Selling mental health services to organisations with Jessica Lorimer

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. In this episode, I'm interviewing Jessica Lorimer, sales expert and the person that taught me how to break into the world of corporates through her program, The C Suite. Jess specialises in consultative selling, in other words, helping clients to make sense of their problems. I can honestly say that following her process and keeping the emphasis on consultation at the forefront of my mind has helped me to feel completely comfortable with the extremely high levels of cold outreach that I’ve had to do to get my foot in the corporate door. This episode is a must listen for you if you're interested in selling your services to corporates or other organisations, but it's also a really great one if you've ever struggled with your mindset around taking money for your services.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Jessica:

LinkedIn

sellingtocorporate.com

Selling to Corporate Podcast

Rosie’s affiliate link for The C-Suite: https://rosiegilderthorp--smartleaderssell.thrivecart.com/the-c-suite-self-study-course-2024bnpl/

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The highlights

• Jess tells us a little bit about who she is, how she helps people and the sorts of services that corporates might be interested in buying from independent psychologists and therapists 01:26
• Jess talks about why it would be worth corporates working with small providers like us 08:53
• Jess tells us how consultative selling is different 14:42
• We discuss the fear of reaching out to corporates and how our skills are relevant to consultative selling 21:06
• Jess talks about the need in public sector and not for profit for external support and guidance, and how if we are from a public sector background, we will still know people who need our skill set 32:32
• Jess gives us a good first move to make if we are thinking about offering services to an organisation 36:18
• Jess tells us where to find her and her podcast, Selling to Corporate 40:32

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SPEAKERS

Rosie Gilderthorp, Jessica Lorimer

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. In this episode, I'm interviewing Jessica Lorimer, sales expert and the person that taught me how to break into the world of corporates through her program, The C Suite. Jess specialises in consultative selling. In other words, helping clients to make sense of their problems and I can honestly say that following her process and keeping the emphasis on consultation at the forefront of my mind has helped me to feel completely comfortable with the extremely high levels of cold outreach that I’ve had to do to get my foot in the corporate door. This episode is a must listen for you if you're interested in selling your services to corporates or other organisations, but it's also a really great one for you if you've ever struggled with your mindset around taking money for your services. So I really hope that a lot of you are going to find this useful today. I know I always come away from talking to Jess feeling super energised and really excited about our work. So it's a real treat to have her here today. So without further ado, let's get onto the interview.

Welcome to the podcast, Jess. I'm so excited to talk to you today about working with corporates and the way that you sell to corporates because I really like the way you do it. Spoiler alert! And before we dive into all of that, please just say a little bit about who you are and how you help people.

Oh, well, I am so excited to be here. And it's also really nice to be talking to a lot of people who are in the psychology space. That's something I'm particularly interested in, although nowhere near as qualified. But luckily I'm good at sales. So I'm Jess Lorimer. I'm the founder of Selling to Corporate, incredibly boringly named, but good for SEO. And I help entrepreneurs sell their services into corporate organisations. So I work with lots of people in the mental health field, in the nutritionist field, health and wellness overall, alongside the stereotypical stuff that we would normally see in corporate. So HR consultancy, marketing consultancy and things, and help them sell those services into corporate organisations so that they can make bigger change and ultimately make more money.

And you know, I've been in your C Suite community for quite a while now, so I've seen the diversity in the different business owners that in there and offering services to corporates. But I think lots of psychologists and therapists listening to this might be a bit surprised to hear that mental health and mental well being is something that corporates are willing to buy.

So could you say a little bit about the sorts of services that corporates might be interested in buying from independent psychologists and therapists.

Yeah, of course. I think it's really interesting actually, because if you'd have talked to me probably 12 years ago about any kind of mental health first aid or any other mental health support in the workplace, I would have laughed. And that is a reflection more on me than anybody in the mental health profession. But I came from a really strong sales background and worked for recruitment firms, which back then weren't so bothered by how well we could support people mentally. In fact, they were just more used to getting as much out of a person as possible, watching them burn out and then crash. Really, mental health in the workplace started being a priority for companies probably about five years ago. And it really made a huge appearance during and post COVID. So we had lots and lots of things happening in 2019, 2020, both with the pandemic itself, but also other world events that meant that employees in organisations were just struggling a lot more than they ever had. And so with that, we saw a huge rise in mental wellness, mental fitness being really desirable from companies. And so you'll have probably seen yourself, but people inside The C Suite who are clinical psychologists, who are mental health first aiders, who are mental wellness practitioners and providers, they're selling lots of different things to companies. And that's ranging from really high level support for frontline staff. So think about social media firms, for example. They have entire teams that are responsible for the removal of traumatic content on the platforms. And actually, we have some people inside The C Suite who have worked with those teams on the front line to reduce trauma, to talk about that kind of traumatic experience that they see or the traumatic experiences they're exposed to every day in the workplace and to help them overcome some of those things. We have mental health and wellness providers who specialise in things like bullying and harassment in the workplace, and will run courses, workshops, and even deliver keynote talks on those areas. And we also have people who are in that kind of psychologist mental health practitioner space who are focused on other, I'm going to say, more normal areas, right? So things like leadership, things like stress, burnout, parenting, you know, returning to work after absence. And they'll work in a range of ways whether that's one to one with leaders and employees themselves, or whether that is running things that are more large scale like memberships or selling resources to companies that they can use to promote better mental health and well being culture in the organisation. So there's a lot of different methodologies, and I know that probably in the mental health world methodology is used completely differently, but what we're talking about is there's a lot of different delivery methods that people can use to successfully deliver within that corporate space now.

That's so interesting because all of those examples, what they have in common really to me is that somebody has identified the real problem that the company is having. And then, you know, they're finding the most practical, pragmatic way of solving that problem for that particular company, you know, and I would never have thought of things like, you know, scanning for traumatic content. But of course we can do that. That would be well within our skill set to do. But you probably wouldn't think of those things without having had a conversation with a company first about the problems that they were experiencing.

Exactly. And I think we forget how much or how difficult workplaces are now. And we also forget about the generations involved in the workplace. You know, we're at an interesting point in our lifetime where there are five generations of people in the workforce and actually our exposure to things is completely different. Our risk tolerances are completely different generationally. The way that we communicate is completely different. And so it makes sense that our mental health and capacity are completely different. You know, Gen Z are coming into the workplace and saying, we're not going to work for a company unless it meets our values, unless we have work life balance. For me, as a millennial, that's terrifying. You know, I'm quite a direct person, but when I got my first job, I was like, okay, thank you very much, you're paying me this money, I'll show up, I'll do whatever you want. No problem. And that's not what we're seeing anymore. And I think now there are so many more opportunities and best practice ways of working with organisations to support good mental health, good mental fitness, resilience, and all of those things. It's about having those commercial conversations with companies and finding out what the opportunities are, because, you know, I imagine that it must get quite boring hearing about the same thing all the time, you know, and thinking, Oh, well, if I work with companies, I'm just going to hear about a load of people who are a bit stressed at work, and maybe that's not where I want to sit. Maybe I want to do something that's more interesting around being trauma informed or around, you know, suicide prevention, you know, or around something that is different, you know, entirely. And I think. It's looking for those interesting opportunities and really deciding what your specialism is now and where it can fit best with organisations.

Yeah, it does seem like specialism is quite key to it because, you know, a question that I wanted to ask today was around, you know, why would a company want to work with a small provider because, you know, most of us, there's maybe one or two of us, we might have associates, but we're not running big companies. And there are all of these big providers, often AI assisted, offering very cheap therapy. So it seems unlikely they're going to want us for generic therapy. So, you know, can you say a little bit more about why it would be worth corporate working with one of us?

So I think it's a real misconception that corporates only work with large organisations. And actually over the years, corporates have realised many a time that working with smallest providers is much better for a variety of practical reasons. So things like, smaller providers are able to be more agile and responsive to specific issues. Whereas if they work with a larger provider, they have these offers that they're not inclined to do any differently. They don't do any kind of audit or assessment frequently, because for them, they're running the cheapest option possible in most cases. And that doesn't always look like the ability to do things properly to assess, to audit, to then create a bespoke solution. I think the other misconception is that providers tend to think that when they're working with corporates, they only want to work within an employee assistance program, which, you know, is typically the area that most people think of when they think about therapeutic practitioners and working with corporates, it’s how can we get aligned with the EAP? And then, you know, they might refer people, employees to us directly. Actually, because there are so many different ways of working with corporate companies now and because in the clinical psychology field and in the mental health and wellbeing field and the therapeutic, you know, practitioner field overall, companies aren't just looking at you to provide therapy anymore. What they're actually looking for is, you know, can you assess people on our teams? Can you assess their personalities? Can you look at why they work well together or why they don't? You can look at leadership overall, team bonding, team building, assessment of personality versus job role. A lot of clinical psychologists have got great talents in being able to understand and diagnose why somebody may have previously been a top performer and is no longer a top performer. So because of the different ways of working that aren't just in a one to one therapy setting, actually, it's much easier for corporates to work with a smaller provider because they're getting those genuine skills and expertise. When you work with a large company who's hiring graduates, you know, year on year, you're paying for that company's branding, you're paying for their training program, you're paying for them to keep the lights on in very fancy offices in nice cities around the world usually, and then you are getting a graduate who's got little to no experience of life itself or the working world. Whereas when they're working with smaller providers, they're getting the 10, 20 years of expertise that's been developed in a one to one setting for, you know, certainly psychologists. And you're bringing that with a commercial lens to a commercial organisation who can make much, much better use of it.

That’s so interesting. And I know it's so true because I'm just coming to the end of my MBA program that I've been doing with Warwick. And it's been brilliant, but one of the lecturers said to me, because he knew it was my final module, he was like, now you can go off and be a management consultant with Deloitte. And I said, uh, no, I can't. I've learned a few models, but I don't know anything about, like change management. That's not something I can consult on. He was like, I know, but that's what they all do. And I was like, wow, okay.

And it's terrifying. I mean, don't get me wrong, we've all been the graduate with no experience, but when we were the graduate with no experience, we went usually and worked for an organisation. You know, if you're a clinical psychologist, you probably worked under supervision strictly for a period of time. You probably worked for an NHS or public sector trust, you might have worked in the private health sector, you know, before you decided to go and set up your own practice. I think the interesting thing about working with companies is that you could do a lot more damage if you are a very recent grad who, you know, has never got that lived experience or working experience. And then you're playing around with people's brains. You know, that's, that's very difficult as a prospect. And in some ways that is the, the sensible and reasonable assumption that we're making about when big companies are using large therapy businesses, they're doing so because those people are being supervised, they’re under supervision, you know, they're, they're not kind of just letting them loose on their leaders and their most important employees. When they're hiring smaller mental health providers or practitioners, they're doing it because they want to solve very specific issues and they want that person to have expertise, they want them to have lived a decent life period outside of university and clubbing, which we've all done, but it doesn't necessarily set yourself up for practice. And they want those people to be experienced diagnosticians and be able to give the right guidance and expertise to get the result.

I think this is it actually. And you know, I've recommended The C Suite to my community lots of times, and I am always telling people to go to your podcast and listen to what you actually say about selling because so many psychologists and therapists tell me that they hate marketing and they're really uncomfortable with selling and they just can't imagine ever going out and doing something like cold outreach, for example. But the way that you approach, I know you call it consultative selling, and I think it fits really well with the values that most of us hold as mental health professionals. And it, and it's because of that sort of assessment piece where you're actually trying to develop an understanding of, of what's going on with people. So can you talk about, a little bit about how consultative selling is different to that sort of sleazy stuff, which I know you get really annoyed with and see all the time in sales.

And always makes me laugh, to be fair. I mean, firstly, thank you very much for recommending The C Suite. I appreciate that. And I think selling is one of those interesting things, I think there's a misconception that there are born salespeople, and I don't believe that at all, and I've worked with about 27,000 people over the last 10 years. So I'd say that there are people who naturally embrace it quicker, and those people tend to be extroverts. Those are the people who are like, cool, whatever, we'll see how it goes. And there are people who need to understand the fundamentals of selling from a theoretical perspective before they feel comfortable and confident to go and implement the strategies. The way I always think it's a bit different is that when we look at the common representation of salespeople, we think about that like, 1980s car dealer who immediately hounds you as soon as you get to the dealership. And they're like, Oh my goodness, you want a car? Like, we'll sell you any car and you should have this one. And, and essentially they won't let you leave until you've bought a car or feel so uncomfortable that you have to get out. And that's the representation that we see an awful lot. And that's because it sells. Right? You know, the reality is if you put a film in place, if the Wolf of Wall Street film was made and Jordan Belfort had been a very normal, consultative seller, selling stocks, not doing anything illegal, would the film be successful? No, of course it wouldn't. Like, we always go with these caricatures, but what we actually have now are this kind of breed of consultative sellers, who realised that it's much easier to sell to somebody who is, or who is deciding that they are qualified to be sold to. And what I mean by that is when we traditionally have looked at sales and marketing, because it's in your face, it's making a lot of assumptions. You've walked into the dealership, you must want a car, I'm going to hard sell you until you leave or buy. What we've learned about human beings over the last 20 years is it's much easier to just be easy and transparent with them and say, hey, look, are you interested in buying a car at some point? And if they say yes, then it's much easier to ask them questions about what they might want and why they might want a car now. And essentially take them on that journey to self identifying, yes, we want something now, yes, this is going to be relevant to us, yes, this person seems credible and useful and helpful, so I want to buy from them. And equally, if they're like, oh no, we're just killing some time, walking away and being okay with that. And I think that's the interesting thing about consultative selling for people in your field is that this is what you do on a daily basis anyway. Once a client is coming to you, you're doing the diagnostics, you're doing the assessment and then you are prescribing solutions that are going to fit. That's all good selling is.

I couldn’t agree more. And I think, you know, often you do have to do a bit of motivational work in that time, you know, once you figured out with somebody what their priorities are, then you often do have to be the person that explains, this is what I think is going to help you meet your aim in the best possible way. And very often, especially if you're working in the public sector with people that maybe didn't choose to come to your room that day, they've been sent there, then you often are really doing a sales job of saying, look, I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but there is hope, this problem can be solved, I've seen it be solved, and this is a really good way to do it. And I don't see really how selling with that intention is any different. You're not trying to persuade people to buy something that they don't need. You're just using your expertise to figure out what you think is going to actually help them and giving them the option to take it. They didn't have that option before because you hadn't, you hadn't told them what it was.

Exactly. And I think it's really interesting because I think we always have this discussion with business owners about educational content. I hate content. I think content creation is such a waste of time and it does business owners a disservice. Like why waste all your time creating all these blogs and everything like that, when actually your best service is to have conversations with people and empower them to make the decision for them. Do they want to do something? Do they not? Like, and, and, and that's all we're ever doing with sales and we always want to be detached from that outcome. We want to have enough sales activity happening that if a person and when a person says, do you know what? Not right now. We go, okay, cool. See you in three months. You in six months, like whatever. That's fine. Instead, what the internet has taught us to do is that we need to create tons and tons and tons of content to stay top of mind, to stay relevant, to do all these things. And that can happen, but actually the world moves so fast these days that everyone's creating all the content and everyone's, you know, contributing to the noise and things. And then we get so invested in every single sale, because we are seeing the unicorn numbers. We're seeing that tiny one to two percent of people who might find our website, find our Instagram, you know, whatever. When we look at B2B sales, we're doing it the other way. Rather than having these big funnels with lots of content that are designed to whittle people down to the smallest percentage of buyers, we're actually turning on its head, we're turning it into a pyramid. We're targeting the people in organisations who are going to be most responsible for our area of specialism and who are going to have the budget to pay us. And we're saying, hey, out of interest, are you looking to support people with this in your organisation right now? Because we've noticed that other people are. And then you're going to have that grownup conversation around what are some of the challenges that we face? What are some of the things that you see? What are the consequences of not solving that problem? And you're going to be able to create a solution or co create a solution with them, rather than feeling like you have to just, I don't know, get on TikTok or whatever the latest platform is, you know.

Yeah. And I think, most people, when they get into those conversations, their kind of therapeutic skills kick in and it becomes much more comfortable because you're doing much more listening than you are talking. But I think often it's the fear of reaching out. It's the fear that you might get an angry email back. And I think some of that comes from the fact that we haven't got that corporate experience, because something I remember you told me early on is if you worked in a corporate, you'd realise part of their job is receiving and filtering these emails and they will just get rid of it. If they're not interested, they're not going to be offended.

They're just going to get rid of it.

And here's the thing, like you mentioned earlier, some of the people that are listening to this podcast will have worked in NHS or public sector environments where the person sat directly in front of you is not happy about that. And I would warrant, it's actually much more scary, like, I wouldn't want to sit in a room with somebody who was angry and upset and taking that all out on me, even though I'd never met them before. I wouldn't want to do that. But I'd send a cold email any day of the week, because if someone on a cold email is like, no thanks, this isn't a priority for us, I would wager that's a lot less damaging than somebody screaming obscenities at me because they don't want to be in a situation that they've got themselves into. So I think the first thing is, you guys are heroes, you know, and you put yourselves in those really, challenging situations to manage people who have extreme difficulty. This is just uncomfortable because you haven't done it before. You know, and the reality is we've all had a bit of a bad day where we've responded to an email in a sharper tone that we’d’ve liked. And we've all had really good days where we've been much nicer about the cold pitches that we've got. You know, if we do it in the right way though, if we target the right type of stakeholder with an email that is relevant to them, they will be polite, even if they don't want it. Because actually what they're thinking is, It would damage my reputation if I then wanted this service and had to come back to this poor person and apologise for being so awful. So you'll find that there's that reciprocity in terms of grace and, you know, polite responses at least.

And that is another thing that I really like about your approach. You know, you're, you're always teaching us to be relentlessly polite and relentlessly optimistic. And again, you know, coming from a therapy background, that kind of, I'm going to hold the hope, even if you seem to have lost it, I think is really, really valuable.

Well I think, you know, in therapy, I don't know that you would sit with a client, and I've, I've had various forms of therapy throughout my life, I've been very fortunate to prioritise my mental health and well being. But I've never sat with a therapist and been like, oh, I sort of don't want to do this thing. And the therapist has been like, yeah, no worries then, I guess just, just off you go. Like, don't, don't worry about it then, cancel the rest of your sessions. We'll see you later. You're good. And it's the same with sales, and and specifically with outreach, you have to look at it and say, well, if I'm looking at what's the worst thing that could happen, what's also the best thing that could happen? I could talk to a company who really has teams that are you know, facing difficulty with, you know, a company going through redundancy. I could really support a team through survivor guilt, post redundancy. I could really support a team with being more trauma informed or really support a team through the bereavement of a colleague. You know, there are so many things that you could do spectacularly, that would be super, super positive, but we all just focus on, Oh God, but I also could get a really upsetting response via email from somebody that I don't know that I'll probably never meet. Who's a bit angry that I sent them an email asking if they wanted to have a chat on a Tuesday. You know, it's not to diminish anyone's concerns, but it's to say like, when we expect the worst, we get the worst, because that's what we look for, that's what we cultivate. And with sales, energy is contagious. You know, when you speak to somebody in any kind of sales environment, whether it's your local Tesco or whether it's, you know, having some kind of high end experience, if that person is smiley and polite, and they walk you through what you really want out of a situation and what you feel like your obstacles will be, even if you end up not buying, you feel really good about that interaction. And that's what we always want is for every decision maker. To feel good about the interactions they've had with us, that we were courteous, that we were credible, that we provided solutions that would meet the need. Sometimes they can't go with it. Fine. But most of the time they can.

Yeah, and I think, you know, when we do therapy with people, a lot of us, the first session will be a consultation where you are trying to figure out am I the right fit for this person? And sometimes you're really not, you know, you ask all the right questions and they're, they're, you know, they're different because they're at the individual level, but it's similar to the questions that you train us to ask of an organisation. It's those kind of broad questions about how do you want things to be different in life? And if you get to the end of that and you're like, do you know what? I'm not right for you. I think I might have a colleague that is or perhaps therapy is not the right thing. Perhaps there's another route that I think might be better for you, then everybody leaves feeling like they've got something useful. And I think it's, it's got to be a similar thing at the end of a really good business development call with a stakeholder. I hope, and I think so, so far, my record, that actually those calls have been useful for people, because even if it's like, oh, no, we're not going to prioritise whatever it is I'm focusing on in that call at the moment, they've usually learned something about what they are prioritising and where they are putting their budget and often they'll say, do you know what? I hadn't really thought about that, but actually we do only really focus on, say, postnatal. We've never looked at pregnancy. There's no budget for pregnancy right now, but that is something I'm going to think about. And I'm like, okay, you think about that.

Exactly. And, you know, when they have, that's the great thing about working with corporates. I always find a no is a not right now. It's not the same as working with individuals where a no can be, that's categorically no forever, never coming back. With corporates, it's very much a, we hadn't thought about this, we weren't sure that this would be a thing, but actually, give us six months and we could be there. We could have that alignment, that budget, that as being part of our priorities. They require the education. I think that's the thing. The world has changed so much, and, you know, I have conversations all day every day with people who tell me, corporates aren't changing enough. They're not doing it quick enough. They're just doing tokenistic things, and I’m like, great, why aren't you telling them that? Why aren't you going to them and helping support stakeholders to make different decisions? Because if they're not approached by psychologists or mental health professionals, and you're tired of them just sitting there on stress awareness day, putting out some posters, then it's your job to go and say, hey, look, it's really good that you're trying to make progress. Have you thought about other ways that could be more transformational? And if you haven't, you don't get to sit on a high horse about it because you contribute to the problem by not doing anything at all.

I think that's very true. And I'm going to write that on my hand and try and remember it next time I'm getting annoyed about Better Help, for example. You want to complain to the right people publicly, otherwise you don't get a say.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's that kind of thing. You want to, most people, particularly in your profession, get into it because you want to help people. And I think, you know, and you want to make an impact. I actually can't imagine how stressful it would be to listen, diagnose, and help people work through their problems at an individual level every single day. I think if I did that, I'd be burnt out in a week. So I think it's an incredible job. I think though, that at some point, you might go, hmmm, how could we encourage more of a ripple effect? And that is working with people who impact others. So if you go to a company, and you end up working with a leadership team, and you support them to do work-life balance differently, to communicate with others differently, to have more patience with people on their teams differently, what happens is that person goes home every night, they're a much nicer person in their family unit. They come into work, they're a much better leader there, and that filters down to their team who then become much better at what they do. And they go home and they're much nicer people because that's how the ripple effect works. And I think that sometimes we forget about that. You know, we forget about it when we're upset about a company who's got better ads or something. Let's face it, that's the only reason that certain businesses out there are getting clients, they've got a big ad strategy. But we forget and we sort of dim ourselves and our skills down because we don't have the same ad strategy. So we assume that we can't work with the big companies. We can't create the ripple effect. And actually it's not true. It's just that we haven't tried it yet. We haven't asked the question

Yeah, it's a really good point. And, you know, as ever, I think when you spend more time immersed in a world, like I went to a big HR conference and I saw some of these big hitters that I'd been really intimidated by and they were up there on the stage, they’d paid to be there, of course, and they were, you know, presenting and I went and spoke to them afterwards feeling really intimidated. Everybody was 25.

Yeah.

And exactly what you said at the beginning. Everybody was 25. They had an undergraduate degree. Nothing more. And I thought, actually, I do offer something different. I could get up there and do my talk. And it would be different. And it just made me feel a lot more okay. But if I'd been avoiding it, which I think a lot of us do, and I did for a long time, so I'm not on my high horse about this. I completely, I first met you, I think, like, in 2020?

Yeah. Yeah.

Four years ago. I'm pretty sure it was definitely in a lockdown of some sort, and you know, I avoided it for another two years after that. So, not judging anybody for avoiding.

Absolutely not.

But when you do get out there and you meet people in corporate organisations, you meet people working with corporate organisations, it becomes a lot clearer what value we do have.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, and you'll already know those people. I don't know about you, but I've probably got five or 10 friends who work in companies. Not all of my friends are self-employed. In fact, I'm the odd one out in being self-employed. All my friends have got proper jobs, you know, they work for companies.

Well this is my problem actually. And I wonder how many people listening might share this,

because if you started out in the public sector, so I started out in the prison service and I then went into the NHS, and my husband is military. I actually don't know people that work in proper jobs.

I say to everybody, like the public sector and not for profit is actually where I made the most money in sales ever because those services are so under pressure and they need external support and guidance. And that's not just, you know, getting in a psychologist on a fixed term contract or whatever, especially in the wake of the pandemic. I mean, look at the mental health challenges that people in the NHS face now. They're asked to do more than ever with less. There's very little mental health provision for people in internal roles. That absolutely should be something that's being prioritised, that's being hired. So I would never do yourself a disservice on ‘I don't know anybody’. You absolutely do. And anybody who comes to you that is being paid outside of their own practice, or outside of their own business in some way, who comes to you and says, I'm really stressed, or I've got these signs that I'm not coping particularly well at work, go and do business development with their employer. Absolutely 100%. Whoever that is, whether it's public sector, private sector, you know, it doesn't matter. But that's somebody who's in a workplace that should be using your skill set. So absolutely ask everybody that you know.

That’s such a good way of thinking about it. And I think it's a mindset issue, isn't it? When you get that blank and you think, I don't know anybody. Of course, we all must. But it's got to be anxiety doing that to our brains.

Yeah, but also it's, I think, especially if people come from the public sector, and we see it a lot in The C Suite actually, we have lots of people who come from public sector or central government agencies, the NHS, those types of environments. And what we hear when we're employees, who are permanently contracted in those environments is there's no money.

Budgets are being cut. We're getting rid of people. We should be grateful to have jobs. We need to serve more. We need to help more. We need to ask for less. I think that's a really damaging mindset and it's a very damaging culture, because actually there always is money. What happens is that people are not always empowered in those organisations to make the best commercial decisions. And that's because external suppliers are not having those empowering conversations with them. Instead, they're like, yeah, great, buy all this PPE, it'll be perfectly fine. Ha Ha ha ha ha. Exactly, right? Sleazy, gross, bad example of sales. But instead, if we were supporting them from a sales perspective and saying, hey, look, actually, let's take a look at unexplained absence, or let's take a look at burnout, or let's take a look, you know, at some of the difficulties that staff are facing. How can I help you create a commercial business case that you can take to the board of trustees or whoever it is, to get external provision signed off for these people who are in need that is costing you money to support and that you're not doing particularly well. Like those employees then would have much more commercial acumen and be much better able to spend money on resources that employees actually need rather than just doing a yoga class because that's all they know how to do and that's all people keep shoving at them.

I think that's so interesting and there's so much to unpack around public sector and how to kind of get in and have those conversations. But I'm not going to make you do all of that now because I'm aware we've already used up loads of your time. But if, you know somebody listening to this is feeling like, oh, I don't feel very confident about it, and I, I don't feel like I've got very many contacts or easy inroads, but I would kind of like to have a go at maybe offering some services to an organisation. Where would be a good, what would be a good first move for them to think about making?

So I think the first thing that you always want to do whenever you're considering selling to corporate is go into that clarity mode of, for 90 days, who would I target and with what? So not in terms of your offer, but what types of industry or what one industry would you target, and what transformation would you be focused on delivering? And so what I mean by that is it'd be very difficult to go to any decision maker and say, hey, I'm a psychologist and I help with employee wellbeing, because both of those things are very big terms and not everybody understands them. Whereas if you say, hey, I'm a clinical psychologist and I really support frontline teams to overcome trauma that they might experience in their roles at social media or in social media content creation, that is super specific, and it's very easy then for that person to go, oh yeah, actually, had never thought of it, but we should have a chat about that. So that's your first point of call really, is deciding, What is your current specialism? How would you apply that to a corporate? What would be the transformation that you would be getting in industry? And again, you know, if you look at different industries, there'll be different things. So construction, for example, has one of the highest rates of suicide of any industry, so, you know, you could decide to say, hey, look, I am a mental health practitioner who specialises in supporting construction firms to work with frontline employees on mental health, resilience, and fitness so that they are avoiding self harm situations. Right? Super specific. So whatever that is, get super clear on it. And then for 90 days, you want to be proactively approaching those types of companies with that messaging to the right stakeholders to start to have conversations about it, you know, have as many conversations as you can. And with cold leads, it's totally fine, you don't need to know lots of people, but with those cold leads, having those empowered conversations around, so what is a problem within your team right now? You know, what are the common issues? How are you currently supporting? And from that, you can start to pick out how you might do it differently, how you might be able to support them differently and how you can get them on the road to the transformation that they want.

So it’s not necessarily, and it’s not, it's actually definitely not about having, you know, everything that you're going to offer mapped out before you ever put pen to paper. It's about being a bit more kind of client focused, so you're getting them on the call and then having those conversations is how you come up with the idea for what you're actually going to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Because at the end of the day, nobody knows a corporate company like that company. So there's no point having all your offers mapped out and getting a website and having, you know, everyone always talks about good, better, best, don't they? Have three offers and they'll pick the one in the middle. That's not true at all. What you absolutely want to be doing is having intelligent conversations with decision makers who know their team really well, and be asking them, okay, cool, so if someone was to come in, do you think that in the first instance, they'd benefit more from having a talk that develops awareness? Or do you think actually they'd be ready to do some kind of interactive workshop? Is this something that would be a group setting? Or do you imagine that this would be one to one? So it's, it's co creating, just like you would with any kind of plan with an individual client, you're asking them, what do you think would work best? You're giving your expertise on it as well. And then you've got that great buy in from the prospective client, and they really want this plan that they feel like they've really contributed to.

Yeah, and I think that fits so well with the way that we like to do things. So I imagine that there'll be lots of people listening to this who really want to learn more from you and come and find you. So where's the best place to find you in the World Wide Web?

I tend, I try to avoid the internet as much as possible, which sounds weird for somebody that runs an online business!

Not very successfully.

I'm, I'm like, I have a podcast. So if you're somebody who likes podcasts, which obviously you are because you're here, then I've got a podcast called Selling to Corporate and that's probably the best place if you're interested in starting to sell to corporates. There are a couple of really good episodes on there about starting to have business development calls, that one's number one. It's right at the beginning of the catalogue. And you can also go and listen to episodes that dig into specific sales areas that you might feel nervous around like cold email outreach and things like that. Other than that, I'm on LinkedIn. So if you are thinking, oh gosh, sounds nice, but I don't know where I would start or what podcast episode I would even listen to, connect with me over on LinkedIn. Drop me a little message. Tell me you found me through the Business of Psychology podcast, and just tell me a little bit about what your practice looks like, and then I can refer you to episodes that would make the most difference for where you are now. So don't sit in overwhelm, essentially. Just give me a shout. I'm quite approachable these days.

Oh, thanks, Jess. That's really generous. And I'm also going to put my affiliate link for The C Suite in the show notes, because I never do affiliate links, it's only this one and WriteUpp, but I really wholeheartedly recommend the program. So I'm very, very comfortable putting that in the show notes to this episode.

Honestly, it's an absolute pleasure having you in there. And I think the thing is I say to everybody, not every sales program is right for every single person. But I also do say to everybody that our participants are super honest. So if you are thinking about selling to corporate, please don't feel like you have to ask me tons of questions about it, and I'm just going to sell you it. Talk to Rosie, get the download, like ask, what's it really like? You know. Because that's what makes the difference in you knowing whether it's a good fit for you or not. And ultimately, I think what we've established probably throughout the course of this episode is that it's about giving a potential buyer all of the information to make an empowered decision. So do your research, do whatever you need, ask as many questions to Rosie, to me, whatever as you need to make the best decision for you for now, for six months time, for the rest of your practice.

Always excellent advice.

We Try.

Thank you so much for being on the show today, Jess.

Thank you. It’s so, so much of a pleasure to be on here. I really appreciate it. And I know that you're doing amazing things in this space for all of these practitioners. So on their behalf, thank you also, because it's a lot of work to give up time to record podcast episodes that are impactful. And I know that everybody appreciates it.

Aww, absolute pleasure.