Working Collaboratively to Solve Problems

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 Myles Davidson, Head of Sales for Amir at Zulka. We discussed how sales skills improvement can help demystify sales for their specialized consultants and technical experts and allow them to align their solutions precisely with customer challenges, building deeper trust through value-focused dialogue. Today, I'm joined by Robin Hoyle to discuss the key takeaways from our conversation with Miles. And what makes Robin such an expert, you might ask?

0:42Well, 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, and has walked in sales director shoes himself. So suffice to say, he knows his stuff. Let's get going.

1:05Loved that conversation with my old... It was great, wasn't it? Wasn't it great? Wasn't it good? Yeah. And that evolving role of customer-facing professionals, I mean, it must be the same for so many organisations, especially in that consultancy sort of world. Of course it is. I mean, we've all heard stories of these consultancies where, you know, you see the salesperson for the first time and then the next thing you've got is you've got a 21-year-old intern who's doing all the work for you you know that idea of having a real relationship with the people

1:30Robin Hoyle:who do the work who understand your organization inside and out understand the problems that you're facing the requirements that you have getting the explicit needs that miles was talking about before they start work i think i think that's just so important and the idea that they can also have a very significant role as they're working alongside their equivalents in the technology department or in the uh other areas of the business i think yeah vital insights that they can bring and of course if they've got a common language the the commercial skills the ability to actually ask the right questions at the right time yeah why wouldn't you do it is is it seems to me an absolute no-brainer that anybody who's got interaction with the customer ought to have those baseline commercial skills at least and in a situation like zulka where it's so much better on trust, long-term sales cycles, understanding the team, they need more than just the surface commercial capabilities.

2:31They really need to be embedded within it. And I like the fact that they understood after the spin training, they'd really loved the idea of the explicit need. Let's get to that.

2:41Robin Hoyle:Absolutely. Because, you know, we like to solve problems. You know, it's one of the things that I talk about when people say to me that they are solution sellers. Well, you know, there's no more solution focused people within my experience of working than the guys who are doing the technology stuff you know the people who are architects engineers of systems they love to solve problems and sometimes they can run away with oh we could do this we could do that we could do the other thing and and they haven't really got what it is that the organization or the client or the user really needs so i think that understanding of wait sell to the explicit need when they've said this is what i want to do get there but it goes beyond there which is the phrase that i think both of you hit on which is this idea of building the customer's vision oh i loved that yeah and them doing that at that at the seller's side is fantastic isn't it absolutely the idea that not that we want the customer to want to buy our stuff but we want the customer to be thinking about where this could go to what the future looks like not solving the problems of last week but the solving the problems of a year and two years hence that idea of really getting onto the same page of the customer is important but it and it's one of the things that you and i have talked about before because we've got a webinar about this idea of the two-faced seller you know the idea of your job is not just outward facing to the customer it's inward facing to your organization to get everybody on the same page to justify the resources the timelines the sales cycles that you're going to go through to get access to those engineers those data architects those cloud specialists to come in and speak to somebody who they understand and who understands them within the client organization before pen has been put to paper that's a hard job getting getting that resource because these people are fee earners and things like that so the sales person's role in the middle of that interaction between the customer and the rest of their own organization is absolutely crucial and i think it's it's a real opportunity to build capability of the salespeople and create opportunities for the non-salespeople to understand the commercial reality in which they're working i also love that story about um his colleague dave with the negotiation skills we love dave we love dave and that idea of just you know not no bs you know actually saying look no we can't do that that's that's a that's not going to work that's not an idea that we're going to pursue being very upfront with people because you have that authority because people know that you can do it and also being so prepared having all having all that stuff in advance to fall back on understanding where he was going to go with it all brilliant yeah i mean i was working with an organization recently and they said i said to them how many negotiable issues do you deal with and they got two or three each negotiation and said and and how many uh possible outcomes do you envisage and prepare for within each of those negotiable issues they go two or three and i go that's great that's exactly what we saw our average negotiators do our skilled negotiators were doing twice as many yeah and you could see them go oh we thought we were quite good at this and you go yeah yeah bang in the middle of average mate well done you good stuff carry on and and that you know just having that kind of sense of no i'm going to be really well prepared i'm going to have done the planning i'm going to have got the data i'm going to understand the potential directions within which this conversation is going to go yeah and i'm gonna i'm going to be ready for it not to the word because you know there will be things which come from left field and all this but just having that sense of i am in control of this conversation i would like it to go from here to here and then it could go over here over there over there and i'm ready for it i'll have a bit of an idea exactly and that that is just you know how many times do you want that person alongside you no it's music music to our ears exactly because you know we've all been there where we've got the one trick pony who comes and goes well what we can do is do the thing that we've always done for other people we always do it for and you kind of go that's not what we need really you know not anymore no not good enough anymore i think one of the other things that he said rich was that that idea of having to put in place processes procedures practices to deal with the fact that people are working remotely and your team is working remotely the idea that you don't actually have to be on their mainframe sitting downstairs theirs in the basement to do the technology stuff that you were doing where they are meet them where they are i don't know there's a lesson there isn't there i think that was really important to say look we know most things are going to happen remotely most things are going to happen at the end of a team's call most things are going to happen through us working in our environment and them working in their environment but actually just making the space and the time to get alongside someone to have a conversation with them to do it in an environment which is slightly less pressured you know we don't have an agenda we're going out for lunch and we've not got a team's meeting in five minutes yeah exactly just make the space for that and again i think within a world which is increasingly remote from each other where people are increasingly outside that i'm not advocating that we all go back to working in the office not for a second but i do think there have to be strategies in place for organizations to just have that serendipitous conversation where you get to know a little bit about the person there's an opening up where it might be a throwaway comment maybe one sentence that they say but actually it goes that's given me an idea an idea there let's see if i can talk to dave or whoever it is about how we make something of it yeah that's important so that's what rachel and i sort uh took away from the conversation with miles davidson the head of sales emea from uh zulker we thought it was a fascinating conversation and if you haven't listened to all of it strongly recommend take some time out 45 minutes well spent of listening to the entire conversation and understanding how zulker have continued to build capability across their team in the commercial disciplines as well as the unquestionable skills that they have within the technical space that they operate in so i think you'll enjoy that but that's what we thought about what miles said what do you take away if you've enjoyed what you saw don't forget to tell other people about it and of course you can make sure you don't miss any of the future sales and mastering negotiations podcasts by liking and subscribing from wherever you get your normal podcasts from and of course you can always find them on the Hustler International website.