How Mike Berman Sells: Customers First Buy into Your Belief of Your Solution, Then They Buy Your Solution

Mike Berman got into sales the same way so many of the people we’ve interviewed for this series did — serendipitously.

He went to college to become a financial advisor. Except, a few months before graduating, Mike couldn’t ignore what he was feeling inside: a lingering belief that he needed to head to a larger metropolitan.

This led to what he expected at the time to be a short-term jump into sales, which felt semi-related. His first role was for T-Mobile selling to the business market. But what he discovered as an Account Executive was:

• Sales perfectly matched his competitive, blue-collar, continuous-learning mindset.

• He was good at it, becoming the top ranked seller at the company within 20 months.

After said 20 months, he was promoted to sales manager and hasn’t looked back. Now, 20 years later, he’s the Americas Commercial Leader for Power & Energy Resources Software at GE Vernova, where his team works closely with the major power and energy resource operators across North and South America.

What has Mike learned in his career leading sales teams? What does he believe is key to winning in sales right now? How does he stay motivated? What did he learn from his biggest failure?

We asked him all of that and more in our latest edition of How I Sell:

1. What drives you?

The Team. The teams we support and the ones that support us. It’s simple in this sense. There’s a BIG team that has a really important role to play in helping the current energy transition, and supporting these energy and resource companies helps improve life on earth. Leading one of the teams and being a part of other teams is a big-time driver when the purpose is so critical.

Continuous Improvement. Constant and never-ending improvement. I heard about CANI years ago, I see it daily at GE Vernova with our Lean operating system, and even our business unit’s main solution is founded on the principles of continuous improvement — asset performance management. Life is always moving forward; I’m scared to pause my learnings for fear of falling behind.

Supporting my family. Helping others support theirs. Providing well for my family and helping enable the same for those on the team and around our team. The opportunity to impact truly feels 360.

As you may gather, all three come down to going further and improvement. That’s where I get my drive.

2. What's your sales philosophy, in three sentences or less? 

• Understand the problem.

• Is that a priority for the company overall?

• Maintain credibility.

3. In today's noisy times, how are you encouraging your sales team to make their communications stand out?

It comes down to deeply understanding the people we’re communicating with. What are we doing to understand their point of view? Inquiring, observing reactions, listening, preparing…

From a sales leader perspective, that means what am I doing to help our sales executives prepare? What tools are we investing in for them? In addition to the Sales Navigator tool, for example, are we providing a list of good discovery questions in advance? Are we helping to inform of market information more readily?

We help in setting the standard.

4. How can a sales leader spur innovation?

Ask questions. Listen. Show data. Give permission (if needed) to think freely and speak freely.

As many sales teams do, my sales team has a wide range of backgrounds. So, it’s about the blending of perspectives and experiences to find new learnings, fostering creativity, and sharing ideas. When we freely discuss topics we get into learning mode – growth mode.

Add to this that each day embarks with consistent thoughts around change management, which leads to the potential for innovation. Sometimes we recognize innovation or opportunity for happening in the moment – good times and growing pains. Other times, we look back after a while and see the new path blazed. Examples of these can be as straightforward as the adoption of new tools, like when we started using Sales Navigator a couple years ago, to a Kaizen event where we’ll make a process breakthrough on a single challenge via a one-week action-oriented brainstorming.

5. How does Sales Navigator fit into your sales process?

We hope our sales process and the buyer’s journey run parallel – for the most part. Sometimes we’re in front of the customer, sometimes they’re ahead of us.

With Sales Navigator, it’s incredibly helpful for identifying and learning about contacts, along with relationship mapping various stakeholders. From the C-Suite to front-line management to end-users, we’ll look to incorporate all into a top-down and bottom-up account plan strategy so we can assist our customers in business-case creation and future-adoption planning.

The insight Sales Navigator provides assists our process of identifying strong relationships and where gaps exist, as well as trends at the prospect company that can help us in prioritizing our attention. With a few clicks, we learn a lot about a customer’s full ecosystem.

I think our next big improvement area for our use of LinkedIn is as a social platform — where our sales team members share their own brand, giving them even greater credibility when seen by customers that make significant purchasing decisions via buying committees.

6. What's the best piece of sales advice you ever received? 

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with several extraordinary leaders throughout my career in long-runs together and short spurts. Here are a few pieces of advice I carry forward:

• If you work for a big company, one of four things tend to play out: Follow process and succeed; Follow process and miss; Break process and succeed; Break process and miss. The first two, in the long run, are better than the latter two as large companies need to operate with standards that allow for all to seek continuous improvement, which starts with process.

I get it, maybe not everyone is going to love reading that. It’s a perspective someone told me as I was about to start my first sales role and I’ve observed it largely holding true in my career, as well in others.

• Quality over quantity.

Along the lines of if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right, preparation for all customer meetings is a must. If you can’t prepare, then don’t have the meeting. If you must have the meeting, make the time to be prepared.

• Customers don’t buy your solution because they believe in the solution, they buy your solution because they believe in your belief of the solution.

And I’ll extend this to the role sales leaders play. Sellers won’t solely believe in the solution because of their belief in the solution, they believe in the solution (in part) because of their people leader’s belief in the solution and their belief in that seller.

Gaining an understanding of this early in my career made the complex role of being a sales leader a little simpler.

7. Is there any habit you have outside of work that you believe helps you perform better?

• Creating time to think

• Observing others

• Traveling (Can I count this as a habit?!)

The common thread for each of these is they offer the opportunity for a new perspective – a fresh perspective and keeping an open mind.

8. What has been your biggest failure in sales and how did that experience transform you?

All wins and losses have opportunity for improvement. Each has their own learnings to harvest, too. To this, I don’t really see failures – they’re experiences and experiences lead to better judgement next time (another piece of sales advice that I carry forward).

I will shine a light on what I consider the darkest point of my sales career though. It was the fall of 2022 and I misread a situation, failing to adequately prepare for the immediate task at hand – an interview series for a newly created and larger role, after a business reorg.

I believed my top three priorities were to set the new team up for success and helping them with their transitions within this reorg. Where I missed was in putting my own ‘oxygen mask on first’, so to say. I elected to pour all my time into the interim team and focus on results, not the interview series. Instead of doing both, I missed on accurately expressing what I’d do, what we’d do, and how all my past experiences of turning around teams and breaking barriers have set me up to lead the transition the business was taking. As a result, I absorbed unnecessary risk, consumed additional time of executive leaders, and set a self-reflected low watermark for feelings about my career as a growth-oriented people leader. Like I said, things felt dark.

On the other side, this amazing lesson of humility and decision making has served as what I’ll look back on and see as a career inflection point. Plus, now I’ll forever have a story to share about the advantages of proper preparation. Ultimately, I earned the role, and we had a high-performing year.

The PSA: Most of us will hit a wall at some point, and we will need to break through it. I didn’t know it was coming, but it sure found me – and in a sense, I am glad it did.

…Wow! While I wasn’t expecting to share this event to an audience as broad as the LinkedIn sales community, I’m okay with doing so now as it’s an opportunity to pay it forward and help somebody else’s wall be pushed out a bit, as they continue their path of growth and continuous improvement.

In wrap up, thank you Paul for this interview and the opportunity you and LinkedIn are creating for the LinkedIn sales community to learn from each other. Impressive roster you have of past interviewees – very good! Looking forward to seeing who’s next.

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