Curiosity Made the Salesman: Maestro Hall of Fame Member Charlie Cononie

In 2011, Charlie Cononie got drafted into professional baseball as a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays. Technically, baseball wasn’t his favorite sport. Basketball was, but at 6’7”, he thought he might be a bit short. Charlie had a pitching style that set him apart from others. “It was a weird angle to batters, it had a lot of movement, and it was fast,” he says, “but I was too inconsistent. Earlier in the ranks of pro baseball, I could get away with batters chasing balls that are not in the strike zone, but as I got up higher, they’re a lot more disciplined around the plate, and that caught up to me.”

He looked around. “I started seeing people that were much older than me, and they’re still grinding it out in the minor leagues, and then someone gets hurt, and now they’re back into the corporate world or whatever [job] outside of sports and starting fresh and new.” He didn’t have the passion for the game that made the risk worth it, so he hung up the cleats, went back to school to finish his undergraduate degree, and then moved to New York City to be with his girlfriend (now wife). He joined a business supply and equipment procurement software company as an account executive. 

Just as he had as an athlete, Charlie started logging a lot of “off-the-field” work in sales, trying to learn as much as he could. The office was located on Wall Street, near the iconic bull statue. “It was like the boiler-room mentality—maybe not that extreme, but we were calling like almost any company that had an office. Now, it’s way different. A lot of people work from home, but at the time, anybody that had an office could be a customer…I was making a hundred, two hundred calls a day, and that’s kind of where I cut my teeth.”

Technically, he cut his teeth a lot earlier, selling televisions at Best Buy during high school and college. “I was always interested in the consultative process and just helping people make decisions.” Plus: store discounts. “That’s kind of why I did it to begin with. I was with the company for five years, and handling objections and educating people to make the best decision for themselves is kind of the core of how I built my sales DNA.”

His subsequent work years gave him the opportunity to sharpen his process into a craft. “Early on, I was very rigid in my sales process. My career took a huge jump when I made an effort to focus on solving problems, not closing a sale.”

Another part of Charlie’s DNA is curiosity, which is one of the characteristics Charlie considers most important in a salesperson. He has a lot of it himself. He loves learning about how top sales professionals do their thing, down to the way they arrange their office. “What’s your tech stack? What is your work setup? How do you do your day-to-day?” he wants to know. “Are they a two-monitor person, do they sit and stand? Do they use a laptop, a desktop; random stuff like that gets me interested.”

THE CURIOSITY-DISCOVERY CREW

A respect for the discovery process is something Charlie shared with Will Fuentes when Maestro came in to work with SalesIntel.io, where Charlie is a senior account executive. Another resource Charlie took with him from this time? “Those question trees that Will constantly talks about.” In advance of a meeting, Charlie will try to game out what questions he might be asked and the additional questions and conversations that may, in turn, spring from them. “Generally, you can figure it out. You always catch a curveball every once in a while…” but “it’s hard in your role in many cases to get completely blindsided by something that you would have never expected.”

In many ways, he’s a different salesperson than he was when he started out. He’s more confident. “I think I’m a better listener than I was before.” He’s also become a resource for others. He has the experience to guide coworkers in what he calls deal triage. He understands the game.

THE SALESPERSON STIGMA

Charlie knows how people outside the game sometimes view the game. “I feel like there’s a stigma,” he says. “I think that the overwhelming majority of the sales professionals that I know, and that I’m closest with—they are biased because they work for whatever company they work for, obviously, but in general, at their core, they do want to help, and they are okay with walking away from a deal if it’s not a fit or really being professionally persistent if it is a fit and trying to figure out the ways to help.”

This insight is hard-won. “I’m at a company where I was employee twelve.” SalesIntel.io now has hundreds of people on the payroll.

So what happens when he comes up against the narrative of the dirty salesman? “I think that you can avoid that just by being yourself and being genuine and being curious and showing people that you’re listening and using less language that’s hollow.” He also avoids what he refers to as feature dumping. Rather—and this comes back to discovery and curiosity—he tries to learn about a prospect’s business, their goals, their pain points.

Another misconception Charlie has noticed has to do with the word competitive. It’s obviously one he knows well from his sports background. “When you hear someone is competitive… the natural thought process is that this person wants to be better than everybody else, and they wanna step on anybody along the way, but a lot of times that means that they’re competitive with themselves.” Sales is not always the gladiator arena people think it is.

Today, with three children under the age of five, Charlie’s hours look different—more time dedicated to caregiving and play. His day has become what he calls “more operationally efficient.” But his approach and his ideas about sales remain, as does his curiosity. He’s going to keep asking people in his field: one monitor or two? Laptop or desktop? It never gets old.

Charlie is currently a Senior Account Manager at SalesIntel.io, the leading sales-intelligence platform and B2B contact data provider. You can learn more about Charlie here. Be sure to congratulate him while you’re there!