Mike Glaicar currently serves as CEO of media company NewBeauty. Prior to taking on his CEO, Mike led NewBeauty’s sales team as Chief Revenue Officer. Mike has sold digital and print media for over 10 years and founded his own sales technology company. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children.
You’re in the boardroom now, but you started your career off in sales. How did you get your start?
So my first sales job was at a company called MJH Life Sciences. At the time, they were out of a small office building in Plainsboro, New Jersey. I was selling ads to large pharma companies for a magazine called Pharmacy Times. It was kind of a trial by fire situation. They threw me right into the mix and I learned how to sell print and digital media pretty quickly.
After about a year and a half, I had the opportunity to move into sales management and manage a small team at the company. I realized very quickly how much sales skills translate to management skills. In many ways it’s just understanding people and what makes people motivated, whether that’s buying from you as a seller or working for you as a manager.
I was in management for about a year and a half before I was approached by someone at Fast Company magazine to run their finance and pharma verticals. So I went over there and sold for them for about a year and a half.
How did you work your way up to CEO? What was the trajectory?
After working at Fast Company and seeing our editors write about the most amazing startups in the world, I got the entrepreneurial itch pretty badly and decided to leave there and start a company: a tech startup in the sales engagement space. I was a solo founder with a small team of developers. I worked on that company for a few years. The tech startup space certainly isn’t easy.
One day, I was pitching our software to a CEO who was a potential client. After a 30-minute meeting, he said, why don't you come and consult for a little bit? We're not ready for the software, but come consult and help my team out.
At the time, I hadn't paid myself for a couple of years. I was investing everything back into the business, so I decided to jump on the consulting gig. After a few months, he came to me and asked if I would join the team full time. I ended up joining Sandow as EVP of Sales and Marketing.
It was funny because I said two things to myself when I started my company. I said I'd never go back to working in media and I'd never work in New York City again because the commute from New Jersey was so brutal. I ended up doing both. But the only reason I did was because I really liked their approach to how they ran a media company. That and the brand I was working on within Sandow, NewBeauty, had very strong engagement with their audience. So I thought we could create some platforms and sell things outside of traditional media based off of the data that we were capturing from our readers. Very quickly after joining the team, we did a full corporate restructuring and I took over the Chief Revenue Office role.
At the time when I joined, our sales team was not huge. We had a regional and national sales team which equated to about twelve reps overall when I joined. It wasn't that different from the management that I had done previously.
I was CRO for two years, I had sort of taken over a bit of an operational role of the business as well. I was working on some new initiatives for our brand and ad offerings, then at the beginning of this year, moved into the CEO role, overseeing the business overall. I think being CEO has taught me more than ever the importance of finding, attracting and keeping that top talent.
What are the top skills that have made you so successful?
Awareness.
For any salesperson, I think awareness is the ultimate superpower. And when I say awareness, I mean, you're in a room selling to a client and you're aware of how your message is being received by them. You're aware of the tone of the meeting and how things are going.
That awareness is the best leadership skill as well. It translates directly from sales because you're trying to figure out how to connect with a client, how to support that client, provide value to that client, and then when you're in management, it's the same thing. You're just doing that with your employees and you're figuring out how to connect with them. A lack of awareness is the biggest red flag for any employee that I have. If I see a lack of situational awareness or personal awareness, I just know that person is never going to be as successful as I would need them to be.
Great salespeople just have an incredible amount of awareness and situational awareness. You can have the best product and the best pitch, but if you aren't able to assess the situation and be aware of exactly what that client is feeling at the moment, you’ll never become an elite salesperson.
What does a typical work day look like for you as CEO of a beauty media company? Are you still doing any selling? Walk us through it.
It’s a lot of meetings, probably more meetings than I ever had as a salesperson. I would say my time is split 50/50 between internal meetings with my team and external meetings with clients. I try to break out my schedule by days. So I do all my internal meetings on Mondays, I do external meetings on Tuesdays, and then I kind of break up the rest of the week from there.
Under NewBeauty, we have nine different divisions. I've had to find and attract great talent to lead up each division. So most of my days are spent with the leadership of each division and making sure that they have all the support that they need and that everything's on track, and then building the vision for the company moving forward.
As CEO, I still meet with a lot of clients. I think that's really important for two reasons. One, it's important for the clients to make sure they have the support of leadership within the organization. Two, it's also really important to keep your finger on the pulse of what our salespeople are hearing in the field. It can be easy to be a manager who's not in the field and you're just harping on your team. “You need to build a bigger pipeline. You need to sell what we have etc.” When you're in the field, you actually get a sense for the concerns and pushback that you might be having or objections that you might be receiving from clients so you can address that head on, or you can see the areas for improvement for your salespeople in the day-to-day sales process.
What’s one piece of advice you have to the salespeople reading this who want the top job (CEO) some day?
I think a great skill is learning to manage up. So if you're a salesperson and you don't manage anyone, learn how to manage your manager's expectations.
Be super communicative as far as letting them know what's going on with your accounts and what they should expect. Always look for ways to create solutions for your manager. Never go to your manager with just a problem, come with solutions too. When you're eventually a manager, you better be able to create those solutions on the spot. You’ll be honing your skills for what you need to do as a manager or as a leader in an organization.
What’s your favorite sales movie?
Although it doesn’t seem like a sales movie, The Big Short is an amazing example of people trying to sell an idea to people who don’t believe it - great lessons from that movie.
