Speaker 1: 0:00

As a salesperson. I won't repeat some of the ones I've said before, but look, remember that you're selling to human beings that have needs, desires, ups and downs, good days, bad days. I think part of your job as a salesperson is part psychologist and part problem solver. Don't forget you're part psychologist. There's a lot you can do to help your prospect and customer by empathising with them, understanding what motivates them, aren't really be there for them, and I think I've had an interaction with a pretty senior security officer at one of the major banks in the last couple of weeks and my message was that I'd love to talk to you about whether I can solve a problem for you.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Welcome to Growth Pulse B2B Sales Podcast. You might be a salesperson. You could lead a sales team, maybe run a business. We are a battle-tested entrepreneur. But then we've built this podcast for you. Great salespeople are built in our board. We learn so much from the deals we win, but we learn even more from the deals we lose. In each episode, we bring you some of the world's leading salespeople, sales leaders and experts in sales tech to share their best lessons from both their wins and their losses.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Before we start, please check out the screen of your phone or laptop. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure you click subscribe and press that like button down below. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, click the plus sign to follow so we can let you know when we publish each new episode. If you liked the episode, drop us a comment with any questions about the show. We'd love to get to know our audience. Great businesses always feature world-class salespeople and the best salespeople are always learning, so let's jump in. Welcome back to another episode of Growth Pulse, the B2B Sales Podcast. I am Dan Bartels and I'm here with Simon Peterson. How are you, buddy? Very well, thanks, mate.

Speaker 1: 2:01

We're coming to the end of the year, so six weeks of selling left before a new year starts.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Mate, we're going to do a bit differently. We haven't got a guest today, and I think there's an opportunity. We don't really give each other enough credit for the stuff we've done in our past. I think it's a good opportunity for us to jump in and talk to each other about what we've done and some of our wins and losses, but I think it's also worth while taking a second and really reintroducing ourselves and our backgrounds to our audience. Mate, so look what, why don't you take a second and just jump through? You've had a pretty illustrious sales career and technology career in particular, but let's take a bit of a trip down memory lane. And what was your background?

Speaker 1: 2:41

Sure, I came into sales like most salespeople by accident. I did a computer science degree at New South Wales of uni and I went into that by accident as well. So it's interesting. I remember finishing high school and looking at my HSC mark going that's not quite as much as I thought I was going to get and my mum sat me down and said you like computers, don't you? Why don't you go do that? So that's how I got into computer science, which is interesting. And then I finished uni and the Cricut was on and I spent that summer painting houses. It was awesome. I had no idea about what I wanted to do.

Speaker 1: 3:15

So those people that are going through their university and jumping into a career and they're wondering what the hell I'm going to do, you're not alone and it's funny. Parents are great for advice. My dad saw me up the top of a two-story ladder painting his house, enjoying not having a career probably a little bit too much and that was back in the days when job ads were actually in newspapers and he tore out a job ad for me. He said mate, you should probably have a look at this. Some software company needs to hire some graduates. Okay, no problem. And I went along for the interview at the recruiter and it was really interesting. It sounded fascinating, the role that they're pitching me for. But then they said it was a German company that no one had ever heard of. And I said, oh Lordy, it's not the Silicon Valley that I had mentally pictured in the back of my mind and went along and lo and behold, that was SAP back in 1994. And what do you want to?

Speaker 1: 4:08

do I've just finished this degree and we're hiring five or six graduates and I must have said something right, because they hired me as a programmer of all things and honestly, I was not a very good programmer. I was okay, but the guy next to me was always better than me. So I moved into consulting and that was really interesting. What do you want to be a consultant in? I looked at what SAP did. I said I'll do accounting. I said have you got any accounting background? I said no, but I'll learn it. And that was really interesting.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Back in the days I would sit down and learn from all of the consultants around me and figure it all out. And I remember teaching an academy for GSIs back in the day and we had the Anderson Consulting and the Deloitte Intuition. Most of those don't exist anymore but I had about maybe 40 people in my class and I had to teach them cost accounting for SAP. And I'll never forget there are a couple of mates of mine from high school in the audience and they were the clever ones that went to the big consulting firms and I remember in the first break I said, mate, you never studied accounting in your life. How are you teaching accounting? I said, mate, I'm three pages ahead in the manual and I'll do a very good job.

Speaker 2: 5:16

So I think, it's funny.

Speaker 1: 5:17

I think the lesson there is, mate, just you got to follow your nose a little bit. And I'll never forget a piece of advice someone gave me very early in my career. It's don't look at what you can't do. Throw yourself in the deep end and you'll figure it out. And I've done that consistently. I always throw myself into the next job and you have that holy shit moment that you go. Is anyone going to find me out? Do I really know what I'm doing? And, honestly, you put the hard work in and you figure it out, mate.

Speaker 1: 5:47

So I ended up spending 20 years at SAP, but getting into sales was an interesting one. I'd been in Germany and Canada and various consulting gigs and I just looked across the aisle and saw those sales guys having way too much fun and there I was stuck with implementing the stuff that they would sell. I saw the cars that they were driving, I saw the lifestyle and I went. I don't necessarily want to emulate all of that ego, but I absolutely wanted to try my hand in it, and I remember my boss was the COO at the time and I said mate, we've just acquired this thing called business objects and each of your AEs has 12 million euro target and these average deal size of these business objects analytics deals are about 2,300k.

Speaker 1: 6:31

We're losing a lot of them and I was the ops guy back then. I studied a lot about what we're winning and losing and I said, mate, give me a team and I'll go after the small deals. And he said sure, and so I got a team of 11 reps, went and hired them, many of whom those original hires you probably know Andy Brockhoff, alex Trane, amongst a lot of others. Tim Woodman was in there. There was a lot of people that have gone to have amazing sales careers post that. But yeah, we saw a lot of software. The first three years. The worst I did was about 230% of my number, and that was when I realized I could probably do this.

Speaker 2: 7:08

A lot of bad outcome. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 7:11

No, it was an awesome experience and I think that's a testament to throwing yourself in the deep end. I'd never been an AE before. I'd watched AEs for over 10 years doing what they're doing. I'd been in pre-sales. I'd done a whole bunch of bits of bases and sort of to myself, rather than teach people how to do it. Why don't I go do it? And I loved it every second of it. And, to be honest with you, I think the consulting background really set me up in good stead, because it was really about thinking about the problem you're trying to solve. How's the company going to absorb the change and what are the key things you think about when you have a massive change of effort, and I think as you implement ERP, it's sort of a heart-lung transplant. You've got to absolutely think through now what's the implication, who are the stakeholders, what have they got to gain and lose? And I think that was some of the fundamental things at the beginning of my sales career. And are you very much focused on the problem we're trying to solve?

Speaker 2: 8:12

Yeah, I think even the way you went through your journey to get to understanding like how to pull apart problems and how to then experience when someone's not diagnosed what the real problem is at its core, it is the reason that people engage in solutions, right, the reason people buy anything. People often focus too much when they talk about I want to build a product. They're growth company. However, the product still solves a really cool problem that the customer has. They're not buying it just because the product is cool. The customer. Even when you go and buy dinner overnight, you buy it because you're hungry or you take someone to a fancy restaurant because it's your partner's anniversary, Otherwise you're not going there. So you go to the pub because you can hang out with your mates. So it's understanding those use cases, the problem that that particular delivery solves at the time and then how to fit that to the right customers. I think people too often in business don't get that. They don't really break it down to what it looks like Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 9:16

Yeah, it's really interesting. I think the next stage of my career that was probably after 20 years at SAP was that early 2010s. I looked at SAP a fantastic company, hell of a training ground. I'd lived in Germany and Canada and spent time in Australia Great relationships, great friends, great learnings. But I saw the Assas juggernaut really taking off.

Speaker 1: 9:38

And I'll never forget somebody that a lot of the people that listen to this podcast may know, paul Appleby, who was a bit of a legend in the early days of SAP. But he was over at Salesforce and he quite cleverly and this is a good tip for people that are trying to hire salespeople he rang me about 430 on the last day of a quarter. I said, mate, how's your day going? And he knew damn well what day it was. He knew it was the last day of my quarter. How's it going? I said a bit stressful, can't really talk. He said, mate, just give me five minutes. And he pitched me and he said, mate, you've been in SAP for a long time. I bet you're keen to get into SaaS. I went, yeah, where are you? And he said Salesforce. I said, oh, it's a one trick pony company, a bit of a Mickey Mouse serum software, coming out of the SAP world where we tried to do all things for all people, and thankfully, I took his advice and came on and I absolutely loved my time at Salesforce. I started in an ops role, of all things, and he promised me, within sort of nine months, I'd be back in Salesforce leadership and, sure enough, that's what happened and, look, I had an awesome time at Salesforce. That's obviously where we met and selling Salesforce back in those sort of early to mid 2010s and then up until the end of 2019, 20, et cetera. What a ride it was.

Speaker 1: 10:53

I think it was a unique sort of a company coming up with spectacular solutions at a time when a market really needed those solutions and a transaction model that made a heck of all of the sense as a service, and they write things at the right time and, I've got to say, surrounded by some incredibly clever people. That's another thing. As you look at your career, the most important thing, or one of the most important things, is surround yourself with smart people that you're learning from every day, and they might be working for you. You might be working for them. They're a lot of smart people. I give you great ideas about how to do things and I think as I went through that journey an amazing experience I had some ups and downs and I think anyone that's ever worked at Salesforce hasn't had a few ups and a few downs.

Speaker 1: 11:35

It's a tricky environment. I loved it. And then I moved to financial force, which is now Satinia, and I guess the rest is history. But that was ERP and professional services automation on Salesforce's platform. So for me it was fantastic. I brought all that background in ERP together with what Salesforce does around CRM and in a neat little package. And what a wonderful seven years six, seven years I had there. That was outstanding fun Growing a business. When I joined the company I was a little bit hesitant. I didn't have a wonderful reputation in Australia. It was seen as too difficult to work with.

Speaker 2: 12:09

Yeah, I'm over that.

Speaker 1: 12:11

A bit of a hobby of financial force having a region in Asia pack. I joined and there's probably two or three people and it'll service office somewhere and it was pretty toxic culture. The sales team reported into somebody in the US, which is problematic because you can't have a bunch of people trying to learn and engage in a local culture and a local sales environment when your boss is 12,000 miles away in a different time zone. It's very difficult to breed that culture and I'll never forget the first day I started. I almost had to break up a fight between the sales guys and the service guys. I knew I had my job cut out for me, but then things came together. We hired a lot of spectacular people and grew that business I think 10, 15-fold probably there. Yeah, it was out of rangers growth yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:59

It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 2: 13:00

Yeah, in a five year period that I was there, it was the growth was I think it was 10X, 10X plus in doing three or four X each year to go year on year. It wasn't without its massive challenges early on. So I think there's definitely some lessons we can talk about there in the path of the session today. Tons of lessons. And you've now stepped into the security world, which has been different. Yeah, the data storage world.

Speaker 1: 13:27

It's an interesting one, mate. Look, I started in the RP. That was very much back office, then CRM, very much front office and thinking through how do you continue to challenge yourself and grow? I never thought of myself as someone that'd be selling plumbing, and it's quite a technical problem that you're solving. But I think one of the things I bring to it is there's always a business problem. So we're in the data protection.

Speaker 1: 13:51

I think certainly in the last certainly six, eight weeks in Australia it's been pretty apparent that data protection is from the center. You look at Claire O'Neill announcing the cybersecurity strategy at a federal level. You look at what's happened to DP world, optus et cetera, and CEOs have been asked to do over it. Companies have been brought to a standstill and I think security, data protection together is something that is I hadn't done before, but I'm loving the challenge and I think one of the things I'm bringing to it is I joined a team that was very used to selling at an infrastructure level and that's just not my background, and one of the questions I asked myself a few weeks into it is what's the problem we're solving? We're not selling my widgets better than your widget. There are a lot of different data protection companies out there and a lot of them are very good, but how do I differentiate myself?

Speaker 1: 14:41

And I thought to myself, if I'm protecting data or backing up or providing security, it's not necessarily just about security, it's about the value of the data that I'm protecting. So, for example, one of the things we protect is Salesforce data and traditionally you could say are you backing up your Salesforce data? That's a pretty dry old conversation, to be honest with you. Backup is boring, but if you have a conversation about what's the value of your Salesforce data, you've got every customer interaction, every sales service and marketing interaction where your revenue comes from, propensity to spend all of that stuff that chief revenue officers live and breathe. Is that a value to you as an organization? And that is an interesting conversation. So I think, looking at the workloads that we are protecting and the value of those and fundamentally it's not about can you back up it's also fundamentally about uptime, speed of recovery.

Speaker 1: 15:38

And if you lose your data, your business comes to it at an enormous stand and I think if you let's look forward for a second you look at Salesforce as well. I know a lot of our listeners are in that world Data cloud and AI that Salesforce is coming out with. Many other companies are doing the same thing. Data bricks is in the snowflakes, doing data lakes, and what does it tell you? It tells you that the data that feeds AI and analytics and decision making in order to deliver a better outcome to customers. It's all about data, and if you're not protecting that data and you're not valuing that data, you're just out of business. And I think, fundamentally, that for me, is an exciting next step. I've done back office, front office, and now I'm trying to protect the office, which is an interesting thing.

Speaker 2: 16:24

You've got to think about it.

Speaker 1: 16:25

And I guess, if you think about cyber resilience, cyber security, one of the interesting things I've discovered is a cyber attack on a business is not a one time event. Typically it happens it begins with fishing, might click on a link. They build a profile of the organization, the people in there. It could be nine, 10 months between the first fishing attack and the actual cyber attack, and so it's a long, drawn out process and I think you also need to think about what are they trying to achieve when they're trying to disrupt your business. There's pure maliciousness.

Speaker 1: 16:54

There's all sorts of different actors, but one of the things I've discovered is, if you're going to try and take a business offline, one of the first places you disable is their backup, because you destroy their production system and they've got a decent data protection strategy, sort it out, they'll sort it out and that's interesting Deep into what I'm doing today, but it's fascinating, it's different and, as I say to my team, backup's boring, but data protection is not boring, it's front and center and I think as the next couple of years, it'll just get more and more fundamental and you'll see boards resigning, you'll see CEOs resigning, you'll see CIOs looking for jobs if they don't get this stuff right. And, interestingly, that's a dialogue I'm having right now and, honestly, the biggest organizations in Australia are lining up to figure out what they need to do. They don't need to buy or buy my software, but they need to invest in a cyber resilience strategy, that's for sure.

Speaker 2: 17:48

It's funny, mate. You just used the frame of reference that you know it can be boring. I think one of the things that I've seen and I know I experienced this definitely when I stepped into financial force, right, Because we were selling back off from the RP my perception was that's a pretty boring sale. Most businesses are pretty boring. What the piece of? I'm not necessarily all that exciting, but it's when you tie stuff together and that function plus that function plus that experience, like that becomes exciting.

Speaker 2: 18:22

Everything you think if you run you run a theme park, all right, there's rollercoasters and stuff, but what are you really doing Really? Running a gate at the front and a concession stand. It's a corner store and a turnstile. It's a pretty boring business, right? Yep, how do you make it exciting? I think that's the. How do you turn it into the experience? Or how do you turn it into the outcomes or deliverables, or what problem are you solving? Hey, we run kids birthday parties. That's awesome. That's a really fun thing to do.

Speaker 2: 18:48

It's a different way of thinking about the fact that you run a theme park. Yeah, I think there's a bit. I know we've talked a lot about that over the years in terms of how do you call the experience out, the problem out of what someone's actually doing in their business, and that's what we kind of address and attack. So it's probably a reasonable segue into kind of the purpose of today's podcast, right, you know, let's look back into our kind of lessons. We always run into the lessons of our guests, but what's one of the top lessons that you'd look at? Would it be a sales cycle or as a sales leader, that you really try and instill in your team?

Speaker 1: 19:25

There are a lot of them. I think what's interesting fundamentally for me, it's about understanding who you're selling to and, as we always say, it's about the problem you're solving. I guess, moving from the previous conversation where we were talking about it's boring or blah, blah, blah, it's that internal bias. You have my bias against sales force. Mickey Mouse, software, One Trick Pony. Why does everybody need a CRM system? I got into it. Absolutely not the case. That was absolute bias.

Speaker 1: 19:57

So one of the things I do see sells people that Often have bias around the problem their customer is trying to solve, have a bias around who the real power is that they're trying to sell to. They have these preconceived ideas based on office chit, chat, previous experience, et cetera, and as a result, I guess two things be curious and always look to discover what's new. And if you do those two things, the risk of that sort of negative bias tends to go away. And we've all been in sales cycles right when you get to the end of the deal you've committed it and it's going to happen and the person you're talking to isn't actually the person signing the check, Isn't the person making the decision.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Oh yeah, Look, I really like it. It's awesome. I've just got to my boss and just see if it's on their radar and as a salesperson at the end of a sales cycle, that's about as bad as you can possibly get, and as you get older you certainly don't make those mistakes. But that's all about bias. You're sitting there and you're listening to all of the feedback that you're getting along the way and they're giving all the right signals, but just not talking to the right person. Boxed yourself in. Everything's going well and the old happy years conversation.

Speaker 2: 21:14

That's probably the most common one, but is there a good story on that you can share with everyone?

Speaker 1: 21:20

I'll give you a positive one. I was in Germany at SAP and we were doing value-based selling and I was working with a couple of sales teams over there. I wasn't the sales guy, I wasn't the leader, I was an advisor to the team and we were one of the largest chemical companies in Germany and big conglomerate, massive company, reasonably big sales force sorry, a shop and we were pitching. I can't even remember what the solution was, Probably analytics. At the time I was a thin slice across everything. We'd come up with the value chain of the business. We've analyzed every stakeholder. We had figured out who was to gain and lose by what was to lose. We'd built an ROI model. We'd done everything that we could possibly have done. We presented it.

Speaker 1: 22:04

I was part of the presentation, presenting this model to the CIO, and the CEO said yeah, look, that's awesome. You've done a really good view. You understand our business and analytics is nice to have. Just look at the business model you've got. You forgot our consulting business. I went what? Yeah, this is a chemical company with a consulting business.

Speaker 1: 22:23

He said I've got 4,000 consultants that I've got out in our customers understanding their needs and working on it. I don't know where they are and how they account for their time. I don't know what they're doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of that we ended up, I think, with a better 5 million euro deal to go sell SAP's project management and consulting software. Now the lesson there is we pitched, we're trying to sell analytics.

Speaker 1: 22:49

The lesson there is don't assume the company better than the person you're talking to and don't worry if you get it wrong. If you present back a well thought through, intelligent view of why and what the company does and how they do it, they kind of lean in and start giving you the nuggets, offer them stuff that you have left out. That are the nuggets of gold. That really drives the value creation. That was a huge lesson to me. It was borderline. It's always good to leave something out of the presentations. Your prospect or your customer will lean in and fill in the gaps for you. You don't want to always do that because occasionally you'll come across as ill-educated or just not paying attention. But it is a fine line there. But huge lesson there. My assumption was I knew that business better than they did. Clearly it wasn't the case and there were 4,000 or 5,000 consultants that obviously hadn't been touched.

Speaker 2: 23:39

They were not interested.

Speaker 1: 23:40

Yeah, so that was a fascinating story that one and needless to say, I wasn't the sales guy on that one the sales guy on that one was delighted with the approach that we talked about. We left out that and had an opportunity to go and sell about. I think it's about 5 million euros.

Speaker 2: 23:55

That's a decent deal, absolutely yeah. I think it's one of those pieces, that what came up for me, as you were sharing, that I see too many organizations who are built towards a pit. Honestly, I've pitched anything in my life. I've been in sales for 25 years. I've never done a pit presented. I've talked to some. I've had done a first call deck which is, hey, let's just have a starting point for a conversation. Even if you're presenting an RFP, it's still.

Speaker 2: 24:27

It's fighting that, fighting that dandiddle, that voice saying I think they want me to go and talk about these things, they want to have a conversation with you, they want to actually have a two-way engage. They want a partner, they want someone who's going to work with them. It's not just. I did experience for early in my career I worked for marketing agencies and they would go in and do pictures. I was on the side of the business. I could never understand it. I was like how do you? I get thrown mud at the wall and hoping that your ideas would work, and then we actually had some reasonable leaders come to that business and completely transformed how they were doing it. And it was. They got rid of pictures. They would let's have a collaborative engagement around what we want to build and we'll build you an outcome to your problem. Yep, I think all that stuff is so important, right?

Speaker 1: 25:16

I think, certainly in the context of where we live in Australia, most executives just hate being sold to. It debases them. It's just. I don't want that. I want to value the conversation I have with you and I think, as a sales professional, if you're genuinely curious and engaging and you lean in, that's where you find the nuggets and that's where you start adding value. And that's the difference between a 10K deal and a million dollar deal. You're really adding a ton of value, yep.

Speaker 2: 25:46

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1: 25:50

Absolutely. You flip this on its head.

Speaker 2: 25:53

I was about to say the same thing. So yeah, I'll give you a 10 cent tour on my background. And look, I've been in. Unlike you, I've been in sales my entire career and I didn't. I never planned to be in sales. It wasn't like I was at school and said I'll be a salesman. I got a job out of uni, had to find my way to buy myself beers on a Friday night and I saw mobile phones of all things at retail store. My first job was actually to motor roll. My first sales job was actually at a motor roller level C service centre and when people would come in with a broken phone they needed a bloke standing at the front counter. He could sell a phone.

Speaker 1: 26:29

You remember it first time.

Speaker 2: 26:31

Um, it was a replacement handset and it was actually. This is how long ago it was. It was one of the big old, like a long rectangular bricks with the big arrows on top, and I had this guy that's. He crushed it. He'd driven a truck over it and it's still. This had good, these mobiles were all laughed now at iPhones and and androids and stuff. How quickly the screens break. He driven his truck over it and it was just the fact that he grated the front off it, and when it's not worth to play, it's not worth fixing. I'll buy a new one, but he goes. This is great. I grew up by the aerial and I'll chuck it in the back of the tray. That's our route. That's those things over the driver to driven his truck over it. That was my first sale.

Speaker 1: 27:13

Yep, this one.

Speaker 2: 27:14

Yeah, yeah, precure cherry, so to speak. But no, I spent another sort of three or four years and I was at university working mobiles selling in different locations around the city and then finished university, had an economics degree from Sydney Uni Don't know how I was, just it was in business. That was as close as I could think about what I was doing. Spent almost a year as a insurance broker of all things, selling credit insurance, and looked around and went I'm not an insurance breaker, this is, I've got no interest in doing this whatsoever. Then spent a couple of years working for a. Spent a couple of years working for one of the agencies under the Cleminger brand.

Speaker 2: 27:50

I got bought by Cleminger just after I left, but they were a field marketing experience agency, so we used to look after how people working in retail channel with experience Samsung and Optosaw mobiles when you walk into store did a big project for Westfield shopping centers around the globe, which is pretty interesting. So at one point I had a thousand mystery shoppers and orders a month coming into Westfield shopping centers around the world, which is pretty cool. And then stepped out of that and joined Nikon cameras of all places and was looking after their regional sort of operational sales team Left that when across and worked in for Hasbro toys selling action figures and things for a year into toys are asked in more words and a whole bunch of different places. It wasn't that fun it wasn't my bag at all.

Speaker 1: 28:36

You didn't get the stuff to either.

Speaker 2: 28:38

Yeah, yeah and then spent actually then spent three years running my own company. I ran a. We bought a division of it. My father and I bought a division of a. A Plumats company was going broke and we turned the repair division into a national repair. I'm flying to a repair company with a sideline for replacing appliances and selling spare parts, and that's how I actually got into tech, would you believe. Again, you said before, like you, as you plot your trajectory, and I hear people joining there early in their crews going what's the right, what's the pathway? There's no pathway.

Speaker 1: 29:09

There's no pathway, you'll work it in a way, anyone who tells you there's a pathway is kidding. Now you've got mobile phones, action figures camera and then I'm in tech.

Speaker 2: 29:17

now, right, and so how I got in tech was I had to run this company and so I had to bootstrap. How do I build a? I didn't know what a CRM was and I had to. I've got customers and I need some way of tracking them and billing them and working it out and outsourcing it now to our contractors. And stumbled on a CRM and that was Salesforce and did the world's quickest RFP in about 15 minutes and said oh, google, the customer, if Google has done the assessment, this kit must be all right, I'll buy that.

Speaker 1: 29:48

Was this our board of the?

Speaker 2: 29:49

time. Remember being sold to. I was sold to by a guy who I believe actually is listening to the podcast, called Imran Ali. He's been around for a while.

Speaker 1: 29:57

He's been at doctors in mind and just close to him at SAP too. There you go.

Speaker 2: 30:01

Yeah, imran did the sales cycle for me and again that was helped by one of our good friends, paul Mansfield he was my SI at the time delivered that project. Again, the cool lesson that I learned on that one, paul. I turned around to Paul about a year and a half later and said, mate, what you built this CRM for me, and now I've learned all these other things. Why didn't you build that for me at the beginning? He said because if I told you to do all those things, you never would have launched the project. You weren't ready to hear about it because that wasn't the problem you were solving yet. The problem you were solving was getting up and running fast and just getting phase one done. I went yeah, that's fair, great yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:37

And I've remembered that so many times. It's like if you tell me you can scare a customer away because you didn't, you know where this is going to go. They're not ready to hear that yet.

Speaker 1: 30:46

How many times have you had a salesperson in your team that pitches to absolutely everything you can do? That's just nowhere near what the client is trying to solve. And because they're widgets, really cool.

Speaker 2: 30:58

Just sell the bit they need to buy and all the function they need to buy. That's all they care about. So I did that, and then actually a guy called Tony Armfield who's now over at IBM, I believe I was doing a whole bunch of different bits and pieces, custom references for Salesforce and some cool videos. They were very cool. He joked me one day and said I'll make more than this half of my sales guys do. Why aren't you working for me? It was an all.

Speaker 2: 31:18

When I sell the company, I'm tapping on the shoulder. And I got some advice. A couple of years later that's a couple of months later almost it said if you're going to sell the company it's never my long term dream to run an appliance repair company you need to fire yourself. So when you sell the business, you don't go with it. I went. That's good advice. So I did. I fired myself and went and got a job at Salesforce. Tony referred me in.

Speaker 2: 31:39

I joined the join Charlie Woods team in Radiance Six and spent a couple of years traversing through the marketing cloud business as they, as Radiance Six became Radiance Six Plus Buddy Media as a social marketing cloud and then exact target got acquired into the business and then stepped across in the call with you, which was pretty cool, and then obviously across into financial force and then off into Conga and now I'm searching for the next grade engagement of whatever life is going to look like, doing some work in the sort of the startup plan, which is pretty cool. But yeah, look, it's been. It's been an interesting journey to get to where I am having now looking back on 15 years in tech enterprise. So everything from selling action figures through to selling individual transactions to mobile phones as a kid, now to selling multimillion dollar enterprise deals, it's an interesting piece that I think doesn't matter what size the sale is.

Speaker 2: 32:28

There might be more voices in the process, but the concept always so similar, yep. And when you break it down to the individual transaction, there is always still one person on the other side who is fundamentally making a decision on. This is the right way, or that's the right way. Maybe there's a couple of voices in a in an enterprise conversation. To make sure, you've validated all the different directions Nine times out of 10. There's one decision makers that's saying that's the right direction to go in.

Speaker 1: 32:55

And I think it's such a good lesson right, You've got to put yourself in the mind of that decision maker. They've got three or four alternative solutions to buy. It is trust. What are some of the things you put yourself? You're at Aussie white goods. You are buying sales force. Sales force was front of center for you in terms of make a decision.

Speaker 2: 33:16

It's a lesson that I've shared with so many different people over time. I really learned hard when I was running my own company. Everybody thinks the biggest competitor is some other solution. In your space, the biggest competitor is always do nothing. The biggest competitor is the fact that the executive that you're talking to, versus engaging with you and buying your solution, has just got other priorities. I'm not saying that you won't lose a deal. Everyone loses a deal to a competitor every now and again. That's where the actual conversation was happening. We talk about tender fodder and those sorts of things when sales cycle right, someone else was leading the charge on that conversation. The real assessment that the organization or the individuals having was do I buy this, do I partner with these people to deliver that outcome, or do I just focus my time on it for doing something else completely, or just keep doing what I'm doing today?

Speaker 1: 34:13

Tell me when you come up with those. When Imran came and pitched Salesforce to you and you were thinking to yourself, yeah, do I do nothing? Do I listen to this guy that's talking about CRM and what can do for my business and how it tracks my customer engagement? What were some of the messages he gave you that really said you know what? I'm not going to do nothing.

Speaker 2: 34:34

Yeah, look, I think I presented him a problem which was hey look, I've just built this company overnight and bought some assets and I'm going to have to turn the phones on in five days time. Right now, my plan to manage the inflow of customers is a board of paper and some faxes and emails. That model, while painful, will work. I think there's a thing here that you can help me on educate me on what I don't know, and then I can make a conscious decision around. Do I spend the next couple of months getting that right or getting something else? What he painted for a picture for me was okay in your business, these are the types of things that are going to happen Now, look, I have an issue. I was in a pretty unique scenario that we bought some assets we knew we were going to have. We had a big guess we're going to have a whole bunch of traffic Monday, one which was helpful. He was able to paint a picture for me that said these are the things that are likely to happen as a result of these things happening then. These are the things that will happen. These are the problems you'll have. On top of that. Here are a couple of different ways you can solve those problems. This is how we do it. The timeframe to solve it with us looks like this. Investment looks like this.

Speaker 2: 35:53

Then we brought up some additional issues. I didn't want to pay any money because I didn't have any revenue yet. I had no idea what the revenue would look like. On the other side. We pushed on him with payment terms and what's our commitment timeframe and what happens if I grow astronomically. What's this going to look like if I've got 50 people in six weeks' time? He solved some problems for me, which is a great sales guy. It was always around, but they had problems for tomorrow. This is how we alleviate your immediate problem right now.

Speaker 1: 36:20

It's interesting.

Speaker 2: 36:22

That was a really interesting experience being on the side of actually buying the software yourselves. That was the other interesting conversation that I never forget. At the time zero was really early and I was quite keen for us to use zero. But it was early at trajectory and my old man pulled me aside and he said are you going to do the accounting? I said no. He said okay, cool, we were sharing an account. He had a legal practice, world sharing office space and stuff. He pulled me over and I love a girl called Cheryl was running the books. He said Cheryl, what accounting package do you use every day? She said use my OB. I said okay, cool. Have you ever used zero? She said no, never used zero. He turned to me and he said so, are you training? I said no, I went fair enough decision made.

Speaker 1: 37:09

Think through that. You're an MYOB rep and you're a zero rep. You're calling on your company.

Speaker 2: 37:15

Yeah, like when you think at that point in time the decision had nothing to do with whether MYOB or zero was a better solution. It had nothing to do with was it cheaper? Were the payment terms good? Was the integration better? Was the product better? Time, effort and money. I was not going to spend the time and I definitely wasn't going to spend the effort worrying about retraining my 30 year experienced accounts person on a new platform.

Speaker 1: 37:47

There you go.

Speaker 2: 37:48

There's a lesson there right, like that's yeah, 100%, lesson right. It's not about the widgets, it's not about the widgets and that engagement it was to the zero rep from the sell. To me that was against do nothing. This is my account and already had it means, since it's zero, it didn't cost me any money. We still had to pay a license and buy a new organ. Lots of stuff had to pay money for it. But the decision was a competitive engagement against do nothing. Yes, they didn't get beaten by MYOB, of course not. They got beaten by do nothing.

Speaker 1: 38:16

So, yeah, I think let's roll forward it a little bit. Walk me through one of your favorite sales cycles. What went well? What would you do differently?

Speaker 2: 38:25

Hook, one of my favorite personal sales cycles. I did a big deal the biggest deal I did as an individual contributor with a very, very large North American fast food outlet that sells hamburgers. But like that, the deal that I loved about that was we competed against everybody. It was as though I kind of moving into how do they bring their customer experience, their transaction at the register, into the 21st century? How do you do it on an app? Or how do you move it away from affording your old having to stand there and punch your order to doing it yourself and putting screens at the front, et cetera. They were very early in their journey but they brought everybody in Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, et cetera, and early on in the engagement and look at that stage, Salesforce was probably the smallest player in region by a long way Ten X, smaller than everybody else. And the brief we got was like it was brief, it was on one page and I was like where's the rest of this brief? It's got to be more detailed to this problem statement and what I think.

Speaker 2: 39:35

The bit that I look back on that and actually I've worked with a guy we both know, Peter Reid, on this and the bit that I loved about the engagement that we had was we worked out that not only no-transcript, they not know the brief themselves, Somebody else owned this brief and everybody else was madly trying to discover from the customer themselves, not actually understanding how this customer operated. And this particular customer had two marketing agencies that basically run this business for 50 plus years. That's how long relationships were. So we went okay, this is actually about changing customer experience, it's about marketing, it's about getting your data sent underneath it. We spent all of 85% of our time delving into building a relationship with these two marketing agencies and we then worked out that no, and they said you're the only couple talking to us. Okay, cool, this is our bet. This is our bet that we think this is the right way to go about it.

Speaker 2: 40:38

Now we're chasing CEOs and heads of marketing and two. Okay, if you have one page brief, you have no idea what we're doing here. We don't know what the problem is here. We just know we need to go and do something different. And what we found out on the pathway was the day before we were all presenting, and it was a showdown. And again I'll go back to the fact I said before I never pitched, but the showdown was all these different agencies walking out and the different vendors walking in to talk to these guys. The day before, the two agencies met with the customer and educated them on what the problem was, what they had to go and solve, how to go about it, what the player of the market liked and what their recommendation was on a solution. We built the recommendation and the solution for them. Yep.

Speaker 2: 41:29

So we came in the next day and again we didn't present. We came in and we had a collaborative discussion with them and walk them basically sort of back through and what they had learned the day before as to what all their problems were. And it was like, hey, great, tell us about your problems and this is what it is. And they told us and they, great, amazing, this next slide, it looks exactly what you need to let it look like. And then here's the architecture diagram of how you would solve based on that. And they stopped us and they went how did you know? That's what it was. And I said, well, you spent eight weeks talking to your partners and they went oh, you actually understand us. You want to understand our business. So that was an interesting one.

Speaker 2: 42:13

But there were some other great pieces of that particular deal that I experienced and loved, which was how to manage executives. When you're in a larger organization, even a smaller one, how do you manage up internally? And one of the big problems we had in that particular deal was there were a lot of other parts of the Salesforce platform that wanted to be on this deal and they probably weren't relevant. A big part of that was managing some executives and some egos around, how do we get our logo attached to this engagement? And there was one particular meeting where I recall this, like it was yesterday and I worked out half of the meeting that the CMO, who was the main for all this, just was not swallowing what our particular executive was putting down in the meeting.

Speaker 2: 42:59

And I had to pivot and you, after the meeting, I was going to get literally yelled at or torn a new one and got that copped it on the way home in the taxi, on the way back to the office in the taxi, and walk back in to see my own leader at the time who went I've just got this text message what happened Walked him back through what happened. He went. Okay, you've had to fall on the sword on that one, fair enough. But look, we won the deal at the time. It was someone did surpass it, not very last was, but at the time it was the single largest deal we've done in my part of the, my part of Salesforce at the time, which was pretty cool, but it was a big deal. There were lots and lots of moving pieces to it, some good lessons there.

Speaker 1: 43:37

Look, I think, influence the influences. Actually, who are the influences? Yeah, they're not the people you think they are. Yeah, and I guess the other one is curiosity, right, you really wanted to understand the problem and it wasn't on that one page. So you talk to people that were influencing the company you're selling to. 50 year relationship is not one to ignore really.

Speaker 2: 44:00

Yeah, and it was, and we know one of the things that we also did. Now that I think about it, we didn't just follow the bouncing ball of the customer to give us which was there was at the start of it. Here's the one page brief. Here's the things that you're going to go and do in the meetings we'll have. We just ignored it. We asked them for the meetings that we needed to have to be able to do our bit. We went and asked for more information, we sought out what was necessary for us to build a view of what was right, and we never just accepted the fact that we couldn't ask more. Yep.

Speaker 1: 44:33

Absolutely so. Look interesting. I think I know two sales cycles are the same, but I think I guess the one that I mentioned before being curious, not knowing the business but being open to understanding what was not uncovered from your perspective that one was amazing. I love the fact that you identified that there was an influence outside the company that had a long business history with them, that probably had a good understanding of the business outcomes they wanted not the widgets they needed to buy and you pivot your talk track to that. And I think as a salesperson you don't get it particularly often. But when you present and your prospect says how did you know that? How did you know that? How you're in a pretty good spot, right, and your slides or your presentation themes are 100%, spot on, I guess pivoting. Have you ever done a presentation where it 100% missed the mark? Yes, we both have, I know.

Speaker 2: 45:30

One thing I did before I jump into these were they've completely missed the mark and in fact I'll tell you one that I missed the mark on and we ended up closing. In fact, in this story one of the things I'll say that salespeople and people in business really should remember you're going to lose more deals than you win and that's a function of the way that sales works. If you're closing more than 30% of your total pipeline, you are a superstar. Either that or you're fudging your numbers a bit. So that's the first piece.

Speaker 2: 45:56

But there was a particular printing company out of Melbourne who've now been acquired and done some other things anyway, and we had, we were pitching for their ERP business and their billing business and we dropped the ball so hard on the presentation and part of it was some technical problems in our gaps in our product that we, as a solution, just stepped around and the guy at the time, the customer who was owning the process, rang us back and just went. That was horrendous. You didn't answer any of the things that you needed us to do and I knew on the call I went, but this has just gone pear shaped. The thing that we did that saved that deal and it's a really I've never I don't know how I came up with this at the time, or if I heard it off someone.

Speaker 2: 46:55

We asked for a do over, like we actually just said to the customer. Do you know what? I don't want you to make a decision based on my shitty work and I think I just I was off on a completely different pathway here, and if you're going to make a decision on what you're going to do moving forward, that shouldn't be based on the fact that maybe I dropped the ball. That was like a pattern disrupt. They stopped. Yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 1: 47:21

Okay, do you know what's interesting? I remember that and, with all due respect, I already decided what the problem was. Yes, and it's a weird thing, right, and I've done that before. I mean, we all have right. You have this tweak in your brain. You go I know what they want, yeah, and then everything else that hits you after that is just noise. Was just noise? Yeah, and then you just turn up and do what you assume is the right outcome and it's just not listening.

Speaker 2: 47:47

Yeah, the questions we'd ask we'd prepare answers to we're. Just they wanted some really basic functionality covered off for us and we just hadn't done it and asked us for it. We weren't listening to it and we ignored it and, like the pattern disrupt was, I just said, look, I don't want you to make a decision that's going to impact your business based on me being bad at my job this bit. I'm going to make an unreasoned request and can we do it again? And the customer went yeah, I think that's actually a really good thing to do, because I don't want to go and advise my CEO that, because Bartel did a shit job, we've now gone on his other pathway and not looked at all the right data and not had a good engagement. He said, okay, but what I'm going to need are these things and great.

Speaker 2: 48:33

And we went and blibbered on those things and even in the second engagement with them it was significantly better, but it wasn't all the way there. But because we'd now built this kind of back and forward relationship in terms of getting them the outcome, they went okay, we can actually see that there's a potential that you could do these things, but we haven't seen them. We actually want to see it like this, and it allowed us to have some much more open conversations around what was there and what needed to be built and what would come in deployment that we would normally have. But it was a conversation. It wasn't a pick, yeah, but I got to say there was a deal. That was a deal we won and it was one of the better deals we ended up winning, but it definitely was lost before it was won. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 49:19

But I think you asked me before what advice do you give salespeople? Don't give up With respect, yeah, don't give up.

Speaker 2: 49:28

A deal's not lost until it's lost, until someone's actually decided this is it Now. Thank you very much. We just got to go and spend a time and if it's somewhere else I'll buy something else. What it's going to be.

Speaker 1: 49:36

Yeah, and once that's happened, don't burn bridges. Except, the call went the other way and it's really important because the executives that you spent the last six months building a relationship are going to be somewhere else. You're going to meet them again, especially in a market like Australia and New Zealand. You're going to run into these people and I think if you lose a deal with respect, you're probably going to be Colla May in the next year when they move somewhere else. Done up with respect. You listened, you've empathized with the problem they're trying to solve. You didn't win this one. There's been reasons outside of your control. Accept it, move on and just never burn bridges. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:19

Yeah, oh, and look at that, and that custom was pretty problematic, I gotta say through the whole thing but that particular executives.

Speaker 2: 50:26

I think we were the first or second phone call at the very next job that he had. And I listen, I've got a really similar looking problem. I'm not sure you guys can do it, but can you come in and talk to me about it? And it wasn't just because it wasn't just because that was who we had on the Rolodex, it was because there was a mutual level of we understood it, worked together, we built a level of trust to have proper conversations.

Speaker 2: 50:49

And in fact the other piece I didn't mention that where we built the greatest level of trust in that first engagement was we were scared around some functionality that, some requests that they had that we just didn't do. And we had a lot of I remember this a lot of army and army around. How do we manage that conversation? And I don't recall where I said I come up with this or someone else did. We had to, we came up with. We just have to tell them when I do that, we have to tell them we don't have that functionality and that needs to make a decision based on pieces of work and what wasn't even a workaround.

Speaker 2: 51:27

We can't deliver that for you. And the feedback from the customer was he said that was the moment we trusted you, because you were honest and you were open and, even though we're asking, trying to push you, we knew what the boundaries were now. And now, when you were telling us other things that we can do that because you told us you couldn't do that thing we now knew, when you were telling us you could do that, you could do it, but before we were just saying yes to everything, we didn't know what was real and what wasn't genuine.

Speaker 1: 51:55

That's a massive lesson for people In a sales cycle. If you haven't said no at some point, you've got to second guess where you're going to win this right? Yeah, you've got to find the boundaries. 100%, yeah, 100%. I think it's like kids, right? They'll keep asking until you say no, absolutely. What quite often happens in that scenario I've seen, especially if there's a consulting team to implement, you keep saying yes.

Speaker 1: 52:19

the profit margin of your engagement just gets whittled away in every single conversation and you get to the end of the cycle, if you happen to win it. You wish you'd said no a little bit earlier, because when you do say no, it's often reasonable. To say no, it's not reasonable. We've both had small kids. They're just going to keep asking until you say no. Can I have another lollipop? Yep, can I have another lollipop Yep? Even though it's not good for them, you've got to say no at some point.

Speaker 2: 52:47

Yeah, you also don't want your first no to be about price.

Speaker 2: 52:50

Yes, if you haven't said no beforehand. It's different things that we can't do. It hasn't set the boundaries of okay, what can I? Otherwise? The customer has a perception that you can do anything I ask you to. So now, all of a sudden, it becomes super difficult for that. First. Hey, this is the same as that example we talked about before. I just can't get there. This is the construct I've got to look at. This is what I need from the profitability perspective. This is me being truthful. This is not just me saying I want to make some comp. Yep, like that, because if you haven't pushed back earlier, it becomes like a sweetly deviate conversation. Boundaries Another good lesson? Either question. So we've obviously given a bunch of advice and shared some stories, but, as we ask all of our guests when they come on, one lesson on our way out for our listeners that they should take way out of today's session or just a key lesson for their careers.

Speaker 1: 53:39

As a salesperson, I don't want to repeat some of the ones I've said before, but look, remember that you're selling to human beings that have needs, desires, ups and downs, good days, bad days. I think part of your job as a salesperson is part psychologist and part problem solver. Don't forget your part psychologist. There's a lot you can do to help your prospect and customer by empathizing with them, understanding what motivates them, really be there for them. And I think I've had an interaction with a pretty senior security officer at one of the major banks in the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 1: 54:15

My message was look, I'd love to talk to you about whether I can solve a problem for you, but if you're not ready, it's okay and I'm keen to keep the dialogue going. If you just want thought leadership around how you solve the problem in general, I'm here for you and I think that's a lesson right. Hopefully that builds rapport and trust. But you're dealing with human being and they have exactly the same up days and down days that you do, and just remember that when you're selling Dan over to you, mate. What's a lesson from you, mate?

Speaker 2: 54:44

I'm going to extrapolate on the one lesson you just gave. Everybody you're dealing with on the customer side, they're just a person. It doesn't matter what their title is, they're just. They're a man, a woman, a mum, a dad, whatever they're going to be. They've got kids. They've got a problem. They've got challenges at home, the dogs sick this week, counter-cant pay the mortgage All those things come into.

Speaker 2: 55:06

Doesn't matter what role they've got. Yeah, people the more senior up the channel, up the pyramid, they've just got more emails in their inbox. They've just got more challenges on their time. They're not different or unique, or often do they even know more about the problem than those below them? Quite often not. And by all means, look at the context, but don't be afraid of talking to whoever you need to talk to. Yep, doesn't matter what role you've got. Whether you're a BDR, a strategic AE, you're a CEO of a company, you've got every right to be able to talk to anyone you want to talk to. On the other side, by all means build a plan between your team around who talks to who. So you've got you just got a structure around it, but don't be afraid to talk to whoever you want to talk to. You'd be amazed who'll take your phone call. You'll be amazed who'll answer your email. Oh, your email, yep. So that's one of the key lessons for anybody out there from a sales perspective.

Speaker 1: 55:57

Absolutely. Dan Good advice, mate, and I'll summarize that Be a good human being, an art soul, and never get your sale 100% mate On that everyone.

Speaker 2: 56:06

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Growth Pulse, the B2B sales podcast. If you're watching us on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe. Click that like button. Give us a comment, if you can. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple or any of your other podcast audio networks, click the plus sign so you can let me know when the next episode comes out. Thanks everybody for joining us Until the next episode.