Sales Turnaround: Diagnose Before Replacing the Team

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0:00 In MedTech, the difference between a good quarter and a great one isn't always the product. It's the friction standing in the way. Broken sales cycles, misaligned teams, deals that stall at the finish line. Every leader feels it, and the best ones know how to remove it. Welcome to Zero Friction, the podcast where we go inside the minds of MedTech's top commercial leaders to uncover the real barriers they face, the decisions they make, and the systems they build to keep the revenue moving. I'm your host, Terry Coutsolioutsos. Let's remove some friction. And again, welcome to Zero Friction podcast. This is Terry Coutsolioutsos, and I have a great guest this afternoon, a software sales professional, software executive, and president, and also an author. Today I have Bill Sullivan, who is the president of Iothic, which is an encryption company. Bill has spent many years really creating the gold standard in the selling of software. And so, we're going to spend some time talking about Bill's career and that expertise arena, and

Then we'll talk about what he does for Iothic, and then maybe kind of tap into his new book. So, Bill, great to have you. Why don't you give us a little background about yourself personally, and then we'll dive into the company. Hi, Terry. Pleasure to meet you. I'm married 30 years. So, daughter who just graduated college works as an accountant at Ernst & Young. Uh I've been working in technology, specifically software, for most of that time. Early in my career, I learned that it is a lot of fun, to do turnarounds. I was at PeopleSoft, did a turnaround there, went on, was promoted to run North American state and local government, was actively involved in the hostile takeover against Oracle.

When that went through, I actually did the integration for PeopleSoft public sector into Oracle. After that experience, Oracle, as I like to say, was a profitable but soul-destroying experience. So, went over to SAP on the commercial side, took over a division on the commercial process manufacturing that, you know, was down to three sales people. Vice president had left. Built that. It was the number one division a year later in North America for their their enterprise segment. This all drove towards, you know, I was hired by Informatica to run their public sector.

My CEO and friend from PeopleSoft, Craig Conway, called me and said, "This company really needs a public sector leader. Are you available?" And I course was interested and anytime Craig calls, you take that call. And joined Informatica. Within a year I was named top one of the top 1% critical employees. They had 3,000 employees in the company at the time, so it was quite an honor. I was named a second year as a top 1% critical employee. And along the way I discovered that the company was actually defrauding the United States government. And I first told them, "Don't do that.

2:48 That's illegal." And then I took it to internal legal and had them review the situation. And they issued a report that said, "Sullivan's right. This is illegal. Stop doing it immediately." And they did it. Six months later, he looked at it again and said, "You people are still doing this. I told you Sullivan's right. Here's all the bad things that could happen." So, long story short, I went to the CEO and quit. He asked me not to quit. Asked me to help him fix the company.

Five months later they fired me. So, that only at that time did I take the matter to a friend of mine in Washington who's a lawyer. And this was then passed on to the Justice Department. So, it's it's been, you know, one heck of a career. The number one empirically rated vice president at six or seven of the technology companies, most respected companies, industry's most respected companies. Followed by federal investigation, settlement, and a defamation campaign that I've had to fight my way through. And it's all in the book. Yeah, all the emails and as as you and I were chatting, the book seems to be Amazon run out of ran out of copies. They're going to a second printing apparently.

It's also available on Barnes & Noble and on Goodreads. So, there's a snapshot of my career and I hope that offers you some openings to discuss topics of interest. So, sure. So, tell us a little bit about like your career and what you found yourself to really How did you elevate yourself first to the top 1%? Where do you think were the the biggest attributes, Bill, that sort of propelled you to that top level of performance? I think first and foremost is a willingness to go into the burning building, right? Most executives do not want to take over an organization that is clearly distressed. There's a tremendous amount of risk. There's a tremendous amount of visibility on the situation. I've always seemed to be attracted to fix-it situations for a variety of reasons. First, I'm just not the guy you want to hire if the business is growing at 10% and you want to bump it up to 12 or 14%.

That just is just not interesting to me. I I I'm fascinated to to get into situations where I can have a material beneficial impact on both the company and the people that work there. That's rewarding to me. Secondly, I a very clearly defined philosophy about how to run a business. And that that's both philosophical, something that I call Bill's Rules, as well as a one-pager that I use to run any business is how to run a software business. And again, both of these are in the book. But from a high level, Bill's Rules are something that I put together over the years. There's I don't know, probably 22 of them now. And they're not directive.

5:26 They're aimed at creating a environment in which everybody wants to work together. And then, how to run a software company basically is a public sector software organization. General George Marshall once said, "If a man can't explain what he does in one page, he does not know what he's doing." So, this is my one-pager. And it lays out how I run an organization. And I share that because when you go into a troubled environment when, you know, the house is on fire, it's very rewarding to see that your approach, your philosophy, how you run a company is successful, right? It's a battle of will against chaos to try to cause the people in that organization to come together and execute in excess of the sum of their parts. And that's really what I've strived to do throughout the course of my career. It's the reason I've been successful in the software industry and it's been a great run. But that's why I've really been attracted to it. As I say in the book, what fun is software if you can't throw

The throttles all the way open and light off the afterburners, right? And I've been blessed to work for some of the most aggressive and competent software sales organizations. When I was at Tivoli, it was per capita the most productive sales organization in the industry. Um I was at PeopleSoft, you know, running a large portion of that business. A very well-respected company. It's the reason it was the first major company that Oracle sought to buy. Uh SAP under Bill McDermott, as one of the CEOs that I had as a customer once said, "Now there's a sales guy." Bill's a brilliant leader, brilliant sales guy. And so, you know, I don't aspire to, as I that old Monster commercial, claw my way up to mid-management. I seek to make a difference. And when you do that, you realize that people realize the greatest part of their their potential.

You know, after the year the last year I was at Tivoli, we went from last place to first place in the North America's and I was vice president of the year for IBM Software Group in North America. But one of my managers came to me and I was about 38 years old at the time. And he was late 50s, probably 60. He looked at me and he said, "Bill, I'm going to have a good retirement because of you." Right? This was a This was a an individual who was very talented, but hadn't been making a lot of money the previous four quarters last year.

And so we turned it all around with his help. He was a tremendous leader to his team and a great teammate to the other four managers in that organization. But it made me realize that when you do these turnarounds, it's not just about getting a plaque on the wall and it's not just about getting a big check. It's about unlocking the potential of individuals and the whole organization. And you know, as I tell my managers, this is how people pay their mortgages, this is how people fund their retirement, put their kids through college, and cover their health care.

8:16 And so the decisions you make affect all of that. So decide wisely. And so when you have that opportunity to turn things around, all of that makes what I've done to me personally very satisfying. What do you think the biggest challenge that you ever faced and overcame was it in in your software experience? Like what was sort of the biggest problem or the biggest hill you had to climb? I don't know that I could point at any You know, every time I go into one of these fix-it situations, I think, well, I've seen it all. And invariably Right. there's another new one. You're like, you guys are doing what? I I will tell you probably my greatest disappointment was when PeopleSoft actually was acquired by Oracle. It was It was a It was a tremendous company. It was tremendous technology. We had a wonderful team in the public sector. We were dominating in our market and in large measure because all the wonderful people that came together to make that possible. And you got to remember in

ERP, you know, we had people that were CPAs on the on the finance and payroll side. We had career HR professionals on the HR side. We had career technologists bringing all that together. And when you build an organization like that, it's just tremendously satisfying to be a part of it. So, when that, you know, we really fought hard to avoid the acquisition, turns out it was very good acquisition for everybody including Oracle. It didn't start out that way. But, you know, losing that, you know, was was probably my greatest disappointment. You know, I I helped do the integration with Oracle. Many of the people who left PeopleSoft went back and were hired by Oracle. To Oracle's credit and to Larry Ellison's credit, um you know, they actually funded and continued to develop and grow the code line. So, it was a benefit for both the customers of of PeopleSoft as well as the people in the market. You know, when you initially made the hostile tender offer, he said, "I'm going to buy the company.

I'm going to shut down the technology. I'm going to fire all the people." He went from that and our offering, I can't remember what it was, $4 a share to There's like a 20-some-odd premium between the opening offer and the final offer when the the deal finally went down. And it was, you know, expensive. I think he brought 11 or 12 billion dollars for the company. But, in the long term, that was very successful. But, I will tell you that losing that opportunity of PeopleSoft was probably my greatest disappointment. When you look it back at your career as a fixer, right? Like, you know, looking at all these challenges, what are some of the personal traits that you have to take into fixer type of situations? Like, what what do you go to battle with every day from a, you know, personal skill set? First thing when you go into those situations is you just really have to know yourself. You know, I wrote Bill's Rules originally just to

11:08 Articulate what is important to me. Right? And that's critical. When you go into a situation where everything is chaotic, where politics are rife, everybody's backstabbing each other, you got to come in and just say, "Look, this is who I am. This is what I believe. And this is how I'm going to operate." And all of a sudden, everybody freezes up, turns around, and looks around, and says, "Who's the new cat?" And and what that does is, you know, just that self-knowledge and sharing that with people, it does a number of things. First, it it calms everybody down. Secondly, it gives you as the leader the opportunity to objectively evaluate everybody's performance without regard to what anybody else says. And third, it allows me to look at each segment of the business from the product to the marketing to the channel to sales consulting and figure out how strong is any one of these individual pillars.

You know, how what do I need to do in what order? And that's critical. What do I need to do in what order to fix this problem first? And and that's, you know, from a tactical, from an execution perspective, that's probably the hardest thing to get your head around. And you got to do it quickly. But having a framework that I've used repeatedly from business to business and a found philosophical foundation from which I operate, I can do that a little faster and a little easier than most people. But that that's just practice, right? That's just coming together.

But as I say, stratifying, you know, usually you come in, they're they're behind on the number and everybody says, "Well, it's sales' fault." Well, you know, how's the product quality? When was the last time the product was refreshed? What's the marketing quality? Are they generating leads? Are we relevant to the market? Do we have any channel partners? Are we co-marketing with our channel partners? How much is all that behavior generating leads to the sales force? We're not generating leads. Okay, so maybe the problem isn't your sales force. Maybe the problem is everything that comes before it. Now, if you got all that stuff, and chances are you don't, but if you got all that stuff clicking, then you can go look at the sales team and say, "Okay, you know, strat- it's real easy to stratify a sales force. Who's ahead of the number? Who's behind? Stack rank them and move." But before you go in and start shooting people indiscriminately, you better know exactly what the problems are because you could create a much bigger problem

For yourself by failing to understand what's going on in the environment. Thank you for that. So, tell me about your your current, you know, your current company, Iothic. You know, cybersecurity is that kind of the arena you guys play in? That's correct. Uh it is Specifically, it's post-quantum encryption and authentication. So, it is a techn- In English for our listeners. Yeah. Don't worry, I'm not a cyber guy. So, I I can I can explain this at the at the 60,000 foot level. So, it the company, the technology itself originally came out of Oxford University in England. It was originally funded in part with some United States Navy money. They've solved They solved a problem that most people didn't even understand for the first five or six years last, you know, it it What is quantum computing? You know, how does that work? Okay, now why do I need a cyber defense against that? And increasingly, you know, people are starting to understand what is quantum

14:26 And why you might need to be able to defend against it. From a layman's perspective, you know, cybersecurity has largely existed along the lines of perimeter defense, your network, sign-in and password, okay? And then you hit a PKI certificate, which authenticates you, and that combination then will also give you authentication to those systems internal to a company or an agency for which you should have access at the level that you should have access. Um Yeah, that's very high. And you know, I actually ran a cyber company back in 2007, 2008.

Cyber is a lot like manned flight, okay? From the Wright brothers to the F-35, the fundamental principle hasn't changed. You've got a wing, air passes over the wing, there's lift underneath, there's drag across the top, but that basically is what creates flight. Cyber's the same way. You have a network password, PKI certificate is about 50 years old and it's the same principle. What I Iothic does is basically we're flying saucer. Okay? We've done away with the whole principle of a wing. What we do is instead of a singular point of entry to the network, we turn the network into a trust layer. So, when you go to sign on to the network, you have to authenticate across five or six different elements in the network and if you fail any of them, then you do not get access to the enterprise. And this is designed to accomplish a number of things. First, you know, a quantum and AI right now is already generating scripts which allow you to just continue running passwords against a a network until you can get

On. Well, if we find out that somebody's doing that, we can automatically just disregard their efforts to access the network. There is some question about quantum computing, you know, being able to do that times 10. Okay, write those. Just be able to crush through sheer numbers through sheer computing power what exists. And again, the concept is that having to authenticate across five or six different elements in the network will help protect against that. The next component that we address is, you know, right now I think PKI certificates might be Now, there's there's some academic research to suggest that they're about 80 to 90% hacked.

I think I saw something out of one of the major cyber companies. So, that we're designed to actually protect against that. You Once you have that the the the Iothic framework in place, you don't actually need a PKI certificate. Now, it's important to recognize we don't we're not looking we're not telling anybody to get rid of your your PKI certificate, right? We we can sit in front of that network and serve as an additional layer to protect and to avoid some of these risks that quantum offers.

17:14 But, when you look at large enterprises, particularly some of the United States federal government, you might have multiple networks daisy-chained in order to accomplish a singular purpose. So, think about, you know, networks designed to provide control for a theater in in the military for theater commander. Okay, so they might have one network controlling satellites, one for planes, one for ships, one for under underwater, one on the ground, another one for floating assets. So, you got five or six different networks you're trying to integrate, and managing the PKI infrastructure across that is a tremendous expense and complexity.

And by sitting in front of all of that, Iothic is designed to remove that expense and complexity. So, there's a lot that goes into it. As a friend of mine up at the fort once said, Bill, all we really know is what our PhDs tell us. So, I have my PhD talk to his PhD, and I've got the humility to recognize I need that. But from a high level, that's that's what Iothic it does. So, let's lean into the book a little bit. You mentioned it a little earlier in in the intro.

And so, you know, I wanted to kind of as we close things up here, let's talk about the book, which is titled It Used to Be Fun. And and it's really around the software executive's experience as a federal whistleblower. And so, why don't you tell us about the book and you know, what you can talk about and what you can't talk about? Well, just about everything is on in the book now, but I became aware that there was an active defamation campaign against me as a result of the Justice Department finding the company $22 million.

You know, the CEO and the president of the company, obviously they had won many awards. Informatica had hit its numbers for 47 straight quarters, which was somewhat unheard of in a lot of areas, but particularly in the software. And so, they certainly did not want the world to realize that they'd been submitting false representations and certifications to the federal government for a period of years governing hundreds of tens of at least tens of millions of dollars of revenue. Now, why is that important? Well, for the for the benefit of the layman, when you sell to the US government, the US government is the largest acquirer of anything, software, pencils, jet engines, okay?

And so, you know, and because it's public money, the government says you have to give us your best price because we we buy more pencils, jet engines, and software than anybody else. And so, that's called most favored nation pricing. So, to get on to sell to the government through the GSA schedule, which allows you to sell direct without having to go through an RFP and a bid and proposal every time, under oath, you say that these are the best prices available on a commercial market. Okay? And what was happening was Informatica was knowingly falsifying their submissions to the federal government. Now, this in and of itself is a big deal.

20:14 The other companies have paid a $180 million fine, $60 to $200 million fine. It's a very big deal. But the even bigger deal is by the fact they knew it and they did it over period of at least 5 years, according to the government's own settlement document, and I only worked for the company for 3 years. They did it over 5 years. Individual executives could have borne criminal responsibility for that behavior. And the reason they've been conducting this defamation campaign against me is to just defer blame, responsibility, and acknowledgement for their own conduct.

And it gets better. The CFO of Informatica was named the CFO of the year for the software industry for 5 or 6 years when all this was going on. So, it's important to note that the CFO of Enron was also named the CFO of the year. And so, you know, these group of executives did things that might otherwise have caused them to go to prison for some period of time. And it's important to remember that, you know, Martha Stewart went to prison for 6 months on a $43,000 tax problem. Right. These folks submitted documents to the federal government and the SEC, which were knowingly false for over 5 years, and all that happened was that the company paid a fine. So, they had to find someone to blame, and that someone for the last 8 years, 9 years, until this book came out, has been me.

So, I I I caught them doing that. I hired retained some private investigators from a large national firm. I have these individuals on tape saying that Bill Sullivan set this whole thing up. Of course, that's an entire entirely as emails demonstrate, that's untrue. And finally, after a lot of machinations, uh the acting US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein heard about the situation through a friend of mine. He took the case, uh and he sent them a letter saying, you know, we know what's going on. You need to cease and desist. So, all this is in in the book.

It you know, all the emails, Rod's letter, the settlement document, it's it's all available to read. And and I would not have written the book at all. I'm not all that comfortable talking about myself. But, you know, I have been fired repeatedly because people thought I was a criminal. It's been hard to find another job. And uh so, it was just time. And you know, and that's why the book, and that's the story from 60,000 ft. But, as one of my attorneys said, look, if you just publish all the emails, that's all you need to do. And that's literally what I've done. But, you know, I don't see myself as a victim. I'm not a victim. I refuse to be a victim. It would be better for some people if I was in fact a victim, but I'm not. You know, I had a very successful career.

22:54 I'm going to use some of the skills that I learned across that career to fix this situation. Now, that's where we're at. Well, good. We wish you the very best of the book. You said it was already on backorder. Oh, that's great as it as it starts off. So, where can the listeners get the book? It's available on Amazon. Uh it should be in the next couple of days. They're they're re-stocking. Uh but it's also available on Barnes & Noble, and it's available on Goodreads. So, again, the name of the book is It Used to Be Fun, a software executive's experience as a federal whistleblower.

Well, there you go, guys. Bill Sullivan, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate your stories. Appreciate you giving us perspective, and certainly appreciate you being here as you launch your new book. So, thank you so much. Pleasure's mine, Terry. Thanks so much for having me. You're welcome. That's a wrap on Zero Friction, the show built around one simple idea. Remove the barriers, and the revenue will follow. If today's conversation was valuable, please subscribe and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. That's how we will grow this community. I'm Terry Coutsolioutsos, just a revenue architect powered by AI.

Come find me at my website, myrevrx.com, and let's talk about what friction is costing you and your organization. Until next time, keep removing the barriers, and keep the revenue flowing.