How to Succeed When All Sellers Sound the Same

So, housekeeping out of the way. Don’t forget the feedback form. Over to you, Jonathan.

Hey, Matt, thank you. It’s great to be here and thank you all for joining. If my eyes are a bit red, I have been up early this morning, so hopefully that’s not going to be of any concern. Matt, thank you for that introduction. Really, really appreciate it. And the thing that I didn’t know was that there are over 600 videos available on the portal. You know, and I’m really looking forward to diving into those and seeing other perspectives as we all look to hone our craft and get better and better and represent the profession really, really well. So it’s a pleasure to be here. And in terms of the ISP, you know, really appreciate the opportunity.

Um, our time together today, uh, hopefully it will be slightly interactive. I know it’s not the perfect environment because we’re not having a conversation, but you can interact with the chat and through Q&A, and as Matt said, we’ll look to pause and bring in conversations as needed, or we’ve got time at the end for Q&A. But a little bit around the state of sales, right? So from a research perspective, what’s going on? What’s going on within our profession? What’s going on within the market? Touch on AI. It’s such a... Matt and I were talking earlier when we just joined the call, such an amazing tool that we’re all using more and more, and it’s becoming such a, a dominant force in our profession. A great tool to leverage, but also it poses certain challenges and certain threats as well, and it’s a bit of a leveller because everybody has access to it.

Differentiation is going to be key and a big part of what we talk about today. And we’ll look at it through a client’s perspective, but we’ll also look around what can we do to help ourselves differentiate in a often very crowded market. We’ll touch on trust, and then we’ll also look at this idea around a Trust Equation. As Matt mentioned, we are a partner of a firm called The Trusted Advisor. They wrote the book The Trusted Advisor. They’ve done a lot within the trusted space. And during that part of the session, I’ll show a QR code that if you want to, you can just capture with your phone to have it to hand and it’ll take you to their website and you can do a Trust Equation and just see some of the dynamics in there, how you relate to others. And it will give you some insights in terms of your own style and approach. Value matters, right? And we’ll talk a little bit around client value and looking at it through that lens. And then we’ll share just that short framework very quickly at the end in terms of how can we differentiate and how do we think about differentiation, again, through the client’s lens, not through what we bring. And then we’ll wrap it up with some Q&A. I know it’s Q4, so I do appreciate that, or for many of you, it’s the fourth quarter of the year, so I do appreciate it’s a busy time. So I appreciate your investment in that time with us, but I’ll look to get you away, you know, well on time, so that you can, you know, get into your, into your Thursdays and, and the work that you have at hand.

So just to set the scene, right, just a scenario, right, that we all, I guess, have been familiar with in some way, shape, or form. You’ve had what felt like really good meetings with the client. They liked your approach or your demonstration, if you had to demonstrate something. Your solution meets the brief, right? Everything seems to align, and you’ve sent the proposal as agreed, right? The proposal that they asked for. And then comes the question, right? ’Hey, you know, there’s very little difference between you and the other providers. Is there anything that you can do around price?’ Right? And actually, how do we differentiate? How do we create more value for them so that we not only position ourselves well, but also can avoid some of those conversations? And it’s just a, a framing question to get us started off. explored it more fully, and if you want to go into the chat, how do you describe differentiation? How do you think about it in the context of selling? I’m just curious if anyone’s got any particular views or perspectives on that. So, when you think about differentiation, how would you describe it? What do you think of? I’ll give it a minute or two to see if anyone’s got any views. If not, we’ll keep going.

So Gary, love that, right? You know, the quality of service, right? If we can deliver better service to others, absolutely, right? It’s a way that we can differentiate. So, I love that, Darren, right? How do we personalise? How do we really understand what’s important to them, right? And demonstrate that we’ve understood it. Our customer relationships, client care, level of aftercare, love that, David, right? It’s not just about delivering and winning the sale, if you like, or the mandate, the opportunity, but it’s also what we’re going to do after all of that. Something that your customers will value that your competitors don’t have. Value adds, non-monetary extras, level of that. So I really love this perspective coming through and we’ll explore it more as we get into the conversation. And also from a value perspective, just thinking about differentiation. And, you know, looking at it also from a client or a customer’s perspective. So, thank you for that.

And just want to touch on the state of sales. Um, I don’t know how everybody’s finding it. It’s going to be different in different markets and different firms and different environments. But on a macro level, if you step back and you look at sales at the current time, it’s quite difficult. I just wonder if you’re finding it harder to sell in 2026 and 2025 than you did in ’24 and ’23. And if you look at the macro data, actually, you’re not alone. If things are feeling a little bit difficult, there’s some data from Fullcast, which acquired Ebsta, from Ebsta, who was acquired by Fullcast, rather, earlier this year, in terms of their benchmark data reviewing a lot of sellers. Actually, you know, less than, you know, 78% actually missed target, right? So again, it’s a challenging environment for a lot of individuals in the markets that they’re in. So that’s from a seller’s perspective. If you look at it from a sales leadership perspective, from a CSO survey or chief sales officer survey that was done by Gartner, again, earlier this year, a lot of that is driven by external factors, right? Things that are going on in the market, the economy, the, you know, the indecision, all of those things that are driving technology, technology advancements, changes coming through, that a lot of the impact that we’re having is coming from external perspectives, and some challenges around all of that.

And I think, you know, it’s safe to say pockets are performing really well, pockets are actually finding it more difficult, but we’ve been here before, right? I always look back at history and see, like, what are some of the similarities, and whilst 2026 might be a difficult year, and, you know, hopefully things will get a little easier in next year in terms of on-target performance and attainment, we have been here before. For many of you, you’ll have been selling through the pandemic. And the challenges that came when the pandemic hit in 2020, suddenly everything that was done in person, we had to go virtual. There was a struggle to actually help buyers align and understand what’s going on and how they are working internally. And it just brought about a different sense of challenges that we needed to address as a profession.

Uh, in 2008, if I look back to, if any of you were selling at that time, I certainly was, um, the financial crisis became very, very difficult, right? Everybody was pulling back, you know, markets changed dramatically. The ability to engage and to actually help organisations make a decision to move forward with something, given the restrained budgets and the pressures that organisations were under was immense. And it was at that time, actually, I was at the Corporate Executive Board, or CEB at the time, when the Challenger sales model, and the Challenger model many of you will be familiar with, that was born out of this era, right? So, it was, you know, what are those performers that are still doing well in this really difficult environment doing differently? And Challenger was all around, how do we teach, tailor, assert control in that environment? And Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson did some great work around all of that. And I remember being at CEB at the time, and one of the phrases, I think, that Brent coined was, ’It’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell it.’ Or ’how you sell it’, rather. My accent’s coming through there. And I think that’s very apt for the time that we’re in right now. Not what you sell, but how you sell it, given some of the advantages and everything else that’s coming through with AI.

And of course, if you go further back, there’s the dot-com bubble, um. Again, really challenging time for people in commercial or frontline roles. And you can go even further back and think about, you know, the selling during the Great Depression. And I just stole the screenshot from the Sales History Podcast. For any of you that don’t know it, it’s run by a gentleman called Todd Caponi. He’s really fascinating and interesting. He’s written some really topical current books around transparency and sales and everything else. So I highly recommend you look him up. But his podcast is fantastic, and so often the challenges that we’re faced with now, or the issues that we’re looking at now, actually have been repeated throughout history. So if you’re a bit of a sales nerd or a bit of a history geek, I invite you or recommend you look up the podcast, because actually there’s some really interesting nuggets there. It’s available on wherever you get your podcast from. So we’ve been here before, right, in terms of a challenging market and dynamic.

But AI, and again, referencing the conversation that we had earlier, is such a wonderful lever, right? It’s helping us be so much more efficient, so much more, you know, uh, effective also in terms of how we do some of our role and produce that. So it’s offering us a huge opportunity, right? It’s an unprecedented opportunity in terms of the work that we do.

Uh, you know, I’ve often thought about sales when I talk to others that are around it, or team members, or clients. You know, there’s the desk part of the role, right? There’s the working, you know, the work that you do on your laptop and the work that you do to prepare and get ready and everything else. And then there’s probably what I’d call the performance part of the role. When we’re engaging with clients or customers, we’re in front of them or having conversations with them. And they’re two and very, you know, skills that we need to bring together, right? The, the, the craft and the art of it. And some are stronger at one end than the others. Ideally you want to be really strong at both. The, the aspect that AI is helping with this desktop bit, it’s driving huge efficiencies, right? If we do it well.

Um, if I look at a lot of research, and some of which I’ll share in a second, um, from Bain, but also organisations like Winning by Design, talking about the 3X seller, how do we get 3 times, three times as much time back to actually spend with our customers, to spend with our clients, to actually go out and have those important conversations, rather than doing some of the, you know, the desk work. Finding and prioritising clients, right? Doing the research, doing the preparation and the reach out, developing proposals, coordinating CRM, and doing all of the, you know, the admin work that we often get drowned out in, you know, reviewing plans and putting things together. AI is helping us with all of that, right? We’ve got to set it up and govern it correctly, but it’s driving huge amount of efficiencies, which lets us get out and spend more time, which most of us love doing, with clients, with prospects, having good conversations, and really understanding what’s important to them and how do we drive things forward. So, I think AI is offering us a huge opportunity here to actually get out and spend more time with clients.

If you look at some of the research, you know, before generative AI, you know. And again, depending on how you cut the research. But you know, we only spend a day a week on active sales time in front of the right and in front of sales salespeople, right? And it’s going up significantly. And it’s going to be different in different sales environments. But if you look at solution selling, at a macro level, we haven’t spent enough time with the clients or we can spend a lot more time with clients now because AI is helping us reduce some of this desktop work. We still need to do it well and govern it efficiently, but it’s a huge opportunity for us.

The challenge, I think, is that it’s also a leveller. And what I mean by that is we all now have access to very, very similar tools. So as Matt said in his intro, when we’ve all got access to the same information, we can all do the same prep. We can all get the same insights. It becomes very easy to be very samey in this environment and sound and come across very, very similar. Likewise, our clients, our buyers, have access to the same tools and environment. So, whilst it’s a huge add for us, it’s an unprecedented opportunity for us to lean in and drive with it, it actually becomes quite a leveller as well.

And, you know, I’ve always been interested in sales tech, and this is a slide from, you know, 2 or 3 years ago, just the plethora of technology that’s available to us to actually drive more efficiencies, become more effective, and everything else across a number of different dimensions. That tech there is still there, but we all now have access to the big six, right? We all have access, probably, to one of the big LLMs that we can engage, plug in, have all of the plugins doing things for us on our CRM and everything else. And again, it’s going to be different in every organisations depending on how you govern from an AI perspective, but it’s very easy to tap in and to research a prospect very, very quickly, get the follow-up done very, very quickly to generate some ideas and insights very, very quickly. Um, but we’re all doing the same thing. We’re all leveraging the same tools. So, information, knowledge actually isn’t the advantage that it used to be, right? All of our competitors have it, all of us have it, our buyers have it as well. So, how do we differentiate over and above all of that?

So just want to explore this idea or this concept around differentiation. So, I’m going to invite you to think about what city I’m going to share with you now. I’ll give you a clue, it’s a big city, and it’s on the waterfront, right, which you’ll see in the first slide. So, what city is that? Actually, let me see if you want to put it in chat if you want to have your best guess. I’d love you to share. Does anybody know what city that is?

Quite challenging, right? From a buyer’s perspective, actually, all the cities look the same, right? All of my potential suppliers look very, very similar. Darren, it’s Israel, 100%. Steve’s cracked it too early. Anyway, if I gave you another, a different view of the same city, but from a different vantage point. You’re going to see a bridge there, and I’d imagine that a few more of you might recognise which city this is. And I’m going to give you one more photograph, which is going to absolutely nail it, I’d imagine, for all of you. And it’s the same city. It’s Sydney, right? Sydney in Australia. Same city and just different vantage points. The point is, as soon as I show you that, it’s very distinct. It’s very memorable. It’s very different. And that’s what clients are looking for from differentiation, right? Something that’s distinct, memorable, relevant to them, as opposed to, you know, that first photograph from that angle, it could have been anywhere.

So what are clients hoping for? When they engage with different providers, different suppliers, they’re looking for a resolution to a challenge that they’re facing, or they’re looking for a particular service, or they’re looking for a particular outcome from somebody. They’re hoping for something that’s very, very different. And often, if you speak to them and you look at the, you know, the assessment that you get on win-loss reviews, or if you speak to procurement, or you speak to buying centres, there’s often a lot of the same, right? We get very similar things, right? A lot of the different firms could do the same thing, they all sound the same, they all look the same, they all could deliver the same outcome, we have high degree of confidence, they all have the right credentials. But they’re looking for something different. And unless you’ve got something that’s market-leading and you are clearly differentiated between your product or your solution or your service, actually a lot of that differentiation comes down to us as the frontline professionals representing our firm, right? One of our key differentiators for your client’s decision is you, is how we engage and how we shape things differently, which I think is quite empowering for us as a profession, right? How we, how we sell, right? Going back to that quote from Matt Dixon in 2008, right? ’It’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell it’, I think is very, very apt today.

And if we look at a lot of the research, it’s talking to the same thing, right? In complex B2B, it’s not just what you sell, it’s how you sell it. And so, just 3 research points, and you’ll have access to the recording and the slides if you want to dig into this a little bit more. But, you know, AI can create the capacity. We are talking about AI being a lever. It’s helping us with all of the desktop research. It’s helping us with a lot of the administrative stuff that we used to do within our role. So it’s creating more capacity. But it’s us as humans that go out and have those conversations that create the real advantage. So AI for efficiency, humans to actually drive that sales effectiveness, or that commercial effectiveness. And Bain was sharing, you know, almost that 2X revenue growth and productivity, if you get the mix right. AI and efficiency on its own, without the improvement or the different discussions and differentiators that a human can bring into those dialogues doesn’t quite get you there. You need that human element too.

McKinsey has done some research recently which says, you know, relationships are becoming more and more important. And I don’t mean, you know, the golfing buddy or, you know, let’s grab a drink and everything like that. There’s meaningful business-to-business relationships where you’re focused on them and their outcomes and actually helping them drive things through. Really becoming that trusted advisor is becoming more and more and more important, important in B2B or in commercial conversations, right? So not the buddy relationship, but actually building that sort of advisory type of relationship rather than being overtly sort of sales focused.

And Gartner sort of marries this up a lot as well. You know, so buyers need confidence. They need confidence in your solution. They also need confidence that they’re making the right decision. They need confidence in the information that they’re getting. And almost 70% of buyers are going back and saying, ’Look, we’ve done a lot of the research, we’ve pulled this in from AI, but actually we want to have an engagement with somebody to validate this, to help us pressure test it.’ And it comes back to then the second bit being that trusted advisor. So how do we help as a profession buyers make better decisions?

And so if we look at all of the research, and again, you know, there are other firms that are doing a lot of great research in this space right now that you can tap into, and happy to share other points of view if you want on the back of this, if you get in touch. Our takeaway is for buyers to choose you, it’s not what you sell, you must first, they must first trust you, right? It’s what we do and how we engage is going to make a huge difference in terms of the differentiation that you can bring into the conversations and the outcomes that you’re delivering for your clients.

So with that, for us, it’s, it’s that, that human perspective, right? So how do we get back to, and again, looking at Todd Caponi’s Sales History Podcast, a lot of the themes are coming back to the same things again and again, right? It’s actually that human connection, that human rapport, the good intent, the conversations, the, you know, driving things that actually separate organisations and firms and why buyers often tend to pick certain organisations and certain individuals over others.

So looking at a lot of these human dimensions, and a lot of these used to be called soft skills. And I heard somebody talk to them about, you know, these are really power skills now in the, in the age that we’re in with so much information and so much knowledge and AI driving. So like these soft skills or, you know, these human skills are really the power skills that are going to drive our profession forward, I think, especially in complex sales, right? Earning trust, really understanding the client from their perspective, you know, and helping them decide. So, you know, building and maintaining trust. You know, that active listening, being really present, helping them articulate and think about things and get things down. Handling difficult conversations with them. You know, that purposeful curiosity.

Curiosity, it’s a great topic. If anybody’s interested in it, there’s a great book from a researcher in the States called Diane Hamilton, Dr Diane Hamilton, and she wrote a book around the curiosity code, and Cracking the Curiosity Code. And there are four things that actually numb or detract from curiosity. There’s the environment that you’re in, there’s technology, there’s fear and assumptions. And if I look at a lot of those, or at least 3 of those, AI is actually accelerating all of that. I don’t need to be curious anymore, because I can find out everything about you through technology. I can leverage AI, I can do all of the research, so when I show up, actually, I know more, I know so much about this, so I’m not genuinely curious and interested in your perspective around it, so. I think that, you know, this purposeful curiosity and maintaining curiosity and nurturing curiosity is going to be a superpower skill for our profession as we go forward.

Commercial acumen, of course, navigating the organisation, helping them navigate the organisation and bring different stakeholders together to align, and then helping them decide. Judgement, right? We’re often here now, and in that Bain research that I shared earlier, judgement is such a critical piece. You know, how do you bring different bits of information together? Know when to push, know when to back away. How do you help shape and work with your champion to move things through the organisation? Matt, you’re in public sector work. Judgement in that is so critical, right? Knowing when to pursue, when to slow down, when to move to the left, to the right, to actually bring different stakeholders together to get this done is going to become such a powerful skill, right? Because it’s becoming more and more dynamic. Sorry, I don’t know if you’re going to come in.

Public sector is so heavily regulated. And using your judgement to know when you are under the regulation and when you’re free to talk is just massively important in public sector. If you don’t get that right, you miss opportunities, or you ruin your possibilities.

100%, right? And the thing is, AI is not going to help us with that, right? That comes down to, you know, the skills that we have, which I think, again, is so, um, you know, exciting for us as a profession, constructive challenge, storytelling, being able to take people on a journey and, and good qualification. And you know, we’re gonna have to get better at AI. We all are. And that continual journey in terms of, of self-improvement.

So I just want to focus a little bit on, on trust and building and maintaining trust, as I mentioned, we’re partners with The Trusted Advisor. Uh, if you don’t know the book, The Trusted Advisor, it’s a great book just in terms, and it’s all... seminal human interrelationship elements, uh, becoming more and more important in how we differentiate and how we can turn up differently. I just want to talk a little bit around trustworthiness. So, building and maintaining trust. Two things need to happen, right? Somebody is trusting and somebody is worthy of that trust, right? Or there’s a high degree of trustworthiness, and then you can build trust, right? If you think about it, there’s the trustor, the one that is going to, of it being trusting. And then there’s the trustee, the person that’s driving that. In order for that to be right, there needs to be an element of risk. So if you think about you want your clients or your buyers or different stakeholders to trust you, there’s a bit of risk on their side. And so how do we mitigate that risk, minimise that risk and make it easier for them to trust us, and that’s probably through, sort of, the values and how we show up and how our conduct, right? And that comes down to our trustworthiness.

And David Maister and Charles Green and Robert Galford put a pretty powerful equation together, which some of you may know, that it’s trustworthiness equation. And I’ll invite you in a second to capture a screenshot, which will take you to an assessment where you can actually find out your own Trust Equation. But trustworthiness, right, not trust itself, but the trustworthiness that we bring falls down to four dimensions, right? The credibility that we bring, how credible are we, our reliability, how good are we at doing what we say we’re going to do, and the level of intimacy that we can build with the individual that we’re engaging with, right? So trust is a very personal thing, but the level of intimacy, and I don’t mean intimacy in a... It includes, well, actually, how do we have safe conversations, right? How do we get under their skin and really understand things from their perspective is really, really powerful. And that gets eroded, right? Or the denominator in all of this is our self-orientation. Is this about us or is this about them? Right, and it’s hard for us as sellers to go in and actually make this more and more about them, because of course, we’ve got targets to hit, we need to drive revenue. So being conscious of this as a derailer of establishing trust is something that’s really important and getting that balance right. Which is why this is such an exciting craft and an exciting concept to think about when you explore the Trust Equation.

So let me break it down a little bit more. So credibility. It’s not your spreadsheets, it’s not your client logos, it’s not everything else, because everyone else has got that. Credibility often surfaces. Now, can I trust you? Can I trust your expertise? For me, it’s often the questions that we ask demonstrates credibility, right? The curiosity that we bring, looking at it from different perspectives, back to Matt’s point, the judgement that we can bring. In all of that demonstrates our credibility. You know, we’ve done this before. We’re asking the right good questions, the challenging questions, not for our gain, but to help the client think differently. That demonstrates our credibility more than a list of logos on a creds deck. You know, bringing insight relevant to their business, right? Thinking through some of the perspectives that we can bring, admitting when we don’t know. ’Hey, don’t know. Really don’t know, like, let’s try and figure this out together’, right? Saying you don’t know is a great way of, of building trust.

Reliability, right? Can I depend on you? Do we deliver what we promised, right? Do we meet the deadlines? Do we flag problems early, right? Again, you know, um, being open and having good judgement, you know, in terms of, ’Well, this might be an issue. Let’s explore together. You know, I just have a concern, you know, for your benefit, not for mine. You want to get it done by this, unless we do those things by a certain date’, right? How I flag problems early is going to help us with that reliability and dependability.

Intimacy, can I speak openly with you, right? This idea around listening without weaponising information, I think, is so key. You know, so often in a sales environment, people talk about pain. Can you find the buyer’s pain? And what happens when that pain is shared? It’s used against them, right? ’You said you this, or you said that’, or the... Actually, it’s not about that, because as soon as we start to weaponise, and again, it’s a term that I’ve coined, but, you know, use that against them, they’re gonna sort of clam up and not want to share so much with us, right? Can I speak openly with you without you using it against me? Can I handle sensitive information and keep confidences? Can I make it easy to discuss concerns and difficult conversations in a safe space?

And then that self-orientation, whose interests come first, right? This is the epitome of being client-centric, right? It’s not pitching too early. It’s really understanding their context. It’s making sure that we are listening and engaging and doing things that are right by them, right? Earning the right to push if we need to push. But it’s their deadline. It’s their priority over ours. If we need to move things forward, how do we make it beneficial for them, not in a discounty way, but really understanding the benefit to them and the outcome for them, right? So we do all of this good work, and it can be undermined by that self-orientation. So it’s just a framework, but it’s just where are we on that? How do we use this to actually build trustworthiness so that clients will start to trust us so that we can start to share different information so we can get to a different point and validate more value for them in terms of how we show up, not what we have in our bag. And this comes back to AI being a huge leveller, but actually there’s a lot that we can do to differentiate. Matt, let me take this.

Yeah, can I ask you a quick question?

Yeah.

Developing trust is something which happens over time. How do you get that? How do you start the process? How do you get your first foot on the road with the client? Is there something that you can do that immediately starts you on the journey?

Yeah, so, so often we hear trust takes time. I think, and I’m just gonna challenge it. I think that’s a comforting thing to say. Okay. Because trust can happen quite quickly, as long as you get these things right. And the big derailer from a sales perspective is it’s about them and not showing our cards that actually we’ve got the target and everything else. And so I think if I’m looking to accelerate trust in conversations, it’s creating that safe space, leading with a few insights. But actually, really being crystal clear on the outcome for them and asking some of those hard questions. I think it’s asking the hard questions that sometimes you don’t want to ask because you haven’t yet established trust. ’I don’t know them well enough. I can’t ask that. I don’t want to get into that.’ But it’s by asking the hard questions and getting your clients to think differently about their best interests and what’s good for them really starts to show that you’re mindful about their outcomes and not what we’re trying to achieve here. The way that I’d often phrase that is, you know, if you’ve had a good conversation where somebody goes, ’Hey, you made me think differently about this. Thank you so much, that was really valuable. I don’t know where we’re gonna go, but that made me think differently.’ You’re immediately starting to establish trust because you’re getting them to think differently by asking those hard questions. But with their benefit in mind, not my benefit in mind. And that, I think, is a real accelerator for trust. So, long-winded answer, um, but it’s by asking those questions that are well-intended and they’re good in terms of getting them to think differently that I probably think, ’Oh, I haven’t earned the right yet to ask them.’ By asking them, you then start to establish trust and rapport and everything else.

So you can start it, you have to start it from the very first interaction.

You have to start it from the very first interaction, otherwise it’s, you know, six months of, you know, pleasantries to establish some sort of rapport, but actually we still never get to that trusted status, because we’re not asking the hard questions that are, you know, we’re focused on them and their outcomes and being able to challenge in the right way. It’s where is your intent? If your intent is about their outcome, it’s easier to ask those hard questions, and it’s through those hard questions that you start to establish and build good trust. So love your point, but I challenge that actually trust takes a long time. I can trust somebody within two days or two minutes. You’ve made me change the way I think about it. Okay, anyway, there we go. Thank you.

So I’m going to pause here. If anybody wants to do the Trust Equation, have a look on the slide or grab your device, take a, what’s it called? Screenshot, photo grab thing of that. It should take you through to the Trusted Advisor website and there you’ll be able to fill out a form, and they will email you your Trust Equation. If you can’t get it, contact us afterwards, and we’ll be able to send you through to the... Pretty easy. It works. Okay, Matt, thank you. Appreciate that. They’ve done, I think it’s 400, uh, Charlie, it’s 400, 450,000 surveys now, so there’s a great benchmark of data there as well for you to be able to assess yourself against.

Just want to touch on value, and then talk a little bit around this VALID framework, and then we’ll get to some Q&As. Value matters, right? Value matters above everything else, really. You know, we need to establish trust, be different to identify and create more value for our clients, and that’s really the differentiator, but trust comes first, how we differentiate first, and then we can uncover more value. So I just want to share a framework which, uh, we’re very, very proud of, um, because it’s taken a lot of research and time, and our clients find it very, very helpful around value. And before we do, just in the chat, what is value? How do you think about it? If you think about value in the context and value from your client’s perspective, how do you think about value? What is it that your clients or your customers value about you?

And as you’re thinking about that, you know, it’s complex, right? But value. Something that I can do which moves my client closer to success, 100%. Value matters above all else. It’s what aligns us. You know, the more value that we can identify, the easier it is to differentiate, the easier it is to progress things, the easier it is to defend our fee level or our pricing or everything else. It’s all comes down to this sort of equation around value, and I love that, our knowledge and experience, right, being able to solve problems, how we can solve problems and feel good about the relationship and the process. The more value we can identify, actually, the easier these conversations go, and it’s on us to establish rapport, differentiate, build that trust, to be able to have the good conversations that help us do that.

If you ask five different clients to define value, you’d get five different answers, right? What truly values to you? It’s hard, right? We’ve got to uncover that. And so I’m just going to share a framework with you just to think about value. But before I do, value is complex, right? And I can see in some of the answers coming through in chat, it is a, it’s a complex topic, especially in B2B selling. And value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And what we mean by that is I can’t force my value onto you. I can’t push it onto you. I need to introduce ideas or uncover ideas, and then I need to validate why is that of value to you. And it’s through that validation that I actually understand it from your perspective, rather than saying, ’This will be of value.’ But, you know, there’s a difference between a USP or a value proposition from a marketing perspective, which is that broad-brush mass outreach piece, which is done through research, but this is how we differentiate in our value proposition, versus what we get into, which is the one-to-one sales relationship, value to the individuals, and actually validating why is that important, why is of that value to them, and it’s through that validation that we have something that really matters and we can differentiate around. Right, so it’s in the eye of the beholder. Could be logical, emotional, quantifiable, subjective, objective, right? There are different mixes around all of this.

But I’m just going to share a value framework with you, and this was born out of a lot of research that we did, looking at, you know, the BCGs and the Bains and McKinseys and what everyone was talking about in a B2B context, what is value, uh, looking at a lot of our clients, looking at a lot of their win-loss reports, doing a lot of surveys and research with them. And there are about, I can’t remember off the top of my head, I think it was 126 different variables that you could see that were of value in this B2B landscape. But it clustered around, if you started to group it, it clustered around four key elements.

The first was business value. Like, what is the organisation trying to achieve? What is the opportunity it’s trying to capture? What is the challenge it’s trying to address? What is the risk it’s trying to mitigate? But what are they trying to achieve? What are they trying to move to away from a business perspective? I’d say that higher end, it’s not our servicing or our knowledge. In aid of what, right? How’s it going to help the organisation move forward?

There’s value to the individual, which comes back, if you think about that Trust Equation, the intimacy piece. Like, what’s important to them, right? They’re part of this decision, so if I think about the different individuals that I’m engaging with in terms of this pursuit or opportunity, what’s important to them? It’s the first time they’ve done this, it’s a safe pair of hands, it’s how we can network them with others, right? It’s how we can help them get the promotion that they’re wanting, or they just got the promotion, how can we help them feel comfortable and secure, right? But there’s value to the individuals that we’ll be engaging with.

There’s value in, and it came up a lot in the chat, what we do and how we do it. And so solution could be the product set, but it’s how we deliver what we deliver. Our solutions, our capabilities, our service, our product set, et cetera. And our technical expertise, if it’s so well geared. And then us as an organisation, how we, you know, the provider or, you know, why us, why our business? Right, our terms and conditions, right, our credibility, right, our brand, our positioning in the market, you know, our global reach, or local heritage, whatever it might be, but things that the client might value based on our organisation. Now, again, none of these matter unless we’ve had the conversation and we’ve validated it with them. Like, why does this matter to you, right? All of these different elements.

But what is the upshot of this, right? If I think about the outcomes, this is really where you get that return on investment. And what are they trying to achieve? And what’s the return on that? Or the cost of inaction. If they don’t do something, how is this going to hurt them? But at a business level, it creates that ROI or the cost of inaction, which we often don’t focus on as well. If we’re good at building out that individual value, we create a genuine champion, right? Somebody that’s going to help us. And Matt and if I think about the public sector, having a champion on the inside that’s going to get you into the meetings that you couldn’t get into, you’re going to share information that they can disclose, but they probably aren’t going to share with everybody. Right, that real champion is going to help us uncover a lot more information, but we just need to understand their own individual value drivers to do that. And then there’s the value that we provide in what we do, the solutions that we provide, or us as a provider, which really is how we can differentiate again once it’s been validated.

So if I was having to write a proposal, if I think about these different value drivers in this value framework, if I was writing a proposal, the top one is, this is why they’re doing it. This is the business case, what they, you know, where they are now, what they’re trying to achieve, why that matters, what the outcome is that they’re looking for. The S is, how do they want it done, and why do they want it done that way? Why is that important? What are we validated through the conversations? And the provider is really, who do they want to do it with, and why? And why that sort of organisation? And we validated all of that. So I’ve got all the ingredients to put a really strong proposal or, or way forward in front of the client. And the individual value is probably, if I do that well, how I’m going to capture all of that, right? If I can build that, that’s where that trust, that intimacy, that rapport, the CRI and the, and making sure the S helps me actually build out that champion that’s gonna help me uncover some of this other information to put the best possible position forward for the organisation. And that’s how actually we can differentiate through how we show up and sell.

Definitely. So often, when we will do win-loss reviews for the client, they’ll say things like, or, you know, um, their client will say things like, ’Actually, there was another firm that could have done this. They were cheaper, they were more credible, they had a better solution, but we went with them because they just got us. They understood us. We felt like there was a better rapport.’ And that’s down to not what we sell, but how we sell it, which I think in the age of AI and everything else, getting back to some of that human element and human dimensions is super, super exciting, even in environments where it’s very, very technical or it’s very driven by procurement. As long as you still have access and we can show up and have conversations, it’s through that interpersonal exchange that we create and capture and validate more value and we can start to differentiate ourselves. So I think it becomes super exciting and it’s a super exciting time for us as a profession. With AI, we can spend more time doing the things that are really going to matter rather than getting swamped up in some of the desktop work.

What is the output of this, right? If we are strong just in these two areas, we’re probably gonna be a capable supplier. If we really want to elevate and get into that trusted advisor relationship, we really need to understand things from their perspective, from a business standpoint, and from an individual. That’s where we actually elevate the level of conversations, by moving conversations up into this space, and being clear and validating that with a variety of different stakeholders.

So I’m conscious of time and also just want to get to some questions if we have any. So I just want to share a quick VALID framework that we use with our clients and you’ll have access to. But differentiation needs to be valid, right? We can differentiate by how we show up, by how we sell, but really that’s in aid of getting better information and validating that information with the client so we can position ourselves really, really well. But clients only value differences that they can see and that matter to them, otherwise it’s just noise. But a simple framework that we often use with clients is, you know, VALID. Can we validate it? The client has clearly validated your differentiation as being important to them. They can articulate it. Is it easy for them to discuss and articulate internally? A lot of the, you know, you’ll have heard this phrase, a lot of the selling that happens in an organisation is not when we’re in front of them, right? It’s in the corridors, in the rooms that we’re not party to. So how well can your champion and your stakeholders articulate the why you, and your differentiators, and your positioning, and everything else through the information that you’ve been able to capture and validate through being different in your exchanges. But if, again, I’m not picking on public sector, critical in public sector, right? You’re not going to get access to how well can the people that you’re engaging with carry that message on internally. Is it, can they legitimise it? Is there social proof? Can you sort of back it up in a way? Is it clear in terms of the impact and the business benefit that it’s going to drive for them, and is it distinct, right? Is it something that’s going to be memorable and different to your competitors? And if you start to work on that, on the big opportunities that you start to see some, some differences and actually where the gaps are and how you can, you know, convert more opportunities to be successful for you.

So, a lot in there, uh, to take away. I’m gonna pause now, you know, as I said, we do a lot with the Trusted Advisor. Um, we’ve got a programme that we run called The Differentiation Advantage, which is really all about the capabilities that we as sellers can bring to bear. If you want more information, again, there’s a QR code there that you can download. If not, we’ll share our contact details at the end.

Key takeaways. And then we’ll get into Q&A. AI is such a powerful tool, but it’s going to help us drive so much more efficiencies. If I think about that desktop work versus actually getting out and actually having the conversations and being present and being with clients in the areas that matter, it’s going to be revolutionary for us. But everyone’s got access to the same information. So how we show up, right, how we hone our craft, how we become the professions and the professionals that we want to be, and through the ISP and all of the research and knowledge and thought perspectives that they bring is helping us with all of that, but we can make a huge difference, right? It doesn’t need to be something in our bag. And that tends to the second point, right? The biggest differentiator in a lot of markets is us and how we show up. And it’s the human elements, it’s trust in the human skills that’s gonna make a huge difference, um, we believe, in the next couple of years in terms of sales, and how well you do in your respective markets. But anyway, um, hopefully, I didn’t go too fast. Hopefully, my twang was all right for those of you that are picking up a bit of a twang in my accent. But, Matt, let me pass it back to you and see if anyone’s got any questions or comments or perspectives before we look to wrap.

While people are thinking and typing, please give us some questions. So fascinating. Thanks, Jonathan. Really, really insightful. And it’s given me a couple of new lenses to, to look at things through. The last piece, the kind of the VALID, VALID framework, and one of the challenges in public sector, and so I talk a lot about public sector, because that’s where I sell to, but is actually getting it early can be tricky. But what you’ve just said in terms of, of that framework applies equally well to a written, written proposal. I hope so. You can. You could. You can use that to craft your win themes that, that go throughout the proposal. So I thought that was really useful.

Thinking about AI, I use AI a lot, as I guess everyone does. But, but there’s a, there’s an old analogy, which is that the factory machine stops working. You phone up the £1,000 a day consultant, and they come in. And they look at the machine, they get the hammer out the bag, and they hit the machine, and they say, ’Why did we pay you £1,000 to hit that machine with that hammer?’ And the consultant replies, ’You didn’t pay me for hitting the machine with the hammer, you paid me for knowing where to hit it.’ Yeah. And I think AI, for me, still has that, has that ability to create an advantage, if you use it in a way that’s more creative than your competitors are using it. And that comes from understanding what the customer values, understanding how to give value to the customer, and then understanding how you can use your knowledge plus that accelerator to be even more effective. And this morning I used it to write the golden RFP, the golden tender for my customer. Now, I use that, I use my knowledge to understand, A, that that would be of value to them, because I checked first. I can bring all my knowledge into it, but then AI did it in about 10 minutes, and it would have taken me 3 days. So, now, arguably, they could do it in 10 minutes too, but they don’t know where to hit the machine, and I do.

100%. I think that hitting where, where to, where to place the hammer is such a critical, uh, piece, and, and, yeah, it comes back to... Okay. Judgement, knowledge, all of those good things as well. So, yeah, really, really appreciate that.

Just quickly, and Charlie’s put the book in the chat for you, Jonathan, if you’re asking about that.

The aspect around VALID and the proposals, I think that’s really, you know, it’s a great way to think about it. Actually, how differentiated are we? And with AI, again, many of you will know this, is this proposal about us, or is it about the client? And put your proposal into AI and say, ’How many times do we say my name, my company name, me, us, you, us, versus you, your, your client name, and is that ratio about 3 to 1?’ And suddenly you’ll see, actually, this proposal’s about you, it’s not about the client, unless you get that ratio of about 3 to 1, right? You know, leveraging AI for things like that as well. Are we saying the right things? Is this about us, or is this about them? Is a really, really powerful, powerful aspect. I just triggered a thought, you know, given that you’re talking about proposals. And... yeah, copy of the slides are there. I don’t think there are any other questions. So there’s some details on the slide. If you wanted to get in touch with us, there’s the ISP website address, which you will all know, as I said at the start. 600 different videos there and thought pieces, plus all of the other content. So I’m definitely going to be tapping into that because I’m a bit of a sales nerd in terms of just understanding our profession and how we can all do better in it. So looking forward to tapping into all of that. And Matt, I’m going to say thank you and thank you to the ISP for the opportunity, and thank you to all of you for your time today. And Matt, I’m going to pass it back to you.

Pleasure. Thank you. Really insightful. Thanks again. Let’s keep in touch. Nidhi has put the feedback form link into the chat, so please feedback on that and take advantage of everything that the ISP can, um, furnish you with in terms of all that content, and now some great new content in there from Jonathan and the team. So, thanks everyone, enjoy the rest of your day, and see you on one of these again soon. Okay. Thank you, everyone.

Bye. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.