How Adam Tiberius Generated $1M in New Business: A Masterclass in Building Markets & Winning Clients

Adam, welcome to the podcast.

Great to be here.

Obviously cool to sit down with you. Obviously we met for the very first time at the live podcast event. Yeah, that you came to. I know you shared with me, so I hope you don't mind me saying, obviously listen to this podcast for a good amount of time. Yeah, you're one of the very few people I can imagine who proactively reaches out to people to say, hey, love your episode, would love to ask some questions about this. And I know you've had some cool conversations with people off the back of the pod, which is, which is really cool. Yeah. So today you're in the hot seat.

I am, yeah.

And we're gonna be really focused on something that you've done consistently over the last 2 years. So we're going to treat this as a bit of a building a market from scratch masterclass. And the way that you do, uh, how you do your business, I think people are gonna find really interesting, but most of all, I'm gonna be able to learn a lot from. So really excited to go through this with you. And we've got a couple of sections that we're going to go through, and we might end up talking about a few other bits, but we're going to really start with the foundational stuff, which is market mapping. How does Adam think about that? Why is it so important? Um, then we're going to get into the, the detail of actual prospecting, because I know you've mapped this entire process out. Then we have discovery and these sales meetings, conversations, how we approach those. And then we've got delivery and client retention. How do we go about that? At Zenopi, you have a very committed model that isn't 360. It's, uh, split into very specific roles, which we're going to talk about. So how does Adam think about, uh, that model? You've got your own team, um, so obviously it's set up in that way. And then along the way, we might, you know, have you share some challenges, learnings, but also how you've got better at coaching, getting the most out of your team. As well. So we've got quite a number of things here that we're gonna go through. To give everyone some immediate context, let me know if I get any of this wrong, but what I love about this story is you started in recruitment early, right? You started as an apprentice. You've now been in the industry for, um, over 4 years, um, and a couple of highlights here which you should be super, super proud of, um, really from year 3 to year 4, you've been really focused on building out specifically biz development functions for Zenopa. In year 3, after you spent time resourcing, um, learning market mapping, the recruitment process, running your own recruitment desk, year 3 you really focus on this, this sales side. Um, you help run the UK and a bit of EU, right, in terms of building that out, build the BD function for that. BD function, sorry. And then for the last year you've been entirely focused on the US piece, right?

Correct.

So some highlights, within that which I think are really cool is throughout your time as an OP, you've won over 100 accounts across UK, EU, US. Accounts being clients, prospects you sign terms with.

Yeah, correct. Right.

Um, and then within this as well, in, in the first year of this US focus, you generated $1 million, uh, dollars in new business. Yeah, that, that's unreal. And right now you've got 4 core people in your team. Yep. That you're coaching, that you're supporting, that you're helping, um, progress their careers. You're literally— you're just telling me before we started this, you've got your WeWork in Charlotte.

Yeah.

You're in the process of getting over there, taking the team over there, which is really exciting. And then as part of this team as well, you've got, um, some people that also do the UK and EU, uh, markets on the delivery side that are supporting your team as well.

Yeah. And that transitional period, we brought some people over to help with the job fire.

Love it. So there's a few bits that we've got to cover. That's sort of a bit around you and I guess the highlight reel. Um, let's start with market mapping. I guess just talk to us a bit about your other perspective on like why this is important, because we— you, you would have heard this phrase a lot, right? So what— why is market mapping so important and why does it start at this level, the foundational level? If we want to build out a market from scratch, we have to start with market mapping and take it seriously.

Well, the way I see a market, the market map is your North Star with everything that you do. And I think that the majority of people, when they go through a market mapping process, don't invest the appropriate amount of time to get it 100% right. So what they might do is they might look at some conference lists, they might do the odd LinkedIn search, that kind of thing. But unless you have a comprehensive view of every business who, within that ICP, who high is that candidate profile from the blue chips to the one-man bands in that area. You haven't got a clear view of that market. Once you have a market and you know the size of the businesses in that space, you can then start to segment that market by size of business, size of the ICP, and then that will dictate the way that you go about your BD process depending on the size of those clients. So what you can also do from that is you can then, especially if you know your average fee, and you know how many hires to make per year, per size of client within that ICP, and you know how many clients you're going to retain on an annual basis through a BD process, you can then start to map out how big is my team going to look like in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, and then work backwards from there in terms of actually having a bit more of a sustainable way of growing that space rather than perhaps a more basic view of market mapping where you find some companies in your space, you start to call them without that foundational data to give you a really clear picture of where you're going and why you're going there.

Love it. Okay, really great breakdown there. I guess what might be helpful for people is, because people listen to this, might be listening to this and go, I've got a market map, I've done it right. But you've shown me your market maps and they are extremely thorough and I just think it's really cool the way that you've approached it, and, and it really is— if you do this right, it can almost, which we'll get on to, massively help you sell your services as well, right?

Yeah.

But I guess what might be helpful is if I'm— if me and you are sitting in maybe a bit of a coaching session.

Yeah.

And I had a bit of homework that you gave me, which was to bring you like a minimum viable product as a market map.

Yeah.

What would that minimum viable market map— what do you expect to see on there? For people, um, that, that might be helpful to give people something to work towards as a minimum.

Yeah, if I can find a company that isn't on your list, from a one-man band to a massive blue chip, um, that fits into that market that isn't on your list, it's not done properly. If I can find one, it's not done correctly. That's how you can tell. And the way you can tell if a market map is done appropriately for that size is— and then I explained to you before If you can, let's say you take one candidate in one sub-niche of an industry. So for us, for medical devices and life sciences, we do a lot of field service. So, um, if you can take one candidate and send it to every single client in that market space, every single ICP of that company within that market space, then you have an appropriate market, right? But again, if someone came to me and they showed me a market map and I had to go If I could go on Indeed and find a job that's relevant for that market and you haven't got the right ICPs on that market map, it's not done properly. So you want to get in a position where nobody has to go anywhere except for that list to find every single relevant stakeholder with every— each company within that market space. And if that's not the case, then you got to go back and map it again. Yeah, go back. If I could find one, I send them away and tell them to do it again.

And how, how like, is that just like infinite then? Or like, is there— have you normally found one? Because you've done a few different sub-niches. Is there like a finite— is there normally— if we say our ICP, yeah, just to make that clear, that's an ideal client profile. Yeah, we've agreed that that is— I think we've got here like 20 to 100 employees, it's in your sub-niche, there might be a few other bits in there. Like, is there normally a finite amount of companies that will fit that?

Well, it's just like anything. It's like there's only a finite amount of companies that make chairs.

Yeah, right.

So it's like Doesn't matter what market you're in, there is a finite amount of people who do it. Now, it works better in our market, it's an evergreen because the majority, especially if you're working in devices or life science, um, on equipment, these things take a long time to make, it took a long time to, um, go through processes to be actually being used in those environments. So on the equipment side, there's not a ton of startups, so you can map a market really quite well, especially in devices. If you work in an industry that's like constantly pumped with startup companies, it's a little bit more difficult. Um, but for any standard industry, it's, it's possible to do.

How long, how long would you expect it to take? How long have you found it typically take when you've gone, you know what, I can't go and find another company, they've done that?

Yeah, if you're doing it manually, if you do it the way that we do it, um, for the size of the UK and the sub-niches that we go, it's probably a month. It will take you to do that. And that might sound like a long time. And like, from a 360 perspective, when you've got a bill next month, like, that is a long time. But you really got to extend your timeframe. Like, the point of this, your point is not to get jobs out of that market today. The point is you want to achieve over a 3 to 5 year period, the maximum market share you can of those companies hiring that candidate profile. So as long as you extend your timelines, Spending a month at the start getting it 100% right. So you never have to go on job boards again. You never have to chase leads on LinkedIn. You know, as long as you're speaking consistently to every stakeholder in that space, you'll have 100% coverage of that market space. That's a peace of mind that you need to make sure that A, you're actually covering it appropriately, but B, your BD becomes finite. Now, a lot of people, when they do BD, it seems infinite because there's always more stuff to chase here, always more stuff to chase there. But if you know every stakeholder from every company in that space, then, and you've spoken to all of them, you know, you've, you've covered that as best as, as you can. What it also allows you to do is do a load of tests because like we love cold calling, we do a lot of traditional BD, but there are some great people who do some interesting sort of outbound direct mail methods and that kind of thing. When you have a map of this quality and you know the differential size of companies in the space, you can do really, really strong tests. So you can send let's say some funky thing in the mail, direct, you can see what the return rate is from the corporates, from the SMEs, from the mid-sized companies. And then when you have that data, you can then apply that to the next market that you do. So from a long-term perspective, putting the upfront time and getting that right is crucial, fundamental.

Yeah.

The other thing that happens is, let's just take your chairs example, right? And let's say you're finding every single company that makes chairs. And you, let's say you onboard one of those accounts and they're looking for an engineer who fixes chairs. Well, guess where they're going to come from? They're going to come from every other company that you found. So what you just stop doing, like the typical search string, you stop doing the Boolean stuff. You're like, somebody who fixes chairs in this particular market have to work for one of these companies. So it means from like a candidate point of view as well, to get 100% candidate market map. You use that rather than relying on human input on like CVs or LinkedIn profiles to try and find someone. It means again, you have a finite pool on the candidate side, which then means when you then go to clients to deliver on the role, you can say, well, I know for a fact this is every single person from every single company in this market space. Hire one or don't. And you have that level of control and confidence. You can say, go elsewhere if you want to. 'But these are the guys,' right?

So yeah, I think, yeah, you just put together such a compelling sell there on why this is so foundational and the benefits not only on the sales side, but like you just said there, in terms of understanding where you're likely going to get this talent from and where they're going to be. Just before we move on, because I think you nailed that, you said that it could take a month, especially how we do it manually. Just tell us about that. What do you mean manually? Is it like talking to people, do you know what I mean?

No, it's all data-led. Okay, so, um, I won't go into too much detail on it, but essentially the same way that you might do manual market mapping looking through old CVs, you need to look at everyone's experience they've ever had, and that could be thousands and thousands and thousands of candidates to find these people, right? So, um, that's the only real way to do it. It's the same problem as why ChatGPT and other like automation tools like Clay, I don't like any of them. And the reason why is they rely on the data input on the company side. Excuse me?

On the actual human.

Yeah. So let's say like typically speaking, about 25% of the market will be like a small SME and 25% will be a decently sized SME. So that's like 50 to 300 people will be on the upside, 20 to 50 on the low side of those like SME style ideal accounts. Now, a lot of those accounts you're going to get 4 jobs a year out of on the small side, 8 to 12 on the high side. They're going to be really high-value accounts. You fill in those jobs. Now, these people are not going to have all the keywords and data on their system. And anyone can test this. You can go immediately through to— you can build up your market map as I describe, and then you can use the AI tools, you can use Google search, you can do whatever. Try and do it without going through all the candidate profiles. You'll probably get about 60%. But at 60%, it's just not enough to do what we're trying to do from a full market perspective.

Okay, fair. Yeah, because I know I was talking before this, like there's some stuff that Zenope has really invested in that's enabled you to do this, and it's part of your USPs, right? Which is why you said won't be able to go into some detail on that, which I get. But I guess for just to wrap this up, like if I don't have tools like that, yeah, what are we saying? Like what would you be doing? Would— so a lot of that, like thinking in that first month, if I have someone in my team, yeah, and I buy into this idea of like committing to market mapping in that first month, what, like, how would you advise people to do that? Is it speak to as many candidates as possible?

Um, I don't know, like, how, how could we do it if you're a one-person trying to do this? So when I, like, again, if you're 3-6 and you're trying to bill, being honest, you have to do it on, in, in your own time. You can't invest, oh, 4 weeks worth of working hours into doing this because otherwise not make any cash, but, um, start smaller. So within every niche, there's a sub-niche. Within every sub-niche, there's another sub-niche, another one, another one.

Okay.

And then almost like, because markets and industry, it's, it's not pillars, you know, it's more like a, like a gradient, right? So you might be able to find a sub-niche where there's 50 people or 50 companies that just hire someone doing exactly that, but they would hire person A and B as a tier 2 profile. Because they have an adjacent portfolio or an adjacent skill set within that same niche.

Okay.

So you just start there and then slowly build yourself out rather than saying, bloody hell, my market's got 10,000 companies, let's try and do that. If you've got 10,000, you're way off base. If you're in the UK market, you should end up with probably somewhere between 50 to 200 companies within that sub-niche. And again, that's from, you know, your one-man band consultant guy who spun out another company through to your FTSE 500 blue chip stuff.

No, that's a really great explanation. And then, sorry, just final bit on that. How— so if we, we— if I was like, yeah, too big, I'm gonna do what Adam said and just focus on that, like create that 50 to 200 list, how would you do that? Like the actual tools, do you know what I mean? Like, what would— is it— am I just using data tools? Am I using— you would have access to them? LinkedIn?

Yeah. What I would say to someone who's doing this for themselves is, what's the best role you placed that you really know, and it's, and it's a role that you know, um, exactly how to fill? You know the problems, you know the candidate profiles, you know that stuff. I would start with a Boolean search that you know works for that market. It'll pull up all the candidates, then look through every company every candidate's ever worked at, pull those out. You might have a few thousand. Manually look through those, see which ones of those are actually within your market sector, and then that will be comprehensive market map. Because the theory is at least one person from any of these companies will have at least one of those words on their profile. And then as long as you then look at not only their current experience but their previous experiences, you're going to get the full market. Because— does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. Okay, so let's move this on then. We've got— you've given me the task of doing my market map. It's taken me a month. You're happy with what you've seen. Now, because this also ties in with like how you upskill people, right? Yeah. Which we'll touch on because I think it's really interesting. We're now on to then prospecting.

Yeah.

And, and because now what we've done is, like you just said, you don't need to worry about who am I calling, who are my targets. We've got all of that. Yeah. We've done the foundational work which is going to help us, like you said, in the long term. But now I've got people that I know that I need to engage with and always be trying to be having conversations with, get on the radar of.

What—

before we get into how you think about this, why don't you just share how you found over the, the last 2 years, how have you typically worked with people? Because you, you've mainly worked on a contingent basis, right? But your fill rates are really solid.

Yeah.

Is that fair?

That's fair.

Yeah. So that's the context there. And then I think you've already said, but to be clear, you, you are working in, in niche markets as well, right? This isn't— you're not like a generalist by any means.

So all the clients that we work with that I onboard, it's all contingent, exclusive. They're all locked into like essentially delivery process that we have. Everyone has to turn up to weekly teams meeting. Um, we have very hard timelines on when we deliver the market map on the candidate side to them, when we have 5 to 10 profiles where we have for them, what the interview process looks like. So I have sold some upfront fees before, but it's, to be honest with you, I think a lot of the time when people talk about paying upfront from a recruiter standpoint, it's, it's a lot about themselves. And with everything we're prospecting and the mindset around that is it's not about you, it's about them. Like the whole way through, it's not about you. So when it comes to sort of why we work in the way that we work and why we onboard them all exclusively but on a contingent basis is because typically that's the best solution for that client in that sub-niche.

Love it. We're going to break that down a bit more detail because I think there'll be some things that people can take. How do you, because I know you've broken this down. Like, talk me through what are the— if we'd put headings, then we can talk about each one.

Yeah.

So what are the headings around— I've got my target client.

Yeah.

I'm now going to call these people because you're very phone-led.

Yeah.

How do we break this down? Because we went from like opener, problem, menu, all that bit. How would you break it down? What the headings? Then we'll get into it.

Before we go through that, which is important, there's one piece before that because you can break down the call, but the most important piece beforehand is the mindset piece.

Okay.

Yeah, you have to go into that prospecting session knowing that these people have problems and you can fix them. If you don't know that within your heart and you don't really believe you can do that, it's gonna come through in how you speak to them. It's gonna come through in your tone of voice. It's gonna come through the way in which they treat you and the way in which you allow them to treat you. So throughout that entire piece before you go in, you can't go in thinking, oh my God, I'm bothering these people. It's like, no, I know this market like the back of my hand. I know every company in this market. I know every single candidate in this market. I know what problems they have, I know how to fix them. So you're doing them a favor by picking up the phone and calling them and ask them if they have problems you can solve.

Yeah, that's the first piece. Yeah, just on that, just quickly, I appreciate you sharing that because you're totally right.

How—

because I do feel like if people are really committed to getting better at sales, they're very quick to come across this phrase problems, right? Yeah. And I'm a big believer in that as well. I just think where some— I don't know how you feel about this. You've literally trained people from scratch, so you can tell me how you think about this, but I do think sometimes people can get a bit— I don't want to say like confused, but a bit sort of hung up on like, well, I don't— like, what problems do I solve? Or how do I understand what problems I solve? So do you mind just talking a bit about that? Like, maybe one, give us an example of like the problems that you believe you solve for your clients. And two, how can we go about understanding that? And, and so then we can then be confident, you know what I mean? I think some of those can—

people can get a bit confused with that. I think the best way to describe this would be a vacancy isn't really a problem. Okay, so let's take what we do, which is like maintenance engineers, for example. Um, the fact they have a hole in their team in the Great Lakes region isn't a problem. The problem they have is either their engineers across the rest of the country are now flying in, cost them a lot of money, or they can't deliver for their customers. Those machines are down. Like, that's the challenge. Like, the fact they have somebody there, um, to fix that. It's just their current solution. I think probably a more straightforward, you know, the thing of that would be, let's say someone's looking to grow out their business and they might have a vacancy for a salesperson, right? But that's not the actual problem they have. The problem they have is they're trying to grow their business. Now they could do that by hiring a salesperson, or they could do that by hiring a marketing person, or they could do that by outsourcing it to, you know what I mean? There's a variety of solutions they have. So the vacancy is just like an indicator of a wider business problem. So if you know your market inside and out, which you should do if you go through the process that I described at the start and you're working just in that small niche, when you see, let's say they have a gap in their team in one particular, you know, team within their business, you'll know, well, that means person X is having to do Y and so on and so forth. So I think when it comes to the business problem that you're actually trying to fix, you need to have an understanding of why are they trying to fill that role in the first place. Like, what's actually going on on a business level as to why they're trying to fill it with a person? Because a person is just a solution. Like, they could be trying to hire an SDR, but another solution is an AI SDR, right? So I don't— not that I'm a big fan of AI SDRs, but does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I think— yeah, no, you're completely right, because the best recruiters that I meet do have— and what we're talking about here is like commercial acumen and actually thinking about the wider picture. We're not just thinking about the job briefing and the vacancy. Like, we're not just focusing on that. We're trying to actually understand, okay, what happens if we don't hire this person? What's happening right now in the business because this person isn't in seat or whatever? But that's what you're saying, right?

Yeah. And also from a delivery pers— everything you do on a business development, uh, side has to make delivery easier. That's the whole point. So if, let's say you go through that process and you don't ask those questions about why they have a hole in the business, And they just say, I want this, this, this candidate with all this experience in this space. The delivery team haven't got half a chance of finding that person. But if you go there and you're like, well, I know you have a challenge in this region. And the reason you have that challenge is because someone's left with loads of experience and you haven't got the knowledge there. Well, a solution could be, why don't you send some more junior people to a different site, train them up over 6 months and then import them. That's a more cost-effective way of doing it.

So.

I think when it comes to why you do problem-based prospecting and why it's always the focus is, A, it gives you an opportunity to offer alternative solutions, even from a staffing perspective, that will actually make your life easier, but also the best outcome for that particular client. But also, if they haven't actually got a genuine problem, they sure as hell aren't going to pay you to fix it, fundamentally, and they won't continue to do so. So if you're looking to onboard accounts rather than onboarding jobs, finding businesses that genuinely have issues that you can fix is the way to do that. That rather than trying to slap a plaster and chuck someone in a post.

Yeah, and I do think— I'm sure you've found this, then, if you've got anything to compare it to— but I do generally believe that if you approach it in this way, it gives you an edge and a competitive advantage against, like, your peers, most likely, because they're speaking to people about recruitment and you'll speak to them about their problems, and you're speaking their language, and you're showing them that you know them and you understand, or at least you know, going in there going, have you got these problems? I know other people like you have them.

Yeah.

Um, is it something you're motivated to fix, or is it something that you do need to be fixed? If you don't, then I'm not— I don't need to help you right now, you know, I can't help you. But I do also think having this approach and the way that you approach this can give you an edge as well, is how I view it.

Yeah. And you, you can tell when someone's done it in a certain market for a while, because as soon as you're— and we'll go through it in a minute— but as soon as you're ringing through your problem menu, you just get yes, yes, and yes. Anytime you speak about it from the client or the prospect's perspective, um, you should be like a fly on the wall. They should be like, was this guy sitting in my meeting yesterday? Like, that needs to be the level that you're at. And the only way that you get there is by asking all those people in that same market space over extended period of time exactly what those challenges are, how they're trying to fix them.

Yeah, yeah, love it. Now I'm glad you brought that up first. So we've got that, we understand our problems, yeah, we've got a target list. We've got some numbers hopefully that we can call.

Yeah.

What are we saying? How do you break this down with your colleagues?

So the purpose of the call is you're turning a suspect into a prospect. So a suspect is someone you have on your market map list. You think they have problems, but you don't know.

Yeah.

So the whole purpose of this call is figuring out, does this person have these problems? Is it causing enough of an impact? Do they actually want to get it fixed? And if that's the case, then you book the meeting. So this is broken down into the opener. Problem, impact, is it worth solving, book the meeting.

Lovely.

Now we have scripts for that which are good for junior people, but what you'll find is that's the 5-step framework, and as people develop their skills at prospecting, they'll start to change it for their own language. So there's loads of openers. Let's start with that. So there's classic, like, this is a cold call style opener. There's hi, how are you? There's like, there's a million openers that you can use. The most important thing about the opener is it's comfortable for you because the only reason why you're doing that opener is so you can deliver the problems. How you get to the problems isn't relevant. I don't care if you, you know, have some crazy, like, you better get your jacket on, this is a cold call style opener. I don't care. Like, it doesn't really matter as long as you get through to them saying yes and giving you time to give them the, uh, the problem menu, then it's fine.

That's, that's all that matters. Yeah, it's very, very well highlighted. I don't know how you feel about this, but something that sometimes can be missed unless you do the reps and you consume certain content online is sometimes what, um, was a bit of a hurdle for me that might be helpful for people is you might be like, right, I've got my opener, it's a permission-based opener, see a lot of these online or whatever, I'm going to use that. Um, what might help you if you are struggling to go from someone picks up, I do the opener, and my conversion from that to the, the next part of the call isn't very good Yeah, sometimes you might get hit straight away with like, Adam, what are you trying to sell me? Or what are you calling about? Yeah, so I like— I've done this a number of times now, and sometimes what helps, which might not be a mystery, is you've got your opener but someone hits you straight away, they're trying to take control of the call. Like, Adam, what are you calling about? What are you trying to sell me? Yeah, is you need to then re-ask it again and just be like, look, um, are you happy if I go through what I wanted to go through in 30 seconds? It's not relevant, then, you know, I don't need to call you again. Is that fair? Yeah, it's just like a bit of a bridge. I just thought I'd share that because sometimes people can hear openers, I've got that, and they, like you just said, the whole purpose of it is to have the opportunity to go through, do you have these problems?

Yeah.

So if you're struggling with that, that part, that's something that helped me is like just like having a bridge.

Yeah, from that, I would say like when you're looking at, first of all, the whole cold call, you get about between, depending how good you are, you'll get between sort of 10 to 20% of them meet you as long as you've done your market mapping correctly and your problems are correct and all that kind of stuff. You're going to get some of them to tell you to go away, but it doesn't matter. Like, if you've done thousands of cold calls, you know the conversion rates. So it— as soon as you do the volume, you stop worrying about it. Does that make sense? So anyone who's basically being hit by a wall with the opener, first of all, have someone listen to your call, because most of the time when people struggle to get through openers, is confidence and tone.

Tone.

You can basically say anything. Yeah, to be honest, as long as you say it and you say it with a smile, right? And it's like, you know, how often do you get calls from an estate agent or something? Or let's say you're getting your house done or something's happening and your plumber's going to call you, you don't know his number, he'll say, oh, hi, this is Brian.

Like, you don't go, oh yeah, so much of it is how you say it.

Yeah, so it's like, it's very rare that you put the phone down unless you can hear straight away it's a sales call. And I think that's also why if you go into a prospecting call thinking it's a sales call, then you're going to go straight into sales mode and talk about yourself rather than talking about them and the tone will change and that type of thing. So I think if your mindset's correct going into the call, then most of your issues with the opener will be gone.

So we get to the next part. Talk to us a bit about this. You called it a problem menu.

Yeah, exactly. So in each of your market sectors, you're going to have, there'll be core problems. Us, it's really obvious. Like us is, do they have the right experience on that particular portfolio? Will they travel? And then package. So normally, like, um, the portfolio knowledge or whatever sector you're in, like that particular niche knowledge will be an issue. Price is always going to be an issue from a package perspective. And it's good if you know your market really well to throw something in that only somebody in your market would know. So for example, if I was going to be calling like SMEs in the imaging market, let's say they're sales and service businesses, I know for a fact they service Siemens and GE MRI and CT machines. So it's like, you struggle finding that experience. Like, you haven't told them anything about you. You'd ask them a question, but the nature of the question and the way that it's phrased and what you say tells them straight away, you know what you're talking about. So as long as your problems are real problems that you know they have, which if you know your market, you should know those. And you deliver them with confidence, then most of the time, or at least half the time, they'll say, I recognize that one.

Yeah. How do you— how do you— after you've given them the problems, how do you normally frame it? Do you normally— do you go with the, like, now you're probably going to tell me that you don't run into any of these issues?

I used to do that. I always— I change it quite frequently. So it really depends on your tone, because, like, if you have a bit of a cheeky tone about you, like, you can quite easily say I bet you're going to tell me none of that applies to you. And they'll be like, actually, you know what they do. But if you say that in perhaps a little bit more of a dull tone, it won't land so well. So for some of the, for Alex, the guy I work with, we changed it to which one of those is causing you the most headache?

Nice.

So it really depends on like the way you deliver the close of the problem menu will impact which phrase works best for you. And that's just trial and error. And it's having someone who has listened to thousands of cold calls to listen to him, but actually, you know, tweak that and try that again and then improve it.

And how do you like to frame it up before the problem menu? Do you normally go in with like, I typically speak to so-and-so, insert job title, that keep telling me they're running into one of three problems or a couple of problems, one this, two this?

I think it really, again, it all depends on tone. So if you have a little bit more of a curious tone, that works really well. But if you're just going in straight away, like super direct, you're like, I know you have these 3 problems and you sound direct and you're like, I've spoken to this guy and he name drops someone and I say, I know you have one of these 3, which one is it? Like for some ways of delivering that, the level of confidence, especially if in your problem menu you've got some really niche knowledge-based questions in there. You know, like we always say, you don't show you know what you're talking about by telling about it, you'd show it by asking informed questions. If that's there within your problem menu and you're that direct and your problems are correct, you have them in the palm of your hand from, from dot, right?

So, so if I say, Adam, the one that's called like— yeah, like you're definitely speaking my, uh, you understand my world, whatever I might say. Yeah, but it's the second problem that you said that's really my issue.

It's the traveling piece.

It's a traveling piece. What, like, how do I then transition that? Like, the goal is that they recognize one of those problems, right?

Yeah.

If they recognize one of those problems, what are you then coaching me to do on the next part of that call?

So the next part of the problem— they found a problem, expand it.

Okay.

So it's pretty obvious, like, tell me exactly how long it's been an issue for. Okay. Tell me exactly how long you've been trying to fix it. Give me more details. So ask them for more and more details on that, on that particular problem. Ask them for examples. Of that problem. So you want them to talk about it in as much detail as possible by you asking probing questions. So if it was a traveling piece, for example, I might say, well, tell me exactly what you mean by finding someone high travel. And they might say nationwide travel, for example. You might say, well, why is that? How long has that been an issue for you? Or what have you done so far to try and fix it, etc., etc.? So you just delve more into that problem, and you want to expand the problem until it's as big as you can possibly get it. Mm-hmm.

Right.

And then you have a huge problem. Let's say by the end of that conversation, let's say it takes 2 or 3 minutes, the guy's like, I can't find anyone to do nationwide travel. I've been trying to do it for 12 months and the rest of my team's covering the country. It's costing me a bomb and they're all going to leave. That's a big problem.

Yeah.

Right. The next thing that you do, the lead part might be a bit about the next one, but then it's impact. So it's like, what's the impact to you? What's the impact to your customers? What's the impact to the wider business? And again, when you go through those, it's all about stretching out the impacts of that. So the financial impact, the personal impacts. So the financial impact, of course, is like, well, how much that costing you, right? The personal impact, how much of your time are you spending on the road doing this? So you want to make sure the problem's as big as it can be, the impact's as big as it can be. So the guy or girl has just spent the last 10 minutes crying down the phone at you, telling you every single problem they have, how it's impacted them and all those challenges. And then that tees you up really nicely after you ask them what you tried to do about it so far and nothing's worked, to then take all of those things because you're making notes during this and wrap up the problem and the impact of the problem in a nice little bow. And you say, summarize it, summarize it. You told me you have these problems going on for this long. You've tried this, this has not worked. It's causing you a massive headache, it's costing you a lot of money. If I told you I could fix this, is it worth fixing? And then they will say, oh, I mean, clearly after 10 minutes of them telling you how much of a pain in the ass it is, they'll tell you, yeah, it's worth fixing. And only after they've told you it's worth fixing do you then book time. And I think that step there is the step that most people miss.

The summary.

Oh yeah, 100%. And then asking them, is it worth fixing? Because like what a lot of junior BD people will do is they'll get super excited. They're like, I've been smashing the phones, I finally got through. My menu's down. I found a guy, he's in massive pain. I know I can fix his problem. You're like, oh, meet me, you know, and they start kind of pulling back. You have to qualify first if it's worth fixing. So essentially through every step from the opener to booking the meeting, you want it to be as low friction as possible. And adding that extra step in there between asking for the, um, you know, whether it's a problem for them and booking the meeting. Asking them if all of that is worth fixing, that little baby step makes that final step a lot easier.

Yeah, that's really good insight. So rather than maybe you might— if you do a lot of cold calling, you might end your calls on this close part to be like, would— is it a bad idea to explore further on a call to see if we can fix this for you? You're saying what you found to be really effective is like, if I can fix this problem, um, for you, do you think it's worth fixing? Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's a good insight.

And I think, I think I When you book meetings, you want to book qualified meetings. So what typically happens again with newer people in the BD process is, because it takes a lot of practice to do all this over a long period of time, and they'll get to the end and then they'll just— whether the prospects really has the issue or not, the suspect in this case really has, um, the issue, um, they'll say, well, is it worth 10 minutes if I showed you all of this stuff? Like, you don't want someone who we're going to give you 10 minutes like they've just spent the last, you know, 10 or 15 minutes on the phone with you telling you about how much pain they're in. They will spend half an hour with you properly. And if they're not willing to spend half an hour with you after telling you exactly what a pain in the ass it is, they're probably not going to pay you to fix it either. So it's really important that when you go through these steps, you're not just trying to book meetings for the sake of booking meetings. You want to book meetings with people who actually have issues, that actually want to fix them. Um, so then when you go in, you can get way higher conversions on your discos.

Where— look, you've been— you spent a lot of time listening to your team's cold calls, coaching. Where— you were talking about it there, but like, where would you say often you're seeing people fall short, or like common hurdles on this that might be interesting to share? Like, because there's a lot that you covered there. Um, where have you often found people really struggle the most, or where do often people go wrong?

There's two, there's the kind of three major points. So what typically happens if they say no to, I've not got any of those three problems, they start panicking and they're like, I don't know what to do now, right? So, um, that's a really cool one. So, um, from there, like, if you know your market really well, you know they have at least one of those problems, you can either do it one of two ways. You can be kind of a dick about it and be like, well, I know you have one of these ones, which one is it?

Yeah.

Like, you know, if you really know it really well, um, now if you're not so confident, you can say, okay, do you have any different challenges or different problems? Let's say you're trying to build a market the first time and don't really know it. Or a nice soft one if you're trying to do some information gathering, it's like, oh, okay, that's interesting. The last 5 guys in X market I spoke to said they had these. What are you doing differently?

Yeah, yeah.

And then that would be my natural one. But like That's typically if you need to get information for a market. Most of the time, if you've been BDing the same market for a long period of time and they tell you no and you know it's a fob off, you just gotta go for it.

Just not take that initial no straight away. Okay, fair. So when you maybe put on the spot, well, no, Adam, I don't have any of those. Sometimes people might have to have a few of those instances to then better handle that next time where people can go wrong. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, like, sometimes you can laugh Like, yeah, because again, if you really know your market, and that's why it comes down to the North Star market, if you really know what's going on, you know everyone has these same challenges. Someone tells you they don't, you know they're not being honest.

Yeah, right. Okay, so that's the first one.

That's the first one. I'd say the second one is jumping from problem to is it worth solving too quickly, right?

So they might expanding and—

yeah, you've got to do way more expanding on it because— and the other thing is like not clarifying exactly what that issue is. So for example, um, they might say, let's say, um, the core problem they have is finding people with industry experience is their challenge. Someone with new to cold calling might say, what if I told you I could find people with industry experience? It's just too vague. Like, you need to spend more time digging into what exactly do you mean by that? Like, what have you actually done to find that kind of person? Right. So spending the time to really delve down as deep as you possibly can as to what exactly that issue is and then spending the time on the impact. If you haven't done that, the prospect's only been on the phone for like 2 or 3 minutes. Like they haven't really spoken about it. It's a cold call. It's out of nowhere. Their mind's elsewhere. Unless you give them the time to talk about their issue and talk about the impact of their issue, they're not going to be emotionally bought in enough to actually warrant saying, you know what, that's worth fixing. So Spending the appropriate amount of time digging into exactly what the issue is, exactly what they tried to do to fix it, and exactly the impacts. That's probably the second biggest one. And the third biggest one is the wrap-up at the end and saying, is it actually worth fixing?

Okay.

That piece there is the final hurdle. I think those three things are by far the most common issues that I will see in other people.

So bits that if you're listening, maybe you could work on. Just curious, then, before we move on on that second part, I don't know if this has been helpful for your team, or you might not approach it this way, but whenever— because I'm not surprised that you said that, like, it is a real skill getting them to expand and get into the impact. I've often found the best way to do that for me personally is before maybe I'm asking them to break it down a bit further, like framing up with like, do you mind if I ask you a direct question about that? Or do you mind if I ask you to explain that and go for it in a bit more detail? Or Just framing up that, because obviously, look, you've probably listened to way more than I have, but like you said, it's about them. You've called them out of the blue. You obviously understand them because you've gone through the problems, but you know, sometimes it can be difficult to get that information. So you don't want to call people up and then them feel like it's just a complete one-way interview, do you know what I mean? You're just peppering loads of questions.

Yeah.

So I've just found to help from that second point that some people might use is like, if you're struggling to get to like the root cause or get to the emotional part, um, with that one question, following up with a framed question of like, Adam, do you mind if I just ask you a direct question about what you just said there? Has often helped me. I don't know how you found that.

Yeah, I think like for especially difficult suspects, um, when you're going through the prospecting process is, um, what I typically do is you can almost tell them a short story. So let's say they told you they have the issue of the traveling piece, you're trying to go through impact, that is not giving it to you. You can say, um, well, I spoke to X person who's a manager here, they had that same problem, it was causing this impact. Is that causing you the same impact? Yeah, because then, because like a lot of the time they're like, actually, that is the issue that I have. And because you've just told them there's someone else who has the same issue, they're a little bit more inclined to be open with you about it. Even on a cold call. So that's not the ideal situation, but if they're being cagey, and of course it's a cold call, people are going to be cagey sometimes, telling them about other circumstances very, very briefly, very succinctly. It doesn't take a lot of cold call time about the impact it's had to a different company. Often makes them more inclined to tell you what they're trying to do.

Yeah, nice. That's a really good insight. Okay, let's move this on to the, the next phase, which is you booked a meeting, we're having a discovery. Just before we do, really quickly, two things. One, if I'm in your team and my, my core goal is to book meetings, and one of the main channels that I'm doing that on is, is calling.

Yeah.

What does good look like in terms of if I have a day And I've had maybe, I don't know how you do it, 2 sprints in that day on the cold calling. We've got the foundational market map, all that. If you look at my numbers and you go, that was great versus not good enough.

Yeah.

What's the difference? What are the numbers you expect to see on the call-wise?

So we're not super high volume. So they would do, let's say, 40 dials would be about 10 connects with the right data. By the way, if you're doing this cold calling thing, like by great data. The data is terrible.

Yeah.

Um, so they should get about a 25% pickup rate. They should have about 10 conversations but 1 meeting in per day from that, from an ICP.

So good for you, looks like 40 calls because they're targeted, right?

Yeah, but we— so we don't target on dial-outs.

Okay.

We're targeting actually, have you spoken to the guy?

So connected.

Yeah, exactly. So a good day would be 10.

10 connects.

Yeah.

10 conversations, people picked up, and then you go through this.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

And then the second part, um, you just mentioned it there, but I've had quite a lot of people share with me that they haven't had a whole lot of success cold calling people in the US.

Rubbish. Complete rubbish.

Uh, fair.

It makes— in fact, it's easier.

Okay.

The data is way easier to get hold of.

Okay.

So in the UK, we'll probably have like 40% of our ICP's phone numbers. It's more like 95% in America. Okay, you've got everyone's phone number really quite easily.

Pickup rates you found to be similar?

Very, very similar.

Okay, fair.

As long as you get your systems right.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, don't try and call from an 07 number, it's not going to work. Like, buy a proper American phone and do it properly, or don't bother.

Yeah, that's, that's key. How would you describe— because this isn't common practice, right? How would you describe if me and you both work in recruitment, we met up as mates, we're in the pub chatting about recruitment.

Yeah.

And you're telling me about how you do things. How would you describe this discovery meeting? Like, how— like, what's the point in it? What's the purpose of it? Just tell us about that, because not everyone has that.

Yeah. So I'll frame this this way. The point of the prospecting phase of that call is to turn a suspect into a prospect. So someone who you think has a problem, i.e., a suspect, now they're a prospect who you know has a problem. The point of that discovery call is working out, is this problem something they actually want to fix? You can actually help them fix, and will they pay for it to be fixed? That's the point of the call. Okay, so when you go through these discovery calls, much like on the cold call, any kind of client outreach, like, none of it should be about you at this point. They probably shouldn't even know your name. Like, if you don't cold call properly, you don't say who you are, No, no, none of that. They see your name on the email so that just gives you a bit of framework in terms of— You haven't told them anything about you yet.

Mm-hmm.

You join that meeting. The purpose of that meeting again is to get them to open up, talk about it much like on a cold call but in more detail with a problem and that particular impact, and then find out if you can fix it. So the way that you do that is really straightforward. The biggest mistake everyone makes when they start on Discos is not taking control.

Again at the beginning?

Yeah, it's a mindset thing. This is your meeting. They're the one with the problem, not you. You're there with the solution.

It's the best way to do that is agenda setting. This is how I normally like to run these. Let me know if you want to do anything.

How I like to run this, this is how it's going to run. Okay, yeah, we have half an hour today. Yeah, I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm not going to pitch deck. I want to find out about you. I want— and I've worked with this particular business, or you might want to say that's given a bit of framework and context, but it's like, tell me exactly, you mentioned these 3 challenges, tell me exactly about those challenges again. And they'll run through them again. And you run through much similar to on a cold call where you go through problem and impact. You just do that but way more in depth.

Okay.

So much like on a cold call, you go problem, impact, is it worth solving, wrap it in a bow, you know, book a meeting. It's the same thing. So it's problem, it's impact, what we've done about it so far to fix it, how much is it costing them, all that kind of stuff. Then you summarize again for them, wrap it all in a nice little bow and say, you've told me all this stuff. Let me show you how you fix it. And then for the last 5-10 minutes of that call, you show them exactly how you fix only the problem they spoke about. Like, one of the big problems or challenges that new BD people have with client meetings is they start selling stuff the client just couldn't give a toss about, right? Like, the only thing you should talk about in that meeting are exactly the issues they're speaking about. So that could be whether it's candidate access or finding people with the, the right package, right? Or if it's trying to keep their staff because they lose them each 6 months, whatever it is that they spoke about. And that's the impact they spoke about. And that's what they're really nagging. That's what you solve at the end. You don't solve it by saying we worked in industry for 25 years, blah, blah, blah, because they don't give a toss. Like they've only just spoken about their, their challenges themselves. So I think for that discovery process, you shouldn't even, you shouldn't even be anywhere near fees. You shouldn't be talking about yourself at all. You should just be asking really good probing questions that are very specific to that industry, to that particular prospect, to get them to uncover every single challenge they're having, exactly how they're trying to fix it right now, how long it's been going on for, and if they actually want to get it fixed. So that's typically how you'd run that.

And how do you close out that then once you've been like, okay, you've done the summary, this is, um, yeah, we can fix this for you, but then what's the ask at the end? Because I'm assuming What are you getting? You're talking about, like, right, so work this way together.

So, so you've asked them if it's worth— you summarized it, their challenge. You then show them how you'd fix it. Hopefully you have some examples. Yeah, as how you'd fix it. Once that's done, you ask them, will this fix your problem or not? Okay, just ask them straight up, this will fix your problem. Is this going to help you or not?

Right.

And if they say yes, you know, okay, great. Now we go through commitment. And this is where you do things like saying, this is going to be more expensive than you're used to. This is going to take more of your time than you're used to. You're going to see me on a weekly basis until this is done. Not, you know, these types of things. It's like you're prefacing everything, as in like the— you almost—

yeah, yeah.

You're saying, this is what's going to happen. Are you okay with that? Right. And then they say yes or no. And then if they say that's great, Well, that's done. These are our fees. This is this. When you want to book in the briefing call? And that's that. Yeah, really straightforward. Like, the pitching part of that process should take 5 minutes. Yeah, because you're only pitching against that particular challenge.

Yeah.

When it comes to— and again, we're talking about these SME-style businesses, so you can make decisions quite quickly. You can get decisions like that as long as you're with the right stakeholder.

Yeah. And you've seen a 30-50% success rate on these calls?

As long as— yeah, so we were at 50%. Our boys have been booking in some less qualified discos, dropped down to 30%. So that's like, it's still, still all right, you know, one-third.

Yeah, between that, between that 30% and 50%, mate, if you were to compare that to people, how many client meetings they're having to like working with, it'd be interesting. But you've had that up to 50% before. Yeah. And then you've just said again, in the way that you deliver it, we charge 25% and offer a 6-month guarantee. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah. When you do, and you, again, you can tell the way that you're talking about it, how you say it is important.

It's all about how you say it. Yeah, like, I've never discounted— I just don't do it, I don't believe in it. Um, and if you've gone through this process appropriately and they actually have a problem and you can actually fix it, why would they say no?

No, you're right. Tell us about— because, because again, I, I love this, and there'll be parts that maybe some people are doing this or not. You just mentioned it there. So I've gone, I've just, you've just taken me through that. I'm a prospect and then I've gone, all sounds good, excited to get cracking. We booking a job briefing call. Just tell us about, you already mentioned it earlier, but the process that you've built around this in terms of going from job briefing call to being filled while you've got some really solid fill rates. Because I think that this is class, the way you do this. So tell us about the important bits there.

Yeah, so in terms of when the account comes in, it then gets handed over to the team. So that'll be a Teams call. Be a kickoff call. So that will have, uh, the BD person in it. So in this case, me. It will have probably an account manager or a more seasoned person, and then probably a delivery person. So it'll be 3 of us on the call and 1 or 2 of them, depending how many people are relevant for that particular brief. We'll go through a consultation process. So again, because we spoke about what actual issue they're trying to fix in that consultation to deliver, they might say 'Uh, we need someone like this,' and we'll say, 'Well, here's the market map.' Go back into the North Star market I spoke about earlier. It's like, 'That person doesn't exist in that region. How about you do this and this instead?' So you use that consultation call to basically make sure you do not come off that call until you are 100% positive you can find that person for that business, right? So that's the point of that particular call. And then from then, you book in weekly Teams calls with that client every single week. Um, I want onto like a basically a timeline of when you can get candidates and that kind of thing. They don't agree to that, we don't take on the job. They don't turn up to the briefing call, to the weekly calls, we stop working the job. So it's super important that, and this again comes back to when you onboard the accounts, when you go through this process and they're on your call and you took control from day one and you took control in terms of how the fees work, you show them exactly how the, uh, the filling process works, you take control of the consultation when the job first comes in. The only interaction that clients have with you is you running the process appropriately. It gives them a level of confidence in what you're doing, and it means they're more committed to turning up to your meetings. What I would say though, if you're looking to do this for yourself, is you better bloody fill the job. You have to deliver. You have to deliver on time. It has to be quick. It has to be quality. Because if you're asking for higher fees, you're asking for that level of commitment. Like, the delivery process has to fulfill that to a high standard because it's really quite easy. You can have all the bravado in the world up front, you've got to deliver, but on the back end, if you mess it up, you're in a real pickle.

What, what's typically been from the time that you've always worked towards, from job briefing to like, yeah, what does good look like? What are you always aiming for? Like, the key milestones there?

So it depends on the region because that will impact how much data we have.

Okay.

on the candidate side. Um, but typically it'd be, you know, one week mapping, one week, um, week, week, week two, sorry, when they have the candidates. The interviews typically take two weeks, so it should be four weeks from job in to accept.

Really? Yeah. Nice.

And there's no reason why that can't happen. And the only reason why these might go off the rails would be if a client stops showing up to meetings.

Yeah.

Right. But that's why throughout the BD process, why it's so important, because if you get that commitment from the start and they know that's what they're signing up for, and they know they're paying higher fees because they're going through this extensive process, then they meet 3 people in that briefing call. Like, they have— yeah, I mean, there's a lot of weight behind that. And then I've shown you— we won't go into loads of detail, but I showed you the, um, the candidate maps we have and all that kind of stuff, like, and the, uh, the data we had to back up the filling process of those particular jobs. With that, you had that confidence in the client. There's no reason why they wouldn't Show up, and again, it's a real issue they're trying to fix.

What's like typical agenda on those weekly calls typically?

So week 1 would be, you told us you want to find this person, we told you this was available, this is actually what's available in that market space, right? That's week 1. Week 2 is, these are the candidates, you sell the candidates on the call. I typically won't send a CV— well, I tell the team, you don't send a CV to the client until you're on the call.

You speak them through it?

You speak every single candidate, you talk through with them.

Okay.

Some of the time we'll do a recorded interview. And send that as well, depending on how busy that particular client is, right, to make sure the process is on time. And then the next ones are pretty much interview feedback.

Yeah. What, um, you know, you said if someone doesn't show up to one of those, you stop working the job. How do you, how do you deliver that in a way that doesn't then burn bridges?

Well, it's relatively straightforward. So right from the first meeting, you send them a document that outlines the whole process.

Yeah.

And you're like, so And I'll be really honest with them because we spend a lot of time on our vacancies. I'll tell them, it's like, if I'm paying someone 2 working weeks to fill your job, you're going to show up for a half an hour meeting.

And if you don't?

We don't fill your job then. It's like, okay, there you go.

It's like, so if I show up to week 1, then I don't show up to week 2, how are you delivering that to me? Because clearly I had some of the things.

But if they have the challenges, right, from— and that's why I went through that particular process— and they show up to week 1 and we went through that we wouldn't send them to the candidates until they show up to week 2.

Right.

So it's like you either fill it yourself, in which case it's pointless taking our time anywhere on that particular role, um, or you need to rebook it.

Okay.

But you won't get any candidates to interview until you talk to us.

Yeah, fair.

But again, like, it's kind of rare. It happens occasionally, mostly with very small companies. Um, but most of the time, like, if you've taken someone all the way through this, like, you've really got the data to back it up, you've got really great case studies, You know what you're talking about. You've got 3 or 4 people delivering on this job for them. You're giving them that much time.

Fairly foolproof.

It's like, it's fairly foolproof on that side. Yeah.

What does— you've done this a lot now, right? And I'm sure this part of the year, as we're having this conversation, you'll be looking at the data even more, thinking about where you can get this US division to. What does a good month look like? You know, we've got— we've spoken about what does good calling look like, but now when we think about meetings, jobs on, accounts on, Yeah, what, what kind of— what does a good month look like if we follow this process, we get this dialed? I'm really trying to improve my sales process and implement some of the things that I've learned from this conversation. What does good look like?

If you're doing full-time BD at a competent level, you should get 4 new accounts a month.

4 new accounts a month?

Yeah, each of those accounts, as long as you're on your ICP correctly, again, in your North Star market map, um, each of them should hire between 4 to 8 times a year. So You should be able to build a solid desk in 2 to 3 months.

4, okay, 4 accounts. How many discovery meetings you reckon we're having? What is a good month for discovery?

So if you're doing full-time BD, it'll be between 2 or 3 a week. On a really good week, it'd be 4. But 2 or 3 really well-qualified meetings from companies within that market map.

Love it. Let's talk about, because you've mentioned it in different ways, this way that you've got the team set up, because not everyone has it set up this way. So do you mind just telling us a bit about this? Because I think this is really cool. Have you— how, um, do you know to have this set up? Because you've got— you've built out this BD team, right? So explain to us what that means. So like, let's just break this down because we've got business development, account management, and delivery. Yeah, exactly. So it's just who's responsible for what, where does responsibility stop? Just tell us a bit about that because I think this is really interesting.

Yeah, I'll start with like perhaps comparing it to a lot of models. Okay, so When you separate BD from account management, you start to get in a position where your best BDers start to avalanche in loads of accounts. What typically happens, let's say you've got a model where you've got sales and delivery, but sales keeps the accounts, right? Which is a lot of models. The challenge is, like, let's say you're a consultant, you're decent at BD, you've been doing it for 2 years, you're now sitting on a pretty nice fat desk.

You're not incentivized to do any more.

So it's a complete waste.

So complacent, but you can get complacent.

Yeah, you get complacent straight away, and it also, um, limits what you think you can do. So when I first started doing BD, I had to hand over the desk that I built, and then when I started doing the American market, I had to hand over all the markets that I built out for the UK stuff. So I got really used to building it out, um, but for us, in order to make sure that we're consistently growing The people who've been on the accounts, hand them off straight away, terms assigned, they're exclusive, join that first job briefing. I now don't get involved until there's an issue.

So BD stops at that first job briefing call.

Yeah. And then back to on the phones, new client, that market space. And that, what that allows you to gain, like, if you're doing a good job, you should do about 10% of the market map you built. You should be working within a year. Like, if you do it properly.

And then account management starts from that job briefing call to when?

Yeah. So until the end of the account to its field. Yeah, well, no, so the account manager is always talking to that account.

Okay, so you have the delivery, so they're incentivized to make sure they work with you 4 to 8 times a year.

Yeah, exactly, because like once they're in and once they go through the first job and they've got a really good feel for the process, the feedback's normally pretty good because like it's quite rare these SMEs get that level of commitment and level of delivery for these jobs. So normally it's quite strong, and then it's the AM's job at that point to do internal business development, I suppose, within that account.

Account development.

Just account development stuff.

What about delivery? Where does that stop for them?

So that's per vacancy, essentially. So they would run the process from the start. They might have a more junior person resourcing on it, but from sourcing the candidates through the system all the way through to job offer, accept on that particular role, joining all the weekly meetings, that type of thing, joining the review call. So after any job we fill, we book in a call to tell us how it's gone and that kind of thing. So they'll do all of that stuff.

So they work really closely with the account managers.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, um, but again, like, so it's when you're looking at staffing in general and you're thinking about like what people are good at, um, it becomes really difficult for someone to do really competent AM and really competent delivery and really focusing on it But if you are able to split them up like this, you're able to acquire lots of accounts, quality accounts, you're able to keep lots of them and you're able to fill lots of their jobs. The only challenge with that is, unlike the 360 model, which has sort of like a beauty in how simple it is, the challenge with this model, though, it works really well. Everything has to work really well, right? Because when there's one—

every part of it has to be—

every part on that has to work really well because one break in that chain, you got a real big problem. Right. So, um, that's been really challenging, making sure you get that right. But once it's right and it's humming, it's like a factory, right? And you can do really, really well with it. Um, but you do spend a lot more time making sure every piece of that puzzle aligns appropriately.

And you may be aware of this, might, might not be. What, what does— because I think you might have to figure this out for your own market— how many accounts per account manager? On average, roughly, what does that look like before maybe service levels drop, or I don't know, what typically an account manager is working towards, do you know?

It really depends on the size of account, because if you're dealing with, like, we have 4 groups of account sizes, so depending on the size of account will depend on how much work you do for it, right? So that would really vary. I think in the UK it's like £1 million worth of business is one full-time job, right, for account manager or something like that, right?

Got you.

It's probably about It'll be more than that.

It's something you have to figure out though.

Yeah, yeah. So it will really depend on the outcomes that we get from what we do. And then when we are over there, um, it becomes a lot more easier in terms of like face-to-face meetings and that kind of thing. So you've got to budget those in and, and work out from a time perspective. But account management really shouldn't take that long. And the reason why is at the end of the day, you're, you're a supplier for that business. Like, if you're dealing with the people you should be dealing with, which are the directors, they are not hanging around waiting for a coffee catch-up. Like, they're doing their job. So if you're doing your job as an account manager, you're doing the minimum amount of appropriate contact to that account to maintain and grow it. Not too little so you lose it, and not too much that you start encroaching on their business, right? And that's a really fine line. I think you'll know it because if you deal with suppliers, Right. There becomes a certain point where it's just too much.

Too much.

And then there's too little where now you're open to other people.

Yeah.

Right. So it's finding that balance where it was appropriate. And then the real skill in my view with the account management is when you have those quarterly meetings or monthly meetings depending on the size of the account, actually talking about stuff they care about. And again, it comes back to that market map. If you're working solely within that market space and you know everything that's going on, all the information from their direct competitors is going to be useful for them to know. If there's a new bonus structure going on somewhere, if a new space is growing faster, if someone's paying better, whatever, you should know that through the market map. That's more useful to tell those guys. Yeah, but it has to be that particular niche to that market sector.

I think it goes hand in hand with your sales process or your filling process as well. But I think if you're really good at account management as well, a really good and simple tactic is you always have the next meeting booked, or, you know, the next time you're speaking to that account. As well. I think that, that, that's crucial. Um, something that whenever I speak to people about this, what they're always trying to figure out the best way to do it— hopefully you don't mind, um, sharing— but like, how do we incentivize this machine? Do you know what I mean? Like, how is that typically done? It might have changed over time, but does the sales team get the majority of the placements done? Do you know what I mean? Because I think that's something that people have to experiment with as well. So how is everyone incentivized?

I won't go into loads of detail, okay, on that. Um, what I would say is if someone's good at BD, they can build their own desk pretty quickly and they can have a resourcer and all that stuff, and they'll get to that position where without this system where they're kind of comfy. Okay, if you're expecting somebody to do nothing but cold outreach non-stop, high quality, bringing in high value accounts, like most of these accounts should be worth $50K plus depending on the size, um, even the smaller ones be around that kind of mark, you have to incentivize them really well to warrant them doing that. Otherwise, they might as well go and start their own business or like whatever if they're that good at BD. So, um, but you have to pay them separately because at the same time as that, what you don't want to happen is, um, you're not incentivizing the account managers and the delivery people because as soon as that jobs come in, that account is in, they have to manage that really, really well.

Yeah.

So, um, I'd say it's, it's about, it's probably 80% on the delivery side. 20%, but then there's a different scheme for the sales piece. But in terms of like, if you look at your billings, yeah, from a delivery perspective, you will still get the majority of that fee for that job.

Yeah, because I know again, this might have taken over a long period of time to figure that out, and every business is different, but you've got this like really broken down and there's an overview, haven't you, like at each stage? And then just curious, because I know this is something also something people think about, do the— does the BD time— do you think the BD time should be incentivized on not only the account the accounts that you bring on and that first job being filled, or jobs being filled, but also are you incentivized for the amount of money that account spends in the first year, or—

Yeah, exactly that.

Okay. Yeah, because that is the other part that I think is you should incentivize. That isn't just about doing the spot business and you're just incentivized to bring on accounts that spend in the short term, but actually are you targeting accounts that could be spending money with us over the next 12 months, 24 months? Yeah, that should be incentivized.

Yeah, it's designed that way.

Yeah, it should be. Yeah, nice. Let's, let's bring this home then around the stuff that you spend a lot of time on now with your team. Um, and I think, you know, everything that we've gone through makes this part easier. It's still hard and takes energy and work in terms of you helping people become competent and really great in these aspects. But I think from my view, as you, as you've got all this broken down, you've got a clear process which a lot of recruitment teams don't, it makes your coaching and how to help people get better a lot easier. Yeah, because there's you've got clear processes. So you're telling me before we started this, like, the normal, like, journey you take people on— tell us about that, because I thought that was interesting, because a lot of your time now is the coaching part, isn't it? And helping people get great at the prospecting, get great at the discovery, get good at these bits. Tell us a bit about if I join your team tomorrow, I'm an apprentice and I'm in the BD team, I'm in Adam's team, what, what are we doing in those early periods? Because I thought it was quite interesting.

Yeah, well, to start with, you won't join the team until you go through the resourcing audit and the recruiting audit, um, for a few reasons. So you need to understand what recruitment is and how that works. In my view, we try to import salespeople, doesn't work very well in my view.

So you try to do that straight to sales versus resourcing?

Yeah, well, yeah, so you have to really get it. And also there's a certain level of fluency within your market that's really useful when you're doing BD, um, I spoke about it in terms of how specific your questioning is around the problems. But if you aren't fluent in your market, your margin for error in sales calls, especially BD calls, is tiny, right? Like if you say something stupid, it's just picked up like that straight away. So without that foundational knowledge within that market space, it becomes a lot more difficult. So let's say you want to do sales, you want to do BD, you've gone through the first 6 months at the business and you want to do that. From there we have a 3-month audit. So month 1 is mapping. So you have a month, you map out a market, you— and all stuff went through earlier. Month 2 is prospecting, as I spoke about earlier, going through all those stages from— a lot of that's call-based, right? We don't ask them to do things like LinkedIn and email and that kind of stuff. We have different systems for that. Um, but at the same time, as I explained to you earlier, one of the biggest challenges people have building out Sales functions is phone first. Yeah. Yeah. So we make sure that they're trained from day one just with the phone. Now, the thing is, if you're going to do that, you've got to make sure they have immensely good projects and ICP lists, amazing data, great phone systems. You've got to make it easy for them to consistently use the phone.

Reduce friction.

Yeah. If you're trying to get someone to be phone first and you're getting a 1% pickup rate, your data is terrible. Like, good luck. So do your job first, set them up for success and be phone first. So with that, month 2 prospecting, essentially it's a theory behind prospecting. They had to book one meeting, they had to talk me through what that looks like. And then month 3 is disco. So again, as I spoke about, they have to book like 10 meetings, they have to attend 10 meetings, go through that process with me or someone else senior in the business watching them. And then once they're through that, audit, which could take anywhere from 3 to 9 months. Only at that point are they then allowed to go away and do their own crack on BD.

And what, having this process, what have you seen so far with the team? Because you've got some pretty cool things you should be proud of. Like, how have you— yeah, some bits that the team have achieved, right, in a fairly short period of time.

Yeah. So there's, there's the most— the coolest thing for me is everyone who goes through that process has the same conversion rates.

In what sense?

In terms of the call to discovery, discovery to account, right? Pretty much within really small variance.

Um, regardless, unpredictable.

That's the whole— that's the whole point. That's— and that's what makes it most exciting, because if you know it's predictable and I know I can coach them to do it, then it's just find the bodies that are good enough to do it, right? And you want to pull through that process. So that's the cool thing. The other thing is, like, within our second year, we onboard, um, I mean, the last 6 months we've onboarded just over £1 million worth of new business, which is a lot from that BD function. So, and again, it's only 2 years old, right? Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's really quite cool to see. Um, and like, from a, from a business perspective, like, it's our job to provide people who work for us with opportunities to do well. If that's through the really strong BD coaching I spoke about, giving them consistent results there and paying them really well for doing cold BD, or from a delivery standpoint, like, you're feeding them really high-value exclusive vacancies they can fill with high-committed clients that they can make great money out of. It's like this whole— what I'm most proud of with the whole system is, A, it works, which is the most important thing, but B, every single person benefits from it. Not just the business, but the BD people, delivery people, everyone does better because they're working within that system.

Love it. So where, if we were to sit down this time next year, where are we going to be, mate? What are we excited about? What are we making happen?

Well, I'm gonna wait for the US government to get my team through first. That's really fun.

Well, that would have happened. Where are we taking this US team?

So I won't go into loads of detail, okay? But I think by next year we'll have at least 4 to 8 more headcount, okay? Um, and then from there I'll reassess because it really depends on, um, how good my 2 new BD guys get, okay? So whether they get to level 4, level 2, that will dictate the amount of accounts that come in, which will then dictate how many hires I make and so on and so forth. So because of the way we have it is really well structured and we know our conversion rates across it, depending on the quality of those guys will depend on the rate of growth.

Yeah.

Now if they turn out to be rock stars, then, you know, yeah, so hopefully you're going to be in the US living the dream. Yeah, with any luck.

So now look, honestly, massive thank you for breaking all of this down for us. I know there'll be, there'll be so many different parts there. That people can take, can use, can implement in their own processes. And like, genuinely, like, really excited to see from afar, you know, where you take this team, the journey that you're going on. Like, it's really cool to see and really appreciate you sharing it with us today. Thank you, Jim.