Speaker 1:

Hi, and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, where we get perspectives from industry thought leaders about strategies that are unifying marketing and sales cycles to help accelerate growth inside your world.

Simon Hazeldine:

Welcome to The Insiders sales and marketing podcast. I’m Simon Hazeldine. I’m a Sales Transformation Strategist and Sales Performance Consultant, helping my clients to get more sales more often with more margin. I’m also a keynote speaker and author of seven books on sales and negotiation.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’m your host, along with my co-host, the one and only Richard Lane, Co-Founder of durhamlane, who are an inside sales partner that helps businesses grow their revenue through an integrated sales and marketing methodology. Richard, great to be back in the Insiders studio with you again, and it’s your privilege to introduce our guest for this episode. So over to you, Sir.

Richard Lane:

Thank you, Simon. Great to be back recording another pod and thrilled to be joined today by Franklin Williams. Franklin is Director of Global Commercial Excellence at Thermo Fisher Scientific. So, Franklin, welcome, really looking forward to our conversation today, and I’ll hand it back to Simon to get us started.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Thanks Richard. So, Franklin – welcome to The Insiders. Great to have you with us. What we’d like to do as we do at the start of all of our episodes; could you just give a little bit of background, a little bit of career background and how you came to be in the role you are in currently? So our listeners can get to know you a little bit.

Franklin Williams:

Yeah, sure. And thanks for having me here today. I’ve been in sales my whole career. I mean, I graduated in 2006, 2007 and went straight into sales at Cisco Systems. Did Big Enterprise in Big Tech, moved into consulting back into sales leadership, and back into consulting. And most recently I was a consultant at a sales and revenue consultancy called Skaled Consulting, where we handled hundreds of both large and small clients. And I ended up finding an organization that I wanted to see the work that we’d done through.

Franklin Williams:

And when our engagement came up and a role came open, that seemed like the right fit. It was basically the extension of what I’d been doing. So, I stepped in, took the role last June and it’s been an absolutely spectacular ride since which lands me here. And honestly, I’ll just say it’s a lot of fun pivoting and injecting really modern sales behaviors into Megacorp. And going through that transformational exercise, it’s been a wild ride so far.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wow. I love it. Modern sales behaviors. We may return to that a little bit later, Franklin, I think. On your LinkedIn profile, I was having a look before we came on air, you mentioned everyone is a seller. Could you expand on what you mean by that?

Franklin Williams:

Yeah, yeah, sure. There’s two things embedded in that statement, right? Number one, everybody can impact the bottom line in an organization. I used to work with a firm where literally everybody had a target. You had to do some sort of bottom-line impacting behaviour in your role, whether it was outreach or reducing spend or doing something. But every role had some sort of a commission tied to it, and I love that. It was driven by their CRO. It was supported by their CEO and it really put everybody’s focus on the ability to impact not just selling, but also your numbers as a whole.

Franklin Williams:

Too many organizations get really focused in their specific skill set and their specific behavior and don’t think about the organization as a whole. And at this sort of skill, empowers them to both go out and do some sort of selling behavior, and we’ll get to that in a second, or even internally figure out how to support revenue generation and bookings generation by thinking about their function outside the box and the impact it can have on commercial teams.

Franklin Williams:

Secondly, and this one, I think, is where you were really going. Social is everywhere, right? Social is the reality of today and frankly drives selling behaviors faster and more impactfully with no real spend. You put aside a little bit of time in everyone’s schedule and give them a task to do putting that out in the world. And you look at tools like LinkedIn in the states and Europe and various other tools across the rest of the world where you can get in, share your thoughts, share your perspective, and get folks to empathize with you. And it’s almost like a value-driven presale behavior that everybody in a business can do.

Franklin Williams:

Again, finance can do it, go out, talk about how using their product can impact an organization’s budgeting or structure or spend, or even just help drive up EBITDA by driving down spend in other behaviors to allow you to hire more sales people or redefine how your product is positioned on the market. You can get ops people in there doing something similar, even engineers sharing their perspective and getting people to think, “Hey, these guys know what they’re talking about.” It becomes the most powerful lead engine. And I’ll tell you, we drank our own Kool-Aid. My last firm, 95% of our inbound leads came from social selling.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wow.

Franklin Williams:

The amount that we spent on outbound efforts was infinitesimal compared to our CEO and our selling staff getting out there. And not just our selling staff, selling, marketing, our operations teams, just posting their thoughts. All of a sudden, you’ve got people reaching out or reaching back out to say, “Hey, we need more from you,” or, “We need some work from you,” or, “Hey, we know that you’re a specialist at this behavior. Can you help us?” And that took maybe two hours a week and generated millions of dollars. So, I’m a firm believer that social is today’s number one activity, but it needs to be driven by marketing and then upward toward leadership to get that behavior embedded in an organization as a required action.

Simon Hazeldine:

I mean, it’s great to hear you say that. That’s a fantastic success coming from social. I work with a number of clients in that area and sometimes, well, we’re very busy. This doesn’t take very long, right? It just doesn’t take very long at all. And I think for example, you mentioned engineers and I sometimes say to clients, engineers are like your secret sales force because the customer doesn’t regard them as the sales person, they engage with them sometimes in an entirely different way.

Richard Lane:

They talk the same language, don’t they? That’s the [inaudible 00:06:58].

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. They do, they do. Richard for from durhamlane social for you.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. Well, frankly it sounds like a real best practice case there. I was just thinking of the change curve, Simon, as we were, listening to that point there, because I think it’s absolutely true that everybody should be an evangelist for their company. You can help grow the business in many different ways, because it might be through saving dollars or it might be making dollars. Social has opened up the world for everyone in terms of how they can promote their organization. And we do our best to do that. I think we’ve got some rigor to install that Franklin just talked about there, it needs to be sponsored at every level. It’s something we are working on hard because it’s about reputation, with post pandemic trust and reputation is becoming probably one of the key drivers now at the very top of the sales funnel. So everyone has a part that they can play in that.

Simon Hazeldine:

And I think also, Franklin, with you getting everybody involved, you are potentially activating everybody’s professional network, aren’t you? Which is quite significant if you add all of those together. That’s a fantastic source and an amazing best practice for organizations to follow and on the subjects of social selling, when we were having a conversation in our sort of pre-interview you said your focus is on having outbound organic content versus canned content. Can you expand on that? Those definitions and why they’re so important.

Franklin Williams:

Yeah. And actually, let’s even go back a little bit further, right? People ask why bother on LinkedIn? I mean, I got to tell you, and this will all lead… I promise this’ll lead to something in a second, right? It’s a network that’s literally updated by users themselves. No one’s spending money to try and get these folks to update their data. They’re telling you actively, this is what I’m doing. And ironically, it was started by the whole trend of LinkedIn’s my resume. People wanted to go in and update it and make it appear that way. So they’ve been telling you for years what they’re doing and where they are. Now, it’s not your resume. Right now, LinkedIn is literally a place to drive trust through your profile. But when you think about the content we’re being shared, this exactly aligns to what you’re calling out, right?

Franklin Williams:

Canned content feels like, “I don’t care enough to go and put something out in the world?” Great. We’re going to go out and we’re going to go send out all this stuff and I’m just going to reshare this. I don’t care about what your business has to say. In effect, everything your company is putting out in terms of canned, being someone else made this, you’re resharing this at the behest of your business. Typically, it’s a mobile advertisement, right? It’s a piece of advert that they’ve put in a package of white paper or a PR event or whatever that delivers no real value to your reader. As sellers, we talk about value all day long. And at the end of the day, we care about what our customers value. So, when I get an In Message, when I get the link laid in a pitch-driven, product heavy message.

Franklin Williams:

When I see, “Hey, this company’s doing this. Look over here.” It’s an advert. It’s the effect of walking down the street in New York City and seeing something on the side of a bus. I don’t care. I ignore it. And I’m thinking about the sandwich I want to get down the street.

The good organic content is the stuff that you write about yourself. What did you do on that sales call you were on? What was something you thought about when you talked to someone at work today? What’s your career been like? What happened to you? Did you just get fired? What’s the impact there? It’s what your customer wants to hear. Now, unfortunately, folks have taken this a little bit too far. They’re posting very personal things on LinkedIn. They’re family, some somebody got sick, “Oh, I got laid off, but I have this thing that got me laid off,” or very social opinions.

Franklin Williams:

When we talk about LinkedIn, we don’t mean in the sense of social network that it’s for you to share your very immediate, personal life. It’s a place where you go and you share your thoughts, feelings, and opinions about your or other businesses and how that impacts other businesses or markets aligned to your customer. It’s not a space for clickbait. Clickbait is literally what gets people to ignore you. And it’s funny, I think about where I pay attention on LinkedIn. It’s not the shares. It’s not the canned content and it’s not the personal content that doesn’t relate to something that I care about. It’s the stuff that’s like, “Hey, I was on a call last week and this came up,” or, “The market’s doing this, how are you perceiving it?” That gets us to engage. So really, again, it’s what your customers think about.

Franklin Williams:

It’s how they’re engaging. It’s what they might want to engage with. And then it’s really done in a way that makes you thoughtful. Right? How does someone look at you and think of you as a thoughtful, intelligent individual with something to share back to the market? I just want to highlight that we’re in this nice middle ground right now, but as you think through that social strategy really think about, have you not gone far enough in sharing your perspective or have you gone too far and diluted the value of that social attachment and frankly of all the work that you’ve done to attract people to your profile?

Franklin Williams:

One final note, the LinkedIn algorithm does promote people, sharing thoughtful engagement items. When it sees too many people engaging, making the same comment or arguing back and forth, you get demoted. Similarly, too many shares and too much can content, your posts get demoted. Thoughtful, structured comment, driven engagement that’s not overly shared, gets promoted. We want to grab onto that as much as we can, get a lot of engagement, but not be so engaged that it looks like we’re just sharing content that’s driven to get shares.

Simon Hazeldine:

That’s a wonderful, short, sharp masterclass, I think in social selling content Franklin. And then there’s some really, really important points. I mean, sometimes if I’m working with salespeople on this and they’ll say, “What do I share?” And I normally say, “What are you doing day to day? Who are you talking to about what, what questions are they asking? What challenges have they got?” And normally you’ve got a very rich, real-life genuine as well, which helps them connect you as a person without sharing that your pet rabbit is not very well or something, which I think is best, best left to Facebook rather than on LinkedIn.

Franklin Williams:

That’s right.

Simon Hazeldine:

And I know you’ve got obviously some strong views on social, which is great. And also, I know you’ve got some strong views on tech and how it could be used. And I know the subject of tech is a hot topic with listeners to The Insiders. So, I’d love to get your thoughts on that.

Franklin Williams:

Yeah. I mean, I could talk about this for hours, right? Technology goes two ways, right? It’s strategy in, results out. Folks like to just drop technology in because it’s technology, it sounds interesting, it sounds good, but you have to have strategy behind it. The goal for me of technology is to do two things. It’s to drive behavior and to drive output, you define your technology stack based on the behavior you’d like to drive. And then you define how you go through that behavior to the output you want to get out on the other side.

Franklin Williams:

So my perspective is that it underpins everything we do, right? We build our competencies and our methodologies and our processes and our behaviors and our reporting into it. And by creating those gates and requirements, you can literally force people to do things by giving them certain amounts of leeway, to do what they know that they do best, but also to provide you the data and the information that you need to have in order to be a thoughtful, intelligent organization.

Franklin Williams:

I’ve seen hundreds of Salesforce instances, HubSpot instances, dynamics, NetSuite instances, and they all do the same thing. They have a page. Well, not all of them, many do the same thing. It’s a page with lots of data for data’s sake. And people fill out as little as they possibly can because, and I say this being in sales for decades, we are lazy people. We want to do as little as possible to get the highest amount of output. That’s just good business; do as little as you can to get the best results that you can on the other side. And it’s okay. But that means that on the op side and the tech side, our job is to make that little as possible. Exactly what we want and to make it feel like it’s not a burden. And the biggest reason CRMs have become a stressor is because we’ve made the data that we have to fill out hard to get, “Oh, tell us the amount they want to spend, who are the people listed out? Give us all the requirements in here this broad text field.”

Franklin Williams:

There’s no pick lists. We don’t do thoughtful, gating, all of our things are built in a way that’s kind of frustrating. If we don’t get that data, we can’t move on. So it behooves us to then create the questions that we ask in a way that become intrinsic behaviors that our people have to do. Hey, we know that as a top tip top funnel, we have to know who the basic people are. And if we have a next meeting, so maybe if I click, yes, the next meeting was scheduled. It gives me a date field. And then I can’t move on until I fill out the date field. So I can mandate that somebody will give me a meeting time before we move on.

Franklin Williams:

On the other hand, I could note, “Hey, I got off this call.” I can’t convert this lead until the person gives me a date. And then you go and you convert the lead and it goes to an opportunity and the rep won’t accept it, or it can’t proceed until that date is filled out. I mean, it’s basic things like that. And recently as a huge boom, Salesforce opened up a new feature, which is expand as you fill, which it hadn’t done in the past. So you can literally say, when this is done, you get the next options, but you have to be thoughtful about not making people feel like they’re being overburdened in those basic behaviours.

Simon Hazeldine:

I mean, I think sometimes in the quest to get, for example, opportunities, well-qualified salespeople have to fill out, as you’re saying, endless data fields, don’t they? Whereas you are talking about really drilling it down to the key, most important ones and making it as simple as possible for the lazy salespeople. I think I resemble that remark, Franklin, to do it as quickly and easily as possible.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. It’s funny what you should say, because actually durhamlane really exists, Franklin, because I met Lee Durham at a course I was delivering all those years ago and we got talking about creating a CRM system designed by salespeople for salespeople, which is exactly your point. We started researching that as we had our two little consultancies together and realized that neither of us was vaguely technical so that wasn’t going to help. It was quite a crowded marketplace already. So, we did something different, which is where you get durhamlane, but it is so true that rubbish in, rubbish out. You’ve got to make it easy. I think CRM was really being designed by technical people for management. And that doesn’t really then sit well with a busy sales professional that wants to make the best use of their time, Simon, not necessarily that they’re lazy, I would say.

Franklin Williams:

Yeah. It’s an unfair term, right? But you get what I mean, right? We want to do as little as we can with the biggest impact and… My old boss used to say to me and the reason that I get this term is he used to joke when he was saying it, right? Like, “I’m the laziest guy I’ll ever meet. I want to do as little as I can with the biggest impact.” And it struck a chord with me. We all want that. Businesses are good when they want that because it means you’re being efficient. You’re maximizing output. There’s actually a modus that I’ve been beginning to operate by, which is if I can’t do it on the train from my phone, it’s not simple enough. If I can’t whip out my phone and click a couple of buttons, click the accept button and move on, it’s too hard. Now, when I get back to my desk, yeah. I want the whole picture. I want to see the whole thing, but it’s got to be easy because otherwise people just won’t do it.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s a good test. It’s a great idea, but also that’s the way everything is going, right? Everybody more and more is via smartphone. Field base sales people are probably not going to crack their laptop open, right? It’s going to be tablet at best. So I think, making that, can I do it on the phone, on the train test? I think it’s a great takeaway maybe for listeners to consider. Now, The Insiders is obviously sales or marketing podcast. And as you would imagine, Franklin, the hot topic with our listeners is the never-ending conversation about the alignment and or the connection between sales and marketing. We’ve had everything from warring factions to beautiful, beautiful partnerships discussed. How are you approaching that kind of topic from your perspective?

Franklin Williams:

Yeah, this is a real big, hot topic. And it has been for so long and you make a really good point, right? We typically see marketing and sales having completely polar goals. We’re just leads in; we don’t care about the results. All we do is we make leads and then sales is saying, but your leads are bad. And marketing’s saying, we don’t care how good the leads are. Or maybe it’s you that’s bad sales. At the end of the day, someone’s always to blame. You know, my first strategy is the obvious one, which everyone says that they do, but they do badly: feedback loops. You have to have solid feedback loops. And the way that people fail at these is that they’re not formalized. Your first feedback loop is often sellers to content, what’s working, what’s not working. What are you seeing convert? Digitize this, have something like a high spot that feeds the data out through Salesforce.

Franklin Williams:

So your reps, can’t just hand someone old content. It’s got to go through your tools. And then it’s trackable. Similarly, have sellers give campaign feedback. How did it go? Where did we win? Where did we miss? The biggest gap is that sellers often don’t go the whole way through a campaign and we don’t have a metric to track it. I can’t tell you how many massive thousand person selling teams. I’ve seen that don’t have something like a sales loft or an outreach in place that can give those analytics around winning, losing, et cetera, and can allow us to AB test. If you have a BDR SDR team, they’re intrinsically tied into marketing, right? Marketing should be developing the outbound strategy for these teams.

Franklin Williams:

It’s a mistake to have your sales teams do it. They don’t know marketing’s outbound strategy in what’s already happening today, and they can’t. Now you could have a BDR leader or a dedicated person on your team do it, but then they have to be in lockstep with marketing as well. If they’re out of that connective loop, everything begins to fall apart. Then you have to do some deliberate things, right? Test your quality of lead. Look at what’s actually converting and what’s not. And bring that back to your AB testing. What works? How do we change? How do we iterate? What are our timelines for conversion? Where are we dropping the ball? Is sales taking too long to get to our leads? Is there a bottleneck in marketing? We often see that some, even small organizations take such a long time to get converted leads from marketing to sales that again, marketing’s saying, “Well, sales didn’t convert,” and sales is pointing back at marketing and saying, “Well, you just left the leads on the table.”

Franklin Williams:

So managing all of those things very carefully is critical. And, and to me, again, this all comes from in integrating your tech stack. Whatever your marketing tool is to your CRM, to your outbound automation tools, they have to be functioning together and ideally feeding into one dashboard. Whether it’s a power BI or whatever you want to use based on your CRM, that data has to have a core home. And even if you don’t have a data scientist, someone has to be doing all of that number crunching.

Franklin Williams:

You’re starting to see this change a little bit more and more with more agile orgs, right? There’s this view, especially for things like inside sales, that inside selling teams can be more agile and strategic. And I mean, we can get into this later, right? But inside sales is doing more than ever to manage more of the sales process, which is sort of a pivot from that BDR SDR definition, just two or three years ago, which is almost going back to where we used to be, right? Where inside sales was just an augment from some of these outsourced orgs to do cheaper sales, that weren’t technically inhouse.

Franklin Williams:

We’re going a little bit back to that older mentality, but we’re taking with us some of those SDR BDR behaviors that align back to that critical marketing tie. Now, I do want to go back to something quickly, which is that the biggest way to get marketing in line with the rest of your org? The number one way from my perspective is to comp them on some amount of bookings or revenue generation.

Franklin Williams:

What are your leads converting into? And we give them some time out. We give them six months, three to six months, depending on your sales cycle, but we want to see what they’re working on convert. The slower the sales cycle, the longer we have to give them to get there. But we want to be able to say, “Look, after a year, marketing, only 40% of your leads are converting and they’re only small deals,” or, “Hey, marketing, you’re doing great. All of your leads or 80% of your leads are converting and they’re big.”

Franklin Williams:

But then you might turn around and say, “Okay, we’re leaving a lot on the table,” that we need to go pick up because there’s a long tail that we should also be addressing and picking up. And then it lets you kind of pivot and adjust and work with all the little bits and pieces that you have to create that holistic [inaudible 00:25:21] approach. The other thing I’ll note is that sales often get frustrated with marketing based on where they’re targeting. And over time we want to work to address the total addressable market, as opposed to these little spits and spurts and segments. And one of the things that drives me nuts is when sales says, “We’ll get the big leads over here, we’ll deal with the big strategic accounts.” And then marketing is relegated to all the small stuff at the end.

Franklin Williams:

And that just doesn’t work right? It’s number one, it segments the market in a way that basically says that your teams aren’t allowed to manage the full breadth of what they’re capable of targeting. And two, it makes the assumption that either one of these organizations can do everything, which we know that we can’t. And then you end up with a lot of bickering with folks saying, “Well, we could have done that. Why didn’t you let us do it?” And that’s not a good approach. So from my perspective, when I think marketing the biggest way to get it to work aside from comp is to align it underneath your CRO VP of sales, et cetera.

Franklin Williams:

Putting it under an operations lead or a product lead, which happens a lot, bifurcates the target that marketing is running for. Where in my perspective, all marketing really truly is, is tippy top of funnel to feed into top of funnel, right? It’s really the funnel to your SDR team or your sales team or whomever. And all of the other componentry that marketing brings to the table is empowerment to your selling functions to continue to improve and to continue to get more leads or close deals faster. So, aside from comp, which would come from a VP of sales alignment anyway, making sure that they’re tied to the same leadership. So there’s one cohesive strategy is hypercritical.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I think we’ve had that come out a few times with interviews about reporting into the same leader under the CRO seems to be quite a trend at the moment. And Richard, in integrated sales marketing methodology is your bread and butter in durhamlane. So, your perspective on Franklin’s comments?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, totally lined Simon. About a year and a half ago, we created a RevOps function in durhamlane. So that’s for our selling unit is customer success, new business sales and marketing. So our marketing team absolutely know when a deal is closed that they’ve been a part of. So that speaks to what Franklin was staying there. I think the other thing from the business services that we provide to our customers, I tasked our team a quarter ago. I said, right, there’s a UK phrase, Franklin, “You eat your own dog foods.” Hopefully that resonates. We spend a lot of time talking about the integration of marketing and sales, MQL to SQL. So we now publish quarterly the rates that we are achieving on behalf of our customers. And so we’ve had our first quarterly report published.

Richard Lane:

We converted 34% of our client MQL into SQL last month, 25% on average, across the quarter. We’re going to publicly produce that every quarter and just tell the world what we’re achieving, because I read that across enterprise, it’s typically between 1 and 2%. So there’s a significant misalignment that I think we’ve got an obligation to try and bust the myth that it shouldn’t be way, way better than that. That’s available, we could put it as a link to this podcast probably, but I think by going public on that, then it also drives our business to make sure we are totally focused on making that happen as well on a daily, hourly basis.

Simon Hazeldine:

And Franklin, I think your comment on comp, we were doing an interview recently with one of our other guests who sort of come out of a history of sales roles into more of a marketing role and was very shocked not to have any targets for the first time. And she sort of said, “Gosh, how do I know whether I’ve had a good week or not,” which I thought was an interesting, really interesting perspective on having that outcome driven part. Also, you were mentioning inside sales. And I know you told us previously, you had a view of it that was different to your industry. So what was that difference?

Franklin Williams:

Yeah. Inside sales in this and a lot of other really large industries is typically trying to think of a really thoughtful way to put this. I mean, it’s really that older school, look we’re small, cheaper, lower cost sales people. I don’t want to say more modern because it’s changed again, but that more startupy feel of, “Hey, our job is only top of funnel that typical SDR BDR experience doesn’t really exist.” And I’ve seen enough enterprises to know this is a very high trend, especially physical product and service organizations that aren’t selling software or license-driven items where you just need to capture somebody’s attention. And the spend can be very fast if you’re structured in a way that enables that. So, my experience has been, as we move towards selling software, we absolutely need to start to pivot, right?

Franklin Williams:

It’s so critical that we recognize that inside sales needs to start approaching the market and be a little bit more strategic about that approach, but be a partner to our field sales teams. Now, I do want to note inside sales has changed in the last three or so years predominantly due to the pandemic, although slightly before that it was changing as well. But what I like to highlight to people, and I had these thoughts probably about four years ago, pre pandemic, that inside sales wasn’t making sense anymore. But it became really prevalent during the pandemic where hiring and young isn’t really the issue, but unskilled, untrained, low cost, B skill sales people, or people who have never been in sales, but want to dabble because they’re cheap, but can be trained to follow a script to do sales.

Franklin Williams:

Our buyers are just too smart. They’re too sophisticated, and what we’re starting to see, and what I’m seeing is older not because they’re older, but because they’re more experienced, slightly more expensive, remote sales, people who love outbound, they’re tough, they’ve got grit, they know what’s required to do this sort of work. They can look at their metrics and pivot. Those people are bringing more impact to modern field sales that I can even begin to explain.

Franklin Williams:

Because what they’re able to do, number one is understand really what they’re selling. Number two, they’ve seen outbound before. So they understand the bigger pattern of outbound top of funnel selling. Number three, because they’ve got more experience, they understand business and the questions that they’re able to answer don’t feel quite so scripted. They’re able to get in, ask questions, ask the impact of their industry and the behavior of the client or prospect. They can really begin to dig. And four, they can do a little more than just tip-top funnel.

Franklin Williams:

They can often qualify, do a little discovery. Sometimes they can even reach out to existing clients and dig because they have experience in a space that they can really leverage to grab onto and ask the right questions. And it makes them a good partner to a customer success team. Great. They’ve started to identify these things. You work together, you can do that outbound. You can be the early stage seller before you’re ramping things back up and passing it back off to a field team again.

Franklin Williams:

So depending on your setup, I’m just recognizing over and over again that at least for me and when I look at this space, it’s becoming more of an augment to sales with the skill of sales, but a refinement in top of funnel, as opposed to being a throwaway group that works or doesn’t, and then you just get lucky. But again, deliberate spending, not arbitrary hiring because they’re there and because they’re cheap.

Simon Hazeldine:

It’s a more thoughtful approach, isn’t it? And I think certainly, you referenced COVID and I think suddenly everybody was inside sales for a while, and I think that’s probably shaken things up and a few viewpoints about what’s possible for an inside sales function to achieve and do, which is going to be really interesting to see how that can continues to develop. So, Richard, do you want to just… Any thoughts from a wrap-up from your point of view? Key things you want to call out?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. I mean, there’s been lots to unwrap there, Franklin, so thank you so much for the conversation with Simon and myself. I think we started from pivoting modern sales behaviors into global enterprise. I think one thing we see is that global enterprises are complex and there’s certainly an opportunity to help them modernize how they sell significantly. I love the idea that everybody has a responsibility to sell. We’ve always had that inside of durhamlane. We’ve trained many engineers, Simon, I think you brought them, we’ve trained them in Selling at a Higher Level.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes.

Richard Lane:

So, just giving them the confidence to ask some questions and have a conversation and guess what? It turns into revenue and they go, “Well, why didn’t someone tell me this before?” So that’s been always an interesting one. We’ve had some good chat around, and I think some key takeaways for our listeners around the tech that enables sales teams to be successful.

Richard Lane:

And I think we’re still some way off that connectedness, Franklin, in terms of the tech stack, really being a connected tech stack rather than just a tech stack and a load of different technologies that people have invested in, maybe use a small percentage of, but I think we’re all together on the least amount of work for the biggest output. If someone came with a CRM system now that allowed us intuitively to document a deal cycle without us having to do any more work than the work we’re doing with the customer, then that would be a killer idea.

Richard Lane:

And then final piece I liked was that idea of the feedback loop. We’re totally on board with that. I talk about us as being the middleware that connects marketing and sales. That connection point is so critical that you don’t waste the money that you’re spending, getting the right people interested in you, how do you then take that and move that forward? So lots of takeaways, I’d suggest.

Richard Lane:

Really great to have you on The Insiders podcast, Franklin. Thank you so much from Simon and myself. And we will maybe check in with you in a while down the line and see what progress has been made. That would be be great.

Franklin Williams:

Yeah, certainly.

Simon Hazeldine:

Franklin, did you have a possible song or track to go on The Insiders’ playlist just while we’ve got you? If not, we can come back to you on that one.

Franklin Williams:

You know, I did. And it’s something that my whole family has been enjoying. One of my favorite artists for the last couple years, have been this woman Melody Gardot, and she did a cover of The Bare Necessities, that song from the Jungle Book years ago.

Simon Hazeldine:

Jungle Book.

Franklin Williams:

And it’s just so… I mean, I could listen to that track a hundred times. She and the individual that she’s sang it with are just so talented. I would encourage everybody to go take a listen.

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic. Guess where I’m headed on YouTube as soon as we’ve finished with this one. Because I love the movie and I love that song from when I was a kid. So, to see a cover version will be fantastic.

Franklin Williams:

Yeah. There’s a whole album of jazz Disney-

Simon Hazeldine:

Jazz Disney.

Franklin Williams:

… which we discovered and it’s just so good. I mean, literally we’ve put it on by accident and, I kid you not, it was on the radio for a solid month.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. This playlist will be a voyage of discovery. The Insiders playlist without a shadow of a doubt. Thanks so much for your time, Franklin. Really appreciate it.

Franklin Williams:

My pleasure.

Simon Hazeldine:

So thank you very much for joining us on this episode of The Insiders. Please make sure you subscribe. So you get notified of new episodes, which we are recording and releasing on a regular basis. So thanks for listening in folks. Good luck with all your sales and marketing.

Speaker 1:

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