Maximizing Sales Win Rates with Kevin Gibbons

Mike Lander (01:54.338)
Kevin, welcome to Higgle, the B2B sales club podcast. Thanks ever so much for joining us.

Kevin Gibbons (02:03.71)
Okay. Yeah.

Kevin Gibbons (02:09.895)
Yeah, we're good.

Kevin Gibbons (02:20.806)
Yeah, of course. Thanks a lot. Good to be on.

Mike Lander (02:24.947)
So we've known each other for, I don't know now, wow, I've lost track, 15 years? Must be 15 years at least.

Kevin Gibbons (02:32.062)
sure it is but it feels like it. I don't mean that in a bad way, we've come through a lot.

Mike Lander (02:38.835)
No, no, no. Exactly, we have come through an awful lot. Exactly. As kind of business colleagues and also as friends, exactly. So I want to give a bit of background about basically who you are, what you do, what does your agency do.

Mike Lander (03:04.512)
Oh, have I lost you?

Kevin Gibbons (03:05.926)
Yeah, of course. So I run a digital marketing agency. We're focused on e-commerce SEO, um, corporate signal. Almost forgot that part. And we work with clients like assets under armor, fat face. So kind of quite a lot of, yeah, kind of retailers, not just in sports and leisure, although that is a big sector for us, but also kind of.

fashion and apparel and yeah we've built up a team of 20 people and a strong reputation in the UK and we've actually just launched in the US as well. I'll have a couple of comments over there too.

Mike Lander (03:47.027)
And just out of interest, just kind of like, how did you get into it? How did you kind of like get the idea and how did you start that business?

Kevin Gibbons (03:56.302)
I mean, it's now in, I don't even know how many kind of like reiterations or evolutions of it we've had, but I started in 2006. Based on a freelance background, I was actually quite fresh out of uni at that point in time. And I had built up experience in SEO at a time and it was very new. And then that evolved into

consulting the clients with SEO as core. We went down different routes of kind of like paid search and social media analytics at the time, but then really kind of decided to double down on SEO as our core and then single offering.

from now moving forward, but it has been, yeah, kind of like lots of iterations and a long evolution towards where we are today in order to find our feet in some cases, or just figure out actually where does our best work come from? Who are the clients that we serve and the ones where we can add the most value and then refining and improving and actually niching down over time, as opposed to what might feel like the more natural way of actually broadening outwards. We've got

narrower over time and focused much more on that proposition.

Mike Lander (05:16.862)
Yeah. Okay. Perfect. So that leads us nicely into kind of as you've grown the business, kind of the first question really, which is around what techniques and tools do you use to maximize your sales win rates? And that's around RFP, more informal kind of client briefs, but yeah, kind of what tools and techniques have you found successful?

Kevin Gibbons (05:40.174)
Yeah, so I think in the early days, I think I've probably a reluctant salesperson, as in I don't consider myself to be a salesperson, I consider myself to be someone who's kind of learned a craft in SEO and I'm a

consultant, a strategist and an advisor to our clients. And over time I've realized actually that transfers to sales very well, even if I didn't want to admit it. And what we found in terms of like, why that's successful is it really is, it's kind of having conversations with potential prospects. And I've always thought...

The skills that I have in both SEO and managing and running a business has been really beneficial because it gives me background on subject matter expertise, but it also gives me a commercial edge where I don't get too deep in the tactics. I'm very much, okay, well, if this is me in their shoes, why would I spend money with this? Because it needs to be.

treated as an investment in marketing and growth. And if it doesn't deliver upon that, then why do it? So I think putting myself in their shoes has really helped a lot. I think fast forward to today, and it's much more about actually how do we bottle that? How do we understand?

rather than me naturally having conversations with people and turning that into a signed contract. And that certainly happened a lot in the past. I think now that we're working with bigger clients, it's much more tricky to do that. It's a team approach.

Kevin Gibbons (07:21.774)
You're not going to get a large brand that's going to say, Kevin, we love everything you say, like where do we sign? Because they know it's not me that's going to be delivering on that account. And so it's got harder, but it's gone harder as we've grown. And now it's important for us to understand, okay, well, what tools and techniques do we use to close that sale? How do we do that at a bigger level and how do we build the team into that? And it's actually, it's being more process led, which

Again, isn't natural to me. I think most entrepreneurs are very much like, they know what they're doing. It's in their head. Let's just get on with it. But actually if you want the team to perform, it needs to be much more consistent. Everyone needs to know the role that they play at each stages. It can't be me leaving the pitch till 11 PM the night before we're going into a meeting. I've certainly done that before. It frustrates a hell out of our team. Sometimes we win. And.

sometimes we probably shouldn't win, even when we do win. And it's kind of, it's that type of thing that now it's much more important for us to say, okay, well, how do we pre-qualify if this is a good opportunity? Mike, you've definitely helped us a lot with us. Again, I'm the typical entrepreneur of...

Mike Lander (08:23.478)
Hehehehehehe

Kevin Gibbons (08:38.138)
Every lead looks like this is going to be amazing. Let's go for it. I want to win. Um, the reality is if you're invited to a tiny way pitch for something that you haven't got experience in and they are kind of, they've got strong relationships with another agency, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, your odds of winning that are really poor and as much as you want to win everything that's coming your way.

Mike Lander (08:46.941)
Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Gibbons (09:04.918)
You can suffer from spreading yourself too thin and having that death by a thousand cuts in the sense of you just become average at everything. So actually the first tool that's really important is pre-qualification. Are we going to win this and is it worth assigning a team to put days if not weeks worth of time behind this plus external costs and travel and when you look at it as an opportunity cost.

Mike Lander (09:21.131)
Yep.

Kevin Gibbons (09:32.014)
What could you be doing for your existing clients? What could you be doing in marketing activity? What could you be doing on alternative opportunities versus this opportunity? And that pre-qualification is really important because once it's in, in my mind, you're all in. There's no, let's just do half a job and see what happens. It's, we pre-qualify this as a great opportunity and then we're bringing our A game and we're gonna do everything we can to win it. Or we don't do it.

So it's very clear. You have to give it your best shot or you don't do it at all. And that really helps. Because again, if you're trying to get a team behind it, the team wants to win. There's no point dragging them into a pitch you don't think they've got a chance of doing. And there's no point getting them to spend a small amount of attention. It's never gonna be good enough to win a pitch. So pre-qualification, I think, if I was to pick any tour, and there's probably quite a few of them, it's probably the most important one because

You want to make sure the odds are in your favor. And if they are, then you're much more likely to, when you put everything behind it, have a win rate that, I know we've spoken about this before, but if agencies are winning one in three pitches, they're doing well. If they're winning one in two, they're doing incredibly well. So really you want to be in that sort of bracket. If you're down to the winning.

Mike Lander (10:48.958)
Yeah.

Kevin Gibbons (10:53.21)
even 20% or less, I think that's where you might want to start considering, are you going for the right opportunities in the first place?

Mike Lander (11:01.746)
Yeah, definitely agree. Um, we also did some work on, uh, that kind of discovery template, didn't we? Cause we realized that, um, if we, you know, if it all relies upon what's in Kevin's head, then that can be a problem. Um, if we want to try and scale the sales function, then we have to write down, well, what does a good discovery look like? And we wrote down a whole set of questions and there was some templates and stuff. So, um, do you see that as being a, another tool in the kind of armory of building out, uh, a sales capability?

Kevin Gibbons (11:31.278)
Yeah, and again, it's, I ask questions naturally over time. And I found that having, I've got a list of 10 key questions that I ask clients. I found this has been useful for me. I've come up with, I think probably all 10 of those questions, but I'm human. And if I'm on a phone call with someone and I'm doing it off the top of my head, chances are I've probably done quite well to ask them seven. So actually having.

10 of them listed out in a way that, okay, well, this can help improve the proposal that we give to clients if we know key things is really helpful. And again, that's much more transferable to the point that we don't put together a proposal unless we have answers to a substantial amount of those questions, if not all of them. And again, that's really key. Sometimes...

A discovery could be a paid discovery, it could be we don't know enough about this problem yet in order to give you a 12 month proposal and we're not confident that anyone at this stage can create you a solid strategy so let's put together a piece where we do some analysis, we maybe run a workshop together and let's really figure out what the problem is before we jump in with both feet because that's better for us, it's better for you.

And then certainly if it's coming from the outside and they haven't worked with us before, it feels like that's a safer bet on both sides, so you get to know each other and make sure that you're solving the real problem rather than just answering a few of the exam questions that might not be the right questions in the first place.

Mike Lander (12:59.08)
Yep.

Mike Lander (13:08.702)
Exactly. So, which again leads on to the kind of second question we talked about, which is, what are the three biggest reasons that you win RFPs or client briefs? And what advice would you give to other agency leaders and salespeople?

Kevin Gibbons (13:26.863)
So I've touched upon the first one which is pre-qualification. Make sure your odds of winning are strong. We've got a pre-qualification scorecard and that certainly helps us a lot just to know that...

and what we're going for is the right opportunity. I think any agency owner this will resonate with when your pipeline is weak you will naturally go for more opportunities than when the pipeline is full. If the pipeline is full you can afford to say let's turn down these opportunities because we've got three or four that are waiting and we can't do all of them certainly not to

Mike Lander (13:51.358)
Yep.

Kevin Gibbons (14:03.794)
high standards. I'll be lying if I said that qualification score worked for every opportunity, even if we hadn't had a leave for six weeks. That's not the case. But the case is you actually have to be applying continuous pressure on your marketing and lead gen activity so that you can be in a situation where you've got plenty of opportunities and you can be selective and picky about it as much as you possibly can. So I think that's the first point.

I think the second point is understanding the brief, making sure that you're clear on what do they want, why do they want it, make sure that you understand actually, are they asking for what you think is the right thing, can you deliver against it? The answer might be no, and even after talking to them the answer might still be, I don't get it. In that case, I wouldn't be.

afraid to either turn it down or ask them some challenging questions on, don't really get what the value is from what you're asking for, because I think otherwise you're just kicking the can down the road and you'll end up...

selling something that might even work in terms of closing the sale, but longer term, that's just going to come back and bite you. We've certainly found that in the past with, I mean, you know, stuff like this, where it's like, might be selling links, for example, and I've certainly asked a lot of questions around, so what, and what's the revenue target? What's the business value that you expect to be going on that? And the answer might be, we want lots of links.

Mike Lander (15:30.558)
Exactly.

Kevin Gibbons (15:36.006)
And I know in hindsight, the ones where I've just, I've taken that and said, okay, fine, they're just one links. They don't want business value. That comes back to bite us pretty much every time. The ones where they're like, okay, well, this is our strategy and this is how it fits into the overall strategy to make us money for business. Um, then it's much clearer and you can prove your value based on the ROI and the return that you're getting is not just.

Mike Lander (15:48.492)
Yep.

Kevin Gibbons (16:01.418)
kind of a tactical metric if you like. So I think just being clear on the brief, the goal, the objective is really important. I've done quite a bit of work over the years and found one of the most useful tools around this is Blair Ends' Win Without Pitching and know that I went through his sales course, I know that you know him pretty well and

Mike Lander (16:26.359)
Hmm.

Kevin Gibbons (16:27.118)
I think just having free pricing options is something that I found really helps. It gives flexibility. It shows people that you haven't got all the answers. It's not that you don't know what you're doing, but it's just that, okay, well, these are the different ways that we can serve you based on an initial conversation. And then we can tailor and shape something around your goals, your objectives and your budgets. And that really helps to turn it into a bit more of a conversation rather than one option that is very much.

take it or leave it. So I think that helps as well. And then the final point on that is pricing based on value. So I think that would be my third point is understanding, like I say, from the brief, what's the business value, and then how do you price based on that value. So if...

Mike Lander (17:02.041)
Exactly.

Kevin Gibbons (17:16.666)
If you know and you have a sales conversation along the lines of we can generate you a million pounds worth of incremental value, would you be willing to pay 10% of that to achieve it? And if you can have that sort of conversation in the early stage and then you give them a proposal that is in that ballpark and then you give them a budget and a KPI that is around this is what we discussed, this is the target, this is how much we're going to charge to deliver that outcome.

I think that can become really compelling and it takes it away from the procurement style, if you like, of trying to look into how many days, hours and minutes are you going to be spending on this piece of work into what's the return that you're going to deliver. And I'd always rather the latter conversation. I know of conversations I've had with clients where I've added

Mike Lander (18:03.756)
Exactly.

Kevin Gibbons (18:13.838)
immense value over a lunch that you probably can't really put a price on. And I know that certainly you wouldn't put an hour, it's worth an hourly rate behind it. I probably also wasted my time in the past and not been at my best and provided that much value. And I think actually, if there's a way that you can say, OK, well, what are we going to deliver? I mean, there's a reason why Google is so successful. You pay.

based on essentially a cost per acquisition. I mean, the business model is a bit different to that, but essentially in terms of how you measure success, it's based on a CPA. And if you're making a return, you'll continue investing. If you're making a significant return, you'll increase your budget. And if it's not working, then...

you cancel it or you at least trim it down to a minimum. And I don't see a reason why SEO should be any different to that. I think it's, for me, SEO is a performance marketing channel and you need to speak the same language to a marketing director about the growth that you're going to drive.

Mike Lander (19:18.346)
Yeah, absolutely. So, um, which then moves on to, um, when you do meet procurement people. So you talked about, you know, the value as pricing and working with, uh, stakeholders, uh, and ensuring that there's a good ROI, clear ROI. But when you do have to engage with procurement and you obviously you do in, in bigger brands, uh, they will be present, especially in the higher levels of spend, how do you prepare?

when engaging for a discussion with procurement.

Kevin Gibbons (19:51.134)
Talk to you. So.

Mike Lander (19:54.324)
Hahaha

Kevin Gibbons (19:57.474)
It's, you've taught me that procurement are people as well. Um, that is a big learning. And I think it's, it's just trying to get someone to bet to it. It's just like everyone has their own agenda and everyone wants to get something out of it and procurement are no different. We want to win a contract. They want to get a deal. Um, we, we need to understand how we can come together on that. And I think the more that.

we can be educated on that, but procurement professionals are very well trained in negotiation. Agency owners and new business people are generally not. And I think if you can close that gap and you can say, okay, well, I get where they're coming from and I get what tools and techniques and tactics they're trying on us right now. And it's not just about how do you then use that against them, it's actually more how do you look at it from their side of the table. I did a...

I might have mentioned this to you before in terms of the tat-tip, but I went on the Harvard Business School, leading professional services program about five years ago, maybe a bit longer now. And the person on there was, he was involved in the Middle East doing an acquisition that just about was on the edge of falling through and it was worth hundreds of millions. And this guy was there to resurrect the deal. And

What he did is he got both sides to look at why they were unhappy with the deal that was just about to fall apart. They were both very angry and they were adamant that they were right and this deal was not going to hurt and this is never going to happen.

What he'd ended is he got the one side to just look purely at the other side's point of view. And he did an exercise where he got them to argue from it as if he was on the other side, or as if they were on the other side. And he was facilitating that conversation. He then did the same exercise with the other side. And he was just like, forget about what you're sitting on right now as company A. Look at this from the perspective of company B.

Kevin Gibbons (22:02.886)
What do they want to get out of it? And now I want you to, as a role play, I want you to negotiate as if you're on company B. And at the end of that, they were just like, do you know what, I get where they're coming from now. And they did a deal and they put it through because you have to put yourself in the shoes of the other side in order to get to compromise. And I think, I mean, there's a reason why that guy gets paid a lot of money, but.

at the same time, I think it's if you don't put yourself in the shoes of the other side of the story, it's that's when it is an us against them. That's when procurement aren't real people and the same, I think you have to look at it in that right way but I found that fascinating. I think it's just and it's not a natural way to look at it because everyone just gets defensive and then they just almost like double down on I'm right, you're wrong and you're never going to get anywhere with that approach.

Mike Lander (22:31.391)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (23:00.906)
Exactly right. And I often talk to agency people, as you know, about when you're engaging with procurement, take off your kind of sales hat, take off your creativity hat, and just start understanding their perspective and their drivers. They're just another stakeholder, as you've said, and start preparing for the negotiation well in advance because they're prepared. Have a framework, use some tools, and start trading rather than discounting.

I think there's a tendency, be interested to get your view on this actually, is that there's a tendency to too quickly start to discount the price without an exchange for anything. Well, if you're a negotiator that's trained as a buyer, you're like, well, I wonder how much more they'll go down without giving away anything at all, or me giving away, without me giving away anything. And it's a bit of a race to the bottom. So what's your experience of that kind of discounting versus trading?

Kevin Gibbons (23:57.39)
Yeah, I think you can learn a lot from it. Obviously we work in e-commerce, but if you look at the premium brands, luxury brands, Apple are always a great case study for this. But if it's like, I don't know, I don't wanna spend 1200 quid on a MacBook, I wanna spend 800 quid. I mean, they've probably got a product that you could spend 800 quid on firstly, or you just go elsewhere. They're not gonna say, okay, well, that's fine. You can have our 1200 quid MacBook for...

800 quid, there's another option. And I think that's exactly the same in this case of, okay, well you don't have, I don't know, 100K or whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter. As a budget, what...

what do you have? And sometimes people can't sign off the level of budget that you've given them. Um, but I think you always definitely help us with this. If saying you don't lose on price, you lose on value. And it's for us, it's okay. Well, maybe that budget could be lower, but the value has to reflect it. You can't say we're going to charge a hundred K and deliver X amount of percentage growth and, oh no, we're going to knock off 20%. We'll charge you 80 K and we deliver the same value.

Mike Lander (24:53.78)
Correct.

Kevin Gibbons (25:10.816)
would be really confused in the buyer's position of like, well, wait, what have you just done? Why was it 100K before? I no longer trust you because it sounds like you were lying to me beforehand. It's bizarre, but I think you're right. Everything's a trade off. It's like, okay, well, you can have less time from us. Again, don't particularly wanna go down the route of time and materials, but certainly less value as a KPI that can be achieved against a lower budget that will get you started.

Mike Lander (25:15.586)
Correct.

Mike Lander (25:23.199)
Exactly.

Kevin Gibbons (25:40.794)
We could work with you for 10 months instead of 12 months. There's everything is a trade off, like you say. Um, I think the other thing is just having procurement experience. If it's not in the room at the negotiation stage, it's certainly external support that you've helped us with this a lot and new biz people put a lot of work into winning a pitch. When you've won the pitch, you just want to get it over the line by the point of.

someone saying can you knock your price down and then it's a done deal. Most newbies people feel like they've come through so much by that point of just saying okay fine let's just do it. A procurement person that's not as emotionally invested in that whole pitch process would be just like you're mad do you know how much profit margin you're giving up right now with that one decision.

And that's where it turns into an initiation where people can be trained on both sides and have that conversation again is almost looked at from the same side of the table, not kind of opposite ends. And then how do you meet in the middle to turn that into something that, yeah, like I say, it's like it works for both sides. And we know we've discussed this before.

Mike Lander (26:33.134)
Correct.

Kevin Gibbons (26:55.418)
But procurement do want a deal that works for the supplier because if we were to sign a deal that made us zero margin or there's loss making, that's not sustainable. We all get to a point where it's like, this client is more hassled than they're worth and we're gonna stop working with them or.

Mike Lander (27:18.336)
Yep.

Kevin Gibbons (27:20.086)
worse still we've discounted it so much that the elite senior team we promised them it doesn't make sense to use them anymore we're going to hire some grads we'll put them on it instead and we'll save our costs so that we can still make the same margins and everything just gets cheaper and cheaper the quality goes down and it's a it's a long slow death that is you don't sell what you promised and it's not good for anyone so i think just being clear

Mike Lander (27:28.736)
Exactly.

Kevin Gibbons (27:46.19)
in those early stages is absolutely crucial.

Mike Lander (27:52.034)
Definitely. And treating it as if more procurement people, you know, saw this as an investment with a return. And also if more procurement people's bonuses were based upon the return created off the back of the investment, rather than the savings delivered off the back of a like for like comparison, the world would probably be a better place I suspect.

Kevin Gibbons (28:24.974)
Oh, a hundred percent. I think, I mean, does that actually happen? Because I think it feels like it should, but it does feel like procurement. Maybe that's more the way things are going, but it does feel like procurement should be looking at this totally as an investment, not just a cost. There is a cost element to it, of course, but it's just getting something cheaper would be the most expensive thing you do in terms of leaving money on the table.

Mike Lander (28:30.638)
Ha ha ha.

Mike Lander (28:45.526)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (28:53.442)
So Blair Enns has this podcast called 20%, the 20% podcast. He's talked to a number of procurement people and they've said, we would like to think that everyone who's thinking about it as an investment rather than a pure cost, the reality is, and there's no absolute number on this, but the reality is more still focus on how do I get the cost down than how do I get the return up? How do I get the value increase? And yeah.

Kevin Gibbons (29:16.849)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (29:23.378)
I think that's got a lot to do with incentives and also mindset and who they work for, which is often the finance people. I've been in those shoes, as you know, and it is difficult because you're set savings targets and you've got to hit your savings targets. But sometimes that can be at the longer term cost of the business.

Kevin Gibbons (29:33.37)
Yeah, that's interesting.

Kevin Gibbons (29:47.746)
Yeah it does and it had conversations.

Mike Lander (29:48.578)
Kevin, last few words, so.

So at this stage, so what piece of advice, any agency leader growing their business or a chief commercial officer or a sales director that's growing an agency, what be your kind of one or two takeaways to say, adopt these couple of principles or these things that you can do that will sustain your growth over the kind of medium and long term.

Kevin Gibbons (30:16.894)
I think know your own strengths. So that's where pre-qualification comes into. Understanding your chances of winning and where you place your bets because you can't do everything and you need to make sure that time is invested in the right areas. I think knowing.

what it's like from the other side of the table, from the client side, from the procurement side, the more that you're educated on, okay, well, what is it that they're trying to get across and not make it us against them, will absolutely help you to just have a.

kind of a strong conversation that can shape something together. And the last point I was just about to mention was around, I've had quite a lot of conversations recently with people that it's around how the market's tough right now. People will want more for less. Targets are still going up. Sometimes in a way that doesn't feel fair because

certainly in retail and e-commerce, there's a lot of brands that are still comparing success against a spike that they received in 2020 and they want to get that back or they want to get continued growth on that base and the reality is they're still significantly up versus 2019 and they want to get back spending less money than they've ever done before but I think really it's a realistic conversation around what can be achieved.

And also how do you tie that to value? Like we've mentioned, if you have a value-based price that is very clear what the estimated ROI is going to be on that activity, I mean, you have to give believable figures, like our value at Resignal is realistic optimism. And for us, it's, we want to be able to give an expectation on results.

Kevin Gibbons (32:03.206)
but we absolutely need to be confident that we're going to deliver upon it as well. So it's not just closing the sale, it's how do you delight the client at the end of the contract that the rental will take care of itself because he's done such a good job. It's so I think the value based pricing is the starting off that and that helps to set the tone and the conversation that follows afterwards in terms of the overall relationship.

Mike Lander (32:32.054)
Brilliant. Kevin, it's been fantastic as always. Where can people find out more about you?

Kevin Gibbons (32:38.094)
So I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so definitely if you wanted to connect or follow on there, then definitely do so. Otherwise, happy for people to drop me an email. Maybe it's easier to just visit our website, so resignal.com and yeah, go for it now.

Mike Lander (32:59.278)
Kevin, thanks ever so much for joining us on Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast. Thank you.

Kevin Gibbons (33:03.794)
Great, thanks a lot, Mike.

Mike Lander (33:09.558)
So I'll stop recording and then hopefully it should upload. One second.