Why Telling Buyers You Are Different Never Works

You all look and sound the same. When you show up talking about you, your, your, your, your distrust you.

How do you go about actually building that trust?

But trust is a principle. It’s like gravity. AI never delivers that. People deliver that. We’ve done big training programmes that fail. Why would I say that?

Welcome back to another podcasting episode. Joining me today is Les Bailey, uh, the CEO at the Sales Coach Network. Uh, Les, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights today.

You’re very welcome. Looking forward to it.

So you founded Meridian, build it up, sold it to Accenture in 2006, and then you spent close to seven years inside kind of that operation. So, uh, question to you, what made you, you know, walk away from Accenture and go independent again?

Great question. Incredibly selfish, and I loved my time at Accenture. Accenture on its good day is is fabulous, but like everywhere, on a bad day it can be, it can be tough. I think the the key, the key thing for me was, well, there were two things. Number one, I entered Accenture by acquisition, and I was already, I thought, quite an experienced business developer, quite an experienced sales guy, and I learned so much about consultative selling at Accenture. I wondered, why did I never know this? So that, the high of of having that and being exposed to that, one, was incredibly invigorating, and two, that’s really what started the prompt around helping others with consultative selling. And the reason I went independent is in a large organisation you run to the beat of the organisational drum, and that means they own you as a senior exec. They own you. And, you know, the day I decided to leave Accenture, to retire effectively, I just got off the train in Amsterdam to go to the Dutch office to work on a deal with the team. And as I got off the train, I got a phone call from my boss, who said, ‘Where are you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m just got off of Amsterdam and I got, I’m, I’m going to work on this deal.’ ‘Okay. When can you be in Helsinki?’ I, ‘Hang on. I’ve just arrived in Amsterdam. You want me in Helsinki?’ And it just gave me this feeling that I’m not in control and I need to relook at what I do to have a better work-life balance. Remember, I sold my business to Accenture, and so I had some obligations, but I was free of those obligations. It just felt the right time.

Right. So, Les, uh, today we’re really going deep on sales, and I think one of the main reasons why you are the one that can speak about it is that you’ve actually coached sales teams, you know, at big firms like PwC and IBM, on actually how to, you know, stand out from competitors. So from your experience, what do those teams tend to kind of struggle with most?

Wow, that’s a big, big question. So let’s start with differentiation. Okay, if you are, and I remember doing a keynote speech for IBM in in Singapore where they were struggling on on a couple of things. One of the things that struck me was if you’re in a competitive environment with similar vendors, from a buyer point of view, and I did some win-loss reviews, from the buyer point of view, you all look and sound the same. You, you dress the same. You say the same things. Buyers get frustrated, so they look at your websites. And guess what? They’re all the same, too. So I explored this with this group and had some people on the stage. We had some live discussion around, it’s not just hard to sell these days. It’s quite hard to buy. Buyers have a lot of information, but they still need humans to make sense of it. And when they all look and sound the same, it, it doesn’t really help. And so I started to focus on differentiation as a key. What happens, and I use a metaphor with apples. I, I have a slide with four red apples and say, ‘Look, this is what buyers get.’ And I have a metaphor with three red apples and one green apple. ‘This is what buyers are looking for.’ They’re looking for standout. They’re looking for something to capture their attention. And that’s what people need to work on. Now, the next question is, well, if you just stood out as different, would that win? No. Because you got to be different in a way that matters. Now, what do I mean by that? I see people, differentiation and value, I see in the same way. Sellers try to impose their view of value or impose their view of why they’re different onto a buyer, and you just can’t do that. It’s incredible. So we start to think about differentiation as, in order to differentiate, you’ve got to know enough breadth and depth about what’s important to that client or prospect. You’ve got to spend more time in a diagnostic phase, in a collaborative discovery phase, more so than your competitors, so that you know more, you know more about what they value, you know more about what they prioritise, and you can start to build a compelling reason to act because you’re answering their individual requirements. Now, that sounds easy. Where it becomes hard is often buyers can be defensive. They don’t share all the information sellers would love them to share. And that happens because there’s a bit of mistrust or distrust. And so the first job of a seller is to build trust, rapport, relationship, and earn the right to ask the questions that give you the information you want, and ask them in a way that the buyer is comfortable to answer. And so you get a free flow of information, and what we teach is a structure to do that, focused on four pillars of client value. So we need to explore, what do people value at a business level? What’s the outcome they’re looking at? Then, at an individual level, what’s important to them in this process? What’s their thinking? Then it’s the solution. And then, what do they value in a provider? And what I see from experience, I’ve seen it for years, is sellers are really good at talking about their company and their solution, but they don’t invest enough time understanding the business outcome, which typically has a higher value, and the personal aspirations of the individuals that are involved. So there’s this combination of, how do I uncover value? How do I then validate that that’s important before I make my proposal? Because many sellers just jump too quick. And, you know, the ones that stand out are the ones that show you they care about you rather than care about themselves. Long-winded answer, Mikulas. I don’t know if I bundled too much.

There is a, there is a lot to unpack. So, uh, to your point about different, differentiation, I think it’s, it’s really important, and a lot of the times people try to differentiate themselves on things that don’t matter to your potential customers, ICP. The second bit that you said I think is very important. I, I call it world view alignment, and it’s when you meet, kind of, you meet the world that your customer lives in with your own world, because everyone is living in kind of their own bubble of, so, some sort, and as you said, for everyone there is different things that are important for them, and so it’s important to be able to understand their world view so that you can align what is important to them.

I think trust is a big topic currently in general, because I think there, it’s, there’s still less and less of of it. So my next question for you would be, how do you go about actually building that trust so that you can actually ask them the questions and get the information that you want in order to run the diagnosis… the discovery?

Yeah. So if we look at trust in isolation, um, there was a fabulous piece of work done by Charles Green and his co-authors when they published The Trusted Advisor over 20 years ago. But trust is a principle. It’s like gravity. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there in a degree or another, and you can build it. Now, the way you build trust is through every individual interaction. It’s almost like making a deposit in a bank account. You know, you’re making deposits into this trust account with with the other person. And the way you build trustworthiness is through three elements. Okay. One of them, candidly, is how credible are you? Can you demonstrate your worth? If you’re experienced, you understand what they’re talking about. This is not your first rodeo, and you can talk with authority. So, you need to demonstrate credibility. The second thing is, and there’s an equation for this, the second thing is reliability. You build trust when you do the things you say you’re going to do. ‘I’ll get some information over to you on Tuesday by 3.’ It’s got to be there Tuesday by 3. You got to show up on time. You got to show up prepared. And so this whole idea of credibility attached, you know, to this idea of I, I’m reliable. Yeah, it’s credibility and reliability. The third element is to build intimacy. Now, intimacy is a strange word in a business context, but it’s essentially those personal relationships, creating a safe space for people to open up and have a dialogue. And so, if you work on all of those three things consistently, deliberately, and you do it conversationally in a client-centric way, it’s about them and their value, you can build trust really, really quickly. Now, the downside, because in the Trust Equation I mentioned, there was an equation, there is a denominator called self-interest, and often salespeople’s self-interest is too high. So people love the credibility, the reliability, the intimacy. But when you show up talking about you, your organisation, your solution, your clients, your, your, your, they distrust you. And in a, in a large environment like a big deal, big deal team where you’ve built trust, it can be really frustrating when you bring a subject matter expert in and all that subject matter expert does is talk about themselves. So trust is something you can deliberately build, and the way you do that, the conversational frameworks, the mindset shift, is teachable and learnable.

I think, you know, a lot of what you do when you sell comes down to a very human skill and pattern recognition of some sort. Where do you see newer technology fit into what, what you do in the day-to-day? Is there AI incorporated in it?

So the short answer is yes, but, based on our earlier conversation, in a, in a thoughtful way. So technology in various forms exist in selling, from a CRM to, you know, outbound marketing platforms, messaging platforms, LinkedIn. It’s all technology, or albeit you could argue some of it social, and then there’s an AI layer. I go back to a couple of things. Technology is good from a point of view of driving efficiency. The use of AI has grown rapidly, particularly agentic AI, to generate points of view, to look at intent data. So all of that is great. It just needs conditioning so that it’s aligned to a framework and you’re not pushing out raw data. Uh, I, I know when something’s come from Claude cuz I use Claude, right? So when someone tells, sends me something that they’ve never sanitised, they’ve never branded, that, that’s a, that’s a miss. Now, do we use technology? Yes, we use technology. We create, as part of our coaching and training programmes, detailed AI prompts based around proven frameworks that allow people to start to plan meetings and create messaging. But AI never delivers that. People deliver that. So I, I’ve got this, you know, kind of line in the sand for me, where AI is an enabler of efficiency, is doing some heavy lifting, but selling still happens when people meet people. So we use technology ourselves, our clients use technology, we use AI to help them learn and and execute on the skills we teach them. But in our world, which is high value, long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, it’s conversations.

So it’s still human in the loop, which is, I think, the important part.

I would go further. I’d go further and say it’s the expert in the loop, or it’s the practitioner in the loop. One of my clients is in, uh, services, big pharma. They have big medical writing agency, and they were challenged on, you know, pricing. ‘You’re using AI, must be cheaper, you can reduce the price,’ when in fact AI just gives more options. We talked about human in the loop, and in their case it’s the expert in the loop, because they’re all clinicians. So the added value, the synergy and and the net effect of having an expert and the technology is far greater than putting the technology in the hands of somebody that’s not practised. That’s my p... that’s my point of view.

So, let’s say that I’m a sales director at, like, a midsize professional services firm and I reach out to you that I would like some help. How do you go about your own kind of diagnosis and discovery phase? What are some sort of frameworks that you could share, because you mentioned a lot of them earlier?

Yeah. So we practise what we preach. So when someone shows up for a half an hour conversation, we’re never going to pitch, right? We’re never going to pitch. I’m keen to understand, when we’ve done the introductions, what caused you to call us? And by just asking that question, before we start, before we dive in, ‘Can I just ask, what caused you to call us?’ It puts the baton back to them, and I learn either about their choices, why they reached out to us, or their challenges. It just gives me a bit of a, an insight. I then ask them how much they know about us, because they, I want to see how much they’ve researched me, because I’ve researched them. So, all of this happens, by the way, in like 2 minutes. The next thing we do is to say, ‘Right, we’ve got 25 minutes left, 20 minutes left. I’d love for the end of our call for you to decide, for you to have enough information to decide whether we should explore this further. So, it’s all on you. What I’d love to do to demonstrate and understand if we can add value is let’s talk a bit more about your challenges.’ And so I just get people to talk from the heart around what is it that’s on their mind, and it typically falls into three areas, typically, right? We don’t have enough pipeline, we don’t win enough, or we don’t do big enough deals. And we just need to unbundle that. What does that mean in detail? And what I’ll often do at the end of that call is is summarise back and offer a further call where we’ll use a couple of tools to understand, you know, where we should focus. And these aren’t tools that we publish in our toolkit. These aren’t things we teach to our clients. So they’re pertinent for us. The first is we have a calculator that starts to look at the potential outcome and value of any engagement. So, I’m a great believer, salespeople hate training for training’s sake. They don’t want to be in workshops. They want to be with clients. And so it’s not about training. It’s about moving the dial on a performance element that matters. And so we have a sales acceleration formula where we build a calculator, and we ask people, we do it together on a call, to put in how many deals in their current pipeline at any time that are qualified. What’s the average value of those deals? And then, what’s their win rate? Now, when we understand that, and I’ll also ask about their sales cycle time, the average cycle time, I’ve got the baseline. So, back to your earlier point, I’m meeting them where they are. We’ll then look at anything that comes out of that to say, you’re doing all right here. I had a client recently where they had enough deals in their pipeline. They just weren’t winning enough. So all of a sudden we’re starting to focus on where’s the headspace to grow. And then what the calculator does is says, let’s just assume you could get a 3%, 4% increase in win rate. Maybe you could get 1 or 2% increase in deal value. What does that add up to? And so we’ve got a bit of a north star to aim for, and we’re linking anything we do to a business outcome. So if you link anything we do to a business outcome, you’ve got the why. You’ve got a communications approach to explore with leaders and contributors why we’re even considering an initiative. So part one is, what are we aiming at, where are we today, and what’s the value of the difference? Then we’ll use a simple worksheet with them to say, right, these are the metrics we’re trying to change. Now let’s look at what are the processes and methods that need to change, and what are the people where we need to change behaviour, and what are the skills required to do so. So we got this really aligned and logical approach to figuring things out based on the desired outcome. And what this allows us to do is put together programmes that give an ROI and that we’ve got people bought into for the right reasons. So that’s how we’ll go about that diagnostic piece. There’s one other point, though, from experience.

I, I should just mention, we’ve done big training programmes that fail. Why would I say that? Because we’ve learned. And what we’ve learned is you can’t just go and run a training programme without leadership involvement. You can’t run a training programme without the environment being right for leaders to coach, for leaders to set new expectations. So you need to get the environment right before you do any interaction, training, coaching. And then, on the back of that, you need consistent coaching to drive the execution. So what I’m looking at is, I don’t just want to show up and run a workshop. Thousands of people do that. What we want to do is think about everything as a bit of a change programme that takes them from where they are to where they want to be. Does that make sense?

No, it does. It does. And I think, uh, one thing that’s very important is, as you said, kind of link the whatever you’re trying to help with with a clear business outcome and a ROI for them, so that they can see that this really, you know, in the numbers makes sense, because a lot of the times I think people are trying to sell features, and no one likes these features. Everyone wants the desired outcome.

So I definitely agree there, and people in our bis... in our industry don’t often do that. They sell programmes, and any time you sell a programme to a large company, whatever price you put on the table is going to be high. So the key is understand the R, the return, before you think about the design and the I, because typically our clients are looking to get 10 to 20%. But you only get that if you think about it and design it appropriately.

Yeah, definitely. And a lot of people, because no, no one really likes trainings and workshops, really, like no one, no one gets excited about that. And I think most people want to improve their business. At the end of the day, the reason why they are doing something like this is so that they can improve their metrics.

But it, but it doesn’t always get communicated that way. So what’s the why at a business level? What’s the why a division level, a team level and an individual level? If I’m in high-value technology selling, commission’s a big play. Well, the benefit for me is I’m going to double my income, if that’s what matters to me. So, let’s not make it about training. Let’s make it about learning. Let’s make it about improving, but let’s think about what’s the outcome that people want individually and for their teams. And I think you’re in a, you’re in a different conversation, and and you’re in a different place.

Mm, uh, so Les, uh, you know, you, you built and sold one firm, then you built again from scratch in 2021. If you could, you know, go back to that starting point, what’s one thing that you would do differently?

What a great question. I would probably start by asking myself the question, are you buying this business or are you selling it? And what I mean by that is when you start a business, and you know this from your own experience, it’s sweat equity. You’re paying to own and run the business. And you’ve got to switch to work on the business more than in the business. And that’s something, you know, I think I would want to do faster. So, working on the business with a view to creating value. Now, that’s an exit. Is that a sale? Is that a partial sale? I have a definitive plan for my business. But to your point, if I started from scratch again, I think I’d be more focused on that journey from buying the business with blood, sweat and tears to selling the business for a reward, because there’s no value until you sell it. Whatever, whatever selling it means.

And what’s your vision with, uh, Sales Coach Network?

It’s a bit of a selfish vision, if I’m honest. I want it to be a sustainable business without me. So there’s that founder mentality that, you know, we’ve got to have this business running, you know, without me. My vision is for us to own. When people are asking about the human elements, the human skills, the human dynamics of conversation in selling, my vision is for us to be the go-to for that.

Les, if, uh, there is someone that’s, uh, looking for help, uh, what’s the best place for them to, to find you and continue the conversation?

The normal places: website, LinkedIn, just send an email. You know, we’re always open to conversation. We believe in conversation. We don’t pitch, we listen.

Amazing. So, links are down below. Les, thank you for coming on and sharing all of your insights. Hopefully, this was helpful.

I enjoyed it. Enjoyed chatting to you. Some great questions, Mikulas. And if we can give something of value to the business community out there, fabulous. And if people do want more help, please, when you publish this, broadcast this, just let people have the website.