Episode 63: The Undeniable Power of Simplifying Sales with Bob Marsh

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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. Today, I'm very pleased to welcome Bob Marsh to our podcast.

Bob's been a sales leader and CEO.

At two category creating companies. He's raised millions in venture capital, sold out at two companies. Well done, Bob. That is very difficult to do and has won and grown businesses around some of the top brands in the world at a top line level. Pretty impressive resume across a very broad spectrum of sales. But as we were talking before we started today, Bob also shared with me he was a very competitive golfer as a junior. For me, I love seeing people who have transitioned from higher end competitive sport into the business world as well because there are disciplines that just work so nicely together. So we have very much a man who knew how to work hard as a younger man into someone that's translated that into growing businesses that have succeeded, raised capital, sold out and been really successful with big brands. So, Bob, welcome to Stronger Sales Team podcast.

Ben, thank you very much. So, so great to be here and I look forward to the conversation.

Excellent. Well, thank you for jumping on board. Can you tell us, as we get into today, a little bit more about the Bob Marsh journey, what you do and why you are successful at what you do?

Sure. So I've really spent my career as an entrepreneur, a founder, a tech CEO, but a lot of my focus has been on the area of sales, marketing and growth. You know, one of the things that we'll get into that I say specifically to your question of like, what do I think has helped kind of drive some of my success and I'm always looking for more, so there's no end in sight, is that I really have always had this mindset that, you know, when you're in sales, your job is quite simple. It's to help the customer make the right decisions for themselves. And that has always been my approach. My very first job in sales was probably no surprise, selling golf equipment in a retail store. And I just learned like my job was to get kind of disarm people so that help them realize they can trust me and then learn about their game and help them figure out what was right for them. So that basic simple foundation is something I've carried on through adding value, understanding people, building a real connection, getting them to trust you, carrying yourself with confidence and just helping them make the right decisions for themselves.

Excellent. It's really nice when we hear about value coming as the first priority for anyone in the sales profession really specifically around value. Simplicity is becoming more and more important, particularly in a world when it's quite easy to make things complex. There is so much information around. So today we're going to talk about simplicity and selling and if we look at that in a little bit more detail, it's all about actually removing complexity and, and helping customers make decisions faster. So if we took that as a focus for today, can we start by having a look for you about what does complexity in selling look like for you, Bob?

Well, I think that a lot of it is self inflicted that the world companies make processes too complicated. We try to apply technologies techniques to try to sell faster or do more. And you know, while there sometimes can be advantages to learning what's the new sales technique, new sales tactic, new sales technology that I'm hoping is going to be the silver bullet really, you know, none of that can mask you getting the fundamentals wrong. And so if you step back like I just had a conversation earlier today about somebody who was regularly implement trying to implement mass communication, reaching out to customers in a more really what was a more complicated way? Large emails, lots of information and they were seeing a decline in, in response. What they ended up doing is writing very short simple emails to people and all of a sudden they had this literally explosive increase in sales and the simple product offering they had and it took a little bit more effort, actually took less effort overall. But the point is it was just so simple and that's what kind of opened up this growth. And so if we zoom out a little bit, it's getting more to the heart of your question of why we have to break through this complexity is the world is just getting more complicated and we're affected by it, our customers are affected by it and if we can understand why it's happening, we can overcome it. So I'll give you a couple points around this. So first of all, we're all dealing with shrinking information over information. Coming at us left and right, there's more information than ever before. The average human being takes in 74 gigabytes of information in a single day. That was a point of reference. That's the equivalent of 16 full length movies in one day. And we all know this is getting worse. Technology, video, social media, emails, on and on and on and on. It's just too much information for us to process. And we know that our customers are going through that. The more simple we can make our communication, the easier is to get through. We've all seen the example of somebody sends us an email, it's really long, you open it, you're like, I can't get to that right now, and you move on. However, sometimes when you keep it nice, short and simple, those emails get read and they get reacted to. So it's information overload is one thing to kind of breakthrough. The second thing is acknowledging that I touched this by accident earlier is we have shrinking attention. People's attentions are not as good as they used to be. I'm doing my best to kind of hold attention by all kinds of different ways. Like right now I do this as a speaker, et cetera. And if we acknowledge and understand the average human being attention Spanish is less than 8 seconds, which has gotten much worse in the last 20 years. In particular, if we understand that we can work to overcome it. And all this is, we're all seeing the evidence of this the hour. It takes an average of four times more attempt, email, phone attempts to uncover a single opportunity than it did just five years ago. Executive 87% of executives say that they find their conversation with salespeople to be unhelpful. And it's just because we're trying to do brute force, more messages, more technology, mass production, and it's just not working.

So we have businesses increasing complexity of their systems and processes. We have attention spans shortening. Eight seconds is the number used. We have the amount of data that we're consuming increasing. I think you said 16 full length feature films, have I got that right? And then at the same time we have decision making processes lengthening. So all of those naturally lead to an increase in complexity. I mean, it's very hard to argue against that. Even if you don't agree with one of those four pillars, it just is. So we've got a world where complexity is naturally increasing. So what does the inverse of that look like to you? Particularly in a sales process or a sales environment. What does simplicity then look like to you in its best form?

Well, first of all, I think it's a matter of, like, understanding what really drives customer decision making, what makes people comfortable to make a decision. And I kind of boil it down to four key things. One is, customers buy from people they like and people they trust. And so you think about, where does trust come from? Trust comes from, like, is this person confident? What they're saying is it's confident, not arrogance. Are they clearly an expert in what they do? And so a lot of times, the customer feeling confident in us is driven by us being confident in ourselves. So the ability to communicate with confidence is vitally important. As item number one, we overcome it by just carrying ourselves with a bit more confidence. Number two is building this, really aiming to build a deeper connection with people. So too many of us, because we're relying on mass communication, trying to amass customization, which, like, makes no sense, but that we're not really getting deep with customers, we're not building deep connections with people. We keep things on the surface. I call it building the third layer of a connection. So the surface, like, we just stay at the very top. We're not really paying attention. We're not really asking probing questions. We're not really digging in, you know, where we want to get deep to understand a customer's goals, their objectives, you know, being willing to tell them, like, hey, this isn't a good fit, or you don't really need us, or, you know, really helping them think of the world in a different way. So again, confidence building connections. The third thing is what I call leading the journey. Is it like helping the customer get to the decisions by themselves? And it's really to stop thinking of selling as something we're doing to somebody and to start thinking of it as an act of service. We're helping a customer come to the right conclusions on their own, and our job is to lead them through that. And the fourth and final way to do this is just being much more deliberate and focused about your time. Like, I think some of the root cause of trying, like, tips and tricks and techniques to try to achieve more sales success is because we're just not deliberate and focused enough about how we spend our own time so we don't end up building deeper connections. We don't focus on the right customers. We just say, I'm just going to go for the masses and hope it's going to bring me the results that I want.

So we've Got confidence, connections, taking the customer through the journey, or the hero being the hero of their own story rather than that brute force kind of sales trauma and. And prioritizing your focus. Correct. Okay, so four things that when we talk simplicity are relatively simple in concept. I want to look at it from two avenues. Let's say we get simplicity, right? What does that look like for the customer's journey? How does it help that?

First of all, I mean, there's a few different ways we kind of talk about. One is that the messaging is clear, it's tight, it's specific to what the customer can ingest at that moment. I think many times we say, if I send them an abundance of information, content material, they're going to think that I'm thorough. They're going to see that we've thought through everything when the reality is that they just didn't even look at it because it's too overwhelming. So the ability to crisply communicate your message and what the customer is able to consume at that moment is vitally important because all you're trying to do is get to the next step. So that's kind of one thing, is how do you crystallize down your communication to somebody? The other way to kind of think about making things simple is use an example of options. We often get lost in options. We think that bringing our customers more options, more scenarios, more capabilities, it will make them feel better about us. And they're like, we've got all kinds of different scenarios and all kinds of different ways that I can help you. Where the reality is that's just confusing the customer. There's been all kinds of research about it. You've probably seen some of this. If you bring somebody too many options, they just get lost. Indecision. And the converse is actually true as well. If you bring somebody a single option, they end up freezing and they get lost in single option aversion. It's called right. Like, I don't know if I believe that. And they wait. So you can't have too many. You can't have one. Finding the right kind of right balance of. Here's a few different recommendations. And having the confidence to relinquish control to the customer, to say you decide what's right for you. Here's a few things that I recommend based on what I've learned. Those are examples of how you can simplify to help the customer simplify decision making.

Yeah, really love the concept around simplifying the complex. And that often comes back. And I think what you're saying Is it comes back to making sure that what we're putting in front of the customer is focused on the outcome that they need to achieve rather than worrying about communicating everything that we know.

Correct.

So if we can be really clear in knowing what the customer needs for success in their journey, and I call that knowing what success looks like for our customer. And we're then presenting the outcomes around that, we are simplifying a process by removing unnecessary information. Very, very powerful. So from a customer angle, I think it's quite clear it helps them make faster decisions if we can provide them with the information in a context and a package that works for them. What about at a sales person? So let's say we're a sales leader running a sales team. What does simplifying the complex or simplifying the sales process do for the leader and their teams?

So the main thing is that if you're simplifying the experience with a customer, it's going to help you drive performance. One second is that you can now focus your training and development efforts in less areas. So instead of thinking about all the variety of things we. We kind of want to train people on is if we're really training on confidence. Carry yourself with confidence. Believe in yourself as an expert. Understand that customers want us to help them make the right decisions themselves. Like and just arming people with ammunition for. Here's another customer we were successful with. Here's another customer that we made a good recommendation to. Here's another call that I was. That we were. Look at all the calls that we're on. We are the experts in what we do. The. The more you can kind of build up that confidence, it changes the way that customers communicate with their customers. The second part of it is we're really kind of working together to simplify our communication. Our messaging, our emails, our proposals, our recommendations, our pricing scenarios. Suddenly that makes it a lot easier for a salesperson not get lost in all the nuance. And they're thinking more about the customer and the mind of the customer and make things more simple and how. How they make those decisions. So they're really as a leader, you know, what you're able to do is focus more of your time and attention on building these core fundamentals of focus, confidence and connection as opposed to like, let me kind of train everybody up on the new process or procedure that we need to follow because that's not what anyone really wants to be doing.

And really what you're talking about there is coaching. We can spend more time coaching, less time training and certainly if we have a look at all the statistics around the world, employees that receive formal coaching, which is generally done informally but let's call it a formal coaching program, are far more likely to stay. And the numbers that 70 to 80 to 90%, depending on which surveys and results you look at. So I think that is a super powerful unintended, or perhaps it's intended at your end, but an unintended consequence that says we can spend more time on the softer things. But what I really like about what you just said then is we need to spend less time training. And certainly with all of the businesses we work with at a strategic consultancy level, there is no doubt that I am yet to come across a business who has their training program nailed, who spends enough time training. So if we can simplify that before we even start by having a process with our customers that's simplified, then tick, tick, tick. Love it. The second thing I really liked about what you said there was that we are actually using less resources across the business by having less specification sheets, less quote templates, less different types of collateral and data and everything that we're sending out to our customers. And by doing that, we're getting better focus from our marketing teams, from our customer service teams. Even our delivery teams are able to deliver the same thing more frequently rather than, you know, a level of bespoke offers or projects. So so many benefits that come around simplifying the sales process that you can funnel through an entire organization rather than just at a sales team level. So if we were to. And thank you. So if we were to have a look at sales leaders now, how are you seeing the best sales leaders that you're working with? Simplify the sales process.

So one is that they are pulling their teams together and realizing that all of the great ideas are already sitting inside of their own teams. So as an example, you know, I just worked with a client a couple weeks ago. This is a global, multi billion dollar company in the semiconductor industry. And one of the things that they started doing is we talked about how do we stay in front of our customers, how do we stop like just doing like, hey, just checking in. Hey, just checking in. Hey, we met a while ago. Like, you know, what's new? Like is that they actually got their team together, they pulled them together. This is that third three layers of connections concept I talked about. And they kind of went one step further with it, pulled everyone together and came up with what are all the excuses, as I call it, for them to stay in front of their customers and the thing is, there's an enormous amount of them. So recent customer wins, press releases, what's that? Information about things that are in the news, like going through all the different reasons to stay in front of their customer. My point is simply like whatever they are for your company or inside of your own business is they're pulling their teams together to unearth what are the little tidbits of information, insights, accolades that give you a reason to reach out to customers and say, hey, I just was talking to somebody else in my team is working with a customer just like you, and I thought you should hear what they're doing. Like, that's much more powerful than hey, just checking in, got any new business for me? So that I would say is one thing. Another one is that they're putting much more focus on talking to their teams about admitting and uncovering, like, where do you know you need to spend more time, but you simply never seem to be able to find the time to make it happen. And what we're trying to do is overcome this feeling that so many people have, like where you get to the end of your day and somebody says, so what'd you do today? And you struggle to give a meaningful answer to like a really simple question because you're like, geez, I was really busy, but what did I really do to move the needle? Or you think about what are your main priorities over the next 30, 60, 90 days? And you don't really have a good answer for that. And I think this comes from a lack of understanding. What are my critical top priorities and how do I cascade it them down to my daily and weekly priorities? And so what teams are doing is they're talking to their teams. Understand what are the obstacles that are getting in your way. If you were to say, at the end of the year, I was highly successful for these two or three reasons. Let's make sure that we're time blocking or we're focusing your time and attention to make sure you're focusing your efforts there. That's the second kind of unlock that people are putting some attention around. The third one is a very simple tactic, which is I call the CEO fist bump. But it kind of can apply to any kind of level a leader. And the idea is of getting leaders of companies to be more engaged with customers themselves. However, allowing the salesperson to act as the quarterback of that scenario to say, hey, I'm working with this customer at a great conversation, but we need to get higher in the organization like on the org chart. So you know, what if I, as a salesperson, went to the CEO of my company or went to the chief Product officer, the chief Information officer or whatever it might be, and said, hey, I want you to reach out to the customer and just introduce yourself, make a connection, say, hey, you know, I heard about our opportunity together. I'm really excited about this. I'm happy to help in any way. You know, you're in good hands with Ben, but I'm here to help you in any way that you need. There's such a simple way to build confidence from the customer. And the customer knows, like, wow, this is an impressive company. I've got the attention of their leadership, and now that simple thing, which is about confidence and connection, suddenly changes the trajectory of the company's results.

Great. Three really, really punchy things there. Number one, we're talking about taking conversations with customers away from being about us and being more about them. So rather than it being benefits, we're talking about outcomes and we're using all the tools that we have around us when we contact customers. Love it. Number two is getting really deliberate with where you spend your time. I always talk about a power line. Everything above the power line is the stuff that you have to get done every day you die and you make sure it happens. Everything below the power line is that nice to have and stuff that you'll get done if you can. And the third one is actually helping build confidence and trust in the customer by using the resources around you, I. E. CEOs and senior leaders to cut through some of that. I call it decision paralysis, where we have customers that might be getting stuck because they haven't quite got that confidence in your brand. So they are all really, really good, practical, chunky tips. Stuff we talk about on this podcast week in, week out. So fantastic. Thank you, Bob. Okay, so last but not least, and I know you've been in this position multiple times over the course of your career, but you're a sales leader looking to supercharge your growth profile this year. So you want growth within your team. What are the one or two things that you are going to focus on as an absolute priority this year to nail to hit that growth?

I would say that this topic that I touched on a moment ago, what I call is commander impact, you know, I would just kind of leave with, like, this one thing was about focus. We touched on it a couple times in a few different ways. And I think of it like this. I've never been a big fan of the idea of time management. I think it implies, like, how Do I just jam more into my schedule? How do I get better at crossing things off my to do list when the way we want to think of it is where do I need to put my time and attention to make a bigger impact? And so, you know, we often see people who, you know, almost surprises us that they're so successful. It doesn't look like they're working that hard. You know, it doesn't seem like. It seems like things just magically fall in their lap, which is 100% never true. What it comes down to is prioritizing your time and attention accordingly. So let me give you a specific example. Let's say as a team, you were to look at, if you were to say, I'm going to time travel myself to the end of the year, why was I successful? We'll often hear is things like I uncovered X number of new business accounts, I figured a way to break into these new accounts in new ways, or I figured out a way to take an existing customer and I broke into a new division, I broke into some other whatever it might be, it's different for everybody. And so if you were to say, okay, if that is truly important and if I were to say that is the most likely activity or thing that happened is going to get me my success to be much more deliberate about how I focus my time around it. And one of the ways you do that, you know, very simple way we've heard about time blocking and just say, hey, I'm going to spend 10% of my time. I'm going to make sure, without fail, I'm going to spend an hour a day or five hours a week, whatever it might be. And I'm going to make sure that I'm working new relationships, I'm figuring out a way to expand my existing relationships again, whatever it might be within your business and if we're deliberate about it, that simple little act changes the impact you make on your company, your performance, and probably your own satisfaction in life and everything that comes with it. So I think about it like this. As an example. Let's just say you have a meeting this Thursday with a client and another client reaches out to you and says, hey, are you available on Thursday at 11 o'? Clock? You very comfortably and easily say, no, I'm not available, I've got another meeting, so let's just find time to talk. But what if you had Thursday at 11 o' clock carved out as this is my time to go research this critical new account I have to break into and I'm Doing that on Thursdays at 11 o'. Clock. If somebody called you and said, hey, are you available on Thursday at 11 o'? Clock? What if you had that same attitude? I'm not available because you're going to find another time, you're going to find another way to do it. But my point is if you have that kind of mindset around like these are the most critical things that will move the needle for me and you focus more of your attention on that that you know can most certainly unlock much higher levels of satisfaction and performance.

Russell, I think what you're saying there is get your team really clear on what they need to focus on and make that the priority. And we talk about secondary goals being at times the enemy of primary goals. It's about making sure that we know exactly what we have to achieve and focus on it. Love it. So much simplicity today when we're talking about simplifying the sales process and the customer journey that there are quite a few practical pieces I think everyone you can take out of today and if you're unsure, go back to the show Notes, they're easy to find. They're on strongestsalesteams.com you can get them via LinkedIn. You won't have any trouble finding those notes but I think it's worth this one might be one worth re listening to to find those chunky outcomes. So thank you Bob for your time today. Where can people find the outcomes?

I love that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Outcomes. We always talk about outcomes.

It is, it is chunky outcomes, not any outcome. Chunky outcomes.

Yeah. Even better. Right, I'm going to start chunky outcomes, excellent. We'll find some way to phrase that more regularly.

So tell me, where can people find.

Out more about Bob Marsh?

So you know, simple place. Visit my website meetbobmarsh.com I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn so you can find me on LinkedIn. Follow me there, connect with me there. Always happy to connect. Always happy to help people wherever I can.

Excellent. Well, thank you Bob. Really enjoyed it today. It's very nice to talk about something that is focused on simply simplifying a complex world. Very grateful to everyone else out there. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

Thanks Ben.

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