Maestro Spotlight on Michael Valade: No Job Too Big or Too Small

In my initial days at Maestro Group, the rule was, “If you need help, ask Mike.” Michael Valade coordinates Maestro’s operations, including software licenses and employee accounts. Yet I soon recognized the underlying advice, which concerned not only passwords and timesheets, but navigating a new-to-me company’s culture: if you need help, ask Mike. Valade is an amazing resource of not only hard-earned expertise, but approachability and empathy.

Before Maestro Group, Valade worked with Maestro founder Will Fuentes at Lemur Retail. He developed point-of-sale software, led the sales engineer team, and ultimately served as Director of Client Services. Before that, Valade was a multi-unit manager at H. H. Gregg and Best Buy, managing store profit-and-loss statements in the $20M–$60M range. 

“I was good at building relationships because I overshared. So people shared with me, and trusted me,” Valade says, when I ask for a portrait of his young self. “I didn’t sweat the small stuff. I believed wholeheartedly that I should never ask someone to do what I wouldn’t do. I’d clean the toilets at least once a week at Best Buy—how do I ask the warehouse guy to do it if I wouldn’t do it?”

Plus, Valade’s numbers didn’t lie. “If I took over a department, we hit revenue that next month,” he recalls. “They might not have hit revenue for a year, otherwise. We were hitting our goals because I was getting people to work really hard for me without micromanaging them.”

YOU CAN’T WIN IF YOU DON’T TRY

What’s exciting about sales right now, in terms of new approaches? Valade gets to handle high-volume, technology-driven aspects of sales that I don’t often discuss. He’s excited for the potential of artificial intelligence to turbo-charge the sales process, and recent shifts in pricing have allowed him to guide Maestro clients toward using AI-powered parallel dialing services. “Every outreach company will have that tool built-in in three years,” he says. “Guaranteed.”

In general, Valade is skeptical of the power of cold email (“unless it is super-personalized, it doesn’t mean anything”) versus phone connections for booking meetings. Hyper-personalization of emails gets higher open rates and response rates but is difficult to do at scale. Any CRM platform that can leverage AI in that direction will acquire a significant advantage, Valade observes, though that service may still be three to five years out. 

Valade is also excited about products that track organic traffic to websites (setting aside “visits” from salespeople and bad actors) and lay the groundwork for converting clicks to making actual contact or booking a demo. What starts as an automated chatbot dialogue can be taken over, in real time, by an actual customer success representative—someone who can offer a video chat before the visitor ever leaves the site. There’s also a back-end possibility to coordinate visiting the site with triggering an automatic sequence of emails based on IP info.

Companies will need to be smart about applying these new tools to yield their full value. Otherwise, clients are stuck with existing efforts to retarget leads through breadcrumbs and cookies, which often “waste so much time and get zero results,” he notes. He’s patient in his coaching of sales professionals because he understands that it can feel like an uphill battle to connect with prospects. Their success stories become his victories.

MAKE IT WORK

Valade’s typical attire for a Zoom meeting is a monochrome t-shirt. I’m surprised to learn that before Maestro, he spent more than five years working with the clothes boutiques of Washington, D.C., including high-end women’s retail and Italian menswear. 

The connection began when Lemur Retail was looking for a small business to install its software so that it could be viewed in action by a potential larger client. A decision-maker at a sporting goods company was coming to D.C. for a 5K sponsored by her brand. Knowing she was a fan of high fashion, Valade found a boutique she was likely to visit and offered to give them Lemur’s software for free. 

The boutique was not only lacking point-of-sale software, they tracked transactions with pen and paper—and desperately needed more staff. Lemur Retail didn’t offer a salary, and Valade was living in a basement and doing nighttime security to pay the bills. So any extra hours of income were welcome. Eventually, he worked with about 50 local businesses in Georgetown and beyond, acquiring new clients by word-of-mouth, and assisting with sales and marketing.

“When I say ‘consulted,’ I literally installed the window in your building, made sure the electrical wiring worked, helped you build the PC, set up the inventory, and taught you sales,” he tells me. “Strategy, social media, SEO; you name it, I did it.”

THE NATURAL

“I’m not running your play if I don’t think your play is good,” Valade says. He’s wary of those who want Maestro’s execution skills but can’t set aside their egos to learn. He is thoroughly invested in the value of the fundamentals, the science of sales, and the power of process.

Valade often slips into sports metaphors. As a kid, he captained the football team. By age 11, he was playing travel soccer and refereeing games for kids older than him. He describes Best Buy’s floor dynamics in terms of “blue shirts” and “white shirts.” The first thing I learned about him, in conversation, was that he owned a home plate used by the Washington Nationals in their 2019 World-Series-winning season.

Because of his athletic experience, he recognizes the necessary cycle of opportunity, failure, and growth that is organic to acquiring new skills. He speaks with kindness toward emerging talent—sales reps and BDRs, people who remind him of his own 25-year-old self—attempting to cross over into the corporate world. His favorite aspect of working with the Maestro Group is the mentorship and professional development that he can offer them. 

“Better to do it, and fail, and figure it out,” he says. The only true enemy is inactivity. 

“Don’t spend eight months figuring out what’s the perfect thing to do,” he says later, returning to this core concept. “Spend a little bit of deep thought, figure out what you can do, and do it. Make the decision, take the action. You’re going to fail a lot, but that’s fine. You’ll pick yourself up, you’ll be better for it, and you’ll learn.“

Valade fosters that same adventurousness among his four children, who range in age from one to 14. He challenges the older kids to fire up the toaster, make their own Jell-O, and navigate their own video games. The household complexities are manageable because he has a great partnership (and he does a grocery run to six different stores every Sunday).

“I’m the one pushing the kids, and she’s the safety,” he says, in appreciation of his wife, Candice. “That’s a perfect balance.” Sometimes, Dad catches the kids off guard with his playful appreciation of risk. “This is the summer we’re going to break a bone!” he says, when his daughter mentions having not worn an arm or leg cast yet. In other words, “You should go out and do more.”

I could happily talk to Mike Valade for another hour. He’s full of jokes and stories, and he tolerates even my most roundabout questions (“Ask it a different way,” he says gently). But he’s got places to be because he’s one of the hardest hitters on our team: let’s say he’s got 88 mph exit velocity, to borrow from baseball. We’re lucky to have his batting power on our side. 

Ready to lead your team to victory? Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, assessments, and more.