61: Jamal Reimer - Doing Mega Deals at Oracle (3X $50M+)

0:08 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm.

0:21 Scott Ingram: Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Jamal Reimer, who is an incredibly high-performing strategic account manager manager at Oracle in Sweden. Welcome to the show, Jamal.

0:35 Jamal Reimer: Hey, thanks so much, Scott.

0:36 Scott Ingram: So this episode is sponsored by the still very new Daily Sales Tips podcast. If you aren't already listening to that show, you've got to check it out. Just do a quick search for Daily Sales Tips in your podcast app and hit subscribe, or you can go to dailysales.tips for more information. All right, Jamal, let's jump right in like we always do and talk about the 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success there at Oracle.

1:03 Jamal Reimer: I think relentless is an overused word, but I'm going to use it. So I relentlessly live in the shoes of my customers. I choose that wording. That's number one. I choose that wording because in every interaction that I have with a customer, I'm continually thinking what's going on in their professional life right now. What are their MBOs? What's the context of the work environment that they're in and everything. And that's actually, I've got some pretty good feedback on that because there was a story that we can get into later, but I, I was taken off an account at one point and I was brought back. And I asked somebody, why do you think that was? And they said, Jamal, you work like we work. And the other rep just didn't. And so you gel with us and that's why we want you back. So that's number one. Number 2 is I try to have a peer mindset with everybody that I interact with. And I've had to develop that and stretch myself over time. To have the same mindset with executives, because the more complex deals you do or the bigger deals you do, you need to interact with executives. And they really only want to work with people who they can sense have something to bring to the table, not somebody who's kind of, you know, going to be kind of a cowering person sitting in the corner. So I've had to grow a peer mindset with every level of person that I, that I need to work with. And the third one is that I have really learned how to grow a spine of steel in every negotiation. And the only way that I have done that is by working a lot with data and having really, really strong arguments when it comes time to hammer out what the final price of a deal is going to be.

2:45 Scott Ingram: Well, let's dig into a couple of these. So like when you say relentless, I feel like there's another word needed there in terms of the way that you get to the point that you're understanding your customers. Is it relentless curiosity? Is it relentless questioning? Like, how are you getting to that point?

3:02 Jamal Reimer: I try to listen as much as possible. And if you're ever going to get to a point of listening, it's like active listening. You got to start with questions and just let it roll from there. And so relentless curiosity, that's a good way to put it. If you're not wondering what's going on with them and where they're coming from, you're going to wind up just pitching. And pitching is the wrong place you want to be if you ever want to come to an outcome that's really going to be positive for the customer. And the needs and wants of anybody who's sitting across the table from you are so much more powerful than anything that you could come up with in terms of, hey, here's what I think is valuable and you ought to buy that from me, you ought to buy that idea. Or this product or this service from me. The thing that they want and letting them express that is just so much more valuable. So I'm always listening and I'm always just trying to let that come out.

4:02 Scott Ingram: And then coming back to your 3rd point, what is the data that you're using? Is that ROI data? Is that business case data? What are you using to help sort of maintain your position from a negotiation standpoint?

4:15 Jamal Reimer: Well, I suppose you could say right now I have a little bit of a luxury. So I have less than a handful of customers, and the customers that I work with, especially one of them, they do a lot of business with us over and over in one area or another. And so when we talk about either expanding the business or making changes to contracts or, you know, going into new areas, we have a lot of data about their operating norms. And so we always comb through all of that data to say, okay, here's what you normally do, here's what you've done over the past X months or years, and based on that, here's what we can really have a good idea about what we think you're going to do over the next year or next 3 years. And therefore, with that growth trajectory, the sum total value of the contract is… should be X. And it's really hard to disagree with data when you get into that level of it. Now, I was taught that by one of my VPs, and we would just spend months in advance of doing a big deal or putting a proposal in front of the customer. And the thing that I learned from this VP was he said, you can comfortably argue whatever you can prove Or at least have an extremely sound argument for. And it's those kind of arrows you want to have in your quiver when you go into negotiation. You can go in with rock-solid arguments and a lot of confidence about where you want to end up.

5:47 Scott Ingram: Awesome. And I'm sure confidence really relates the most back to your second point. When you think about having that kind of peer mindset in the way that you're connecting with executives, think back to when you started that process, right? Maybe give me a story about the scariest time where like, okay, I got to go toe-to-toe with this guy. I'm intimidated out of my mind. How am I going to have the confidence or fake the confidence and play at that level through that initial interaction, for example?

6:16 Jamal Reimer: Initial interactions, I am extremely reactive. And what I mean by reactive is I go back to this kind of whole question thing. One of the concepts that I was thinking of in preparing for this chat was I seem to play 2 roles. The first is Columbo and the next one is Socrates. So, you know, in the old Columbo show, he would just kind of always continually ask these questions and he was a very humble guy, but he asked really smart questions. They were pretty innocuous in the beginning, but they would always lead somewhere. And then winding up by being Socrates is you just kind of follow the argument to its logical conclusion. And especially in the early interactions with a customer stakeholder, I don't really feel the need to kind of go in with really strong opinions. I'd rather let them do all the talking and they're going to just tell me, okay, here's the landmines, here's the pot of gold, here's the direction we're trying to go. And then you can build upon that. Love it.

7:16 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. Well, we're going to flip the script a little bit here. Usually I talk about where you're at and what you're doing and what that role is, but you gave me a little glimpse into your history and I think it's going to make more sense to go through this a little bit more sequentially. So talk about your beginnings. How did you get your start in sales?

7:35 Jamal Reimer: Yeah, so it started back in university. Just before university, my family was living in Africa and we were living in South Africa. And when I came back to start university, I was going to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. It was right around that summer that the value of the currency of South Africa was the rand. It plummeted to about 25% of its original value. So whatever savings my parents had to try to start my college years, it was next to worthless. And I found myself in my freshman year in a space between when school started and when my first Pell Grant loan or my Pell Grant and student loans were going to be distributed. And there was a period of weeks where I was basically penniless, and I found myself in one of my favorite kind of hole-in-the-wall restaurants. It was called Time Out, and they make the best chicken biscuits in the whole world. And what they do is they fry chicken like any other chicken place does, and then they'll take a breast of chicken and they'll rip off the, the breast of chicken and stick it on a biscuit and they sell that. But then what's left is like, you know, some bones with some breading and a little bit of meat on it. They put those aside and then they sell those for 10 cents apiece and they call them bones. And I found myself living on 2 bones and a plain biscuit and a water, like day after day after day. And it was the most humbling experience I'd ever had. Then I was like, you know, a 17-year-old kid all alone. My parents were on a whole nother continent, and I would just sit there. And in that moment, I thought to myself, you know, I am never going to allow myself to be in this position again. And I didn't really know what that was gonna look like, but it lit the fire. You know, whatever it took to never be in this place again, I was going to do it. And I was going to do it, you know, standing on my own 2 feet. I wasn't going to ask or expect anyone else, a person or an institution, to give me anything. And what happened was I was approached by a friend of mine. I was on the fencing team and one of my teammates suggested that I come to a meeting and it turned out to be a recruiting meeting to sell books door-to-door in the summer. And I wound up selling for 5 summers. And that was the start of the beginning of a sales career.

10:10 Scott Ingram: And then connect the dots loosely, if you would, to that experience and selling books door-to-door during college to your time at Oracle. And then we'll go through Oracle because I think that seems like a monumental leap forward in some of the stuff that you've done in that role.

10:25 Jamal Reimer: The road to Oracle was a long and bumpy one. And the short story about that is that I worked for a series of startup-y, early-stage technology companies. And I was, you know, a year in one place, 18 months another place. And it actually came to the point where there was a recruiter… I was between jobs, and during that time I had been fired twice from 2 different companies, one because I wasn't selling much and the other because it was kind of a downsizing exercise. But I was sitting in front of a recruiter and they were looking at my resume and how many jobs I had done in kind of a short span of years. And he actually said, well, it's not like you worked at Oracle for 10 years. And I was like, oh, okay, I get it. And lo and behold, within 2 months, I got an offer at Oracle. So I jumped on it. I said, oh, this is, this must be where I must need to be. Because, you know, if you can make it at Oracle, you can almost make it anywhere. So that's the period between.

11:23 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. So now walk us through Oracle, because that's been an adventure and a journey of its own, it sounds like.

11:29 Jamal Reimer: Yeah, so when I was a rookie, right, your, your first year at Oracle, I was called a rookie. You kind of look around and you say, who's around you and who's doing well and who's not? And there was a rep, her name's Marcy Akers, and where the typical rep was doing… this is 2009, I think it was, no, 2007… the typical rep was doing anywhere from half a million to $2 million in annual sales. And Marcy, the first year I was there, at the end of that first year, she did a deal for over $10 million. And then the next year, she did a deal for like $14, $15 million. So back-to-back years of absolutely blowing it away. And I was just starstruck. And, you know, I used to think, gosh, I would just love to be a fly on the wall just to hear her talk to customers and, you know, what kind of magic does she do that just makes them kind of pull out their wallets and write these massive checks? But I was always kind of wondering, how do these big deals get done? And year after year, I was just kind of chugging along. And, you know, I had a good first year, but it was, you know, on and off for the next several years. And then fast forward to 2012, I had just been taken off of an account the year before because there was an acquisition and new management coming in. They didn't know me. And they did a big restructure of all the accounts. So I was taken off this account that I really loved, and within the year, things weren't working out with the other rep, and this account asked for me back. And I was super excited, and we got working together again. And it turned out that it was just several months before the renewal of one of the contracts that we did together. And that contract was… it was a decent-sized contract. It was like $8 to $10 million, something like that, for these 3-year SaaS deals that we were doing. And the context here was that although my relationship with them was pretty good, this engagement was in dire straits, partially because of the acquisition. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the engagement from a services perspective, and there were bugs that were causing issues with the stakeholder base of everybody using the software within the customer. And the long story short, a couple of VPs, the VP of sales of the software and the global VP of the services, worked with me to completely transform the operating model of how we worked with the customer. And it turned out so successful, and the customer valued this new reality, or this, you know, this future state of what we could do in turning around how the software was used and how the services were implemented, that the contract went from being $8 or $10 million to over $50 million. And so that was my first, you know, what we call at Oracle, a mega deal. And since then, I've actually learned to lead other mega deals and I've done 2 more even bigger since then.

14:30 Scott Ingram: Love that. And we will definitely be spending some time talking about those mega deals and how you're putting those together and kind of what you learned from that first experience that you've been able to replicate. But I want to take one step back and just ask if you could have started the Oracle adventure sooner, right. And not gone place to place to place. Place, would you have done that, or was there something formative in those early experiences that you kind of had to do to get to the place that you are now?

15:00 Jamal Reimer: So I can only speak from my own experience, and I actually go back to selling books. When I used to sell books in the summer, I did it for 5 summers. One of the things that the student managers, right, these other college kids who would recruit college students to be on their teams, they would have the beginner bookselling students follow them. And I would follow some of the, you know, I would not only follow my manager, but I'd follow others who were really doing well. I'd see what they were doing and then I'd get it. And then I could actually model some of the things that I resonated with in their, in their selling style. And I tell that kind of vignette because at least for me, For the first 6 years of my… 5 or 6 years of my tenure at Oracle, I just saw things the way that I saw things, and I was having the results from that perspective. But having been thrown into this mega deal scenario, I was a part of it. In a way, I was following other great sales reps, the VP of the software side of the house and the VP of the services. And so I had a very similar kind of following experience. So to answer your question, if I had started a little bit earlier, I kind of think that I, I'm the kind of guy that needs to see it. Once I see it, then I can believe it. Once I believe it, I can go do it.

16:20 Scott Ingram: That's fascinating. Very, very interesting. So before we keep going here, let me give another quick plug for the Daily Sales Tips podcast. Now, I decided to start that show because the 2 best things about this show I think are also the 2 worst things about this show. So the first is, if you haven't noticed, these episodes are freaking long. And the Daily Sales Tips show is the exact opposite. The target right now is 5 to 10 minutes per episode or less. That's on a daily basis, but also on a weekly basis. My goal is to keep the full week's worth of content at less than an hour. So you can easily binge through that in a single setting and get through a week's worth of content. The other thing about this show that I love and I will never change, and it's why I had to start a completely separate show, is the fact that I only interview top 1% performers like Jamal. On the Daily Sales Tips show, I'm really after a lot more variety. So there's an opportunity for you to get exposure to the folks that frankly don't qualify to come on the show because maybe they're not actively in a selling role today. They're writing great books or they're doing some consulting work or they're presenting at conferences or what have you. So just a lot more variety. So check it out. I'd love to hear what you think. You can go to the website at dailysales.tips, or better yet, pause this episode right now, do a quick search in your podcast app for Daily Sales Tips and hit that subscribe button. Just don't forget to come back and listen to the rest of what Jamal has to share with us, which I'm sure is going to be pretty spectacularly valuable. So Jamal, now let's talk about just the results. I mean, what have you done? Talk about your, your rank and whatever other kind of details you can give with us just to understand. Understand your performance of late?

18:08 Jamal Reimer: So what I can share in terms of numbers is the first one was over $50 million and the next 2 were even bigger. That's probably about as much as I could say there. What's interesting is the ranking issue. The first time that we did this, you know, typically with sales compensation and setting quotas and all that other kind of stuff, either you do or you don't have visibility of deals coming down the pike, right? If you're the management kind of setting out and distributing the quota. And in the first one, nobody saw this huge bump in revenue and the transformation of the deal size. So at that time I was doing… it was like well over 1,000% of my number. The second one, they knew something. They're like, okay, that team did that. Are they going to do it again? We're not quite sure. So the next time it was like 800% over. By the third one, they were well onto us. So even though the numbers were really super high, I was only 1.5 times my number because they set that third number so high. But the first 2 times at 1,000 over and 800 over, because there's so many reps at Oracle, I was in, you know, the top 0.005%.

19:23 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. So was it one of those deals? Like, what are you most proud of in this stretch that you've had at Oracle? Is it one of those deals or is it something something else?

19:32 Jamal Reimer: It was definitely the first one. And even though it wasn't that I, you know, went out into the icy ocean with my small skiff and landed a massive whale all by myself, it was just a massive, massive effort. And yeah, short story is the first one was absolutely the thing that I was the most proud of because of the effort that went into it. It was just absolutely heroic effort from a team of about 35 people. With a leadership team of about 5 people. And going through that, it just kind of read like a novel for me for about 9 months. And it was a transformational moment in my life. So that's the moment that I'm the most proud of.

20:14 Scott Ingram: And then what is the formula? The most important thing about this is you didn't… and I talk about this a lot, right? You didn't hit the sales lottery, do this one time and you've never been able to do it again. But you have been able to repeat this again and again What's the formula?

20:28 Jamal Reimer: So what I've learned is that it's not a formula. It's a mountain, right? It's a mountain with multiple facets. And depending on what kind of climber you are, you can go on the east face or the west face, and you can still get to the top of the mountain. And how I've learned about that is there are things that I do that work for me to get these big deals done, but I've gone back and I've talked to Marcy, or I've talked to other you know, whale hunter reps, and they do it differently. And sometimes they say, yeah, my management's come to me and trying to replicate it, and they just haven't been able to do that through any kind of sales enablement program. So even though it's not a formula, there are absolutely some commonalities that I see, not only with the stuff that I do, but with these other people who I've had a chance to talk with and to learn from. One thing is absolutely the ability and the desire to work with executives. And the truth of the matter is, at least in my experience working with big deals, at some point it's almost like running for public office, right? Because there's so many stakeholders. Typically there is a large stakeholder base of users of the solution or, you know, corporate consumers. Of the service. And then there's the next layer up, and they're, they're like mid-level management, and they're project leaders or department heads, what have you. And then, you know, as you climb that mountain, the population gets super small, and then it's either a steering committee or a single person or maybe 3 people who are really making the decisions. So in my experience, the whole name of the game is you can really cut to the chase, accelerate buy-in and closure if you focus on the few that have the greatest proportion of influence and/or decision-making capability. So that's number one, is a desire and an ability to work with executives. The other is to… this is one that's just straight from my experience, and I go back to it… is the use of data to come up with very rock-solid arguments. So at least in the software world, software at some point as the deal size gets bigger, its value becomes a little more abstract and customers tend to use that to their advantage to try to keep prices low. So there's this whole effort. I guess I could put this as a 3rd component along with data is just the ability to start very early in kind of setting the goalposts about what the expected value would be. And then working toward proving it or shoring up your argument that that value is actually going to be there. So a combination of having some kind of a model that you get buy-in with the customer to agree to, that yeah, you know, if you could make things different in our shop in the following ways, it cuts so much time, or we could redirect our resources and, you know, our people to do other more high-value tasks or whatever. And if you can get them to buy into a model, then you can in a nice way hold their feet to the fire and say, look, this value has always been here. And you need that to be able to defend your numbers when it comes to the end of the process, because then you move away from just working with the business or IT or whoever's doing the analysis, and you tend to wind up with procurement or sourcing, and they don't know very much about that value process. And so if you're not able to quickly tune in your stakeholders to say, you got to tell procurement about this value, or else they're going to try to reduce the size of the deal by so much, all the work you've done over months or even sometimes years to build up the momentum for the big deal, it goes to waste because the deal never materializes on paper. So there's working with executives, there's the use of data, And there's building credible value models that you can maintain buy-in throughout all the stakeholders that you have throughout a sales cycle. And there's more, but those are kind of the real, the common areas that I find when it comes to doing these really large deals.

24:48 Scott Ingram: Well, and let's touch on a couple of those and starting with kind of the executive piece, how are you first getting to that level? But I find that a lot of people are able to get the first meeting with an executive, what becomes really important is, do you have the right to go back and can you get sort of the ongoing buy-in of that executive? What's, what's your process around that?

25:12 Jamal Reimer: One of the things that I was thinking about is a question that you had posed to me earlier, which was, what kind of challenge would you set out? You know, something that you can challenge the listeners to go do next week. And instantly I thought, go pick an executive within one of your customers and figure out how to do something valuable to them just within that one week. And go think outside of the box. And what I mean by that is, so you asked me, how do I, how do you get past the first meeting? You know, how do you get the right to come back? So I'm in a regulated industry. I sell to pharmaceutical companies. And typically, I have, I have no qualms in saying this, I am typically not the technically smartest guy in the room. I'm surrounded by PhDs in biology and chemistry and pharmacy and all kinds of engineers and physicians and academics. So it's not the technical or academic or scientific know-how that brings me into a room and, you know, gets everybody to listen to Jamal. But I do find people like that on my side and bring them in. So I tend to be seen as somebody who's a really good resource. Ah, Oracle's a big place, and Jamal can give me really smart people to go talk about pretty much any topic that I'd want to when it comes to technology. And then I try to step out of anything having to do with my product into… this goes back to Let's call it relentless curiosity. I like the fact that you put curiosity on top of the relentless piece. What has this executive got to get done this quarter? You know, looking through the, the financial documents or whatever. I've attempted or helped executives find people for their teams, or I've connected one executive at one company with another executive at another customer Just for the sake of connecting them because they might want a peer relationship at the corporate vice president, senior vice president level. And I do whatever I can to not be perceived as a sales guy. I'd rather just be perceived as, oh, he's my go-to guy. I could, I can go to Jamal for lots of stuff and therefore they want to take my call or, you know, they'll text me. I've got some folks sometimes, you know, texting me 10:30 at night asking a question. Do I know somebody who, you know, that kind of a thing? So the conversation really, really shifts when you start to add value in every way you can, not just in a way that's directly related to your product or service.

27:53 Scott Ingram: So Jamal, that's awesome. And I love that you gave some really tangible examples to that. How do you… I mean, if you're trying not to be seen as that salesperson, how are you describing yourself? How are you introducing yourself at the executive level?

28:09 Jamal Reimer: If we're in a meeting and I'm one of, you know, 2 or more people in the room, we always start with introductions. Then I just say, I'm Jamal, I take care of XYZ company on behalf of Oracle, and that's it. And I never put a name on what I do. And every conversation that I have, I try to simply go back to, okay, What is it you want? What is it you need? And then I get really, really curious and I delve into the details and I look at it from 5 different facets. And then I don't start pitching right away. And then I go away and I come back and, you know, start… we're always talking in the language of the customer, in their vernacular, and about the topics that they care about. And I never… it's not about me. So why would I need to say, hey, this is my title or role? Rather than, you know, I'm just here to do whatever it is that I can to help you to move whatever ball forward you need to get done this week.

29:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great stuff. So simple. Now, when it comes to the business value that you're building, how are you going about that?

29:11 Jamal Reimer: So in the business unit where I work, I have a big bag. There's a lot of products. And so I tend to work with multiple business areas within the customer, and some of them is a part of our install base, so they're using a product of ours or a service. And in other areas, there's just nothing going on. So with the areas that don't have anything going on, we start by talking about what they're going through, or if there's some kind of compelling event. Sometimes the meeting or the engagement is triggered by some event that we're doing, and then we… that kind of just sets the agenda for the meeting or the interaction right then. Other times when they're a customer of ours in terms of actually using a product or service, we start talking about how it's going. And then as we start to get into how it's going, sometimes they've got gripes or they've got questions. Hey, could we do this or that? And other times we'll start to bring things up. And sometimes it's not… certainly it's not me that comes up with the deep-down details about what's possible, but I'm always trying to bring people over and over to say, well, Could we do it differently? Could we speed it up? Could we move things over? And the other big thing that I try to do is large organizations are full of rules, full of rules, and those are needed, right? The bigger the organization is, the more hierarchy there is, you need rules. But one thing that I've learned, sometimes to really deliver value, you have to work around the rules. And I use those words carefully because I'm not a rule breaker. But what I do is I go ask permission and justify why we should, in this case, for this customer, give them an exception to the rule. And then that typically will just delight the customer, right? Because in working with lots of big vendors, not just Oracle, they're used to a lot of rules and we have to do it this way, we can't do it that way. And when they're met with somebody who can say, well, I can just get that done, and we've done it in a special way. It just goes miles.

31:18 Scott Ingram: And just to be clear, you're talking about not breaking the customer company's rules. You're talking about navigating Oracle.

31:27 Jamal Reimer: That's right.

31:28 Scott Ingram: So talk more about that. Having spent some time at Oracle with 130,000 other people, this is a very large organization. How do you think about that navigation? And I love that you're also putting it in terms of positioning that or making that into a value that you bring to the customer?

31:45 Jamal Reimer: It's not, in my experience, in talking with reps and executives at other vendors, it's not a characteristic that's unique to Oracle. I just want to throw that out first of all. So I think a lot of customers, especially at big organizations that work with big vendors, are used to this whole rule-based world and the ability to change it, it's another way of differentiating yourself. So I don't know if that's really answering the question, but most of the time the customers are used to not being able to get around rules. And so once they're met with the ability to do it, it's another way that I can look like a go-to guy. And I've, I've been asked to help out with situations that are not in my product area. They're not in my line of business. They're in some other part of Oracle. And I've been asked to come and help and say, hey, you know, can you help translate the way that we need to do business because we're a regulated entity to this other part of Oracle who doesn't normally work with regulated entities? It's very obvious very quickly to the customer who's used to working in a rule-based system when you try to work exceptions to those rules, they appreciate it immediately. There's not a lot of… they don't take it for granted and you don't have to say, hey, I'm doing this that's special for you, and that never happens. They know that, and they, they appreciate it incredibly.

33:07 Scott Ingram: And I think that's a great articulation of the why. Can you give us some thoughts around the how? How are you actually getting that done for them?

33:16 Jamal Reimer: That actually feeds into my whole Big Deal strategy. So I set expectations on both sides, and I start with the customer. Well, actually, that's not true. I start with Oracle. So getting things approved that are anything different from the norm take a lot of stakeholders within Oracle. So sometimes if I'm going to go after a really big deal, I'll get a number of people who I know I'm going to need approvals from later, and I'll have a meeting or a call with them upfront. And I'll say, here's what I'm going to go do. I'm going to go to try to make this big deal happen. And here's who I'm going to go for. And I think to make it happen, we're going to have to work around this and this and this. I'm not asking you to do it right now, but I think it's coming. So let's start thinking about what it would look like if we did. And that softens the groundwork. It lays the groundwork very early internally. Then I go to the customer and then I say, I know you have a pain or a problem or a desire or a wish in this area. I think I can make something like this happen, but you know how big organizations work. If you really want to make it something that's like a custom solution that's just for you, we really are going to have to make it something of size. So, you know, let's go think it through. Who are you going to need from your side? It's going to be very high. Which senior vice president should we go pick as a sponsor? And let's get buy-in to the idea. Before we start going down the road of doing anything else. And then they, they just love it because they can't get that kind of out-of-the-box thinking from a typical sales rep. Love it.

34:57 Scott Ingram: Love it. And if you peel that back, obviously there's a lot of insights in there in terms of how you're setting this up. Now, as you're working through these mega deals, what do you find the biggest challenge to be?

35:10 Jamal Reimer: Time. So I never have a full 12 months between when I smell smoke and then I try to turn it into a fire and when the end of the fiscal year comes. So the first big deal that I did happened within the same fiscal where I got hold of it. And it was that first one. The other 2 took years to foster. So the biggest challenge that I have is when I see something, that looks possible and then it becomes almost probable, I really want to get it done in the year where most of the work is done. But oftentimes that simply doesn't happen. I don't know if that's answering the question you're trying to get to, but that's the one that I think about all the time, that the amount of time that it takes to close the deal.

35:57 Scott Ingram: No, it totally does. And so what do you do in those interim years where you're massively invested on one of these mega deals, but you're not, you're not going to have a lot to show for it in that particular fiscal year.

36:12 Jamal Reimer: So I still have other customers. And so I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but once you get into doing more than one of these, at least in my experience, it's all I want to do now. It's all I think about. It's all… all of the… my account plans that I do are always based on some kind of transformational project. And so if in a slow year or an interim year in one account, I'm trying my best to stagger the opportunities between the accounts that I have. Certainly, it doesn't work all the time. Sometimes it's very much feast or famine, but I'm chasing what could be a $100 million deal. I have no idea how close or far we are from it, but that's the vision I have. That's the pitch I'm trying to share with lots of stakeholders at a different customer right now. So you spread around your territory, whatever size it is, whether it's 5 accounts or 50, and you try to keep a couple of fires going that way.

37:13 Scott Ingram: And what about just the expectation setting that you're doing internally and, and getting through the, the times of famine so that you're not eating bones?

37:22 Jamal Reimer: Yeah, well, so like I said, I have a lot of products, and some of them, just natural renewals come up, and those can kind of, you know, tied me over. Sometimes I try to do a mega deal and it never quite gets there, but something smaller along the same lines does materialize. Case in point right now, the last mega deal that we did, we were actually trying to grow it by adding additional products to it, and we ran out of time. You know, the time factor came into play. We just couldn't get it in before close of play. But now that effort is… we're going to enjoy a deal in a typical off year because of the additional work that we did the last time around. It'll happen in one of the off years.

38:08 Scott Ingram: Got it. So now let's dig into just the time in general. And I always like to sort of open with this and just having you walk us through. And what, what does a day in the life look like starting with like alarm clock goes off? Give me the blow-by-blow.

38:22 Jamal Reimer: For the past… I don't know if it's aging or nerves or what, but for the last couple of years, I just naturally get up at about 5:30. And I head downstairs to my office and I just start working on whatever I need to. I meditate.

38:35 Scott Ingram: Is there an enablement on the meditation? Is that you just do that, or are you using Headspace, or what's the meditation piece?

38:41 Jamal Reimer: No, it's just calm reflection time, about 20 minutes each morning. Well, so from like, let's say 5:30 to 6:00 is meditation and quiet thing. I'll have a cup of coffee and do some quiet stuff, and then I'll kind of slowly work into the contemplative side of getting ready for the day. That's everything from… I try to do some kind of a task list, but really short. Like, I ask myself, what if I only got a couple of things done today? What would those things be? Because so many things are going to come up that are going to take my time. If I just got a couple or 3 things done, what would they be? And I write them down and I put them in Outlook. I put all these notes in Outlook at the beginning of the day. And I refer to them all day long as I'm making notes or going through meetings, etc. And then most days I'm working from home. If I'm not at home, I'm at the customer site. So a couple of days a week, 3 days a week, after the 6 o'clock kind of half-hour meditation, I'm getting kids ready for school, etc. And by 8, I'm back at home, and then I'll go for a run. 3 days a week, 8 to 9 is a run. And then I'm fresh and ready, and by about 9:30 I'm back at my desk. And then, you know, the day just rolls, and typically it's call after call after call. And sometimes I'll have a 3-hour spot to try to get outbound calls and catch up with people or do email, etc. Most days are like that, but then I've got days where I'm on site, and those are typically And it goes from one meeting an hour to like a half day to governance meetings that can last pretty much all day once a quarter.

40:27 Scott Ingram: And what about the back end of the day? How do you kind of wrap things up?

40:31 Jamal Reimer: Well, I have small kids, and so one of the benefits of mostly working… Oracle is a big work-at-home environment. That happened back in 2008. It really encouraged working from home. If nothing else, it was a cost savings play because it reduced the number of floors in every office building that we had to, to rent because everybody just had a hotel desk instead of an assigned desk. But so I take a pause in work between 4. By 4, I've got to pick up a kid, do stuff with them, and have a couple kids at home. And then there's dinner, then you put the kids to bed, and then it's back to work at about 8:30 till 10 if I want to work, or I got other stuff going on. But I typically break up my day that way, so Starts with meditation, then some exercise, then a whole bunch of busy work and meetings, then a 3-hour break in the afternoon-evening, and then a couple more hours in the, in the late evening.

41:30 Scott Ingram: Got it. Are there any other habits or routines that are really central to your success and the way you operate?

41:36 Jamal Reimer: The meditation and the exercise are the key and the only real consistent parts of my schedule that I do on a regular basis. Everything else is relatively movable.

41:48 Scott Ingram: And before I forget, I'm going to totally switch gears here, but I don't want to forget the question. How the heck did you get to Sweden?

41:54 Jamal Reimer: Love. My wife is from Sweden, and I met her when I lived in Washington, D.C., and her sister lived not too far from me, and we met through her sister, dated internationally, And she's a physician, so she studied and trained in Europe, so she'd kind of have to start over again to practice medicine in the U.S. So instead, I just came over here.

42:20 Scott Ingram: And was that post-Oracle? Did you do all of that with Oracle, or did you join Oracle in the middle of some of that?

42:25 Jamal Reimer: I was with Oracle on both ends. So 2007 to 2009, I was on the CRM team in Mid-Atlantic. I happened to be working with a few big pharmaceutical companies, but that was, you know, a few of the accounts that I had in the geographic territory. And then when I moved to Sweden, I switched business units into a kind of a pharma-only business unit, a life sciences business unit, and that's where I've been ever since.

42:51 Scott Ingram: And how did you affect that transition? Because that was one of the things that was always really interesting to me at Oracle. And in fact, I was at Eloqua when we got acquired by Oracle. It was so funny. I'll the day that that acquisition was announced, you know, Thomas Kurian comes in and he's talking about, you know, all the stuff that's going to happen. And I distinctly remember he didn't say it this way, but this is the way I remember it. I remember him saying, oh, it's so cute that you guys are in like 7 countries because we're in like 167. And it was that point that I really started to… just started to get my head around sort of the reach of Oracle. And I thought, you know, this is a really interesting place to be if you have an interest. And my wife went to high school in 3 countries, so she's always kind of pushed a little bit to, hey, you know, we… you don't have to necessarily be here in the US. There's other places that you could work. So how did you make that happen? How did you go from the Mid-Atlantic to Sweden to be with your girlfriend-wife?

43:48 Jamal Reimer: So the way that Oracle is structured is that there's a different entity for every country. So there's Oracle America, and there's Oracle Sweden. And so on and so forth. So it was really 2 stages. One, I had to quit Oracle America just because by the very fact that I was leaving, I just simply had to quit. And in the interim, I would just use all my connections and I just said, hey, I need a job in Sweden. And through internal networking, found a different opportunity for… and there was a new first-line manager who needed a rep. And needed several accounts covered in Denmark. And it turned out that I was in the relatively southern side of Sweden. And so it was good. And I had worked with some pharmaceutical companies, not with pharma apps, but with, you know, at least understanding something about the industry. So it was a good match. And then I was rehired by Oracle Sweden. And I was able to keep some kind of seniority in terms of retirement and, you know, number of days of vacation, things like like that.

44:49 Scott Ingram: Now, did you have that lined up before you left, or you quit and you left and you affected all of that from Sweden?

44:55 Jamal Reimer: It was in the middle. I had… but before I left, I had met this manager who turned out to be, you know, my new boss once I got there. But I left just jumping. I did not leave with a job when I got on the plane to move.

45:09 Scott Ingram: Wow, that's fascinating. I'm so glad I asked. So back to the regularly scheduled process, talk to me about just what your information diet is. What are you reading, listening to, watching, and And when does that happen typically?

45:21 Jamal Reimer: I got a lot of Google Alerts set up, right? So it's keyword-based. So the names of my customers, the names of some of their products, and definitely the name of the executives that I care about and either I know or I want to know. So I'm watching every day what's going on in the news just from the Google Alerts. And I also keep up with their financial documents, you know, the 10-Ks and things like that. And sometimes I will listen to their earnings calls. And that's kind of the daily, truly customer-oriented media. But then otherwise, I'm more and more listening to podcasts. There's yours, and there's, I think, Advanced Selling Podcast is another one. There's a couple of sales-related podcasts that I'm listening to more and more. And then there's that one, Finding Mastery, which is a great podcast and just really inspirational talk. And a sports psychologist, and I think he's with the Seattle Hawks. He just has a number of really, really great top-shelf guests. That's more introverted and introspective, I should say, my information diet. Other than that, then it's books. I read nonfiction and fiction alike, but when it comes to business stuff, I read… I've actually recently come back to a number of really great sales books. There's The Challenger Sale. Maybe even more than Challenger Sale, I like Selling to the C-Suite. Those are 2 really great books. And then there's one that a friend of mine turned me on to a few months ago. It's called The Power of Moments. I don't know if you've heard of that one.

46:55 Scott Ingram: I haven't.

46:56 Jamal Reimer: It's… the basic idea is that moments can completely change your perspective on some part of life. And in fact, moments can be engineered. Some moments are totally happenstance, and other moments they can actually be engineered for the better of yourself or your customers or humanity or whatever. And it talks about how to positively impact moments that are meaningful to forward your relationships and, and your business dealings. And it's been impactful. It's been really impactful. And it's a great book. I highly recommend it.

47:31 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. Well, as always, we will put links to all of the books and podcasts and all the other linkable stuff into the show notes. And if you just go to top1.fm/61, that will take you right there. I was actually in California the first part of this week, and I drove all the heck over the place. So I flew into San Jose, drove up to Santa Rosa. So that's about a 2-hour drive all the way. I guess I didn't go on that side of the bay, but past San Francisco, way up north into, into wine country, and then back to San Jose where there were no hotel rooms left, which caused me to spend a night in Santa Cruz, and there are worse things except for that it was raining. And all of that allowed me to listen to the whole of Dan Pink's book, When, followed by… and I tend to dive into things thematically. So Win was followed by… I'm about halfway through Cal Newport's Deep Work. And both of those are… it's a very interesting kind of mix and certainly has me thinking about a lot of things in terms of the way that I structure my time and the way that I do the work that I do. And that is particularly relevant for me right now, just in the process of bringing the new Daily Sales Tips show on board and making all of this manageable so that I can continue to sell in my day-to-day. So I've also been in the process of onboarding a full-time virtual assistant so that I don't kill myself with all that I'm trying to do, because I, If you're paying any attention, you'll note that I've got a lot on my plate. It's a little bit ambitious, but so far so good. Some other good resources for folks if you're into the book stuff. What about tools and apps? Are there other things that you're using over the course of your day that are really central?

49:17 Jamal Reimer: More and more it's LinkedIn. And I've got this idea of doing a t-shirt and the… bit of a tangent, but it relates to LinkedIn. So just stick with me. And on the t-shirt, I envision having… it's almost like a formula or an equation. It's 0, and then next to the 0 is an arrow pointing to the right, and then next to that is a 1. And to me, that symbolizes going from never doing something to doing it for the first time. And I, I've kind of first dabbled and then dove into LinkedIn with video. And over the past 4 weeks, I've done 3 videos, and I just post them on my, on my profile. And the first 2 grew over a few weeks to get somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 views, which just blew me away. I mean, I've got like 800 contacts, but I had no idea that anything that I would do would ever get any kind of viewership, and I'm always trying to do videos that relate to something that the customer cares about. Yesterday I did my 3rd video, and within 18 hours it had 1,500 views. So either there's some kind of cumulative effect of people watching what I'm doing, or maybe the topic of the 3rd one was more on point than the other 2. But it's an incredible learning experience, and now on this 3rd one I'm starting to get real engagement from my customers. So it's… my eyes are really being opened to the power of this. If you want to call it an app, then it's an app. But other than LinkedIn, I'm pretty light when it comes to apps. I mean, I'm connected to my phone. My wife calls my phone, my second wife. So laptop and phone all day long. And other than that, it's pretty it's pretty light, but I'm really jumping into LinkedIn now.

51:16 Scott Ingram: That's, that's really interesting. And we will, we'll certainly link to your LinkedIn profile so people can pretty easily get to those videos. What are they more kind of client-focused? What, what is the content of those videos?

51:27 Jamal Reimer: So the first 2 are absolutely client-focused. And, you know, there's an interesting line that I am trying to stay on the safe side of. So I'm in conversation with our own marketing department and with my own management team And, you know, they've generally said, hey, it's great, you should go to LinkedIn and, you know, build your, your brand, etc. But then I started doing these videos and all of a sudden everybody's really starting to take notice. And, you know, they basically said, Jamal, we really encourage this, it's really good, but make sure that you're not speaking on behalf of Oracle. So I was already absolutely on board with that. So what I'm doing is I am talking about themes that are important to the customer. And I think that's even so much better. In my last conversation with, you know, the famous Marcie Aker, which I brought up more than once, she said, I never use the word software. I just call it the asset and talk about the benefits and the outcomes and the business processes. I never use the word software. And I'm challenging myself to just remove it from my selling vocabulary. And so in a way, that's what I'm trying to do also with these videos is talk about themes that the customers care about. Now, the 3rd video that I did, I noticed in the first 2 videos that even though they were customer-centric themes, I looked at the stats, well, more than half of the people who viewed these videos were salespeople. They weren't my customers. So then I'm thinking, okay, now there's a growing audience of sales guys watching what I'm doing. How can I address that audience? So the 3rd video that I did was What Salespeople Should Be Doing for You, But Most Don't. So I wanted to keep it customer-centric, but if I saw that headline on a video on LinkedIn, I'd absolutely have a look. And I think that's why this 3rd video is doing so well is it's actually 2 audiences who are consuming it.

53:29 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. Well, and obviously the implication is for your customers that are seeing that are that these are things I do that most salespeople don't, right? So let's just leave that one at a tease. I would love to dig in and find more about that, but instead we'll actually find a link directly to that video and we'll put that in the show notes so people can find out what you had to say on the topic. So again, top1.fm/61. Now, Jamal, do you subscribe to a particular or specific sales philosophy?

54:01 Jamal Reimer: You know, I don't, and I've read all the books and I've taken a ton of the, the training, but I think this goes back to my experience in not only my own large deals but talking to these other folks that also do really large deals. Typically, the folks that do what I'm interested in doing don't adhere to a specific philosophy, if I'm understanding the question correctly. Yeah, they're laser-focused on the customer. They speak with enough passion that it raises them to the peer level to whoever they're talking to. So lowly project team member all the way to senior vice president or C-level person is going to listen to that voice. So So that's the thing that I hone in to the most, questioning and curiosity to understand where is the mind of my audience and where do they want to go? Because if all I do is show up at where they want to go, I've basically done my job because they're going to look at me and they're going to say, wow, you're delivering exactly what I wanted or where I want to be. So I don't know if you would consider that a sales philosophy, but that's where my mindshare is, and that's how I kind of inform my own process.

55:22 Scott Ingram: Yeah, love that. Now you've mentioned something a couple of times now that I'd like to understand a little bit better. You've talked about the conversations you've had with Marcy and the conversations that you have with some of these other… your whale hunter peers. Talk about that, right? How intentional are you about those conversations and learning from each other in that process.

55:40 Jamal Reimer: So what's that quote? You are the sum total of the 5 people you hang around with, something like that.

55:45 Scott Ingram: Yep. Jim Rohn. You're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

55:48 Jamal Reimer: Yeah, that's becoming just more and more true. And I remain dissatisfied with the level of my own progress. And even though I've done some things that maybe the typical rep in my professional world have done, It's not enough. I, I want to do the next… I'd love to do $100 million, but that's just a number. But really, I want to start to have impact in a way, because this might be a bit of a tangent, but it's super, super important. The size of the deal has become secondary to the impact of the deal. And this came into my consciousness when I saw that the transactions that our team have been able to do have actually impacted millions of patients who are the end users of the products and services of my customer. And when I realized that what we do makes them more able to bring drugs to market faster, more cheaply, and more safely, why would I not want to have more impact like that? That out in the world. Now, that's really where I'm trying to go, but that is a bit of an aside. If I'm dissatisfied, how am I going to get to the next level? It's not going to be hanging around with myself because I only know what I know. I very intentionally go out and I seek out people who have done more complex deals or bigger deals or more impactful deals than I have. I've reached out to the point where I've gotten the story and I can kind of anonymize it because it's not really… the details of this story are not mine to tell, but I can tell you a little bit. I've heard the story of the biggest deal that was ever done at Salesforce.com. And the part of the story that I can tell is that there was a rep who was in a financial vertical, and one of his prospects was an insurance company. And so what he did is he took the insurance licensing exam and became a part-time insurance salesperson for this company.

58:00 Scott Ingram: That's awesome.

58:01 Jamal Reimer: For months and just started working in their CRM system and really understood from literally being in the customer's shoes, what is a day in the life, a week in the life, a month in the life, a year in the life of an insurance salesman at this company? And then he and his team wrote an analysis of that experience and how much better it would be, of course, with their product, and sent it to the CIO of the insurance company. And long story short, that yielded him a deal of over $150 million.

58:39 Scott Ingram: So how did you find that? Did you have a conversation directly with that individual?

58:44 Jamal Reimer: Nope. Had a conversation with the gentleman who was standing next to him at the awards ceremony where they gave him like a 6-foot-long check, you know, of several million dollars in commissions.

58:54 Scott Ingram: That's great. Well, and that's sort of exactly the point of what inspired me to pull together the Sales Success Summit, because it's so hard to find those stories, find those people, surround yourself with 5 other people who are absolutely amazing that are going to help you get to the next level. And Jamal, I know we've got some additional arm twisting we'll do after we turn off the recording. Obviously, this is geographically inconvenient for you to be here in Austin in October, but I'm going to see what I can do. There's something about just being surrounded by people who are also doing it. And sure, you can kind of get that at President's Club and your sales kickoff and you start see some of these stories, but I think there's a lot of value in just the diversity, right? And getting outside of your industry and being exposed to other ideas and other thoughts that maybe aren't SaaS or aren't technology, or, you know, in your case is more on the account management side versus what some amazing BDRs and SDRs are doing and just kind of stewing in all of that. So anyway, I've already flogged the Daily Sales Tips podcast. I don't need to flog the summit on this one. But if that has some interest to folks, if you go to top1summit.com, you can learn about what we're trying to do here in October. And I've already sold about a third of those tickets. So that show will absolutely sell out come October. So I'd encourage you to, to dig into that. Jamal, so we talked about your philosophy or lack thereof, but actually, I think you actually have a very clear kind of customer-centric philosophy. How would you then describe your style and your approach?

1:00:31 Jamal Reimer: It's very informal, and that's intentional. So I'm a student of marketing right now. We talked a little bit about this in a different conversation, but I think that the whole direction of the role of a field sales rep is going to become almost 10% that traditional sales role and almost 90% marketing. And a big reason for that is that we're simply in the information age. We're in the digital age. And the people who make decisions about the stuff that we're trying to sell anyway are forming their opinions way before they'll ever talk to a sales rep. And even the people who we want to influence probably wouldn't agree to meet with a sales rep. So how are we going to get to them? It's through social media. It's through Google searches. It's through LinkedIn. It's through the digital world. And so we've got to become much more adept to using the tools and the spaces and the platforms in that space if we're ever going to really influence the people that we want to influence and do the deals we want to do.

1:01:35 Scott Ingram: So that's a fascinating observation, one I certainly believe in. If you look at the things that I'm doing, you can see that this is also something that I'm practicing. So beyond the LinkedIn videos, what else are you doing to start to practice marketing, right, beyond the traditional sales role?

1:01:53 Jamal Reimer: Well, I have the intention to write a book, and the book's topic will be relevant to executives that I want to get to know. And in fact, I'm gonna seek out these executives to be interviewed and featured in the book. So I have a lot of reasons for that being one of my life goals that I'd like to take action on relatively quickly. But it's just another way. One of the reasons I want to do it is to yet again separate myself from any kind of prejudice or, you know, preconceived notion about what a salesperson is. Because if I'm having conversations with them at the level of bringing something new and different to the market in terms of research or interviews or insights about an industry or a practice, I'll be able to have conversations at a much, much higher level. So you ask, what am I doing outside of even the new platforms? That's probably my most ambitious effort. Another thing that I've contemplated is some of the people who are executives… I mean, they're mid-level folks and some are a little bit higher… I've worked with them long enough to be able to discuss doing side projects. Like one of them, I might do an interview, right? You know, something like a podcast but more like a one-off, or something that I could do on LinkedIn that would be like a combined video with me and a customer, but we're not talking on behalf of our companies. We're just 2 people in an industry talking about industry, something that's interesting in the industry. And another thought that's come up is having like an investment group inviting people who were in the pharmaceutical space to look at startups or to look at products that they could see would serve the market because they're in the market. And that's just another way to have a completely different conversation, but to build a relationship and to do positive work on another front.

1:03:52 Scott Ingram: Such excellent ideas. On the book front, is that something that you're prepared to talk about at a high level, or do I have to have you come back to talk about that once it gets a little closer?

1:04:01 Jamal Reimer: I mean, so let's talk about it now because I've got to start verbalizing outside of my own 2 ears, you know, what, what my intention is. So I want to write about my experience and the experience of other reps who have done mega deals. And I'd like to both give some best practices because like I said, I don't think there's a formula, but I do think there's a direction or there's principles or there's common components to most mega deals. So I think that's one topic that is hugely interesting, at least to me, but I, but you know, I need to kind of validate that from the rest of the market. But I also want to find out what do big deals mean to the companies that sell them as well as to the companies who buy them. I just don't know the numbers in terms of what is the cost of sale of a major, major deal, right? You put so many extra resources on it. Maybe there's some extra discount on it that reduces the margin. I just don't know. So I think it would be a hugely interesting exercise to talk with primarily technology companies to talk about, you know, what big deals mean to them. Are they hugely important and are they strategically key, or are they kind of icing on the cake that, you know, bumps up their quarterly number when they get a bluebird in or, you know, an unexpected extra? But these are the kind of topics that I find hugely interesting. And yeah, that's kind of the direction of the book.

1:05:27 Scott Ingram: Well, you've certainly piqued my interest. And one of the things that's funny, I was planning on suggesting this anyway, and now we have a great reason to suggest it. Because of the Daily Sales Tips show, I invested in some better commenting software on the website just to be able to have more conversation on there. And we're going to cover a lot of ground today. We have covered a lot of ground. But there's plenty of stuff that I'm sure I missed. I'm sure that some folks are really interested in some of the negotiation stuff that you teased at earlier, and I haven't asked enough about that. I would love if you would come to Jamal's page. So again, top1.fm/61 or top1.fm/jamal. I'll make it all work. Add your comments or add your questions, right? What would you want to know particularly about the mega deal? That we didn't cover, and maybe that'll help inform Jamal as he starts to think some more about this project. And I'm sure we'll pay attention and be able to make some announcements at some point in the future when this starts to become more reality. We can let folks know what's going on there.

1:06:32 Jamal Reimer: That sounds awesome.

1:06:33 Scott Ingram: So Jamal, when it comes to motivation, like what motivates all of this for you and how do you think about motivation in general for yourself?

1:06:43 Jamal Reimer: It comes and it goes, and I think a lot about that topic. I think a lot about, is motivation a necessary component of my daily life to perform? And, you know, I'm a man of many seasons, right? I will be the first to say one of my weaknesses is the difficulty in being consistent when you're in the doldrums, right? There's no wind on the ocean. Your sails are not catching any wind whatsoever. And so I think about motivation and I think, okay, when I'm super excited and super motivated, I'm kind of unstoppable. And when nothing's going on, I'm really terrible with unstructured time. So how do I get over some of the triggers for whatever the opposite, you know, being demotivated or unmotivated? One thing is just this whole spreading of activity across accounts. Part of that is just the fact that, you know, I think something that I share with all other reps, or most other reps, is having just a very short attention span. So if I spread activity across a number of accounts and have a few things going at different levels of activity or compelling events or what have you, then if one's not really going anywhere, I can just switch and go to the other. And then, oh, I have a whole different set of motivations because I've got a new person that has engaged with me, or there's a new opportunity, or there's, you know, something kind of fresh. So as long as I don't just have one account or one opportunity or one effort to focus on, that really, really helps. But the other thing is just realizing… so I'm 50, and I've been at this game for many moons now. And I've seen enough cycles of motivation and enough cycles of a lack thereof to at least have my floor is a little bit higher. The bar is a little bit higher on my minimum such that I can say, okay, I know that I'm not motivated, but I know that really cool stuff's going to happen if I just keep plugging away, even if there's no great thing happening right now. So just do it. Just have the faith because you've seen it happen before. Just make the calls, just brainstorm about the next thing, just keep reading those Google Alerts until you find something that's actually going to be enough of a hook to start the next conversation.

1:09:04 Scott Ingram: Nice. So it sounds like, and maybe this comes with age and wisdom, you're a little bit further ahead than me, but not a whole ton, that you have kind of mentally smoothed out the peaks and valleys of the roller coaster of the sales experience a little bit.

1:09:20 Jamal Reimer: That's quite accurate.

1:09:21 Scott Ingram: Is that a maturity thing? Like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, was that a different experience?

1:09:26 Jamal Reimer: Well, absolutely. Plus having some success that is lasting in memory. So I don't want to make it sound like the only thing meaningful that's ever happened in my sales career is these big deals, but after going through one or two of them, it propelled my confidence to the point where I can be super quiet about the whole confidence thing because it's just there. It's like, okay, I've done that. And that's great. So now I know how to do this, and I know that now I've done a couple of them and there's years between them and they can still come up again. So yeah, the highs and the… and tell you the truth, the 3rd one that we did, which we just did last fiscal, it didn't have the same extremes on the upside either. And I wasn't even all that disappointed about that. It was just like, yep, it was the 3rd one. It was really hard. We burned the candle at both ends and we got it done and we can celebrate that. But it's not like this earth-shattering thing because now it's a common piece of previous experience and it's repeated.

1:10:31 Scott Ingram: Very cool. That's heartening to hear. So along those lines, I mean, you did it for the 3rd time. You did it this last fiscal year. How do you manage the what have you done for me lately side of things? Because you must get some pressure there and the expectation must be really high at this point.

1:10:51 Jamal Reimer: You know that I totally know where you're coming from. I think my management team, one of the really great things about them is that they pretty much leave me alone. And, you know, they know that with what I do, there's a cadence between them and we stay in touch and, you know, we have periodic reviews and I tell them what I'm up to. And I think everybody pretty much understands that there's going to be… I have to say, I am in a bit of a unique business unit within the whole Oracle ecosystem, and the typical culture or norm around quotas is quite strong, and it's, it's definitely every 12 months. And in the business unit where I am, it's known that there's this kind of gestation period, and then there's really, you know, feast or famine. And then they kind of distribute that over a number of reps. And I'm the kind of a rep where they know, okay, he's one of these flood or famine guys. We've got others that can bang out, you know, the rest or other parts of our annual quota in a more consistent way. So I have to say that I'm very grateful for the management team that we have to be able to let me carry the role the way I do.

1:12:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So is there something you believe that the average rep would think is crazy?

1:12:18 Jamal Reimer: You know, I was thinking about that, and I don't know if the average rep would think this is crazy or not, or basically just think it's kind of new agey fluffy stuff. But I have really… I don't know why, but especially in the last year, I've really come back to spiritual principles. Like, I think about my own personal power. You know, how am I going to do that? If I've done something that's pretty cool, right, these large transactions or deep relationships or whatever, what's the next thing? And where am I going to get the power or the energy to get that done? And I just remember reading a quote from an Eastern teacher which went something like that. And it was basically like, it was like a Sufi poem. And the poem was God Talking to Man. So I'm a believer, so that's where I come from. That's why I say I don't know what the typical rep's going to think about this, but the quote, I'll never forget it, where he said, turn thy… this is the voice of God speaking to man, which was, turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find me standing within thee, mighty, powerful, and self-subsisting. So for me, that was hugely, hugely impactful. So if I'm going to go reach for the next thing in whatever effort I do, and in this case, the context is work, I have to actually look inward to tap into whatever higher power I might believe in. And I think that if all of us found a higher power, you know, a river can be a higher power, right? You can't withstand the force of a river. Therefore, it's a higher power, right? Money could be a higher power, but I don't know if that's something that you'd want, you know, you or I would want to ascribe to as a higher power. But if I was going to choose a higher power, it would be kind of the source of the virtues that I employ to have any kind of meaningful impact in whatever environment I'm working in, be it work or social or service or friendships or family or whatever.

1:14:21 Scott Ingram: Man, that's deep. That's good stuff. It aligns with certainly some things that I believe, so I, I love that you shared that. What about the flip side? What is it about just the average sales rep that you think is crazy?

1:14:35 Jamal Reimer: The amount of anxiety that goes into our overall sales culture, at least in technology sales. I remember when I was new to Oracle I was in a situation that was… that the manager who I had and the situation that I found myself in. And, you know, at Oracle, sometimes there's different business areas that have overlap with what you do. And so sometimes, at least back then, there was some competition between internal reps. So I was just faced with an awful lot of anxiety in my day-to-day selling. And so that was just such a a crazy, crazy environment. And that was just on top of whatever insecurity I had as, as a relatively new rep in kind of a… one of the premier, one of the bigger names in the software world. So what I would look back and say, what does the average rep think that I think is crazy? Just the amount of pressure that comes internally from a rep, not only from the external world, because as soon as you assign or bring that pressure on yourself, the natural, you know, the frontal cortex just goes away and you just become a reptile again. And it's all about fight or flight or lay down and play dead, because the nuanced thought of being calm is completely gone. And so if you're always on yourself in that level of pressure that becomes anxiety, you're never going to perform. So do whatever it is that you have to do to relax, to become calm, and employ your, your true self and the better part of your brain.

1:16:17 Scott Ingram: And it sounds like… and maybe I'm putting words into your mouth… but it sounds like this is something that you struggled with and have now overcome.

1:16:24 Jamal Reimer: Yes.

1:16:25 Scott Ingram: And is that the meditation, or is there something else going on here that you figured out how to crush the beast of anxiety?

1:16:32 Jamal Reimer: I think I just got tired. You know, at some point when you beat yourself against the wall so much, and it was before the mega deal stuff started to happen, but I just got so tired and so burnt out of having so much anxiety and so much accepting, so much pressure, and even magnifying it, what came from the outside, I'd magnify it on the inside. But I think that fatigue, at some point I internally said, I gave up. I can't, I can't take on this pressure anymore. And as soon as I gave up, good things started to happen. I started to talk to my customers like I was a real human being rather than that kind of, you know, that punch-out placard in the Computer Associates commercials, you know, the sales guy coming in under the crack of the door and, hey, you wanna buy some software today? All that went away and I just became a human being. And as soon as I became a human being, the human beings who were my customers wanted to connect with that guy. And then I was like, oh, so This is what authentic interactions look like. Huh, kind of cool.

1:17:30 Scott Ingram: You know, I just did another podcast interview where I was the interviewee yesterday, and, you know, one of the things we were talking about is for me, sales just gets more and more fun. And I think it's probably that, right? It's the more you just sort of relax about it, you build sort of a confidence in your skill set and what you're capable of. You don't don't worry and have the anxiety around those pieces, and you just get to be a person, and you get to work with other people, and that's a lot of fun. It's getting through that when you're so worked up about, oh, am I doing this right? Am I doing that right? Is there a better way I could do this? Like, yeah, if you just sort of relax and talk to people, it sort of works itself out and, and again starts to be really fun.

1:18:15 Jamal Reimer: Couldn't agree more, Scott.

1:18:17 Scott Ingram: Couldn't agree more with So, I think that just says that I'm getting old. That's fantastic. If you're young and listening to this, I guess it just comes with age. Keep at it.

1:18:27 Jamal Reimer: Or take our word for it and don't spend the years to try to achieve it through fatigue and just try it out now and get the jump on us by a decade.

1:18:36 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. Love it. So, I'm curious if you've got something else for us. I like to ask if there were really important decisions you've made or lessons you've had to learn to get where you are today? Is that something that we haven't already covered?

1:18:51 Jamal Reimer: So if I go back to that college story, right, about kind of my low point and then start learning how to sell something… I was selling books door-to-door. I think one of the best decisions I've made in my entire life was selling books for the second time, because my first summer was such a traumatic experience. That's one of the places where there was so much anxiety, was that was the first time that I ever had to really come to grips with down-and-dirty rejection. You know, we worked for a company that hired college students, and then they'd send us really far away from our homes for the summer so we wouldn't have any friends to hang out with. We would just work. And so we were selling books like 80 hours a week every summer. Turned out that I was in an area that got hit by every door-to-door salesperson. So, you know, magazines and fruit and knives and and encyclopedias and then my educational books and everything. And I would get… I remember this one guy came to the door and it was a blistering hot 95, 100-degree humid day in Topeka, Kansas. And I knocked on the door and I could, you know, there was a screen. It was an old house, the screen door, and then inside that kind of the internal wood door. And I heard the wood door open, but I couldn't see him. And then I saw this silhouette of him coming up to the, to the screen, and he just looked at me with such a frown. He said, I am not interested in anything you have. And I just said, I'm sorry to bother you. Turn around. And I went, I sat on the curb, and I just cried. I was a 17-year-old kid, and I was away from home, and I just bawled because I've never had to deal with rejection like that. So to come back to the decisions that I've made to get where I am, I think that was a huge decision. I had such a traumatic and unsuccessful experience in selling when I was between my freshman and sophomore year in college. I decided to come back to do it again because I was so scared of it. I did not want there to be a thing out there in the world that I was so terrified from it that I would run. From irrational emotional… for irrational and emotional reasons. So I went back, I conquered the fear, I stuck around for the second year, and then the whole world changed and I actually got kind of good at it. And then by the fifth summer, I was, you know, doing really well. And that was a lesson that I'll never forget. And since then, facing fears has become easier because of the first time doing it back then.

1:21:27 Scott Ingram: Zero to One.

1:21:27 Jamal Reimer: Zero to One.

1:21:28 Scott Ingram: Love it. So this is the soapbox portion of the show. What advice would you have to somebody that is just starting out in their sales career today? And, you know, whether that's selling books or technology sales, although this is a pretty B2B-oriented show, so maybe we want to stick to the technology sales.

1:21:47 Jamal Reimer: It's just very tactical. Get in the digital world. That goes right back to what I said that I've learned is that I think that, you know, the role of sales is gonna only look like 10% of the new salesperson is going to be doing the salesy stuff we do now, and 90% is going to be way overweighted toward going to where our customers are doing their research and making… the cement is drying on their opinions, which is the digital world. So the advice that I'd have is develop a digital brand. Every single person can do it. If me, a 50-year-old guy, can just now a month ago start doing videos on LinkedIn and having any modicum of success, just think what a millennial or younger could do who's lived in this world since they were kids. So get in that world, develop an online presence. And then you're gonna have an audience that'll follow you from job to job to job regardless of which company you work for. You'll maintain and grow an audience over time. And that's, I think, the resume of the future. It used to be that sales guys, if they were really cocky and, you know, they were… somebody was trying to recruit them to say, please send me your resume, they would just send them a bunch of W-2s. Just say, boom, here you go, there's my resume. I think in the future, it's not going to be W-2s anymore. It's going to be, look at how many followers I have, or look at the engagement I have, or, you know, here's my YouTube channel and all the engagement and people who follow me there from a business or professional perspective. Because I think that's where the, the money's in the list, if you understand what I mean.

1:23:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. You know, something that very recently came onto my radar… I haven't connected with these guys directly yet, but I think what they're doing is pretty fascinating. Fascinating. There's a company called Bravado, and they're basically building sort of a… it's hard to explain. You just have to go look at it. It's really based on the feedback of your customers that you've worked with, right? What has the sales experience been for somebody who has worked with you? And I think that is such a powerful way to look at the real value of what we do, right? Especially from just a a longevity perspective, right? I've always… I mean, shoot, I've been in marketing technology sales for, gosh, coming close to 10 years now, and the world is so ridiculously small it hurts, right?

1:24:24 Jamal Reimer: Where…

1:24:24 Scott Ingram: I mean, I just experienced this last week, right? The executive from one of my client… one of my company's accounts, not one of my active accounts, but she moved from That organization is now an even higher-level executive inside of one of my accounts. And just the experience that you're providing, you can't screw people because what comes around goes around. And in this digital age, it's going to come around a lot faster and whack you upside the head, either good or bad, right? So I think if you really serve people and you think about the customer in that way and they have those great experiences, then they'd be willing to talk about it and advocate on your behalf through a tool like Bravado. I think that'll be really interesting. Now, what about somebody who's a little bit further into their career, right? They're more established, they're making their numbers, they're doing okay, but they've not yet… they haven't figured out the mega deal yet. What's your advice to them to really get to the next level?

1:25:18 Jamal Reimer: From my own perspective, I would… and this never happens in not only Oracle but the companies even before that. I haven't been able to do this since I was back selling books door-to-door. Sometimes you got to see it to believe it. So find a way to model or witness or follow somebody who is massively better than you, because we all have it in us. We just got to figure out which way we're going to climb the mountain. And if all we're doing is beating our head against the wall by doing what we do and reading some books, I just don't… you know, if you're mid-career and you haven't had even a, in kind of a, you know, this spark of real success, however you define success, if you haven't had it and you're just kind of plodding along, you got to shake it up somehow. And another thing, and this is something that I've been thinking about, is get a coach. Your manager is not your coach. Your manager is your manager. If you go get a coach, that is a, you know, the whole world of coaching has just absolutely exploded And I'm only scratching the surface to understand the implications or realities of sales coaching, but I'm considering getting a coach. And I've done these really big, huge deals, but whether it's one possible strategy to get over the moments or periods of when I'm unmotivated, or whether I need inspiration or a push, a healthy challenge. To rise to the next level, or just to, you know, just get over some time of laziness, whatever it is. I think coaching is another opportunity that's maybe more ripe than it has before. I guess I'm saying if you've gone on a long time and you haven't really broken through, just ask for some help because, you know, you're not going to get it from a book. You gotta, you gotta shake it up and have a more significant change to your understanding, experience, perception to get there.

1:27:25 Scott Ingram: Yeah, good, good stuff. So what would you want to know about the top sellers in other organizations?

1:27:32 Jamal Reimer: Oh my god, that'd be a whole nother hour and a half for each one. I kind of like to think of myself as more than a sales guy. I like to think that I'm a business guy at every level. When I'm in the taxi, I'm asking the guy, so do you own your taxi or do you rent it? How much does the run rate cost you? And in every business, how much is the rent for your brick-and-mortar store? Or what's your ad spend on Google Ads if you have an online store and stuff like that? So I'm just always, whoever I'm in front of, even if they haven't done, let's say, bigger deals than I have, but they've done different deals than I have, there's something I can learn. You're asking me what would I want to learn? Whatever they got to teach me. I just love to hear something new, something different. And, you know, if I hear 10 things, I might only keep 3 of them. But if I don't ask, I'm never going to hear the 10. So I'd rather, I'd rather be able to go shopping through all these little jewels and, and take the ones home that fit for So something I've thought about, maybe we'll cut this out.

1:28:42 Scott Ingram: Maybe I'll leave it in. I'll probably just leave it in because why the heck not? I mean, at this point, if you're still listening to us, like you are committed. I love you. This is why I started Daily Sales Tips and a 5 to 10 minute show because I'm just blowing this show up because I can't stop. This is way too much fun. But I've thought about turning over the reins every now and then and letting somebody else do the interview. So I think I may making an invitation here, Jamal. If, if at some point you want to do one of these interviews and go find another whale hunter or just somebody else that meets the criteria for the show that you'd like to talk to, maybe I'll let you run an interview and, and see where you get.

1:29:19 Jamal Reimer: I'm up for the challenge, Scott. That sounds like fun. I'm scared to death because I've never done it, but hey, zero to one.

1:29:25 Scott Ingram: Zero to one.

1:29:25 Jamal Reimer: I love it.

1:29:26 Scott Ingram: Okay, so challenge. And I think you, you pre-issued your challenge a little bit, but you know, if we always try and wrap this up on something actionable, right? We've talked about so much stuff, but what can the person listening to this right now do to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:29:44 Jamal Reimer: Pick an executive. Could be as low as a VP or higher, but pick an executive, at least one if not more than one, within your customer base, whether you know them or not, and figure out a way to deliver value to them. No matter how small or big, figure out something that you can do to make their day easier. It could be about your product or service or not. Just be of service, be an asset, and do it this week. If you're starting from scratch, if you don't know a single executive because all you spend all your time with directors or below, then you start combing the internet and find out everything about this person as possible. One thing that… another thing that I'm grateful about my management team is when I'm chasing an executive, my general manager has said, Jamal, just tell me if this senior vice president shows up at a conference anytime in the next 6 months. I will go to that conference and just bump into him or her just because we need to, we need to get this going. So that's the right person. If you tell me that's the right person, I'm gonna go find them. I think I'm coining a phrase, ethically stalk somebody who's super important in your account, which means don't stand in their window and look, look at them at night, but find out everything that you can about them and then find a way to deliver value. That's the challenge for the week.

1:31:15 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. And I will, I'll share a hack to help generate some ideas. So I guess this wasn't part of the recording. We were, we were talking before, Jamal and I, just about some of my background, and I've been fortunate to have been part of 2 different IPOs. And in both of those run-ups, we brought on super heavy-hitter CMOs to really get us ready for that, that final stage of the IPO. And these were both marketing technology companies, and we were selling to marketing executives. And one of the things I always tried to do was to talk to those CMOs, and both of them had a lot of experience as chief marketers or CMOs, as one of them was the chief marketing officer of a Fortune 500 company previously, who was our customer. And so, I asked her, I said, what was your experience of us? Right? And how did you think about us? And that brought some enlightening insights. And then at Eloqua, when Heidi Malin started, I just, I asked her, I said, you must get clobbered. I mean, this was at the time where just the marketing technology ecosystem was exploding and there were thousands of tools out there. And I'm like, how do you deal with this? You must get completely bombarded. So what actually breaks through for you, right? How does a sales professional in that environment actually get your attention in a meaningful way? And I'm going to be a total tease and I don't know why I'm not sharing those, but this has already been really super long. But in both of those cases, I got incredible insights that have served me extraordinarily well. So, go find, whether it's people in your own organization or executives that you already have relationships with, and find some of those ideas. And then I'm going to issue a little bit of my own challenge on this again, because I think that you can learn so much from what Jamal has shared today. And hopefully, you've learned a little bit from some of my anecdotes. Along the way, but I think we can learn way more from each other. So I'd encourage you to go to top1.fm/61 and join in the conversation. And I think we've got sort of 3 main topic areas, so it'll be a very convoluted conversation, but it's all good, right? I think the first one is what do you still want to know about just the mega deal process, right? What are the questions that went unanswered in this conversation today? The second one is, are you using a sales coach? How has that been? I'm as curious as Jamal, you probably are about that because I'm not actively working with somebody, although I've also been thinking about it and having a couple of conversations on that front. And then the third piece is talk about your experience with the challenge. Did you do it? What did you do? And what were the results of your efforts to connect within the next week? One of the executives in, in your accounts. Jamal, this has been incredible. Thank you for all of the time we've gone over, but I know it's in the evening for you. So this is, this is probably okay. And I know that you and I still want to talk, but really, I can't thank you enough for contributing all of your, your time and insights and wisdom and just being so willing to share everything with us today.

1:34:31 Jamal Reimer: Scott, it's been so much fun for me, and I just appreciate your accepting to have me. It's been so much fun, and I look forward to doing more with you in the future.

1:34:39 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. So to be continued. In the meantime, go subscribe to dailysalestips.com and go listen to something that's 5 minutes and not 2 hours. Thanks for listening.

1:34:49 Jamal Reimer: Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.