Hey Limitless listeners! We are back again with an exciting and insightful episode on - How to Propel Sales Using Tech featuring Tony Hughes. Tony Hughes has 35 years of corporate and sales leadership experience, having generated record-breaking results as a salesperson, head of sales, and CEO leading the Asia-pacific region for multi-nationals. He is a best-selling author, consultant, trainer, keynote speaker, the Co-founder, and Sales Innovation Director at Sales IQ Global.
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Hey, all. Welcome to another exciting episode of our Limitless Podcast series. I'm Nisha, a product marketer at Hippo Video and your podcast host. We have with us today Tony Hughes.
Hey Tony.
Hey Nisha. I’m really looking forward to the conversation today. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Thank you.
Thank you for being on our podcast. And I'm really excited about the conversation we are going to have today. Okay, so a little about Tony. Tony is the co-founder and sales innovation director at Sales IQ Global. He has 35 years of corporate and sales leadership experience, having generated record-breaking results as a salesperson, head of sales, and CEO, leading the Asia Pacific region for multinational corporations.
He’s also a bestselling author, consultant, trainer, and keynote speaker. His first book, the Joshua Principle Leadership Secrets of Selling is in the 10th Printing, and his most recent books, Combo Prospecting and Tech-Powered Sales are published by Harpa Collins Leadership in New York. All right, Tony. Now let's move on to the questions.
So the first question is about your book, like the hugely popular book, Tech-Powered Sales. What motivated you to write the book? I know you've been asked this question pretty often, but I wanna hear it once again from you.
Well Nisha, I actually, co-wrote the book with Justin Michael out of the USA, who is his nickname, is the Machine, by people that know him well.
So he's someone that figured out, how to, in essence, become a little cyborg. He figured out how to take the best of being a human in creating opportunity, pipeline, and selling. Become really good at blending with technology. And, the reality is right now today, as we record this in 2022, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and the pandemic that hit the world a few years ago, really created a digital-first world.
Everybody pivoted and thought, well, how do I engage through digital channels as the first and preferred option? And even as the pandemic started to fade away, what everyone realized is that the ways of working had altered, and then as we emerged into a global recession, so I know that's debatable, but in my view, we're absolutely in recession and we're gonna bump along the bottom in tough times for quite a period. So, we've now got a recession and economic challenges we're dealing with, and the truth is if anyone wonders about their future in business, as a business entrepreneur or owner, or if they think about their own professional career, if you are a white collar professional, listening to this, you know, maybe a salesperson or a sales leader, if you’re wondering what the future holds, what we know for sure is it'll be filled with technology. And the thing that prompted, us to write the book was that we've always known that to be successful in life and in sales, you need a reasonable IQ.
You don't have to be a Mensa-level genius. But you can't be dumb and be successful. So you need to be, you know, reasonably smart, but the big thing you need in sales or leadership is high EQ, emotional quotient. You need to understand yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and how to best relate to others to navigate the people and politics.
But we believe that we need to add a new Q to IQ and EQ, and that's TQ — Technical Quotient. Everybody needs to become good at working with technology and tools to deliver the level, the level of effectiveness that's needed to be successful today.
Okay. Yeah. That does make a lot of sense, especially in the context of the pandemic and the recession. So talking about tech, how do you balance between, you know, automation, personalization? I know a lot of tech is being used to, you know, send emails at scale or do cold outreach at scale. And, but sales have to be, you know, personalized to strike a personal connection. So how do you strike a balance between automation, and personalization?
How do you make your emails or outreach look like a bot dint send them?
Yeah, that's a really good question. And if we just go back to first principles for a moment, the thing we know is that for sales outreach to be successful and, my goodness, you know, the world is drowning, drowning in very badly written sales spam.
So for the average buyer out there, they're just being bombarded by very poor content, whether it's inside LinkedIn, whether it’s emails and there are some rules we need to honor if we want to be effective. So, we need to show the person that we are relevant to them. The number one way for being successful in building a new relationship is through a trusted connection. So if we're introduced by someone that they trust, that's higher probability. If we don't have that, then we want to reference some kind of trigger event. Something that's happened in their world. That creates awareness of needle relevance. And if we don't have that the third best thing, the least most successful thing is at least to reference something about them or their industry or their role.
Now what's happened is people have started using these sales engagement platforms. So whether it's Salesloft or Outreach.io, whether it's, high-velocity sales inside Salesforce, they've got that sequencing capability. These sales engagement platforms are some kind, sometimes called sequencers.
So they, they automate the process of sending a whole sequence of emails to somebody. Now, interestingly, Nisha, just before, this call we are having right now, I spent 90 minutes doing coaching for one of the biggest software companies in the world with one of their teams. And one of their managers shared on screen, a sequence that had gone to them by, from a company following this manager downloading a white paper.
And it was just awful. and I made the comment on the call that this was an example of the bots running wild right. So this company had automated a sequence based on someone engaging with a piece of content, and then they just let it loose. And what I just did was annoy this person and, actually damaged the brand of the, of the company that had that white paper in the first place.
We know that personalization is really important. Very few people do it well. In the book we talk about a context of, sorry, a concept of liquid syntax, the idea of automating personalization attributes, and then ingesting them into your sequencer. Now, the truth is I've never seen that done well.
So, although the technology has some capabilities, the best personalization is actually done by humans. Right? So that's the reality of it. If you automate personalization badly, what you'll end up doing is burning through your list, having your domain blocked, and damaging your own brand without getting any of the sales results that you were pursuing.
So it's really important to do personalization well, and automating personalization is a dangerous thing to attempt.
Okay, so writing on that, question and your answer to it. So where exactly should technology come in in that case? Because, from your answer, I think, you know, part of it has to be taken over by salespeople, you know, instead of leaving you to technology. So at what stage in the sales process should you introduce technology?
Technology should be used in every single phase of the sales process. And if I think about professional B2B selling, business-to-business selling, there's really, there's really three main phases. There's opening the opportunity and securing access to people and information in an organization and opening is without doubt niche the most difficult and the most important phase of selling, because the way we open determines the probability of ever being able to close a deal.
So, as an example of this, if we try and open opportunities by talking about us and our capabilities, what we typically do is we get treated like a commodity. We get compared with our competition and we get lots of questions about price. Whereas if we can open an opportunity in a very different way, by talking about the customers opportunity to drive improved results.
Now the customers focusing on the business case for change. They're focused on the improved results that they could drive. That's how you sustain an opportunity. It's how the customer makes it a priority and finds the money. So it's important that we open in the right way. Now, the next phase of selling is the progression of the opportunity.
So we're gathering consensus. We're validating some kind of solution and validating the business case, navigating the people and politics of an organization. So, you know, that's, that's the middle stage and the middle stage of an opportunity, you know, between opening and closing. The middle stages where many deals go to die so we won't, we won't talk about all of that now, that's another topic.
And then the third phase of selling is, is closing, right? Closing and onboarding your customer so that they're successful in an advocate for us in the marketplace. Now, in all three phases of selling, we should be using technology. If we think about opening what we should be doing in seeking to open opportunities is we want to open the opportunity, in a way that shows strong relevance.
And we can do that by monitoring for trigger events. So you can use technology to scour the internet for target organizations that fit your ideal customer profile and where a trigger event has occurred that increases the propensity to buy. So a trigger event creates awareness of need and context for us.
So you can use technology to do that. I'm on the board of a company called triggr.ai. So it's, T R I G G R. so there's no E in it. So triggr.ai. Okay. they run a headless browser. They, they monitor for the tech stack. That's being run. They, they look at all the job ads that are being advertised, the job descriptions, they infer and employ tech.
Right? So you, you can start to say any company that looks like these other companies and these trigger events occur. We should be talking to them. a simple thing like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be used to monitor role-based trigger events for us, merges acquisitions, and you can use tech to be your virtual assistant to serve you up lists of organizations you should be targeting. If you manage an account and people change roles inside your existing customers that introduces risk and opportunity. We can use technology like Sales Navigator to let us know about these things. There's tech out there that gives us email addresses, mobile phone numbers, the whole configuration of the tech stack of the organization we sell to you can look at the history of people, do our research.
So, you know, technology pervades every phase of the sale, every phase of the sale. If you look at the middle stages and closing stages of an opportunity, building a mutual plan, you know, there's awesome collaboration tools where you can start to build a mutual plan with the customer, so that they feel they co-created the way we are going to get this through to completion.
If you look at your own CRM systems, we can think about deal stages and time in stage. We can look at things for example, around proof of life, in a deal, actually being alive and progressing to help coach and prompt the salespeople. So there are all kinds of technology. We could be transcribing calls.
The tech is already out there that can watch a call. It can do transcription. It can monitor talk time. It can give coaching platforms like Gong. So there, like there's all of these technologies out there that every organization should think about building into their tech stack. How do they, how do they mash up and build the best tech stack?
Okay. So it's almost like using technology as a sales assistant. Yeah. And, and, and in the book tech powered sales, there's a chapter toward the end that, that I wrote, you know, a day in the life of the future. And I, I talk about this scenario. That's really quite mind-blowing, and it's all around this, this, sales team entity virtual assistant Steve and the thing is, you know, this is, this is hypothetical, but what I say in the book at the end of this, of this case study that I lay out, you go, wow, this is mind-boggling. And I say, every single element that I talk about in the book, every element is here today.
It all exists. There's only one thing missing. There's one piece of technology missing and the thing that's missing from what I wrote in the book, Tech-Powered Sales in this case study a day in the life of the future is the orchestration bot. In other words, the bot that orchestrates all of these other pieces of technology.
That's certainly the future, right? We'll all have a, a sales virtual assistant that, that helps us with research. Right. And, and all of these other things that we actually need to know about. Okay. So it's like tying all the other pieces of technology together, one technology, one piece of technology to tie all the other pieces together.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, and at the moment, you know, this is part of developing our own technical quotient, our own TQ. So if you're listening to this thinking, what does it really mean for me to develop TQ? I understand IQ and EQ. What is technical quotient how, how would that manifest and be evidenced in my life if it was strong, and in the book, we actually provide a checklist.
Right. But you know, what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to use your tools of trade masterfully. You'll be able to build really strong billion searches using Google. You'll understand how to use the bullying search wizard inside LinkedIn sales navigator and save those searches and configure it as your trigger of end engine inside LinkedIn.
You'll be able to build your own mash-up. You'll mash together your own pragmatic text stack, right. That helps you be more effective in monitoring for trigger events, for finding emails and phone numbers. For automating basic tasks. You'll learn how to use the email sequencing tool in your own company, because you'll segment your territory, and you'll think I'll adopt an automated email approach, you know for the three quarters of my territory.
Yeah. you know, but for a quarter of the territory where they're bigger organizations, there's higher propensity to buy. I recognize I get one shot at the top. I'm gonna go deeper on research on the 25% of my patch, I'm gonna adopt a more manual approach, but leverage technology versus automating the outbound in other parts.
So, that's really what developing TQ really means. We just recognize the fact that machines and AI and tech is really good at filtering big data. It's very good for finding signals, amidst all of the noise in data and monitoring for trigger events. It does, you know; what if analysis and pattern matching?
Technology's good at making recommendations. So, I know Salesforce are doing a lot of work around using their own AI to suggest best next steps. Yeah. Einstein, right? I think, yeah, exactly. With Einstein, Einstein for Forecasting, right?
So you can use technology for automating tasks and workflows. You know, or generating proposals, configuring all the elements of a quote, securing approval, information analytics. So we need to use that part of tech well, but then we need to recognize there are things that will always be the domain of humans. So this thing of storytelling, fun, and humor, transferring belief, you know, that's one of the first things we have to do in selling is being an evangelist and transfer our belief to the other person on that person's opportunity for a much brighter future, and improved future state. So belief and trust are really important in selling, and that's the domain of humans, managing ambiguity and politics, creating emotional consensus, and creating a vision for the future.
You know, all of these things are really the things that humans do, but you know, building a good business case, navigating all of those politics. So if we can leverage the strengths of being human with the power of technology, that's how we create a level of effectiveness with an efficiency that'll be unrivaled.
So we can just achieve so much more. I, I often say that an old dog that can learn new tricks will always outperform, you know, a young pup no matter how tech-savvy they think they are.
It's very true. Yeah. And, Tony, could you elaborate a little more on that? You know, the human part, like how can sellers effectively use the time freed by technology? And you touched upon that in your previous answer, but could you elaborate a little more?
Yeah. Sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that question. Just ask that again?
Technology frees up a lot of time, right? For sellers, like, you know, by automating all the mundane tasks. So how can sellers effectively use the time, the time freed by technology? I know you touched upon it in your previous answer, but could you elaborate a little more on that?
Yeah. So let's maybe think about something like CRM. So, you know, every B2B seller in the world should be using a CRM system, many sellers, just jump into their CRM half an hour before their weekly sales meeting and do their updates and that is not the way to use CRM.
My challenge to the leaders of organizations is we need to implement CRM, you know, platforms like Salesforce. We need to implement them in a way that enables the sales process and gives sellers back their time. So if you think, well, you know, we, people go to a website, they fill in a form, they show interest, you know, we wanna seller to bring them back, call them back.
You want that lead to be allocated inside CRM. Nowhere else. And then you want to be able to give a single view of all of the history and interactions with this particular customer or potential customer. And if you're going to blend together the process of discovery and qualification, You know, you want those questions to be surfaced in CRM and captured in CRM.
And based on that discovery, if they become a qualified prospect, you might need to give them a proposal. You want them to be able to hit a button inside CRM that then generates the proposal, leveraging the data. If the seller needs resources internally to help win the deal you want the decision to allocate resources coming from inside the CRM. So if CRM becomes not just your system, a record, but your system of execution for providing a much better experience for your sellers and also the customer. Now you'll capture the data you need that provides the insights and improves the results that you're looking for. So think about if I'm going to implement any technology inside my organization, how does this give people back time?
And how does this make the execution of the process easier for them and with more consistency. And we wanna align our sales process with the buyer's journey right in the way that gives everybody back time, and gives people a much better experience, right? That's how we ensure the successful adoption of technology.
Yeah. so how do, sellers effectively use the time that's been given back to them by technology, like, you know, in building human relationships or navigating politics, as you mentioned. So what else can they do with that time?
Well, many sellers are extremely busy failing. So they're driving huge levels of ineffective activity. So we all need to recognize, I used to be a drummer many years ago, playing the drums and the thing for all musicians is all good musicians know that less is more. Less is more, the sort of busier we get in playing our instrument, the more things going on in the band, the sloppier, it sounds, you know the more it doesn't work and it's the same for seller.
So we need to think less is more. How do I use the technology to help me decide where to focus? How do I use technology to give me back time, to do some serious research? Where I can pull some genuine insights that'll help me elevate the conversations inside an account. So every seller listening to this, I just really encourage you to think about segmenting your territory and deciding on the accounts you're going to go deep on, you know, as part of improving the probability of success.
Right? So just think, where will I take more, an automated, outbound technology driven approach to try and uncover the 3% of the market that's looking for what we do. And then maybe some of the 40% of the market that are typically open to change. Right? So technology build my messaging to appeal to both of those categories, cuz that's the truth.
Only 3% of the market's looking for what we do at any given point in time. But 40% is dissatisfied with current state. They're open to change, but then for the ones I'm gonna target and go deep on, I spend that time doing research.
Okay. On the next one. so one of the emerging technologies in sales is, you know, video, particularly in prospecting. Have you used video in your cold outreach or prospecting, or would you recommend using that?.
Yeah, so, I, in the book we talk about vMail, you know, which can mean voicemail or video email. So, video is very powerful, but what we find with all forms of sales outreach the more others are all using it and using it badly, the less it's going to help us drive results. So I'd absolutely encourage people to use video. So there's certainly some great tools out there that help us do video mail and videos incredibly well. At the most simple level you can use your LinkedIn Mobile App. You cannot do this on your web browser laptop version of LinkedIn, but on the LinkedIn mobile app, you can record a short video and you can send it to people.
So, I think video mail is innovative. It's a really good thing to do. But we want to make sure that it is highly relevant to the person, right? So you would get video mail maybe into your sequences. You may not use video mail in the first sequence. What a sequence is, what I call a combo, a combination of touches. The most basic combo in markets where voicemail is a thing in markets like India, you know, voicemail isn't really used, some Asian markets it's not really used. But in a place like Australia or the US where they use, you know, voicemail, but the most basic outreach is your phone. If they don't answer, you leave a voicemail, you then send an email. That's a basic triple.
Maybe 48 hours later you phone again, you leave another voicemail, you bump the email back. and then maybe you send a calendar invitation. So, in the voicemail, it says, Hey Mike, it's Tony from Sales IQ. I'm I'm just following up. And wondering how Monday at 8:15 would work for you.
I'll send you a calendar invitation, but let me know if there's a better slot. Yeah. So then I'd bump the email back. I changed the subject line to Monday eight, 15 question mark, and then I'd send the calendar invitation and then maybe if they didn't accept that or didn't turn up, right. I would then phone again.
Hey Mike. Sorry. We couldn't get together on Monday. yeah, please let me know, you know, what, what works best for. And then I bump the email back. You may decide to add video mail, you know, at this point in time so you need to obviously a and B test everything that you're doing with outreach and decide which channels of communication are most effective. So in some markets, you know, WhatsApp is incredibly important. Some people feel bombarded by what happens in LinkedIn and ignore it. Other people are in LinkedIn regularly. You know, so maybe it's text messages, video mail, email, LinkedIn, you know, we need to think about how to best build those sequences.
Awesome. Okay. And, A prolonged sales cycle is one of the major problems, plaguing sales teams. Right. So how does technology shorten sales cycle?
Okay. So a couple of things, there's four reasons deals tend to drag out slip, stall, and eventually die. The first reason is a lack of compelling commercial value.
In change in investing in change in the eyes of the people above where we are typically selling. So we need to, to nail the business case, we need to nail the compelling commercial value of change. That's what we'll have the customer motivated in the absence of a compelling event. Which is normally the case.
The normal state of affairs is there is no compelling event what we need is a compelling business case, a compelling commercial reason for change. You want the customer thinking every month we stay in current state, look at what it's costing us. And look at the lost opportunities, the opportunities we're missing by not improving things.
The next reason the deals, tend to slip, stall and die is a lack of consensus. So again, we can use, we can't really use technology, in a sense to nail the commercial value. That's really a human thing that we need to do. But we can use technology to do high levels of research time effectively. The next thing is consensus our role of the stakeholders on board for agreeing to change.
And the reality is, we can use platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to really try and start to map the power base of an organization. So you can use technology for that are the third reason deal tend to slip and stall and not close. It's just a lack of alignment around process and timing. And we can use collaboration tools to build a mutual plan with the customer.
Right. So we can definitely do that. we can use technology to drive engagement with all of those stakeholders. Now just in case someone's curious, I said four reasons. The fourth reason is something nasty happens. There's just some nasty surprise that we feel we can't control. And that's things like our key supporter leaves the organization. They get acquired, they post bad results. And although we feel we can't control those things, what we know is that time kills deals. So the longer the deal drags out the higher, the probability of the nasty surprise. So if we nail those first three things, we nail the, we nail the risk in the fourth.
So technology inside CRM, for example, can help us with forecasting accuracy. It can help identifying deals, getting stuck in stage. It can monitor for trigger events, for example, if key senior executives leaving or joining our target organization that's a huge area of risk in a deal, right. New senior people coming in or leaving. S
o technology can help us, especially in those areas. Okay. That was very insightful. Thank you for that. And, I think, yeah, this is our last. So what are some books or podcasts that you recommend every sales professional should read or listen to? Or that you read all isn't too.
So I know this is shameless self-promotion niche, but I just encourage everybody to agreeable everybody to read Tech-Powered Sales, the companion book to Tech-Powered sales is Combo Prospecting.
So Combo Prospecting and Tech-Powered Sales are essential reading. If you're trying to solve your outbound pipeline generation problem. As a seller, it's essential reading, I'd really encourage you to subscribe to the podcast that Sales IQ Global. At Sales IQ Global, we've also gotta create pipeline course that really talks about all of these concepts, especially nailing.
The definition of your ideal customer profile, truly understanding the buyer personas to whom you're selling and then really nailing that narrative and building your sequences, you know, as you drive outbound. yeah, so they'd, they'd really be my recommendations.
Yeah. I, I think that's, you know, great recommendation, especially, you know, given the times and the value of technology that people are seeing with the pandemic and the recession.
Yeah, the pace at which, you know, technology is expected to grow in sales. I think it's a very relevant recommendation and it's not self-promotion at all.
So thank you for that. Okay. So Tony, I think that's a wrap. Thank you so much for being here. It was great having you here and, you know, for listening to your wonderful insights on using technology in sales, I'm sure our audience have been truly inspired to adopt sales, adopt technology in their own sales process.
And so thank you Tony, for that insight-powered session. And thank you listeners for tuning in today. We'll be doing many more, many more of these podcasts with much more stellar sales leaders from around the globe. So stay tune to our upcoming episodes. We’re on apple, Spotify, Google and stitch as well.
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Thank you for listening and bye bye. And thank you Tony. Once again for being here, it was great having you.
Thank you, Nisha.