being product lead to in terms of that, like you know that that capability to add more users instantly, then you hit a certain users threshold and then get, you know, buy on the spot, those kinds of things.

Christopher Smith

I really appreciate you coming on sales lead dog. We’re at our time here. If people want to reach out connect with you learn more about what you’re doing. What’s the best way for them to do that?

Gene Villeneuve

I’m on LinkedIn, just Jean Villeneuve on LinkedIn. I’m pretty easy to find there might be one or two other guys with my name. There is also a website does Gene development.com You’ll see more about my cycling adventures there than you will about my business. But there is a mentoring page there as well. And there’s a Contact Me page on the genevilleneuve.com site as well.

Christopher Smith

That’s awesome. And we’ll have all that information in our show notes. So, she’ll be sure to check out this episode on. You can get the show notes on and empellorcrm.com. Forward slash sales lead dog Gene’s episode. We’ll be right there. Gene again, thank you for coming on sales lead dog and welcome to the pack.

Gene Villeneuve

Great. Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be on the podcast. It’s great to meet you. Thanks for the thoughts.

Outro

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