Episode 14: Salesforce Career Conversations Richard Pay with ROD. Listen to Richard talk about his inspiring career journey and how he bounced back following redundancy in the automative sector to carve out a new career within Salesforce.
[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]
Lee Durrant: Hello, and welcome to this episode of broadcast with me, Lee Durrant and joining me today is Theresa Durrant. Today we talk to Richard Pay about his career in Salesforce so far. Richard had a very successful 30-year career in sales. Unfortunately, being made redundant in his 50s, not sure what to do or where to turn. He now works as a senior consultant for one of Salesforce's biggest partners in the world. How'd he do it? He explains all in this episode.
Hi, Richard Pay. Welcome to the latest edition of RODCast. Thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing?
Richard Pay: Great, thank you. It's nice to meet you face to face finally. Thanks for having me.
Lee: Yes. The three of us are going to have a chat about your career to date, well in Salesforce, but also before that. I think we should kick off with you giving us a bit of a, I suppose overview, of your career up to the point you decided, a fancy bit of Salesforce stuff.
Richard: I think overview is a good point because there are 30 odd years of it. Yes, I'll try and summarise it. I did a degree in geography and cartography. Cartography is a dying art, isn't it? For people that don't know, it's making maps basically. In those days, you used to draw them with pen and ink and scribing tools and that sort of stuff. I did that and, very long story, but I didn't go into that particular sphere because I was about to go off on a project, mapping Iraq. I got the job and then they told me that the first Iraq-Iran wars kicked off again. It was on a big hydroelectric project, so I was surveying that. The project got canceled in one of those funny turns in your life; I've had quite a few of these. Rather randomly, I didn't go down the route of being a cartographer or surveyor, but I still love that kind of scene. I love all maps and all that stuff.
Theresa: That is like me. There's something fascinating about maps, yes.
Richard: When I drive around in the car, I'm looking at hills and terminal moraines and all that good stuff. Anyway, all good. I did a degree in that, but I didn't pursue that career. Rather randomly again, I got into the automotive business. I had a basic training, if you like, a sort of a management trainee in a car company down in Devon, Cornwall, that sort of area.
I did that and that kind of kicked off a career in automotive and, I, over the last 30 years basically, I've been involved in that world of automotive. I've gone from a used car salesman, if you like, through to being involved in what they call used car remarketing, which is the wholesaling of vehicles out from leasing companies or rental companies into the secondary market, which is usually dealers and that sort of stuff.
More recently that's become quite techie. It used to be done through car auctions, and then for lots of reasons, like everything frankly, it's all gone on, not all, but it's gone online. I got myself involved in the online piece and basically selling platforms around the online remarketing bit. I got into tech that way, but I have always been a business development guy. That's my thing. I'm not a techie person. Probably speak something about that later on, but I am not a techie person at all.
I come out in a cold sweat whenever in meetings, people say, "Well, what's the percentage of sales that you did last week as opposed to the week before?" I'm one of those people that go, "Oh right," don't really get that. I'm not a mathematician guy at all. I did that and effectively did that for quite a long time actually, rose through the ranks up to sales director level and managing director level of a couple of companies. That's how it all started.
Lee: Quite successful. Obviously, very successful in that industry in the sales side of things up to director, that's about how high you can get, isn't it really? What was the moment where you ever thought, "I might change, I might get off this ladder and start on another one"?
Richard: I'll tell you a story about that. What happened, I was a sales director of a business and I won't name them. Effectively, we got bought out by a big American corporation. I was happily doing my sales director job and earning a decent wage. It was all good, happy days. I got called into a meeting and I went into the meeting, there was our HR director in there and I thought, "Great. I'm going to get promoted." I knew we'd been taken over so I thought this is fantastic. I want to be head of global sales or some grand job along those lines.
I went into this meeting. They said, actually, "Thanks for coming, Richard. We'd like you to reapply for your job." I went, "Okay." Had a bit of a conversation around that and came out of the meeting. Long story short, spoke to a fellow director of mine. He said, "Richard, they're making you redundant." I was surplus to requirements because they had a parallel sales director, so I wasn't needed. Bit of a legal challenge around that. That was the bottom line. Effectively, I was made redundant.
That was the trigger, if you like. I was at the time, what age was I? I was probably in my early 50s. That's the point in time when you got to start thinking quite carefully about what you do next. Do you carry on down that same path or do you have a bit of a rethink? Without getting too deep about this, when it happened to me, it was a massive shock and obviously to my family and everything in terms of our income and whatnot.
It happens to a lot of people and I think it's something that is never spoken about. I notice this when we go onto something like LinkedIn, you see people where this has happened because companies are being bought out all the time. There's lots of different reasons behind that. What I wanted to say was, for people that are out there, I've been through that. The people that happens to, what happens is we tend to just go into our shell about this. This is why I wanted to call out on this podcast because we tickly blokes, we're seen as a successful career, he's a successful guy, he's got a nice BMW and all the rest of it, your neighbours and your colleagues and everything. You don't want to face up to the fact you'd been made redundant. It's a huge blow to your ego.
Lee: Yes, I bet.
Richard: Obviously, the practicalities as well. At that time, it was a massive shock. Something that I wanted to say to people is that, not say to them, preach to them, but simply like, you're not on your own in that situation. It's almost something that I wanted to try and do something potentially in the sales world, actually, to connect with people that are in that situation. Maybe we can do it through that channel, with this channel. I don't know. It's a really serious thing because it really, really affects.
Theresa: That's really interesting. I think there's a whole sort of mental health thing that goes around that. Even if we take a step aside for a second and you look at the people that are committing suicide, it's men of a certain age because there is so much of pressure on them to provide for their families. How did you manage to bounce back from that and give yourself a plan of action, because we'll come to your Salesforce career in a moment, but you were very driven around what you wanted to do. What was the moment you said, "Okay, this isn't going to happen. I've got to make something happen for myself,"?
Richard: Honestly, being pushed by my family, my wife to do something. That triggered it. I've got to recover from this. Not just pay the mortgage but from like you said, from a mental health. I got really down. Really down. I did try and get some help. I did a lot of reading around that particular situation. I did actually finally, through a contact through family, I did go and see someone and have a chat to him about it, what the situation because it was quite serious. Not from a career coach perspective but actually from a mental health perspective. I did investigate that. Actually, I had to say get a plan, do something about it, what the outcome of that was, and a number of other things that says you need to get a plan, what you're going to do.
Theresa: You certainly had a plan.
Lee: Well, how many plans are you going to have? I'm sure you didn't just go – or did you just say right this is Salesforce. I'm going for that?
Richard: No, not at all. I knew about Salesforce because I've been involved in it. One of the companies that I was with, I was tasked to implement Salesforce in the classic days. It was just a job. It was something I did, but I wasn't really heavily involved in it. It wasn't, "Oh, I need to get involved in Salesforce as such." What happened was I decided I didn't want to work for big companies anymore because a couple of-- I've been made redundant from one. It’s that trust thing. Thought, "Oh, actually, there’s a bit of a gap there."
Plus, to be honest, 50-year-old guys of all of a sudden, there's this-- It's quite hard to get a role of that level to return back into work. It's a really serious thing. I see a lot of people on LinkedIn, for example, who-- I know, personally who are really, really capable people but they're not necessarily wanted back in the world that they've just come from as it were.
Theresa: Amazingly, a wealth of experience that could potentially come into the company.
Richard: Particularly sales. You get this thing where people, they seem to want sales guys that are quite young, and dynamic, and thrusting. I think they see experience as actually a bit of a negative. There's that,
