Updates

Updated 25th June 24.

Use these shortcuts to suit:

Recent client comments
Problems I’m currently fixing for clients (you may be facing these too?)
Some examples
What I’m noticing out there (that needs fixing!) (if these resonate, we should probably be talking)
Questions you should be asking yourself
Other news (and projects)

“Our team at Royal HaskoningDHV followed sales training given by Mark two months ago. I was really impressed and so was the entire team. Believe it to be one of the best training sessions that I’ve seen in my career (and with over 35 years of professional experience, that’s saying something….). Highly recommended.” – René Noppeney, Director, Bioresources, France

“I have been fortunate to work with Mark over a number of years and it has benefitted me significantly. Mark’s support is far more sophisticated than selling techniques, it’s a collaborative approach to help define strategy, who your clients should be and how best to support them. Mark invests time to ensure he understands the challenge and tailors his support to match the needs. He’s one of the few people I’ve met who can help technical, non-sales people translate how to best engage and support clients without it feel like selling.” Steve Tinkler, CEO, Level Up Partners, UK

“Mark is a fantastic trainer, there is a night and day difference between my sales skills before and after working with him. He is great at making tactics and ideas simple and actionable and helps you apply his concepts to your specific situation. Finally, he goes above and beyond to support you over WhatsApp outside of his paid calls which are well worth the money. I know I still have so much to learn from him. Highly recommend!” – Matt Pigott, Teleradio Ltd

Problems I’m currently fixing for clients

Contact me if you’re facing any:

Missed opportunties to grow or strengthen business

Your people are not contributing as much as they could be to help grow yours or your customer’s businesses. (Everyone can and should contribute to creating and keeping customers, they just need to know how). Is everyone maximising value to their customers or colleagues at every touchpoint?

Creating ongoing sales results improvement

One off training courses may result in a slight shift that often defaults back to original behaviours. Most of my clients now are bringing me in to support them for 6-12 months. It works so much better. We make it measurable, I get to understand their business, their teams, their people, and the mindset, skill and behavioural constraints of their people. Then I get to work on an efficient plan of attack to help those people improve fast. They enjoy the growth, and the client and myself can enjoy working together to support mesaurable growth. If you think people can build muscle by going to a gym just once, good luck to you. Those who are serious visit the gym frequently.

Low impact internal conversations

Your people don’t always hold strong, efficient conversations that get action and results (it’s a learnable skill to communicate and hold valuable conversations internally – and helps everyone co-ordinate and make the internal sale). Most people have not learned how to structure and optimise their conversations to deliver action and results.

Adapting, learning and maintaining relevance and an edge is a challenge

Change is happening fast around us, and your people need to adapt, learn and increase their value to changing situations fast (the default for learning is woefully inefficient given what’s possible. I can help people measurably learn and improve their performance in a fraction of the time…contact me to discuss how I do it)

Mediocre internal presentations

You’ve noticed that some presentations internally are still not hitting the mark. (“Presentation Skills” courses often teach the same old bland approaches to communicating info to a group. But today’s audiences need something different. They take in information different. They’re busy. They’re distracted. But you can still hit the nail on the head efficiently. It’s not about ‘presenting’, it’s about helping people focus, and think about things that matter to them (that’s why they’re at the presentation) and how they can be helped to take simple but impactful action. Talk to me if you want this improved in your organisation.

Failure to connect efficiently with new people

You know that your people need to connect with and get the attention and buy-in from others. But they don’t know how to do it efficiently with certainty.

Medicore self-management and productivity

Your people aren’t as productive as you’d like to see. People aren’t punctual or respectful of other people’s time, let alone their own. People need a structure and a system to manage themselves from within and drive their value and their career forwards. I can help people acquire this system, and use it to fire on all cylinders. And can help them leverage AI to the full to help too.

Lack of clarity of fast changing roles and responsibilities

Your people aren’t clear on their fast changing roles! Who’s doing what, how do they best sync and how can they optimise creating and keeping customers as a team? I often see a huge difference between how leadership and their teams percieve their roles. Which creates all sorts of other problems, when in fact it was just a lack of clarity and buy-in. Call me to fix that.

Unhelpful mindset, blame, and lack of fixing things

This is common. “Other people” is usually the go-to reason for ones problems at work! “It’s not me, it’s them and it’s our processes”. If you want a workforce who have a strong locus of control, who take charge, and do the right thing, who think helpfully and who can problem solve, this is all learnable.

Teams aren’t improving their performance consistently

How to lead growth (on a practical level, getting the mindset right first, then understanding how to help people learn and grow fast). This is not the heavy weight leadership tools that are commonly taught that end up in the back of ones mind. It’s about real life, fast moving, practical leadership that immediately usable and beneficial. Many leaders don’t know how to lead, and of those, manty don’t know how to lead consistent performance improvement. But it’s learnable.

Some examples..

Getting alignment and sharing up to date approaches to a large global team of senior sales engineers and customer-facing engineers. This was run as a large group workshop, in person, with people flying in from all corners of the globe. Highly interactive, incredibly stimulating for all (considering the sharing of ideas and challenges between different cultures) and has paved the way for a follow up course in 6-12 months.

Restructuring and equipping a team of UK sales and non-sales engineers who sell into the automotive industry to co-ordinate and maximise their sales performance as a team. As usual, they are realising that the non-sales people (customer-facing) are the secret weapon, and more than capable.

Helping a number of individual sales engineers in small businesses to quickly get some early wins, and start developing an approach to succeed medium to long term. My approach here is focused on maximum measurable growth in the shortest time possible, and if people are open to learn and challenge themselves, it works.

A number of clients have benefit from having me help them tailor their cold email outreach, ignoring the common templates you find on line (that claim to work but rarely do) and switching for a more organic, more human, customer-focussed approach, with surprising results. Note: the mindset is more important to develop than the actual wording! When the mindset is right, the right message follows, and has a far better chance of working.

What else I’m noticing out there (that needs fixing!)

Businesses still think the purpose of a business is to generate revenue or profit. And so their mindset, processes, KPI’s and targets point towards this. Which often drives the wrong behaviours and it backfires. They need to understand that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. And that all of them can contribute to that. So how are they going to co-ordinate and do it, on repeat?

It doesn’t take me long to spot the untapped potential in female employees in most businesses I work with. Since I mostly work with engineering firms, there are far fewer females than males. But the females nearly always have traits that give them an often hidden advantage. They tend to listen and learn effectively, they tend to have more empathy and are comfortable asking questions, and are therefore ideal to talk to customers, add value, and connect customers to the best solutions, all without ‘selling’. I always say that non-sales people are your secret weapon in business to generate new opportunities. And the females amongst them are the ultimate secret weapon. So support them to maximise their growth!

Most people who become aware they’re ‘selling’ (it’s everyone, but most don’t realise that, which is a problem in itself) think that they need to be ‘salesy’. Then they wonder why it doesn’t work.

Most people are work with lack enough empathy to solve the very problems they face. They just can’t see things from the customer’s perspective. And so they don’t close the gap enough to create value. Most people still only see sales from their own perspective, and from a ‘controlling the customer’ perspective. The customer feels this. Instead they need to see the entire jounrey of problem to solution from the buyer’s perspective, and help the customer buy in the way that they want to buy. This is easily learnable and most people seem pretty clear and excited once they get this. Because it makes much more sense.

Technical people and engineers still default to talking ‘features’ with their clients. They swim around in all the logical tech side, failing to realise that people ‘buy’ (or make decisions) emotionally, and with buying drivers that go far beyond the technical. Until they can ‘see’ this and understand it, expect to keep losing sales to your competitors.

You don’t know what you don’t know. So I often see businesses making their best guess about how to improve team performance within. And often their best guess is based on out of date approaches that are costly and fail. All they had to do was talk to someone like myself who’s specialised in accelerated learning, sales learning, and performance improvement for 20 years, and I can share exactly what works and what doesn’t with proof. If you’re going to invest in your people, i’ll assume you probably want to get it right. I can help you think that through.

People are boring buyers to death. One mistake engineers commonly make is death by demo. Again, I find it genuinely surprising that this still goes on frequently. People still think that selling means presenting products or solutions and their entire sweep of features. Instead of seeing through the customer’s lens of facing specific business problems (or opportunities) that need addressing. Many technical sales people probably think they’re pretty good at ‘it’ (their demo’s) but there’s no point in doing ‘well’ that which shouldn’t be done in that way at all! “I’m pretty good at hammering nails in with a saw” isn’t as effective as you could be..

Too much old school out of date mindset that’s expired. There’s still a hangover of how sales used to work decades ago. More senior people still insist on sharing these ideas with the younger workforce, trying to whip them into shape with ideas, thinking and tools that have passed their expiry date. Please consider that your best customers will want to buy in the way they want to buy, and your employees who ‘sell’ will want to learn to ‘sell’ in a way that aligns with helping them customers to buy! Not by simply doing what once worked in the 1990’s!

Trying to flog stuff rather than fitting it and building relevant value. I do come across many clients who have lots of stock to ‘flog’. Never easy if buyer’s requirements or options shift. You can ends up with a lot of unsold stock.

I’m noticing more small businesses looking for temporary or fractional sales directors. I’m noticing more businesses that see their team as being able to run like a sales machine, providing they are set up correctly. They realise they don’t need 24/7 sales director support, but just enough to grow sales. Contact me if you want to discuss this.

Old school mindset for learning (just training). There are other ways to learn. Learning takes pla[ce i your head and via actions.

Most presentations are still mediocre. They don’t have to be. If the message is worth sharing, and minds are worth changing, then it’s worth getting it right. It’s worth determining how to engage those very minds, relate to them, switch them on, and steer them appropriately. You don’t learn this on most ‘presentation skills’ courses (that teach the usual basic do’s and don’ts). It’s about understanding presentations differently and building around that.

Questions you should be asking yourself

How much untapped opportunity is my team leaving out there for our competition?

What one or two small tweaks in our team’s mindset and approach might change everything?

What if our leaders became highly competent leaders of performance growth in their teams?

Where’s my weakest link? My teams? And each individuals? What if they’re blindspots? What if they were actually pretty easy to identify and fix?

What does delaying fixing sales performace issues actually cost my business, my team, and me in my role? What about that of my colleagues?

Contact me here.

Other news…

I’ve started a side business with my teenage daughter. A website that teaches teenagers how to cook! –> Upcooked.com

My blog on stronger and sharper thinking (here). Something people need more than ever these days..

I have associates who may be able to help you find the right sales or technical sales people for certain roles. And my own network can almost certainly help you. Contact me if you are trying to find the right people for your technical sales roles.

I have some new ecourses coming soon around using AI to maximise your value to your employer and to your customers. Sign up to my blog above to hear about them.