Raoul Monks Founder and Director at Flume Training and their "Selling in a Crisis" Webinar Series.

Wow, thank you so much and thank you for everyone for taking time to listen to us. I find it quite bizarre that we're here because up until three months ago, this really was not our forte whatsoever. Background as to our business. I started Flume sales training in 2010. My background is at United Business Media and previous versions of that company. And I started the business through sales training out of the belief that sales training should make a difference in terms of results. A couple of Years after that, 2012 realized the way clients were making decisions since 2009 had quite dramatically changed. So we started with a belief that we needed to help salespeople get into the shoes of clients. So we kind of had those two leading beliefs which was that sales training needs to stick and it's all about embedding stuff and helping people actually drive roi. And the second one was all around getting sales into clients shoes to understand what would and wouldn't work and design approaches actually stick. So that's what we were up until eight weeks ago. We'd had the most magnificent year we've ever, ever had. 40% year on year and we were getting amazing client results, couldn't have been happier. And then overnight fell off a cliff and we realized training was no longer a priority. Ultimately training is an event. Right, because we were going into clients businesses and we had the same impact a lot of you guys have probably had. Our core audience was media and events companies and we were running an event and that was quite tough. So we panicked for a few days. What on earth are we going to do? And then we came back to our core belief. One of our core, core biggest questions we always ask ourselves, which is why do we exist? Why do we need to exist right now? And it was that question that allowed us to do everything after. And what we've got now, coming from being a sales training business who ran modular programs, could prove the impact getting amazing results. We had zero community apart from our clients. That was it. We didn't have any community. We had clients at zero. We now have an engaged community of over 2,600 people who are interacting with us in various different ways. And that all came up from one question, which is why do we need to exist right now? And that's how we got to where we got. And I can go into more depth on that in a minute.

But yeah, and I think what I really wanted to highlight, and I find it very interesting, Raul, that in your webinar sessions, when you are doing, you know, the selling in a crisis, one of the things that you highlighted the most, I think it was on the first webinar was like think about your audience, question your audience, understand it to a very good, great level of detail. Some people call it buy Personas, customer Personas, whatever name you want to have that you actually have gone through that process. I know that from the conversations with JoJo as well. Kind of actually went back, she went back and spoke to the audience. So that was an amazing story. So can you expand a little bit more? So what was the. How did this after that customer understanding why do we exist? How did you come to build this digital portfolio?

First point is we didn't know we were going to like we genuinely did not know what the end was we were working towards at first, but we knew we had to do something and we knew that we had to do something that sounds cheesy but was right for the clientele and potential clientele that we needed to be working with. So that one question, I deeply remember the hour long conversation myself, Richard, Paul and Nicky had and we were like, why do we need to exist? And that was to help the media and events industry sales professionals come out of this in the strongest position possible. We knew that if they didn't come through this, then we would struggle to come through it. And we, when we kind of polarized laser focus on that, we were so excited about it. We're like, we've got to just put this out to market. How can we do this? How can we do this? And we realized that by working out the purpose, we could work out different approaches, content that we could start delivering. So it kind of went what does the audience need first and then what's the messaging they need? And that gave us two core streams, pretty simple, which is help people selling the crisis, help sales leaders, help to manage and lead remote sales teams. Two callaways we could massively help. We also did a little bit on the pivot to digital as well. So we went out to market almost immediately saying this is our cause. We stated it, put out LinkedIn, absolute matter of fact, this is why we now exist. We then said, these are the three ways we're going to help you first. And then we said, please let us know other ideas. My LinkedIn prowess was very, very limited before then. I'd had a maximum amount of views ever of 2000. That was when I was doing a long run last, even a business one. My average views was about 50 to 60. And off the back of that post I got 7,500 views. I'm like, whoa, what's happened here, wasn't expecting anything. But because we put our calls out there, our purpose, and it resonated at the right time and answered the question they wanted answer people, just like Joe said, they shared it, they talked about it. And we went to our first, first webinar and we were not expecting very many people, not knowing what's going to happen, maybe 50, 60 people. And the crowdcast system broke down and I was 15 minutes late because I couldn't log in because we had 1,600 people who were waiting to listen to it out of nothing. And that all came from the purpose side of things. And what we then did after the webinar, we kept people engaged into what other content can we deliver it? How else can we deliver it? So we started looking more at platforms and that's interesting because we didn't look at platforms first. We thought, why do we exist? What's the message? And then we started looking at different delivery platforms. So we've started doing. We've got a YouTube channel. We've had an extra 1500 views of that particular webinar. And in total of all of our webinars, we've done four now. I think we've had about 5,000, 4,000 views, something like that. And we created Flume sales chats, which are chats with people in the industry around what's working, what's not working. We did blogs. We started doing all of this different content built out of that one purpose. And we're now looking at different stuff moving forward. So that's kind of where we've got to. But we've completely kind of repositioned what we are as a business. And people are getting very bored of seeing me and hearing me. And beforehand, people. Well, people always say, I didn't even know of Flume beforehand, but we've always been there, We've just never been vocal.

I think you have highlighted something so understanding the audience, 3, 2, 3 core, call it pain points, goals, etc. Which materialized into three webinar sessions. But then you ended up with a lot of content. You're doing the sales, the chat, the videos, which are amazing. You do your own videos on LinkedIn, you are doing blogs, you're doing YouTube and everything. By the way, I have never seen, with the exception of White October, an events business that gets kind of more than 10,000, 15,000 views on their YouTube channel. So you're saying you've got around 4,000 views onto your videos and everything? Because this is very specific. That's a very Good feat. And I think also to highlight the context, you had zero. Now you have two and a half thousand people on your database. Anything you put out in the market, people will then follow you. That's amazing. How did you construct all this? Or was it that just abundance of content that you just kind of ended up with, that you started slicing and dicing and how that got about. I've asked you this at the very beginning.

It's funny because I remember when you, I thought you were joking when you first contacted me on LinkedIn saying, have you got an agency who's helped me put this together? I'm like, who is this joker? And then I started like, oh, oh no, he's not joking. I didn't know. Because the way we've done it is literally just to go back and think, why do we need to exist? That was everything. And that gave you a gut feeling for why it's going to work. And that was that belief that the purpose is right. So just shift to the client's perspective. Spend every second thinking, what wouldn't and what would work? What would I need if I was a sales director, an md, a CEO, and what would and wouldn't work and where do I need help to fit into that? Cause. And that's all we've ever done. We've just regularly reviewed it every time, seen what's working, seen what's not working and think what, that's it. And I can go back in time and say why and what happened. But actually when we were doing it, it was just that feels right because we've got the correct calls.

Right? So it was initially, then, okay, we need to be here for my market, for our market, we need to be adding a lot of value. You have now a series of paid for sessions because everyone, again the question, and I'm kind of being the devil's advocate here, everyone is going to say, okay, great. But yeah, grading leads, grading stuff. How does the revenue come into play? And I would like to kind of weave that as well into. Okay, so right now, how does your business outlook and perspective look like now moving forward?

Yeah, well, I'll be completely open about this. Up until, like I said earlier, eight weeks ago, we were having a boom in time. It was amazing and like getting amazing results. We're not at that point yet. Right. But we've had a time where we're building this community, doing the right thing for people to get through this. And in the last two weeks, sorry, in the last week, we've booked three brand new, well, on the verge of booking one of them. So two, brand new and on the verge, but brand new bits of business with companies we never even worked with before. One of them exceptionally no, two of them exceptionally big. Who 100%, because that's what they've told us. They've come to us because of this. Now, we did do, and we still are doing the paid for impact workshops. And those impact workshops basically came out the content of the webinars where we introduced three behaviors that salespeople needs to be demonstrating. Then we did a deep dive impact workshop because we are trainers at heart, hour long, which we just charged a nominal fee of £25. They're still on demand. Now we made a little bit of money, but ultimately it's not gonna make or break the bank. It was meant to be affordable for people, which it is. But what we found works better is actually because we've got that community, because we can then look into the data and see what other companies do we want to work with. How many people have engaged with our community, how can we get them involved in a conversation? So we got them involved in flume chats, et cetera. So then they advocate it within their business. And then we can go to these different leaders and influences with different ideas. One is loads of your people are already engaged, so you may as well do something and make it look like it's yours. Two, is that a silly. Well, not silly idea. It's a cracking idea, but an easy idea, which is actually, well, why don't I do an hour long Q and A for your company to bespoke at 100%, which then brings all of that audience in front of us finding out how to do things. They take stuff away and then it just forges these relationships, which I believe will last forever. And that's a big part now is I deeply believe what we do for the industry right now will last forever in terms of sentiment and feeling and trust. And we always, always, as a business have always prided ourselves on doing stuff for the right reason. We just haven't been overtly extrovert or vocal about it, whereas we are now. So we are now starting to see money. That's the wrong phrase, but kind of some commercial impact of this. But we never knew how long that would take. And we realized that we probably might be waiting five, six months until any of that's happened. But doing the right thing for people and being vocal about it and proving it has started to open up revenue channels.

And I think that's kind of a Very interesting scenario because I think for those of you guys that organize events or that are kind of looking at what that digital pivot is, taking elements of our previous webinar where we were discussing with Julian about the digital, the different metrics, the different digital KPIs that one needs to take into account, I think you're a very good example because you have engagement on the webinars, then you have engagement on your social channels, then you have engagement on your YouTube channels. And different people consume content in various different ways. So essentially that community is dictating which way you should go about doing things. If we look into how an event organizer with a portfolio events is kind of monetizing that then you're going to start to look at, okay, what is happening as a result of this webinar of this kind of a live virtual event? How did you slice that content? How was the engagement in those different areas? Because in many cases you would be surprised as to how your audience consumes content. And I think one important element I think is not about the live webinar. It's not about the live virtual event, it's what happens after.

Right.

And I think that's fine. So Raoul, so what's moving forward? How does that look like anything that you can share? I mean, are you still running a sales training event or is it looking more like, is it a different company now?

Ultimately we're a sales training company. That's where we excel. We are very, very good at it. I'm very proud of that as our base. But there are other ways we've realized we probably would never have looked at for, well, maybe ever that we now have accelerated massively because we've realized how many different ways we've been much braver because we've had to be right, but kind of looking forward. We've just put out a message yesterday on LinkedIn to ask the industry to get involved in what I feel is the most pertinent and important and urgent conversation right now, which is around setting a benchmark for sales excellence post outbreak. Because my belief, and we kind of heard this a little bit from Joe just now, we're hearing it from so many people who are joining webinars and they're like tuning out after two minutes because it's like you can behave differently as audience members. Clients are having to have a water type business case, which means that sales excellence is being like, it's so exaggerated the importance of sales right now. And so right now what sales excellence looks like has been defined as we speak. And what we want to start and what we're trying to drive is a conversation with the industry where they work with us to help define sales excellence coming out of the outbreak. And so we're committed to a series and we're not going down the webinar route necessarily. It's a series of conversations. So we're going to be releasing proper information about it in the next couple of days. But the idea is we're going to be introducing research, we're going to be introducing discussions, we're going to be introducing plans as a way forwards, roundtables, essentially lots of different interactions to drive conversations from the buyer's point of view, the audience point of view, and therefore the sales and events companies and media companies point of view to create a benchmark which then becomes the benchmark for sales within the industry, which ultimately will allow us to kind of position ourselves in a place of excellence. But I'm very proud to say we are very good and I think we're a good place to do that. But equally, we don't know every answer and we want the community involved to help build it because we believe if they help build it then they're going to want to stick to it more. And that's always been our problem is it's easy for us to tell people what to do or train people, but getting people to actually want to do it and follow through with it is tougher. So we're going for the co creation approach and I'm really excited about it, as you might be able to see.

And I think this is amazing. I think that the key summary that I have here is, as you call it, the co creation, even from Joe's point of view, is the agile. You have to be agile. You can't get too bogged down into the details, you just have to iterate, iterate and iterate. Raoul, thank you very much.

Sam.