The 6 must-have ingredients for successful Sales Transformation

Speaker A: What does go to market transformation look like? Well, in its simplest terms is that you as an organization probably have a growth mandate. I mean which organization doesn't have a growth mandate and therefore what does that look like and how do you achieve that growth mandate? Well, you look through typically a number of lenses, but the first lens would be your strategic lens.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Sales Transformation Lab, the podcast where we unpack proven strategies to supercharge your sales teams, ignite revenue growth and navigate the chaos of modern revenue leadership. Today we're joined by another fantastic guest and who better, uh, to kick off the new series of the newly branded Sales Transformation Lab, other than Johnny Adams, who is managing consultant at uh, SBR Consulting. And Jonny brings decades of hands on experience driving high impact transformation and commercial excellence programs across professional services, technology and the financial sectors for clients spanning Europe as Well as the U.S. jonny, it's

Speaker A: an absolute pleasure to join the first of what is going to be a fantastic series of podcasts and uh, honor that is. So I look forward to discussing sales transformation, some of the pitfalls, some of the challenges and some of those things that you could do better as organizations as you go through. So thank you Matt.

Speaker B: Awesome. Jody. Hey, look, we've had about 110 episodes of the podcast over the years. You know, had leaders from organizations of all the way up to public public organizations, right down to leading organizations through that kind of gritty transformational change of that kind of, you know, 10 to 200 million revenue range. You've seen it it all pretty much in your career across that spectrum. We're going to be tackling sales transformation as the topic today. And I think just out the gate, Johnny, you know, before we get into the topic, it'd be great to HEAR Just a 101 on obviously yourself, but you know, the work that you do at sbr and we're closely working partners with yourselves at uhubs.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things as you referenced there is, it's definitely a partnership. Um, the beautiful thing about you hubs and I suppose our relationship, Matt, is that you also come from a uh, world of consulting so you understand the integral importance of transformation and change. But you've done then built a wonderful technology product that uh, is strong to my heart but also to many organizations is all about capability, intelligence and really driving that forward. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But that actually links a little bit back to my history. So you know where I found myself at the ripe age of 37. Yeah, you'll be surprised. 30, uh, seven is that when I was 18, started to take my UEFA B license coaching badges. So I remember at ah, college um, there was this course that you could go on and a wonderful gentleman called Jim Kelman who was once upon a time the coach for Trinidad and Tobago may I add. So that massive, amazing country that's phenomenal at uh, football. And they put a course on for those individuals that were failed sports stars like myself to learn how to coach. And so I took that course, I passed the course and effectively I had a licensed coach anywhere across the world. The interesting part around that was that it opened my eyes up to what it took to develop individuals, whether that's through tactical level or through transformation. And I liken that back to football because I might have an individual that I need to change their capability and skill set to be better throughout their career trajectory or actually you need to transform a team throughout the season or even in game. It's very much similar to this conversation. So my coaching badges um, took me to a point of going, do you know what? I'm going to be the next England coach, not Trinidad and Tobago, England coach. Then I looked along on the TV and I was looking on the sidelines and I looked at who was um, who was in the dugout and sorry if I offend anyone but there's a word called male, pale and slightly pot bellied were the people that you saw and they had to be around about 55 plus. So a young 18 year old with enthusiasm of just completing his coaching badges quickly realized that he was never going to be an England coach. I mean how that's changed many years on later. So what I did was then my dad used to be a fantastic role model. He built his own business and he fundamentally was what I would call a uh, sales professional. And uh, that sales professional was out in the market on south on West London. And he would then work and support other organizations helping them solve their problems. And he was very much the conduit between finding solutions and he built his own business, a one man band. So I thought I really like developing people, I really like coaching and also then I just know that sales is something I want to do. So I merged the three together, took on a, an internal office role for 10 years, led a team of many sales professionals, recruited over 300 individuals in my time and then I had that sort of feeling of well what, what else happens in the world? So I joined SBR Consulting. SBL Consulting is a sales transformation organization 25 years young and we supported Over a thousand organizations, from the likes of TikTok, Meta, uh, Facebook, to some of the largest banks in the world as well in sales transformation. And for the last seven years I've been leading certain programs of transformation and also lead the organization with certain team members within the financial services sector. So I know you probably prefer a little shorter period, but that tells you all about my early eight years all the way to where I am currently and what I currently do.

Speaker B: Love it. Uh, I think it's. We always like to start the conversations with it with a personal story there because I think it's really helpful context for the listeners to get an understanding of where, you know, I think the context of where you've been is really important in terms of the topic that we'll discuss today and many of the insights and stories from the trenches that I'm sure we'll get into, as you know. You know, I think the similarities. We talked about this before in terms of our backgrounds and both coming at it from a sporting angle. Love a sports analogy when it comes to driving sales performance. Yeah. You know, I think the, the combination of, of coaching, the world of sport that you came in from, um, combined with sales and inspiration from your dad. Awesome story. Transformation, Jonny. So you and I are recording this in November of 2025. It feels like every single organization in the world right now is undergoing some form of transformational change. Just given how quickly society and the world around us is changing through the impacts of technology, very volatile public sector market. You know, if we think about what transformation actually means before we tap, you know, sort of dig into how we can think about the pitfalls and what great looks like, you know, how do you kind of distill transformation? Because I think there's a lot of leaders that are probably undergoing a transformation, even though they may not admit it by using that, that terminology. So, you know, when you think about transformation, what, what does a transformation really mean to you from a sales and go to market perspective?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's important to reference like where I play and don't play, so I play traditionally in the commercial arena and whereabouts in that area is. The go to market approach is definitely the transformation area that I focus in. So I'll talk more deeply about that. You make a very good point about, um, the current environment. So globalization has occurred, as we know, over the last two decades, which has meant that organizations had the opportunity to grow. Twenty years ago there would have been transformation. And I guess I would challenge people to say, is there more now or more back Then I think there's a question mark that we're probably in the same environment of the amount of transformations, it could just be heightened. Because what's happened since globalization is an element of fragmentation, is an element of inconsistency. So you probably have multiple transformation projects in a business ongoing at the same time, versus beforehand. We could only consume one transformation project at a given time because of how we were built in a siloed fashion or the size of our organization. So that's an important aspect. But what does go to market transformation look like? Well, in its simplest terms is that you as an organization probably have a growth mandate. I mean, which organization doesn't have a growth mandate? And therefore what does that look like and how do you achieve that growth mandate? Well, you look through typically a number of lenses, but the first lens would be your strategic lens. So to what extent have you identified your external market insights and your ability to obtain wallet share or go into a specific market or region or penetrate with a new product, for example, is your external aspect. The internal part is, is the business set up for success? So do you have the right proposition and positioning? Do you have the right planning approach, that is the number of people required to achieve and obtain that market share? And then are you able to actually have the appropriate leadership that's wrapped around that in your commercial function to enact change and be the change carriers? Do you have the tools, do you have the skills and do you have the right effectiveness to do that? And those tools are such as Playbooks and other collateral. And in addition, do you have platforms like conversational analytics or competency intelligence platforms like you Hubs, for for example, is the full suite of transformation where we

Speaker B: work and just for our listeners, Jonny, you know, in terms of most of the audiences go to market leadership. I'm sure many of them have been involved in these change and transformation programs in the past. But the typical kind of triggers that we're referring to here, you know, with that growth agenda, you describe things like a new round of investment, potentially a new leadership position. So a new CEO coming in can quite often be the catalyst. Is that fair?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really good point. Can I name client names, uh, under my own. And it is November 2025. So, uh, I've recently been working with a disruptor, uh, in the AI space called Origin Benefits. They are basically disrupting the employee benefits space. They are an AI first organization. Chris Bruce, the CEO's first organization and did a fantastic job after building Darwin, which is a well Known benefits platform. And one of those things about that is you've got a business entrepreneur that's setting up another organization. He had a choice of whether bootstrapping that business or looking for investment notion capital, came in and invested in that. Plus what's then happened is he needs to not just get to 2 million ARR, he needs to get to 13 million ARR within the first 18 months. So that is a great example of you might not be able to bootstrap in this, in, in this environment because of the current situations of growing multiples have shifted over the last number of years. So take the investment. But what happens with investment is a need to grow multiples for obviously for your own investors. So that's one of the catalysts. The other catalyst is that private equity consolidation is so rife within, um, the world. We work with a lot of private equity organizations that are constantly using their dry powder to invest in organizations. It's proven that the first two roles to change after investment is CFO and CEO. Once that occurs, typically what we see is a mandate come down from the CRO to us. Right. I need to get myself in order. Um, and then the final thing is, um, CROs typically only have about a 14 to 18 month gestation period within an organization. Transformation takes up to three years. So you've got this real sort of, uh, uneven approach that you're going to recruit a CRO that you're only going to keep for 14 months, but actually your transformation takes the three years. So it's typically a double catalyst that happens is that leadership is one of the most crucial parts to transformation success. But you're about to take that leadership layer out. So you're always going to have to rebooting those transformation projects and those are some of the triggers that are occurring at the moment in the market.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess leadership's a good place for us to start given that you kind of mentioned it there and I segue. Kind of ironic that, you know, the average tenure of those commercial leaders is down to 14 months, but the transformation program itself takes much, much longer than that. So why do you think that is? Is it that, you know, the impatience of the board and the investors, you know, kind of getting rid of the leadership too, too soon in some instances? Or do you actually think it's just a natural part of the transformation process where one form, you know, one leader can take the organization so far and then actually a different type of leader is required for the second part of the transformation?

Speaker A: I love a podcast host. They ask you a question, then they answer it brilliantly themselves. And I'm like, well, how, Matt, can I answer? Because you've given, you've given two superb, uh, reasons and rationales around, you know, that approach to leadership. And it'd be great to get your opinion. The first point I can only re emphasize is that there is personal benefits outweigh business benefits. So if you think about the investors want their slice of the pie, the CEO is on, um, X amount of payout, keep going down the tier, then all of a sudden that we're remunerating this individual on something different. So EBITDA, down to, down to revenue, et cetera, we're all very much misaligned. So if you think about EBITDA changes or cash flow changes for the PE firms or revenue changes for other people that are incentivized, all of those are misaligned. And therefore what we're starting to see is different timelines to value on those key metrics, which means that that's how leadership can churn and that's how that discontent can happen at a transformation. So align your uh, and your KPIs and align the business from top to bottom would be, would be one of the recommendations. What's your opinion on some of that? From your seat and the conversations you're having?

Speaker B: I think it's a really interesting one. And then obviously I played devil's advocate in some way and sort of teased a couple of answers for you to try and be contentious. One of the things that we see quite a lot of is the board will, depending on where you are in the investment cycle, which goes down to your point around what, what are the kind of KPIs that you're optimizing for? Oftentimes we'll see that particularly in the private equity world, what they'll be looking for is almost a bit more of a kind of. I don't know if disruptive is the right word, but they'll be looking for a bit of more like a visionary commercial leader who can come in and really take the organization, you know, from an LTV perspective, level up the organization, get them on a kind of rule of 40 and get them on a really good solid growth path. Whereas later in the investment cycle, it's obviously much more about cost optimization, profitability and making the business look attractive for, for an exit. And I just wonder whether there's a little bit of those kind of two. It's like a first half and a second half that gets played.

Speaker A: That's a really good point. So the point that you raised, and I think that did go through my thoughts when responding was about the value creation cycle. And on average value creation cycles are approximately four to five years, some last longer because of global economics of what's been occurring in the last three years. There was a conversation that was shared with me a number of years ago about how workday scaled to multi million ARR. And it's really interesting, it's a really great YouTube clip on it. But fundamentally what happened is once they got from 1 to 10 million, they realized that the competence of their leadership team might not be able to take them from 10 to 50 million. And maybe that's the same towards the value creation cycle which is you have different leaders doing different things across that, across uh, that journey. And we were impatient folk, right? You know, we used to be able to wait 20 years before our pension came and we were working the same organization for all of our lives. Now what we're looking for is instant gratification and change, right? So these businesses want payback much quicker. Uh, individual individuals want payback and gratification much quicker. So maybe there's just that uh, sense of we're not willing to wait 20 years for our pension to land. We actually want to have it straight away.

Speaker B: I guess just to sort of round off on the leadership topic itself. You spoke about the importance of aligned incentives across that leadership team. What are some of the things you know from a leadership perspective, Johnny, if you think about the transformations that you've seen work really well, what are some of the like really important watch outs or things that you need to sort of just make sure you get in place as you're going on this journey.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll be ferociously direct. Every transformation that succeeds has the leadership approach well justified and well oiled with the appropriate things around them. So look at the leadership function as the hub that makes the transformation wheel goes around some people and I'm probably being provocative to you, Matt might say technology, the CRM is the hub towards that has to be the leadership that sits at that focal point. But what need to help them with is one of the spokes is incentives. The other aspect is good communication would be another aspect. And we were asked to improve 10% conversion in an organization most recently to 20%. And it was that classic could you just do some, you know, effectiveness training? We all know that it, it doesn't work. So the question we asked was well, are the incentives of your leaders and the client facing team or the individual contributors incentivized to Double that growth to 20%. The answer was no. So you know, the point being is that you're already pushing water uphill within that transformation, which was just one element of it. So incentives are integral. Communication with the leadership is also important, but also the upskilling of leaders. A lot of transformation projects don't have a change management process around it which I, it just fathoms me like you know, M. Matt as a, as an ex consultant, you know, business owner, uh, the amount of times that you must have been in an organization and they don't have a line item um, of change management attached to it or even worse in these big organizations they don't even have change management roles within the business. So how can you do transformation without change management?

Speaker B: Um, Johnny, why do you think that is? Why do you think it's overlooked or, or omitted?

Speaker A: Bold me out there a little bit because that's a really good question.

Speaker B: Is it because it's, is it because that's the hard part? Is that almost because it's, it's like an avoidance thing of people know that the signs of behavior change is the really hard, difficult bit to get right. Therefore.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I think yes, absolutely. Is it, is it a case that we, we find it hard to attribute that role to the transformation? 20 years ago you mustn't, you need a CRM to grow your business. Was it? Yeah, of course. Now it's a must have, it's a must investable.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Maybe that change management agent is undervalued and they uh, also struggle to attribute it to the value statement. Whereas actually what you can do is you can attribute it to the risk. So 70% of transformation or sales transformation projects fail? Well if you know that X cost is going into the transformation and 70% are likely to fail, what would be the benefit? If we're able to de risk that by 50%, that change management agent should, and that process should, should be able to support that.

Speaker B: I like it. Uh, it's a different way of, it's flipping the value of the individual. I think that's a really interesting take

Speaker A: because this has been going through my head recently because we've been trying to help partners and clients understand the value of this particular piece of transformation. And you are perfectly positioned in this role. You measure capabilities of organizations. How often do we measure capability, uh, of those individuals enacting and delivering change As a business in general, not through you hubs, but as organizations in general, how do we identify that capability within an individual present?

Speaker B: Um, yeah, it's really interesting Challenge. I think there's some capabilities which I guess could be almost proxies for that, which would be things like growth mindset. If you have a team that is, you know, embracing obstacles as growth opportunities, then I guess you could see that as maybe a proxy for change, they'd be more open to the change. A lot of this, as I'm sure will come to talk about with the individual capabilities, rests on the frontline leaders shoulders. And I think that the capability levels of those frontline leaders play such a crucial role in driving change. But I think there's, to your point, this, this whole scientific piece around actually having frameworks and processes around your team to implement that change. And I think to your point, that's, that's what's clearly missing in so many of these transformation programs.

Speaker A: Uh, maybe it is maybe the identification of those individuals. It's normally left to someone that we call as a project manager to do the change. Whereas actually it's an integral role. And are we able to identify that set of individuals that have different roles? Are you changing the project or are you changing the people? And are you in the business or out the business? And maybe there's an element to analyze that to make these projects work. In addition, I think something that's most recent around transformation projects. 95% of AI transformation projects fail. I think that's an amazing statistic and a positive. It's showcasing that as a world we're embracing AI and we're trying. And that's going to be the case. When the dot com boom occurred, there were individuals in offices using the Internet where the business didn't have a clue what they were doing. It's exactly happening now. So no wonder the failure is so high. But how do we analyze AI readiness? Because if we're able to understand change management readiness or AI readiness, that's a great way to do that, the profiling or understand the business's ability to accept change moving forward. Just by you asking me some questions, I think I've come up with some answers on the fly.

Speaker B: But that's an important part. Yeah, 100%. And um, what's the space? Because we've recently, recently been deploying AI fluency as an individual sales capability. And you know, already, uh, having only done it across maybe 20% of our organizations, already seeing some really interesting data in terms of the variation of AI fluency across team members. It's being used, you know, very robustly by some high performers and it's not being used barely at all by others. So that, that is a really interesting insight and um, I think we're really kind of cracking the difficult. We are, we're cracking the nut of like the difficult part of transformation. You know, I had a guest on the podcast last week Lead, you know, CRO leading a transformation at a private equity backed business doing about 200 million in revenue. And we spent a lot of time talking about this communication of the why because when you're trying to get people motivated and incentivized to join you on the journey, it's one of the hardest parts as the leader. Right, Such a good point.

Speaker A: We're helping an organization go from 500 million to 1 billion revenue. A uh, top 10 bank, uh, uh, owns this, owns this organization and they've got to achieve that by 2030. The interesting fact what your previous guest referenced about communications, we, we interviewed 50 out of 400 individuals in the business and throughout the tiers in the organization we asked them to articulate the vision on every interview. Essentially once you got out of the C suite the message got diluted. Once you got down a little bit further, it got even more diluted to the point when you got to the individual contributors, which may I add are uh, some of the most important people getting you to that doubling up of your revenue that they did not understand what the statement was around the transformation project. So that's just a perfect example of what your previous guests just referenced. And when we interviewed those individuals, it's

Speaker B: just mind blowing crazy. And is that a failure in process or is that a failure? How has the message got so diluted from leadership down to the reps that they don't understand the message?

Speaker A: I don't know if this is controversial to use this term now, but the sentiment of Chinese whispers, I don't know what the the new word is called now. So apologies if there's anyone that takes offense to that. And I'm sure there's a behavioral science approach towards that. But it's the classic we as humans are built to share stories. So you know, whether that's you sharing it in the office and you've got certain sort of m mindset and challenges going on at the moment. You're going to interpret those words and then share them on to said person. So it's a dilution of that conversation. But it's about the medium that uh, businesses are sharing it. So typically they have um, just the town hall cascade and broadcast that only hits a certain amount and misses out the other amount. Some people like to watch a TikTok style video, some people like to join a webinar. Some people will listen to authority like the CEO. Some people just listen to their leader. Having a one to one with your leader for those that are um, ah, challenges. So like for example setting up one to ones with your teams to say what was your opinion on that? Do you understand? It's all of those facets of communication which really crucial and a lot of the projects that we do at sbr, we spend an awful lot of time on the communication package with the comms team. And if that is done really well, we see a massive uptick in terms of the transformation and the ability to actually see changes.

Speaker B: Amazing. That makes complete sense to me. I mean we talked there about leadership, we talked about the incentives, the importance of communication. Obviously um, it takes a village to transform organizations of this size. Should we talk about vendors? And I know, you know obviously yourselves at sbir Transformation Partners and the work we do here at Uhubs is closely linked to supporting transformation. So what are some of the things that you have seen work well when it comes to getting that vendor selection right for organizations?

Speaker A: Vendor selection, what are the challenges that businesses face? Well resource to manage vendors is a challenge first and foremost and access to uh, obtaining multi vendor selection is a challenge. So we've naturally got a disposition of having a negativity bias. So my perception of a lack of trust, how do I know they're right? They're not right. And to go through that maybe in a transformation where you need to use 12 different vendors can be very laborious and costly for an organization. So one of the things that we've started to see, and particularly we see ourselves at SBR is sometimes at the ah, apex of a lot of transformations. And what we might help an organization do is but why don't we take that pressure off you? Here are some recommended vendors across the transformation cycle that you might like to use. You don't have to, but we can make introductions or you can go and source your own. But what we can also help with is actually the vendor management. So the projects that we work on together, we work closely Matt. And the aim around that is to ensure that our joint client is you know, supported. But we also talk away from them to bring ourselves together on the project goals and the outcomes and then we talk in our own internal um, project meetings and then to go back to the client. So that's how some of the challenges and the solutions can occur with vendor selection. The other thing is like criteria and it's a classic qualification question in sales, but it you know, other than cost. But what is the criteria that you use to make a selection on the partners that you work with? And I asked that of a head of talent of a large organization in the UK last week and they said I just want to trust the partner. I want to make sure that they're additive and they're doing the thinking for us. I don't want to have a business that are turning up and telling us what we already know. So that in itself is interesting about the type of criteria that they're selecting. And therefore we need to make sure that whatever vendor is being used in transformation, it matches up to the criteria and needs of the business. What's your opinion on that from seeing it from a technology side?

Speaker B: Well, I think the point you make around trust is a really just makes complete sense to me and trust is difficult to build and could be very easily lost as I'm sure we've all experienced. The interconnectedness of those vendors feels like something that's really important. If you have of 12 vendors that aren't talking to each other. And even probably worse from a tech vendor perspective, if those vendors are overlapping in their value in their offering, they're probably semi competitive and trying to kind of elbow in and get a little bit more share of wallet. So all of that is to say that those types of behaviors diminish trust and probably sabotage transformation more than enable it. But I think just to echo, the final point I'll make is that that combination of technology vendor plus service vendors, I think what we've seen is that perhaps there's been too much over promising from the tech industry that the technology can be a silver bullet. And actually if you just implement our technology platform, you're going to get an amazing transformative outcome. I think reality that the technology industry has to face up to is that that's not true. You know, to drive behavior change, as we were talking about earlier on the episode, that requires time, that requires human to human involvement. So I think that combination of technology plus service wraparound is something that's really important.

Speaker A: Yeah. And equally it goes on the other side. It's a consultancy. We need the power of technology to do it the other way. So um, I'm glad that we've all come to that point which is let's work in partnership for the greater good of transformation. Because we need technology. For example, we need data within a CRM that's clean and well built or a CRM that can house the appropriate processes and tools. Without that, uh, then a lot of the consultancy for transformation just becomes very much a paper exercise and doesn't get embedded. So it works both ways. Great point.

Speaker B: Yeah. The CRM component specifically is obviously a really important one and there is some great stuff happening on the AI side of things to really help with, you know, CRM adherence. Trying to, you know, not rely exclusively on sales reps doing their admin. And we know as salespeople ourselves that we're notoriously bad at that. But like, in the absence of having any reliable CRM data, uh, I think what it, the challenge that that creates is that you don't have a way to keep score. You don't have a way to then understand if any of the change initiatives are working, let alone forecasting to a board. That's the definitely the kind of getting that data layer, you know. And the other thing I'd say is that if you go into most organizations and say, you know, we're only going to deliver these initiatives when, once the CRM data is ready, it's kind of a case of all right, we'll come back in 10 years. So I think there has to be this understanding of like, what is the kind of minimum level of acceptance that we have for data integrity so that we have some confidence that we can build on top of that from a reporting standpoint.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: We talked about vendor selection a little bit there. We've also talked about technology adoption. I mean, anything else, I guess if we flip it around the other way. Johnny, you talked about multi vendor being complex and difficult and kind of having that negativity bias. What have you seen as like completely work, completely bomb, completely flop. If you think about from a vendor selection technology perspective, what are some things that are just kind of like watch outs, like avoid at all costs.

Speaker A: It's a good question, uh, from a technology implementation, but also just from a general vendor connectivity perspective. It is about the ability to change and integrate. So we've seen the incorrect process being built against the project. So for example, in month one, month three, month four, five and six, integration, integration, integration. As we know humans, our ability to consume change is only finite, you know. So that is where projects have bombed in the past, if you call it that. The other aspect is making the right decision on the type of vendor or technology. And I know that's pretty obvious, but what are your use cases and what are you trying to solve for? Normally that's quite ill defined up front. And what typically happens when selecting vendors and technology is an ill defined set of use cases or in a certain siloed function. So the CTO might build the use cases and doesn't utilize the commercial function to identify their use cases. And that misalignment means that it's very much a procurement process from the cto, which means that the, the actual technology might support the sales function. What we typically are finding at the moment is technology fatigue within organizations. And one of another bank and asset management firm, they recently merged with a large Swiss organization. They have 71 pieces of technology. After that merger within the organization they are not willing and are not able to procure any more technology. It's now about descaling within transformation. You can actually buy too much and the stack starts to topple over as well. Ah, as M, M and A occurs, you might have too much of that going on. So you need to uh, remove and carve out from the stack.

Speaker B: Makes complete sense. I don't think 4 CRMs is useful to any organization.

Speaker A: No, exactly mate.

Speaker B: So we've got some, some tips there around getting leadership on the same page and making sure that we've got really clear alignment across that leadership team and alignment with the team in terms of the incentive structures. We talked about how to go about selecting your vendors and getting that balance and mix right, and building trust with those vendors. Then some really good tips around sort of tech adoption and some things to think about. I guess the next piece to come onto is to talk about the capability of the talent themselves and the mindset. Obviously I think this, this is the piece where obviously, you know, you hubs does a lot of work uh, with yourselves. This is kind of where, you know, you've done all of that hard work but the transformation kind of you live and die by the capabilities of people and talent, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where we get into some of the functional work and you know, some businesses want to stay in this sort of blue sky thinking strategy world and it's like that classic, you know, if you're a striker in the football team, you're classified as, you know, the one. And if you're a defender, you don't get as much gratitude. How, how funny. That's all started to change where there's that equal gratification. But I would say this part of the transformation, which is the people part, can sometimes be seen as a bit of a necessary evil and it is sometimes forgotten and not done. Um, well, what does that mean? Well, in principle of go to market transformation, we've identified that we want to go into a new market. So an organization that we're helping pivot from into a SaaS based business, they need to go into the DAC region. So what does that look like? Well your share of market is X. You need a number of people to do that. But what you've currently got in place are non SAS individuals and the operating model is not set up. So what I mean by that is you've got the class classic bow tie of acquire, win, defend and grow which we've all seen that great operating model. Those individuals may not sit within that operating model and all design. So what do we do? Well we need to be able to assess the profile of those individuals to see whether they've got the capability. And how do you do that? Well most organizations do it through gut feel. Oh well I've been in this organization for 20 years and I know what looks good. Of course you do because there's 138 biases out there that you need to go mitigate. But you do that, that's absolutely fine. The other option is to then integrate a piece of competency intelligence which could be the likes of you hubs or organizations that we can start to identify the profile that sits within the individual and then through that analysis you're able to then put them back into the org design through that operating model and go oh gosh, right, we've got 80% coverage but 20% not because we don't have the right people in the right seats. That then helps you then go and recruit and hire through the right fte which you know, Uhubs has that mechanism to do with the right capability sort of. And also what that also enables you then to do is to develop those individuals into even better people and to help that into that organization go into the DAC region. They might need certain capabilities that they've got the potential to display but they need development to tune them up. Organizations just seem to go into the casino, go onto the roulette table, whack a bit of money on black, spin that wheel and hope they've done a ton of stuff up the track from strategy work to you know, to, to planning to building the product. But then they fail to do the people side. And I think as a coach when I was 18 and I passed my sort of badges, I think that comes back to me, he goes just, just don't do all that hard work upstream to then sort of just leave that to the side. Like that is really crucial to seeing change.

Speaker B: Yeah, I couldn't agree more Johnny. And you know I, I reference uh, a kind of key piece of literature in the Space, you know Jim Collins good to great and he talks you know in the book about like the, all of these category defining and enduring businesses get right is they figure out how to get the right people on the bus sitting in the right seats and then the rest flows from there. And you're exactly right. Like the casino analogy is a really good one. It's bonkers that you know the, the, the lack of data that's used in decision making around performance management and, and sales hiring is, is pretty bonkers.

Speaker A: And every time I've been to the casino I've um, always walked out really annoyed.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think just the other point you make around the mindset piece is really interesting. I had recently talking about they've inherited a team that think they're amazing because they've barely missed target. You know they've been in the role five plus years. They've had industry leading solutions, they've had a great inbound lead machine and the CRO has been brought in by the new investors and has basically looked at the leading, some of the leading indicator data and said we've got a real problem here. You know inbound leads have dried up because the market's commoditized. None of the team are doing any pipeline generation. You then need some objective data to communicate the need for change.

Speaker A: This is seen time and time again. So look at it through professional services to start off with.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: There's an inherent issue that uh, you buy a rainmaker and rainmakers are just ill fated. It's incorrect. There isn't such thing as a rainmaker. Uh and if you build your business on a rainmaker mentality, you're foolish. So fundamentally you democratize business development and if you ever recruit someone on their black book, you're foolish. So using a mechanism to identify do they have the true capability to actually win and obtain clients in the professional service context, in your context is so much more important than dropping 250000 pounds salary plus an extra kicker because that is just going to crucify your bottom line. That's number one. The other side which I have seen and been part of as we've grown at sbr we've emerged into different sectors naturally as you do. We've worked with some of the biggest American organizations from Google to meta to TikTok. If you've ever spoken to someone that sold within meta on TikTok that they have come out, they're intelligent guys, they really are and it's a well oiled enablement function and they go through Multiple transformations all the time. So it's really well built. But they've been earning $250,000 to $350,000. They've been selling under the biggest brands in the world. You ask them about what methodology they use to actually enact and winning work. What do you mean by the methodology? So my point is you could be in a place, you could be earning that money, you could be thinking that you're, you're top. If you don't understand the mindset, the capability of these individuals that you're going to recruit and displace when the going gets tough, for example, when markets get tougher, that's really where the rubber hits the road. And you can identify that within.

Speaker B: And we've clearly seen a lot of that in the last three or so years. I would say, you know, since the zirp, uh, era came to an end and interest rates went off, it's, it's for sure been a more challenging environment.

Speaker A: Yeah. And, and that's where you're seeing organizations in financial services where markets have grown by double digits each year, their cash flow, ebitda, uh, and revenue growth has naturally improved because of globalization. All of a sudden what am I going to do with my people and talent agenda? And you can start to see this trend that, to maximize market, uh, to deal with the market trends of 10 year inflationary, uh, interest rates, all of a sudden seen that spike. They've got to find a way to mitigate that. So back to your first question about triggers. That's a, that's a good example of triggers. A bit like your one as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. And sort of bringing the topic back to like assessment and testing. Right. Because testing not only for capabilities by skills, knowledge and behavior, but also looking at mindset and characteristic traits to start to use that as an objective data point around who's actually up, who's up for the next leg of this, this growth journey. Figuring out who should be on the bus, really important part of the transformation journey.

Speaker A: Right? Yeah, absolutely. And we know that knowledge is the easiest thing to change. We know behaviors is the second. We know motivation is the third. We know that traits is the next. And we know that unfortunately for me and you Matt, that intelligence is the last because unfortunately we find it. But the point being is that 5 scale, if motivation is one of the hardest, like knowing that through an appropriate assessment is going to be much better to see whether they're on the bus and they're interested versus going actually no, I think Jimmy's going to be okay. And I do think that the final part of transformation, just moving on to the final aspect, is not just to isolate this to one function. Within commercial transformation you need a multi function approach. One of the things that we see a lot of issues within organizations is what is your marketing and sales alignment. The interesting point about assessments, I'll go into that in a second but a lot of businesses are not well wired for marketing and sales alignment. And even some of the best SaaS businesses that we would say are ah, some of some of the forward thinking organizations, they're pretty good at uh, sales and customer success alignment but not still very good at the marketing top end piece. The reason for that is KPIs are misaligned. It's like talking French and German. They're not talking in the right language and they rarely spend enough time, et cetera, et cetera. But that needs to be solved for really solid transformation to get, get time to value. The point being is you don't just need to assess the sales team, you might need to assess your marketing effectiveness as well. And this is why assessment can be really great across a broader range of things. Not just in sales, but assess your marketing capability. Do they have the capability to deliver great campaigns? Are they able to build the right collateral for the sales team? Can they build a great value proposition? Like if the answer is no, no, no, start to think about top of the funnel generation because that's going to be a real hard ability to hit your, your growth ambition in that transformation if you hadn't solved that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I absolutely, I absolutely love that. And, and thinking about encompassing, you know, whether it's pre sales marketing, pre sales or post sales. I had a really good conversation with a uh, private equity partner on this recently where he was saying that one of the challenges is that that's really the difference between sort of VP of Sales and a Chief Commercial or Chief Revenue Officer is that the VP of Sales is, it's a net new number, it's grow revenue at all cost and just hit that and beat the number. Whereas the CCO CRO has to think about profitability and ICP and bringing together acquisition, making sure your CAC and your LTV makes sense in terms of how you're scaling the business to deliver enterprise value.

Speaker A: And it's a great point. And where do those typical CROs come from normally sales? Is it less so than marketing? Potentially?

Speaker B: I mean off the top of my head I could name very few that have come from a marketing background.

Speaker A: So just already having a slight assessment to see whether that CRO has the minerals to actually solve for the top of the funnel pieces is helpful for them and for the business. And also, you know, the thing about behavioral change is that to change, you know, as I said, behaviors, you can't change traits that easily are to change motivations. You can change knowledge. So if you're going to give someone 14 month gestation period to deal with marketing, sales and they starting at this base and uh, you really needed the recruitment at that base, that is going to be 14 months of development. That is a three year process. And someone mentioned to me yesterday that the uh, Price, uh, PwC had a head of strategy and the head of strategy wanted to move into a CEO, CEO role but they did not have the sales capability. After they did their behavioral insights, uh, assessment effectively what they did was they took a step down into certain, into us, then move back up. But the point is they went in to get the knowledge in behavioral change to then go up to the CEO. They would never have gotten the strategy up. Yeah, just a good example of some of the biggest firms that we have in the world like PwC.

Speaker B: Johnny. What. What a masterclass. I think we've definitely broken the back of transformation and what a great way to kick off this new series of the Sales Transformation Lab. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I really enjoy the conversation. I know that you and I have a bunch of content coming out together, both, you know, workshops, dinners as well as this podcast. Assuming LinkedIn is a good place for listeners to reach out if they'd like to continue the conversation.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Look forward to it.

Speaker B: Awesome. Johnny, thanks so much. Looking forward to, to doing this again soon. Brilliant.

Speaker A: Thanks Matt. Cheers.

Speaker B: Uh,