Beyond Sales: Creating Value Across Every Customer Touchpoint

0:06Welcome to the Mastering Sales and Negotiations podcast from Huthway International. In this episode, we discuss why the most successful organisations are treating consistent client interactions as a strategic priority. From business development managers to engagement managers, delivery teams and beyond, this consistent communication strategy is crucial in creating value at every touchpoint. Our guest, Miles Davidson, Head of Sales Amir at Zulka, has spent his career understanding the evolving roles of customer-facing professionals in order to create unified communication approaches that result in a successful overall sales focus.

0:45So let's hear what Miles has to say.

0:54hello miles hey welcome to the mastering sales negotiation podcast now this episode's theme we've got a little bit of a theme around beyond sales so what does that mean to organizations like zulke yeah i think it's a great um i love the premise of this uh that's the topic um and i'm I'm minded what actually happens sometimes is like a CEO might make this statement that says, hey, we're all in sales. And 99 % of the organization, if not 100 % cringe, worry, what does that mean? Yeah, for me. I'm not in sales. What does that mean for me? But if I really reflect on that and think about how things have changed with our buyers, things have changed significantly.

1:37I mean, I can remember the days when you probably needed to strongly influence two people. and if you shook hands with the right person, you could get a deal done. We've seen that complexity increase, no doubt, and I think I can see some reasons why. But there's some, in fact, the latest evidence from Gartner about complex business-to-business sales says that today the average number of buyers is around 11 people. Wow. And there's a few things that you immediately reflect on this. So number one, there's a lot more people to meet, And therefore you can't expect a single person to build significant or meaningful relationships with 11 people.

2:19And as we know, in any form of sales, building trust in those early stages is everything. And you can't possibly as an individual look to do that to 11. And so I think the question you ask for me and how I think about this is we have to move from a kind of one to many relationship where I might have personally been able to hold two or three strong relationships and triangulate the different agendas. But now that's got a lot deeper. And I think the best way to do that is to try and have many to many relationships. and for me I think that's one of the that's one of the key things why we need to make sure that any of our colleagues who are interacting with customers have a much deeper commercial awareness.

3:07Sure. So it's not just the business consultants then, so it's not just the sales people then that need those skills, it's everyone in that piece. It's exactly right yeah, because actually it's the non-sales of people who spend the most time with our customers. Certainly once we're underway and we've mobilized and we're doing things. I mean, we're a technical and innovation consultancy. We're very good at having agile methodologies. And that means we love lots of get togethers, retrospectives, show and tells. And these are brilliant opportunities to build relationships and grow relationships. So there are people on the ground who are really positioned to hear other opportunities, pain points and challenges.

3:55And therefore, if these people have that commercial sense of awareness, even know to bring that back maybe to an account leader or client director, we're getting so much more rich information. And then the next step is really enabling and equipping some of these consultants to actually feel like they can carry a commercial conversation. Because some of those people are real specialists, aren't they, in their field? So you've got to be brought into these projects. Absolutely. And in fact, they're very specialists and they're often used to going really deep on a topic. So I'll give an example. You know, we have a lot of people who have wonderful job titles today, data scientists, data engineers, data architects, just to look at one tiny branch of capability.

4:44There was a wonderful example where one of those data architects who just by nature is wonderfully curious. And that's the really good thing. Absolutely. A lot of these consultants are professionally curious. And I think the small tilt of enabling, and this is someone who has definitely been through the spin sales training, has worked together as part of an account team. He took it on himself to have a just to have a breakout of a cup of tea with the product owner. And apparently the first question he asked is, I just want to make our team is aligned to your business value. And he said that opened a conversation for about 40 minutes and he got a much richer picture of the business environment.

5:26and he took it upon himself to share that to the wider team. And that is kind of almost invaluable.

5:33Robin Hoyle:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having that language, common language, between the people who are sales and the people who are non-sales but do have customer-facing responsibilities or opportunities is important. To what extent is that kind of formal versus informal that many-to-many? I know when I've worked with consultancies in the past, it's always been quite traditional that, you know, Senior partner goes to meet CEO and finance chief goes to meet finance chief. And there's a kind of matching off. There's a pairing off thing. It's a bit like organizing a football game. But actually, it seems to be a combination of both formal and informal in the way that you're operating.

6:14Robin Hoyle:What challenges does that present in terms of keeping tabs on who's seen who and what's going on? Where's the information? What's the flow of information? How is that, those insights moving through the organization? Yeah, I completely agree. That laddering and the, yeah, let's get the C-level to talk together, like still happens today, I'm glad to say, and it's still really important. But for me, that challenge comes back to that number. I mean, if you are really dealing with 11 groups, the chances are you might not even meet all of them. And they're not sitting just in the traditional procurement CFOs, executive branch.

6:50there is we discuss a lot and I'll come back to that formal versus informal we discuss a lot though how can we get to some of the unmet needs that might not surface through the traditional way of working and today that could be someone in the sustainability it could be one person who's to do a sustainability it could be someone who's deeply passionate about QA on a project and if that person isn't surface spoken to we found out painfully the scar tissue is here where we've ultimately lost an opportunity because we never knew of an unmet need and therefore we didn't have a chance to satisfy that so the challenge is the traditional laddering of setting up a meeting getting the ceo or the cfo i think that's well known by everyone but again to this point and the executives know how to behave i can put my ceo in front of any ceo and i know that they're going to build the right level of relationships and the right level of follow-up but now we're asking consultants who's not this isn't their day job to really try to meet to understand the customer's requirements with a commercial mindset on and and this is definitely something that doesn't happen overnight and actually some colleagues it works really well with others still repel and find it very difficult and in terms of those

8:11Robin Hoyle:the salespeople, because you do have an account manager who's responsible for that account or multiple if it's a series of different functions within a business. How do you help them to manage that as well? Because we've all worked with salespeople, which is keep away from my accounts, salespeople. That's mine, leave it alone. So I guess there's two things in there, isn't there? And how do you manage that kind of slight reluctance to let these people in? And secondly, how do you ensure that there's a consistency across those relationships? Yeah, it's a really good question. And there's also the difference between the new customer journey, who you might be bringing in, versus the customer we might be working with for a year, and now we're going to grow that account.

9:03And one thing that we have, the journey that Zulka is going through, is as we have grown and we've grown a lot especially post-pandemic as a firm the business development role the role that I took when I joined Zulker was very much a hybrid you were involved in new business acquisition very much account growth today we've got to the size where we are now moving those to two areas of specialists so we have a job family and we have people in new business and we have people in the account management and what I will say to on that question if we take the account management or what we call our client partners or client directors um i think one of their real skills is being a leader within that team absolutely ensuring that we have very deliberate and specific strategic meetings we have account growth and we have developed something called the account development framework and even that we use internal training and onboarding.

10:02And back to my earlier point is there's a lot of people on the ground, although today that's virtual teams meetings. But it's the regular cadence as a team coming together where we do things like let's relook at the stakeholder map. Who do we know? Who's building relationships with who? And that kind of marking and laddering just has to happen on more of a, it's more like a spider diagram today than perhaps a traditional ladder. And I think one of the big journeys that even our client directors are going on is to be the person that is also, and we're also introducing a role called a transformation consultant.

10:44We recognize that we need to really understand the domain in which our customers are working in. And we have a lot of customers in financial services, heavy regulated industries, and the same, for example, in our health industries with customers in life sciences or medical technology. And so what's really important is that that client director really understands the context of the customer, but actually leverages the entire team as the conduit to really understand what is going on in the moment in the customer, in the customer site. And for me, I think it's a real orchestrator and it's a real collaborator.

11:27But things like having some structure, an account development framework where we're working through a progression to get people to understand is where we're starting to see the right behaviours.

11:39Robin Hoyle:Sure. And that transition, translate that into the new business development piece. How do they then coordinate, choreograph, if you will, the team, the wider team to make those connections? Because obviously this is slightly less well known in terms of what are we dealing with, what are the challenges, what are the issues that people face, what are their requirements? How has their role changed to become many to many as well? I think the highest performer, when I look at the real high performance sellers within our organization, we've used the word already today, they are brilliant orchestrators, no doubt about it.

12:21I think they recognize that they haven't got to carry all of the knowledge. Yeah, they need to be able to carry that first C-level conversation. And that could be a CIO, CTO. So it could be touching on very technical areas. but the highest performance sellers know exactly when to bring the right subject matter expert to go deep on a topic. And I think that's critical. And we often talk about sometimes though the internal sell is as hard, if not harder, than the external sell. Because at that moment, if you're the new business, you're starting to be on the front line, you're meeting the customer, you start buying their vision and hopefully together you're creating their vision.

13:06And in the early days, very few people could be you and one other person has actually got any inkling in what this customer is, what their vision is. And you find those early in the early part, we're trying to build consensus, bring other experts who are all busy. This is the challenge. That's all busy. And people are often busy on other commercial paid engagements with commitments. and sometimes and i've been in that role you know if i could bring that data scientist or if i can bring that software engineer or the person who really understands the cloud architecture if i could bring him in to meet this cto i know we can quickly get off of a commercial conversation and again that's what i see in high-performance sellers is they know when to have a commercial conversation when to step back bring in the experts to really um and to put it maybe into hathaway part they instinctively seem to know the difference between a con you know a meeting where you're going to get a continuation yeah and a meeting where you're really looking to make an advance and for me it's when you start at the seller the new business person brings the right experts in is where we see them the steps to advance and and that's really interesting in terms of recognizing the timing but clearly just picking apart what you've just said

14:31Robin Hoyle:there's clearly a role to release that resource you know i'm guessing quite a lot of the resource that you wanted to bring in a fee earners they've got all sorts of you know they've got their own targets and goals and not least of which deadlines around projects etc etc etc so so you you've really got to sell back into the organization the potential value of this and and i can imagine there are occasions when that feels in and of itself like it's kind of hard job to do a harder job as you mentioned and selling to the client yeah it absolutely is it's um yeah that it's exactly that we've got these these these hive you know that generally speaking incredibly in demand consultants and that's what always happens we may have a hundred people in a role but typically you end up finding a handful who are the real leading lights the people who somehow have that beautiful way of taking complexity of technology domain and can sit and translate that into business value those people are all of our sellers gravitate to typically to their favorites or people who are in high demand um and yeah the the internal sell i think what then becomes important is that we really are qualifying every opportunity properly and one of i think the biggest helps here is when we're looking at an opportunity and we bring some rigor to it, we try to do that in a quite open forum.

16:01So there might be two people presenting the case. Sometimes there's a panel who are challenging. But if it's quite quick, quite obvious, this is a great fit. There's a company here with significant purpose. They've got the budget. We're talking to the authority. It quickly turns into what level of investment do we need to make? What do we need to do? and we try to also get executive support where needed to free up time and free up blockers but yeah i said honestly for all consultants it's one of the biggest challenges investing in pre-sales because at the end of the day the industry average might be you would win one in three so you always lose more than you win so you've always got that concern someone said well why should we invest time in this when i'm already deeply involved in a project um it's ever thus and and there's uh and and it's and that's why i say sometimes i think the internal sale can be as hard if not harder than the external exactly and have you had some people that have sort of grown into the role they've grown into being more of a a strong commercial contributor any people that really stand out that we didn't see themselves as a salesperson before potentially Yeah, without a doubt.

17:18I've seen people have either really repelled at first. And in fact, that's definitely one part of it. Let's face it, people have their mental model of what sales is. Why is it that with sales? It's so interesting, isn't it? It just is. Yeah, you're right. Maybe it comes from the car sales part. And there's a lot of statistics out there that people would like to buy a car without engaging with a rep. and you've seen manufacturers, Hyundai have tried it, but they have maybe some brand ambassadors, but they're trying to make it that you can deal with, you can buy the car without interacting it. And then, of course, Tesla come along and prove it's possible.

17:56So the gene is now in the bottle. And so I think people have these fears of what they think a seller is and they have their own views of where their skills and capabilities are. But to your question, immediately what comes to mind, and a colleague of mine, Dave, who's going to hate me referencing him. I shan't say any more about his name, but he'll know exactly who that is. There's more than one Dave at Zorka. But here is someone who has got an amazing track record and a significant career as both a project manager and a delivery manager. He's post-technical today, but he's the sort of guy that gets into the weeds and understands the architecture and the team dynamics.

18:42And I have seen him take on some of our most complicated and complex projects against deadlines that seem impossible and priorities that are constantly shifting for a customer. And I've seen the way this guy's skills at bringing people together. And frankly, he's a phenomenal negotiator. But if you point that out, he repels from that idea.

19:04Robin Hoyle:He's just naturally good. Yeah, he just understands how he's got to get everyone on the line and he's not got a fear of saying no. And he will stand behind his convictions. And what I've learned working really closely with Dave is his preparation. He would never turn up to a difficult conversation without having at least three mitigation strategies. Exactly. And if you think about how you prepare for a complex negotiation, that's exactly what you do, right? You might have your best out. He wouldn't have to huth weight training, would he? Yeah. Exactly. But the point is, if I talk to Dave about, look, we want to present to this customer, he recoils.

19:47Any form of public speaking, absolutely not. And yet when we really, the joy was he and I got to work on an account together. It's one that I actually opened up. It was in financial services. And same thing. Dave came into it with that straightaway wanted to be in his delivery mode. But we were in this journey of moving. So even then it was like, well, Dave, I'm going to transition this to you. And this means you're carrying forward the commercials. And that means not just an extension of the existing work, but how we pivot and how we develop. And I could tell the fear, the uncertainty, the doubt, maybe the imposter syndrome that he brought to that originally.

20:31but you know what it didn't take long for all of his underlying skills and capabilities to fill the gaps and fill the void um the same meticulous preparation working with the team and so that when he instead of coming up with three mitigations for something that's gone wrong and i remember having this conversation with him you're coming up with three alternative ways that we could help a customer go further and that was it instead of solving a sort of known problem you're trying to offer really great suggestions of how we could take we can take things forward and and again i love this because i know he'd hate it but what his style is very brash very factual no flannel and and he sees that as being completely anti-sales but actually what it does is it builds a huge amount of trust and respect and if he says no we can't do that or no we think it's a bad idea and and that's the the key word that we'll always come back to it's about trust david has got the trust of the customer and whilst he originally balked at the idea that that that he would be responsible carry a number to develop the the account he has without doubt learned that meticulous planning turning up and making suggestions um if even more than that his blunt way he never wants to do a proposal he wants to do a statement of work yeah let's go straight

22:00Robin Hoyle:to a signature yeah and i said well that's brilliant yeah he said yeah but we don't normally do that in sales i've not observed that and i went let's have the account meeting if you put that forward why don't you just ask so shall i send you a contract and he's never stopped doing that that one account is currently up to contract number 20 and i was involved in signature of contract number one and David has done the other 19. Fantastic. And you mentioned there that that's a financial services business and given what you do, you know, you're in the world of IT, you're in the world of security, you're in the world of data management, you're in the world of all of those movement to the cloud and all the rest of it.

22:37Robin Hoyle:I can imagine that opening up an account and continuing to supply an account which is in that heavily regulated, shall we say, nervous industry in terms of recent events. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That must have a hell of a long sales cycle, to put it not too complicated. How do you manage that? How do you sell that back into the organization to say, yeah, it is going to take us however long it's going to take us and it's worth doing? What's the dynamic there? and how do you start that process off with them such that you know you can go back with a sense of conviction to say look i know it's going to take a while really we've got to stick with it what what's what's what's that process that somebody like you does in that initial contract yeah so i think there's a lot to unfold there which i i really like i mean to help us have some level of focus you're right so our business has organized around market units so we may have a market unit which is financial services includes insurance which makes sense in the uk yeah where we're slightly larger more mature in switzerland we will have a dedicated only insurance focused banking but common to all market units and the same could be said in health or pharmaceutical we will have a real portfolio view.

24:12Each market unit has a portfolio view of what a really healthy mix of customers would be. And if we drew that out as a pyramid, what is common for all is all market units want to have that probably two or three anchor clients, significantly large, millions or multi-million, long year, long tenure. And then below that, they might need five or six next generation customers where one or two of those could be large. And sitting below that, you need random bets and funky things and fintechs. And you need the startups and you need some, you've got to keep things fresh. We have, if I look at Zulker on one part, we also have to be incredibly attractive to get the best talent to work on our projects.

25:04So a way of answering that is each market unit has a portfolio and will have an absolute target account. And I think it's that you have to have a mixture of where you place your bets. If you were going to go, if you were in financial services on banking and you were going to go, we're going to go all in on tier one banks. We are only going to want to attract tier one banks. And where that is our focus, then you're probably not able to forecast revenue until 2027. Because to your point, those sales cycles are measured in years. And I think, so the strategy comes into, okay, where might we play?

25:45We might have one tier one bank that we are really making significant effort to attract, to influence. We sometimes use advisors. We have non-executive advisors. We're using their black book. We might go in for this knowing that is a large and long sales cycle. And we're probably going for that mid-tier, tier two banks in that example. So you really have to spread your bet. But your other part of the question is, again, how do you keep the faith? If you're the individual salesperson who is trying to do that tier one bank, unquestionably, that is that is um it comes back to that the internal sale can be one of the most difficult um and i think there you're almost having to do an internal showcase to keep it relevant you're having to really show that you've got an engagement plan with that potential customer um and you know we've done before entire events where we've done a round table on a topic we know that bank or that individual is we want to fill that with very interesting industry people but we're doing it secretly to get that one person on the chair if we get that one person on the chair with their peers that person is our focal person of the event and that's the to that level of targeting and sometimes the joy of course is the person who joined late could actually be the the next person you you work for but you're right you you have to have a in our view it's a portfolio view.

27:19And because the sales cycles are so long, we certainly do not make a strategy that says we're only going to go for tier one.

27:27Robin Hoyle:Yeah, yeah. So you've got that balance across the portfolio. You've taken obviously an approach which has broadened sales capabilities. We've talked about the non-sales people who are now involved in commercial conversations. You've talked about the new business people and the account management people so you've got a range of different skill sets capabilities and focus within within and across the team what what have been the tangible results of of broadening that commercial understanding commercial awareness across the entire organization and and has that improved that balance within those portfolios for the different industry groups has it has it helped you to shorten sales cycles where that's relevant or has it helped you to go deeper where that's relevant what what what's what's been the kind of two or three takeaways from broadening that sales capability we're definitely in the realms of we're two years into this program and we we're definitely now building up a wonderful we've got a lot to observe we've got a lot of anecdotes and i think actually we've got enough evidence now that's starting to show that this is working.

28:40You used the phrase earlier, which is absolutely true. The common language that this is now bringing is helping. We, as you know, in sales, you have to kiss a lot of frogs consistently. One thing that the behaviors I'm seeing in one thing in that pre-sales, which typically is three to six months, where we might have that opportunity to meet a new stakeholder, I've already observed people are doing preparation. They're using some of the tools that they've taken from spin training. They are aligning on what the goals and the questions and who and how they might ask those questions. And in some examples, it's brought me real joy.

29:23They're doing the post-core analysis using a T-form. And one thing I've consistently had feedback, and I host a retrospective of every cohort that's done the training. and by the end of this year we'll be up to about 20 cohorts and about 200 colleagues one thing that seems to really be a light bulb moment for everyone is the is the explicit need I want to remember a competitor of ours actually trying to in a way to try and probably nudge us out of the way saying the trouble with Zorka is their capabilities it's like it's like an inch wide and a mile deep um i was like that's great because for us you know that can play to the fact that we're engineers at at its core and so the point about an implicit need or explicit need engineers love to solve problems and and the quicker the better right the quicker i can get to solution the better and so often in in conversations i think you know pre-training what we were looking for is well they've told us they've got a pain, we should go off and fix it.

30:31Two things about through the training course, people start to understand wow this takes months and actually it's change management and it's understanding even though they've got a vision of if we could magically make that happen my life would be better. The engineering mindset is see a need fill a need. See a need, fill a need. but what one of the light bulb moments is this explicit need yeah but has that person also got the vision have they really and what is that vision and to them work as a team to help really you know we use the phrase developing the buyer's vision becomes an incredibly important part so without a question without a doubt one of the um the ways in which i've seen rolling out this sort of training to a cross-functional team and non-traditional sales roles has been in the preparation around pre-sales but I've also had some delitis as you put it earlier within our organization we call it practices like centers of excellence around cloud and I've seen teams putting together very specific offerings of where we've solved a problem multiple times we're recognizing that as a pattern we're presenting as a blueprint which is great that's enabling the sellers that's what we need as a seller we need this constant we have a quest for so much ask so many assets to to keep talking to the customer what started happening organically is there is an internal version of that pack with the kind of the battle cards or the cheat sheets and i've started seeing coming up with very specific spin questions related to the offerings um which just started happening seemingly organically and i can see now this is starting to get into the mindset

32:27Robin Hoyle:and it's getting a wider adoption yeah and and and that that balance between saying well look we've now got some building blocks upon which the consultants can really go further and and build that requirement, understand that explicit need more deeply, develop it, clarify it, extend it. That doesn't become a script, doesn't become a kind of, here's a product that we've now developed because we've done it so many times for other people, have another one of them because you're just the same. Because that's not a very compelling sell. And actually, it doesn't play to your strengths as an organization, your engineers, your people who build stuff, who create systems, who solve problems for people.

33:08Robin Hoyle:Churning out the same thing all the time is not the same as sharing experiences such that you've got a better foundation around what the team and the organization could do. I think that's terrific. Has there been any understanding from the clients that the way that they are being approached by this many-to-many team that you've now assembled has changed? Has there been any feedback from them about actually doing business with Zulka? Yeah, actually, we've got a couple of really good recent examples. You probably expect we do sort of net promoter score surveys with our customer after every major engagement.