This week on The Digital Download, we are tackling one of the most pressing issues in business today: the growing pipeline gap facing sales leaders. With marketing leads becoming scarcer and less reliable, the pressure is on sales teams to self-generate more revenue than ever before. To discuss how leaders can navigate this challenge, we are joined by our own panel of experts: Tim Hughes, Adam Gray, and Bertrand Godillot.

As the co-founders of DLA Ignite, Tim and Adam have spent years transforming sales organizations by replacing outdated, interruption-based tactics with a modern, social-centric methodology. Bertrand, Managing Partner at Odysseus & Co, specializes in re-engineering B2B acquisition by blending proven sales methodologies with the power of digital networking. Together, they will outline a new path forward for sales leaders.

Join us as we discuss questions like:

Why is the traditional model of marketing generating leads for sales fundamentally broken?

What is the first step a sales leader should take to shift their team's mindset from "lead receiver" to "opportunity creator"?

How do you coach a team to build a "magnetic field" of expertise that attracts buyers?

What new metrics should leaders use to measure success when pipeline is self-generated?

How can sales teams use social platforms to create conversations and build pipeline without resorting to cold outreach?

Tim is the best-selling author of "Social Selling" and has documented the 98% failure rate of traditional prospecting techniques. Adam, the co-author of "Smarketing," is the architect of the core methodologies that enable businesses to build genuine rapport and drive revenue in the digital age. Bertrand has built his practice on the philosophy that authenticity and human relationships are now more crucial than ever, helping teams move beyond counter-productive interruption tactics. This episode will provide leaders with the actionable strategies needed to empower their teams and hit growth targets in this new reality.

We strive to make The Digital Download an interactive experience. Bring your questions. Bring your insights. Audience participation is highly encouraged!

This week's Host was:

• Bertrand Godillot, Founder and Managing Partner of Odysseus & Co, a proud DLA Ignite partner

This week's panelists were:

• Tim Hughes, CEO & Co-founder of DLA Ignite,

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of a DLA Ignite

Transcript of The Digital Download 2025-07-25

Bertrand Godillot [00:00:03]:

Hola, todos y bienvenidos episodio de the Digital Download. Oops. Good afternoon, good morning and good day wherever you may be joining us from. Welcome to a new edition of the Digital Download, the longest running weekly business Talk show on LinkedIn Live, now globally syndicated on TuneIn radio through IBGR, the world's number one business news, business talks, news and strategy radio network. Today we are tackling one of the most pressing issues in business today. The growing pipeline gap facing sales leaders. With marketing leads becoming scarcer and less reliable, the pressure on sales teams to self generate more revenue than ever before. To discuss how leaders can navigate this challenge, we are joined by our own panel of experts.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:06]:

So before we begin, let's quickly go around the set and introduce everyone. While we are doing that, why don't you in the audience reach out to a friend, ping them and have them join us. We strive to make the Digital Download an interactive experience and audience participation is highly encouraged. Adam, would you like to kick us off please?

Adam Gray [00:01:26]:

Hi everybody, I'm Adam Gray. I'm co founder of DLA Ignite and I'm very excited to be talking about this topic today. One of the things that I see in my travels is that this is a perennial problem that just keeps happening again and again and again within every organization. So it'll be really interesting to see how we can unpack this and see if we get any insightful and interesting comments from the audience which, which may shed some more light on, on why this, this problem is not being addressed properly.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:59]:

Thank you, Adam, and definitely looking forward for questions from the audience today.

Tim Hughes [00:02:03]:

Tim, thank you and welcome. My name's Tim Hughes. I'm the CEO and co founder of DLA Ignite. And I agree with Adam, which is that we always, we seem to sit hit July and everyone's saying there's no pipeline. But there again we've been through a number a couple of years where people have been saying that there's, there's. The pipeline's been low anyway, so. And with the number of layoffs that have been taking place in tech, you know, I think that's, there's a symptom there. So I'm really interested and excited to be talking about that today.

Tim Hughes [00:02:36]:

And I think that we actually have some answers.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:39]:

Maybe we do. Let's see, let's see. And to check that, gentlemen, I've got a first foundational question.

Adam Gray [00:02:48]:

Sorry, my English is struggling today.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:53]:

Why is traditional method, why is the traditional model of marketing generating leads for sales fundamentally broken? Go on, take that, Adam.

Adam Gray [00:03:11]:

Okay, so I Think the issue is, and you know, we, we kind of toy with this pretty much every time we have a, we have a conversation around this. And the reality is that every single business produces a product which is fit for purpose. And every single business says my product is good. And every single business believes that their product is better than the competition, which it may or may not be. But all of the organizations out there are using the same rhetoric for this. You know, they're all saying to paraphrase it, our product is best, our product is market leading, you should buy our product. And the problem with this is that the buyer who, by virtue of the fact that, you know, if you are a CRM company making CRM systems, you know everything there is to know about CRM systems. One would, one would suggest as a buyer of CRM systems, you're not as sophisticated because you're busy doing injection molding or, or, or legal services or whatever it is that your business does.

Adam Gray [00:04:24]:

So you're not an expert in CRM systems. So you're not experienced enough or sophisticated enough to tell the difference between companies A, B and C. So you look out there, all of these companies claim to be the best. All of these companies claim to integrate with everything else. All of these companies claim to give you incredible. And you go, well, doesn't matter which one I buy then. And, and it means that from the, the, the seller's perspective, there is no strong reason for me to select product A rather than products B or C. And as a result of that, these organizations don't have any control over what their pipeline looks like.

Adam Gray [00:05:04]:

I've had a conversation with Bertrand, he tells me he's going to buy. I've had a conversation with Tim, he tells me he's going to buy. Actually neither of them are going to buy because there are 100 other players in this space and they've said the, all of these organizations. So I think that the, the problem is that, and it's not a fault of marketing, I think the problem is that the buyer doesn't consume these messages in the way that they used to. And still the same old, you know, idea that we're going to create an ideal customer Persona, we're going to talk to those people in their voice, we're going to invite them to webinars and events, we're going to hyper personalized this conversation, we're going to multi thread this. So we're having conversations on every available platform. And I think what so often is forgotten is that conversations are a two way rather than a One way street. So the fact that I'm talking at you is not the same as us having a conversation.

Adam Gray [00:06:01]:

And you know, when we talk to sales leaders, and I know this is true for both of you guys, when we talk to sales leaders and we say you get leads from marketing, they say, well, sort of, yeah. So we phone these people up and we're told they're a hot lead and they're interested in buying the product. We phone them up, Bertrand, so I understand you're interested in buying my CRM system. And you say no, not really. Oh, okay. So there's this massive disconnect because what previously had been a queue, a trigger flag that you were ready to buy now simply isn't that anymore. So, so it's not marketing's fault, but marketing doesn't work the way it used to work. And I think that's the big thing.

Tim Hughes [00:06:46]:

But, but surely if we've invested in creating a brand and a brand that has emotion and then what people are going to do is that they're going to recognize that.

Adam Gray [00:06:58]:

Yep.

Tim Hughes [00:07:00]:

And they're going to see that and they, they trust it and that's how they're going to purchase.

Adam Gray [00:07:08]:

Well, yeah, I think that is in part true. I think that, you know, if, if you think about brands that are recognizable, you know, so, so you're familiar with BMW, you're familiar with Salesforce or Oracle, you're familiar with Apple, you're familiar, familiar with Lenovo, you're familiar with Reebok. All of these are organizations that have spent decades building a brand new. And that brand lives inside your head because you know what it stands for. For me to assume that I can launch a brand or take a, a, a brand stretch, take my product into a new market where we've not been before, and to assume that you're going to have any kind of recognition of that brand is, is delusional really, because, you know, you are far too busy to remember that my brand is professional but friendly. It's the bright, cheery one, it's the one that, that puts flowers. You don't care. You're too busy worrying about how you're going to make your number, how you're going to take your product to market, how you're going to keep your customers happy to worry about my issues.

Adam Gray [00:08:13]:

And I think that always this comes back to the people who are at the front line, the salesforce, the account managers, the technical people that are engaging with the client. That's where the brand lives. And those are the people that own the relationship. So we need to empower those people to be having conversations within their target accounts and their existing accounts in order that there can be some bridge built between your company and the client. Because without that you're just another replaceable product. You know, it's like last time you had a BMW, this time you've got a Mini, next time you're going to buy a Fiat. It doesn't matter, they'll work, they're all fine. You know, there's no difference between any of these things anymore really.

Tim Hughes [00:08:57]:

But surely we can use a product like abm. So account based marketing where what we do, I mean what you just described, you know, what we could be doing is that we can, marketing can basically be connecting. We set a set of nominated accounts, we therefore understand who the ideal customer profile is. And what we can do is that we can use LinkedIn, for example, as a way of showing them adverts. And by basically showing them adverts there will be brand recognition and therefore when it comes to actually buying, they will understand the brand and therefore we will be the forefront of their mind.

Adam Gray [00:09:36]:

You'd like to think so, but actually I think so. In the UK we have two really big supermarket chains, Tesco's and Sainsbury's and for they've been running their strap line campaigns for 20 plus years. And if you say to people what is Sainsbury's strap line? They'll say every little helps. Which is in fact Tesco's strap line. You know this, they've got the biggest advertising budget of any organization in the UK and still people don't understand it because people, people are not that interested. That's the reality. They're not that interested in the, the minutiae between, of difference between product A and product B. That's true of the supermarkets and that's true of your product as well.

Adam Gray [00:10:21]:

And I think that, that the only route to those people is, you know, why am I going to listen to, to you, Bertrand, when you speak? Because you're my friend, because I like you, because we've engaged, because you've listened to me speak, all of that builds equity in order that I give you the time to speak and I believe what you say, brands don't have that. I can fall in love with a person, I can't fall in love with a brand. And I think that's a fundamental disconnect there. And I think the marketers get so wrapped up in oh my brand is absolutely breathtaking and it means everything to me right up until they go move to another company, and then that brand means everything to them. Now, I'm not. That's not a criticism. It's merely an observation. It's like, okay, if this is the one and only brand, you would never, ever, ever leave that company.

Adam Gray [00:11:09]:

But you do, because you get better opportunity somewhere else. Because these are just things.

Tim Hughes [00:11:16]:

Sorry, Bertram.

Bertrand Godillot [00:11:18]:

I can hear our, our, our audience and, and the sales leaders in our audience saying, well, this is marketing's job. This is not my job. So are you saying I have to, to go back to square one and say, you know, I've got to develop my own opportunities, Am I going to do that?

Adam Gray [00:11:43]:

Well, I think the key thing to remember is that in an ideal world, this would be marketing's job, and the things that marketing were doing would deliver a constant stream of quality leads to you, but they don't. So the question is that as a sales leader, do you want to make your number or not? So you can either rely on marketing to deliver these opportunities, or you can rely on yourself, that is your team, to deliver these opportunities. And I would suggest that a phone call from, hi, I'm Bertrand, I bake bread. I'd love to have a chat and hear about your bread. Is much more likely to get a rapport building heart to heart conversation with somebody than saying, hi, I'm Bertrand from CRM & Co. And we've got the best CRM system in the world.

Bertrand Godillot [00:12:32]:

And I can definitely back up this with the hard figures for sure.

Adam Gray [00:12:36]:

Absolutely.

Bertrand Godillot [00:12:38]:

So what, what then would be the first steps? And I'd like to understand, number one, what, what else would be the, the first step as a sales leader to take that shift and how marketing can help.

Adam Gray [00:12:56]:

Well, we've all, we've all got stories, haven't we, about the good old days when you could easily address people with a phone. And, and I remember many, many years ago, the person that ran the company is saying to me, you know, basically, we haven't got any clients at the moment. We need to generate some clients. So here's a list of all of our past clients. Phone them up and just say to them, hi, Bertrand, I've not spoken to you for ages. I just wanted to check you were okay, see what happens. So I phone Bertrand and he say, hi, Bertrand, you know, you okay? And you go, yeah, everything's fine here. How are things with you? And I go, yeah, things are great, but I just wanted to touch.

Adam Gray [00:13:37]:

Then I found Tim and Tim says, yeah, I'm great, but I'm really glad you phoned because I Need some more of this thing that I bought from you before. And I go, okay, I found at the right time then, didn't I? And I found that 20 of the phone calls that I made actually elicited a sales opportunity. Now, the numbers may have changed, but going out there and pressing palms, you know, whether that's knocking on doors, whether that's telephoning people, whether that's sending emails, assuming that you can get through to people in, through those channels, that's great because there's people who already know you and trust you. So a continuing, you know, reminding them who you are, you maximize the chance of being in the right place at the right time. And, and we know that 95 of buyers are not in market at the moment. So you're relying on a 20 to 1 luck ratio to, to get in touch with someone at exactly the right time anyway. So you need a vehicle for getting in touch with people at scale in a way that they don't feel that they're being treated to something at scale.

Tim Hughes [00:14:39]:

Yeah, it's, it reminds me Chris Mason at Namos, which is one of our clients, he's the CEO there, and he put out a post and somebody from one of his clients saw it and said, hi, Chris, sent him a DM on LinkedIn and said, hey Chris, saw your post. Can you get one of your sales team to give me a call, please? That turned into half a million dollar deal.

Adam Gray [00:15:01]:

Yeah, and, and it happens time and time again, you know, like it was Gary Player, wasn't it, that said the harder I practice, the luckier I get. You know, you can't rely on luck, but what you can do is you can make sure that you're, you're out there maximizing the chance of being in the right place at the right time. You know, it's like you and I, Tim, we went to an event quite recently where we're walking through the event. Why do we go to the event? Well, because we were hoping we would bump into some people that we knew and we did bump into people we knew. And interestingly also we bumped into some people that we didn't know, but they knew us because of what we do on social. But the point is that, you know, you turn up there and all of a sudden you're a friendly face. In this morass of people who are trying to sell you stuff, you're a friendly face. Someone like, oh, let's go and grab a coffee and have a, have a bit of a catch up.

Adam Gray [00:15:50]:

That'd be lovely. And I Think that obviously what you want is you want to have an opportunity to keep smiling and waving at people across this crowded digital room in a way that they don't feel that you're pitching them. Because when we went to that event, someone walks up to us and they say, oh, hi guys, I've not seen you for ages. And we say, fantastic. Are you interested in buying another training program? Oh, oh, he's walked off. I wonder what happened there. You know, it's like, that's not the way people want to be dealt with. And yet we all know this, and yet we all forget this when we're.

Adam Gray [00:16:27]:

We're in sales mode.

Bertrand Godillot [00:16:28]:

Yeah, that's a little bit. That's a massive shift in mindset, I would say. We know, and we know by experience that it's not easy to drive this change in mindset from being a lead receiver to a, an opportunity creator, basically.

Tim Hughes [00:16:44]:

To answer your question, Bertrand, there has to be a culture of prospecting coming from the leadership. There has to be a vocalized aspiration and setting by, you know, this is, this is the culture we want in this organization. Now the first time you say that, most of the salespeople will probably ignore you and think, yeah, yeah, yeah, you said that all before. But the other thing is that it has to be shown by the leadership that they're actually invested in the, in the culture. So I remember when I was at Oracle, we had the, the, the, the, the every year, you know, the salespeople wouldn't update the CRM. So it decided that what we would do is that we, we needed to show how to do it. And we were in a meeting and, and it was the same, you know, so and so and so that from pre sales, to use a CRM, which we all knew, knew would be too advanced for the sales people and nobody would do anything. And someone.

Tim Hughes [00:17:50]:

And, and I actually said to, to Steve, New Mark, Mark Newton, the, the vp, I said, the only way that you're going to get the change is if you do the demo. And he said, you're right.

Adam Gray [00:18:02]:

Okay, I'll do it.

Tim Hughes [00:18:04]:

And. And it was Mark. You know, when we said where Mark said, he, he stood there and said, salespeople, you need to update the CRM system. And everyone. And he said, I'm now going to show you how to do it. And everyone. You what? And he basically said, right, where's the keyboard? And it took us ages to teach him how to do it, but he really enjoyed it because he actually liked to understand how the technology works. He liked to have that sort of like I go, I only need to understand it from there.

Tim Hughes [00:18:35]:

But what I'll do is I'll go down a level because that helps my understanding of this. And he actually did the demo of how to update the CRM and guess what happened? All the SalesPeople updated the CRM. And that's the thing. And it's just standard leadership. It doesn't matter how many leads that need to be created, whether it's 10%, 20% or 100%, there has to be a vocalization of that culture and it has to come from the top as well. We have, as leaders, we have to set the, the, we have to set the bar for everybody to try and achieve whatever it is that we set in terms of the culture.

Adam Gray [00:19:18]:

So here's an interesting thing. I was in London yesterday and I met up with somebody who, this person works at a client that we have coached, one of their sales teams. They will remain nameless and you'll see why in a second. And I spent probably a couple of hours with this person and it was very interesting seeing how large corporates still view the behaviors and the KPIs with which they measure the sales team. So this person is very socially able. So they're very good, they're very sociable, they're very friendly, they're very light hearted and accessible. You know, there's not somebody that you would be scared of having a conversation with. And this person leads the league table.

Adam Gray [00:20:21]:

I believe in the UK in terms of the number of conversations that they get with new prospects, they're at about 180 of their number. Their, their reading the table in terms of the number of conversations they get. So I rather naively and foolishly said that's brilliant because I assume that excuses you from having to make cold calls and send cold emails because you get more conversations than anyone else and you're almost 200% of what it is that the expectation of, even in terms of closed business. And they said, no, I'm constantly being reprimanded for not making cold calls. So you make 100 cold calls to people that don't pick up the receiver. You send 100 emails that don't get any response. And I get why you would drive people to do that in, in absence of success. But if the person's being successful, I said, why isn't everybody in the UK looking at you saying how are you getting so many conversations with people and what can I learn from it? And this person said, well, actually loads of people have come up to me and they've said exactly that.

Adam Gray [00:21:42]:

And he said, and you know, I, I, I, it's not any secret. He said it's exactly what you guys have taught me. He said it's not any secret. I show them exactly what I do. And the quest that the response I often get is it's a lot working it. And he said well how much work is it? Because it works compared to all of this stuff you're doing which is a load of work which doesn't get any results, so what's the point? And, and he said, you know, unfortunately there is. And, and you said Bertrand, that well that's marketing's job, isn't it? You know, this is very silo driven mentality, particularly in very large organizations. A it's political and B, it's very silo driven.

Adam Gray [00:22:21]:

So that's not my job. That's your job to do that bit. Even if you failing in quotes to do your job directly impacts on my employment within the business, still it's your job to do that. And that Frenchman is very dangerous, isn't it?

Bertrand Godillot [00:22:37]:

Not sure, natural with natural it's a failure. But let's say that the, as you said earlier, the buyer does not behave. Buyers have changed their behavior so hence the failure of, of that, of that approach. Yeah, sorry.

Tim Hughes [00:23:01]:

And I thought it was interesting the other week I saw someone put out a post about the, the buyer's journey and there was this thing. Yeah, what you need to do is map the buyer's journey and of course they're saying that because they sell those services. And I basically responded the buyer's journey is go to chat GPT and ask a question and ask a prompt, isn't it?

Adam Gray [00:23:19]:

Yeah, yeah. You've mapped is the seller's journey, not the buyer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:23:24]:

And, and it's like, you know, you know I understand that they sell those services but that just shows how much the world has, has transformed and changed in only we're just coming up to three years of two and a half years of, of Chat GPT. And I mean, you know, I see you know, quite a few people, some of the more advanced sales trainers and coaches who put out prompts and stuff, showing people how to actually craft things. They always do it from the sales perspective. But if you did it from a buyer's perspective I think it would be quite shocking. But we can all go to chat GPT and build up a, you know, give me, I'm trying to buy a payroll. Okay, give me a list of the top Five players, what their prices are and what their USPS are. And that, and that's, and that's, that's the buying process.

Bertrand Godillot [00:24:20]:

So going back to, going back to metrics, because I think, and I'm experiencing this as well with our, with our customers, Adam, that there is a certain set of metrics that are, that, that sales organizations report on and also marketing organizations report on. So are we saying we need to change the metrics?

Adam Gray [00:24:51]:

Well, I think we definitely do. But, but I think that, you know, there's a, there's a huge level of pragmatism which is required here. So, you know, we have always said if we talk to a client and they say, I've got loads of leads and I have loads of conversations with new prospects, then there's no point in us having a further conversation with those people at that stage because they haven't got a problem. The bit that we solve, they have already sorted somehow. Great. But oftentimes, you know, the, the, the marketing and early stage sales process is pouring effort into a bottomless pit and they're not seeing anything coming back. And you know, every time I talk to a sales leader or someone in the sales team, I, I say what I had had exactly this conversation with a large tech client a couple of years ago, which was, can your sales team sell? And the answer is, yeah, they're really good. Okay, so why have you got no pipeline? And they couldn't answer that question.

Adam Gray [00:25:59]:

I said, I bet it is because your salespeople can sell, but they haven't got anyone to sell to because nobody wants to talk to them. And they were like, yeah, that's exactly what the problem is. Okay, so there is no point in addressing your sales team's ability to present, their ability to spin, their ability to qualify, or their ability to storytell. There's no point in teaching them any of that stuff. And the reason there isn't is because they haven't got anyone to do it to. So first thing you need is you need to be having lots of conversations with people that you want to be doing business with, and then maybe you're brilliant at selling and they'll close, maybe you're not, and none of them will close, but at least you've put the first piece of the puzzle in place. And continuing to train somebody in negotiation skills if they're not even issuing proposals is a complete waste of everybody's time. They need to focus on the bit that is missing from this chain.

Adam Gray [00:26:52]:

And I think that that's the big issue. You know, we know ourselves. We had a guy that worked with us, and he was asking. Well, when he came to join us, he was asking, should I be in sales? I really hate this. I'm not a very nice person because nobody wants to talk to me. And he went from having one call every two weeks with someone that wasn't really that Interested to having 25 calls a week with people that did want to talk to him. And it's like, oh, my God, love. Just love my job.

Adam Gray [00:27:17]:

I love my life. It's fantastic. Okay? That's. That's the output. The output is queuing up people that want to have a conversation with you, and you see where the conversation goes. But he's not my buyer. The person in that company. No, but I want to talk to you, Bertrand.

Adam Gray [00:27:33]:

You're the buyer. I want to talk to you. But you don't want to talk to me. Well, that's the end of the deal then.

Bertrand Godillot [00:27:38]:

If you.

Adam Gray [00:27:38]:

If you're not going to answer my calls, that's the end of the deal. However, if I can say, well, you don't want to talk to me, that's because you don't know me. Clearly, you don't want to talk to me. So I'll forge a relationship with Tim, and then Tim will say, I think you need to speak to this guy. He's really smart. Okay? So you can walk around all of these roadblocks. So you need to be talking to as many people in the target account as you can, because you're looking for someone who likes you and is prepared to be your champion internally, aren't you? But this idea that you said yourself, Tim, you know that a long time ago, when you were analyzing a sales team's performance, and you said how many people you connected to in that target account? And they said, three. And you said, well, the deal isn't going to close then.

Adam Gray [00:28:19]:

And sure enough. What happened?

Tim Hughes [00:28:21]:

It didn't close.

Adam Gray [00:28:22]:

It didn't close.

Tim Hughes [00:28:24]:

It was Domino's Pizzas, and they weren't connected to anybody in the. In the account.

Adam Gray [00:28:30]:

Yeah.

Bertrand Godillot [00:28:31]:

So the good news from what you just said, Adam, is that one of the metric can remain is the number of calls, but it's the way you get these calls.

Adam Gray [00:28:42]:

Well, it's the number of calls, if.

Bertrand Godillot [00:28:43]:

I understand correctly, the way you get these calls.

Tim Hughes [00:28:46]:

But isn't it the output, which is the number of meetings?

Adam Gray [00:28:49]:

Well, yeah, but I think by calls, what. Bertram, what we're meaning is the number of times you actually speak to someone on the phone. The number of the number of dials I make and the number of court messages I leave is irrelevant. The number of times I have a conversation is what matters.

Bertrand Godillot [00:29:06]:

That's what I meant, of course. Yeah.

Adam Gray [00:29:08]:

So that conversation can be on the telephone, it can be on zoom, or it can be face to face. But if I'm selling something complex, you will never. I'm sure that any, any complex strategic, high value purchase, I can't imagine in the history of the world any of them has been sold from someone reading a brochure.

Tim Hughes [00:29:27]:

So, so, so, Adam, if we go, if we, if we take, we walk your hypothesis basically along and say. Right, okay, so we. Marketing at the moment isn't working.

Adam Gray [00:29:42]:

Yep, yep.

Tim Hughes [00:29:44]:

And the, and the issue is that nobody wants to talk to us.

Adam Gray [00:29:48]:

Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:29:48]:

Because we know what's going to happen is that you're just going to basically pitch to me.

Adam Gray [00:29:52]:

Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:29:54]:

And though we do know that 4 to 6% of the marketplace are buying at any one time.

Adam Gray [00:30:00]:

Yep.

Tim Hughes [00:30:00]:

So we know that for. So we, so if we're not talking to 4 to 6%, that means we're leaving money on the table. We, we know that basically account based marketing isn't working. And as you know, with marketing, what we do is we take an adjective and we put it on the front. Because if marketing doesn't work, what we'll do is we'll put a new additive every week.

Adam Gray [00:30:23]:

Like digital. You made.

Tim Hughes [00:30:25]:

Yeah, digital marketing, marketing, you know, plant marketing or whatever it is. Because we, because it, and then we can say that the previous one failed and then. Yeah, but we're doing performance marketing now. Yeah, it's different. And so, so nobody, if nobody wants to talk to us, how do we get.

Adam Gray [00:30:47]:

Well, I, I think that the, the issue is, and, and, and often, you know, one of the most respected names in business, IBM, Nobody wants to talk to IBM. Lots of people want to talk to Dave IBM because he's, he's really smart. So I, I think this is not about. Nobody wants. Well, this is. Nobody wants to talk to us, but lots of people want to talk to me. So what we need to do is we need to. Marketing's job in the future I think is clear that the marketing's job is to empower the individuals to be smart about how they stimulate conversations with their target market.

Adam Gray [00:31:27]:

So the stuff that marketing can do much better than sales, they're much better at doing pretty stuff, you know, visuals, graphics, they're much better at telling stories, generally speaking, they're much better at writing things. So that is marketing superpower. That's what sales people have traditionally not been very good at doing so. Having a marketer sitting next to you saying, actually, I think you should rewrite that, Tim, and use more of this kind of language. And I've done a really good visual that goes with that thing that you've just written for you means that the salesperson can appear incredibly polished and friendly and the marketer skills are being deployed in a way that, that's really, really valuable. And I think the thing is that, you know, the point of, of marketing is it's seen as one to many. So I've got a market of, of a thousand people. I'm going to write this one thing, I'm going to issue it to a thousand people and a thousand people will see it, but actually it's one to many that aren't listening.

Adam Gray [00:32:31]:

So I'm going to produce this piece of content, I'm going to put it out there to a thousand people and a thousand people will ignore it. And that's generally what happens. And any marketer that says, well, we get 40% response rate on our emails. No you don't. You get a 40% open rate. And that's because the preview pane in the email tool opens it automatically and it gives you the opportunity to scroll down and then click on the bit that says unsubscribe. So and you know, we know that probably seven years ago we began working with a cyber security company and their head of marketing was really honest with us and they said, you know, we've got this really engaged audience. You know, there's like a thousand people in the audience.

Adam Gray [00:33:18]:

And we send an email out and we get like 50 responses and we send an email out. We get 20 responses and we send an email out. We get five responses and we send an email out. You know, it's flatlined, it is not working anymore. What are we going to do? And I think that the first issue here is to bury all of the kind of the pomp that goes with, you know, oh, I've got this budget for doing this and I've got this new tool that's. And look at actually the reality of what's happening. And you know, when we wrote the books, marketing, at that point we could see that there was a huge fracture between sales and marketing. It's nearly 10 years ago now, huge fracture between sales and marketing departments because sales said everything we get from marketing is crap.

Adam Gray [00:34:07]:

And marketing said we give all of these hot leads to sales and they can't close any of them. That was a big issue even then. And what we know is that what, what a marketer might traditionally have qualified as being a really hot lead, I. E. You've been on the website, you've opened a brochure, you've attended a webinar, has little or nothing to do with your propensity to buy this quarter. You might be doing initial research, I might be actively looking at your product to qualify it out. And I'll have all the same kind of behavioral traits as somebody that's trying to qualify you in. And often people look at, you know, this is, this is, this is the way I want it to be, and therefore it is this way.

Adam Gray [00:34:50]:

And you know, you, you know that from sales teams. You know, you say to a sales team, when you pitch face to face pitch, what percentage of those do you win? The sales team say 60, 70%. Then you go, well, you, you, you pitched 27 times last quarter and you won three of them. Oh, oh, yeah. Because you remember the bits you want to remember, you see the things you want to see. So there needs to be a real kind of reality check for both of these parts of an organization and how.

Bertrand Godillot [00:35:18]:

Do we bring that? So assuming that I've done that exercise, I've got the numbers and I agree this is not working, how can I get the C suite buy in into at least an initiative or really changing the game?

Adam Gray [00:35:37]:

Well, I think that. So Tim and I had a conversation about this the other day and I said, so large organizations that we know are incapable of doing this. How come they're continuing to grow? And Tim said, I suspect it is probably repeat sales to their existing customers that are really embedded in that. So this guy that I was speaking to yesterday spent some time with, I said, ask exactly the same question. And he said, it's all old customers. Yeah, that's it. He said, you know, we've got a product, we take it into this market, at which point they're a new customer. Somebody has to sell that.

Adam Gray [00:36:18]:

And an interesting aside to that, he said, one of the things that's really interesting in a sales driven organization, it's like disparagingly people say, yeah, but you didn't actually sell that timing. That was someone in your network. So someone that you already had a relationship with. It's like, what the hell does it matter? They've given us money. It doesn't matter whether I've not, I've knocked on their door or they phoned me up and said, hello, mate, I've not seen you for a month, I need to hand you some money. The end Result is the same anyway, this person said then from then on it's invariably repeat business. And that's why we're continuing to scale our product range in order that we've always got something new to sell these orders organizations because that's the only way, you know, new customers are not a thing. And, and you know, you see that in the tech sector.

Adam Gray [00:37:04]:

You know, Oracle has got Oracle houses, Salesforce has got sales houses, saps have got SAP houses. And once they're in there to, to turf out one of those giants and replace the entire suite of, of product is highly, highly unlikely. So you are, except for new entrants that have grown into that kind of enterprise space. It is for the most part just expanding within an existing, existing name, isn't it?

Bertrand Godillot [00:37:33]:

So we are going where are the, you know, in this type of organizations? And there are quite a lot, especially when times are tough, you tend to turn back to your install base basically or to your existing customers. This is not really a, a very great recipe for growth in the long term.

Adam Gray [00:37:58]:

But, but managing so where our new.

Bertrand Godillot [00:38:01]:

Customer is buying from then?

Adam Gray [00:38:02]:

Well, first of all, managing growth even within your existing customer base can be helped by being better connected into the customer base. You know, and the question is, if everyone in, in that particular account of yours knows who you are or nobody knows who you are, which is a better circumstance. And people go, well, obviously everyone knows. Okay, so why you. Back to your thing about dominoes, Tim. Why are you not connected to anyone or why are you connected to three people then? It's a company of a hundred thousand people. You're connected to three of them, one of whom has no idea who you are. So you've got two potential relationships in the company.

Adam Gray [00:38:38]:

There's no certainty in that at all. But I do think that the big challenge that we have, because we've got that kind of, we've got two competing things. We know that 95% of people are not ready to buy now. So, so that's a, that's a given. But if we've got a good product, what we, what we do have or should have is a fundamental belief that if I've got the right product for you, you're going to buy my product. Maybe not now, but at some point you're going to buy my products, then I need a way of keeping you engaged and friendly on an ongoing basis. You know, and I think that the, for modern sales, and this was not true 20 years ago, but for modern sales, Wolf of Wall Street, Glenn Gary, Glen Ross, the Boiler Room. Films like that are the most damaging belief systems that salespeople can have.

Adam Gray [00:39:39]:

Because basically what they're saying to somebody is buy this quarter or piss off. That's what they're saying. And the client basically says, final, I'll piss off.

Tim Hughes [00:39:50]:

Then this is the. You're either basically qualifying somebody in or out.

Adam Gray [00:39:56]:

Exactly.

Tim Hughes [00:39:58]:

Our sales leadership of saying, are they in, are they in or out? And what you do when you qualify them out is basically telling you to piss off.

Adam Gray [00:40:05]:

Yeah, yeah. Or you, you, your sales leader says to you, well, you just need to go and basically force the, the outcome. So you force them and to the point where they will never engage with you again. So even though they could be a perfect customer for you, that would have come in in two years time, they don't want to talk to you ever again. So you've completely burnt your bridges. That's why there's this constant need to generate new conversations in new accounts. If what you said was okay, there were a hundred accounts in this sector, this is your sector, Tim. You gradually work your way through and get to know everybody in that sector.

Adam Gray [00:40:46]:

So everyone's aware of who you are, everybody consumes your content, everybody values your opinion on stuff, everybody asks for your help, even if they're not buying today. And you just keep people engaged in that way. So you know that in two years time, if someone wants to buy in that space, they're going to come to you because they've built a relationship with you, they trust you even though they haven't spent any money with you. They know that you're good at your job because you've helped them and given them advice. I mean, it's the perfect way of building relationships and maintaining relationships at scale.

Tim Hughes [00:41:20]:

So rather than qualifying people in that in or out, what we should be doing is thinking about a person, are they buying now or later?

Adam Gray [00:41:29]:

Exactly.

Tim Hughes [00:41:30]:

And that gives us then a platform to nurture.

Adam Gray [00:41:32]:

Absolutely. And, and I think that the, the point is if, and you need to be, you need to have a dose of reality with this. If my company or my product is not a good fit for your company or product, then actually you are qualified out. But if I've genuinely believe I've got a good product for you, the question is just wait, trying to get the timing aligned. You know, you can't buy because you're under contract to someone else. You can't buy for three years. Okay, well, between now and three years time, I need to make sure I'm the only person that you think of about this, which is brilliant. Three years is plenty of time to do that.

Tim Hughes [00:42:06]:

So. But, but if we go back to the. Go back to the beginning again, saying that marketing doesn't work and therefore somebody has got to generate the opportunity. So if we're going to say sales do that, what's the best way to do that? Because surely the most quickest and most effective way of. Of getting. Generating any sort of pipeline is by cold calling people.

Adam Gray [00:42:29]:

I don't think it's the way of generating any pipeline. What I think is it's, it's the way of. For the 5% potentially getting a sale immediately if you can get through to something. There are a lot of ifs here. If I've got your number, which I may not have, if you happen to answer the phone, which you probably won't do, if you are prepared to extend me the 30 seconds, one minute, five minutes that I need to position my understanding of you and your problems and a solution to those which you probably won't do. If all of those things I am able to do, all of those pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Cold calling absolutely is the way to get to somebody that says, okay, come on in and we'll have a proper chat about this. The problem is that there's an awful lot of ifs in that journey.

Adam Gray [00:43:15]:

And I think that the challenge here is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to build something which is sustainable and scalable in salespeople. So the beauty of building a network on social is that you can quickly add people to that network because you're targeting a particular industry, vertical, account, region, whatever. You know that every single person you add from now on is going to be somebody that you want to be having a conversation with. And you, you constantly grow, grow that network so that you are building a digital bridge between you and them. If they're not connected to you, they're not going to see any content you share, good or bad. So, you know, and we've all got, whether you've got 500 or 50,000 people in your network, you know, a tiny sliver of those people, you know, so typically, if someone's got 1500 connections, they'll know 300 of them. And the rest of them will be, I probably met an event somewhere. Okay? So first of all, you need to.

Adam Gray [00:44:17]:

I need to be somebody that you recognize in your network. So I need to have a behavior which encourages you to notice me, first of all. And then I have to constantly be feeding you with stuff so you don't Forget who I am. And the beauty of doing that is that If I've got 100 connections today and a thousand connections in a month, and 2000 connections the next month, and 3000 connections the next month, and 4000 connections the next month, every person I add means that my content is potentially being shown to more people that I want to be having a conversation with this. You know, you luck out, you're in the right place at the right time.

Tim Hughes [00:44:51]:

But I mean, in terms of. So, but that's. I mean, you know, for a salesperson to share content, it's very easy, isn't it? Because what we do is that we get content for marketing. So there's the brochures, there's all the case studies, there's the white papers that they create, and we can basically put that out on social comment.

Adam Gray [00:45:07]:

Yeah, absolutely.

Bertrand Godillot [00:45:08]:

But.

Adam Gray [00:45:08]:

But I think that a really good way for anybody who's trying to sell anything to visualize what's going on is like dating. You know, if you walk into a room full of perfect partners for you and you say, hi, girls, it's okay, I'm here now. This is what I have to offer. This is where I work, this is the food I like to eat. This is where I go on holiday. This is the car I drive. This is my house, this is my bank account. You're giving them all of the information that you might give them.

Adam Gray [00:45:36]:

But if you talk to a room full of people in that way, you're unlikely to get any response because they don't see it as being an intimate one to one conversation. Exactly the same in sales. If I think you're saying exactly the same thing to 500 other people, it's of little or no interest to me. So we need to be presenting our ideas in a way which is very different. You can't present the sales idea to a 500 people at a time. What you can do is preferred your present, your help to people. So for everybody out there that I'm connected to here is something that I learned this week and I think everybody should know this. Okay, that's brilliant because either I'm going to show you, I'm going to share something that you yourself know to be true, in which case you'll think, oh, that's good, he knows that as well.

Adam Gray [00:46:19]:

He must be quite a smart guy. Or you're not going to know it, in which case I'm going to share it and you're going to go, wow, he's a smart guy. I didn't know that. Either way, It's a win. And if we constantly did that, I mean, some of the most engaged people on, on social networks, people that have huge followings and are incredibly well known and respected by those people, are people that share interesting content, not people that share sales content. And whether that interesting content is. Here's something funny that I saw. Here's something that I learned.

Adam Gray [00:46:51]:

Here's a lovely quote that I read the other day, because the first thing you need to do is you need to demonstrate to people that you're not somebody that they should be scared of.

Tim Hughes [00:47:02]:

But, but you say that, but our brochures and our white paper and our case studies is brilliant and exciting.

Adam Gray [00:47:11]:

Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:47:12]:

I mean, is that just because we're as, we're excited about it, so therefore you're going to be excited about it?

Adam Gray [00:47:18]:

I, I was saying this to a, a client actually on, on a call just last week. And this client, they volunteer at an animal sanctuary and they work at a tech company and in their spare time they're on the board of this, this animal sanctuary. And I said to them, you know, one of the things you need to, to, to understand when you're starting to put yourself out into the public domain is you need to think about what, what truly is important to you, you know, so you say, and this person didn't say, I'm passionate about business analytics, but so typically people say, I'm passionate about. Insert whatever the company does.

Tim Hughes [00:48:05]:

Transformation.

Adam Gray [00:48:06]:

Yeah, I'm passionate about. And I said, so if you won, this person's in America, I said, if you won the US Lottery tomorrow, would you come into work on Monday? And they said, no. I said, if you won the US Lottery tomorrow, would you go into your animal sanctuary on Monday? And they said, yes. So, okay, so there's the difference between being passionate about something and actually not being passionate about something. And, and it's this, this belief that, you know, this is really important because it pays my mortgage. Actually, unless it pays your mortgage as well, there's no reason for you to be passionate about it.

Tim Hughes [00:48:45]:

Yeah. And, and you know, I, I see a lot of content. You know, people put this stuff out and of course, what it says, it's right back to the beginning of what you, when we talked about at the beginning, which is that what marketing always say is buy my product because we're great. So we don't read when someone puts out, here's a great case study. It's like, well, I'm not going to read it because I know what you're going to say. Yeah, I Mean the customer is not going to say, well you know, you were expensive, that, you know, the, the product didn't work. We had to get the flights and people in from the States. They're not going to say that.

Tim Hughes [00:49:15]:

So it's pointless as reading it. So we know what the answer is. So it's, it's kind of, you know, what we know from research is that buyers are looking for social proof. So we're looking for if we're going to, if we're going to spend money. What we're looking for is social proof from somebody that understands our business, understands our industry and is probably a person as in they haven't got commission, breadth. So we can see that the fact that their son is a paddy diver or something like that or they're watching the football or whatever and that's what buyers are looking for. And so it goes back to what you said about how can we get marketing to support the sales team to be showing those things. While I've got the floor, I'm going to say something else, please.

Tim Hughes [00:50:02]:

Sales kickoffs. So when you say to somebody who's the most important person in the world, the customer. Okay, so why so, so sales kickoffs, sure you can share stuff of that because it shows a bit about your culture. But remember that's internal. Your customers are not interested in it. It's actually quite good for you to report, recruit people. But if you see it as a revenue generating activity is not because again it's internal, not external faced to what your customers want.

Adam Gray [00:50:33]:

Which is. I did a post, I did a post about our, our sales kickoff and I got 175 likes on it.

Tim Hughes [00:50:39]:

Yeah, yeah, 175 people who report to you.

Adam Gray [00:50:45]:

Oddly. Yeah, there seems to be a parallel.

Tim Hughes [00:50:48]:

There between the two.

Adam Gray [00:50:50]:

Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:50:52]:

So, so just, just can we, as we've got a couple of minutes, can we put Jack, I don't know if it's Jet or yat, so he's probably gone. But thank you for, for checking us out.

Adam Gray [00:51:08]:

Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:51:09]:

And Camilla as well. Who, um, who I know, um. Hello. Tyler in?

Adam Gray [00:51:17]:

Yeah. I think that the big thing here is that sales functions within organizations, they need to park all of the belief and start to think about what actually is proven to work and isn't. And you know that unfortunately in sales, you know, it's a very male dominated place. It's not to say there aren't some brilliant female salespeople, but it's a very male dominated place and there's a lot of machismo there isn't there There's a lot of. Kind of like that. Well, you already knew them, Tim, so it's not really selling. And the point is that the only metric that matters is how much stuff have you sold. How much pipeline you've generated is irrelevant.

Adam Gray [00:52:06]:

How many calls you've had in the long run is irrelevant. Unless these are early indicators or leading indicators. How many calls you've made is worse than useless. But the only thing that matters is how much stuff have you sold. And, you know, if. If you're constantly having people phone you up and you're constantly recording stuff into your pipeline and you're constantly closing stuff, the whole business should be looking at you saying, what's this person doing that we're not? And what can we learn from that? Not. Well, it's because he's cheating. He's not making enough cold calls.

Adam Gray [00:52:40]:

Well, it doesn't matter. You know, cold calls are the beginning, not the end of the process.

Bertrand Godillot [00:52:47]:

That's a great starting point indeed. Thank you, gentlemen. It's been great.

Tim Hughes [00:52:52]:

So thank you, Bertram.

Adam Gray [00:52:54]:

Thank you.

Bertrand Godillot [00:52:55]:

Where can we learn more?

Adam Gray [00:52:57]:

Well, I think the best thing is you follow each of us on LinkedIn.

Tim Hughes [00:53:02]:

Because, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Adam's on LinkedIn and Bertrand's on LinkedIn. You should be able to find us. If you can't, you're probably not looking hard enough. You know, please, please follow us and you'll find more. More of this. More of the same.

Bertrand Godillot [00:53:17]:

Okay, excellent.

Adam Gray [00:53:19]:

We.

Bertrand Godillot [00:53:19]:

I, I can't. I can't step. This one. We now have a newsletter. I hope you know that, guys, you're.

Tim Hughes [00:53:25]:

Going to go over pretty.

Bertrand Godillot [00:53:26]:

Yes, exactly. And here we go. Don't miss an episode. Get the show highlights and the behind the scenes, the beyond the show insights and remainder reminders of upcoming episodes. You may scan the score corner screen or visit us at digitaldownload.live/newsletter. Thank you very much, guys and see you next week.

Adam Gray [00:53:53]:

Bye bye, everyone.

Tim Hughes [00:53:55]:

Everybody.

Bertrand Godillot [00:53:55]:

Bye bye.

Tim Hughes [00:53:56]:

Thank you.

#SalesLeadership #Pipeline #B2BSales #SocialSelling #DigitalSelling #SocialEnablement #LinkedInLive #Podcast