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:

Welcome to the Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast that connects the worlds of marketing and sales, one guest at a time. I’m your host, Richard Lane, Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of durhamlane. We’re a revenue acceleration agency helping enterprise customers create always-on channels of meaningful and well-qualified sales opportunities.

Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Richard Jeffers. Richard is the founder and managing director of RS Industria, who reduced industrial manufacturing costs with a data platform that monitors critical assets in real time. I should also say that Richard’s been a customer of durhamlane, so a friendly face. And we’re also doing this in person, which in this day and age is sometimes a rarity.

So, Richard, great to have you on the show. Thanks for being with us. Really looking forward to the conversation.

Richard Jeffers:

Good to be here, Richard. Thank you.

Richard Lane:

So in order to get a started, Richard, and to help the listeners get a feel for the real Richard Jeffers, could you just maybe do a quick intro and share something exciting, interesting about your career today?

Richard Jeffers:

So yeah, I’ve been a late comer to the world of sales and marketing. My career up until five years ago had always been on the customer side of things, in manufacturing, predominantly within the brewing industry. And I always tell people that I’ve run breweries, built breweries, maintained breweries, and knocked breweries down, which pretty much covers the high points and low points in my career.

Once managed to use the demolition of one of our sites in a VW Amarok advert. We’ve had breweries in episodes of Dr. Who. So yeah, lots of exciting things in the world of manufacturing. But I found myself changing career back in 2017 and I wanted to use the skills that I learned on the customer side, but in a different way, and that’s what brought me into RS components, or RS Group as we are now.

Richard Lane:

Excellent. Well, life not as a brewer, but in the brewery.

Richard Jeffers:

Yes, as an engineer in brewing. So that gave me the opportunity to be rude and super silliest to the brewers all the time.

Richard Lane:

So you then found your way through RS Group to RS Industria, I guess we would call that a business within a business.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. So when I joined RS at the end of 2017, and my portfolio at the time was around building out our technical capabilities, and particularly in our solution space that is relevant to engineers. RS has got a fantastic amount of warmth as a brand within any maintenance person you speak to. And any maintenance person will tell you a story of how they have the catalogue on their desk when they were either a graduate trainee or an apprentice depending on which route they came through.

But unlike some of our competitors, we had a very strong web presence, a very strong eCommerce, and we still do. What we didn’t have was some of the real world services that our competitors had. So part of my brief was to build out our technical services capability.

And then over the top of that was a sort of mega-trend that was starting to come to life then, which was the phrase industry four. And my brief was what is industry four? And how does RS Group make money out of that trend? And that led to the development of what has become RS Industria, which as Richard said in the opening part, is an industrial data solution.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, okay. And really interesting. We work with, as I said at the top of the session, we work with enterprise clients. And we work with many of them who have got businesses within businesses and sort of become a bit of a specialty for us.

So it’d be really interesting to get your insight on some of the highs and lows that you experienced through shaping the business. From that moment someone said, “Go and explore, investigate this.” To then RS Industria and how that’s then been taken forward.

Richard Jeffers:

There’s been some incredible opportunity for me to learn and develop my own personal skillset. First of all, it was understanding what are these emerging technologies in industry four? What are things like industrial, internet of things? 3D printing I explored as well to understand whether that was a business model for us.

And really trying to get to grips with not just the tech, but actually the problems that this tech solves. And indeed, I inherited a couple of technology demonstrators when I first started, which were great, but they weren’t actually solving any customer problems. They were just tech. So getting into really understanding customer problems and how tech can solve those problems as opposed to just tech, the tech side.

Richard Lane:

Oh, interesting. So some tech had been created that probably seemed cool and were showing it to customers, but actually the customers didn’t necessarily have the problem that tech solved.

Richard Jeffers:

Exactly that, Richard. Or indeed the tech was solving a problem that had already been solved using different tech. So that’s learning about the technology and the customer problems was very, very interesting.

And I was introduced quite early on in my journey with RS Industria into the concept of lean startup, and the work done by people like Alexander Osterwalder and Steve Blank around business model canvas, agile engineering, customer discovery. And those techniques really, really resonated with me as just being pretty obvious really, which is why don’t you go and talk to people in factories and find out what problems they want solving? Rather than sitting into an ivory tower and just thinking about stuff.

And there’s a phrase from Steve Blank, which I love, which is, “There’s no facts inside the building.” And it’s all about getting out there and talking to customers, and that’s where you validate assumptions, not inside your own business. So I think that learning about the technology, learning about the methodology, and then trying to work out what is a coherent business model that could be applied in that space?

Richard Lane:

And was that seemed to be quite maverick inside of RS Group? Was that a different approach? Was it something that people were challenged by?

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah, so it was one of my colleagues who now looks after our inventory and procurement solutions, who introduced me to it. And for quite a long time, Paul and myself were sort of the two people banging the drum around customer discovery, agile engineering, business model canvas.

Now it’s become more of a language in the business, more of a way of working. But for a long time it was us leading the way. And I remember several meetings where Paul and I came back with customer discovery evidence and we were cheering each other, “Well, you’ve asked the wrong customers.”

We were saying, “We need to stop doing this innovation because it’s not solving problem.” And the response was, “Yeah, well go and ask customers that want to buy it and then they’ll tell you they want to buy it.” And so people are not really, really willing to accept the contra feedback that you got when you got outside the building.

Richard Lane:

So the desire to believe the false positive because that’s just what we do? Right.

Richard Jeffers:

And yeah, you’re falling in love with your own press rather than focusing on what the customer wants.

Richard Lane:

And so that I can really see that, and I can sort of picture you there sort of swimming against the tide to some degree in terms of the juggernaut that is the business. You’re now more established, although I guess still a small part of the business. But how does being a business within the business change as you add more people into the business and as your part of the company grows?

Richard Jeffers:

When we first started moving seriously into Industria, so the first couple of years were spent just exploring a number of different concepts. Looking where in the world of industriality did we think there was a right for us to play? And we started building out what has become Industria seriously at the end of 2019, just in time for there to be a global pandemic in fact.

And actually as part of the pandemic, we were freed up, or I was freed up, to sit outside of the normal ways of working and to move out of the core business. And had the freedom to explore, unconstrained by a lot of our existing ways of working. Clearly there was a bunch of corporate governance that I clearly had to comply with, but actually in terms of our ways of approaching customers, sales, technology, marketing techniques, I had the freedom to do things differently.

And that was absolutely essential at that point in time, to try a bunch of stuff really quickly and find the stuff that worked for us and added value for us. We’re now a bit more mature, we’re now looking to scale now. We’ve got our 25 initial customers, we’ve got value statements from customers so we can explain what we can deliver.

Now we’ve got to reverse integrate ourselves back into the core business now and really leverage the power of the core. And that’s probably today’s challenge now is going how do we move ourselves back into the business and stop being a bunch of crazy mavericks and start being seen as part of the machine?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and that leads me onto the next strand of conversation I think, which is about brand. And as you said earlier, the RS brand is strong within the world that it exists. I guess first question, was it a help or a hindrance having the brand? And then second part of that is how does it help you move to the next level?

Richard Jeffers:

So that back end of 2020, when we started this freedom to explore, myself and their marketing lead, we did a whole bunch of customer discovery activities. Specifically focused around should we leverage RS dot, dot, dot? Or should we be something else that was clearly not to do with RS?

And what came across really strongly with all the customers we spoke to, was that positive vibe around the RS brand. And that’s why I know what story everybody’s going to tell you about their catalogue because everyone told me the story about that catalogue. And it was really clear at the back end of that piece of work that actually there was huge benefits to being RS something as opposed to just being unbranded. So that was when we became RS Industria, as opposed to just Industria.

So the positives is you’re leveraging off the positive sentiments around the core brand. Negative is probably the wrong word, but some of the things to be cognizant around is therefore you are part of a core brand. So you can’t then do anything that’s going to drag away from the core brand messaging. And you need to make sure that you are reinforcing that positive sentiment and not in any way detracting from it.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, it’s interesting. The killer question we are always posed with is, “What am I going to get? What SQLs? What sales qualified leads are you going to create for me?” And part of my, I guess stock answer is no project is ever the same.

And I link this back to brand, which is if we were representing a FinTech startup with an amazing solution, the chance of getting them in front of CFOs versus Deloitte, is massively reduced. They might have a much better solution, but because they don’t have the brand recognition than it’s much harder.

So I guess from your experience going out and doing all of that validation with RS at the front with the logo, will have made it easier to get through the door. And then you get at least the opportunity to do your discovery and diagnosis and listen to the customer.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah, exactly that. We get in the door in a way that a VC-backed startup would never get in there. And we’re able to get into different stakeholders in a way that a VC-backed startup could never get in there.

Richard Lane:

Do you think you’ve been able to leverage the relationships within the group successfully? Because I would’ve thought that with some of RS Group’s major customers, there’s an opportunity to get into those companies via relationships, but has that worked?

Richard Jeffers:

In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. Richard, we as a broader organisation are still moving towards being a solutions led business. We have two business models in the UK. We have an integrated supply business model where we have a very deep strategic relationship with the customer. Then it’s been quite easy to get to the top table in one move.

With the more traditional distribution business we’ve got, we are still very broad but quite shallow in a lot of our customers. And then in some cases the core business has been able to leverage getting Industria into the conversation. And in some cases we’ve been able to reverse that and Industria has leveraged getting the core business in there.

Richard Lane:

Did you put any commission plans or any accelerators or anything like that in place to facilitate introductions to Industria? Because often in my previous corporate experience, I found that there’s a reticence to introduce anything new because it’s unknown. Was that something that you challenged at all?

Richard Jeffers:

So I think it has been challenging getting that engagement with the core business. We’ve got an enormous number of customer-facing people in the UK business and over 100. And if I was to try and engage with all of those, we’d just spread ourselves too thinly. So it’s all about focus.

And so we’ve had great engagement with the integrated supply business unit. Talk regularly with their senior leadership team and with the senior customer leadership team. We have good engagement with our corporate sales team, which is a smaller and more focused team, looking at larger multi-site accounts.

With our broad-based sales team, it has been more of a challenge. There’s more of them and they tend to be the ones operating lower down with the customer. And therefore it’s quite tactical where we’ve got someone in that team where we built the trust and they’ll bring us in. But we’re not killing ourselves trying to get them all to bring us into those.

Richard Lane:

You have to pick your battles, don’t you? And actually the way new solutions typically spread within sales teams is by it working for someone. And then others see it working and think, “Well, I’ll have a piece of that and get involved.”

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. And it’s got to be built on relationships. It’s like the COTA change model applies in so many different ways. It is about building that guiding team. It is about getting those small wins and then building the momentum.

Richard Lane:

Yes, absolutely. Okay, really interesting. So you’ve got a brand within a brand, there’s a huge amount of value from out of the gate that the brand brought you. But then I guess on the other side there is compliance and corporate governance, which does lead me to the question I have to ask, which is do you feel it’s slowed you down in terms of some of that governance? Because if you were a VC-backed startup, then you probably wouldn’t have quite as, you’d have some, but you wouldn’t probably have as much. So has the seesaw balanced out appropriately?

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. I remember somebody saying to me about two years ago when I described ourselves as a startup inside a PLC, they went, “So you’ve got no money and you’re rubbish at making decisions.”

It’s difficult to say exactly, have we moved slowly or have we moved quickly? A lot of the VC-backed startups I speak to, actually think we’ve moved at a pretty decent pace. We’re three and a half years into our existence from no code at all. We’re coming up to two years in the market and we’ve got 25 customers and several 100,000 pounds of recurring revenue.

But if I talk to people inside the core business, it’s, “Well, you’ve been at this for three years, you’ve only got 25 customers.” And so I think, I’m not sure we could have moved that much faster because we were given the freedom back in 2020, 2021 to exist outside of the core. And a lot of the decisions about when we moved and when we launched were down to me to make.

And one of the great accelerators that I had was actually the support of the CTO in the business who said, “Have your own tech team because if you give it to me, I’ll just use it on something else.”

Richard Lane:

Right, absolutely.

Richard Jeffers:

So actually the CTO giving us the permission to have our own tech team was the biggest thing that relieved us from constraint in terms of developing the product. From the commercial team allowing us to play in the UK market without having to go and constantly go back to the UK MD for permission, allowed us to move there as well.

So the way we’ve approached it, probably the positives and the negatives have balance each other out in a lot of ways in terms of the speeding up and the slowing down.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean just as someone with a view into it, it feels like you’ve moved pretty fast. And I think that’s with the support of the brand and also despite the corporate nature of the business I guess. So yeah, it feels like it’s been a good partnership or relationship in that way.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. And I think there was one when we first launched at a trade event back in, when we first commercially launched at a trade show back in November ’21. I had lots and lots of people telling me that I couldn’t do a trade show because I’d not done all the things I had to do to do a trade show.

Richard Lane:

Fill out all the forms.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. And if honest, I just ignored them. We decided we wouldn’t have a stand because we weren’t allowed to have a stand. What we’d do is have a coffee bar. So we joked at the time it was the non-stand stand. That was a very clear signal to actually my team and the business that we’re now launching commercially. We did get some customers out of it, but the key thing was actually just the line and the stand that we got out of being there.

Richard Lane:

Interesting. Very good. It’s nice, classic startup behaviour, break the rules. So third and final topic that we’ve agreed to focus on, Richard, is around I guess this sort of shift in thinking and behaviour. Because RS is typically seen as quite traditional companies.

You’ve talked about before, Industria is really focused on leading edge IOT in itself, sort of a new and growing area, and one where there’s still lots of exploration and understanding to do. And you’ve mentioned this already, but there’s a need to sell a solution rather than selling a product. How did that work within? Or was that an extra differentiator for you in terms of your new brand within the company?

Richard Jeffers:

I’ve come to sales and marketing only in the last five years as I said, but even I get the fact that if you’re saying, “Do you want to buy some spare parts of your machinery?” Where the customer’s machine is broken and needs to buy some spare parts, you’re really just competing on price and service at that point in time.

Once you start moving into selling solutions, you’re actually trying to get into what is the underlying need that you’re trying to meet? What’s the KPI of your customers that you’re going to impact? And that’s been a change that RS is driving across the whole business, not just within my areas.

We started out in some of our procurement solutions and inventory solutions. And Industria is the most advanced of those solutions and it is a completely different way of selling. It’s a completely different conversation that you’re having because you’ve got to understand what are the challenges that that customer faces on a daily basis? What is it they’re being marked upon and measured upon? And how can your service solution help them achieve their goals?

And also inevitably, you are then starting to move out from one budget line. If you’re selling spare parts to a maintenance manager, that’s what his maintenance budget is for, is to buy that. Whereas if you are trying to sell a solution to reduce energy consumption, then actually the person who’s coughing up the cash might not be the person who’s seeing the benefit in terms of their budget lines.

So you’ve got the complexity of really understanding the customer’s KPIs and really understanding the interplay between budget lines and the customer, about how you can tap into those different budgets? And who is the real decision maker? Who is the one who’s actually empowered to make the decision? Again, if you’re a maintenance manager buying spare parts, you’re empowered to make that decision. Whereas if you are looking to buy an IT solution, who is the decision maker?

Richard Lane:

Yes. And one thing I think we’ve always strived to do at durhamlane is take that complex solution sale mindset and bring it into the world of lead generation. Compelling event is a key piece. And I always think what’s the outside force that’s driving someone to do something different? And they might not even know the answer yet, but your job is to be asking the questions that help them start thinking, “I wonder how could we do this?”

And then it becomes about timing and like you say, you’ve got all of the different budget lines and influencers. And lots of research now saying that the buying circle is just getting ever bigger. So solution-orientated deals typically just take longer and I guess that’s something that your business is having to come to terms with about Industria.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah, I would love it if our sales cycle was measured in days and weeks. Sadly it’s not. It’s measured in weeks and months, potentially months and years. So there’s been so many times where we think we’ve got it to the last minute. And then something happens and the customer goes quiet and you’re, “Why have you gone quiet? Could you at least tell me why you’ve gone quiet?”

Richard Lane:

Yeah. I was thinking this morning, I don’t know why, and I thought, “Shall I put this on LinkedIn?” But silence is not golden.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah.

Richard Lane:

Not in the world of a salesperson generally. But you want to know, don’t you? Even if there’s no change, then just let me know there’s no change and when you think there might be?

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. And if you’re not interested, could you tell me you’re not interested?

Richard Lane:

Yes.

Richard Jeffers:

So yeah, some of the common courtesies that you’d like to think that you exhibit to other people, you don’t get when you’re in a sales process.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. Great. Okay, well really interesting. Thanks, Richard.

On the Insiders, we like to focus around actual insight. And today’s conversation has been really interesting for listeners around that sort of startup mentality and how to think differently. But what one thing could you share with our audience that they can take away an action immediately? And our audience predominantly being sales and marketing professionals.

Richard Jeffers:

I mean statement of the bleeding obvious, the more you understand about the customer’s jobs, pains, and gains, and the more you let them talk about those jobs, pains, and gains, the more successful you’re going to be at finding out whether your solution is going to be the right thing.

My sales leader, who joined me as an experienced sales professional two years ago. I remember our first customer engagement, he was like, “I’m the sales professional, I’ll do the talk with the customers.” And I was like, “Yeah, okay, then you crack on, mate.” And at the end of that half hour he went, “I’ll tell you what, Richard, next time you can do that because I had no idea what the customer was talking about.”

And so you’ve got to have an intimate understanding of the customer’s jobs, pains, and gains. Make sure that your solution is addressing those and not just turning up and talking about stuff.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, it seems so obvious to me. But our durhamlane mantra three, “Be interested to be interesting.” That for me has always felt, well of course. Of course I need to listen and understand, but I guess the path of least resistance is just to blah.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah. We use a piece of call recording software with a bunch of analytics behind it. It’s led to some quite entertaining conversations internally because it scores you and tells you how much time you spend speaking and how much you paused and waited for the customer to speak. And you look at your own stats and go, “God, I’m rubbish.”

And so we have a bit of fun amongst ourselves about us all trying to get our stats better in terms of speak less, listen more, and leave time. Use silence to get the customer to talk.

Richard Lane:

Very good. Excellent. Another section we’ve created for season two of the Insiders is around ask the experts. So we’ve got a question in from Yasmin, “What are the biggest strategic alignment issues that act as blockers to shorten complex sales cycles?”

Richard Jeffers:

I think in many cases, the person you’re talking to doesn’t actually understand their own business’s strategic objectives. And we talk a lot about energy. If you can’t measure your energy consumption, then you can’t reduce it.

If I’m honest, I thought that was going to be a complete slam dunk, which is have you got a problem with energy price increase? Which by the way, I know you do. And is your CFO worried about it? Which I can pretty much guarantee he is.

Richard Lane:

If you get nos for those, then that would be a strange situation.

Richard Jeffers:

But actually you do get, “It’s not a priority for us.” Or you get, “Well, that’s not my budget, so I don’t care.”

Something for me that is so compelling of spend less money on energy because energy prices is going up, doesn’t actually translate into activity inside the factory. And trying to sell a solution there, if you’re thinking, “Well, is it my job to get alignment with your corporate goals?” And indeed, sometimes yes it is. Because you want to get the purchase order, you have got to get them aligned to the corporate goals.

Richard Lane:

Yes. Thinking beyond the lines maybe is the mantra there. Excellent.

Well look, Richard, it’s been been great talking about the journey of RS Industria to where it is today as part of RS Group. The last question is often seen as the hardest question, which hopefully you’ve had some time to think about, but this is the building of the insiders Spotify playlist. So have you managed to pick a song that you would like us to add onto this eclectic playlist?

Richard Jeffers:

Yes, I have, Richard. And my kids are in their teens now, and I remember a few years ago when Trolls came out. And one of my heroines in life is definitely Princess Poppy from the Trolls and her song Get Back Up Again. She doesn’t let the fact that what she’s trying to do is clearly impossible, get in the way of her getting out there and risking all her friends from the bad guys.

Richard Lane:

Awesome.

Richard Jeffers:

Yeah, Get Back Up Again, that’s Poppy.

Richard Lane:

So excellent. And as a startup business within a business, maybe that’s your mindset on a daily basis.

Richard Jeffers:

It has got to be get back up again.

Richard Lane:

That is brilliant. Thanks.

Richard Jeffers:

It’s either that or Tubthumping by Chumbawamba, which has the same underlying message.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, absolutely brilliant. Excellent. Well we’ll get that added. You’re not named against it, don’t worry. So that’ll be fine.

Look, it’s been really great having you in and lovely to do it in person, but always good to see you. So thank you for sharing your wisdom with us and sharing your journey. Really appreciate it.

Richard Jeffers:

Excellent. Thanks so much, Richard.

Richard Lane:

Great. Well look, thanks for tuning into the Insiders. Please subscribe on your preferred podcasting site to ensure you are notified of all new episodes as and when they’re published. And if you would like to learn more about durhamlane and our unique method of selling at high level, visit durhamlane.com for more information. Until next time, see you then.

Speaker 1:

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