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 get more sales, more often with more margin. I’m also our keynote speaker and author of several books on sales and negotiation. I’m your host, along with my co-host, the one and only Richard Lane, who is the Co-Founder of durhamlane, who are an inside sales partner that helps businesses grow their revenue through an integrated sales and marketing methodology. So, Richard, great to be back in The Insiders studio with you and our guest, which will be wonderful if you could introduce them to our listeners, please.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, hi Simon, great to be back, as you say. Well, I’m thrilled to introduce today’s guest, we’ve got Neil Ritchie, welcome to the podcast, Neil. Neil is Head of Global Marketing and Sales at Motion Services at ABB, an absolutely huge enterprise organization. Really looking forward to hearing Neil’s view of the world, from inside that sort of a company and how it relates to sales and how we do what we do. So, Neil, welcome.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, thanks Richard, thanks Simon. Pleased to be here.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. So, Neil, what we normally ask our guests to do is just provide a little bit of background so that the folks listening in can get to know you a little bit. If you can give us a little bit about your background and how you came to be in the role that you’re in currently, that would be wonderful.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, I’ve worked for ABB for… I think it’s 33 years now, in various roles. Prior to that, I used to work for, it used to be British Steel, but Tata Steel for 11 years, so I’ve been the customer as well as the supplier in these kind of arrangements. And my career in ABB has traveled through mainly in parallel of the sales function and the service function almost, throughout my entire career. And in the last few years, looking after the division for what’s now Motion in the UK and Ireland, which included robotics and included EV charging as well as the motors and drives. And right now, Motion, which is motors, drives and our digital solutions has evolved into seven divisions, and one of which is the service division, which I’m heading up for the marketing and sales function.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful, thank you, that’s given a good insight, and I think it’s very interesting if you’ve worked, what we might describe as both sides of the buying table, as a customer and supplier, I think that’s quite a useful thing for marketing and sales professionals to get some experience of, so great you’ve done that. And I’ve been doing a little bit of snooping around, I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and I noticed that you put this comment there that you said: “I bring strategy to life and execution is everything”. I’d be fascinated to know a little bit about that because I know that the actual execution of a sales and or marketing strategy is often not quite what… It doesn’t quite achieve the results people would like, making it happen is the real tough stuff. I’d be really interested how you approach that in terms of successful execution.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m quite a simple person in actual fact, so I take that into the role and I take it into the business. And I’ve generally followed three principles if you like, that have served me well and led to some success, certainly around strategy and implementing initiatives. The first one is; get the right people, and I think that might sound simple and it is, but I think you do have to pay real attention to getting the right people. I mean in today’s society, people come to interviews and they interview the company, as much as we interview the person. So, it’s got to be a person that can do the job, but also fit the organization, they’ve got to be happy in that environment. Finding the right people is number one, number two is then getting those people to do the right things, making sure that there’s a role that creates impact and can deliver.

Neil Ritchie:

And the say-do ratio is high, so the people have to be doing the right things, either the roles or the tasks or the communities that they’re working in, they have to do the right things. And then the final point is to keep it simple. And again, it’s dead easy in a large organization to comply, but I think that part of my role is to try and make sense of complications and complex situations, and really keeping it simple is important. I mean, an example in the strategy, we’ve got energy efficiency high on the agenda, and we take a very pragmatic approach, looking at it from the customer’s perspective. So, take the right decisions, mitigate risks, and implement change, that’s the process that seems very simple again, but there’s obviously products that we’ve developed behind that, services that we’ve developed behind that, the process of how we engage with customers to understand what their needs are. But again, a simple process and trying to keep it so that in a global organization, the different people with different language skills and different cultures, equally with customers, it does make a difference.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, it’s very interesting. I used to have a CEO where I used to work when I had a proper job and he always would go on and on about: “We need to simplify this, we need to simplify this”, and this was almost his mantra. And it’s more of a challenge isn’t it, than people think? Complex is easier than simple, sounds crazy, but it’s…

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, I remember… It’s strange, there’s not that much I remember from school, but one thing I do remember from school is being the kid in the class that was a little bit hesitant to ask the stupid questions. But when I became a professional, I realized that asking the stupid questions became a really powerful part of my role. And I realized that there were other people in the room that probably were hesitant to asking those stupid questions, but did want to know the answers. So, I think asking a simple question might not necessarily get a simple answer, but certainly drives towards that objective.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, it’s the quote unquote, “Simple question”, and then there is total silence, isn’t there, in the room while everybody goes, “Oh, that’s a good question”, so… It’s yeah. And Richard, from a durhamlane perspective, what’s your perspective on actually getting a sales or marketing strategy to come to life if you like, when it hits the streets?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I’m still sitting here listening to you guys and thinking of the philosophical complexity is easier than simple. We could talk all day on that I think, couldn’t we, but our job really is to simplify, our job with our customers is to take their products and services typically into… Not always, but typically into new markets. Simple resonates, complex doesn’t. So, it’s absolutely fundamental that when we are building our go to market plans, when we are taking our customers through onboarding, we keep it simple, and I think we’ve practiced that, and we preach it and we practice that, and I believe that’s true today.

Richard Lane:

I think the key to any message is making it accessible, and we have to be able to do that, not just for our customers, but also for our Sales Execs that are taking the message to the market. Then we need to draw out of our customers their message, and then simplify it so that we can then take that forward. So, it’s a complex process to get started. We’ve learned that onboarding well is what makes the difference, and so we put a huge amount of time and effort into that process and it really pays back dividends.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I think having a very, very good onboarding process has to be a priority I think for organizations. It’s often done quite badly, and then takes the person ages to get up to some required level of performance. And Neil, you were mentioning obviously ABB, big global organization, how do you approach business development?

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, and I’m just speaking on behalf of the division that I operate in, but it does reflect most of ABB’s principles I think, in that we drive the strategy and the direction globally. We would develop the products and the services and the support infrastructure and the tools, et cetera. But actually, we really act locally, and we really do the business with the customers locally. And the reason for that is that we want to be as close to the customer as possible so we can listen and learn, and we can be agile in developing a solution or delivering a response. So being close to the customer is really important to us, and we wouldn’t pretend in a global organization, global role, that we know what every customer wants in every single country.

Neil Ritchie:

And it comes back to the value proposition, what one customer will value might be different to another. So being close to the customers locally is really important in terms of the business development. And then of course, what we have to do is we have to make sure that we join those two pieces together, we have to make sure that the global supports the local business, the local business follows the global strategy, and the marketing and sales function and communications is a key part of the glue, in fact, the glue, that brings that together and makes sure that the go to market activities are done in a consistent and harmonious way.

Simon Hazeldine:

That’s fascinating, I think the whole concept of value selling and value propositions, if you find out what the customer values and show them that, then they’ll often pay for it with a higher price, as it was described to me one time. And if you talk about value in your terms, somebody said to me one time, you pay for it with a big discount. So, you have to find the discount, so it’s an interesting, interesting perspective, in what does the customer define as value? Not what we think it is, as sales or marketing professionals.

Neil Ritchie:

Value is an important topic that’s I think often misunderstood. I think that people talk about features, they talk about benefits, they talk about these kinds of things when we talk about value. But value is different to different people. What you value and what I value might be different, even on the same product you might value features more than I do, et cetera. And I think that it’s a topic that I am really fascinated with because it brings the psychology of sales into the equation as well, in asking the right questions and understanding what the challenges are of the customers. And I think only when you understand the challenge of the customer and their desires, can you then understand what the value is that you can offer.

Simon Hazeldine:

It occurs Neil all the time when we’re interviewing all these great guests that we have on The Insiders, around the customer centricity, the customer understanding, and it has to be like philosophy doesn’t it in the organization, not a tactical thing, you’ve either got to do it, or it just doesn’t work for you.

Richard Lane:

Neil, could I just bring us back to that global and local piece? I was really interested in that because I think you articulated really nicely the natural friction that exists, you have a global product and services creation, but then you’ve got a very local, customer driven experience. What happens when the global products and services that you’ve been created don’t fit your local customer base?

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, it’s a great question, and it does exist. We use the word ‘localization’ quite a lot in our business, that we try to develop solutions and services and tools that allow for localization. An example is that we don’t set the… If you look at the labor, we globally are not hiring the local people, but we do define what training programs we expect a local Service Engineer or a local Sales Manager to have. So, we set in a framework for the local business to operate within, but it’s really important that we give them enough trust and flexibility to work within that. So, there’s obvious tensions, but I think we consider the way we operate is almost omnichannel, where we are interested in end users because that’s where the installed base is, and that’s what we want to service.

Neil Ritchie:

We use multiple channels to service and target that customer, that can create tensions as well. But I think it’s all about managing it, I think that sometimes tension’s good, it challenges, it raises questions that if everybody agrees might not be raised. We don’t try to destroy the world of conflict, but what we try to do is give enough flexibility and trust to work in it, and also give a platform for people to raise their hand if they think that there’s some serious issue that we need to address.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. I mean, there’s always going to be a degree of tension in any organization and team, but if it’s positively focused, then that can be a good thing. And you mentioned we were having a conversation before we came on air to record this episode, and you mentioned that you have a great passion for coaching. What do you think is important when you’re coaching marketing and sales professionals, which is what our listeners would be managing or coaching?

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, I actually don’t think there’s that much difference whether you’re coaching a sales professional or a marketing professional, or a General Manager, or a Service Engineer or whatever. I think it’s about the individual, and I think coaching for me is about getting the people to get the best from themselves, and not for me to tell them what to do or to be an advisor, even, although that can be part of the coaching process. I think we want to inspire and motivate people through coaching, so it’s about trying to get them to be the best they can be and develop solutions for themselves. So, it’s spending time, giving advice around the topic, but not necessarily the answer, being a sounding board for ideas and thoughts, building confidence, building high performing teams, as well as part of the coaching in my mind that others learn from each other.

Neil Ritchie:

I think that’s why diversity is important; I think coaching can’t be… It’s got to be recognized as part of a manager’s role, whether it’s a sales manager or wherever, I think it’s really important to impart some of that learning. An interesting topic, I’ve been interviewing a lot of people recently, and we’ve talked about the question of what mistakes have you made and what successes have you had. And it’s quite interesting, almost all the mistakes examples that are given are early in people’s career, almost all the successes that people give are later in people’s career. If I were a scientist, I could argue that there is a correlation between learning from your mistakes, but definitely the whole topic of experience comes with learning, and coaching is part of that.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, it’s always a fascinating topic, absolute passion of mine. Richard, I know you make extensive use of coaching, don’t you, for your team, so it’d be great just to get your perspective on that.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, we really early on in the life of durhamlane, we embedded the 70:20:10 learning model into our business, that’s all around how do you harness informal learning, very coaching centric. So: 70:20:10, for those not initiated means that 10% of what we learn is through formal education, might be a course or reading a book, 20% through structured coaching, so we have structured coaching for every single one of our 115 employees. Everybody has a structured coaching program that they take part in, and then 70% where the rubber hits the road is when you are learning, doing the job. That’s being supported in role, that’s been challenging over the last few years.

Richard Lane:

We’ve had some exciting challenges to overcome from this whole hybrid work that we’ve moved to, we went overnight to a virtual place where we still have to provide the coaching. So, we’ve enabled technologies to help us do that, et cetera, but at the end of the day, everyone has to believe in it, everyone has to see the value in it, and once they become part of it, I like to think that happens. It becomes self-fulfilling as a philosophy and a way that we operate, and the 70:20:10 has – I think – really worked for us in that regard.

Simon Hazeldine:

I mean, Neil, when you mentioned part of a manager’s job, I realized how fortunate I was to end up working for an FMCG organization where you were coached extensively as a salesperson. When I became a Sales Manager, I was trained to coach and was supposed to be out there coaching four days… And as I moved onwards and upwards, I realized how lucky I was at a very early stage to be absolutely immersed in coaching as a concept, both as a coachee and as a coach. And it’s always interesting working with lots of different organizations to see where they get it, and maybe where it’s not quite as understood, because it is such a powerful way. The 70:20:10 is a great framework, but it’s definitely the managers, the coach, I think is the key point. And you mentioned diversity, and also pre-conversation you also said you’re a believer in diversity in practice. So, what are you doing at ABB to drive and encourage diversity?

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, as a business, we’ve always embraced diversity when you look at it from a cultural perspective, because we’re a global organization, we operate in a hundred countries as ABB, as a business. In my business, we operate directly in 65, the management teams and the teams that we work with are from different backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds and countries. So, from that aspect, it’s been really strong and it’s been part of the fun of working within the company, to meet these people. And more recently, I think in the last X number of years, that diversity topic has expanded. When you get into things like LGBT+ and things like that, there’s campaigns and initiatives and embracing diversity as part of the whole, principles and values of ABB embedded in what we want.

Neil Ritchie:

But there’s also some initiatives around gender diversity. So, we have formal female mentoring programs, we’ve set targets to try and promote gender diversity in the organization, and I think that diversity, in fact, not think, I know, that diversity is a topic that adds value. You’ve got to manage it in the right way, people don’t want to be appointed into roles because they’re a woman or because they come from this background – nobody wants that. And I remember I didn’t really fully understand this topic fully, so we invited a lady to discuss why we’re not attracting enough female talent into the business, and the first question she asked is, “Why do you want more women in the business?”. And my answer, which I wasn’t that prepared for, but my answer was, “Well, the objective is not to get more women into the business in my mind, the objective is to get more talent into the business.”

Neil Ritchie:

And we are missing a pool of talent by not attracting the right people, whether it’s because the working arrangements, whether it’s because the work-life balance, whether it’s because of the flexibility of hours, all these things mean different things to different people, but we’ve not really taken that too much into account in the job applications, it was a very orientated to a fixed scope. But I can certainly speak from experience that my management team is diverse, and it’s definitely better off for it. There are definitely different views, different angles, and things that you wouldn’t have thought of. So, I’m really passionate about the topic of diversity and I’m a believer that it does add value into a business and drives results.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes, and like you say, you get a diversity of perspective, don’t you, and blind spots that are uncovered that you just absolutely weren’t aware of, it is an absolutely fascinating topic. And in our pre-interview as well, we also discussed your passion for customer service and the concept of going the extra mile. And that description probably is hanging on 10,000 office walls in different companies around the world, or in reception or something. At ABB, how do you make that become a reality for customers rather than just a nice aspiration?

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, I think it’s about wowing customers, I think that everybody wants to satisfy customers and generally do, but I think we want to wow customers, and it starts with the people. I genuinely believe that people should take it personally, I believe people should see it as a personal attribute to be able to satisfy the customers that we’re working for. And then it comes to having the right people in the organization with the right attitudes, the right focus and getting everybody lined up to it. So it starts with the people, but of course, then you have to have the right processes. You want consistency, you want traceability, you want speed, and you’ve got to put that around it to make it work effectively.

Neil Ritchie:

But customer satisfaction for me is firstly about closing gaps, and to do that you’ve got to listen to the customer. You’ve got to understand what they feel is missing or what they want more of, and then it’s about identifying what those gaps are and closing them proactively and doing something about it. So again, it’s a simple formula, but it starts with the people, and I think quite often, when we get some complaints, everybody does, but when we get complaints quite often we have, “We are not actually complaining about this person, but…”, so genuinely the relationships and the people make a difference.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I had a boss previously who was very fond of saying that management was about opening and closing gaps, which was always so great, he said, “If you find one, you need to close it, and then when you’ve done that, you need to open it again at a higher level and then close it”, and this whole gap concept was an interesting philosophy. Richard, your perspective from durhamlane in terms of wowing customers and what’s needed to do that today.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, so I love and totally adhere to Neil’s phrase: “People should take it personally”, they damn well should. That is really key, we talk about the three P’s at durhamlane, Neil, we talk about: People, Process and Partnership. And I think that speaks to what you’ve just spoken about from an ABB point of view as well. You have to have people that care, you have to have ambitious people that really want to make it happen and care about the outcome. They need to be supported by the right processes, because I think if you have people that really want to make it happen and care, but don’t have the right processes around them, they get frustrated and then probably stop caring as much. So, you’ve got to have those two sync together and then ultimately begin with the end in mind, we want to build long term partnerships with our customers, and when that’s your mindset, then you understand that sometimes you need to dig in deep to create the long term, achieve the long-term objective.

Simon Hazeldine:

No, I love the approach of the personal – you’ve got to take it personally. I used to work in the beer industry and one of the Heineken family, Freddy Heineken famously said, I think it was Freddy Heineken one time, “I view a bad bottle of Heineken as a personal insult”.

Richard Lane:

I love that.

Simon Hazeldine:

That’s just a great philosophy for the guy to have, so.

Richard Lane:

Probably drove him insane, but a good philosophy to have all the same.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I was going to say, that’s quite a high bar to aspire to, isn’t it, something’s going to go wrong sometimes, but… Oh my goodness, being on the receiving end of that, that would be interesting. All industries are undergoing change at the moment, Neil, and be really interesting, it’s always a fascinating topic for us to ask our guests about, people are so interested. What do you think are the changes that marketing and sales will have to make in the future? This is the crystal ball moment, I think, to try to predict the future.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, and I think we could do an entire podcast on this topic if I’m honest, and this is a bit of a pet subject of mine because I… And this is my philosophy, so I’m now giving my vision if you like, of how I believe sales will change, certainly in an industrial environment. I think it’ll go in three directions; I think the first direction is that a salesperson will develop more into account management, develop more into an executive role, will try to work with customers to help them deliver their results and be more of a consultant. That’s the first thing, and that’s the people element. I think the second thing is that I think there’ll be more partnerships, and Richard used the P in partnership and we use the word, putting our heads together, some of our strap lines. Let’s put our heads together, we don’t all have the answers individually, but together we can.

Neil Ritchie:

But we also talked about simplification earlier and we know that there’s complex situations. Just saying, “Let’s make it simple”, does not make it simple, you’ve got to do stuff. Bringing in professional partners, like durhamlane, for example, helps us to achieve some of the goals that we couldn’t achieve on our own in a modern world. And then the third element that I think will change is digitalization, and somebody said, I read an article that basically said, “Oh, and digitalization will take care of the rest.” But I think to put that into context, eCommerce will mean that a lot of transactional sales won’t be a personal relationship.

Neil Ritchie:

It means that software license renewals, which we wouldn’t be able to scale up if we tried selling it through the existing sales models, will need a different way. Customers want more and more self-service, so they’ll want more access to information to be able to make decisions without a personal involvement. So, online guided selling and things like that, and digital marketing. So, I think that’s the three directions that I see sales going in and what I call the next generation of sales. So, maybe we come back in 10 years and reflect on that.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, it’s the one that stuck out for me, because for after a long period of not flying, I flew through Heathrow airport. And other than them checking your passport, it’s almost entirely self-service, you check in online, and then… So, our customers are used to serving themselves in their private lives, but yet sometimes in their B2B relationships, they want to do some self-service, but it’s not available for them, is it? And I think that’s an interesting one for organizations to consider.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, I think you can see it happening in our personal lives. My son came to stay a few weeks ago and we said, shall we order a takeaway? My wife wanted to call the takeaway on the phone, my son wanted to just go online and order it from Deliveroo or whatever. And they both work, you get to the same result, it might cost you a bit more for doing the self-service interestingly enough, but that’s what society is moving into, and the gap between our personal lives and our working lives is narrowing. We expect the same way that we operate, the instant response models that we get in our personal lives more and more today, we’re expecting the same in a business-to-business relationship as well.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, Simon and I have talked about this before and I’m a real believer that B2B follows B2C. I think those two worlds are colliding more and more. I wonder, and again, this is my personal life experience. I think we’re very happy to self-serve when we want to buy something, but where it’s going wrong is that when we have a problem, there’s no one to answer the phone. So actually from a… And a relevant story for me is, my son has just finished his A Levels, he’s meant to be going on holiday with his mates to Magaluf, that’s another podcast in itself.

Richard Lane:

And he hasn’t got his passport back, and we cannot get a hold of… You can’t phone anyone. And so, I think there’s a real opportunity for an organization to excel by having people available for when questions need to be asked and answered. And at the moment we’ve gone… It seems to be we’re moving in the B2C world into a very self-serve environment, but across the board, rather than just focusing on the areas where self-serve really is effective and where I think there’s a huge opportunity for organizations to really stand out from the crowd by enabling people to engage better.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah. I think, I think we’ve got to understand that it’s about the population and the people and the demographic. I think that you’re always going to have multiple ways to serve the customer, or multiple ways that that customer will want to be served in general. If you look at the demographic of general industry in the UK right now, then the age population still wants that pick the phone up and talk to somebody, more often. But as the Gen-Z, as I think it’s titled, generation comes through, then there’ll be a shift towards that acceptance of online, and then the systems behind it will have to drive it to be more efficient. So, I think there’s always going to be this two, three topics that cross over as time changes. And the clever bit is making sure that you can serve both effectively.

Richard Lane:

Absolutely.

Neil Ritchie:

Because it comes back to the value proposition, one customer values picking the phone up and talking to somebody and another customer values going online and trying to find out the status of their order or whatever.

Richard Lane:

Absolutely.

Simon Hazeldine:

It’s been a theme, as you might imagine on a sales marketing podcast, a number of our guests will have said, “What does your customer want? Ask your customer, ask your customer.” So, if they want to phone you, make sure they can get hold of you on the phone. If they want to chat with you, make sure they can chat, and so I think it’s about whatever channels customers want to use, not the ones we want our customers to use.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah.

Simon Hazeldine:

That’s the key, not an easy thing to do sometimes.

Neil Ritchie:

Yeah, and Simon, it’s quite an interesting topic because we’ve used the word customer a lot in this conversation and I’m sure a lot of people do, but it’s even more granular than that, because it’s like, “Who is the persona?”, not the customer, but the person. So, one customer could have 20 sites, one site could be in one country, one site could be another, in that site, there could be 20 people that we interface with or… The purchasing manager who has got a different driver to the efficiency manager than the… So, we’ve got to pay attention to the individual personas and the people’s needs, not just… We use the word customer and I think we’ve got an answer for the customer, but there might be three answers for that customer.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, in any, as we all know, any B2B buying decision, you’re going to have multiple people involved, and the head of engineering, he or she’s going to have a really different perspective to the guy in procurement or the HRD or whatever. So, I think it’s understanding that persona piece is really important. Well, Neil, thank you, probably any of these questions could have been a podcast episode in their own, and so thank you very much for sharing all of your thoughts, ideas, insights, and wisdom, it’s been absolutely fantastic. And for all of our listeners to benefit from that, so thank you very much for being with us on The Insiders.

Neil Ritchie:

Thanks Simon, thanks Richard.

Speaker 1:

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