Major League Sales Playbook: Cultivating Top Performers

I’ve always loved the way Joe Terrion thinks. He currently leads New Ocean as our company’s president, but our career journeys have been tied together long before this most recent venture and date back to our time at Rosenbluth International, the world’s second largest global travel management firm. Joe was instrumental in propelling sales organization for Walgreens when they acquired our  in-pharmacy clinic business. From there, he went onto Walgreens and built their sales organization into a national powerhouse, driving billions of dollars in annual sales.

He’s always able to meet the moment with his expertise. And that’s why I’m so excited to have him here at New Ocean. In this episode, we talked all about that journey, how Joe handpicks and manages his sales teams, and what he thinks about the future of remote work.

I hope you enjoy reading our discussion.

Making Waves is a series of conversations between New Ocean Health Solutions CEO Hal Rosenbluth and a variety of executives from a wide range of industries and areas of expertise. The below article has been edited for length and clarity from the podcast version of Hal’s interview with Joe, linked here.

Interview

Hal: So, Joe, you’ve led a $6 billion global organization where you had to lead a salesforce in 32 different countries. Then, you went to American Express and headed up their client group worldwide. Quite an accomplishment to do that. After that, we got together, after we started the clinic business, putting clinics inside of pharmacies.

Hal: No one had ever done that before.

Joe: Nicely done.

Hal: Well, thank you. Walgreens eventually acquired us. We all went over there. And you then not just led a sales organization, you had to build a sales organization.

Joe: It was a heavy lift.

Hal: So, how’d you do it?

Joe: Well, it was a lot of fun. It started at Rosenbluth. I was working with you out on the West Coast, and Rosenbluth at that point was really aspiring to become a national travel agency. I think we both agreed we needed to build out the West Coast in order to really become a formidable competitor and set the stage for going global.

Rosenbluth had all the capabilities, all the service reputation, and great leadership. So it was just natural for us to go out there and grow that business. And we succeeded—we grew from the middle of the pack to the third largest in the world. And then, as you said, we made the decision to sell to American Express.

And I continued my journey there at Amex. I was given the responsibility for a global business unit, had about half the company’s sales, maybe $14 billion, and was really all their global accounts. And the responsibility was to make sure we kept those accounts.

I was there for eight years. I had been in travel my whole life, started in the airline business, and the ride with Rosenbluth and into Amex was great, but I had peaked; there was nowhere else to go. And I was a bit bored with the industry.

When you sold the clinic business to Walgreens and I started listening to you and what’s going on in health care and how big a deal it is, the expenses and the impact on people’s lives, it just felt like providing someone a long life and helping them solve their chronic condition was more important than getting seat 3a versus 3b on an airline seat.

So, into healthcare we went. We started with just one business inside Walgreens, and we were trying to grow a sales organization with the onsite corporate clinics. And that was a lot of fun.

I think the key there, to kind of put a fine point on it, was that we selected the right leaders, people who were inspired for change, excited about health care, saw the essence of Walgreens and what it could do to transform health care, and we brought all that together, went to market, and had a lot of fun.

Hal: You’ve gone now from a privately held company, to two Fortune 50 companies, and now New Ocean Health Solutions. What do you find different?

Joe: Everything I find different, I find fun. You know, the companies that we were referring to earlier—Rosenbluth, Walgreens, American Express—are highly complex, and there was a lot of coordination with different parts of the business to come together to drive a result. And for the most part, my responsibility at each was sales.

And in sales, what you do is you take the end product of a company’s strategy, and go to market. Their design of what they’re trying to achieve with customers is well-established. And you organize a team around that, you communicate that to customers, and you go out to win business. The big contrast with New Ocean is we started with a clean sheet of paper.

We could sketch it any way we wanted. That’s both opportunistic and complicated because you need to simplify, “What are we trying to be?” So what I enjoy as president is, we get to write the business plan. You need to really think through that in great detail.

We were, as you said, well established in healthcare. We had to put a business model together, a product together and organize a whole bunch of people around what was new territory, which was things that were not being done in the industry. The delivery of health care on your phone through digital applications and using the digital means to move people and motivate them at a personal level.

That’s a very complicated product. And bringing the team together and resourcing that, you have to have high impact resources because you have finite money as compared to American Express. So I found it to be a lot more fun.

Hal: You’re president now. You have to oversee all different organizations within the company. That’s new to you – how’d you take to it?

Joe: I enjoy it because what you’re really doing is being able to participate in every part of the process. Whether it’s product development, pricing, software engineers, how many do we need, how do we resource them, where do we get the highest impact, how do we support this operationally? What’s our go-to market? What’s our pricing strategy? I enjoy all the different areas of responsibility that come along with being a president, as opposed to just taking the output of the company and then delivering that to the customer. It’s like playing three-dimensional chess.

Hal: Yeah. And when you’re playing chess, typically you’re thinking about each move ahead of time. How do you think?

Joe: I do a lot of personal reading within the industry and outside the industry that helps me form opinions, form ideas, and form points of view on where I think we need to go. And I have the advantage at New Ocean of working with tremendously smart people. I get to listen to a lot of different opinions, very informed opinions, things I haven’t thought about.And I get to integrate that into my own thought process. And I think I kind of put all that together and then the output is my best contribution to the team.

Hal: Do you think that the fact that we’re all friends makes it easier or more difficult? We obviously didn’t start out as friends, but I’ve always wondered when we have these conversations, does friendship help in making sure that you reach the right conclusion?

Joe: I think friendship is, while it’s not mandatory or critical, is the best possibility of the situation. You’ve often said, and I think I’ve internalized this, “Friends aren’t going to let each other down.” You’re going to have the most earnest conversation with your friend, and you know each other so well that you manage relationships, you manage temperaments, you manage moods. I find friendship really important to grease the wheels of better decision-making.

Hal: You know, I’ve always felt that very successful businesses address an unknown, unmet need.

Joe: No doubt about it. I’d like to think you and Peter Miller did an amazing job. You saw the environment of healthcare changing. Healthcare would be done at the consumer side of things, it wouldn’t necessarily be done in doctor’s offices, in the hospitals. So to think new, how do we bring health care to the masses in a high-quality, low-cost way and yet do it in an asset-light way where you reside inside the pharmacy?

And I’d like to think at New Ocean, we’re doing the same thing. Chronic diseases account for 80% of healthcare costs. And we’re thinking through, how do we deliver this on a phone so a person can maintain their health? How can we help them better manage their health across these difficult chronic conditions that can really impact them in a negative way, if not properly managed. And how do we make it more affordable and cost-effective? Can we use AI to deliver coaching? Unknown unmet needs are really about expanding your horizon on, “What is the problem and how do we leapfrog to a new idea to really deliver that capability in a way that’s easy for the customer?”

Hal: So then you have to go out and sell it. How do you select a sales leader?

Joe: I think as I reflect on my own history in sales, foundationally, I was a person who participated in sports at a young age right through high school and into college. And sports is about winning. You either win or lose, and in order to succeed in sports, you really got to think ahead within each game.

So a lot of the foundational areas of sports tend to make a good salesperson. Focused, driven, high preparedness, mental and physical agility, constantly thinking, problem-solving, thinking of new ways to deliver solutions. You don’t have to be an athlete, but a lot of the attributes that make a good athlete do bleed over to excellence in sales, and the nature of sales is 20% of the people deliver 80% of the sales. Those 20% are key, and they tend to have those similar attributes.

Hal: How do you deal with the other 80%?

Joe: That’s a bit like sports, too. You have some athletes who are just the very best, and you can’t expect every athlete to be that person. So what you’re trying to do, in my opinion, is bring the rest of the 80% up to a high-performance level.

They probably won’t achieve that super high-performance level. But if you can bring them up through training, resources, tools and mentorship, and get them motivated, enthusiastic, and excited, I think you can do well.

Hal: The sales process has changed after the pandemic. We used to be able to go in, and meet people, get to know them face to face. Then along came Zoom. And I don’t know how you can bring that across all the time. You know, sometimes you can’t even see the person’s face when you’re doing a Zoom call. How do you deal with that stuff?

Joe: I’m actually a proponent of this new era of sales and where it’s taking us. It used to be a lot of plane flights, a lot of dry skin, a lot of showing up to meetings exhausted as you go from city to city to city. People are short on time when you’re meeting them in person. And so while you’re right that your ability to be genuine, sincere, comes across immediately in person, the beauty of Zoom is you can be much more productive. You can create a lot more touches, a lot more accessibility, a lot more opportunity. So for me, the fundamentals are kind of the same: Establish credibility, high integrity, expertise, and awareness of the organization you’re talking to and their context. The ability to communicate all of that is less important than the mechanism of communicating that.

Hal: So we’re living in this this world where change is happening at a hypersonic pace, and yet decision-making isn’t hypersonic. How do you get people to decide quicker than they normally would and have to, because if it takes a while to make a decision, well, you find out the world’s changed again.

Joe: How do you create a sense of urgency to make an expeditious decision? I think your personal credibility and insight into what your product and solution will do creates that sense of urgency. So in our case, with New Ocean, how important is it for your workforce to be healthy and productive?

How big an expense is health care in your corporation? That expense is going up 7-8% a year. It’s outpacing inflation. The only way you can recoup that expense to offset and create a better profit margin is either reduce your expenses somewhere else or increase your prices. So I think the sense of urgency is born out of, we can give you a solution that can make your workforce more successful, make them more productive and engaged.

Hal: We spend most of our waking hours at work, and even when we’re not at work, we’re thinking about work. So it’s critically important that companies recognize that their greatest assets are the people that make up their company.  Companies have a huge effect on people’s lives, and so it should be a positive one. And you’ve helped create positive experiences and careers for people who you have touched. Thank you.

Joe: Well, thank you. And you, too. It’s been a lot of fun.