Half of managers are accidental managers

I started selling in 19— when was it? '87.

Okay.

And I was working part-time at trade shows, that kind of thing, selling piping and plumbing equipment and other rubbish. But I got a bug for selling when I upsold someone from a 50 pence piece of pipe to £135 worth of stuff. And that was really, really exciting. I think they came back the following week and got a refund.

But that gave me a bit of a bug. And then I spent 17 years getting 1 year's experience 17 times over because I worked harder and I read a lot of stuff. I mean, I've always been an avid reader and listener. But the problem was that stuff didn't really work. Most of it was out of date when Queen Victoria was a kid, and it was still being propagated.

Now, then I came across a methodology called Sandler. In all honesty, most of these methodologies are pretty good, but what I really like about Sandler was it was grounded really well in a strong psychological discipline, transactional analysis. Which to me makes a lot of sense. It helps you decode human communication in a way that actually makes sense.

So you understand what's really going on.

Yeah.

When you and someone else are communicating or not communicating. And the challenge then became, how do you create an environment where both sides feel safe? And so I'm a champion for buyer safety. I believe that every buyer deserves to feel safe whenever they deal with a seller, but very few do. And for good reason, because many salespeople are not very good.

And it's not their fault. It's down to ignorance. They don't know any better. They've been conditioned to do things badly. And if they've had training, it's normally around product. And then if they have a bit more training, it's around technique. Those are the 2 least important parts of your training. You learn product knowledge so you can ask better questions, not so you can tell people about your product because no one cares.

And you learn technique so you can protect the prospect, not so you can attack them and use it as a weapon. But that's how most people do. And the language in sales is very, uh, you know, testosterone-fueled. You know, we do campaigns and we crush the competition and, you know, all this kind of stuff.

Well, that's fine and dandy, but that's not the real world actually. And those are old industrial age models. Competition means you carry very sharp knives. Uh, coexistence really means you have very sharp elbows and you'll take advantage wherever possible. And collaboration for most people is done at arm's length because you don't really want to give your good stuff to your partners just in case.

Yeah. So there's no trust. And so the last few years I've really been trying to work out how do we use humanity's superpowers? What put us to the top of the food chain? And the thing that put us to the top of the food chain is genuine cooperation. If you look at tribal societies, they have leaders at different generations for different things.

There are leaders in different generations responsible for defending the cattle against other tribes, for protecting it against predators, for handling migration, for dealing with strange weather patterns. And changing seasons and foraging. Now, people step forward when their time to lead comes, and they step back and let other people lead because it's not about them.

It's not about their ego. And so that's the work that I'm doing at the moment, helping people build those triple-win ecosystems where the customer wins, the partners win, and you win. And we play a game of long-term selfish.

Long-term selfish.

We get— the irony is that came from a former CEO of Goldman Sachs before they went bad. Yeah. And you look at all these great organizations, they've all taken a turn, a wrong turn, because they're now fixated on this erroneous belief that every business exists to serve the shareholders and deliver value to them.

The money is last in line, or it should be. It's always first in line because that's the nature of power. Money and power mix very well.

Mm-hmm.

And they don't give up control easily. But smart investors will invest in the business because it's a great business and it has long-term sustainable future. But the last 40, 50 years, the emphasis has gone on unbridled growth, growth at any cost, so that you can get more logos, you can fill the pipeline with fiction.

It doesn't matter whether it closes or not, as long as the day of the valuation it looks healthy. So then you get a decent valuation figure and it's out of date by suppertime. Now that results in stupid behavior like management pulling forward deals without any thought of the real consequence or the hardship it creates.

When you calculate the hidden cost of bringing just one complete sales cycle forward, um, to bring it into this quarter from next, you could be talking thousands of dials just for one of them. And the leadership brings tens or hundreds of these deals forward because they want to make a valuation number.

So it's a brilliant introduction, and we kind of dove straight into the topic, um, and it's fascinating. And before we dive into our actual topic for tonight, I want to ask a follow-up. Is, you know, you talk about, um, money or shareholders being the priority, um, what should be? Should it be the customer?

Should it be the buyers?

You're like, um, well, again, I believe there's you should serve your people first.

As in your employees.

As in your employees. If you look after your employees and your partners, by the way, your customers get really well looked after. Every job function should have a window to the customer. They need to see how they impact the customer. Everything needs to be built backwards from the customer's intended outcome. And this is where people go wrong because they spend so much time diving into the solution and trying to sell their solution without ever really diagnosing the problem.

Einstein, pretty reasonable thinker, said, given an hour to solve a problem, I will spend 95% of it on the problem and only 5% on the solution.

Hmm.

And there's good reason. When you spend time looking at the solution deeply from multiple different angles with different perspectives, and this is the best argument I can think of for diversity, Diverse teams come up with better solutions than homogeneous teams.

Mm-hmm.

Having range is incredibly powerful. Working in over 500 different segments of the market means that I can create connections where others can't. Now, we are at one of those massive intersectional moments. If we look at what happened in Florence, in the 1500s under the Medicis, that was a place that created intersectional moments because they brought together artists, philosophers, scientists, engineers, and they brought them all together.

Mm-hmm.

And they melted— it was a melting pot. And it was a synthesis of ideas. So what I'm really trying to work on is how do we create these environments where we really cooperate? We're working towards common purpose, which is the customer's outcome. And we have to remember, customers only rent outcomes from us.

They don't buy them outright. You don't buy a car outright generally. Okay? You buy it for as long as it's fit for purpose, and then you replace it.

Yeah.

So I might fall in love with, I don't know, an Aston Martin Vantage, and my consumption is up. To maximum environmental damage level. My adoption rate is high. My satisfaction rate is high. But now I have to look after elderly parents. It's not really the ideal car. So now I have to get myself a Fiat ugly car because it's got slidey doors and steps and ramps and wheelchair access and all that kind of stuff.

Now I'm devastated because I've got to give up this thing I love, but it's no longer fit for purpose. And that's what happens. When you no longer stay relevant. And the beauty of operating within these ecosystems is you are never irrelevant to your customers because within the ecosystem, you can always bring value even when you have nothing to sell directly yourself.

And you're still solving the customer's problem, which is your job. Because selling should be the most noble thing you do in business. Selling is the facilitation of buying. You are helping the customer make the best possible decision for themselves, whether it involves you or not, for now and the long term in B2B, especially in complex sales.

And if you have any other philosophy, I believe it's bankrupt.

I like that. I think you're— I would agree with you. And it's a shame that more people don't think of B2B selling or selling in general as a noble profession a lot of the time. Because ultimately, at its core, it's exactly as you describe. It's matching a buyer problem to a potential solution.

And if you're ethical, that may or may not be your solution. It actually might be someone else's, and that's okay. And that's, you know, part of being a good ethical salesperson. Unfortunately, it doesn't have that reputation a lot of the time. Because I think everyone can relate to a bad buying experience, whether B2B or B2C.

Have you read Charlie Greene's fabulous book, Trust-Based Selling?

I haven't actually, no. I'm gonna write it down.

Charlie Greene was the guy who came up with the book, The Trusted Advisor. And he's been working with all the major investment banks, consulting houses for the last 40 years.

Right.

Bill Bain was on speed dial, all that kind of stuff. And he came up with this fantastic equation, the trust equation. Trust equals reliability plus credibility plus intimacy over self-orientation.

Break that one down for me.

So reliability means you do what you say you're going to do in the manner you said you would.

Yep.

Okay. So you're consistent. Credibility means you can do what you say you can. That would be nice. So no blue sky selling, no exaggeration, hyperbole, no hiding stuff that's material to the decision. Okay. No lying, no obfuscating, no manipulation negatively. And intimacy. Now, this is the most important operator in the equation. Because you cannot have trust unless someone lets you in and lets you in close.

But to get trust, you have to give trust. To have control, you have to give up control. The beauty of all of this is the paradoxes, because they really mess with your head. If you want to get the best out of people, don't push them. Have them fall towards you. Encourage them, find their motivation, find their reasons, and align what you do with what they do by being a master at finding common ground, common purpose, build bridges, look for similarities.

But what do we get trained to do in competitive coexistence and collaboration? We get trained to trust no one.

Yeah.

Everything is contracted. In writing, in triplicate, which means that nothing really gets done. You end up with a piss-poor deal because neither side is happy. The best negotiation— and I learned this from my pal Alan Sang, who is one of the top negotiation trainers on the planet, bar none, and he was trained by the guy who I hold in the highest esteem, Jim Camp— and he said, um, the best kind of negotiation is where there is no compromise.

Both sides get their needs met, but that's hard work. It's easy to just throw rocks at each other, but look for the common ground, find what it is that you have in common, and then build around that. That's why I spend a lot of time working with my competitors. I'm really happy to work with competitors.

It's fantastic. We both get better and they have their spin. I have my spin, and I'd make all of my IP available for free. Because I want people to steal it because I want them to make it better. The 2 conditions are you give me credit once and then when you've improved it, you give it back.

That's it.

Yeah.

Because I want sales to be a force for good. I've set up a community with a bunch of other people and that's our mission. It's to create the conditions so the next generations don't have to put up with the crap that's going on now. You know, the stuff that you see at the moment, the way people are exploited, you know, burnout is just another word for, it's a euphemism for exploitation.

Yeah.

You look at the revolving door in sales that's been there historically and they just burn through people.

Well, the average tenure is what, 13 months in sales roles?

Well, CROs is only 12. So you're better off being a salesperson.

Crazy, right?

Ludicrous. And but you, you look at the acts of stupidity. If you just calculate what selling cold costs, okay, um, based on 80 million cold calls a year— this came from Connect and Sell CEO Chris Beale— and the average takes 33 dial attempts to get through to one decision maker on your list.

Unless you're calling a senior exec in IT, in which case it's 46 dial attempts to get through to one decision maker. On average, it takes 14 effective conversations where you get through to the person on your list to get one first meeting.

Yep. Sounds about right.

33 times 14 is a lot. 46 times 14 is more. But then this is the killer. 7 out of 8 first meetings generally do not result in a second meeting. That means 7 out of 8 times you haven't turned up and been relevant, timely, or valuable. You have no right to expect to come back.

But why not just fix that problem? Because then I can save myself hundreds of dials for everyone in my team. If I can just fix converting one second meeting, first meeting to 2, to 3, to 4.

Yeah.

Why don't I just get, why aren't I getting 8 out of 10? That to me is a much better place to focus my attention as a leader.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And I guess it's not a bad transition into our actual topic today, which is this. The world's changed a lot in the last few years. The world of sales has changed a lot in the last few years. I think some, in some respects for the better. Um, what do you— just, just let's start, let's start high level.

Like, what, what do you think has changed and what do you think about it?

Um, the sensible ones among us have worked out that you're, um, breathing someone else's, uh, air and drinking their sh*tty coffee is not a superpower. Um, you can get an awful lot done remotely. And yes, the human interaction is part of the mix.

Sure.

Um, but it's not a necessary part of the mix. And I know people who are selling quarter of a million dollar deals over the phone routinely.

Yep.

I've trained them to do that.

Same. Yeah.

So that's not unusual. And relationship is important, but engagement is what really matters. And this is now possible to track. So there are technologies like Ebsta.com out there that allow you to identify every single engagement that the company has or has ever had It automatically updates your CRM with current information.

Mm-hmm.

And it tells you the strength and the directional flow of engagement as well. So then it gives every single relationship and every opportunity an engagement score, which is the best barometer based on $100 billion worth of pipeline that they track. That if you track the engagement score, you've got a pinpoint accurate forecast.

You never have to listen to salespeople lie from that work of fiction again. Now that's fantastic because now you've got direction as a leader and a manager as to where you need to put your attention. Which deals can and will land? What do you need to do to rescue the ones that you're about to lose because of inattention?

Then there are other technologies out there, things like White Rabbit that allow you to see the path of least resistance to get to specific decision makers. And the net result of that is that you can navigate without spending all that time and effort that the 97 to 99% of your salespeople waste. Do you know that the average SDR spends 3 minutes per day out of the 480 you pay them for actually speaking to another human being?

And you've got armies of these people. Ask yourself a better question, please, for God's sake. So think about this. If we think about how we can get to market with the least amount of resistance, the lowest cost, and in the way that the customers want, then we have to start asking ourselves much better questions.

Well, what has changed? Well, customers don't necessarily want to see us.

Yeah.

And 40%, according to Gartner, now want a 100% seller-free buying experience. Now, this is a problem, and it's a problem that we have created as a profession, because the people who do buy the particularly more complex solutions without the involvement of a salesperson who has their best interests at heart, very likely to churn.

Who wants that? Sure. Complex sales will really struggle without a seller involved because the level of complexity in the deal is too much. And if you're trying to do all of that on an online portal, for argument's sake, chances are that a buyer's going to make mistakes.

They're going to make some awful mistakes because they're coming with the wrong assumptions and they bought the marketing, which let's face it, is not necessarily positively informative. A lot of marketing is feature-benefit-laden rubbish, or it's just this anodyne morphine that just drips out trying to shout, here I am. And you look at this, there are 8,000— 8,500, sorry— martech vendors at the moment.

That tells you no one has a solution to the real problem.

What's the real problem in your view?

The real problem is it's a wicked problem. It's complicated. It's intertwined. It's made up of loads of different things. It starts with the money. The money behind you permeates the culture of the organization. That then drives through the leadership compensation and measurements and their package and exit plans. And what pressure they then put on managers.

Right.

Half of managers are accidental managers. In the UK, 2.4 million are accidental managers. That means that they're working with somewhere between 16.3 and 8— sorry, 16.7 and 18.3 million UK adults. That's half the UK workforce is reporting to an accidental manager.

How do you define an accidental manager? Is that someone who's—.

They woke up one morning and someone said, Alex, can I have a word? And they think they're going to get fired. And they get told, congratulations, we've just fired your idiot boss. You're now the idiot boss.

Hooray.

And they say, bloody brilliant. Do I get a pay rise? Yeah, a little one. But actually, you're going to work longer hours. You're You're going to be miserable most of the time and it's always your fault because you can get fired from above, you can get put in jail from below, your customers can ruin your lives and your partners and suppliers can make your life hell.

And are we going to train you?

Oh God, no, no, no. We're not going to train you. Just sink or swim. Do what was done to you. Yeah. So managers need to learn that doing and supervising are not good use of their time. Coaching is a great use of your time. Leading is a great use of your time. Planning and strategizing is a great use of your time.

Going on ride-alongs. It's a great use of your time. Heaven forbid you actually build your bench and you make sure that you've got 5 or 6 really superstar candidates lined up for any key position because you want to make sure that you can, you've got contingency. But if you get budget, then hire the best, always hire the best salespeople.

But what do you do instead? You go through the motions and you just throw a load of money at technology trying to make people more efficient. And what you've done is you've sacrificed effectiveness and engagement for efficiency. That's been a big trend.

So, and you think all of that is attributed to the money and ultimately how senior leadership of an organization is compensated as well?

That is a major factor, but what they then impose as measurement on the sales team. Dials, proposals, demos. I mean, none of those metrics make any d*mn difference.

What should we measure?

Well, what we should be measuring is daily effective conversations, actual get-throughs where you speak to living, breathing human beings. If you have 5 of those a day, I'm really happy. I want to know that things are moving forward. So is the pipeline constipated and it looks like an old pair of granny knickers, constipated and baggy in the middle and saggy in the gusset?

Or does it look like a thong? So it's wide at the top, narrower, narrower, narrower, and all the good stuff's in the gusset. I'm going to offend a lot of people there. You might want to take that back out. But the reality is that most people's pipeline is just full of sh*t.

Yeah.

It's just, you know, they're hanging on. Ebster's data tells you that the average deal closes around 96 days. The average closed loss is 137. So that tells you that salespeople are just hanging on to stuff to keep their mortgage paid for one more month or quarter.

Yeah.

And it's, it's just lying and fiction. Why, why create the conditions where your salespeople have to lie to you because they feel threatened and bullied?

Yeah, well, look, I've seen that sort of behavior in, you know, back when I was a salesperson from leaders. No, no, it doesn't.

Insane.

And Todd Caponi talks about this a lot, based in Chicago, talks about this idea of create a transparent environment where salespeople feel to come to you and say, boss, the deal's gone bad, rather than trying to hold it in the pipeline for another 2 months so it looks good for the, you know, the senior leadership pipeline review session.

Everyone loses credibility and you end up then forcing people to scapegoat and you end up chopping heads for no reason. But, you know, if your salespeople are failing, that's on you as a manager. You hired them or you kept them. And your job, your only job is to hire the best people and get the best out of them.

That's it.

And I think something you picked up on and you touched on was where sales leaders should be spending their time and coaching is a big area. But it's actually, funnily enough, it's an area that sales leaders actually probably spend the least amount of time on.

Well, there's a good reason for that, Alex, which is that most coaching is based on the GROW model, which is fantastic. For executive coaching, where you can take an hour and you can put it in a safe place. What you need is something that's quick and dirty that can be done on the job as a manager.

And this is called operational coaching. Operational coaching is where you coach in the moment, on the job, at the point of need. And you coach something that is relevant to them so that they can improve there and then. And when you do this, miraculously, um, you start to free up time as a manager.

One of the companies I work with, Notion, has a program that they can scale across thousands of managers simultaneously and change them from command and control to inquiry-led management style. Now, can you imagine what happens in organizations where even only 20% of the managers adopt this approach?

Significant improvement.

Well, they free up roughly a day a week.

Right.

On average, within 6 months, they've released a day a week to spend on high-value management activities. When you put this into practice, you see ROIs in sales of 426%.

X.

So your single biggest weakness, your Achilles heel in your RevOps, is your management layer.

Mm-hmm.

Because most of them got tapped on the shoulder and they found themselves as a manager and then they muddle through. And they're also the single biggest untapped latent resource for catalyzing your entire organization, not just in sales, but every layer of management. On average, managers get 16 to 20 interruptions a day where their people come and say, Alex, I've got a problem with this.

I need that. How do I do this? Where can I find that? And managers, instead of thinking, stopping and thinking and asking themselves, is this a teachable moment? And asking a question.

Yeah.

They give the answer. Now, when you multiply that out, let's say it's 16, let's say it's 10 per manager per day, roughly half, yeah, are teachable moments. That's 2,400 teachable moments that have been stolen from every single team throughout your business.

It's a nice way of looking at it.

Yeah. Now just flip that the other way. That's 2,500 ways that they've learned to improve. Become interdependent or independent, self-sufficient, think for themselves, solve their own problem. That's 2,500 ways that they're not going to get interrupted again the next time.

That's right. And it's often when, like, when I'm working with sales leaders, a question I try and get them to ask themselves is, should I really be spending my time doing this? Or how could I be spending my time better? And, you know, a lot of the time you're right, sales leaders get caught up in interruptions, they get caught up in approvals and, you know, what, you know, low value tasks for lack of a better word.

So on interruptions, let's deal with that.

Okay.

An interruption on average takes about 7 minutes to recover your concentration after it. Yep. And then you have to do the interruption work that your people are bringing to you. So upward delegation is a huge red flag for me. If you're having upward delegation happen, it's probably because you are a rescuer.

Yes.

You help without boundaries or permission, and you may be mollycoddling or permissive, but what you're probably seen as is micromanaging, an interfering busybody. And your refrain will be, oh, I was only trying to help. As you become a persecutor. Because then you try and get vengeful because your ego's been pricked or whatever.

You have no room for ego as a manager and in channel or alliances even less. Because in that environment, the only currency you have are trust and influence. Now, coming back to that trust equation, because you did ask me to unpack it.

Yes.

We rambled. Or I rambled. Intimacy is the most important part as a manager, as a salesperson, as a leader. That means people feel close to you and they will let you— they let you in. And that means you have to have low self-orientation. Credibility plus reliability plus intimacy over self-orientation. If your self-orientation is high, you're one of those managers who steals credit.

If you are a salesperson whose orientation is high, you are someone who will sell at any cost.

Yes.

Because it's to your advantage. You will sell whether the customer needs it or not. So when you hire, look for people with low self-orientation, not nonexistent, because there has to be some. Remember, long-term selfish. Okay. But trust is hard won and easily lost.

Yeah.

And that intimacy is your insurance because it means that they're close and you don't screw over people that you really love and trust unless you're a monster, in which case you deserve to be then exiled because they'll never do business with you again if you breach trust like that. Yeah. And in alliances, in these ecosystems, the challenge with it— and this is why it's hard— you need people who are equally evolved and they have that low self-orientation.

So they will never take advantage. If they see an opportunity to take advantage, but it's another partner's introduction, they would never do it. They would make a point and say, you have to speak to Alex.

Right.

Yeah. And they would never Um, try and fleece a customer. They would never, uh, do a bad job. And that, that's the key. So this is built on trust. You don't need paperwork. I, I have a friend, Zach Seltz, who is a master at building alliances and channels, and he has a well over 95% success rate.

When he recruits a partner, they all produce, and he's done over 1,000 channel relationships, generated billions of dollars, quadruple-digit growth internationally, and taken companies to skyrocket. And what he does is he spends the first 90 days working with the partner that he intends to work with, building the pipeline and going on meetings while the lawyers are pulling the paperwork together.

So they've got 10 opportunities before the lawyers can screw it up. Right.

And making money.

Secret agent. Yeah, partners want to make money. They're not gonna just take your product on for the sake of having a logo. Or if they are, that's just a waste of your time.

And what his secret is actually just get in there, figure out what they, what motivates them, work with them.

And make them wildly successful. I mean, I remember a couple of times he's worked with companies and to help those partners grow 4,000%. I mean, if you do that for someone's business, I promise you the only way out of their network is in a box. That, you know, Zach always says that. That's the only way out of his network.

Yeah.

And he has real empathy. You know, he learned how to make a particular Brazilian stew called feijoada. And his partner was with him in front of the customer. And the customer said, well, I don't really like working with Americans. I find them very pushy. He said, ah, but Zak's different. Would it surprise you if he makes Volkswagen?

I said, look at that. That's like my grandmother's, he said. Yeah, but that's what Zak does because he really understands people. And this is—.

Yeah.

Majid Zaffer, another one, 8 years ago started a business on his kitchen table with his brother-in-law. And they've got $8 billion worth of renewable energy revenues going through their business now. He is one of the world's best collaborators, cooperators. He's built these ecosystems. Jill Robbins is doing the same thing in supply chain.

We've got these, there are hundreds of us now. It's not that rare.

Yeah.

There are lots of us. So if people genuinely are interested in this, then join Salesforce for Good. We've got a group on LinkedIn. I have a group called the Black Pearl. It's a strategic alliances and ecosystems mastermind. And we take the gnarliest, sh*ttiest, most uncomfortable questions that we can think of. And we try and break the back of them and come up with solutions in both of those organizations.

It's fantastic fun.

It's brilliant.

But then, and it's all about real cooperation, because I want the profession to lead the way. I want us to take responsibility for the turnaround, because frankly, if we're waiting for government, We're going to be waiting some time. We're talking 50 years to pay our way out of this in the UK, at least.

Yeah.

Okay. I don't believe it has to take that long. If you improve 9 management competencies just by 7%, the Confederation of British Industry says that is enough to add £110 billion to UK GDP.

Wow.

That's just that one tiny incremental shift in management performance. Okay, there's stuff that we can do in sales, in channel, in marketing to eliminate. So I'll give you another great example. Um, there's a technology out there called Connect and Sell, um, that one of my telemarketing companies and lead gen companies is using, um, together with a very clever tech stack.

And on average, they can speak to 6 to 20 people on your prospect list an hour.

Okay. That's—.

On average, it's rather good because they produce more in an hour than most SDRs do in 2 days, sometimes a week. Now, why would you not think different? Well, these guys, they have to invest in this technology. I think the SDR function probably should be outsourced. The top of the funnel, I think, should be an outsourced function.

Because those people have to invest in the latest technology. In the old days with technology, you had all this on-prem. And people would hang on. It would become redundant and clunky and whatever. It's the same thing nowadays. You can't afford to keep an army of SDRs that's operating at 3 minutes a day production.

What about— because I hear what you're saying. And I think I tend to agree with you to a point. But, but for organizations who get to a certain size, it often makes sense to do SDRs in-house. And I've seen them do it very successfully. But where I probably tend to agree is, you know, for maybe a startup who has not figured their sh*t out yet and doesn't have the funds to invest in the right infrastructure to do it properly, I think that's where often outsourcing can make sense?

Well, actually, to forget all of that, at that stage, I would really look at ecosystems. Find people who already sell hot into your cold market and build trusted, intimate, close relationships with those people. And then get taken in without any friction and borrow their credibility and get hand-delivered with a 16 to 18 times higher conversion rate and very low cost of sale.

But instead, what do most people do? They build a list, they trawl through LinkedIn, they spam people, they cold call. I'm not averse to cold calling, don't get me wrong.

No.

Brilliant, brilliant if it's done well. However, there are more efficient ways of doing things. It's a fantastic resource for rapid research into a topic. It's a great way of testing your messaging very quickly. But then go hot. Use the messaging that you've tested in the cold market where there's no danger or risk on those really hot prospects once you've tested it and it works.

And, you know, you go multi-channel. And but I think I agree that it does make sense for large companies to have that control and that capability. But actually the way they're doing it is by and large terribly inefficient. They can afford to invest in those technologies and in those tech stacks. So they're finding ways of looking at the problem differently.

So actually, I think one of the areas that most sales operations and revenue operations should be investing in is management enablement technologies. So tools to enable managers to coach more effectively and do it at a time that's convenient to both sides.

Right, like a Gong, for example.

Gong is brilliant. Gong, Refract, all of those conversation intelligence. But then you've got other tools like Mobile Practice. Mobile Practice sits on your phone and it allows you to issue an intervention. So I can say, Alex, I noticed when you talked about the price increase, you choked. I want you to practice these particular behaviors and then I'll measure it on these.

And then you record that on average 4 to 5 times before you save it. So now you raise your level of self-awareness because you see the car crash that is you in front of the customer. Then I can coach you at a time that's convenient to me. And then you can do it backwards and forwards until you've got it and you own it.

Now I can use that as a best practice video for onboarding in the recruitment process, pre-onboarding.

Yeah.

When someone's stuck, it can be a resource for the rule of 3 before me. One of my favorite management rules, before you come to me, try and fix your own problem 3 ways and then come to me with the lessons of failure. Then I'll help you. I don't want learned helplessness.

Yeah. Marcus, I could talk to you probably for another 3 hours on sales and we could riff about this forever, but I know we have to wrap things up. So I just wanna ask you 2 last questions. So the first one is talk to me around your background. What's the 2 Muppets behind you there?

What's that all about? Well, Saffron and Waldorf are the muse to my podcast. I have a podcast called The Inquisitor, which apparently is in the top 2% worldwide. It won the gold medal for best sales and marketing podcast at the Top Sales Awards last year, largely because they're the muse for the podcast.

So they heckle the Muppets and so do we. And so my audience generally gets at least 2 really uncomfortable moments where we hold up the ugly mirror, slap them around the head with it, and then offer a better solution. And we have a laugh along the way. So I've been around, you know, I'm 54, 55, something like that.

I can't remember. I've reached that point now where memory goes and hair grows in ears and nostrils.

What?

And eyebrows. I've got this one. It's just errant. It's terrifying. I hate getting old. Anyway, and I've worked in recruitment for 10 years, consultancy. I had a training franchise for 16, 17 years. And what's been really interesting is that all the problems are pretty much homogenous. There's nothing original. I haven't heard an original objection in 35 years.

I did one actually with, um, we don't, uh, we don't do barter, it's against our religion, from a Sikh. I thought that was hilarious. Um, I mean, if Indians don't barter, I don't know who doesn't. So, um, anyway, but this poor kid has had no cultural awareness. Um, and, um, I've worked in IT a lot.

I've worked in professional services. The weirdest one was a former dominatrix who sold naked platters and female fantasy fulfillment coaching and experiences. The irony was she couldn't sell using pain as a concept.

That is brilliant. And that's a story for another time. Marcus, last question for you. It's been great to have you on. But last question for you is, knowing everything you know— and this is a question we ask everyone who comes on— is knowing everything you know now, go back to your first day in sales.

What's the one thing you wish you'd known right at the start of your career?

Get a coach.

Get a coach, right?

Get a real coach who actually has your best interests at heart and doesn't give you any quarter. Um, and, um, just, you know, they hold up the ugly mirror. I have 6 coaches on the go at the moment and they are fantastic. Uh, they're a sounding board, They challenge my ideas. They force me to be more succinct, except today.

Yeah, but you need people to challenge you. And you need to get different perspectives. Sign up to people's feeds on social media whose opinions you hate.

Hmm.

Because it will kill some of the echo chamber. And it will also give you another perspective and force yourself to understand them. Um, that's another really important thing. And don't look for differences, look for similarities. That's the first thing. I wish I'd learned that. And ask who— whenever you have a problem, first question is who has already fixed it, and then go and ask them how.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Brilliant advice. So many years.

Brilliant advice. Absolutely. I think just getting a coach alone would probably Like the sooner you can do that and find a mentor or a coach, it fast-tracks everything because chances are they'll have been through the things that— sorry, go on.

I worked with someone who was 25% of quota 2 years ago. 18 months later, she was the number one salesperson in a multi-billion dollar company. And she didn't compromise her values at all. She never pressured her customers. And the interesting thing is she only sold the enterprise suite to SMEs.

Interesting.

Because it was the right thing for them to do. That's what they needed, and they never churned.

Um, and Marcus, it's been a pleasure having you on. I've really enjoyed this chat. Where can people find you? Where can they— where's the best place to connect?

Um, LinkedIn. Uh, there are only 2 Marcus Kalkis on there. Uh, the other one is a very nice recruiter from Essex, not me. Um, and the very nice should have been the clue. Um, and, uh, Twitter, The_Inquisitor. Um, and look for Marcus Kalki Podcast. Um, that's probably the best thing.

Brilliant.

And if, if you are genuinely interested in these ecosystems, then, uh, the Black Pearl— it's a paid-for program, um, it's £1,500 a month. You get unlimited reasonable use coaching from me, you get a full day of work that we're doing on real-life problems and your problems, and you also have the ecosystem that we're building with it.

And it's challenging and very uncomfortable.

That's brilliant. Often the best things in life are challenging and uncomfortable. Thank you, Marcus. I appreciate your time.

Alex, thank you.