Winning in Sales with Heart: Lessons from Frederick DeWorken

Welcome to the "Dear Future CRO Podcast" powered by GrowthQ.  In this episode, we are honored to have Frederick DeWorken as our guest. Frederick is an Investor and Co-Founder of a Data Services Company. In this episode, we uncovered the unconventional career path of a man who transitioned from the Peace Corps to becoming a trailblazing executive in tech.
 
Frederick advises every future leader to believe in their potential and to embrace every setback as a stepping stone towards greater success. For those in the tech industry, create or find your community, especially if you're from an underrepresented group—resilience in your convictions and network can shape your career.
 
Tune in for Frederick's inspiring journey, and remember, every interaction is a chance to grow and connect. Join us for the full story of transformation and the creation of lasting impact in the workplace. Stay determined, and let's shape the future of sales leadership together!

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Transcript

0:40

Welcome, welcome. You know exactly why we are here. We are sharing the stories of underrepresented sales leaders to share and crowdsource representation in this profession. We love of go to market and sales. So we have an incredible guest with us today. I'm really excited for this. Frederick Dwarken. God, we could go through your entire and incredibly diverse career from my perspective, but I'd love to hear your career journey from your perspective so you can share with our audience. How did you get in this profession and why do you stay? Absolutely, Esther. And I'll just take the chance to let you know how much I admire you, your career trajectory and everything that you do for the community, to bring us together, to create these experiences and to send the ladder down, so to say, so that other people can follow us as we blaze the trail. Now, my career journey has been non traditional. And it's non traditional because I didn't necessarily think that myself as a sales animal or envision myself in a sales career during undergraduate, definitely not during law school, and certainly not during business school. It really kind of took me going to the Peace Corps to understand the impact of sales and the potential of sales. I had the opportunity to read 72 books in the Peace Corps. And coming out of business school, I had this idea that I wanted to be a consultant. And after calling 50 of them once I'd read a few books on consultancy, I said, I don't think I want to be a consultant, but they all sound pretty cranky on the phone. But then after reading a few business books, things by Jeffrey Gittimer and inspirational books by Brian Tracy, I realized, wow, I have the fundamentals of sales. Anybody that's willing to go to a random pay phone in the middle of rural Panama and call top 50 consultants, that sounds like a sales tactic. And there was a land boom going on in Panama at that time, and my Peace Corps, Cerberus, was wrapping up. So I said, what can I do to take advantage of all this? So I put on a tie in a suit and got an apartment in Tanama City and took my resume from cardstock and went knocking on some doors of commercial realtors that I'd identified in this really shiny, glossy magazine I found at the grocery store. And I just happened to be in the lobby at she B. Richard Ellis, when the managing director was in the lobby and said, hey, you're Ramone Brooks, the manager director of CBRE. And he said, yeah, that's me. And I'm like, I want to work for you. Doing what? Go wait for me. In that conference room. I'll be in there in a minute. And I went waiting for him in the conference room and we had a nice chat about what he was trying to solve, which I now understand this was a discovery. And I said, yeah, I've got the skills to help you solve customer service issues and lead flow issues that you're trying to solve. And you said, excellent, you're hired. And that led me to a short career as a consultant for CB Richard Ellis, helping them to install their CRM and to improve their approach to this inbound lead flow that they were generating and to create a higher international profile of some of these big projects that they were running, which were fascinating, by the way. And this is the time that the United States was turning over large scale infrastructure, air Force bases and Panama was redeveloping them. And CBRE had the exclusive rights for 30 year multi billion dollar project called Panama Pacifico, which has taken this Howard Air Force Base. And I was calling everybody from London to Sydney and the reps that were on Learjet and everything and raising the profile of CB Richard Ellis in Panama. And along the way, of course, I had to help them select and implement the CRM. And we did that. And I went through some sales, I went through some sales cycle and I guess went through this generous because I suffered through some of the worst sales cycles ive ever witnessed by the Microsoft guys and the salesforce.com guys in the early days. This is 2007, and I was thinking back to all those books that I read sitting in my hammock in this little rural town in Panama. Im like, man, I could do this better than these guys are. And they're pretty well dressed, so maybe I should try to point myself in that direction. So I convinced my, hey, this is what we should do. And that was our first little pivot. She thought she was signing up for somewhere that was going to be just like California. We wound up in Seattle and it was a wonderful four and a half years. I wound up latching onto a rocket ship, as they call them, with tableau software. I was employed 180 there and it was just, do whatever you can. I spoke Spanish fluently and they figured that out about six months in. We know that you almost knocked our door down. China sell stuff to Latin America. Would you actually like to do it now? Yeah. Wow. Let's go do it. Let's make sure, let me make sure I got this right. So for people who are listening to this journey, I don't think, I think you're doing a humble job. Right now of keeping it very surface, as if this is not an incredible journey thus far. Let me make sure we're super clear. You're in the Peace Corps, you come out of the peace Corps, you see a unique opportunity in Panama, you go directly to CBRE and say, hey, I can solve your problem with your first. You close your first deal being your consulting services. Basically, you're the product or service. You sell that and you close that first deal with CBRE to sell that service, consulting them on their CRM and their lead flow. You deliver that service. In the meantime, you're noticing that there's an opportunity for you and your skill sets of what you just figured out how to sell with tech companies. And so then you pitch yourself into going to work for a tech company which lands you from Panama into Seattle. And they then look at, oh, gosh, this guy is a great salesperson, and he's also got these skills that we could use in a very unique way in going after a whole new market for us. Being Latin America, like Esther, that's huge. It was, and it played out that way. And there was a critical moment when I'm sitting in the conference room with Senor Ramon Druch, the managing director of CBRE, and I had listened to him and understood what he was looking to solve. And we had that meeting of minds. And I'd read about this in negotiating books. Whoever speaks first loses. And in Panama, your typical professional at my level was gonna get $2,000 max, maybe three if they're related to the principal, maybe. And I asked for fifty k a year. And I never forget how kind of nervous he guy starts rolling his pencil. And I'm thinking to myself, man, I asked for way too much money, but I just did everything I could to stay silent. And in the end, we'll make it work. And I delivered for him above and beyond that 50k, he knows it. We're friends to this day. So there was that kind of inflection moment of, all right, I'm going to put some of the stuff that I've been reading in the books to practice. And then it worked. There was still a whole lot of calling, a whole lot of cultural issues of trying to, you know, CRM, since you will know, it's a cultural thing. If it doesn't get adopted, it's not going to get used. So I had to basically figure out, how do I co op the main seller? How do I co op the valuations director? What's motivating a human resources person? How can I get her to help me create these experiences so that it's not just something that we're telling people that they're living it. And we did that over the course of a year and a half and at the end of that it was time to go back to the states and I'd seen the sales thing but I went back to the States in December of 2009. That was the depth, the nadir, I like to call it, of the financial crisis and here I am full of all this vitamin D from sunny Panama up in overcast coal have you ever heard of the Seattle freeze? Seattle people who are just kind of looking at me weird like where are you from? You got way too much energy, way too much optimism. That's a real thing. It's a real thing and right you're not getting enough vitamin D and sunlight and right thats very real yeah so. Im knocking on all these doors because my vision at that moment was im going to help Microsoft up their game in Latin America im going to sell more Microsoft dynamic CRM than theyve ever seen so the first questions are always how much sales experience you got there Mister dworkin? None really. I used to sell stuff with my grandpa at the flea market which by the way was the best experience in sales school ive ever gone to on that dude chocolate lamb. Have you ever carried a quota? I carried a quota. Chocolate covered almonds for my traffic school when I was a kid. No man, please, come on. I didn't understand how to sell myself from my experience so I actually spent the better part of six months just banging on doors, going to networking events, trying to get informational interviews with as many people as possible. I finally had to take a course initially thank God for this course prolingo with Paul Anderson where he taught me how do you hack the ats? How do you leverage what you hacked in the ATS to optimize your resume to get the interview, applying for the interview but through social engineering and then once you're in the interview how do you use neuro linguistic programming in order to maintain attention of the person that's interviewing you? Crit rapport that was so crucial for me because in that process I narrowed it down and said, you know what? I'm thinking about this wrong Microsoft. They're shedding people right now. I don't want to go to that environment. They laid off 15,000 people the month I arrived to the states. I need to find something different. There's something on the upswing where they're hiring people because it's going to be easier. And that's how I was able to find tableau. I went to this thing called the Book of lists, and people who I mentor will want recognize this. And in every single metropolitan area, there's a business journal, Book of lists. And that book of list always almost has. Almost always has the fastest 25 or 50 growing small, medium, and large company. And the one in Seattle had their fastest 50 pre IPO companies, still privately held companies, like, hmm, that seems like a pretty target rich environment. Let me investigate each one of these and see what they do. And I got it down to three, because that was what the class told me. If you're going for the whole ocean trying to boil it, you're not going to do much. If you can get it down to its narrow focus of three, it'll be very effective. And I'll never forget my three. It was Verta four because I had a little bit of an insurance background. It was cobalt group, because they seem pretty cool. They're selling stuff to the car dealerships and tableau software just because they had this really cool marketing feel and data and everything. And then I went to an actual event and saw their CEO demo the product, and it blew my mind when he was just painted pictures on this tableau of data, and it was making these beautiful visual representations, and he was so charismatic. Esther, I'm like, that's the dude I want to work for. Now, we all know that providence intervenes. It wasn't a straight line of me going up to him and saying, hey, I'd love to work for you. Although I did do that to him and to others. I want to go sell Latin America for you guys. I want to go and sell tableau in Latin America. Well, we're not ready for Latin America. It wasn't until five months later, when I was in my emergency role, my Johnny Hussle role, doing whatever I can that I was qualified for as a claims adjuster, that I wound up at the front door of one of the directors, the chief sales director of Tableau software. This guy's name's Lynn Smith, because he had his son put up. Sure. And the sink overflowed his sink into his floors and had damage in his home. And he saw my little workbook that I got the schwag at the in person event that I was taking my notes in, and he says, hey, I work for that company top low. And I put my sales hat, and I said, you do? Let me tell you a few things, man. I want to work for you guys. It was amazing. It was amazing. And it's moments like that, and this is why I'm a big, huge believer. A big believer. Faith, belief, Joy, you got to incorporate it. I had faith that I would get into tech. I didn't know how. Let God figure that out. I had belief in myself. I knew I had good basic skills. I knew I could articulate those. And I was joyful about it. I wasn't resentful, but I hadn't got there yet. I wasn't pissed off about anything. I was just like, hey, man, I'm happy to be here with some app ads. And it worked out. God helps you out along the way when you have those three things. God reached out and put me in that spot in that moment, and I came in at employ 180 at top load. Now, that's only the beginning of another little main process because they put me through seven interviews. Esther, to be like the lowest level run inside sales person you could imagine. Wow, there's power in there. That shows a focused company who wants to make sure if you're going to come in, you're going to be part of this group. We've got to make sure it's not just anybody that can come through the door, but we've really thought through who the best candidate is to join the team. God. I tell you, Fred, just from the journey you've had, from your time in the Peace Corps to being a consultant and in that consultancy, being the person sold to buying CRM to then flipping to the other side of the table, selling CRM at a company called Microsoft to then saying, you know what, there's something else I see here. And putting yourself in position to work at the time of an incredibly fast growing company in the Seattle area. Tableau. The things that stand out to me of themes that you did, you bet on yourself and you have belief in yourself. You knew your value, and you were afraid to have that elevator pitch ready when the opportunity came, where you were in the right room or in the right elevator. I like how you focused your ICP. Right. You already did your research to go to that book of lists, if you will, to focus to your, when I say ICP, ideal customer profile, you focus your ideal customer, and in that case, hiring company profile to figuring out who that would be based on going and doing that research within that group. Book of lists of fastest growing companies in the area. Touche. Thank you, Esther. It's very important to approach it like a sales cycle, to approach anytime that you're looking for a position and to recognize sometimes too. At the end of my tableau experience, six and a half years later, I was a burnt out mess of a pulp of just blob. I was useful to no one and I had purposely and thoughtfully took six months off just to recharge. Because you have to have your heart in it. You have to think about, this is a sales cycle and you got to bring your a game to every single engagement, to every single encounter so you can drive value. It is a sales cycle and you have to approach it like that. So very true. So very true. I want to jump in a little bit and ask a few other questions. So one that we talk about a lot here at growthq is pivotal moment that stretched you in your career. Pivotal key moment that stretched you in your career. Can you think of one story in particular that was a stretching moment for you in your career? Yeah, absolutely. So after tableau, I had a couple of different stops and all wonderful experiences, learning experiences. One was with the data science company, another one was with the martech company called Telem. And while at Telium, I just didn't feel the commitment to Latin America to invest in the resources that would really help me drive the kind of results that I thought were possible. And I said, I don't want to do this thing halfway. Like, I don't want to just float for a year, for whatever years and w two it and great bandits and blah blah. I want to go hard, go hard to go home. So I actually tended my resignation. I had no idea what I was going to go next. I said, you know what we just went through? We're going into corporate planning. Doesn't look like we're really going to be able to double in on Latin America. I'm super passionate about Latin America. I think we can win. So I don't think we're in good shape anymore, which is a hard conversation to have with my leadership at that time. And I loved him to death. Man, talk about a. Talk about a lesson in both humility, but thinking like a GM. You essentially went in and said, you know what, I'm going to lay off myself because I don't think it's the right thing to do for the company. We're not in a position where we can really invest in the way we can win, and the best way to use me is in a position where I can help you win in Latin America. And if that's not going to be our focus, doesn't make sense for us to that what a mature way of looking at it. But at the same time, they probably respected the crap out of you because that's like thinking like a GM or thinking like a CEO of the business, even though you're an employee of the business. Yeah, absolutely. I certainly hope that we left with those feelings. I know it did. Grant and Dave daters were such wonderful leaders that I still interact with just almost on a monthly basis. And it was mutual respect when we left. Now there was still the whole task of getting another job. And so I reached out to my network, as you were, as you will. And I looked at the Deloitte Fast 500. I have a pretty good recipe that works. Book of lists. Deloitte fast talked to my network. If they're in these companies that look good and identified Snowflake as a high potential company. And I noticed that there were several of my tableau colleagues that were there, people that I really enjoyed, loved, and trusted. Ross Perez was the main guy. And I know what Fred did for us in tableau. Do the same thing for us here. He put me in with Orion Grojean and where, yeah, man, this thing's gonna be great. He put. They put me in touch with a few other people, and then the sales cycle kicked in, approached like a sales cycle, and I closed them. And I got the lead as their go to market for Latin America. And I'll never forget the last discussion I was having with Paul Moriarty, who was in charge of the Central and Latin America at that time, sitting in the little cubicle in Cleveland with them, because they just flew me in for the interview. And back home the same day, he looks at me and he says, fred, I really like you. We haven't made the decision yet, but if we can make this work, do you think you could be in Mexico next week? We're gonna be at the Gartner event. We've already paid for it. We don't have any spanish speakers on staff. You think you could do that? I could do that. Wow. So I go home not knowing if I get the position or not. By the time I land, I've already got a voicemail from Paul. LFG, let's go. And I prepared myself by Treka from the fire hose. And what the heck it was. Snowflake did what the key differentiators were from the status quo, from the competitors like redshift, who the main targets would be at Gartner that we want to influence. And my computer arrived the day that I was leaving. I activated the computer and attended the orientation session from the Amex club in Mexico City. After I got off the airport. My God. Ordered it to the booth. Talk about again, this goes back to the theme for this entire discussion that I'm finding. Approach your career and any net new job like it's a sales cycle. And if you're going into it, research that, call it customer, in this case, your potential employer, as if they're your client. You went in already researching all of this. So if they said, hey, can you be in Mexico City and jump in right away? Because you've got this unique skill that no one else has, you are already ready because you've done your homework. Literally, no hesitation district. That's how confident I was. Because I'm not going to go and waste cycles interviewing for something I know I'm not going to sell. No, thank you. I'm just not into that. I've got into it in my heart. And the first questions I ask when I'm doing my interview, my informational interviews, so people who know about it tell me the founding story of the company. Why did they found this thing? That is such a telling question. And the response that you get from the people, if you get a response from people, that lights them up and they're like, yeah, let me tell you about these three Stanford grads. That tableau we had. One of the founders, he architected the solution called Renderman. I don't know if you're familiar with Renderman, but Renderman literally is what made Pixar viable. It's this interface, this operating system, if you will, that would allow you to create animation out of pixels. Fascinating stuff. And he was one of the founders of Tableau. And then he took that same mentality and he said, hey, looks, why can't people paint pictures of their data? An easy to use drag and drop interface. When I heard that, I was hooked. Yeah. When I heard that the founders of Snowflake had been at Oracle and they saw that Oracle was really shitting at bed, excuse me, with their approach to the cloud, trying to take all this old stuff to the cloud and make it work, but there was all this other potential out there that could unlock all this value from corporations and their big data. I was like, that makes a lot of sense. Money with that. Because you know how it is with the marriages. The first one's for money, supposedly, and the second one is true love. And it's so funny. I love that you use that metaphor for founders coming out of companies that the first one's for money, the second one's for marriage. I almost look at it as the first company, if you will, is for learnings. And then the second one is really for the unicorn. There is, I don't know if you've heard of this book called Super Founders and it's an incredible researcher who talks about the stories of billion dollar companies. So unicorns basically companies that have turned into billion dollar valuation companies and where those founders or groups of founders have come from. And if you look at, he did a study in there that talked about where the top 20 or so tier one companies that those founders have come from, billion dollar founders have come from. And yes, you would think the normal Google, Amazon, Microsoft might be on that list. Who else is on that list? Oracle. There. Oracle is one of the top 20 companies where a billion dollar founder have call it grown up in for not just their exposure but also how it's a reflection, if you will, of how well run Oracle is to then spit out incredible creators or ideators that want to go solve bigger problems that are out in the market. So hats off to tableau and also at Snowflake. So, question for you. This comes up quite a bit from some of our members and I'd love to get your perspective given the diverse aspects of your career. If you could look back at your career, what's the one thing that you are most proud of and what's the one thing that you learned from that? That's a great question, Esther. You have a career like mine that's non traditional. There's a lot of different things. I presented a project to the president of Panama that was a pretty high deal. They had me give a speech in front of the ambassador and several government dignitaries. That was a proud moment in the culmination of a lot of work. Well, if I had to point to my corporate career, it would be founding the Black Snowflakes alliance at Snowflake. And it speaks to the heart of why we here at Groq. In the 13 years that I was a go to market seller and executive in tech, I could count literally on one hand before I got to Snowflake how many market executives that I saw that looked like us. And the things that I saw in terms of chauvinism and inside me and the workplace appalled me in some instances. I'm not saying everybody's like that, but some other things were just like, really, I hope we have some b and o insurance, the corporate lithophysics, how we're going to play ball. The catalyst for me was going to one of our sales kickoffs. It was a sales kickoff just before we headed to the lockdown in 2019. And they presented women in sales event and our sales kick off, and the panelists that we had there, Allison Tierney, Kate Yachland, who at one point was my boss, Denise Pearson, the CMO at Snowflake. And there's one more I'm forgetting. She was from Braves. And they started to articulate the same things that I'd heard and not that I'd heard, that I felt. These ladies were articulating things that I felt in my heart about being only inside the meeting, not speaking up in a meeting, being talked over, being discounted in sales cycles, being topped and sold over whenever you had control of your sales cycle, being overlooked for promotions and consideration for special assignments. Me, too. Me too, man. But I didn't do that because it was a room full of women and that was their moment. But I felt solidarity, and I was like, man, this would be nice to have something like this for people of color. Just a cathartic place for us to shit. And I networked afterwards and shared in wine and talked with the. A few of the leaders, especially Alex and Tierney, and tell their inspiration of them to talk. And then I considered to myself, how can I do something like this for people of color? And for the last two years of my snowflake career, every month, the last Monday of every month, we had a meeting of the Black Snowflakes alliance. We had 90 people at the high water mark in our slack channel. We routinely had 15 to 20 people connected to our meetings. And after you've gone through this cycle at Cisco, the work that you did there and creating the black directors group, that Cisco was inspirational. You and I even got to collaborate on some of what we did at the Black Snowflakes alliance. That was the most fulfilling word. And a lot of people won't understand it, but you will. And others who are listening, people look at you funny and do stuff like that. They're like, why would you spend. Why would you waste your time on that? But the great thing is, I was kind of ready for it. I told people when I was in the NBA I was going to Peace Corps, and they were like, same thing. Why would you do something like him? I was like, I don't mean it's. Going to work out. You found a space or an area. And this goes to the last theme that I love about your story, which is you either find community or you go and you create it, which is incredibly important. Navigating any career, especially any career, when you know you're going to be going in maybe and in an underrepresented group or the only in the room. Fred, I am so inspired by your journey and your story and what you've seen across your career. Last question I'm going to ask of you, which we ask everyone to answer. I love for you to finish this sentence. It's like our love letter for all of our listeners, and we typically finish every single episode with this dear future CRO. And then how would you finish the sentence to write your advice or love letter to the future revenue and go to market leaders that are listening to this? So if you could answer that dear future CRO and answer the sentence, how would you, how would you restate that sentence? Absolutely. Esther, I love that you asked this question of everybody, and there's some inspirational responses to this, and I hope that mine will provide some inspiration to somebody. But for the future CROs out there, I'd like to say, dear future CRO, don't be afraid to believe in yourself. Copy or doubt. Learn that. Harper. Consider. That. I love that so much. I am so grateful for this conversation, Fred. I cannot wait to see all of the things you do next. From investing to really getting in and making space and communities for others, you continue to give back not only in communities that you touch, but even greater communities from an investment perspective, from tech, in LAtam, in politics. Just really excited to see all the things you do. And thanks for spending this time with us. Absolutely. And if anybody wants to get reach out to me, I'm available on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect and brainstorm and see how we can connect and create community together. Thank you for providing this forum, Esther. Amen to that. Thanks, Fred.