The Power of Patience and Personalization with Brooke Pinkney

00:00 - Brooke (Guest)
You talk about sales skills and behaviours. Listening, I don't think is seen as a skill, but it absolutely is a skill when we're talking about a world in which you have to have hyper-personalisation and it's much harder with prospecting to get hold of a senior buyer on the phone. So when you do get them, you have to be able to have a credible conversation with them, and that is all around being interested in them.

00:30 - Mike (Host)
My name's Mike Lander and you're listening to Higgle, the B2B sales club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released. Brooke, thanks ever so much for joining me on Hegel, the B2B Salesfield podcast. It's great to have you.

00:57 - Brooke (Guest)
Thank you, Mike. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

01:00 - Mike (Host)
Pleasure. So let's just start off with who are you, what do you do and your favourite song and why?

01:08 - Brooke (Guest)
Wow, I would say I'll answer the easy one first. So my name's Brooke Pinkney and I'm the managing director of a sales agency called Broadly Speaking. We've been going for nearly 30 years. I've been with the business for just over 12 years and grown through grassroots, learned on the job and grown with the business, very passionate about sales and sales led marketing. And we work with B2B businesses, helping them with revenue growth, pipeline development and setting appointments with their senior decision makers so they can go and convert new business. Appointments with their senior decision makers so they can go and convert new business. And the more important question so my favorite song I don't know if you can call it a song, but my favorite piece of music has to be the Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams.

02:01
Oh a beautiful piece of music. Now why? It is a piece of music that I can completely escape in and it's quite an emotive piece and it just makes me feel at peace and calm and so happy. So whenever I try and have it on in the car because I love classic FM, classical music and trance I think they're quite similar. People might disagree, just at a different pace, and it's just amazing, Absolutely amazing, and they don't make anything really like it. You know where it's, you can just get lost in it.

02:32 - Mike (Host)
So it's always on in the car. It's a brilliant, brilliant piece. That's a brilliant piece of music. Yeah, funny enough. So I listen to Radio 4, I listen to Classic FM, jazz FM and Heart.

02:48 - Brooke (Guest)
Dance in the morning, so I get a bit of a mixture.

02:50 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, I've added smooth country in there as well, really. Oh, I say a bit of smooth country. Wow, that'd be quite interesting. I'm not sure I could do that. I think our son might complain about that, yeah, but anyway. So let's get to the questions. So what's the real problem with short-termism in sales, and why has buyer behavior changed that perspective?

03:11 - Brooke (Guest)
I think this is quite a big one to try and unpack, but I'll try and answer it the best I can. I think there's a especially now it's heightened that there's this need for quick wins and short term fixes of fundamental sales issues that businesses have. And because a lot of people don't have time we don't have a lot of time at the moment I think that short term mindset is still in place to think that you can go ahead and run a three-month short sprint campaign and fix everything and you'll get X amount of new revenue. But the issue with that is in the B2B sales landscape or landscape in general, the complexity of buyer, the buying journey and the buying committee involved in any significant B2B purchase. And I think the key word here is complexity.

04:06
Short termism doesn't equal solving complex problems or getting results through complex approaches. So you know, we have it. Companies come to us and say right, I'm I don't know 2 million down on my target this year. I've got four months to hit my target. Can you just do me a load of lead gen and prospecting, get me loads of appointments and leads and we can fix the problem. And it won't work. It just doesn't work like that To be able to. If you think about the buyers themselves and the buying journey, there's so many more people involved in any significant B2B purchase. You all know this from your experience.

04:46
Something like 10, 6 to 10 potential buyers and influencers. You don't necessarily have to meet with them all, but you have to be able to influence and engage them across the buying cycle. And if we're talking about high value B2B products and services, the sales lead time is at least six to 12 months. I mean, that's a shorter sales cycle. Sometimes we're talking 18 months, two years, three years. So how can you have that mindset, that short term mindset of let's just do a quick I don't know what it is email campaign, email blast, get our name out there, we'll pick up some leads and we'll win some new business? Well, your buyers aren't behaving like that, you know, but your competitors might be.

05:31
This is the thing. So potentially there's not enough. I don't know whether it's time. People feel like they have to diagnose the fundamental problems within their sales approach. Whether it's time or investment, it does take time. It does take time, it takes patience, it takes investment and it's not about and this is where I think maybe the bigger firms go wrong where they come in to solve problems for businesses take six months to build a plan. It's not about that.

05:56
That's just a waste of time exactly exactly any business that you talk to the sales director or the ceo or whoever it is leading pushing sales cro, they will know what their strategy is. Hopefully they'll know who they want to target. They will have a good understanding of that.

06:15 - Mike (Host)
It's about a plan you know they'll have. Like, they'll have weekly sales meetings with all their sales managers and their sales teams and they'll have dashboards and everything will be in place.

06:26 - Brooke (Guest)
Exactly, but something is pushing A the behavior to being reactive and not proactive. So when we talk about tenders, like the tender trap we call it, is where businesses are out there just firing responses to RFPs, rfis. They're just sat there waiting for them to come in and they're responding to them and hoping. It's like a hope, hoping they'll win. Well, they don't know anything about the buyer, anything about the business. The business probably doesn't know anything about them. Someone in that process will have been engaging the prospect along the journey and they'll probably have an idea of who they want to choose because they have been researching out there, having a look at who's out there.

07:09 - Mike (Host)
And then they'll get told at the end of the process you were a close second. And the reality is they were a close second before they even opened the email. Exactly they were never going to win. It's pointless.

07:21 - Brooke (Guest)
So that's it, and I think it is pointless. And businesses spend thousands on these massive proposals, you know, really thought out proposals, but it's just being chucked into a void because you don't know. You know, actually, if we look at it like this. So we're in this situation where we're being reactive, not proactive, responding to tenders, hardly winning anything, got a 20 win rate or something even less than that. Probably where you want to get to is where you know an opportunity is going to be coming to tender in two years and before that two years, you are spending time and we'll talk about this getting to know the buyers, spending time mapping that organization, understanding them, understanding who are in the buying positions that you need to influence. What are they talking about? Because this isn't all about you as a business, it's about them. There's so much chucked out about product, product, product solution, all these features, but what about you know? Have you got a really intimate understanding of that opportunity? Because sales leaders should be sat in a room with a bid, no bid strategy going. We don't know enough about this opportunity to bid on it. I don't feel like our relationships are strong enough. We haven't been building awareness, we haven't been seeing the engagement, and that comes down to tracking metrics as well.

08:37
A lot of businesses are going to track metrics that they can't even make decisions on. What's the point in that? It's just numbers, isn't it? Oh, hey, we've got a click-through rate on this. What does that mean to me? What am I going to do with that information? So being able to do that, sit in a room and go, okay, we've been influencing this business for two years. This is what's important to them. They've been with this incumbent for five years. We know who the key buyers are, the key players, and having that understanding and building up to it and warming them up and nurturing them I know it takes time. If you've got enough of them going on, then you start having a nice stable, repetitive engine for growth and then you'll have the quick wins that come in sometimes, obviously, yeah.

09:19 - Mike (Host)
So the message here is, bluntly, is that unless you're at super scale sure, if you've got 10 million to spend on outbound and you have a multi-channel outbound program and you've got SDRs and you've got really good processes and you've got AI automation as well, and, yeah, sure, cold calling isn't dead but for the majority of companies I talk to, that's not going to solve a three-month problem and the reality is solving a three-month sales gap to hit quota. There are very few ways of doing that ethically that are going to get you to close that gap Because, as you say, it takes time to build confidence with buyers now. It takes time to meet their decision-making network. It takes time to get them to trust you as a potential supplier. Well, you can't do that in.

10:10
I'm going to go and meet someone today and I'm going to convince them that we're brilliant and we can solve all their problems and I'm going to sell them a solution and it's half a million and I'll close the gap and I'll do it in six weeks. You might get lucky. It's possible. It's highly unlikely.

10:24 - Brooke (Guest)
It takes time to build those relationships.

10:27 - Mike (Host)
So let's move on to the second question, which is what is prospect intimacy and how do you go about building it with integrity?

10:34 - Brooke (Guest)
So I think we all hear customer intimacy all the time, build customer intimacy, but I think what is forgotten and and we see a lot and I see a lot when I'm talking to business leaders and sales leaders is that prospect intimacy layer. So when businesses go, okay, we've got a universe of prospects and we've got a thousand in the pipeline. If I was to sit in a room and ask you, how well do you know that thousand? You know on a scale of one to 10, 10 being I could take them out for a coffee. One being I don't know them 98% of that pipeline will be down in the zero or the one.

11:12 - Mike (Host)
It will their names on a list.

11:15 - Brooke (Guest)
Their names on a list, their potential. Actually, at this point, if you haven't spoken to them and it's interesting what you say about cold call instead it's the phone is still a really integral tool you can use to have a well-informed, credible conversation with a buyer. But it is about that touch point comes much later in the journey. So you've already built up trust.

11:36
So prospect intimacy is about having a surgical focus on your prospects. Like they are all human beings, they all have different roles. So if we talk about the buying group is around six to 10 buyers. Each of those buyers will have different roles, each of those buyers will have different challenges and each of those buyers will buy your product or service for different reasons. So if you're not taking the time to get to know your prospects and what's important to them, what they're focusing on and how you can best position your solution to match their needs, then that trust you can't build it along the way. I would much prefer my sales team to come to me with 10 prospects in their pipeline that they know really well, that they've been working on for however many months, building trust, having conversations, understanding them, researching them, and there's technology and tools out there which are fantastic for accessing information quicker for sales teams, so then they can spend their time looking at the insights and the intelligence to help position the solution.

12:43 - Mike (Host)
Out of interest. Brooke, what tools would you and this isn't a promotion for anyone, but what tools would you kind of broadly mention that are good for doing research these days?

12:52 - Brooke (Guest)
Yeah, so first one is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is a really good, sophisticated tool and most of the time we're using LinkedIn for B2B, social selling or social intelligence rather than the other platforms, because it's all B2B, high value, complex sales. Sales Navigator is really good. You can a salesperson, you can build your lead list, you can set triggers and alerts to let you know what's happening within the organization, you can build your kind of black book of buyers and it allows you to be more sophisticated and just access to information quicker rather than having to search the whole LinkedIn network for people. And we use ChatGPT. So I think that's really good for the team.

13:33
If there's annual reports of businesses they're focusing on, they can put them there and get a site. It's not about and this is one thing it's not about can you write me an email to send this prospect? It is not that the hyper-personization that buyers want. Now. You cannot do that through just purely doing it in AI. It's just not. You've got to have that human intervention and human intelligence and instinct to be able to know how to personalize it. So I would say they're the two calls and we've got data partners. But Sales Navigator is really good and Chat2PT for access to information to get you to understand your prospects a bit more.

14:10 - Mike (Host)
Yeah to information to get you to understand your prospects a bit more. Yeah, and any other tips around creating prospect intimacy in terms of a journey from they're on my list of yeah, they're one of the top 50 companies we want to target through to. Actually, we've won an opportunity, that kind of journey. Any tips about what good practice looks like for a salesperson going they're on my list, but I don't really know what to do apart from, oh, I'll stalk them on LinkedIn.

14:36 - Brooke (Guest)
Yeah. So to make this really quite simple, I think there's two elements to this is prioritization, firstly, and then get out of your own ego. I know that sounds really harsh, but firstly, if you've got 50, prioritize five for that week. Take five and go. My goal is to really get to know these five organizations, all the buyers. I'm going to map them, I'm going to research them, I'm really going to find out what's important to them and have a checklist of going.

15:05
Do I know these things about this prospect? Do I know where their sites are, what their growth strategy is, who the buyers are, what are their roles? How long have they been in their roles? Where have they been before? All these different things? And then put your prospect at the center of your world, not the other way around. Do not think that, because a lot of salespeople and this is probably behavior driven from top down, to be honest is I'm just going to shout at them about all the features and how amazing we are as a business. It's not. You've got to put yourself in your prospect shoes. They're the center of your world, so it's all about them. And then, when you know that and you do that, maybe five at a time and then you've got a nice flow of being able to focus on them, reach out with really personalized messaging. You understand them more. You will be more effective at meeting and getting to that conversion.

15:55 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, absolutely, and it takes time. I mean even simple things, you know, once you've researched them and you've worked out what the biochemies might look like and you've started to map those out. Simple stuff like on LinkedIn well, if they post something, well, make a meaningful comment. If you've got something to say, that well, make a meaningful comment. If you've got something to say that's meaningful, make a meaningful comment. Start to engage with them, not in a sleazy way, in a meaningful way. I mean all of this kind of like hi, that was great. I don't know why you bother. What's the point?

16:24 - Brooke (Guest)
What is the point? All the AI generated comments you can see from a mile away and I think people are getting scared to be their authentic selves. But that is what is going to help you build trust and help you build relationships is being your authentic self and exactly what you say. So I had an email or a message on LinkedIn the other day that said really enjoyed your post about leadership around this, sales. It made me think about X, y and Z and I thought you've actually taken the time to read it. Look at my profile and that will cut through the noise better. And I'll look at that and think, oh, they've actually taken a bit of time to get to know me. I might give them a message back, even if it's a no thank you. A salesperson, a no thank you is really important just as important really as a yes, because you can narrow down and prioritise your efforts Exactly right. So tell me about the last question your thoughts on.

17:40
You talk about sales skills and behaviours listening. I don't think it's seen as a skill, but it absolutely is a skill. So when we're talking about a world in which you have to have hyper personalisation, buyers are remaining anonymous in like the anonymous zone for quite a while before they either reach out or they kind of take notice of you. And it's much harder with prospecting to get hold of a senior buyer on the phone. Much harder these days, especially, I would say, since hybrid working, remote working to be able to speak to a C-suite buyer. So when you do get them, you have to be able to have a credible conversation with them and that is all around. You do get them, you have to be able to have a credible conversation with them and that is all around being interested in them, not interesting. So I think I saw something the other day where someone's team, their sales team, was spending something like 60% of the conversation talking. Well, that's the wrong way around.

18:28
You know, if you're a seller and you're talking, and this comes down to maybe lack of confidence or lack of knowledge in the product or service, or lack of researching your buyer, if you are speaking to anyone and you'll know this from your experience and I know this if someone calls me and it's a sales call, and then they just instantly go into. This is who we are. This is why we're great go straight into a pitch. They haven't checked I'm the right person. They haven't said hello properly, you know they haven't introduced themselves or built credibility, given me a reason that they're calling and then asked me a nice open question. You know that's usually so.

19:02
A lot of salespeople are still trying to be interesting and it comes back to this ego thing, I think. And it is hard. You know sales is tough. It's hard. People don't want to be sold to, people want to buy in their own time and it can be quite frustrating if you're trying to prospect and speak to people, if you're missing that opportunity when you have like 10 seconds with someone to engage them and build some trust, you're not going to build any rapport, any trust. If you're just talking about yourself and your business, they don't care.

19:32 - Mike (Host)
Imagine, brooke, imagine we I had met you before and we happened to be in a business center and we're both kind of working, and we're kind of working next to each other while hot desking and we've both got a cup of tea and we've just kind of like sat back and we start talking. Well, prospecting with someone that you've not met before is very similar. If you started giving me a pitch about who you were and what you do, I'd just put my headphones on and get on with my work. I'd be like not for me, definitely not for me. You wouldn't do it. It wouldn't make any sense as a human being to do that. And yet we do it in emails and in calls all the time when we're prospecting. It's insane.

20:12 - Brooke (Guest)
It is, and I think you've touched on a really key point there. We're humans, we're all people, and actually people like to talk about themselves. So when you're prospecting, if you have and this is where it comes down to in your armory, you should have some really really good, thought-led questions, really good questions that are backed by your research of that prospect, your understanding of them and their business and saying, hey, this would sound better, isn't it? We've sat next to each other in a coffee. Oh, mike, really interesting.

20:40
I see you're reading the magazine around procurement live. I think that's really interesting. Tell me a bit more about why you choose to read that, what your background is. I'd really like to know. It's having a conversation, but it's got to be a balanced conversation and to build rapport, as you said. If I just went into it and was like hi, mike, I'm Brooke, nice to meet you. So if this is everything I do, you'd be like you're on Exactly Well, you would, wouldn't you? Yeah, I just find it so boring when no one asks you a question. I have it in social situations where you're meeting someone and they go yada, yada, yada, this is all about me and I've done this and I've done that and their credibility with me just drops to the floor and I go. I don't really want to know them, I don't want to talk to them again.

21:21 - Mike (Host)
When I first meet people on a pre-record you know, for the podcast I do a pre-record. On that pre-record I often haven't 20% of the guests I haven't really met or they're not part of my network. They're new. They're new new people. Well, what do I do first? Well, I look at their background on Zoom and they'll have a magazine or they'll have music or they'll have a guitar or they'll have pictures or a bookcase or something. Well, I'll find something in their image to just open the conversation.

21:49 - Brooke (Guest)
Yeah, this is it.

21:50 - Mike (Host)
I met a guy the other day. He had guitars in the background. I said, well, that's interesting, our son plays guitar, he's really keen on the Gibson Les Paul original. And then they go ah well, and you open a conversation. Just about opening a conversation.

22:02 - Brooke (Guest)
Exactly so. If you had a look at a prospect and they just recently moved from I don't know I'm just going to use this as an example to Tesco as the chief information officer, and they used to be at Asda for 10 years before and you see that they volunteer at a rugby club, whatever it is you know. So obviously you don't want to go too quickly into that with the prospecting because obviously when you're meeting someone with a podcast, it's creepy.

22:28
Yeah, I've been stalking your LinkedIn page and I can see Exactly. I've been stalking your LinkedIn page and I can see. Exactly when you get into conversation you can say, oh, it's really interesting. I see you've moved from Asda across to Tesco. You know it'd be really interesting. You know, find out a bit more about that move. What you're focusing on in your role, what Tesco are focusing on, you know, it's just things. It's about being interested. It's about being inquisitive and curious as well. They're really key skills to have, behaviours to use.

22:51
If you're curious about others, you're going to get way more information out of them in a nice way that they're going to want to give you and you're going to build rapport. And also, I think, going into clothes too soon, trying to pounce on people. That's all being interested in your own motives and that's where people can pick that up so quickly. Oh, you just want an appointment with me to tick a box.

23:13 - Mike (Host)
Exactly so, brooke, pulling it all together, what are your top three tips for top of funnel, starting to get to know new prospects at the very top of that kind of sales funnel? What would your top three tips be?

23:27 - Brooke (Guest)
Top three tips would be to firstly, just have a look, diagnose any problems. So have a look at all the activities you are doing to try and win new business. So right the way from cold data right the way through to looking at bidding and converting business, and just have those questions in the back of your mind of why are we doing this? Why are we measuring this? Questions in the back of your mind of why are we doing this? Why are we measuring this? Are we doing this? Is this adding value? You know, are we having conversations? Are we having good, meaningful conversations with prospects? Do we know our prospects? So I think it's having those general, making sure you're doing activities that mean something and allow you to make decisions.

24:08
The second one is less is more. So if you've got a pipeline full of thousands of names, you're just going to be going from A to Z and you're just going to be throwing mud at the wall. You don't have any time to get to know them, any time to actually research them and have that personalized approach. So prioritize and start off with a smaller prospect universe. You can use the bigger one for a bit of email marketing. You know you can still warm them up. But, specifically, if you've got a thousand, pick a hundred with your team right, you've all got 10 each.

24:41
I want you to know everything inside and out about these in the next two weeks and you're focusing on them and your objective is to get a meeting with all of them or whatever. And then, thirdly, is put your prospect first. So in all of your comms, whether you're talking on the phone, whether you're emailing, whether you're being interested in them, understand what's important to them and shape your solution or product, your service or product, to match their needs, not your needs. So if you need to hit a £10 million sales target, they don't care. The way you're going to do that is to flip it on its head and go. How can I help them hit their target with what my solution can give them?

25:18 - Mike (Host)
Exactly, and you know, I think, not being too quick to start to put your solution in place. I was always taught you diagnose, take your time diagnosing and getting to know them.

25:33 - Brooke (Guest)
And then when you build trust exactly, exactly if you're going to sell in the first conversation, you're not going to get anywhere you'll lose trust. And when you lose that trust, mike and we all know this is working procurement it's so hard to get it back again. You've kind of got one chance to build trust and credibility and I think in the ever-evolving, even more complex, volatile environment that we're all in, getting this right takes time, it's a bit uncomfortable and it's unnerving, but if you get it right, then you've got a really good repeatable engine for growth and it will motivate your team more and you'll see better results.

26:06 - Mike (Host)
Brooke, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much for joining me. Where can people find out more about you?

26:10 - Brooke (Guest)
On LinkedIn. I would say it's the easiest place. I'm pretty approachable. Okay, yeah, it's been a pleasure, really insightful conversation.

26:20 - Mike (Host)
Thanks for listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host, mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.