From Order Takers To Consultants, The Sales Revolution Has Happened, Mostly – Episode 153

What role do salespeople fulfill? Now that's different to what they did. Maybe when you were at some of the engineering companies you worked with and helped to grow over the last ten, fifteen years?

Going back, there was two different types of salespeople, in my view, in engineering and tech in particular. There was what I call the order takers. The client already knows what they want. They've done the research. If they call your organisation, you send the salesperson in. They would take the order. The other sort was the one who the client would ring up and say, I've got a problem. I'm not quite sure how to solve it. Can you guys help me? So it was problem solving. And I think to a degree, both of those are becoming less of a demand on the salesperson because the person with the problem can do their research online. In my mind, a modern salesman is really a consultant. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Actually. You might be right there. Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson, and my colleague Stuart Harrison. Stu, how are you doing?

I am good for a Monday. How are you?

Good stuff. Fine. And I'm looking forward to, uh, all of the interesting subjects that you want to discuss that you're bringing along to this podcast. So let's just start off straight away with, uh, your hot topic of the week.

So funnily enough, I have a hot topic of the week and I don't know if you've covered it.

I was trying to put you on the spot and you've gone and been organised.

I have, yeah, I've been reading quite a lot about AI in marketing.

There is a lot to read about AI in marketing. So that's uh. Yeah, go on then.

Well, I'll start at the top level. Is it a good or a bad thing? Discuss.

That's not really what we mean by bringing a subject to the podcast. That sounds more like something you'd do at primary school. Um, but being the academic brain that you've got, I suppose I could, I can let you off with it. Um, I think ultimately it's a good thing. Um, but it's very easy to use it as a bad thing.

Yeah.

Next question.

Uh, well, that's the only topic I brought.

So yeah, I mean, if I just talk, um, briefly, I think obviously we're still in the, the hype phase of, of, of AI. Um, and I think gradually over the next wee while, maybe even a few years, it'll kind of start to normalise a bit and we'll start to realise what it's good at, what it's not so good at. It'll, it'll also no doubt improve, I hope. Um, and I think from a marketer's point of view, there's various different things that, that you can use. And we've discussed quite a lot of them in the past. I think the, the way that it's mostly abused is that people who can't write suddenly had this amazing tool that will pump out loads of content for them and I must say of dubious quality. For the most part. But if if you're just kind of, you know. Um, never mind the quality, just feel the width. If it's, if you're in that sort of mindset, then, you know, maybe from that point of view, it's okay. But I think, yeah, I think it's, that's where I think it's potentially a bad thing because all we're really doing is filling servers up with crap in the hope that somehow it's going to help us promote our business a bit more effectively with very little effort.

Yeah, it's really interesting because a lot of the articles I read, um, yeah, I kind of took a step back and thought, well, okay, is this a good thing or a bad thing for, for marketing agencies? Yeah. And there was a lot of criticism online, mainly from marketing agencies talking about how, as you've just described, this is this is just a quick and easy way of producing volume, not quality. Yeah, yeah. And I kind of went back because I'm an old dude, you know, I kind of went back and remembered the days of word processing coming in and everybody went, oh, this isn't good. You know, the quality of reports will drop. And, you know, um, obviously typing pools will be out of work, etc., etc.. So is this really just agencies trying to protect their jobs? Yeah. Mhm. Um, and then the sort of counterargument to that is, okay, it can make you more efficient if you know how to use the tools. Well. Yeah. It does have the ability to help you produce better quality content. So from a creative point of view, if you know roughly what it is, the message that you want to communicate, it can help you communicate that more effectively. Yeah, yeah. And potentially in a more consistent way. And then I started thinking about, well, us and the tools we use. And I have to say, the one that really blew me away was notebook LM.

Yeah, I've, I've spoken about that on the, on the podcast previously. And I agree with you. I think it's a very useful tool.

Yeah. I mean, particularly because we work with clients and we kind of interview them in the nicest sense, have discussions with them to to understand the pros and cons of their products or their services. You know what they're what they're trying to, um, offer really, and what the benefits of what they offer is, you know, to be able to go back and look at a transcript is one thing, but that transcript, when it's been modified, put into sort of a conversational podcast style, it really brings the material to life. And from a creative point of view, I found that really quite inspiring actually, in terms of writing good quality content.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, you just mentioned the word transcript there. And, um, I have to say, although it's kind of useful, um, the transcripts that Gemini is creating, um, from some of the Google Meet sessions that we have with clients where we're gathering information are borderline awful. Um, they just, it's obviously it's accents are a problem. Uh, words, language contexts seem to be just impossible for it to figure out sometimes. And, um, what I often find myself doing is like rewatching the video. So I've recorded the meeting because we're trying to gather information off, off a, off an expert. And, you know, we only get a certain amount of time to talk to them and the transcript ain't that useful. It's not that useful. I mean, Karen spends a lot of time going through the transcripts and cleaning them up, and especially if she does it straight after the meeting and it's kind of yeah, I remember what we were talking about there and we weren't talking about that. We were talking about this. Um, so, you know, thinking about where it's probably better than not having a transcript at all. Yeah. But it isn't of sufficient quality to be extremely useful, I think is probably where I am with it at the moment.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think the other thing I find it struggles with is where you're actually having a conversation, which ultimately means people talking over each other or, you know, agreeing with a the statement and it can't work out who said what, and it just messes the sentences up. Yeah.

That's right. Exactly.

My favorite was the recent one from from last week with the client. And he was talking about, um, sending staff to jobs overseas, you know, bye bye flights. And they transcribed it as hairy planes. Yeah.

Yeah. And you'd think that AI would think. Right. So hairy planes. That's probably not right. What might it be? Well, aeroplane sounds like hairy plane. It's probably aeroplane. So I'll use my artificial intelligence to put that instead. And that's what I also notice with um you know, like autocorrects and things like that sometimes, like, you know, especially in WhatsApp and stuff like that, the autocorrect suggestions are utterly nonsensical. I mean, completely crazy, you know, they actually annoy you. They only annoy me anyway. But um, I'll tell you another one that came up and I did share this with you last week I was writing, um, I'm writing a blog post. Um, it's on the subject of I'm just trying to get the thing to scroll. Uh, it's investing in digital marketing explained. So it's, I often like when I'm blogging, I often circle back and do a kind of catch up blog post for people who are kind of probably, maybe at the beginning, because we do work with companies. Believe it or not, there's still plenty of companies out there in the engineering and tech space who they've succeeded so far without the use of digital marketing. And now they're kind of thinking, right, we probably need to look at this stuff and they're playing catch up. And so I quite often do these kind of consolidation blog posts where I kind of pull it all together and sort of top to bottom, top to bottom, soup to nuts or whatever you want to call it. Like, um, you know, um, how to go about starting out. Um, because I realise it's a bit of a scary thing. And there was one at one part of the blog post, I thought, I'll just get a bit of AI assistance to write this. And it wrote me, uh, a bullet pointed list, which it often does when you ask it a question. So I went back and said, I don't want it as a bullet point and please write it in UK English. And it came back with it was almost like, you know, go blimey, guv, you know what I mean? All right. And if you ever ask it, if you ever ask AI to do this, it it's it's thought process. That's the wrong word. It's algorithm if you like he is or recognises you saying put this into British English. And then quite often it'll just say, you know, if you were in England, this is what you would do, blah, blah, blah, as a way of sort of trying to make it, you know, for, for a UK audience. But one of the things it put in there, because it was to do with, I think it was something to do with landing pages and it was to do with like being able to create the landing page so it, you know, grabs the attention of the person and actually and gets them engaged. And it was along those lines and it actually came back and said, um, you need to do this to reduce the risk of people buggering off. They actually said buggering off. And because it's obviously thinking, yeah, bugger off is a is. Americans don't say that, for example. So it's a very UK English thing to say. And it, it just thought, yeah, if I say like, stop people buggering off, that'll make it British English sort of thing. And I just thought that was hilarious. I shared it with you at the time.

You did. And to be honest, one, it really surprised me because you're right. I mean, the whole, you know, conversational piece that it wrote, it was like something out of Mary Poppins.

Yeah, yeah. It was.

It was absolutely stereotyped of sort of nineteen sixties Britain. Yeah. And you think, well, what else is it stereotyping that I'm taking for granted as read, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I've had I've had a problem in the past. I was writing a training package for a client on a particularly dry subject. And I wanted just to find a really good quote, you know, relating to, to do with the international law. So it wasn't the most entertaining, um, subject. So I asked it for a quote and I wanted something from the UN general secretary, you know, and it came back with the most magnificent quote. And I was just about putting that in like as a highlighted box in this training package. And I thought, I need to quote the source. So I went back to, to the AI engine concerned and went, you know, can you please tell me the source of this? And he went, yes, I'm sorry, I made it up.

And I fessed up.

Yeah, I mean, it answered my question. Can you give me a quote? So it gave me a quote because that's what I asked it, you know, so I think, yeah, it's useful to make those mistakes early on because you start to understand the limitations of some of this kit. You know, it can be very powerful and very useful, but by heavens, you know, take it with a big pinch of salt and check everything out. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. And like you say, you know, you wanted to sort of discuss the good, the bad and the ugly with AI. And I think, you know, it's very easy to pick holes in AI when it comes to content generation. Uh, you might argue that if you churn out loads of AI content and it makes your website, you know, it kind of packs your website full of stuff, you know, however good, bad or indifferent that stuff is, and that starts to have a positive impact on the amount of traffic you get from search and the enquiries that come in. Then you sort of think to yourself, what's not to like? Because one of the things I would say is I've been blogging, writing blog posts, writing content for websites since, well, forever. Um, and I've, over the years fully understood that I'm writing a piece of content because I know people are carrying out a particular search and I want them to find us when they carry out that search. But I'm also doing it in, in the, with the expectation that very few of those people would bother to read the content that I'd written, they might skim through it, think these guys sound like they know what they're talking about. I'll give them a ring or I'll fill in a form on a website and I'll get in touch with them and, you know, start a conversation and see if they can solve this problem for me. Um, so you might argue, well, you know, if you're kind of if you're cognisant of the fact that people are not going to read all this great content that you agonise over, why bother at all? But I guess the answer to that is like, I want all the content on our website, and I want all the content on our clients websites, and I hope they want all the content on their websites to be of high of a high quality and genuinely useful, informative, the sort of stuff that people might link to, the sort of stuff that people might share. Now, I know that's all very idealistic and like, yeah, that's a great idea, Dave. And if you're, you know, if you can find people that'll give you lots of money to do to create this wonderful content that hardly anybody's reading, then good luck. But I still think it's worth it. I think it's, I think it has to be reflective of your organisation. And if you just get an AI to churn it out, then, uh, yeah, I don't know.

It'll be interesting to see how it affects traffic in the coming years. I think in the sense of, you know, where there is mass produced content in the nicest description, whether the likes of Google or or other AI search tools start to ignore that content because it recognises it for what it is. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's something it's something that Alex brought up in one of the previous podcasts. And I think he wrote a podcast. I think he wrote a blog post about it where he was talking about how, um, Google is kind of struggling to index content because there's been this kind of exponential rise in the volume of content that's being created because it's a zero effort endeavor. You can literally just, if you're prepared to copy and paste the garbage that AI produces into a blog post, stick some pictures in it and go, Tada! I've just written a fifteen hundred word blog post about whatever it is. Then, um, and clearly plenty of people are happy to do that. Um, I'm actually, as I said to you, I'm writing a long, quite a long blog post at the moment and I'm really enjoying the process and I'm enjoying making sure that it's something that I, you know, I would enjoy reading it. And I think anyone that's genuinely in a place where they're kind of confused about what to do with their digital marketing, etc., would be able to read it and come away feeling like they'd had a conversation with somebody who knew what they were talking about. Do you know what I mean?

I do, I'm just wondering if you're enjoying reading it. It must be quite niche. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, it's funny because I sometimes listen to these podcasts and I do I do quite enjoy listening to them because when you're in it, when you're doing it like we do, and it's not scripted and you don't always remember everything that you discussed. And maybe in the same way, I guess what I'm not saying, like, I sit back with a big smile on my face and read it and think, oh, how clever am I? That's a really nice piece of work. I read it and think to myself, if somebody came to this subject confused, I'm now happy that they wouldn't be confused anymore.

Yeah, I'm so happy.

That there would be, um, they would be satisfied if you like that or they would be Clearer about the subject. Um, it's all right. I've just. Whatever. Whoever was looking for that two factor into that account. I've done it. Um, the beauty of digital marketing from the coalface. Um, okay, so you did mention, um notebook LM I've spoken about it before in previous podcasts. So what are you saying about it? How are you? Why is it useful to you?

I think it just because of the way it can transcribe, you know, black and white information into what appears to be a conversation. It brings the whole subject that you're trying to learn about and then write about to life, you know, and it's actually a little bit like you just described with your blog post. It brought clarity to me on a number of subjects. You know, I mean, you know, I'm not a mechanical engineer, but, you know, I've got the science background. So when I was reading, um, around some mechanical engineering stuff, I got the basic principles but didn't quite get the technicalities And and notebook LM actually made it very conversational. It was like somebody was saying, so does this mean this? And the answer was no, but it means this, you know, and you go, ah. Funnily enough, that was a question I had in my head, you know? Yeah. And it really did, um, help help me understand the subject I was then going on to write about. Yeah. Um, and the actual quality of it blew me away as well. You know, the first time I heard a notebook LM podcast, um, it wasn't through through working with you. Somebody sent it through to me and I thought it was a genuine podcast. I genuinely had no idea that it was AI produced from a transcript. Well, actually, it wasn't even a transcript. It was a number of documents that had been fed into it. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, wow, this, this is, this is, this is in a different league to some of the sort of more basic AI tools, you know?

Mhm. I think that is an area of AI that has dramatically improved. I mean, whenever we put blog posts on our blog, because we use the HubSpot content management system, which we, which we really like. Um, after the blog post is finished and it's been proofread by others and it's like, yeah, it's ready to go. You can just press a button and it creates, um, it creates an audio version of the blog post and it's, it's a very listenable audio version. You can choose different voices. We tend to use, I think it's alloy or something we use. So we tend to use the same one every time. And again, it's, it's, it's very listenable. And that to me, that that's one part one, one aspect of AI, which seems to have moved on significantly over the last wee while, um, from really sounding quite robotic and getting everything just that little bit wrong, it now feels very natural. Yeah. No, again, that's another tick. You know, the notebook LM not just because of the audio it produces, but the idea of chucking a load of sources. It's like a limited, it feels anyway, like it's a limited scope. Whereas you know ChatGPT Gemini ask it questions, no idea what sources it's using etc. with notebook LLM you're basically saying here are the only sources I want you to use. Go and use them and give me the information back in a nice, easy to consume document or as you say, a nice, easy to consume and pretend podcast and, uh, yeah, pretty good.

Yeah. And for me, that is a real benefit. This is where technology tools make it more efficient, isn't it? You know, if you do a blog post now, you can pretty much automate the production of a podcast on the back of it. Yeah, yeah. Mhm. Quick, ready, easy and accurate and very listenable. Yeah. Whereas if you were to do that in traditional methods, you'd have to first of all, you write in your blog post, but then it's a half hour or an hour of recording, editing, etc. to get the, the audio file. So you're producing the same information for, for people who consume in different ways. Yeah. Um, a great efficiency. That's what tools should be about in my view. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Um.

It's an interesting one though, because one of the reasons I brought it up, as you know, I've done a lot of work over the years in things like bidding for public sector contracts, writing proposals and bids, um, you know, assessing bids as well. And certainly in public sector. Now the requiring everybody to state whether they've used AI or not in the production of their bids and proposals. Well yeah, I part of me thinks that's interesting. Why does it matter. Yeah. Because you shouldn't be scoring the proposal anyway on the fact that the person writes brilliant English or their grammar's perfect. You should be scoring the proposal on the basis of, you know, how well does it meet the brief that we've set, you know. Mhm. Um, now I get, you know, you could feed the brief to it and then get it to write the proposal so it produces, you know, a perfect answer. Um, and it's going to be interesting to see going forward, I think with, with that kind of particularly in the public sector, with competitive bidding process, because there's going to be less and less to differentiate the quality of the proposals.

Mhm. Yeah. If you can feed in the IT and the criteria and say, we need to hit this one hundred percent, go away and do it, and it comes back and makes a really good job of it. Yeah. Then then yeah, they've, they've got a bit of a problem on their hands and it's maybe that they'll have to review how they actually procure because the way they procure. Now let's face it, you and I are not fans. You do a lot more work in the public sector procurement space than I do. And one of the reasons we don't is because they are they are impersonal. They are far too competitive in that they chuck it out there and you'll get potentially sixty companies bidding for a piece of work worth twenty grand or something like that. Yeah. And most of them like somebody in their bedroom. Um, and it just seems like a point, and I don't believe that the public sector's getting good value as a result of that. And I just kind of dip out of it really, unless we get invited to tender for stuff I very rarely will consider public sector.

No, I totally agree. You know, they might have to go back to the old school way of inviting three companies in to present and have a discussion with them. God. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine? I know, I know, I was actually.

Which is exactly what we do in the private sector. You know, we before we engage with the company, we want to sit down and talk with them, understand the problem in, in, in as much detail as possible, figure out if we're the right people to help them figure out if the chemistry is right, all of that stuff. And that's all missing from the public sector stuff. And don't get me wrong, I understand their rationale. I understand why it's missing, in that they have to be whiter than white and squeaky clean, and everybody's got a fair crack of the whip and all the rest of it, but it just seems ridiculous.

Well, I was I was chatting with a colleague the other day who works in a proper commercial expert, and he was saying, there's been a very large contract awarded in England. And, um, they've now included thirty percent of the scoring marks on social value. Okay. So the company that won it, because it's so heavily weighted to social value, the company won it, put the best social value element together. Yeah. But technically and financially, they weren't the best to deliver the contract.

Yeah. I mean, how's that going to end?

Well, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it just seems a bit ridiculous.

Um, anyway, off topic. Sorry.

Well not really. I mean, you know, that's why, you know, we talk about in this podcast, you know, we're all about digital marketing, business development and things like these. Uh, if we've got an RFP, a request for proposal in last week, which we, um, politely said, no, thanks. Um, one of the things that struck me about that, and this was a private sector, one is the amount of work that would have been required to get this gig. And I got a very strong sense because of the explanation they gave about the organisation, that they probably had nowhere near enough budget to do the job properly. Um, it wasn't a good fit for us anyway. It was B2C instead of B2B, so it just wasn't a good fit generally. But, um, I just wonder how much time is wasted on these things. It just kind of, um. Just, it just, you know, public or private sector, I mean, predominantly coming down on the public sector in this conversation. But, you know, even in the private sector, I looked at it and I was glad that we weren't a good fit because if we had been a good fit, I just should have a think how much work would have been required to, to get it to, to win it. Whereas if you can actually, you know, as I've said before, if a company does a bit of homework, surely they can narrow it down to two, three or even four organisations that they can then invite in and have a conversation with, spend a bit of time with, show them the operation and get them to understand the problem, etc.. And then from there, um, you know, potentially, um, potentially engage with them, you know.

You, yeah, it's a straightforward process. I mean, particularly in marketing, you know, I mean, if a marketing company can't market itself, there's something wrong, isn't it? You know, um, but I see it in sales a lot. You know, when, when I was employing salespeople, you know, you go out for CVS, and it staggered me. The number of professional salespeople who wouldn't talk in the CV about the sales had achieved, like they never put numbers in there. And I don't mean like financial values even. You know, nothing in there to say, you know, I increase sales ten percent year on year. You know, they avoid talking about sales achievements and you're thinking, but it's a sales role. You should be selling yourself. You know.

You must, you must have had some quite, um, sort of pregnant pauses when you've been interviewing people over the years when you said, right, okay, tell me about some of your successes and you know, how you've gone out there. And because I think hiring salespeople is onerous, it's difficult.

Yeah. It is. Um, I've had some corkers, some great stories as well. And, um, but I, I had a person who I was interviewing for a position who kept talking about a different company, not the company that I was working for. And we stopped him halfway through the interview and just clarified with him, you do know this job is for our organisation X? And he went, no, it's not. He was absolutely adamant he wasn't, you know, and we kind of got the job advert out and showed him the logo and he was like, no, no, that's not the one I saw. That's not one I applied for. You know, it was for a different company.

Jesus, how would he, how would how it had come through all of the, uh, process to get to the point of actually getting an interview? I know, without him realising that it was quite that's quite special.

Yeah. I mean, the sales one is an interesting one, particularly, and this is very relevant for engineering and tech companies. You know, your ideal salesperson is somebody who actually understands the engineering and tech and can talk about it, talk about it in a qualified, competent way. But they don't exist because generally speaking, if the really good engineers, they don't want to be salespeople, they want to keep doing engineering, you know, so, so that means recruiting somebody in sales who doesn't really understand the technology or the engineering. So, and I, I resorted to, um, actually taking young, hungry people who didn't necessarily have a technical background. And when it got technical, we would, we would send an engineer along with him. It doubled up the sales costs. Yeah. But these were these were for large projects. They weren't sort of twenty K jobs. They were, you know, one hundred two million style jobs, you know. So it was it was worth the investment. Um, but they, you know, I took on one, one young lad with a degree couldn't get a job. So he was working in Costa's. The irony of that was he didn't like coffee. Um, but he, you know, he just wanted to better his life and he couldn't get an opportunity to do that. So we said, well, okay, here's the scheme. This is your basic pay. This is your commission. You know, there'll be a company car because you're gonna have to drive around a lot. Are you up for it? And he was like, yes, I am. And in no time at all, he was getting doors open for us, ferreting out, you know, opportunities. ET cetera. ET cetera. A lot of which you can do digitally now, of course. But that's wasn't the case then.

I mean, it does beg the question, what role do salespeople fulfil? What do they actually do now that's different to what they did? Maybe when you were at some of the engineering companies you worked with and helped to grow, you know, over the last ten, fifteen years, is it we we keep hearing, for example, the statistic that, um, you know, something like eighty percent or something big number anyway, eighty percent of people have already kind of more or less made the decision about what they're going to do before they even reach out to have a conversation about a project or, you know, about, um, you know, hiring your services or buying a product. Um, because they've done the research and they've narrowed it down. Does that mean that, you know, your traditional leather wearing salesperson is no longer required? I'm thinking probably not. But how was that role changed?

I that's a really good question. I mean, personal opinion only I've got no evidence for this. But in going back, there's two different types of salespeople, in my view, in engineering and tech in particular, you know, there was what I call the order takers. Yeah. So if your point before, you know, the client already knows what they want. They've done the research. If you if you're selling products, they've already looked at your catalog, you know, they call your organisation, you send the salesperson in. All right, you want item number three off page one hundred and twenty, and you want ten of them. And you know, they would take the order. The other saw was the one who the client would ring up and say, I've got a problem. I'm not quite sure how to solve it. Can you guys help me? You know, so it was problem solving. And I think to a degree, both of those are be are becoming less of a demand on the salesperson because the person with the problem can do their research online. Um, I do think there is still a role for the physical, you know, person going out on, on the beat, so to speak. And that is I was always and my colleagues were always successful in talking to clients where clients had a problem and didn't realise there might be a solution for it. So the, the never done the research. So when you were talking to them, it was like, okay, well, have you thought about doing it this way? Or, you know, if we combined with X company, we could give you a solution that does that. Is that the kind of thing you're after? You know, and you're like, oh, I didn't even know you could do that. So there's an element of going out and finding problems that potentially the problem owners don't want or think can be solved. So they haven't done the research online. So, um, that would be the main one for me.

That's kind of is that like the almost into the Rumsfeld we, you know, the stuff we know, we don't know and stuff we don't know, we don't know sort of thing. I do wonder, because that's a conversation I've had many, many times and quite recently, uh, with either customers or potential customers where, you know, you've just been having a conversation and you say, oh, well, you do realise that you could maybe do this or do that. And oh, wow, didn't know about that. I never heard of that before. And you can see them busy scribbling things down because and that's great. And I think that is the role of, um, potentially the role of sales because although, you know, my background is more technical, I've never considered myself to be a salesperson, but I am primarily the person who will go out and speak to potential customers and try and understand their problem. But I can only do that because of my background. I couldn't hire a salesperson to do that because they wouldn't have they wouldn't have the points of reference. Correct that I've got. I'm still and you're the same. You and I are both of, of a, of an age where we are points of reference are huge. And, and I'm talking all the way back to when I was sixteen and stood at what is now BAE systems with a file in my hand making something as an apprentice, uh, Vickers shipbuilders at the time, you know, through the time I spent at university, through the time I've spent like building this business up, you know, the points of reference are phenomenal. And, and, you know, if I'm, I can be talking about, um, TCP IP, I can be talking about PHP programming. I can be talking about marketing, talking about keyword research, talking about SEO, talking about content marketing. And there's so many. And, and I kind of, I'm across all of those things. Um, and to get somebody who could just replace me and go out and do that, it's not easy, really isn't.

It's funny hearing you say it like that. I guess probably another way of describing it. In my mind, a modern salesman is really a consultant.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, actually. He might be right there.

Yeah. And okay, then you get into the issue of not giving free consultancy, but you know, you want to be paid for your expertise. But but even if it's a, you know, a broad consultant rather than a very, you know, deep or expert consultant, you're you're right. It's those points of reference. It's being able to say, well, I've seen something like that before, somewhere else that's worked or yeah, I can join those dots that you maybe as the customer can't because you haven't got that breadth of experience. Yeah.

Yeah. When you talk about paid for your expertise, that's a really interesting one, especially in this game in the, in the creative industries. Traditionally, companies went to a bunch of agencies or sometimes freelancers and got them to do the work in order to win the work. Yeah. You know, go out. I want you to, you know, show me how you what you think my new website should look like? Design it for me. And if you. And if I like it, I'll buy it off you. You know, and thankfully, I think that's now going away because that was absolute horseshit. And that is not the way to any industry should operate. You know, do the work to get the work. It's it's just ridiculous. And creatives have for generations, for probably hundreds of years, have given away their valuable expertise in order to try and persuade somebody to hire them. If you can't look at everything I've done before and all that stuff and think, actually, these guys will be able to solve this problem for us, and they'll do a great job of it. If you can't do that, then you're an idiot.

And you still see it in engineering. I mean, I still see proposals going out where, you know, the client's got an engineering problem, let's call it. And in the proposal from the supplier or suppliers, they ask them what their solution would be. Yeah. And I'm thinking, no, I'll give you the process. We'll go through, you know, we'll do an auctioneering study or we'll do a design study or we'll do a front end, you know, feed study or whatever it might be, you know, but we're not going to tell you what you know, oh, we've got a solution, but we're not going to share it with you for free. You know, that's, that's our IP. Yeah.

Yeah. that's right. Yeah, absolutely. Just going back to the sales thing, I mean, did you ever come across this situation where the salesperson would come back and the engineers would look at them and say, you told the client what?

Oh, yes. It's probably easier to recount the times that didn't happen. Yeah.

Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean.

Again, was that because the the people going out doing the selling didn't really have, you know, they weren't really across the brief in terms of what what the company they work for actually did and the capabilities.

No, I don't think so. I mean, there was only, only the odd occasion that the salesperson offered something we couldn't deliver. Okay. And I worked mainly in service companies, not product companies, you know. So, um, more often than not, it was the technical guys or the project guys would kind of be like, oh my God, you know, that's going to be horrendous to deliver. It's going to be challenging. It's going to be difficult. Yeah, yeah. But you can do it. Yeah. Um, it's just, you know, it takes us out of our comfort zone or the normal way in which we would do things, you know? Um, I mean, I won't breach any confidences here, but I had a situation where I had a client wanting a particular type of, I'll call it a simulator and leave it at that. And the client themselves was adamant they wanted one. They knew, but they had no budget.

Okay.

So actually, you know, when I went back to the sort of I brought that, that opportunity in when I took it back inside the project, guys all went, well. We're not doing it. Then I went, no, no, that's the wrong answer. We've got to help them justify how they can buy it. Now. Now, that might mean us doing a technical study, like a safety study or whatever it might be. Well, we don't do those. And what the answer is, well, we're about to start. You know, it's that kind of and it developed the service. So we had to do some front end work, which was completely outwith the comfort zone of what we normally did. We built, we built and commissioned and delivered simulators. And all of a sudden, all of a sudden we were doing regulatory safety analysis and all this kind of stuff so that the client can then put a business case together. And the solution to this problem is X. Yeah. Yeah. They paid us to do the work. We didn't do it for free, but it took six months, you know. Um, but that's kind of an extreme example. But more often than not, it was, you know, just getting different departments to work together in ways that they weren't necessarily used to. Yeah. And you have to remember, we didn't have none of the companies I ever worked in. We never had project managers or engineers sitting around doing nothing. They were always busy. No.

Yeah.

That's right. So on the one hand, they love the sales guys because that that continued. You know, we brought the orders in and and that guaranteed their future and paychecks at the same time, all we were doing was giving them more problems to deal with and more work to do, you know? Yeah.

So but that was always a tension there is interesting. What you've identified is that the really good salespeople, um, they understand intimately what their organisation is capable of, even if, as you rightly said, there, that organisation isn't currently doing that thing. But they think, well, they've got all the component parts. We could do it. Identify that that's the problem the client's got and see an opportunity and bring that in. Now, there is just no way that an inexperienced salesperson who is just a salesperson, they know how to sell. And you see them all the time on TikTok and LinkedIn. And you know, when somebody says it's too expensive, you come back and you say, oh, blah, blah, blah, you know, all those people. So they understand how to flog second hand cars. But actually, when it comes to engineering and tech companies, you need people who can, like I said, understand the capability of the organisation they work for and really understand the problems that the clients have got. And it's a similar thing with us in digital marketing. You know, we want to really understand the problems that our customers solve for their customers so that we know, for example, how to put a content plan together, you know, because we want to understand those problems and how people and where people and how people are looking for solutions. And anyway.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's one of the things I really enjoy about this. I mean, you and I have talked, you and I have talked about this at length in the past, but I never considered myself a salesman. Um, and it's why I probably worked in services rather than engineering services rather than products, because what I really enjoyed was solving the customer's problems.

Yeah. It is problem solving is problem solved. Good salespeople do.

Yeah. And just even thinking about some clients you and I have been working with recently, you know, when you're having those discussions about something that they offer and you kind of go, okay, so is it your staff that make you better than anybody else? Well, well, actually, when you put it like that, no, it's because we've got a particular piece of kit they love and it's based in a particular location somewhere in the world. Right. So that's the bit that's really selling it, you know, and, and actually all you all your existing collateral, your brochures talk about the wrong things because that's not what people are attracted to. You know, so it's, again, back to that problem solving. Why do people really buy from you? What is it they really buy, you know? Yeah, yeah. So and I love that. Yeah.

I absolutely agree. Um, I think it's probably the same company. Um, we're talking about, um, we had a nice message come in on Friday, didn't we, from that um client down in Somerset. And you know, we basically we're doing a rebrand for starters, we've got a whole heap of work to do for them. But um, up front we're doing the rebrand stuff and um, fair to say we've, we've knocked it out of the park and it was an interesting presentation. We gave them a couple of evolutions of their current brand and a couple of revolutions. And, uh, the one that we all thought they would go for, they actually have gone for, although during the meeting, um, being engineers, they were kind of quite reserved, a bit cautious. Um, I yeah, cautiously, um, appreciative, you might say. Um, I was reading between the lines in that meeting and you know, that the body language suggested that they were really quite excited by what they were seeing. Uh, but we got a message from them after the presentation, and we then sent them the stuff through so they could look at it at their leisure and they were saying, you know, we need to sleep on this. One day passed. Another day passed. And, you know, we were kind of thinking, well, okay, they've been sitting on this now for two or three days. And then just before we went into the weekend, the message came in like we were kind of looking at the option three that we really like option three. And you know what? It's kind of perfect as it is. There's nothing we want to change about it. And it's like, wow, that was so good. And you know, it's an exciting project anyway. And it's great to have got off to such a great start.

It is. And it was. You're right. I mean, I did have a chuckle to myself when I saw the feedback on Friday, because I was thinking, that's a proper engineer's response, isn't it? You know, there was no kind of, wow, we loved it. You know, you've blown us away. It was, you know, yeah, we we feel on balance that. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And quite right. Because that's what that's that's the culture of the organisation and the culture of the business they work in, you know, so but yeah, no, it's good, good and good fun. So good.

Good. Okay. Um that's fine. That's, um, I think what we'll do that's, um, I think we'll wrap that up for now. We've, we've obviously been discussing sales quite a bit in this one. Um, and obviously the bit on AI at the start, um, I think, yeah, that's fine. It's Monday isn't it. So when we're recording it's Monday anyway. And I know that you're tied up at the UK Atomic Energy Authority for quite a lot of this week. Um, so I'll get a big, big list of things to talk about for the next one. Um, and we'll do that, um, maybe the same time next week if I think you were around on Monday next week.

I think I am. Yeah, that would be good. I enjoy that.

Zooming up and down the country. No. Okay. Good stuff. You've been listening to Dave and Stu on Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, I was going to say, if you've got any questions, fire them in. But we're not really interested. We're just like talking and you just like the sound of our own voices. So, um, don't bother. We'll just keep doing this.

What? We're the only ones who listen to it anyway, so that's fine, isn't it? I know, absolutely, yeah.

Good stuff. And I'll see you next time.