Top Tips from Andrew Seerden:
1. Hire Slow, Fire Fast:
“Number one, when you think about your sales and marketing function, hire, slow, fire, fast. So what I mean by that is that we’ve had so many examples whereby people employed individuals because they needed people.”
2. You Cannot Improve What You Cannot Measure:
“Number two, like I said, you know you cannot improve what you cannot. So make sure that whatever you want people to do from a behaviour perspective, you can measure that and report on it and hold people accountable against it.”
3. Don’t Do The One and Dones:
“So in other words, you know, sales training, please don’t do the one and dones make sure that whatever you put in place actually gets embedded.”
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, people, businesses, customer, business, salespeople, crm, individual, talk, new zealand, key pillars, number, buying, crm system, selling, commission, rfp, put, totally, marketing
Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:25
Welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I’m your host, Debra Chantry Taylor, and I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:42
I’m a Certified EOS implementer, an FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner with myself with several business interests, I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them live their ideal entrepreneurial life using EOS, The Entrepreneurial Operating System, my guests come onto the show to authentically share the highs and lows of creating a successful business, and how they turn things around in their business to create a better business and better life, or as in today’s show, they’re also experts who specialize in working with businesses. So today’s guest, he has worked in sales his entire life. He started selling mainframes for IBM way back in the day. He was born in New Zealand, in Tokoro, to be exact, but was raised in the Netherlands, and he returned at the age of 26 where he met and married a kiwi, and they have twin boys, which he says is double the fun. Today he’s going to share with you the four key pillars of high performing sales and marketing functions. Andrew sealer is the co-founder and director of fresh perspective sales. Welcome to the show, Andrew.
Andrew Seerden 01:40
Thank you, Debra, and thank you for having me. Oh, absolute pleasure.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:43
Yeah. Now I didn’t actually mention it in the intro, but we actually met because we were both executives and residents of the Icehouse, and that was how many years ago?
Andrew Seerden 01:51
Now, too long to remember. Let’s not go there, but it shows we’ve got the scope.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:56
We’ve got the gray hair and all that kind of stuff too, yeah, which is great. B ut we actually reconnected us recently, and as soon as we reconnected, I thought, I’ve got to have under on the show. I really want to hear a little bit about what he’s been up to. And I know that you have some amazing tools and things you can share for people in business.
Andrew Seerden 02:10
Totally.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 02:11
So before we get started, tell us a bit about your story. Tell us how you got to where you are today.
Andrew Seerden 02:17
Love to. Look, like we discussed before, and like you mentioned. I used to work for IBM in the Netherlands, in this case, selling mainframes, big, large, DASD, etc, and the good old days, and IBM offered me a year off, sabbatical, year after I did my MBA, which they paid for. So said, Why not unpaid leave? Where can I go with my Dutch girlfriend? At the time, he said, Let’s go to New Zealand. Went to New Zealand. Knocked on IBM’s head office door and in the terrace in Wellington. In those days, I’m talking late at 1989 and within four weeks, I had a job offer from IBM in Wellington.
So I joined them, and four and a half years later, after they moved me up to Auckland, copper computer, knocked on the door and said, Would you like to come and work for us? We have this particular vacancy or the vision that we need to somebody to look after and that you want to do that. So sure. I did was with compact for 10 years, and then the good old Euler Packard came knocking on the door. They’re quite compact. Long story short, I just become farther off the twin boys that you were pooping before Ava and Luca and decided, no, this is not me. I’ll take a check. So I took redundancy at that time of that merger, and HP kept knocking on my door. They said, When are you coming back? I said, Well, why should I?
Well, 18 months later, I was back at HP for another four and a half years. And then when those four and a half years were over, I actually got sick and tired of working for a large corporate Wall Street driven short term thinking, no long term planning, etc, etc. And by the way, New Zealand is a rounding error in terms of the total business of a multinational. So look, decided to leave. And at the time, I was working with my current co-founder and other director, Greg Nunes, and we decided to set up fresh respective sales to help businesses get better at what they should be good at, revenue generating through either marketing and sales, and we’ve been doing this now for about 15 years. So that’s in a brief summary.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:09
So I’m really fascinated going from a very large corporate I suppose HP is massive, and like said, New Zealand’s a rounding error. What was it like going from that to actually starting up your own business?
Andrew Seerden 04:19
I’ve always come from an entrepreneurial background. My father owed has, has many, has had many businesses back in the Netherlands, even in New Zealand, he was self-employed. My wife has two businesses. So, I came from that entrepreneurial background. But the point is that in this country, a lot of businesses, as you probably know, and we saw that through the ISOs as well. They get to a certain stage, and they plateau, and they don’t know how to scale from that initial startup, so to speak. And look, having worked now in these large corporates, you know, we know what. We both know what it takes to scale a business. What are the fundamental foundational elements that you have to put in place in order to scale a business? And that’s what we then bring to the table to a lot of these mid-sized, or what, what in global terms, are small businesses? In New Zealand.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 05:00
I have to laugh, because I get a lot of your US based clients on this podcast, and they talk about small businesses. But of course, a small business in the US is 50 to a couple of 100 people.
Andrew Seerden 05:10
Yes, and millions of dollars of turnover here now. Totally.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 05:13
Okay. And so tell us a lot about your passion for sales, like, Why? Why are we about sales, what is it that attracts you?
Andrew Seerden 05:22
Look obviously an extroverted individual. But besides that, I think you know I like helping people. My innate motivation, my innate drive is to help you. And you know, when you see organizations in this country struggle with generating revenue or scaling their business, what is it that I can do, leveraging my experiences, my skills, my gray hair, my scars, and that’s that gives me the the innate satisfaction, intrinsic value, or intrinsic reward that I get is to see people flourish. And you know, coming from the Netherlands, we don’t have what we call in this country the tall poppy syndrome. I love seeing entrepreneurs. I love seeing individuals succeed at what they do right? Because they risk their income, their family, their lives. I love to help them with that, so that that’s really the key core driver. But outside of that, you know, when you’re in sales, you’re actually there to help customers. You’re there to help businesses, because B to B, you help businesses get better at what they do. So so if you’re in a direct sales organization or sales function. Your job is to help other people, and I want to help those people, help other people. That makes sense.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 06:27
It does make sense. It is interesting. I said, I think we have a bit of a fear about sales. Sales always feels like that dodgy car sales person who just all the people who spam you on LinkedIn, or the people who pick up the phone and just talk at you. But that isn’t what sales is. Is it? Well, not effective sales.
Andrew Seerden 06:43
Well, I’m not correct, but look that that’s not going to go away. And yeah, in the 15 years that we’ve been doing this with respect to sales, I mean, there’s a couple of observation I would like to share. Is the number one is that most salespeople in this country do what I call, or forgive the expression, the show up and throw up. So I’m with XYZ, and we’ve got these widgets and we’ve got this XYZ. Which one do you want to buy? Excuse me, you’ve not asked me one single question or that you’re doing a show up and throw up. You’re not leading to your solution. You’re leading with your solution to be more politically correct, right? So instead of saying showing up or throwing up, you should you they’re leading with what it is they try to sell instead of leading to and how do you do that? You ask the right questions again.
Andrew Seerden 07:23
The majority of the salespeople in this country don’t know how to ask the right questions of the right people at the right time, or they’re too scared if they come in touch with the CEO or CFO shut down, or they don’t know what to ask at that point in time. And that’s where you get the nuggets. By asking the right questions at the right time to uncover the need behind the need, etc, etc. So, so to me, yes, sharp and throw up is, is a key. Let’s say finding that we that we’ve come across Greg and I with fresh protect sales, we would have assessed more than 600 sales individuals, sales managers, sales leaders.
That was number one, number two, and I’m generalizing, forgive me. There are totally exceptions. Don’t get me wrong. But number two, most of the people in sales are lazy and not curious. If you want to be successful in sales, you have to have a curiosity about you, whereby you curious about the people that you’re going to be engaging with, the business that they’re in, the environment that they’re in. If you don’t have that element or that attribute, you’re in the wrong job, seriously, because, you know, most people don’t go the extra mile to find out about the people that they are going to be selling to or communicating with or trying to help. And you know the old days, in the old days, when I first had my training at IBM, which was phenomenal one month in Sydney, it was phenomenal training.
Andrew Seerden 08:39
They get me wrong, but in those days, you would ask a question like, what’s keeping you awake at night? Debra, and you know, this day and age, if anybody asks that question again, you you’re in the wrong job. Why? Because you should know already what is keeping them awake. You should know what’s going on in their business, what’s going on in their life, what is going on the market. So if you don’t know all of those things, you’re in the wrong job. You’re not going to be successful. You have to spend the time and the effort to find out what’s going on in their world, individually, in their job, in their with their business, and in the market. Then you can contribute and add value. That’s the other thing. So I said showing and throwing up. So typically, they’re lazy, they’re not curious enough. And then, and then, thirdly, you know, if you do not deliver value the minute you open your mouth or the minute you engage and interact, you’re wasting your time and look the way that people now are buying has changed so much, particularly, of course, during covid lockdowns, if you do not digitize some of the interactions you have with prospects and with customers, you’re going to be left behind. So you have to be on that bandwagon of digitizing number of the interactions, I’m not saying all of them, and depends on what kind of selling you have to do if it’s high high value, low volume is different than what is, of course, high volume, low value that could be digitized entirely the standard.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 09:57
I was actually at a conference last week over in Sydney, and they were talking about the. Got AI chat bots and things and I mean, there’s certainly they’ve improved out of sight for a start, but also they’re taking away the repetitive stuff, the stuff that is not quite as doesn’t have as much as much value. When you talk about adding value, that’s what we themselves will do.
When I first came to New Zealand, it was really interesting. I actually had a sales and marketing role for an engineering and construction firm, and part of my role start off was to go and find out what was actually going on. And we’re going out with the salespeople on the road. And I come from a pharmaceutical sales background, so I’ve had, I’ve had the training. I’ve had the CROs. Back before CRMs were a thing. I’ve had a laptop, but we used to dial into the little dial ups or tone thing when, yeah, that’s right, yeah. And so I kind of went to this first sales call on this but this but this person went in and they had a chat about the weather and the rugby and then they came out of the call, and I went, Oh, what was the purpose of that call? And they said, What do you mean? I said, Well, why did you go in and see that customer? Oh, we come and see them once a month, one of the biggest customers. I said, did you have anything you wanted from that call? Like, no, not really. Okay, so what’s the next steps? Don’t really have any, and where have you recorded what you’ve actually just talked about? And we don’t record anything, and that’s what, this was a long, long time.
So I’m really hoping it’s changed since then.
Andrew Seerden 11:09
Well, you’d be surprised
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:10
And I suppose I felt very privileged that I’d actually gone through some serious sales training with modern national pharmaceuticals. But yeah, it’s, it is interesting that the needs to if you want to add value, you’ve also got a reason for being there as well, right?
Andrew Seerden 11:26
Absolutely agree, and you have to be prepared that that comes down to that curiosity, and be prepared before you go and see somebody not just show up with muffins and coffee and talk about the rugby and the weather, forgive me, but to your point, it’s still happening today, believe it or not. But So that’s at a sales, individual level from observations.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:43
But that must come from higher up, though, too, like if they’re not being held accountable, if they’re not sort of.
Andrew Seerden 11:47
Totally, and that comes down to you mentioned CRM, for example, you know, you cannot improve what you cannot measure. And some of the things that we do is we put in place functional the functional implementations of CRM systems, whether that’s Salesforce or Microsoft or HubSpot, we got a customer uses Insightly. See, I’ve never heard of it, but we’re donkey deep into it now. And the point is, if you can’t, you know, like I said, if you can’t record or you can’t improve what you can’t measure. So you have to have ways and means to record certain things during the sales process, for example, that’s the kind of stuff that we improve in place.
But come back to, you know, talked about the individual sales level, that individuals are lazy. They show up and they throw up, etc, at a sales leader level, you know what the challenge that we find with majority, and again, I’m generalizing in New Zealand, is that sales leaders in this country do not want to have what we call the open, honest, tough, courageous conversations around sorry, Debra, you haven’t been performing in the last two quarters. You have mission number. We’re going to have to put you on a performance improvement plan. These are the consequences if you don’t buy etc. So they try to avoid conflict. And you know, and from my perspective, our perspectives, fresh perspective, is that the first job of a sales leader, Debra, is to get rid of the left hand side of your bell curve.
Andrew Seerden 12:57
If you think of a bell curve of performance, you’ve got 60% of your people sitting in the middle, say 20% on the top right hand side, top performing and 20% on the left hand side. If you do not get rid of and move those people on, guess what happens? The top performing people will go hang in a minute. I’m working my butt off. I’m getting all the numbers. These people over there are cancerous. They’re at the water cooler having all these conversations about what’s wrong with this business, what’s wrong with their leads, etc, etc, Excuses, excuses. I’m either going to resign because I don’t want to be part of this culture, or I’m just going to lower my output. I’m going to work as little as I can, because I’m getting away with it. They are getting away with it.
So, they also then take up most of your oxygen as a leader, because you think you have to help them, you think you have to coach them, you think you have to coach them. You have to think you have to take them on the journey and then get help. No, you’re wasting your time. Because the biggest impact is that impact on your top performing people, if they leave. Got it. So, your number one, in my view, number one objective as a salesperson is get rid of the lessons about the bill. Secondly, move the middle. If you move 60% of your people, 5% to the right. Guess what the impact is on, on the business right, as opposed to try and fix what’s on the move on? Yep. And then comes down to coaching. And then it comes down to, like I said before, if you can’t capture or measure what it is that they’re doing, you can’t approve it. And that’s where, let’s say CRM system comes in.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:20
It’s interesting too, isn’t it? A lot of people are nervous of CRMs. They see a big brother. I used to love my CRM. My CRM made my life entirely easy as a salesperson, because it just ran everything for you provided for the next step in it. You woke up in the morning and said, This is what you need to do. But from a sales leadership perspective, I must admit, when I tried to implement it within one of the sales teams, there was this hesitancy about, why do we need to record all of that? Why do you need to see all of that? How do you overcome that objection from sales leaders and salespeople?
Andrew Seerden 14:49
Yeah, quite certain. Yeah. No, no, good. Good question. Debra, and you’re right. There’s this hesitation by sales individuals as well, that they’re going to be found out or they’re going to be somebody’s. Watching over their shoulder all the time, but also sales leaders, because sales leaders will be held accountable as well, right? But the point is this, there’s two elements to this around CRM implementations and, you know, it’s quite simply, comes down to what we call the carrot and the stick. If there’s not enough carrots for the individuals concerned or for the sales leaders concerned, that enables them to be better at their job, to reduce their sales cycle to, you know, convert deals quicker. So that’s the carrot. You know, if it helps, like you express yourself, it helps you every morning, you know what to do. You know what the focus is. A lot of us automate the background. It doesn’t do that. Forget about it, because then it’s pure admin. It’s pure, yeah, satisfying the business and my manager, right? So it’s the care, but the second one is a stick.
Andrew Seerden 15:41
So in other words, what we have put in place in a number of businesses around, for example, sales compensation, is there are gates. We put gates in that says, if your data quality in your CRM says is not at this level, we’re going to withhold your commission until you have updated or it’s where it should be, right, either the entire commission or percentage of commission, guess what it does? It drives behaviour. It drives the right behaviour. And, you know, it’s rubbish in, rubbish out, if you do not at the front and put in the right data, etc, etc. So, and then we create sales processes. We do a lot of sales training. And how do you embed that behaviour that you want? Because training is about changing people’s behaviour, typically, right? How do you embed that? How do you make sure it actually gets done? Because done? Because I don’t know about you, but we’ve had so many experiences with external sales training companies whereby they do what we call the one and done the one and done means they come in, you sit in there for a day and you get blah with all this information, slide after slide after slide, and you go back to your desk and then, okay, now what?
There’s no incorporation of the teachings, of the learnings within either the CRM system or within the coaching methodology. We make sure when we deliver sales training, which we do, is that it actually gets embedded, and that people know how they can apply it to their job day to day. Otherwise, the one and dones don’t work. Don’t work. So yeah, so come back to to the CRM systems. We have helped implement so many different CRM system we’re agnostic, no matter what the industry, no matter the company is, no matter what what the organisation is, as long as you put things in place that add to those three things, carrot and stick.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 17:16
It’s actually really interesting as again, going back to my very long, long time ago, back in the pharmacy for sales, we actually used to have the ability to, once we visited a doctor, we were telling drugs doctors, you could put in what you had talked about, you could put in a little bit of information, and you could pick a post that would then it would be printed off from head office on a dot matrix printer. I think they would when they get sent to that doctor a day later after you visit them and said, Hey, look, you know, great to talk about blah, blah, blah. About blah, blah, blah, blah, looking forward to catching up. And here’s where. And I just thought, you know that it was such a sort of surprise and delight thing, because that sort of thing didn’t happen, even though print on top makes into it, still something there. And I’m not, I’m not sure that we do that particularly well either. See, I used to also use my CRM, not just for keeping track of the doctor’s conversations, but I would record the receptionist what her kids names were, what their coffee was, what their dog was called, what their interests were, yeah. And I go in and kind of go, Hey, look Andrew, lovely to see. I bought you a flat white. And I go, how do you know I have a flat white? And it’s like, well, you know, I just remember from last time me and my CRM.
Andrew Seerden 18:16
Totally but again, it comes back to you. You and Nate Lee were curious about you. Were interested in, people you would ask them those questions. Most of those people don’t. They’re there to sell you something. Oh, I’ve got to hit my quota, my target. I’m down behind on my target. I have to sell you this.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:31
There’s a book, a series of books, by a guy called Bob the called the Go Giver series. Have you ever seen those? So he in one of them is called the Go Giver that was his original book, and he went to go giver sales. And go giver. Sales is all about how you actually give value then and not looking for the sale. The sale actually just happens because you’ve given that. People want to work with people, right?
Andrew Seerden 18:48
And trust you as well. Because, let’s face it, it comes down to trust as well. If you’re just here to sell me something like a car salesman, do you trust them? No, I don’t on the outset. So you
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:57
So, you, we said there are the beginning to talk about the four key pillars. What are the four key pillars of high performing sales and marketing functions?
Andrew Seerden 19:04
Good question. So look, we’ve developed a methodology over these years whereby we would come into an organization, whether they’re small, medium, large, doesn’t matter, and we do an assessment, an assessment around these four key pillars that we’ve come to work with. Four key pillars are, quite simply following the number one pillar is what’s called strategy, the strategy pillar, what is your overarching business strategy? What is it, if you’ve got one? Because guess what? Businesses don’t, you know for a fact, but some business so what’s your overarching and then what are the functional strategies? So what is your marketing and what is your sales strategy supporting that overarching business strategy? And guess what? 80% 90% of times, either they don’t have a business strategy, but let alone, let alone a sales and marketing strategy, let alone one that that actually aligns with the overarching business strategy. Because, like I said to you, before, things have changed dramatically out there after covid, right? Businesses had to change the way that they would go to market, or where they were selling and how they were selling. Guess what? A lot of the functional strategies, such as. Sales and Marketing haven’t changed. This is how we’ve always sold. Why should we change? This is how we’ve always engaged, and we’re different. I don’t know about you, we get we’re different. Hang on a minute.
Andrew Seerden 20:10
You’re in this business, aren’t you? Yes, okay, so the four key pillars apply strategy. Number one, if you don’t have an aligned sales and marketing strategy to your arch industry, you’re not rolling in the same direction, you’re going in the wrong direction. You’re not going to get the result. Get the results you deserve and that you require. That’s number one.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 20:25
And I wouldn’t mind bends. A lot of businesses that have not got a sales and marketing strategy, they might have a business strategy or a business plan, but they haven’t actually thought about how that aligns, because I see that with some of my clients, as well as they have a sales, sales like so how do you?
Andrew Seerden 20:38
Shotgun use. Shotguns. I’ll throw some mud on the wall and hope that something sticks. You can’t afford that anymore. These days, you have to be laser focused anyway. That’s the number one. Number two is funny that the customer pillar, which is all about So who are your customers? What is your segmentation that you do? If you think of a pyramid with your A accounts, B accounts, what’s your strategic account planning process and methodology. Have you got one again, most people don’t right? What does that mean? It means understanding who’s who in the zoo. Forget the expression at that account level. But what market are they in? What are their challenges? What are the needs that they’ve got? And document that and an ongoing basis within your CRM system, not in a Word document that ends up in a draw somewhere, right? No, it is live all the time. So that’s the customer pillar.
Andrew Seerden 21:23
And then the third pillar is the people in the functions. So, and that’s about competencies. So for example, we developed a competency model that says, if you are an individual sales contributor in this industry or in this type of role, be that BDM or forgive the expression Hunter versus farmer, what are the typical competencies and attributes and experiences that you would look for in an individual when you hire them, or when you when they’re on board. You know, we’ve, like I said, we’ve assessed more than 600 people. We would do an assessment against those competencies, and that then helps you create a development plan. So let’s say if, if one of the individuals not that great at or needs help with negotiation, well, there’s a development plan you could then create for that individual.
For individual or for teams. And we’ve done this for multi country businesses. So you have a aggregated development plan. If a lot of people need negotiation skills, well, there’s, there’s an opportunity to put a course together, etc, so, or coaching together. So it’s a so the people is around hiring, hiring processes. Because, again, you ask businesses, what’s your hiring process? What do you mean? Well, we put an ad in LinkedIn and and then we have a couple of interviews, and it’s all ad hoc. And, okay, have you considered doing this and this? Oh, never thought of it. What a great idea.
Andrew Seerden 22:30
So we help formulate those hiring processes as well. Anyway, it’s the hiring, the firing, it’s the training, development, anything to do with people compensation sits in the fourth pillar, sales compensation. We call it the sales enablement pillar, Debra by that contains sales processes, CRM, systems, or any systems. For that matter, what is the other sales enablement tools and processes that you have in place? If any?
Those four key pillars add up to about 20 elements, individual elements that sit in those in those four key pillars, and what we don’t typically do, we assess of those 20 elements, number one, which of those are important to your business today and going forward, because not all of them are relevant. Depending on the industry, if you’re in a in New Zealand versus the sun, across health care versus the Fairfax Media, they vary the importance of them.
Andrew Seerden 23:18
Then the ones that are important that we’ve identified are important to you as an organization today and going forward, which ones do you not have or underdeveloped or need to be further developed? It gives you a heat map. Quadrants. Think about right up a corner, there’s four or five elements out of the 20 that need to be further developed or put in place full stop. So that’s the first step we do. Second step is okay. Now we’ve identified collectively, what it is that’s missing or what needs to be developed. What are we going to do about it? To me, it’s all about action, right? It’s nice to have a white paper around what needs, what has been identified. What are you going to do that? So that’s a strategy session that we have with the executive of a conversation.
Then we decide who’s going to do what, by when, etc. So with a governance plan around it, food phases, execution and most of the cases, most cases, companies say we’ve got day jobs. We’re busy selling or busy whatever. Can you help us implement it? And we do. We come in and we become part of the team. And it’s fascinating, because we’ve got so many testimonials of people. For example, there’s a relatively well-known director called Wayne Norrie, who was I sales, who had various companies. He said, the difference between what fresh respective sales does and what I’ve experienced with other consultants is this, consultants typically stand at the top of the hole and shout down and tell me what to do. Right?
You guys jumped in the hole with me and helped me climb out the hole together on the ladder. You created the ladder. You helped me climb out. Phenomenal. Another testimonial was, Okay, you guys don’t just stand on the sightline and shout that the players on the perch, you actually part. You’re in the rock rugby expression. You’re part of the rock. You’re underneath you. You’re dirty. What great. We love those kind of testimonies, and that’s what we do. We become part of the team.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 25:00
I want to go back a little bit, because I heard you use the whole Hunter, Hunter versus farmer, with a little bit tongue in cheek, I think. But I mean, is that still true that there are two different types of salespeople, as in a hunter who goes out and looks for the business, and then a farmer who is more about account, managing, keeping that person kind of happy and making sure that they’re growing.
Andrew Seerden 25:20
Yes, there is, and the attributes or the competencies are different. And good luck if you can find somebody who can do both. It’s very hard to find somebody who is, let’s say, self-motivated, gets out of bed thinking, I’m going to target, I’m going to find new customers, because that, again, requires certain thick skin, hard wired into you, isn’t it? Yeah, exactly the hunting aspect of and then findings, identifying, finding, closing opportunities, closing new class, new customers, new clients, is not something that everybody and anybody can do. Typically, account managers or farmers forgive the expression they are. You know more on the on the post sale side, whereby they’re responsible for customer success, or they’re responsible for identifying for additional opportunities within an existing customer, not net new logos. There’s still that difference.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 26:09
And can that second function be outsourced? Because I heard you talking about who’ve got outsourced teams? I know there’s a big trend towards taking away some of that work and using more cost effective things, shall we say?
Andrew Seerden 26:20
Yeah, so, so it’s not so much, I don’t think on the account management side, because once you’ve got a customer on board, you want to retain that relationship and be present in that organization, rather than outsource that function. There’s a lot of people that are outsourcing the BDM, the business development side of things, so cold calling, setting up appointments. So, so let’s say you’ve got an account manager, or you got a sales individual, you can outsource, or people outsource getting appointments. Get me an appointment. These are the typical industries, companies that you need to target. Start calling.
Start calling. Now, how effective that is this day and age. I’m not necessarily convinced. Why? Because that’s a numbers game, and it’s typically the challenge I have is that a lot of people compensate those kind of companies on the number of calls they make, the number of appointments that they make, but they’re not qualified. Oh, you want me to just get your appointments? How many do you want? Here’s 50. Okay, are they? What value are they? Are they been qualified? No, they haven’t. So so to me that that’s throwing money away or seeds into the rocks. So yes, you can, you can answer some of that. And now with AI as well, you’ve got the ability to have great, full cold calls through AI. Well, again, where’s the personal touch? Where’s the value?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 27:32
But I think there’s also real danger. I’ve just seen it this recently, is that, I mean, I’m all for using automation, and I do believe if we can get rid of, if we can get rid of certain things, it makes a lot of sense. And even some of the, some of the messages I’ve seen come through are quite beautiful, except for the fact they’ve sent it to me, I’m already a customer. And so you kind of go, Okay, there’s a fundamental flaw there. And so there’s a, I remember reading one that she did this morning, and I kind of read it when all this sounds really interesting, and then I realized, oh my gosh, they’re trying to sell me something. And, yeah, I’m already got a, you know, I’m already customer of that. So that comes down to CRM and having and having it integrated within our workflow, automation and stuff.
Andrew Seerden 28:09
Totally personalizing. Because that’s to me, like I said to you before, the way that B to B buyers are buying this DNA, especially with millennials coming through as well. They’ve done their research. They’re 78% through their buying journey before they pick up the phone or reach out to somebody. If they reach out at all, they’ve they’ve narrowed it down. Think about what last time you bought something for yourself. You’ve done your homework in terms of Google search, etc, etc. Then you go and, you know, touch, feel whatever, have a conversation. But same in B to B, with B to B, bond on top of that, B to B, buyers expect now A, B to C buying experience. And what I mean by that is that, think of Netflix. Think I don’t know whether you use Kindle. I use Kindle art or Amazon or Alibaba. Doesn’t matter. You know when you when you search for something, you buy something. Guess what happens? They say, oh, people that bought this bought this as well. Netflix this day and age.
Andrew Seerden 28:55
Talk about AI, right? If you like. For example, George Clooney as an actor, right? And who doesn’t? Right? Anyway, my wife does. That’s okay. But if you through social media or and it gets picked up, as you know, you talk today about going to Montenegro, guess what? Tomorrow you get advertisers, advertise, advertisements for Montenegro. Any detail. Point is Netflix now, through the algorithm, algorithms, if you like George Clooney, and there’s a movie coming up with George Clooney, the trailer, the trailer for that movie. Guess what? We’ll have George Clooney in it. I like Robert De Niro. If they on the same movie, guess the trailer that I’m going to watch is Robert De Niro instead of George Clooney, etc.
So, so my point is, it has to be personalized, and the B to B buyers these days expect that experience when they are willing and in the market to buying something from A, B to B perspective. Big change. And so, for example, one implication of that is that, if you think again in the pyramid, you A, B, C and D customers, not all C and D customers. You need to put an expensive outbound, in person sales rep on you can, you can digitize that whole journey. You. Getting businesses in this country, we are not thinking along those lines. Oh no, no, but we have to. We have to meet face to face, but they’re buying 100 bucks a week. You can’t afford it. Oh no, no, but this is how we’ve always done it, and we’re different. Yeah, okay, good luck. See you later.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 30:12
I want to switch completely now, so we’ve got strategy, customer people and the compensation and sales enablement. I’m interested in the whole compensation side, because there is, and maybe it’s just me, but I’ve seen in New Zealand that most salespeople expect, like, a really big base salary, and then they want compensation or commission upon that, which is fine. Well, is it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s fine. Yeah, that depends definitely. But you know is, is there any kind of research or anything that you’ve seen that shows that actually having a less salary or bigger salary makes a difference having a an accelerated sales commission program versus a traditional sales what’s the trends all the above? How long’s a piece of string? Yeah.
Andrew Seerden 30:53
Yeah, But again, we’ve got so many different examples and experiences now of how we put together collaboratively sales compensation plans, or we call a raw architecture, an architecture whereby, depending on the on the behaviour you want to drive within your sales function. So like coming back to if you have business development managers versus farmers versus account managers, typically, a business development individual has got a higher risk, higher component of their total pay at risk could be 5050, In one example, we get 100% commission. Guess what? That drug behaviour, trust me, because the bigger you make your base pay, people get comfortable. And like I said to you before, I’m generalizing, majority of the people in this country are what, lazy. Why? Because it pays the mortgage and commission is seen as cream on top. So no. So again, we established with those businesses, what is the behaviour that you want to drive? How can you compensate for that? And and there’s many different ways. We call them plan types. You could be on plan type that says 50% base, 50 Commission, or 8020 80% days, 23 commission. It’s up to what the business
Debra Chantry-Taylor 31:56
should be driven by, what outcomes you want to get from that. And I suppose also the amount of the value of the products on services you’re selling as well.
Andrew Seerden 32:06
Totally because, let’s say, if you’ve got long sales cycles right for six months, 12 months, and they have to wait for that long before they can earn commission. Different conversation. But there’s another element that we typically put on the table. So it’s not just around, what are your targets? What do you need to achieve. But also we call them specific sales objectives. So for example, if you have a new sales person starting first three months, they’re not necessarily going to sell much, right? So we’ve got specific sales objectives that they need to achieve within that period of time for them to get their commission paid.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 32:35
So guaranteed commission, but not guaranteed only on the basis of achieving certain KPIs. Sort of
Andrew Seerden 32:40
So specific sales objectives here, like you have to call on these 10 customers, or, etc, whatever that looks like. So yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 32:46
And all that profitability, because profitability often sits in the hands of the salespeople, and yet I and again, a mass generalization, and I’m going to get shot by all the Kiwis out there, but I do feel like the whole pricing thing is, it seems to and I’ve talked to share with you myself. I’ve done it myself, where people kind of question the price, and easiest thing to do is drop the price, which means it drops profitability.
Andrew Seerden 33:06
Yes, totally. And look, and that comes down, in my view, again, to the laziness of salespeople, because they think, Oh, I have to drop my price, because otherwise we’re going to lose the business. Hang on a minute. What are you going to get a return? So we teach, we train people on negotiation. So when it comes to that conversation whereby, okay, so you want to drop what do you want to take out? Then we’ve got this is, this is the quote with all these elements, these these aspects, tell me which ones you want to take out. We’re happy to reduce the price. But which ones are you? Yeah, well, no, no, no, we need to hold back it, etc. Okay, well, great. What am I going to get? And this is not what you would ask the customer, but in your mind, you go, if I have to do something for that particular prospect of a customer, what am I going to get in return? So I’ve made the same mistake, right in my early days at IBM, RFP responses. We got RFPs coming up the wazoo, coming out of our ears, working until 4am in the morning to get an RFP response done a document this thick. And the point was we never, never got involved with putting the RFP together. We didn’t have the right relationship. We didn’t run any Gus guess.
Andrew Seerden 34:08
Why? Because that was the learning. The big scars that I’ve got is that whenever somebody asks you to do something, a customer, a prospect, what are you going to get in return? Happy to do, happy to respond to the RFP. But before we do so, I need to have a meeting to have a meeting to understand and get and ask you some questions, because I want to make sure that whatever I put in the RFP as an example meets your needs, or is it required? Oh, it’s in the document. I still have a lot, a lot of, large number of questions. Oh, we don’t wait. No, we’re not gonna Okay. Well, I’m sorry I’m not gonna respond the RFP, simple as that, simple as that. And they said, why would you have to? But why if you can’t commit to some time, I need 30 minutes of your time, and you can’t commit to that, sorry. Oh, but you have to, well, why is that? You’re just doing a price check, etc, etc. So you peel the layers to get to, really, the core of, why do they need a price reduction? And look, there comes a point whereby you walk away as well, right?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 34:58
Well, there’s opportunity. Cost. We talk about this too, is like the end of the day, particularly if you’re selling time, then there is an opportunity cost for you taking some of that, that price, versus something else. But even, but even in any business, whether it’s services, whether it’s product, though, it’s still always going to come with some loss of profitability. So there has to be something in return, right?
Andrew Seerden 35:16
Totally, totally. But look, and then coming back to sales conversation, there’s a lot of companies that say, Oh, we want to pay people on gross margin. We want to pay them commission on the gross margin. And principle, that makes sense, right? Hey, we could we say revenue is vanity, cash sanity, or profit is sanity, right? So, but a lot of businesses can’t measure gross margin. They cannot measure it. If it’s a services, they can’t actually measure it, so you deem it, then we’ve got companies that deemed the margin, and that was that didn’t work out either, because sales reps would then question the validity of the sales compensation and would go, hang on, it doesn’t look right, and spend time wheel spinning, internal navel gazing, waste of time.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:59
So if you can measure profitability, it can be part of the equation, but it’s not all of the equation either, right? And I’m interested in leading and lagging indicators. So we obviously teach a lot of our clients about measurables, and we always say within your measurables and your scorecard, you have leading and lagging indicators. There is an element of, you know, quantity into the funnel is going to have an ultimate thing, but it’s really more about conversion that makes a difference, isn’t it? Because you can keep pumping things into the funnel, but if they’re not converting, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and effort, right?
Andrew Seerden 36:27
So leading and lagging in that, in that, in that aspect, in that context, is now when we help people do the functional implementation of CRM systems, for example, we create dashboards, and you know, you’ve got leading in the case, for example, you’re saying that you you’re saying in your pipeline that in the next 30 days you’re going to close these 15 opportunities, but they’re still sitting in the prospecting stage. Your sales cycle typically is six months, so you’re kidding yourself, and you’re kidding us by saying you’re going to close these 15 opportunities in the next 30 days, and they’re still sitting and prospecting the top of the funnel, while your sales cycle is six months, it’s wrong, right? Or we have your pipeline says you’ve got, say, 65 opportunities. In total. Of those 65 you got 15 with a closet in the past, the stale, we call them stale. Or we say in your pipeline, you got multiple sales stages, right from prospecting to negotiation, to contract signed, etc.
These opportunities have been in this sales stage for more than 90 days. What are you doing about it? Right? So to your point, lay leading and lagging, right? It’s those are leading indicators, or what’s the shape of your pipeline like? And it’s fascinating. You know, in one case, we indicated to a business owner, you look at the shape of the pipeline this individual, it’s very bottom heavy. So if you think of a pipeline in this V shape, it was a lot sitting at the bottom, nothing at the top. So we said to that individual, the business owner, watch this person. He’s looking for another job, and he was because he was not putting anything in the top of the funnel. Was all the bottom to get commissioned. Basically. Anyways, fascinating, but that’s the point around measuring. If you want to improve things, you have to be able to measure it
Debra Chantry-Taylor 38:09
Perfect. Hey, look, I’m sure there’s lots we could talk about, but So we’ve covered the four key pillars of strategy, customer, people, conversation, sales enablement. These things actually apply whether you’ve got one salesperson and maybe you’re the salesperson of your organization, or if you’ve got a whole team of self, then the same things will apply, don’t they? That they’re principles. Yet, just in terms of for the listeners, we always love to give them some top tips and tools that they can take away so they can go, oh, I can do something about that right now. What would be your three kind of top tips you’d share with the listeners?
Andrew Seerden 38:36
Number one, when you think about your sales and marketing function, hire, slow, fire, fast. So what I mean by that is that we’ve had so many examples whereby people employed individuals because they needed people. I’ve done I’ve made the same mistake. I needed somebody in Christchurch. I had to travel down blah, blah, not quite, but almost the first person walking through the door got their job six months later, had to move them on because they’re the wrong person. So make sure you got the right person. Other examples of customers whereby they’ve promoted sales individuals into sales leadership roles. They didn’t have those competencies or skill sets. They were an individual contributor, and six months later, they have to say to them, sorry, the wrong appointment. Guess what ego gets in the way they resign or walk off, major loss to a business.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 39:19
So that highest and fire fast is, yeah, is, but it applies to internal promotions as well, right? So don’t just promote your top salesperson.
Andrew Seerden 39:27
Just because you got a heartbeat means that you can do the job, right? I mean, some examples of that. So that’s number one.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 39:32
And we talked earlier in the podcast about getting rid of the 20% on the left hand side of the bell curve as well. So that’s firing fast, right? But they’re not performing.
Andrew Seerden 39:39
Keep elevating the performance of the total sales and marketing function by doing that every year, you should look at who’s in the top who’s on the left hand side of the bill, because what are we doing about it? Moving on and setting the example to the top performer that this is a high performing culture. You want to stay in this business, you have to perform detail.
Number one, higher slow firefights. Number two, like I said, you know you cannot improve what you cannot. So make sure that whatever you want people to do from a behaviour perspective, you can measure that and report on it and hold people accountable against it. From a coaching perspective, from a learning and development perspective, like and that could be CRM, it could be whatever. That’s the other one. So once you’ve identified what some of the development areas are within your sales and marketing function, in terms of individuals, teams, etc, make sure you don’t just put a one and done training exercise in place, because they don’t work. We’ve had situations whereby people would come in from around the world into New Zealand for a week, a weeks long, training, very expensive, of course. And we would ask the in this case, the company provided the training.
So what are you going to put in place to make sure that when they go back to their countries and to their desks in New Zealand, that they actually apply what you’ve been teaching them? That’s not our job. That’s what they would tell us. And we go really and you’re charging them How much for this training. So in other words, you know, sales training, please don’t do the one and dones make sure that whatever you put in place actually gets embedded. And we can help that as well. We do the training, but we also make sure that whatever we teach them to be measured is going to be better, because you need to change their behaviour.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 41:08
Practical and pragmatic and, yeah, making sure you actually fund just because I think we this is one of the things. I loved it when I first started doing EOS. You know, a lot of coaching people come in and they’ll do this beautiful plan, they will get to get very excited about the vision, the values and blah, blah, blah, but then they go back into the business and nothing has changed. And so that plan very quickly gets shelved somewhere. Nothing happens with it, whereas if you actually change the fundamental behaviours and start putting things in place, you’ll get the long term results from the plan that you put later. Yeah, beautiful. Okay, well, we’re going to put details of where they can get in contact with you in the podcast notes, just in terms of our last thing you’d like to finish up on and share with the listeners.
Andrew Seerden 41:49
Oh, okay, now who need, who doesn’t need sales and no marketing for the matter, because, from our perspective, marketing, sales Now is so much more coupled and intertwined, more so than ever before. Why? Because of this digitization of the buying journey of people out in B to B land, whereby it’s not just siloed. And we still see too many silos in companies and businesses, whereby marketing is a separate apartment. Sales are separate. They’re one.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 42:12
I take it one step further. When I was working at Tower, I was head of the sales and marketing. The Head of Sales and Marketing at tal was that they said head of marketing, sorry that ahead of sales, at a head of customer service, and then we have marketing. And when I first went there, those three departments didn’t talk to each other. Now sales, marketing and customer service in an insurance industry is all one and the same. It’s all part of that kind of customer journey. I was always fascinated by that so but I think you’re right with the way that people are behaving online now and the amount of work they’re doing around the traditional kind of marketing thing before they even become a sales prospect. You’ve got to have those two working very closely together. Yeah. Okay, great. So, yeah, if you want to have some help with your sales and marketing fresh perspective, then certainly get in contact with Andrew. Um, thank you so much for coming along, sharing.
Andrew Seerden 42:56
Thank you for having me really a pleasure.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 42:57
It was great, absolutely appreciate it. Thank you.
Andrew Seerden 42:58
Thanks, Debra.
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Debra Chantry-Taylor
Certified EOS Implementer | Entrepreneurial Leadership & Business Coach | Business Owner
#betterbusinessbetterlife #entrepreneur #leadership #eosimplementer #professionaleosimplementer #entrepreneurialbusinesscoach
Certified EOS Implementer New Zealand
Certified EOS Implementer Australia
Certified EOS Implementer UK
Certified EOS Implementer NZ
