Sales Transformation & Customer-Centric Revenue with Dr. Grant Van Ulbrich

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed.

Thanks for listening.

Now let's go mix it up. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Siero Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna. I'm the founder of the Sierra Collective. You know, change is probably the core thing that I'm dealing with mostly in with my clients. You know, essentially what I'm doing is I'm saying to companies, you know, hire this person who's going to run everything. And you didn't do that before. And they're like, okay, I mean, it makes sense. But you know, there's a lot of things going against that because it's very disruptive. And you know, a lot of, frankly, people who run these companies, they don't have, if I would say, intestinal fortitude to make that kind of decision because it's going to be met with so much resistance. They just rather not deal with it, you know, even if they know that it probably makes a lot of sense. I was introduced to this really amazing person by the name of Dr. Grant van Ulbrich. He lives in London, he's an American, and he wrote this great book that's about transforming businesses and transforming change. And he also founded a company called Scared. So what? And he created a methodology around change management. That's really amazing. In fact, he is the first person who has ever gotten a doctorate in, in this particular, like sales psychology. It's fascinating. So anyway, it's a great conversation. Can't wait for you to listen to this and enjoy. So you are in the. You're in the. You said you were in the cruise business.

Yeah.

What would you do? What you do in the cruise business specifically?

My goodness, so many different things. I spent about 15 years working on chips.

So tell me about this. That's amazing. Tell me more about that.

So I started off as a port and cruise consultant 20 plus years ago working for NCL Cruises in America. The Hawaii ships, they were the first three ships that had 100% American crew. And so it was very interesting times. And then I switched over To Celebrity Cruises which was part of the Royal Caribbean Group family and worked on board senior revenue managers, guest relation manager, associate hotel director. So different roles throughout the ship as a senior officer. And then after so many years I just went shoreside and kept doing revenue sales, operations and then started moving over into international. So it's been a great career.

So you went from the cruise business and then what kind of. First of all, another question for you is why Dr. Grant? And are you like why you? Are you a PhD? Are you an MD?

I am sure I am not an MD. I'm PhD. Yes. But I'm the first doctor in sales transformation in the world. And you're like what is that? So it is the science and psychology.

Yes. What is that?

Yeah, it's a science and psychology behind sales. And so sales is the last area to be academically professionalized with full on master's in science and doctoral programs in science as well too. So over here in England, Middlesex University was the first to partner with this Consolia Sales business school and put the academic rigor behind the pathway in the career. Since then they've had multiple schools across the world including the United States have started to do academic rigor for the sales profession. But it's last you think you can go get your master's and PhD in human resources in IT and technology and operations and accounting. So many different fields. But after all this time, sales is the final, almost the final frontier to do it. So there are a few different master's programs and the one I took was how do you lead sales transformation? So you think about sales. The last major education push we had was in the 80s and that was around consultative sales tips and tricks to manipulate conversation. Think like contact center sales always be closing. All of these, you know, different skill sets to actually close the sale. But what it really was was a transactional leadership approach on how do you manipulate the sale. But today's customers don't live there at all. You know, the advancement of the Internet took us to a whole different view. Right now you have modern customers. Most of them know more about our products and services than we do because they actually have the time to sit and to actually study our services and our offerings to whereas internal salespeople have scripted roles. Often if you're in call centers environment, it's very much scripted and still the old, old ways of say this close three times keep going and keep going for the close. You look at key account management, strategic account management, national and global account management as well too. Where are the curriculums and what have they been taught? So that's the reason why Royal Caribbean, back in 2018, they asked me, they said, you know, we've been going for about 50 years, but what do we teach our salespeople? And actually if you look at our salespeople, we typically say we hire the best, but we can never answer what have they been taught? Right. And I'm sure you come across this Warren, with revenue officers, CEOs, et cetera, the leadership. Have you ever looked at these major corporations and said, well what is it that we actually teach these people? And what you see is a lot of just training programs which are one off and bespokes. And if you find like negotiation training, for example, it's typically written for FMCG types of sales, which is a harsh push close environment. And that's the nature of that business. But is that the right methodology for airlines or for cruise lines or luxuries or resorts or hotels around the world? Are there different types of sales and relationships sailing that needs to happen? That's up to each different business. So what I was asked to do was to go to this new university program and take in my, in my 40s to become the first one to take the full on how do you lead this program and graduate the program? And we were able to do it. That's where I built out the sales academy for our international teams worldwide and put the actual science and psychology rigor behind how do we want to sell and how do our customers want to be sold to. To. That's the unique question. So then we could actually say we have a unique alignment and a curriculum pathway that we would teach. Not just train, but actually teach and embed in our salespeople across the whole organization. And we knew that our rigor would be applicable to all of them.

Fascinating. Amazing. So the curriculum that you created was a derivation of the work that you got through the university. So it was bespoke to that organization. But what are some of the core principles that you were derived from the training that you could share that were insightful? Because I, I agree. I mean I've never sort of heard of a doctorate in this area. So I'm fascinated to know maybe you know, from an academic perspective, what are the, some of the core principles that came out of that and how could they be applied to other, other industries?

One of the, the. Well what the highlight of it was the mindsets and also values based selling, not value selling. We hear that a lot. You know, what is the value of the products and services but this goes deeper into the mindsets of what are your values and what are the values of the company and what are the values of the customer. So you have to look at what is the before the, during the after sales process and how does it all map and align to the cross sector values of what you're trying to do? And can you be so authentic in your sales approach that if your values do not align or the products or services don't align with the customer's values or needs at that moment that you would actually say, this is not for you and here's where you should go to actually get what you want and need and what does align for you. And that is truly being, living in your authentic truth. So we look at the mindsets. There are values of negative mindsets that constant sales has been born within. So manipulation, overt arrogance, supplier centricity and complacency. That's where you actually psychologically in sales, where we have lived the most of our mental capacities. Why is that? Because it's forecast. You've got revenue teams, you've got, whether it be marketing teams, you have the internal C suite leadership that has all the KPIs and pressures, that lives in a transactional leadership approach. And the foundation of transactional leadership is telling people what to do. Okay, so think about revenue, KPIs, et cetera. Just go do it. I've sat with so many revenue departments and divisions. Can't you just tell the customers what to do? You know, it's that thinking, it's those blinders. Just do it, you know, without even understanding the relationship of what our customers want and need or what they value. The opposite mindsets are even harder to actually shift yourself into. And this is where transactional sales needs to shift. So how do you live in authenticity? How do you live in client centricity? How do you live in proactive, proactive creativity? And how do you live in tactful audacity? So tactful audacity is the ability to be a little bit bold, but know your limits of where the customer wants you to be and needs you to be so that you're not selling. Proactive creativity is all about coaching and listening to the customer and then offering solutions that they deem they want and need. So in essence, the old days of coming in with your agenda in account management is over. It has to be kind of put into your pocket and just thrown away. The research was done globally in making these master's programs by Dr. Philip Squire, and he's the CEO of the Consolidated sales business school. And what he did, he went globally to companies like Google, Accenture, you know, Microsoft of all different kinds of companies. And he asked the C suite, he said, how many of your salespeople are actually effective at their jobs, People coming and selling to you? And the answers started to be shocking. But they added up that less than, less than 10% of salespeople are actually effective at their roles. And they just kept the same, the same over and over, company after company. In essence, 90% of salespeople that are taking up your time are all agenda focused. Product dumping. Do not have an interest in my business. Don't ask me about my values. Don't ask me about what my business plan is or my needs, objectives. In essence, they're an interruption of my business. We often know more about their products and services than they do themselves. And that was unique. So I learned that came back to Royal Caribbean as we were building our sales academy. And I actually asked the internal leadership team, I said, how do we test this with. For ourselves? And should we, should we actually be so bold to hire an agency outside, truly bespoke and blind, without our influence, and go and ask our B2B customers worldwide, what do you think of our salespeople and how effective are we? So we did it. And guess What? Less than 10% of our salespeople were effective at their jobs. The voice of the customer. And we videoed him. It was horrific. But then we asked them, we said, well, why would you? What's the behind it, right? And the answers were really very simple. When you come in to sell to us, you have your agenda, you have your promotions, you have everything about what you want to do and what you want to dump. But you fail to realize is as soon as you hang up the call or you leave, here comes the other cruise line. Here comes the other cruise line. Here comes the other cruise line. Here comes the tour line, here comes the airline. At some point, we as the travel industry have to sell, but yet we have to cater to you. And you think that we have to listen to you when in essence, we have a revenue contract with you. But if you don't align to our values, we can sell somebody else. And we often do. And that was the aha moment that maybe we actually need to change and transform our sales approach. And we did. And so we built a whole sales academy based off of these mindsets, based off of consumer values, company values and individual values. And how do they align? They have to interconnect and they have to concede together. And in doing so over about eight years, we then re asked our population around the world, we said now how many percent of our population is actually effective in their roles? And we were getting into the 70, 80% numbers from the voice of the customer. And that's scary, Warren. That's so scary to be that vulnerable. But if you're ever going to transform your business, don't you have to listen to the voice of your customer?

Thank you so much again for listening to the Sierra Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the zero collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible.

A couple things to note.

If you're a aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a chief Revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a Chief Revenue Officer, we offer the CRO Accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a 15 week course that is populated by aspiring Chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader. And they either want to move into the C suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they win in the role. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn. Just DM me CRO accelerator and we'll set up a time to talk and then I can send you more information to give you a brochure. Of course. So again, CRO Accelerator Course. 15 week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great. And you'll see some more information about it on the website.

Thanks. I would think so.

Yeah.

I certainly, I certainly adhere to this principle in my business and in the way that I, you know, work with my clients.

Yeah.

So we are. You're preaching to the choir here. I'm fascinated by this idea that also, if you don't mind, I'm curious. So when you say values, right. This Is an interesting word. Right. It's kind of like a bit of a, Got a lot of weight on it, that word.

Yeah.

You know, how would you, in your world or in this particular context, would you define values? Is it morals, is it ethics, is it what, what are, when values, how are they attributed in a sales process and how are they identified?

Values are stemmed from your beliefs. And so we ask, there's a whole metric that you can go through to understand and what are the diagnostics of your human values, of you, the actual salesperson. So you have to look to see what are your values at home, in your personal life and then what are your values at work? Are they the same and are they different? And often what you'll find is the core values are the same of the person. But there are unique values that change as soon as you come to work. We dial up, we dial up strengths like empathy, like care, consideration, analytical skill sets, mindful values. To actually look at how do I align? And then you have the business values. And so the business values would come from what do we stand behind? What do we, what is our mission in life? Behind what our products and services, what we sell and who are, who are our target customers and what are their values? Who are they? What's the target demographics? Who are the makeups? Because those people would come on board and use our services within Cruise, they would make up the guest experience that has to align with the values of our crew. So it's a massive connect the dots. Do we align and do we have the right value based fit of the people? If you don't, then maybe you're in the wrong role. Maybe there's something else you should be doing. Maybe you shouldn't be sales front focused. You know how many times I was just at a CRO event where we were talking about salespeople are in the misaligned roles and how so often we take salespeople who are the star sales and had the highest sales and we put them in leadership roles and they fail so often. And that's very common. Very common. Right. You see that everywhere. Yeah.

Different skill set, different type of person. You know, I speak a lot about how, you know, the best coaches were usually not the best players, etc. Etc. It's a very common thing I, I think was we make the mistake of identifying a specific skill. Like it somehow means that they're skilled everywhere. Right. This person's a great salesperson. Wow. They must be a great leader. Let's you know. And they're not. You're not using the same. Even the same tool to measure those things, you know?

Exactly.

It's rather fascinating, you know, when you see this mistake being made still to this day. And I don't think that leaders have an understanding of how to diagnose specific skill sets, and they're not using those when they promote people. They're just looking at. You know, it's like, for example, you're on a construction site, and you see someone who's a really amazing Mason. Yeah, they're amazing. Like, masterful. And so you call them over to go do something else, because this person is amazing, and it's not transferable the skill. They go over to do drywall, and they don't know what the hell they're doing. And, you know, it's funny. I remember this scene in. In Rain Man. Right. So, you know, when, you know, Raymond was displaying his mathematical capabilities, you know, when those toothpicks fell on the ground, and he was able to. Oh, yeah, right. And so, you know, is his brother, you know, sort of like, was like, wow. He saw this mathematical computational skill. And so, of course, what he did was he took him. Charlie took him to Vegas, Right?

Yeah.

And when he took him to the blackjack tables, the mathematical components of blackjack were. Were they comported with his skills? He was able to count cards, right?

Yeah.

And so he was watching him make all this money, and he's like, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take him over to the roulette table. And there's no mathematical computation associated with that, with the rul. It's pure luck, Right.

It's.

It's actually morally probability. And he couldn't do it. And so he was freaking out. He couldn't understand, like, why can't you do this? Because he saw one thing, one competency, and he thought that it was one that would transfer over to other things.

And I think. Relatable. Yeah.

Not knowing how to know what those competencies are and how to look for them is a mistake. We make a lot. Why we put people in the wrong job, and then they get fired over it, and it wasn't their fault. Right.

Yeah.

So I'm curious about this. So you. You made a really interesting distinction there, where you were able to identify whatever it was that was not working about your sales organization at that. That 10% success rate, and you increased it. What? I. I'm really looking for some specifics, like what were some of the things that. As a result of the awareness.

Yeah.

Did the salespeople do differently that had them be more successful than when they, what they were doing before.

Yeah, the biggest thing that we, we transitioned away from was product dumping, being reporters, reporters of the internal mechanism. So for example, in the cruise industry, you sell, you front load your business. At least 80% of it is done in what's called wave season. And that's January, February, March.

I said seasonality and you know, seasonality again.

We want, we want to front load our, our whole cabin mix and availability for the year. We want 80% of the business sold in those first three months because it's harder to sell the less the last 20% during the year. Cancellations, adjustments, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah.

What we typically do is we give the biggest offers at that moment and then we load up our salespeople with all of the products, all the definitions, all of the KPIs and the requirements. We set targets for our customers, which are travel agents. Right. And so we do it all at, we map out the math ourselves with our revenue teams and basically it becomes a go tell them what they have to do, which is a transactional leadership style. And now here's the funny thing. Neither you nor I like to be told what to do. Right. Nobody does. And that's imposing change upon people. So then how do we get out of that metric and out of that way of working and actually how do you take the math and the numbers and the mission ahead of you, but yet file that in the back of your mind and then go straight into relationship. How do you then go into investigation of what does my business, what did they need, what do they want, what do they value? What are their goals, what are their objectives? So throw the agenda away. In essence. And it has to, you have to become an investigator and a better knowledge, more power, empowerment, knowledge about their business, almost more than our own. And that differentiated us. So if you think of the cruise industry, how many cruise lines, 20, 30, 40, 50 different cruise lines times thousands and thousands of salespeople. They're all going on the same travel agents around the world. So our biggest opportunity was to switch. So instead of us going in and telling them this is the promotion, this is what you have to do, this is what the targets are, this is what we're expecting from you. These are the product mixes and the categories and the pricing. We put all of that to side and we actually said what do you need to sell this year? How are you going to get there? What is your bottom line? What is, what is your, your, your marketing support? We started to Basically immerse our salespeople into their business and, and become agents of their business for them to achieve their goals, knowing that yes, we had a product and service that could help them meet their target customers, but if we couldn't find that, then we would back out, give them a base standard of what to sell and move on to the clients who could vote the needs.

So it becomes like a choice.

Yeah, I wasn't making that distinction. It's interesting. So your customer is a distributor essentially, travel agents worldwide.

Yeah.

Do you, you guys do, do the. I know we're not speaking about the cruise business, but it's.

That's okay.

This conversation is how often were cruise organizations speaking directly to customers ever to.

Face, to face customers, contact customers who.

Are buying cruise ship vacations? How often were they calling Carnival Cruises directly? And you had salespeople talking to the buyer as opposed to every day to a third party.

Every day. Yeah, but that would be through our contact center sales. Hundreds and hundreds of contact sales.

Contact center sales. And then you add the channel sales.

Yeah. So we have inbound and outbound sales. We have our web sales. We have our web web customer support sales as well too, which are people.

I never went on a cruise, I never bought one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You literally had every sales aspect globally, if you can think of it. And then you had field sales agents, retail high street sales agents. You have accounts based agents that would support accounts virtually national global accounts. So yeah, the wide spectrum.

So that's interesting. So because you were talking about your examples in relation to the, let's call it, for the sake of this conversation, the channel partners, which are the agents. What percentage of the sales represented through that channel?

You probably get upwards of 65 to almost 73%.

Which means those are primary.

Primary. Yeah. Travel agents are the, are the bread and butter of the business day.

Still people use travel agents.

Oh yes, absolutely.

Travel agents. They were talking about the same thing. I'm talking about the guy in the strip mall. You walk in, you sit down, you're talking more about the Expedias and stuff like that or actual human beings.

Expedias are travel agents. Yeah, but we still have, there are still many retail and high streets worldwide.

It's amazing. I mean I just, you think about, people just go online and just Google, you know, cruise ships and why would I drive down to the trip mall? I guess there's still demand for that. I just didn't know. It's fascinating to me.

Yeah, there's still huge demand for it. Because you think you know travel, you, you can book online, especially for people who actually know it. Right. And who have been before but for the first time. Holiday or.

Yeah.

They might need somebody to say, well, what is a ship? What is the destination? What should I do? What can I do? So there's a lot of. It's not like just buy. Well, you can buy a car online now, that's for sure. And it will just come. Yeah. But there's a lot of pre. Pre knowledge that is awareness about those products and services, not so much in travel.

So back to what you're saying. It's interesting is. I love that by the way. It makes so much sense. Right. You call up the person, you find out what their motivations are and how you can help them achieve them. It's no different than you're selling any B2B product.

But that's not the way we're taught. Right.

I understand. We're not. Well, unless you work for a good organization. Some do. Right. Some are very good at this. But you're correct most of the time. And I think this is an interesting distinction I wanted to talk about with you because you brought it up before and it's one of the things that impacts. The whole reason that I went to market with my business is exactly what you said, which is everything's incentives. Right. We do it, we're incentivized to do so. Incentives are built specifically to generate a certain behavior. Incentives are upstream from culture. So if I'm working in the finance organization, I'm let's say the investor of the organization and I bought this company and now with that purchase I have revenue goals to return on my investment and I push that down to the CEO of the company. I'm like, you need to get us this number in two years.

Yeah.

You know, because that's our expectation.

Right.

After having invested in your business. So now that, that becomes a mantra across the organization, which completely shifts the entire culture. And you are incentivizing people to get deals as quickly as possible to make your quarter.

Yeah.

And this has been the way we've been doing business for I don't know how long it's been as long as I can remember. Yeah. And you know, when you get a sales job, you're given a quota and a time frame.

Right.

And so you're chasing a number. And you know, the, the obvious thing is everybody knows that that particular type of incentive and the dynamics that percent of are going to drive you to have to try and coerce people to make your number you Know, like, how often did you see a salesperson, hey, we're closing out this month and we're going to giving off, you know, a discount to make our number. As if your number matters to me. Like, I'm. I want the discount because of your quota. But this is incredible how people talk. And, you know, we all know, as you already said, you know, when you're on the phone with somebody, you can tell that they seem very motivated to want you to make a decision, like a coercive way in which they're talking to you, and they seem to be leading you into some. The other way that it got more complicated was it's not just time, right, to get the clothes. It's also, I'm being held accountable to other things now, not just to get the deal, but also. And I think one of the biggest one is what are the fingerprints and evidence that I'm leaving from my organization to know about this deal? I need to have certain information from you because I have a salesforce, you know, field here that I have to enter all this data into.

Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.

And so I need to get all this information out of you because one of the ways that I'm being, you know, maybe I'm being rewarded is my ability to do that. Like, now I have a technological relationship with this like, like, screen. That is part of my remit.

And so that's why it's required.

No, you get. You get incentivized for the guy. The people who do the best job of filling out their CRM get rewarded. You know, so now you're talking to a bureaucrat like, I just want to buy something from you, and you're asking me all these questions. We all had this experience when you get on the phone with somebody, and the first thing, okay, give me your name. Give me your email address.

Like, look, I'm calling you, filling the line.

Why are you doing this to me? Because they're incentivized to. Because they know it's almost in a strange way, the way that they're thinking is we know the percentages of people that call that actually close a deal. So if we know that it's low and we at least want a way to be able to get in touch with them again. So, you know, why don't you make that the first thing you do? So we have a database that we can fill out and reach out to people and put them in our system. Over time, they'll get enough emails from us that might close the deal. It's utter insanity.

Right.

And here's the thing, though. This is where I want to, I'm leading to in this is all these measures are put in place because they sort of fit the revenue model that we've created in our, you know, culture. If you remove those incentives, doesn't it then slow down the speed of the sale? And then how does a company adjust their projected timelines for revenue against a new way of selling that may not be happen as fast, but it'll be a better quality experience for the customer? You know, where's that trade off between the business goals and the customer goals? And how does the teachings and the academic perspective that you have on managing that difference in those changes?

And it's a fair question. And I guess it really depends on each identity of each, you know, business themselves and who they see themselves and where they want to be. And who do they. Again, back to who do. Who do they value? Are they more valuable of the profit that they're driving, or are they more valuable of the customer and relationship and the name and the branding and the voice of the customer? All I can speak for is, is for us in the cruise industry, we did value both, right? You had to be profitable, you had to drive the profit. But at least we had multiple different ways to do that, whether it be through web to build the inbound funnel.

Just as you had multiple touch points.

We had multiple touch points that we could shift. But what we found was the true voice of our customer. What we weren't realizing is that even though our primary sale goes to a B2B, which is to our brokers, our travel agents, they still in turn sell to our end customer. So the values had to absolutely be aligned because the end customer maybe come through them, but then they come. But then they come on board our ships, and now, guess what, they're in front of us. So whatever our broker did has to be the same, has to be the same for us. So therefore, the full sales experience had to dictate how does the whole life journey go? That was more important for us because you know what happens? The NPS score of the guest. So if our broker wasn't facilitating or matching our own values, and for whatever their sales process, they got on board and all of a sudden we didn't had to repair that we were losing because they would do more damage. And then you also had to look at a new sales pipeline, which most people don't have onboard ships. We have travel agents on ships, and that's usually the internal sales division. I used to run that on board as well, too.

What are they selling people on the ships, like when they cruise.

Oh, so the next vacation, the next holiday.

I see. So they're trying to do like an upsell while they're on the boat.

I knew a complete new sale. A new sale. So what we want to do is in the travel and hospitality, and I think land vacations someday should pick this up. But in cruise, we really perfect in it. It is a massive revenue pipeline. But what we did was we built luxury travel centers on board the ships. And we said if a guest is on board and if all the stars align, meaning the travel agent did great, our sales teams did great, our customer service teams did great, and they got on board and had a great experience. The best place to buy a cruise is when you're on a cruise. So we will give the richest offer right there, attribute it right back to the travel agent that they used, and the guest would walk away, not going to someone else, to our competitor.

Amazing.

But do you see how all the values must align? Makes.

It makes perfect sense to me. And. And we're all in it.

Totally.

It would.

It would require what you're already articulating, which is just a knowledge of, like, what works and how that experience needs to be constructed. But the other part would be an immense amount of sort of downstream training, right?

Yes.

And almost control over the whole.

That's. That's where the science and psychology had to come into play. We couldn't have. You can't have. In that kind of a sales pipeline where you're. You're required to have such an entrenched partnership with your travel agent. And there are millions of them worldwide, by the way. It's massive. It's the whole globe. And then also your sales teams on board and your crew. Right. Everyone had to be aligned and in sync to make that experience go so perfectly. That's not traditional sales. That's not selling a can of Coke or Pepsi or a Snickers bar, you.

Know, not at all. I mean, in your case, in that particular industry, which is sort of unique in a lot of respects and makes it pertinent for this, is you're selling an experience to people.

An experience. We're selling people.

And so because you're selling an experience, there has to be a consistent experience. And leading up to that experience. Right. The whole thing is an experience. Right. Disney is very good at this. You know, Disney is particularly.

Oh, yeah.

You know, they figured out how to kind of do that, and that's their businesses and experiences. So then let's switch gears. How did. Tell me what?

Scared.

So what? And how did that come about? And what. What is it? Please describe this to me.

Yeah.

The listeners and what it means for organizations.

And I love this. This is where you and I met. Starting talking about this, especially for CROs and C suite leaders. In 2018, when I went into the master's program, I had to learn all of the sales program, right? And we did it. We built it. Built this psychology out for all of our sales teams. There was one section on how do you lead change? And honestly, Warren, I thought I was going to fail the class. And if I failed the class, I'd probably lose my job as well, because that wouldn't have been very, very good. But we learned about organizational change management in the world, and it's been around for about a hundred years. And I just thought, I can't use this on my salespeople. It's transactional at best. It's telling people that change has to happen to them, and nobody likes that. That's not attuned to our lived values. So I asked the professors, I said, can you accept change? Yes. Can you reject change? Well, yes, of course. I said, then why do none of the models allow for that? And everybody stopped. And at this moment, I had senior vice presidents of sales from other companies. They're like, well, wait a minute. The American in the room has a question, and it's actually making sense. It was quiet, Warren. I thought, wow, this is my last day in the university at 45. But the three professors turned around and they went, you know, you're absolutely right. Most organizational change models say that you might be in shock, you might be angry, you might resist, but you'll eventually accept it.

You will, but you will obey.

You will obey. You'll do what you're told, which is transactional leadership, and we will manage you.

Through the change issues. Do it that you have, but you're gonna do it.

And three people in hr, along with their project managers will make sure you do it or you'll leave, right? Yeah. So. So they. I said, well, where's the model for me as a human being? Where's the bespoke model that allows me to accept and reject change and be confused about it as well? In essence, real life, where's that model? It didn't exist. So they said, you need to create it. So the university put full efforts behind me to actually. And I thought it was pretty cool. I was like, not so stupid, am I? To my colleagues, right? I forgot something here. But they put the full energy behind me to do the research on what is the fear of change, which is metaphysophobia. I thought, I can't use that, that's two word too big.

Fear of change is called what?

Metaphysophobia. It's the extreme clinical diagnition of the fear of change. And many people have it. Sure. It absolutely shuts people down.

Everything has a name.

I guess everything does, including that. So what I wanted to do was and think about, you know, I'm a veteran as well, I served in the military. We were not supposed to feel. You did what you're told and you think about police and fire. All of these types of hardcore jobs require that.

That's a, that's a job requirement. But that's not real life. That's a.

You still have feelings, you still have them. Exactly. So that's where scared. So what came from? Scared allows you to process your feelings and instead of making an assumption of decision, you can make an information based decision. And as you go through S C A R E D, which is surprise, conflict, actions receptive or rejective, can you explore options to gain information and what decision can you make about it? Right. Once you reflect through that, the stress is starting to go away, the anxiety starting to go away and you're finding solutions and you're not done there. You then have to think, well, so what, so what can I do about it? What's my strategy? What options will I include? Do I have a way forward, Have a. Do I have hope or do I know how this is going to work? What actions will I take and how do I take ownership? So scared. So what became the first methodology for people to learn how to manage change for themselves? I did this over nights and weekends, passed with a distinction. The leadership said don't stop, go into the doctorate. So I did. And in the doctorate where you and I talked about, I looked at, well, what are the leadership foundations that this can be taught from? And so instead of all the leadership hierarchy structures, I looked at transactional leadership and transformational leadership. 76% of your life is lived in transactional telling people what to do. And that's actually the worst leadership skill set because low ideation, low creativity, low engagement, low following, high attrition, but yet it's the easiest to do because when you get up in the morning, it's about you, right? So when somebody comes into your office or calls you or puts their on your calendar, it's so easy for you to get them away by just telling them what to do. But what you fail to realize is they don't have to own it. And when they go away and they do what you told them to do and it doesn't work, they can come back and say, I did what you said, it didn't work. Whose fault is it? Yours. Because you told them the opposite is even more true. Transformational leadership. If you coach, if you develop, if you co create, that's the transfer of ownership. They come up with what to do, they walk away and own it. So these two elements went together. Transformational leadership and personal change management. And this is where I go to C Suite CRO, you know, Connected, and your programs as well, all of the C Suite. Whenever I do a keynote, I ask these two questions. Raise your hand if you've ever been taught how to achieve transformation for your organization. And everybody looks at me like I have three heads. No hand goes up. Raise your hand if you've been taught how to manage personal change for yourself. No hand goes up. But yet you all said you're leaders and your board has challenged you to transform your business. And neither, none of you know how. Here's the skill sets. And so from there I just, I've recently left a 22 year career history and cruise and I'm now stepping up scared. So what which is personal change and transformational leadership for organizations. And so you think of who are our biggest customers right now? Well, the cost of failed global digital change technology is 2.3 trillion. The customers are fruitful. They're everywhere. It's every CIO, CRO, CDO technology, every CEO who runs tech and SaaS, every merger and acquisition, every company that's dealing with change. If you're still doing it the organizational change process way, keep contributing to that loss. But if you actually want to achieve transformation, start including and empowering your people, that's who you need to execute your change strategy. And don't tell them what to do, show them what to do.

Thanks again for listening to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have and more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here. Feel free please to share the CRO Spotlight Podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here and want to get the word out to as many people as possible. And your, your support of the show is really appreciated. I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is A bimonthly group of six seasoned Chief Revenue Officers who are looking for a Chief Revenue Officer Board of Directors, so to speak, that they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role. And these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Master's Councils, again, they're twice a month and they last for at least six months to a year. So if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own Board of Directors of Chief Revenue Officers, it's a private, confidential conversation that we have. It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other Chief Revenue Officers you can talk to and say, hey, I'm working on this, or have you guys figured that out? Or I'm having this issue right now with my business or my results. These are just invaluable conversations with Chief Revenue Officers. Chief Revenue Officers have a very, very unique role. It's a very lonely job and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and DM me masters or master's Council, and I'll follow up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it. Looking forward to seeing you there. And thank you.

Wonderful. I love it. So you're, let's say, would you call it. Is it a methodology? Is it a curriculum? Is it all the above?

It's both. Yeah. Yeah, it's all. So we've got a certification program that I do first. I created the program backed by Oxford University, CPD Global, ITEL Global. And so within a day, I can transfer the knowledge over to you, and at the end of it, you assess it back and I can certify you. That way you understand transformational leadership and personal change. And then we have the first ever change technology so that you can actually empower all of your employees. And think about that for a moment, Warren. Think of the C suite leaders you speak to who run these big organizations. Typically, what you're going to find is this a McKinsey 7s structure, which is about the shared values. But those shared values are all created at the C suite level. Have you ever seen an enterprise like a Google or Microsoft that goes to every single employee? How do you feel about this? What are your values? Can you get on board with this? No, it's transactional at best. You have an engine that's just running. How do you transform the business? Unless you actually involve the business. That's the flip.

So walk me through how this is implemented. So I get it. I mean, I agree with you. So, you know, you try and implement change across an organization and you made a decision to, let's say, for example, perfect example, I we're going to bring on a chief revenue officer here.

Okay. Yeah.

So we're at 40, 50 million in revenues and we sort of reached our peak and we're at a point where now we've sort of, you know, fulfilled on what our engine currently could produce for us. We need to revamp our engine and part of that's going to be a go to market revenue leadership restructuring where we're going to bring a chief revenue officer in who's going to run the entire go to market. And that's a big switch for a lot of people in that part of the world because yeah, you know, all the operators in that part of the world are now, you know, having all the natural reactions to that. We're threatened by this new person and I have a new boss now and who is this person? Are they going to evaluate me and I might not, you know, be kept here or they might give me a job I don't like or I'm not used to this or all the stuff.

That comes up, classic reorgs. And even for the new CRO that's coming in, that's positive change and it's fearful for them.

So what would the. I can't tell you the whole thing here. I understand, but what would general application be for both the organization and that CRO to utilize principles of yours to ensure that that transaction transition is more successful?

Yeah. First thing we would do is we need to equip that leadership with the capability to manage change for themselves. What's happening, that is the fundamental shift that has to happen is you can no longer count on the two people in HR to drive the change for the whole enterprise and organization. It's, it's not sustainable and it's never worked. In the UK alone, the annual cost of failed general change is 340 billion every year. So trying to get a count on the HR chro and the two change people, that unrealistic. So what we would do is we go in with a C suite and say, all of you need to learn how to manage change for yourself. This is a key leadership trait. You need to understand. You're all driving business, you all drive People and you're accountable for all of these people and resources within your business. But you're pushing it all on in one department. So we train that we do the certification, transfer the knowledge. Once they have the knowledge, then we come in with the actual technology. That technology is a fast launch and deploy to all of the employees. And through coaches and leadership and L and D teams, you repurpose the change and leadership and learning teams to continue the education throughout the workforce. You want that knowledge to spread because not only can the leadership understand what personal change is about, but then they need the employees to do it. And the technology will be the enabler. Well, that's one side of the technology. The other side is you can no longer rely on surveys. A we can see who said what. Survey fatigue, survey distrust. It goes into a black hole and it's always so yesteryear, three months later that somebody's looking at the scores. The enterprise never gets to understand what truly happened. And you see that all the time. So employees won't give them full selves in surveys anymore today. So what we've done with the technology is we made live dashboard. So instantly as the employees are populating their feelings, taking their quizzes, building their so what plans, they're in charge if they want to share it with supervisors, leaders, coaches, et cetera. But you can see a high level, anonymized dashboard of what is the immediate change going on within your, within your organization. It's live. So this is how you bring everybody together, educating the leadership, transferring the knowledge and embedding it with inside and using the technology in real time to see your change culture. You can see top 5, top 10, 15 positive change, top 5, 10, 15 negative changes. The change archetypes the engagement process that's going through. So you're actually managing in real time, not three weeks, four weeks, a month later when a survey came through. Does that make sense?

It does, yeah.

It's the proactive approach.

I love it. It's interesting to me on many levels because you know the, you know the, I would say like the competing coursework that I'm in. My area, which is training go to market leaders, is understandably and necessarily in many cases very operationally driven. Right. Like how do you run a go to market? And all the nuance that go with building a funnel and customer success and all that stuff, which I think is you need to know how to do that.

Of course.

But what it ignores and what I focus on a lot is the stuff you're talking about, which is like these Are people, you know, you're not moving around a bunch of numbers on a sheet. You know, you have to have human beings that are involved in this stuff.

Absolutely.

And, you know, they have to know what to do and how to do it. More importantly, it's like, why are they doing it? Like, what's the reason that they're doing all of it? Many times it's just they're complying because they want to keep their jobs. You're just going to say, sure, okay, fine, it's my job now. I'll do that, I guess. And, you know, you're not going to get the best out of them from that, you know, because you're just going to get them to just say yes to something and they'll do a mediocre job or just good enough not to get fired. You know. But if you. If you're going to make a change of the type that I'm sort of professing, which is, you know, change your whole leadership structure to build a more aligned organization. Alignment doesn't just mean. Which it does mean partially data and process. Right. It also means alignment, like, just like we're on the same page. Like, we all agree, right? We're all marching to the same drum. Then we all agree that this is a better approach. And usually, yeah, the best way to do it, I found, like, what's the central thing? Right. There's two components to that. One would be, and you've said it already quite eloquently, is the people's personal motivations, like for themselves in the system. Like, why are you here? Why do you have this job?

Yeah.

And the obvious stuff is I need to make a living. Okay, fine. But other than that, I mean, you know, what other ways can this job kind of fulfill on some of your personal stuff? And the other part of it too, is the customers that we serve. Right? So we're selling stuff to people who are buying from us. And, you know, if we care about the outcomes that they receive and the value they get and all of us are aligned around that, then it'll give us some. Something that's sort of like not that's external to our own needs, but more, you know, and that's, I think, an important part of it. So, you know, trying to get an organization to do that and adhere to those things while they're being constrained by those dynamics that you and I referred to before, which is you got to get this done quickly, get deals done fast. Those are counter to what I'm trying to say, you know, so it's like how do you manage like two conflicting objectives. One is get this shit closed fast or at the same time do it in a way that you know, they don't comport all the time. And I think that's the conflict that has to be unlocked in these things, you know.

And you're so right. And I'll go back to the precipice of why did I do this in the first place for my sales teams in the science. If you understand a sales experience, typical sales experience. So I've got a product and a service. I'm going to go out to a client and I'm going to make my pitches, my introductions. Marketing is going to help me get into the door and get connected, et cetera. Or I'm going to hunt and farm for my pipeline. Whatever is going to be. You have to realize that the sales interaction itself is a change and you are imposing a change on a customer. Think about that.

It's true.

Would never actually looked at it that way. So you've got a person who a doesn't know how to manage change for themselves. So they're transactional at best. For them to truly make that a co creative environment, they need to understand what change means to themselves so that when they go and actually do the facilitation and the conversation and the relation that they're building, the relationship that they're building. If I understand the psychology behind change for me, then I know how to not impose this change on them. I actually will formulate my questions and my conversation to invite them in. So we have co creation and that's coaching and that's transformational leadership. You can teach this Warren, but we've never taught it. And so then the sales interaction, the sales process becomes duality of co creation and it becomes about the customer seeing themselves within and they see that you have the products and services, let them sell back to you. Because you also have to keep in mind B2B sales. Rarely do you find the person who can actually make that decision right then and there and close the deal. They've got to go back in and do another sales job right internally. Do we want to buy XYZ products and services from this vendor? Okay. And so if I've done my job correctly now understanding the psychology of change, working in a transformational leadership approach. So it's co creative and it's coaching which is asking the questions back of them. They then have the wherewithal to go back and sell it. They'll go close for me. I won't close them.

I love it. So you have a book, I assume?

I do, yes. Called Transforming, Transforming Sales Management Lead Sales Teams Through Change. It's just won two, two great awards here in the UK, which is great. Best Top 20 Business Minds and the UK Better Book Awards, which is nice. So that's available. And I just did a TED talk that is just past 2 million views, so hopefully people can go see that and learn more about Scared. So what?

Amazing.

Yeah.

Then you have your program where you train and develop organizations and people around your particular methodology.

We do.

And you have a certification program, correct?

Absolutely, yes, we do. And people can find information at Scared. So. And reach out to us. We're here in London, England, but we service clients worldwide and it's super simple to do the certification programs. We can do it face to face or we can do it virtually. Transfer that knowledge into you and then empower you with the technology to start managing inclusive change for you and your organization and your customers, which is really where it should be.

Amazing.

Well, this was an amazing conversation and I appreciate it. What you're doing is really important and I'm a believer. I think it's, it's vitally important, you know. So thank you and thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

Thank you so much, Warren. And keep doing what you're doing. It's so important. The revenue officers, they're the heart of the business and we can transform futures together.

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