Leading Change as a CRO, With John Smibert

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Sales IQ Network. Hi and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna from the CRO Collective and I'm here with my co host, Lupe Feld.

Hey, Lupe.

Hey, Warren. This is Lupe Feld and I'm glad to be here with you.

So this podcast is really for aspiring CROs and CEOs and current CROs whom are interested in learning from not only us, but the great guests that we're going to have.

We're here to tell you that there is other areas of the business that can drive revenue and we're going to look and inspect and come up with some great ideas for us to bring in as much revenue as we can and drive some meaningful change for the business.

So tune in. We have some exciting opportunities coming up for really amazing conversations and any B2B leaders think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you.

Hi, this is Lupe Feld and I'm delighted to be here with you today. Welcome to the CRO Spotlight. I have a wonderful guest with us today. John Smibert is here with us and let me tell you a little bit about John. John is an Australian, which one of my favorite countries that I yet to visit, so it's on my bucket list. He spent several decades as a sales leader across the U.S. japan, Australia, with many IT corporations. And over the last 20 years or so, he has helped B2B organizations transform the way that they sell. And so he is passionate about enhancing the professionalism of salespeople. He has founded sales leader forums and sales masterminds. And he is also the creator of a authentic selling method called Ed Advance. And that sales model is what underpins the Wentworth Project. So with that, I welcome you, John, thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much, Felipe, and delighted to be with you too.

Great, great. Well, this is the CRI Spotlight and part of what we do here is we dig deep into the CRO role and it's a fairly new role role. It's been in effect for about 10 years and I'm sure in your more current practices you spend a lot of times with CROs. So tell me a little bit about your experience with CROs and maybe take a stab at what you see done Right and what you see as an opportunity.

Okay, that's a very broad question to start with. So that gives me lots of license, right? Exactly. I've been working. My history is large B2B, typically large organizations. But the emphasis is more on large transaction size typically and large relationships with clients, clients and customers. So if I look at that for a long, long time I grappled with the whole issue of having silos in big organizations where you've got sales, you've got marketing, you've got product development, product management and you've got. Back in my day there's nothing like a customer experience, VP or whatever. And so I grappled with this silo mentality and the impact it had on how we related to our clients and the engagement, the relationship with clients was just jeopardised the whole time. And so I was always. And you know, I think Warren talks about the CRO ROLES Being about 10 years old, whether we called it CRO or not. There's been a lot of activity prior to 10 years to pull those silos together and put it all under one leader, sometimes a CEO. But obviously that's too big a role for a CEO. And we need customer relationship manager to really drive the whole understanding across the organization of how to engage with the client effectively, essentially. Now my background sales and B2B sales, so I really understand the sales side of that and I also understand the issues with not having sales and marketing aligned. Big, big issue. So I've been working more recently with some fairly mature startups and trying to build in the CRO role very early in the process as they develop as an organization. And it's really interesting to see the outcomes and the results of that.

That's great, that's great. I think it's, it's exciting to see a lot of the walls being taken down, you know, from the silos that existed, you know, years ago. And as you think about the whole customer journey, it's so important that the customer is taken care of along the way and every and every facet of the business cycle that they're in, whether it's, you know, when they're being, you know, groomed to be a customer, to being acquired as a customer, to being transitioned and retained as a customer. And I think sometimes with the silos it was very difficult to do that. And having, you know, a person, so to speak, at the helm that kind of organizes all of that, makes it a little bit easier.

Well, we've gotta be really careful that we don't identify that we do have a silo type mentality and put somebody in charge of the key ones, which are essentially sales, marketing and customer experience and say, you now are the CRO, address this issue we've got and lead these sorts of silos forward. And of course, unless we drive a change in mentality, a cultural change in the organisation, it doesn't matter whether that we put somebody at the head called CRR and have those three areas reporting into them. You're not going to change the culture of the organisation unless you actually do something significant to do that. And of course, culture change is a journey, not a destination. So step by step, how do we actually engage sales, marketing, customer experience to work together for the betterment of the client, betterment of the customer. And that's what it's all about. It's not putting a person in the lead saying, you're now a CRO, that's not going to fix the problem.

So true, so true. So often CROs are added into organizations as kind of like that magic bullet that's going to change everything. And I'm sure you've seen it in your work consulting with B2B businesses and helping to organize their sales and their, their business to really make an effort into changing the culture. And that's a great point. I mean, that, that starts, I would say, at the CEO level, but it extends to the whole executive team to really embrace the concept and make sure that they're on board to do that. That's really, really important. I think that's something that Warren talks about all the time. He talks about, you know, the, the intent versus the result of what the job is supposed to be doing. And I think everybody needs to be aligned to that vision early on.

In the center of it is what you mentioned earlier. It's a customer journey. It's, you know, we talk about the customer buying journey. Well, that's just buying the single process of buying something, but it's a customer journey overall and how we can engage and work with and help that customer as they progress through their journey. And as an organization, how do we know not just sales, but not just, you know, customer experience, not just marketing, how do we do it together and in helping that journey? And that means knocking our heads together, it means talking to the customers a lot, really getting down and understanding what their journeys are all about and how we can align with those journeys as an organization, not just as the salespeople or the marketing people.

That's some great insight. So in your work, I'm sure you deal with a lot of CEOs as well as CROs. What advice would you give to a CEO if they were looking to put a CRO in place? If they were looking for a CRO? Any, any tips that you might want to offer to a CEO?

Well, the thing I say to most CEOs that are talking about, you know, we need to address this. Should I put a CRO in? My say is prepare the organization first. Now, sometimes you can bring a CRO in when you've got the organization already siloed and so on, and get the CRO to drive that. But you've got to get the mentality of the executive of the organization. You've got to get the vision in place. You've got to visualise what the organisation is going to look like and how they're going to be operating with their customers and start putting all that in place so that you can define for your organisation what that COO role and the CRO operation is going to be. The advice I give to CEOs is you're not going to fix it by just going out and hiring somebody. Here's a role description. Coo. We're going to knock all these sites, those together and put them all under one leader, but not think about how the operation will work, how we'll integrate and align with customers. So, bottom line is, don't go and hire CRO and thinks you're going to fix the problems, Put the vision in place, identify how you're going to do it and then get a CRO that suits your organization and suits the sort of people you've got that can come in and help you deliver that vision.

That's great, I love that. And flipping that coin to the other side if you are a CRO applying or looking to find a position. Any advice for a CRO? Some questions they should ask and, you know, some tips?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you'd be familiar with. I'm sure a lot of CROs would be familiar. I've just been hired into a role and I can't make it happen. And so the advice is ask all the right questions and really understand is there the absolute commitment to the change that's necessary in the organisation, not just the CEO. Sometimes you get CEOs that got great drive and vision, but somehow they can't drive the leadership for change in the organisation. So you need to judge, is this organization ready for change, will they support it from top down? And have they got. I mean, you obviously need to ask all the questions about have they got a competitive position in the marketplace, are they doing a good job of staying ahead of the competition in terms of bringing really good solutions to the table for their client base, all that sort of stuff. But it's more around, is this Organization ready for change and will they support me in that change role?

That's great advice, Great advice. As I think about the responsibility of a CRO, you are an expert in the sales arena and I know that you've recently written a book and, and talk about a little bit about the book.

Well, let's go back one step before I actually talk about the book. When we're talking about driving change in an organization, you need to think about how that's going to look, what's that going to look like and what sort of framework do we need to put in place to support all the people to behave the way we want them to behave. So I'm very focused on putting framework together, good business framework that is focused on helping the customer through the journey, whether it's a single buying journey or whether it's the longer term journey a client's going through. So with that in mind, I've been working for some years now on how do we do that, what sort of frameworks do we put in place, how do we drive change, cultural change, particularly in organizations, which is not easy, it's really, really tough. And we do need to think about it being a journey. So what are the steps in the journey over the next five, 10 years? And these sort of journeys take that long. So yeah, I put a lot of work into how all that's going to work. Then I brought it back to very simply, what is the client journey and particularly in obtaining that very first order in an organization, how to marketing and sales work together and ultimately customer experience to help the customer in that journey and lay the foundation for the longer term journey. So I've been running working with a framework with a lot of my clients. It's called Advance, I think you mentioned before, edvanc and it's both process and methodology and how parts of the organization work together to engage properly with the client. So how do we get that message across? Well, one of the things we decided is if people love stories and really good stories that they can engage with, they can work with, you know, they get emotionally connected with and so on. So we ended up saying we were on a novel, which is a brave thing to do with, with you know, originally two, me and my partner, business partner both decided we'd write a novel and neither of us had any novel novelist type experience. And we ultimately brought a third person in, another business person who turned novelist and the three of us ended up writing what I think is a. And the feedback we're getting is it's a page turning Novel sits up there amongst some of the better novels that you could read. But it's all about doing business, engaging with clients and how you go about that and cuts and thrusts. It is a novel. So we've got a person being killed in the second chapter of the novel and so on. So it's a very readable novel. But we think we get the message over now. The basic message is engaging. In this case, it's a mature startup engaging with a large financial institution. And the whole novel's about that process and that journey. A lot of fun. A lot of fun.

Well, that's. That's amazing. That's wonderful. You know, I think about the fact that you linked your process and your framework to a story. And it's so appropriate as you think about, you know, the people that run and function in a business, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, with their customer success, product, whatever the function is in the business, they do that for a period of time during a day, but then they go home. They're human and they have a life and they have their own story. And part of what they do during the work hours is what funds their story. And so I think it's really appropriate to combine the two. I don't know if I've ever seen anything like that done before. I know I've had a lot of sales books that I've read that had a lot of humor built into it, you know, a lot of different things.

A lot of stories.

A lot of stories. And some of the best salespeople that I know and I've, you know, had the pleasure of leading have been phenomenal storytellers. And so I love that approach of turning the process and the concept of running a business and the whole customer journey into a novel. I'm excited to read it. I'm excited to read it.

Next thing is we'll put a movie together about it. That'd be wonderful, wouldn't it? And the issue is, the very positive thing is that business people relate to the book. We're talking about their environment, a novel. So lots of cut and thrust and issues and challenges and the heroine being knocked down and then pick herself up again and all sorts of things like that. However, it's a business book and people can relate to the business that's occurring and the relationships between people inside your own organisation. And we've got the heroine, we've got people that support the heroine and we've got the counter characters in the book, the one sales manager, for example, that everybody will Relate to that. Everybody get his. I used to work for that guy once. So it's fun. But you're right, it's a story that people can relate to. And at the end of the book they sit back and say, okay, I can understand now how this organisation needs to work and how we need to engage with clients and how we need to go through that journey. And I'm one of these people and I get a lot of pushback on this. When you're going through a journey with a client, it's not about your product or service that's almost incidental. So the way we engage with clients, we're there to help them through a journey, we're there to help them think about the challenges they've got, the implications of those challenges, all the sorts of things associated with the current situation, and then help them go through a thinking journey to a new way of thinking. And that's what selling is all about. It's not about bringing your product in and saying feature, function, benefit. So those people that read the book will see that our heroine hardly ever talks about the product.

You bring a great point. You know, some of the best leaders that I have had the pleasure to work with, and some of our guests in the podcast here as well, have talked about the purpose of their product and service. And it's not necessarily what the features and benefits are, it's more along the lines of what problem does the business have and how do I help the business solve that problem or make that problem better or, or ease the burden of that situation or. And that to me is the key to success.

It is, and I'll take it one step further. It's there. We're there to help the customer achieve an outcome of value. Now the customer often doesn't know exactly what that outcome of value is going to look like. And so we're there to help them on a thinking journey. And the outcome of value, again, is not directly associated with the product. Let me. Do you mind if I tell you a story just to illustrate?

I love stories. I knew I would get one from you today, so. Absolutely.

And this is an ancient story for a lot of your listeners, but it really illustrates the point. Years ago I was selling manufacturing solutions, software based manufacturing solutions. When I say years ago, this is mid-1980s and I was back then. I'm a great believer that the people that are talking to your client must be. Be domain experts in the client environment. Right. They're not experts in your product, they've got to be experts in the client Domain. And I was quite, back in those days, an expert in manufacturing. And so I'd do the tours around the manufacturing plant with a manufacturing manager and the CFO and I'd be able to ask all the right questions and I could illustrate. I really understood their business and the challenges they've got and so on in this particular organization. The lighting manufacturing, the light fittings you see in, in houses and so on, they manufactured those. And so I went in and they had major issues with big queues in front of each workstation, the time it took to get from beginning to end in the whole manufacturing process and they were being outstripped by their competitors. So I talked about closed loop manufacturing just in time and all that sort of stuff, put a proposal on the table. They loved it and they said, but we've got to have a look at the software. And I hated demonstrating software because software gets down to feature function and feature function is not what they need, but it diverts them away from the outcome they're looking for. But I agreed. We come into the office, we'll do a demonstration. This is in the days of old green screens. Nothing like a PC or a laptop or a mobile phone or whatever to engage with your system. So put up two green screens, big whiteboard in the middle, and we started talking about all the issues they got manufacturing, close loop and how to solve the problems with how you should do the scheduling, the just in time and closed loop manufacturing, all that sort of stuff. At the end of the day, they invited, there was 12 of them in there and they invited. The CEO hadn't been involved in the process up till then, and the CEO just had question after question and lapped it up. And at the end of the hour and a half into it, he said, well, this has been wonderful, but I've got to go, I've got another commitment. Come on guys, I've seen enough. And the little nerdy tech guy up the back said, but we haven't seen the software yet. The CEO said, oh, software, look, I've seen enough. This is the sort of thing we need to do. And they all left. Three weeks later, we got the contract. Three weeks later I'm out there talking to them about where they're going to put the computer, because back in those days you needed a computer room, air conditioning and all that sort of stuff. And by the way, the computer is primarily what we wanted to sell, but that's where our margin was, the hardware back in those days, not the software. So talking with the IT manager and the CF and looking at where we might put this computer with an air conditioned room. And the CEO walked past and he said, g', day, John. Good to see you here. What are you doing here? So we're working out where we're going to put the computer. Absolute blank look came over his face. The computer. Does the computer come with this? He had bought the outcome. This whole rewe thinking about how they're gonna change the way they manage their manufacturing and get better response to their customers and lower inventory costs and all that sort of stuff never dawned on him. A computer came. I was selling a computer. He was buying an outcome that's, you.

Know, essentially what a lot of great salespeople do. And some of them do it through a process of, of just habit and learning from their success and their, you know, their opportunity or failure. But very few people are able to put that into a method or a framework that they can kind of rinse and repeat and do it over again. And that's a phenomenal story because when you can get your prospect, your customer, so bought in and so engaged and on the journey with you to that outcome, anything's possible. But getting that buy in is key.

And it doesn't take one person, it takes a team. And that's. And it takes a team across the organization these days. Yeah. Particularly when you get a larger B2B and your larger transactions you're selling to, there's typically, you know, sometimes 10, 12, 15 people that are involved in making that decision and decision makers, all of them. And when you look at that and look at all the teamwork we as an organization need to do to help them through their buying journey and help them through their overall business journey. It's a massive team effort and we need some sort of model and framework that helps us do that. But also we need to have a framework that aligns with the customer journey that actually is designed to help the customer. And too often the old traditional sales process were there to manipulate the customer. Not so much help the customer, but force the customer through a decision process that really wasn't conducive to good value for the customer or for us as an organization in the end.

Yeah. And I think you just hit on something that's really important. As I think about what the CRO's responsibility is, it's really owning that customer journey and that customer satisfaction and making sure that every, every aspect of that relationship or that journey is serving the customer. And when it sits under different leadership and when everybody's out to drive their own agenda, or their own, you know, outcome, then the customer end of it, falls short sometimes. And so that is, to me, fall.

Short and we destroy our trust as an organization. There's a lack of trust between the two organizations because we've got conflicting behavior happening in our own organisation. The customer sees it. How can you have faith in an organization when you see that happening?

Exactly, exactly. Well, you just hit another favorite topic of mine, which is trust. And building trust is at the core of every successful business, every successful customer relationship, every successful employee. You know, what are some tips on building trust that you can share with us?

Sometimes I take the word building trust out and it's really a process of developing trust. And you don't deliberately go in to build trust, but you need to understand that trust requires a number of things. But the key bottom line is we have to, in everything we do, it has to be part of our being that we're there for the customer and then that drives the right behaviour. And that's what builds trust. Because they see the reliability, they see the commitment to their own outcome, not to us. We're not about getting business and getting an order. Yeah, sure, that's going to happen, but that'll happen through reciprocity. And yes, I know we have to manage reciprocity, but if our whole being and focus is on being there to help the customer achieve their outcomes, but knowing also we can influence those outcomes because we can help the customer think through what they're doing and then visualise a better way of doing it that they may not have. You know, we help customers think outside the nine dots. If we're doing it properly outside their paradigm, they need that. You know, I use the word disruption quite a bit. Our job is to disrupt the customer's thinking. Now, we probably don't go in and tell the customer that, but why do we want to disrupt the customer's thinking? Thinking because we think we can help the customer achieve a much better and much more valuable outcome for their business. Now, every customer worth their salt that I've ever spoken to wants their thinking disrupted. They want to think out the nine dots. They get stuck in their own paradigm they're working in every day and it's very hard for them to get outside that paradigm. Our job is to help them do that as an organization. And I'm not talking about an individual salesperson, I'm talking as an organization we're bringing in. Marketing's job is very much this. Helping bring thought to the table and bringing thought leadership, but knowing the customer really well. And where their current situation is, what the current problems and implications are, and then bringing thought leadership to the table, that takes the customer to a new way of thinking and then helps them achieve that new way, that new vision. But it's all about the customer. It's not about us. We'll get our return through reciprocity.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. You are so right on that. And it's not just about finding problems or fixing things that are pain points. There's so much opportunity sometimes in the marketplace that a particular customer might be missing and it's really opening up their eyes to those opportunities. And that's really an incredible way to build that trust. And so often, you know, I remember reading this in a book, in order to get trust, you have to give trust. And that to me was really powerful because we often want something that we're very reluctant to give. And as an organization, you have to really trust your customers, listen to your customers and then build around that knowledge and information. So I, I love, I love our conversation. It's really engaging. It's at the core of everything that I love and believe and it's amazing to me. I'm eager to go find your novel and, and read it. So tell us the name of the book, tell us where we can find it.

It's called the Wentworth Prospect. Three authors and a six year project. Massive project. If, if I'd known how much it was going to take to get the book to the table, I probably would never would have started. But of course, very gratified. Now we have a book on the table that we think we can really help change the thinking of organisations and the way they engage with customers. It will help drive cultural change. We get a lot of, I get a lot of people writing to me saying thank you for this book. CEOs, a lot of CEOs are reading this book now and they say, I read this book, I've given it to every person in the organization and we're working through a plan now to change our culture. It's, it's what it's all about. So it's an exciting, exciting journey.

Oh, that is amazing.

I keep using that word journey, don't I? It's all about the journey. It's not about the destination.

Well, it's so true. It's so true. I don't think as a, as a customer you ever stop being a customer, you know, even, you know, things that are transactional, that it's one and done. Eventually in your lifetime you'll buy Again, whether it's a car, whether it's a house, whether it's, you know, something that you think is kind of a lifetime purchase. But there's so many businesses that continue to get our business for different reasons, and it's kind of digging deep into the reasons why people continue to do business with businesses. And some of them are not very glamorous, some of them are just convenience, and some of them are, you know, not necessarily what you would put as, like, best practices either.

When you say not glamorous, it just. It reminds me of one of my clients a while ago. It's an organisation, one of the Bosch companies, and they sold. I said, they sold sandpaper. Basically, they sell sandpaper. They call it abrasives and it's industrial abrasives, but it's sandpaper. So it's not very glamorous. Right. So we did some work with them and it was really interesting. They. One young sales lady, I was brought in by a sales director, brand new sales leader in there, that said, you know, we're transactional people. We. We walk into the factory and say, look, you know, I'm here again this month. How many. How many bits of sandpaper and which ones do you want this month? Take the order and walk out. And that was it. We got a couple of new sandpaper products you might want to look at here. Here's some test ones you can test. And that was basically all they did. I had one young lady in this program said, my territory is the Eastern seaboard of Australia, and I. One of my key loves are the surfboard manufacturers. I said, okay, how do you go about selling? Well, it's just what I just said, you know, I go into all the surf mold manufacturings. How are you going? How's our sandpaper going? And what do you want this month? Are you using competitor sandpaper? Let's talk all that sort of stuff. We changed her thinking. And so she said, well, I'm a domain expert in surfboard manufacturing. I understand how to get the finish. So her dialogue from then on was all about talking to the surfboard manufacturers about the finish they were getting and whether it was exactly what they wanted. And bring to the table some thinking other people are getting this sort of finish by doing it slightly differently and would that work for you? And so on. She became the consultant in the industry. Never talked about sandpaper anymore, just came right. And she went from having 20% of the grand. The market share in that market to about 70% in three years.

Wow, that's amazing. But it is around your positioning. And so that is a great, great point of view to always keep in front of you that your features and benefits are just that they're features and benefits. It's the outcomes that people are most passionate about and they can really kind of form an anchor and a passion towards.

We train our people and our products so much. You know, I've just been working with a reseller of plant equipment and they resell American manufactured plant equipment. And we talking with the CEO and the, and the CRO, which they're now trying to put in place about the level of training they've given to their people over the last two or three years. And it was all product, all product. And I. And bottom line is, well, if you're going to train them on the product, what's the message you're going to. Now obviously they need some training on the product, but what's the message you're going to give them? The message is you go to talk to your customer about the products because you're the product. We've got to be training them on how to engage with clients as a team, what all their roles are, what the process and framework is, and how you can drive value and thinking to clients. It's not about product. At the end of the day, when the client says, you've painted a great vision, I agree with this. I can visualize and I can verbalize the value we're going to get out of this. We want to take this direction, then we can say, okay, let's look at how we can help you get to that vision. You know, we can bring this product and this service to the table. Maybe as a third party we can bring in and so on and pull it together. Right. But only when that vision is solid, when the value in the mind of the client is well perceived and well thought through and well verbalized.

That's great. That's great. You just reminded me of a year leader I had years ago. And every new employee that would join, he would make a point to get in front of them eyeball to eyeball and say, we don't show up and throw up here. We engage with customers and you know, and help them make a decision. And sometimes it's not us, and sometimes it might be that we don't offer anything that they need, but we've made the connection and maybe next time we'll be of service to them. And I always love that saying, showing up and throwing up, because we do arm salespeople and sales leaders and even marketing. Well, Marketing will talk, you know, spin a long tail around the features, the benefits, everything about a product, but really it falls off, you know, the, the view of the customers and it's missing the mark a little bit.

Marketing have, should have a very significant role in the buying journey. And we really need, particularly for larger customers, we really need to very clearly define and agree and work with marketing on every opportunity because we should understand where that customer's at in their thinking, where we're thinking of helping them go through all that dialogue. And marketing should be producing the material, but also engaging with the number of people in that community, client organization over a period of time as they're going through that journey. And it's an account strategy that marketing have a role in. And of course, as we develop our relationship with customers and are providing services and so on, the customer experience, people have just a fully integrated role with that whole relationship and we all need to be working together on it, bringing our own role and skills to the table within the framework.

Well, I could talk to you all day and I'm sure we wouldn't run out of things to talk about. So again, it's been a great pleasure to have you on. You have enlightened us with a lot of tips and information. More importantly, I'm excited to read your book. I think, you know, as I mentioned, it's on my next reading list. I can't wait to dig into it. And I have a funny suspicion that it will be on a lot of people's summer reading lists, especially people who are CROs and CEOs, really need to kind of take a look at this and think about how it'll impact the whole organization, the culture, the framework, and essentially the outcomes of the business. So thank you so much.

It's a winter winter reading book list down here, of course, and we've just been told we've had the coldest week in Brisbane in the last since 1904. So we're. We're freezing down here.

That's funny. It's. Well, we're Fahrenheit, but it's 115. Where I am is the high for the week. So we're in the middle of a heat wave. Not everybody in the US is going through that, but I'm in Arizona, so we have beautiful winters and very, very hot summers. So I thank you again for the time. I appreciate it and I wish you well with your book. And again, thank you for being our guest today.

Anybody that reads it wants to engage, just get me on LinkedIn and very happy to take a message and have a chat. Thank you very much.

Thank you.