In part 2 with Matt Milligan, co-founder of Uhubs, the discussion delves into the differences between software sales and consulting sales, and the need for a consultative approach in both fields. Matt talks about AI in sales processes and the profile of high-performing salespeople. He explains that AI tools can automate significant portions of sales workflows, leading to increased efficiency and performance. The conversation also touches on the evolving role of Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), who need to be data-literate and have strong revenue operations (RevOps) support. Milligan introduces the RISE framework (Revenue Skills, Impactful Behaviours, Strategic Process Execution, Expert Knowledge) as a structured approach to assessing and improving sales capabilities, ultimately driving revenue growth.

Welcome back to the Growth Workshop Podcast with

myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams, and part two of our

conversation with Matt Milligan. Talking about the difference

between software sales and and selling consulting. And Jonny,

you described this, and I might butcher this slightly, but you

described it as a lot of consulting sales is maybe less

tangible. So it's much, it's a different, arguably a more

complex, sale than going out and saying, we've got a platform

that does this. What it does is it encourages more of a

consultative sale, more of an outcome focused sale. And you

could absolutely see why technology businesses selling

large enterprise contracts would want to bring that capability

into their business.

Totally. As someone that's been in

consulting and also, and I'm going to elaborate on your

question, someone's been in consulting and also works, has

built a product based software firm. My view in the market is

that account executives, Senior Account Executives, who get paid

a good amount of money in a SaaS firm, do not have a strategic

mindset towards selling. That's quite a blunt comment, but I'm

going to stand by that comment you. I believe that you know,

the consultative approach is is valuable in both consulting and

also as a senior account manager in a product based sale. Am I

talking rubbish? Is that true from your point of view, and

whatever way you go, yes or no, but why do people not have a

consultative mindset when they're selling software at that

senior they're getting paid 150,000 200,000 pound a year.

Why do they not display that consultative approach?

My instant answer or perspective on that would be,

it's not black and white, and the reason is that high

performing AES at software companies, particularly if

they're selling bigger ticket deals and slightly complex

solution, they have to have that solution sales mindset, right?

So the best enterprise sellers are absolutely solution oriented

and can navigate those complex sales cycles. Otherwise they

just wouldn't be in the role or all wouldn't last long. If

they're an organization with an effective performance management

setup, I do definitely acknowledge your point that I

think sellers that come from that consultative background

have developed a muscle that is actually a difficult muscle to

build, because you're right, like when you're selling

services, it's much less tangible. It's like you're kind

of creating something out of nothing. Obviously, you've got

frameworks and tools that you're using right and I think that's

partly why we're seeing maybe a bit of a shift towards that

profile and that skill set, because we can equip them with

the negotiation skills and a bit more of a commercial mindset,

but to build that consultative muscle, that takes time and that

takes experience. You know, I think about my own experience,

of how I did it was through immersion and watching partners

at EY navigate these relationships and, you know, put

these really bespoke solutions together. And also, the other

thing I'd always hark back to is the way in which they would take

learnings from one client and then they'd go down the road to

that client's biggest competitor, but, but that is,

that's what you're paying for, right? If you're a CEO, you're

like, well, give me all the things that didn't work when you

did it with that company, and we're going to do it 10 times

better.

I mean, my background was 10 years in B to

C selling, and people are like, Well, what does that mean? It's

effectively high transaction. Did it need much consultation?

Probably not as much as what we would look at in a B to B world,

yeah, and I was fortunate enough then, who's my current Managing

Director, Stuart Lotherington, you talk about immersing

yourself 100% I advocate for that. But the challenge now is

that in this software as a service environment people, it's

fact that we see them in action as a consultancy firm, and they

are not strategic enough in that consultative approach. Do you

think there's some type of AI or technology, or even maybe Uhubs

can offer that? Is there a platform out there that would

allow you know someone, maybe with that software based

approach, to actually immerse themselves with an AI bot that

could actually learn through that way? Have you ever see any

of that going on at the moment?

Perhaps not exactly what you're describing,

but I think just on the AI point, there's something really

important here, because everything we've just spoken

about in terms of the profile of a high performance salesperson

AI rips up all of that, like literally everything that we

know as a best practice today is in the process of getting

rewritten right now. And I think about that in two key, key

buckets, if you like. I think about it as one is process. So

the sales process and how you actually run a sales workflow

from point A to point B is completely like the playbooks.

The old playbooks gone.

But explain why, because you've got feeling. I'm

hearing you, but I think we need a bit of context around it.

So I'll deep dive, double click into that in

a sec, process being one of them, I think the second one is,

is the profile of capabilities completely being reimagined as

well, right? So let's take the first one of that process. We've

seen instances in our customers right now where CROs are turning

around to us and the same I walk so. Had a specific customer

three weeks ago, four weeks ago, he said to me, I was walking

through the office, and I walked past one of my reps, and I

caught the glimpse of his screen, and I said, what was

that? And this rep was really secretive about it, and he tried

to sort of close the minimize the window, whatever. And he

said, Okay, fine. He got him to open it up. He said, Talk me

through like, what was that? Looked awesome, and the guy had

used AI this rep who was also their highest performing rep, he

had automated his entire self built he had spent time to

upskill himself on prompt engineering and AI tools in the

market. And he'd used two or three different AI tools to

completely automate his account, research and prospect building

workflow. The CRO happened to just walk past it and catch a

glimpse of it and be like, what's that? And then he said,

Well, have you told your colleagues about this? He goes,

No, no, because obviously this high perform rep was like, This

is unbelievable. Like, I've just automated 25% of my job. I'm

therefore able to do 25% more. Keeps them myself. And he's

smashing it. So the CROs that I'm hearing are like, how is AI

being used? And how do we get that replicated across more

reps? Because we're getting some amazing outcomes in pockets with

these early adopter reps. So that's just a small example to

help you understand process and how the whole process is being

redefined right now. And there's some really hungry self starter

reps in the market that are going home at night or getting

up early in the morning or weekends and thinking, Hang on.

Let me think about this. I'm just going to play around, and

I'm going to test these different tools, and I'm going

to connect them together, and I'm going to write my own

prompts, I'm going to train my own models, and that's what you

know this this rep had done. So the process is getting

completely redefined. So there's big question mark there around

how that changes the dynamic between high performers and low

performers. It doesn't mean there's gonna be even a bigger

gap, because the high performers are the ones that are gonna self

start and train themselves. So process is one bucket, the other

one is capability and profile of the actual sellers. And this

flips it. And this thinks about the mass disruption that's

happening through AI right now. What about the buyers? So if

you're an experienced sales person with 2025, years

experience, and you sell mostly on relationships. If you think

about those experienced enterprise sellers who have got

this Rolodex, they go into a new role, and they basically tap up

this network of trusted relationships that they've been

selling to buyers for a very long time. What happens if those

buyers are gone? What happens if those roles are in the next five

to 10 years, and this is happening quickly, right? So, so

then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for

the profile of successful, high performing salespeople in the

future? Because does that mean that the relationship based

Rolodex type seller is going and therefore it's a risk for us as

a business, if we continue to rely on that, are we moving much

more into a world of intent based signals and AI automation?

Automate the hell out of your workflow and just be super

efficient?

Well Matt, I kind of listen to people talk about

AI. I'm going, Yes, Matt, I understand. I'm like, show me an

I believe it approach. I think with AI, it's just a it's going

to be a fascinating journey when we're going on that we're all

going on. And to your point about the buyers changing, I can

only think about that ourselves as the buyer profile, the buyer

persona, is going to change, but it might be. It might have taken

three years for that to evolve. Now it might be six months for

that as the workforce and transitions, you've spoken a lot

about CROs or Chief Revenue officers. Now, there's a lot of

research out there. It's a really interesting environment.

We work with a lot of Chief Revenue officers as an

organization as well. So we often get asked to work with P

backed organizations where the investment manager is asking us

to help the CRO. Now a CRO is life time within their

particular role is about 14 to 16 months on average. Now, when

we ask an investment manager what the challenges are around

the CROs that they've got in their port codes, they're

typically saying that they're not good enough at data numbers

in general, so their numeracy is not very strong, and on average,

they're not very good at selling. And what they do is

they're trying to elevate themselves to be on the

business, rather than in the business, doing the deal

reviews, doing the pipeline reviews, and actually really

sort of winning some of those deals. That's their words, not

mine. But how do you help CROs, you know? Because if that's the

problem statement by their employees, how are you helping

them become more proficient?

It's a great question, yeah, and that's

really interesting insight those two areas. I had this

conversation with the CRO the other day, who was talking about

the future, the future proof. CRO is actually less the kind of

relationship, sales career kind of guy or girl. It's actually

much more about being really data literate and having a

really strong rev ops function around you. Hence why the you

know the importance of of that early rev ops Higher One of the

things we talk a lot to CROs about is just helping them de

risk that journey. As you mentioned, 14 months is really,

I mean, it's less than four quarters. Yeah, job, you don't

have long. You got to really get some quick wins under your belt

and get moving in the right direction. So just help them de

risk that process. And one component, as we spoke about, of

that journey. Only use your talent, so therefore, how can we

just help you de risk that talent, make sure you've got the

right players on the pitch, in the right positions. To your

point, around data, what we often find CROs really crave, at

a macro level, those insights that you can't necessarily get

from your CRM. So you know, it's, it's that kind of softer

stuff that's a little bit harder to measure, but you can't rely

necessarily on your sales managers, because there's biases

there, right? I was with a customer yesterday, and she was

saying she's CRO of a research organization. She said, Yeah, I

got this feedback given to one of my reps that it was a

terrible call. So I said to the manager, send me the call. And I

reviewed the call and I completely disagreed with the

manager. Said I could see certain improvement areas that

the manager had picked out of the call. But actually I thought

there was so much potential on that call. I actually thought

stylistically, it was a great call. The CRO She then went on

to say that the rep was was a woman, the manager was a man.

And she said, I've experienced this map throughout my career as

a female in a very male dominated sales culture, which

most organizations often ask. Unfortunately, that's a huge

bias, because there's this masculine expectation of what a

effective sales execution should look like. And if you're relying

on one manager's opinion, there's inherent bias there. So

the CEOs are craving these more objective insights and objective

views of where their capability actually is, rather than relying

on one person's opinion, which is likely to be inherently

biased.

And Uhubs provides that insight between capability

and the profile. And can it direct something about the CRO

here, if you knew what capability to shift, are you

able to pinpoint the revenue growth? So actually, a CRO is

able to go in a board meeting actually forecasting three

months ahead. If we're able to shift capability by x, we can

improve revenue by y. Are you able to get to that data point?

That's exactly it. And we spoke earlier about

benchmarking and why benchmarking is so important to

get that gauge. But where benchmarking so that's become

really interesting as well, is that by monitoring 1000s of

sellers every quarter, you can start to get an understanding as

to which capabilities are influencing revenue the most. So

if we see an uplift in negotiation capabilities, and

alongside that, we see a massive improvement in late stage

conversion in those AES deals, that's a benchmark. We can now

apply that uplift, and we can start to replicate that for our

customers. And we can say, Well, based on your average deal size

and based on your sales cycle length, we've identified,

there's a gap in this capability area, and our latest benchmark

data shows, or indicates that if you can improve that capability

by this much, this is how much of an uplift you're going to

see.

That the whole process sounds great. And to

some that have not heard of Uhubs, they might be going,

Okay, well, that's good, but outcomes are the most important

factor, right? That keeps businesses going, and if they

were to use Uhubs or use other platforms that they're going to

have to see some demonstrable returns for their investment.

Can you just describe, like a bit of an example of what

happens? I think you assess the capabilities. Can you then use

data points as you reference to benchmark what the uplift might

be moving forward? Could you just give us an example?

Yeah, so a recent example that springs to mind. We

baselined Q beginning at q4 September, October, last year,

based on account executive organization, we pinpointed two

capability areas that were holding back that team. One of

them was product acumen. The other was objection handling.

And we then used the cool data to go deep on what the specific

objections holding back that team were. So we diagnosed that

gap. We saw that there was an opportunity. There were about

25% below the industry baseline for those two capability areas,

we identified a significant revenue opportunity off the back

of that, off the back of that insight that the product

delivered, their enablement team went away into two things. They

took the cohort of AES that have been identified, they put them

through a weekly objection handling boot camp. The

enablement team then also did a refresh of their product

university that they had internally to refresh all of the

product, knowledge, we read baseline. 90 days later, we've

been able to see an over 20% improvement in both capability

areas and an increase in win rates of 12% across those areas.

And as a revenue, can you share that? Because we

don't know the client, I'm sure you give us a little bit of a

baseline about how much that might...

It was a 1.2 million uplift.

Wow, and who doesn't want that?

Who doesn't want that? And just as we sort of

think about, you know that you've talked a lot, Matt about,

like, some of the detail behind that, but what we like to do on

the podcast is for our listeners, just to get those

kind of really punchy frameworks, what is it that they

can think about? What should those leaders out there be

thinking about, obviously, apart from giving you a call, but

that's going to help them on their journey with some of these

challenges that we've talked about today.

Yeah, so I'll talk about a framework called

RISE that we're big advocates of, and you can find out more

information on our website. When you're thinking about all the

different capabilities that make up high performance, it can be

quite overwhelming. There's a long list of capabilities that

make up success. So rise is a really simple, four part

framework. It's an acronym that I'll walk you through, and it's

a way to structure your thinking about the different types of

capability that make high performance. So R first up

stands for revenue skills. So these are those core revenue

skills that sellers need to be effective, negotiation,

Objection, handling. I stands for impactful behaviors. So

these are the behaviors that we want to see demonstrated. So

this could be everything from how are individuals managing

their time, time blocking of their schedules, etc. It could

also be to what extent are they demonstrating resilience or a

growth mindset, which is really important for overcoming

objections. So you got R, you got I S, then stands for

strategic process execution. So if you have a sales methodology

or a set process in place, as many organizations do or should

have, to what extent is that being adhered to? And then

finally, E stands for expert knowledge. So what is the level

of product understanding and what is the level of industry

knowledge. So we think about those four key ingredients as as

the the kind of combo that makes up a high performing

salesperson, and the capabilities that sit underneath

those four vary role to role, but that that's a useful

framework and a start point, you know, and even I'd encourage

anyone listening who's going on this journey of trying to

structure and answer that question of what good looks

like, just start off with those four categories. Start in a

spreadsheet and think about what are the capabilities under

revenue, skills, impactful behaviors, strategic process

execution and expert knowledge. What are those capabilities you

want to see in your reps? And then have a go at starting to

think about benchmarking them against those.

Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the

Growth Workshop Podcast. It's been amazing to have you, and we

look forward to a growing, ongoing relationship between

Uhubs and SBR going forward. So thank you.

Thanks guys. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was

good fun.

Cheers, Matt.

Brilliant.