Episode 12 - Accelerate your Sales

Is your sales team struggling to close deals and keep clients coming back? Feeling the pain of trying to sell more for more, more quickly? 

In this latest episode of the bite-sized conversations around People Matters at Realising Potential Ltd, Fiona Brookwell and Michael Jones are joined by Jeremy Baker, an independent consultant at RPX2 Ltd and expert in The Predictive Index (PI).

Jeremy brings years of experience helping high-tech sales and SaaS companies navigate the challenges of scaling effectively.

As the creator of the "Accelerate Your Sales" program, Jeremy’s work centres on empowering sales teams to better understand themselves, their customers, and the techniques that drive impactful sales.

Throughout the conversation, Jeremy shares stories from his journey in corporate sales, his unique approach to diagnosing and solving sales challenges, and his insights on what it takes to cultivate elite salespeople.

He emphasises the power of PI in shaping teams that are both high-performing and adaptable, and he discusses how true sales success comes from aligning a company’s strategy with the people who will bring it to life.

If you’re curious about leveraging people analytics to drive sales or simply interested in learning what makes top salespeople excel, this episode is for you.

If you'd like to find out more about how we can help your people, teams and businesses realise their potential, please visit our website.

Transcript

Neale James: In this episode of our conversations on People Matters at Realising Potential, Fiona and Michael are joined by Jeremy Baker.  Jeremy has used the Predictive Index at several companies in the past. He is an independent PI Consultant at RPX2 and has been working with high tech sales and SaaS companies to help them scale effectively. 

Jeremy has developed and delivers the Accelerate Your Sales program, which is designed to help sales teams to know themselves, know their customers, and know how to convince them.  

Michael Jones: Hi Jeremy, thanks for joining us today. We've known each other for quite a long time now, haven't we? I'm trying to work out how long it's been. 

It's probably been about 12 or 15 years, has it? Perhaps you'd start by telling us about your experience about the Predictive Index, how we met, and how in corporate life you've used the insights that the products that we work with bring.  

Jeremy Baker: Well, if I start with how I found or discovered PI. PI was introduced to me by somebody. I'd never heard of it before, and it was timely because I was looking at trying to solve the problem of helping to scale a sales team, and part of the challenge of that scaling a sales team as much, as I wasn't necessarily Involved in hiring people, I was involved in onboarding those people. 

You know, educating them on the solution set and the problems that the company I worked for at the time solved. And I was seeing a pattern form which really translated into me kind of scratching my head and saying, but who hired you?

Or why were you hired? Both good and bad. So really at the intersection of that problem, that business problem, somebody introduced me to PI, the concept of PI, and I completed my profile. And then a couple of short weeks later, I met you, Michael. And I still remember to this day being sat in a hotel foyer. 

Yeah. And, using some fairly Anglo Saxon language when you talked me through my profile, because it was really just ‘How do you know that?’. And in less than five minutes of input, how do you know that about me? Because that's absolutely accurate, both good and bad. So that was my understanding, and then from that, I then used that in the business that I was working with at the time to help begin to identify ‘what good looks like’. 

So rather than just going from a standard interview to actually understanding who are the most successful salespeople that we have and what is the commonality in the profiles that they have from a behavioural standpoint.  

It won't necessarily be a silver bullet, but it would certainly help. And it did certainly help us identify who we needed to hire and who would really cut it in the particular role, in that particular company solving those particular problems at that time.  

Michael Jones: And then you've gone on to work with the Predictive Index and a number of organisations after that first organisation that you worked with it.  

Jeremy Baker: Yeah, I've worked with PI. 

So, I've been a client of PI's for probably the best part of 10 years and I've used it in, I think, at least three different businesses. And potentially guided or acted as a, an input to other companies with regards to its potential use.  

And those organisations have shared a very similar pattern over the last 10 years. They've been organisations that are typically in high tech or services oriented. In other words, you're selling something that's quite invisible.  

It's not something you can plonk on somebody's desk, and they can feel and touch. It's something that is more, what would typically be called, value based as a sale. And the other commonality, the other common element with those companies I've worked with, is they've all been wanting to scale. 

So not so much startups, but scale-ups. So, you're typically talking 50 employees plus maybe a hundred employees, and then taking those organisations I've worked with from say a hundred employees to something like a thousand. Primarily focused on what we call the front office. Otherwise known as the go-to-market team, sales, marketing, messaging, customer success. 

If you're in that field or in that market, you'll understand what those terms mean, but primarily salespeople and also leadership. So as the company scales, we need to scale our management capability as well.  

Michael Jones: So where are you now? So, you've obviously taken the decision to, as it were, jump the corporate ship. 

So, what is it that you do right now?  

Jeremy Baker: So I, I'm trying to sustain and maintain what might be called a portfolio lifestyle. So doing things that are at the intersection of what I enjoy, what I'm good at and where I'm useful to organisations. 

And the primary one is in and around helping businesses understand the power and the potential of their people, which is a fairly fancy description of ultimately businesses have to think visually. On the left-hand side of the page, they have a business plan and a strategy, and on the right-hand side of the page they have metrics, KPIs, measures, revenue numbers, profits, et cetera. 

There's invariably a gap between those two things. That’s an assumption that many companies make, which is, well, those will come as a result of the plan. The plan is only ever taken out and carried out by the people.  

So that's really where I come in and help organisations - whether that's from a sales perspective, whether it's the R& D team, whether it's the finance function - is helping those individuals, but also those managers and how those people come together as a team to perform better, more quickly, more efficiently. Whatever it is the business needs from their people.  

Michael Jones: So, the last 20 or so years of your corporate life was primarily in supporting the sales function, in enabling the sales function. How do you weave that into your own consultancy now? 

Jeremy Baker: I have a natural leaning to what I would call front of house. So, customer-facing people that are sales/marketing.  And I suppose that ultimately stems from what I recognised in probably 20, 25 years ago now is a ridiculous interest in people and what makes people tick and why is she like that and why are they like that? And why did, when I was selling myself and I still sell myself, why is that person reacting in this way when the last person I spoke to reacts that way? And that's because they're different. 

And I've noticed over the years that whenever anybody's selling anything, they're typically enthusiastic about it. They're possibly expert at it and you combine those two things together and it becomes their enemy. Because put it in terms that we all understand, whether it's in the pub or a party or a gathering, if you're talking to somebody, and all they do is talk about themselves, which is what a lot of salespeople do, what we do, you know, how the company started, how good our product is against X, your prospect isn't really at all interested in that.  

So that's one of the challenges that I help organisations overcome, which is stop focusing on yourself and be more outward focused on what it is your customers, your prospects need, whether that's from a messaging perspective or actually in selling the product and having the customer buy the product.  

Fiona Brookwell: So, Jeremy, if I'm running a business, predominantly a sales-focused organisation, that seems to be where your history and your passion actually lies, what does elite look like? What does the best salesperson look like? And, and how might I use your services within my organisation to, to get a higher performing sales function?

 Jeremy Baker: Interesting question. I've tried to boil down what I would say are the behaviours and embedded within those behaviours are ultimately skills, so people can change, people can learn these. 

In those I've seen overall from a selling perspective, and the selling I'm typically involved in is arguably complex, high value, with multiple decision makers, so it's not a single product that solves a single product problem. And the behaviours I've seen are really the skill of whoever she or he is salesperson being able to suppress their need to sell their product and talk about their product, and suppress that need and listen to and understand what the customer’s problems are.  

And if anybody's listening to this that can experience that or understand that, it's a difficult thing to do. It's a combination of what I would call self-control, might be termed as emotional intelligence, is to suppress the need to want to jump in and talk about what it is you do.  

If you're talking with a prospect, what I've seen from elite salespeople, one characteristic is that ability to focus on them, understand their problems, to listen to what they say. 

Number one, listen to what they're not saying as well. So, the elite listening skills I've seen in salespeople, which is a skill shared in other disciplines, like hostage negotiation, is to listen, but what's not necessarily being said, or what's being implied.  

So, you could say it's listening with your eyes. It's listening with your ears. It's listening with your emotions to understand what that is. So that's one of the skills I've seen, uh, that ultimately leads to a term that I call ‘uncovery’, where you are acting like a detective.  

You are uncovering the layers of challenges, the layers or the understanding of the situations of the prospects and the people that you are talking to and selling to. 

So, they are a couple of the unique skills that I've helped organisations or sales teams, individuals, develop those skills in order for them to become far better at what it is they do.  

Fiona Brookwell: Thanks, Jeremy. So that's an interesting insight into some characteristics of elite salespeople. So, back to sort of my sales organisation, and we're not quite making the sales that we should be making. So why should I engage with you?  

Jeremy Baker: Well, people normally contact me or find me or get recommended to me because they want to sell more, for more, more quickly. Yep, not something that my English teacher would recommend phrasing! 

And normally behind that statement are problems, characteristics. Some of those characteristics are, for example, companies that are moving from selling a single product to a single individual that has a budget that ultimately becomes a more complex sale. 

So, it's typically a broader product set. So, we've expanded out our product set that may be through acquisition, that may be through development, organic development. We're selling it to more senior people. So, when you're selling to more senior people, you need to speak their language and you need to be understood by them. 

And that transition is difficult, similar to a sort of 15-year-old going to their boyfriend or girlfriend's parents’ house for Sunday lunch or I've got to speak to more adult people. And there is a similar fear in salespeople that are adults that need to sell at more senior levels for the organisation or what might be termed the C-suite. That's one characteristic of the problem.  

Another can be, well, we have a price for a product or our solution. But we now need to change the perception in the prospect or the customer's eyes of the value of that. So, that's typically called a value-based sale. And that's where I help organisations. That's a combination of messaging and a combination of skills, primarily sales skills in their sales team. 

The other problems are we'll not be able to accurately forecast, so we may have sufficient business, but that business is very difficult to forecast on when it's going to close. And that's an important factor in the world of selling and for the business in general.  

Why can our sales team not confidently predict when business is going to close, when customers are going to buy things? So, come back to sell more for more, more quickly, or could be sell more for more, more predictably.  

Other characteristics are ultimately in tough economic climes is overcoming what's something called the status quo bias. We all experience it. Another way of phrasing that is your customers or your prospects are lazy, scared and overwhelmed. 

In other words, it's easier for them to do nothing sometimes than it is to make a decision to buy something new, something different, something more effective. Everybody, when it comes to buying, experiences the status quo bias. So that may well be a challenge that sales organisations are having.  

If I'm describing something that sounds quite complex and a multitude of things, it is a multitude of things because it can be behaviour of the sales team, it can be the skills the sales team are using, which may be incorrect or not appropriate for that type of sale that they're now involved in.  

It could be something around their sales process. For example, it could also be about organisations that call me to say, ‘Jeremy, we need you to come in and help upskill our salespeople with a training course’.  

It may actually be misdiagnosis of the problem. In other words, it may not necessarily just be the sales team, it may well be the messaging of the company and how the company positions itself. Because every organisation I've worked with, you know, sales and marketing, it's a bit of a dysfunctional relationship. 

In other words, they get along, but they tend to point and blame each other when things aren't going well. In other words, we haven't got enough sales leads, our marketing's not very good, that type of thing. So, they are the characteristics of the problems of the companies that I help.  

And that's normally when I get a call, and more often than not, that call is to say, can you come in, and I will deliver sales skills and help the team, the sales team develop those sales skills and become better at what they do by becoming better. 

They will sell more, and more, more predictably.  

Fiona Brookwell: What I'm hearing you say is that your job is initially to go in and do some diagnostics so that each programme that you deliver to a client is not necessarily preset in any particular way, so it's all quite bespoke to the specific challenges of the client. 

Jeremy Baker: That's absolutely right and that, and that can, here's the warning, that can be infuriating. Cause it's ‘Jeremy, I just want you to deliver a two day sales or three day sales skills course and coach some of our sales people’. I can do that. And I'm, I'm happy to do that. And I've done that. I'm experienced in that. 

But ultimately if you're just planning on investing in that without actually identifying the problem. Then you could spend that money and not necessarily see the change in performance.  

Fiona Brookwell: So, you like to not just address the symptoms. Ideally, you like to get to the root of the problem and work with the client to address the core of the problem.  

Jeremy Baker: Yeah, if for no other reason than I've spent an awful lot of the company's monies I've worked for over the years on sales skills and sales process, and it hasn't necessarily had the effect.  

Michael Jones: How does working with a product like The Predictive Index augment what it is that you do naturally anyway?  

Jeremy Baker: Uh, from a selling perspective, selling is, whether it's done virtually over Zoom or whatever format or the telephone or face-to-face, it's what I would term as a contact sport. 

And what I mean by that is you have to communicate, persuade.  The people that are very good at this may not know this, but they are naturally very good at reading people, understanding people, and being able to communicate and convince those people. You're never going to be able to sell something to somebody that either can't buy or isn't interested. 

So, it ultimately comes down to people, and I think where something like PI comes in, beyond how companies may use it, which is to help them hire people and maybe to help their managers, is where I've seen it useful with salespeople is to help salespeople understand, number one, who they are, because everybody's default is most of the people are like me, aren't they? And they're not.  

And if you're selling something to multiple stakeholders - that might be finance, it might be technical, it might be legal, it might be marketing that you're selling to - they all behave in different ways and you will have different behavioural types, character types within those troups that are deciding on whether to buy you or not. 

So, that's where it comes in and that's where it's useful. So, it's useful for an individual to number one, understand themselves. So, what are their natural strengths, but also what are their blind spots? It also helps their managers who realise that the individuals in their teams, and let me say for the, for the record that sales teams do not operate as teams, they are out for themselves.  

The only time they come together as a team is for their sales manager. Otherwise, their first goal in life is to beat their colleague or however many colleagues they've got. So, they're at the top of the scoreboard table. Where they do operate as a team is where they may involve their technical colleagues, their legal colleagues, their marketing colleagues to sell as a team and communicate as a team to their customers and prospects. 

So, that's where it comes in handy, comes in very handy to understand oneself. When you, when you understand yourself, you can begin to see how other people are different. Therefore, ‘Oh, I need to reign back on this’. Or ‘I need to focus more on this’. So, it could be I need to be more detailed with this group of individuals and less detailed with this group of individuals as an example. 

Fiona Brookwell: So, Jeremy with your experience either from corporate life or within your role as a consultant in recent years, any particular success stories that you'd like to share with us?  

Jeremy Baker: Yeah. Uh, one of the organisations I recently worked with, and this was more of a full time role than a consulting role, was, and it's just not, I was part of a host of things that helped produce these results, was taking an organisation from selling what would be called a perpetual license. 

So, this is how software used to be, you buy it once and you may well, three, four years later, upgrade that software. Uh, so transitioning from that business model to something that's called more of a subscription model, where you buy the software, and you renew the software every year.  

The results manifest themselves in taking annual revenues from 25 million dollars a year to north of 150 million a year in a three-year period whilst at least doubling the size of the sales team. 

So, bringing on board new people in those organisations and making sure they're effective as quickly as possible. Okay, understanding the products, but more importantly, understanding the problems that those products or solutions sell. Also helping scale the management team around that as well. You can't just hire or double the size of your sales team without having solid management in place that know how to manage, that know how to keep those people focused and directed on the right things. 

Fiona Brookwell: Was Predictive Index used in that process with that client?  

Jeremy Baker: Yes, it's been used in simple terms in helping to hire. So, helping to identify what good looks like and hiring against that, but also understanding what good management looks like, because management that typically comes from within companies is more effective than hiring somebody that's coming in from the outside. 

In other words, they know how things work. They have this network of communication and functions within the organisation that an outsider may not have, but upskilling the management using PI, or the Predictive Index, has been very useful too.  

Michael Jones: I've got one final question, Jeremy. I get asked it a lot when I'm talking to clients. What's the right profile for a salesperson?  

Jeremy Baker: I could give you something, but it possibly wouldn't be right. Again, comes back to possibly practicing what I teach, or what I preach, which is the beginning of wisdom is the definition of term. So, need to know what it is your company sells. And who you sell it to. 

And more importantly, what are the problems that those individuals, he or she, experience, that your solution or product will help them overcome. That then informs what does good look like. And it does vary. 

Michael Jones: Of course, we need to remember that the people that we work with are not their PI profile. They sometimes act in ways that we might not anticipate because they're just very skilled at what they do, or they've been doing it for a very long time, or they're kind of driven, perhaps, by something else that makes them special, which might be a, a value or a work ethic or something. 

So, we always have to remember, don't we, that you have to take into account the whole person.  

Jeremy Baker: Yeah. So, I have met some astonishingly effective salespeople that are outliers. For example, something in the world of pharmaceutical, where you are selling to possibly doctors or very, very skilled professionals that are highly educated. 

And, you know, this model you might see on programmes like The Apprentice, which is the sort of gobby salesperson in the shiny suit, whoever she or he is, is going to not be effective at all at selling to somebody that is a professional.  

So, whether that's pharmaceutical, legal, services-based types of organizations like professional services, that’s not a good salesperson. It may be an effective salesperson for an estate agent, but it isn't for pharmaceutical or fintech or something like that. 

Realising Potential with Fiona Brookwell and Michael Jones.  For more information about our services and organisation visit www.rpx2.com.