Richard Walton is the Founder of Outsell Sales, a boutique growth agency that specializes in helping B2B firms succeed in selling high-ticket items with an average contract value of $50,000. With roots in South Africa, Richard brings a global perspective to sales and marketing strategies. He possesses a blend of entrepreneurial spirit and in-depth knowledge of complex sales cycles that span up to three years. Richard is known for his belief in building genuine relationships and confidence in the sales process, and he imparts that whether he’s delivering keynote talks or working closely with his clientele.
Venturing into the complex world of high-value B2B sales can be daunting for any founder. How do you maintain patience and build genuine relationships in a market that demands quick results and constant adaptation? What strategies can ensure success without compromising on quality or authenticity?
According to Richard Walton, a seasoned entrepreneur and expert in B2B growth strategies, the key lies in patience and a deep understanding of your customers’ needs. He highlights the importance of maintaining a customer-centric approach and engaging directly with clients to truly understand their pain points. Richard underscores that founders should stay involved in sales and customer service, as these interactions offer invaluable insights that drive strategic decisions and foster trust. His approach combines hands-on learning with a focus on building authentic relationships, ensuring that the sales process is both effective and meaningful.
In this episode of the America Open for Business, host Cameron Heffernan speaks with Richard Walton, Founder of Outsell Sales, to discuss the nuances of patient, high-value B2B sales. They explore the significance of maintaining direct customer contact, the challenges and benefits of narrowing focus, and the enduring importance of personal touch in sales.
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This episode is brought to you by Your B2B Marketing.
Are you a mid-market B2B company facing challenges articulating your value proposition to customers? Without a well-defined strategy, allocating marketing funds may not yield optimal results.
Your B2B Marketing, a team of experts specializing in devising and implementing plans, helps entrepreneurs and leaders understand what makes them invaluable to customers and puts that front and center in their messaging for scalable growth.
Discover how strategic marketing and communication approaches can drive your expansion by visiting www.yourb2bmarketing.co or contacting us at info@yourb2bmarketing.co.
Narrator: 0:03
Welcome to America Open for Business, where we talk with high growth entrepreneurs and leaders who have found success in one of the world’s most important markets.
Cameron: 0:15
Hi everybody, I’m Cameron Heffernan and I’m the host of America Open for Business, and I’m very excited to kick off today’s show. We have in today’s session the Founders and Owners Series, richard Walton from South Africa, who I’ll introduce to the show in a moment. The episode is brought to you by EuroB2B Marketing, a global marketing agency. We work with mid-market companies in the B2B arena around the world as they face challenges entering new markets, expanding across borders. We handle end-to-end marketing, both strategy and execution, so clients can focus on customer growth and expansion. Discover how we can drive your expansion by visiting our site, yourb2bmarketingco. And past guests of the show have included Brian Smith of the UGG brand, the Australian Sheepskin Boots and Footwear. Ben Tidja, who’s the founder and CEO of Earthly Wellness, a $20 million plus direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand that’s changing healthcare. And today’s host not host, rather, guest is Richard Walton from Outsale Sales, who is in South Africa and joining us on the show today. Richard, welcome to America Open for Business.
Richard: 1:28
Thanks, Cameron. Thanks very much for having me.
Cameron: 1:30
All right, glad to have you on. So when I start my program, I usually kick it off with one initial question, a big, big picture question of how do you help people, how do you help companies?
Richard: 1:47
That’s a great question and it’s funny. My brother and business partner were talking about this this morning because we don’t think we do a very good job about talking about all the different ways that we give value. And my brother was saying we need to do a better job of communicating all the value that we do. And I said I don’t know if we do, because I quite like surprising people with all the value they get with working with us. So I guess the big how do we help companies? Well, I mean, sure, we’re a boutique growth agency and we work with B2B firms selling pretty high ticket items average kind of annual contract value of 50,000 US dollars.
Richard: 2:26
A lot of our clients are a lot harder. So the way that we help our clients is essentially they’re normally selling things that are very hard to market. Traditional inbound tactics don’t work. Their sales cycle can be anything up to two years, sometimes three years. So helping them put all the pieces together is a big part of it. But if I was to say what’s the one thing Because I would say it’s about having confidence in the process, because when you’re selling these types of things, one of the key things to remember is that patience is king, because if you start to panic and you start to rush and you start to push harder, then you’ve got a real risk of burning your prospects or your accounts, and that’s the last thing you want to do when you’re in this kind of space, because generally, normally, your account list is very small and you can’t afford to do that. So giving our clients in the process is a very big part of what we do.
Cameron: 3:24
Wow. So desperation is not an attractive trait for a sales person or an entity.
Richard: 3:29
I don’t think it’s an attractive trait for anything yeah.
Cameron: 3:36
And those are the kinds of emails that we all get, or LinkedIn outreach. Have you seen my email from 30 minutes ago? I’m ready for you to respond, and it’s just that there’s no thought to them. It’s just a total shotgun approach. Your effort would be to coach people out of those kinds of tactics. What do you do instead?
Richard: 3:53
Yeah, I mean, let’s face it, how many times could you, can you say, did you get my last email? I mean, you know you just can’t do that. So you know the world is changing. I think in the last couple of years, what used to work just doesn’t anymore, and I think anyone listening to this conversation has probably received two or three emails at a minimum today trying to sell them something. And it’s the same with LinkedIn and possibly other channels as well. The same with LinkedIn and possibly other channels as well, and I don’t think this is perhaps controversial, but I don’t even think AI is going to make that better.
Richard: 4:31
I think, actually it’s going to make it worse because I think the volume is going to pick up.
Richard: 4:35
So what we advise our clients to do is how to adopt a multi-channel, multi-touchpoint approach to building real, authentic relationships with people and not trying to sell people stuff that they don’t need. It’s about working with people, understanding their problems and putting together really good account monitoring tools so you know when is the right time to approach people to sell, rather than trying to stuff things down people’s throats. So, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff we could go into about how that actually works, but, in short, it’s about building real relationships, monitoring accounts and then arming your sales team with account intelligence reports, or dossiers, as we call them, so they can go to the accountant, to the prospect at the right time, armed with we call them, so they can go to the accountant, to the prospect at the right time, armed with really detailed information so they can have good conversations how do you walk that balance of in, in in your content approach or your or your content strategy of identifying with prospects, needs and emotions versus your solution to those pain points?
Richard: 5:45
emotions versus your solution to those pain points. So it’s an interesting one. I guess perhaps we should also talk about how different prospects are, talking about their individual needs as opposed to the company’s needs. So when we work with clients, we talk a lot about decision makers versus users. We, we, we talk a lot about decision makers versus users.
Richard: 6:10
Um, I’m a very big fan of um, of thinking about who uses your products and service initially, not necessarily who’s the decision maker, because quite often they’re the. You know, let’s face it, who’s the hardest person to reach in any organization. It’s the decision maker, right? And if you can find a way into an account, probably the easiest way is to think about the users who could be benefiting from your product or service. So understanding their needs and their pain points is key, and their needs and their pain points is probably going to be quite personal to them.
Richard: 6:41
It’s probably going to be very different to the CEO. The CEO is probably going to be, or the CFO is going to be, much more about how much money is this going to save me, how much more effective is it going to be, et cetera, et cetera, whereas the producer is going to be much more about how is this going to make my life easier? How is this going to make me perform better in my role? Can this help me advance my career? So, quite often you have, in terms of content, you need very different strategies for different people at each company. So that’s one of the first things that I would you know that, when we work with clients, is to really delve in deep to understanding the difference between users and decision makers and then understanding their individual pain points and then building a content strategy around that makers and then understanding their individual pain points and then building a content strategy around that.
Cameron: 7:26
That’s why we do unique buyer personas and we look at different levels and an interesting concept between decision maker versus the budget holder. They’re going to want different things and it’s also different parts of the sales cycle top of the funnel. It’s about awareness. That often could be the end user, an influencer, but maybe not the budget holder.
Richard: 7:46
Yeah, 100%. A story I like to tell is about six years ago. I was running a sales team and my sales manager came to me and she said hey, richard, I think we should move to HubSpot. We’re on Salesforce at the time and I said, okay, why is that? And she said because of this, this, this and this. And I said well, how much does it cost? Okay, why is that? And she said because of this, this, this and this. And I said, well, how much did it cost? She said, well, it’s going to be this. And I said what are you concerned about? She said, well, this and this. And I said, well, what are the things that are going to help you leave your concern? She said this and this and I said okay, sounds good, let’s do it.
Richard: 8:18
The conversation They’d reached out. She wasn’t involved in the picture-making process, but they’d reached out to my sales manager, who, of course as a salesperson was the first person to pick up the phone I’m always a big fan of. If you want to get access into an account to understand what’s going on in a business, talk to their salespeople. They’ll always pick up the phone or answer it, yeah it can run effectively in.
Richard: 8:43
Yeah, but you’re absolutely right, you need different content at different stages of the funnel. I know some companies you and I were talking about before this went on air. We were talking about how you’re a client in Mexico that had 12 customers. Yeah.
Richard: 8:58
And I’ve got some clients that for them, success is signing one customer a year and it gets so detailed. They actually produce a content at an account level for one particular business and, um, and you know, that can be really interesting as well, because I think what we’re talking about is creating content at the right time to the right people. That’s going to be very engaging for them, and the more granular you can get, the more effective your content strategy will be yep, that granularity.
Cameron: 9:35
that’s where you speak to what they’re you know they’re listening for uh, they’re they’re. You’re talking the same language. Take the example of events. I’ll often work with a client in particular. We deliberately seek out events where it’s not 300 exhibitors, it’s maybe 30 tables and they have a chance of getting up on the dais and they have a chance of getting a nice package together at the show. They have a chance of partnering with the publication that is at the show for content and that client of ours in particular. They’ve built this relationship over years with a publication that covers a very niche area of manufacturing wire harness assembly and they’ve built over a five-year period a really good webinar. They have a partner webinar every year before the biggest trade show in the industry.
Cameron: 10:27
We started it during COVID because there wasn’t going to be an event that year. There was no event for two years. I said, well, let’s do our own thing and we’ve gotten great traction. It’s now branded. They do it every year and when I work with my clients I try to look at where are those opportunities where you’re different, unique. Some people think, well, if you only need one client a year, that must be easy, right, you only need one client a year. That’s got to be the easiest job in the world.
Richard: 10:55
It’s not the case. I mean, I think, as we all know, and the reason they only need one client a year is because the customer lifetime value is in the millions of dollars. But when someone is spending millions of dollars it’s not easy. There’s a lot of things that need to come into play and there’s probably. The decision-making process probably involves five or six people, and having trust in the company that they’re talking to, trust in the person that they’re talking to, is really important, and building those relationships takes time. We all know that building relationships. So no, it’s not easy. And you get one thing wrong, you know, at any time in that funnel, and you can, you can risk destroying all the hard work that you’ve done. So, no, it’s.
Cameron: 11:41
Yeah, um, uh. Let’s go through a typical client engagement as yours. How does someone get to you, what is the pain point they’re approaching you with? And walk us through your your process. When, when you work with someone new yeah, um.
Richard: 11:57
So quite weirdly for a growth agency, we don’t do marketing okay uh, so, um, we’re very small, so we we only we like to work with only 15 to 20 clients at a time, and the reason for that is our growth consultants, who are the account leads, are all ex-entrepreneurs, um, and the reason for that is, um, I believe I know a lot of growth consultants and lead gen agencies companies like that where you sign up with them. There’s someone quite impressive on the call does the sales call and then you’re handed off to a junior account manager.
Richard: 12:32
I think you and I are entrepreneurs. We’re both members of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and I think we all know that business departments don’t operate in silo. So businesses, business departments don’t operate in silo. So if you’re going to be successful in outbound sales, you need to have a deep understanding of all the different things that come into play. And you know we talk I’ll talk a little bit in a minute about our process but alignment is a very important part of that. So having that entrepreneurial mindset, I think, is really, really important. That’s why we’ve decided to keep our agency small, so we can bring highly experienced entrepreneurs who can help other businesses grow.
Richard: 13:10
Most of my clients come through the Entrepreneurs Organization, the EO Network, which I’m a very big fan of. So there’s lots of word of mouth and I guess another thing that I do is I am on the public speaking. I do a lot of public speaking, I like doing it and we get a lot of potential clients through that as well. I’m actually off to Bahrain on Monday, so that’s how people come into us. In terms of client engagement, we operate on a retainer model, so there’s a three-month minimum commitment and yeah, and to date we’ve never lost a client. So I think that must be. We’re very proud of that. But we’re also very picky. So here’s the discussion. We’re also very picky about who we’re going to work with. So we probably say no, 30% of the time, 40% of the time and that’s and we and we. That’s not from snobbery.
Cameron: 14:12
It’s from the way that we work.
Richard: 14:13
Isn’t going to work for everybody. Yeah, and because we don’t do any marketing and it’s all word of mouth, we want to make sure that we can be successful, so that’s a very big part of what we do.
Cameron: 14:20
Yeah, I was stunned. Not a great word, but I saw on your website we only work with 15 clients at a time. It’s right there, it’s very obvious, and that’s an amazing thing to have the courage to be able to say too that we do turn people down because it’s not the right fit.
Richard: 14:38
Okay, all right.
Richard: 14:42
There’s another reason. So I’m nearly 50, and I’ve built a number of businesses over the last 30 years and I’ve got to admit I’m getting a little bit tired and my previous business was a digital marketing agency that focused on SMEs in the UK and that we were supplying with marketing services from South Africa. We were a team of 25 before COVID. Covid hit and we grew to 160 people in 18 months and it nearly killed me and I just don’t want to go there again. I want to work with a small number of clients that we can know that we’re going to be successful with. I want to keep the team small, so we’re a team of about 13 people here Actually, no, sorry, we’re a team of 16 people, so we’re a small team, and you know it’s hard to scale a business.
Richard: 15:42
You know, as we know, you know that for me is the most fun part of a business. When you start going beyond that. There’s a layer of management that you have to put in. There’s a whole bunch of other things. So, yeah, we do it because I think we can provide huge value to our clients. Could we do that if we were larger? Yeah, I think we probably could. I think we could probably grow to 30, 40, 50. But I just don’t think it’s something that I have the appetite for in the moment. But if you go onto my website in a year and you see that it says 30 or 50 clients, then You’ve gotten over it.
Richard: 16:15
Hey Richard, what happened?
Cameron: 16:18
So I’m going to throw a quote at you. I want to hear what you think about this. Owner-led sales is the road to despair.
Richard: 16:25
Agree um, I disagree because I I think and I know this for a fact, because all of our clients are doing owner-led sales yeah it’s, but they’re not doing the bit that they should be doing.
Richard: 16:48
So we can make it, so the owners can enjoy the sales process. And so I give this talk. It’s called the 50 Nuggets of Sales and one of my slides is why can’t my sales team sell like I do? And I’m always talking to founders in this talk and I say to them I say you’re probably all thinking about this, aren’t you? And they’re saying yeah, and people will say but I don’t even like sales, I’m not even good at it and I can still outperform my sales team. So, yeah, a lot of companies come to us. They’re founder-led. I like working with founder-led, I like working with founder their companies. And they say I want to remove myself from the sales process and they want to do it quickly. And I say, well, hang on a minute before we go that route.
Richard: 17:39
Let’s look at your sales process. Look, let’s look at all the things we’re doing and I turn around say if I would, if we were to set it up so you were just having one or two really high value conversations a month, what would that look like? Would you be happy with that?
Richard: 17:52
oh yeah, I wouldn’t mind that yeah but that’s you know and, as I said you know, this is very specific to what we do and we’re you know we work, as I said earlier, with companies with hard to market products or services, generally selling high ticket items. We’re not talking about doing five, six calls a day. We’re actually talking about maybe having three or four really high quality conversations a month, because a lot of our clients some only need to sign one client a year. More average is probably six to 10 a year. But you’re not dealing with a high number of volume of leads and if you run your sales process properly, you have a really good outbound sales strategy, as you and I were talking about on the phone.
Richard: 18:30
I think I was saying 60% or something of prospects have already decided if they’re going to work with you before they approach you. That’s absolutely true. If you do your job well, by the time someone reaches out, all the hard work’s been done. I think where it becomes an issue is when you’re adopting other tactics, where you’re bombarding people with emails and LinkedIn messages and you’re just picking up rubbish and then you’re having some phone calls that are just disheartening. That’s what wears founders and owners down. So I would say let’s make it fun for the founder to do the sales process, and then we can talk about removing you from the sales process. But yeah, so that’s my kind of default answer to that question. It is something that comes up regularly.
Cameron: 19:16
Why do you think so many owners can say that, like my team can’t do it as well as me? Why is that the sales part I mean?
Richard: 19:25
I’m a salesperson, I’m a salesman. For me, sales is all about attitude and energy. It’s about confidence, but attitude and energy are the big ones. They did a Harvard Business Study review when was it? A few years ago? And they did a study that said that salespeople who stood up, their conversion rate went up 3.1%. That said that salespeople who stood up, their conversion rate went up 3.1%. So you know, energy is really important and no one has got more energy than the founder.
Richard: 19:59
And it comes across, you know, as human beings. You know it’s one of those things that’s very hard to track. But your body language, the tone of voice, you know how fast or slow you speak. Those are things that can make the difference in a sale. That’s why Because, as founders, we believe in our product or our service more than anybody, anybody. So, as a side note, if you want to get your sales team to sell like you do, goddammit, they’ve got to believe in your product and service like you do. So your job is to sell to your team. First and foremost, you have to believe in it. And also, you know, if we’re talking about founder-led sales generally, you’re talking about smaller businesses and it matters. You know you’re the last person to get paid right. So you approach every sale with the energy and passion that it deserves, whereas you, whereas sometimes employees don’t do it as hard as you do.
Richard: 20:56
I mean we could go off on a tangent and talk about commission structures and other ways to manage the energy of salespeople, and it is solvable. I’m not saying founders have to keep doing sales. I’m just saying, before we fix that problem, let’s sort out everything else and then we can start talking about how to remove you from the sales process. But there’s a whole different bunch of things that need to be done to make sure that your sales team can sell as well as or better than you.
Cameron: 21:24
At core? Do you consider what you offer a training process, a program? Do you you consider yourselves those who lead by example? How would you describe yourself to someone new that you may be working with?
Richard: 21:38
so we’re a consultancy, but we, we, we also do a lot of the execution as well, um, um. So we do offer training programs to sales teams, um, if it’s required, but that’s a but, that’s kind of like an add-on service. That’s one of those value adds that we do. It’s not on our website, we don’t advertise it, I don’t talk about it in the sales process, but if we feel that our clients are struggling to convert the leads we’re sending them, absolutely we’ll jump in and we’ll run training programs around that. The leads we’re sending them, absolutely we’ll jump in and we’ll run, say, training programs around that. No, so kind of what we, what we do is we’ve, you know, we’ve got, um, we’ve got a team of what we call prospect relationship managers. So kind of our team is, as I talked about, as the growth director, which is seems that season entrepreneurs.
Richard: 22:26
We’ve got prospect relationship managers, which are the kind of traditional term is SDRs, sales development groups. We call it prospect relationship managers because we’re big about big relationships and their job is to monitor and analyze accounts and prospects for opportunities to sell and opportunities to engage with in an authentic way, looking to help. Beneath that, we have a data team, a couple of data people who are building lists of potential prospects and breaking them down into kind of micro campaigns, and then we have our tech stack. So we’ve got a whole bunch of tools that we use mainly for monitoring accounts for a whole bunch of reasons. So that’s what we do, so we are a big part of our client’s team. We meet with our clients normally once a week. We engage with their marketing team, we provide a lot of feedback and advice on positioning, we work with their marketing team, their content team, to make sure that all those things are aligned. So hopefully that gives you a better idea of how we work.
Cameron: 23:32
Yeah, and it’s interesting too, because often when we work with clients, they’ll come in with a specific deliverable or need. Often it’s we want more conversions or we need to grow sales. But when we go and look to work with them, the positioning is not clear, the messaging is not clear, their value proposition you’re smiling, I see already, and and so is that something you face too every time, okay, every single time.
Richard: 24:01
So you know who’s your icp, everybody, uh, I mean, it all starts with really understanding who you want to target. So one of the things I always say to clients we start working with them is I want you to get your account list down to 200 people Sorry, 200 businesses and the way to do that is I want. The way that I would encourage you to think about that is what 200 accounts and the prospects within them do you think you’ve got a good chance of bumping into in person in the next 12 months. In person underlined is the key thing. Once we’ve got that down, then we can start having a think about who your ICP actually is. Once you understand your ICP, then you can start understanding what their pain points are and then you can start thinking about positioning. But I have this test that I call the grandmother test. But you know, some people have you know, oh, we’ve got our positioning, and then you look at it and I, but, but no one else understands what you’re talking about right your position.
Richard: 25:07
So be so clear that your, if your grandmother says what do you do, you say I do this and your grab them. Your grandmother should understand it. And I and I think I think sometimes we, as entrepreneurs, we get so excited about our offerings that it almost feels like we’re being unfaithful unfaithful to our vision, if we and I don’t want to use the word dumb it down, but it’s the one that comes to mind to make it simple we feel that we’re not doing our business justice, but we have to keep it simple. It is that you do and we have to focus on. We have to sell solutions, not features, and we spend a lot of time working with our clients on that, because it’s very hard for us to do our job. Know that’s we spend a lot of time working with our clients on that, because it’s very hard for us to do our job if that’s not very clear I think a lot of people in marketing or maybe they’re business people or owners that think they know marketing confuse or conflate benefits with features.
Cameron: 26:08
They’re not the same, and particularly in the tech world. Uh, warner and I have talked about same, particularly in the tech world. Warner and I have talked about this a lot In the tech world. It’s speeds and feeds. Here’s what we do. We have the fastest widget. We’ve got this great solution. All these features, okay, but how’s that going to help me as a business? How’s that going to help me be more effective? How’s that going to help me close more deals? Do you experience that too?
Richard: 26:29
Yeah, yeah, I mean all the time and it’s actually a really tough part of what we do and it can take quite a lot of time and I’m still not 100% clear why it’s so hard. I said earlier I think perhaps it’s almost feeling you’re not doing your. You’ve got a lot of pride in what you’ve just built you want to tell everyone all the things that you can do but, your customers. They don’t care, as you just said. How is it going to help me?
Richard: 27:01
And we talked about users and decision makers and again, those two things can be quite different. You know, user, how is it going to help me, how is it going to make my life easier? Decision maker, how is it going to make me more money, or how is it going to save me money? Or how is it going to make me more money, or how is it going to save me money, or how is it going to do a whole bunch of other things, and that’s what you really speak to. And if you don’t have that, and if it’s not clear, then maybe you, you know, you haven’t got the right product or service for this particular market, because that match has to be there, doesn’t it?
Richard: 27:30
yeah you know what? What is your icp’s pain points and what’s the assumption that you’ve got to fix that? If that isn’t clear, then you’ve got the wrong ICP or your product or service needs tweaking.
Cameron: 27:40
Yeah, or that it’s not up to date or it’s from an industry that’s not directly related to the one that you’re going after now. Things change over time and I’m a big fan of saying to clients we need to update those regularly. We need to look at, particularly if you enter a new market. One of my clients has they’ve added outreach to medical device manufacturers. Very different audience from industrial manufacturing, from automotive, for instance. Different value proposition, different buyers. It’s not all about just low cost labor for the medical device world. So we had to shift and really adjust. What’s our real value proposition? What are we offering to this particular set of buyers?
Richard: 28:19
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s. It’s so, so important. And I think I think perhaps what and I’m talking a lot about my experience working with founder led businesses and I think perhaps maybe the issue is that for a lot of founder led businesses, you start your and I’m sure you and I have both been in this position before you’re desperate for revenue, so you’ll take revenue from anyone and everything, and then what happens is you start you’ve got basically a whole bunch of different types of clients who probably require lots of different types of things, and then what happens is, around year five, you sit around and think, oh, I’ve got a pretty successful business here. How do I go to the next step? Well, the next step is about making it very clear what you do, and so what I’m saying is you can hustle to that stage right, and then you need to sit down and you need to start thinking about building a proper brand strategy and be clear about your positioning.
Richard: 29:18
But it’s hard because when you look at your existing customers, they’re from all over the place and they all have different. They’re using your product or your service in different ways, and the reason therefore it’s a challenge, I think to just kind of narrow that down, tighten it down is you’re probably saying no to a lot of your existing customers, and that that’s quite scary to think. Well, actually, what we’re now doing is potentially, you know, we could potentially risk alienating a very big part of our business right but I think that’s the only way to grow to the next step.
Richard: 29:53
So I think that’s probably why it’s it’s so hard is just maybe what the normal growth trajectory is for for startups.
Cameron: 30:00
Actually, they kind of encourage to say no, to say you know this is not where we want to be longer term. This is not where we see the growth of where we’re going, and that’s why, myself we’re pivoting from a commoditized that. In my opinion, marketing services are becoming more and more commoditized. You can do a lot of it now with AI tools, offshore competitors that can undercut you for cost. I’m leaning into let’s work with overseas headquartered businesses that want to grow in the US market. That’s something special, that’s something a little bit more unique, and I feel we can add more value there.
Richard: 30:36
Well, our tagline on our website is growth favors the brave. I think that’s, you know, speaks to what we’ve been talking about because, um, it is scary, um, but it’s absolutely critical. If you want to break through that one line, I would even argue that you know it’s. It’s why, um, you know, if you want to break through that one line, I would even argue that it’s why.
Richard: 30:59
If you’re looking at traditional venture-backed businesses, why so much money is thrown at them is so they can remain very, very focused on a particular customer and a particular product or service. Because if you’re not venture-bound, you’re bootstrapping. Then you take it from everywhere, which fragments your home, as we just talked about, and then actually it’s a lot harder. It’s a bit like, you know, is it easier to build a new home or to renovate an old one? And you know that’s the kind of similar analogy that we’re talking about. You know, you’re getting to that year five and you have to do a whole bunch of renovations. It’s a lot harder than if you just started out with just one clear aim at the beginning.
Cameron: 31:41
I mean, it’s hard to get a business you know, five years in and say we’re going to tear down and just keep this one area of it, this one segment. We’re going to focus on that because you don’t want to say no to things, Because you don’t want to say no to things you don’t want to. I’m turning revenue down, right, but I feel that that’s where growth is going to come from, because otherwise you’re just a. You’re not a specialist in anything. You know what would your case studies look like? They would be all over the place. There was no. There’s no common industry. There’s no common approach.
Richard: 32:10
There’s no common type of you know in can you have. How can you produce really authentic content? And you know you can produce it and then people really go. This is just for me. And then you come to your website, look at your social media. It’s what a minute. This is very funny. Startups that have got so much less resources than bigger organizations often beat them because they’re bigger in organizations particularly. You know if they’re publicly, if they’re listed companies, you know they have to keep growing every year and so they start adding new products and services and they can move away from that. And then you have startups with far less resources that can come in and they’re focused on doing that one thing People generally like to go towards experts. They’d like to go to the people who they feel really understand them, who are talking to them. So there’s always a big opportunity to remain focused on the niches. It’s really important.
Cameron: 33:07
I read an interesting quote from Mark Cuban the other day. He said something along the lines of when you’re starting your company, founder, don’t look at it from an economic perspective, but from a learning perspective. Deliberately, take on everything. Do those things yourself, don’t outsource them. Learn how to do video editing on your own, learn how to write a business plan, learn how the production process works, because that’s school fees that would cost you a fortune ordinarily. What school fees that would cost you a fortune ordinarily? And a lot of business coaches would probably go against that, saying well, don’t do what you do best and outsource these other things. His point was you want to go out and learn all you can about these different aspects of the business as you grow.
Richard: 33:47
And, by the way, it also saves you money?
Cameron: 33:48
Yeah, yeah.
Richard: 33:50
I mean, I was listening to a podcast by Paul Graham the other day from Y Combinator and he wrote an article years ago which I just absolutely love, which is I think the title of it is Do Things that Don’t Scale, and the famous story there is the Airbnb one, where he persuaded the founders to go out and actually visit the homes of hosts. A lot of what they learned from that experience actually made Airbnb what it is today, and I think what’s been interesting what I’ve been reading a lot about over the last three years is how big companies and the ones in particular are Uber, airbnb and Chat and chat gbt the founders of those companies. So I think the, the ceo of uber, was an uber driver for three months. Um brought airbnb, stayed in airbnb houses for a year. Yeah, sat when um I was listening to a podcast a few months ago, spending the next year traveling to meet users and it’s all about learning from your customers and being customer-centric and the point of that is so you can better understand their pain points.
Cameron: 35:06
So you can create those.
Cameron: 35:07
That’s what we’re talking about yeah, I like to make the analogy with my team is marketing and sales. Both we’re the waiters at the restaurant. We need to be out there talking with customers, hearing about the food, the dishes, what’s good, what’s working, the chef back in the, in the. You know that’s production, r and D. They don’t get that interaction. So the we, you need each other. Sales and marketing needs to give feedback to the, to the um. You know the production team, the R&D team, to make sure that this is what people like you know it’s not salty or not spicy enough that that team collaboration is essential.
Richard: 35:41
It’s funny. You’re making me think of an article I wrote a few weeks ago on LinkedIn called be the customer.
Cameron: 35:47
And.
Richard: 35:47
I was down and I was thinking about the businesses that I’ve started over the last 25 years and which ones worked and which ones didn’t.
Richard: 35:57
Straight away, I saw what the common theme was. And the common theme with the successes was, in every single instance I had actually been the customer, meaning that I had, you know, gone with a potential well, gone with a competitor thought, oh, that was good, but I could do it better or I could have done this or that, whereas the other businesses that I started I had, you know, I never was the competitor or probably couldn’t be the competitor, it was just completely out of my range and there was. I think there was just so much value to be had about really really deeply understanding what the pain points are of your customers, and that’s certainly yeah, as I said, I think there’s a huge value to be had in adopting that customer mindset. The closer you can be to a customer, the better. And we were talking about founder-led sales. So one of the things that always worries me about founders, removing them from sales, is there is no better way, in my opinion, to understand what your customers need and want than to be on the phone to them.
Cameron: 36:59
Interesting yeah.
Richard: 37:01
And I always encourage. Anytime I run workshops or do talks, I always encourage my audience to say, just as a founder, if you’re not involved in the sales, it’s fine, but just take one sales call a week, because not only would it really motivate your sales team, but you’ll learn so much. I would also encourage you to spend a day a month on customer service as well.
Cameron: 37:27
How much you’ll learn. Yeah, the pain points how much you’ll learn. They don’t have to be in HubSpot Under the Hood or Salesforce building lists, but it’s the customer interaction that is essential. You know to be learning about the needs. I had one of those last week and I’ll share it with you briefly. I was with the kids who went to Wendy’s which I’m not a big fast food person went to get some food after my kids track meet and their tests piloting here.
Cameron: 37:49
Wendy’s is headquartered in central Ohio. It’s a franchise model but because that’s here, they pilot stuff here locally. It was a ordering board was there, but it was all ai driven right, so you make your order and we also had the app. So we had both the app on the phone as well as the wendy’s ai board to make your order. And I said I’d like to place my order with the app and they said just a moment, we’re going to call a you know, a service person to come and help you.
Cameron: 38:12
Defeating, defeating the whole purpose of the AI, the app I had downloaded. I’m an early adopter. They tried to incentivize me to be on the app. The person comes on and I don’t feel bad for the. It’s not the fault of the person who’s working there at entry level, probably a high school student. They said, oh, if you want to order, you want to order by the app. And I said yeah. And she said, oh, pull around, you’re gonna basically you’re holding up the line pull around and go make your order over there and then come back. So a couple things struck me. First of all, the friction involved in that. Aren’t you trying to get me onto your app to order more food, to be more loyal, and that’s how you reward that loyalty? And then they hadn’t thought through, no one had tested this out. Is this going to all work together? And this is a multi-billion dollar global brand?
Richard: 38:54
Yeah Well, I mean, I’ve made this mistake before. I built a company and I’ve been very excited to build layers. That ultimately removes me further and further away from customers. You start out, you’re on the floor at a trade show, you’re talking to customers, you’re doing the sales calls, you’re doing the customer service. But I can’t wait to build all these things so I don’t have to do all that stuff, so I can sit in the big office and just think about strategy and come up with amazing ideas and inspire the team, but you lose touch very quickly. It’s very dangerous, I think.
Cameron: 39:29
Well, richard, I’m going to ask you one last question, but first I’m going to reintroduce you to our listeners and thank you so much for coming on. The show Richard is available at, or findable, I should say, at, outsalessales OutsalesSalescom teaching B2B big ticket companies how to succeed with outbound sales development, and you can check out. They have a lot of good resources and information about the pool of companies that they work with on their site. Richard, my question to you is in a decade, when you’re inducted into the Business Development Consulting Hall of Fame, what are you going to lead with at your speech? What’s the most important thing you’d lead people with to talk about how to succeed in this arena?
Richard: 40:13
I don’t know why, but I have an image in my mind and it’s a bit of a cheesy image. It’s a guy in a leather jacket holding a massive Nokia phone like this, and he’s got two martinis in a coffee cup holder. This is a picture that I saw from the 80s and I don’t think that that picture will ever go out of fashion. So I I think I’ll probably I’ll probably have a t-shirt made with this picture on the front that says something like don’t forget the personal touch, Because, however great AI becomes and all the other tools that become, I can’t see when you’re doing what we do, which is big ticket items.
Richard: 41:07
I don’t think that we’ll ever get to a point that the personal touch won’t matter. In fact, I would think that that’s going to become more and more important, and I think in the last 10 years we’ve moved away from that. We got very excited by tech and you know we used to spend a lot of time going on the floor, going to meet people, and then tech made us pull back from that. Covid made us pull back from that even more, and I’m just a very big fan of encouraging people to just get in front of prospects. Use that human touch be real. We live in a virtual world, so I think our biggest competitive advantage now is being able to meet in person, and let’s remember that.
Cameron: 41:47
Yeah, absolutely Well, richard. Thank you so much for joining the show. Richard of Outsell Sales. Thank you for joining us on America Open for Business Take careica open for business, take care thanks very much.
Narrator: 42:04
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