How sincerity and storytelling support meaningful sales

Speaker 1:

This is ClientSide from Fox Agency.

Speaker 2:

(singing)

Nathan Anibaba:

Richard Lane is the co-founder and chief commercial officer at durhamlane, a leading revenue generation company. He has over 25 years of commercial sales experience, delivering progressive business development solutions to businesses of all sizes, from SMEs to blue chip clients throughout the UK and Europe. Richard Lane, welcome to ClientSide.

Richard Lane:

Thank you, Nathan. Great to be here.

Nathan Anibaba:

So first question or statement, defend the indefensible, there is no misalignment between sales and marketing. Discuss.

Richard Lane:

So defend the indefensible. I believe that everybody in sales and marketing is doing their best, and they are doing what is being asked of them and what is being tasked of them. The challenge comes whether those two worlds align and link up correctly. So I don’t think there’s a misalignment because people are driving towards different objectives. But my question is, is the connection made? And if that connection isn’t made, then how do we make that connection better?

Nathan Anibaba:

So explain how the connection should be made. Maybe walk us through or describe how most large B2B businesses run their demand generation programs at the moment and what’s wrong with the way that’s done currently.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. I mean, I find a fascinating place, Nathan. I’m making it my mission to be the middleware that connects these two worlds together. So as I said, I think everyone is driving with the same ambition towards the same event, which is revenue creation. What I think is happening though is that marketeers are tasked and targeted to create interest and to create meaningful connection with potential customers. Yeah, hopefully the right people in the right sorts of companies ideally at the right time. Where the disconnect comes though is that sales professionals are tasked with converting revenue and bringing prospects and turning them into customers, and marketing stop before sales get started. And that’s really where I’ve come up with about five or six different metaphors for this over the last week or so, Nathan.

Nathan Anibaba:

Let’s hear them.

Richard Lane:

Well here’s one, right? Imagine that you’re in a relay, and they’ve marked the lanes out incorrectly. So when you are running towards me at the end of the second 100-meter sprint, and I’m turning and I’m ready to pick up the baton off you, our hands don’t connect.

Nathan Anibaba:

Okay, that’s a good one.

Richard Lane:

I’m standing in the right place. You are handing over in the right place, but the lines are wrong. So there’s one. Another one. Marketing take the sales opportunity to the second run of the ladder. I’m in sales, and I’m standing on the 10th run of the ladder, and I lean down, and my hands aren’t long enough.

Nathan Anibaba:

I’m grasping it in thin air.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. So there’s the second one. Now actually, what might be happening is [crosstalk 00:03:06]-

Nathan Anibaba:

They continue like this. Did the other three continue like this with the gap metaphor?

Richard Lane:

I’m not going to give you the… I’m not going to give you all of them. But what I was going to say is what happens on some of the times is that actually, we do connect and we do meet or I do stretch down and I do catch hold of it. But that’s the rare occasion. And that means that we’ve got the challenge, which is that very occasionally it works and converts to revenue, but more often than not, it doesn’t. Which is why we find when we start working with our enterprise customers that they have thousands of flickers of interest, glimmers of interest of in light sitting in their CRM in what we call zombie leads. Because there was interest, maybe interest enough to download a white paper or to fill out a form. Marketing has done its piece of the jigsaw correctly. Sales haven’t had the bandwidth or haven’t had the professional persistence or the time to be persistent and persevere to take that connection, build rapport, discover, nurture, and get it so that it’s sales-ready.

Nathan Anibaba:

So what does a salesperson need then to do their job properly? What are the tools, tactics, behaviors? And more importantly, how can marketing enable sales with the tool to kit to be able to do their job most effectively?

Richard Lane:

So I think qualification is key. So a lot of people have heard of banned qualification. Budget authority need time scales. We have our own tool called the Magic 35 qualification framework, which is seven criteria that we discover about when we are creating opportunities for customers. So sales need insights and they need readiness. They need to be speaking to the right person in an organization, or they need to understand the plan and the direction of travel. They also need to remember that prospecting is a key part of the world of sales. I think what happens, certainly what I’ve noticed through my career is that people maybe start off in a outbound sales role and as quickly as possible…

Nathan Anibaba:

Yeah.

Richard Lane:

… move into an account management role.

Nathan Anibaba:

Right.

Richard Lane:

And all of those skills have getting forgotten. I’ve always tried to maintain it myself. I’ve always tried to remind people that you should be doing a little prospecting often, often, often. Little and often means that you don’t lose the skill and the capability, but also you’ve got to keep that wheel of business development moving.

Nathan Anibaba:

Yeah. You build the pipeline with it little and often, don’t you? That’s really interesting. So talk about then… I mean, you mentioned prospecting. How has prospecting changed in the last two and a half years? We’ve been in many different lockdowns. Historically, salespeople would love to use the phone to call in offices. People aren’t in their offices so much they anymore. They’re working from home. They’re working remotely. They’re doing a lot of sales calls on Zoom and Slack. Talk a little bit about how sales has changed and prospecting has changed over the last two years.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, really, interestingly, our business is predominantly a proactive outbound organization. We found actually our connections that’s went up at the beginning of the first lockdown. I think people were sitting at home thinking, “I’m not traveling, I’ve got all this time,” and probably a bit of fear. And they were answering every call. That changed as we went through. We’ve had a hugely disruptive time over the last two years, positively disruptive for many in business. I do think the pandemic has just accelerated change that was already happening. So a big shift from field sales to inside sales.

Richard Lane:

You can now, at the click of a button, be speaking to people from all over the world in a discovery call using Zoom or Teams or whatever video conferencing tool you use. That was all was available to us previously, but we didn’t use it as much as we do now. I think the value of face to face will have changed because people just aren’t sitting around waiting for meetings anymore. If you go and see someone in person, it will be a meaningful discussion. You don’t just rock up and say, “Hey, I’m in town. Can I come and see you?”

Nathan Anibaba:

Yeah. I’ve got some time.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. I’m not in town. What are you doing there? So actually, I think that’s changed as well, probably for the better. I think about lots of my trips up and down the northeast line to London. Probably 50% of them I didn’t need to do, and I won’t do in the future.

Nathan Anibaba:

Speculative.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. So face to face I still think has got a really huge place to play. And I think the value of human-to-human connection is still very much there. But back to your question, prospecting has to be omnichannel. And this is the interesting thing around my crusade for connecting the world in marketing and sales because it’s even more important now that your digitally available to your customers. You need to be peaking interest with relevant content. You need to be sitting and going fishing in the digital places where your customers are spending their time. Having five conferences booked in your diary across a year just isn’t going to cut it anymore. So it’s omnichannel. It’s using every tool at your disposal to connect in a meaningful way with people that you would like to be your customers.

Nathan Anibaba:

So email, social, texts, I would imagine.

Richard Lane:

WhatsApp, phone call, emails, LinkedIn…

Nathan Anibaba:

All of that.

Richard Lane:

Yeah.

Nathan Anibaba:

Really interesting. So then how does marketing automation play into this. I mean, HubSpot for a very long time, I would say five or six years ago, it was all the rage because everyone said, “Oh, you need this HubSpot or you need Marketo. You need Eloqua.” And they will nurture the leads for you. And then magically out the other end, we’ll pop a sales-ready lead. And all he has to do is talk to them and convert them.

Richard Lane:

Yeah.

Nathan Anibaba:

Where do we sit with marketing automation today?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. So we call ourselves a tech-enabled sales business, but I think the human-to-human factor is key. Is automation important? Yes, it is, at the very top of the sales funnel. But I think personalization is key. I don’t think that’s changed really. We talked about being relevant, being concise, being topical, and being actually orientated. I think you lose elements of that with automation. However, you are able to reach a broader base, and it’s about remaining top of the inbox as well. But I think HubSpot’s view is it’s still valid, which is if you serve up relevant content to the people you want to be your customers, then you’re going to build brand recognition with them. So that at the right point, when the need is compelling enough for them, they’ll remember your name.

So there’s very much a place for it. Lead scoring, there’s a place for it. But I do think that what we have got to get our heads around and what we’ve been preaching for the last 11 years is around qualification. Automation will take you so far, but then you need to get under the skin and start really qualifying the need, the compelling event, the budget, the time scales, the decision-maker portfolio, the mapping, et cetera, what you’re up against. All of that needs to be delivered to a business develop manager or account exec so that they can then take it to the next level and make sure that we have a solution that fits.

Nathan Anibaba:

What have you learned over the years about what it takes to be a great salesperson?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I will say it was the best trip up that ever happened to me, Nathan. I was going to be a rockstar. That was the plan. And then I got a job in sales. No one ever suggested to me that sales would be a great career for me. And that’s something I’m really passionate about. I think it is changing but still not fast enough if I think of my kids. No one recommends a business or commercial world to them through the entire school process.

Nathan Anibaba:

It’s crazy when so much of our economy is based on that.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. And business is sort of still doesn’t necessarily get seen in a very positive way by a lot of people. It’s been a brilliant career for me. I think why… What do you need? Well, emotional intelligence is becoming more and more important. You need to be able to build rapport. durhamlane’s first mantra is business fit, business value. I’ve all sort of always followed that. So I want to be talking to people where I believe that we can help them because I’ve understood something about their world. I need to know we’re going to add more value than they’re going to spend with us. Otherwise, if it were me, why would you bother? And I’m interested in long-term relationships. It’s just such an amazing job to have where you just spend time getting to know people and helping them to be successful through the provision of your services, products, and support.

So that emotional intelligence is really key. I think more and more, we have to be storytellers. So we’ve helped people like you. This is the challenge they had. People want the picture to be painted for them. And that’s storytelling is not new, right, but I think it’s becoming more and more powerful, particularly in this sort of automated world that we live in. Again, it’s about getting that balance between automation and then the human interaction of telling the right stories at the right time to the right people and taking them on a journey with you until they become a customer.

Nathan Anibaba:

You’ve got your own methodology called Selling at a Higher Level. Explain how that works.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. So Selling at a Higher Level really came out. When I left corporate land many years ago, I set up a consultancy where I was just trying to raise the bar of the sales profession, really get people to think differently about the world of sales. Started working with SME organizations, which frankly, typically, a salesperson was hired because they rocked up to an interview. And there was something about them. This is a decade plus ago. But that was sort of felt like that was as far as it got. There was no training for sales people in SME land. And so I set up a business around that, and I just tried to help people to put some structure and process behind how they help people divide from them. And that’s really where Selling at a Higher Level came from.

I do remember having created it, and I had a handful of clients where I was implementing it, and we were having great success. I do remember picking up a copy of challenges sale thinking, “Oh my God, this is the hot thing. I hope I’m aligned.” And I got to the end and thought, “Great news. I am. So Selling at a Higher Level is sort of based around consultative sales, question-based, being interested to be interesting.

Nathan Anibaba:

Right.

Richard Lane:

And really just helping people. And we’ve proven this now with hundreds of people just proven that just by taking things really simply and doing the obvious but doing it well allows you to be very successful.

Nathan Anibaba:

So sounds really interesting. Sounds fascinating. I can clearly see that you’ve understood the way that sales people should sell really well. What do you say to your prospects who say to you, “That’s all well and good, Richard, but we’ve got a really complex business, and your methodology, your model doesn’t really fit with us because we’ve got really long sale cycles, we’ve got higher average order values. And it’s just a very technical sell.” How do you respond to a prospect?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. The common question… “Look, our business is really technical. There’s no way your guys and girls are going to be able to sell our product services.” I mean, I love that question, Nathan, because I always say, “We don’t need to be experts in your business, but we need to be experts in why somebody should be interested.” And that’s the bottom line, right? So when you are inquisitive, when you are interested in other organizations, as long as they’re the right type of customer, you’ve got your profiling right, the right ICP and the right persona within that, then you don’t need to be an expert in the widget or you don’t need to be an expert in the SaaS product or the tool. You need to know something about it, and you need the stories, as I mentioned earlier, but by asking questions and provide someone with a consultative workout without really needing to have a huge amount of knowledge at all.

That doesn’t mean to say we can take that flicker of interest and nurture it and take it through to a closed million pound deal for example. But what we can do and what we’ve proven many, many times is that we can create the flicker of interest, nurture that into a conversation, take that conversation through discovery and then serve it up to a BDM or account exec with a sales-ready opportunity for them to then propose to and close out and turn into revenue. And the more complex, the better frankly.

Nathan Anibaba:

Last couple of questions before we let you go. Really, it’s a couple of questions about the future of sales and kind of where you see the profession going. Because for a long time now, people have talked about people self-educating themselves online, which has been happening and is happening. The buyer journey is far more fragmented to now than it has ever been. AI and if you believe what all the Silicon Valley AI companies are telling you that there will be robots in the future that will replace salespeople that will be intelligent enough to be able to do that. Will there always be a need for a human salesperson, or do you see at some point in the future a salesperson being irrelevant?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. I haven’t got my crystal ball with me today, but I think interestingly, how many times have you spoken to anyone from Amazon?

Nathan Anibaba:

None.

Richard Lane:

So we’re already there. However, I said before, the more complex, the better. I think business-to-business behavior typically follows business-to-consumer and it’s number of years behind. I think voice is a really interesting development. So if you think of the work that we do here at durhamlane, it’s typically very top end of the sales funnel. How much of that could be automated using AI and artificial voice, probably quite a bit of it. Do I think that people are still needed for the foreseeable? Yes, because I think that human-to-human connection is something that we crave. I think automation takes you to a point, but I do think the human-to-human piece is what makes us different and makes us want to try different things and new things and build our business. But like I say, I’ve never met an Amazon salesperson. So automation is moving in fast.

Nathan Anibaba:

And finally, what have been the most influential, either books or salespeople, that you’ve followed in your career that have most influenced you?

Richard Lane:

Yeah. So a guy called Brian Tracy, I used to love… Some of his words of wisdom have stuck with me. A book that really changed my life was a book called Beyond Selling Value, which was really about consultative selling. That’s an amazing book. Challenger is excellent. Anything which is about putting the customer first, putting your feet in the shoes of the customer, I’m sort of totally with it I think. Now I mentioned best trip up ever happened to me. Well, why does it work for someone, not for others? Well, I think for me personally, it was that I just naturally am a sort of person that thinks, “What’s that other person trying to achieve,” rather than, “What do I want?” That comes second for me. It just always has done if I think about me as a little kid, I’ve got examples where I’ve just always put my feet in the shoes of the other person. I guess you call that emotional intelligence. And that’s some of the key learning. So anything like that, I tend to get drawn to.

Nathan Anibaba:

It may have even been Brian Tracy who said, “You can have anything you want in the world as long as you can help other people get what they want.”

Richard Lane:

Right. Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Anibaba:

Was that Brian Tracy or was that… I don’t know who I’m thinking about.

Richard Lane:

I’m not sure actually, but it does sound like one of… I call him AKA the silver fox. But, yeah.

Nathan Anibaba:

Love it. Final question before we let you go, do you regret not having the rockstar lifestyle now?

Richard Lane:

No, I don’t actually. Do you know I would’ve been terrible? It would’ve been awful for me. It was a lucky escape, I think, to be honest. I think I’m a real home bird, so I’m not the… if I’d been out on tour for 14 months living the high life, I think it wouldn’t have lasted that long to be honest. So I think I’ve probably made more money doing what I do than I would’ve done being a musician. Yeah, I’m lucky enough to be able to play guitar and enjoy it, but I’m also very happy doing what I do.

Nathan Anibaba:

You made the right choice. Richard, thank you for being on the show.

Richard Lane:

Lovely to be here, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Anibaba:

If you’d like to share any comments on this episode or any episode of ClientSide, then find us online at fox.agency. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, then please email clientside@fox.agency. People that make this show possible are Zoey Woodward, our executive producer, Hannah Teasdale, our podcast executive, Jennifer Brennan, our digital strategist. Supported by Sofia Ravanis and Alice Winterburn, our social and digital experts. I’m Nathan Anibaba. You’ve been listening to ClientSide.

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