In a sales career spanning 5 decades you see a lot change, and a lot stay the same. Get ready to hear the most important parts of both.

In this episode Lupe is joined by John Smibert, co-author of The Wentworth Prospect. In this episode Lupe and John talk about revenue operation in the pre-CRO days, the role of culture in change, what both sides of the table must consider when filling the CRO seat, plus the power of storytelling and selling the outcome.

🔗 LINKS

Connect with John on LinkedIn.

His book is called The Wentworth Prospect and you'll find it on Amazon here.

Find Lupe on LinkedIn.

Empower your sales pros transform their sales. Find out more about the Create Pipeline course from Sales IQ here.

He spent several decades as a sales leader across the US Japan, Australia with many it corporations and over the last 20 years or so, he has helped B2B organizations transform the way that they sell. And so he is passionate about in enhancing the professionalism of sales people, he has founded sales leader, forums and sales masterminds, and he is also the creator of a authentic selling method called at Advance. And that sales model is what underpins the Wentworth project. So with that I welcome you, John. Thank you for joining us.

So. If I look at that for a long, long time I grappled with the whole issue of having silos in big organizations. You've got sales, you've got marketing, you've, you've got product development, product management, and you've got back in my day. There's nothing like a customer experience VP or whatever.

And so I grappled with this silo mentality and the impact it had on how we related to our clients and the engagement the relationship with clients was just jeopardized the whole time. And so I was always, and, you know, I think Warren talks about the CRO roles being about 10 years old. Whether we called it CRO or not, there's been a lot of activity prior, prior to 10 years to, to right pull those silos together and put it all under one leader, sometimes the CEO, but obviously that's too big, a too big, a role for CEO, and we need customer relationship manager to really drive the, the whole understanding across the organization of how to engage with the.

Effectively, essentially now my background sales and B2B sales. So I really understand the sales side of that. And I also understand the issues with not having. Sales and marketing aligned big, big issue. So I've been working more recently with some fairly mature startups and trying to build in the CRO role very early in the process as they develop as an organization. And, and it's really interesting to see the outcomes and the results of that process.

You know, groomed to be a customer, to being acquired as a customer, to being transitioned and retained as a customer. And I think sometimes with the silos, it was very difficult to do that and having, you know a person so to speak at the helm. That kind of organizes all of that makes it a little bit easier.

And of course, unless we drive a change in mentality, a cultural change in the organization, it doesn't matter whether we, that we put somebody at the head called CRO and have those three areas reporting into them. You're not gonna change the culture of the organization unless you actually do something significant to do that.

And, and of course, culture changes a journey, not a destination. So. Step by step. How do we actually en engage sales, marketing customer experience to work together for the betterment of the client, betterment of the customer. And that's, that's what it's all about. It's not putting a person in, in, in the lead saying you are now a COO, that's not gonna fix the problem.

And that's a great point. I mean, that, that starts, I would say at the CEO level, but it extends to the whole executive team to really embrace the concept and make sure that they're on board to do that. That's really, really important. And I think that's something that Warren talks about all the time. He talks about, you know, the, the intent versus the result.

And what the job is supposed to be doing. And, and I think everybody needs to be aligned to that vision early on.

But it's a customer journey overall, how we can engage and work with and help that customer as they progress through their journey. And, and, and as an organization, how do we know? Not, not just sales, not just, you know, customer experience, not just marketing. How do we do it together? And in helping that journey and that means, you know, knocking our heads together.

And it means talking to the customers a lot, really getting down and understanding what their journeys are all about and how we can align with those journeys as an organization, not just as the sales people or the marketing people.

Now sometimes you can bring a CRO in when you've got the organization already siloed and so on and get the COO to drive, drive that, but you've gotta. The mentality of the executive of the organization. You've gotta get the vision in place. You've gotta visualize what the organization's gonna be, look, look like and how they're gonna be operating with their customers and start putting all that in place so that you can define for your organization, what that COO role and, and the C operations going to be.

You. Yeah. The advice I give to CEOs is you're not gonna fix it by just going out and hiring somebody. Here's, here's a role description CEO we're gonna knock all all these silos together and put 'em all under one leader, but not think about how the operation will, will work, how will integrate and align with customers.

So bottom line is don't go and hire a CR and think you're gonna fix the problems. Put the vision in place, identify how you're gonna do it, and then get a C CRO that suits your organization and suits the sort of people you've got that can come in and help you deliver that vision.

And so the, the advice is ask all the right questions to really understand. Is there. The, the absolute commitment to the change that's necessary in the organization for not just the CEO. Sometimes you get CEOs, that've got great drive and vision, but somehow they can't drive the leadership for change in the organization.

So you need to need to judge, is this organization ready for change? Will they support it from top down. And, and have they got, I mean, you obviously need to ask also all the questions about have, have they got a competitive position in the marketplace? Are they doing a good job of, of staying ahead of the, the competition in terms of bringing, you know, really good solutions to the table for their client base, all that sort of stuff, but it's more around. Is this organization ready for change and will they support me in that change role?

So I'm, I'm, I'm very focused on putting framework together, you know, good business framework that that is focused on helping the customer through the journey, whether it's a single buying journey or whether it's. The longer term journey, a client going through. So with that in mind I've been working for, for some years now on, on how do we do that?

What sort of frameworks do we put in place? How do we drive change? Cultural change, particularly in organizations, which is not easy. It's, it's really, really tough. And, and, you know, we do, we do need to think about it being a journey. So what are the steps in the journey over the next five, 10 years?

And, and. These sort of journeys take that long. So So, yeah, I put a lot of work into how all that's going to work. Then I brought it back to very simply what is the client journey and particularly in attaining that very first order in an organization, how to marketing and sales work together and ultimately customer experience to, to help the customer in that journey and lay the foundation for the longer term journey.

So we I've been running, working with a framework with a lot of my clients. It's called advance. I think you mentioned before ed V a N C E. And that's, that's got both pro process and methodology. And how parts of the organization work together to engage properly with the client? So how do we get that message across?

Well, one of the things we decided is. If, if people love stories and really good stories that they can gauge with, they can work you know, they, they can get emotionally connected with and so on. So we ended up saying we were on a novel which is a brave thing to do with, with you know, originally two me and my partner.

Business partner, both decided we'd write a novel and neither us had a novel novelist type experience. And we ultimately brought a third person in another business person had turned novelist and the three of us end up writing. What I think is a. And the feedback we're getting is it's a page turning novel, sits up there amongst, you know, some of the better novels that, that you could read, but it's all about doing business, engaging with clients and how you go about that and cuts and thrust.

You know, we, it is a novel, so, you know, person being killed in the second chapter of the, the novel and so on. So it's a very readable novel, but We think we get the message over. Now, the basic message is engaging in this case. It's a mature startup, engaging with a large financial institution and the whole novels about that process and that journey.

They do that for a period of time during a day, but then they go home, they're human and they have a life and they have their own story. And part of what they do during the work hours is what funds their story. And so I think it's really appropriate to combine the two. I don't know if I've ever seen anything like that done before.

I know I've had a lot of sales books. and that I've read that had a, a lot of humor built into it. You know, a lot of different things into a lot of stories, a lot of stories and some of the best sales people that I know. And I've, you know, had the pleasure of leading have been phenomenal storytellers. And so I love that approach of turning the process and the concept of running a business and the whole customer journey into a novel. I'm excited to. I'm excited to read it.

However, it's a business book and people can relate to the business that's occurring and the relationships between people inside your own organization. And we we've got the. We've got the heroin. We've got people that support the heroin. And we we've got the, the counter characters in the book, the one sales manager, for example, that everybody will relate to that.

You know, I, everybody will get his, I used to work for that guy once. So. It's fun, but you you're right. It it's a story that people can relate to. And, and at the end of the book, they sit back and say, okay, I can understand now how this organization needs to work and how we need to engage with clients and how we need to go through that journey.

And, and I'm one of these people and get a lot of pushback on this. When you're, when you're going through a journey with a client it's not about your product or service, Yeah, that's, that's almost incidental. So the way we engage with clients, we are there to help them through a journey. We're there to help them think about the challenges they've got, the, the implications of those challenges, what all the sorts of things associated with the current situation, and then help them.

Go through a thinking journey to a new way of thinking to, to, to, and, and that's what selling's all about. It's not about bringing your product in and saying feature, function benefit. So those people that read the book will see that our hero and hardly ever talks about the product.

The, the purpose of their product and service. And it's not necessarily what the features and benefits are. It's more along the lines of what problem does the business have and how do I help the business solve that problem or make that problem better or ease the burden of that situation. Or and that to me is the, the key to success.

And I, I was quite. Back in those days, an expert in manufacturing. And so I'd do the tours around the manufacturing plant with a manufacturing manager and, and the CFO. And I'd be able to ask all the right questions and I could illustrate that I really understood their business and the challenges they've gotten.

So on. In this particular organization, a lighting manufacturing, the light fittings you see in, in houses and so on, they manufactured those. And so I went in and they had major issues with product, you know, big queues in front of each workstation. The time it took to get from beginning to end in the whole manufacturing process, they were being outstripped by the man by their competitors.

Sorry, I talked about closed loop manufacturing just in time and all that sort of stuff. Put a proposal on the table, they loved it and they. But we gotta have a look at the software. And I hated demonstrating software because software gets down to feature function, and feature function is not what they need, but it diverts them away from the outcome they're looking for.

But I, I agreed. We, we come into the, the office would do a demonstration. This is the days of, you know, old green screens. Yeah. Nothing like a PC or a laptop or a, a mobile phone or whatever, to engage with your system. So put up two. Green screens, big whiteboard in the middle. And I started and we started talking about all the issues.

They got manufacturing, close loop and how to solve the problems with how you sh do the scheduling, the just in time and close loop manufacturing, all that sort of stuff. The end of the day they'd invited. There's 12 of them in there and they invited the CEO. Hadn't been involved in the process up till then.

And the CEO just had questioned enough to question it, lapped it up at the end of, he said, hour and a half into it. He said, wow, this has been wonderful, but I've gotta go. I've got another commitment. Come on, guys. I've seen enough. And the little nerdy tech guy out the back said, but we haven't seen the software yet.

The CEO said, oh, software, look, look, I've seen enough. This is, this is the sort of thing we need to do and let they all left. Three weeks later, I was out, we got the contract three weeks later, I'm out there talking to them about where they're gonna put the computer. Because back in those days, you needed a computer room, air conditioning and all that sort of stuff.

And by the way, the computer is primarily what we wanted to sell, but that's where all our margin was the hardware back in those days, not the software. So talking with the, the it manager and the, and the CFO and looking at where we might put this computer or the air conditioned room and the CEO walked past and he said, good.

Hey, John, good to see you here. What are you doing here? Said we're working out where we're gonna put the computer. Absolute blank. Look came over his face, the computer, does the computer come with this? he had bought the outcome this whole Rewa. Yeah. Thinking about how they're gonna change the way they manage their manufacturing and get better response to their customers and lower inventory costs and all that sort of stuff. Never dawned on him. Our computer came, I was selling a computer. He was buying an outcome.

And that's a phenomenal story because. When you can get your prospect, your customer, so bought in and so engaged and on the journey with you to that. Anything's possible anything. And, but getting that that buy in is key

Yeah. Particularly when you get to larger B2B and your larger transactions, you're selling to, there's typically you know, sometimes 10, 12, 15 people that are involved in making that decision and are decision makers, all of. And when you look at that and look at all the teamwork we as an organization need to do to help them through their buying journey and help them through their overall business journey.

It's a massive team effort and we need some sort of model and framework and we need that helps us do that. But also we need to make a, have a framework that aligns with the customer journey that that actually is designed to help the customer. And too often the old traditional sales processes were there to manipulate the customer.

Not so much help the customer, but force the customer through a decision process that really wasn't conducive to good value for the customer or for us as an organization in the end.

And so that is to me...

And then that drives the right behavior. And, and that's what builds trust because they see the reliability, they see the commitment to the, to their own outcome, not to us. And we're not about getting business and getting an order. Yeah, sure. That's going to happen, but that'll happen through reciprocity and yes, I, when I, I know we have to manage reciprocity but if our whole being and focus is on being there to help the customer achieve their outcomes.

But knowing also we can influence those outcomes because we can help the customer. Think through what they're doing and, and, and then visualize a better way of doing it that they may not have, you know, we help the customers think outside the nine dots. If we're doing it properly outside their paradigm, they need that, you know, I use the word disruption quite a bit.

Our job is to disrupt the customer's thinking. Now we probably don't go in and tell the customer that, but why do we want to disrupt the customer's thinking? Because the, we think we can help the customer achieve a much better and much more value, valuable outcome for their business. Now, every customer worth their salt that I've ever spoken to wants their, their thinking disrupted.

They want to think out the nine dots. They get stuck, stuck in their own paradigm. They're working in every day and they, and, and that's very hard for them to get outside that para. Our job is to help them do that as an organization. And I'm not, not talking about an individual salesperson I'm talking about as an organization, we're bringing in marketing's job is very much this helping bring thought to the table and bringing thought leadership and, and helping the, but knowing the customer really well and where their current situation is and what the current problems and implications are.

And then bringing thought leadership to the table that takes the, the customer to a new way of thinking, and then helps. A achieve that new way, that new vision. But it's all about the customer. It's not about us. We'll get our return through reciprocity.

And, and so often, you know I, I, I remember reading this in a book in order to get trust. You have to give. And, and that to me was really powerful because we often want something that we're very reluctant to give. And as an organization, you have to really trust your customers, listen to your customers, and then build around that knowledge and information.

So I, I love, I love. our conversation. It's really engaging. It's at the core of everything that I love and believe. And it's amazing to me. I'm, I'm eager to go find your novel and, and read it. So tell us the name of the book. Tell us where we can find it.

We get a lot of I get a lot of people writing to me say, thank you for this book CEOs. A lot of CEOs are reading this book now. And I say, I read this book. I've given to every person, the organization and we're working through a plan now to change our culture. It's, it's what it's all about. So it's an exciting exciting journey.

Eventually in your lifetime, you'll buy again, whether it's a car, whether it's a house, whether it's, you know, something that you think is kind of a lifetime purchase, but there's so many businesses that continue to get our business for different reasons. And it's kind of digging deep into the reasons why people continue to do business with businesses.

And some of 'em are not very glamorous. Some of them are just convenience. and some of them are, you know, not necessarily what you would put as like best practices either.

Right. Basically they sell sandpaper, they call it abrasives and it's industrial abrasives, but it's sandpaper. So it's not very glamorous. Right. So we did some work with them and it was really interesting. They one young sales lady I was brought in by a sales brand, new sales leader in there that said, you know, we we're transactional people.

We, we walk into the, a factory and say, look how you know, I'm, I'm here again this month. How many, how many bits of sand paper and which ones do you want this month? Take the order and walk out. And that was it. We got a couple of new sandpaper products you might wanna look at here. Here's some test ones you can test.

And that was basically all they did. I had one young lady in this program said my territory is the Eastern sea board of Australia. And I want one of my key loves the surfboard manufac. I said, okay, how do you go about selling? Well, it's just what I just said. You know, I go to all the surf mill manufacturing, how are you going?

How's our sandpaper going? And what do you want this month? You using competitor sandpaper, let's talk, you know, all that sort of stuff. We changed her thinking. And so she said, well, I'm, I'm a domain expert in surfboard manufacturing. I didn't understand how to get the finish. So dialogue from then on, was all about talking to the surfboard manufacturers about the finish show, getting and whether it was exactly what they wanted and bringing to the table.

Some thinking and other people are getting this sort of finished by doing it slightly differently. And what would that work for you? And so on, she became the consultant in the industry. I never talked about sand PA sandpaper anymore just came. Right. So, and, and she went, she went from having 20% of the, the market share in that market to about 70% in three years.

And we, I was talking with the CEO. And the CRO, which they're now trying to put in place about the level of training they've given to their people over the last two or three years. And it was all product, all product and I, and bottom line is, well, if you're gonna train them the product, what, what's a message you're gonna, yeah.

Obviously need some training on the product, but what's a message you're going to give them the message is you go to talk to your customer about the products because you are the product. It it's, we've gotta be training them on how to engage with clients as a, as a team, what all their roles are, what the process and framework is and how you can drive value in thinking to clients.

It's not about product, you know, at the end of the day, when the client. Says, you know, you've painted a great vision. I agree with this. I can, I can visualize, and I can verbalize the, the value we are going to get outta this. We want to take this direction, then we can say, okay, well, let me let let's look at how we can help you get to that vision.

You know, we can bring this product and this service to the table, and maybe as a third party we can bring in and so on and pull it together. But only when that vision is solid, when the value in the main mind of the client is well perceived and well, well thought through and well, well, verbalized

And sometimes it, it might be that we don't offer anything that they need, but we've made the connection and maybe next time we'll be of service to them. And I always love that saying, showing up and throwing up because we do arm sales people and sales leaders, and even marketing. Well, marketing will talk you know, spin a long tail around the features, the benefits, everything about a product. But really it falls off, you know, the the view of the customers and it's MIS missing the Mark A. Little bit.

Because they're in they're they should be. Yeah. We should understand where that customer's at in their thinking where we are thinking of helping them go through all that dialogue and marketing should be producing the material. But also engaging with the number of people in that client organization over a period of time as they're going through that journey.

And, and it's a, it's a, an account strategy that marketing have a role. And, you know, as, as we, as we develop our relationship with customers and are providing services and so on, you know, the customer experience people have, have just a fully integrated role with that whole relationship and we all need to be working together on it.

Bring your own role and skills to the table within the framework.

I think you know, as, as I mentioned, it's on my next reading list. I can't wait to get dig into it. And I, I have a, a funny suspicion that it will be on a lot of people's summer reading list, especially people who are CROs and C CEOs really need to kind of take a look at this and think about how it'll impact the whole organization, the culture, the framework, and, and essentially the outcomes of the business. So thank you so much.

This episode was digitally transcribed.