The Chat – Sales Market Fit with Gavin Tye

Join us in this episode as Gavin Tye unpacks the concept of “Sales Market Fit” and explains how aligning sales strategies with buyer behaviors can dramatically improve outcomes. From his experiences in high-stakes B2B SaaS sales to redefining sales methodologies for enterprise clients, Gavin shares transformative insights into modern sales tactics. Discover how businesses can move beyond “burn and churn” approaches and embrace a value-driven, influence-focused strategy that wins in today’s competitive market. Whether you’re in sales or marketing, this episode offers actionable wisdom to help you refine your approach and close more deals.

 00:00- Terry:

Welcome to “The Chat”, where we take you behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past nine years as Chatmetrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales, sharing insider secrets and strategies that drive inbound success.

00:39- Terry: 

Join us on “The Chat”, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

00:51- Terry Wilson: 

Hi Gavin. Welcome to the chat.

00:54- Gavin Tye:

G’day Terry. How’s it going?

00:56- Terry Wilson: 

It’s good. Very good. Thanks. I must admit you’re probably the closest person that I’ve spoken to in the chat so far in the sessions that we’ve done I think almost stone’s throw away from where I am here.

01:06- Terry Wilson:

There has to be thousands of kilometers

01:08- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. What are we like 20, 20 kilometers, 10 miles, maybe 12 miles from each other.

01:14- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah, I think it is. It’s like that. We could have almost caught up at a coffee shop to do this. Look, jumping right into it. One of the things that really caught my attention with you, Gavin, was the, and I overlooked it to start with. I saw it as a product market fit, but it’s not that at all. What you talk about is sales market fit.

01:33- Terry Wilson:

Look, I’m really interested. What is sales market fit?

01:36- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. Sales market fit is it’s the process really in, in a summary, 10 second description. It’s the process of aligning your sales. Strategy and framework to how your target markets buy. So we’ll talk about this a little later. There’s a set of fundamental sales truths that exist. It doesn’t matter how much someone wants to sell something.

The buyer needs to go through a journey, whether it’s to get informal approval, whatever that is. But sales teams need to actually align their effort to help them get through those stages, which are quite predictable. And if they can do that efficiently, They’ll close more sales, they’ll grow revenue, and beat the competition, which is what it’s all about at the end of the day.

02:18- Terry Wilson: 

Okay. And you mentioned earlier that you stumbled across this or discovered this almost by asking a different set of questions. What was the, what was it that made you start to ask those different questions? What was your aha moment as far as that’s concerned?

02:33- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. So I was selling, I come into a startup in 2015 and I was selling really high end B2B SaaS. The price point was around, it was somewhere around 15 K to 45, 000. per month for SAS fees, right? Plus an implementation fee of 600 to 800, 000. It was essentially an engineering drawing management solution for water and power utilities, but it was competing against the big incumbent competitors in the world like Autodesk and SAP.

So it was at the extreme of the sales process. And what it did is it really showed all the flaws that we were having in In a sale, right in a lower price point, you might get some clients over a sale, like marginally over who are marginal, right? But this really showed that, Hey, no, if you don’t get all your ducks in a row, you’re not going to sell anything.

So I basically learned, although the market was saying, this is such a game changer. The response was phenomenal. I thought it was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel, but that interest just didn’t convert into sales. And I was there, I’m going, what are we missing? There is something that we’re missing.

It’s got to be right in front of us because markets buy and sell all the time and they reach a medium where they exchange goods and services. I said, what are we doing wrong? And then I figured out that although they were interested, they couldn’t equate value to the high price point. We knew it was a valve.

We knew it was valuable, but until we actually gave context to saying, Hey, it’s going to cost you 45, 000 a month. But by the way, it’s costing you 800, 000 in safety risks inefficiency across your two or 3000 person organization rework with your supply chain. They just weren’t going to take action.

So I was like, Oh, yeah. So instead of me trying to sell, I switched to creating demand. And or giving light, bringing to light these processes that existed in businesses for 10, 20 years beforehand. Soon as I did that, Terry, it just changed instantly. They were like, Oh, okay, now we’ll move forward.

We unblocked it because they could see for whatever the price point was. That they were getting ten to twenty X the ROI de risking a lot of safety issues in their business and they could justify the value or the spend where before they would, they couldn’t.

04:51- Terry Wilson: 

And so that was through asking a different set of questions.

04:54- Gavin Tye: 

It was for realizing, it was coming up with hypothesis really. It was saying, okay if I was in their shoes, what what am I missing? And then I was like, I think I’m missing the value. And then all I did there was, yeah, you’re right. Asking a different set of questions instead of trying to get them to sell, I would show them the platform.

I’d say, I know you’re not ready to buy yet. I’m taking that off the table, right? I’m not even going to ask you to sell what I’m not going to ask you to buy. What I’m going to do is I want to give you context of all the issues going on inside your business. So I actually become a business process expert as such.

For the company I was working for. So I would create surveys and give it to the economic buyer in the business and say, so you can make an informed decision. I’ve created a survey, send that out to your users or your staff, and I’ll collate the responses and I’ll give it back to you in a presentation. So you can see if this is.

Worthwhile of your attention to pursue or not. And so in one survey alone to a major electrical distribution company here in Australia we sent it out, he sent out to 2000 people, I think 300 come back and in one metric alone, they were wasting over 100, 000 a week just on drawing searches. And I was like, holy dooly.

That’s a that was way more than what I thought it was. And he, I know he was like, this is a massive problem in the business. So he started paying attention to it. So I started creating the movement towards a solution.

06:19- Terry Wilson: 

So that advisor, almost almost a challenger style type model.

06:23- Gavin Tye: 

it’s exactly the challenger sale, except challenging their thinking or challenging the perception, not being, I’ve seen a challenger sale work in a negative way where people are just belligerent and that they think it’s part of the challenger sale. It’s not, it’s actually opening up their eyes and.

Getting him to think about the problem in a really different way. And upon my investigation, B2B SaaS software, it only solves a handful of problems. Eight root cause problems, right? Increased manual effort, multiple sources of truth reduction in automation, manual processes, and things like that.

If you can figure out what that is, or we figured out what that was and we brought it to light and then people have a vicarious liability or responsibility to solve that. Particularly in enterprise where people’s safety are at risk.

07:10- Terry Wilson:

And so in enterprise, where were those leads actually coming from for your organization that in, in essence, in the past before then you’d been burning them. What was the effort or investment required to generate those leads for that business?

07:21- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. It’s an interesting interesting question. You’re asking the Australian market for. Enterprise for what we were selling is in maybe hundreds, not thousands, right? So you couldn’t burn the leads. So we would have to go through and have an engagement and we would have to engage a topic that we knew the market was heading in.

So in, at the time, digital engineering or digital twins was the. The AI of today, right? It was the hot button of the market. So we would position to say, Hey, look at our founder. He’s an expert in digital twins or the digital engineering future for large enterprise. We would love to introduce him.

We can talk about where the latest B2B SAS technology is taking this. And of course, I’d be interested in that. So we would position the future of. Digital engineering and then we talked to them about it and we said the first step of doing this is getting all your engineering drawings in a single source of truth so you can make use of a proper digital twin without it, with your multiple sources of truth and duplication of data, I said the future is impossible.

But you need to wind it back and we were back at the start so we could help them do that. Yeah, so we would, we were always trying to add value to the industry first bring a fresh perspective into conservative organizations like water and power utilities and government organizations. And then out of that, we would go, hey, the 1st step of doing this, if you’re interested.

 Which is where the market was going is to get your engineering content in order. And that’s how we would create the leads.

08:50- Terry Wilson:

I’m just going to say that again for our listeners because I know the majority of them that get the circulation on this are actually in the U S. So one more time, we’re talking about a market, a total available market in the hundreds. Not thousands or tens of thousands, literally in the hundreds. And so if there was ever a motivation to refine a process and devise a flow to give you the ultimate amount of conversions that you possibly can, there’s a pretty high motivation when you’ve got such a small total available market to work with.

And every one you burn, then it’s a lot in enterprise. It’s a longer, much longer cycle to be able to get to a point. It’s not like they’ll forget about you in three or six months time. You burn enterprise and there’s long memories. They had long tenure in most of those buying teams.

09:39- Gavin Tye: 

And that’s where I think we were lucky, Terry, is we didn’t have the market. Like we, we eventually jumped and went into the U S but to give you context, water and power utilities are like 3000 each, right? Or roughly 3000 in each of those industries. So you’re looking at 6, 000 businesses to target in the U S opposed to Australia, which is a couple of hundred.

 So we it makes the American. lead generation process is really burn and turn, right? I’m going to find the people who are actively in a buying cycle as we’ll get into later. If they’re already in a buying cycle, you have a limited ability to influence their thinking, right? So you already know what they want.

They’re just out to market and you’re really just taking orders or trying to muscle in on what they’re already, their perception is. So we had no choice and I liken it to, Somewhat to the American mass production car market. The American market is so big that SAS agencies can afford to do a burn and churn, but it’s not ideal.

And we’re seeing a change in the market now, right? It’s not actually working as much as what it used to. Whereas in Australia, we had to adopt a more total quality management approach, like the Japanese and the German car markets where we had to really be solution orientated and. And engage earlier in the buying process to shape how they saw the problem.

10:56- Gavin Tye: 

And then once we did that, our win rate was, it took longer, but our win rate was 70, 80 percent once we went to open market tenders and things like that because we took the time.

11:07- Terry Wilson: 

Generally B2B technology in the US, I see it has changed dramatically. Burn and churn was the approach that in the past, even a couple of groups I’m involved with from an outbound selling perspective that don’t do marketing They’re recognizing that anything that’s churn and burn just is not delivering the results.

And whatever you’re investing in there is just not getting a return. So

11:28- Terry Wilson:

it’s much more specialized. It’s much more focused on adding value, and it’s much more targeted to those people that really are in the ICP, in the ideal client profile that can extract value from what it is that you’re offering.

11:42- Gavin Tye:

There’s we talk about ROI all the time. I’m going to talk about this a little bit later. But I think there’s a really important metric for sales teams and what an effective sales strategy does, and it’s a return on effort, right? You can’t necessarily reduce the length of sale from a client.

Sometimes big enterprises move at their own speed, but what you can do is reduce the amount of effort needed to move that client to a buying decision. You want to get to that one shot, one one action that’s moved the site closer to a buying conclusion. Yeah, it was a really interesting journey I went on there and it’s all about being an expert in the buyer’s journey and being prepared and reducing that sales friction, which is comes up in every complex sale.

12:22- Gavin Tye: 

When

12:24- Terry Wilson: 

I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago about leadership. And one of the things that we discussed and that I put forward was that effective leaders really need to be other centered. You need to be thinking about the other party and I, it’s no different in sales. As far as I’m concerned, I think that perspective, if you’re walking into it saying, I need to sell you something as opposed to how can I, how can what we do solve the problems that you’ve got? Two completely different mindsets and too often I see salespeople that walk in with that mindset of, I’ve got to hit my quota versus, I’m, I truly want to solve your problem. As soon as there’s that sniff of neediness and self centeredness that deals generally go south. How did you get into this business?

There’s two parts to that question, really. The first one is you had, you’ve had like myself, a bit of a change in industry from an industrial sector into technology, what brought that about?

13:19- Gavin Tye:

I got to 30, I had an epiphany, right? I was like, I’m just not on the track that I wanted to be on with my life. And I was like what am I going to do? And in Australia, everyone goes to the mines, right? If you want to go, if you’re a in your twenties and thirties as a young man or woman, if you can get into the mining industry, you can really set yourself up for the rest of your life. 

And I was like, that’s what I’m going to do. So I moved up to Gladstone and worked at an aluminum smelter, right? And the goal was it was a Rio Tinto site and I was going to go from there and then move up and further into the mines in Northern Australia. But the global recession hit financial crisis hit, and they put a lock on, on, Recruitment, right?

No more transfers. I was like, okay, I’m stuck in Gladstone. So it was an interesting time. I was there for five years, just driving cranes and seeing heavy industrial processes work. And it was, I found it fascinating. Everything was built to be optimized, right? They were trying to optimize everything all the time, even down to pipe diameters.

And we, they used to call it tapping aluminum out. So that would do everything to try to optimize and increase the profit. And I went from there and I got a job back into Brisbane as a blue collar recruitment BDM bit business development manager. I’ll go and find blue collar.

Civil construction guys to go work on site. I was there again for five years, but it’s a really tough job. Terry was based on relationships, right? Getting out there, meeting people and outlasting the next guy, the other guy, right? And after a period of time, I, my tenacity and thinking outside of the box and just being there every day and building up a reputation, I started to slowly succeed and I got traction, which The tenure there was about six to 12 months for a BDM, but I was there for five in a retail, in the Brisbane market during that time.

I’m at the founder of red eye, which is where I worked at before. And he was, they were just starting the B2B SAS company, but I was still pretty committed to what to where this company work back at the time and then you get to five years and I was like, okay, it’s time for a change and I spoke to the founder and I was like, I’ve got a big track record.

This is what I’ve done. I’m in operations. It was an operational engineering joint management platform and he goes yet. No worries. I did not know Terry. I was about to enter the hardest five years of my life with RedEye. It was incredibly difficult, right? I, what I was, what we were trying to do was sell an engineering drawing management platform, right?

But that’s not what the client, what I learned was that’s not what the client was trying, was buying. They don’t care about that. They were just trying to de risk and improve a broken process that existed in a long in their businesses for many years, some words upwards of 20 years. And but I went back to my operational standpoint and everything I tried to do.

I was like, okay, how do we make the lead generation process more efficient? I started with phone calls. I didn’t start with cold email. And then once I got tapped out of my outlet, my capacity, my weekly capacity, I slowly transitioned to email. Cold email sequencing email wasn’t out then, right? So we were just using, basic email, right?

Gmail. And there was no email finders around. I think it was email hunter where you would guess the emails. It was really our cake. And then I just slowly optimized the process and got better and better. So my goal is my operational background really helped because I framed the conversation for operations.

Most b to b sass buyers in enterprise are not They’re not computed. They’re not technical. They’re operational, right? So I still not tech. I don’t know much about code. I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff, but what I do know is operational speak and how to frame the message for the intended audience.

So they could see the outcome. And that was where my specialty go went. And that’s how I become successful at that business.

17:09- Terry Wilson: 

And so then, so that’s the industrial into technology. Now it’s a shift from that technology as an employee effectively into teaching that process to others. What made you decide that you wanted to change from that?

17:22- Gavin Tye:

When I got to about just again, five years seems to be the mark for me, right? When I got to five years at red eye, I was like, I’m either Really good. I’m a really good salesperson just for this business, or I’ve learned something that I’ve got to go and test for the market. And I made an incredibly hard decision to leave red eye at the time.

And it’s never happened to me before. But when I went and told the founder that I was leaving, we were both, we’re both teary about it. We’re really upset. He’s going, what can I do to keep you? And I was like, I’ve got to go. I have to go and continue my sales journey. career or my career. And I’ve, cause I’ve seen people get pigeonholed, right?

Like I’ve seen some people in a recruitment issue, get stuck and they’re all, they’re known for 10 years as recruitment and they can’t get out of it. And I didn’t want that to happen. So I went to a multinational and it wasn’t for me. And then it was COVID hit. And I was like what is my passion or what have I learned?

And I didn’t think about sales market fit in a context that I think about it now. And I was like, I’ve learned something that, yeah. Still to this day at that business, they haven’t recaptured what I had to my knowledge. And I was like, I think I found out this thing called sales market fit that I’m surely there’s got to be other people who are talking about this.

And I had to look around and there’s people who talk about positioning really well, like April Dunford. And there’s people who skirt around the topic. But no one talks about this process of sales market fit. And I was like, I’ve got to do it, right? I’m on a mission to improve the sales experience for founders and their customers, because we, I want to help them develop customers at.

in a better place at the end of a sales process than what they would do normally, right? And I think that really unlocks a business if you do it the right way and it doesn’t take a lot of effort just to change your perspective really.

19:12- Terry Wilson:

In your experience so far, what do you think is the biggest mistake that most B2B startups make that impacts their revenues?

19:22- Gavin Tye: 

So they follow what they read online. That’s the main thing, right? When I started at RedEye, I did all the go to market stuff, SWOT analysis. I was like, okay, I’ve done everything to the letter of the law. I promised the founder I would, I go and do exactly what Was done and then I would go to a client and do it.

And I go, okay, thanks. I’ll go, how come they’re not buying? So my biggest observation there is most of the stuff online is. Effort based, right? Sales is effort based. Or process is effort based. They’re not accounting for fundamental sales trues and but what they need to do is be outcome focused for every meeting have a specific outcome.

And I think about a sales process of when a business meets a potential client is one, they start at the zero. They don’t know who you are. And 10 is they want to buy you, right? And so there is a predictable journey that goes from zero to 10 on all people and businesses. And so my goal is to always just move them one step forward on that journey.

Sometimes it’s a two step journey. Sometimes it’s a 10 step journey depending on the business, depending on the market, but it is predictable and getting them on that path is outcome focused and knowing exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Okay. at any given time.

20:41- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah. And so as a, before we get into the real detail about that process, as a founder, what’s one of your biggest frustrations? What’s been one of your biggest frustrations?

20:53- Gavin Tye:

So me as a founder is I fall into the trap that other founders that I coach other founders on is I’m too close to the problem sometimes. And sometimes there’s

21:03- Terry Wilson:

Guilty as charged. Guilty as charged.

21:04- Gavin Tye: 

yeah, like there is always two sides to a sale, right? And the biggest fallacy is businesses have a sales problem, but any founder who’s watching this or anyone watching this podcast later, they could take 10 to 20 X the amount of sales next week.

21:20- Gavin Tye: 

right? They might have a delivery problem, but they don’t have a sales problem. What they do have is a demand problem, so they don’t have that 10 to 20 X amount of demand. So I fall into the same trap and I heard this saying the other day is you can’t read the label from inside the jar. And so I have to continually pull myself out of me being the founder, looking at the sale from the business side to framing it from the client side.

And even my wife sitting there sits next to me sometimes and she, I’ll get a full call and she goes, I’m pretty sure you just did what you tell your client, your clients not to do. I’m like, ah, you’re right. And it’s perception and emotion plays funny, plays a funny role in trying to develop sales strategy.

22:05- Gavin Tye: 

Particularly when you add pressure into it.

22:07- Terry Wilson: 

And pressure as your own business, that pressure is there constantly. You’ve got to pay the bills. You’ve got to pay the staff. It’s like there, there’s a pressure.

22:15- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah, that’s right.

22:16- Terry Wilson: 

I wonder if it gets to a point, I’m sure it gets to a point at some point in time where it disappears. Maybe it is, but I guess maybe not.

22:21- Terry Wilson: 

Because then there’s always managing the performance of the individuals within the business as well. So

22:25- Gavin Tye: 

I think that pressure probably changes, right? Like it just, it’s there and there’s the pressure where you can put in an action plan and you go, okay, I’ve solved that. And the pressure that you don’t have a plan for that can probably eat away at you and eventually cripple your business. I think there’s two different ones, two different types.

22:42- Terry Wilson: 

We’ll pressure. I heard pressure at almost, like into anxiety

22:45- Terry Wilson: 

and anxiety. I had defined the other day as unmade decisions, you’ve got to do something, but you just haven’t done it yet. Or made it made a call on it. Look, you talked about the term sales truths before.

What does that mean?

22:59- Gavin Tye: 

So every business or every industry, sorry, is made up a set of truths or principles, right? Truths, principles, interchanging. Accounting has a set of principles or truths, right? That you balance ledgers and all that kind of stuff. I’m not an accountant, but there’s a set of principles they run by.

Engineering has a set of principles that if they don’t follow, buildings fall down. Medicine, there’s a set of principles that people follow, right? But then when you think about sales, Mhm. It’s been largely thought of as a soft skill, right? Where experience comes from someone like myself or just yourself.

That’s been in the industry for 10, 20 years. And it’s picked up all these soft skills that define it very hard to train. And just, and so as a result, they go, Terry, Here you are, go out and sell, right? But the reality is there’s a set of sales principles or truths that need to, that exist. And they’re very plain.

They’re plain as day once you see them. Now, the reason I talk about that is because if you think about a pyramid, I call it the truth pyramid. At the bottom layer is a set of truths, right? Our truths affect the truths in something affect our beliefs. which affect our behaviors, which inform our process, right?

So if, and what happens, why processes, sales processes don’t often work is people often try to change the process at the top without actually changing their behaviors or beliefs, and they’re not even addressing the fundamental truth. So it’s built on shaky ground and it doesn’t often work.

So if you understand the trues, And you go, Oh, most people inherently know it, Terry. So once you become obvious and you see it and it’s just shown to you, you go, Oh, now I understand that truth now. And naturally, your beliefs and behaviors change and the process is the last thing to change. Because it doesn’t feel right because you’re not addressing the rest if you know what I mean, and the best example of that is if I if you believe or the truth is my truth of the world is it’s mostly a happy place, right?

So my belief is people are not necessarily negative. They’re more positive. So my behaviors are to be friendly to everyone. And my process is to try to say hi to as many people as I can to raise my kids to do that. So I live the world to the truth of the world is mostly happy and that informs everything else above it.

My but for people who think the truth is the world is mostly negative, their behaviors and beliefs and processes are different. It’s the opposite.

25:24- Terry Wilson:

Very true. Very true.

25:25- Gavin Tye: 

If we address some of those truths, I’ve got some here to go through, right? And I’ll address some, but we probably won’t go through all of them, right?

25:32- Gavin Tye: 

But the main thing is sales has moved, this is a universal truth here, sales has moved from the information age to the influence age. We can no longer give people information anymore and hope that they’ll make the right decision. We have to be able to influence their thinking, right? The information age worked when there was no internet and there was those traveling salesmen that used to take people out to the football game or to an event.

And that would work because I would give them the right amount of information. The bias had limited access, but now that’s simply not true. Any buyer can log on to four or five different competitors and quickly get confused about what’s going on, right? So we have to be able to influence our thinking, The other side is people hate being sold to. We inherently know that’s the truth. We all hate being sold to. So we can’t sell anymore. So as soon as you try to do that, and pressure and revenue goals. And what you mentioned before about salespeople with quota, as soon as they do that and they’re meeting more online, the buyer just disengages no more online meeting and the sales over.

So we have to find a different way, but we know that people reliably act in their own self interest. Everyone does it. So as long as we create the message and our intended outcome is to help the person act in their own self interest, then that will increase the likelihood of a sale at the end of the day.

All right. And there’s two other ones I’ll carry is I’ll start with is one is a sale is exactly like a journey. Now a journey has three parts. It has a beginning zero. They don’t know who you To an end, they want to buy you and then the route in between. So most businesses, B2B SAS businesses only speak in the destination.

Our solution does X, Y, and Z. It will help you do ABC, but they don’t actually anchor in what the starting point of the journey is. And that’s why people can’t equate the proper value. To the solution because they’re not actually realizing what they’re selling, but they’re selling a business process. So the starting point has to be their existing business process and figuring out how to articulate that is really is really is really important in the B2B complex sale.

27:48- Terry Wilson:

So I’ve even found across our own clients that there’s some that do focus very much on the technology that they’re selling and they’ll talk about the features. With what we’re doing on the website, answering the prospects through the live chat. That’s the conversation they want us to have. There’s others that then very much focus on much more of the exploratory process and understanding those actual solutions that the customer is trying to solve with their product. And there’s not always a good fit if that’s, and if it’s not, you better have to know early that the problems that they’ve got aren’t going to be fixed by your product, as opposed to just trying to push the product because they look like a customer head. That fits your other customer. If they’re a match that you think they’re a match and they’ll, they might be completely different problems that they’re trying to solve. So that, and obviously the outcome between those two very different in terms of the quality of the leads that come through from those initial chat conversations we have.

But I know that is also the entire process that they follow through their organization and you see some are just simply more successful than others for following that process.

28:50- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. Yeah. They don’t have a great return on effort, right? They’re spinning the wheels a lot, trying to get, trying to wedge a square peg into a round hole, opposed to doubling down and leading a client or trying to shape how they see that problem and actually going, actually what you’re trying to treat is the symptom.

It’s actually not the root cause. This is how we see the root cause of it. And this will give you fundamental change and a hundred percent. And it’s I work with a couple of people who really struggle to lead. The sale, right? And not lead it as a pulling through, but shape how they see it differentiate themselves from the very first outcome.

And that’s a really important part. Now that the last thing is here as well is Demand must be present right before any sale can occur and most businesses don’t even consider trying to create demand intentionally create demand right if you can intentionally create demand for change and then the need for you then there’ll be no need for a sale people change the question changes from should we go with Terry to Why wouldn’t we go with Terry?

It’s a no brainer. They’re discounting reasons not to instead of trying to find reasons to. And it’s it’s a really fascinating it’s a really fascinating change of perspective. My four principles of work for my business are helping people change their perspective, unlearn the false truths about selling.

One is Always aim to find a competitive advantage in no matter what environment you’re in. If your kids go to the same school as someone, leverage that. If you’re in the same town, leverage that. If you’re in a country and your major competitor’s not, then go to see those people and do what you can to actually create a competitive advantage.

The other one is This only works if you’re proactive. Yeah. And I forgot the other one, but I’ll forget that. I’ll bring it up in a second.

30:37- Terry Wilson:

Yeah.

Look, you know the comment about there’s got to be demand. I’m in the process over the last 18 months of I’ll rephrase it. I wrote my first radio ad June of 1994.

And so I’ve been doing a lot of copywriting over the years. I’ve never done any it’s all been practical. I’ve written what I think works and we’ve modified things and learned as we’ve gone, learned as I’ve gone.

The last 18 months I’ve actually been studying it. So starting to understand the theory behind copywriting and one of the, one of the fundamentals in copywriting is that, you can’t create demand. Demand. has to be there. You can shift demand to your product, but there has to be that existing pool of demand. I see demand as not necessarily, Schwartz talks about levels Schwartz talks about levels of awareness. I think there’s a awareness where there may not be awareness, but there’s still, What you would call a need. I still classify that as demand. If people have got the problems, even if they don’t know that they’ve got the problems or don’t know that there’s a solution, there still is demand there.

There’s problems that need to be solved. And then how you communicate to them changes based on where they are in that journey, as you said. So I just wanted to come back to that, because I think that that can’t be understated that yeah. No sale happens unless there’s demand. And if it’s unknown at the point that you’re starting the conversation, you’re not going to get to a point of them wanting to buy from you until you get to that stage where you’ve shown them or taken them on that journey, that there is demand, that’s the get to the point.

32:12- Gavin Tye:

Yeah.

32:12- Terry Wilson: 

You, mentioned that so much.

32:13- Gavin Tye: 

oh, I was just going to say you can’t create something out of nothing, but what you can do is open their eyes to something that may not have been aware of, is open it up and go. Wow. I did not know that existed. Oh, more importantly, I knew that problem was there, but I did not know the flow on impact direct and indirect.

And I did not know that it was, could be causing me this much cost hidden cost in my business. And then you really just trying to open their eyes to something and let you can never tell anyone what to do. Terry, you can only show them the information and position it in a way that might impact them. And if you do it in a right way and it resonates with them.

And this way you need your ideal client profile and a bias within an ideal client profile so you can frame your message. But if you can do that in an authentic way where you’re trying to help them with a solution, hopefully they’ll pick up that message and go, Oh wow, that applies to me. Shit, I need to do something about that.

And then you’re on your way to creating demand and need for change. And, but yeah, but you and I have no need for a heart stent because we have no heart problems, right? Then you can’t manufacture something for no, no reason. Got a heart attack tomorrow though, that’d be a different thing.

33:26- Terry Wilson:

Correct. Absolutely. Absolutely. You mentioned earlier on that a lot of the buying process now can be completed before the buyer even engages with the salesperson. Statistics, 70%, 80 percent have been thrown around, I think five years ago they were talking 70%. I saw some stats last week.

That’s at 80%. I know that about 99 percent of stats aren’t true. But generally being in the game for a little while, you get a sense that people are much further down the journey than what they’ve ever been in the past. And, there’s this language around dark social and dark funnel. There’s so many areas that people can get information from. What does that even really mean for salespeople today? How can you influence, how can you get in and have an earlier influence and rather than just sitting and waiting for them to get to that point where you actually do get an inbound inquiry?

34:14- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah, so when you look at, we’re living, sales is a really interesting topic about this, right? When you, because we are all sellers and buyers and at multiple times in our life, when, just to prove that this is true, just think about Whenever someone goes to buy a car or a house, you do not call a salesperson first up, right?

What for a car, when we were looking for a car, we were like, okay, what kind of car do we want? What’s our what’s our family like and what do we need? So we did all this research, then went looking on webpage, like on websites, then drilled down into build your own car specs. And then when we’re ready to test drive, we were like, Oh, we don’t want to call these salespeople.

We’ll just go one or two. And then we would then we engage. We were 70 percent through the journey already, right? It’s the same with a house and it’s the same with this is why we’ve moved from the information age to the influence age if we just give them information, they come to these conclusions.

So the main thing about what I say is engaging. The more innovative and the newer you are, the more you have to go back and influence it. that they’re thinking or getting him to think about something a little differently to what they may have. And that’s why founder led sales, particularly from a technical founder is really important because they’re subject matter experts on this process inside a business.

And they can actually give insight, give talks or whatever that is, engage with people to get them to pay attention first and foremost. lead generations, what attention, awareness, interest, engage, right? And that’s why the subject matter expertise of the founder is so technical, right? It’s so critical in this stage.

So it’s really about testing as a founder, an hypothesis of, Hey, this is what I think the market will engage with me or what’s the industry trend. Where’s the trend going and how can I get them interested in engaging me to talk about a larger industry trend and then I could talk about my solution.

There’s really not, hey, do this one thing, try it. It’s about, I’m going to come up with four or five different hypotheses and test them on a consistent basis to different buyers within a business to see which one resonates and then go from there.

36:26- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah. Yeah. There’s the book, predictable revenue. And I think. When I was reading that, I started to question the whole process. I only read it three years ago but already I was starting to see from our perspective, because we sit in that front end, online SDR place in the funnel. I was already starting to see cracks in this SDR role back then, in terms of, this highly repetitive outbound, mostly spammy and high volume outbound, as we mentioned before, churn and burn to try and book meetings for account executives. I started to feel there was cracks in it then already.

How do you think that You could go to I guess what in, in what you do, how do you develop a reliable, repeatable winning strategy? I guess that’s the question.

37:17- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah, so I think that the predictable revenue, I think, has a place when a business has sales momentum, a large, I think about sales, the type of strategy that goes, it directly relates to how much sales momentum. that the business has in the market. If they’re trying to build momentum and turn that massive wheel, SDRs have no place, right?

Because they can’t book hundreds of me or 10, 20 meetings when there’s no, what are they doing? They don’t know the process. So the founder in the beginning needs to be involved, just needs to start talking to the market about, Hey, this is what I’m doing. And this is why it should start well before they’re ready to go to market.

This is what I’m starting. This is what I’m doing and know the solid framework about how people need to see value what their drivers are so they can actually start creating it now once they build up momentum and think about the funnel right all the way from leads all the way through to close and the founder is relatively across all of that.

Once I start getting momentum, yeah. Typically they’ll start figuring out the early part of the sales process first, like lead generation and discovery. Then they can start withdrawing back further into the sales process and supplementing maybe a salesperson, an AE on the front, right? Or giving someone a a chance from another industry.

Like I was lucky enough to get where you want that effort. From a red ocean industry where someone puts in a lot of effort, right? And they can learn as I go. As you start getting more and more momentum and you start getting more and more sales, I think when you’re at the 10 million, 20 million a year, there may be the predictable revenue model works.

I just, I don’t, I’ve never seen it work. And even when I’ve been part of it, it feels, it breaks rapport with me because I go, Oh yeah, I’ll talk to you, Terry. And you go, hang on, I’m going to hand you off to Tom. And I’ll go, I’ll just. I thought I was building a relationship with you right now. I feel part of a process.

So.

39:13- Terry Wilson: 

Don’t get me started on that. Some of my worst buying experiences have come through that process. It’s in, in organizations that had no right to be doing it. I’ve seen, and I think that’s why I’ve probably seen the, some cracks in that process, you’re right. I think it’s a good point.

You make in that it’s a larger organization with good sales velocity already coming through the business that you can start to separate some of those functions. Potentially I’m actually seeing a wave now across our customers and others that I’m speaking to of folding that in and having it full cycle again.

39:47- Gavin Tye: 

yeah yeah. So a team, a client that I advise we had last year, we did the SDR. We tried to do it right. And then, but they were largely remote. So SDRs. When I was working in office, they would learn by osmosis, right? That would sit down and just listen. They lose that. They just don’t. So they’re sitting blind at home, just doing effort and they’re not learning as, and it’s, it just doesn’t work as much from a remote work.

So now I we’ve redid that strategy where it’s an AE and they’ve separated out the accounts. I do account growth and marketing will sit on top. And then now we’ve got two pillars, right? We can compare one against the other slightly different strategies or They can try different things, but now we have an AB test to compare against as they will grow.

We’ll split it out to three and then maybe then once it’s momentum, maybe, but I just don’t, it doesn’t feel right. Like I’ve, I’m with you. It doesn’t feel right to put the SDR in, right? There is, I’ve seen that in a few different businesses that are growing. They’ve had pillars, right? Full cycle, right?

And it was particular markets aren’t massive. You don’t need, you’re not doing the you don’t need SDRs.

40:52- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah, I agree. I agree. In fact one of the arguments for rolling the SDR function in that I’ve seen through a couple of our clients has been that the account executives just simply aren’t busy enough. They’ve got so much excess capacity that they might as well be doing the prospecting. And then when they made the change, they found that the account executives, because of their industry knowledge and their expertise in the stages of the client buying process were much better set to be doing that.

That outbound and setting those appointments in the first place anyway.

41:25- Gavin Tye: 

There is so much that you capture during a sales interactions that you cannot put into a CRM and it gets lost from one person to another, they have to be for a particular longer sales cycle is there’s a, there’s sometimes there’s information that someone brings out in one of the first or second meeting.

That doesn’t pop up again for another six or seven months. And you need to be across it cause it’s really important. It’s hard to tell you exactly what that is, but I know it exists. And it can be the difference between a deal or not, or sometimes something they’ll say something here and you go, Oh that’s a red flag.

If you don’t address it there. You could go down and waste six or seven months and it pops up and you’re shit. I knew that happened back there. I should have addressed that.

42:06- Terry Wilson: 

I think it’s acumen. I describe it as acumen and it may not necessarily, it’s business acumen in terms of the industry you’re in, but it’s also your own acumen in terms of the process, the sales process that your clients from this industry go through. It’s beyond experience. People can do a lot of the same stuff over and over again and not learn.

But I think when you learn and you can improve that level of acumen is what makes the difference. You can’t have, it’s very difficult to have an SDR that’s never done full cycle. That’s fairly relatively new to the business or even the industry potentially have enough acumen then to be able to really deliver the same sort of results that an AE would in those same conversations.

And at that point, in the end, you’ve made all the money you’ve invested all of the money in your marketing and advertising efforts. You’ve done everything you can in terms of building your brand up,. the front end of leads into the business. You can’t afford to have once they’ve come in and raised their hand.

 The last thing you want to do is have somebody in your business muddle it so that you lose that opportunity.

43:08- Gavin Tye: 

I think you’re far better off using specialists who are subject matter experts on LinkedIn or white paper distribution or podcasting or something like that, that They’re just amplifying your message that no, that works or delivering your message in the most optimized way for however you want to target lead gen.

But circling back to what you said before about the right strategy at the right time. This is one of the reasons I started sales market fit is doesn’t matter whether you’re. Just trying to get momentum from scratch today or you have full momentum. Businesses make decisions the same way. But you need to have the right framework in place that you can add to the strategy and then you build it across.

Now, methodology and processes alone don’t do it. Like I’ve done Miller Hyman, I’m aware of medic, the methodologies are all effort based, but you need to have the outcome that you train, that you’re working towards without that, you throwing mud at the wall and hope some of it stinks.

44:06- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah, I agree. You’ve talked about the four eight methods. What’s that about?

44:13- Gavin Tye: 

So we all know complex B2B complex sales or B2B sales are complex, right? And there’s many different areas of complexity. So one of the things that I’ve learned is if you can simplify a process that people that at least they go, okay, if it’s more simplified, it’s more straightforward, then it’s easier to follow.

Then It gives people better outcomes. So basically the four ATE method is a four stage process of positioning and you go to market sales and positioning strategy, really. So the first part is. educate. So a great way to add value in a sales process instead of asking for a meeting or trying to ask them for the sale in the first instance is to educate them.

Now, the, one of the reasons I bring that up is imagine someone’s coming to you, right? They’ve gone to three other people who are similar to you and they go let’s have a discovery call. So you’re the third person on the third business to have a discovery call. Then you just do what everyone else says is, tell me what your problems are.

Tell me how it’s affecting you. So you’re just waiting for that to position your solution, right? Two other businesses do that before you. You just, where’s the competitive advantage? Where do you stand out? So I think about educating the market is. Educate the market. The discovery should be about educating the market on the actual root causes of the issues that you solve in an industry.

You’re not saying that they exist in their business, but generally this is why the root problems exist in industry. And if you can articulate that in a way that they go, I never thought about it like that’s really interesting. No one’s ever spoken about it like that before. Then all of a sudden you’ve differentiated yourself and you’ve given them an aha moment and they’ve gone, Oh, these people might actually know what they’re talking about, right?

And I liken is very similarly to another industry is, when people lose weight, Terry, they show the fat guy and then the skinny guy. If you only spoke in skinny guy language, you can very hard to see the value because you don’t know what the starting point was of the guy before he went on the weight loss journey.

It’s very similar to startups or B2B SaaS companies is they often only speak in skinny, skinny guy language. We do this, we shave 60 percent off, but they do, they give no context to the actual root causes of the issue inside a business or the market. So if you can articulate that clearly and say, Hey, this, we built this business.

I’m the subject matter expert. And I built this business because I saw a repeatable problem inside the, in the industry. And it looks like this, which is a business process flow. That’s what I start. That’s what I created. It may or may not exist inside your business, but it probably does to some extent.

And they go, wow, I never thought about it like that. You just educated them on something they didn’t know. You started. You cemented yourself as a subject matter expert. They’re more likely to let you lead them now to, to an outcome because you know what you’re talking about, right? Opposed to just trying to get the sale.

The next step of educators articulate, you want to be able to articulate your solution, how it applies to them in their world, not the features and benefits. That you’ve developed, but how those features and benefits actually help the workflow or their business, right? Remember the truth where people inherently act in our own best interest.

If you make them the center of conversation and go, Hey, this more than likely will exist in your business. That’s how we improve that process. Then the Delta is the ROI really. So as long as you can do the root cause issues that SAS businesses solve can be measurable. So if you do educate, articulate how your solution changes it, then you demonstrate it during a live demo.

Most people still would they do live demos, but a lot of people has a hesitant to do that. But if you have a starting point, Terry, remember how we spoke about using email to communicate and it’s really cumbersome. You’ve got to download the PDF on your hard drive and upload it somewhere. In inside our solution, where we, when we spoke about that, it’s like that.

Then you’re showing that you’re proving what you’ve actually said that you do. Then the last one, if you can do that over and over in a demo, this is what discovery is so important. If you can go, Hey, we spoke about that. That’s how we fix it. We spoke about that. That’s how we fix it. That we spoke about that.

That’s how it impacts your world, right? Changes gives you an hour back a day.

48:32- Terry Wilson:

Yeah.

48:33- Gavin Tye: 

Then the fourth part is a quantitate anything that you say you do and you prove that you show that you can do you have to be able to approve, you have to approve it so people only buy for three reasons wants to generate revenue wants to reduce operational cost and one is to reduce risk so have your ROI.

framed around, ready to go around those three measures. And and so it’s straightforward. It’s, there’s some complexity in each one of those, but if you can follow those four stages, then you were well on the way to improving your sales strategy and getting clients more easily.

49:07- Terry Wilson: 

One of the things I’ve heard a lot from our clients over the last 18 months is this terminology of ROI fatigue. It’s virtually, everyone’s throwing out ROI on that to the extent now that they’ve, Almost become, look it’s not that I don’t believe you, but I don’t believe you.

49:25- Gavin Tye: 

A hundred

49:26- Terry Wilson:

Everyone says that the ROI is going to be 2000 percent and, it’s either in ridiculous numbers, which often it is even though it’s true or it’s just so benign or not relevant to the individual receiving it.

That how do you get around that doubt?

49:41- Gavin Tye:

It’s a great question. I see it all the time. You just see, you can log onto any most websites and go, Hey, we improve officially by 66 percent there is nowhere in that process or where they engage with you that they ever try to prove it. And it’s, you can see, you don’t even, I don’t even see it anymore, but really it’s about whenever I engage with someone.

I’ll go, Hey, this is what we do. If you are serious about solving this problem, this is the journey that we will take we will go on together. And during that journey, we will go through some, do some exercises to get data from you, and then I will show you how we will fix it. And then you will get an ROI based on your data, not industry data.

So I think. Going through a process where people you diagnose what’s going on inside their business and you extract their data. What’s your problem? What’s your process? What’s the impact for this is for qualitative risk. And then you have a risk matrix score and then how your solution fixes that and the reduction of risk that’s their data and they give you that data.

50:44- Gavin Tye: 

So it’s a real ROI in relation to their business.

50:48- Terry Wilson:

Them specifically as opposed to standard.

50:50- Gavin Tye: 

Their specific fat guy model, their processes in a business, right? So I think there’s a big difference on ROI. Most people quote ROI as the cost of the solution and the benefit, right? They cost 50 a month, but you’ll get a return on investment of 300 a month, right?

At six X ROI. The real ROI is. The cost of the current process or the way of they’re doing things might like the difference between what they’re doing and their to be state minus the cost of the solution. And that’s why you need to be an expert of the direct and indirect impacts because first degree impacts are really super, like people know that, but they don’t know the indirect impact of, hey, that flows onto here and this is where you get your 10 to 20 X ROI.

In saying that, to sum up, the answer to your question is The ROI has to be customer focused. It has to show the customer how it relates to their business, because if they do like you or want you, they have to create a business case and get approval for change. And that’s why the simple like stuff on websites doesn’t matter because you’re not framing the message for their benefit and you’re not reducing that sales friction.

You mentioned earlier about. People, salespeople want to solve problems in their business, right? But the solution, once I implement, there’s a set of solutions. Beyond once they buy you, but there’s a whole set of problems inside the sales process that they need to solve even before a client gets there.

And this is where sales market fit or finding the right sales strategy will alleviate those issues that stop people from buying you because indecision at the end of the day is our biggest competitor, hands down. And that’s what we have to try to tackle first and foremost.

52:37- Terry Wilson:

And is sales market fit, look, how does it differ from the standard sales pipeline? The normal sales process, which we say is an inverted funnel. You’ve got your, inbound or leads at the top of the funnel. And then, the clients come out the bottom of it. How is the sales market fit different to that

52:55- Gavin Tye:

Yeah it follows the same. Think about that funnel, right? When you think about why is it wider at the top and smaller at the bottom? It’s because people will disk, they will self select out or not proceed forward from each stage of the process.

53:09- Terry Wilson: 

or be qualified out potentially?

53:11- Gavin Tye:

correct. But most people use a pipeline, a sales pipeline to forecast revenue for shareholders or for the founder or whatever, right?

53:18- Gavin Tye:

It’s not actually a sales tool. It’s a database for to say, Hey, I think in three months we’re going to close 10, 000 or 000, whatever it is. But the sales pipeline should be fundamentally aligned with the buyer’s journey. It should be. I’m engaging with a client here. I want to create demand.

Demand happens in three stages. Interest, want, then need. So everything that we do in our sales process is geared at creating demand because demand must precede the sale. And inadvertently, without that hope becomes a strategy. They hope demand is created, right? So everything that of the sales market fit funnel is.

is we intentionally want to create demand and we follow the client on their buying journey. Now, for instance, with that, an example is at red eye, we would show them red eye. We’d be really great at getting them to want, I really want, this is going to change the business, but I knew want is not enough. To navigate a complex buying process side in a large organization, right?

Procurement processes are difficult, so I would say, okay, I know you’re not ready to buy us. I’m taking us off the table. Now I’m going to run you through a couple of workshops to give you context and help you gather the information to get a business case for approval for change. And then once you get approval for change, I know you’re gonna have to buy us through tender process.

I’ll give you a set of requirements, system requirements, and tender documentation to knock a few months off the up buying process for you. So it’s easier and I get okay, right? I’ll go through these stages because I knew that they have to do it internally and I knew they weren’t experts in the problems that we solved.

If I left it to them, Okay. They would just not even see one tenth of the value of what we really were.

55:00- Terry Wilson:

Yeah.

55:01- Gavin Tye:

And I left at once with a client, it was a water utility. And they, we proposed to them 30, 000 a month. They went away, did an exercise and come back and said, Hey, it’s only saving us 30, 000 a year.

That’s not the right value. And I was like, ah, they’re just not experts in it. They’re just looking at superficial one, one metric. So they can’t go through. They can’t go through that process without you. If you do, you’re just introducing a huge amount of risks at the sale. I won’t go ahead.

55:25- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah. Does this apply to all different types of sales? We’ve been talking a lot, obviously, about high end and enterprise sales. Does it work with lower value sales as well? Does it work anywhere where the salespeople are involved in a selling process?

55:43- Gavin Tye: 

it does. It even works in like B2B where you may not have where you may be able to sell to one person, business professional, right? They still need to see value. But the main part is. Crawl, walk, run, right? Just walk through the process, get it working and repeatable and go, Hey, I know how to get people through here and then begin optimizing.

56:06- Gavin Tye-

Optimize to the point, or automate to the point where you go, I’m not getting the same result anymore. And go, okay. I think we’re at the optimal point of the law of diminishing returns beyond this point of when we’re automating, we start losing sales beyond what we’re capable of, what we want to do, right?

So every sale has to see value first, right? They have to see value before they buy, but you can see this demand inadvertently on any website, right? So when you think about the three levels of demand interest want the need on a mirror site, right? You’ve getting free for three boards, right? They’re trying to get you interested in using the platform at no cost, right?

They know they may not have labeled it exactly that, but they know that’s why people offer a free trial. They want you interested to start using it. Then after 14 days or you use your three boards up on Miro, they think you’re going to want it. So they offer the first price point and then they know to get to jump to enterprise.

People just can’t do it by themselves. So they have to create a need and that’s why you have to, or you have to increase demand. That’s why you have to engage with the enterprise team to go. So it’s everywhere. It’s already there. But this is just a more scientific way or based on human psychology to deliberately aim to create demand instead of hoping that it happens unintentionally or intentionally happens.

57:29- Terry Wilson:

Do you think there’s a way, and I was going to ask you a question about product led growth, PLG you covered it, you mentioned it already, but is there a way, do you think that you could apply this to a product led growth process? So it’s virtually, a hundred percent driven by the website and then the user experience, free trials, freemiums, user experience, as opposed to having a salesperson involved?

57:52- Gavin Tye:

I think that comes to, there’s some complexity when an enterprise sale, right? There’s a, I remember my biggest sale that I had, which was engage with them for 12 months. But then by the time they had a buying committee had 14 people on a buying committee, right? Or from I. T. The enterprise engineering drawing process covered all these different departments for a powered transmission provider.

You just can’t product like growth is just not going to cover those different buying personas. But I think once you understand the strategy. Of how to intentionally create demand and what your buyers want to see. And I’ve heard a great podcast on Lenny’s podcast with the people from Miro saying how they see some great indicators of people clicking on certain parts of Miro, it’s an indicator that they want to actually.

They’re going to actually up grow their account as long as you can see that and you know what you’re looking for. You can recruit, increase your return on effort. It’s all about return on effort. I’d hate to this. I’m not gonna use the saying right because of what’s happened in the U. S.

last week. But there’s a specific saying that I use is you’re trying to increase your hit rate. But if you can, once you understand the fundamental principles of it, And then, and you’re outcome focused instead of effort focused. If you know what you need to do at each stage and how to do it, then you can start winding that back and going, can I automate this in our business?

But most people don’t under understand the fundamental principle of how to get a business, how to create the demand in a really repetitive way that allows them to scale. And that’s yeah,

59:29- Terry Wilson: 

So again, in terms of thinking about where else this can be applied, I get it. Enterprise sales, there’s a level of complexity. You talk about buying groups and multiple people involved in that decision. Forget it. Hands down. I can’t see there’s going to be too many, product led growth plays into that scale of organization.

Not too many. That’s not to say there’s none. I’ve seen some quite successful get their way into individuals in an organization and then find the organization adopts it. But if I think about it in terms of creating demand, there’s a marketing component. So attracting them to your website you spoke about those things before, about the business founder or the business leaders being effectively thought leaders in, in the industry, becoming the go to person whether it’s the founder or whether it’s the team or whether it’s the brand itself then is used to attract people to a website. Do you think that this process can be adopted to any extent? In terms of helping that product lead process to get people through to actually a sign up and then we’re in so once they’re signed up where do you think it could be used

1:00:32- Gavin Tye: 

yeah. Look, I do think sales and marketing. Intrinsically linked in this process where I think the challenges comes from is when you hit demand creation, they go, Oh, that sits with marketing. And it, but I think marketing amplifies the message that works on the ground on a one on one basis. We have to be able to create demand in any situation.

In any conversation or the sales team. That’s why it starts. It’s got to start with the founder, right? But understanding people have short memories. Once I see value in something when you provide them with a huge outcome after a couple of months, I forget it. They forget that they’ve had, they forget what life was like.

So I think once understanding what the real value is that a company offers to a business, but then continually showing them. To say, Hey, this month you saved X amount of money. I know loom does it, Hey, this month you’ve shared or people watch this many videos. You’ve actually saved this many hours.

It’s a very basic metric. Yeah, but it’s still there.

01:01:31- Terry Wilson:

it’s there it’s a reminder I actually quite like the way that it does pop up and remind it in prior life in the steel industry you know it’s always about you’ve signed a new client how you’re going to keep showing value beyond discounting price all the time and so generally that exploratory process is much more intense than they’re ever used to in the past and we identify Five, 10, 15 ways that we can add value little things that are important to them that we don’t give them all at once in the first six months, you might indicate this and then the 12 months on there’s something else that you do and then you introduce it.

It’s almost like innovative and adding new features into software. to try and keep clients and customers happy and users happy in terms of your software. There’s this idea that you’ll keep bringing on new features. Where do you get those concepts from? While you listen to the customers, existing customers, generally it’s the paid customers you want to listen to, not the free trial customers. And utilize that feedback then to prioritize what new features or build you might do. And as you roll that out, that’s bringing an added value. And an enterprise where you’ve got a platform like you’ve been talking about, where. They may not necessarily, smaller features may not necessarily bring that much value at a point. How would you go through that process of reminding them or recognizing what value is being delivered over a certain period? Do you have some, is it a, is it just a communication? Do you have some type of strategic review? What would that look like?

01:02:51- Gavin Tye: 

So you can have, when I spoke before about the qualitative risk matrix, that’s a live running document, right? So one of the biggest challenges comes from When you go live when a client signs with a B2B platform, whether it’s a contract value they sign on value, but when it gets implemented, it often gets implemented on features.

And, oh, you don’t have this feature. And then people like, shit, I don’t like it gets the value gets continually eroded. But if you focus on outcomes from the beginning and go, Hey, you said you had this problem. This was the impact from go live. It’s exactly this. This is the outcome we provide and you show them this and you continually review it or you add to it over time.

Then you can show continually reinforced that you are adding. you’re at continually adding value. Now there’s a couple of things before you asked about with product like growth, if you could frame the value and particularly make in descending it to an economic bias, I, Hey, this month, your team saved this or something like that.

And if you’re waiting for them to come to you to say, Hey, what value have we been getting from you? That’s a really bad position to be in. But if you can be proactive in that and saying, Hey, getting on that front message front foot of that message, then if there’s room for account growth there.

they’ll be going, Hey, we’re getting value here. Where else can we use it? And I think that’s really important for any land and expand opportunity, is to proactively show, Hey, this is the value we’re offering or, or delivering stuff, like an internal case study that those economic buyers can take to their bosses and go, Hey, look, I implemented this.

This is the value we’ve got. Where else can we use it? But It’s about being proactive on the positioning of value and showing them. So they don’t ask the question what value are we getting from them? Which is not ideal. If that gets asked without an answer over many, over a long period of time.

01:04:35- Terry Wilson: 

And as onerous as it can be, I’m all for strategic reviews, whether that’s quarterly or biannually or even annually, but you really do need to have in that enterprise level quarter, some type of strategic review process where you’re keeping close with the client, obviously, which you want to be doing on an ongoing basis, but this is beyond the day to day type conversations.

It’s actually digging back down through all of those reasons they bought in the first place and being able to. Checkpoint that you are still delivering that value, show them the value you are delivering. And it might also, disclose some opportunities where, it might be land and expand to broaden the offer that you’re doing or adding some additional value somewhere along the line. I think that’s just part of it. Certainly of sales on that scale.

01:05:18- Gavin Tye:

I did a webinar the other day and I recommend maybe you speak to Dan Ross because he he has a point of view that real hockey stick growth comes from customer success. And he talks about when you churn, even a 10 percent churn rate can really have detrimental long term effects on your revenue growth.

But yeah he’s all about strategic review, right? And yeah, it might be worthwhile having a chat to him, but yeah, a hundred percent agree with you there, Terry.

01:05:41- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah. Yeah. So in, in your experience, since you’ve been out, In doing this particular work and sharing what you’ve learned with regards to sales market fit. In your experience, what’s the level of improvement that you’ve seen happen with your clients?

01:05:57- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah it’s been extraordinary with some and then some it’s been, marginal because I don’t put in the effort, right? It’s a, it’s. Longer is effort based. Some people come in and they just go, Oh I’m doing all this work, but I can’t put it together. There’s something that I’m missing. And I’m like, it’s just your framing, right?

It’s your framing and your positioning. And we talk about the four eight method and I go, Oh, got it. off they go and then we check in once a month. They come to the training sessions and they’re like closing, 10, 20, 000 deals every week after next, where before they were like getting 5 percent show up rates from leads.

And it was smart. They were not getting anywhere near the results.

Other people it’s a lot more work. Because they’re more technical, but then they’re too scared to put any effort or they get distracted that when they’re under too much stress, people go back to their default position, which is often technical, right?

So that guy, I’m doing a lot of lead generation stuff, but they’re writing technical blog posts about code that does not, it doesn’t resonate with an economic buyer. They think they’re busy, but they’re not doing the right thing. But it’s really about. Fundamental change. Like one company, one person, Allie from her business, she had a platform that improves the communication between healthcare, insurance provider, doctor, and patient.

And she could not get her model right. Her business process model. She goes, Gav, it’s just too busy. It’s too complex. I was like, imagine if you can’t do it then how can the market do it? And she goes, yeah, that’s a good point. It took her three weeks. It’s a seemingly easy thing to do, but it took her a long time.

01:07:35- Gavin Tye: 

She couldn’t see the label through it in the jet from the jar, right? She fixed it. She unlocked a 300, 000 opportunity then and there. And now she’s closing a multimillion dollar deal with a pathway to acquiring. So

it’s yeah, it’s once they get it. It’s, it really opens up. And some, it takes a bit of time, right?

Some markets are slow and some people maybe shouldn’t have started their business, but they’re in it. But one of the most exciting clients I work with is Leonardo the AI company that had a, They had a retail, they have a consumer product, right? Now they’re developing a B2B product.

And I was like so how’s this? I bet you didn’t know this could exist. They have a 16 million person waiting list. Email list, waiting list and I’m like, I never knew outbound could come to inbound that can go to outbound again. Might as well be a database like a, an outbound database,

01:08:28- Terry Wilson: 

Absolutely.

01:08:28- Gavin Tye: 

Interesting.

But like I said to them, okay, so what does your platform do? Oh, we, AI produces better images for, better than, Then what’s out there, but how does that help a business and they’re like, yeah, I don’t know how that would work. I was like, okay, so we mapped out the business process of how a design studio or a company would request images for a project.

And we went through it, it saves them millions and millions of dollars for one project. And they were like, he’s I just had no idea that existed. I just did not even have an understanding, even a subject matter experts who would design heads in studios were like, we just did not even think that was part of the process and demonstrable, Terry millions and millions of dollars where you think about in New York, you want to run a campaign to get a shut the street down, hire taxis cordon off the street, pay the city to have that street down and then maybe it rains.

Or whatever else, maybe the weather’s not right. So you’ve, you paid all that money and may not work. Whereas with Leonardo, you could say, Hey, give me a cityscape in New York on Madison Square Avenue with a yellow taxi in there and give me the image. It can do it in 10 seconds.

Millions of dollars, right?

It’s, to 85 percent and then I can go in and touch it up, right? It’s a phenomenal. But we worked on a business process. Yeah, really just that change of perspective, right? And being proactive.

01:09:50- Terry Wilson: 

Excellent. Excellent. Look so you’ve had some experience both being a salesperson and leading sales teams and now across many different sales teams. What are some of the values in high performing sales leaders?

01:10:03- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. So one is they’ve got to be customer centric, right? That’s the fourth principle. I couldn’t think of before, right? The fourth principle is being customer centric, right? And you’ve got to frame everything for the value of the customer. Yeah. And that’s where I know, I think a lot of culture in businesses today, it definitely comes, it’s one, what the founder says, right? 

Or what the sales leader says, that’s part. It’s only, I think that’s about 20 percent of it. It’s the actions that they portray is the other 80%, right? So they have to live. What they say, right? They have to do company culture or it comes from the sales leaders or the founder in this case. And if they’re being customer centric and being pro proactive and actively getting out there, getting the elbows dirty and trying to be tenacious, That has a flow on effect to those underneath them, right?

Cause you want to work with great people and it’s even more important today working with great people, working online. If you’re at home 40, 50 percent of the time, right? You and it’s demonstrable actions that make people want to follow.

01:11:11- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah. Yeah.

It’s inspiring. It’s inspiring.

01:11:16- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. What do you

01:11:16- Terry Wilson:

So then sorry.

01:11:18- Gavin Tye:

What do you think? What do you think are good traits of sales leaders?

01:11:22- Terry Wilson:

Oh, look, I agree with you. I think it’s the ones that are prepared to get their hands dirty that have done it before, prepared to lead from the front and show, I think the best way to give, bring the best way to help. your team be successful is to give them success, help them achieve. And so depending on where they’re at, recognizing that they’re not all going to be at the same level, that they’re going to need different levels of support. If somebody’s struggling, I’ve always found that the best way, if somebody is really struggling, one of the biggest issues that will be holding them back is themselves. It’ll be their own morale and self esteem. And so you can either pair them up with someone that is performing or yourself, go and help them go and close a few deals and start to get to that point where they can pump the chest out a little bit, square the shoulders and just start to feel confident in themselves again. And then that will bring them on. But working so closely also then lets you identify, whether it’s a can’t do the job or a won’t do the job. Scenario.

01:12:21- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah.

01:12:22- Terry Wilson: 

And I think part of it leadership. responsibility is making sure that they do also where there is underperformers through attitude as opposed to capability that they deal with that because the worst thing that any leader can do is let an underperformer continue in the business. It’ll just drag your top performers down if you don’t do something about it. So one way or another, you either lift them, they’re in, get them up or get them out. That’s something that But leading from the front, showing the way and helping them mature. That’s the one of the most important things.

And I’m with you. Self centered versus other centered. You’ve got to be other centered and have the mind of the customer in front of mind for you all the time. Perspective of the customer. Yeah I agree. What about what are some traits you’ve seen then? And it’s not, I know we can’t just say it’s the opposite of that, but what are some traits you’ve seen in unsuccessful sales leaders?

What are you saying that they’ve had in common?

01:13:13- Gavin Tye: 

So I think one of the biggest ones is getting sales leaders who hire people based off past experience and not off innate traits of the person. Oh, look at these guys work for Xerox or whatever. It’s I’ve been in a business like that and I kept continually kept hiring on those people and they just would not, they have their place in a large business.

They just don’t have their place in a small company because they’re not the jack of all trades and they’re just not going to go through the pain in their career or the challenge in their career because they’ve already been through it. And it’s frustrating. And it’s the thing for that is do it once and learn from it.

01:13:51- Gavin Tye:

Just don’t do it again. But I worked with a founder that continually did it. And then, but, and he would go hire them and he’d go and travel for three months. I was like, you can’t keep doing it because it keeps putting pressure on the team. There would be a January where he would hire six or seven people by August.

They were gone three years in a row that happened. I was like, stop. Stop hiring people. Like that. And he kept doing it and he goes, Oh, this guy. And I was like, we met him. We used to have roundtables and then we’d all meet him and go, no, turn hard because I’m hiring me anyway. So why even bother having a roundtable?

So he would just, he was just a solo operator and he was too directive down to the team. And he had the culture that had the culture of, Hey, we would, we want feedback and feedback is available. But when it didn’t suit him, he, that would just not, no, we’re not listening to it and do whatever. That’s the That’s probably a big thing as well is having your behavior different to what your state of culture was because everyone follows the lowest bar, right?

01:14:44- Gavin Tye:

That transfers into

01:14:46- Terry Wilson: 

Absolutely.

01:14:47- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. Yeah.

01:14:48- Terry Wilson: 

Absolutely.

01:14:49- Gavin Tye: 

what I say and not do what I do. So that was some of the biggest things there. And you hear it all the time. Oh, we’re going to hire this person got experience in this industry. He just knows a few people. They don’t know.

Tenaciousness or proactiveness is one of the most critical things.

01:15:04- Terry Wilson:

And look, there’s a huge difference, isn’t there, between, working for someone like a Xerox versus a, a beta, a startup business, you’ve got a known brand and there’s a level of credibility that comes with that. Then you walk in the door. Versus in a startup, where you’re fighting and clawing for every opportunity on the way and have to prove yourself every minute of the day, as opposed to, ah, yes, I’ve got, Xerox.

01:15:26- Terry Wilson: 

So there’s a, there’s credibility

01:15:28- Gavin Tye:

Yep. And then there’s more people in that Xerox team to support you and give you some of the stuff that you need. Whereas in a startup, I don’t think people quite understand what the role is in sales in the startup. It is mostly no, it is mostly scrapping for scraps, like trying to get people interested and trying to go well above and beyond.

to listen to you. And then one, they may not even have the the structure in place to buy from you because they’re too conservative. My worst loss, Terry come from, I’d chased the business for three years, want to tend to process final stage of procurement. Now we’re like, what’s that dip? then then increase.

I’ll go, Oh, that’s when we’re raising. They’re like, nah, we can’t buy that. That looks like you’re going to go out of business. And we’re like, that’s how startups work. And I’m like, sorry, like it’s over. And it was like, you’re getting three years of stuff. So

that was a hard lesson. And I was at Tony Robbins at the unleash the the, his conference.

I was like, I’m supposed to be feeling great. And it was, it ruined it. But it sees, I would not go through that today. I’ve been through it once. And at the end, I was like, that was a tear. That was the best journey I’ve ever gone through. I’ve learned so much, but I’m not doing that again.

01:16:36- Terry Wilson:

Yeah. Yeah.

01:16:37- Gavin Tye:

It was really difficult unless I’m a founder, which I’m doing it now for my own business, but I’m not going to do it for somebody else.

01:16:43- Terry Wilson:

Yeah. Yeah. Look for me. I think there’s a couple of traits that tend to be repeated. Once they’re in the team having one leadership style that they just apply all the way through, there’s your target, go and get it. The point and shoot the lack of support for the individuals. And the other one, I think, is that the only time that there’s a, there’s an interaction is at the end of the month when you’re reviewing the numbers as opposed to touch points along the way. I think that’s a bit of a recipe for disaster, particularly in a, smaller organizations for sure.

01:17:13- Gavin Tye: 

yeah, I agree.

01:17:15- Terry Wilson: 

Are you reading any good books lately?

01:17:16- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. I’ve got a few that are stacked up at the moment. I’ve got both April Dunford’s book obvious books, obviously awesome and sales pitch, which is on my next list to read. I’ve also got the second one from the challenger sale, the jolt effect by Matt

Dixon And Ted McKenna. And then the qualified sales leader from John McMahon.

So there’s a few different ones that I’m I’m reading at the moment and then planning my own at the moment in the next six months. Hopefully playing my own one as well.

01:17:44- Terry Wilson: 

No, very good. Very good. If there was any aspiring up and coming sales people and sales leaders are there any particular books that you’d recommend that they should get hold of and just as a, and not negotiable, if you’re going to move into a sales role, then you should read these books.

01:18:01- Gavin Tye:

Yeah, there’s a few different ones. I think the challenger sale is really important and it’s talking about, don’t go with the status quo, right? Don’t be afraid. To stand out from others and how can you offer value that no one else is doing? And there were plenty of space between the lines to do that.

And it’s, but you just got to go looking for it and be proactive and don’t be afraid to fail. And you, it’s being, having, I think that courage challenges doesn’t talk about it, but having courage in sales process is really important. I think just doing what everyone else has done is not going to get you the results that you want.

There’s. Chris Voss’s book It’s negotiating book. I could forget what it was. Never split. The difference is a great book on positioning messaging. That was great as well. But there are a few around. I’ve got a heap around. I just, but those two, the ones that stood out.

01:18:51- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah great. That’s great. I’ll put that on the end. Look, do you have any recommendations for sales or marketing leaders in terms of knowing just how well they’ve got their own sales market fit nailed down?

01:19:03- Terry Wilson: 

How could they find that out?

01:19:04- Gavin Tye: 

yeah, I’ve got a questionnaire. Like you can it’s a bit of a scorecard. We can come in and you can actually, I’ll ask, 10 or 20 or probably about 20 or 30 questions. Then out of that, I’ll give you a report. On what your level of sales market fit is. And then out of there, a bit of an action plan on how to make us, how to start improving it moving forward.

So I’ve got that. I’ll send you that link, Terry, to put with this. But that can also be found on on my website, I believe. And Yeah, it can follow me on LinkedIn as well. I can actually give it to people from there as well.

01:19:35- Terry Wilson: 

And what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

01:19:37- Gavin Tye: 

Yeah. LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn. It’s a Gavin Ty, T Y E. But you can also go to website salesmarketfit. co. You can find me there. There’s a white paper on the topic of sales market fit which actually tell you how to implement it from go to work all the way through. And but again,

01:19:52- Terry Wilson: 

so that’s just available for anyone that goes there?

01:19:54- Gavin Tye: 

Yep.

It’s on there. It comes a pop up there. You can get that. And then if you need some help, you can reach out to me and we can talk about how I can help implement it, help you implement it and shave off, a fair bit of time on actually getting it right for your business.

01:20:07- Terry Wilson: 

Excellent. Excellent. Thanks, Gavin. Look, I’ve got to say it’s been a fantastic conversation. It’s an area that’s very close to my heart. Our business deals and provides that. front end of the lead generation for inbound. I’ve lived an outbound life up until recently we’ve started a more of a marketing push. And so I know the challenge in terms of trying to get those sales processes in a business and particularly in the smaller business, it’s, you wear all the hats. Being able to get something that’s repeatable and that works is important. So thanks very much for joining me today. It’s been a great conversation.

01:20:39- Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Thanks, Terry. I think the most important thing in the beginning is to realize sales isn’t a numbers game in the beginning. It’s a problem solving game. And there’s only so many problems that people need to solve. They’re numerous, but they can be solved if you put it into the right framework. And once you have, once you realize it’s a problem solving game, then you’re not scared to make mistakes.

And then once you get that sorted, then you can ramp up your sales and lead gen strategy, right? So yeah, it’s really important. So thanks. I really appreciated your time and it was great to be part of this.

01:21:09- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah, it’s been good. Thank you.