How to be the conductor of your own corporate orchestra

0:07Welcome back to the Mastering Sales and Negotiations podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Massey. And this week on the podcast, we had the pleasure of being joined by Rebecca Bromwich, Global Account Director at Vodafone Business. We discussed trust, how to be the conductor of your own corporate orchestra, and lots of other real world challenges and lessons from the sales frontline. Today, I'm joined by Robin Hoyle to discuss the key takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca. And what makes Robin such an expert, you might ask? Well, he is very well known in the L &D industry, addresses leaders all over the world at conferences and summits, and is the author of two books around learning culture.

0:46In addition, he has walked in sales director's shoes himself. So, suffice to say, he knows his stuff.

0:59so we got through quite a lot there with rebecca didn't we this afternoon a lively conversation very lively conversation and i think that idea of the trusted advisor and the challenges that brings

1:09Robin Hoyle:a lot of challenges it seems yeah absolutely and i think i think one of the challenges that's kind of uppermost is that idea of the organization thinking that somehow calling somebody something means it's going to happen it doesn't we know that you have to build the capabilities of the people who are going to do that but also understanding that you cannot just come out with some rhetoric about we are trusted advisors you have to kind of live up to that and and and be trusted advisors and that takes time and and giving people the opportunity to fulfill that role properly is kind of part of what leading a sales organization is about if you're serious about that if in actual fact you just want people to close deals and and you know bring in the revenue and and all and then move on to the next customer and all that fine you know do that but don't say you're going to be one thing and then yeah try not to type yeah reverts to some of the kind of lower levels of of sales transactional level relationships where i think genuinely organizations value that longer term more in-depth more more strategic relationship yeah we didn't touch in the conversation about the really the skills needed to be that kind of trusted advisor there are very specific skills that are needed to do this absolutely and i think number one is to be curious and to which is not a skill but it's a kind of mindset where he says actually i want to find out yeah which leads you naturally down the route of asking those questions but you can ask as many questions as you like if you don't listen to the answer you're not really getting any any of the responses so you know paying attention being absolutely focused on what information you're picking up and maybe sifting it later and finding actually that wasn't that important that's a that's a real gem and some of that understanding of people what what what i see people get wrong is either they say they're going to be trusted advisor consultative seller solution seller whatever it is and they're terribly transaction so that's at one end of the spectrum the other end of the spectrum is the people who build a relationship but they don't kind of maintain a sense of well what's the commercial benefit of doing that so there has to be that mix somewhere in the middle which says not only am i listening carefully to the answers but I'm trying to spot where there's information which I can then create insights around, where I can say, oh, have you thought about, or I can ask another question.

3:42Typically, within our world, we talk about asking implication questions about the problems that people talk about and developing the needs and building value that way. But you can't do any of that unless you've listened very carefully to what people said and paid attention, really paying attention to what people are saying to you and understanding it and keeping a kind of third eye on the conversation, which is, well, how do I offer them value and where is the value for us? Well, that's that sort of, you've got to lead it into that strategic vision then, haven't you? That you've got to be able to do that conversations with both parties.

4:20You've got to be able to have that conversation with the customer and you've got to be able to link that back to your organization and say, I'm doing this and this is why.

4:27Robin Hoyle:Yeah, and I thought Rebecca was very clear about that idea of being the conductor of the orchestra. We've talked before about that idea of the salesperson being a project architect, sitting between the client organization and the supplier organization, and representing both to each other, and being very clear about the role that they're playing in each of those conversations. But I also think it's about carving out that time. I thought what was really interesting was that there were opportunities within Rebecca's current role for strategic conversations with each group. And introducing people at different levels, bringing the senior people in to talk about new developments, innovations, new ideas.

5:12Just to have a level of conversation which isn't purely transactional. Yeah, there were some great examples there, weren't there, from Vodafone about how they build that customer picture with their focus groups, etc. Yeah, and the idea of having a steer co where people will talk about, well, what's going on? What's happening? Where are we speaking to? Who are we speaking to? Where are the level conversations? In other words, where our C-suite are talking to their C-suite and things like that. That idea of building that multi-level conversations because otherwise, as we spoke about in the session, an individual leaves and the whole account goes with it.

5:49It all goes, yeah. It's all gone. Either the client loses their main contact within the supplier organization or the other way around, the supplier loses their main contact and realize that actually the relationship is actually quite deep but not very broad. It needs to be both deep and broad. And a lot of that comes from having a strategic mindset, focusing on where the value is. You might not be able to do that for all of your accounts. You might not be able to do that for all of the organizations that you're speaking to. but identify which ones you're going to really invest time and effort in and be supported and advocate for the time and the resource to build that relationship with the organization and you can't build that relationship just because it's a nice thing to do you have to build that relationship with a clear sense of well how do we gain value mutually from that so the commercial acumen built on strong information built on asking questions and most importantly build on listening to the

6:51Robin Hoyle:damn answers that you get because so many people don't great thanks a lot robin you're welcome