Episode 102: Selling Without Selling, With Phil Ohren

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Right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. This podcast has been a couple of months in the making. We had a couple of false starts getting here. Even though we live, let's say, 10 minutes away from each other on the Sunshine coast. And it's rare to find, I think, people of the talent that we have with us today who live locally. Please. No offence to those on the Sunshine coast, but certainly in the marketing space. The man we're interviewing today is one of the sharpest that I've worked with across my 25 odd year career. And we have Phil Owen here to kick off our getting towards the end of our summer series for the Stronger Sales Teams podcast. Now, Phil's a man who has been in marketing since the age of 15. Very early, right? For most people who don't get there until they dabble with it through university, but finally decide to get into marketing, often because they don't know quite what else to do. And I'd say the same with salespeople, right? They're in there by default. But Phil's been in there since the age of 15 and over the last 20 plus years he has worked with some serious brands across the world. Chanel, Land Rover, Bupa, Unilever. Really focusing on digital strategy and digital assets. Now, why would we have that type of person on a sales team podcast? A question that might be going through your head. Well, for me, when I first met Phil, what he had was the ability to disseminate information and really talk through how you can meet your best customers at the right place and the right time in their sales cycle. Evolution that I hadn't seen from many people. So I thought, you know what, this is a terrific first degree of separation for us as sales leaders and salespeople to be, to be thinking about and to be talking to someone like Phil on our podcast. So Phil is also. He happens to be a sustainability enthusiast, which is right up my alley. We're actually recording today from my studio and Phil drove here very proudly in his Tesla that almost got hit by a falling palm from this morning. So I like the curiosity that Phil brings to the table. So we have Phil Owen here today with us from Intenda Marketing. Phil, welcome to the Stronger Sales Team podcast.

Thanks for having me, Ben. It's good to be here.

My pleasure. Now, tell me a little bit, please, about Intenda and what the business does.

So let me start with the name. So the word intender basically means someone who is in market to do something or purchase something or achieve something. So to get that out of the way, the reason why we use that is almost like as a noun, to have a precursor. So, for example, if you're an EV intender, you're very different to a V8 intender. And the reason why we do that in media and marketing is our job is to find those people so that our sales teams, whether they be digital and automated or people can have more context when they're talking to a customer. So basically we started intender actually because of a person at Volvo one day said to me, look, we just need more seven seat SUV intenders. And I'd never heard that expression before back at a place called Mindshare. And I couldn't get it out of my mind. I was probably about 29 at the time. And what I realized in that moment was that the client had inadvertently asked me to just find the needles where without the haystack. And so why that was quite important at the time was I'd realized just how much noise, I. E. The hay we had been weeding through to try and find this person who just wanted to buy a seven seat. Now, the crazy thing about that was there was only about 10 or 15 people looking to buy a 7 seat SUV per week in New South Wales at the time. So immediately I went from thinking big budget into sort of how can I make this person want to talk to us about their 7 seat SUV as opposed to shouting from the rooftops and trying to get them to do that. So in tender fast forward, sort of four and a half years, I'm a team of 15, all based in Noosaville. I think we've got one in Brisbane as well. It's a really good culture of, like, thinking curiously in terms of trying to find where these people would be what their motivations are. And there's probably a lot more I'll weave in throughout the session today about how we do that. But I think the main difference with intender versus other agencies is the way that we sort of think people first. So your sister, your brother, or whatever, when they're operating in the marketplace, that either are expressing intent, expressing interest, or you can interrupt them. Now, no media company I know of will talk about the latter, which is interrupting people, you know, showing an ad, a Harvey Norman ad or something like that, in between the footy show or something like that. And what we tend to do is go the other way, where we're looking at people on Google who are expressing intent or on Facebook or meta, looking around seven seats, SUVs and things like that as well. The reason why we do that is we need feedback from people to show that they are interested or inclined to want to talk to us or listen to what we have to say or absorb our educational content.

Yeah. In sales speak, what we're talking about is getting really clear on the ideal target market, that ideal customer profile that sales teams often glance over with a glazing of the eyes to say, yeah, look, it's everyone, right? Or it's every male who drives a car between the age of 20 and 45. Fantastic. Right. We've narrowed that down to a couple of billion people.

Right.

Rather than many, many billions, whatever it might be hundreds of millions. But the point is, we're talking about getting really, really clear on who your ideal customer profile is and the importance of that role, both at a marketing point in time. Right. The early stage point in time, building brands, building leads, and then also at the selling point of time. So I really like that. And the second piece I'm hearing from you is that we essentially, we have a business here called Intenda, who actually is built to find ways to engage with that target market at different points of their buying journey. And I think for a sales team, straight away, what I'm thinking is, hey, time's not wasted if we're dealing with a lead or prospect who isn't necessarily ready right now. Correct. Right. There are different stages, and we will have different journeys or different pipeline maturities that we work with across our own businesses. So as we get into it, one thing we've spoken about before is selling. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah. Like, I've always been of the feeling that sales is not a dirty word. And often, even at huge agencies, when you work indirectly with the client team, sometimes there is A requirement to advise the client that may come across as sales. And so the way that we like to approach our approach to getting clients is that we're showing them the data and helping them make a unique decision. But then we took that and applied that to the people we're talking to as well. So again, if you're looking for a seven seat suv, I want to dial into the triggers, the symptoms and then the solutions, which in many ways is sales.

Right.

So again, rather than trying to sell the outcome of the product or what it is black and white, you're actually saying hey, you need a spade. But really what you're trying to do is dig a hole. As one of these quotes changed my Life, probably about 24. And it was that. And I forget who did it. If anyone knows, please tell me. It's basically a good florist sells flowers. A great florist sells hope and appreciation. And for me the reason why that was quite powerful is that the florist selling hope and appreciation A can charge more because B, they are leaning into the symptom or the symptom before the solution. And so you think about this. In digital marketing, if you are a sales team trying to rent out excavators or something like that, you've got to remember it's not just an excavator, it's some sort of particular hole or some sort of particular job that needs to be done. And so you know, there might be tight access where you need a specific excavator size to navigate a challenge around them. And then therefore in the marketing, before we even get to sales or marketing qualified leads, we already considering the fact that the person's reason for being on the website today has been listened to as opposed to rent this excavator now for $99 a day, you know, and just go straight to price, we're going to like purpose and to the kind of symptoms that that person's face.

Yeah, and this is one of the key reasons I wanted to take a marketing perspective, I use it loosely. A marketing perspective in today's podcast is that this messaging doesn't differ once you get into the sales channel. Right. We can talk about a product, we can talk about the features and I guess the benefits of the product and what's likely to happen for when you use that product, that's fantastic. But when we can talk about the outcomes that come from that and if we stick with that excavator example, I'm putting a sauna into our house jungle sauna. As I call it at the moment, we've spoken about it this morning and one of the things that I need to do is about a 10 meter trench and I know I can dig that by hand and it's going to take me a certain amount of hours and it's going to mean I have to work a bit less and so forth. Right. Or else I can get the excavator little mini digger that comes in and get that done. Now for me it's not necessarily about getting in a digger to dig the hole, right. It's about getting me towards that journey of having my sauna up and running sooner. And if someone put that in front of me and said it's going to cost you $300 extra but it's going to be a month quicker because you're going to procrastinate about digging that hole, then I'm like, right, right. There's a very different outcome to just digging the hole. And I think that where marketing teams and sales teams have an exceptional opportunity is to merge their line of thinking and carry that outcome based focus from first point of contact or first intention, can I call it first intention right through until the closing of a sale. So we spoke a little bit about the probably the consumer style behavior, right. Buying a seven seaters, a consumer purchase, buying a digo. Right. Like yeah, sure, we can look at that in the B2B sense, but how does it differ or is it the same at an enterprise level?

Enterprise level, I think if we look at say tens of thousands of people per day. Yeah, to be honest, the same recipe is there. But I think what's emerging this year is this notion of zero party data. And if you are not familiar with the terminology of first and second party data, that's often when like Google or Facebook are telling you that this person came through on this keyword and then we're telling the sales team about that and I'd love to talk about this later on in terms of merging, but zero party data is when we get the person, regardless of whether they're a consumer or a business, to tell us what their symptoms are. And so this year I'm starting to see a little bit more permission based marketing happening at an enterprise level. And you'll see this a lot with skincare brands. So one of the ones that I quite like is a company called Biology. They're in Byron Bay and instead of them trying to sell the product straight away, they're actually asking you about your skin concern with a quiz. And then when you go through this Quiz, they know more about you. And then that information is then passed through to the sales team which determines whether it's an automated e commerce sales or the skincare specialist, the salesperson will call them up and sort of triage them a bit more. So the benefit there, just to clarify, is by us asking them about what they're trying to achieve, we're being more like the hope and appreciation florist. We then have more information that means that we can pass that through to the sales team, which means they can have a more meaningful conversation and, and thus therefore kind of close them in a better way. So the challenge with enterprise though versus small to medium or B2B is just doing that with 100,000 people a day. It's a lot harder. And so we do need technology to do that. But I think ultimately if you think about like I don't necessarily believe in funnels, but if you imagine a funnel in your head at the moment with sort of five or six steps. Typically the old funnel was awareness, consideration and purchase intent. I believe there's two steps prior to that. I believe there's passive and then there's a trigger. And then you go into awareness, consideration, purpose, intent. And what we're trying to do at intender is help get more context at passive and trigger put into awareness and consideration so that the drop off is quite substantial. But anyone who talks to us during passive or trigger still has us in the back of their mind primed, ready to talk to in the future. And so there are now two types of intenders. There's existing intenders who are in market for what they need now. And then there are future intenders who we are trying to get to become in market. And so is that sales? I suppose it is because we're trying to change their psychology. The selling without selling aspect is kind of permission based rather than non permission based.

Essentially we're talking about pipelines for now and pipelines for the future. And the best sales teams that I work with, they absolutely have an understanding that you are building a pipeline for today. But it's okay to be building a future pipeline too, right? As long as we're looking after the now, we're putting food on the table and doing everything we need to do to breathe and to function and to survive. It's okay to have a long term plan. Okay, so we talk about that, you call it zero party data. And you wanted to talk about how we can merge that in with the sales function. Have we got that right? Yeah, totally, yes. Let's continue down that path. What does that look like for you, you think this year?

So in its most simplest form, the vision which will be hard to achieve is that can I pass through 5 to 10 times more context to my sales team with their leads than what they had previously. Now, to do that for 100% of leads is kind of your dreaming, really. I think trying to do that for 20% of your customers would be great because again, that's a huge sample set for you to act upon and digest a little bit more. And so in terms of what we pass through already and have done for a few years, things like the keyword they came from, one of the benefits of the keyword being passed through is that that is the intent of the person, right? And so if they said they want a seven seat SUV and you then try and sell them a five seat SUV because you didn't have the context, then you're wasting that opportunity. So what I want to see more happening is that the marketing teams and the sales teams are trying to build a bridge or a common ground with context being passed through into the CRM. How we do that now versus 10 years ago has unfortunately got significantly harder due to Priv. So in probably 2005, I could tell you exactly what their multiple keyword journey was and to a point where it was quite creepy. And then that would be aligned to their email address, which became like a serious concern, especially in health. So what we are left with today is we can sort of know the creative message they saw, we know where they came from. So again, if this person came from Financial Times versus Facebook, I want to tell the sales person that because it might help them create a unique original thought about how they're going to approach that person. Because originality, I think is just as important in sales as it is in marketing. No one likes to feel like they're being sold to. Again, sweeping statement obviously, but the more that we can make people feel good, the better that kind of sales chance is likely to be to come off, I think. And so passing through as much data into your CRM is what I want people to try and do more this year. So data from search, data from Facebook, data from email, and when I said the zero party data, I meant if you do a quiz on your website to sort of understand or even not a quiz, just ask the person a question, like what brought you here today? Is it because you want to do a transformation project? Is it because you're struggling to position the value of product X? Or is it something else? Even just by asking one question with three answers, you can have so much more context into kind of the lead. The old way of doing that. And I think dealers used to do this. You know, you're ready to buy now in three months or in six months, and guess what? You click the now button, they call you within a few minutes. Right. So I know we've been doing this, but were the marketing team recording the options of now 3 months, 6 months, or was it just the sales team? So again, bringing them together, as you said before, with sort of a single customer view is what we need to do a bit more in marketing pre click and in sales post click.

Yeah, And I think for me, a message here is absolutely having sales and marketing teams align more effectively around the transfer of data, around being clear on your type of ideal customer that you want to target. Be amazed the number of sales teams I work with. And we have a beautiful ideal customer profile. And my question is, right, are marketing aware of this? And they look at me and go, huh? Or how marketing going to generate your leads? Oh, marketing generate me terrible leads. Okay, well, how are they going to generate your leads if they don't know what you're looking for? But the second piece there around collecting data and understanding customers so that we can understand their want or their need or their problem or their opportunity. For sales teams and marketing teams, but I'm talking sales teams here in particular, there's a responsibility to collect and store that data. Because once you're working across the business, it is very rarely, in my experience, one person only that will work within a deal. There's your manager, there's the people that are potentially, potentially doing your estimating or your quoting. There's technical support, there's customer service. Right. There's lots of different people when they can understand the motivators and the drivers of your customers or your prospects, you are infinitely better placed than you are without them. Okay, so, Phil, we're talking a bit here around your purchasing. I'm ready to purchase, I'm not ready to purchase. Right. Your stages before that kind of recognition and that initial engagement. Is there any role you think for emotion in this part?

Oh, absolutely. I think with one of your previous guests, Steve Plummer, that's what he does really well. Again, I think the example save SOS for steel, which was save on steel. Again, sometimes having that pithy kind of statement is key. But if we break it down into like the three key areas of acquisition, we've got the creative team, the media team, sales team. Yeah, I think emotion needs to go horizontally across all of those. But I think where to your previous point, where there's a risk there is that it becomes disjointed. And so ultimately CEO CMOs and head of Growth or Chief Growth officers, they need to be that horizontality, I think as well, to make sure that the baton being exchanged is not alienating to people. So emotion needs to not be forced. It's kind of like it's a big responsibility to have someone's emotional quotient in your hands. And again, playing with that is potentially you're balancing being creepy sales with being kind of too soft as well. So I like to remind myself that, you know, what value can I offer to this person in media? And I think again, in marketing, it created. It's. It's sort of, how can I explain this simply? And in sales, it's like, how can I make them want to buy it? You know what I mean? And I think so what's the role of emotion? I think it has to be unique. It's not something that there's a silver bullet for. But I think brand thinking, horizontality and trying to at least follow that intender through the journey is something that we all need to practice a bit more. What do you think?

So I think a piece that you've said around getting aligned is really important so that all functions within a business are working towards the right emotional lever. I think as a sales team, more specifically, if you go in looking to elicit an emotion, it's a dangerous game. You risk lighting fires that are going to get very burnt and singed fingers. However, I think if you're going in with the approach that focuses on drawing out opportunity or ways to solve problems, that emotion can naturally come from that. And when you see the emotional drivers from a potential customer or prospect, I think that's worth spending time on because as humans, we are emotionally charged and driven at the best and worst of times. And when we can improve our emotional state, right, by getting something we want or solving a problem, then we're improving people's lives. So I have no issues at all with dealing with emotion. However, I stop short of saying targeting emotion is your number one priority is the way to go.

Yeah, I'd sort of class it as an earned thing. One of the things we do in our sales approach is we sort of break it down into thirds. There is a tiny little bit that I can't quite label, but the first third is the approach to the brief. So how are we going to respond to the approach? The second Part is, do they like you? And when I say do they like you, do they feel good about being around you? Because often for salespeople or clients, meeting with the media team is one of their funniest meetings of the week. And then lastly, there's the price. And so we typically aim to get the first two nailed so that we can be not expensive, but the right amount of value for what we're doing. And again, that's because you're not just hiring us for SEO or for content marketing, you're hiring us to try and show people in market why you are the best or why you are the most suitable.

We talk about creating value early and often because once you do create that value early, I think it's a lot easier to be the brand of choice the whole way through that journey, including the quoting the price. All right, so Phil, last question from me for today. You're the sales leader of the business. You've got some runs behind you already, but you're looking to turn on the growth engine in the next 12 months. Where would you start?

First place I start is audit. So I take a step back, look at the. I'm trying to find the archeries that are bringing in the good types of intenders and then I would audit those and split them into two key types. So people who are actively, we're actively closing and then people who we need to create as future intenders. That is awareness. I think one of the things I often see is that brands are doing one or the other and they haven't quite worked out what their awareness mix is to the acquisition mix. And often there's normally such a silly little thing that's holding it back, which is someone's looking down at everything thinking that it's all just about one number. And so the third thing I'd then do is work out what am I going to measure in terms of metrics in awareness. That is completely different to metrics for acquisition. For example, if we go back to the quiz idea, if I know the quiz is going to drive leads, then what's my cost per quiz start and my cost per quiz completion? And when I'm running media to that quiz, I am then making sure that the big boss knows the stats that like 1 in 3 people who complete this quiz will become a sale. And therefore we know that our maximum media we can spend to get someone to start and complete the quiz is 2 or $3 in the acquisition side of things. Looking again, say at skincare, we still know that selling directly for someone who wants a dry skin moisturizer? We know that the cost per acquisition is $30 still. So having both of those at the same time, I can then show that kind of sequencing to the people and then the budgets are protected, then they're both doing specific roles. So step four then would be just having that process standard operating procedures to scale those two budget lines and have them treated with respect. Stage five is then wrapping that up into the executive summary that the big boss still wants.

Okay, so what we're talking about in this interior is identifying who your customers are for now, identifying who your customers are for next year or next period or next growth cycle, for example, and then making sure you're building out plans around how you treat them. That doesn't matter if in your marketing, if you're in sales and if you're in customer care, any part of a business. Right. The differentiating between those and then I'm assuming right for your growth engine for now, you're probably spending your time a little bit more on the acquisition customers right after you've segmented them and excellent. Okay, I really like that. Soron from Intenda, Tell me a little bit more around how people can get in contact with you.

You can Google me. You should be able to Find me after 25 years working in Google. So you can find me@intenda.com or you can find me on LinkedIn at Philorin and you can also drop me an email at phil with1lintenda.com Excellent.

Phil with1lintenda.com excellent. Well, thank you Phil for giving up some time today. Appreciate you having you here. And for everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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