Episode 82: How Joint Business Planning can Transform Sales Results with Luke Hawley

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is 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 have a friend of mine I think I can call Luke a friend. We've known each other for a couple of years now and Luke is someone who I have often lent into when it comes to advice around building networks. It's something that I have had heaps of experience in myself. But of course, surrounding ourselves with experts is something that is very, very powerful for us to grow as individuals. So who is Luke? Well, Luke, to me he's a pretty seasoned marketer, entrepreneur and I'd say connector. Very, very good at connecting people. But his expertise, I think was developed long before he moved into that entrepreneurial, I guess, streak or phase of his life, if you like. And that was where he began his career with Procter and Gamble. And then very quickly I think got to work on products such as Olay and Clearblue. And you'll probably hear me joke later on, Luke was pregnancy testing with Clearblue, I was condoms with Ansell. Right. So same, same, but different type of products. But he really worked with some of the big Australian brands during his time with Procter and Gamble. So that was Coles, Kmart, Target, those companies where, you know, you get often one chance to get it right or you can, you know, simply it's the difference between success and failure. So Luke's gonna share some great perspectives with us around his time there at the mom. Luke's moved on from the corporate career, if you like, had a similar path to me. I had 10 years in corporate as well, where really he is all about being a super connector. It's self labeled, but I think it's actually a label I'd give to him and many others would as well. So he uses his experience to leverage some really serious local area and local business networking and which has expanded out and he's sure soon to expand out across Australia. So Luke currently wears quite a few hats. He's managing director of matters magazine, the B2B group up here on the Sunshine coast, and a buy local group as well. He also works with some of the LinkedIn local chapters where I've presented and spent a lot of time with Luke. So I know he's very, very good at what he does, which is connecting and finding mutual benefit for customers and their partners as well. So first of all, welcome Luke. Lovely to have you on board today.

Yeah, thank you, Ben. I'm looking forward to the show.

So before we get started, can you give us just a brief background, you know, if there's any flavor you want to add in terms of that introduction I've just given to you.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm one of the few. Sunshine Coast. I grew up on the Sunshine coast, so I did primary school here, high school here, university here. Even my first role with Procter and Gamble was based here on the Sunshine Coast. Actually spent another two years as state account manager in Queensland, driving down to Brisbane and doing the territory manager work, which was great. Before making the move to Melbourne and then Sydney. One of the projects I'm working on now, you know, it's kind of all under the umbrella of a media company here in the coast. And obviously our mission is around, you know, helping businesses share their story, share their advice and their offer with the community and, you know, building that model out so it can be replicated across the country. So it's, yeah, really exciting stuff to really focus in on how to deliver, you know, very powerful partnerships that leads to great returns for those involved. So, yeah, looking forward to talking about some of those, those tactics and strategies we'll learn along the way.

Great, Excellent. Well, today we're going to talk about joint business planning. So we're going to leverage those years of Procter and Gamble skills across the Eastern seaboard of Australia, plus those that you've developed as an entrepreneur. And for me, I really like when we can blend two sets of skills, a very formally trained set of corporate skills with entrepreneurial skills that are often formed through doing and meeting of some great minds. And I mean, really having to stand up and know that if it's to be, it's up to me. One of my favorite taglines. So I love being able to explore these topics with people who have lived in both worlds. But so first of all, what does joint business Planning mean to you?

Sure. So for me, joint business planning is two separate entities coming together to share resources to deliver shared goals. So two very different businesses that have decided we're going to work together in some way sharing resources to deliver agreed goals.

Right. Okay. So supplier, customer, partner, customer, coming together. And often those goals won't start out being the same. They can be really difficult to navigate. And I think in the past we used to call this negotiation. And I love a book by Herb Cohen around, you can negotiate anything. Fantastic book. If you haven't read it, please look online. I can put the link in the bottom of the podcast, but it's so easy to find. But I think in the modern world where we can approach these as partnerships and joint business planning as we call it, that's when we start to see some of the really serious long term partnerships built. Because often in a negotiation you can see that one party comes out anywhere from slightly aggrieved through to seriously aggrieved. I've been in plenty of negotiations along my journey and I certainly prefer to see them as joint business plans. So. Okay, so let's dive into that. So could you provide me an example of what a joint business plan could look like? Right. What a successful joint business plan could look like and how you go about it.

Yeah, I think that there's kind of two key mechanics to a joint business plan. So the first is that the shared goals needs to go beyond purely transactional. Right. So this isn't just a negotiation around inclusions and exclusions to service delivery. Joint business plans truly about. Okay, we're about. We're going to grow together to have a big impact on whether it's for the category within Coles or supermarket. If I'm a SaaS provider, maybe it's more around the implementation and execution of the program, but it's really thinking about how do we share resources with the second mechanic. So we. It's beyond just I'm going to give you money and you're going to give me a service in return. We're going to debate around what's included and excluded. This is more about shared resources, which could mean people like someone in my organization actually based in your office working to help you deliver the outcomes that we've agreed upon. It might be shared space. Right. So. And I'll share some examples of what I see with Proctor and Gamble. But it might be, hey, let's share office space. You know, why don't we come together and so we can negotiate on utilities and rent or, or why don't we come together so we can negotiate with our other suppliers in order to get better deals? So it's really thinking about beyond the transaction, how we can work together to deliver those goals. And it's the shared resources that's really different as well as shared IP as well. And that was one of the big things that Procter and Gamble was really good at in terms of building those few joint business plans with those strategic partners, which is how they shared intellectual property. So how do we share our insights? How do we share what we're learning when it comes to shopper based to shine and shopper behavior, how do we start to incorporate those insights in a way that leads to mutual benefits? And that's the really exciting thing about the idea of doing business planning is the idea of like if you don't ask, you don't get and starting to ask for things that goes beyond the initial transaction. And that's the stuff that's quite exciting when you start to think, oh, what else can I ask for? That's high value to me but low cost to them that I can add to the mix.

Yeah. I particularly like the piece around ip. I think sharing office space and sharing resources is fantastic. It has limited application, works for some businesses. Generally the smaller you are or the smaller your customers are. So you might be a big supplier that might offer some of your space to some of your smaller customers. But generally one side of the strategic partnership is going to be small where you have medium sized businesses to larger businesses that are working together. The IP piece is super important because these businesses have been successful because of that IP they've been able to build. Right. I know it's brands can be really strong in this point as well. But the stronger your brand often has come from some IP you've built, but where you can work together to actually leverage that IP for more than one plus one equals two. It's that old. You know that primary school joke, one plus one equals a window. I don't know if you remember that from those days. Right. But certainly a window is more than two windows and doors are bloody expensive at the moment with all the inflation pressures we've had. So I digress. Come back to the topic, Ben. So where we can be sharing ip, super, super impactful. Particularly where we've got a relationship that allows us to ask questions and dig in a little deeper. And then you went on to that in the second part of that piece there was that where we are prepared and we have the courage to ask questions through our partnerships. That's when we can start to get this real value. And unfortunately, we will often walk into negotiations or discussions or what we see as negotiations with our customers, not being prepared to ask those questions or those insightful questions for fear of losing the business or reducing our appeal to that customer. So where have you seen examples of these joint business plans? And look particularly around the IP where people are prepared to ask questions and work together and really dive into a deeper understanding of each other. Where have you seen that work? Powerfully.

Yeah. So I'll share a bit of a story here, which is with Cochrane Gamble working with Colts. And this is about 15 years ago with a project called Project Breakthrough. And this truly kind of redefined the relationships between suppliers and retailers, not just within Coles, but then duplicated across the country. So very, very powerful way of kind of sharing IP and intelligence to change shopper experiences. And for me, it was my introduction to national account management. So I got to come in halfway through Project Breakthrough and got to witness a completely different approach to account management and sales compared to the previous two years as a state account manager, which is your very typical negotiating on the terms, right? And I just come out of negotiating trade terms with a bunch of commercial distributors on batteries. It was a tough slog because I was basically reducing terms across all of them. So I just got out of this kind of very big tough fight and they kind of come into this almost like a utopia for a salesperson in terms of the types of conversations that were happening. So let me provide a little bit of background. So this was about two years after Wesfarmers had taken over Coles. So they just rolled out the process of rolling out the five year growth plan. So it was at a time when Coles was losing to Woolworths quite significantly, market share was down and it was a very. Coles was also that very old school kind of retail approach, right? Just hardcore negotiators replaced the entire leadership team at Coles and brought in people from Tesco and other kind of big retailers in the uk. So completely replaced the leadership team with foreigners, right, to come in and to rethink again how they put together their supplier partnerships. Also that had with Tesco, the work of Procter and Gamble in the UK for a variety of different projects over there. So wanted to bring that to Australia. So they had partnered with a couple of category captains, so people like Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble for Beauty and a few others to work together in these kind of joint business plans to start to form these things together. And the Idea was how do we completely revolutionize the category around shopper experience but have it very insight led. So very, very data driven. So the agreement was basically how do we change the partnership? And I've got like a little, little chart here for you. How do we go from this type of relationship where it's just account manager and buyer to this where you've got the team working with the other team. Right.

You'll have to describe that for those that are listening and don't have audio. Describe these very creative Vinnie Van Gogh type of lines you've done here.

Yeah. So if you can imagine, you know, as account managers, quite often it feels like the commerce, like we're the one point of contact and we're working with the buyer who's that single point of contact for that organization. So all the conversations at the very pointy end, right. So we're grabbing information from how, you know, the white coats within organization, all the smart people do all the research for us, have all the information, you know, that the research and developer guys, the marketing insights team, the product supply, all that information is coming through the account manager and the account managers then deciding what information to share with the buyer as part of those negotiations. And some on the other side, you know, they've got their team of experts and support and they're making that conversation. So it's a very, you know, a relationship set up really for conflict. Right. The idea is that it's we're making choices on one information to share and what not to share. Whereas the shift that they had in Procter and Gamble, particularly with Coles was what do you give? How experts direct access to your experts. Right. And the account manager and the bias essentially have quarterbacking it. Right. So they're not the single point of contact, they're just helping to facilitate and manage. Right. Those conversations. So how market research expert will work directly with their team, how shopper based design expert will work directly with the shelf planners, the product supplier. How guys would actually sit in their office and work directly with them on supply management and what can we do to help reduce costs? And any opportunity to kind of build those one to one partnerships within. So again shared resources and people. Any opportunity to do that was then built out of the team. So it takes a lot of for an account managers a hard thing to do. Right. Because you're now no longer the single point of contact. You're often playing a bit of catch up. Right. In terms of okay, what is being discussed and how does that influence the negotiations. You're still having. Right. Because it's still part of the role, it's still winning the category views, getting new products in. But then how do you kind of facilitate this in a way that leads to new opportunities?

Yeah. Okay. And for account managers, the challenge is you're actually giving up control and wondering if you're adding actual value. But for me, I mean, the quarterback is still the most valuable player, one of the most valuable players in an NFL team. Okay. So for those that are listening, I'd like to try and describe this picture in a slightly different way. So imagine you have your funnel, your big wide open, fat end of the funnel and you're stuffing opportunities in there and then squeezes out the other end in a much narrower fashion. So think of that as information from the supplier side. So we start wide with all the people that you've mentioned and all that information gets funneled and channeled through one person at the end. Then on the other side think that the customer is doing the same thing. They've got all that information starting wide at the big fat juicy end of their pipeline and they're squeezing that in and only a very small amount of information is coming out from the buyer. So we're getting two small points of the funnel that are meeting together where information shared. Then flip that to that inverting and as you said, the quarterback role being played by the salespeople, but then bringing all those people in the organization together to cross thread. I love that as an example around getting everyone together to share ideas. But what I really like about that is that we're cross threading relationships through an organization and no longer are we having one buyer, for example, then putting together a business case and getting the sign off in their business, or if it's a smaller business, going to the GM or the CEO or the owner of the business and going, here's what I want to do. We're no longer doing that with no perspective being had at the decision making end. We have perspective across the whole organization, which means we're less likely to have that emotional. No, I don't know who you are, I don't know what you're buying from them, but I have my favorites and I want you to go and talk to them. And for me that is one of the single biggest blockages of salespeople getting their result is that they don't have enough buy in from enough locations within an organization. So I really love that. But I can see that it could be problematic if you tried to roll it out with all of your customers. Because there's some huge resources that need to go into this. What are your perspectives around whether or not you'd roll it out to all of your customers?

Yeah, I think this has to be highly selective. Right. So I feel like joint business plans is something that's earned right. Over a period of time versus something that you use for onboarding. Right. So I want to bring in a new client and immediately put together this level of a joint business plan where we're sharing this level of resources because that level of trust. Right. Like because we are talking about the sharing of intellectual proper property here. So when I talk about with the previous example in terms of the white coats organization, they were sitting in and actively sharing, you know, leading research and leading science around shopper based design, Shopper insights, some of the new stuff coming in from neuroscience and using that data to help them put together experiments within the Coles ecosystem. Test this stuff out. Proof that it delivered massive increases in sales. Something like 20 to 30% increase in baseline sales for the entire category.

Yeah. Wow.

Skincare went up 15%. Just baseline sales, right. Not just straight up. We're here and then now we're here in terms of baseline sales. So huge impact. But tested and then rolled out over I think it's about over 18 months that went from 12 stores test to all 720 fleet and rolling this thing out because the data kind of dictated that, but that was from a Procter and Gamble side. Massive investment in resources because you're now having your people working in the Coles organization. So the time that would normally be in Sydney in a separate office doing their research and advising all the account managers, the marketing guys, they're now sitting in the Coles office doing the same thing for Coles marketing team for their supply chain. So it's a heavy investment, resources and a lot of trust. There was a bunch of NDA signed, right. In terms of. To make sure that this information was used in a way that helped support this joint agreement. I mean really mindful of how the information is then used as part of Coles negotiating with how competitors.

Right.

Because obviously it was changing the nature of the entire category and the way in which the the relationships were going to be managing the beauty category. Right. So no longer whoever paid the most money got the best space or anything like that. This was all data driven, insight driven. So that level of vulnerability almost in terms of sharing that level of IP or means that it's got to be an organization that you trust that by sharing this information it will lead to greater Opportunities for both. And it needs to be sizable too. Right. Like this isn't, you know, like the. I think Coles were doing something like close to 200 million with Procter and Gamble. So, you know, plenty of investment. Right. In terms of, to justify that level of resources and sharing.

Yeah, I'd imagine at a smaller business size. So that works for the big end of town. I think we've ticked that off for the medium end of town and even the smaller end of town that we could take some hybrid approaches here around how we could use a similar approach. Do you have any thoughts around that?

Yeah, for sure. Like for me, again, if you kind of move beyond just the transaction and start to think about what else can we ask for or what else can we work together on that will lead to shared outcomes. So for instance, it might be like a very common ones, like a co marketing opportunity. Like okay, well let's, we've worked together on this project. We've delivered great returns for you. But I think there's an opportunity to leverage our shared audiences or our shared client base and then do some co marketing activities. A great one would be for a business that's working with a large national supplier and asking questions like, hey, what if I was to give you like a full landing page on my website? Are you able to provide us with some funding and some resources? Because that helps them with their, maybe their search marketing strategy by having a full page on my website. Great. 2,5k for that. Hey, I'm going down doing a, a bunch of expos around the country. Would you be happy to co fund that initiative and we'll include some signage and some samples with you or you know, I'm about to run a, a large national Facebook campaign. Would you be interested in donating the prize for the competition? So that way it can be a collaborative effort. So there's, there's things that you can start to ask for that against low cost to them, but high value for, for you in what you can do to build out your reputation and credibility in the market, particularly when you may not have the same level of resources as some of those larger plays, but have the same ambitions.

Yeah, yeah. And you could even extend that to simply just putting smaller teams together. If you're a business with 2, 3, 4, 5 staff, grab a couple of your key experts, grab a couple of the key decision makers from the other side of the business. And when you're really focusing on expanding that value pie rather than that negotiation, that works too. Okay, great. I love it. Thank you. I Think that's a really worthy topic for our listeners to explore because it doesn't matter the size of the business or the position you're in. Whether you be a salesperson, an account executive, or a sales leader or senior leader, you can have some thoughts around how you open this up within your organization.

Just to add on that, one of the great tips my boss gave us was because we are always working with people and one of the things he used to do is this idea of we're both looking to get promoted, right? What is it that you need that will make you look good in front of your boss and your management? Like what are really your priorities? And then once you have that list, like oh, you needed some photos of this big display here or you need like an example supplier doing this, like once you get really clear on beyond the margins and beyond the transactions, what else you can capture, it becomes such a very, very powerful way of like, oh great, here's what we can collaborate on together that makes us both look like champions to our tourist bosses.

Okay, so last question before we go. Put yourself in the position of being a sales leader and you're wanting to turn on the growth tap over the next 12 months, where would you focus?

For me, it's always the existing customers. I think that's the. So it's the lowest hanging fruit and quite often we're underserving their needs. And this is why again, I think joint business planning, even as just a mindset is so important is if I can go back and ask those questions, hey, and I really appreciate, you know, all the work we're doing for you. What else can I do for you? Like what else do you need? And it might be through connecting them right, through introductions and networking. It could be through co marketing opportunities. Maybe they're having some challenges which might be quite surprising, right? Maybe they're having issues with other suppliers, maybe there's a resource gap, maybe they've got some people challenges, you know, maybe there is information they still quite can't quite figure out whether it could be an IP exchange. But having those really open conversations which isn't around the transactions about how can I help you? What are some of the challenges you're facing in your business that I might be able to assist with and I'm a big fan of if you give people enough time, they'll tell you exactly what they need for you to sell to them, right? So they'll tell you how to sell to them, but you got to give them the opportunity to share. So that'll be my bigger tip. If you're looking for growth, get on the phone and speak to your existing customers and just ask the question. What else can I help you with?

Yeah, yeah, I love it. And I think we often overlook the importance of asking questions without having a preloaded answer. Ask questions and really listen. Fantastic. I think we're almost 90 episodes in and I don't think I've had that response to that question before. So I love it when new ones keep coming up. So thank you, Luke. Okay, fantastic. Thank you for today. I really appreciate it. I know when I can pick up perhaps things I've forgotten and I remember them on your tips in a podcast. It's been a good one and I certainly did today. So can you please, for those listening, where can they find out more about Luke Hawley?

Yeah, just on LinkedIn. So if you search for just Luke Hawley AU, you'll find us on LinkedIn. Best way to connect with us.

Excellent. And I know you're very quick at coming back on LinkedIn, so much so that you've got some LinkedIn local events that you run yourself. So excellent. Thank you very much, Luke. Really appreciated your time today. And for everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favorite social media channel. We're stronger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.