Streamlining the b2b sales cycle for technology industry

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[Music] the world is changing and if we continue on our traditional approach to the way we sell we'll be overrun by our competitors we need to change the way we sell so this topic today is really important it's a transformation we all need to think about your grams going to put a lot of insight to the table to help us think it through and then let's have a good panel discussion after that Graham please come up thank you John back from you sir thank you very much John for that kind introduction and thank you all for being here great to see so many familiar faces quite a few old colleagues here a few partners and suppliers and quite a few familiar faces from LinkedIn as well although the face has looked different in real life don't they thank you John I have to say that the term thought leader doesn't sit very well with me I have to say I don't consider myself to be a thought leader at all really what I am actually is an aggregator of other people's ideas and concepts in writing the two books I've spent a better part of five years now researching and anyone that's written a book will tell you you do more reading than you do writing so I've read a lot I've been out and spoken with a hell of a lot of customers and everything I do and say in my my daily life now and certainly the masterminds group is all about this here which is voice of customer and so you know the buyer feedback that I've had over the course of the journey has really influenced where I'm headed with the future of the sales profession so with all of this change in Bridgette I think outlined it very nicely the buyer has changed dramatically right everyone agrees with that the thing that really strikes me though is who do we listen to who do we who do we go and talk to as I mentioned for me it's the buyer those of you that follow me on LinkedIn may have seen this post that I put out recently slightly facetious where I said don't listen to this guy don't listen to sales thought leaders just go out and ask your buyer how it is that they want to buy and for me that's been a wonderful source of feedback on you know getting stuck not talking to sales thought leaders not talking to salespeople just understanding the buyer now what made this really quite funny is um no sooner had I pressed publish on this post but my phone rang and it was key and mcLaughlin and key and I'm sorry maybe I don't do a very good Irish accent but but Keon said to me oh my god Graham I just saw your photo come up on my newsfeed and I thought someone was having a go at ya but clearly it wasn't someone anything open it was mayor he'd written it and it was facetious but it was all designed to say listen to your buyer it was about understanding how the buyer wants to buy and using that as your your feedback so I mentioned to key-in before I've got a ton of content that I'd like to share and I've had to try and trim it back we're going to break it up into three sections first section is context and I think this is an area where we as salespeople because we're all so busy and under so much pressure now for end of month ended quarter and all the the metrics that we're trying to measure I'm going to talk a little bit about the thing that we don't do and that is we don't step back we don't sue mout and have a look at the environment around us and what's driving all of this change so I'm going to spend some time going through some of that then we'll talk about the implications for all of us as salespeople and what that means what the context driving then we'll get into four recommendations that I'll make at the end that hopefully will help people get an idea of where I think the future of sales is going just before we move on quick show of hands sales leaders in the room sales leaders yep great so quite a quick quota carrying salespeople quite a few any marketing folks yep couple product management's any product management HR finance no good okay excellent so context let's talk about how things have changed in the last 10 years when we go back to 2007 I use 2007 as a bit of a landmark because that's when the iPhone was first released think about that for a minute 10 years ago none of us knew what an app was the other important thing that happened just prior to 2007 2006 in fact was Amazon Web Services and that ushered in the era of cloud and consumption based economics that's a huge change so in that time we've moved from vendor push to customer pull business models we've moved from being customer aware to being customer led I think everyone will agree with that I think you know Bridgette mentioned this one before I think this is probably the biggest change that we've seen in the last 10 years by far is information parity when your buyer has the same amount of information at their disposal as you do as the vendor and they can solve their own problems that really calls into question the role of the salesperson doesn't so information parity is a big one for me we've moved from interruption based marketing to permission-based marketing everybody knows that we buyers don't like to be interrupted anymore do they we've also gone from awareness marketing to context marketing with insights Tony Hughes talks about leading with insights all the time I think it's probably one of your favorite things Tony and it's quite right how do you open with the right narrative how do you carry that narrative forward how do you make sure your buyer gets insights everybody knows that we've also moved from being very inwardly focused most organizations that I talk to in my day-to-day operations with clients vary inwardly focused focused on delivery focused on fulfilment focused on volume metrics the traditional sales volume metrics that's the inside-out focus we all need to step back as I said before zoom out and start to understand what the markets doing look over the horizon for those unanticipated needs be able to you know see what the buyer really wants and that's the outside in perspective that we need to get to transaction focus to value exchanges thank goodness we're finally getting to lifetime customer value as the important metric now I think for far too long certainly in my career across 28 years it's all been sale sale sales revenue and quota and Commission and all of that stuff that we used to now are a little bit more focused on the on the buyer we've gone from a hundred percent outbound to a mixture now of creating inbound and certainly something that HubSpot does very well that whole nurturing creating conversion pathways that's where we're headed and we've gone finally from being data aware to being data and analytics driven you've all seen some up Tony's post probably I know there's others that do as well kin as well the the sails stacked now the technology stack we'll talk a bit more about that later so you can see in the last ten years the balance of power really has shifted lots of change I argue in the book that we've seen more change in the last ten years than we've seen in the last hundred and thirty when it comes to b2b sales if you take a look at what some of the big vendors are saying with all of this change I think comes opportunity and mr. beers us at Amazon thinks that we're on the edge of a golden era and I think he's right yes there's a lot of change there's a lot of technology impacting our roles and what we do but certainly this creates opportunity as well artificial intelligence cognitive computing what the guys at IBM are doing anyone from IBM here know what they're doing at IBM right now with Watson is unbelievable I'm sure you've all seen some of the amazing things that they can do with artificial intelligence cognitive computing look at what they're doing at Microsoft all about AI at scale machine learning this is the context that we're now living in Oracle although my codes not there anymore very focused on using analytics to give their salespeople the right tools to serve the customer in the moment and of course we've already heard from Salesforce and I just mentioned to Bridgette before I was in Salesforce office in Melbourne last week looking at what they're doing with Einstein and mind-boggling predictive lead scoring and some of the artificial intelligence that Salesforce is now building with Einstein is set to change our roles even further so what's driving this change and you think about some of these these charts and and where we are these days the explosion of connectivity the explosion of information is really what's driving a lot of this and where we are today where the red dot is in 2017 is about twenty eight point four billion connected devices we all know the Internet of Things is going to ramp that right up and it is so by 2020 we are looking at 50 billion connected devices and you can see that trend line is just astonishing so our use of data our use of analytics our use of connect connectivity is just going right off the charts now and when we will continue into the future if you think about how long it used to take an organization to reach a market capitalization of 1 billion back in the old days a fortune 500 company it would take you know 20 years to get to 1 billion now here we are with snapchat and whatsapp in 2011 taking less than 2 years so you know we've reached this point where we've got this unbelievable exponential growth you'll see in your packs that I've made a recommendation about some reading that you should do I read this book recently is anyone read this one exponential organizations if you haven't do yourself a favor fabulous book and exponential organizations is really the concept of the way some of these businesses these days are growing if you look back through history and you smooth out all of the peaks and troughs in the business cycle you know you get what is fairly consistent linear growth nearly all of the benchmark index that we look at these days if you look at things like Moore's Law every 18 months computing power will will double it's always been fairly linear fairly steady growth hasn't it now we've got this thing happening where the businesses like uber and Airbnb and you know sales force themselves a sort of growth that is just exponential growth it's creating huge amounts of disruption huge amounts of innovation and as per my little diagram here lots of VUCA everyone's heard the term VUCA volatility uncertainty complexity namby ambiguity a little bit overused these days I think that term but what this exponential growth is causing is a real vacuum here between the traditional mainstream businesses and these these exciting unbelievable growth businesses that are just going off the charts and this is this is really causing some issue for all of us in my opinion because the mainstream businesses are now very focused on they're very focused on driving cost out of their businesses they have to they're worried about disruption so this is something that I think in terms of context is really important for all of us to understand the guy that wrote this book is a gentleman by the name of Salim Ismail and he said rapid or disruptive change is something that large matrix organizations find very difficult and I'm sure you all agree if you work in most matrix style organizations slow moving the exponential organizations are creating a lot of pressure and a lot of disruption so again this is the context that we now live with I'd like to now just quickly tell you a story about a light bulb moment in my career and this is a meeting that occurred in 2010 so a little while back but this is a meeting that actually changed my the entire way I think about sales now what makes it especially interesting to tell this story this morning to you is that the account manager that was with me at this meeting is actually here in the room diana Buckhannon sitting up the back there diana works for BMC diana with my Starr account manager and in 2010 diana was the account manager for one of our large customers I was always a Sales Director at Attachmate and for those of you that know Attachmate we were host connectivity company our fourth largest customer here in Australia was Qantas as anyone sold to Qantas Tony has if you haven't Qantas is probably the number one leading vendor basher and you all know what I mean by vendor bashing right they operate on razor thin margins like most airlines and you know each year Diana and I would go out for our annual maintenance and support agreement negotiation and it would be basically a vendor bashing session the procurement people would just kick the hell out of us and make it a real miserable meeting for us so in 2010 following I think three years of this vendor bashing that we'd endured Diana and I are there with the procurement people again and they started with the same thing they started complaining about everything we hadn't done in that year and they must have caught me on a bad day or something I don't know whether I was just tired or whatnot but without even thinking it just came out of my mouth I said for God's sake do we have to go through with his rubbish this is just a charade Diana turned around and looked at me and like as if she was going to kick me under the table the people had quite a solve all sort of went you know what's what's he talking about I said you tell us you want partners not suppliers and yet when we try to get close you keep us at arm's length we're trying to deliver value as a vendor and each time we do we turn up to these meetings and you just complain all the time I said can't we just be adults about this and with that the head of procurement and vendor management was a lady by the name of Pru Jacobson so if any of you know prove it she's a lovely lady she said Graham you're absolutely right let's call this meeting to a close you and I need to go and have a coffee and I thought what about I might have overstepped mark here so Dai jumps to the cab she goes home back sorry back to the office and Prue and I go downstairs for coffee process I mean now Graham you need to understand a few things I'm like okay what have I done now she said I've been given a directive by the CEO that we need to do more business with less vendors and I've heard that before I'm sure some of you have heard that before too the concept of vendor rationalization she said we arrange our vendor stack our technology vendor stack into three tiers does everyone heard the term vendor stack yep whew the vendor stack is the way most businesses arrange their vendors and everyone's got a different view on how they do that Qantas has a three tier vendor stack she took out a piece of paper and pen and she said now in Tier one we have nine strategic vendors and Diana and I both knew who they were was IBM and Fujitsu and all the big strategic vendors said okay that's fine she said 87% of our annual spend go those 91 benders now at that time Qantas for us was a 1 million dollar account so it was a reasonably large account for us she said in tier 2 we have 13 vendors so the likes of Oracle and Microsoft and some of the still strategic vendors but tier 2 and I knew where she was going she said you're in tier 3 with 363 other tier 3 vendors some single product vendors but you know we had one product in there that was reasonably strategic but there was plenty of other she said now the big challenge that you've got brand is that I'm taking I've been given the remit by the CIO to take the 363 and tier 3 back to 100 and I said okay what does that mean for us previously well it means one of two things either you will be culled completely as a supplier to Qantas in other words we will find a substitute product from one of our key ones and they could have done that right down they could have easily gone with IBM they had a similar product or you will be forced to sell your practic wonders via one of our key ones now either of those for me as the Director of Sales at our little vendor was a potential disaster certainly being culled from the vendor stack is a huge disaster but if we have to start to sell our product into corners via a reseller model hoping that we can get the attention of this the t1 prime partner that's a real a real concern so I go home tail between my legs thinking hmmm this is not so good I started going I had a chat and I said I wonder how many other customers are thinking along these lines I wonder how many others are rationalizing vendors and so I started to interview a few more procurement people I went to National Australia Bank National Australia Bank similar three-tier model five vendors 31 vendors in Tier two 1,100 vendors in Tier three the guide NAB says to me I've been given the remit to take the 1100 back to 600 again more vendor rationalization now the reason I'm bringing this up is it just about everybody in that in the diagram before the mainstream customers they're all looking to drive cost out of their business right and in doing so bender rationalization or vendor management in general is a huge problem for all of them so my first book I went out and researched and interviewed a lot of buyers and every single one of them said we are in some form of vendor rationalization so what does that mean what does that mean for us as salespeople think about it it means that our markets our territories the target addressable market the market sizing that we all do I argue is nowhere near as big as we think it is your territory you think it's this wide I'm telling you it's this wide a lot of these customers are not permitted to buy from you so I go to some talk I'm sitting in the Sun Corp CIOs office up there in Brisbane and I say what are you doing around vendor rationalization he says we'll see see behind me here and it's an open-plan class area he said the 17 full-time employees sitting behind me and he said those 17 full-time employees are focused on vendor management contracts management only I said right what does that mean he said well those people just crunch contracts all day every day terms and conditions license agreements contracts that's a massive cost for our business just having those that many vendors we're having to manage they're not engaging with the vendors they're just managing the contracts so you can see even the even the large medium sized organizations having to drive this cost down so again I make the point your territories are nowhere near as big as you think they are and that's an important thing to consider so you'll see in your um in your handouts there there's a little discussion document we're going to spend a minute now just having a bit of a think about some of the sorts of questions that you might need to ask your buyers right up front in the sales process so just spend a minute or so making note of some questions that you would like to understand and we'll we'll kick it around shortly just to see if we're all on the same page in terms of types of qualifying that you might ask so just to reiterate that point here's some direct quotes from those customers that I interviewed around this topic of vendor rationalization take a look at the one that Suncorp said here we actively block off panel purchases so again to reiterate that point if you're not on their existing supplier list now they will block you from getting on so some of the sorts of questions that we need to ask I think are based around you know right up front in the qualifying phase you know do you accept new vendors and spot on exactly right so I've divided it up and I'll get you a copy of all of this as well divided the questions up into new customers and existing customers so think about you know even if you're on the phone in that very first meeting it wouldn't hurt to ask listen we don't currently supply you mister mr. customer do you accept new vendors if so what's the process what what hurdles do we have to get through before you'll accept this as a vendor I often like to ask now you know could you give us an example mr. customer of an exemplary experience that you had with a with a particular supplier we would like to try and match that if we can yes wouldn't you wouldn't you rather know some of this upfront before you start wasting time I had a guy that I spoke to about a month ago who said I was given the NAB account to try and get into nab and my boss said to me just shake the tree kick down the door getting to nab any way you can he said I spent 18 months trying to work you know in the business units and work my way up and he said I developed some relationships only to find that they put the hand out and said sorry we're rationalizing you can't get on the panel so we have to be careful of this I've divided the questions slightly differently if you're if you're an existing supplier you still need to know where do we rank on the vendor stack how do we protect ourselves as vendors how do we move up the vendor stack if that's even possible these are some of the questions I think we should be asking right up front in the qualifying process any other thoughts up this end everyone's on the same page by the sound of it are people seeing this are you seeing this out there in the marketplace yep good to see okay all right so let's talk we've we've covered some some sort of diverse ground there in terms of context what we're all dealing with now as salespeople technology we talked about exponential organizations and bender rationalization the fact that most of our customers are now trying to drive cost out of their business some day so let's talk about the implications for us as salespeople and what that means today I argue in the book I'm not sure how successfully but I argue anyway that the role of the salesperson is diminishing and I say that because when I look at what I've done for most of my career it's been Nets hasn't allocated into a territory salesperson manages all activities for the territory prospecting opportunity identifications solution design proposal through to clothes that's been the traditional role we have a little bit of help from marketing that Chinese wall between sales and marketing around some brand awareness and maybe a few leads but effectively the territory was managed and owned by the salesperson now of course we're moving towards digital campaign lead management inbound outbound all of the artificial until stuff that we were talking about before with the sale stack in the marketing technologies we're moving to this new era where the role of sales is being squashed gradually what's changing some people say it's it's becoming more of a specialist role and it is we're seeing a rise of in Bower inside sales versus outside sales I think you've all probably heard the old thing about field sales was fine when the buyer resided out in the field but the buyer doesn't reside in the field anymore do they they reside online so we're seeing a big change there as well so when you look further into the future I argue with account based marketing and account base selling whether you think that's just jargon or not doesn't matter that's where it's headed buyers can self-serve more often nowadays so the role of the salesperson particularly the field salesperson gets squashed even further meaning we all have to become specialists and the division of labor for frontline staff will be spread across a specialist team we've have sales and marketing alignment we'll have product management people pre-sales post sales with a real focus on customer experience depending on which analysts you believe Forrester have said that that means that there'll be 24 percent of b2b sales people outside sales people whose roles will disappear by 2020 that seems high to me 2020 is only three years away if twenty four percent of us are going to be losing our jobs by that time that's that's pretty quick but when you consider that customers will manage 80% of their relationships without human interaction and Garten unquote then certainly it sounds possible if buyers don't need us the way they used to and certainly there'll be some change coming in the next few years I think one of the other proof points here about the change or the implications for us is that the fact that more and more of us are underperforming that is failing to meet or exceed quota 63% ing to Harvard others say it's higher I think CSO said it was 55 percent objective management group says it's 85 percent I don't know what do you guys seeing you're seeing more and more under performance is 63 about right in your organization's more than more than double not hitting their quotas now yes well is that as well that's very true is that an unrest yeah so what yeah absolutely so what was just said there is that is that an unrealistic setting of quota and of course in many cases it is for those of you that follow me on LinkedIn I've been writing fairly blunt posts about this recently where you know just taking actual or an amount from the previous year and building in a ten percent stretch to target for the next year's quota and expecting everyone to hit their numbers is ridiculous and frankly it sets sales people up to fail so that's just my opinion on it but certainly when I started my career back in 2003 managing salespeople my first job as a Sales Leader we had I think two out of ten that didn't make their numbers didn't make club now you know it's certainly more than that it's more than double but they're not making club so sales under performance is real the other thing that is another proof point to me and this is just absolutely absurd is the average sales tenure would anyone like to have a guess of how long the average sales person lasts in their job now to eighteen months six months some of them are about six months update ing to sales hacker at sixteen point eight months now consider this consider that the average time for onboarding and training now is about seven months so you've gone through the recruitment process you've identified your your candidate you've brought them on board they start day one and then the seven months before they reach maximum productivity if they're gone in 16.8 months you've got ten months to get any return out of that person right that is just absurd and it's not sustainable in my opinion the other part the other fact with that study that I read is that only 5% of sales people stay in the same role but any more than 3 years again if your organization is suffering this constant sales staff turnover we're going to talk about some of the costs of that shortly but certainly I think that's a proof point of the implications that are now happening are you seeing more and more of this sales staff turnover in your businesses no if you're not that's good we'll talk a bit more about that shortly so moving along some recommendations I think having collated a lot of this information and having you know sifted through mountains of data I think I've come up with a couple of really important points that we all need to start to consider when we're building our our buyer aligned sales processes the first thing I want to talk about is culture because as Peter Drucker said many years ago culture eats strategy for breakfast and that's a hundred percent right so when you look at the way most businesses arrange their their sales organizations their cultures we tend to have it'll be wrong to have a quadrant wouldn't it so we've got point solutions internally focused businesses down here so transactional businesses commodity based sales approach price focused haphazard approach to sales very reactive bottom-left okay that's the sort of culture I've worked for a while ago not fun to be there then you've got in Quadrant B you've got people that say they're customer centric how often do you hear oh yes we place the customer at the heart of everything we do but then they go and ask their salespeople where's your forecast how many calls you've done this week you know what meetings have you got this week etc so it's all about sale sale sales nice people with little impact and again reactive where of course we need to get is a systems-based approach that can give a scale leveraging all the predictive analytics and the tools that we just talked about before artificial intelligence we need to become customer success focused and obsessed almost I often say to my clients the ultimate aim really is to establish customer advocacy that's the that's the panacea when you've got loyal customers and repeat business customers that will actually go out and sell your products for you that's the greatest thing you can have the cheapest sales force you'll ever get are your customers right so moving to an outside-in perspective moving to a real client focus shared risk and reward with you with your customers you've all heard this before long-term outlook focus on retention lifetime customer value becomes a real priority instead of just this churn and burn mentality that we've seen in the past teaching not selling I'm going to talk about that next and as I mentioned leveraging technology for personalized engagements I'm sure you've all read as I have on LinkedIn and everyone's talking about buying staged appropriate messaging and that's really important too so the number one recommendation is to have a think about your culture what is your sales culture look like today where are you on this quadrant are you a customer success focused business or not I think a lot of people pay lip service to the fact that they pick customer centric but in many cases they're not so as I say the arrows indicate we've got to get ourselves up to there now as part of that cultural thing let's talk about this thing again turnover reduction when you look at the cost to replace a salesperson some study that came out of the US recently said that it's a hundred and eleven thousand dollars every time this happens and that's only just separation cost sorry hiring and Retraining when you look at the real opportunity cost each time a salesperson leaves your business that becomes really staggering now we all know that when a salesperson disengages there's a period of some months in some cases where that person is disengaged you might have them on a performance improvement plan you might be managing them out of your business whatever the search scenario is they are generally switched off right while they're disengaged you've got lost sales and you've got lost sales due to underserved customers in that territory when you start to factor all of that in the opportunity cost with that the re hiring the retraining lost sales dudes do the onboarding if this happens here three months has gone by your sales guys asleep at the wheel effectively takes another six months to find someone to replace them roughly three to six and then another seven months to onboard that person train that person up again that territory has had a major dip hasn't it we've all seen that before and that looks like 13 months to me by the time you had 6 & 7 together much less the three that they were switched off imagine your territory 13 months customers being underserved competitors swooping in and displacing you that is just madness one study said that that can cost somewhere in the order of a million dollars each time that happens so again I make the point here turnover reduction it's part of your culture part of making sure you're not losing people all the time it's incredibly expensive and I think I don't know why but we've all just most of our business leaders have accepted that this is just a part of doing business oh yeah we turn sales people over oh yeah so and so it's left and we've got another guy in it's crazy it's madness when you do the numbers it doesn't stack up I want to talk about bio journey mapping and Bridget you alluded to this earlier as well and you know everyone's talking about journey mapping how many actually do this in your businesses map the buying journey people done it a few hands I know you have Sam you're the experts talk about you in a minute by a journey mapping I'm doing this weekly now with my clients where you sit down and you actually say okay tell me the steps that your buyer goes through let's look at your target addressable market your segmentation plan let's understand who they are what are the buyer personas look like and what's your ideal customer profile put those things on paper now let's put together a map of what your your buyer goes through remembering of course that ing to Chet Holmes at least three percent of your target addressable market is actually in a buying window at any given time meaning 97 percent of our customers are in a status quo position they're not ready to buy anything they're not aware of a problem they're not aware of a need right so it's critically important that we understand what are the steps and what's required one of the messages that are required to get that person to move through the buying journey with again the ultimate aim being how do we create loyalty ustomer x' and come back and buy more stuff right so once you've mapped out the buying journey you start to look at the trigger events what are the trigger events that move someone from one stage to the next understand what they look like social listening you've all heard the term social listening using Google Alerts and trap it and various other tools now that give you insights into what might be happening with your buyer how do you get the buyer from a window of discontent to awareness and normally that's bad experiences changes or transitions may be a senior leaders change that might be a trigger event that leads you to believe that there's an opportunity or just changes in awareness a new piece of legislation whatever it might be then you start to look at okay well whatever one of the messaging key messaging elements across the journey if you just look at three areas awareness consideration purchase you might say okay well in this section of the buying journey we've got this particular set of content might be educational content ebooks white papers etc you map that all out you do the same in the next section it might be a slightly different approach you might have podcasts video when you start to map all of that out across the journey you can start to understand what the sales process really looks like then of course the next layer is tools and technologies and we all know there's a lot more of that available these days and I'm not suggesting for a second that these are the tools that you need to use or in this quantity even but certainly there are a range of tools that can help the buying journey progress the bone journey once you've done that and this can all be done on one page it's not hard to do once you've done that you can then map the touch points which leads me to the gentleman sitting over here the number of gentleman sitting over there with those HubSpot t-shirts on I've got to tell a story about my engagement with HubSpot and I'm not by the way right up front I'm not being paid a single cent to endorse HubSpot this is just credit where credit's due so mid last year for my own business I was looking at marketing automation technology I've heard about HubSpot but didn't know anything about it really what it was I was on Twitter I saw something a post about HubSpot I read it I thought that sounds very interesting so I jumped on their website I downloaded a white paper knowing full well that I would get a call from someone at HubSpot because I've just downloaded a white paper sure enough the next day this gentleman calls me this gentleman's name is Jack Doran and Jack's another Matt Iseman kun and Jack calls me and he says hi I've just had a look at your website and thanks for downloading that white paper he said love to talk a bit more about your marketing automation requirements he said I'm an inbound marketing specialist anyway the phone call unfolded Jack was very polite and pleasant and and he was really just using the time to educate me and being the sales guy that I and I had I still had the sales cap on even though I was a buyer and I was sitting there thinking as the call went on I'm thinking this guy's hopeless he's got he's got no idea I haven't had any spin model questions there's been no band questions he has narcs for a compelling event he has knocks to bad budget timeframes process he has an axe tentative that I'm thinking this guy's no good he doesn't know what he's doing but in fact it was me that was being stupid what Jack was doing was just educating me and he did a brilliant job the call was extremely refreshing for me as a salesperson it was just you know let me know what I can do to help you then I started to realize that this is actually the HubSpot model in fact I read them not long after Sam that Brian Halligan put that quote out about you know create value before you go and extract value and that's the whole leaf dose of HubSpot right so then I went out and bought the book the sales acceleration formula which is recommended great book micro barge is the gentleman that built the HubSpot sales model from the ground up and I noticed that here's this HubSpot buying journey in the book I pinch this from the book Sam I hope you don't mind hope mark doesn't mind that is the HubSpot buying journey all nicely mapped out and the penny dropped the penny drop that Jack had actually just taken me through this process six months later I'm a customer of HubSpot my business now uses HubSpot thanks to these touch points that were very clearly identified and utilized by Jack each of those touch points had some content attached to it so you know the initial seeing it on Twitter followed by the phone call followed by another download followed by an email with some more content it was all very predictable once I understood this but as a buyer it just felt like I was being educated it was a really well done approach yeah it certainly did in it you know for a long-term salesperson 28 years having been trained in sales process - all of a sudden be a buyer and understand no this is a buying journey it's a totally different mindset Tony talks about mindset a lot and this is what I'm talking about in changing your culture I know the guys at Salesforce do it brilliantly as well I'm now a Salesforce customer same same approach map out the buying journey understand the messages understand the tools and the touch points and the sales process becomes so much easier you're not having to second-guess or try and push the customer through a journey it's all it's all about education moving right along the final recommendation for those of you that are quoted carrying salespeople you absolutely have to specialize these days the overwhelming feedback that I got from the research phase of both books in talking to buyers is that we no longer value salespeople who can't tell us something we don't already know it's obvious isn't it if you're not bringing insights or new value to your buyer then they won't spend five minutes with you who's finding it difficult to get meetings these days meetings with buyers how difficult used to be you'd pick up the phone when I first started selling in IT I could pick up the phone and say all right Graham Hawkins from Compuware here I'm going to be in your area next Wednesday love to come and chat you about your file and data management yes mr. vendor come on in you know they roll out the red carpet not be more they've got access to that information they know as much as you do in some cases sometimes more so you know we've got to specialize and the way we specialize which I outline in detail in the book is around these five key areas you've got to understand your career direction you've got to look at where you are in terms of your passion where your customers are where your market might be growing it's really if you're not bringing commercial insights to you buy you just won't get their attention at all so all of us as salespeople the challenge is specialized you can't be a generalist anymore you can't be a walking brochure I had one customer say to me we go into salesperson avoidance mode the moment a salesperson sounds like they're just you know a walking brochure those days are over so in summary I think we're on time are we Tony in summary don't assume that everyone can buy from you have a think about that vendor rationalization thing and I you know go and talk to some customers if you don't believe me just ask your buyers they are all trying to drive those single product vendors out of the business they are trying to put more and more of their spend their annual spend through strategic partners the Accenture procurement strategy report of 2016 says very clearly that buyers will basically coalesce around a small number of strategic by our suppliers to drive risk and cost out of their business that's happening change your culture you've got to get your culture to become focused on customer success like the guys at Salesforce like the guys at HubSpot and various others I'm sure you many of you are doing it as well but see if you can get away from being focused on sales I always say that a sale is just something that happens naturally as a result of being immersed in your in helping your buyer once you do that yet the rest of it follows along the turnover reduction thing again huge savings to be made here if you if you're finding in your businesses that you're turning over stale staff constantly then just have a bit of a look at the cost when you add up the real cost you wouldn't let sales people go and if your I hate to say it there's no one in this room that does this but any of those lazy sales managers out there that just after 3 months pigeonhole someone by saying he's no good or she's no good we'll have to manage them out that's just lazy start coaching start mentoring start developing those people bring the bottom performers up range management and mapped buying journey that's pretty straightforward and pretty simple to understand I think and of course for salespeople we all need to specialize so I'll leave you very quickly with this one if you don't like change then you're going to like irrelevance even less we we all we all need to change and we need to change rapidly I think that's the key message I think you all get that but hopefully there's been at least four recommendations there that you can take back to your businesses and hopefully implement as soon as you can back to you time Graeme's thank you let's give a round of applause [Applause] [Music] [Applause]