What if sales is not about closing, but about serving? For Loretta Nelson, nearly four decades in technology started with a bluff, and was built on relationships.
What if sales is not about closing, but about serving? For Loretta Nelson, relationships come first. Her conversation with Anthony Bay on Zero to Prove traces how that belief carried her from a small California town to senior roles at Cisco, VMware, Dell Technologies and ServiceNow.
Loretta grew up in Portola, California, in a high school class of fewer than 30. Her mother worked her way up from post office clerk to postmaster, and her father operated a loader at the mill. When she was 16, her mother encouraged her to go to Africa as an exchange student. She landed in rural Kenya, where she was the only white person many in the village had seen. She came home knowing she could get through difficult situations and come out the other side.
Her first sales job came with a small bluff. The role asked whether she knew Unix, and she had taken a single one-unit class at Berkeley. She said yes. Soon she was working the Yellow Pages to sell 386 computers to small businesses. She volunteered for international sales, made her first overseas trip at 23, and went on to manage OEM contracts for Bell Technologies, later acquired by Intel, with customers such as Siemens, Olivetti and AT&T.
Her definition of sales is simple. You get to know the need, the people and the business, and you build a relationship, because you cannot match what a company needs without understanding it. A deal may be executed as a transaction, but lasting success is more than that. She was never the technical person, and she says that helped: she was curious rather than threatening to the experts, with a bias for action and a real commitment to the work.
That approach shaped her partnerships. At Cisco she was moved to Seattle to manage the Microsoft relationship at a time when the two companies were in conflict, and the aim was to build a relationship rather than go to war. Later she managed IBM. With her IBM counterpart she set strict governance for a three billion dollar business, and she also wanted to meet his wife and children. She is still friends with many of the people she worked with.
Relationships also reach beyond the obvious decision-makers. When one executive would not finish an agreement, his executive assistant mentioned that he had coffee every morning at seven. Loretta got on a plane and was at the coffee house at seven o’clock. The deal was signed, and she credits that relationship with helping her get it done.
Loretta now applies the same intent to her own life. She worked from home as an early telecommuter around 1989 and 1990, before her first daughter was born, so she could balance work and family. Today she is planning around one life-defining challenge a year, a handful of smaller adventures and some habits, with work as one part of life and not all of it. She admits that pulling the trigger is hard when momentum, a bank account and stock options say otherwise.