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.

Richard Lane:

Simon and I were delighted to be joined for this special episode by Richard Smith, VP of Sales for EMEA at Allego. Although Richard’s a now recognized sales leader, he entered the profession like Simon and myself did, by chance. A move we like to call here at The Insiders, the Happy Trip Up Club. During our discussion, we covered topics such as what prospecting approaches work best, the impact of call reluctance or call anxiety, how technology enables but human connection is still key, and the sales coaching disconnect. I even managed to get durhamlane’s belief equation in there. Anyway, it was certainly fun to record and I’m hopeful as always that you will take a range of ideas away with you to implement and develop your practice. Enjoy a conversation with Rich Smith and see you again soon.

Simon Hazeldine:

Hello lo and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast giving you the inside track on all things B2B sales and marketing. I’m your host Simon Hazeldine. I’m an author, sales expert, and keynote speaker on all things sales and negotiation. I’m joined as always by my co-host, the CCO and co-founder of durhamlane, Richard Lane. Richard, great to be back with you for yet another episode of The Insiders. Could you tell us a little bit more about durhamlane before you introduce our guest, please?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. Hi, Simon. Great to be back in The Insiders podcast studio. Very quickly on durhamlane. We’re an integrated sales and marketing agency. What do we do? Well, we help our customers create [inaudible] on channels of meaningful, well qualified sales opportunities that business development teams love to close. So today’s conversation I really think is going to be very meaningful in helping us achieve some of those goals. So thrilled to be joined by Richard Smith, VP of sales, EMEA for Allego. So, Rich, welcome. Really pleased to have you on the podcast and looking forward to the conversation. So I’m going to hand it back to Simon. Simon’s going to get us started and off we go.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Thanks, Richard. Rich, and we’ve got two Richards, I think one’s a Richard, and ones a Rich. We had two Simons on a previous episode, so this might cause us logistical challenges. We’ll stick with Rich if that’s okay. Rich, what we always ask our guests to do, just give us a little background how you came to be in the role you’re in currently.

Richard Smith:

Yeah, yeah, well delighted to be here, gentlemen. How I landed where I am today is I guess off the back of a 13-year career in sales where like many, I found myself leaving university with a quite frankly, pretty useless degree by the end of it, realizing I was too thick to become a developer. So I fell into sales because one of my friends said, “Hey, you’d be good at sales,” without any real rationale or reason behind it.

So yeah, started life as what is commonly known as an SDR these days, but it wasn’t so much known as that back in those days, working for a small software startup in the Northeast. Basically, I guess ground my way through a couple years doing that role, booking meetings for sales consultants in the team, kind of progressed to closing my own small deals over the phone, realized I could do that. Then worked my way up to I guess more of a full cycle sales rep in that regard.

Then after that, I was very fortunate to co-found a startup company called Refract. I think in that period of that four or five years of building that company, I feel like I learned more about sales in that period of time than the six or seven years before that. That company was a great journey. We sort of grew that business from just the two of us to a team of 30-odd people and then we were acquired by Allego who I now work for in the end of 2020.

So my role here is all about just growing and building the revenue organization in EMEA from a pretty successful North American business I’d say. We’re looking to expand their footprint in other parts of the world. So yeah, that’s the two-minute story.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wow, wonderful. That must have been a fantastic journey. Richard, we have yet another member of what we refer to as the Happy Trip Up Club. So we sort of end up with selling by accident. So, Rich, I was also told I should be in sales, but they did qualify it for me. They said, “Because you talk a lot,” which actually probably wasn’t the best advice I’ve ever had. Great to have another Happy Trip Up Club member on The Insiders.

In our pre-interview, Rich, before we came on air, we were discussing that some channels of prospecting are more effective than others and I know this is a subject close to your heart. I’ve been taking a good look at your book, Problem Prospecting. That covers a variety of different prospecting methods. To bring this all right up to 2023, what’s your perspective on what’s working from a prospecting point of view right now?

Richard Smith:

Firstly, what I would say is I feel like given a lot of the stuff I post on LinkedIn, I maybe have this image of this person who is all about cold calling, the phone’s the only thing that works. When actually the reality is not that. I still believe that the phone is a channel when it comes to prospecting is alive and well. I see that in the data in our own team. So it’s not just my hypothesis.

I see this in the pipeline that we create as a business using the phone, but I do feel like the route to a successful prospect and strategy is using all these channels that are now available to us. Even when I started in the role, there was pretty much two channels. You had the phone and you had email and that was it. I think there’s so many other methods at people’s disposal now to break through the noise.

I kind of touch upon these in the book, you’ve got obviously the phone, you’ve got email, you’ve got social, you’ve got direct mail, you’ve got video, you’ve got audio notes, you’ve got text messages. The truth of the matter is, is that if you just rely on one channel, you are not going to maximize your potential because here’s the reality, some people will never ever answer their phone. I see it, people say out loud, they say, “Hey, if I get a call on my mobile from a number I don’t recognize, I’m simply not answering it.” So of course the phone just will not be a successful channel with that prospect.

So the key is, is making sure that you use the right blend, but also spending more time on the channels that you do have most success on. I think it’d be wrong to say that you do an equal split across all channels. I think over time you will find one channel that really gives you the biggest bang for your buck and that’s the one that you should obviously invest more time doing.

Simon Hazeldine:

I guess your comment’s really, really critical, isn’t it? That no one channel works for all types of customers. So there is a certain amount of experimentation and having a look and seeing what works, but also it was just interesting on reflecting your comment that you say to somebody the telephone and they say, “I never answer my telephone to those sort of calls.” They apply that to everybody else. That’s actually not true, is it? Because I never answer a sales email or I never answer this, but lots of other people do. I think that that sometimes is used as a bit of an overgeneralization, isn’t it?

Richard Smith:

A hundred percent.

Simon Hazeldine:

I hear a lot of people saying cold calling doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got data to say it does, Rich.

Richard Smith:

Yeah, I mean quite frankly, if people say it doesn’t work, it is a lie. I can prove that lie by showing people that we put meetings on the phone. So it’s too much of a blanket statement to make. I do feel that typically that comes from I think a couple of places when people make those statements. A, they’re kind of, what they’re saying is I wouldn’t like to be prospected via that channel myself.

Or, B, they simply aren’t that effective with that channel. They may have tried it, they may feel like it makes them uncomfortable, they maybe understand that they’re not actually that skillful using that method and so they just assume that it doesn’t work. Most things don’t work if you’re not that good at them, quite frankly.

It’s too much of a blanket statement. Again, I kind of look at the data in my company across our entire pipeline where we generate meetings from, 50% at least of those meetings come from the phone. It’s a very, very strong channel for us.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. So I mean think it’s a, I’m a big fan of using data when you’re working with sales and salespeople and what’s the actual data telling you, not what is your right generalized view of the world. That’s just based on an opinion rather than on fact. What are your thoughts on other channels that maybe we haven’t touched on? Direct mail, gifting, some people seem to think is useful.

Richard Smith:

Richard might have some examples of where this sort of direct mail at durhamlane has been effective. Something that we haven’t tried so much, but I’ll tell you one story. I was in the office of my former colleague Mark Ackers this week, and he held up this tea towel. He was like, “Look at this.” I was like, what is he showing me this tea towel that had this almost a written note on this tea towel. I was like, “What is it?” He was like, “Well, read it.” It was basically a tea towel with a handwritten with a marker pen on it. It was a guy trying to sell it to Mark. Mark said, “How could I not respond back to this guy who’s done the effort?” I just thought, wow, it obviously takes effort.

I was thinking, let’s just say that took the guy who sent that tea towel, let’s imagine all in going to buy the tea towel, writing the note, packaging it up, going to the post office. Let’s say it took him two hours to do that. Some people would say you can’t spend two hours doing that. Whereas it might be the same person who spent two or three hours blasting out emails that hasn’t had one response, yet the guy who went the effort to market that tea towel got a good outcome.

Yeah, I think we can maybe dive into this. I feel like email is, there’s a very challenging channel for a lot of people right now when a lot of the data that shows that especially during the pandemic, the send rates of emails went up and the reply rates came significantly down. So I think that’s a difficult channel. The other one that I’m still convinced is can be so successful for so many people, yet so few people are doing it is video, I do believe is a very powerful mechanism. Not many people are leveraging, but everybody that I hear that receives these videos are watching them and are responding to them. So that’s something for anybody listening at this and who prospects to take note of.

Richard Lane:

One of our enterprise customers attributes the video message our BDM sent to him as the reason that we have the contract, and now we work across multiple divisions.

Richard Smith:

What a story.

Richard Lane:

A couple of thoughts on this part of the conversation. One, you mention number one, business fit, business value. There’s no point in hammering someone with phone, omnichannel, whatever, if there isn’t a fit and there’s no value that you can offer. So I think we sometimes forget that as well. Isn’t it funny, I used to use a slide in training saying, a little image, it was a cartoon of someone getting loads of emails and feeling bogged down and then receiving a letter going, “Oh, a letter just for me.” It’s one of those things where we’re full circle.

When I was in corporate life, so a while ago selling global software solutions, I used to text my stakeholder because that was the way that she would respond. So texting’s not new, but I think what is new is people feel comfortable doing it because it all ends up on the same machine. So people might say, “I don’t answer my phone,” but they do if they answer to a text. So again, it’s sort of to Rich’s point, it’s trying out what works. I love your comment, most things don’t work if you’re not very good at them because that’s totally the point.

That’s the same thing when it comes to direct mail. We have some awards for one of the campaigns we did. We won a global account on the back of it and just piqued his interest enough to get into a conversation, to show that we were relevant, to be able to tell some stories, to be able to talk about value and the sales conversation commences.

Simon Hazeldine:

Was this your pizza mailing, I think, Richard?

Richard Lane:

Yes. So we sent a pizza box, it was dead cheap to run as a campaign, massive ROI because it was cheap and it landed a contract. It was a pizza box with a picture inside, a voucher to get a Dominoes on the back of have a conversation with us, but more importantly, this is why we want to have the conversation. That’s the important bit. Quite like the tea towel idea, as long as the fits there.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, when I was head of a sales academy for a big FMCG company, you obviously get lots of suppliers trying to contact you. There was a guy who used to regularly do different kind of, I think they refer to it [inaudible] was lumpy mail. So there was a little toy monkey that stuck to your window and it was like the title was Get the Monkey Off Your Back. They were all very creative and different. I have a friend of mine who built a very successful IT services company and they had rubber ducks as part of their brand identity or something. He used to mail little plastic ducks to people. Kind of hard to ignore those if they land on your desk. Again, if it’s relevant and it works, give it a go.

Richard Lane:

There’s the balance because marketing has spent years, decades sending crap with no relevance to people trying to get their attention. Whereas actually I think the world we’re in now where they connect the two worlds of marketing and sales is that Rich and his team will be informing the marketing department about what works. I remember again, back in corporate life marketing had this campaign. We sent everyone a London double-decker toy bus. I’m like, well what’s that got to do with anything that we’re trying to talk about? They were stumped by the question.

Whereas I think the world we’re in now where you ideally are integrating those two departments, divisions, then suddenly it’s got power because sales should be informing, this is the message, this is the story. Then marketing helping us to peak the attention of the right people at the right time.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I was talking to the MD of a very, very large successful… I don’t have permission necessarily to share the story without checking with him, but they use gifting and they work out, they do some research and they send a very, very relevant book to the person that they know the person is interested in. They get it parceled up really nicely and it shows that they’ve done their research on the person as an individual. He claims that’s been very, very… Cheap. Richard, to your point, really cost-effective but it works quite nicely. Of course, all these things split test, et cetera.

Rich, you mentioned cold calling and I guess anxiety about that or even call reluctance to maybe warmer prospects can be a challenge. How do you go about addressing that?

Richard Smith:

Yeah, and I think call reluctance, call anxiety is a real thing. I think all of us face it to some degree, some obviously on a bigger degree than others. It can be the, well, in fact I’ll rephrase that. I think it is the single biggest thing that will prevent people from being successful on the phone because they have this anxiety about essentially interrupting a stranger. It does go against all the things that you were ever told as a young child. Don’t interrupt people, don’t talk to strangers and all of a sudden we’re asking people to go against those things. So you can see why people’s nature is, it doesn’t make people feel comfortable.

So I think the first thing to do there is to just acknowledge that it is a real thing. It’s not to just dismiss the fact that call reluctance, call anxiety, it’s like, what are you on about? Just pick the phone up and call people. I don’t think it’s… That’s not how you get over that with people. I think you have to first of all acknowledge that it’s a real thing and address that front on so that people on your team who may face that can feel like you’re on their side, you may experience it yourself or you know what they’re feeling.

A few things that I think can do to get over it. I think it’s like anything, I come back to that phrase of things generally don’t work if you’re not very good at them. So I always relate to how do you build confidence? Well, to build confidence you have to build skillset. It’s two things go hand in hand, you get more confident about something the better at something you get.

So I think first of all, you have to give people a structure and a framework to actually making cold calls because a lot of people don’t actually get taught that stuff. People just get told to make some sales calls and that’s just not giving someone actually a methodology to leverage a structure, a format. I think as soon as you get that, then things start to get easier because it feels like you’re just less smiling and dialing as they say, and actually you’ve got an actual thought process to what you’re doing.

Practice. Practice gets you more comfortable. Talk a lot about practice in sales and how practice is missing a lot in sales, despite the fact a lot of us have hobbies and sports outside of work that we’ll practice, no questions whatsoever. We’ll practice on a weekly basis. When it comes to the thing that pays our bills, puts roofs over our head, the thought of practicing, that is kind of alien to some people.

I think that this classic phrase that gets bantered around a lot, but I’m a big believer in it, I think it was the thing that once I got my head around this was the single biggest thing that just got me over any phone anxieties is this concept attaching from the outcome is not thinking so much as, hey, the purpose of making a cold call is to book a meeting. Because when you have that mindset, if you have a conversation with a prospect and you don’t book a meeting, you feel like you’ve failed.

Whereas if you think about making cold calls is simply about finding the people that you may be able to help and also find those people that you may not be able to help, it just gets easier. You don’t think of a call where you don’t book a meeting as a failure. You just see it as it’s just part of what I need to do, the process that I need to follow to find the people that I can help. It was that single thing that I just reminded myself in my head is like, hey, if I don’t book a meeting on this phone, it’s not failure. It’s actually just part of the process, actually helps to build confidence and belief in what you’re doing.

Simon Hazeldine:

I think it’s not, although we’ve been talking about picking up the phone call reluctance. I’ve seen it working with my clients. I mean one about working with a company in Canada about social selling and their particular customer’s very heavily involved in Twitter. He was just talking to them about sending a few tweets about the company and they were really, with the greatest of respect, overthinking it. “If I send this, will anybody get offended?” And all this.

It’s kind of like unless you’re doing something really dumb, no, just try a few. Well see, going in for the C-suite, that’s quite common I see with account managers is in my company the C-suite is three above me, four above me. Therefore, I can’t possibly reach out to C-level in my customers because, I don’t know, they’re going to be too scary or something for me to deal with.

Richard Smith:

That’s so true, Simon. I mean I laugh at this because I used to be one of those people. When I start on the roll, I would go on LinkedIn and I would literally skip past calling somebody because they had director in their title or they had a suit and a quite serious looking face on. I was like, they look like a scary person. I literally avoid calling those people.

When actually I would say that the best people to speak with, the people who are most open to speaking on the phone typically end up being the most senior people in business because, A, they have a genuine desire to, hey, if you talk about things they care about, they’re going to hear you out. Secondly, believe it or not, but they’re actually the people who are getting prospected less because there’s loads of people who are too scared to contact them. The more senior people that you target tend to be the most open to actually hearing you out is what I’ve discovered in my career.

Simon Hazeldine:

When I had a proper job in a large corporate, when I first started having to go into senior leader and exec team meetings and present, and I realized how badly behaved they were. It was just normal chaos of any meeting. You kind of go, “And these are the people I was worried about?” They’re poking fun, they’re having fun with each other, they’re laughing. You go, “Well, this is not what I expected.” Maybe it’s an uncrowded road for folks that like you say, they’re not getting cold… Technology’s obviously a big thing for lots of listeners to The Insiders, Rich. How do you view the role of particularly say sales enablement technology in enhancing sales performance?

Richard Smith:

Obviously the natural thing for me to do here would be to drink the Kool-Aid and say how great it is because that’s the business that I’ve been in the last seven or eight years, is specifically selling software that’s all about improving sales effectiveness, is a umbrella way of thinking about it. What I would say to preface this is that you use the word there enabler, Simon, and that’s the word that I would describe. It’s never the solution. It’s never the only solution because I still think that when it comes to improving performance, we still need the human element. We still need managers to be focused on coaching their salespeople and train their salespeople effectively.

Obviously there’s a lot of noise at the minute about ChatGPT and all this kind of stuff. Whilst there’s mind-blowing stuff, I also just look at examples of it and think it’s still miles away from replacing a human being. I just see it as there’s some great technology out there. I sell some great technology to improve sales performance, but it is only an enabler. It’s an accelerator. It’s something that helped with scaling, but it’s never the absolute solution. That’s why more than ever salespeople, and I’m seeing this, seeing this more now than ever before, salespeople are craving that human personal touch, that coaching that they really desire. Yeah, that’s why it’s both of those things together is the perfect matchup.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. I mean manager coaching around, best utilization of sales enablement technology and following up with people. That really brings it to life, doesn’t it? Coaching in all of its, I guess, manifestations. Critical. Richard, I know you’ve got an amazing example from durhamlane in terms of how you get people to be C-suite outreach competent in a pretty amazing period of time, Richard. Yeah? Do you want to just enlighten our listeners on that one?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. Sure, Simon. It ties together the last couple of points actually because Richard has mentioned, yeah, we have at durhamlane something you might remember it called the belief equation. So belief plus knowledge gives you confidence, times that with understanding, putting your feet in the shoes of the prospect. That’s what I believe creates high performance. Then it’s the frameworks and tool sets that help you get there. Plus the technology is the enabler, the accelerator, the scaler to help make it happen.

I always talk at durhamlane about people being our software. Sometimes you sit there and think, God, I wish I had a software company because software doesn’t get up and leave for a better package, or software doesn’t get up and decide that they want to do something different or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. At other times I think, wow, this is just amazing because I’m in total agreement that, that human aspect is still so hugely important. So we call ourselves a technology enabled services business.

Part of our success and probably back to our first bit of the conversation, there are thousands of people around the world putting calls into prospect organizations every day. So I would say the phone is still alive and well. We’re about 130 people now, so a tiny fraction of that. There is definitely an industry that recognizes that warm calling or cold calling, however you want to term it, works. We’ve developed a program that enables us within about four weeks to have someone with no experience, as long as they have effort, attitude, and aptitudes, in about four weeks we can have them prospecting in on behalf of our customers with a question-based, value-based approach using our selling a high level methodology into the C-suite.

I love Rich’s thought that this is what we talk about as well. If every call was about getting a meeting, we’d all be hugely unsuccessful. It’d be very hard, wouldn’t it, to think about. It’d be very hard to have a really successful day if every call the outcome was meant to be a meeting, but therefore what do we challenge ourselves on? What are the success points along the journey to the meeting? So we’ve developed that out. It means that you have to get people in deep from day one. We use the 70, 20, 10 learning model to help embed skill and knowledge. It is unfortunately in life, practice makes perfect. It’s always been just a frustration, isn’t it? That I just know that to get better, I need to practice something.

Simon Hazeldine:

We’ve got one-to-one sort of human coaching, Richard, all throughout this process.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. Spoiler, we use, Rich, the technology from Allego. So we use the conversation intelligence platform because what does that help us do? Well, it helps us to accelerate learning, but also it helps us to share best practice. That’s the big game changer in the use of tech in our world is, you don’t just have to hear it through the grapevine anymore. You can actually go in, and a new starter could go and listen to 50 great call openings over an hour or whatever. Whereas in the past, I would have to listen to what my mate was doing on the other side of the sales floor. It takes some of the guesswork out of it.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s a fantastic case study from standing start to four weeks, C-level competent and confident.

Richard Lane:

It’s mindset, isn’t it? It’s mindset, and mindset and belief. Yeah. Are they the finished article? No, because I don’t think anyone is, but can they have a professional outreach conversation? Yes.

Simon Hazeldine:

Richard, just connecting your comment about software doesn’t get up and leave and Rich’s comment about particularly during the pandemic, that human contact piece, most of the exit interview data I’ve ever seen says relationship with line manager is a number one reason to be departing. So if you’re coaching and some work I did previously in talent retention, they want to know they’re going to be able to advance, they want know, they’re going to be able to develop, they want to feel they’re appropriately challenged and they want to feel connected with the organization. I think coaching is one of those things that can probably tick all four of those boxes.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I’ve always said a silver lining of the pandemic for durhamlane is that, well it’s now about 36% of our workforce are no longer in the northeast of England, so we’re not constrained by location like we were. That comes with another challenge, which is how do you push a culture through digital channels, and today it’s how you communicate with people and how you’re supported and feeling like you’re part of the journey and part of the organization. It created a bit of a new world for a lot of companies, I think.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes, definitely. I mean, it’s a challenge and always as there is opportunity as well. Rich, I know you are a big advocate of sales coaching, so I’m preaching to the converted here. I guess question I’m always fascinated by is why does it seem to be frequently undervalued and also underutilized because it’s such a powerful way of engaging people and improving performance.

Richard Smith:

Yeah, it’s a baffling one, isn’t it? Because you said the word undervalued there, the data suggests that’s right. What makes it confusing is that I think if you asked most people out there, is sales coaching a valuable thing to do, it’d be hard to find that one person that’ll say, “No, I think it’s a waste of time.” In fact, the actual data that we’ve seen is that the majority of sales leaders surveyed say that coaching is a highly valuable, integral activity for success. Yet on the flip side, the salespeople, the people that they’re supposedly coaching are seeing that they rarely or are never getting coached. So there’s this massive disconnect.

I think there’s probably lots of reasons for it, but I think the main ones that it boils down to, A, I think people kid themself that they’re spending time coaching when they probably aren’t. They’re just kind of one of those things that it makes them feel better to feel like they say they’re doing it. The other side of it is, I think a lot of people feel like what they’re doing is coaching, but that’s not being perceived in the same way by the people that they are coaching.

When you dig into that, I think a lot of the sales leaders feel that they’re coaching what their salespeople are actually seeing is, I’m being interrogated on my deals. I’m being challenged on why haven’t you made this many calls today? I’m going to virtual meetings or face-to-face meetings with my manager and they’re there as a support mechanism, but in reality, the manager has taken over the sales call and the sales meeting.

I think when you look at all these things, there’s this massive disconnect. I think the other side of it, the more new inside of it is that a lot of managers aren’t taught how to coach. It is actually a skill that you have to develop. I’m always trying to get better at it myself. I know that I still fall down some of the sins of coaching, as I would describe it, but I try and work at those things.

The data also doesn’t lie that says when people get regular effective coaching, all the metrics go in the right direction. To such an extent that coaching has such a monumental impact on performance that the C-level in every business should pay notice to it because it can move the share price quite frankly. So yeah, I know that I’ve chucked a lot there. Yeah, there is that disconnect between people believing that it’s valuable, but actually the reality as it plays out doesn’t necessarily back that up.

Simon Hazeldine:

I think it sometimes is people think it takes a lot longer than in reality it actually does. Drip feeding coaching is also a very effective thing to do. It doesn’t have to be right now, let us get 45 minutes in the diary for coaching. It’s in the moment, isn’t it? It just becomes the way it is in the company.

Richard Lane:

I mean I’ve [inaudible] on about this for well now it’ll be 14 years, but it’s the no one ever recommends sales to anyone. Where do we start this call? The Happy Trip Up Club. So no one recommends sales as through an education channel. There are lots of reasons for that, we go into it another time, therefore it’s not seen as a profession in the formal sense. When you have a profession, you have frameworks and you have structure, and you have ways of doing things. So you’ll have continual development, you’ll have CPD, you’ll have whatever, whatever, whatever. You’ll have structured frameworks there.

Sales, that doesn’t exist. So when the pressure’s on, the sales manager is just looking at the number and when they’re doing sales coaching, they’re just used to looking at the number and frankly that’s probably what they’re most bothered about. So they haven’t been trained how to coach and we all fall into that trap. You go in for a coaching session, you get stuck into doing, you’re like, why is this not happening? Why is that? Suddenly that’s not coaching. That’s interrogating someone. So I think it’s really fundamental. It is changing and it is getting better, it certainly has got better over those years. You’re dead right, Rich, the sales coaching disconnect. I mean, there’s your second book title, probably.

Richard Smith:

I did like what Simon said though about that, it doesn’t have to be seen as this like, we’ve got to schedule an hour on the calendar. It has to be a big thing. I’ll give an example. I was just having a one-to-one, which by the way, one-to-ones doesn’t equate sales coaching. I think people have that mindset too. I was having a one-to-one with one of my team yesterday and we were talking about a deal that she’s working on and it turned this whole thing around like, challenges with negotiation.

What that then transpired into was just unplanned 10 minute role play of let’s revisit what happened in that call last week. Let’s role play it out and let’s say how you would approach it differently this time. It was an impromptu activity. It was essentially 10 minutes of coaching. Again, it was dynamic, it was relevant, it was based on something that she’s working on at the minute. It didn’t have to be this big thing, but at the end of it, I always finish every coaching session, was that useful? Was that helpful? The answer you’re looking for is of course, yes, if it’s because you want to make sure the only person that can decide if coaching was helpful is the person that you coached.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. I say just slide easily into it. I think also sellers will often be entirely oblivious that actually quote, unquote, coaching is taking place. They just think it’s been a really useful conversation that’s helped them to overcome a problem, overcome a challenge, and they want more of it as well. That’s the other thing. I think that’s the… I always say to sales managers, sales leaders, when they come hunting you, then because they want to have a conversation, as in they want to be coached, then you really know you’re getting somewhere.

Richard Smith:

Yeah.

Simon Hazeldine:

So Richard, we normally do your pithy summary of some of the key points of wisdom shared from our illustrious guests.

Richard Lane:

Putting on the pressure now. Yeah, well look, Rich, I knew it was going to be a good one, and I’ve really enjoyed the chat, so thanks again from The Insiders. Yeah, where do we start? Well, we started with the Happy Trip Up Club, that we are all proud members of. We came back to that as we went through the conversation, but we’ve talked about prospecting.

Omnichannel is a must, I think, easiest way, take out the cold and call it warm. If you’re doing business fit business value, then it should be a warm call. You’re investigating to see if there’s a fit. I love the idea of spend the channels where you get most of your success. So focus on the things you’re good at and get better at them. Most things don’t work if you’re not very good at them. So that the other part of that, which is useful.

We talked about call anxiety, thought about that belief equation and the skills structure and practice that goes into help people become successful. That then shifted to us to technology as an enabler. I’ve written down here, enable, accelerate, scale and the human, what are you trying to enable, accelerate, and scale where you’re trying to do that with human effectiveness. Then finally we looked at the value of sales coaching and the sales coaching disconnect.

I guess I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and one thing we were saying there, I wonder if the disconnect isn’t quite as big as we think because perhaps people just don’t realize they’re in a coaching environment. In a way that’s sort of what you’re looking for is you’re not looking for someone to go, “Oh, I get coaching.” You want them to just think, “I’m always supported wherever I go.” Perhaps that sort of coaching environment is the nirvana for us to build in our sales organization so that everyone is continually looking to improve their practice. So that would be a amazing place for us to head towards.

Simon Hazeldine:

Absolutely. Thank you, Richard. Rich, just before we go, final question for you, which is often one of the more challenging ones. We’re building The Insiders Spotify playlist, and we ask every guest to add a song. What is your chosen song, Rich, you’re going to add to this very eclectic, I ought to say playlist?

Richard Smith:

Yeah, as you can imagine, I had sleepless nights trying to think of this because of this [inaudible]. The song I’m going to put forward is by a band called the Gaslight Anthem. They’re one of my favorite bands. They’re from New Jersey in the US, more of a Americana sort of rock band. Yeah, I mean they’ve got tons of great songs. I’ll chuck forward the song 45, as in the number 45, is one of my favorite songs. If you want to do a cold calling session, just blast that on and you’ll be ready to go.

Simon Hazeldine:

So that’s your motivational track?

Richard Lane:

I’ve not heard of them, so that’ll be a good one.

Simon Hazeldine:

So that is Rich’s motivational booster prior to hitting the phone, folks. So thank you very much. Wonderful. So thank you very much to Rich for joining us on this episode of The Insiders by durhamlane. Thank you to my co-host Richard, and

thank you for listening in, folks. Please subscribe to The Insiders Podcast on your preferred podcasting site and you’ll be notified of new episodes as in when they’re released, which they are on a regular basis. Visit durhamlane.com to learn more about selling at a higher level. In the meantime, good luck and good selling, folks.

Speaker 1:

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