We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amie Teske a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Amie, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I’ll anchor my answer to the question in the context of a true story.
There is a woman I know, let’s call her Kate for anonymity’s sake. She is an ace at sales. Clients consider her a partner; bosses want to clone her, and peers respect her. She began software sales at a start-up, which is where I met her, and worked her way up to enterprise Healthcare IT sales. I clearly remember it being her dream job.
In a recent phone call, she told me she is not sure how much longer she wants to do the job. Then she went on to say several others felt the same way.
As the conversation continued, she talked about enduring long sales cycles and how the culture sucks where she works. But she quickly said “I don’t do this for them. I do it for my family, I do it so I can pay my house off, I do it so I can write my own story. In my next job interview, I can say I hit this number and exceeded quota at this size of company. One sentence to say it all!”
I asked her how a business like mine can help her.
She said “Can you help me do my job better and faster? I need someone who is going to teach me something, and then we do it together. How do I skip the line? What is the fastest way to get to the top? You’ve mastered the art of selling and you also know the industry. You’ve sold multiple products across decades. I could ask you anything about how to sell in healthcare and you would either have the playbook or an idea that would help. How do I take what you know after 20 years and learn it in a year because I’m impatient and I don’t want to wait 20 years?”
Talk about activating the fire inside!
The entire context of what I am doing is anchored in this story.
I have an innate drive to help others. I get fired up when a challenge is presented. I am re-fueled when I see a person’s progress. It brings me so much joy and peace when they realize the outcome, and the enhanced character they developed along the way. I’m fascinated by the whole process, and I constantly seek opportunities to grow business and to help others succeed.
Translated, I love helping people solve problems, especially ones with people dynamics. I fully realize what fuels me, exhausts many others. I’ve had times where it exhausted me too, but I think that was a sign that I no longer had grace for my place, and it was time to move on.
I spent the last 24 years in the Health IT industry, specifically in software sales and business leadership. But, the last two years have been 100% focused on deeply understanding Health Leader’s expectations of Health IT sales, finding the most impactful sales professionals who have crossed their path and then recognizing them for their impact. I call them The Echelon, and this program is the primary driver behind a podcast starting in 2023.
The Echelon stories are also infused into a brand new, novel and very straightforward playbook called Impact Recognition, curated specifically for Health IT sales leaders to address disengagement risks, like Kate’s story, while exponentially increasing sales performance.
Beyond the sales performance gains, what makes the playbook unique is its simplicity and the complementary nature of the offering for sales leaders who are already time-crunched. It also gives them a new growth strategy to execute that is 100% in their control…no cross-functional alignment required as with most other go-to-market growth plays.
It indirectly cross-trains a sales team and can help clear any head trash paralyzing sales behavior and performance.
This is a playbook that has been masquerading as optional for far too long. The state of sales in Health IT is fierce right now. Fundamentals are not optional, especially ones with geometric performance gains that also address the demotivated sales force issue plaguing most sales leaders I know.
My goal is to be the modern sales advisory practice and resource that honors sales in Health IT, bringing solutions that sit on the leverage curve (meaning low effort with high return), respecting the time, pressure, stress, and goals of sales leaders and those they lead.
My goal is not to be a generic sales advisory business. It’s too vague and has no teeth. Nothing about that sells itself. Two of my core values are Impact and Excellence so generic won’t do.
I know first-hand the time sales leaders do not have. I also know first-hand that salespeople are desperate for a leader who not only fights for them, but one that fights with them, in the trenches, not to do their job for them but to stoke the fire within them.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I began in sales shortly after my career started. I was implementing healthcare software at the height of the Y2K scare and the pull to sales was palpable. The laughing, the dinners, the challenge to “solve” and the opportunity to help—all seemed more intriguing and fun.
I come from a split family, and both my dad and stepdad were in sales. So, growing up, I was around it and I remember observing it with awe. I honestly do not know why I was so in awe. Maybe it was the humble confidence and conviction about them that resonated with me. Whatever it was, it planted a seed.
For me, the beauty of sales is the freedom of it, the challenge, and the people.
It satisfies this insatiable curiosity many of us have, like the mind of a child that is full of wonder and opportunity–creatively exploring, navigating uncertainty, enduring pressures, always something unexpected. It appeals to our sense of adventure, our continual desire for something new and the dopamine hit we all love called achievement. It is a very seductive profession.
So, when I re-visioned my advisory business, which I originally started in 2017, I wanted to double-down and make a bigger impact in the world of sales after more than two decades of practice and experience.
Enter The Echelon, the Impact Recognition program and other advisory offerings like Second Exec, where I am a sounding board who can relate with a Sales Leader, off the record and confidentially, when they need to talk through real ideas, thoughts and challenges.
What will be new, and interesting, are forth-coming conversations with Sales Leaders after learning new insights about our customer’s (Health Leaders) expectations of sales. I’m interested in how and if that might change some traditional sales organization structures for better alignment.
Sales is a rollercoaster ride that can be thrilling and terrifying in the same breath. The stakes are high but the reward is greater. This community has never rallied together. But, we are in a new age and I’m hopeful that collaboration has earned its merit so we can all rise up.
I have been routinely recognized for leading Health IT/Tech organizations to double-digit sales growth throughout my 24+ years in the industry, I know sales. Now, I’m on a mission to take the lessons I’ve learned—both from my own success and what I’ve learned from others—and give back. All in honor of the sales profession, and the positive impact potential that lay in their hands. Through The Echelon award and program (and podcast launching in 2023), the Impact Recognition playbook and other sales advisory services, I hope to motivate modern sales growth and revive a dying love of sales. My brand relaunch in the next month is in support of exactly that.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Sales is a challenge, but it is also a blast. As an individual contributor, who moved into sales leadership and then business leadership over a span of 24 years, I’ve experienced a lot and had many “pivots”. However, it wasn’t until I went on my own and started advising and researching the needs of sales that I learned an important lesson, a mind-pivot if you will: A sales team is not just a vehicle to deliver a number, they are a growth strategy and a market itself. They must be engaged and motivated to act, just like a traditional customer.
If I had fully understood this and then practiced from this lens, I would have done abundantly better than I was already able to achieve in my sales career.
The lesson I learned with this pivot? As a sales leader, don’t spend all your time operationalizing your team, engage them. The performance gain is geometric.
Sales professionals are very much like professional sports athletes. They constantly practice their trade and need to be mentally engaged and motivated to achieve their best results. Sales is a high stress and anxiety role. Their mental toughness is an enormous factor in overachievement. They are your biggest and best growth strategy because they hold the reins of your success. They’d better be playing at the top of their game.
On a different note, this may be an interesting story, or perspective nonetheless, that is helpful for others. Especially for sales leaders newly involved in a “process” of selling a company to a prospective buyer.
When you go through a “process”, there are a lot of extra hours on top of your day job. The trick is how to do that and your day job. I have tips on that for another day.
Private equity is a fascinating ecosystem. They work crazy hours and are crazy good with numbers. Not only that but the exceptional investment bankers who support a buy/sell process are well versed in the art and finesse of strategic presentations. At times, it felt like Broadway meets NASA.
I spent a lot of time preparing, like you would for any large sales opportunity, but something I learned was to be exquisitely clear on the metric that provides visual proof of sales performance that leads to growth. In other words, what is the common denominator that visualizes and indicates progress.
The lesson for any sales leader here is this: Knowing your vital metric to gauge sales performance, that drives ultimate success, is not only important for your own achievement, but when going through a “process”, it helps you have a succinct message delivered with confidence.
I’ve seen the sales conversation go both ways in these situations, and I have been the blubbering idiot explaining performance and growth in long form. Know your vital performance metric. It helps deliver a needed confidence. Especially if your pipeline is dissected 100 ways from Sunday during a process (and it will be).
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I graduated college in three and a half years because I knew what I wanted. Business was my path. I knew it from a young age. My dad, mom, and stepdad were all in business or sales. My dad and stepdad both did sales, and I was always intrigued. My mom ran an Ophthalmology center for many years, where I worked when going through school. So, I was surrounded by business, sales, and some healthcare in my formative years.
Twenty-two years ago, after a few years on the road implementing software. I stepped into sales because it looked fun. The people in sales were a blast, and I enjoyed the dinners and drinks and conferences and the laughter. What was there not to like!
Overtime, I stayed in sales because I enjoyed helping people, leading people, the network, and the camaraderie. Plus, I proved that I was good at it, so the money wasn’t bad. I have an insatiable curiosity about most everything so discovering the needs of a client and helping them solve it was right up my alley.
Now, I’m on a new adventure of entrepreneurship, giving back to those still “in” the profession by taking what I’ve learned and what I continue to learn to help the larger community get better every day.
I once read an article where a psychoanalyst and ethnographer named G. Clotaire Rapaille described the successful sales archetype as a Happy Loser. In other words, they are someone who sees rejection as a motivating challenge. I think there is a lot of truth in that for me. I don’t get offended with “no” easily, and it’s always been a form of informal feedback that creates a drive to learn and get better.
The constant learning, over time, sharpened my sales and leadership skills. Looking back, I realize that it was never just the thrill and environment of sales that I loved but also the learning and feedback I was getting along the way. I love learning new things, but it wasn’t until I was older that I figured out the connection between my love of learning and sales success.
I’m a rebel at heart so I think sales and driving growth was always my destiny. The way I did sales then and what I know now are great complements in advisory work. I get the rebels and I understand the need and power of planning and operations.
Last story about resilience. In 2010, I was at a software company where there was a strategic market that our competitor practically owned. There was plenty of opportunity, and we had a small beachhead (well, we had one customer) in that market.
I was asked if I wanted to chase it. Challenge accepted! I rallied a sales team, built a business case for a customer success team to help us differentiate (ongoing support and responsiveness was important and expected at a higher level in this market). It was an incredible ride. We grew it to $15M in 3 years. When a business trusts sales enough to be innovative, creative and scrappy, you will be amazed at their capacity and just how resilient they can be.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.amieteske.com
- Instagram: @BYAMIETESKE
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/byamieteske
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/amieteske
- Twitter: @amieteske