Podcast Transcript

[00:00:41] Sean: G’day everybody and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can maximise the potential of their businesses, their impact in the world, and make bigger decisions with greater confidence. And I am very excited today. I'm your host, Sean Steele, and I have a super special guest to bring you today. A very well-known guest in the area of sales. I am joined today by best-selling author, keynote speaker, award-winning blogger, sales trainer, and you know Tony, you are one of LinkedIn's top three sales thought leaders globally. Your number one sales blogger globally. You've been recognised as the most influential person in professional selling and APAC three years in a row. Ladies and gentlemen, I have Tony Hughes with me today. How are you, Tony? 

[00:01:29] Tony: Sean, I'm well, and I thank you so much for having me on the show. I feel like your audience is exactly my hitting zone. So, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

[00:01:38] Sean: Perfect. We're in the sweet side. Well, for the audience's benefit, Tony, you and I met about probably four years ago now, I would say. I was the CEO of an education group and we just acquired a major business and we were doing a sales transformation program, and I knew your co-Founder, Luigi and I asked Luigi and yourself to come in and give us a hand, and you'll be very pleased to know that business continues to go from strength to strength and was doing very well. So, thank you very much for your contribution to that journey.

[00:02:04] Tony: Yeah and Luigi Preston is a great operator. He's got a good background in education as well.

[00:02:10] Sean: Absolutely. Yeah, he is a bit of a gun. Well, you Tony, you speak, write and consultant train on B2B selling and sales leadership. And, you know, people might not realise that you have more than half a million blog followers and over 300,000 LinkedIn connections. And what I love about your background is that, do see, of course, authors and so on. Sometimes that have come from, may be not a long lineage of professional expertise in the same areas, for some reason, shape or form that sort of found themselves in a space and they've developed some great material about yours actually comes from a deep career experience in sales, general management, executive leadership. And I know you were the MD for a region of a multinational. And so, I'm a super interested actually, if you could maybe kick us off with a bit of a sneak peek for our audience into your background, and what made you transition out of leading other teams, to establish your own practice and your personal brand and your thought leadership in this space.

[00:03:10] Tony: Yeah, Sean, I'll keep it brief because I'm sure everyone wants to hear how can they drive their own business. But when I was 25, I had moved from Australia and was living on the west coast of the USA. And I had my own start-up business in America and I learned some really important lessons. One of them was that if you can't personally sell and market really well, you're nowhere as an entrepreneur or a leader. So, when I came back to Australia, we'd sold our business and I was getting royalties for 12 years and I was a non-compete. So, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next in a business as an entrepreneur, but I sure as hell knew. I needed to get better at selling. So, I got a job as a sales rep and I ended up falling in love with it. And through the path of selling, ended up leading as a sales manager and then as a CEO and for about 12 years, I've had roles running the Asia Pacific region for north American multinationals. About 10 years ago, I decided to go out on my own on the back of my first book that had been a business bestseller around managing the complex sale. And I decided to do consulting in that area. What I discovered, however, was that managing the complex sale is not the biggest problem that leaders and tech business and services businesses have. The biggest problem is not enough consistent opportunity pipeline. And whether it's an accounting firm or a law firm or a professional services firm, or a tech business that's scaling, a lack of consistent healthy opportunity pipeline just creates massive downstream problems. So, I've become a little bit of a specialist in the area, or how do you drive top line opportunity pipeline in businesses. And I do work for companies like DocuSign, Adobe, SAP, Salesforce are some of the biggest and well-known brands in the world and I train organisations all over the world. So, I'm looking forward to the conversation around how does a CEO of a scale-up business, whether you're in tech or professional services, what are the five foundations, the five prerequisites for being able to drive predictable profitable.

[00:05:17] Sean: Absolutely. Well, interesting. Listening to your background, it made me realise, you and I have got a lot of similarities in our background. Because I grew up in sales, I was a wayward teen with no idea what I was doing and a lot of trouble and getting arrested and drinking and all sorts of things and then did a degree that meant absolutely nothing. So, I got to the end of my degree and went, oh, well I guess I'll just take a sales job and found out I was like, really good at it and really enjoyed it and built my first opportunities through that and grew up through sales leadership and the sales management and general management and then CEO. And so yeah, actually interesting part, but I've obviously missed the opportunity to become an expert to be the global thought leader in sales, but I'm thrilled to have you on the show so you can talk to us about it. So, to your point we've got a really interesting community here. We've got a lot of Founders in the 2 to 20 mil range in terms of revenue. We've got lots of people who maybe are first time Founders, so they haven't scaled to the next stage before. And so, I think, getting some insight into your perspective on for those kinds of businesses, what do they need to be thinking about, how are they going to build sustainable and profitable revenue growth at the top line? What are your thoughts? Where do we start?

[00:06:20] Tony: Well, let me talk about the five things and then we can circle back and deal with them one by one. So, these are the five things that are so essential. The first is you need clarity about your ideal profile and that's based on being brutally honest about product market fit. So, the first thing is: Know your ideal customer profile - your ICP. Second thing: Have absolute clarity about the people that you are selling to, to whom you are selling, know your buyer personas, and it will never be just one buyer persona. There'll be three seven, maybe even more by personas that formed consensus for change in the organisations you're selling to, if you're selling B2B, by the way. So now, your ICP, understand your buyer personas. And then the third thing is: Nail your narrative. I call it a Value Narrative, but how do you create conversations around how this person is buyer persona can drive improved results in their role. I'll talk more about that when we revisit it, but ICP, Buyer Persona, your Narrative. And then the fourth thing is: You have to find a way to break through into the world of those busy people that you can help that are wired to ignore strangers and sellers. So, that's finding a way to break through, and that was the subject of my second book combo prospecting. And then I followed up with how do you execute in Leveraging Technology? Well, in my latest book, Tech Powered Sales, so find a way to break through. And then the fifth thing is: You need to anticipate objections and have the best questions ready to go. And if you haven't learned all of this as a leader of a business before you start hiring sales and marketing people, you're just going to spin your wheels and waste a lot of money and have a lot of frustration. So, you earn the right to start to scale up with sales and marketing teams, by having clarity in those five areas.

[00:08:21] Sean: Tony, so you're trying to tell me that I go out and hire a sales person and then not going to bring all this to me. Surely this is what they do. Right? I go and get sales and marketing people, and I just bring all of this process and excellent thinking that surely that's the way it works. Isn't it? 

[00:08:34] Tony: Sean, I've invested in a number of start-ups, scale-up businesses. I'm on the advisory boards of a number. So let me talk about the typical scenario. What happens is you have an enthusiastic evangelists domain expert that sees a problem in the world they'd love to solve and you go “great.” And they're very passionate and they crack the nut on how to solve the problem. And they start to win some initial customers based on their own passion and credibility, and relationships and network, and then they're off to the races. Then what they typically do is “Great. I've proved my concept. Now we'll just hire people and they'll go sell.” And that's where the first big mistake typically happens. It's a giant false start, because the people you're hiring aren't you, they don't have the same level of passion, of credibility, of domain knowledge, and if you don't line them up well for success, then they're not going to be successful. So, you can't just say, “hey, salespeople should just figure it out.” We need to make sure that we've earned the right to start to invest money in those areas.

[00:09:37] Sean: Yep. And I laugh because, you know, I work with a lot of different Founders and I see this happen all the time. And it's a natural scenario, especially if you've never built a sales team and you haven't, therefore, I had to think about the whole sales ecosystem and what's going to be necessary for them to succeed and I just hope that someone's going to come along with it and you think, “wow, so you want a sales person who wants to be earning commission, who's never actually built the thing before to actually build the thing and then to be focused on selling it” it is bit of mismatch. Okay. So, take us back to the first one then. So, your comment about getting really sort of brutally honest about your customer profile. Let’s start there, unpack that for me. 

[00:10:16] Tony: Yeah. So, we need to be honest about product market fit. The whole world is not a market, so we need to think, “Well, what are the attributes of an ideal customer?” And we think about typically three things: firmographics, technographics and psychographics, including sort of competitive footprint within the technographics piece. But what I mean by that is you might decide, I'm looking for companies that you're in the manufacturing industry. They're based on the east coast of Australia, either Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, they will have a size that I can measure by revenue in terms of X dollars of turnover, or maybe they've got X numbers of employees. So, you're very clear it's not just any manufacturer. If a manufacturing, Perth expresses their interest, you might go “well, do you know what? Flying to Perth to try and win them as a client. How do we service them, it's all remote, how do we service a client in New Zealand right now?” So, you can easily start diluting all of your resources. The first thing is what defines ideal customer profile in terms of the firmographics, the attributes of the firm or the company, then you think psychographics. So, you might think, do you know what I'm looking for manufacturing businesses that are growing, or manufacturing businesses that are seeking to penetrate overseas markets. I'm looking for manufacturing businesses that are trying to drive cost out. For example, in Australia, selling to manufacturing, bizarrely, we have the highest electricity costs in the world when we're an energy superpower, we have highest labour costs in the world amongst the highest rent or premise costs in the world. Lowest economies of scale, highest freight and distribution costs. We try and export into markets where they're still protected with tariffs. And yet our government's dismantling all the protections for us in a domestic market. So, you go, my God, if you're a manufacturer you're operating in one of the most hostile environments in the world to be successful. So, if you truly understand your market, you start to think, “well, what problem do we really solve for them? And what attributes am I looking for?” And then the third piece is the technographics. You think, well, if I, for example, sell technology, you go well, what other technologies indicate that they would invest in things like mine? What technologies exist that we're really good at replacing? So, you're thinking about, are they in growth? Have they got things that we replace well, or we augment or compliment? And what you're doing is you're focusing on where there's higher propensity to buy. 

[00:12:53] Sean: And Tony, sorry, just to take a step back. How would you think about the last point around technographics in the context of services, businesses not selling a software solution?

[00:13:03] Tony: Yeah. So, you might decide that the firms, there's a really interesting correlation. There's a difference in correlation and causation, right? But you might find, for example, that companies that have invested in something like Salesforce, as a CRM system, it's not cheap. You tend to be a grown-up business that's really trying to drive disciplined execution within the sales function. You may bizarrely find that although the consulting you do does not relate to the sales organisation, companies that have invested in Salesforce are at a maturity level where they want to invest in business process re-engineering and other parts of their business. Now I'm just making this up. But you can go and use technologies that run headless browser tech stacks that can go and find those technologies. So, even though you don't work around the Salesforce software, you don't compliment the Salesforce software. If someone's invested in it, you might find 95% of your existing clients … 

[00:14:05] Sean: It's a signal. 

[00:14:05] Tony: …have invested in a CRM system. You go, “Wow. Well, firms that invested in CRM will typically be at a maturity level and a mindset level to want to work with us.” At a technographics level, you might think, and for example, I'm doing a lot of work with Grant Thornton, as a professional services firm around the world, but in this region, and for example, for them, one of the attributes they might be looking for is a business that's been working maybe with a suburban accountants, but they've made some acquisitions they're growing and they're thinking, “Do you know what? I've really liked my account I've worked with for 15 years, but we've probably outgrown the relationship. They're unable to bring me the perspective that I need to de-risk my strategy and plans for growth. So, the attribute is they're working with a small suburban accounting service provider, but they've got high rates of growth you think, ah, well in that situation where an ideal fit because they're growing, so they're thinking about how do we de-risk our growth, but they've been working with someone that won't have the, the family of practices and the breadth to be able to de-risk and support them.

[00:15:14] Sean: Yeah. So, I really liked that. You know, I always think about that as an interesting ‘fly on the wall’ type opportunity. Like imagine prior to you engaging a customer, or you just imagine that you're on the customer side and you're about to approach them in some way, shape or form, rewind three hours, six hours, a week, two weeks, a month, and think about what sorts of problems are going on in that customer's mind. And then go further out after an engagement with you, what sorts of problems are they then solving? Because it starts to really, to your point, put some context into how this engagement might turn up. So, as you said, somebody who's just made some major digital investments in communications system, may be undergoing some significant change. So, if you're a workforce management or an HR outsourcer or you specialise in kind of change and transformation, but on the services side. Well, there's a nice signal for you, maybe now it's time to engage. I liked that concept of thinking of what else is going on in the business that might suggest that actually there's room or a need for us?

[00:16:10] Tony: Yeah, exactly. And then the second thing we need to think about is the buyer personas to whom we sell. So, you think; okay, who's the group of roles. What's the group of roles in an organisation who are the people in the team that form consensus for change because between opening and opportunity and closing it is the middle and the middle is where many deals stall and die, and there's four reasons the deals stall and die. The first is a lack of compelling commercial value in change, in the mind of the people that form consensus for the decision. The second reason is not everybody's onboard. Now, it may not be someone that's funding it, but maybe they've got to provide some resources in their team for the change initiative. So, lack of consensus is the second reason. Third reason is a lack of process alignment. Maybe the person or the people we're dealing with don't truly understand how to get something over the line and contracted on their side. So, we need to make sure there's alignment in timing and process for getting it all approved and making it happen. And then the fourth reason is just some negative surprise happens. You know, the person we're working with leaves the business, the company posts bad results, COVID happens, a change of governments, economic problems. So, we can't really control the fourth reason, but if we focus on the first three will dramatically drive down risk in the fourth, because if an organisation can see strong compelling commercial value of change and everyone's on board with making it happen. And you've got complete alignment with how they run that as a process in their organisation working with you and all of the timing, then we shouldn't get the nasty surprises. So, we need… 

[00:18:00] Sean: Tony, and I saw this just to jump in there, because I'm thinking also that we've got plenty of people in the community with B2C businesses and this applies equally in B2C you know, it's amazing to me how often an organisation will think about whoever's making that final transaction as the only person that's important in that process. So, if you take, for example, you know, our borders are opening back up, so happily, we've got 4,000 international students coming back in a week. We're probably only back to maybe a hundred thousand students. Hopefully soon it'll be back up to 150 plus. But if you think about, say an international student who might be making a decision to come to Australia, well, theoretically it's a B2B sale if you're an international organisation first as a sort of sale to the agent, then the agents dealing with the student and who's behind the student? The parents, the family, the people are probably providing money, they've got massive influence, the parents, in the process. And how many people, how many institutions have actually gotten materials for the parents who have different questions, who have a completely different perspective on how to make a decision or how to influence the decision of the student, who's making the call. So, in the absence of that thinking, it's very narrow, one dimensional, and you can really miss, to your point, can lose a lot of deals as a result. 

[00:19:06] Tony: Yeah, it's very true, Sean, everything you said just then is spot on, spot on. So, what we want to do with buyer personas is we want to document what's important to them, what their stresses and frustrations are, how they prioritise, what are the common objections or pushbacks? What are the best questions to ask? How are they measured in their role? So, it's really a case of understanding them so we can build the right conversation narrative. So, unless you understand how someone's measured in their role, you've got no chance of building the right conversation, because the really interesting thing is this. If we build a conversation narrative based on us and what we do, we only appeal to the 3% of the market that's actively looking for what we do, but if we can build a conversation narrative around our particular buyer persona can drive improved results in their role then now we'll appeal to at least the 40% that are open to change. So, they're thinking, “Hey, if I could drive an improved results, I'd be open to change.” And maybe just to give you an example, you know, for me at the moment, I've got 22,000 unread emails in my inbox. Plus, I drown in InMails in LinkedIn. So, I've got 340,000 followers and first-degree connections there. So, every time I get into my emails and in-mails, I'm just sort of skimming, just trying to deal with the flood of bombardment that is what I have in my life. So, if you tried to build a narrative saying, “Hey, Tony, my name is Mike, I'm your account manager. I'm with X, Y, Z company, we’re the global PR agency for authors, you know, like I'm just straight away thinking, don't have time for PR agency, not looking to spend any money on PR agencies. All of my books have gone number one, anyway, I've got more work that I can cope with, I'm out. But if that same person said, “Hey, Tony, congrats on the new book. Saw it went number one in five categories, have some ideas on how you could drive $300,000 of speaking revenue out of the book. When can we find 10 minutes?” I’m in. Because you're speaking about something I care about. There's no real money in books. People publish a book because they maybe want to leave a legacy and make a little bit of a difference. But they also think if I publish a book and it does well, it could generate a whole lot of speaking work, or bring new clients. So, this person would build the narrative around that. But you can't build the right narrative unless you understand the buyer persona. So, for example, my clients, one of the personas they sell to is the Head of Learning and Development. And they say, “Hey, Tony, we're not getting much traction with the L and D managers when we approach them.” “Okay. So, what are you typically saying?” You know, and they say, what is it you guys do? How do you answer the question? They said, “oh, well, we tell them that we help their leaders drive revenue growth by providing them with an external perspective.” And I said, “okay, great. Is the head of learning and development measured on revenue growth?” And they said, “Ah, we don't know.” And I said, “well, I do. They're not, they're not measuring revenue growth…”

[00:22:32] Sean: And if you don't know, don't ask. 

[00:22:33] Tony: And what I said is “I'm sure you've got lots of happy customers that L and D managers, go and buy them a coffee. Or take them out for a beer or schedule a zoom call with them and just say, “Hey, we're just trying to better understand that the L and D manager role that we work with, you know, that's your role. Can you just let me know when you know, who is your boss? Who do you report to when you do your annual performance review, what are the things they want? How are you measured for success in your role?” Because I said, “if you don't understand that and document it in a buyer persona, how can you have any chance of building the right conversation narrative?” So, we did a little bit of Googling and research, and we talked about the fact that they're typically measured on the feedback score for any little program, they run inside the business. Well, this company I was working with has feedback scores of 9.7 out of 10, if you can believe this. So, I said, “well, anybody working with you, your high feedback scores, you get by people attending your online events and your live events, that'll lift their overall feedback score. That'll help them with their own KPI. So, say, “Hey, I've got some ideas on how you can lift your average feedback score on the programs that you're running and actually get more programs delivered without a consuming a whole lot of your time and resources” because they're typically measured on the number of programs that they can roll out as well.

[00:23:54] Sean: Yeah. 

[00:23:55] Tony: So, that's an example of ‘Know you by persona, so you can then build the right narrative.’ So, if you're talking to a CFO, you know, they're typically measured on cost control and cost out and compliance. If you're talking to a Head of Sales, they're measured on revenue growth, new logo, acquisition forecast, accuracy. If talking to head of Professional Services, they're measured on utilisation, project success, project profitability. So, speak to what matters to them in their role.

[00:24:25] Sean: So true. Can you give us a B2C example in that regard, Tony? So, if you thinking about someone who might be making a decision as a consumer, who's fundamentally not measured by somebody else, but they clearly have influences around what success looks like for them and often people are just throwing features and benefits at them, hoping for the best, but haven't really unpacked what is the issue they're going to be most grappling with or the thing that's going to matter or influenced them the most in their decision. How do you think about that? 

[00:24:59] Tony: Yeah. So, my specialty is B2B, so complex selling, not B2C. So, I just make a general comment. If you're selling B2C, then one of the things you'll typically be doing is to have more of a marketing driven approach to create inbound funnels in how you execute. So, one of the things you really want to focus on is think about what do people look for online before they would ever know to look for me. So, what do people look for online before they'd ever know to look for me and create that content? And as an example, the hobby I do with my own family is wakeboarding. And we bought a white board boat a number of years ago, and the four-wheel drive we had for our previous boat, couldn't tow the whiteboard boat. So, we needed to get a bigger car. So, the trigger event that occurred in our life for buying a new four-wheel drive, was we bought a bigger boat. Now, interestingly, when I jumped online, because I needed to find something to toes three and a half ton, when I jumped online, I didn't Google the brands of the four-wheel drive manufacturers. So, I didn't Google Toyota Land Cruiser or Nissan Patrol or any of those things. I just Googled three and a half thousand kilos towing capacity. Really interestingly, nothing came back in my Google search against that search. And I'm thinking well, the forward drive market is haven't been thinking about what does someone look like. When I went to the dealer for the wakeboard boat that I bought, they've exclusive dealer for New South Wales in Australia, where I live, I said to the owner of the business, I said, has any four wheel drive manufacturer ever come and seen you and work talked about some kind of alliance, when someone comes in to buy a boat and you can see they've got a car there's never going to toe it, that you can sort of, you know, give them a lead? And he said, no. And I said, how crazy is that they're not thinking about trigger events, that actually caused interest. So, what we know in all selling is the one who educates and provide some insights is the one who becomes the emotional favourites. So, if we focus on us and what we do in the mind of the buyer, whether it's B2C or B2B, if we focus on us and what we offer, what we trigger in the mind of the buyer is the need to compare. I need to compare with other offerings. What we want to do is we want the buyer comparing us with the cost and risk of staying in current state and the loss of the opportunity to have a much better future states. So, there's sort of two sides of the coin. It's not just the negativity and the fear mung, fear-mongering around what if you stay in current state, but hey, look at the options for things to actually be better. So, if you focus on how they can drive an improved result rather than, ‘Hey, we've got the best thing,’ what you do is you anchor the motivation to buy. And we know that people are best motivated by reasons they discover. So, think about buyer's journey and help them on that process of discovery, especially if you’re in B2C, but that also applies to B2B.

[00:28:07] Sean: I think that's a beautiful example. And if I offer, and in alignment with that, when I think about B2C selling and I've trained a lot of sales teams in education and the first question that I've trained every salesperson never to ask or every course advisor is what's the thing that happened immediately prior to you thinking that you should give us a phone call or got online and started sending those emails, because no doubt you send us an inquiry. You probably send an inquiry to five other places, but what was it happened before that that actually made you get on the computer and do it in the first place. Because to your point, that's the trigger event. There's something else going on in their life that made them think, “okay, I need an outcome.” And then to your point, they couldn't care less about what's in your course, to be perfectly frank, nobody wants to do education. Has anyone ever gone, ‘I'm so desperate to get the learning?’ Everybody wants ‘what's on the other side of the learning?’ The learning is just a vehicle and it's actually a really annoying vehicle. It takes time. It takes effort. It's often boring. So, they don't care that you have the greatest teacher and you have this amazing learning management system of blah, blah, blah. They want to know A) Is this going to facilitate me getting to the other side? And B) Once you've been able to establish that, one of their big I guess motivators or sort of emotional decision-making factors is confidence because the moment they go, “Okay, I accept that this is the thing that could get me to the end of my journey.” The next question is, “Am I capable of doing?” Like, am I actually going to start this and fail because I don't want to fail. I don't want to, you know, invest a bunch of money in time and then realise I actually not good enough to do it or I'm not going to succeed. And so, actually the rest of the compensation is about confidence and their concerns and what they're scared of and what kind of support we have. Not about, here's the seven subjects we do and we cover these 12 things and that's just terrible marketing and sales process and education. So, it just really nicely aligns with everything that you just said about the whole point of the, kind of the trigger, the outcome and the mechanism to get it from here and there. 

[00:29:58] Tony: Yeah. And I might just give you an example of narrative and the sort of framework I use. So, have clarity about your ideal customer profile. So, you're targeting or you're focusing your resources and targeting with his highest price propensity to buy, then make sure you understand the buyer personas, how they're measured in their role, what's important to them and speak to that rather than about yourself. Then on the basis of all of that, build the right narrative. And I'll give you an example of this. In Australia here, we all know flight centre travel. And I work with their B2B brands. So FCM Travel, Corporate travel, flight centre and a Business Travel. So not retail, not B2C, but B2B. And they've given me permission to share this example. When COVID happened two years ago, they rang me and said, “Look, our sellers and our account managers are getting the same pushback when they phone customers or prospects. And the pushback is this. ‘Hey, look, I don't ever know why you're phone me. None of my staff had traveling. Ring me back when the airlines are in the air again’.” Now that's pretty brutal objection. Right? It feels very valid pushback. So, what I said is, “First of all, we need the mindset of let's make the excuse, the reason. The fact that the staff aren't traveling, we need to make that the reason why they should be talking with us. So, let's build a narrative. And what we did is we built a narrative to the CFO - Head of Finance and they'd phone up and they'd say, “Hey, Mary. Would none of you start traveling right now, I think there could be an opportunity for you to drive somewhere between 8 and 12% of cost out of what's going to return to be the third to fifth biggest expense line item on your P and L. And with none of you staff traveling, you've got no change management issues. And do you have the bandwidth in your admin team. You mind if I ask, when's the last time that you reviewed your travel policy? And the way you're running treble as a process?” Now here's the thing, the crazy customers, lazily want a focus on what's your booking fee for booking a trip for one of my staff? Is it, I'm making up numbers, right. But $38 50, you know, is it cheaper than $38 50? because that's what we're paying right now. Gee, you're $42. Why would we change to you? That 4 or $5 is nothing. The real cost of wastage and incurring of risk in a trouble program is when all of the inmates run the asylum will travel, you know, everyone books their own favourite airline, their favourite hotel, their own favourite credit card. They're maximising all their personal points on all three of those things. So, they can have their free holiday on the gold coast with their family at the end of the year. If you can drive compliance, you'll drive out a whole lot of costs and risks. You'll avoid the travel freezes that damage the business. Anyway, so that's an example of narrative, right? Build the right narrative. You need a point of view. So, you need to say Hi, Mike…it's my case. Hi Mike. It's Tony from Sales IQ. Hey, Mary suggested I give you a call or, Hey, I noticed you're hiring a lot of inside sellers right now. Ah, look, the reason I'm calling is I think there could be an opportunity for you to get more of your reps on target year to date and in a way that de-risks the forecast that you're passing up to the CEO John, do you mind if I ask, what percentage of your reps are on target year to date right now? How much pipeline coverage have you got in the business for this quarter and next quarter, how do those two coverage numbers compare with where you think it needs to be? Now, by the way in my world, no one has a good answer to those questions. So I go, “Hey, it absolutely makes sense to talk.” And they go, “Sorry, what is it you sell? What do you do?” I say, “I work with the sales leaders or the CEOs and companies like yours to help you hold all of your sellers to account for self-generating their pipeline gap so that you can hit the numbers that you promised to the board.”

[00:33:58] Now, I haven't talked about combo prospecting, tech powered sales, RSVP selling, Sales IQ global, where we've got an amazing e-learning platform, you know, to put the sellers through, to learn all of this, I can do a sales keynote for you at your kick-off. I haven't talked about any of that rubbish. They don't want any of that. They don't want any of it. All they want is more people on target. You know, more pipeline coverage, more accurate forecast, less stress on hitting the number every quarter or every month. So, talk about what they want. That's really the keyword narrative. So, you say, “Hi, John, it's Mike from X, Y, Z. I noticed once you can textualize with something relevant, a trigger event, a trusted relationship introduction. And look, the reason I'm calling is, I really think there could be an opportunity for you to, or I’ve got some ideas on how you could benefit A / benefit B. Do you mind if I ask, if they go not far slick, I’d need to know more than that.” You say, “Sure.” And then you talk about the strategy that gets the result. In that example, I gave you the strategy is around being able to hold your sellers to account self-generating their own pipeline gap, rather than complaining about marketing doesn't give us enough leads. So you talk about result, strategy that gets the result, and then we become the enabler of the strategy. But by the time we get there, they're ready to listen. So that's really the third thing. Nail the narrative.

[00:35:25] Sean: It's so interesting. You know, I think the first time I was exposed, even to the part around context, was probably the first time when you and Luigi came into our business and, you know, watching Luigi just the way you were monitoring how to actually start the conversation, because quite often people have no leading, they haven't done any research and they're just going in cold and there's just not even a starting point to even get to the narrative. But to your point, that's a really nice and elegant. That's an elegant frame. So, then assuming that we've thought about our business, we've got clarity around our product market fit, our ICP, our buyer persona, we've got a narrative now that's kind of making sense. It's talking to the language of the customer about things they can. How do we sort of find this wide a breakthrough?

[00:36:12] Tony: Yeah. So, I’m not to show myself plug but get hold of combo prospecting and read it. So what combo prospecting is this, people who do not get know us are wired. They're hardwired to ignore us. You think about your own life. You know, for me, I'm thinking, I even think when I bought my last car, right?
Like I'm looking at YouTube, I'm looking at what my friends are driving, I’m talking to people already own one of the vehicles that I want to buy. I'm not interested in what the salesman is going to tell me. That's all sunshine and light. What I want is the truth. So, I'm on the forums, looking at known problems and stuff with vehicles. So, what happens is most buyers think; Look, if I want to buy something, I'll go on my own journey for that. I'll reach out to them and network I'll go and look online and all invites a short list of the contenders in to talk to me. I'm not lonely and bored looking for another friend from the land of sales. You know, I'm not looking for another pitch from anybody. So they're wired to ignore. So, the idea of combo is you pattern interrupt the way that they not. So, you use combinations, little pattern, interrupting combinations. And for example, for everybody listening to this or watching this first thing they need to do is get back on the damn phone. People have gone way too passive. You know, I'll just build that my LinkedIn network and post content and leads will flood in. Well, like, yes, you can get leads that way I do. But there'll never be enough for you to hit the goals that you've got for your own business. So, what you need to do is you need to find them, and what lose the phone will ring. And I think, “well, not in my phone book, don't know who this is, not answering it.” That's fine. That's all okay. The phone rang, they dumped the call to voicemail. Then their phone goes, ding. Ah, they left a message. Always leave a message. If you don't leave a message, I'll assume you're a scammer or a spammer. So, leave a message and the message is simply, “Hey Sean, it's Tony from Sales IQ, looking to get 10 minutes with you next week, I'll send you an email.” That's it. I don't say, “Hey Sean, it's Tony from Sales IQ, we’re the global and intergalactic market leader in independence sales enablement.” None of that crap. Just, “Hey Sean, looking to get 10 minutes with you” or “Hey, Sean, looking to get 10-minutes. Your name come up in a conversation with Mary last week. I'll send you an email.” And that's it. And you're thinking, I wonder what that's about. Now for me, when I go into the city, I'm on the train. So, this happens on the train. A lot phone rings. Let it go to voicemail. I wonder if that was, and then ding, oh, email. And it's an email from the person. What's happened is you've dramatically upped the probability of them reading the email and that's called a triple. Phone, voicemail, email. You made their device buzz ring and ding three times in 90 seconds. If you just do one thing at a time all spaced out, it all just gets ignored. If you send an InMail on a Monday, you send an email on the Wednesday, ring a phone on the Friday, you only ever leave one voicemail because you don't want to appear to be doing. Then they block your number because you never leave messages and they think you're a seller or a scammer. And you're wondering why you're not being successful. So, what you do is you're always open with a triple as a minimum and then 48-hours later. You phone again. “Hey Sean. It's Tony. I'm just following up…” Then you would say where you're from. “Hey Sean. It's Tony. I'm just following up. I'm wondering how Tuesday morning, 8:45 would work for you. I'll send you a calendar invitation.” And I hang up and then I opened the email. I'd sent you 48-hours earlier and I bumped it back at you. I changed the subject line to say ‘Tuesday, 8:45. Question mark.’ And I add to the thread, “Hey Sean, just following up has Tuesday 8:45. I'll send you a calendar, but let me know if there's a better time.” I send it. I then send a calendar invite. I've now done a quad and what's happened is in 48-hours. I've touched you seven times in two little pattern interrupting clusters and what all the research shows is that depending on whose statistics we choose to believe, it takes anywhere between 7 and 13 touch for someone to respond, but we've done the seven touches in 48 hours with two little sequences or two little combos is what I call it. And if you add to that, maybe before you did your first combo, you looked at them in LinkedIn and sent a connection request. Because you're in there anyway doing a bit of research. You do that too, then you're not even necessarily, it's on a cold call, because you're going to contextualize the outreach in that email that you send in the conversation if you have it, but you've connected with them in a. And you can see if people look back at your LinkedIn profile. So, that's the basic idea of combo and combo prospecting and tech powered sales as books really go into, how do you build out the sequences within the right rhythm? So, that's the right cadence. 

[00:41:14] Sean: Yeah. 

[00:41:15] Tony: The right cadence or rhythm of running little sequences of people. And it talks about how you can leverage technology to great effect with that as well.

[00:41:23] Sean: And I'm sure every person that's listening is, as you're talking, thinking about the kinds of approaches they've had from other people, how, when they've been spaced out what channels they've come from and every person that they've said no to or ignored, and, you know, it happens to me all the time and I'm like, Hmm, no. To your point, every person listening to this will be able to think back through that sequence and go “Well that probably would have actually got my attention, the kind of intrigue that's coming from the voicemail and then the short email that's followed and the… yeah, that's a really fascinating opportunity. And in your newest book around, I guess the ways to leverage technology, how much of that if come prospecting is a lot more around the kind of the patterns and the sequences, where do you take people with the technology side in terms of the technology enablement?

[00:42:07] Tony: So the book combo prospecting is really a Clarion call to wake up as a seller and stop being passive. And it talks about all of the strategies that you can employ. And what tech powered sales talks about is exactly how do you do this? So, if you want to automate, for example, your outbound email and automate your sequences, which include manual things like making a phone call, how do you design your cadence and sequence? What technology can you use for example, to monitor for trigger events, to give you that context, how do you go on source direct mobile phone numbers ethically? How do you build a good tech stack? Now that the really important thing is if you're going to up your game in how you run outreach, it's critically important that you nail the conversation narrative and the message. Otherwise, you could be seen as an annoying spammer. I've seen so many people automate their outreach and what they do is they end up just getting their domain blocked and they burn through their list really quick. And they just brand themselves as a spammer in the minds of many people. So, you have the narrative, it's all about them, not us. And we have a point of view on how they can drive, improve results in their role. So, for example, if I'm talking to a head of sales, And I'll say, “Hey, Mike, I think that could be a way for you to get more of your reps on target and de-risk the forecast, you know, it's about you being able to hold every seller to account for self-generating that gap.” To me, I don't say this to them because it's rude and arrogant, but to me, the way I feel is ‘Mike, you deserve to get fired if you don't want to have a conversation around how you can solve those problems, because the next most likely person to get fired by the CEO in the team that sits around the boardroom table is your role. It's the head of sales, right? You've got the toughest job in the management team. And there's some ways for you to dial down the risk and stress that you have in your job and help your people be more successful.’ Like. now who wouldn't want that conversation, but if I bring up talking about my sales methodology, they're thinking, well, we've already got three sales methodologies that people don't use. Why do I want a fourth?

[00:44:27] Sean: Yeah, 

[00:44:29] Tony: Don't want a fourth methodology, right? Yeah. Anyway.

[00:44:33] Sean: Yep. That's very true. And so then, okay, we've nailed our narrative and we've now got their attention. You're into a conversation, right? So how do we then avoid or minimise objections. Like what's the process that you think through to get this stuff out so that you've got clarity about what's coming and how best to address it. 

[00:44:58] Tony: So, some of you listening to this right now might choose to think of me as Tony is the heretic with what I'm about to say. But I believe most sellers create their own objections and problems in the way they engage. So, for example, if you call someone up and say, you know, “Hey, Sean, is now a bad time?” Well, I've just encourage you to tell me to spend time. I've had one seller say to me that they're opening phrases. “Hey Sean, I'm sure you weren't expecting to be getting a cold call from a seller this morning.” Now that's like maybe a bit humorous or whatever, but you're putting the thought in the mind of the person. Well, actually you're right. I don't have time for a cold call from a sales person. I'm not interested. So, if we talk about us and what we do, we create a comparison with competition, we create the situation, getting delegated down to somebody else or just, Hey, we're not looking to change provider at the moment. So, if you ring up and say, “Hey, you know, I'm with such and such, and we're a professional services firm that does X.” We're not looking to engage any new professional services firms at the moment. Thank you very much. So, with objections and questions, we need questions that lead to the value of change. So that's why my question to a sales manager of how many of your reps are on target year to date? I want them thinking, I don't have enough of my people on target year to date. I don't have enough pipeline coverage. My forecast accuracy is regarded as a joke by my boss and also the board. You know, I've got an improved forecasting accuracy. I get more people on target and I've got to stop aging a whole year of my life every quarter because we never have enough pipeline coverage. Like I've got to get that fixed. So, I'm asking questions that create that epiphany. People are best motivated by and retain and remember information when they themselves have the discovery. So, just telling them doesn't mean we’re selling. We want them to come to their own conclusion. The next thing is, remember that example I gave about flight centre travel group? The objection is none of my staff are traveling. Are you stupid? Like why you ringing me about travel when no one's traveling? Well, you can anticipate that objection. Why don't you say, “Hey, Mary, with none of your staff traveling, you've just killed the objection.” You've killed the objection. So even if you're selling into an industry, that's under a lot of. Like you think of walking on interesting. Say, “Hey, look, I know your industry is under a lot of pressure right now, but that's actually why I'm calling. I think there could be an opportunity for you to drive cost out in a way where you're still positioned to take advantage of growth as things start to turn. Do you mind if I ask?” So, you talking about what this person is thinking about and what's important to them. So, all questions should be phrased as much as possible as open questions. So, I'll give you an example of this and you go, this can't be true, but I swear it is. I once had a life insurance agent ring me and say, “Hey, Tony, do you love your wife and kids?” 

[00:48:05] Sean: Jeez. 

[00:48:06] Tony: I said; “Ah, Yes. Yes. Yeah, I do.” I'm thinking, what's going to be the zinger follow-up?

[00:48:12] Sean: What's coming. Yeah. 

[00:48:14] Tony: Like yes. They said then, “And if you weren't around anymore to be able to provide for them, would you want to know that they'd still be okay financially?” And I said, “Actually no.” And they said “No?” And I said, “Yeah, no. I'll be dead. I won’t care.” And this conversation is over. It just annoyed me being like, of course I love my wife and children. Of course, I do. Now a better way of asking.

[00:48:43] Sean: Somebody read an old book. Haven't they? Someone's reading old. You're going, somebody has read a book from 1975 that said you need to get three yeses or five …

[00:48:52] Tony: So, you know, what would have been a better question is, “Hey Tony, look, obviously everybody wants to know that their family is going to be okay if they weren't around, what does that look like for you? And what what's the current gap? Because if, what you think it needs to be, isn't what it actually is. I'd love to have a conversation about bridging the gap for you affordably.” Like I'd be open to that. “Look, obviously everyone wants to know that the family is going to be. What does that look like for you and how big is the gap?” Like that's a more nuanced way that gets me talking about whether I have the problem or not. So, anticipate objections and as much as you can position in a way where they're, don't come up, I've got an example of that. If you get an objection that is a bit of a surprise, never be surprised, be really calm, acknowledge, have some empathy. And then ask a question to reframe their thinking. Okay? So, if they go are, “We've already got a piece of technology in that area. I know. Look sure, I'm aware of that. It's really great that you've already invested in this area. What we've seen with a lot of firms like yours at your stage of growth is they're looking for something that can help get them to the next level.” So rather than be shocked. “Oh, oh, you've already got a piece of technology for that. Or you're already working with a service provider in that area around your remuneration on packaging.” I say, “Hey look, if all of our customers we're working with someone else.” But the reason they decided to change was they were really looking to achieve A and B, do you mind if I ask?” And what you want, the person thinking is my God, the current provider hasn't come to me and talked about any of this. And these are things I should be aware of and address. So, what we know is the one that provides insights and starts the reframe thinking, helps them with their business case, helps them manage risk of change. That's how you become the emotional favourite. So, always turn up with a humble yet researched and informed point of view on where you suspect they could be driving some improved results in their role, and that'll get them to lean into the conversation. So, we don't want to be arrogant about it, you know, “Hey Mike, I can help you be more efficient in this area.” And they're thinking you don't even know my business. You're insulting me implying that I'm not running it efficiently already at the moment. So, it needs to be done intelligently.

[00:51:28] Sean: Wow. That's a just a fascinating. I mean, it's beautiful that you've been able to give us that in five really simple steps. And as you get into the depth of that, clearly there's a lot of nuance, and there's a lot of practice for someone, you know, and I think, if somebody coming out of this conversation, who's going; actually those five steps make a hell of a lot of sense and you can see immediately all the things you're doing. Clearly, you've got some books there that are going to allow people to get into some depth and into the nuance that's going to help them. One of the things Tony and I know we're running short of time now, but I I'm really keen to ask you this because I'm seeing it happen with a lot of clients, in every sector at the moment, talent is pretty hard to find. And people of asking for some pretty big dollars for jobs that maybe we're 50 or a 100 percent less than that three years ago, obviously in technology in particularly, but in sales seems to be one of those spaces where it's really difficult for people to find salespeople in a way where it's such an employee’s market and they don't feel like they've seen that kind of condition before. How are you? I'm sure that's coming up in conversations with your clients. How do you talk to them about, I guess sort of dissecting that or thinking about how they can attract the best talent in this kind of market? I know it's not a one answer, silver bullet kind of question, but how do you think about that? 

[00:52:42] Tony: Well, we know that younger workers today want to work in an environment where they feel that there's an alignment of values. And where they can make a difference to things they feel emotionally connected to. So, that's really important. The other thing is we need to invest in our people and truly enable them, people leave their boss before they ever leave the company. And you don't want people joining and feeling frustrated. So, I think in the world, generally, there's been a massive under investment in the last 20 years, maybe 25 years in sales enablement and training. So I know it's a shameless plug, but you know, we mentioned Louie earlier on, I've moved all of my IP into sales IQ global, and we've got an e-learning program with real time, weekly coaching for sellers or owners of businesses to address all five areas that we talked about today. So, all of the templates to build all of this out. So, the thing is, if you don't do it with sales IQ, that's all okay. But find a way to invest in your people to truly enable them, just hiring people, to solve your revenue problem, or hiring marketing people, or spending money on ad words, which is a lazy, expensive way to try and solve the problem, doesn't work. We need to nail these five areas. And then when we hire people, they're set up for success. You know, one of the things that Louie does at sales IQ in this program is people build their own playbook. So basically, the seller or you, if you do the pre-work, you can give the seller the playbook or get the seller to do the program and show you the playbook. But they document their own personal goals, their ICP, their buyer personas, their messaging, their cadence and sequencing, the objections, the questions, you know, like they define all of this and now you can have confidence that they can actually go to market and be successful rather than thresh around damaging your brand and not delivering results.

[00:54:36] Sean: And I think gone are the days Tony where, if you go back 10 years, it feels like, you know, there was a time where people were just grateful for you to offer them the job. Do you remember that period? It seems like it doesn't feel like it was all that long ago, but to your point, the world has flipped and people will know if you're not investing in other people, you know, people are pretty savvy and they certainly know if you're actually not a business that has any level of purpose or care about what it is that you're doing. And it is, you know, I see a lot of Founders who still go; Do be able to be talking about purpose? Like it's just kind of a financial vehicle for me. Like I don't really have one. I feel like I'm sort of artificially making when I go, which I understand. And it will be hard to, if you can't… the best performers are people who want to continue to grow and learn, that's why they're the best performers. So, if you can't offer them an environment where they can A) Contribute meaningfully, and B) Where they can save, well they are going to continue to get developed and they're going to grow through that process. Why would they join? It's a really… 

[00:55:34] Tony: Yeah, Sean, so true. We want to hire people that A) Have a level of professionalism, but they're genuinely curious people driven to make a positive difference in the lives of the people they engage with. Because to me, that's what selling is. You're making a positive difference in the life of your customer. And that's ethical selling and that's something you can feel proud of and enjoy doing.

[00:55:56] Sean: Tony, I absolutely am so grateful for your time today. That's been just full of gold for our audience. So, thank you very much. How can people get in touch, follow along with what you're doing? Where would you sort of direct them to for more information and how to sort of follow the journey? 

[00:56:11] Tony: Yeah. So, if they're wanting any tools or want to learn about these concepts, go to www.salesIQglobal.com. You can connect with me in LinkedIn to just search for Tony Hughes. Well, Tony J Hughes in LinkedIn. Also my personal website, www.Tonyhughes.com.au has got lots of webinar recordings, podcasts, videos, just lots of free content there and details about the books.

[00:56:38] Sean: Perfect. That is wonderful. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed the show today And I'm absolutely sure you will have… Gigantic thanks to Tony Hughes. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with the podcast. And remember, you know, Founders who are listening to this. The only thing that can actually prevent you from even having the possibility you might be sitting here, listening and go. Wow. I've got a lot of work to do on my sales process on the way that I train my salespeople or pre pre-work. I need to do before I even hire the next person. But remember, in the context of where it is that you're striving to get to, the only thing that's actually going to completely prevent you from getting there is giving up on the path. So, you've got to stay completely unshakable in your faith that you going to get there, adaptable in your approach. And if you're thinking that sales is going to be a bit of a place that you need to be spending some time, I suggest most of you will be saying, “yep, that's me.” You've got an amazing resource to kick you off today. So, thanks very much, Tony. 

[00:57:30] Tony: Sean. I've got to add one last thing because you just raised. When you design your sales process, make sure it's aligned with your buyer's journey. Really, really important. So, thanks, Sean. It was great being on the show. Thank you so much. 

[00:57:43] Sean: Pleasure. Thanks so much chat to you all next week. Thanks. Thanks, Tony.

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