Adam Cooper (00:02.244)
Okay so I'm great to be joined today by Ollie Tuffney and for those of you that don't know Ollie is the owner and creator of Sales Velocity and a few other ventures I see on your your LinkedIn so you know thank you very much for joining me today.

Oliver (00:20.704)
It's absolute pleasure to be here.

Adam Cooper (00:22.994)
Excellent, excellent. so you're obviously a sales guru, a sales expert. And so today we're going to dive into that world a little bit and understand a bit why sales feels so chaotic for small businesses, for small business owners and what they can do about it. So the audience of this podcast are sort of right on track for that and very much small business owners and entrepreneurs. And obviously you're a

an entrepreneur yourself. So it'd be great to hear a little bit before we kick off a bit more about how you got to being the owner and creator of Sales Velocity.

Oliver (01:00.3)
Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say it started off around six or so years ago. I ended up somewhat falling, as many people do, into the career of sales coaching and consultancy. And I joined a company as the first employee way back when. So at the time it was just an independent contractor. And we went through a journey over the course of six or so years.

of building up a sales agency, if you like. And over the course of that time, I must have worked with over a hundred different sales functions, all shapes and sizes, as you can imagine, some in the UK, some in the US, some dotted around elsewhere. And what was interesting was around perhaps three years ago, I was then first introduced to EOS and we as a company adopted EOS. I was the integrator.

And we got very deep into that world. So a lot of our clients were actually EOS implementers. A lot of our clients also ran on EOS. So we became very, very, very familiar with that language and that operating system.

Adam Cooper (02:09.002)
Can I just ask, Golly, just before we dive into that world, could you just really briefly explain what EOS is for anyone who doesn't know?

Oliver (02:15.97)
Yeah, sure. Sorry. So EOS is a effectively an operating system for small businesses. So a way of running a company if you like, which is built in the book Traction. But what was interesting was the further I got into it, the more I realized that it very much lacked a sales layer. It was very light. It was excellent from a generalist standpoint, but from a sales standpoint, it was really quite light. And so fast forward a little bit further in the creation of sales velocity, which is what I now currently run.

What I've effectively sought to do is fill that gap, combine my knowledge of EOS, combine my knowledge of sales and sales functions and small B2B and build that layer. And if you think about it, the types of problems that that department deals with, so lack of accountability, lack of visibility, lack of structure, lack of process, all of the things that EOS stands for and it...

desperately in need for it within the sales function, but it just doesn't exist. And so that's effectively what I've sought out to do. Build something that directly plugs into EOS, but also stands alone in and of itself, but helps create that discipline, rigor, structure, visibility within the sales function in order to create what everyone wants, which is ultimately scalable, predictable sales growth.

Adam Cooper (03:34.758)
Excellent, very well explained. you talk about scalable, predictable sales growth. I know a number of the business owners look at their revenues as they come in and it feels slightly out of control, which is why it's so good that you're building sales velocity to address that. What is it, big picture that you think causes a lot of the SME businesses that you work with to run on those sort of very boom and bust sales cycles?

Oliver (03:51.31)
Hmm.

Adam Cooper (04:03.508)
What's the main cause of that in your experience?

Oliver (04:06.668)
Yeah, so to an extent it can be death by a thousand cuts, lots and lots of different things, but the couple that would come at the top of the tree would be, number one, hiring a salesperson to do everything. So if you've got a salesperson that operates on a 360 basis, i.e. they hunt, they close, they account manage, they do absolutely everything, then what usually happens is they'll spend one quarter trying to fill up their pipeline and find opportunities.

As soon as they get those opportunities, they'll spend the next quarter trying to close them out. And it's human nature to try and get that instant gratification of getting the deal over the line. So those opportunities tend to absorb all of their attention. Eventually they mine those deals, they close them out, and then they're looking at an empty pipeline and then the cycle repeats again. So that would be at the salesperson layer, the problem that typically happens. On top of that, you've then got the sales management layer.

And oftentimes in smaller organizations, there's a deficit when it comes to sales management. Oftentimes it's still the owner that's doing it as a part-time gig, still overseeing the sales manager. And the big focus is close out the month, close out the month, close out the month, close out the month, and just hit your number, hit your number, hit your number. But what that does is it creates short-titledness. And so people aren't looking at the wider quarter or the wider H1 or the wider year. It's just close out the month. So.

There's many other things that I could go into, but if I was to be looking at a sales function, they would be typically the couple of things that I would first look to. How broad is that salesperson's role and how are they being managed against their pipeline?

Adam Cooper (05:47.52)
Now that's great and definitely seeing that as well in the businesses that I work in and so in terms of sort of what are the key ways of addressing that from from your experience how do you ensure that particularly in those smaller organizations you don't have budget to hire you know additional sales people additional sales managers etc what would be your kind of quick fixes or tips that you could give to the audience to best address that.

Oliver (06:13.966)
Yeah, sure. So I think the first thing that I would give is, now this is rule of thumb advice, so this isn't necessarily for everyone, but rule of thumb advice. When it comes to hiring your second salesperson, rather than having your second salesperson do the exact same thing as the first salesperson, actually split the roles rather than having two of the same. So have one which is focused on business development and lead gen, and the other one which is 100 % focused on closing.

that should eradicate the boom and bust because you've got 100 % dedication. That'd be number one. Number two, from a sales management standpoint, and again, I appreciate founders often don't have the luxury of time. So I would say if you just have three meetings a week, just three meetings a week with your sales personnel sales team, the first one is focused on accountability. What's going on with the numbers? What's going on with the most critical deals?

what's happening with activities over the course of the last week, those types of things. The second one, only needs to be 30 minutes, but a one-to-one deep dive on pipeline. Let's go through all of your opportunities. What is it you're expecting to close this month? What is it you're expecting to close next month? But managing that pipeline and just getting out of the weeds. And then the third one would then be one which is focused on coaching. So based on wherever you're seeing the greatest deficit,

for that salesperson or if you've got a team then thematically across the team, where is it that they need the most augmentation of skills? And you might be doing role practice, you might be doing upskilling, but effectively what that enables is them to close more deals faster through that coaching, holding them accountable to whatever they're doing, where their number is for the month and the quarter, and then also making sure that they're not getting caught up in human bias, which is whatever's closest to the finish line. I'm gonna pour all my time into that.

So that'd be my key couple of recommendations.

Adam Cooper (08:08.288)
Those are great tips there. just diving into the pipeline piece there, your second tip around sales management, I think that I don't know what you've found, but this is an area that I think there are a lot of tools out there, but they're not a lot of practices or processes that use those tools effectively. What I mean by that is there's a lot of garbage in garbage out. Is that what you say? Is that what you see? And how do you best advise?

Oliver (08:32.621)
Hmm.

Adam Cooper (08:36.98)
founders, entrepreneurs who are hiring their first salesperson or second salesperson to best manage the pipeline piece of that so that they're getting valuable data rather than just over optimistic or data's not there that they need.

Oliver (08:52.428)
Yeah, amazing question. So the way that I see it is you've got qualitative and you've got quantitative. So the quantitative piece is the collection of all of the data that exists within the CRM and is it giving us a true picture. Salespeople are not designed to be admin people. They don't like it, they hate it, and...

A lot of a sales manager's job will just be chasing their salesperson. So a quick hack, if you like on that, it sounds micromanage-y, but it works, is let's say your sales meeting is at 10 a.m. Schedule the meeting to start at 9.30, and the first 30 minutes is everyone just updating their pipeline.

Sounds really micromanage-y, but it works and it works consistently. eventually, so that would be a short-term thing, longer-term thing. I would say the moment you can afford it, even if you offshore find someone on Fiverr, it doesn't matter, get an admin. Because if you look at the value of that salesperson's time versus them entering data into the CRM, it takes a lot of their time. That's time that could be much more valuable use selling.

Adam Cooper (09:38.025)
Nice, yeah.

Oliver (10:06.37)
but also by having someone else that's 100 % accountable for the data ensures that you're have much greater data integrity. That's the quantitative side. The qualitative side is you can use frameworks such as Bant or Medic, which is used to stress test what's in the pipeline and is it actually real. So for example, with Bant, you're at effectively hitting off different criteria. Are these criteria true? And then from a sales management standpoint,

challenging that salesperson to ensure they're not putting probabilities in, for example, based on gut feel. So do we know the budget? How do know that budget's real? Have you stress tested it? Do you have access to the decision maker? So things like that to ensure that, again, what we're putting in is actually substantive, is actually true.

Yeah, that's really the way of ensuring both qualitative and quantitative.

Adam Cooper (11:05.843)
That's great advice and I know a number of clients who I've worked with in the past who would have definitely valued that and benefited from it. So I hope they're listening. You mentioned at the outset about EOS and this being a sort of sales layer to EOS. Obviously, as you explained, it is an operating system that a lot of people use in the smaller business circles. I'd love to understand what you feel.

it gets right about sales and then you what it misses you've touched on it but would you mind diving in?

Oliver (11:38.38)
Yeah, sure. So in terms of what it gets right, I think what you have to look at is what would be true without EOS at all. And typically, not in all organizations, but within a lot of small SME organizations, what you have is just a lot of chaos, lack of structure, everything is based on gut feel. And so with EOS introducing things like scorecards, the discipline of an L10.

creating a VTO. All of these things, the accountability chart, all of these things bleed into sales that previously wouldn't have existed. So there is, just by proxy, is structure that gets created, as it does within the wider organization, and so the sales function gets a knock-on benefit of that. So that's excellent, and that's already 10 steps further forward than it would otherwise be. So, big fat tick in the box for that. However,

Where it falls down is that the system is generalist because it's designed to apply to all departments within the organization. So if you were to then go, okay, well that's great. But if we were to convert that into specialist and go one level deeper in sales, what exactly would that look like? And I'll give you a couple of examples. So if we're looking at the scorecard within EOS, you might say, okay, for sales, we need to come up with how many leads do we want to get per week? Yeah. Nice easy metric.

What we would do is we would go, okay, well, what's the target for the year? How many, what's your average deal size? How many deals do you then need to get? What's your typical churn rate? So what are you expecting the delta to be? And in terms of your sales mix, what are you looking to achieve in terms of small deals versus large deals? And therefore, this is how many leads that we're expecting to get. So it's one which is, it's great to have a number.

because without it we have nothing. But in the other scenario, it's something which is actually designed for growth. So that would just be one example of how it takes something which is generalist and then makes it very specialist. Same again with a process. One process followed by all would be the EOS terminology. But then if we're looking at a sales process, what I would equally want to see is I want to see recordings and examples of salespeople in the trenches

Oliver (14:06.228)
on pitch calls, seeing what works, what objections they've been facing. I want to see role practice scenarios as part of designing that process. I want to see the example templates of what email to be sending as a follow up. So again, it's just one level deeper in terms of what does that look like if we're looking at excellence, but from a sales perspective.

Adam Cooper (14:28.896)
I like that. No, definitely. can definitely see you've got the generalist framework and then it's diving into that and getting to the next level down to make it relevant. Do you? Yeah.

Oliver (14:36.472)
Yeah. So it's not just something just worth underscoring. It's not different. It's not like this instead of EOS. EOS is brilliant, but it's just saying after you finish that company quarterly planning session and you've agreed the output at a company wide level and then it's just, okay, now sales, you do this, but it's just rather than the what is then getting into the how just to make it so that it's less

open-ended and clear and tight and structured. That's really the main thing with it.

Adam Cooper (15:10.878)
And you mentioned at the outset there about how the sales piece can often be done by founders, the sales management piece can often be done by founders in those early stage companies. Do you find with the businesses you work with any resistance, particularly if it's the founder has always done it that way, the founder is growing the business and has seen success that way, when you're trying to put in place the more science versus art approach, do you get any pushback and how do you get around that?

Oliver (15:39.778)
Yeah, excellent question. So yes and no. mean, in order to work with us in the first place, there needs to be, it's a really fine interplay that you've got the ambition. Otherwise there's no point in investing in sales, but equally the growth mindedness of recognizing that perhaps what, if you didn't need us, then if you didn't need these systems, you didn't need change, you wouldn't be speaking to us in the first place.

Adam Cooper (16:07.936)
show.

Oliver (16:08.462)
So it's that fine interplay, however, that said, it is the case that there's the, there can often be what people want and what they need. They know they need to change, but I've always been doing it this way. And so I don't really want to do what you're telling me to do. So that can often be a thing. But then I think with any good facilitation and any good coach, it's the people as much as it is the process. It's hearts and minds and taking people on a journey.

Adam Cooper (16:34.272)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (16:37.442)
The way I often think about it is a frog in hot water approach. You can't just take a founder that's been doing it their way for forever and the whole team look up to that person and see them as the holy grail of sales and say you've been doing everything wrong. That's obviously not gonna go down well and you're not gonna end up getting the output of growth. So sometimes you do have to take a slightly longer route round in order to get to the same outcome, but I think it's just a case of hearts and minds and taking people on a journey.

Adam Cooper (17:08.0)
Yeah, no, absolutely. A lot of similarities when we come in as their first CFO and they've been running things in that way. But no, I think this is really interesting. you know, we talk about, you know, where where this overlaps your your world of mind. And when we were talking before, you mentioned about financial modeling as being quite

Oliver (17:14.382)
I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Cooper (17:33.876)
critical and key for you. Could you just explain a little bit because again some of the audience might not understand how that affects your world as well as mine so it'd great to hear a little bit more on that.

Oliver (17:43.831)
Yeah, so when we were pre-briefing, we were saying how there's, when I look at my world, the intersection with CFOs, the type of session that I run, where for me it's absolutely critical for us to have a CFO involved, or if they don't have a CFO involved, this would typically be where I'm recommending, hey guys, you have a serious gap here, like you need to have some financial support. And that would be when we're doing the financial model.

This is when we're building out the initial targets would be an oversimplification But let me just paint it for you and then it will become clear So if we were to be saying, okay, what are we looking to achieve over the course of the next three years? Let's say we're be working this top down. So these are the hops year one year two year three Okay. Now, what does that look like in terms of average deal size? What does that look like in terms of?

sales mix and which markets we're going to be getting that from. What does that look like in terms of our churn rate on average by month over the course of the last 12 months? What does that look like in terms of deal cycle lag and what impact that's going to be having on when we're likely to be receiving the output from the work that we're doing? It's day and night, and I'm going tell you something you already know here, it's day and night if I'm doing that with just a regular founder, business owner, CEO.

versus if we have a CFO in the room. If it's just with the founder, then it's like, I don't really know. I don't know, I'd need to pull the data. We have the data, but I don't know what it is. That would typically be the response. And so a lot of the discussion ends up being around hypotheticals rather than substance. And as with any model, it's only as good as the data that it's initially based on.

Adam Cooper (19:10.442)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (19:35.82)
So the more of a CFO involvement that we can have, the better it would be. And often, like the great interplay ends up being, we might have the model and structure, the CFO then feeds in what the baseline is and the understanding of the inner workings of the organization. And then what we apply is then the discussion and the rationale behind if we were to move this lever or this lever, be it conversion rate, average deal size.

what would need to be true within the organization or the function in order for that to happen. And then you have, you know, the great back and forth with, okay, well, if that means they're an expanding team and overheads X, Y, Z, which could mean whatever for the bottom line. You don't have that same quality conversation around scalable growth without the CFO in the room.

Adam Cooper (20:25.618)
Yeah, absolutely. Now, I think that's huge in terms of like having that data, having those, you know, from a CFO perspective, knowing that that process has been undergone, it means that you can trust the assumptions. Whereas if you're coming in without that kind of scientific view on order size or mix or churn rate, then, you know, it's obviously more challenging. So it's great that you have that mindset of doing it hand in hand with the CFO rather than doing it after the fact retrospectively, which I

Oliver (20:38.222)
Understood.

Oliver (20:54.158)
For me, it would be crazy otherwise. It would be crazy otherwise.

Adam Cooper (20:56.936)
Yeah. And so interesting, guess, just to double down on that a little bit in terms of the when you have the data, particularly in younger organizations, do you find that founders, even if they're willing to have a CFO in the room, even if there are sales leaders within the team, there are areas that need unpacking or areas where there are common issues with the data that you're being given around that. So.

for example, the quality of data around average order size as the size of the organization scales, that can change rapidly. So I'd love to hear your experience in the hundreds of organizations you've been part of where there are those areas to focus on even if the data's there.

Oliver (21:43.278)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to be honest with you what ends up happening is rather than it being a a one-and-done session it ends up being the start of a journey that that's usually what happens because equally when we're building a model a model is only good if it then converts into targets and that's something that you then regularly tracking against and more often than not the The common thing that I usually get is the data exists some

Okay, where is somewhere and how do we use that? And so, like that would be the most common thing like rather than it being a high average order size, it's just in terms of the data quality itself and being able to actually extract that that does not exist in an easy format. Because usually people have got different systems and ERPs and something to CRM sums in zero sums in wherever else. So usually it's just getting the data.

Adam Cooper (22:37.535)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (22:41.186)
But even once we've got it, having it then produced or converted into something which is practical and easy to run. I'll give you a good example actually when not having a CFO in the room. So I was working with the sales and marketing director of an organization and I was saying, okay, what we need is we need have a scorecard. And this is the way that I need it. I need it a month view, a quarter view, a year view. And I need all these different measures and I need it broken out.

company and then each of the different salespeople next to it. What I initially got back was it was fully populated, but all of the data was literally hard coded. It's like every single cell typed in. I like, this is never going to work. Like this needs to be updated daily. That's a full-time job just plugging in numbers. Like no, but obviously a CFO.

Adam Cooper (23:28.286)
Yeah.

Oliver (23:35.95)
would just never do that. No, they would quit immediately. So I'd say that would be like the biggest thing, just like the recognition. And that's not a quick thing because you can't just usually go to zero and go, hey, I just need all of my data in this perfect format or with the CRM. There are changes often that need to be made with the inputs in order to get those great outputs. So usually it is very much the start of a journey and the CFO is usually very, very happy with that journey because...

they get better clarity on the numbers, which enables better decisions and better subsequent sessions. So I'd say that's probably the biggest thing.

Adam Cooper (24:11.552)
That's brilliant and I've seen that so many times and like the that journey as you say, I can sense your frustration and I can empathise. Absolutely, absolutely. I think that the process from a CFO perspective is that going on that journey gives you the confidence. It gives you the confidence that you guys and girls in the sales function have thought about the numbers that you're putting in. It gives visibility.

Oliver (24:16.31)
I in

Yeah, like man, this is vuvuvu.

Adam Cooper (24:40.25)
on Outsider CFOs to sign off on that sales investment that's required and ensure that we don't break things as we go. So I think it's critical. So for anyone listening, that is a nugget of gold there. Involve the CFO, make sure that you're linking your spreadsheets, your Google Sheets, whatever you're using and that the data is being updated regularly. Great advice. Great advice, Ollie. I'd like to, another area when we met before the...

Oliver (24:44.846)
Mm.

Oliver (25:02.146)
Thank you.

Adam Cooper (25:08.244)
that we talked about is about compensation and making sure that you're building compensation structures that motivate rather than cause friction. Could you dive in a little bit to that and give me a couple of tips for the audience of how they best build kind of scalable and fair compensation structures?

Oliver (25:21.389)
Yeah.

Oliver (25:32.662)
Yeah. So let me start off by sharing with you one of the, one of the biggest problems. And the one of the biggest problems is that people want to pay as little as possible and still get best in the market. That is the most common thing. This is what we can afford to pay, but we want the absolute A player. Let's see if we can even squeeze that salary further and further and further down. That's like the biggest challenge.

Whenever I'm looking at building a compensation structure, there's always two parts to it initially. There's one part, which is the external benchmarking. So think of your ideal salesperson. What type of jobs would they be looking for? Go onto Indeed, go onto LinkedIn, go onto Monster, go onto any of those and just type that in. And from there, you'll just get a good baseline or even with ChatGBT, you can now ask what is the expected salary or expected earnings.

Adam Cooper (26:28.533)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (26:30.35)
And that gives you your external benchmark. And then you've of course got the more CFO part, which is the internal component, i.e. what is it that we can afford? Now, whenever doing this, we always look at it on three different levels. There's the basic or the budget. What's the minimum that we expect this person to do? There's the target and then there's the stretch. And you want to create effectively three different scenarios for each of these whilst also weighing it up in comparison to

what is the external benchmark? And then from there, you can then start to build out the compensation structure. Now, within that actual structure itself, I always love the Charlie Munger quote, which for all the CFOs, you'll obviously be very familiar, which is, you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. And I think that's very, very true when it comes to salespeople. So the way of looking at compensation with salespeople is you've got lots of different levers that you can pull, far more so than,

I'd say any other department or role within the business. So you've of course got the basic salary and within that salary you want to do just enough in order for them to cover their core costs and for it to be a somewhat appealing role. But you don't want to pump everything into that. In order to be scalable, you're far better off putting it into the other levers. So the next lever would then be commission. And what I would always recommend is there is commission on every single sale. I don't care if it's the first one.

I don't care if they haven't yet covered their costs, every single sale. Obviously you're building this into the wider model and the kicker here is, this is the third part, which is you wanna have tiers. So tiers of commission. So the first tier with their first however many thousand or hundred thousand for the month, that is on the lowest level. After it gets to a certain point, it then clicks to the next level, clicks to the next level, clicks to the next level. So these are higher commission brackets.

based on what they're selling. And what you're doing there is you're driving discretionary effort. Because again, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. If you were to give somebody just pure, I'm gonna go to an extreme. If you were to give someone just salary, no commission, no bonus, no nothing, which is often the case within small B2B SMEs. And then I want this set of persons to be working all day and night, closing everything they possibly can.

Adam Cooper (28:47.04)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (28:52.758)
Where is the extra incentive? If it's not there, it's not going to happen. So tears is the next thing. And then if you've got a real superstar, one of the things that you can do, I often recommend this is think of it like golden handcuffs, if you like, which is let's say they have an absolute stormer of a year do phenomenally, give them a bonus, but pay that bonus out over the course of the next four quarters.

Adam Cooper (29:22.079)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (29:22.094)
And if you do that every year, then it just locks that salesperson into the company, which is always a good thing to do. And then the fourth part would of course then be bonus. And the bonus, would then look at salespeople can often be lone wolves doing their own thing. So it's often good to have a bonus, which is more linked to team camaraderie and operating together. So often if the team does

however well or if a certain proportion of people exceed their target, so you don't have one person just carrying the number, then that unlocks a bonus. Now, to a CFO you're probably hearing like, god, more money, more money, more money. That sounds like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're gonna be forward so much. Which is why it then goes back to building it into the model and having different scenarios. What happens in the basic, what happens in the target, what happens in the stretch. But that's the way that I would recommend doing it in order to have it so that the

salesperson, their motivations are 100 % aligned to the performance of the company. One of the big problems I see is capped commission. So if you're cap a salesperson's commission, but then still expect them to be selling all day and night and putting in lots of discretionary effort, it's just not going to happen. It's just psychology. People are always trying to rig the system.

So there would be a couple of the key things that I would recommend. Again, it's always super important to operate very closely with the CFO here, because otherwise it's easy for the sales leader to chuck out numbers, but you've got to ensure that it is scalable. And I've seen lots of scenarios where companies have got into very hot water because they haven't structured their compensation model, or particularly the payout of their compensation model appropriately, and then it can end up pretty bad.

Adam Cooper (30:42.624)
Hmm.

Adam Cooper (31:07.23)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Really good advice there. And I think just to pick up on that final point in terms of where you see this cause tension, I think, you I've seen you've outlined very clearly kind of four or five levers and the scenarios that you need to outline. The key is ensuring it captures all of those from my experience, but it doesn't over complicate because what you don't want is your sales.

Oliver (31:32.269)
Yes.

Adam Cooper (31:34.47)
lead and sales team sitting there spending time trying to dissect the incredibly complex and nuanced plan and this is where accountants and CFOs need to take a good hard look at themselves because we can often over complicate things. It's about being keeping it simple as complex as it needs to be but don't over complicate it. Make sure that the team and individual targets are aligned but as I say not not over complicated. Another thing you just just

Oliver (31:41.614)
Sure.

Adam Cooper (32:02.078)
there you mentioned about was around timing. I think you mentioned on the handcuffs, the golden handcuffs as you said, those kind of four quarters. Do you see issues around payment on particular deals and where, you it might sort of cross over in terms of, we've got the order, but the invoice hasn't been sent or cash hasn't hit the bank. How do you kind of manage that in your experience?

Oliver (32:07.182)
Hmm.

Oliver (32:23.384)
Yeah.

Oliver (32:28.236)
Yeah, I see all ends of the spectrum on this one. in the sales, I'll give you the sales purist version and then the CFO version. So the sales purist version is you'll be familiar with Pavlovian conditioning, Ring the bell and dog salivars. Okay, so if you look at what happened there, rang the bell, then a nice tasty treat, dog salivars. Exactly the same thing with a salesperson.

getting a deal over the line and then getting money. If you were to separate the time between the bell and the tasty treat by six months, there's no association anymore. And so what you wanna do is you want that recognition association link to be as tight, tight, tight as possible because you need to have the feeling of I've just got this thing over the line, I'm now getting money. Because the more that happens,

the more, I keep using the term discretionary effort, the more that's gonna be happening. So you want it to be as close as possible and you want the payout to be as frequent as possible. It blows my mind when people save up all of the bonus for, or all of the commission for right at the very end of the year. You're just not gonna get great output from your team. Now, I say that and I also said that that is the sales purist version. There are also scenarios where you might sign a deal

and you don't start invoicing for six months, sometimes even longer if there's like dev work and what have you that needs to happen. So what I would say there is it's then a case of chunking it out. And if I was the company owner, I would strongly recommend then giving a portion on signature and then back waiting the rest. But there needs to be something in order for the salesperson to feel

Okay, I've now been rewarded for all of my efforts because otherwise, and look, I have lots of conversations with CEO, sales leaders, sales managers, and sales people. And what you end up breeding otherwise is resentment. You get lots of resentment from the sales team. And let's say you've got an absolute star A player who's just harpooned a whale of a deal, which is going to be phenomenal for the company's performance. And now they're not going to get any money for that or recognition for that for six months.

Oliver (34:50.146)
you're getting a lot of resentment and I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up losing that salesperson because ultimately they care a lot about money and they'll end up going to another organization that has a better payout frequency. So it is a balancing game. The biggest, I've seen a company before, no doubt you probably have too, where they structured it so that they got everything on signature rather than on invoice. the company was growing really fast.

Adam Cooper (35:14.4)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver (35:19.458)
and it just sucked cash like you wouldn't believe and the company almost ended up going under. But then they also got to a point where they were then really scared of their salespeople because the salespeople then carried so much weight within the organization of I don't want to upset them because they're now ruling the roost. So the way that that gets structured is so important because it starts off as a little monster.

but if you don't tackle it whilst it's small, it becomes a big monster which can be quite scary for a small company owner.

Adam Cooper (35:52.896)
100 % and I think that sort of underlines the need to have the CFO and the sales team together when they're running those scenarios that you mentioned at the outset. So you've got the structure, you're compensating upfront an element, you're compensating element through the life of the project and effectively you're building that into your scenarios at the outset. So from a cash flow management planning perspective, the CFO can factor that in. So you really good advice there.

Excellent, well just moving on to our last section which is our business books bonus section and this is where we always ask our guests if there's a book or a podcast or another piece of content that shaped how you think about the business and could recommend to the audience. So Ollie, is there anything that you'd like to recommend?

Oliver (36:40.652)
Yeah, so interestingly, the book that I would recommend, it probably isn't what you'd expect. It isn't a traditional, like, hardcore sales book. It would actually be Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I don't know if you're familiar with that. So basically, it's written by a woman who spent a lot of time both at Google and then at Apple. And the premise of the book is around how to be direct and clear.

but without either going too far and then you're the aggressive person that nobody likes and what people think of when think of being direct, or you're the passive person that doesn't say what they think at all and they hold onto everything and they just harbour resentment. So how is it that you can have clear, direct, grown up conversations, but without being wildly offensive or holding onto everything? And I think it's...

massively important. It's one of the most recommended books that I often give because in the world of sales, oftentimes sales managers are needing to give feedback to their sales people, but they don't really know how to do it. Or the sales person might need to give feedback to the sales manager or sales person to sales person. And there can be some big egos. Don't know if anyone ever noticed within the world of sales. So how do you do that? And equally in the boardroom, I think it's really important to have a healthy board debate.

So I think this is probably rather than a niche vertical, it's probably more of a horizontal. It's just very broadly applicable. And I found it for me just the way that I think about conversations and giving feedback and leaning into difficult conversations. I found it to be really powerful.

Adam Cooper (38:25.144)
Sounds perfect. yeah, Radical Candor, Kim Scott will put a link to that in the show notes. Great recommendation there. So just to wrap up, thank you very much for joining today. Lots of useful insight, I think, for the audience. And what's the best place that people can find you or learn more about what you're up to?

Oliver (38:43.726)
Sure, so the best way to reach out to me directly would be just on LinkedIn, so olivertuffney. And the best way to find out more about Sales Velocity would either again, just reach out to me, ping me on LinkedIn, or go to our website, salesvelocity.co.uk.

Adam Cooper (39:02.154)
Amazing, amazing. Well, thank you very much, Ollie, that's great. Thanks again for joining and really appreciate your recommendations, your insight and your time. Thank you.

Oliver (39:11.074)
Thanks a lot, have a little fun.