Flipping the Sales Approach | Ep. 04

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Business podcast. My name is Charles Mackay and I'll be your host today. Today we interviewed Graham Hawkins, who is the CEO and co founder of a business called Salestribe. The reason we got Graham on today is because I love the fact that he had to change dramatically what he was doing throughout his career and out the back of that has built a really cool business. Graham is a career sales guy and throughout his career saw this monumental shift of the way buyers were behaving and how the buyer is now in control of the situation in that. Graham then went and did his MBA and studied it and has written a book around it and the New Way of Selling. So if you're interested in where the future of sales play is, sales are always going to exist in some particular way, but how it is done and the way you approach your sales is absolutely changing. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Graeme and we'll get into it. I'm very excited to have a good friend of mine, Graham Hawkins, the CEO and co founder of Sales Tribe, join me. So Graham, welcome to the conversation.

Thank you, Charles. Delighted to be here.

So, Graham, whereabouts are you sitting in this fine time of year? Where would you normally be sitting and where are you sitting at the moment?

I'd normally probably be on a plane somewhere, so spend most of my time traveling, as you know. But right now I'm like everyone else sitting at home here in the northeast of Melbourne and four kids running around doing homeschooling behind me, hence the virtual background that I'm using. But yeah, it's a strange time of the world that we're living in right now.

Yeah, totally, totally. So Graeme, before we get into what you're doing now, tell us a little bit sort of where your career started and a couple of pivots you've been on throughout it at a high level. Where did you first get into business and what did that look like?

Yeah, look mate, the short version of that story is that I'm a sales guy and have been for 30 years now. I just turned 50 and so I consider myself a salesperson first and foremost. Although I'm running a small company now called Sales Tribe, I'm still a sales guy and sales is what I love. So I began as a 19 year old in financial services commission, only worked my way through to telecommunications and then finally into it where I was working with software companies, primarily US based software companies, and I worked in a whole range of different sales business development roles. Worked my way up to being the sales leader and sales director and head of sales and all that kind of thing. So I spent 25 years roughly, Charles, in, in high tech sales roles, selling B2B technology solutions in a great period. Say I was fortunate to be in those sort of companies at this particular point in time. But in 2010 or thereabouts, I started to realize that for some reason my sales techniques just weren't working as well as they used to be. Right. It was getting harder. I couldn't really work out why. I could tell fundamentally that buyers were better educated than they ever were previously. There was no hope of using a closing technique or overcoming objection technique. Those old fashioned sort of interruptive push sales techniques that I was taught years ago. That stuff just wasn't working anymore. So I decided in 2012 to go and do an MBA. I was at that stage, 42 or 3 or something, and I realized that I needed to upskill a little bit. So I spent some time. I spent 12 months doing an MBA full time. I engineered my own redundancy and went off and did school full time. And I specifically wanted to go and study biobehavior. And one of the electives at RMIT in the MBA program was this research project on biobehaviour. So really short version of the story. I spent 12 months running around Australia, Charles, interviewing a whole bunch of buyers. And I specifically did that because I wanted to hear from the buyer about what they thought it was like for them to engage with salesperson, vendor, salespeople. And the feedback I got was it was not only sort of, not only it was consistent across the board, but it was confrontational.

Right.

It was like, oh, wow, okay. I didn't realize that buyers were so well educated and they knew all of the tricks, they knew all of the techniques that salespeople use and basically they're sick of it. So out of that MBA came this book, sales profession, and that's now an international best selling book which I wrote. And that all, as I say, that all came out of the research project from my MBA. I wrote that book in 2016. And Charles, I know you and I talked about this offline, but what's now happening in the world with COVID 19? A lot of what I wrote back five years ago is now sort of being brought in a really sharp focus, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, 100%. If you're like in those shifts over that 25 year career, can you see like what has been the themes that have slowly happened over that 25 years to, I suppose where we're at today that you've seen to be the biggest change.

Look, it's a really simple one, to be honest, Charles. It's access to information. So, you know, I was working in telecommunications, early 90s, mid-90s, when the Internet was just first being sort of mooted as something that people might use one day and along comes, you know, personal computing and, and all of the stuff that happened in the 90s. And with all of that, I think what most vendors in some cases still haven't realized is that the buyer has access to the same information as the vendor. Now back in the 90s, they didn't. Right. So we had information asymmetry back then. Vendors had all the information and the buyers had none. And of course now it's the other way around or it's information parity. So that's been the big one. You can no longer, as a salesperson or a business person working with a product or a service that you're trying to push out into a marketplace. You're no longer the information giver. The buyer's already got the information. They've done their research, they know what they want. That's the big difference.

It makes total sense. And I couldn't agree with you, having sat in a vendor seat, I mean, in a, you know, an end user seat and a decision maker seat, their sales thing was really frustrating. Who, who did you actually interview? Was it your existing clients or was it just people on the street or did you get puts to the ground? How did you do that?

No, look, what I did was I went back to a whole bunch of buyers that I'd sold to over the years, people I developed recently strong relationships with. And I said to them, hey, listen, I'm no longer working with a vendor at the moment. I'm going to do an MBA and I'm thinking about writing a book. Would you mind if I interviewed you? And the moment I took the salesperson's cap off and just went and sat down with them and talked to them, they were all really willing to share, you know, in some cases, some fairly blunt feedback. So, yeah, it was B2B. It was B2B. Senior procurement people in enterprise level companies like Telstra, Qantas, Westpac, nab, Suncorp and some of those big companies. So that was where I got the feedback from.

Yeah, and it's fascinating too, because they've been probably the slowest to adopt to this new world as well. So it's going to be interesting to see the Current environment, how they're going. So getting into writing the book, and obviously now you've started up Sales Tribe. Like when you first got into Sales Tribe, what was the core problem that you were looking at solving?

Great question. So, yeah, the research phase of writing the book, which by the way, took me about two years really to pull it all together and whip it into shape. But during that time, it became really obvious to me that the B2B sales role was changing faster than any of us realized. People like Forrester, the big research company, was predicting back in 2015, they wrote a paper called the Death of the B2B Salesperson. And back then they were saying that 20% or 22% of the world's B2B salespeople will be gone or transitioned into something else by 2020. Now, the extent to which that's come true or not is debatable. But one thing's for sure is that with COVID 19 now on our doorstep, everything that they were saying back then and everything I wrote about in the book is now very much true. So back in 2016, when I first published the book and was doing the research, it became obvious that there was a business opportunity to create something that could help these salespeople. I was a mid-40s sales guy at that stage and thinking, wow, how do I get through to 65 if this whole role that I've spent my entire career working in is changing so dramatically? So the idea for Sales Tribe was born out of that research.

Very, very smart. And I think the amount of research and work you've done and the info you've got is phenomenal. It's about articulating that message to people that don't understand it. I think that's one of the biggest challenges with early adoption of anything is, is how do you seed the problem rather than tell them the problem. Especially when you're not selling, like technology is a bit different to selling change and culture and all those sorts of things. So I can understand how that is a massive problem. And people probably also have a bit of a thing that they don't think is a problem as well.

Well, it's fun. You should say that. I reckon. I spent the first two years of, well, one year pre launch and then after we launched SalesDrive, I spent a lot of time pushing out this new message on platforms like LinkedIn and we did a lot of content marketing. I had the book as something I could point to. It was heavily research based and I spent a lot of time pushing out content and getting very Little feedback. And in fact, I got a lot of negative feedback in with, as is often the case, I was sprouting this new way of doing things. And of course the established, entrenched view of the world back then was like, you don't know what you're talking about. Sales has always been the way it is. People buy from people they know like and trust and it's all about relationships. And I kept saying, well, yeah, people buy from websites more and more now. So, you know, the world is changing, everything's shifting.

Yeah. Yep, you are spot on. And I suppose that leads into where we sort of met Graham actually. He was presenting at an event in Sydney and presented out what I've been doing from a much more technical front. And Graham was selling more of the change management and people change and internal process change. And that's where our discussions sort of played out. So now that you've been doing this for, you know, a few years now, the current environment we're at, what problems are you seeing escalated from your research? But also now people are going, you know what? Wow, if we don't do this, what does that mean?

Well, yeah, look, I naturally, Charles, I look at everything through the lens of the salesperson and, you know, the vendor. So the big problem we've all got now, really, if you boil it down, is in this globalized world that we all work in and this highly disruptive, fast changing business velocity world where products lifecycles are getting shorter, everything's speeding up. The big challenge we've all got is really just getting visibility amongst all the noise. There's so much noise out there on all these platforms that we talk about. How do you stick your hand up and say, hey, I've got this product or service now. How do you get attention? Every sales director that I talk to these days is saying fundamentally the same thing, Graham. We've got what we think is lots of leads and things and we've got a forecast that kind of looks okay, but nothing's closing because everything's stuck in the middle of the funnel. And half the time it's because they're managing or they're chasing leads that they should never have been chasing, which are not really well qualified. And it comes back to how do you get attention of the ideal customer profile in a world where everyone's now competing for the attention of these buyers. So, you know, gone are the days, Charles, and you and I have talked about this, of spray and pray. Traditional marketing, blanket marketing, generic messaging, all of those traditional forms of getting attention are no longer working. Because as my good friend Adam Gray says, he says that the trouble with traditional marketing is everybody's yelling and Nobody's listening.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, sorry, go on.

I was just going to say that I think the biggest shift that I'm seeing on my end with this component is it's no longer the product market fit, it's no longer about what you're doing. It's that experience for the customer. And especially in these trying times, I think it's been phenomenal. Some of the businesses that have started or shifted and pivoted, it's all about the customer and the experience they have and caring about them and being empathetic to them, which is definitely not the old way of thinking.

No, mate, you're right. And listening to Brian Halligan, as we both did last year at Inbound, when he spoke about experience market fit, he's spot on, isn't he? The buyer experience is now all that matters. And I know, Charles, I've worked for many organizations going back 10 years ago now who would proudly exclaim on their website that we are customer centric and that we place the customer at the heart of everything we do. And yet when I talk to the sales director, it's how many meetings have you got, how many calls have you made, how do we bring that deal forward, how do we close this deal? It's all self serving, inward looking measurements and KPIs around, revenue maximization, that's just not customer centric anymore. So a lot of what I wrote about in the book is these changing models.

Yeah. So on that point, obviously at the end of the day, sales reps, sales directors, they're there to move the business forward and collect feedback and hopefully help customers to move them down that journey or the customer journey. When you meet with someone and they say, right, or we've got these problems of funnel bloat and you know, we're not hitting quota or we're not getting revenue in what, what are they two years down the track, what are you seeing some outcomes looking like now where they've gone and transformed?

Well, if businesses transform the way you and I talk about, Charles, and obviously your business is the critical piece to some extent. I can talk about the why and you know, the strategy and give the advice about what you should be doing given the modern buying context. But if you don't put in place those incremental steps, cultural change, you know, operational change and then technology that can support that, then you end up just having people, they default back to what They've always done so, you know, it's all got to be done in a very incremental change management way. But the ones that get it right, the ones that do, you know, make that leap of faith from vendor push to customer pull business models or you know, moving away from outbound and moving more towards inbound. I keep saying, Charles, you've heard me say this a million times, we have to learn to stop chasing buyers and instead start learning how to attract buyers. And for the guys that get that right down the track, they're going to have more advocacy, more loyalty, they're going to have happy customers that give referrals, that talk about what a great experience they've had engaging with sales tribe or Syncs or whoever. And that's the ultimate to me. When you can create raving fans, people who tell other people. That's the ultimate.

Yeah, and removing the friction and all those sort of things. I, I think the other thing especially I suppose talking about enterprise stuff and it's so relevant because we had a conversation this morning with a particular group of people and like, as soon as you start talking enterprise, the biggest problem is most likely the internal politics in these businesses and potentially even that in call it outbound selling or inbound selling into internal divisions, getting over that internal politics and flipping it and going, what are we trying to solve for here? Is it my job or is it my division or is it the greater good of the customer? And I think that's a massive thing that we come across quite a bit is, you know, we can help you, but you've got to internally be open to flipping everything you're doing. Yeah, mate.

And listen, I'll be honest with you. My biggest challenge in, you know, creating change around sales enablement. And really it's not sales enablement, it's buyer enablement. My biggest challenge is getting Senior, senior people, that is the C suite, CFOs and CEOs to change the mindset around, you know, incremental revenue gains. Because that's all they're focused on, financial measurements. Because if they're a listed company, well it's what's the street playing? You know, how do we, how do we increase the share price? We've got misalignment so much with senior people and their short term financial measurements and metrics that really never allows the organization to make those changes because it sometimes flies in the face of what the CEO is trying to achieve.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I couldn't agree with you more. It's similar to countries gdp like in reality, if you've got happier people and a happier country, a happier society, they're going to do better at what they do. Same in an organization, if you have a staff happiness meter, they're probably going to do better work. And I think it's fascinating. We've talked about this change piece a fair few times on that transition. I could even talk about the government here with going from coal power to solar panel power, you know, renewable energy. You don't need to sack the 20,000 employees. You put an educational program in place to transform their skill set. Like all of this stuff's learnable. You don't need to go to uni again. You can learn it on the job. And that shift of all of that 50 years of thousand years of knowledge gets transformed into new ways of working. So much more powerful than just sacking your whole team and bringing in new ones. But, yeah, I can rant about that one for quite a bit of time.

And what you're saying, Charles, in terms of change management, change is always hard, right? Naturally, humans change resistors. And I like what Eric Shinseki said, the U.S. navy general, I think he was, where he said, if you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. And we all have to just embrace this change that's happening now and get on board with it and move with it quickly. Right. Otherwise we are going to be irrelevant.

Yeah. And I think on that point, like with what's happening in the current environment, obviously lots of people have been forced to change and forced to do things. So it actually shows how quickly these things can actually be done when you remove the wrong metric. So. So, yes, we've all got to live, we've all got to survive. We're here to hopefully turn a profit and feed our families. But at the end of the day, the greater good, if you do stuff for the greater good in a good way, you're going to have a better place, happier people, which then attracts talents, which attracts customers. I think that's been my observation with this whole Covid stuff at the minute, people can change. It's like they just didn't want to change.

Correct. We need a catalyst, don't we? We need something to force us to change. And now that we're all doing this sort of thing, zoom calls and engaging our buyers on digital and social platforms, which I've been banging on about now for five years, when we're now forced to do that, people realize actually it's not difficult and actually it works pretty well.

Yeah. And then, by the way, you've got a bit more time for your family and a bit more time to do stuff that you love outside of work.

Benefits everywhere.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Like in those problems, obviously, that you're solving for businesses is. I'm sure it's changing a lot and even after this current environment, those problems are going to change again. But I think the fundamentals of what you've know, you've approached and the research you've done is fascinating. So, you know, good on you for doing that work because most people probably at the stage of the career you're at would have gone, oh, well, I'll just keep ploughing along.

Well, thank you, mate, I appreciate that. And yeah, look, I got. Once I started on this journey in 2012, Charles, where I went out and interviewed buyers, I just got. I became fascinated in all of this. You know, when you look at what machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this stuff, you know this stuff better than I do.

Right.

When you look at where that's all headed and what it means for commerce and business in general, I think the next few years are going to be the most unbelievable, exciting time. Exciting for those who want to embrace change and get on board and try things new, but they're going to be devastating for people who are stuck in the old ways of doing things.

Yeah, 100%. There's a, there's a fascinating book that I have read which is like, it's called Abundance. And what it talks about in that book is the world's going to go either one of two ways into scarcity or into abundance. And what does an abundance world look like? Well, it's, you know, robots and machines taking care of a lot of these things that people don't like doing. Like, it's actually where I get a bit frustrated with people just outsource mundane tasks to a country that they can't see. They can't see the people, but they just give them all the shit work. Robots and machines are going to do that. So in an abundance world, we don't work five days a week, we work three days a week. You've got more time with the family, there's less travel of food. Like all of these industries where we've globalized it, but not gone back to localized solutions, machines are going to take care of that, obviously. Energy, food, health, all of these big ticket items, it's going to get disrupted heavily. But is the world without getting into political sides of things on that, it's going to be fascinating. So I totally agree with you. Like AI is look at anything in two ways. Either yes, it's going to be a challenge, but the opportunities are going to be great for humanity, I believe. Totally agree, totally agree.

I haven't read Abundance, but I read.

The.

As part of my book research I read a book by Martin Ford called Rise of the Robots and what a fascinating view of the future when you look at all of the routine.

And.

Fundamental tasks that can be outsourced to a robot or an artificial intelligence bot of some sort and how that frees up the humans to do things differently. To some extent when you're seeing a Charles in our country here in Australia, the government handing out what they what Martin Ford referred to as a universal base income, the machines are doing some of the work and the humans are on a universal base income from the government to some extent. So who knows where it's all going the next 10, but the next five I think are going to be exciting too.

Yeah. No, I couldn't agree with you more. Another fascinating, like I could quote a few books, but another fascinating one, I think this is quite relevant for businesses that are struggling with that change is called the Road to Reinvention and that is looking at how you can attack your business model or attack your products and services and only change a little bit at a time. Rather than changing the whole thing. Just test it Peter. Test to build an internal startup within your business and that incremental change mindset just shifts it all. Instead of being a huge, overwhelming massive project, you just flip it into a little micro change thing and then then it becomes not as overwhelming. You actually get stuff done.

Well, it's one of the things I learned the hard way Charles. When I started Sales Tribe or the business before Sales Tribe transformed Sales International, I was advocating sort of what was effectively rapid big bang radical change quickly change now. But the truth is most organizations can't, can't do that. They can't mobilize themselves to create big incremental or big radical change, I should say. So go back as you say, go back to incremental chunk it down little bite sized pieces and do them in the right sequence and you can gradually over time win the war, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah. Those 1 percenters become. It's like football simple stuff here. The 1 percenters are what win grand finals. It's not not taking the hangar.

Exactly, exactly Right. Spot on.

So Gart, you touched quickly on the journey. So obviously when you went out and did your MBA and wrote Your book. Did you have the intention of starting Sales Tribe and I suppose talk us through that journey as opposed to what your vision was to what it's been like and what you've learned along the way? Yeah.

Now look, there wasn't, there wasn't an intention to do an MBA and start a business. It was funny, during the mba, Charles, I got to spend a lot of time with some younger people, millennials. You know, I was 42 or 43 at that point and some of the people in the program were, you know, late 20s, early 30s, and they were doing some really cool stuff with social media and content marketing. And I don't think Instagram was big back then, but I know they were doing Facebook and Twitter ads and all this sort of stuff. And I got really fascinated in what all that was looking like. So I decided I'd spend some time with them trying to learn. And yeah, having done the research and then written the book and spent some time getting my head around these new technologies and platforms, I started to see the opportunity to build a business. And, you know, Sales Tribe was born. And I decided to use content marketing on LinkedIn to get a message out to try and build a brand, not just a business brand, but my own personal brand. And I often say to people, you know, I chipped away at that for a long time without much success. Charles, I've got to say, probably six to 12 months, I would push out articles and posts and short form, long form, blogs, et cetera, and nothing much was happening really. And then all of a sudden, at about the 12 month mark, I started to realize that on LinkedIn in particular, I was getting quite a lot of engagement, quite a lot of feedback. And so whilst the vision for salestrike was always help salespeople, I began to realize that actually what I'm doing now can help businesses as well. So the pivot for us was to some extent, we can create this two sided marketplace where we help businesses on one side and we help sales individuals on the other get upskilled and repurpose their skills and whatnot and then connect the two through a marketplace almost where businesses need salespeople who've got the latest skills and the latest competencies, and salespeople need access to new training and new ways of doing things to be relevant in the modern era. So, yeah, that was our pivot, if you like, once you started to realize, okay, well, we're building two sided marketplace here where we can bring businesses and salespeople together. And yeah, so the journey took a bit of a twist in the road at that point. But it's always been based on my, you know, my own personal experience with sales and how it's changing and getting prepared for this future that's, that's kind of now lived.

And I think it's fascinating if you were to say, start to think. We've talked a little bit about the future and I like to talk about the present because it's just easier. But where do you see the future? 10 years of sales, like where do you, where do you think it's going to sit?

Well, you know, that's an Interesting one. 10 years now is a long time, right?

It is.

What are they saying? That by 20, 30% of the world's drivers will be out of work because we'll have self driving cars? Hard to believe, but maybe that's true. What does that mean or what does the future look like for sales? I think there's a couple of realities that we have to all accept. And one of them is, Charles, that old thing about commercial realities or the invisible hand of the market always dictates what happens. And if you think about it logically, businesses will always find path of least resistance when it comes to doing things more cost effectively. Right. Buyers now know that when they're talking to a person, a salesperson, that there's a cost involved in that. And so quite often what we're seeing, even now, we're seeing it buyers go into salesperson avoidance mode. They'd much rather go direct to the manufacturer, so to speak. They'd rather bypass the salesperson in some cases, not all, but in some cases they would. And that's why we're seeing a huge shift now towards, you know, online retail spend. And all of the proof points that sort of point to this idea that, you know, the salesperson is kind of like the middleman. And in lots of cases, like with companies like Atlassian and you know, lots of others, where there's no salesperson needed. I mean, I said to a client the other day, Charles, and you'll love this, but your business is similar to mine. I run Xero, I run HubSpot, I run Stripe for payments, I use AWS for hosting, a whole bunch of other technologies that run my business. And I've met one salesperson from those companies. So, you know, cast that forward five years. What's the role of the salesperson? Well, it's a vastly different role to the one that's happening right now. We've almost got this pincer movement happening, Charles. If you think about it the vendor on one side who employs the salesperson is looking for any means by which they can lower the cost of acquisition. And still today, the cost of sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue is the highest cost of acquisition. If you can remove the marketing and salesperson from that acquisition cost for getting your customers, that's a big improvement in margin and profit. On the other side, the buyer is looking for how do I get the best deal? Well, I'll go online and I'll do all the research and I'll find the best possible price online. So, you know, salesperson who sat in the middle is being squeezed from both sides commercially.

Yeah, no, it's.

That's kind of how my brain is thinking about it.

Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, the rise of new roles, the talking T shapes all that's been talked about for a while, but customer success and you know, it'll be just, it'll be really interesting what happens. Like I think we're going to go into a seed and grow mentality of and lots of them are doing it. Get in, get started and then you get reached out to when you need help. And then by the way, they've probably trained in sales on how to upskill up service or upskill or cross sell, blah, blah, blah. But I couldn't agree more.

Well, it's all happening now, right? You're spot on. The green shoots of this new way of working is happening. The rise of customer success, the rise of focus on lifetime value. The number one business metric now for most businesses is churn mitigation or net retention.

Right.

That's a huge shift from when I started selling, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

Whenever, you know, and I think especially at the minute, the people that you know, I can guarantee you that across the board, net new sales are down globally. But what's retention like? The people with the best retention and the best customer success are going to get through this period. The ones that don't will no longer exist.

Simple as that.

Fascinating. So, Graham, if you were to give one tip to, let's talk to a business owner or, you know, that C suite. You get into that meeting and you've now got them at interview stage rather than you trying to convince them of change, but they're vulnerable and they've gone, you know what, we need some help. What would that tip be?

Well, once again, looking at everything through the sales lens, Charles, the tip would be you've got to now understand that the attention of your buyer is shifting. Forget the old idea of cold calling and sending out blanket messages and emails. You've now got to understand how you can engage those educated buyers on the platforms where they now reside. I keep saying field sales, which is what I've always done, was fine when the buyer resided out in the field. Get in the car, jump on the train, go out and meet the buyer. The buyer now resides online. You have to learn how to engage those buyers. And you know, Matt Dixon, who wrote the Challenger Sale, said it beautifully. He said the best salespeople right now are engaging buyers where and how they learn. And increasingly that's on social platforms. So you better have a strategy. Business owner or CEO, you better have a strategy around how you're engaging your buyers on these platforms. That would be my number one answer.

It makes a lot of sense. And like you've said, I think like you were saying in that Journey piece, you spent 12 months curating content, putting content out there and with nothing but that compounding effect of what happens off the back of that is massive. And that's one of the biggest challenges, I believe that, you know, people are looking for this instant success, instant this. Buyers want, buyers want instant success. They want instant gratitude. But a business is not going to get the same result. So how do they be more patient? And it came up in a previous conversation we had in this series about being the custodian for the business. Rather than just leaking the, stealing the profits and bleeding it dry, how do you leave it in a better place? And this would be one of the strongest things that I would be doing. So I think your advice is spot on.

Yeah, I think you're right, Charles. We've all got to stop this short term mentality that we've always suffered from. And in sales, you know this too, right? Salespeople, end of month, end of quarter, quick. Bring that deal forward quick. We've got to hit our numbers. That old mentality, short termism has to stop. We've got to, as you said, I love that quote, seed and grow, that seed and grow mentality. What I've done with my business over the last three years has been, it's blown my mind how well it's worked. But we've taken a very long term approach where I treat every single potential customer as an opportunity to build a long term relationship. And I don't care whether they're ready to buy today, tomorrow, next month or next year, at some point they're going to come back and my cost of acquisition will be so much smaller because we've nurtured relationship Right, Yeah.

Yeah, you are. I couldn't agree with you more. And it's just that flipping the mindset I think we've talked about a lot, the customer is now in control. I think that's going to shift a little bit. Not that the customer is not in control, but their expectations need to change a little bit. I think we were a bit ahead of ourselves with customer expectations and customer demand. Not saying that that's a bad thing, but just the world was going, you know what, we're running out of resources. Stop using so much stuff. Stuff. So it'll be interesting to see where that happy medium plays out.

I think you're right. Yeah, totally. There's always a balancing. Balancing effect, isn't there?

Yeah. It's like any relationship, as soon as it gets too skewed one way, it's going to break. So we've got to even up the equation a bit.

100%. Yep.

Yeah.

Once the we're in violent agreement.

That's right. That's right. So you can share some of your biggest success stories here, Graeme. So what's something that you've been your most proud moment since you started Sales Tribe and released the book that you can share with us?

Well, yeah, we've had a number of wins along the journey, Charles, and all of them are important, particularly when you're in startup mode.

Right.

But I think one of the things that I'm most proud of is that for a little Aussie company, we managed to win in, I think it was our second year. It was, yeah, it was our second year. We managed to win one of the world's largest and oldest banks, Lloyds Banking Group in London. And it was testament to everything I've been preaching about, how to engage modern buyers in the places where they learn. Lloyds bank was, unbeknownst to me, was sitting back watching some of my content. One particular gentleman over there, guy named Wayne Mills, who's the MD of Global Capital Markets, he was sitting back watching some content and he reached out on LinkedIn and said, hey, listen, I like what you're saying about how sales is changing. He said, we're an old fashioned bank who needs some modernizing. And he said, if you're ever in London, let me know and I'll shout your coffee. So my content marketing strategy got the attention of this senior guy inside one of the world's biggest banks. And next thing I'm in London having coffee with him. And now they're our most important customer globally. So for me to have been able to win One of the big banks in the UK is still mind blowing. I still don't know how that happened. Really?

That's fascinating. Imagine if you flipped it and said, lloyd bank is one of our accounts we're going to chase. Like, where would, where would you start? With that account mapping document and the org chart and the.

I mean, you know, let's be clear, serendipity and these sorts of things happen all the time, from time to time. But yeah, certainly that was one where my investment in content marketing and the time and effort we put into pushing out that content. What people don't understand is that quite often there are buyers sitting back in the dark, so to speak, watching your content and trying to work out whether or not you're the right sort of person. And so without even knowing it, I was nurturing this relationship with Wayne and fast forward sort of six months and all of a sudden I'm being engaged to come over there and deliver a whole bunch of sales enablement training with their teams, which was just fascinating. And so that's been an amazing success story and there's been a few others like that as well. But the power of these global platforms, when you do it the right way, is just incredible.

Yeah. And that's that simple. You ask, we answer or give value before you extract value. Like, those terms are pretty, pretty relevant. And I can bet you, like, what was that sales process like, Graeme? Did you go through procurement and did you go through nine levels of approval or did you just give him a proposal and he signed it off?

Well, yeah, it was pretty simple, to be honest. The hardest part of that was really just filling out all the supplier agreement forms. So to be a supplier to the bank, I had to go through some hoops there, but.

So they had friction at their end still.

Yes, they did. But look, it was because of Wayne and the relationship that we sort of. We'd struck up on LinkedIn and then having coffee with him and getting to know him and the team and I made the entry level really simple for them to chew on. You know, that part of it was really quite easy. In fact, I was quite surprised at how quickly Wayne was able to make a decision to move forward with some little company from Australia. Hard bit was just getting the T's and C's in place. But once that was done, it's been a wonderful relationship.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Oh, good on you. I. I love hearing the success stories because you just. They're everywhere and, you know, especially I'm not a big fan of people promoting their own success stories, but when you hear them, it's, you know, puts a smile to your face. So well done. So, Graham, we better start to bring this to ground. But how do you know, how do people find you and how do they engage with Sales Tribe or yourself?

Well, no surprise what I'm going to say here, Charles, but you find me on LinkedIn. I'm everywhere on LinkedIn, as much as I can be. So, yeah, look me up on LinkedIn or jump on the website. Sales Tribe we've just recently launched and I'm excited about this. We've just recently launched the Sales Tribe Academy, which is our online learning for salespeople and we've got our first course now available to subscribe to. So for $39 a month, people can access the platform and go through our sales success with social media program in their own time, all online. And so we're really excited about that. We've got our mobile app coming very, very soon which will make the end user experience on the mobile really, really slick and enjoyable, hopefully. So, yeah, some exciting things happening, but that's the way to contact me, Charles, on LinkedIn primarily.

Awesome. I love it. That sounds really interesting. I would strongly recommend any reps out there to jump on and do that because reality is businesses probably won't do it for you, so you're better off to upskill yourself and, you know, some reps out there at the minute probably got a bit of time, unfortunately there's a lot of being laid off. So as good a time as any to jump on that. So. Awesome. Graham. Well, thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I look forward to sharing this out there. But yeah, thanks for your time.

Thanks for having me, Charles. It was an absolute pleasure, mate.

Awesome.