Timothy Hughes: Why Traditional Sales Is Failing and What Actually Works in 2026

Business.

Business.

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Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast. And Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Tim Hughes, the CEO and founder of DLA Ignite. How are you, Tim?

I'm excellent, Amy. Thank you so much for inviting me on.

I'm so happy. It's been such a fun time to have a few conversations with you, and every time I chat with you, I feel like we go deeper and deeper and deeper into some of the real complexities and difficulties affecting our market today. So I really appreciate your time and being willing to on and share some of the insights that you have.

Okay, love to. Always happy to, to talk, and I'm really excited to, uh, have chat with you today.

Yeah, me too. Thank you. Well, just so our listeners, um, can get a, a brief understanding of who you are, could you give me a little bit of your background?

Yes, so I've been in sales for probably about 35 years. It's always been business to— um, excuse me, business to business. The last 10 years I've run, I've run our own company. But before that, it was, I was basically selling what would be called ERP, so accountancy products, either for Oracle or one of their partners. I went to Oracle and went to the partners and then came back to Oracle and stuff. So it's always been big ticket, complex, multi-year. I, and I always enjoy it being as complex as you can get it. Always new business.

Interesting. So the upsell motion is not something that you've done a lot of it, but you've done the hard stuff, the new stuff, opening.

I'm a door knocker. Yes.

That's awesome. And you've also written this book called Smarketing.

Yes.

Can you tell us a little bit about this before we get started?

Yes. So a friend of mine at a company I can't mention, though I've already mentioned them. Basically came to me and so I'd already written the first book, which is now nearly 10 years ago. And I was thinking about a second book. And a colleague basically came to me and said, I think that there's this really great story about how we got sales and marketing to work together. And so Adam Gray, my business partner, Hugo and I basically put the book together. And for us back then, I mean, that's what, was it 2018? Then nobody, you know, people were saying we need to have sales and marketing working together, but the term RevOps didn't exist, which is why we called it Smarketing, which is the merger of the sales and marketing. And everyone kept saying we need to be doing this. And so we decided to write the book and it's about, you've read it, haven't you?

Oh yeah. I read it, I bought it twice.

Oh yeah. You did buy it twice because she bought it twice because she lost the first copy. So she's one of my biggest fans.

It was overused.

So yeah, so it was about how do we actually get people to work together? And because we, we worked on a project and, you know, it took us 18 months to, to, to actually get people to start kind of talk to each other and use the same language. And so, so, so yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. Even, even today, even now working with marketing and sales. You know, I got an email just yesterday from defensive sales team saying we were giving them crap leads and it's just, you know, that, that kind of stuff, it will always happen. But the idea of one framework from an account base working together, working with RevOps, it— everyone is on board with this now. So, you know, well done for all the work that you and your colleagues and the, the others like us have done to help bridge that gap. One of the things that I think is very interesting coming up is the social selling piece of this, because that's also very integrated between sales and marketing. And I know that you're an expert in social selling. So I wondered if you'd give me a little bit about your perspective.

Yes. So, so I wrote the first book on social selling 9 and a half years ago, and I've been in social media now for a decade, decade and a half. Uh, so, and, and, and what we did when we set up the company was that we all, we wanted, we were gonna be just focused on social. So we see ourselves as the best in the world on that. We don't do sales compensation or, you know, how to ask open questions or something like that. It's always about social. And one of the things that we wanted to do was actually define what social selling was. There's a lot of people that call it all kinds of things, and a lot of people, I see people great talking about social selling and actually they're just spamming people. You know, when, you know, LinkedIn is a social network, not a sales network. And this is a fundamental issue that people have. I've just seen somebody, a very famous person has just written a book on LinkedIn and it's like, this, a lot of it is not good practice. In fact, a lot of it is actually people are being told to do things which is actually harmful to them.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. What are a couple of things like this?

Well, I've come on to that. So just to answer your question, so I need to read it off the wall. So our definition of social selling is using your presence and behavior on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationship and trust, which lead to conversation and commercial interaction. What we see social is, well, the fundamental issue in the market is nobody wants to talk to a salesperson.

Right.

Yeah. And what we do is that we have this pretense that somehow or other, what we did in 1980 is fit for purpose in 2020. It's nearly 2026. Or what we did, you know, I remember when email first started in 1990. Why is it that a 1990 process is fit for purpose in 2025, 2026? It's not. You know, I spend my day basically taking emails out of, you know, deleting things where they've, You know, even the use of AI. Hey Tim, I've looked at your LinkedIn profile and I see la da da da da, and here's a list of my products and services. What's fundamentally different from that than what we were doing back in 1990? Nothing at all. So we have this issue that nobody wants to talk to salespeople and the more cold calls we make and the more email, the spam that we basically send, the more we're pushing the customer further away. So is there a way that we can actually have Conversations, which is what we want, and conversations that actually the buyer wants to have. And what we've done is that we've come up with a methodology where, and we spent the last 9 years basically either getting the data for it or the research for it or proving it out. So, you know, think certain things about psychology where, because what happens is that in the world of sales and marketing today, we convince ourselves That somehow or other, if we send more emails, if we make more telephone calls, that somehow or other the buyer's going to go, wow, you do that, do you? And can I buy two, please? It just doesn't happen.

Well, it's interesting you say that because like there are very reputable companies that do say it's a numbers game. It takes 20 touch points to engage a B2B buyer, whereas it used to only take 8.

And so, this is all speak from the 1980s and 1990s.

Right. So I find that—

I can get a meeting with a customer and touch them once. Why are we wasting time having all— I know why it takes 19 or whatever the figure is now, because what you're doing is that I've got a cadence and what I do is I phone you and if you don't answer the phone, I'm gonna send you a connection request. If you don't answer that, I'm gonna send you an email. I have a cadence too, which is if you phone me, I block you. If you send me a connection request, I block you. If you send me an email, I create a rule that it always goes into the wastepaper basket. You know, why are we trying to convince ourselves that somehow or other that these things are working? Because they're not. You know, the figures that people are getting, you know, there's a, there's a lot of people spending a lot of money on applications and they're creating very little fed. We talked to a number of VC companies who are saying none of the tech, we've used all of the tech. There's a number of VC people who are my age who said, we've used all the tech, it doesn't work. And when we've gone to them and said, here is a completely new way of doing things using social, using AI as well as a way of going out and forming conversations with people, conversations that people want to have, and using it as a way, you know, as I say, using your presence and behavior on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationship and trust, which lead to conversational and commercial interaction. So, so let's go through those because you asked me a question and I'll pick—

I'm dying to know because I'm thinking about a lot of, you know, AI outbound tools that are basically making the problem worse. And I wanna know a better way.

Okay. Well, I've, you know, the feedback I have, I mean, we've been saying that the marketing doesn't work and we've been saying that for 9 years.

Yeah.

And the feedback that we've had, you know, it gets the noise from in marketing saying it's just not working gets louder and louder and louder. Yeah. You know, the feedback I've had is the AI has completely killed email marketing. And the ironic thing is that we actually had an email marketing company come to us saying our tool doesn't work. Work because it doesn't generate any leads. Can you teach us social selling so we can actually go out and sell our tool that doesn't generate any leads? You couldn't make this stuff up.

Oh my gosh, that's unbelievable.

So, you know, they're selling a tool that the marketing person basically said that every night she gets in a car and she cries because basically she said, we've turned off our email marketing system. He said, it just does it anyway. So there's 3 things that you need to know about social. The first thing is about your profile. This is not about you. This is, yeah, who's the most important person in the world?

Your client, your prospect.

Well, in your world, it's you.

Oh, okay, right.

Yeah, yeah. But in terms of the buyer, it's, it's them.

Yeah.

So this is about, this isn't about you. You know, the worst thing that a buyer can see is, you know, I've been to President's Club 5 times and the, and, you know, the first thing I can, as soon as I get my teeth into a client, either they die or I die first. You know, this sort of stuff, nobody's interested.

No.

And there's all these salespeople because they're not being coached and taught about what social is about. Because what happens is quite often they're going onto social and talking about sales. Again, as a buyer, I don't want that. You know, it's like going on a first date and talking about all of your conquests.

Correct.

You know, what, what, it's just like, We're not interested and we're trying to convince ourselves that we are. So the first thing is about your profile. Your profile is your shop window to the world. There's 1.2 billion people on LinkedIn. Your job is that for 24 hours a day, 366 days a year, people, those, they're walking past and what you want is someone to go, that looks interesting. I wonder what that person does. I think that they can help me. Actually, I think I'm gonna contact them. I think I actually bring them in and see and talk to our people about it. We've got clients that are doing multimillion dollar deals because their salespeople have an interesting profile on LinkedIn. Not about, we call it biocentric. Some people call it personal brand, but I don't like the term. Biocentric profile where people are going, that person could actually help me. And they're contacting them and then that's turning into a conversation, which turns into deals. I've had Chris Mason, CEO of Namos, who is an Oracle consulting company, basically come on here and said, yeah, we're doing multimillion dollar deals. And that was 4 years ago. Well, you know, this isn't like next year or whatever. This is This is, we've been doing this 10 years. Right. So, so the first thing is, so, so, so you then asked me a question, what are people doing that is, is self-harmed, right? On your, on your LinkedIn profile, your summary title is the most visible thing about you on the internet. If you Google yourself, there will be your photo, your name, and your summary title. Your summary title's job is to get someone to go, Amy Cook, She looks interesting. I wonder what she does. Look at the LinkedIn profile. Now, if you have Professional Edition and above, LinkedIn shows you who's basically been to your LinkedIn profile. You've got an opportunity at that point to have a conversation with them. Hi, hi, Tim. Thanks for looking at my LinkedIn profile. Don't send a list of your products and services. You just say, hey, I hope you found what you were looking for. If not, Just give us a chat. Maybe we can connect. So there you've got an opportunity to have a conversation because somebody has actually looked at your profile. They've done it for a reason. So I get a lot of my speaking gigs because the person that will look at my LinkedIn profile will be marketing intern. So if you have a sales kickoff and you wanna get a speaker, what do you do? You get this marketing intern to basically look at a load of LinkedIn profiles. The marketing intern looks at my LinkedIn profile and says, hey, you know, if there's anything— well, actually, I'm looking, I'm doing a sales kickoff. I said, oh, I can do that. And I'm the first person that then she then took out. It was on the call. Okay, let's do that. So, so, um, your, your summary title is the most visible thing about you. What that needs to— the, the thing that, that everybody, every single LinkedIn trainer says, what you need to do is what you do. Okay. So I get people coming to me and it will say, I help CEOs become financially independent by having their own real estate portfolio. So what do I do? Ignore. I help CEOs with their personal fitness. Ignore. I help CEOs with their go-to-market strategy. Ignore. Because I'm not in the market to buying any of that. They could be the best person in the world, But if they actually had something that was something— what you actually teach people about putting their why. So if you've been to my LinkedIn profile, you will see my summary. And anybody who's watching this, come to my LinkedIn profile and read my summary title, and you will see it's something very, very different.

It's very different. And it made me scroll down onto your profile and be—

Job done. Hold on. I'm gonna go home. You've answered it. The whole point of it is the summary title makes you read the rest of it. Your summary then shouldn't be about my name is Michael and I sell email marketing systems and we're the best in the world. Well, you're not going to say you're the worst in the world, are you? You know, every single company goes to market exactly the same way. They all say the same thing, buy my product because we're great. No buyer can basically differentiate any of the companies. So the only thing that you have in your organization, your only USP are your people. And I'm not saying that from a fluffy, fluffy, we're investing in our people, da da da da. This is about how they look online, the culture, the everything that, everything that you would, if I said to you, why is your, why is Forecast different? You'd say, well, it's to do with the CEO and he's really good and he does this because da da da da da. Understand. None of that, what you told me, exists on social. Why? Because all of your, all the people that you are trying to recruit, all the people that you are trying to sell to would buy into that, but you don't put it on social. So, and nobody else does. So what you need to do, you need to be empowering your people to go on social to tell that story, to tell their own story. So, so my business partner basically is, he, he did violin at some music college. I always say university. He says, no, it was music college actually, Jim. And, and, and he's got, and he doesn't play the violin now. He plays guitar. He's got guitars all behind him. Good acoustic guitars, not electric. Everybody he sells to plays the guitar. Everything.

That's so interesting. I really love this. So I mean, I, I went to college to study violin, actually. I need to meet him. So that's really fun.

I will connect you.

Yeah, I'd love that.

He's a big Bach fan.

Very cool. I love that. That's very fascinating.

So, you know, from the beginning of sales, you know, it's an old cliché, people buy people, but it's totally true. And in the world of AI, what we're seeing even more, when AI first came out, I thought, oh, we're dead. But actually, as time has gone on, people have realized that the most human company wins. And actually being active on social has become more and more relevant. And so, so, so the first thing is about your profile. The second thing is about your network. I can guarantee you that your sales force is totally, totally invisible to your customers. I can do an analysis of it and they're totally invisible.

So why is that?

Because they're not connected to them. And the only way that they connect to them is here's a list of my products and services or connect and here's a list of my products and services or hey, are you interested in, in some RevOps shit that we got for, that we're selling this week? And it's like, no. But if it was a case of, so one of the people that worked for me, his We're moving on to content, but which is the third thing, but I'll, I'll move between the three. So his best piece of content that he ever got, got. Now, when I say best, we're all about revenue. So everything that we do is, everything that we do about social isn't about fluff and having flowers on your profile and thing like that. So how do we drive revenue with social? So his best post in terms of revenue was about Led Zeppelin.

Really?

So his, his, his post was every Friday night, which is interesting because it's Friday, Friday night for me. Every Friday night. So my, my wife and I, we love Led Zeppelin. Every Friday night, we, when it's time for me to basically finish up and go and join the family for the weekend, she puts Led Zeppelin on and I know it's time to, to finish what I'm doing and, and go and join the family. Uh, what's your favorite Led Zeppelin song?

Dire Maker.

Ah, okay, Dire Maker. Mine's Kashmir. And but people would, you know, Dire Maker, Kashmir, In a Great Kingdom. Dire Maker is a strange favorite. You must be the only one because a lot of people hate that track.

Anyway, I love, I love that track because it reminds me of high school. Okay. It reminds me my first boyfriend in high school.

Fantastic. When the levee breaks, da da da da da, you know. So he's then got all of those. So for everybody that he's connected with, on the Monday morning, he basically sends them a note and says, oh yeah, Custard Pie. Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting track on Physical Graffiti. Clearly we've got something in common. Why don't we have a chat? All the people he's not connected to, he basically says things like, oh yeah, Communication Breakdown from Led Zeppelin I. It's a, it's a blues classic, isn't it? Can we connect? Now, in all of those cases, you're not a threat. If I go to you and I connect and say, either I don't send a message, there's a big thing at the moment that the best way to, the best results is to get send no message at all. But that's only because the people are spammers. You know, if the choice is, do I send you spam or do I send you no spam? No spam. And because you'll then connect and then you'll spam them.

Right.

But if you're, if you're, so, so anything to do with your company or your product is a threat. Threat that you're going to basically phone me up and say, you just like my article about our new super duper whizzy thing that we've just released. Can I put you down for two? So no one's gonna ever like that comment, that, that content because you're a threat. Whereas if you're talking about Led Zeppelin or anything else, you are not a threat. If you do it in the right way and don't mention anything salesy, then what will happen is that as people don't see you as a threat, so what they'll do is they look at your profile, they'll look at the people that you are connected to. It's important that you, you are, who, who you're put connected to from a network perspective. And then they'll look at the content. If someone is liking or commenting on it, what they're saying is, I have a digital resonance with what you're doing. And, and, and if it's like Led Zeppelin, you've got an opportunity to go and have that conversation. Now, what you will find is if you do anything salesy, they will run. And we've tested this. So if you said, let's have a call, here's my Calendly link, they'll never respond. Because that's what salespeople do. If you respond and say, let's have a call, can we make, because we were always taught in sales to do the alternative close on meetings, you know, can we meet the next, can we do Tuesday or Thursday? Again, they'll smell a salesperson and they're gone. You won't get a response. It's so important that you're walking this fine line that there's a lot of people in the States that don't like it when we say if you sell on social, you won't get a response. Well, I, you know, it's all about steaks and, you know, and red meat and, you know, and it's all about a numbers game and stuff like that. Yeah, but I can get better response by not selling than by selling. And so, so, so that takes you through the 3, the 3 elements.

Well, I love, love everything that you've said and it's, it's a really a truly masterclass in this and what's interesting and fundamental to me about what you're saying is that we've got to put the humanity back in selling. We've got to be— it's got to be people to people. People want to talk to other people. They don't want to be spammed by AI. And I think the way that you're talking about it is like, be interesting, be genuinely interested in other people, connect in ways that are meaningful. And that are mutually interesting. And it doesn't necessarily have to be about sales and the sales will come.

I totally agree with that. But what you'll find is that if there's any sales lead, if there's any red meat sales leaders watching this, they would have switched off at that point. Because for them, it's about numbers. It's about, I know that I can just go to my sales team, they can pick up the phone and we can generate business. But I can generate more business than you can on the telephone. And the important thing is I agree with you about all those things, but I can actually give all of the sales. I can get you leads in quarter. And I can get you more leads and conversations and more revenue in quarter than you can do if you're cold calling. So what we're saying is, yes, I totally agree it's about people, but if you do that people connection, if you do it in the right way, and have the experience and you have the understanding of be realistic about how people buy, you could get a better response. So for example, we've been running a benchmark now. Let's talk about figures. We've been running a benchmark now across our clients for 3 years and the average SDR gets 5 meetings a week. That's 5 high-quality ICP meetings a week. That's average.

Is this inbound, outbound, or both?

It's outbound, cold outreach, outbound, 5 meetings a week. You're gonna ask me if that's average, who's the best? The best SDR, one person is getting 35 meetings a week. He complains that he has too many customer meetings. Now, I don't know how many other salespeople are getting 5, let alone 35. But, you know, so I totally understand that it is about people, but when it comes down to cold, cold outbound ability to get conversations and get meetings, this beats cold calling and spam email every single day.

Absolutely right. That's amazing.

So, Let me, if you take some figures down, you, you can send, if you've got the professional edition of LinkedIn, you can send, if you do it in a non-spammy way, you can send 200 connections a week. We teach people how to do that in, in an hour. So they can do the whole of their prospecting in an hour in the week.

Hmm.

Um, um, and what you do is you, of those 200, you should be getting a 60% acceptance rate. Now I can buy, you know, I can get people up to 80%, but let's take the average, which is 60%. Is it? Because you gotta remember that in the world, if you walk into a room of 100 people, there'll always be 20 people that don't like you.

Yeah.

I don't like bald people. I don't people like people with glasses. They like people with English accents, whatever that is. Yeah. So, so, uh, 200, 60%, you should be getting a 60% acceptance rate on the connection requests that you send. Of those 260, you'll get 10% of those basically going for meetings. And of those 10%, you should be getting 34% going to next action. If you do, if you actually do the maths on that, that's about, that's 12 meetings that you should be getting a week. And on average, most people are getting, as I said, the average is 5.

That is incredible. So this is 5 just from social selling using your methodology.

Yeah.

That's incredible.

Yeah, I know. We're very proud.

Wow. That is very exciting. So clearly you are at the top of your game and I want to know what we can do to engage your services. So how do we get in touch with you? How do our listeners get in touch with you?

So the best place to get me is on LinkedIn. I'm Timothy Hughes on LinkedIn. You will see pictures of this book because I'm constantly trying to sell it.

I see it on your— I looked at your profile in advance of this and it— but the way you do it is so cool. It's not just pictures of the book. It's people holding the book again, like bringing the humanity back into it, which I think is fascinating. So, all right. Well, and then my last question for you today is what do you do to stay on top of your game besides listening to Led Zeppelin?

Well, I'm, I'm a, I'm a big, I'm a big vinyl. I collect vinyl. So I was on a call earlier today with a customer where there was a knock at the ding dong and I said, I've got to go. And it's a post person basically delivering some more vinyl for me. So I've got about 2,000 vinyl records.

That is amazing.

And this is my great-grandfather's. 78 record player.

Oh, is it really? I was wondering what that was.

And this is a, this is a 78, but it's, it's perfect working order. And most of them at that time were, had metal. So this is the top of the range with, this is wooden. And this box, this box here was made by my grandfather. And this houses my great-grandfather's, my grandfather's, and my father's 78 and my father's vinyl records.

Oh my gosh.

It's, it's, it's one, one hell of a responsibility.

Oh, no kidding. My grandma and grandpa had one exactly like that. And every time we would come up to their house, we would play the vinyl. And it was just, it's one of my very favorite core memories from going up to their house. It's so fun. Well, Tim, thank you so much. What an incredible meeting today. I learned so much. You are just an absolute rock star to meet with me and to share this wisdom with everyone. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you, Amy.

Business, yes, that's business. Business, yes, that's business.