Al duPont of RRD On How To Turn a Good Sales Team into a Great One

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Recovery: The “go-go-go” mentality is not sustainable. I communicate the importance of balance to my team. I tell them to mix it up — take a walk, play a sport, get lunch, meditate. When we focus on recovery, we build gratitude and recognize our collective momentum and excellence.

A strong, high-performance sales team is critical to a successful business. But what makes a sales team successful? What strategies can leaders use to create a highly successful sales team? To address these questions, in this interview series, we are talking to CROs, marketing leaders, and sales leaders about “How To Turn a Good Sales Team into a Great One. “As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Al duPont of RRD.

As Chief Commercial Officer, Al leads RRD’s U.S. Sales, Marketing, and Client Services organizations. He also heads up the Healthcare Solutions vertical and the Inside Sales Group. This go-to-market group is the company’s largest team driving sales efforts across RRD’s four main service groups: marketing, packaging, print, and supply chain solutions.

Prior to this role, Al served as RRD’s Group President of Enterprise Solutions and Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales. Before joining RRD in 1992, Al was National Advertising Director at Hachette Filipacchi Media and started his career in sales at Xerox Corporation.

Al has extensive experience in supporting Fortune 1000 companies and advising C-level executives with multichannel communications solutions.

Thank you for doing this with us! Before we begin, our readers would like to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path?

Early in my career, my path felt somewhat undefined. Out of college, I started out on Wall Street on the floor of the exchange for a year and then found myself at Xerox where I ultimately ended up in sales and then took a role in magazine publishing where I was working for Cosmopolitan, Popular Mechanic and Road & Track.

To make a long story short, I met a gentleman through Road & Track who was an RRD sales rep and he raised an opportunity to join RRD…I did some research — multinational company, opportunity to work abroad, diverse sales and marketing careers — and during that time in a totally unrelated setting, at a charity golf outing, I was paired with another gentleman who worked at RRD.

Before I knew it, I was taking on a new opportunity at RRD which would lead me to a 30-year career! For those unfamiliar with our company, RRD is a B2B, global provider of marketing, packaging, print and supply chain solutions. We serve 25,000 clients, including 92% of the Fortune 100, and employ 32,000 people across 29 countries. I was under the impression that RRD would be a 5-year stint, but it proved me wrong.

Two of the biggest differentiators that have kept me at RRD:

• The people are second to none.
• The ability to grow through new opportunities and challenges on a consistent basis.

I tell my kids, who are early in their careers, that it’s all about networking and being inquisitive about opportunities and where they can take you. Being curious and open to new paths can lead to really incredible outcomes you didn’t even know were possible.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that has occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or takeaway you took from that story?

As I shared, I’ve been with RRD for 30 years and part of that time spanned the dot-com era. There was a massive rise in internet companies, and I was being offered opportunities with much greater pay and higher titles. I started to get curious, but as I reviewed the revenue models, I didn’t find the business plans stable long term and a lot of companies at that time ended up going under.

It is a very interesting time to look back on as I reflect on the lessons learned. Here they are:

• If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
• Do your homework. Be curious. Ask questions.
• Don’t get distracted by the shiny and new.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We know that effective onboarding is crucial for new hires in terms of engagement, retention, productivity and long-term success. With that in mind, RRD has a number of initiatives to support the growth and development of new sellers. Our New Employee Sales Onboarding (NESO) Program guides new sellers through a 30/60/90-day onboarding process. The program strives to accelerate the new sellers’ path to pipeline and revenue growth through virtual training, manager coaching and hands-on experience.

RRD also fosters a Peer Mentoring Program, which aligns our new sellers with experienced sellers, enabling them to collaborate on prospecting, account growth strategies and targeted training. Welcoming new employees and connecting them to a sense of purpose from the start creates long-term success that is mutually beneficial.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I consider myself fortunate to have learned a tremendous amount from two key people: Dan Knotts and Tom Quinlan.

Dan Knotts is the former CEO of RRD and he taught me a lot about vigilance and discipline. At the time I was working with Dan, I was a bit more lax and his approach to business impacted me in a way that greatly benefits my present-day reality as RRD’s Chief Commercial Officer.

Tom Quinlan, current CEO of RRD, is also an incredibly influential person in my journey, especially regarding executive-level leadership and my understanding of financial markets and the position of public and private markets.

For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about your experience leading sales teams? How many years of experience do you have, and what size teams have you worked with?

In the process of building a 30-year career at RRD, I’ve hired, trained, and motivated high-performance sales and executive teams — some of them numbering more than a hundred people. My present day has evolved immensely since first starting as Western Sales Manager in 1992. I currently oversee all of RRD’s sales efforts and strategies as the Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer.

I’ve developed and managed sales, marketing, and business unit budgets that hold my teams accountable to targeted results. As a C-suite member for the last two years, I’ve had a major part in strategic planning and new business development and leaned on that experience to help the company steadily grow sales and market share.

In 2020, we made the business decision to establish a unified Sales Enablement & Operations function responsible for supporting the overall performance and effectiveness of the sales organization as we scale and grow. This Sales Operations team was set up to focus on four strategic objectives:

1. Increasing our odds of closing deals by providing sales reps with resources to expand their product knowledge and industry expertise.
2. Improving sales success through client target prioritization and opportunity identification.
3. Maximizing our potential deal size by equipping sales reps with the tools to sell complex deals more effectively.
4. Helping sales reps increase the time spent selling by streamlining other activities that may take them away from lead generation and relationship building.

Because of our success in establishing this group, we were recognized by Forrester in 2021 with the “Program of the Year” award. The award was presented to RRD for our overall sales transformation that was driven by a closer alignment of Sales and Marketing as well as the execution driven by the Sales Enablement & Operations team who led the execution of the vision.

What do you think makes a sales team great? What strengths or characteristics do you try to cultivate?

The sales industry has evolved dramatically over the last decade, requiring a new set of skills to succeed in the digitized and automated sales marketplace of today. A business background is definitely important, but industry knowledge and interest or pride in what you’re selling can be better indicators of success.

To help sales reps excel as a team, I often emphasize the need to coordinate their efforts and unselfishly support one another. You also need to exercise an entrepreneurial outlook — not just looking for, but also creating your own growth opportunities.

Creating a cohesive sales team that is not afraid of our competition, has a growth mindset, and does the work is always our goal. I cultivate passion, energy, creativity, and curiosity among my employees and ask them to RIDE the WAVE:

• Willing to take risks. Fail first, fail fast and move on and learn
• Aspire to our collective goals, common ground and common values
• Venture to new places with curiosity
• Evolve and continually innovate with creativity

As with any department, there can be a lot of different strengths, weaknesses, and personalities. How do you manage such diversity on an individual basis? Is there such a thing as a blanket motivator?

A values-based organization stands the test of time, delivers positive results, and creates a culture that is the secret sauce to winning. A culture should value and celebrate talent and motivate its employees.

An ideal sales candidate can vary widely in personality and background, and it’s important for managers to recognize and embrace this diversity. The key is to match people with the right specialties and targets to make the most of their individual talents.

Our Sales Enablement team excels in creating resources and programs that cater to the individual needs of our sellers, while not losing sight of the bigger picture. Lately, when it comes to motivation, we’ve been focusing on Drive VS Drag. While it’s valuable to know what excites our team, it’s equally important to identify and correct what holds them back and keeps them from feeling bored, stagnant and unfocused. Based on observations and feedback, we’ve created opportunities for our sellers to contribute to the direction of the department and alleviated administrative burdens with improved processes.

What strategies have you tried to increase motivation, engagement, and productivity? We want to hear it all; the stranger, the better!

Here are a few that come to mind:

• Sales Advisory Council: A designated group of diverse salespeople who meet regularly to provide field-based insights to executive management and the sales operations team. These meetings help focus our sales team, covering topics directly impacting customers and the sales organization, ultimately supporting sales growth and revenue-driving activities.
• Sales Recognition Program: An RRD incentive program that recognizes our top sales performers on a monthly and quarterly basis. Top performers are rewarded annually through an offsite event with senior leadership.
• Go-To-Market newsletter: A monthly newsletter to empower our sales reps, keeping them informed and engaged with industry trends, operations and enablement tools, new updates, and success stories on customer and platform engagement.

Of all the strategies you’ve tried, which did you find to be most effective? How did this have a direct correlation to sales?

The Sales Advisory Council has been a very successful program for us.

Getting sellers involved earlier in providing feedback on key initiatives that we are rolling out has helped lead to the adoption of various processes, tools and strategies. One example is our new account planning tool that is integrated with Salesforce. The council met over three months to discuss and pilot the tool, providing recommendations and improvements as well as advising on how to roll it out effectively to the larger sales organization.

Can you tell us about a time that your sales team outperformed their targets? How high over did they go, and what was that like for everyone involved? Can you share a possible reason for this unique performance?

Throughout my career, there have been several times that our sales teams have outperformed their targets, but the most recent — and dramatic — was our success in 2022. During the pandemic, our sales team excelled at identifying replacement revenue streams, so much so that when our normal revenue streams reawakened, we witnessed a boom and an incredibly successful year with the normal revenue and the additive. I am really proud of our team for their adaptability and creativity, which ultimately led to really positive business outcomes.

Great things often take time. What do you think is a realistic timeline to take a sales team from good to great?

That all depends on how many variables are in play as well as the metrics you’re using to measure greatness. In the current market, the sooner you can get all your people up to speed using an AI-enabled data management platform and/or CRM software, the better their chance of achieving results in the near term. Automated intel resources can accelerate progress by guiding your reps to the right opportunities at the right time with the right offer, improving their close ratios.

From a motivational standpoint, anything you can do in your team meetings to build resilience — that ability to learn from rejection instead of wallowing in it — will help build stronger momentum toward greatness.

Ok. Thanks for all that. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your five strategies that will help turn a good sales team into a great one?

Every team requires a distinct strategy…But from my perspective, any successful strategy includes these five cornerstones:

1. Drive: A sales team needs to have the drive to succeed. We need to look deep within ourselves and understand what motivates us and what derails us. Just like a GPS can’t know where it’s going unless it knows where it’s coming from.
2. Courage (Big C and Little c): Managing courage, big and small, is all about managing stress. I encourage my team to get out of their comfort zone and learn how to confront and deal with stress. Instead of quickly reacting to stress, I tell them to take a breath…and embrace and lean into it. If you’re stuck in your comfort zone, you’re missing out on opportunities.
3. Curiosity: I encourage my team to be curious, not judgmental. If we forfeit curiosity, we forfeit joy, motivation, and access to creativity. Curiosity is the root of innovation. The key to unlocking curiosity is recognizing that we don’t know it all and having the courage to seek and embrace the new.
4. Creativity: Creativity is the intersection of courage and curiosity. When we get into that flow state of mind, we are completely present and focused on the task at hand, which helps us turn obstacles into opportunities. I push my team to explore new environments and engage with the unfamiliar.
5. Recovery: The “go-go-go” mentality is not sustainable. I communicate the importance of balance to my team. I tell them to mix it up — take a walk, play a sport, get lunch, meditate. When we focus on recovery, we build gratitude and recognize our collective momentum and excellence.

We are nearly done. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I really believe in the power of curiosity. While it seems simple at first glance, curiosity is what keeps us moving forward as a society and helps us reach unique breakthroughs, both personally and professionally.

Also, if I’m really going to double down here, I’d like to add that it’s not just about being curious, but inconveniently curious, meaning you have to step outside your own lane and sphere and learn about things you’re totally unfamiliar with.

Being curious opens us up to new ways of thinking. It can potentially be scary to challenge preconceived notions, but it’s necessary to expand our compassion and understanding. I aim to inspire curiosity in my teams at RRD and would love to challenge the readers of Authority Magazine to spend 30 minutes this week reading and researching something that is totally new. See where that takes you, and build this practice into your daily, weekly routine.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Feel free to keep up with me and the happenings of RRD on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/adp616/

Thank you for the interview. We wish you only continued success!