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.

Simon Hazeldine:

Welcome to the Insiders sales and marketing podcast. I’m Simon Hazeldine. I’m a sales transformation strategist and sales performance consultant, and I help my clients get more sales more often, with more margin. I’m also a keynote speaker and the author of several books on sales and negotiation.

I’m your host along with my co-host, the one and only Richard Lane, who is the co-founder of durhamlane, who are an inside sales partner that helps businesses to grow their revenue through an integrated sales and marketing methodology. So Richard, over to you to introduce our guest for this episode, please.

Richard Lane:

Thank you, Simon. Great to be here on the podcast. Really absolutely thrilled to welcome Emma Botfield to our podcast today. Emma is the MD for the UK and Ireland of RS Group and, Emma, thrilled to have you with us. I know through our pre-conversation, we’ve got some amazing topics to get through today. So I’m going to hand back to Simon and we’ll get going, but welcome.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Yeah, welcome, Emma. Thank you, Richard. First question, Emma, we normally ask just so our listeners can get to know our guest a little bit. Could you just give us a little bit of background, how you came to be in the role you’re in currently? I think that will be a great place to get started.

Emma Botfield:

Yeah, great to be here, Simon and Richard. Looking forward to having a good conversation with you both. So I’ve been at RS, well, it’ll be eight years in August. I was only ever intending to stay a year, but I had many more reasons to stay than to leave because I wanted a taste of a completely different industry. I’d worked in financial services and public and private sector previously and just saw the opportunity to help our organization realize its ambitions.

I’ve had various number of roles in the organization, leading customer operations, inside sales, our branch network, and delivered results through that, and was really privileged and humbled about 16 months ago to be given the opportunity to lead the UK and Irish market for RS. Really pleased in terms of how we’re creating the right culture in terms of achieving our ambitions. So, yeah, that’s how I ended up in my MD role.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. And since you’ve stepped up to the MD role, it’ll be really interesting, a topic here on the podcast, always around sales and marketing. So in your MD position, have you seen sales and marketing differently maybe than you did in other roles in the organization?

Emma Botfield:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You will always think when you are in a functional role that you look at things holistically, but really you don’t, I would say. If you are honest with yourself, you think you want to, but there is always that functional lens. Moving into the MD role, you have to look at it more holistically and you have to look at it through a customer lifecycle lens rather than a functional lens because it drives investment decisions, it drives ways of working, it drives organizational structures and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not sales or marketing, or marketing and sales. It’s “Mar-Sales”. They have to go together and it’s not digital versus human. It’s complimentary of where the most value can be added through activity. I sometimes think of it, when you think of a marriage, you have two sets of in-laws and when they first meet they’re sussing each other out, and one wants to be the better in law than the other. But if you can get them to focus on the couple rather than themselves, then you’ve got a really powerful force, and that’s how I tend to now look in this MD role at that whole mar-sales – because I have to stop saying the end, because they’re interconnected.

Simon Hazeldine:

You might want to copyright that or definitely register the domain name or something, Emma, I think you never know.

Richard Lane:

Too late, Simon. I’ve just done that as Emma was busy speaking.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, Richard, I know at durhamlane, I’d be fascinated your take on, I love this sort of in-laws analogy, so your take on why in-laws… No, let’s move on to sales and marketing or else Richard might need to go into some personal stuff for which is going to just get in the way. So your perspective of this division that exists sometimes.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I’m not going to go down the in-law track. So we’ll cut that one off right there, Simon, I think but I have wonderful in-laws it should be said for the record. I loved your point then when I was actually, I’m going to swerve maybe Simon’s question a little bit, because I think your background in customer service is really interesting because should we be talking mar-sales or should we be talking customer? And, actually it’s sort of maybe the level up, isn’t it? I always joke that marketing’s done a better job of selling itself than sales has. I think that’s the reality. I spend my life not talking about in-laws, but talking about relay races and who’s handing off the bat onto who, but ultimately it’s the customer lifecycle. It’s how do we support our customer? And I guess you do have to have different divisions, don’t you? Because everyone needs to sit in a place in the business, and you’ve got engineering and you’ve got pre-sales and you’ve got production, et cetera. But if everybody’s focused on the customer, you tend to win.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, because then if you are having debates, they are debates about how do we best serve our customer not debates about where does the budget go? Healthy debates, and tension is good in an organization if it’s focused on a clear purpose and I think if we’re helping the customers to win and the customers to get what they want, then it’ll work itself through I think a lot better.

Richard Lane:

So Emma, does your background in customer, do you think that’s given you a different insight than some have maybe?

Emma Botfield:

Yeah. I think it’s gave me a natural thought process because yeah, I don’t know, it’s innate me to just talk customer, from the outset in terms of how are we attracting them to, how are we keeping them, how are we driving loyalty and how are we constantly adding value? So I just think that is part of my professional DNA.

Richard Lane:

Taking that on to the next level. Then those that now report into you as UK and Republic of Ireland MD, are they seeing, or feeling the change or the customer centricity that you bring naturally?

Emma Botfield:

We’ve always been driven as an organization to be first choice for customers, but I’ve been in a fortunate place where, because other people have moved into different roles, I’ve created a brand new leadership team and it is brand new. My recruitment approach has always been focused on the customer. So really talking about, is it customer rhetoric or is it customer passion, and does it really make a difference and do people really think customer? So I think that whole talent acquisition piece has played a huge part in just setting the tone and the language and the behaviors that we expect around customer. So it’s always in our conversations.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, and that’s when it’s a culture or a philosophy, isn’t it, rather than a statement that how many times have you seen it on office room walls, ‘Customer First’ and all those sort stuff. And it might be laminated on the office wall, but it’s not lived, as in the organization? So, that’s really kind of interesting to hear that. In terms of your customer, what are the changes you’ve seen in say, what are they demanding? What are they expecting from you and from your industry? What are the big things that have been impacting from that point of view?

Emma Botfield:

We deal with every industry sector you can possibly think of in the UK from manufacturing and production point of view, to education, public sector. I think over the last couple of years, they’ve been shaken to the core in terms of what are they looking for in a supplier? Because we are a distribution organization moving to be a technology solutions provider and customers want to really find a partner rather than a supplier. They want to move away from transactional relationships. They don’t want to be sold to, they want people who can help solve their problems and help them to achieve their outcomes, and it has to be value driven but value in what they class as value, not necessarily what we class as value. Also I think the appreciation of data and insight has come to the fore because people were time poor before, they’re even more so now and they don’t want to be sold to, they really don’t. They want data-led decision making through a partner that can add value to their organization, and that’s coming out really strong because we’re seeing buying behaviors change rapidly.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. I mean, we’ve all seen those kind of changes taking place and the move to solution selling or value selling or whatever label people might want to attach to it. Sometimes I think it’s almost like it’s the art of selling without selling now. People just don’t want the classic pitch approach anymore. I think it just irritates them enormously. Richard, is that something you see as well out there in the world? I mean, you’ve got quite a wide number of clients that you help in the sales arena.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. A hundred percent Simon. So I mean our methodology at selling at a higher level is based on question based, consultative sales. Our third mantra is be interested to be interesting, the more interested you are in other people, the more interesting you naturally come to them. Our first mantra is business fit, business value. So, we should be prospecting to people where we believe there’s a fit where we can add value to what we think the problems and challenges they’ve got based on the research that we’ve done. And you can do that at an SDR level through to a senior account management role probably on a different scale. So seeing that trend right across our client estate across all enterprise customers. I think the other thing we’re seeing that is sort of rocket fuel as well for the sales industry, is the shift from being in the field, to being behind the desk. And I think when you, when you take that consultative sales approach and take away the “I’m going to get in my car and drive for two hours to go and see someone to have that conversation,” then you unlock a real huge amount of opportunity, but you also probably create some fear for people as well, I think. So it’d be interesting Emma to know how RS group has sort of dealt with everybody becoming an inside sales professional overnight when the pandemic hit.

Emma Botfield:

It’s amazing that the catalyst for change and how people adapt. The willingness to suddenly have video conference conversations was fantastic. Some people needed more support than others because it was a complete change when you’re out on the road. And then you’re at home trying to engage in a different way but we saw more collaboration between our customers, our inside sales and our field sales. So there was that triangulation in terms of adding the skills and using the skills and the people where they are going to add most value. And it’s really helped us think about, now we are living with the madness of the world around us. What is the role of a field salesperson and where add most value? There is still value for us, for people to go and meet with engineering directors on the shop floor, get a feel for the production environment to understand what solutions are best suited to solve their problems. Whereas our inside sales, were probably targeting different types of personas because procurement people now want to interact in a virtual world, in a virtual way. So we’ve seen a huge transition for our people but it really helped people adapt to new technologies and different technologies more quickly.

Richard Lane:

Yeah.

Simon Hazeldine:

I think if nothing else it’ll be a more a decision rather than a default to go and visit a customer in person. Very interesting to see the hierarchy that often seems to exist is inside sales do smaller customers and field sales do the big ones and that’s turned everything on its head as well, I think. And of course, with a customer focus, how does a customer want their relationship to be managed, rather than how do we want to organize ourselves?

Emma Botfield:

That’s absolutely right and that’s been key. We’ve done a lot of discovery with our customers in terms of, what’s it meant for them now? How do they want to build a partnership with us? Because that’s what we’re looking for, We’re looking for long term partnerships rather than short term contract wins because we believe we can add more value to the customer by having those longer term relationships because they see us as a partner.

Simon Hazeldine:

It’s a time perspective is interesting. Isn’t it? That often… Sometimes it’s not a criticism of salespeople or sales managers. It’s how they’re measured and driven inside the organization close the month, close the quarter, which I think sometimes leads to short term tactical behavior rather than the long term focus. Richard, I know you incentivize your folks in some different ways, don’t you? Than what you might normally see.

Richard Lane:

We do – I mean, always playing around with this and I still don’t think we found the perfect answer yet if it exists, but we don’t pay standard commission Emma to our SDR teams. Why? Because ultimately we believe it drives the wrong behavior because our business is about creating meaningful, qualified opportunity for our customers than to go and do further discovery and to who hopefully propose and close. If you are giving someone 50 quid for creating a meeting, “End of months, need another couple of those because I’m going out the weekend.” Yeah. It’s just, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for that either really, but it just drives the wrong behavior. So always playing with it. We do have a reward model that’s based on competency. So demonstrate to us that you are getting better at your job, demonstrate to us that you live and breathe our values and we’ll pay you more.

And we’ve just created a new scheme, which went live beginning of April, where we take a percentage of our quarterly number. It goes into a pot. It’s almost a bit like the lottery, where you have Euro millions, it’s this, and everyone on that team across all of our customers has the opportunity to take their share of it. So it’s, down to them and so there is incentive then in there, but it’s just nuanced slightly differently with… We hope to create the right results, which lead to long term value. I was doing a bit of work, it’d be interesting to know how RS looks at this. But I was doing a bit of work in our business recently on lifetime value of our customers and a couple of a couple of customer names popped out, which really frankly surprised me but they’ve been with us for eight, nine years. They’ve bought from us consistently. And guess what? They’re in the top 10, there’s no big show or dance. They’re consistent. They’ve used us, always on that timeframe. It all adds up so it’s that lifetime value piece. You can learn a lot of lessons through sort of SaaS businesses and how they measure, it’s become very scientific and I’d be interested to know how you look at that from an RS perspective.

Emma Botfield:

Yeah. We’ve got a vast array of customers. Right at the top of the pyramid, corporate, MOD, large multisite pan… Well, global organizations, to small businesses that are probably third tier to supplier somewhere each with different goals. So, we’re fortunate because we’ve got the infrastructure to measure the lifetime value of a customer, right from when we do the acquisition to retention and how they move through that customer lifecycle. It’s interesting and fascinating, especially with some smaller businesses, how you are helping and enabling them to grow and fulfil their professional and business ambitions whilst also at the top, you are helping the infrastructure of the UK.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. Right.

Emma Botfield:

So, you’re keeping food on the tables. You’re keeping hospitals running, schools going – there are two different, well purpose led organizations so from an innovate, and help businesses to create and become something truly different to maintaining the infrastructure of the UK really means something to our people because we are there, we are by their side.

Simon Hazeldine:

That’s wonderful. I love the-

Richard Lane:

That’s amazing that is.

Simon Hazeldine:

I love the… The customer spread is quite impressive to say the least, right? Gosh, that must take some different understanding of the different customers…

Richard Lane:

Simon, I made a note there, just made a mental note of, “durhamlane has some way to go.”

Simon Hazeldine:

Helping keep the country running. Right? That is quite… I was just as well, just on that previous points about people closing the month of the quarter. I just wonder how many businesses have really effectively trained their customers to wait until the end of the quarter to spend. So they know they get a discount and you’re just basically, you’re incentivizing your customer to ask for a discount, aren’t you? And you’ve created the monster yourself.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. 100 percent. Yeah. I was once part of a business that tried to shift from being very quarterly driven to being monthly driven and we totally failed – just couldn’t change the discipline. Part of the problem was the US didn’t follow suit. So we were just doing it as a UK entity, but it’s a real mindset and actually, I think your customers get used to that mindset Simon, as you were saying and so they think, “Well, I’m not going to do anything until the end of the quarter, because why would I?”

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, because I know what’s going to happen, because it happens every quarter. Well, or at least every quarter the salesperson’s behind on quota and away-

Richard Lane:

And it’s the brave salesperson who goes, “No.”

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little bit of a career suicide perhaps. Emma, in our pre-conversation before we came on air, you mentioned that you wanted to challenge some of the preconceptions about what a sales and marketing professional should be. I’d be really interested, Richard and I would love to know more about that aim and give us a bit of insight into that.

Emma Botfield:

One of my aspirations whilst I’m custodian of the UK and Ireland market, is I want to create communities because people want to belong to communities. That’s the whole definition, right? And then from those communities, we can get teams of people to work together, to deliver outcomes. You’ve got to understand a bit of the history of our industry. We learn from history, don’t live in it, but the background is that it is very male dominated, there is a high proportion of people in roles that are of a certain age.

And when you look at the balance, we’ve probably got more females in our inside sales than we have in more of our senior sales roles that are dealing with C-suite executives in multinational organizations. So sometimes in some roles, what we’re looking for is industry experience, but not industry baggage – and the key to that is that growth mindset. How can you think about your role differently in terms of being part of a community rather than a job role that is a specified, and just a list of activities that you do. So having that curiosity and the belief that you can advance and have different types of conversations that you probably haven’t had before. So you’re going to be uncomfortable, which links all to that growth mindset.

I’ve got a real passion that I want females, especially within our industry, especially with different ethnicities and cultures and perspectives to go, “I want either sales or marketing to be a destination for my career and I am purposely wanting to go into that arena and be a professional within that.” And for me, development is a two way street, it’s push and pull. We can give you some skills and give you some experiences, but you’ve really got to want to grasp them and open your mind to connect the dots through that whole customer life cycle. There’s no point just being an expert in one part of the customer life cycle, because it’s a continuum. And that’s really important to me, having the belief to just think differently, ask different questions, be a little bit more curious to be able to be proud of being a professional within sales or marketing.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes. It’s often not marketing maybe, but sales is often not regarded as a profession, it’s that kind of perception, isn’t it of it? And I have to say, certainly from my background, I was in fast moving consumer goods and there was almost an unwritten rule many, many years ago that it was okay for women to be in the call center, but it wasn’t okay for them to be in field sales roles, crazy kind of, not that long ago.

And then some pioneer sort of broke through, did really well and the organization, I think started to have to wake up to the fact that, “We’re missing a trick here.”

Emma Botfield:

It’s really important because different perspectives drive different outcomes, to solve different problems and it is a generational thing with the industry that we’re in. We’re never going to magically turn it overnight, but if we can make, sales within RS group, an exciting destination, whether that’s an entry level or whether you are an experienced professional business leader, because going back to the question earlier, people don’t want to be sold to, they want their business problem solved. And that’s, what’s important, if you can have a commercial conversation around a business problem then that opens the door to a lot more talent.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, also there’s a lot of nonsense. Isn’t there about what sort of people the customer will feel comfortable with. And I think they’ll feel comfortable with somebody who helps to give them the solution they need to their problems and then age, gender, everything else is an irrelevance because the customer’s got someone who they knows going to help them achieve what they want to achieve. And hopefully then you’ll see some changes in the demographics taking place.

Richard Lane:

I would say when I’m training people in our methodology that, can you be a strategic resource from day one? No. Can you think like one from day one? Absolutely. And that’s the difference. It’s about being a business professional. It’s about help. I’ve always thought and a bit like, Emma, you were saying earlier, I think it’s… I always say it’s the biggest and best trip up that ever happened to me was getting a job in sales because no one recommended it. They said, “Richard, we think you’d be great at market research.” That was the careers’ advice, but just have this sort of knack of putting my feet in the shoes of the person I’m talking to and being interested in them and then solutioning. It’s amazing that that’s a job, isn’t it? I’ve always felt so privileged and lucky that actually it’s a job! And I still, being careful not to get onto my pet subject but, the lack of sign posting of sales as a career is still shockingly poor out of-

Emma Botfield:

Scary actually.

Richard Lane:

… any educational institution, worldwide, and the UK is behind other countries, certainly, but it’s getting better but it’s still way behind where it should be.

Simon Hazeldine:

Well, I think you might find mar-sales, the hybrid might be the attractive career option that Emma’s going to be championing Emma soon,

Richard Lane:

Emma’s Mar-sales Academy. I can see it now. Yeah.

Emma Botfield:

I could do that.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’ll sign up. I’m in, I’m in.

Richard Lane:

Sorry. So just one just quick-

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, sure.

Richard Lane:

We’re joking about that. But actually the sales professional of the future needs to be a Mar-sales because actually we’ve gone digital. You’re picking digital attention. You need to be savvy when it comes to being able to use technology to get your message across, to interact, to communicate and you need to have all of those sales and solution sales skills to be able to then nurture and discover properly and to present and negotiate and close. So actually we’re joking, but you have to be both, don’t you? You have to be a T-shaped person, I think they say. Don’t they Simon?

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic, and I’d be really interested on that on the subject of sort of bringing in external support. I know we had a chat about this as well before we came on the air. When should an organization consider outsourcing or bringing in external sales and, or marketing resources or mar-sales resources? Perhaps I ought to have said.

Emma Botfield:

I find this fascinating because I think lots of organizations are just self-obsessed that they have to solve every problem themselves. I think there is always an opportunity to use expertise from outside, time, capacity, and sometimes capability barriers to achieving goals at pace. So if you find the right partner and I choose that word carefully, because it has to be a partnership if you’re going to outsource because it’s your brand, it’s your values, it’s your purpose that you are asking someone to support you with and represent. But if that partner has aligned values and there’s an alignment in purpose, then there’s mutual benefit. It fascinates me why people think that everything has to be done internally, or if you go, I’ve seen many outsource relationships where the intent was right but then it became adversarial because it wasn’t in the right mindset to go, “How do we achieve together?” Because that’s what it has to be and I think it should be considered at every opportunity and any opportunity, because again, it’s the best solution. What is going to be the best solution? So it goes back to that growth mindset. You have to be open minded in business today. You have to be.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, and try some different things. Richard, you must have a perspective on this because you’ll see it from the external partner, yeah.

Richard Lane:

I think it’s a bit of a philosophical question. In fact I openly say that to customers right at the beginning of the conversation, that I think Emma’s absolutely spot on. Some are just so closed to the idea of letting go of any element of their process that it’s not going to work, and that’s fine because there are lots that aren’t closed off to it, but I would also sort of counter it with, it’s not right to outsource all the time and sometimes outsourcing isn’t right forever. We often get asked to prove a proposition or to prove a new marketplace and we can do it faster and we should be able to do it faster and we should be able to scale more rapidly than if you were doing it yourselves.

I think the value add, which people often forget is that, we’ve got what? 45 customers that we are working on at any one time, 40 to 45. So you’re getting all of that insight and value for free, really. So I think that’s the bit that people miss when they think, “Oh, well, we need to do everything ourselves,” because there’s a huge amount of learning and I see it… I’m really passionate that we have an absolute obligation to deliver back insight. It’s not just about creating outcomes, but it’s about the insight and whether a customer says, “Yes.” Or a customer says, “No.” Why? And that’ll be the first question on Emma’s lips would be, “Well, why were they interested or why weren’t they?” And that’s our job to deliver that back. It’s timing but… One we talk about, the three piece for us is people, process and partnership. That’s probably pretty aligned to Emma was saying there, I think.

Simon Hazeldine:

I mean, I often say when I’m working with sales teams, that you’ve got to remember 99% of the time the customer is head down inside their own organization, be that the ministry of defense or whoever it is, large, corporate, small, start-up, they haven’t got the time to see that broader picture and to get those insights from the market. So there is so much value for suppliers, I think to bring and to help to educate customers and then you become a real trusted partner, you’re seen as a source of authoritative advice, and don’t like to be sold to but they quite like being helped to make really good buying decisions I think is one way of kind of flipping it around.

Emma Botfield:

Yeah. We’re a large organization so, can we be as agile and flexible as someone like Richard’s organization? We probably would love to be, but in reality, it’s just never going to happen. So where you want to test, learn, test, learn, evolve, get those insights for me it’s always about, what’s important and why? Why is it that you want to achieve something and how can you quickly get the results and the insights to make informed decisions? And just as our customer want to be data driven and insight led so do we as organizations. We’ve just got to make sure we think laterally sometimes and it’s not all we created here that is best.

Simon Hazeldine:

No, that’s a great… I think that’s a great philosophy and a great way to think about it. So Emma, thank you so much for sharing all of those fantastic insights with us. It’s been absolutely fascinating to see inside your perspective, inside the organization and best of luck with all of those very admirable changes that you’re going to be driving. Richard, any closing thoughts, comments from you, sir?

Richard Lane:

Oh, I’ve loved that, Emma, thank you so much Emma. Your customer rhetoric or customer passion, I love that one. Mar-sales, we’ve talked about a lot. Data led decision making based on value. Industry experience, but not industry baggage. How cool is that? If I was listening to this podcast and thinking of a change, then I’m thinking, “Oh, actually, those could be something for me here.” And then finally, what’s important and why? Something we should always be asking ourselves, all of the time, I guess. So yeah, it’s been great Emma, really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Emma Botfield:

Loved it. Thank you.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

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