#144 – The best of last year’s Global Sales Transformation event
Hey, everyone. Eddie here from the marketing team. With GST right around the corner, we thought why not revisit some of the best talks from GST last year? The theme of which was how organizations can be future ready, a topic that is still relevant today. If you still haven't got your tickets for this year's event, well, what are you waiting for?
Speaker 1:The link to secure your tickets will be in the show notes below. Come and learn from some of the best in the industry when it comes to key account management and some of the leading industry experts who will give you different perspectives on how to approach the art and science of sales language. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:So what do we do when we embark on a change and transformation journey? Well, often, in my experience, it's quite a secretive program or project, and a few of the leaders go on an off-site, maybe with a management consultancy, and have a discussion about, well, we need to drive change. We need to change the organization. And there's nodding, and then we go. We say, okay.
Speaker 2:Let's let's start to change the organization. Off we go. And the people come second. So if you think of a a sailing analogy where the boat is the organization and the people and the crew are part of the team that need to be taken on the journey, the boat has gone sailing off from the harbour side and the crew are all left standing on the side. And maybe as the boat gets a few miles offshore, well, then we'll send an email.
Speaker 2:We'll have an all hands call. We'll have a fireside chat, and we'll we'll tell the people about the organizational change and expect them to catch up. The challenge is however fast those people swim, they're not going to catch that boat up. Some might drown, and some may stand on the sideline and never jump in in the first place. What we actually need is the boat and the crew working together in one direction so that we are sailing in a common direction.
Speaker 2:Well, where do you start? Do you start with the organization? Do you start with the people? You need to do both. We all talk about needing to run and operate now and build for the future, and we need to do it both at the same time.
Speaker 2:How do we ensure that we have both the company and the people, back to our sailing analogy, speaking a common language and sailing boat and crew in the common direction?
Speaker 3:Royal Mail, of course, is a legacy organization. Everybody knows Royal Mail. Right? The photo on your left was taken last week. Clearly, it wasn't.
Speaker 3:It was a week before. It's not crazy. But the reality is that Royal Mail, we've got a real challenge when it comes to change because the task that we've got as part of the infrastructure of the UK is to change absolutely everything whilst staying exactly the same because we're a regulated business. We're a business that has to deliver to all of your houses 6 days a week, delivering the letters and the parcels under what's called the universal service obligation, and that's a real privilege. That gives us a network or forces us to have a network that means we have to cover the UK single price, one price goes anywhere pricing that doesn't exploit, the people that can't afford to use postal services and so on and so forth.
Speaker 3:But that also means that Royal Mail might carry might carry the notion of not being particularly innovative. Well, I'll just give you a little timeline. And there is people in the room, I will say, that were here at the beginning when Royal Mail opened, right, who who actually worked there on day 1. They didn't really. Sorry, Mike, wherever you are.
Speaker 3:Yes. So, look, way back in 15, 16, Henry the 8th's knight, Brian Chuque, the first master of posts, establishes the key postal towns across the country and builds a formal postal network, 1st in the world. It's amazing, isn't it? Now I've skipped a bit. Right?
Speaker 3:So I have jumped a little bit because otherwise we'd be here all day over the 500 odd years of history. 17/11, the Post Office Act paves the way for unified postal service across Scotland, England, and Wales. That might not sound very innovative, but, again, one of the first in the world. Ireland then joined in 18 08, so a little bit of time passed again. So jumping ahead a bit, 18/40, the world's first adhesive postal stamp, the Penny Black, is launched.
Speaker 3:Queen Victoria appears on it. 68,000,000 are used in the 1st year. Now hold that thought a minute. 68,000,000. This was innovative.
Speaker 3:Nobody had done this before. This was groundbreaking technology of the time. 1968, 1st and second class letter services are introduced. Again, the first in the world. Skip.
Speaker 3:Right? 1990, Royal Mail re parcel Royal Mail Parcels, sorry, is rebranded as Parcelforce. Huge investment. Why was that? That was to account for the adjustment in the way that people were using postal services, starting to send goods predominantly to businesses, around the country, introducing online tracking, the construction of national and international sorting hubs.
Speaker 3:This sounds really, really boring nowadays, doesn't it? But back then, that was innovative. 2006, online posted launch trees, allowing you, the general public, to pay, and download and print your labels and buy postage from us. This is another huge challenge that we come up with, being working for Royal Mail, is many people still think we're the post office. Of course, we're not.
Speaker 3:We're not the post office. The post office for many, many years, we were part of the same organization. Of course, we are. But today, for us, the post office is a retail organization that happens to sell some of our services. 2014, Walmart tracked 24 and 48 is launched, introducing a tracking of parcels across the UK.
Speaker 3:Now this is not a product that is sold under our universal service obligation. These products were designed. In fact, my job at Royal Mail largely was to write the strategy for those products and bring them to market. It now makes up well over half of our parcel volumes and over half of our revenue. And just this year and last year, 2 new mega hubs are opened, 1 in the northwest, 1 in the Midlands, capable of processing up to a 150,000 items an hour.
Speaker 3:Now for all of you that have got no context of what that is, it's a lot. Right? A lot. By far and away, the biggest processing capacity of any delivery company in the world. So it's amazing, and it continues for a company that is not innovative.
Speaker 3:This is all of the stuff that we do all of the time and we've got carried on, and these are continual improvements, which is there, designed with our customers' customers in mind. 3rd box thinking, Phil, drives a lot of what we think about what we do. And clearly, I'm not expecting you to read any of this. The point being that that change is absolutely constant, all whilst staying exactly the same, which is quite difficult.
Speaker 4:I wanna tell you a story of how I got into AI ethics and its governance. So it all began, of course, with an AI application. What you see in the screen is, AI application called Sales Choice. And what I have doctor Cindy Gordon here. The name is mentioned.
Speaker 4:It's doctor Cindy Gordon. It happens to be the CEO of Sales Choice in Canada, and she brought Sales Choice to us. We looked at Salesforce. We looked at Sales Choice. We looked at another vendor, and we onboarded this at my previous job.
Speaker 4:What this tool really did was it took a defined set of win factors and categorized all the opportunities by digital reps into 3 ratings. If you can see them, a, b, and c on the probability of winning. So all the opportunities were ranked a were liable to win much faster than the b's and the c's. The reps would have some guidance instead of going willy nilly and checking all the opportunities, they could start off with the a's, finish all the a's, and go on to the b's and the c's. And I would be remiss if I do not give, doctor Cindy Gordon credit because she's a global AI expert, and she was my coach, guide, and mentor, during my thesis on ethical AI, that Phil referred to shortly.
Speaker 4:So the next thing that happened on the story was one of our senior sales leaders, and we name him John Smith for now, wasn't really convinced that Sales Choice was giving us the right output. He came to me and he said, Lenny, do you really think AI can do this? And and this is we're talking about 4 years ago. So I think AI was still coming into the market, but not in that big way. And he was like, what if the output is right?
Speaker 4:Are you telling me that I should guide my people and believe piece of software? He was questioning was this intelligence really ethical? He was skeptical all the way. The other thing that happened to me while I was doing finally during the same period was I apologize to a chatbot. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's correct. I apologize to a chatbot. It just happens so that as most of you in the room here attend sales webinars, I do I did also attend a webinar, and then I received an email from a lady called Alexis Taylor. By the way, just quick plug in, all the images that you see here in my presentation throughout have been generated AI generated with DALL E 3. So you'll see them throughout my presentation.
Speaker 4:And this Alexis Taylor was also generated by, DALL E 3. So you can see what big models can do in AI. Coming back to my story, long story short, Alexis really pursued me for a period of 6 months. She wrote consistent emails, was on point, her grammar was, like, really to point as well. And after 6 months, I had some pity and I said, you know, Alexis, thank you for your patience and resilience in pursuing me.
Speaker 4:I've been really busy, but, you know, I understand. I'll go ahead and have an appointment with you. And low and behold, there was an email quickly which came in and said, oh, Lenny, love love your response. I'll get you in touch with Tom, who's my manager. And so the next day, I had a meeting with Tom, the manager.
Speaker 4:And the first thing I asked Tom was, Tom, who's Alexis? I'm really perturbed. She was brilliant, she was amazing. And guess what Tom said? He said to me, Alexis is a chatbot lady.
Speaker 4:Boy, was I letting float. An unethical sales call, you call it?
Speaker 5:So one of the challenges I've received when I came to board was what's our ideal customer profile? What is ideal customer profile? So the challenge was articulated to me, we're a horizontal company, meaning our solution fits many industries. We have about 2,000 customers. We have extremely opportunistic sales who doesn't have this problem, and we need to double or triple sales productivity.
Speaker 5:So we can't be doing what we're doing. Who are the right clients to go after? How do we get more of them in the funnel? And how do we distinguish and focuses on the right ones? And I use here I hope my wife doesn't watch this video.
Speaker 5:My wife is a yoga teacher, and if she puts 3 weeks salary together, she can step into Louis Vuitton and at Best Buy scarf. However, she can keep the seller busy for an hour and a half showing her every bag in the shop, whilst 20 potential customers with enough money in their pockets just pass by and say, he looks really busy. I'll just step over to Chanel. Right? If Louis Vuitton could filter all yoga teachers married to me, they'd they'd do it.
Speaker 5:So what is the ideal customer profile? So it was some immediately I understood that the challenge of the solution will involve, people. I need input, from the best salespeople, best sales managers. I will, at the end of the process, need some buy in. There'll be some data science.
Speaker 5:Yes. Process with definition, insights, maybe even compensation impact, and even technology involved. All that is in the mix of the solution. It will require some investment in terms of buying technology, and time. It's gonna become probably a new operational capability.
Speaker 5:So I'm gonna put this word out there, operational capability, and I'll come back to it after the torture. New maturity curve and, new mindset. That's Phil yelled at me when I didn't have this one. So what is ideal customer profile? If you Google it up, who is likely to buy smoothly and on time, have a successful implementation, upsell, cross sell, renew, and be a great reference?
Speaker 5:Don't we all want those type of customers, yeah, that are retainable, and we can sell and sell and expand? What I've added to this mix is a meaningful new logo land, a meaningful expansion, and a rinse repeat motions that we can do it again and again and again across all geographies, across all countries, across across all salespeople. What are the detractors of that? Sales opportunism. The seller in Louis Vuitton who cannot distinguish what which customers are walking through the door.
Speaker 5:Lack of discipline. Ineffective demand generation. If my demand generation engine pumps the wrong leads, those are the leads I have to work with. So it leads to wasted marketing dollars, unprofitable revenue. One of our biggest customers of board international is UNHCR.
Speaker 5:UNHCR is the refugee agency of the United Nation. Can I tell my salespeople go after nonprofit organizations? You're gonna make big bucks there? No. Also, the implementation of the HCR was a nightmare because we never implemented process for a refugee agency.
Speaker 5:So it's a a whole unprofitable revenue that at the same time we acquired this customer, maybe we could have acquired 5 others that would be much more easy to easier to implement and expand. So wasted and, of course, wasted time on lost deals and renewals. So all the good reasons why to focus your company on ideal customer profile.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So in Causeway, and in part in the other companies that I've run, I don't really have any time for people who don't wanna learn. So when it becomes to hiring a key enabler of mine, one of the first questions I asked is tell me something that you've learned to do in the past 2 years that you haven't never done before. And if people can't give me an answer to that question, you cannot come in. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I've probably lost loads of good people over that, but I think I've probably gained many, many more, and this is about growth mindset. And why is that important? Because you live in a world of change. Yeah. Everything around us is changing.
Speaker 6:You just look at the presentations that we've had today on AI and ethics and the world and what is happening in the world, the speed of change, and what's happening in change that Kathy talked about, and I know that Vladka will talk about. You know, if you ask Grant to tell you about his life in the last 3 years and the whirlwind of change that was, you know, and what he's done since then. Right? So the world is changing really, really quickly. We don't have time.
Speaker 6:So a growth mindset and people that you're bringing in coupled with emotional intelligence are 2 of the things that are amazing. So trying to be future ready is asking ourselves about, I want those people in my organization. Don't have the time to explain. I want people who want to come in and are prepared to challenge themselves and challenge our customers and challenge our markets, so that I can give them that unfair advantage that then means that as a company, no matter what the future throws at us, our resilience or ability to think our way through those challenges is is exponentially increased. And, you know, if I put it to maybe people in the audience, you know, having done this for a, you know, a long time, I left school at 16.
Speaker 6:I didn't go to university until I was 43, and I had the, the absolute fortune. A meeting fell, and I had the, the absolute fortune of being taught by, you know, some of the people that are in this, in this room. And, you know, that inspired me to understand. If you wanna be future ready, you never ever stop learning. And if you haven't picked up a book in 12 months, I would say to you, go pick up a book.
Speaker 6:If you don't have a practice yet of reflecting, and I mean every day sitting back and going, what happened? Did it go the way that I thought that it would? What did I learn from today? And, you know, what am I gonna think about? And what is amazing about that, when you start to do it and you start to write things down, the difference in the quality you're thinking is is just huge.
Speaker 6:So for me, future ready, never ever stop learning. You know, never stop reading. And I promise you, I'm not somebody that reads a 100 books a year, but I am somebody that takes an hour every single day. And I'll go on to LinkedIn because I wanna know what Grant's doing, and I wanna know what John's doing. You know, I wanna figure out what's happening in the world and how can I learn, and how do I get my, you know, my teams and my people to learn?
Speaker 6:Reflection and building that period of reflection in on an individual level is
Speaker 7:Okay. Black, I'm so interested to hear your perspectives as a practitioner as well as an academic and so as sort of an expert on change. And we've heard about the emergent leadership. So how what are your insights?
Speaker 8:So we'll go back to emergent leadership model because this is the heart of the management shift approach, which is known as the how of the big shift from old paradigm based on command and control to new paradigm based on people, purpose, collaboration, and that is based on years of interdisciplinary research. And I see the world through these 5 levels. So as Kathy mentioned, there are 5 levels that our individual mindset goes through, but but there is also a corresponding organizational culture at every level, which is characterized by specific thinking patterns, language use, leadership style, organizational culture, organizational outcomes, and we cannot skip the levels. It is also very highly relevant to sales professionals because I map those 5 levels to sales drivers, to customer centricity, and 32 other areas. Anything you can think of, give me a challenge, I will map the 5 levels to to that particular issue problem, whether it's individual, whether whether it's organization or societal.
Speaker 8:Because we know from neuroscience, with our, thinking, with our behavior, we are spreading the ripples. And with our mirror neuron brain cells, we pick up the moods and emotions of people around us, and then we operate at that level. So coming to your questions, how do we get future ready? We get future ready by shifting individual leaders, employees, and entire organizational culture to level 4, occasionally level 5. I can briefly say a little bit more about the levels just to put it in the context.
Speaker 8:So level 1, lifeless mindset, apathetic culture, not much gets done. It's a, there's a lot of toxicity, fear, blame, worry. It's really not a good place to be. Level 2, reluctant mindset, stagnating culture. People do a minimum they can get away with just to get their paychecks.
Speaker 8:So they bring their body to work. Their heart and mind stay at home. Level 3, controlled mindset and, orderly culture. This is command and control micromanagement. We do what we are told to do.
Speaker 8:And this is where majority of organizations are, and this is where sales is driven by numbers such as sell, sell, sell to meet the spreadsheet numbers regardless of, people and what they want and what customers want, etcetera. So we need to go through this big shift, what I call the management shift. So we help leaders. We shift the sales mindset. We we we shift organizational culture from level 4, where the mindset is enthusiastic and culture is collaborative.
Speaker 8:And this is where magic happens, and I'm delighted to have Kathleen now is one of our business partners because she has and her team in SAP experienced this magic and achieved the breakthrough. So the keywords are trust, transparency, purpose, collaboration, working on something much bigger than ourselves. And this is where all the numbers go up. Sales numbers, innovation, engagement, staff retention, everything improves. We are really, really purposeful, and we want to make this world a better place.
Speaker 8:And, occasionally, we can reach level 5, where, we have, unlimited mindset and limitless culture. This is where highly innovative teams work day night on some amazing innovations. So everything we do within manage shift solution is about helping, leaders, organizations to shift to level 4, and occasionally tap into energy of level 5. And we have various tools and processes I developed over years because as you introduced me, Phil, I'm a kind of a hybrid person, academic and and management consultant and the coach and etcetera, and a few other hats I'm wearing as well. So a long answer to question future ready organizations, future ready leaders are level 4, occasionally level 5 leaders and organizations.
Speaker 9:I'm interested to know, in terms of future ready and future proofing businesses, what are each of you doing to ensure repeat customers to ensuring that the customer journey doesn't just end at that point of the contract being signed? Because I think this what this one year has taught us where there is very little new business is that the value of those customers and the customer life cycle needs to be nurtured and and really grown. And
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 9:For someone who's always been focused on new revenue, that's I I'm really glad to see it because I think it's been neglected. So interested to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Shall we ask Grant to
Speaker 10:maybe Yeah. From, the cruise industry, it's very different. You know, we went through 2 years of being frozen. No revenue whatsoever, for 2 years on the books, and it's quite astonishing how the cruise industry even survived. Airlines got, compensation from governments around the world, hotel chains, resorts.
Speaker 10:It's, the same as well too. The cruise industry didn't. We had to go 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000 in debt just to stay afloat for ourselves. But then what we've seen now is with the rise of crews coming back, it's who has taken care of their customers. So it's been a massive shift in the dominance of where the customer is going to go spend their money.
Speaker 10:And knock on something, Royal Caribbean has been there. And I I attribute them back to our philosophy of the customer must always come first, whether it's the end customer or our primary customer is our travel agents. And we are diligently loyal to them. And even through the pandemic, when most cruise lines shut down, you couldn't even call a cruise line to get through to them. We were there.
Speaker 10:Our entire sales force, he's sitting right here as well too. Sean, my right hand, who I pulled from the Salesforce, to be sent sales transformation with me, they were all on the phones just to be on the phone and listen to a travel agent cry. Literally. Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, through that the pandemic losing their business left and right. How are we gonna survive?
Speaker 10:Well, you could categorize that that's not sales, but it was the relationship. It was the trust. So we kept our Salesforce. We scaled down, but we kept our sales force going. So back to a little bit about what both of you guys are saying, it is the trust, and it is a relationship.
Speaker 10:But I will also tell you before we went on the master's program, contracting used to be difficult. The relationships used to be difficult. But now that we have a different way of learning of how do we behave, how do we work, how do we create a winning value proposition together, our whole account management process now is not led from Royal Caribbean. It's led the other way. We actually go through to the customer first and start with a transparent blank sheet of paper.
Speaker 10:What is it about you? What's your need? What is your customers want need? Then how do we just might happen to have the the products to serve you and support you? Now the cut now in full transparency comes with that.
Speaker 10:This is our standard contract. This is what we can do within the industry, and everybody sees it. The relationship is there. The trust is there. And so the buying, experience has just been phenomenal.
Speaker 10:We are we are literally having the most incredibly record breaking year we've had in 54 years. So k. Actually, I'll take it even further. We hit target 3 months ago.
Speaker 7:Targets are too low.
Speaker 10:Just don't tell my boss.
Speaker 11:Fantastic. In terms of that innovation, piece that you talked about and, you know, and being responsive to to a customer's needs and how quickly that innovation can actually happen. You know, in some industries, you know, like, obviously, fintechs, it happens quite fast. In sort of like where I work in that corporate banking, not so much. And it's I suppose it's are you do you think that the the speed of innovation and responsiveness to the market, is having to sort of catch up with the sort of AI technology, or do you think there's time to to respond to customers' needs?
Speaker 10:It's it's it's it's amazing you say that. We we had a great quote, let's see if I can get this right, by our former chairman and CEO, Richard Fain, who really is the father of Royal Caribbean Cruises globally. He said the speed of change will never be as slow as it is today. And we all had to sit and think for that. We're like, okay.
Speaker 10:With great words of wisdom and power wherever you are up there. Oh, wise one. Thank you. And then he said, no. Seriously, just think about it.
Speaker 10:The speed of change will never be as slow as it is today. So with the there's always the advent of a new tool. AI is just one. We sat in a great panel discussion with many of the leaders here in this room just the other day with the ISP having this very discussion. How do we learn about AI, and what should we be doing within our own organizations?
Speaker 10:Because most organizations have just sent out a blanket ban from IT saying, don't use it. But do you think how how do you think that's gonna go down with salespeople? Our salespeople are like this. Did you know I could do that? It just wrote all my emails.
Speaker 10:Okay. Hang on. Was it a good email, or what was it? But embracing that change process, that part of it, and just being honest and, transparent enough to say, we know what we know. We know what we don't know, but let's go on the journey together as a unified team with our customers along with us.
Speaker 10:So we're starting the discussions with AI. What is acceptable use? What is threats? What is ethics? How should we allow our people to use it because you can't stop them?
Speaker 10:What will be used on our systems? And then we already use the funny thing is I learned at the ISP just the other day so many different things about, do you realize you're using, elements of AI for years? You know, chatbot, text, WeChat, these different things that are going through. So it's not that we're just magically started today. We've been doing this for, I think AI, they said 70 years with the technology in some aspects of it, but it's how do we embrace that change, and how do we join it together.
Speaker 5:We're all talking, very lofty terms. And especially in the b two b type of business, at some point, we get to contracting. And that's where all the organizational red tape comes up on the customer side and the, obviously, the organization. Everybody tried to protect themselves and and become future ready in terms of protecting revenue and protecting, whatever the the it is what that you're selling. I come from the subscription world.
Speaker 5:I guess you are as well. The question is, how do you keep that? How do you keep at that level that that report that you established in such a nice way all the way up to contracting, and that's when the red tape hits the road?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I I just wanna build on it about the, Vladka used, which is trust. And I think how do you engender trust through your sales team during that sales cycle? There are things that between 2 companies you'll just never get over. Right?
Speaker 6:A company has that policy. You have that policy, and, you know, you end up accepting things. But I think in the main where trust has been established right the way through that sales cycle at all levels of the sales cycle, I think my experience is you get through, those type of contract discussions really quickly, whether that's in, you know, Cathy and I have the experience of doing a $100,000,000 deals, or whether it's doing a 2 or a 300 k deal, right, with a much smaller company. It's it's really a thing of trust. So what I found in genders trust is having a team and execs in that company, together in front of a customer, and make sure that you understand the layers.
Speaker 6:So back to your ICP work, but also the persona work offered. So when you bring persona so to the vertical, you bring the role in a sense. When you bring the role, and you understand the layers in that organization and you map those layers correctly, I think back to purpose and the purpose of the company and you drive that in through your sales cycles, I think you build trust. That contractual position becomes much, much easier in the end is my experience. And the ones that have been really difficult have been the hardest commercial negotiations where right from day 1, it's been price, price, price, price, price, and then you get to the contract stage, and it's the exact same thing.
Speaker 6:Because trust to the buyer doesn't matter. Yeah. And then the question for us is, do you want that type of customer? Do you want that type of business? But, you know, that's that's a question for a different
