#265 Searching For the Right Role that You Can Be Great At

Notes:

Sales is performance. It involves a lot of things usually associated with an artistic performance: preparation, practice, and competition.

My guest for today studied classical music before transitioning into sales engineering, but he still views his current role as an SE leader in a health IT company as a musical display of sorts. When he does a demo, he views it as a “performance of a lifetime.”

Josh Price is the Manager for Solutions Engineering at Trella Health, an IT services and consulting company based in Atlanta. In this episode, Josh joins the podcast to talk about transitioning from music to sales, the health IT industry, and the challenges of being an SE leader.

Key Takeaways:

How a Bachelor’s in Music helped Josh in his IT career
The stresses of a career in music
How Josh transitioned from being a musician to being a sales engineering leader
What Electronic Health Records (EHR) are
How to approach the “hard conversations” in sales
The experience of doubting yourself in your first few weeks in a sales role
The feedback Josh got from his management team while he was an account executive
How to figure out the 10% you love about your job and increase its percentage
How Josh’s view of sales changed after becoming a sales engineer
The difference between Health IT and other IT industries
The requirements for sales engineers working in the health industry
How healthcare software fits into the healthcare industry
The importance of understanding the healthcare industry if you are an SE working in it
The technical component of interoperability
Why Josh accepted the challenge of being an SE manager
Josh’s favorite part of sales
Josh’s superpowers
How to get better at receiving and giving feedback

Quotes:

When you’re thinking about demoing… you’re like a movie director or a chef, and you’re going and you’re putting this art out into the world. And then the sales reps that are working with you, your sales VPS that are working with you, they come back with a million different critiques. And you might have thought you put like the best piece of art out there. But somebody’s always got something to say. — Josh Price

I think we all can kind of relate to being brand new in a space and not knowing what the heck is going on. And that’s kind of what I felt. When I think about it now, I feel like I’ve come a very long way in my seven, eight years. But it doesn’t feel like there was any one moment that everything clicked. It’s just, at some point, I became a lot more confident, and I focused on what I knew. — Josh Price

We are given training as SEs or as salespeople. But I think of sales engineering and sales in general as sports in the business world. We perform more than we practice, whereas in every other sport or every other musician practices way more than they perform. So how can one feel confident about what they do if all they’re doing is mistakes, especially in the first few weeks? — Ramzi Marjiba

Project management is fun. But I find the problem with sales, in general, is that we have a million projects on the go at the same time, and each one has a million moving parts, with a million different people. — Ramzi Marjiba

When I’m interviewing people, I’m not worried about if they understand the architecture with which our platform sits on. I want them to be able to understand the product, the value props behind where the healthcare industry comes in, and how we can help them achieve whatever goal they’re trying to achieve. — Josh Price

When you have an interesting feature that you want to show or something that really is just going to wow the audience, don’t wait to show it at the end of the demo. Get in there and please show it because people will lose interest. And then 30 minutes later, you’ll be getting to that point and then people will have already lost interest. — Josh Price

You are doing people a disservice if you are not honest with them. — Josh Price