Episode 15: Salesforce Career Conversations Charlie Cowan with ROD. Charlie is an Enterprise Tech AE and published Author of "How to sell Tech". Listen to Charlie talk about his career journey, with a surprise master class in selling pipe cleaners. Charlie has sold both Salesforce professional services and products, and talks about why empathy is important within his role.
Lee Durrant: Hi, I'm Lee Durrant. In this episode of RODcast, we're speaking with Charlie Cowan about his Salesforce career to date and any little tips or nuggets he's learned over the years, particularly as a now published author of sales books, I think plural. Let's just dive straight in and say hi, Charlie. How are you doing, mate?
Charlie Cowan: Hi there, Lee. I'm good, thank you. Thank you for having me on.
Lee: Thanks for agreeing to do it. Obviously, you and I have known each other for quite a long time in this Salesforce ecosystem. I did notice your recent news about publishing a software sales book. I thought it might be good to get you on and have a chat for people that are listening about, I suppose, your journey in Salesforce and how you got into it, and all the way through to this point now where you're a published author of sales books, which is brilliant.
Charlie: I'd be happy to share that journey. Hopefully, it's useful either for people that are in sales, but also people that are not in sales and more in either the consulting ranks or interested in what it might take to get into sales.
Lee: Yes, absolutely. It's a growing part of the Salesforce ecosystem, of course, but even the wider cloud software space, I would imagine. It'd be quite interesting to dig into that. If you're happy to maybe give us a little overview of yourself and then we can dive into how it all began, if you like. Fire away, tell us what you're doing.
Charlie: I'm an enterprise tech AE. I've worked in cloud sales pretty much since I started working. '99 seems a long time ago now, but when I left The Agricultural College, which is what I studied in, and just through pure coincidence, the town that I was studying in, which is a town called Cirencester, also had a number of tech companies that got set up there. I was lucky enough to get a job in one, pretty much straight out of uni. I did a quick transition from agriculture into technology. Then I've stayed on that path the whole way through, sometimes selling the tech, sometimes selling services. I spent my career in that space.
Lee: Like a lot of people I speak to, it wasn't necessarily your plan to get into tech, then. Obviously, the agricultural thing that was-- You had a totally different life plan.
Charlie: It was pure coincidence and a little bit of luck. While I was at uni, I was also working in my evenings in a local pub. To get from uni to that pub, I used to drive through a little industrial estate in Cirencester. I used to go past this building there, and it had a little car park at the back of it. There was some nice cars in that car park. There was a Lamborghini Diablo, there was a Ferrari 355. There was some good stuff going on. One day, on my way to work, I had a little bit of time before my shift started. I parked up and I went and knocked on the door.
I spoke to the receptionist, and I was like, "What on earth do you do here?"
Charlie: She said, "Oh, we're a business-only ISP." I said, "I've got absolutely no idea what that means but can I have a job?" I didn't even really ask for a specific type of job. I didn't really know what kind of jobs were available. She put me in touch with the sales director there, a guy called Johnny. I popped in a week later to have an interview with him, and had some initial chats about what I wanted to do and what interested me. I was just like, "I'm a student. Obviously, I want a big telly." That was the only thing I could really remember saying.
Lee: Not a Lamborghini.
Charlie: Not a Lamborghini. Yes, start small. Luckily, I'd stumbled into a sales recruitment process that they were going through, and so the following week, he invited me along to a mass interview. They had about 30 people turn up. We all sat down in their training room. Some sales trainer upfront ran some exercises with us, handed out some of these old pipe cleaners that you'd use for art and craft. "Who can sell me this pipe cleaner? Give me some examples of how you might use it."
Lee: Jordan Belfort, yes.
Charlie: Exactly. "Sell me this pen." I was one of the 30 and I just thought, "Well, I've got to come up with some ways of using this pipe cleaner." I put my hand up and made myself known. It seemed to go okay and I got invited back to another interview the next week. That was a bit tougher with one of the managers. Anyway, I muddled my way through it, and I got offered a place as a sales exec. I started there the week after my finals finished. I went straight from agricultural finals and then straight into the first day of sales.
Lee: Fair play. Just to go over that again. It took some balls to walk into a car park full of Lamborghinis and all those lovely cars to do what you did, probably something that I don't imagine many people do nowadays. I have to ask you as well if you can remember, what was your answer then to the "sell me the pipe cleaner thing"? What did you say?
Charlie: First, instead of walking in through the door, I would say, I've always thought about that since then. So many people when it comes to wanting to get a job think, "Right, I'm going to go to LinkedIn," or, "I'm going to speak to a recruiter," or, "I'm going to hit apply on a careers page."
Lee: None of that existed. I'm not trying to make you sound really old, did any of that exist then? Probably not. Probably not LinkedIn.
Charlie: There would have been offline recruiters.
Lee: Oh, that was around. Yes, they'd been over there knocking the doors for you.
Charlie: Yes, exactly. Essentially, if you just go in through the traditional methods, you just go into a pile with 100 other people. Whereas if you either literally walk through the front door or metaphorically walk through the front door by speaking to someone that's influential or getting in contact with a hiring manager directly, these are things that separate you from someone that just hits apply on a LinkedIn ad today. Definitely, always think about that as a way of differentiating yourself. Then in terms of, what did I do? I can't remember. I think it was about you could use it to clean something, you could use it to hang something on a radiator. It was just pointless. Pointless ways of using a pipe cleaner.
Lee: At least you stuck your hand up.
Charlie: Exactly, that was the thing. It was like, "I've got to stick my hand up, whatever. I can't sit here and not say anything."
Lee: I think the very fact that you steamed in there as a young man and said, "Give me a job," probably puts you at the top of the list without you even realizing it.
Charlie: Yes.
Lee: I said at the beginning of this podcast, we jump all over the place. That's what I'm doing. How could that translate into today's world then, walking into an office like that and saying, "I want a job." Sometimes all you can do is apply on LinkedIn.
Charlie: You mentioned earlier that I've written a couple of books. Actually, the first one which we carved off the front is really about how do you get a job in tech sales. It's applicable to anything, which is, if you have got a company that you want to go and work for, how do you make sure that you can get a job there. One of the things is to target an individual hiring manager. Let's say you do want to work in sales and you know a particular company that you want to go and work for; it's not difficult to go onto LinkedIn and find out who are going to be the sales managers or the Salesforce practice managers or whoever it might be.
They're going to be the people you're likely to work for. Then through LinkedIn, you can very easily see if you're connected to that person and you can either get a referral. If you can't get a referral, a warm intro, then it's easy to find people's email addresses. You just literally go to Google and type in company name, email address format, and you'll find something that will come up. 75% of the people at this company have got this email format. Then you can just email that person directly.
Lee: You've given away a lot of my secrets here for recruitment. We all do the same thing, don't we? That's a bit of, I suppose, just being a bit, especially if it's a sales job as well, more than anything, if it's a sales job, you should be a little bit more creative around how you approach these people.
Charlie: Exactly. Sales is all about getting in contact with the right people, and if you can't demonstrate that in trying to get a job somewhere, then you still almost fail at the first hurdle.
Lee: Absolutely. Going back to you then, you got that job, no doubt. You mentioned there in the company.
Charlie: Yes, it was a company called Star Internet back in the day.
Lee: You were selling to small businesses via internet?
Charlie: Internet connections. It was '99. Still small companies were just getting connected to the internet for the first time or trying to upgrade. We are selling ISDN connections or in some cases, for larger companies, leased lines, which we used to call it a pipe back then. It was like, "Oh, these big companies get a two Meg lease line pipe." Now, you think about a two Meg connection for a company with hundreds of employees, you think, "Oh, this is crazy," when we're now on gigs and gigs. That's what it was. That company, we invented a new way of scanning for viruses as well. Viruses were just starting to become a problem and spam as well.
That really took off. It was before things were called cloud. We called it like a managed service,
