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 episode of The Insiders by Simon Ball, Market Director at Equans, a leading organization delivering technical, FM, regeneration, and energy services. Despite working in a heavily commoditized marketplace, Simon relies on a highly nuanced and patient approach when it comes to winning new customers. Listen on to hear Simon’s views on being a disruptor and an enabler, the power of personalization and how success in sales is nearly always a team pursuit. Hope you enjoy this episode of The Insiders by durhamlane.

Simon Hazeldine:

Hello 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 a keynote speaker on all things sales and negotiation. I’m joined by my co-host, the CCO and co-founder of durhamlane, Richard Lane. Richard, great to be back with you for another Insiders episode. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about durhamlane before you introduce our guest?

Richard Lane:

Hi, Simon. Thank you. And yep, great to be back in The Insiders studio. Well, just very quickly, durhamlane, we’re an integrated sales and marketing agency. We’re in the business of helping our customers create always on channels of meaningful and well qualified sales opportunities that business development teams love to close. And today we’re thrilled to be joined by Simon Ball. Simon is market director for Equans. So Simon, welcome, really pleased to have you with us. This is a bit confusing, but I’m going to now hand back to Simon who’s going to get us started.

Simon Ball:

It’s a demographic thing. Simons are dying out, so I understand there’s a few of us in the future, but for the moment we have many of us, so I celebrate the Simon.

Richard Lane:

Firstly, Simon, great to have you with us. And Simon, handing back to you.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, Simon Insider Simon. So Simon, welcome to The Insiders. First question what we’d like to ask all of our guests is just to give us a little bit of background how you came to be in the role you’re in currently, so that our listeners can get to know you a little bit.

Simon Ball:

Yeah, no problem at all. My current role is Market Director and it’s important distinction because marketing would be a slightly different role. By market, we mean all of the market sectors that we’re targeting as a business. So there are certain key markets that are a priority for us. Some perhaps less so for sorts of reasons, and I’m responsible essentially for having early clients engagement with clients in those targeted markets. The role that I got, which I started about four and a half years ago here, came out of the back of about 20 years of sales in the facilities management sector. I guess in terms of my background, I actually started in 1996 as a researcher. I was doing a PhD in facilities management. I’d spent a lot of time at university and thought that might be a career that I might want to have, but what that did expose me to was lots and lots of businesses.

Actually, funnily enough, we had what we called associate companies who were looking for market research and support and understanding for this burgeoning new profession that we called facilities management, which is something that I’ve worked in now since ’96 to the present day pretty much consistently throughout. So what that did expose me to was an enormous amount of networking and some really key individuals who shaped this profession, this industry that I now work in, which obviously led to connections, which led to job opportunities and so on and so forth.

So I wasn’t a natural academic, I’ll put it that way. I was far more interested in writing publications that we could sell and make money or undertaking research that companies were paying us to do. And that was somewhat at odds with your traditional academic university environment, I think it’s fair to say. But it was a great learning point and it’s something that I’ve kept with me throughout right up to now in my current role where we undertake research in the market sectors that we do operate in. We’d like to take a fully informed approach before we go and meet any customer. So again, that’s something that I’ve brought forward right to the present day.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’m very impressed. I wouldn’t describe my time at university as being a natural academic, but I was more distracted by socializing and beer, Simon, I have to say.

Simon Ball:

That was part and parcel I could say. I did four year degree course. That was my first degree. Then I did a MSC. That was a year, so I’d spent five years. Then I did another year, which was the first year of a PhD, which is an MPhil, master in philosophy. And so there was a career path there for sure. The distractions were all too evident in terms of the commercial opportunities that were available at the time and lots of social distractions, of course, I did enjoy that.

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic. And as a business, you provide your services into multiple sectors as many of the listeners to The Insiders podcaster, manufacturing, corporate, public sector, et cetera. How do you approach those different sectors from a sales and marketing point of view?

Simon Ball:

Yeah, well, I probably just explain just a little bit just generally about facilities management and the sector that we largely operate in. If you’ve ever walked through a London Underground station, we sit behind the scenes maintaining those facilities. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of other clients for whom we provide those back of house services. As a brand, we’re well known, I think we’re becoming better known within the industry they operate in, but not well known in the public space. In fact, very few I would say facilities management companies are particularly well known in the public space, despite the fact that we’re 120 billion pound marketplace within the UK alone and have global reach and are pretty well established. Our position within the market where we’re keen to offer something slightly different, which is perhaps a less commoditized view in terms of the services that we deliver and the value that we can add to core businesses, because although the work we do is largely behind the scenes, back of house we might call it, it does have an impact on that front of house position.

It can have an impact on the core client’s business, particularly these days with regards to sustainability, the drive to net zero, the challenge around cost of course, which is all pervasive, particularly in the last year or so. So the work that we do is an integral one. It’s a real added value point. And I would say as an industry, we are an investment, not a cost to any business, and it’s an important message to get across because quite often we’re fighting against the lowest cost, slightly commoditized view of service. And again, that’s not something that we as a business want to operate in.

Simon Hazeldine:

So how would you, for example, articulate added value to say the justice sector with the courts versus a large manufacturer?

Simon Ball:

They’re surprisingly similar in some ways, but also different in many other key areas. I would say the one big thing that’s happened in the last few years has been the rise of digitalization. So if you operate a court service, more and more of that work can now be done online, just like we’re having this conversation via Teams. That takes pressure off a very aging property estate. There is also a large challenge around ensuring that that estate is low carbon and is reducing its energy exposure and energy expenditures. So that challenge is magnified in manufacturing as well, where they’re huge users of energy. Some of the biggest users of energy in the UK are manufacturers. You can’t just turn off a manufacturing process to save some money. So you have to think around the edges of, well, what can we do in terms of making every element of what we deliver as efficient as possible?

Really where it begins for us is understanding the customer and their motivation. So you could be a large refiner of raw food products and your biggest concern is gas expenditure. How much of them are spending on gas? So as a business that has its DNA in energy and carbon is able to look at the estate and go, well, actually maybe there’s some parts of the estate that could be electrified and things that we could bring forward. Or maybe even a bigger challenge around if you’re going to get out of gas in the future and you’re going to turn to hydrogen and you’re going to turn to other technologies, maybe there’s added value we can support with on top of the core services that we deliver for you.

Simon Hazeldine:

I was having a look at your LinkedIn profile and you mentioned that you, like I’m quoting here from your profile, disrupting old established models and challenging the status quo, which sounded very intriguing. So let us know a little bit more by what you mean by that.

Simon Ball:

This is probably the area of the recording where you’ll need to cut it out because it’s probably going to cause too much trouble. No, no. I think it stems from my time at university really because I was working in an environment which was very stayed in its approach and its process and this is the way you will do things. I rail against that. I look at the world that’s around us and go, well, we’re changing. We’ve got more young people now, more Gen Z in the workplace than we do my generation, and they have different needs and demands and challenges and so why should we do things the same way we’ve always done things? And I think as an industry, the industry that we operate in, it’s based around obviously compliance with certain procedures. It’s based around a model which hasn’t really changed massively in the last 30 years.

So technology being a good example, whilst if you go to any manufacturer for the last 20 years, they’ve been remote monitoring their equipment. Remote monitoring in buildings is something that’s still fairly in its infancy and essentially I want to move towards a world which is a little bit more agile and a little bit more flexible. Move away from a textbook telling you this is what you do step by step towards an environment. And I can see this happening in the future, but it hasn’t happened yet of buildings and property telling you when they need servicing, telling you when they need support and changing the service that we deliver around that. This industry is built around certain key things which have never really been massively challenged I think in the last 30 years or so. Technology is an amazing enabler, but it’s also an amazing transformative tool.

It’s starting to happen. It’s not happening massively, but it is starting to happen now. It’s quite exciting. It’s like a pivot point that we’ve gotten to. So by disrupting the status quo, I like sitting in front of clients and saying why do you want this? Why do you want it this way? Why are you prepared to pay for this in that manner when actually there’s an alternative, which could be maybe a bit more unknown, may mean taking a bit more of a risk on the technology or an approach or a commercial model that’s a little different to the norm, but actually if you do that, it might be more materially beneficial to your core business, particularly as we move towards this environment of AI.

I think that’s a very exciting development, artificial intelligence and how it can be applied not just from a sales and marketing point of view by the way, because I’ve had some interesting debates just this week about how AI can be used to write a bid document for example, or query a commercial set of terms and conditions, which must be very worrying for anyone involved in that. But I see it as a massive opportunity and a massive disruptor in a fairly well-established marketplace.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I’ve been seeing an awful lot of traffic amongst one particular network I’m involved in where the copywriters are looking at ChatGTP and will AI remove us from the entire process, which I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how that technology emerges and affect us. And you mentioned previously around you’re often competing against lower price, more commoditized service offering and also in our pre-interview you were just describing that facilities management is often perceived that way as a highly commoditized service. I guess a lot of organizations, companies are struggling with that. I’d be interested how you are dealing with that challenge so that you right from the start, I suppose, of your customer interaction all the way through.

Simon Ball:

Yeah, no, it is always a danger. I mean, nobody in this marketplace that we operate in has more than about three or 4% of the market and as a result, there’s a huge amount of competition which obviously puts pressure on price and price becomes a massive driver. People will tell you that price is the number one driver in this marketplace. I don’t know that I really genuinely believe that. I think there’s certainly been plenty of instances where we’ve won work and we weren’t necessarily the lowest price. I think a customer will feel a degree of trust and that will lead to a thought process around buying your services and because they feel trust in the people that you’ve put in front of them. So I guess my job in sales in this and to avoid that kind of trap of commoditization is to get to know our customers as well as we possibly can.

Ideally way ahead of any formal procurement arrangement. Procurement have a bit of a bad rap as salespeople have had a lot of closed doors in their faces from procurement people and I get that. But in many ways they are also the door openers and I think if there is a willingness within a client to engage and challenge and question the way that things have been done up to that point, if there’s a willingness to drive towards a zero carbon economy, that’s interesting to us because we are very strong in that area. If what they’re dealing with is highly critical and very risky, again, that’s interesting to us as a business. So these key metrics, if you come out of conversations that we have with customers way ahead of that formal process, and as I say it’s either through a procurement lead or it’s through a consultant who may act as a sort of third party, say they might act on a part of the customer and say, “Oh, what’s going on in the market? What’s interesting? Who would you recommend me talk to?”

Or it might be the customer themselves going, “You know what? I’m new in this role. This is a new thing that I’m taking responsibility for. I’ve got a fairly open mind. I think there might be a better way of doing things.” Then we are prepared to have those conversations even if nothing happens at the end of it. I’ve spent two years speaking with a customer currently, I don’t think it’s going to come to the market as a proposition that we could bid for anytime in the next two years, but we’re happy to have those conversations because when these things come to the market, when they are competitively being bid, we have to make the decision on whether we want to bid them or not.

And if we’ve had that conversation with the customer, they know us, they know what we’re offering, we know a bit about them, we’ve got a solution that we think is a good fit, sets us apart from our competitors, then that’s going to get far more traction internally, far more support. And I would say one thing to bear in mind about the industry that we work in, the bid process and the eventual selection of a winning biz can take anything up to a year or more. So obviously that’s a significant investment from our point of view. We don’t have infinite resources. So that selection point right up front is absolutely critical in identifying those customers who don’t want to buy commodity.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I’d like to return to that point in a moment, but I’d be interested, Richard, in terms of, you obviously work on behalf represent a number of clients, what’s durhamlane’s philosophy approach to that commoditization differentiation challenge?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting to listen to Simon talk about that. I’ve just made a note. Highly tailored approach in a highly commoditized marketplace. Our mantra number one is business fit business value. So our goal whenever approaching any prospect on our behalf of our customers is to be talking value and to be talking fit and to be different. And we coach and teach our staff to think and to think differently. That’s one of the things that one of our core talents is we want people to be thinking, but we also want you to be thinking differently. And a lot of what Simon’s talked about so far on this session has been about trying to bring a new angle to a common conversation. You’ve also really talked about qualification there, Simon, at the end, didn’t you? In terms of if it’s all about the price and the price being the lowest, then that’s not for you and therefore go and spend your time where you can be more successful.

Simon Ball:

Yeah, quite right. We want to put the odds in our favor.

Simon Hazeldine:

And Simon, I’d be interested in that what approach do you take to determining which potential clients you’re going to focus your marketing and sales office? I mean, I understand that if they just say, “Hi, Simon, we are looking for the lowest cost provider,” that’s a fairly easy decision, but a lot of others are going to be a little, I guess, much more complicated than that.

Simon Ball:

It might be or it might not.

Richard Lane:

With such long sales cycles, you might start off in a very value-based conversation and then with personnel changes it could become highly commoditized. So be interested in how that plays through.

Simon Ball:

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m afraid that is true and you can start having fabulous conversations with people who are incredibly engaged, incredibly excited and want to do something different. And then lo and behold, I mean it all gets very, very serious and they bring in procurement and they bring in consultants suddenly of what they’ve brought to the market isn’t exactly what you were hoping for. So we do have a way of measuring that and monitoring that over a period of time, quite long periods of time. That level of engagement, that level of relationship is really critical. So it’s important for us to have multiple engagement points with the client at multiple levels to try and avoid that trap, if you like, of even being told one thing by one person and then suddenly it all falls apart and the depth of that engagement. So we will often have workshops with these clients.

We’ll have in-depth engagement with multiple partners. We will bring our guys into the room and we’ll have open and honest conversations with them, none of which is a sales pitch. It’s all about trying to understand them better. And if they go down that route of we’re going to go down the more traditional route of procurement, in some ways, the fact that we’ve still had those conversations with them and that they’ve been open and engaged at that point isn’t necessarily that detrimental because we know them really well.

And so the solution that we then come up with in perhaps a more constrained procurement process is perhaps one that will align quite well with what they want. Customers sometimes don’t know what they want and they will be contradictory. I had a client say to me towards the end of last year, we’ve been speaking with them for several years, we’ve done a bid and we’ve submitted it and we came to presentation and they said, “Oh, we don’t want a sales pitch. We don’t want any salespeople in the meeting. We just want to speak to operational people.” Great, absolutely fine. So we brought in the operational people, we had the conversation and then the feedback afterwards, “Oh, these guys are great, fantastic, really strong operators, really credible. But when we’re missing some of the sales pizzazz, where’s all the sales pizzazz?”

Simon Hazeldine:

So Simon, you mentioned multiple engagement points and I’d be interested in terms of sort of client C level engagement as an engagement point. And you’ve mentioned that we don’t want salespeople in the room, we just want operational people in the room. But what’s your perception of executive C-suite, what they want from a modern sales professional, which is kind of interesting. It might be not a sales professional.

Simon Ball:

By and large, the higher up any organization you get, the easier the conversations become I find. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s the industry that I work in. By and large, no, they don’t want some slick sales pitch and I think I know what they mean by that. I think it’s don’t sell me something that I don’t want. Don’t come in here thinking you understand me and pitch me on something that I have no interest in. So the starting point, and I think this is true pretty much of every industry is just to get to know the customer that bit better. Not just the business itself but the individual and what makes them tick. So most people I’ve met in CEO positions quite financially astute, they’re quite sharp. They’re normally smart enough to bring smart people with them if they don’t know something. So legal people or financial people, commercial people and what have you.

So they’re smart at bringing good talent and putting them in front of you and really good CEOs have total trust in that team. They don’t tend to get massively involved in the work that we do. I haven’t met any CEO yet who really cares who does their cleaning. I’ve met plenty who will go, I really like such and such who does the cleaning, but none that really care who does it. That’s not to say that they’re disinterested, but their motivation is different. Their interest is with their stakeholders, their shareholders, the board of directors, the direction of the business, the latest financial numbers, and they’re not going to be distracted by you coming along and going, “Oh, we’ve got this really interesting smart buildings technology that if we introduce it into your…” They’re not going to be interested. So speaking with their subject-matter experts, however you will get more traction.

And ultimately, of course, understanding the position of the people that you are speaking with in relation to the CEO is also very, very critical. So understanding who’s going to ultimately make the decision and understanding what that governance process will look like for that client is incredibly important as well. In the private sector though where we operate, it’s a very mixed bag. In the public sector, it’s a little bit easier to understand in some ways because we’re a strategic partner for government, so we have regular meetings with the cabinet office as do a select number of other major partners. So the number of stakeholders to some extent is reduced.

That’s not to say the challenge isn’t enormous, of course. Click to giving what’s going on in government at the moment and in the public sector generally. My perception of C-Suite would be that where they engage, they’re incredibly engaged, they’re very smart bringing experts in, but by and large in our industry, they tend to rely on their trusted advisors and supporters for a recommendation. Deals done on the golf course, they used to happen, don’t think they happen so much now. There’s a lot of ethics stuff that we have to go through, a lot of forms that we have to fill out for obvious reasons about bribery and corruption and other things. And a CEO being dogmatic and saying, “You must work with these guys,” is kind of rare.

Simon Hazeldine:

As a non-golf player, I have to admit to a certain amount of skepticism over the importance of business on the golf course. Just sounds like a really good excuse for a game of golf, but maybe I’m being overly skeptical. And in terms of just looping back to we want operational people in the room, not your sales team, for example, as a situation, some sales professionals will be a little nervous of the deployment of non-sale colleagues within the sales process because they’re worried they’ll say something that’s commercially damaging or say the wrong thing at the wrong time. How do you as a business deploy non-sales colleagues for better expression?

Simon Ball:

So we have a lot of operational colleagues, as you might imagine. I think we’ve got 95,000 employees globally, most of whom are frontline staff. They’re working directly on client site. We have quite a small back office, if you know what I mean. So the management function that sits above that. There’s a number of ways we utilize them. Obviously, it depends largely on the clients that we’re speaking with, so the individual client themselves. What floats their boat in terms of personality, to some extent, operators are, in my experience, incredibly honest people. Honesty is great. I like honesty as a salesperson. I think if you put an honest person in front of a customer, it shines through. Where that honesty is negative is perhaps where they go, well, that won’t work, this system won’t work and that won’t work. And they’re very challenging and very difficult. We try and avoid that where we can by bringing our sales colleagues in as early as we can in the process so that they can build up a degree of relationship and understanding with our customers.

But I would say this genuinely hand on heart. As a salesperson, I’ve been involved in things and we’ve won billions of pounds worth of work over the years that I’ve been in sales, but I’ve never personally sold anything. It’s been those operators that I’ve put in front of the customers. It’s my job to corral them, if you like, to ensure that those personalities are matched, that there’s a cultural fit, which then breeds a sort of discussion and then a relationship and then trust. And when you think about it, if I’m in the final presentation and I’m the one doing most of the talking, I’m not the guy that’s going to be delivering the service. So to a degree, we have to let them speak and we need to get them up to a certain standard in terms of being able to do that. But my experience would be that most of them are very capable of doing that.

Twisting it slightly on its head, I think it really helps if you work in sales and you’ve actually been operational. So for a brief period of time, I was a facilities manager and I did manage buildings on behalf of a client. In my case, I worked for Cisco Systems during the dot com boom, which is very challenging. Things going up every five minutes, doors falling off, chaos basically. It was an incredible learning experience I will say. I’m very glad that I’m on this side of the fence. It’s the sort of job you take home with you, you worry about, you stress about, or I did anyway, it’s a really, really difficult job. But having those guys in the room, it lends enormous credibility to the things that we’re saying, but we need to bring them in early. We need to ensure that they’re engaged in that solution. It needs to be familiar to them so that when they’re in front of the customer, we’re not at odds when they’re not saying one thing, but we’ve said something different in the bid. We have to absolutely align.

Simon Hazeldine:

Certainly I think a nervousness I have seen across a number of different industries is the client or the customer is a little nervous or skeptical that the A team has turned up for the pitch and then once the business has been won, then they’re going to get the B team. And I think that introducing the people who will be working with your client at a very early stage really overcomes that concern. I think also adds a lot of richness to the process in many other ways as well.

Simon Ball:

Yeah, I totally agree.

Richard Lane:

One thing I love doing in our business is just introducing our sales execs really early. So go and speak to two three of our team. You have a skeptical client saying, “Well, how can you create meaningful qualified opportunities for me?” Well, just speak to some people doing the work. It’s all very well for me the co-founder of the business to be selling you the dream of what’s possible, but actually go and speak to the team that do the everyday. I always have ultimate trust in team just being themselves and that’s always the steer. And I think you said something there about honesty, people warm to honesty, Simon. I think that’s totally true. So don’t try and be who you’re not.

Simon Ball:

Yeah, I mean genuinely. And of course the things that we’re selling to some degree have real impact in these businesses, particularly in the public sector around social impact, leveling up, community engagement. We’ve got to practice what we preach. There was one particular client just last year, we brought 10 of our graduates who are on our graduate program and put them in front of the customer. The customer was blown away. Why you’re bringing these amazing, inspiring young people? What made you think of that? Well, because your demographic is changing and actually these guys are going to be your customers of the future.

And actually learning from them and understanding from them, putting them in front of the customer rather than someone slightly older, shall we say, is incredibly powerful. It speaks volumes about who we are as a business and what we want at the backend. We want long-term relationships, we want genuine partnerships. We want trust all levels. Show us to the whites of your eyes is a common enough phrase. But we do like to do that where we can bring those people in. They really do help to shape an impression of the business, which I say everything else will be the same. Price will be pretty similar. Quality submissions will be very similar in terms of bids. But those little things, they will make all the difference at the end of the day.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes, it’s that trust, which is simple little phrase, but very, very powerful concept. Normally we get Richard to do his pithy summary of some of your key points, the wisdom and expertise you’ve shared with us, Simon. So Richard?

Richard Lane:

Yes. Well, Simon, firstly, again, thanks for joining us on The Insiders. I’m always fascinated by the businesses that sit behind the scenes. No one ever said to me the sales profession would be a great place for you to spend your time. And then when you start and get into the world of sales and you realize what an amazing opportunity it is for you and for your career, and then you start seeing that everybody needs to buy something and therefore are probably being sold it by someone. And next time I walked through the tube, which will be next week, then I’ll be thinking of Equans. So firstly, love that. I think it’s been a really interesting discussion, particularly around that sort of solution focus, which is very close to my heart, but you’re in a very commoditized world. We all are I guess. But you said I think three to 4% is the highest market share of any of your competitors.

So really highly commoditized, but your entire approach is the absolute opposite, which I think is really interesting. You start by understanding your customer and their motivations. Those will change as different people get involved and you’ve therefore got to be on the board and putting your feet in their world and in their shoes at all times I’d suggest, which is clearly a challenge. Disrupting and enabling. So disrupting the norm and then enabling people to do things differently is an interesting place that we’ve spent some time on. We’ve talked also about customers not wanting the slick sales pitch and don’t try and sell me what I don’t want. Unfortunately, that is… I was delivering a workshop to 40 or so people the other day, and I will start up by saying what’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of salespeople? I won’t repeat what I heard, but that often comes from that exact phrase you mentioned, which is they try and sell me stuff that I don’t frankly want, so don’t waste my time.

And that led us to the last main topic, which I’ve just titled down here, is it’s a team pursuit. I totally agree with you when I see CVs of enterprise salespeople who said they won this account and it was four million pounds. Well, they didn’t win it, they were part of a winning team. And the ability to bring your colleagues that do the do, the operational people, the people that are honestly able to talk about customer experiences, I think that adds huge value. So any of our listeners there thinking about how do I impress my prospects or my customers? Well, get the people that do the work in front of them, get the people to talk honestly about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. And you build that trust that we’ve talked about and hopefully you build solutions that add value and make a long-term difference. So those are some of the key thoughts I think, Simon.

Simon Hazeldine:

Thank you, Richard, for that summary. And Simon, just before we go, we’ve got a final question for you. We’re building The Insiders Spotify playlist, and we ask all of our guests to add a song to the playlist. It is a very random, diverse, and eclectic mix across countless genres, including some quite niche ones. What are you going to add to the playlist, Simon?

Simon Ball:

I’m going to add Space Oddity by David Bowie. Big Bowie fan. And the song was written in the ’60s, but I think it became a bigger hit in the UK in the ’70s when I was a kid. And just a fabulous song and quite interesting and timely. Looking down on planet Earth, drifting off into space. There’s something about that song that’s always resonated with me. So I love that song. So I’d include that in the playlist.

Simon Hazeldine:

And actually yes to the shame of the Insider Spotify playlist, I think that is the first time David Bowie has made an appearance.

Simon Ball:

It’ll fit well for sure.

Simon Hazeldine:

So thank you for adding such a legend to the Spotify playlist. Wonderful. So thank you very much to Simon for joining us on this episode of The Insiders by durhamlane. Thank you to my co-host 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 they are released and visit durhamlane.com to learn more about selling at a higher level. In the meantime, we’d just like to wish you good luck and good sales and marketing folks.

Speaker 1:

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