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 joined by Jason Harvey from Zebra Technologies for this episode of The Insiders. During our discussion, Jason shared the cultural shift that is necessary to move from a product focus to a solution selling based approach.

We loved the ‘be curious’ attitude Zebra has adopted. We also discussed how it’s important not to overwhelm your buyers or your sellers, small shifts can make big differences. Win loss analysis, account classification, market transformation, if you’re interested in any or all of these, listen on. As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion.

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 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, it’s 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 please?

Richard Lane:

Sure. And hi, Simon. Great to be back in The Insiders Podcast studio. Sure, durhamlane, very quickly, 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.

The business development teams love to close and particularly fascinated by that link between MQL and SQL and making sure that that works well for our enterprise customers. Thrilled to be joined today by Jason Harvey. Jason is VP solution sales for Zebra Technologies. I know from the pre-conversation we’ve had, we’re in for a great episode today of The Insiders. So Simon, to get us started, I’m going to hand it back to you.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful, Richard, thank you very much. And Jason, welcome to The Insiders. Absolutely wonderful to have you with us. First question, which we normally ask so the listeners can get to know you a little bit, could you give us a little bit of background on yourself, and particularly how you came to be in the role that you’re in currently?

Jason Harvey:

Absolutely, Simon, and thank you very much for inviting me on. So I guess, I’ve got a bit of a different start to my sales career. I started my time in the British Army for the first 14 years of my life, serving in a Majesty’s Armed Forces doing telecommunications, which set me up nicely for the communications kind of background that I wanted to get into in civilian life.

I started my career with Cisco Systems as a sales engineer, system engineer, and very quickly moved on into the world of barcode scanning, the dark arts of barcode scanning and joined Symbol Technologies where again, I moved into a sales engineering management role.

And then after a few years doing that, I moved into my first foray into sales management, which was running a small team, six, seven individuals that really were looking at new verticals into the barcode scanning area that we were going after. So that was the start of the career.

I’ve now moved into a solution sales role, and I think the idea of the background of technical sales engineering really gives me a bit of a jump on most when it comes to solution selling and understanding those complexities. And now after Symbol Technologies was acquired by Motorola Solutions and Motorola Solutions was acquired by Zebra Technologies, I’ve now moved from a commercial, well technical role into commercial role running the North Europe and then moving into an EMEA role running solution sales. Very exciting opportunity for me.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful, thank you. And folks, we are actually recording this on the 31st of October, Halloween. And I think it’s the first time I’ve heard of barcode scanning being described as a dark art Jason, but very, very, very [inaudible 00:04:03] considering the day that it is. But you mentioned that sort of technical background and many of our listeners will identify with the need for sellers and also marketers to make the shift from having a technical product focus to more of a customer centric solution focus. And I’d be interested as the VP of solution sales, how are you addressing that at Zebra?

Jason Harvey:

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think there’s many companies that have gone through this transition, product selling into solutions. And it’s a tough, there’s no one silver bullet for sure. But the thing about Zebra Technologies is it’s been going more than 50 years now. It’s got a very strong market in its product, mobile computing, scanning, printing.

And we’ve maintained a number one position across most of those markets, most of those product groups for the last 50 plus years. And that gives its own challenges. One of the great things about that, it’s a very strong core portfolio. And as part of that, you’ve got core sellers and technical sellers that really understand their product. As Zebra Technologies is starting to move into more of a solutions led company selling both software and services.

And they’ve become more and more exciting. They’re investing through acquisitions in machine vision, automation, robotics, software as a service, retail solutions, cloud AI machine vision. That means the portfolio is becoming very complex. How do you take your product person from that “I know a product and I’m the expert” into this wide portfolio. And it’s been really challenging.

And again, no one silver bullet, but multiple facts. I think the first one is really creating a culture which we’re very lucky to have at Zebra Technologies, which is a culture of innovation and trust. And that’s really important because you need to make sure that you put a safe environment around those product sellers moving into solutions.

It’s not a far and higher culture. You need to upskill them. You need to make sure that they’re aligned with their customer journey. You need to make sure that they are really putting their time and effort into focusing on solutions. And if they do fail, then that’s okay. Right?

And you’ve got to give them that warm blanket to say, “It’s okay to go and continue to sell your core, but at the same time go and take the leap into selling solutions. And if you fail, that’s okay. We’ll put our arms around you, we’ll put some more training, we’ll put some more enablement in place and we’ll make sure we get you over that line.” And I think that’s probably some of the most important things at Zebra that we’re doing.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, it’s very interesting your approach there where some organizations will go, “Right, well, we’ll go out and we’ll bring in some solution sellers,” as though these wonderful beings exist in their entirety in the market. Whereas you’re making sure you’re recognizing the kind of the legacy technical aspects and then encouraging that evolution of the sales teams. So have you got your sales leader, sales managers kind of coaching and helping them on that journey?

Jason Harvey:

Yeah, we’ve definitely undertaken a significant transformation of our own company and there’s been a lot of internal training. We’ve got mentoring and coaching plans that we’ve had in place for a long time. And it’s really, like I said, there’s no silver bullet, but it’s about tweaking that already existing framework that we provide at Zebra Technologies that allows the opportunity for success and that big curious attitude.

And where we have made acquisitions and you’ve got a very strong sales team that you’ve acquired, we are very proud of the fact that most of those people that we acquire are staying. And it’s an evolution of those skillset. I’m not saying everything is a nirvana and we get it right every time, of course not.

But we’re leveraging all of that new talent coming in. We’re leveraging the core people. We need our core people to continue to sell the core, but it’s about looking left and right by maybe one degree this year, taking those core products, adding 1% on, adding the following year, adding 5% on. And it’s a constant evolution, but leveraging the right coaching, mentoring, feedback, culture to allow you to be successful and not have a fear around failure.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Which is a really interesting perspective in sales, big focus on winning the deal, isn’t there? And failure sometimes, not something people feel as comfortable with. Richard, from a durhamlane point of view, this shift that has to take place in many, many industries from a more technical product feature focus to a solution outcome focus, what’s your take on that?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I love that be curious attitude. And I think sales for so long has been selling stuff rather than helping your buyers to buy from you. And that’s where our selling at high level methodology comes from. It’s really that sort of consultative, sell it in a box I guess. And really interesting to hear the cultural shift that Jason and the team are on as or Zebra as a business are on.

Because I don’t think you can underestimate the sort of impact that that shift will have. But also you’ve got to keep the day job going, you’ve got to keep the lights on. And so getting those two working in tandem I think is quite a feat. But actually I think people, particularly technical people, when you share with them why you’re doing it and perhaps help them with the how, then they’re often some of the best listeners out there, aren’t they? I think.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:09:20] it’s an important part. And selling is a team sport, right? And in the time that we’re in now without a doubt. And Jason, you mentioned at Zebra, you’ve got a wide portfolio of products and services and solutions. And selling across a portfolio successfully is another one of those holy grail things that many organizations are aspiring to do successfully. How do you approach, for want of a better expression, portfolio selling as an organization?

Jason Harvey:

Yeah, it’s another hot topic. I often look on a quarterly, half yearly, yearly perspective. We measure success based on your target that you’ve done. And certainly from a core perspective that could be, that is and continues to be a very important part of what we do today at Zebra Technologies. However, I can look at that from a solution sales perspective.

We can have sales, account managers that achieve target, overachieve target, but they don’t sell any solutions. And is that what success looks like? So for me, it’s small increments. Certainly when we’ve grown organically around solutions, it’s very much of enabling the sales teams to understand what vertical they’re in and then getting them to understand that they can add more value to their core product that they’re selling to their customer by looking one degree left or right and selling a wraparound solution with it.

When you do that right, we’re finding that account managers that have been very core centric on that portfolio of product realize they’re much more relevant and they’re much more sticky with their customer base and their customer starts to see them. We overuse the word trusted advisor. And they start to see them from a commodity salesperson to really a trusted advisor because they understand that they’re offering more value to them.

And when you can get that final moment with some of our account managers around those points, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and the flywheel starts to turn and you gather momentum and you start to accelerate. And the portfolio starts with those small increments. Making the leap from perhaps an acquisition, for example, the machine vision acquisition, how do you get an account manager that sold a barcode scanner and a printer and a mobile computer to take that jump?

Again, it’s about making sure that you give the right coaching and mentoring around the elevator pitch. The account manager is going to go and see his customer that they’ve had for many, many years. Hopefully they’ve built up that trusted advisor status, they’ve become a bit more relevant, they’ve added a bit more value, they understand the customer journey.

And because they’re in that luxurious position, they can have that elevator pitch around the value proposition of something that we bought from a right hand side solution. And if you get that right, that is the fast start that you need for the account manager to open the door for the skilled solution seller that’s got the deep understanding of the solution they’re providing.

So the portfolio’s wide, eat the elephant in bite size chunks every single time. Don’t overwhelm your customer, understand your customer’s journey, don’t overwhelm the seller. Get the seller to understand that he’s not alone and he can bring in the solution specialist. And that’s really how we’re attacking it at Zebra today.

Simon Hazeldine:

So you’re trying to sort of encourage and empower your sellers to have that initial conversation, sort of elevator pitch to grab the attention and then for the deeper dive, then it’s handed over to one of you specialists.

Jason Harvey:

Absolutely. And again, it’s the fear of failure absolutely comes into it. You’ve got to do the right level of management inspection, and you have to have the right structure around account planning and a methodology that puts you in place to make sure from your account planning perspective, you understand the market, you understand your customer’s journey, and you plant that seed with your seller that gives him the opportunity to go and add that value. And that’s the challenge.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Wonderful. I think you said it’s, I mean, it’s a challenge many face, but clearly you’re making those sort of incremental moves towards it, which I think seems to be a key theme in your kind of philosophy.

I think with your portfolio, it’s probably the same with a number of my clients when they start talking to their customers about other parts of their portfolio, which when the customer goes, “I didn’t know you did that.” And it’s just kind of like we assume our customers know our portfolio and they don’t. They often have us in a box.

Jason Harvey:

Correct.

Simon Hazeldine:

Where they buy us from. And it’s an education process, isn’t it? Because they’d be delighted to talk to us about other solutions.

Jason Harvey:

One of the things that I often say is Zebra is the best kept secret. We can be selling a printer and a wristband into healthcare, and we have done for many, many years. And sometimes when you speak to them about some of our asset tracking software and our software that drives workforce automation and efficiency and productivity, they look at me and go, “Wow, why didn’t you come and speak to us about that?” And this kind of dovetails into the questions around getting your marketing right. So it becomes very important from that perspective too.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. That’s a lovely, a customer saying, “Why haven’t you told me about this? I’d really like to buy it” right?

Richard Lane:

I think it’s selective perception as well, isn’t it though, Simon, Jason? Because I mean, I would share the story where we, in our old logo, we used to have three services that we offered it actually underneath the name of our company. And I would forever be getting people saying, “Well, I didn’t know you did that.” And I’d think, “Well, every order form, every statement of work, every invoice that you’ve received has had it on the top right-hand corner.” But actually people only see what they expect to see typically, don’t they?

Jason Harvey:

Exactly.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. And it’s not the customer’s job to work out what we offer.

Richard Lane:

No.

Simon Hazeldine:

Right?

Richard Lane:

Exactly.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, that’s definitely our job. And Jason, in our pre-interview, you mentioned your go-to market transformation that the changes you want to be making there. So how do you see marketing and sales contributing to that?

Jason Harvey:

It’s a good point, and what we’re definitely seeing is our customers are changing. The solutions that we sell are changing. The world is changing, especially after the last few years about the crazy explosion of e-commerce. So we’ve got to make sure that we change our messaging. Much more of the sales is online, much more of the sales is video focused.

And sometimes you’ve got to make sure that you get your message and the value proposition message very succinct, otherwise you lose your customer. But what we’re doing with marketing is making sure we got a great marketing team across EMEA and the globe, and we’re making sure that we get our vertical messaging right, and especially around the digitization of those messaging.

We’re finding more and more of our customers go online and they do their research before they even speak to anybody. And if that message is not clear and it’s not succinct and it’s too complex, then quite often you don’t receive or you don’t receive that inbound call or the sell is much longer.

And in order to make that very succinct, you’ve got to make sure that your marketing messaging is really on point. And I think at Zebra, we’ve worked very hard around verticalizing those messages because the message isn’t a horizontal message across the board.

Clearly, Zebra is an asset intelligence company really driving assets and employees and keeping track of those things in the enterprise and doing that real time at the edge where work gets done. And that’s your horizontal message, but you’ve got to make sure that you go back up and go, how is that meaningful for me in healthcare or pharmaceutical or retail or manufacturing? And those are the things that we’ve worked very hard on making sure we get right.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve mentioned a few times on The Insiders, and the research is a little bit old now, the CEB research that average B2B buyers 57% of the way through their buying process before they want to engage with the seller. I’m sure it’s much, it’s probably even further on now. So it’s interesting to hear you talk about how you’ve really got to be there when they’re researching.

You’ve got, Zebra’s got to be present and relevant to them at that early research stage of the customer’s buying process rather than necessarily our selling process. And I know you’ve got many thousand channel partners, I’ll be interested, how do you manage your channel partner relationships as part of that? Some of our listeners will have a direct approach, others will be going via the channel. So I’d be interested to get your perspective on managing that relationship.

Jason Harvey:

Yeah. It’s channel partners are really the lifeblood of Zebra Technologies. I think more than 90 plus percent of our business goes through channel partners. So it’s a big part of what we do today. I think from my perspective, you’ve got to have the table stakes. You’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a great partner plan, award-winning partner plan that’s great, but which allows you a landing page, the ability to have train information at the hand, change marketing and add their logos and all of those kind of things, their table stakes.

But I think what you’ve got to have an ethos around is making sure your channel account managers with the sales engineers sit down with the channel partners and really understand the channel partners business, where are they looking to expand and grow and how can we be relevant to those channel partners in helping them drive more profitability for their business using our products and portfolio of solutions.

And that starts with making sure that you’ve got a great business plan and it’s got to be clear, succinct. You’ve got to set marketing targets. You’ve got to be able to measure results. And you’ve got to have the channel partners willing to not just share their pipeline, but share their success. You’ve got to understand if they’re not being successful, why are they not being successful.

And you’ve got to do something about that. And that’s measuring win, loss, having regular quarterly business reviews with them. You want to get out of this mentality that you’re going to see a channel partner and you have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. It’s got to be for a purpose, it’s got to be for a reason. There’s got to be real driven outcomes.

And I think that’s certainly where we are making sure that our channel account managers and our channel sales engineers have got real purpose and they don’t waste the time of the channel partner. And I always say to my guys, the channel partner’s got a choice. They won’t be vendor unique. They’re going to go and speak to many vendors. And it’s how Zebra Technologies drives the biggest opportunity for profitability for them.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. I think the days of what an old boss of mine used to refer to as cappuccino calls where you don’t achieve much more than having a nice cup of coffee are probably well past their sell by date. This is having business meetings. And win, loss as well, Jason.

I mean, I think so many organizations miss the opportunity to learn from wins and from losses. And obviously, I think the two big problems I see is wins trigger the champagne corks and losses, people are uncomfortable to discuss failure. So it’s sort of sweat under the carpet. And there’s so much to learn from both. Do you have a process you follow?

Jason Harvey:

Yeah, we do. We absolutely do. And it’s a great point because I love, everybody likes talking about success. That’s what gets you a sales kickoff. You’re on the stage, you’re talking about the wins, right? You’re being positive, there’s a time and a place. But quite often, as you said, you learn your most from your loss. Why did we lose? What did we do differently? What could we change?

What’s the process? So we actually split the win, loss down into vertical win losses in our company. We drive that across EMEA. Sometimes we go on a larger scale, but typically we drive EMEA wins losses in our major verticals across the board. And we take them from a sales perspective and we do it from a technical perspective as well. Because as you say, the losses are really important. If anything, you want do more work on your losses and that’s where you learn your most.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, it’s a valid [inaudible 00:21:21]. Richard, your durhamlane perspective win, loss as a concept. How do you approach it?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, being a services organization, we probably obsess over the wins and then obsess over the losses from a service delivery perspective. I think actually one analysis is really important because then how can you copycat that? So rather than just necessarily the champagne popping, which I think we are, yeah, we all do and we want to celebrate, I think why did we win is really important, as important as, why did we lose? But one of our mantras is 24 hours to celebrate or wallow in misery. So celebrate when it goes well but and commiserate when it doesn’t, but then get back on the track.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I’ve got you. The 24-hour failure wallow is allowed. And then after that, let’s learn from it and get back on.

Richard Lane:

Well, it comes back to my interest in the blues. So yeah, sort of 24 hours to get deep down and dark with it or… And when things go well, then celebrate. But remember that that deal didn’t just happen in one day, it happened over months of effort from lots of different people. So I think it’s really easy in sales for people to get carried away with the moment of the win and seeing it as a moment, whereas actually it’s the culmination of a huge amount of effort typically, isn’t it? So.

Simon Hazeldine:

And I think having learning reviews or huddles with your team to share that and say, “Okay, we’ve won. What can we now apply elsewhere? Oh, we’ve lost, what have we learned? How can we apply that elsewhere?” I think is a good, is kind of a discipline for sales managers and sales leaders to encourage.

Jason, in our pre-interview conversation, we were discussing how you classify your customer accounts and therefore how you organize your teams to support that. This is obviously something that lots of organizations struggle with sometimes or find quite a challenge. It’d be great to get your insight into the key factors you consider in that classification process.

Jason Harvey:

Yeah. So we’ve, in the bigger countries in Zebra, we are very vertically aligned. So we typically look at the top 100, top 200 biggest, the standard public, private, size, location, buying patterns, technology adoption, those kind of things. And we’re pretty much covered off on those big accounts. And I call it the tip of the triangle, right? The pyramid. We’re right at the top.

And we do that very well. But I think, and that’s certainly the case for our core. We are moving to make sure that we drive a better customer engagement and a customer outcome. So we are very much looking at getting to the right persona and making sure that it isn’t just the IT procurement or the ID director. There’s multiple persona across the board.

And never so much so now that we’re looking into solutions. We are looking at market size, of course is a factor. We are then drilling back that down into identify the sweet spot and really understand what’s the profit potential that we’ve got from the solutions that we’re selling into that vertical. How relevant is that and what’s the profit potential for us as well as a company? Because they go hand in glove, right? And then we make sure that we’ve either got solution specialists or account managers covering that.

And then we need scale.

You want to win the big accounts, of course you do. But to get that consistent growth, sometimes the solution sales are very long, they’re 18 months plus. Sometimes they’re not as consistent as you would. There’s no linearity to them. And therefore, you want to make sure that you’ve got the scale. So we can sometimes go, let’s go and have a look at a customer that is white space, and we leverage our marketing teams with ABM, with deeper dives from a marketing standpoint to augment sales.

And if we get the right approach and the right value set there, we go then after that. And then we go drop a tail down to go for that mid-market. In order to drive that scalability, we’re using a lower cost model of inside sales, for example, maybe agency to start to drive the messaging around. I talked about the solution. Sometimes you’ve got to plant the seed and get that messaging right. And it can take a sales motion of more than 12 months.

And you don’t want to be using your expensive resources to foster that relationship over 12 months. There’s other tools to do that. And again, we use that high-touch account manager, the channel account manager with marketing handing glove to make sure that we’ve got a resource model to focus on the small, mid, longer term opportunities. But hopefully, if you get that right, today’s gravy is the long term gravy as well and you’re just building that constant pipeline of opportunity.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. So you’ve got that current and also future focus in your approach of looking at this, which I think it’s really important. My experience is the current big customer base seems to occupy, obviously occupy attention, but who’s going to be the customer base in the future moving forwards? And I think and resourcing appropriately can be a challenge. But so thank you ever so much for sharing your insight. So Richard, I’m going to hand to you, give us your usual pithy summary of the key points from our conversation, please.

Richard Lane:

My writing is particularly bad today, Simon, for some reason. But yeah, well, I think sort of key points really. I love the beginning of this episode talking to Jason about his background, and I think that’s really come through in terms of your sort of tech background, but then into product and then the shift to solution.

And you talked about a cultural shift, safe environment, upskill. So support your people properly and then get aligned with your customers and develop and foster that be curious attitude. So nice little takeaway for anyone listening to think about how do they shift their organization. I talk about left and up and down, Jason, and you’ve talked left to right a couple of times, sort of the 1%, the 5% shift.

Don’t try and boil the ocean, but just look at what else, where else, how else might we do things that support our customers effectively. So that was really interesting. And I also really, I can relate this to what we’re doing, but you really linked it to vertical. You’ve said that a lot of times. So why is that important?

Well, it’s about the world of your customer and the pains they’re feeling rather than what you’re trying to sell to them. I would suggest we talked, as we often do about the world is changing and the buyer is finding information digitally online. We’ve got to put ourselves in the places they go and we’ve got to be relevant.

You’ve talked about making it relevant and being present, which I thought sum that up really nicely. And we spent some time, which I think our listeners will really enjoy around that account planning piece. And it’s probably fair to say massive generalization, but no one plans enough. We’re probably all guilty of not planning as effectively as we could do.

And so that won, loss analysis, again, looking at that on a vertical basis, being purposeful of our engagement and then classifying our customers and really thinking about what is the best sales motion to draw them into the funnel at some point. And we’ve only touched very briefly at the end there, but that really comes down to where durhamlane spends its time, which is that link between marketing and sales.

And I often refer to us as being the middleware that connects the two, but it sounds like you’ve got a machine there that’s operating nicely and is working both from an ABM perspective, a high touch motion, and then using your solution sales people who have all of that experience and the attitude of curiosity to then hopefully convert some of those bigger customers into long term partners. So I think lots to take away from people, hopefully at a very practical level. So thank you, Jason. It’s been amazing.

Jason Harvey:

You’re welcome.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, wonderful Jason. But we do have one final question for you, which some of our guests tell us is the hardest question we ask. We’re building The Insiders Spotify playlist, and we’re asking every guest to choose a song which we will add to the playlist. Sounds like Rich has got a little bit of blues on there for his loss review moments, his 24 hours. But Jason, what would be your chosen song?

Jason Harvey:

Well, it’s a good one because I’ve just come back from climbing one of the highest, well, the highest mountain in North America, which is Denali with a group of.

Simon Hazeldine:

Oh, wow.

Jason Harvey:

A team from Zebra. And it’s a tough mountain and there’s some really tough times in there. I guess a little bit like sales. But one of the things that I used to put on my playlist was something that would get me up that ice wall, something that could keep me going and keep me motivated. So it’s a relatively fast pace and it’s a song called A Town Called Malice by the Jam. I used to put that on and that would certainly get the heartbeat going, the mind racing, and yeah, it got me to the top.

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic. Well, there’s a good high-paced choice folks for or your motivational track. Yeah, that is a fantastic song by a great band.

Richard Lane:

Excellent, excellent choice.

Simon Hazeldine:

So wonderful. Jason, thank you ever so much 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. And please remember to subscribe to The Insiders podcast on your preferred podcasting site to be notified of new episodes. We’ve got some fantastic guests coming up for you and visit durhamlane.com to learn more about selling at a higher level. In the meantime, we’d just like to wish you every success with all of your sales and marking efforts, folks.

Speaker 1:

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