Announcer:

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 joined by Jed Williams, head of Global Sales Acceleration at Poly for this episode. During the course of the interview, Jedd provided us with some excellent sound bites, including one team, one effort, one plan. This is similar to durhmalane’s ethos of one team, one approach, get things done well when you do them together. A name makes something real. If you want to drive change, give it a name and focus on customer’s needs rather than selling your products. In Jed’s world, this means hardware mustn’t get in the way of the sell, perhaps obvious to those in the know, but always worth reminding. Finally, are you a Zeams persona? Simon and I are. Enjoy this episode and thanks as always for listening.

Simon Hazeldine:

Hello and welcome to The Insiders by Durham Lane, 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 Durham Lane, Richard Lane. Richard, great to be back with you for another episode of The Insiders. Do you want to give us a little bit of insight into Durham Lane before you introduce our guest for this episode?

Richard Lane:

Hi, Simon. Thank you. Yes, always great to be back inside the Insiders Podcast studio. So very briefly, Durham Lane, we’re an integrated sales and marketing agency. What does that mean? Well, we spend our time helping our customers create always on channels of meaningful and well qualified sales opportunities. Today we’re thrilled to be joined by Jed Williams. Jed is the head of global sales Acceleration for Poly who are recently acquired by HP. So Jed, welcome, great to have you on the show and I’m going to hand back to Simon to get us started.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Thanks, Richard, and thank you very much, Jed, for joining us on this episode of the Insiders. Jed, a question we normally like to ask our guests at the start of all the episodes is just give a little background for our listeners so they can get to know you a little bit better, how you came to be in the role that you’re in currently.

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, glad to be here first and foremost. And to answer the question, how did I get to Poly, which is now owned by HP as you mentioned, is I joined back in October of 2019, so coming up on I guess three and a half years at this point. And so I had been with a company called Cisco, most people know about Cisco, for about 21 years and really grew up at Cisco in multiple roles over there. Started as believe it or not, a systems engineer in the sales organization and just progressed my career from a SE to a salesperson to a sales leader to run in their overall go-to-market strategy. And I came to Poly to do exactly that type of role as well, right, so we can build an overall sales acceleration team, which a lot of people say what is sales acceleration? And it’s really a way to drive new product introduction, new lines of revenue across the broader Poly sales organization and then now taking that same thing and doing it for the broader HP organization.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful, thank you. And you mentioned your background and the global remit and you are responsible for go to market globally for Poly. How do you approach different regions, different markets when you’re going about doing that successfully?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, like many technology companies, we align our sales efforts around three theaters like the Americas, which includes obviously North America and Latin America, EMEA, which is all of your European type countries and then a Asia-Pacific or APAC. Right? And so we really focus our energy and effort around three distinct sales motions across those three theaters. HP’s aligned slightly different, they go down one more level, almost at the market level as they call it, but it’s still organized in a similar manner.

And sales plays that work pretty well within EMEA and AMER, those are very similar sales plays. Those same sales plays may not work well inside of APAC, so you have to adjust them and really build a sales play specific for the Asia-Pacific market, whether it’s specific for China or going into what we call ANZED, right, Australian-New Zealand market. There’s some nuances for that part of the world that you can’t just take an America’s based sales play and just force fit it into APAC. It will not work effectively or efficiently. So we really have to drive these sales plays per market, but there’s a lot of similarities between AMER and EMEA, but the APAC we’ve learned over the years that you have to be pretty unique and pretty specific to each country, if that makes sense.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, and you mentioned you have different platform partners in different parts of the world. How does that influence that approach?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, great question. So the interesting thing about being on the hardware side of the collaboration equation, and that’s what Poly does in case people don’t know that, right? We build phones, we build headsets, we build video units like the one I’m on today. And so we don’t sell any of our hardware without it attaching to somebody’s platform, whether that’s Zoom or Microsoft or RingCentral or 8X8. You can’t mention all 80 or 90 or 100 partner platforms, but in China there’s a specific platform provider called Tencent, right? So you really have to look at the platform providers that are specific to the country that you’re going to market in and making sure that you have the right partnerships, relationships with those providers, and clearly the desires to be a strategic partner with those platform providers versus being just looked at as a hardware provider.

Simon Hazeldine:

And in terms of your team at Poly, obviously you mentioned the partners and you work with a number of them and we have a lot of listeners who are working through the channel or a similar structure and a model. So how do you help and encourage your partners to drive sales of Poly products and services?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah. It really is all about how to sell their service and how to make their service more broadly adopted, more used, which makes it more sticky. And that way when they come time to renew that contract for that service, for offer, then the renewals become just that much easier. So if using a Poly headset like the one I have on today makes that service stickier and more broadly adopted, to repeat myself a little bit, when it comes time to that renewal conversation, usually the renewal is it’s an easier conversation and you want to do the land and expand type of motion where they actually add more usage to that renewal type contract.

So we focus less about our devices and more about how we really focus on solving the customer needs first and then that pulls through the hardware in the end, but it’s all about leveraging the customer need. And the one important thing is we don’t want the hardware to get in the way of the sale, right? So you can’t be viewed as A, if I attach hardware to this service offering, it’s going to slow down my sale. That is not an equation for success.

Simon Hazeldine:

You’ve now been obviously part of HP, acquired by HP. Do you have a job role there around encouraging HP sellers to be widening I guess their arena of focus to include Poly?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah. Yeah, 100% we do. We like to refer to that as synergies, right? How do you drive more synergies across the organization? Poly’s roughly 1,000 sellers, so my remit before the acquisition was how do I get 1,000 sellers selling this new technology or something that my team is responsible for from a new product introduction perspective? Now the remit’s just gotten 10X bigger, right? How do I get the broader HP sales organization selling that and driving those synergies? Especially if you take a large HP customer that may not be buying Poly today, that is an opportunity to go to that customer and say, Hey, we’re going to make it easier for you to transact this type of hardware, this type of service with HP Poly that they didn’t have before. So it really is just an upside opportunity for us, but also for the customer to make the acquisition process just that much easier.

Simon Hazeldine:

I mean, I guess it’s a question linked to the previous one about partners and also HP sellers. So when you are co-selling or you’re selling alongside alliance partners and potentially colleagues from HP, how do you set that up to make sure that works successfully? Because sometimes you avoid tripping over each other or a clash in the way you conduct customer discovery, customer meetings.

Jedd Williams:

Yeah. It’s that classic conversation of who is the quarterback in the equation? To use an American analogy for U.S. football, who’s the quarterback driving that overall transaction, really owning the relationship with the customer? Who is providing more of a support function to help really bring in the right level of expertise into that discussion with the customer? We don’t like to talk about it. People think that overlay is a four letter word, but at the end of the day, my sales acceleration team is an overlay organization with our remit to co-sell with the alliance partners, to co-sell with the HP team or even the Poly team to make sure that we’re maximizing the size of the opportunity and getting the customer what they need early on in the process time to revenue. Right? If we can really co-sell and wrap those opportunities up faster and get the customer what they want initially, it’s good for everybody, partner, customer and Poly/HP.

Simon Hazeldine:

And I guess this next question links to that one again I think because when we did our pre-interview before we came on air, you mentioned the importance that you personally attached to the concept. You described it as one team, one effort, one plan. Could you just explain what you mean by that and expand on why you personally believe that’s so important?

Jedd Williams:

And that’s something that [inaudible 00:09:43] worked with me and alongside me and the organization will hear will know that term, one team, one effort, one plan. And I like to actually add on to that, say, hey, it doesn’t have to be my team, my effort or my plan, but let’s make sure that we go in with one of those, right? Let’s go in with one of them to the customer and to the alliance partner because there is nothing worse than competing against yourself in an opportunity and it can happen, back to your question around how you make sure you’re not tripping over each other.

And so I’ve always worked along the process of hey everybody, bury egos, bury the agendas, let’s figure out what the customer wants and figure out how we work together as a single team to go get there. By the way, I also say if my team is not adding any value to the equation, we should not be in that equation. So the ideal scenario is if the HP team or the Poly team can transact the deal and they don’t need the global sales acceleration overlay team in there, that’s not a bad thing. That means that my team’s done a good job and got them to a level where we don’t need to be inside of that opportunity. That’s how I look at it at least.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I mean it’s ego sometimes, isn’t it, Jed? It’s the thing that maybe gets in the way sometimes when you’re trying to get that focus, those different agendas, I think, that you alluded to. Richard, your perspective from a Durham Lane point of view on that great, I think, example from Jed is that the north star is the focus on what’s best for the customer, but the alignment of the teams.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I love that one team, one effort, one plan. We have ours, Jed, which is one team, one approach, a similar thing. I think without doubt across our business and we’re 12 years old now, well, on Saturday, so we know without doubt that when we partner successfully with a customer, then we are successful and we deeply integrate into the BD teams that we serve and we have success. So I think that that integration is really important. One thing, it would be great to bust a myth, Jed, if you can. So I’ve always thought that from a tender situation you might want to be involved in multiple bids. Does that not happen or does that happen? Yeah. So might you be involved in a tender with two different partners and Poly being part of the solution in each of those bid responses?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, it’s a very interesting question actually. We just had a trade show here that we dressed wrapped up in the U.S. called Enterprise Connect down in Orlando, Florida. And I met with a lot of my alliance partners face to face and we always have that discussion on I wish you guys would only sell my solution. And tongue in cheek a bit, I say, well, I wish you guys would only sell my hardware, right? And so the reality is that there’s a lot of different unique customer use cases where one cloud offer fits better than another cloud offer.

There’s also some very interesting solutions or situations where customers use a little bit of everything. We love when we refer to customers that use Microsoft and Zoom at the same time as a Zeems customer. And that’s where Poly really has a lot of value to that customer because that same physical hardware device can work across both platforms or multiple platforms. So it’s a similar experience to the end customer.

But to answer your question, every now and then it does pop up, but typically a customer tells us, hey, we’re going down path A or path B, we’ve made a decision. Very rarely does a customer come to us and say, Hey, we’re going to replace our video units. Whose platform should we use? What cloud provider should we use? It’s typically, hey, we’ve made a decision, we’re moving away from a legacy provider and we’re going to this new architecture that they believe is more modern and will fit their needs better. Now what hardware would you recommend fits our needs? So typically that’s where it’s at in the sales cycle.

Simon Hazeldine:

Every day’s a school day. I’m delighted to know I’m a Zeems customer as I do have to move between both of the platforms on a regular basis, Jed, so that that’s a name if you like for customers using both of those. And also on that theme, in our pre-interview as well, you mentioned the importance you placed on naming things. That sounds fascinating. Give us an example, naming things, which means what to you?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, it’s something I’ve done my entire career and believe it or not, I’m still a relatively young guy, at least I tell myself that, but I’m on year 29 of my career now and doing this stuff. If you give something a name, it makes it real, right? So one of the things that we did during COVID when we had a lot of supply shortages is we named a big program that we drove inside the company Apollo. Right? And so everybody in my company knows what Apollo is, right? And they know how to enact on Apollo. So we measured Apollo, you got to inspect what you expect, that old saying. Right?

And so dashboards, everybody had their Apollo goal, everybody knew what they could sell that was available via Apollo. And so anytime you want to really get the machine, your broader sales force behind you, as silly as it may sound, and as simple as it may be, give it a name that everybody from the CEO on down talks about. Hey, we’re executing Apollo, right? And there’s been a few things that’s like, Hey, that’s not my name, I don’t love that name, but back to the one team, one effort, one plan. Let’s embrace it, let’s get behind it and let’s go. And that does seem to get the momentum of the broader organization behind you because people know what it is.

Simon Hazeldine:

It creates focus, right?

Jedd Williams:

It does.

Simon Hazeldine:

Because sometimes we’re trying to draw together a number of possible themes together and get people focused on it. And Apollo, I think you said you were making sure because of supply constraints, you had focus on using inventory that you had at the time, wasn’t it? It was a smart move at the time.

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, exactly. If you guys ever watch the movie, there was an analogy in the movie, it’s like, hey, we’ve got a square canister, we got to figure out how to make this square canister work in this round cylinder. And sometimes you got what you have and you have to figure out a way to make it work.

Richard Lane:

Turning earphones into videos.

Jedd Williams:

There you go.

Simon Hazeldine:

Or as an old boss of mine used to say, let’s sell what’s on the truck.

Jedd Williams:

Yeah.

Simon Hazeldine:

And obviously your folks are selling into large enterprise and large global organizations, I’m sure. And with regards to the role of what we might refer to as the enterprise seller, albeit you’re very young in your career, Jed, as you said in just 29 years, what are some of the big changes that you’ve seen happen?

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. Now, especially during the pandemic, the enterprise seller was able to become almost an inside seller. They would never want to be called that for sure, because back to that ego word, it’s like, no, I’m a sales executive. But we became very adept and successful at driving sales via inside seller during the pandemic, so the pandemic has changed the way we all do business now. Right? It truly has. In fact, this trade show we were just at, there’s a lot of folks that it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in four or five years face to face in some cases. And so it’s just a very interesting dynamic that you don’t have to be in front of the customer all the time.

Now I will say there’s a healthy balance there though because as much as you can do things effectively just like we’re doing here via video, and that’s exactly it, we want to bring the equity to this remote experience. That’s what we’re all about. But you do have to get in front of the customer every now and then and have that face-to-face conversation and really make sure that you, again, an old term, press the flesh. Make sure that you shake some hands and make sure people understand that you’re a real person and that you’re there to help them be successful. But it has changed the dynamic pretty considerably and I think we all see that now.

Simon Hazeldine:

I love your expression, everybody became an inside seller, and where traditionally, I don’t know, a lot of organizations, inside sellers do up to this much and externals, which is … I do fondly remember a conversation taking place and a client where an external salesperson was getting very upset and said something to one of their inside colleagues and they said, you can’t do a deal that big, you are an inside salesperson, which was absolutely you’re not allowed. You’ve been too successful, stop it, I think was a crazy conversation. Richard, changes from your perspective across … you’ve got quite an obviously broad client base.

Richard Lane:

Do you remember our podcast with Ryan Bott from Sodexo, early on in the days of the insiders, Simon? So Sodexo really, really lent into the shift that the pandemic was accelerating from enterprise to inside. I think some of the efficiencies that you get from being behind a desk, whether that desk be in your office or in the work office or at home, wherever then are significant. All of our businesses is from behind the desk, so there are lots of benefits to be gained from that. And I believe that the lid has really lifted in terms of what people believe is possible from a non-face-to-face interaction.

That said, totally agree with Jed where you still can’t be getting face-to-face. Sales is a human endeavor, I believe, and building relationships is a key part of what we do. I just think that we can work in a much smarter way than we ever have done before. And personally, if I think about over the last 10 years, the trips that I’ve gone down to London, I probably look at 50% of those and think, nah, probably didn’t need to do that. So you now make the time really count. I think it’s also heightened the importance of face-to-face. So when you do actually get face-to-face with people, there needs to be something really meaningful behind it.

Simon Hazeldine:

And, Jed, changes to your buyers as a result, I suppose, of those changes in the way people are working. So I guess that must have altered things for you from their perspective.

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, it’s really interesting. For the last 10 years in my industry, and I’m in the collaboration space, as I mentioned earlier, headsets, phones, and video units, the pandemic has really cemented the fact that at least for the average knowledge worker, you need a headset, you need a video camera, you may not need a phone. Right? And so that’s really changed the dynamic on, for a knowledge worker, what is the need for a phone, right? You still need a phone number, right? You’re still going to take phone calls, but you may take it via your PC or via soft client.

What’s really interesting though for the SMB, right, the small medium business, so in the vertical space, healthcare, retail, they still need phones. I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression what I just said is like, Hey, phones are finally dead. No, that’s not the case at all. But I think the folks before was like, no, I have to have a phone on my desk because of the pandemic have gotten very comfortable with, you know what? This soft phone thing actually does work really well and so I don’t need a phone. Yeah, I take a customer, let’s say they had 10,000 phones before the pandemic and they’re going to upgrade their phone system to the next big cloud provider, it’s one of our providers. They may buy 5,000 phones and 5,000 soft phones. Right? So it’s definitely changed the dynamic of what people use to collaborate with for sure.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s another example I think, isn’t it, of what’s the customer need? So what’s the need of the customer? Not necessarily the customer needs a telephone. It’s they need to be able to do certain communication. And how do you keep up to speed with those changes so your marketing and sales approach is relevant and effective? We’ve got a world that’s changing obviously so much.

Jedd Williams:

Yeah, it’s a really great question actually because right now I think all of our collective customers are trying to figure out what does return to office really mean. At the beginning of last year, I’ll tell you, the business was incredibly hot. In fact, it was everybody was video enabling everything, everything was cloud connected, and they were modernizing their offices, refreshing their offices, trying to make it appealing to get people back to the office. And so that was the first half of last year. And so they did all this work and then people didn’t return to the office. They were like, I’m not going back to the office.

So I think a little bit between, okay, we built it and they didn’t come and the economy’s gotten a little bit soft, I think is putting it lightly. My largest customers are reevaluating what does the floor print of our office space need to look like? Maybe before I had 100 conference rooms that weren’t video enabled, maybe now I just need 50 conference rooms, but they all need to be video enabled as an example. Right? And so everybody’s reevaluating what does this return to office thing really look like and how much are we going to force or mandate our employee base to come back to the office?

And if they are coming back to the office, why? What’s the need to come back to the office? And so that to me is really changing the way that we market. In my industry, we’re all focused on, okay, how do we help our customers put a strategy in place to make return to office make sense for the employees and really cost justify their real estate footprint and drive the productivity gains that they need to drive, especially during the time of an economic downturn?

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, because it’s been an unknown situation, hasn’t it? That’s never really occurred on the scale that it occurred with COVID. And then I guess I had clients I think who assumed, well, now it’s over, everybody’s going to want to come back to the office and employees didn’t. And they went, right, we’re going to go two days at home, three days in the office and employees still went, yeah, not so sure about … So it’s been a really fascinating, very volatile situation. So I guess, are they looking to suppliers like yourself, Jed, to help to answer those questions?

Jedd Williams:

They are, right? And so we’re working with our alliance partners and we’re also working with some of the large systems integrators that are out there that provide that kind of consultant level to build some practices around the return to office concepts and principles as well as we call it personification. So where you’ve got sales salesperson, what product, what equipment, what devices do they need to be able to do their job versus a top level executive versus a knowledge worker that’s down building a product in the factory? Right? And so we have about eight different levels of personas to help customers understand this is what we’re seeing, and we’re updating those personas to make sure that they are current because the personas pre-pandemic versus now are pretty drastically different.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, and I think that’s part of what I often say to account managers and salespeople when I’m working with them at my clients, is you have that incredibly broad overview across multiple customers and potentially multiple industries, which our customers don’t because they spend the majority of their time head down inside their own organization. So you have a much broader, more informed perspective. You’ve got a lot of value to bring to them even before you actually start talking to them about buying requirements. So yes, an interesting place to be. Customers are looking for guidance sometimes because they can get very confused about things. Can’t we all, when we’re making buying decisions, when we’ve got so many different choices? So Richard, first of all, obviously happy birthday to Durham Lane on Saturday for your happy birthday to that. Key points for you from the conversation with Jed?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, sure. And Jed, thank you. It’s been great listening to your experiences in the way that Poly works. So if I can read my writing properly here, which is seeming to be a bit of a struggle today actually. But yeah, we just started off talking about sales acceleration and the differences. I think that’s maybe the topic to come back to another day. Simon is selling into different parts of the world. We come up against that lot a lot and talk about it a lot. Really interesting from a Poly’s perspective is that all products are attached to a platform. It would be very easy I think to get stuck in product sales, but Jed mentioned a number of times how you’re selling on customer need, which is really, I think speaking our language here on the insiders. So focusing less on devices and focusing really on customer need to deliver the solution. And to that point, the hardware mustn’t get in the way of the sell, so also like that as a bit of a mantra.

We talked about one team, one effort, one plan. We learned that Simon is a Zeem, as am I, actually. Durham Lane is a Zeems customer. So that was a new term for us, but also a name makes something real and we’ve got examples of that here, but I like that, Jed. I think that’s a really great point for listeners to think about. If you want to focus on something, if you want to implement something across your business, then give it a name, get it the recognition in that way. And then finally really touched around a little bit back to the pandemic, so the enterprise sellers becoming inside again. What do you need in order to do your business?

I don’t have a phone on my desk, so I spend most of my day on Teams, sometimes on Zoom and obviously email and the rest. And then we finished with what could be a very philosophical question, which is what does the return of the office really mean? So I’m going to leave my summary there. I think that’s still to be decided, isn’t it? I think the return is yet to be debated. And Jed, back in my corporate life, I used to sell globally learning solutions and one of my mantras at that time was build it and they won’t come. And it seems like many of our global brands build their new environment and then have found that people haven’t come back, a lesson to be learned there maybe.

Simon Hazeldine:

Jed, final question. We’re building the insiders Spotify playlist and we ask every guest to choose a song which will add to the playlist. It’s a very rich, diverse, and eclectic collection of genres. What is your chosen song to add to the playlist, please?

Jedd Williams:

Well, this may surprise you, but I’ve got a daughter that’s about to be 14 and I got called out on this last week on a broadcast we had, an intro broadcast for all of HP Poly, but I’m going to say Taylor Swift’s Sake it Off. Right? When you have a 14-year-old daughter, you hear a lot of Taylor Swift and right now with the economy doing what it’s doing, we got to shake it off and figure out how we’re going to make the number and keep pushing forward-

Simon Hazeldine:

Actually, I am surprised with an artist of such popularity. It is the first time Taylor Swift I think has made it onto the insiders playlist.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, my daughter will be very pleased to hear that Taylor’s made it onto the esteemed insiders Spotify playlist.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful.

Richard Lane:

Yeah.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, thank you very much to Jed for joining us on this episode of The Insiders by Durham Lane. And 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 which are released on a regular basis. And please visit durhamlane.com to learn more about selling at a higher level. In the meantime, on behalf of everybody at the Insiders, we’d just like to wish you good luck and good sales and marketing, folks.

Announcer:

The Insiders by Durham Lane. Subscribe today to never miss an episode.