Utilizing B2B Sales to Shift from Small Business to Global Leader with Craig Letton

Mike (00:26.883)
Craig, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. Great to have you.

Craig Letton (00:40.024)
Yeah, thanks for inviting me, mate. Appreciate

Mike (00:41.807)
Pleasure. Obviously, we go back now, what, probably two or three years, I guess, of working together. I've always loved working with you, but also just having conversations and looking at your entrepreneurial journey, which is amazing, which hopefully you'll share some of that on the podcast today. Without further ado, do you want to just introduce yourself? Who do you do? What are you? Sorry, what do you do? Who are you? Then something unusual about yourself.

Craig Letton (00:46.638)
Indeed,

Craig Letton (01:07.17)
Yeah sure, my name is Craig Letton. I'm the CEO of company called Hybo, an award marketing technology company. And I'm now based in Boston, USA, originally from Scotland. we are a technology company specifically focused on the beverage alcohol vertical currently. We may expand into new verticals soon, but at the moment we're very much focused on alcohol customers. work with suppliers and distributors.

and beer, wines and spirits. And we essentially have a technology platform that allows their sales people to create marketing materials quickly, easily and get them to their customers super fast. So we now do that in over 50 countries. And the reason I'm in the US is because we're rolling out a deal with a very large distributor, actually the largest distributor in America. and right now we're growing at over 100 % year in year as a result. So the business is going great guns and we're adding people and customers.

all the time, so all good. And then in terms of me, you know, I'm just a normal guy, I've three young kids, I like playing sport and something slightly unusual is I actually grew up in the US, I went to high school here, so this is my second time living in the US and as a result I picked up a lot of American sports including ice hockey, lacrosse, wrestling, skiing. When I returned to the UK and went to university in Aberdeen I continued playing those sports.

Mike (02:25.913)
Wow.

Craig Letton (02:31.704)
continued playing lacrosse and ended up actually playing for Scotland at lacrosse, which is quite an unusual

Mike (02:35.523)
Wow.

Mike (02:39.247)
Absolutely, and a hell of an achievement. Just out of interest, do you see any, I had a really interesting guy who used to play professional rugby on a few weeks ago, and we talked about the parallels between being in a professional sports team and being an entrepreneur, and it turned out there were quite a few. Do you see any parallels?

Craig Letton (02:58.37)
Yeah, I mean, I was a long way from being a professional, but I definitely took it seriously. I think I said something to someone recently. said that I would probably say the majority of my leadership and management skills have been built on a rugby pitch or lacrosse pitch or a football pitch from the ages of like four upwards. You know, I didn't learn how to lead people in maths class at school. I learned it being a captain of a lacrosse team for four years.

Mike (03:01.045)
No, no. Pretty seriously. Yeah, exactly.

Mike (03:23.543)
No. No.

Craig Letton (03:27.822)
So I think it's one of most valuable things you can do, whether it's sport or music, whatever it is, working within a team at a young age, you learn those skills, it's super valuable. And it's just that discipline of showing up every day and preparing and practicing and training and being able to perform under pressure. I there's a ton of overlap and I still compete mountain biking, not so much anymore because I've got three young kids,

I still love that kind of competitive spirit and I love competing at pretty much anything. So whether it's sport or business to me, it's kind of the same

Mike (04:05.635)
Exactly. Just before we get into the questions, if you don't mind, because obviously, as always, listeners, there's a couple of questions that we've kind of prepared. We'll have a discussion around. But just before that, slightly more ad hoc, do you want to just give like literally a minute or two on your entrepreneurial journey? Because it is slightly unusual where you came from, what you did, and kind of where you got

Craig Letton (04:26.126)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's quite a long story, so I'll keep it as short as I can. I mean, I came at this from, guess I spent the first four years of my career in a corporate world and sales and marketing for some big consumer goods companies. And the opportunity came up to take over the running of the family business, which at the time was a digital print business that my parents had founded 10 years prior. And so I took over the business in 2012 and spent the first two years fixing it up.

really focusing on one specific vertical. So I shut down a lot of the business. wasn't even making money or just was a bit of a distraction. And after that two year period, I actually decided to buy the business. So I did a management buyout and took some money from the bank and bought the business from my parents and at full market value. And then I proceeded to pivot it pretty significantly. So I actually shut down the print operation, built out a technology team to build a software product to solve a specific problem that I'd identified myself when I worked.

Kraft Foods and just by pure coincidence, my father had actually built a software product that solved that problem. So I thought, well, if we can productize that and scale it, I believe we can sell it to global brands and expand this thing internationally. And that's exactly what we've gone and done. So we now work with people like Diageo, Bacardi, Ricard, Carlsberg, Molson Coors, and then most recently Southern Glazers in the US. So we've really taken that idea and

blown it up. that's been over a 12 year run for me. So quite a long story, very short, but the business when I took over, I think we had seven people, I think we did about 400 grand of revenue. Right now, I think we're about 110 people this year will turn over 10 million pounds. And the business looks nothing like it did before, but actually the essence of it, the DNA is the same, the value, the culture.

Mike (05:58.104)
Yeah,

Craig Letton (06:20.366)
product and what it does and the value it delivers for customers is the same as it was when I took over the business 12 years

Mike (06:27.223)
Really interesting and amazing success story as well. I'm sure there's lots more to come in the future. So a couple of questions that we talk about. What are the three biggest reasons that you win RFPs, of like, you know, slightly less formal client briefs and what advice would you give to other salespeople?

Craig Letton (06:48.718)
Yeah, so I mean, over that 12 year period, we've, I mean, I've named some of the big name clients that we've won, right. And some of those are global contracts. And, you know, at the time, and arguably still working over a small company from Scotland, right. So you're going up against some of the biggest companies in the world with, you know, very well trained professional procurement people and marketing people and so on. So you have to do something different if you're going to get in the door of these.

companies and if you're going to persuade them to take on your technology. winning,

Mike (07:17.282)
Exactly

And not even just getting on the list, but winning. Getting on the list is one thing, but winning at that scale and given kind of the context, that takes something special.

Craig Letton (07:31.054)
Yeah, it does. Yeah. mean, the most recent example of that is the deal that we struck with the biggest distributor of alcohol in the US and possibly the world. We haven't found anyone bigger if we had. We'd be speaking to them. And, you know, they'd used the same vendor for 15 years. And prior to that, they'd actually done this work in -house with their own people. And

Mike (07:43.673)
Yeah.

Craig Letton (08:00.174)
We were able to convince them over quite a long period, I think it was three years from start to finish, to move to a technology -based model and sort of move away from what they've been doing for literally 60 years, which was manually designing and creating all of their marketing content using graphic design teams, whether that was in -house or an agency doing it, and to a world where their sales reps could create this content themselves on the fly using our tech. And it's a pretty substantial change in their business.

Mike (08:12.654)
Well.

Mike (08:28.536)
It's enormous.

Craig Letton (08:28.654)
And this is a $25 billion business, right? 22, 25 ,000 people. So it's a huge change. That's a risk, right? For any large organization to make a change of that magnitude. So you have to be pretty competent at selling and being able to convince the client that you're able to make this change and successfully help them make that transition. So thanks for, we were able to do that, but you know.

Mike (08:32.185)
Jeez.

Craig Letton (08:57.134)
It took a three year period, four proof of concepts, an 18 month RFP against the current vendor and one other. A lot of meetings, a lot of time and effort. And now we're a year into the rollout, we've done 60 % of the states, about 80 % of the volume. And that's what's really grown our business so dramatically in the last year. But yeah, you have to have some special sauce really to be able to win these types of clients. And the only reason we were able to do

It's because personally, I had almost 10 years of experience of having done it already. And my team had as well. So we'd built on every experience, taken the learnings from the previous day, rolled it into the next one. And we were just getting better and better and better. And to the point when it came to have the biggest opportunity of our lives, we were able to successfully close that because we had all that experience, all that learning within our team. We'd of built that muscle. Obviously, we continue to build it now and we haven't stopped learning.

we'd got to a point of proficiency where we could really kind of contend for these big deals very confidently.

Mike (10:03.215)
Very good. So just pick a little bit, some of those learnings. you know, how did you, how do you win multi million pound deals with large global enterprises? What are like kind of like the three to five things that you would say? You could. You definitely, well, maybe you, maybe you will one day.

Craig Letton (10:18.732)
Yeah, that's a big question. Yeah. I could probably talk about this all day long. I definitely could write a book about it, but maybe one day I will. But if I was to kind of narrow it down just to three things, I think the first one for me, which I probably say is the most important one, is building relationships and building trust. You know, whether it's in a team or whether it's a relationship between two people, whether it's, you know, regardless of the relationship, whether it's customer supplier

husband wife or friend to a friend, trust is the foundation of any great relationship. And if you don't have that, you've got nothing in my view. So I put a huge emphasis on building trust from the very beginning. And that's a two way street, right? I'm not just, I'm trying to build mutual trust. I trust them, they trust me. And my style kind of lends itself quite well to that.

I'm just just a very open and honest and transparent person. That's kind of my default setting. I don't really have another setting. So that kind of helps a little bit in terms of being able to kind of build those relationships quickly. But one thing I do kind of subconsciously now, but is that you could call it a technique is that very early in that conversation, I'll disclose something quite private or personal, more borderline confidential, and just show a bit of vulnerability. And often what will happen is the other person will mirror that and they'll tell you something.

along those lines. And before you know it, you've now got mutual trust, right? And if they don't do that, right, and they're a closed book and they're holding stuff back, then you're like, okay, well, you know, we're not quite there yet. But I've, you know, I've had some relationships, particularly with procurement people, where it's taken me years to get to that point. But when you do, the whole thing changes. There's been other relationships where we've done it in first five minutes. that's what I'm looking for. Before I even start anything, that's what I'm looking for is to build trust.

Mike (11:59.513)
Yes.

Craig Letton (12:11.714)
and all the relationship and that can be done in a meeting, can be done at dinner, can be done over a drink, whatever.

Mike (12:18.639)
But what's interesting Craig about that one thing is, and I've been talking a lot about this recently with lots of commercial leaders, is does this thing about, I need to have like hundred clients in my prospect list and then I get it down to like 30 and then some opportunities come up and then we win a few. And what a lot of us were saying is, well, actually you're better off building a few trusted relationships way before any deals on the table. Make sure that you're front of mind.

And then when the right deal comes up, you're likely to winning is very high. I think what you're saying is you've grown through building lots of trusted relationships with very big brands.

Craig Letton (12:59.19)
Yeah, over quite a long period of time. Yeah, and that's, you know, I think I've told this story before, but that's how we got into Southern Glazers. You know, I think it was a third or fourth degree of connection, but it was just only one person relationship, trust, and so on and so on. And particularly if you zero into a specific industry, you get this kind of snowball effect because you're building this network. You know, people move around different companies. If they trust you to deliver a company X, they're going to trust you to deliver a company Y. And you just

Mike (13:01.261)
every long period of

Craig Letton (13:28.248)
You build the reputation. think one of our former customers at Carlsberg said we were the best hidden secret in the industry or something like that. Everyone kind of knew it wasn't something we were talking about, but you just build a positive reputation through building relationships, building trust, and doing what you say you're going to do. That's what it comes down to. Building trust and then not breaking it is pretty critical. And I think what I've found

Mike (13:30.115)
You do.

Mike (13:48.386)
Exactly.

Craig Letton (13:57.326)
RFPs or any kind of situation really whether it's with a supplier or a customer or a partner in a company. There's often just two lead people from either side, occasionally one or two more, but usually just two. what you need to, know, there's, during going through an RFP process or a legal process, there's the kind of day -to -day stuff where you've got teams of people working on things. But at end of the day, there's typically two leads on each side. And what you have to have is the ability for those two people to have an open.

and honest conversation so that when things get a little too intense down here, you can escalate that up and you guys can just have a direct conversation, sort things out. And I've had two of those in this week, right? And as that person said to me, as long as we can keep having these open discussions, we can kind of get through anything. And that just sums it up for me. So point number one is build.

Mike (14:26.767)
Absolutely.

Mike (14:46.361)
which is what I call a principle to principle discussion. You have to be able to have a principle to principle discussion.

Craig Letton (14:50.402)
Yeah.

you do, but I think it has to be based on that relationship you've built over a period of time, you've built that trust. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. that's kind of number one for me. Number two is really what I call the, I know what I call it, but it's called the challenge of sale approach. I only actually heard about this book recently and I was like, that's what I've been doing for 10 years. Yeah, it's a great book, great concept, the research is brilliant, but we've actually, I've not, no.

Mike (15:09.133)
Yes. Matt Dixon. Yeah, it's Matt Dixon.

Mike (15:18.509)
Have you read Jolt, by the way? So his latest book is called, definitely read Jolt, which is the next book he's done with Ted McKenna. Jolt, you'll love Jolt. If you love The Challenge of Sale, you'll love Jolt, yeah.

Craig Letton (15:24.438)
Yeah. really?

Yeah, when I heard about it, was like, that describes our style perfectly. That's the style I've been using and it's the style I've kind of been teaching our team and they've adopted and they're now doing a brilliant job of using this. it's really about having a need to have product that doesn't rely on price as the sole competitive differentiation, because then you're just a commodity, right?

Mike (15:54.627)
Correct. You are.

Craig Letton (15:58.63)
And that's kind of where we've been really successful is we, it's why we've been able to win these big clients is we've done something completely different and done it in a different way that's more effective. So we're not just competing at the same level. We're actually competing in a whole new different world that is actually, they are unable to compete against the strategic differences. And to give you an example of that, like all of the materials that are produced in our technology are printed by third party printers.

In the US we have a couple of great partnerships, printers all over the country and what that allows us to do is send that file automatically to as close as to the end destination as possible, have it printed locally and shipped locally. And what that means is we massively reduce the time, the cost and the carbon in that order. The competitor we were going up against, owned their own print kind of location and they were printing from one central location in the US, which means no matter what they did, they could not get that order to California or Florida faster than we could.

Mike (16:56.013)
Yeah, exactly.

Craig Letton (16:56.748)
we were printing in California and Florida. So that's a fundamental strategic difference that I designed it that way so that we could beat the competition. And the other one was the technology, right? You can't beat the technology if you don't have it, right? But technology takes years to build, it takes a lot of money to build. And if you haven't made those investments in time and money, you can't catch up overnight. You can't just boom, we've got a competing product. So you have to have those fundamental differences.

Mike (17:16.781)
You

Craig Letton (17:23.468)
Kind of going back to the sort of challenger approach, the way that we kind of do it is in our team, you know, would describe our team as experts in this industry. We're experts at what we do in marketing technology and in point of sale, but also experts in the alcohol industry and how it works on an international level. And what that allows us to do is really consult with our clients as experts in this space. And so we're not selling to them. We're consulting with them, advising them.

And really at the end of the day, we're challenging the status quo that they operate in now. And quite aggressively challenging it, I would say. Saying, by the way, like, what you do now, it isn't great. Here's what, you when we did our big presentation to Southern, had all the pain points of their current process and system, and we put them up on a board and knocked them off one by one. mean, there was dozens of them. So you always have to build up that understanding with the customer that actually what they're doing now isn't that great. It's actually

paying in many respects, either costing the money or using up lot of resources, a lot of time, and getting that kind of buy -in to say, actually, this isn't great. We want to do something different and we want to do it better. And then it's about showing them how you can do that using your product or service. How is this going to improve their business? How is it going to make more money, save money, take less time? And then showing them how you've done it already for other clients, right? Proving to them that you actually can do this and it's not just some rubbish that you've made

and then really de -risking that decision to choose you by providing this evidence of success and a track record of delivery. And there's a really great sales trainer, a coach called Andy Bounds, I'm not sure if you've met him, really interesting guy, you'll find him on YouTube, he's got a great book called The Jelly Effect, and he talks about this principle in simple terms where he's kind of like, the customer doesn't care about you.

They don't care about your history and your million clients and how many countries you're in. They don't give a crap. All they care about is how are you going to make their life better? How are you going to improve their business and their, sometimes improve that individual's role in that business? And how are you going to get them there? And how are you going to de -risk it? Because as I said, with our customers, they're making a business transformation when they work with us. And there's risk in

Mike (19:16.685)
Nope. Correct.

Craig Letton (19:39.998)
and that person who's signing on that RFP and the person who's delivering that project is kind of putting their name on the line there. So they're putting a lot of faith in you to get it done and therefore

Mike (19:51.065)
We want them to be a hero, not get fired.

Craig Letton (19:54.912)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so they're kind of putting their head on the line. And I think that's where it goes from. Once you've got them sold on the benefits of it, it's actually that's a sort of an emotional, sometimes an emotional argument, sometimes logical. But then it's a case of actually, how do we do riskless in their mind? How do we build confidence that this isn't going to fail? And the best way to do that is to attract record success, right? And so you've done it time and time again.

So in many of our RFPs, we're not focusing on selling, because we've probably already done that. We've already done that. What we're now doing is saying, how are we going to get you there? And we actually would, therefore, focus on the implementation plan, the metrics that we would measure as we go, and really the focus on delivery. So it's a different way of doing things. But I've found it to be super effective, particularly if you're going up against kind of run -of -the -mill salespeople. And that kind of takes me on to my third point, which is

I would say the majority of salespeople.

do it all wrong. And that's what is in that challenge of sales but rather think there's five different profiles. And one of the common ones is they kind of relate the relationship builder, right, which is often stereotypically what people think of as salespeople, people that are great chatterers, great conversation makers, great relationship builders. And that's all well and good. I know a lot of those people, they're wonderful people, great friends to have, but it doesn't actually mean they're actually the least effective sales

Mike (21:03.855)
There is. That's right.

Mike (21:21.945)
They are. The research was fascinating.

Craig Letton (21:23.794)
And I've seen it firsthand. It isn't very effective. And what I believe is the source of that is really that most salespeople, and unfortunately a lot of the training is focused on like, tell us about yourself. The first five slides are about you and your company. And as said, the client is going to give a crap, right? So when we did some of our decks, we literally don't even put it in. We don't even talk about

Mike (21:52.217)
Correct.

Craig Letton (21:53.464)
We literally start with the client and the problem that we're here to solve. That's it.

Mike (21:56.525)
Yep. The only place that that should be in, in my view, is in the appendix at the very back. And if someone really wants to know who you are and what your background is and how you funded, et cetera, et cetera, it's in the appendix.

Craig Letton (22:04.137)
Yeah,

Craig Letton (22:11.15)
100%. Yeah, and that's exactly what we do. And I think, and that principle of putting the client first and the problem first extends to what I think is the greatest tool that a sort of salesperson or the person kind of pitching to the work has, which is your ears, right? And unfortunately, it's the least used tool by salespeople commonly.

Mike (22:31.63)
Yes.

Craig Letton (22:38.274)
And I've recently had a really fortunate experience of being exposed to some really incredible business people and through one of our suppliers, both their CEO and their founder. And the number one thing that they both have in quantities that I've never seen before is the ability to listen. They are listening so intently that they literally say nothing. And when you're finished, they're able to summarize the entire thing. And they'll be able to ask you a question that zeroes in on one specific area, like a laser.

And I've never seen anything like it. like listening on a professional, like elite level. And it's the most powerful tool because at the end of the day, you need to listen to what the customer is looking for, what are their concerns, what are their fears, what are their hopes. Like all of that is the goal that you need to be able to understand how to then sell to them. If all you do is you talk to them and tell them what they need and tell them what they want, you have given them no ability to actually inform you. It's like the dumbest thing ever,

That's where I think

Mike (23:36.067)
And like, what have they tried that's failed? And what have they tried that had little bit success? And what they're thinking about trying? I mean, basic, if you're a curious person, some basic things. Like, how are you gonna sell anyone anything unless you know what they've tried before? You won't know all their fears about trying something new.

Craig Letton (23:58.702)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And I think it's really about the listening and asking great questions. And you build that up over time. You know, it's a bit of a skill that you learn. But that's in direct contrast to what you do. And, know, I did a, I did a sort of presentation to a large company recently and I think I was presenting for over an hour and I used zero slides. And I did that. had slides, but I didn't use them because it wasn't a natural, the minute you do that, it's a presentation.

Mike (24:04.184)
It is.

Mike (24:28.643)
Yeah, exactly. Correct.

Craig Letton (24:28.974)
It's not a conversation. So you're getting zero information back, right? That's not how it should be. Like for me, a good kind of sales call really should be like 80 % them and 20 % you. I mean, I'm just making that up, but like that's the kind of balance I would look for. And I think that's why like I would describe myself as a bit of an introvert, not an extreme one, but a little bit more on that side of the scale, but I'm also very curious. So it's quite easy for me to just sit back and listen, because I don't feel that overwhelming need to talk.

So when I look for sales people, I'm looking for people that have got high emotional intelligence, are great listeners, lots of empathy, not your typical blah blah blah salesperson. Because that might work in like a car showroom, actually I don't think it does, but that's a bit more stereotypical. But for a high kind of complexity enterprise sales, large customers, you won't even get in the door with that approach. And if you do, you'll get kicked out.

Mike (25:24.033)
Exactly. And the ability to problem solve. Great salespeople have an innate ability to, I believe, to collaboratively solve problems with the client. So the solution ends up being something that you've both designed, not that you've provided.

Craig Letton (25:35.63)
100 % yeah.

Craig Letton (25:39.874)
Yep. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more, I think. And there's so many situations like that, you know, and we did something with a customer recently and didn't quite get a plan. And he said to us, if you just kind of come to us with the problem, we could have worked together to find a solution to work for both parties rather than just pretending a solution. And I was like, that's a damn good point. And we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and stress if we had done that.

Mike (26:02.679)
Exactly.

Craig Letton (26:09.464)
But it goes back to point one, unless you've got that trust and relationship, you're probably not going to have that conversation. So you are going to push through whatever it is you're trying to do. that's it. It's a skill that you just constantly learn and constantly improve. And I don't think anyone's an expert at it. But it's fundamentally different from A, the stereotype, and B, a lot of the training out there. And it's not what people think at a high level. And a lot of that stems from humility.

Mike (26:32.515)
Definitely.

Craig Letton (26:39.022)
Because if you think you know it all, you think of the bee's knees, you're not listening. Why would you listen if you already think you know it all? So it starts with humility and trust. And I think moving on to the final bit, in terms of principles and approaches with regards to negotiating and preparing for those negotiations. Yeah.

Mike (26:55.693)
Yeah, so once you've kind of got a deal and you're now negotiating it, yeah, just talk us through a few of those kind of principles.

Craig Letton (27:01.996)
Yeah, and I think I said to you offline, I will never get to that negotiation point unless I've done all that work up front. Right? And the customer has to be super excited about what you're doing. You have to resolve all their fears and concerns. You have to have the trust and the relationships. All of that needs to be in place before you even get to that negotiation point. Because otherwise you're trying to negotiate on a very shaky foundation. And at the end of the day, you're going have to work with these people if you want to. Right? So you want to make sure

Mike (27:23.652)
You are.

Craig Letton (27:31.466)
you like working together, right? And just because maybe you're the supplier and they're the customer, if you don't feel like you've got trust, you don't feel like you've got a good fit, then it's probably not gonna work long term, right? So you both have to kind of make a decision, is this the right relationship for us? But the way that I prepare, mean, just to keep it really simple, is I'll do a lot of deep research on the individuals that we're working with.

Mike (27:43.171)
Exactly.

Craig Letton (27:58.318)
So to give you an example, with the recent Southern Glazers deal, I read two huge history books like this thick on each of, on the company and they were a merger of two companies. So I read the history book on both. And I also spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos of their founder and their current CEO, specifically to look at, to try and understand the culture and the DNA of their business.

And one thing that I really pulled out from that amongst many things was their passion for winning and their competitive drive and their just, you know, unstoppable desire to improve and to grow and to learn despite their size. So we ended up structuring the entire presentation around the theme of winning and how we would help them win and how our technology would help them win further and differentiate them from the competition. But without doing that research, I wouldn't have known that. Right. And therefore we would have got the winning theme

Mike (28:51.137)
No, very good point. Yeah.

Craig Letton (28:55.02)
ended up helping us win, right? for me, you've got to gain a really deep understanding of their culture, of their values, the DNA of the business, in order to understand how best to communicate with them. And I'm not doing it in a manipulative way,

Mike (29:08.239)
And we talk about wind themes, Craig. It's a brilliant, brilliant point actually, I want to just reinforce for people that listening. Everyone talks about wind themes. All the sales training talks about wind themes. And sadly, lot of it is very trite. What you've just described is the opposite of a trite wind theme. That was, you knew precisely through many, many hours of research, what turned that company on and how you could align with their core drivers.

Craig Letton (29:38.254)
100 % yeah and it's not kind of manipulative but what I'm looking for is like those shared goals right so I'm a competitive guy. I ran a family business right we've run an entrepreneurial business yes the one business is 10 million pounds and one is 25 billion dollars but the DNA is the same and we have the same relationship with one of our suppliers and one of our print suppliers and if you share that DNA and you share the culture and the values like your chance of success is vastly superior.

Mike (29:40.929)
No! Exactly! You're aligned! Yep!

Mike (30:07.061)
Yeah, you're virtually unstoppable.

Craig Letton (30:07.148)
Right? And arguably I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't do it if that wasn't there, at least not sufficiently there. understanding that and spending time and listening to them and just really understanding their, you know, their desires and fears and concerns. And that's all about how you build that in. And it's a lot of it's subconscious and a of it's emotional and psychological. But in the way I can think about things, people make purchasing decisions often emotionally.

And then they back them up with logic and evidence. And you're going to need to do it in those two ways. Get them excited, get them passionate about it, get them on board, reduce those fears. And then, okay, how do we back this up with evidence so that if they have to take it to someone else to explain why, they can say, well, this is going to work because they've done this, this, this, and this. And we know it's, you know, we've redirist it. And so that's

Mike (30:49.997)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (30:56.767)
I remember a conversation that you and me had during the negotiations about how they could compare apples with apples rather than apples with oranges. If they can't do that... Exactly!

Craig Letton (31:06.722)
Yeah, and I think I said I'm not a freaking I'm not an orange, I'm a pineapple. And that's the whole thing, Like, procurement often, and it wasn't in this situation at all, but often we'll try and make the apples to apples comparison. But if you're a business model and proposition is fundamentally different, it's like, I'm not a freaking apple, take me out of that box, I'm a pineapple, I've got my own box up here. And that's where again, we'll challenge them. I've spent a lot of time educating.

for human people that we are not print management company like you use right now, right? We're a marketing technology company. We do this in completely different way. And here's the benefits of that. It takes a while sometimes to get that to click, but eventually it does. And then you're competing against no one, right? Competing in a different world. Yep. 100%. It's a great book. And then I think the third point is

Mike (31:51.095)
Exactly. It's a blue ocean strategy rather than a red ocean strategy.

Craig Letton (32:00.942)
Prepare, prepare, prepare. I mean, I think for that particular presentation where we had to present the 27 people, which was the final step of the RFP, I'm pretty sure we rehearsed it 10 times in one day. And bear in mind, it was like an hour long. I was absolutely sick of hearing it by the end. And we actually took some photos throughout that day and we started at 4 a because we were all totally jet lagged and wide awake in Miami. So was dark when we started and it was dark when we finished. And honestly,

Mike (32:13.507)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (32:25.571)
Yep.

Craig Letton (32:30.606)
By the time we came to do the presentation, was like, if I ever see that thing again, I'll be sick. But that's the level of preparation that you need to smash these things. you know, in the lead up to that, we'd spent a month putting together the RFP and it was the most detailed RFP on earth. Nothing to do with me, all to do with Katie and Ben and our team, we put that together. But that's

Mike (32:46.403)
I remember.

Mike (32:55.745)
Every single question had been answered. They'd answered the question. They provided evidence. They were giving insights on top that the client didn't even understand that they needed those problem solving. It was a masterclass, I think, in how to deliver a solution.

Craig Letton (33:10.358)
It was, I actually asked them, I was like, need you to deliver the best RFP in the world. And I honestly think they achieved that goal. And the thing is, once you've done that, you've built that capability, you've built that skill in your team, you've got all the information, you just replicate it. with, know, not exactly, but you use a lot of the same skills and techniques. So I think we've got to the point where our enterprise selling capability is now like a world class level, despite us being a small company.

but we've just had so much experience of doing it and doing it with the biggest and best companies in the world, right? So we're competing at a very high level and despite our small size. So my confidence in our ability to go and do this again, going with another large customer is very, very high as a

Mike (33:40.943)
agree.

Mike (33:55.097)
Yep. Craig, amazing. I I think I'd call that a masterclass in how the challenger, the David Kandelak and Goliath, and it's not the right analogy because they were obviously, one was the enemy of the other, but in the case of customers and suppliers, just because of your scale against a colossal enterprise doesn't mean that you can't both win.

but you need very, very, very honed enterprise selling and negotiation skills to be able to do it. Or else you'll just fall at the first hurdle, because you're not believable.

Craig Letton (34:35.242)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that skill transcends into doing deals with investors, doing deals with suppliers, you know, whether it's sort of mergers and acquisitions and financing deals, you know, bringing them on employees. Like I want to think I say to people is like, particularly if you're CEO, you're selling all the time, whether it's to any of those parties that I've mentioned.

Mike (34:50.594)
Exactly.

Craig Letton (35:01.154)
Whether you're trying to persuade an employee to join your company, whether you're trying to persuade an investor to put money into your company, or whether you're trying to persuade a customer to work with you, the principles are actually all the same. The stories you tell are often the same and it comes from the same place. So it's just such a valuable skill to have. I think that's, I'm very thankful that I started my career in sales and we were at the frontline of the business. You're hearing what customers need, understanding how to solve problems.

Mike (35:12.42)
They

Craig Letton (35:32.13)
and you learn every single day. If you eight sales calls a day, that's eight attempts to get better. So I always encourage people to start in the sales style, the field, learn your craft, and then one day you'll be doing multi -million dollar deals.

Mike (35:47.161)
Exactly. Craig, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks ever so much for joining

Craig Letton (35:51.042)
Yeah, thank you mate. Appreciate

Mike (35:52.719)
And where can people find out more about you?

Craig Letton (35:56.45)
So I'm a LinkedIn guy, I don't use social media outside of LinkedIn, so you'll find me there. My name is Craig, or Craig as we say in America, L -E -T -T -O -N, and the company name is Hybo, and you'll find us at hybo .tech.

Mike (36:12.303)
Craig, it's been amazing. Thanks ever so much.

Craig Letton (36:14.52)
Cheers mate.

Mike (36:16.375)
Right, let me just stop the recording.