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This is Conversations with Women in Sales, an award-winning podcast created by Barbara Giammanco, who hosted the first 67 episodes.
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Listen to interviews with amazing women about their journeys in their sales careers, often discussing sales leadership tips, ideas, and strategies.
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We aim to inspire women to consider a sales career and for some women to grow into sales leadership.
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Men, we appreciate your allyship.
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And now, your host, Lori Richardson.
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Thank you to our sponsor, Scalibrium.
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Scalibrium just added a methodology agnostic module to their existing coaching platform to improve the effectiveness of your sales and go-to-market teams.
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This includes out of the box templates and frameworks, enhancing collaboration and driving better outcomes.
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See what all the excitement is about at Scalibrium.com.
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I m here today with Jamie Konselman and Jamie is VP and GM of America s sales at Rackspace.
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You oversee the America s for sales as VP GM at Rackspace.
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Your keynote speaker, executive coach and author of DealMaker.
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I m so thrilled to have you here.
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We ve talked for a long time and been wanting to get you on the podcast forever.
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So thank you so much for being here.
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Oh, it s my pleasure.
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Excited to be here.
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Any chance to just chat with you just makes my day.
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Yeah.
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We actually got to meet up in Vegas when we were there for, we went to a Fempire dinner.
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Shout out to Fempire.
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Was that fun?
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Yeah, such a fun evening.
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And you re a sales leader in the tech sector and you have been for some time.
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You ve worked in addition to working for companies like Rackspace, you ve worked for Unisys, Xerox, Axiom, other organizations.
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And you have an interesting journey in terms of how you, your origin story.
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You wrote a memoir and it talks about your college years and early adulthood.
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And what I immediately picked up on was the fact that you were a zoology major at North Carolina State University.
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And your heart was set on veterinary school initially, right?
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No, that s exactly right.
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I was an animal lover and that seemed like my destiny at the time.
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Yeah, I love that.
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And then things change, right?
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So so through, I don t know, being around different people or I m not exactly sure from maybe you can give us kind of an overview of just briefly of what happened next and then we ll talk about sales.
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Sure.
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I m happy to write.
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It was a big secret for, I don t know, 20 odd years.
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And then once you publish a book, it s no longer secrets.
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And so, yeah, I was studying zoology at NC State University, graduated high school at 16, super book smart, not so people smart, but not so socially adept as they say.
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And then thought I would study my way through it and get to vet school as fast as I could and took
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quite too many classes and was a junior within three years and then flamed out royally.
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I just didn t have the study skills to maintain that kind of workload.
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And so I ended up losing my college scholarship and didn t quite have the courage to tell my parents.
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And when I finally got up that courage, my mom was like, you know what?
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We sold the house we grew up on.
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We re retiring early.
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Your, your godfather passed away.
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We just need to know you re okay.
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We want to travel the country in a RV because that s our dream.
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And at 18, 19 years old,
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I didn t know what else to say other than, of course I m okay.
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And then go, how on earth am I going to figure this one out?
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And so for me, it was really survival mode.
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I had a professor, really a lab TA and her husband took me to a strip club on amateur night and said, you know what?
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We know you need money.
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This is the fastest way to do it.
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We know you were a dancer as a child and exposed me to the world of adult entertainment.
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And I m not somebody who does anything small, like go all in.
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And so it went big, go big or go home.
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And in hindsight, what I can see is my very first mentor was a very famous headliner.
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And I ended up not just obviously dropping out of school and dancing, but she took me on the circuit and I learned to
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enter pageants and win titles.
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I learned how to build a fan club by doing radio interviews and set up a little website and have a membership.
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I think I sold Jamie Lynn because of course I used my real name because I thought how cool was this?
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I was famous, right?
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Jamie Lynn branded everything from mouse pads to golf towels to hats.
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And at 19 built a quarter of a million dollar a year business, but as an adult feature entertainer.
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Wow.
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And I didn t even fail skills back then.
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That s just it.
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Oh, always.
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And we made packages and put these things together.
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And in hindsight, what I can see is in a world that would often consume most people, like I found mentors and a path that cultivated communication and business schools that business skills that I had been hungry for, but not really gotten through formal education or my own life for whatever reason.
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And while many people I think would look at my life and say, oh, young girl gets off track, makes mistakes.
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I don t see it that way at all.
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Yeah.
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That was part of your journey.
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Part of my journey.
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And I feel in an esoteric sense, the path that we re put on and the challenges and how we climb through that.
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But not only does that make us who we are, but I don t know that I could have gotten the lessons that I needed to become who I am any other way.
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Well, I love that.
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I love that so much.
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And then you found your way into sales.
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into corporate America?
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I did.
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And so I always knew dancing was a sort of a dead end track.
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And my plan was always like, make the money, go back to college, get a degree in something.
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And I was dancing in New York City, enthralled with all the businessmen that came in there and just started reading during the day, like the self-help section, everything from Franklin Covey to books on sales.
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If you can, and talking a total true story, right?
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And doing like chemistry homework, trying to get an associate s in business and eventually a bachelor s in business.
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How to win friends and influence people.
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Exactly.
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That s exactly what it was.
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Right.
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Cause and sure enough, figured out that I didn t know what I wanted to do.
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And the concept of business was still abstract.
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If I got an associate in business first, it d probably be a good foundation.
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Yeah.
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So I did that.
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And then I realized, wait a minute, it s literally finished making friends and influencing people.
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And I thought if dancing isn t about money anymore, what is it about?
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And I had this sort of this light bulb moment that maybe it s mentors.
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Maybe if I talked to all of these regular customers that I had and said,
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How did you get where you are?
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Would you mentor me?
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And that night was the last night I ever danced.
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I walked out of the club that night with probably 25 business cards, job offers.
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And then the next day I went and interviewed for a tech startup, ironically, and they made me a sales associate.
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They said they d cap my hours at I think 20 hours a week, but of course I dove in and worked nonstop.
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Yeah.
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But I was an assistant and they had about six sales guys and I was reading a book about sales and there was a chapter on how you have to talk to people because it s better in person.
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And I remember going into the two founders of the company, serial entrepreneurs, like they had founded hotjobs.com and BizTravel before that, and said, you have six sales guys.
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You probably pay a lot more than me.
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And all they do is email.
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And this book says that you should talk to people.
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I think we should make them call people.
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Can you imagine 19?
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And, and I said, or even better, haven t, we were trying to sell technology services into the casino industry.
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And so I said, or better yet, put them on a plane to Vegas and have them pick up the house phone and call people.
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Right.
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And about an hour later, this is still when you went to travel agencies in the late nineties, the CEO founder didn t even say a word.
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He just dropped a ticket, paper ticket on my laptop.
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And I said, what s that?
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He said, congratulations, you re in sales.
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Don t come home until you sell something.
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And I got sent to Vegas.
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True story.
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And I thought, what am I going to do now?
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And the book I was reading said you write a script, right?
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So on the plane there, because there was no wifi in the plane back then, I just wrote my scripts and I came out to Vegas and started cold calling all the casinos.
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Talk about lack of sales train.
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They re like, there you go.
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Here you go.
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Good luck.
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Go figure it out.
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But I d been selling, right?
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I d sold bottle service at the dancer.
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I didn t dance most nights.
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I sat in the back and drank champagne and got paid by the hour, right?
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That s selling services.
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different kind of services, but learning how to connect with customers and ask for business.
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And I really think that foundation is what helped me accelerate my business career.
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That s amazing.
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And your book came out a couple of years ago, right?
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I guess it ll be two years ago this summer sometime.
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Yeah.
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Hoping to see your anniversary.
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It s great.
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It s very evergreen.
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So I encourage people to check it out.
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But were you initially concerned at all or was just like, Oh, I was petrified.
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So I ve written three manuscripts and then had this ideal that one day I d be at the high enough level, whether I was a senior director for over a decade.
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And I always thought if I make BP, I ve made it as high as I need to go, then I can publish the book and it ll be safe.
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So I kept a printed manuscript, I think in like my sock drawer.
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And one day I was going to publish it and one day I was going to publish it and then COVID happened and I started to realize the thing I was petrified to do I needed to do because how could I be in integrity as a coach, as a leader, telling people there s no shame in taking a different path if I was still hiding that part of my life like a secret.
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And when I decided, okay, I m going to do this, I really believed it was going to ruin my business career, but I had to be willing to walk through those doors.
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to be true to who I am and what my beliefs are.
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Wow.
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And our society is paralyzed by shame and regret and fear, and so what a brave thing to do.
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And it s been a very positive experience for you.
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Yes, thank you very much.
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essentially promoted like four times that elusive VP title that I never thought I was going to get.
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I got a few, a little before the book even published, like literally right after I started that commitment to publishing it, like everything started falling into place.
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And it s ironic.
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I love Brené Brown s so many good books, TED Talks.
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And, but yet there was always one quote I didn t like, which is interesting and I m going to butcher it, but it s something to the effect of you either stand inside your story and you own it.
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or you stand outside and you hustle for your worthiness for the rest of your life.
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And I can see for myself while I was still hiding that part of my story, because that s not my whole life story.
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That s a piece of the journey.
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Yeah.
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I was, yes, I ve been very successful in sales, but so much of it was rooted in a fear base trying to prove something.
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Yeah.
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And when we do that, I think we rob ourselves and those people around us of really getting to experience our own true greatness.
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It s power and force as opposed to empowered.
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Interesting.
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Yeah, because the power we don t need.
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People talk about, oh, you should empower people.
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We have the power.
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We have the capability for our own power.
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That s why we take advantage of it or not.
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That s something that I hear people saying a lot, and I m always curious about that.
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So you have a motto, destiny awaits for those who answer the call.
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What do you mean by that?
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To me, in an esoteric sense, I believe we all have a purpose, a dharma, right?
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There s many words for that in different cultures.
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I like the word destiny, like it ground me.
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And I think it s abstract in that in our society it s so easy to get conditioned by the external things.
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I ll be happier when I lose some weight.
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If I can just pay off all of these bills, I won t stress financially.
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And what happens in that searching and that looking, it s outside of us.
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Yeah, that it s that forceful power as opposed to empowered to come back to that same sort of analogy.
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And so to me, that phrase means, am I willing to do the inner work?
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Am I willing to get so crystal clear on who I am?
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and make a stand and space for how I serve others through that, that I ll step further and further into that destiny or dharma, if you will.
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Wow.
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So the people that you coach, are they mostly executive or are they mostly women or men or?
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It s been all over the board.
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Like I don t take private individual coaching clients now.
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Obviously I m all in at Rackspace, but I get to coach people every day.
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But when I have worked with private clients, it was a mix.
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And what was really interesting to me is you go to one of those coaching schools and you get all of your certifications and there s all of this messaging around pick your niche, right?
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And niche down and figure out the riches are in the niches.
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That s right.
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And I m a coach who helps blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Right.
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And what I would find is on any given time, I would be working with a demographic of people standing many ages.
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Like I ve worked with people who are very successful executives who want to leave a legacy.
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I ve worked with a couple of professional athletes that have made their mark but don t know what to do next because their identity is wrapped up in their sport and they don t know what s next.
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I ve worked with children of people within my network who have, for whatever reason, lost their way or not found their path yet, dropped out of college, have something they re trying to overcome.
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And what I have found is most of my clients, it s more of a sociographic
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values in common, right?
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People who are really committed to making a difference in this world.
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People are really committed to finding their purpose or to serving other people.
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Um, but less about it s, it s midlife women who are going through divorce, right?
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Or something, something, something as simple as that.
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And that s why, to me, it s so special because your people find you.
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And one of the teachings in coaching school is, right, every person you coach is a gift and you often as a coach experience and learn and grow just as much as your clients.
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And so that to me has been the coolest how.
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I love about what I do because I learn from everybody.
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I learn every day.
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And so.
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Wonderful.
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It s fun to teach, but it s also great to learn.
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The statistics are that sales as a, as an organization just doesn t invest in coaching and managers don t know how to coach and things like that.
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Have you run into that in your different places you ve been?
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I chuckle, right, because I m a product of that in the sense that I think I had, there s one place I worked, very large global French company.
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I was there over a decade.
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I think I had 16 different managers across that time and never once a performance review.
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Wow.
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Very, I think two of the folks I had, I could get to show up for a one-on-one on any regular basis, but you re basically outsourcing managed services can be a really brutal environment, like
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One of the boss who would show up for me, a guy named Louis Jones, awesome manager, worked for IBM for a long time.
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He said to me, I will show up because when I was at IBM, we used to joke that IBM stood for I m by myself.
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And so it s not a secret within many of these big services companies have massive attrition rates.
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I think at that previous place, it was like 86% or something.
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Sounds silly.
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It s crazy.
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And.
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I wouldn t be who I am had I not been at a place that was so structured and processed that I got my coaching by fire by taking a process that I had to go through and get kicked in the teeth and come back and get better at.
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Right.
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And so I m not only have a bias towards coaching because I am a coach, but I just look back at the struggle that I had to find my way for so long and wonder what would it, what, what would have been possible if I got a little support along the way.
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And how many people are in that position?
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I used to joke, if a meeting was going poorly, let s say a customer was upset about something or there s a service delivery problem, it was like rats on a ship.
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Everybody would disappear.
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Or as I got into doing bigger and bigger deals as a dealmaker, 50 million, a hundred million at total contract value.
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When it was hard and you were in the fight of the deal, very difficult to get people to show up to a meeting with you, an executive, let s say.
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Um, not always, but sometimes oftentimes, but when it was signature time, right.
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Yeah.
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They came out of the woodwork.
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And so as a belief system, the lens I look at the world through, I just think everybody can benefit from a coach, especially, um, in a time when the sales environment is becoming harder and harder.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, that s for sure.
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And how are salespeople doing now with generative AI and all these other things?
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Are people okay?
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Are, are they, are they worried about how things are changing?
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Cause I find in the greater community of sales, there s still some things that are up in the air.
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The economy hasn t really settled.
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That s, there s some different challenges that we re dealing with now.
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I think absolutely.
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Right.
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I think it s go to cross-sector.
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It s no different.
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So many, if we, if we just take a look back at the industry, I I m in IT services companies, right?
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Two of the three biggest have split into two pieces, right?
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The hyperscalers came in and have done extremely well, but are now not seeing their same growth, right?
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We have the good fortunate Rackspace of being owned by an Apollo.
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So, right.
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So one of the largest private equity firms.
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And at our sales kickoff, two of the partners from Apollo came and spoke with us, which was amazing.
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Right.
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And so some of the questions are, what are you seeing in the market?
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And one of the first things they said is there s a lot of confusion right now amongst buyers.
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If you think of the role of a CIO and how it s changed, it used to be a cost center, right?
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And in many cases it still is, but how did, but every company is becoming a technology company, right?
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If you look at Nike for many years, their 10K, they said we re a retail company.
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Wholesale, retail.
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If you read their annual report today, it says we are technology services companies.
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Over 60% of their business comes through the Nike Plus app.
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Isn t that amazing?
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Think about that.
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They ve completely transformed their business model, building a direct to consumer relationship predicated on technology.
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Yeah, almost every now.
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Yeah, almost everyone says their business is technology now, don t they?
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Right.
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Cause it s involving everything.
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Fascinating.
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And I find it very interesting and exciting because I m not afraid.
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And you know, it s the one thing that s always happened in, in our industries, especially and, and in your specialization too.
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So what words of advice would you have for, let s say for a woman who maybe is interested in leadership in, in IT, in sales?
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What would you say to her?
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Great question.
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I would say lean into yourself in the sense that I think I spent so long referenced that Bernie Brown quote, trying to prove myself, right?
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I hit my quota went from 10 million a year to 350 million a year.
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And then I was leading a team that ultimately did 4.6 billion.
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But within that, I was the same level within my company, senior director, and my
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Accelerate stayed the same.
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And did you personally feel like you had to keep doing more and keep doing more to show them?
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It was the more machine, right?
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Be on this committee, help with sales kickoff, be on this special program to help synthesize all of the things.
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And it wasn t until I actually started coaching others.
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who were in that predicament, right?
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And I thought, I can t coach.
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At first, I remember a woman approached me and said, I want to make vice president.
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You need to coach me.
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And I said to her, I ve been a senior director for 12 years.
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I don t know how I can help you.
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And she said, I know you re my person.
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And I thought, let me think about that.
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And then I read about a dozen more leadership books because that s exactly what I needed was one more leadership book.
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And I thought, okay, I can help you.
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And I came up with a plan for her.
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I said, how does this sound?
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Like you put together an evangelization deck and we ll brand you and we ll do all of these fun things.
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And wouldn t you know it, I think it was like within five or six sessions, she s, I don t need any more sessions.
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I just got promoted.
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Thanks.
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And then did that three or four more times, like literally four clients.
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And I was still the senior director who wanted to get out of sales and was coaching clients at my current company to prove that I could be a full-time coach on top of doing the big deals.
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Right.
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And then yet, when I finally did some of those things for myself,
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was when it all changed, right?
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And so it was in a stepping into myself and owning my power and owning my accomplishments.
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And I will leave with one other thought.
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One of the books that I read for myself as a coach, when I was going to help this particular woman get her goal of becoming a vice president, I think it was called, What Got You Here Won t Get You There.
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And so there s multiple versions of this book, but the version that was written for women, the author partnered with a female executive coach.
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And they talk about, I think there s 11, maybe 13 lessons in there that are pitfalls, that are some of the commonalities among high-performing women, the character traits, the behavior patterns that likely got you promoted very early in your career, but at some point become a double-edged sword and they keep you stuck at that level.
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Hmm.
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And when I read this book, I thought I won t get anything out of it.
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I ve read so many little arrogance sometimes, right?
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I ve read so many leadership books.
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What am I going to get out of this?
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I will never forget it.
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I read it cover to cover on a plane and couldn t stop taking notes because I saw myself in every single one of those pitfalls.
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SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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And I just want, yeah, go ahead.
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I was going to say, I want to end on the idea that we have these college and university sales programs now and the sales competitions, more than 200 universities around the United States participate, and you can get a degree in sales.
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You can get a major or minor, maybe even a PhD now.
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And sales and yeah, and women in these university programs do extremely well.
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They win all when they have competitions.
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There s always lots of women that are not all, but there s lots of women that do really well.
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Then they go to corporate and they put their head down.
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We put our heads down, work really hard and we figure somebody s going to tap us on the shoulder and that we re just going to rise through the organization and it just, it doesn t happen.
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So somehow we have to fix that.
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that there s a point there where we got to keep these women moving and getting promoted so that they can get up to senior leadership as well.
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Absolutely.
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And there s so many things that you can then, one of the lessons in there just talked about how, especially in women, you re engraved not to take credit.
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It s the team, the we.
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And yet in specific times, when you ve led, it s okay to say I, right?
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I direct the team to do X, Y, and Z. Right.
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And for me, I still have to practice that because I was conditioned from probably my first boss ever that you never say I, it s always we, but if you re not actually claiming your accomplishments and claiming your contributions, guess what?
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In corporate America, somebody else probably is.
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Yeah.
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Tip of the hat to Cynthia Barnes.
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I don t know if Cynthia, but she has a new hashtag that says, thank you.
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It s true.
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And we should be saying when someone compliments us, say, thank you.
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It s true.
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And if more women did that, get credit for our ideas and for our accomplishments.
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That s right.
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We can do big things.
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So.
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Absolutely.
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I love it.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Jamie Konselman, thank you so much.
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Continued success to you.
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And it s just a pleasure having you on the show and I hope to have you back sometime.
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Thank you so much.
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I always love chatting with you and I appreciate all that you do for women in sales, right?
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I know you ve got your book out too, She Sells, which I think is awesome.
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And so I just can t wait to collaborate with you more.
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SPEAKER_00
All right.
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Thanks, Jamie.
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Bye.
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SPEAKER_00
Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Women in Sales.
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You can find all of our episodes at WomensSalesPros.com forward slash podcast.
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Help us spread the word and let s change the face of B2B sales.