Introduction

0:04 we've got ai let's just put it into the business and that that's not the way to do it why is ai a different business decision than other technologies in the past how much do you need it or not need it when you can still say so what you know you haven't found value a publisher wanted to replace a system they had for 16 years why because it's 16 years old so what it's old and clunky so what

0:33 it's not feature-rich so what keep going and you eventually get to the real answer it couldn't do dynamic pricing and that was costing them two million euros a year that's not a reason to change that's a whole business case and nobody had asked for it i guess today spent 40 years selling enterprise technology and reckons most deals stall because the seller never got past the first so what you watch around two big trade shows asking vendors one question what do you do for your business

1:03 your customers. Almost every single one answered by describing their technology. We get into why AI has made that habit fatal, why the finance director is the person you're actually selling to and what happens to the six minutes a day your software says it saves. Stick around. I'm joined

Meet Andrew Buchanan

1:19 by my good friend and sales mentor Andrew Buchanan. Andrew and I first met five years ago when my now wife wanted confirmation from her friends that I seemed like a good guy. Andrew is a sales strategist, coach and founder of Future Consulting, specialising in AI and enterprise technology go-to-market strategy. He works with boards, sales leaders and technology vendors to build commercial frameworks that translate AI capability into repeatable revenue growth with a career

1:48 spanning over 40 years in enterprise software sales, commercial strategy and executive advisory and he's helped organisations across multiple sectors including financial services and professional services across the globe. Andrew has also written a book which I'm sure we're going to cover some of those aspects that nobody wants your AI as a title. So we'll leave you with that and then we'll come on to talk about

2:13 it. So Andrew, welcome. I'm so excited to have you on today. Yeah, great. Thanks, Shaun. It's really good to be here. I can't believe it's five years. Time flies. It was sad mid-COVID, wasn't it, when we first met? Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Yeah. And I passed the test. So thank you. I'm sure Julia's very happy. Yeah. So I think it's really, one thing that's been great in the podcast is to make sure that we're bringing different types of conversations from different

2:42 types of people that we don't want. You're not just pro-AI, also there is a concern debate on AI and also in different sectors. And I think sales is an area that we really haven't looked at yet. And I think it's really interesting to see you, to have you come on board. And I literally look at that really because...

Why AI is a different business decision

3:01 One of the things that you mentioned in the book is the impact and that AI is a business decision. I think that is such a key thing. Maybe we can expand a bit on that. What does it mean to be? Why is AI a different business decision than other technologies in the past? Yeah, that's a great question. I think I'd just qualify that with, bluntly, for the whole 40 years I've been selling some form of technology,

3:31 it has always been true that in the main, it's been business-to-business selling. It's always been true that a business buys something for a reason. And so that concept hasn't changed. I think why this is different is for decades, vendors, certainly IT vendors, have been able to get away with not focusing on the business outcome because they're leaving the

3:59 customer to join the dots. And they assume, well, the customer knows why he wants it, why she or he wants it. All I have to do is prove that my technology is better than the next guy's. So you end up in this bits, bytes, speeds, feeds, my green widget, your red widget, a tech comparison. And a lot of technical people within the potential prospect and client were quite happy to purchase on that basis. So they

4:29 would do a tech comparison. Why AI has changed? Well, I think that's a key question. Why AI has changed that is there's no real tech to show. So if you're using Claude or Gemini or whatever, all you've really got is a prompt. You've got a window where you can start creating or asking or generating or whatever it may be. And so you can't use the same sales tactics that you did

Two trade shows, one simple question

4:52 maybe for 10, 20 years that you have to use now. It won't work. Just to qualify that, I went to two very large, large shows at Excel, one run by Amazon and another, the Info Security Show. And I went around a lot of vendor stands and I ask a simple question. I look up, mention the name of the company, find somebody who comes talk to me. What do you do for your customers? A very, very specific

5:21 question. What do you do, Mr. Whatever company you are, for your customers? And 99, well, everyone, everyone except one, they told me about their technology. They told me about their bits, bytes, speeds, feeds. And of course, that wasn't the question. What I was asking was, what does it do? Yeah, you've got this tech, but what does it do for customers? And with AI, that is now essential because there's no

5:48 tech comparison to have anymore. Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, you can't, there isn't something to show. And so that if you, even after you've purchased and somebody says, why did you purchase this thing? How do you then demonstrate to them what it is that you've just purchased? Right? What is the thing that you've actually bought? And also if you come along and you go, okay, I've built a tool, and I built an AI tool to do this specific purpose. And at the same time, we're saying,

6:20 well, actually with AI, you have the opportunity to build your own things in the way that you would like to build them. So there's that challenge over that same principle, isn't it? You can't just go in and say, I can deliver. thing but what values it why would i choose to work with you why would i choose for you to deliver something to me that's going to give me the outcome that i need to solve the problem that i need if it's also something that i could do myself yeah i think both customers and vendors and all of

Solutions looking for a problem

6:50 us all fall into the trap of having talking ai creating ai solutions and then looking for a problem to solve and reality is if you're advising a customer then what you're really looking is okay what is it you're trying to achieve in your business what's holding that back okay what's the process usually or yeah what's the process that's holding that back and how does that need

7:21 to change and then and only then say okay could ai be the solution to fix that process which in turn helps you with that business challenge whereas what you see a lot of is oh yeah we can build agents why don't we just put loads of agents in and there's recent examples of companies who you know put in ai agents instead of people and they're now reversing that because what they really have missed is okay but what why

7:49 what was the problem you were trying to solve with that and all they were trying to solve was could i pull my wage bill down but by doing so customer sat drops or whatever and so they ended up reversing it and that was a classic let's we've got ai let's just put it into the business and that that's not the way to do it or it's not the way to do if you want to be successful yeah and it's definitely that importance of of outcome and i mean i've seen it seen it in my

8:19 my decades in working it as well is that the lack of return on investment and so there's always there's been this element and it sounds to me that we're not talking about like a new sales process but we're talking about a sales process that how you really should be doing it and looking at it and saying well okay what's the what do you want to achieve what is the overall goal you goals you have for the organisation what is preventing you and i'm not and i'm not it's not being an expert this is me spouting out what i've read in your book is um is that

8:49 actually we need to understand what the cut the business we need to understand what's going on with the organisation what problems are they having confirm those with them to understand what do they want to achieve and then you know we're talking about a sales process but we're talking about a sales process that how you know we are when we're talking about that that already

9:26 with some people the same way because we can for in university well we're talking about an operation that is actually working together for study this kind of thing is for личiom and it's it's i think it's really for like like i said everybody i've been want is back back in the day my old mentor IBM who is one of the people I dedicate the book to he's long retired now but he always spoke about being inquisitive as did my original two bosses who sadly are no longer with us but are also dedicated in the book it it's understanding

9:51 the customer so if you're a bit nosy and a bit inquisitive if you were an inquisitive kid you probably make quite a good salesperson because what you're really trying to do is ask a load of questions and really find out okay what what's this business about why am I here in the room if they've invited you in and what do they really think I'm there for but what is it they think in their head they're going to achieve by having someone like me in that room and so I

10:19 might think I know what they want to solve because I've dealt with other companies but until I ask the question and get into a dialogue I don't really know but once I'm in that dialogue and we both agree that actually yeah we can help each other solve this problem then the business case kind of builds itself the problem is often we make an assumption and we go

10:47 in with a our pre pre-determined business case that may not be 100% wrong but it it's not right enough for the customers who immediately go oh yeah this is this is fantastic because even though you may have dealt with similar companies you haven't dealt with this company and so that that's really critical if you can get that kind of dialogue then that's

The 11 to 17 people who can say no

11:13 that's perfect but often as well we're talking to only one or two people apparently research says now that in most deals of any significant size you can have 11 to 17 people who can say no they can't all necessarily definitely say yes but there's so many stakeholders now and yet often we're dealing with one two or three of them so we're basing often our even if

11:40 we've done a business case we're basing it maybe on two or three people's requirements and wants but it could be another five or ten that have completely different views so yeah it's it's a more complex world but yeah we should always have been doing it this way we were just fortunate that we could get away without doing it yeah I think that's that and it sounds as well that it becomes even more

12:08 important when you say that there's more more stakeholders involved maybe you've only got part of the picture but at least if you understand what some of the business problems are that you can demonstrate you have had some conversations and I think you know the conversations we've had where you've been mentoring me it's off it's come down to that when you've been mentoring me it's off it's come down to that about getting in front of people which is almost a little bit counterintuitive when people think we want to be using AI to be the front end and sell our AI to do my sales process

12:38 for me but my experience as a as a recipient of that of people contacting me has really been one of saying well I have to get very generic messages and this is pre-ai you know non-personalised or I messages that don't quite make sense that that they maybe use a little bit of ai but it's not really all particularly good and for every single one of those my first instinct is i i want i don't

13:03 want to connect with you i don't i don't want to work with you you you've not you've gone from being a cold to a dead prospect whereas if you'd actually put in a little bit of personalisation maybe grab a little bit of what you thought about that i might actually need to be relevant and not sell to me in the first message then you know i'm going to be maybe slightly warmer i'm on that process of where we could potentially end up with a conversation and it's very rare that

13:29 somebody will email me something that i happen to need right there and then in the space that you know they happen to message me yeah and again if you look you look at ai i mean i'm a big advocate of our user a lot i'm involved with some companies where we're using large language models in the digital forensic law enforcement space i was talking to some people around what it's doing in the medical space in the drug research space you know it's there's some incredible uses there and you know i use um chat gpt and claude

14:00 pretty much daily and multiple times a day and in the sales and marketing process that obviously is really useful because it can do that research it can help you compare things it can put nuances and give you different points of view but it'd be very interesting if you did a poll and said of all the things that i've done in the past i've done a lot of things that i've done in the past how many times do you use 100 what ai generated for you in other words you generate a document a

Do you ever use AI output unchanged?

14:35 powerpoint a presentation an roi calculator or whatever it may be or even those that are generating code and building solutions how many of the time how many of those times do you actually use it 100% without any form of changes and of course i would probably say zero there might be a few who say they do but i would say that's got to be very very small percentage and the reason for it is it is

15:03 still ai you still will have more experience and therefore what i find is it's brilliant for i'm not great with a blank sheet of paper and so with the way my brain operates i'm much better with something that's generated i go in and maybe completely amend but it's got me going that's how i work and so whilst i use it a big advocate of it and think it's got a real place you know obviously it's got its own

15:31 challenges and and issues and concerns with it but i never use it and not go in and look at it check it rewrite things put in different slants but i use it as a good start point and so i think that's the same in sales and marketing ai can do an awful lot of things for you but it can't replace you in that sense it may replace some of the grunt work

15:59 but that isn't going to necessarily replace a whole ton of people you and i both know whenever you get a message to connect on linkedin the ones that you never reply to are the ones where you accept and immediately a note pings into your message so they've got an auto rule well to me that that's just lazy it's not going to work so i'm going to use it as a good start point and so like no you're engaged and 99 of the time that's immediate sales pitch to me in the main in my

16:27 business it's all about how to build my business how many as a consulting firm would how many what would you think if i could get you 96 leads in four hours you know that kind of message well i just ignore them because i'm going you haven't looked at my business there's nothing there about me with ar you can find out all about me but you haven't you've just linked in maybe used ai to find consulting companies you've not looked how big i am you've not done any

16:55 research and then as soon as i connect boom a message comes in i can't believe anybody actually responds to those messages except someone might respond and go this won't work for you but i can help you so if they sent it to like another sales organisation they might turn the table and this is really rubbish let me help you do it it has a place but i certainly don't believe it's going to uh certainly in sales and marketing

17:23 it's not going to completely replace uh people designers yeah it can design certain things but even then you'll want to go in and amend it it's where a lot of people building websites but it's doing it and then you're going in usually as i did and amending it and tweaking it and changing it it's not generating the finished product

Where human judgement still matters

17:48 yeah i think there's definitely so one of the things that's come up in the previous podcast as well has been the talk of it it doesn't have empathy so these these these human characteristics that it can't doesn't do very well then we need to bring those things into it so as you say you know there's there's websites there's there's various things maybe it can do a sales brochure but all these things it can do we need to make sure we bring in the human judgement that we're

18:15 looking at those things and and looking at going does does that match our brand and we need to is it is it something that i would say is it is it because it come across in the in the right way that i would like it to because if we leave those things out they just become generic and this is part of the problem that i see is that people will use ai or other automation that's happened over the years they use tools to build things because they can but most of the time that

18:41 people go and build something because they can but don't have the knowledge to know what's a good website you know what is a good good good sales strategy what is a good marketing strategy will give something a go one they won't have much confidence in it because it's not something they're an expert in but eventually they'll find themselves in front of an expert because there is something isn't quite working and whether it's on their website or their strategy or you know they're not making the sales and go i don't understand yeah i've ticked all the boxes

19:07 maybe even ai has given me a list and yeah similar to you i mean i i yeah i i use up hours and hours of credits on on using ai and i discover something that i don't understand and i don't understand things work better than than others do and but certainly the amount of effort we would need to put in to get something that is really crisp and curated for someone you might be able to get maybe

19:35 95 of the way there but there's that five percent that if it's if it's slightly off then there's just enough somebody can read your message and it may look like a perfectly great message but something about it says to them that doesn't feel authentic and then it's as simple as that they can make a judgement and then it becomes something sometimes i'll reply to a message on linkedin because it's clever and i think i think you know what i mean sometimes i might even go you know what that might be

20:03 automated but it's so clever that i'm going to respond to you because i want to say yeah great that's clever and sometimes i might respond to people and say well actually sorry but i wouldn't work with you because actually i'm about authentic connection and you haven't

Why Andrew wrote the book

20:18 made any attempt to have that to make that connection one of the things that i wanted to ask you about was just sort of quite interesting people write books for various reasons and you know you've got you've got all this sales experience and and you're now look and you've got this experience with ai so what was behind writing the book what made you decide to to do this particular book um so the flippant answer is i wanted to be able to put published author on my

20:45 linkedin profile um of which you know which i now have a lot of experience with and i've got a lot of have go look at my linkedin profile and first thing published author but the real reason was i i'd had the idea for a book quite a while ago and then about four years ago and i think actually you know during that covid period where you had a lot more time on your hands i was playing around with you know this whole concept of stop selling and win more business

21:11 was the working title in my head um and again it was all based on i'd started back in 2010 i'd come out of full-time employment and became self-employed as a strategist and coach and an awful lot of my work was okay i'd go into a company and i'd say tell me what you do for your clients and even on a coaching engagement or or i'm going for an interim or fractional oh sales leadership

21:41 they would always tell me about the tech i'm going yeah but what does the tech do that someone wants and so it was a increasing bugbear that whilst it was great because i could add value to these companies it irritated me that you know a lot of health people were still not really getting it so fast forward and i finished the contract late last year and had a bit of time

22:06 and so i thought you know what i'm actually going to do this and this is where i am AI is really good. So I'm really dyslexic. Apparently, I will be diagnosed now as ADHD. So my brain, on the one hand, is a real superpower because I can compute an awful lot of things. And I can see the answer really quickly to most problems, particularly in the sales marketing world. But when I was writing, the way I write really wasn't book-like.

22:36 And so often I've got 50 things in my head. So it was like, wow, I'd put all this down in Word. I'd use, I'd talk and it would then write it for me because I'm not really great at actual writing. But as most people know me, I can talk really well. I haven't for a long time. And so I put all my thoughts together, all the posts I've been doing on LinkedIn about this, the videos I've done for the last five,

23:02 six years, and basically started pulling that together. And then I asked Claude to say, OK, how would this format add up? But again, going back to our original point, having done that, it then took four months of me rereading, re-editing, changing things, looking at things before I got to the point. I thought I'd publish it two months earlier, but I was still reading through it and saying,

23:28 does this sound authentic? Is it me? And will people get it? So you'll notice I've got takeaways at the end of each chapter. Because again, I know what salespeople like. The reason it's, you know, only 97 pages, a lot of those are the credit references and credits at the back, is because of sales guys. I don't have that big an attention span. I want something quick to read or using the Kindle version, listen to. And I want takeaways at the end of each chapter so that

Nobody Wants Your AI

23:57 there's a real takeaway there that I can, if all I ever do is go to the takeaways, you'll learn something. And so it was having coached hundreds of people and two and a half years later, I was able to do that. And so I think that's a really good talk to lots of vendors at shows and other places. I just realised there was a real gap here of, come on guys, we need to be selling this way. And by the way, AI has just

24:23 compounded that. And so I thought, right, I'll call it something provocative. Nobody wants your AI, which is basically saying, look, if you show up at a client with just an AI solution and go, hey, look at my AI solution. They don't want that. What they want is, to solve their problems and solutions. Hence why I put a practical guide to value selling. So people knew exactly what it was after they first read the provocative title.

24:50 I did think I could do a whole series of these of nobody wants, et cetera, et cetera. So who knows? I am working on a small business edition as well on the same sort of lines. So yeah, so it was a bit of frustration. I'd always wanted to do it. And I think AI in my view has just brought it, this whole sales issue to a head. And now's the time. Bluntly, the salespeople and

25:18 companies they work for who grab hold of this and begin to sell that way will undoubtedly be the companies that don't. There's no stats yet per se, but it's probably in the region of three times more successful. If you're doing that, you're going to be able to sell that way. I think it's actually great. You said you'd work in a small business edition and I'm about a third

25:48 of the way through the book myself. And I said to you before we started that I thought, oh, you know, it's only a little book. I'll get through this quickly. But actually I found myself writing a lot of notes and going, okay, these are some things. Because I mean, I'm not a salesperson by trade. I'm a tech by trade. I've done e-commerce and e-commerce is, you know, is very different in terms of, in terms of the marketing, the sales side of it. You're kind of

26:15 trying to figure out human behaviour and how they're going to behave as they go through your funnels or your website. But, but actually, you know, so I've had to take some, take my time through it in understanding. I mean, it's been really helpful to me and I can see how for, you know, for, yeah, SMEs, it can be really valuable as well. So I would, I would encourage anyone that isn't actually thinking, okay, so salespeople know, it's a hundred percent. It's not, it's not a hundred percent just for salespeople because

26:42 there's things in there help you to understand how maybe you need to approach particularly entrepreneurs. So if you're good, if you're looking to sell, selling something, you're trying to sell that in a way there's obviously at the moment, lots of new people coming into the space because they're like, oh, I can build something with AI. I can use AI. I can build a tool. I can solve a problem now, which is, which can be great. But of course, as we've spoken about really, you want to start from the, who do I,

27:09 where is the problem that aligns with me and my values, my purpose? Where do I think the problem is? Who are the companies that might have this problem? Get in front of those, then find out what is the real problem? What is the actual problem? What do they want to achieve? And then build something around that. Whereas of course, as we're saying, the downside at the moment is that AI is almost encouraged to build something because we can, but then we get to this, the

27:36 classic problem, which is not an AI problem, which is a, been a classic for all time really, isn't it? Is that, oh, I've built something that I think people want. Now, unless you've got a massive marketing budget behind you, that's going to be a hard sell, right? Well, it's solutions looking for problems as opposed to problems looking for a solution. And so I think, you know, it's getting better, but early doors of your,

28:02 you know, your anthropics, your chat GPTs, co-pilots, et cetera. You know, a lot of it was around time-saving. I mean, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think

The six minutes a day problem

28:09 from one of the big vendors coming out saying you'll save six minutes a day. Well, the problem with that was you go to the CFO, just little sales tip. Most sales people rarely include the finance director or the CFO in their discussions, yet they're critical because what's happening, you're going in, let's say you've got a hundred grand solution you're trying to sell. It's AI. And you go to your boss who goes, oh, brilliant.

28:38 This is great. At some point, someone from finance, if it's a hundred grand, probably the CFO finance director will go, okay, so how much is it going to cost? Well, you've got to spend a hundred grand. Okay. What does it give me back? Six minutes a day times X number of employees. But the bit that misses out is if that six minutes a day is only going to be used for someone to have a longer lunch or scroll, doom scroll on their phone, what the CFO,

29:08 he's going to say is, hold on a minute. You want me to spend an additional hundred grand over what I'm paying them already to give them another six minute off. Unless you can say, well, actually in that six minutes, they're going to be more productive because they will be able to do more of this, this, this, or this. The CFO is going to knock it back. And many, many times I'm doing deal reviews for customers. So I do a lot of fractional sales meetings. I'll come in

29:38 every month or whatever, or every week and go through deals. And they go, yeah, here's the business case. But the business case is a business case for the people you're selling to. That may not translate to particularly the CFO. What the CFO wants to say is, okay, if I'm going to spend a hundred grand, show me where the 300 grand of additional business is going to come from. Or

30:08 I'm going to be really blunt about it and say, okay, don't just come and tell me I'm saving time. That time is only valuable to me if it means they're generating additional business that they could potentially could, we could invoice for. So again, it's, that's why it's critical to find out what is it we're trying to solve here? What problem does the customer want to solve?

30:34 Because once you get to the board level, and certainly finance level, finance will be ruthless. They're not interested per se in the tech. They're interested in what it's going to do financially for the company. And that's often the bit that's missed by all sales. I've done it in the past as well myself, you know, of forgetting that actually ultimately somebody in finance is going to have to sign this off.

30:59 Yeah. And they'll have to be competing. If it is a hundred grand, sorry, Shaun, if it's a hundred grand, they've probably got five other competing projects for that. So they're going to look and go, right. So you're telling me it'll save six minutes. Okay. But how does that translate into getting my hundred grand back? Right. You're one of five people going for the same hundred grand within the company. He's going to go with the ones that he thinks is going to bring the best return. So if you can't pull yours to a proper ROI that is meaningful, then

31:31 yeah, you're probably not going to get much further. You might have a great pilot, but I think that the stats on,

Why most AI pilots fail

31:38 failed pilots is in, I believe is 60 plus percent. And the number of AI projects, I believe, and it keeps changing because AI is so new. Tessal projects that actually achieve the ROI they originally were signed off for is about around approximately 6%. So you can tell that that's the bit that's missing. And of course, with the way vendors are charging for credits now for what you're doing quite often now, people,

32:08 again, hold on a minute. We're saving this, but look how much it's going to cost us to do that now with a credit-based AI tool. And so again, I think that's why at the moment there's such a high percentage of pilots don't ever go live. Those that do only six, I'd say only 6% approximately are successful in returning the ROI. They said they would. I'm sure that'll get better as the market,

32:38 matures. But yeah, the sales guy who got that 6% is the guy who will undoubtedly be following some version of this. This is not rocket science. A lot of what I'm quoting has been around a long time. There'll be people, and there's some very good people out there following this type of process who'll read the book and go, yeah, absolutely. I know all this. I've learned nothing new. They'll be the ones that will be selling the successful 6% project.

33:08 Yeah. And I think it's really interesting you give the analogy as far as the projects. And it came to my mind, what we talked about earlier was this whole thing about knowing what's going on in the business, knowing the business. Because if you can turn around and go, well, I know you've got these other projects. Well, actually by doing this, this is actually either going to reduce the cost of those projects, or we can actually do those other two projects. If you can actually go, well, I'm going to save you that instead of, I can do these for that

33:36 hundred grand. Or maybe you can... Include all the projects or whatever that might be. But that understanding of what's going on in the business. And I think it's really interesting you mentioned as well that there's people who know this. And I certainly have this problem. You talked about it as well as an expert. And you've missed things as well. And I think that's sometimes a classic thing, isn't it? As humans that we go, we know what to do, but actually going through the process,

34:03 particularly if it's something that maybe is, for me, is less familiar. For me, it's unfamiliar. In doing the sales process. And I think, but it's... The other thing is, I think anyway, and you could correct me on this if I'm wrong, but it feels to me like if you know more about the business, you are really clear about the problems they have, then whatever it is that you're looking to introduce to them, you're going to have more confidence in. In fact,

34:29 it becomes less of a conversation about sales and more of a conversation about, well, this is clearly something you need. So I don't need to sell it to you. I'm like, well, this is what you... Clearly this is need. And this is a cost to it. You've done all the work. And it really comes down to how much do you need it or not need it. And as rather than you having to be, you know, kind of, you know, you have to give to the gab and try to convince somebody of that. Yeah. And it's... So some of the stats, I quote quite a lot of stats in the book.

35:01 And of course, you have to be careful. That's why there's multiple pages of credits at the end, because I've used a lot of industry... And they're, you know, if you're not careful, you can get the stat you want or the stat you're looking for. So I quote quite a few priorities there just to give a more complete picture. But approximately 80 odd percent of deals fail to close when they were first forecast.

35:32 And any sales director or sales manager or salesperson listening to this will know, and the companies you work with, probably know different, which is salesperson gets very excited. They've got an opportunity and they forecast it for, you know, end of March, end of June, end of whatever. And as they dig in, they get excited. They do a demo. They send a proposal.

36:00 And I talk about quotes versus proposals. A proposal has a business case around it. A quote is just a bunch of stats. And I quote quite a lot of stats. And I quote quite a lot of stats. But off it goes. And at this point, in any form of CRM, whatever you're using, they'll put that at a 75% chance of closing. Okay. And then the date, a month before the date, they said it would close. When you look at the history, when I drop into companies,

36:26 I have a look at their CRM. I'm using HubSpot at the moment. I actually have three lots of HubSpot on my laptop because I'm doing three fractional roles right now. But you'll see, Suddenly, all of these deals get moved out 30 days and then another month goes past and they get out, go another 30 days. And so what happens is, generally speaking, a deal that's called within three months, 85% of them close later and they're usually closing at least 60 days later than originally forecast.

37:01 When you dig into them, not always, but many times, you look and go, right, you've got an unrealistic, over-optimistic percentage here because you've sent a quote in effect. You might have some words around it. What you have not done is clearly articulated what the benefit of that will be.

Never leave the customer to join the dots

37:25 I always call it, never leave the customer to join the dots. And that is... I'm demoing this to you and I'm showing this to you and I'm leaving you, Shaun, to go, ah, right, so Andy's shown me this red widget. Yeah, do that red widget. I wonder what that solves. So I'm pretty sure the red widget solves this problem. Right, okay. Do I have that problem?

37:52 Oh, yeah, no, I think I do. And that problem is causing me this amount of pain. Yeah, okay, no, I do. Okay, so that red widget is really important. By now... I'm four minutes on talking about something else that you've not listened to because you're trying to comprehend, do I need the red widget? And loads of demos go that way. As opposed to saying, look, the reason I'm showing you this red widget, Shaun, is because I know you have this issue that is causing this problem that, as far as I'm aware from our discussions, actually has a monetary value on that or a time value on that.

38:27 And so that's a far better way of doing it because you go, no. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so now moving on to the yellow widget. And we have the same process and the same discussion. And so you look and you look at that proposal and say, what are we actually really solving here? And I'll give a generic answer.

The publisher and the two million euros

38:49 I'll give you a prime example. I was working with a company some years ago that sold into large publishers around the world and big advertising and publishing systems. And most of these companies... Most of these companies kept their systems for many years. And a European potential customer had their system 16 years. And I was asked to come in and this was the biggest deal they had that year for that financial year.

39:16 It was worth many millions of euros. And I was asked to come in and do an overview of it. So first thing I said is, okay, a big meeting planned, an eight hour meeting in person with the customer. Okay. Which is a lot, a lot of time with the customer. And that was to go through every aspect of the system. Fine. First question, why had prior proposals, discussions, and they were at the point of, okay, we're going to have this demo, our meeting, blah, blah, blah.

39:50 So the first question I asked is, why are they getting rid of their current solution? And the answer was, because it's 16 years old. I said, yeah. But does it work? Yeah. So why wouldn't you just keep it? We're going to charge them X million euros. What? Why? Oh, well, cause it's really old yet, but that doesn't make sense. That makes no sense to me just because it's old doesn't mean to say they need to get rid of it, go and find out anyway.

40:20 It took them a little while, but they found out that the reason they needed to change, it wasn't because it was old. It was because advertising had become a dynamic. System bit like Uber does, um, boosts and, um, price boosts and, you know, go up and down advertising's done the same. And so you could have a online real time change in an advertising cost.

40:47 And unfortunately, because their system is 16 years old, it didn't do that. And so the reason they were changing was purely because they needed that functionality because they reckon it was costing. It was costing them 2 million euros a year of lost revenue. So of course now charging them 2 million, okay. 2 million of revenue, not necessarily profit, but that would quickly pay for itself over three years.

41:14 And if they kept it five, 10 years. So I said, now you're going to that meeting with a totally different agenda. CEO is going to be in the meeting. So that first 45 minutes is critical because he only cares about that 2 million. So do not do your normal log on two hours of tedium, log off, go straight to dynamic pricing, show that while the CEOs in the room, and then you can, when he's gone, you can show the rest.

41:46 I took, took quite a while. That's what they did. They won that. They won that deal. But if they hadn't gone and discovered the why it would have just been another me too. Demo, they may well have got and shown it probably knowing them for as in CEO is not there a little bit bored for as in maybe it would have come up.

42:13 And so that is the most common thing I find is deal stall deals go nowhere, even though theoretically, according to all of the processes, whether that's med pick solution, sales, challenger, or whatever you're using. And so that's the most common thing I find is deal stall deals go nowhere, even though theoretically, according to all of the processes, whatever salesmen Miller Hyman, whatever salesman is using, they'll have it a high 75%, but they're kidding themselves because they've not really discovered what's the real reason they're going to buy this.

42:42 Yeah, absolutely. I know that, that, I think that's a, uh, as you start joining your clients, really great way to wrap the world up and think in terms of what you've been looking at in terms of what I've read so far in the book, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it, but definitely that that's a wonderful example of being curious, asking. Dig deep. Digging deeper, not just taking the face of it and going, oh, well, there's an opportunity. I'll take their money and actually going, because no, you wouldn't take their money because it would stall or it may not even happen.

43:11 But by that great, that example, there is one of going, well, actually you, you're going, no, I don't understand. Hold on. Like, no, no, you need to go away. We need to understand this better. And they're going, oh, so they're then going and finding out the reason, of course, that real reason actually builds your, the business justification and the business case. Huge. And it does your work for you, doesn't it? They did your work as a salesperson from what I'm hearing of that story. So I think that's a wonderful thing.

43:37 And why one of the things that, um, often when we have our conversations in general, I come back and I come back with what I call an Andrew ism, right? It's like, there's a, there's a one liner. I know you're one of the Kings of the one liners. And, and I, I, the most recent one was, are you serious about? And so I now got a list of, I've got my here. I said, Shaun, are you serious about a list of things I look at and go, am I serious about these things? So.

The "So what?" test

44:00 So what is, what is a, an Andrew ism that you can leave us, leave us with today? If you, so if you can use the phrase, so what, after a client has talked about their need, you know, you haven't found the real pain point and the real value. So if you're trying to discover value, for instance, using that example, why do they want to get rid of their system because it's 16 years old?

44:29 So. So what, well, it's old and a bit clunky. So what, it's not that feature rich. So what, but when you get to, it doesn't have any form of dynamic pricing. So what it's costing them 2 million euros a year, you found value. And so that whole question, inquisitive scepticism of when you can still say, so what, you know, you haven't found value.

44:59 So. Anything. You're trying to, if I, if the customer says, yeah, we, we, we're, we're unhappy with it. So what, you know, it's old. So what? I'll see is a million pounds a year. Ah, now I can't say so what to that, because I've now got a value. So I would always say an Andrew ism is always having the back of your mind. So what? Yeah. Brilliant. I love that.

45:24 And I'm almost a bit concerned now that some wife, Julia, when she comes back to watch this podcast. She'd be, when I talk about buying my new gadgets, she'd be like, so what? Well, I need it for this, but so what? I need, I need this because this one's old. So what? Yeah. But that's a classic thing, isn't it? So I think that's a wonderful thing. So thank you so much, Andy. I think this has been really, really insightful in, in many ways. And hopefully those that are watching or listening are going to be actually, I think they're going to want to get a copy of your book, maybe even get in contact with you.

45:57 So how would they, how would they go about doing that? Yeah. So there we go. Copy of book. Yeah. So then get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Andrew Buchanan on LinkedIn. Most people call me Andy. Um, they, uh, there's a website, futureconsulting.io where there's links to buy the book, um, find me on Amazon, find me on IngramSpark. If anyone wants to drop me, um, um, a message on LinkedIn, feel free. Um, or yeah, then get me, uh, on my email, which you've got Shaun happy for that to be on my, um, you know, when you post this happy for that to be there.

46:30 Okay, great. Yeah. So the links will be on then. Yeah. We can put on the show notes, both for the, the podcast, the YouTube and on the website as well. So you'll be able to get in contact with, with Andrew. And if, yeah, if those listening, if you've got other topics that you'd like to hear about, or you want to expand on some other topics we've covered or hear from other guests again, then yeah, just let me know. And also just like, follow and comment and share as much as you can, because if you're enjoying this, others will enjoy it as well.

Where to find Andrew and the book

46:58 So if you can share that. Further along, then that'll be great. And it really helps for the channel. And yeah, once again, as we, as we close, thank you again, Andy, it's been a, been a great time. Great. Thanks, Shaun. Really loved being on it.