Trust Has Become The Ultimate Advantage

I’ve spoken to two of the Big Four firms and I just asked the question, how do your people talk about value? It’s just a conversation stopper because in a lot of organisations they come with this preconception. I need you to be in that corner cuz that’s when I can solve. What we teach and work through with our clients is.

Meet Les Bailey, founder and CEO of the Sales Coach Network, who spent his career teaching consultants and sales leaders how to sell value instead of pitching credentials.

Whatever it took to get you in the room needs to be developed. And the only way that happens is through conversation. It’s the strength and depth and breadth of the conversation about the client that sets you up for the right conversation. And you just can’t do that with AI.

You’re right. We can use AI to help us identify who might be a good fit for us to help. But almost as soon as that identification is done, the lens has to flip to this is no longer about us. This is now about you.

Now, in consulting and in our world, people only buy for one of two reasons. Number one.

I thought the the story about EY investing significantly in developing judgement was really interesting because what it shows to me is that consultants in particular, but advisory in general, is recognising that the compression of AI of information giving and now problem solving, which was before the real value that consultants and advisers brought, has now left judgement as kind of the next value proposition. And judgement was always something that was in consulting, but it was developed primarily through apprenticeship, right?

We learn judgement. Time served.

Exactly. But it’s not just time served. It’s also learning, watching others and how they assess things and what they weigh and what’s important. And now we’re trying to industrialise judgement the same way we industrialised problem solving with consulting over the past 100-plus years. So the intriguing piece is that what that really leaves, because judgement won’t be a differentiator for long as it’s becoming industrialised. But what that really leaves is the differentiation of the relationship. And the interesting piece that came together as I was exploring this investment in judgement, because honestly AI isn’t that far behind in being able to make judgement. What it really is, how do we get them to accept our judgement? And for many companies, they can rest on brand. Right? If somebody comes from McKinsey, you’re going to accept that person’s judgement because McKinsey is known for their judgement. For anybody who doesn’t have that brand recognition to rely on, it has to be the trust in the relationship, creating the conditions for them to want to listen to us. And that’s what brings me to the Sales Coach Network’s real value proposition. Does that feel like it holds water to you?

I think it does. I think when I have conversations about AI with clients and I look at what some of my clients and contacts are publishing, there’s been an evolution for AI’s sake to how do we maintain the value of the work we do when everyone has AI. It’s clear that we’re using AI. We went through these various levels of discussion around the human in the loop. And the human in the loop is, it’s kind of commoditised now because there’s always a human in the loop. I mean, really, it, someone’s got to ask the questions, set the prompts. I was in a a panel with a client looking at pricing and looking at how they had to defend what they do even whilst they’re using AI because there’s a natural expectation price will be reduced. You’re using AI, it’s got to be cheaper. Well, no, it’s actually going to give more options. It’s going to provide us more effective working for you. One of the examples in this case was a medical writing agency, and and what we evolved was not the human in the loop but the expert in the loop, because these were medical professionals. So you don’t get that context, that history, that judgement from using AI alone. You’ve got the human check, if you will. So that’s been interesting to see it play out. I think a lot of people are accepting now that AI doesn’t give you context, and judgement without context may be seen as flawed. I think we’re just in a world where everything is changing, and when I wor... one of the big global firms I worked with in in consulting, I did a workshop at their innovation centre literally last year, and as we were preparing for it, the leader and the sponsor said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to work out the critical thinking. Whatever you’re going to teach the folks, whatever we’re going to workshop, can we just put critical thinking tags in there, because it humanises it in a way that AI perhaps can’t.’ I find the subject fascinating and challenging.

Yeah, I have an upcoming guest who just wrote a book called Don’t Smash the Watermelon. And it is a book on problem solving and critical thinking. And what really separates it from other critical thinking books is she actually builds in a lot of the trusted advisor concepts. And her primary is that the experience that they have with you is as important as the result that you end up coming to. And I think that that’s what AI can’t duplicate. What I love about what you just said is including context, because you can give AI a lot of context. You can provide your documents, you can provide your financial statements, you can provide your org charts, all of your background material on your company. And I think that’s the critical context that’s missing.

I think so. And in our experience, the way you get that context is through conversation. And so for me, as we started to look, my partners and I looking at our business and what we do, no doubt you’ve done the same, in an age where AI is available to everybody. Everyone is using AI at scale. In a sales environment, people are doing bad things at scale. So the other contextual element is this idea that if you’ve got the right frameworks, you got the right approaches, you can do good things at scale. Whereas I’m frustrated multiple times a week by clients that say to me, ‘Yeah, don’t worry. We’ll just put it in AI. We’ll put it in Copilot. We’ll get it from.’ And that is just absence of context and absence of judgement. I even had a client say, ‘We’re going to create a new account plan globally. We’re going to do it in Copilot.’ There, it just seems divorced to me, but it’s just one of those, one example. The the key thing though, back to your point about where we play. When we were considering the impact on our business of AI and looking at the sales cycle, from initial outreach campaigns to generate new business, right the way through managing opportunities, to serving clients, expanding clients, defending from competitors, AI can play in a lot of those places. But where it’s really playing, we’re seeing it play out, is upfront outreach, outbound marketing, lead gener... generation. And I can see that growing and growing, getting better and better. We can use applications like Claude to go and look at intent signals to actually start to say who should we reach out to. So we can get targeting much, much stronger. The bit that you can never replace though, and the big challenge we see with organisations, is okay, you got to meeting one with a prospect, very first meeting. How many of those turn into meeting two? So whatever it took to get you in the room needs to be developed, and the only way that happens is through conversation. So that’s where one person from the seller’s side meets one person from the buying side, or multiples of them. But they, it’s how they engage. And so from the very first meeting, it’s the strength and depth and breadth of the conversation about the client, not about us, that sets you up for the right conversation. And you just can’t do that with AI. So where we play, and where I love the synergy between the Trust Equation, which we’ve been quoting for years, and what we do, is it’s principled, it’s client-centric and it just allows a first interaction to feel different from the majority of sellers that show up and pitch. Part of my language, as I often say, show up and throw up, because all they do is is talk about them, their company, their experience, their clients, their service centre. Really? It’s like having a big credentials deck. No one uses them anymore. No one needs any credentials decks. If you get into the room with someone, they’ve done their work. So then, how do you actually quickly get on their side of the table and think about the buying cycle versus, hey, what am I here to sell you? In our world, most of our clients are selling high-value consulting. They’re selling solutions rather than product. They don’t know at the get-go exactly what the requirement is. So, they got to test it. And I think it’s when you’re client-centric and you’re really listening and really testing, you build that kind of trust. And it’s only when you go deeper and broader that you can know enough and learn enough to differentiate yourself. Long answer to a short comment from you. Apologies.

It’s fantastic. And I want to dig into it a little bit, because I want to relate some very specific things to trust, and and this is why there is so much synergy. I think the very opening that you talked about, the difference between, it used to be, and I remember when I was sitting on the other side of the desk as a buyer, and I would have people come in from large consulting firms, large global Big Four consulting firms, and they would come in and they would present me a deck, and I knew that it was for me. It had my name on it. It had my title on it. And then they would proceed to tell me everything that they thought that I should know, which they of course already knew. And again, it’s this borderline hubris of thinking because I have the brand behind me, I can come in and I’m the expert in the room and the other person will automatically believe me and will hire me because of that. And honestly, at the end of, I remember one meeting in particular, it was two partners. I won’t name who the company that they were with. When I finally thanked them and and got them out the door, the first thought I had was they never even asked me what I do. They literally had my name on an org chart and a title that they never asked me what is my role, what am I trying to accomplish.

And what caused you, and what caused you to take the meeting?

I was directed to take the meeting.

Okay.

Right. Because networking is real. My boss said, ‘I want you to meet with these guys. I think that they have really great things that they can help us do.’ And they came in and talked about really great things that they do, and at the end of the meeting I said, ‘Thanks very much. That doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to do in this role.’ Right? What strikes me about what you do is that from that very first moment, you’re right, we can use AI to help us identify who might be a good fit for us to help, but almost as soon as that identification is done, the lens lens has to flip to this is no longer about us. This is now about you. And I want to ask you to walk through kind of your first few questions in our programme. We talk about four questions that have to be answered in sequence, and talk about those, because I think that that at its core demonstrates the whole new differentiation, which is I’m in your corner and I care about you.

Great point to make. Two things, I think. There’s absolutely the questions, which I’ll come to. The other thing is when we test something, we’ve done our research. We’ve done the AI research on the company. We’ve looked at their market. We looked at their challenges. We can look at public information. We can’t get in the buyer’s head. So, we have no idea. Bit like you just said, I’m meeting, but I know nothing about you and what you do. The question piece is is is absolutely key. But the reason behind the questioning and the reason behind the softer communication skills, the softer communication skills are so critical. But before we even leverage those, it’s the mindset shift that says I can’t impose my view of value on them. I can’t present a value proposition to them and for them, because I haven’t done any diagnosis. I haven’t understood what’s going on. So, I think there’s a bit of a mindset shift, because people sharpen pitch all all too often. They make assumptions that haven’t been tested. So, we got to test any hypothesis. When somebody agrees to a first meeting, and I’ve been in workshops with salespeople and they just say, ‘Well, what do you do? What do you say to open the meeting?’ And quite candidly, it’s so, so simple. I, well, I just get comfy with people and engage with people before I start to ask those questions and direct the conversation. And quite often the first thing I will do is, ‘Hey, I’m curious now. We’ve got 30 minutes together. This is your meeting. What would be good for you at the end of this meeting? What would make this a good investment for you?’ And it just throws people cuz I’m not pitching. And I get a sense of where they’re at. And I know broadly whether or not I can help and where that’s going to go. The next question is, I will ask, ‘How much do you know about us? What made you invite us?’ And either someone’s done their research and they share it, or, ‘Hey, look, we’re interviewing a few people and you seem to be in the mix.’ And they’ll either say, ‘I’ve done all my research,’ or they’ll say, ‘Not a lot,’ and I’ll give them the quick answer. ‘Hey, look, would you like a short explanation or the long one?’ They always say, ‘Give me the short one.’ So I can credentialise and explore, explain what we do in 20, 30 seconds. No slides required. I will start to go towards question one once we’ve had a bit of context and level set. The first thing I want to explore is should they do anything? Now, in consulting and in our world, people only buy for one of two reasons, is our hypothesis. Number one, they have a problem to solve in the here and now, or going forward they’d like to do something different and better. So we need to understand which direction they’re coming from, what they thinking about. So we can absolutely start to use soft language to explore that from their point of view. The questions that I love to hear from people is, ‘Ah, tell me what you can do for me.’ ‘I’d love to do that, if it, and if I can help. Yeah, I don’t know enough yet. If we could just explore a few things, then I’d be happy to give you my thoughts at the end of this meeting.’ Meeting one, I’m probably only ever seeking to align with them and for them to decide, is it worth meeting again? Because our first meeting, I’m never going to sell anything. Not in a high-value consulting environment. But what I just want to do is start that conversation around should you do anything? As the conversations progress, can you buy? And there’s a whole bunch of things that get in the way of corporates buying, as we both know. Then it’s about will they buy, or will you buy? So we know you should do something. We know that you can do something. The next thing is will you? Is there a business case big enough? Is the momentum for change big enough? And then the fourth question is will you buy from me? What do you buy from us? And I think sellers in general don’t follow those client-centric perspectives. And of course, you know this, you’ve written about this, you teach this as well. It’s about the buyer’s journey, not the seller’s sales cycle. So for me, through the cycle, however long it is, I’m keen. Should you do anything with anyone? Can you do this? Will you do this? And only then, will you do it with us? And I think leaving that till last is what enables us to build that client centricity and that feeling of safety.

Absolutely. You know, if you think about, um, Charlie Green talked about this in Trust-Based Selling, the psychology that buyers have, it really breaks into three different stages. The first stage is that we’re screening. If I’m a buyer, I’m trying to find somebody who can do something that I want. And the second stage is selection. Now I found, you know, I’ve down-selected to a number of buyers and I know that they can do what I want. So who do I want to work with? And then the third stage is the justification or the rationalisation. I’ve made the decision. Let’s go back and make sure that I can clearly articulate why it’s the right decision. What we find is that buyers tend to do one of two things. The biggest mistake they make is that they go into the selection phase behaving as though they’re still in screening. And that’s where we get the, as you said, show up and throw up. I come in, I lead with my credentials. I lead with all of the different people that I’ve solved problems for. I tell you how smart we are and how many people we have and everything that we can do for you. And what it does to me, it leaves the buyer sitting in a position of saying, ‘Well, gosh, now I’m even more confused, cuz you’re coming in and you’re telling me stuff and I don’t know if this actually maps to what I need.’ The other thing I think, and this has been more prevalent in the last probably 20, 25 years, is we come in with a presumption of what value is to them. We lead with the value proposition. And so the whole conversation is about almost manipulating them into telling us the things that we want to hear to be able to say I fit. And so we may go in with lots of questions. We may go in asking them about very certain things. We may demonstrate that we understand them, but we’re still driving the whole conversation towards what we want to do for them, what we see as the highest value. And at the end of the day, that’s where will you buy really comes in, because can this help? Sure. Can this help you? Absolutely. Is it your number one priority? And does it line up with your values? Now you’re all the way down at the buying decision and you’ve missed entirely what it is that they need, or you’ve missed entirely what it is that’s important to them. It may be the absolute best fit, but it’s not the best fit right now. It’s not what’s most important.

I think there’s a huge amount, what you’ve said. It’s something we see and we try to think through. The first thing is when buyers are buying high-value services, renewing high-value contracts, sellers are comparing competitors, when in fact the biggest thing in the way is doing nothing and this no decision. And that happens because buyers don’t have enough to be confident and justify doing something different versus putting up with what they have, because they don’t get fired for that. Typically, they get fired for hiring the the wrong thing and spending 100 million. The interesting piece for me, and this is where again I see huge synergy in what we teach and the way that you think about things, is if I were to articulate a process, an opportunity management process, a sales process, we are going to go to do something to initiate conversations and generate, you know, potential opportunities. It’s a numbers game, of course. What happens then is we need to mine for value. So I’ve spoken to two of the Big Four firms, learning and development people, sales enablement people, and I just asked the question, how do your people talk about value? ‘Oh, we’ve been doing it for years.’ Yeah, I I get that. And it’s just a conversation stopper because in a lot of organisations, they come with this preconception. They’re doing that manipulation thing. I need you to be in that corner cuz that’s when I can solve. What we teach and work through with our clients is put a little stage in your sales cycle beyond solutioning and jumping to a proposal. We have a phase called value validation. And this is the idea that you’ve met a number of people in the organisation. You’ve got their collective thoughts. You understand the dynamics around the power, the decision-making, but actually, to bring everyone’s thoughts together, we got to check that off. You’ve got to take time to say, does that really fit? And in order to do that, we’ve devised a framework, and we’ll talk about that on our upcoming webinar, where we’re absolutely giving direction on how to talk about value. And we have a framework that describes four pillars of value that we can explore with any buyer in any scenario, but we name them. So, we’re looking to explore business value, business outcomes. We’re looking to explore individual value. So what’s important to every individual buyer? We’re looking to explore what they need, want and value from the solution itself. And then finally, the provider. Everyone leads with the provider. We do this, we do that, we do well. They have a choice. And what a lot of sellers fail to ask is, ‘Hey, I understand you have a choice. I’ve heard the business outcomes you want. I’ve heard the solution specifics. I know what’s important to you and your team. With all that in mind, I understand you have a choice. What are some of the things that are important when picking the right partner?’ And it’s conversation that doesn’t happen enough.

What do you do if you get to a point where you realise that it’s not a fit?

You need to tell them it’s not a fit. I mean, I’ve had this working in the past for a major consulting firm where qualifying out of an opportunity was almost a sin. It’s become much, much better, right? We’ve only got to qualify the right opportunities. But I’m a big believer in literally being honest about it. I remember being dragged into a a meeting by a market maker. He said, ‘Hey, look, we’re meeting the CFO of this huge retailer. They’ve enquired about outsourcing.’ And he was excited. He said, ‘Look, you’re the guy. You’re the subject matter expert on finance outsourcing. We need to go to that meeting.’ And we did all the normal stirring of coffee, all of the contextual stuff, the making a connection, making introductions. The meeting just went downhill. And you know it’s going that way. You feel it, right? And if you don’t do something, it just gets away from you real far. So, I just said, ‘Look, help me understand what prompted you inviting us.’ And I got a simple, bland answer. ‘Hey, we’re looking to outsource some of our finance capability.’ And my next question was, ‘Hey, what’s prompted this?’ ‘My boss told me to have some conversations.’ Here we go. I now know I’ve got to dig a little deeper. And so we had a few more, you know, back and forth questions around functions, what kind of work they do. And then for me, selling big outsourcing deals with a major provider, and at the time we had 90,000 people in India, so we’re doing big transitions to people, and I said, ‘What kind of work, what’s the volume of work or the full-time equivalent headcount that you’re looking to outsource?’

You’re perfect, but I am literally, I am on the edge of my seat knowing how many people they outsourced. What, what was their headcount?

She said, ‘We’re going to start with eight.’ I said, ‘Well, hang on. You are a global retailer and you really want to move the work of eight people.’ I said, ‘Candidly, I think you’re thinking about things in the right way. You’re thinking about the right functions for outsourcing. I think there’s two things missing. Number one, there’s a better business case than this if you wanted to take a fresh look, and you may or you may not. And secondly, we won’t be the best provider to move the work of 12 people. I can recommend others, but if you’re looking to do this at this moment, we’re not the best option.’ Apart from the market maker just stewing and next to me in the meeting, this lady was shot. I said, ‘It’s not us. This isn’t for us.’ And as a result, we walked away clear-headed. We’re not chasing shadows. And she got some good advice. That’s my principle on this. Noelle, again, it’s hard in a big consulting firm to qualify deals out.

But it’s hard for very human reasons, right? And it, honestly, it doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the firm. With my little company, I have the same problem. I want to help everybody. And the further I get into the conversation, the more invested I am, and then I start thinking about the time that I’ve already spent with them and the fact that I want to help them. And it’s really hard to recognise that point where the best thing I can do, the most helpful thing I can do, is say, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m the right fit for what you’re looking for.’ And as you said, ‘I’m happy to recommend some people.’ Or, ‘It sounds like we’re a really good fit, but I’m not convinced this is the best time for you. Why don’t we put this on ice, and when some things resolve, when it feels like the right time, let’s pick this back up.’ Because what people don’t think about, you know, it’s easy to rack up the number of hours that I’m spending or the amount of attention I’m giving to a deal in my pipeline that should have been qualified out. But if we flip that around, you’re also taking up the time and attention of that client or that potential client. You have them continuing to have meetings. You’re in their inbox. You’re causing them to feel guilt or to be annoyed. You are giving them negative interactions, whether or not you intend to, because they probably know somewhere that they’re either stringing you along, they’re not quite ready to pull the trigger. That person doesn’t really want to do it. They’re doing it because their boss told them to have the conversation. Right? And so it’s not just the impact to us as sellers. It’s not just about having a cluttered pipeline. It’s also about respecting the relationship with that potential client and having enough respect to do the right thing for the long run versus the thing that feels easiest or most comfortable right now.

Agree with that. And of course, the thing is that buyers in general, I use the term broadly, they’re not used to somebody saying this. They’ve grown up expecting to be pitched something. And candidly, we should cut that off early and focus on the people that we can help. I think it’s a two-way street. And it’s that balance. And if we’re not careful, we end up thinking about our time and our pipeline, and all of a sudden that’s not client-centric at all. I love the way you put that. But look, I mean, you and I are in close enough business. That is usually what people bring us in for.

You know, I have people who reach out to me and they say, ‘I want you to come in and help my team.’ And I say, ‘What are you seeing?’ And they run down all of the problems that they have. We don’t, our cycle time is too long. We’re not converting enough. Our close rates are down. Whatever it is, it’s always about them. And then I say, ‘Well, what outcomes do you want for your clients?’ And it’s almost as though they’ve never thought of that before. They’re all about making their own numbers. They’re all about their own processes, being more efficient, more effective. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how we make profitable business. But I also firmly believe that the best way to be profitable is to focus on what it is that your clients need. And if you keep that in your focus, then your internal processes, yeah, you can tweak them a little bit. You can get a little more efficient, you can get a little higher volume, but your conversion rate is going to go up so high if what you’re doing is focusing on what your clients need.

I’ve long had the mantra, and I’ve seen this from a selling point of view. As a buyer, you can recognise someone that’s not hitting their quota, that’s not hitting their target. You can feel it, that comes in the room before they do, kind of thing. Is that weirdness going on. And what I say to people all the time is don’t focus on your numbers. Focus on the client’s numbers. If you focus on the client’s numbers, and that links all the way through to their end users, whatever they’re trying to do for their end customers or clients, focus on their numbers, your numbers will take care of themselves. But we’ve just got to transmit for them to do the same thing. So, focus on your end user, client, and your numbers will be okay. It’s just something that a lot of people just don’t, don’t get. Fascinating. Stop selling, start helping, right? Sorry, I just quoted you. The tagline from Trust-Based Selling, Charlie Green’s book, but it’s so true. We use it all the time. I wrote a paper five, six years ago now, was ‘Sell less, win more’. Stop trying to sell and just work on what are the client issues. And I did a lot of win-loss reviews. I spent a lot of time at Accenture, and I’ve done win-loss reviews for other big organisations. And what happens when I speak to clients, often they say, ‘Well, I can’t even recall who that team were, cuz they all look and sound the same. I can’t tell you that that team knew anything about my business.’ And sometimes the team that showed up didn’t even feel like a team. And so I’ve come across all of these weird feedback from clients on why people didn’t win. Some real commonality. And what’s really interesting to me is the client never tells you it’s about price. The internal team always tell you, ‘Oh, we’re too expensive.’ What the client team always struggle with is what made them, they didn’t even stand out. They gave me not one reason why I should consider them. And we’re back to now this biggest challenge that I see at the moment, when everyone looks and sounds the same. And how do you differentiate? And that comes back again to breadth and depth of conversation in a client-centric way, and building the trust to the extent that they’ll share anything. I do a lot of coaching for my clients and they got gaps. You know, we’ve hit a wall in the deal with, this isn’t happening. I just say, ‘Well, what have you asked them?’ ‘What do you mean, I’m supposed to ask them?’ Exactly. There are some, I often term whiplash questions, which are harder questions around funding, who’s got the budget, who’s sponsoring, where’s the money coming from. Of course, there’s all of that, but just asking the fundamental questions. You know, I, I do a deal review and a client will say, ‘Oh, we think we’re up against the normal suspects.’ ‘Who are you actually up against?’ ‘Well, we don’t know.’ ‘Did you ask any questions?’ It’s fascinating for me.

That’s really interesting. I want to pull on this thread. I feel like you and I could talk about this for another hour, but let’s explore this and then love to just touch on the the webinar.

Pull on that thread first.

So this idea of asking questions. I came up consulting primarily in the federal government space here in the US, where procurement is extremely rigid, and in many cases we were barred from having any conversations with the buyer, which, I have shared this with senior executives at the Office of Management and Budget and the other government agencies here, I think is absolutely, absolutely absurd. Why would you keep your potential provider from having conversations with the person that they’re trying to help? But that notwithstanding, I do find that there is a fear on the part of providers to ask reasonable questions. For example, I recently got an RFP, very clearly laid out what it was that they wanted. We’re not the least expensive company in the business that we’re in. And the first thing I said was, ‘We need to go find out how much their budget is.’ ‘I don’t think that we should ask them about their budget.’ I said, ‘Look, here’s how this is going to go. We’re going to spend a couple of days putting together our best proposal. We’re going to recommend something that we think is the absolutely right thing for them, and then we’re going to find out that they have half of what we’re proposing, that their budget is less than half of what we’re proposing.’ I said, ‘Find out now and qualify it out if we need to. Don’t spend two days of energy.’ And it is such a difficult thing to ask somebody for their price. Well, the outcomes are a little easier, but, um, are you the decision maker? When do you want to have this completed? Is it even possible for us to do all of those important questions to qualify a deal? And I guess it’s, we’re going back to the same thing, which is the information that you need to keep your pipeline clean and to progress the right deals at the right time is what we really don’t want to ask about. How do you overcome that?

I think it feels unnatural for people, but people take a very straight line, a simple view of it. Whereas the art of asking questions in a smart way can be taught and it can be learned. So rather than, ‘Are you the decision maker?’, to which they will either say yes if they are, and sometimes yes if they’re not, they feel under pressure. I prefer just go softer with it. I might say, ‘Hey, no, we’ve had some great conversations. It looks like there’s something we could do to add value here, and I’m curious. I work with a lot of organisations similar to yours, and the one thing that’s common is there’s quite a complex procurement process, or there are other people that need to be involved in order for you to start seeing the benefits, for you to actually take advantage. Help me understand, how does that work here?’ So what I’m doing is asking about the process and not, ‘Are you the decision maker?’ It’s the same with budget. So, we might get to a good conversation around a good outcome for someone that might monetise that. Might, we might say, ‘Hey, look, this looks like it’s 10 million worth of value for you if we could deliver on this. Have you got a budget?’ I’m not going to do that. I’m going to say, ‘Look, looks like it’s about 10 million here. Have you considered the investment required to get the return we’ve been discussing?’ So, two things here. Number one, I’m going softer. Secondly, we use the word investment, because price implies cost and people try to reduce it. Investment implies a return. So if we’ve got the value identified, if you thought about the investment to get the return we’ve been discussing, and just ask that question, they’ll leave, there’s all sorts of answers, and come back. ‘Yes, I have.’ ‘No, I haven’t.’ ‘We think it’s X.’ ‘We think it’s Y.’ ‘I don’t want to tell you.’ I don’t care what they say. It gives me the opport... I’ve got it on the table. And it gives me the opportunity to say, ‘Well, other organisations similar to yours that looking for a 10 million annual return tend to invest between 6 and 700,000. Can you see yourself falling in that range?’ It’s just a softer way of testing it. But if you don’t start with the value for them, anything you put on the table is expensive.

Yeah. And it goes back to how you opened this conversation, which was that you need to actually know what they value in order to be able to articulate a value.

And you’ll never learn that if you don’t build the trust through focusing on them, having the right structured conversations that give you the depth and breadth to allow you, one, to say, actually, I know we’re a good fit, and because I’ve plumbed the depths of those conversations, here’s why you should be considering us. Here’s how we will deliver this differently. Not necessarily to a competitor, but maybe differently to the way you were thinking when we first started the conversation, because we’ve shaped their thinking. We’re looking out for them. We’re listening for the signals and we know what’s important to them. When we put our proposal forward, it’s all about them, versus, you know, let’s have five slides all about us. Drives me crazy. So, it’s, you’re not going to differentiate unless you go deep and you take the time and invest in it. And of course, a lot of people don’t want to do that.

When we talk about differentiating, it makes me call back to what you were describing in your interviews, that, ‘Oh, I don’t even remember which team that was. I cannot,’ right? They are incapable of differentiating. And some of that is, I remember the team that really had a deep understanding of me. But I think there’s something even deeper than that. I think it’s, I remember the team that understood me. And there’s a difference between having a good understanding of a client and actually understanding them, and the actually understanding them gives them the feeling that they are understood. I can know everything about the client. I can have very deep knowledge about them and what they do and even what’s important to them. But if I haven’t demonstrated that, they don’t feel understood or invested in, and that they understand what’s important to me is what creates the condition for, and so what they propose will work. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good your solution is if the person that you’re pitching it to doesn’t believe it works for them. I think that’s where so many companies get it wrong, is that they think that the solution stands on its own and they just want to know what to say to get the person to believe them. And the person’s never going to believe them unless you have let them know that you actually do understand them and what’s important to them.

I think 110%, if that’s a thing, right? I agree with that wholeheartedly, and it brings me to the joint webinar, the kind of workshop that we’re hosting. And, you know, for people that aren’t aware, we’ve reached an agreement to collaborate on a programme that takes the best of the trusted advisor work, the principles, and our principles around consultative value-based selling. And what we’re going to explore is how you can show up differently. So there are a number of things that we need to be thoughtful about. Of course, building trust, rebuilding trust where necessary, is fundamental throughout every step of the process. The bit that makes the difference for me is we win when we validate our value and why we’re different. So, one of the things we’ll be looking to explore and share is this test. We call it VALID. We want to make sure we can validate the value before we propose. That we can articulate, in the same way as the client, what the value is. We can legitimise it. We’ve got the proof. It’s not our first rodeo. We’ve done it before. It delivers impact. It’s actually going to move the dial. And it’s distinct. It’s the kind of thing that if you get comfortable with it and we start delivering on it, you don’t want to do without it, right? It just becomes your way of operating. You know, unless we explore value differently up front, we can’t validate value. And so, one of the things I’m looking to explore with with you, with Charlie, on our interactive session is what are the steps that we need to go through to actually get there. Otherwise, everyone looks and sounds the same.

Again, that customer-centric view and the role of building trust, being able to build trust rapidly with somebody that you’ve only just met in order to get through the VALID framework, is absolutely critical. You can’t talk about, especially these days, you can’t talk about sales without talking about trust.

I agree. And I think the other thing is trust, for me, it’s always been the case, always been a principle we work on in our sales acceleration methodology. But trust, like value, is through their eyes. We’ve got to be trusted, and that’s about them. Only they make that decision. And people miss that point, that unless and until they make that decision, we can’t rush them. We can’t shorten the sales cycle. We shouldn’t drop our price to move fast because we want to sell. Buyers buy when they’re ready to buy, not when we’re ready to sell. And I think this whole concept of leveraging the principles around building trust from the get-go, in a market like ours, where we’re working with clients that have long sales cycles, multiple decision makers, procurement and all the things that go with it. If we don’t in every interaction look at that client centricity and build that trust, we’ll never learn enough to say, ‘Hey, we’re a good fit because we’re different, because you should do this. Yes, we’ve looked at it. Can you do it? It seems like you can. Will you? That’s for you to decide. But there seems a compelling business case. We can actually deliver on that. And here’s why.’ That’s, you know, if you don’t put the building blocks in place, you just don’t get there.

Absolutely. I know what I wanted to say when you were talking about the importance of trust and how critical trust is to that process. You know, there’s a reason that trusted advisor is in that order, the two words. Trust has to come first or the advising doesn’t matter. And it’s something that really so many people get wrong. They think that if I have the good answer, if I give the right advice, someone will trust me. But in reality, if they trust you, they will take your advice. So the order is important.

I love that articulation. Agree 100%.

So Les, thank you for being with us today. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Oh, no. Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. So I’m Les Bailey. I’m the founder and the chief executive of the Sales Coach Network. We’re a network of experienced practitioners, if you will, not necessarily trainers and showmen. We don’t showboat. We work with organisations that want to move the dial on revenue. We have a network of of coaches that spans the world. We have proprietary tools and methodology, very much like you. And of course, we’ve recently announced that we’re now collaborating on a programme that combines the best of the trusted advisor thinking with our value-based selling. So that’s me. Really looking forward to working together, and of course our discussion today.

Absolutely. Same here. I could not be more excited for this partnership. All right. Thank you.