Welcome back to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams, and part two of our conversation with Matt Milligan. Talking about the difference between software sales and and selling consulting. And Jonny, you described this, and I might butcher this slightly, but you described it as a lot of consulting sales is maybe less tangible. So it's much, it's a different, arguably a more complex, sale than going out and saying, we've got a platform
that does this. What it does is it encourages more of a consultative sale, more of an outcome focused sale. And you could absolutely see why technology businesses selling large enterprise contracts would want to bring that capability into their business.
Totally. As someone that's been in consulting and also, and I'm going to elaborate on your question, someone's been in consulting and also works, has built a product based software firm. My view in the market is that account executives, Senior Account Executives, who get paid a good amount of money in a SaaS firm, do not have a strategic mindset towards selling. That's quite a blunt comment, but I'm
going to stand by that comment you. I believe that you know, the consultative approach is is valuable in both consulting and also as a senior account manager in a product based sale. Am I talking rubbish? Is that true from your point of view, and whatever way you go, yes or no, but why do people not have a consultative mindset when they're selling software at that senior they're getting paid 150,000 200,000 pound a year. Why do they not display that consultative approach?
My instant answer or perspective on that would be, it's not black and white, and the reason is that high performing AES at software companies, particularly if they're selling bigger ticket deals and slightly complex solution, they have to have that solution sales mindset, right? So the best enterprise sellers are absolutely solution oriented and can navigate those complex sales cycles. Otherwise they
just wouldn't be in the role or all wouldn't last long. If they're an organization with an effective performance management setup, I do definitely acknowledge your point that I think sellers that come from that consultative background have developed a muscle that is actually a difficult muscle to build, because you're right, like when you're selling services, it's much less tangible. It's like you're kind
of creating something out of nothing. Obviously, you've got frameworks and tools that you're using right and I think that's partly why we're seeing maybe a bit of a shift towards that profile and that skill set, because we can equip them with the negotiation skills and a bit more of a commercial mindset, but to build that consultative muscle, that takes time and that
takes experience. You know, I think about my own experience, of how I did it was through immersion and watching partners at EY navigate these relationships and, you know, put these really bespoke solutions together. And also, the other thing I'd always hark back to is the way in which they would take learnings from one client and then they'd go down the road to that client's biggest competitor, but, but that is,
that's what you're paying for, right? If you're a CEO, you're like, well, give me all the things that didn't work when you did it with that company, and we're going to do it 10 times better.
I mean, my background was 10 years in B to C selling, and people are like, Well, what does that mean? It's effectively high transaction. Did it need much consultation? Probably not as much as what we would look at in a B to B world, yeah, and I was fortunate enough then, who's my current Managing Director, Stuart Lotherington, you talk about immersing
yourself 100% I advocate for that. But the challenge now is that in this software as a service environment people, it's fact that we see them in action as a consultancy firm, and they are not strategic enough in that consultative approach. Do you think there's some type of AI or technology, or even maybe Uhubs can offer that? Is there a platform out there that would allow you know someone, maybe with that software based approach, to actually immerse themselves with an AI bot that
could actually learn through that way? Have you ever see any of that going on at the moment?
Perhaps not exactly what you're describing, but I think just on the AI point, there's something really important here, because everything we've just spoken about in terms of the profile of a high performance salesperson AI rips up all of that, like literally everything that we know as a best practice today is in the process of getting rewritten right now. And I think about that in two key, key
buckets, if you like. I think about it as one is process. So the sales process and how you actually run a sales workflow from point A to point B is completely like the playbooks. The old playbooks gone.
But explain why, because you've got feeling. I'm hearing you, but I think we need a bit of context around it.
So I'll deep dive, double click into that in a sec, process being one of them, I think the second one is, is the profile of capabilities completely being reimagined as well, right? So let's take the first one of that process. We've seen instances in our customers right now where CROs are turning
around to us and the same I walk so. Had a specific customer three weeks ago, four weeks ago, he said to me, I was walking through the office, and I walked past one of my reps, and I caught the glimpse of his screen, and I said, what was that? And this rep was really secretive about it, and he tried to sort of close the minimize the window, whatever. And he said, Okay, fine. He got him to open it up. He said, Talk me
through like, what was that? Looked awesome, and the guy had used AI this rep who was also their highest performing rep, he had automated his entire self built he had spent time to upskill himself on prompt engineering and AI tools in the market. And he'd used two or three different AI tools to completely automate his account, research and prospect building workflow. The CRO happened to just walk past it and catch a glimpse of it and be like, what's that? And then he said,
Well, have you told your colleagues about this? He goes, No, no, because obviously this high perform rep was like, This is unbelievable. Like, I've just automated 25% of my job. I'm therefore able to do 25% more. Keeps them myself. And he's smashing it. So the CROs that I'm hearing are like, how is AI being used? And how do we get that replicated across more reps? Because we're getting some amazing outcomes in pockets with
these early adopter reps. So that's just a small example to help you understand process and how the whole process is being redefined right now. And there's some really hungry self starter reps in the market that are going home at night or getting up early in the morning or weekends and thinking, Hang on.
Let me think about this. I'm just going to play around, and I'm going to test these different tools, and I'm going to connect them together, and I'm going to write my own prompts, I'm going to train my own models, and that's what you know this this rep had done. So the process is getting completely redefined. So there's big question mark there around how that changes the dynamic between high performers and low
performers. It doesn't mean there's gonna be even a bigger gap, because the high performers are the ones that are gonna self start and train themselves. So process is one bucket, the other one is capability and profile of the actual sellers. And this flips it. And this thinks about the mass disruption that's happening through AI right now. What about the buyers? So if you're an experienced sales person with 2025, years
experience, and you sell mostly on relationships. If you think about those experienced enterprise sellers who have got this Rolodex, they go into a new role, and they basically tap up this network of trusted relationships that they've been selling to buyers for a very long time. What happens if those buyers are gone? What happens if those roles are in the next five
to 10 years, and this is happening quickly, right? So, so then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for the profile of successful, high performing salespeople in the future? Because does that mean that the relationship based Rolodex type seller is going and therefore it's a risk for us as a business, if we continue to rely on that, are we moving much more into a world of intent based signals and AI automation? Automate the hell out of your workflow and just be super efficient?
Well Matt, I kind of listen to people talk about AI. I'm going, Yes, Matt, I understand. I'm like, show me an I believe it approach. I think with AI, it's just a it's going to be a fascinating journey when we're going on that we're all going on. And to your point about the buyers changing, I can only think about that ourselves as the buyer profile, the buyer persona, is going to change, but it might be. It might have taken
three years for that to evolve. Now it might be six months for that as the workforce and transitions, you've spoken a lot about CROs or Chief Revenue officers. Now, there's a lot of research out there. It's a really interesting environment. We work with a lot of Chief Revenue officers as an organization as well. So we often get asked to work with P backed organizations where the investment manager is asking us to help the CRO. Now a CRO is life time within their
particular role is about 14 to 16 months on average. Now, when we ask an investment manager what the challenges are around the CROs that they've got in their port codes, they're typically saying that they're not good enough at data numbers in general, so their numeracy is not very strong, and on average,
they're not very good at selling. And what they do is they're trying to elevate themselves to be on the business, rather than in the business, doing the deal reviews, doing the pipeline reviews, and actually really sort of winning some of those deals. That's their words, not mine. But how do you help CROs, you know? Because if that's the problem statement by their employees, how are you helping them become more proficient?
It's a great question, yeah, and that's really interesting insight those two areas. I had this conversation with the CRO the other day, who was talking about the future, the future proof. CRO is actually less the kind of relationship, sales career kind of guy or girl. It's actually much more about being really data literate and having a
really strong rev ops function around you. Hence why the you know the importance of of that early rev ops Higher One of the things we talk a lot to CROs about is just helping them de risk that journey. As you mentioned, 14 months is really, I mean, it's less than four quarters. Yeah, job, you don't have long. You got to really get some quick wins under your belt and get moving in the right direction. So just help them de risk that process. And one component, as we spoke about, of
that journey. Only use your talent, so therefore, how can we just help you de risk that talent, make sure you've got the right players on the pitch, in the right positions. To your point, around data, what we often find CROs really crave, at a macro level, those insights that you can't necessarily get from your CRM. So you know, it's, it's that kind of softer stuff that's a little bit harder to measure, but you can't rely necessarily on your sales managers, because there's biases
there, right? I was with a customer yesterday, and she was saying she's CRO of a research organization. She said, Yeah, I got this feedback given to one of my reps that it was a terrible call. So I said to the manager, send me the call. And I reviewed the call and I completely disagreed with the manager. Said I could see certain improvement areas that the manager had picked out of the call. But actually I thought there was so much potential on that call. I actually thought
stylistically, it was a great call. The CRO She then went on to say that the rep was was a woman, the manager was a man. And she said, I've experienced this map throughout my career as a female in a very male dominated sales culture, which most organizations often ask. Unfortunately, that's a huge bias, because there's this masculine expectation of what a effective sales execution should look like. And if you're relying
on one manager's opinion, there's inherent bias there. So the CEOs are craving these more objective insights and objective views of where their capability actually is, rather than relying on one person's opinion, which is likely to be inherently biased.
And Uhubs provides that insight between capability and the profile. And can it direct something about the CRO here, if you knew what capability to shift, are you able to pinpoint the revenue growth? So actually, a CRO is able to go in a board meeting actually forecasting three months ahead. If we're able to shift capability by x, we can improve revenue by y. Are you able to get to that data point?
That's exactly it. And we spoke earlier about benchmarking and why benchmarking is so important to get that gauge. But where benchmarking so that's become really interesting as well, is that by monitoring 1000s of sellers every quarter, you can start to get an understanding as to which capabilities are influencing revenue the most. So if we see an uplift in negotiation capabilities, and alongside that, we see a massive improvement in late stage
conversion in those AES deals, that's a benchmark. We can now apply that uplift, and we can start to replicate that for our customers. And we can say, Well, based on your average deal size and based on your sales cycle length, we've identified, there's a gap in this capability area, and our latest benchmark data shows, or indicates that if you can improve that capability by this much, this is how much of an uplift you're going to see.
That the whole process sounds great. And to some that have not heard of Uhubs, they might be going, Okay, well, that's good, but outcomes are the most important factor, right? That keeps businesses going, and if they were to use Uhubs or use other platforms that they're going to have to see some demonstrable returns for their investment. Can you just describe, like a bit of an example of what
happens? I think you assess the capabilities. Can you then use data points as you reference to benchmark what the uplift might be moving forward? Could you just give us an example?
Yeah, so a recent example that springs to mind. We baselined Q beginning at q4 September, October, last year, based on account executive organization, we pinpointed two capability areas that were holding back that team. One of them was product acumen. The other was objection handling. And we then used the cool data to go deep on what the specific objections holding back that team were. So we diagnosed that
gap. We saw that there was an opportunity. There were about 25% below the industry baseline for those two capability areas, we identified a significant revenue opportunity off the back of that, off the back of that insight that the product delivered, their enablement team went away into two things. They took the cohort of AES that have been identified, they put them
through a weekly objection handling boot camp. The enablement team then also did a refresh of their product university that they had internally to refresh all of the product, knowledge, we read baseline. 90 days later, we've been able to see an over 20% improvement in both capability areas and an increase in win rates of 12% across those areas.
And as a revenue, can you share that? Because we don't know the client, I'm sure you give us a little bit of a baseline about how much that might...
It was a 1.2 million uplift.
Wow, and who doesn't want that?
Who doesn't want that? And just as we sort of think about, you know that you've talked a lot, Matt about, like, some of the detail behind that, but what we like to do on the podcast is for our listeners, just to get those kind of really punchy frameworks, what is it that they can think about? What should those leaders out there be thinking about, obviously, apart from giving you a call, but that's going to help them on their journey with some of these challenges that we've talked about today.
Yeah, so I'll talk about a framework called RISE that we're big advocates of, and you can find out more information on our website. When you're thinking about all the different capabilities that make up high performance, it can be quite overwhelming. There's a long list of capabilities that make up success. So rise is a really simple, four part framework. It's an acronym that I'll walk you through, and it's a way to structure your thinking about the different types of
capability that make high performance. So R first up stands for revenue skills. So these are those core revenue skills that sellers need to be effective, negotiation, Objection, handling. I stands for impactful behaviors. So
these are the behaviors that we want to see demonstrated. So this could be everything from how are individuals managing their time, time blocking of their schedules, etc. It could also be to what extent are they demonstrating resilience or a growth mindset, which is really important for overcoming objections. So you got R, you got I S, then stands for strategic process execution. So if you have a sales methodology or a set process in place, as many organizations do or should
have, to what extent is that being adhered to? And then finally, E stands for expert knowledge. So what is the level of product understanding and what is the level of industry
knowledge. So we think about those four key ingredients as as the the kind of combo that makes up a high performing salesperson, and the capabilities that sit underneath those four vary role to role, but that that's a useful framework and a start point, you know, and even I'd encourage anyone listening who's going on this journey of trying to structure and answer that question of what good looks
like, just start off with those four categories. Start in a spreadsheet and think about what are the capabilities under revenue, skills, impactful behaviors, strategic process execution and expert knowledge. What are those capabilities you want to see in your reps? And then have a go at starting to think about benchmarking them against those.
Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the Growth Workshop Podcast. It's been amazing to have you, and we look forward to a growing, ongoing relationship between Uhubs and SBR going forward. So thank you.
Thanks guys. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was good fun.
Cheers, Matt.
Brilliant.