Interview with Phil Zalewski, Managing Director - Parkwood Group

Phil Zalewski started as an accountant doing tax returns for sales professionals and aspired to make the commissions they were making. He is now leading the Parkwood Group where he leads a network of elite senior sales professionals who do commission only relationship selling on behalf of emerging companies.

Host - Carl Grant
Producer - Seth Grant

Transcript

Carl Grant: 0:00

Welcome to rainmakers. I'm here with Phil Zalewski, CEO of the parkwood group. But before we talk to Phil, I want to remind you that rainmakers is a podcast about business development. When I started in business development, I had nothing to guide me didn't know how to do it, and to make it up as I went along. And so I'm talking today with people who are really good at doing this stuff, to learn how they do it, and how they learned to do it, and teach you how to do it. And so today, we're talking to Phil's Zalewski. Phil, what is the parkwood? group?

Phil Zalewski: 0:39

So parkwood group is a, it's a consultancy is to sales advisory, helping companies accelerate revenue growth. Today, revenue is the number one driver for value creation. And a lot of, you know, a lot of the best firms, they're already skilled that financial and operational value creation, they've done all the engineering. Now the next realm, if you will, in terms of really being able to drive value is through organic sales and increasing organic sales. And that is exactly what we do help companies and help investor groups drive that revenue growth engine,

Carl Grant: 1:26

So when I first met you, you were you were doing sales for telecom and things like that. And then I've known you over the years, as you've tried to do a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, you know, ventures, and those didn't work out all that great. And then you started a new entrepreneurial venture. And you said, what I'm really good at Carl is sales. And so this is a, like a startup. It's not a startup anymore, but it's an entrepreneurial venture around sales, right?

Phil Zalewski: 1:55

It is, and I'll even take a step back how I even got into a call. So my career started in accounting of all places. Okay. So I was I was an audit, in the audit group. And a friend of mine, not not at the firm that I was at, was doing taxes, and he was branching off creating his own firm, which has become successful. But at that time, it was just him. And so he pinged me said, Hey, would I mind working at night helping do tax returns? Like, sure, you know, it's extra money. I'm a I'm a kid out of college. You know, I can certainly do tax returns. And so I, I was helping him at night. And often I would be doing tax returns for these guys, you know, guys in sales, right? And I would talk to them afterwards, present their tax return to them, Tom. And after talking with them Carl I said to myself, I can do this, you know, I'm looking at their w two earnings. I know exactly what they're making. And I thought, oh, wow, this is, you know, this is a game changer. And so that was the that was the switch. That was the lightbulb that turned on. That was just the beginning. Because as you could imagine, no, no one in sales wants to hire anybody from accounting. Right? It was the polar opposite. So had to had to overcome a number of obstacles in that regard. to really learn, you know, what it was that they went through, Oh, I can't tell you dozens of interviews and always said, you got to get experienced, you have to get experience. And ultimately, I found a small reseller, an Oracle reseller, who had just bought a, somebody that created financial applications on Oracle, and they needed somebody to sell. And the only deal that they would give me was 100%. commission. Yeah, I thought

Carl Grant: 3:55

today, that's exactly that's your business model today. So if you're, so give you a plug, if you're if you've got a cool, cool startup company, or even a growing company, and you need to juice up your sales, Phil knows how to do it, and he'll come in and he'll only get paid if you get paid. But so so Phil, the funny that you mentioned the accounting because my first business development job was in accounting, and I was selling accounting, I knew nothing about accounting like in college and graduate school. I was horrible at it. Anyways. So one thing I differentiated on in this podcast is pure sales versus business development. And granted, business development is just a light, a light name for sales, right? It does is it seems kind of uncouth to to call, you know, somebody sales in a law firm or an accounting firm, right. But But I think the real difference is the nature of the sale, right? If you're selling a widget, you know, some hardware device For a piece of furniture, you know, you're selling that thing. And there's not much of a relationship that is developed around selling that item. It could be, but but usually there's not right. So your typical salesperson is doing cold calls, and it's a numbers game. But in the kind of sales that we do, I think if you're more of a business developer, you know, because you're a relationship guy, and the guys that you have involved in the women that you have involved with the parkwood group, or people that have been doing this a long time, they're seasoned people, they have relationships, right. And so they don't need to go out and and cold call a bunch of people they're calling people they know. Right? And so talk a little bit about that, that difference between kind of the pure sales in the business development type of sale that you do.

Phil Zalewski: 5:43

Oh, Carl, there's a huge difference. Right. So I would classify it almost as you know, to your point, you know, selling the widgets. Yeah, that's a different type of sale, than when you are working a large enterprise opportunity or a large b2b. So as an example, I'm working with one client right now. I've been working this opportunity for two years, two years. And it is, it is all relationship. It's everything. It's the nuances of it. And it's the complex cell. There's so many moving parts, so many influence, or so many people who have a say in that decision. It might be, you know, well, it certainly is folks in the finance department, it's folks in the, in the multiple areas in the IT shops that all have a say. And so my job and my team's job is making sure that everyone is shaking their heads, yes. to the to the value proposition. And that, you know, that transverses all all sectors, right, there's a everyone has a certain value proposition that they bring to the table. And yeah, that sounds, you know, that sounds trite and normal. We, you know, we all hear about that. But it's the what separates the elite, if you will, from everyone else, it's all the little things that we do. Right. So think about it. This is two years, this is an endurance race.

Carl Grant: 7:14

Yeah, the quota if you had to meet meet a quota. Yeah. And, you know, you would have metit last year, right?

Phil Zalewski: 7:22

That's about that's how then then you balance the short term with the long term, right. So there are certain shorter term opportunities that you focus on, never taking your eye off the ball off the big deal, Carl, this is a nine figure deal. Okay. And so there are a lot, like I said, there's a lot happening, but to your point, it is it's knowing everything, it's knowing your business, it's knowing everything that's going on within that account of somebody, you need to know somebody coughs, if you will, right. Um, and you know, just to give you a short story, when I was just starting out in sales, I was, I mean i was green, right? I was, I was green, and we had this concept of commit, you have to commit how much money you're going to sales you're going to bring in for the week for the month and for the quarter. For the week, I had committed that I was going to bring in $100,000 for a certain deal. The deal came in at$90,000. So the next team forecast call we're talking going over it. Okay, you know, commit with hundred, I brought in 90. My sales manager, you know, made a comment or something like that ago. Yeah, but it's 90. For the next five minutes. He ripped into me just going on and on that I didn't know my business. I didn't know this and that. And that was a that was a game changer.

Carl Grant: 8:43

You should have seem bagged it Phil .

Phil Zalewski: 8:45

Yeah, should have. But the point is, is that was that was a tiny deal. Right? Now, imagine the stakes right now on a nine figure deal. You really have to know everything, and making sure that your network is telling you everything that you're feeding the network and nine, you know, every all ships or boats are rising, if you will.

Carl Grant: 9:08

Yeah. So So I've had, if I think back, I've had a variety of jobs, but I've had a straight commission sales job selling furniture, just to buy gas, gas money. And if I didn't, if I didn't sell that piece of furniture, I didn't get paid. And then higher end job. I was the first business development person hired at Price Waterhouse Coopers. I had a I had a, a goal. They didn't call it a quota, but it was a goal. And then I and I had a bonus structure, which is like a commission. And in so I know and accountants are quantitative. So I get that right. But I always blew way past my goal, you know, because I was highly motivated. But can you believe for the past 18 plus years, I haven't had a goal or a commission structure. I I've just, you know, operated as a business development professional. I've got a team of very business development professionals well paid, I might add, then operate in the same way. And I can measure what they produce. But But I don't comp them on based on numbers, right? It's, it's totally different than a typical sales job. Does that surprise you?

Phil Zalewski: 10:16

Um, it is, but then again, at the, you're right, but for the enterprise self for the large deal, it's qualitative. Okay. So, very, very similar to your business step is that people, you know, they have aspirations, they have goals, and so you know, it, I'm not selling to a I'm not positioning to a quote unquote, pain point and a solution. It No, it's not they have, what is it that that they're trying to achieve? There are, you know, it's selling Look, I hate to be trite about it, but it's selling that dream, they have an aspiration, they need to they're trying to get somewhere. And by getting all the resources, whatever those resources are, and oftentimes, it's, you know, it's things that are, you know, make no sense outside the box. But getting those resources together to help your client to help move that initiative forward. And these are initiatives, right, again, I'll go back to this this big deal. There are there are small initiatives that are all moving, that as long as they're moving forward. Okay, that's great. I'm not closing anything, I'm not selling anything, right, this thing probably won't close for another four or five months. But little things are happening all along the way that at the end, I even hate to use the word close. It's, it's it's a natural progression happening.

Carl Grant: 11:38

Yeah, right. So Phil, how did how did you learn how to do these things that seem so natural to you? They just come to mind one day, or did you while others?

Phil Zalewski: 11:48

No, no, no, no, listen, when I again, I have to make the transition from from accounting to sales, I'd like to think I have a fair bit of energy. So I have going for me. But really, at the at the end, at the end, it is I was a human sponge, I guess would be one way to put it when I first started even using terminology, the lingo, okay, close prospect pipeline, things like that. I mean, you had to learn, I had to learn the lingo, then I had to learn the technology, and really being able to get the nuances, and then just the different elements of of the sales process. Okay, what is it? What are I mean, I, I can't I read everything I could find I, I attended seminars, I I just anything that I can grasp, talk to as many people as I could to find what is it you know, what's driving these two, one to get my first sales job, quite candidly, um, and then after that, it, it can too, and it continues, you know, it was you know, how many years ago even even to this day, I mean, there was a huge article, I'm working with a couple clients in the data management space. And there was a huge article written yesterday around next gen infrastructure, and merchant technologies around that, that makes all the sense in a world. So I guess a long way of saying, never stop learning. I mean, it is I attribute a lot of it to just an insatiable hunger to, to know how to how to move the process forward.

Carl Grant: 13:28

I guess having the sales fundamentals helps you even when you're doing the high end relationship, building type of sale, right, just understanding where this opportunity sits in the funnel, right, understanding this is a, a warm prospect versus a hot prospect versus something that's going to close or never close. You absolutely think those ways, right?

Phil Zalewski: 13:48

Oh, and look absolutely. Because at the end of the day, it is about at the end of the day, it is time is your most important resource. And so being able to assess, you know, where, where you're going to get the sale, because still Hey, we all you know, it's a commit weekly, a commit monthly a commit quarterly pipeline has to build or else the revenue never happens. And, and to to be able to continue moving down that path. Absolutely. It it's the discipline. I think that applying that discipline into applying that discipline to relationships, following up something really simple as, hey, I you know, met somebody had a zoom call or whatever will follow up at the end of the day, hey, I enjoyed this. Those little things, believe it or not make a huge difference.

Carl Grant: 14:44

They do.

Phil Zalewski: 14:45

Yeah, absolutely.

Carl Grant: 14:46

They do and it's what I'm the worst at is the follow up but I know how important it is. I get to take your advice, Phil, any parting advice for you know a young person listening who might want to be like you and they grow up.

Phil Zalewski: 14:59

You don't want to be like me. But I'll, I'll tell you what, again, I would go back to a couple things. One would be never stop learning. Right? It is really become a master of your craft there. I'll use a couple sports analogies here where, like Steph Curry, okay, we all know his shooting percentage. Well, did you know that after every practice, he will go to the foul line and shoot free throws until he makes 10 in a row after every practice. And look, there's the stories are replete of just all the great athletes and just what their work ethic is like so, you know, one, you know, really become a master of your craft be just learn everything you can work hard. It is, you know, there's the elites and there's, there's great people and then there everyone else, the elites just do things a little bit differently. They go that extra mile, they make that extra call, they write that extra email, I would say it's it takes work, but it's very well worth it.

Carl Grant: 16:02

Great advice. Phil's Zalewski, CEO of the Parkwood Group. Thanks for joining us today.

Phil Zalewski: 16:06

Thank you.