Ep. 22- How Top Sales Leaders Build Trust and Close Complex Deals with Eamonn Hughes

Speaker A: Foreign. Hello, and welcome to the Supercharger Sales Velocity podcast, the show where I help you drive more opportunities, bigger deals and faster wins. I'm Fergal Carroll and today I'm thrilled to chat with a guest who's been in the sales trenches, leading the charge on, um, some of the most exciting innovations in tech and smart buildings. I'm talking about Eamonn Hughes. Now, Eamonn has spent over three decades selling and leading sales across industries, from enterprise analytics at teradata to pioneering IoT and smart building solutions at Enlightened, and now the shape and strategy at, uh, Johnson Controls, where he's been at the forefront of their open blue digital solutions and global customer growth. He's sold into some of the world's biggest enterprises, he's built teams to crack new markets, and he knows firsthand what it takes to turn a, uh, a complex, innovative idea into a signed deal. And now along the way, he's helped transform how customers think about sustainability, technology, and the business case for change. Today, Eamonn serves as VP of Corporate Financial affairs at Johnson Controls. But make no mistake, he's a sales leader at heart. He brings the rare perspective of someone who's closed big deals, run sales orgs, and he now sits at the table shaping the financial strategies behind him. Eamonn, I. I'm really looking forward to diving into your sales journey, the lessons you've picked up and, um, how you see the future of selling in this era of innovation. Welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Hey, Farragal, good to see you. How are you doing?

Speaker A: I'm doing brilliant, Eamon, it's great to meet you again. Listen, uh, you've got such a varied background, it's hard to know where to start here. But what I want to start is you've sold everything from IT services to data analytics to IoT platforms, digital solutions, and I'm probably not even doing that justice. Right. So tell me a little bit about your early sales career in terms of the lessons that you might have learned in those early days that would have shaped your success and how you got to where you are now.

Speaker B: Going back a, uh, while. You can see from the gray hair, right?

Speaker A: Oh, don't worry, we were all there.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I started my career as a, uh, technology guy, you know, technical specialist per se. So when you're a technical specialist, the essence of what you're doing is delivery, right? So it's very important to configure, make the technology work to do what it's supposed to do for the customer and the client. And that's what I was doing. And I really liked that. And I loved it, uh, you know, so much so that I often worked very late into the night in data centers and so on and so forth to make the technology work because I wanted it to do what the customer needs, needed it to have done. And what happened was because of that expertise, I started getting pulled into more and more sales situations. So as you know yourself from your own career, if you're a salesperson and a technology salesperson, it's not just you that gets the sale or does the sale. You have a team that supports you, for example, a pre sales, a consultant or a solution architect or a technical, uh, specialist. And I was one of those. And that started giving me an appreciation of the selling element. And what I liked was I liked the energy and the excitement because there was a problem there that was needed to be solved. And uh, whoever came up with the best solution was going to win the day. So it was uh, the emphasis on trying to understand what the client or the customer really wanted. And I learned that, uh, listening and engaging and understanding and being seen to acknowledge that was important because it built a rapport and it gave you an element of credibility. And I think in these types of situations that is extremely important. Or at least it was I felt to me in my early days. And there were people around me, of course, that were demonstrating that more senior people, experienced people. And I always like to say that if you're a young salesperson or an up and coming salesperson, go and carry a bag for a while for somebody else even, you know, and you learn a ton and you learn a lot that will stand by you and help you to hone the craft. And there is no doubt that it's a craft. You know, I firmly believe that. And uh, I just loved the excitement. But I also loved the interaction of the customer element, the interaction with your own team and trying to determine the best approach, the best strategy for coming up with a solution.

Speaker A: So building credibility through listening to the client's needs, putting the customer first. I mean it's all pretty standard SaaS 101, isn't it, Eamon? Not leading with the offer or the product, just taking the time to listen.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is. And you gotta kind of really understand what the pain points are that the customer has. And of course the listening element is one part of it. But the ability to be able to gain information throughout the process is obviously very valuable because, you know, people are people and people quite often are cautious, particularly if they don't really know you because they're not going to open up and give you total access to information straight away. You have to kind of earn that uh, respect and you have to earn that ability. And of course one of the great ways that I learned to do that was constant learning and improvement. I spent a lot of time on different methodologies in my career, many of them. And uh, I do like the concept of the insight based selling element where you're bringing something to a customer or a client, you're teaching them, you're giving them something of value.

Speaker A: I was just going to say that, yeah, bring in value. Yeah, expand a bit on that. Is that a methodology there?

Speaker B: You described the methodology essentially. Now my background, I did a degree in maths, uh, mathematics and English, which is kind of a bit of a strange combination. And then um, I actually did a higher diploma in education. I trained to be a teacher and I qualified to be a teacher, but I decided I wasn't going to be a teacher and I ended up in the computer industry. The teaching element is quite important and that's a big part of say for example, a challenger based methodology. Your ability or need to teach, you know, if you think about it, right, a good teacher, we all know them and we're not threatened by them. We're not threatened by them, we're actually embraced by them. I mean some sales elements have, uh, don't have a great reputation. You know, you kind of hear the kind of people talk about, oh, secondhand car salesman and all this kind of stuff. When you're looking at complex big ticket solutions that are worth many, many millions and so on are incredibly important to an organization to enable them to gain an advantage in their market with their customers against their competitors. You know, that element of credibility and trust is very, very important. And I think the teaching emphasis is significant. And I found that myself in my own experience. And look, I've been a recipient as well. I've had to deal with people coming, tried to sell me stuff. When I feel like I'm not being sold to, that's when I'm more comfortable. And that's an art. And that's something that good, uh, salespeople are able to do.

Speaker A: I believe you hit the nail head earlier. You said it's a craft, it's an art, the ability to achieve what you just said there and Eamon as well when we go through this cycle. So yes, we're educating, we're delivering some value along the way, but there's always pushback. You left an analytics company and you moved into, I'll uh, call it a different world in terms of this whole world of IoT buildings and how to make them more efficient. But that was quite early stages. I mean nowadays I think it's, it's more accepted that this is, I'll uh, call it, this is a thing. But maybe back then it wasn't quite the same and you would have faced maybe a little bit of skepticism on the offer. How did you handle that? Because it, you know, you would have been obviously a passionate believer in the underlying technology to make buildings more efficient. But what pushback would you have received and how would you have handled that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so that's a great question actually. And I think throughout our careers we make choices on what we do ultimately. And I made a choice in relation to going essentially from the big data space at the time and everything was moving to the cloud and it was unstructured data and it was really exciting to the IOT space. I believed that there would be a big impact that that type of technology would make on the world. And I think it's proven to be the case. You know, I mean sensors are everywhere, uh, sensors are driving data everywhere. Cloud platforms are full of uh, sensor, uh, data, uh, and then things like AI platforms are using these sensor data as part of their LLMs and driving out generative AI and so on, so forth. I was driven in my decision to make a choice by the technology. Did I think that was exciting and then the company and the leadership in the company and uh, I was impressed by the leadership in the company. Uh, at the time it was a Silicon Valley based company. So I was being given the opportunity to experience working in that uh, environment and it was a tremendous experience. It was evaluating the opportunity that I had and making the decision based on those. And yes there was a risk associated with that, but I think the fundamentals are the leadership. You know, you need to be able to work with and follow someone and believe in somebody. And the CEO of that company was a great guy, really interesting and very driven and very experienced. Then the fact it was Silicon Valley, the fact the technology was cool, and

Speaker A: in terms of the success of that period of your career, I mean, what do you put it down to? I mean you've obviously worked for different types of companies. This is a completely different offer. You must have some simple sales fundamentals that you carried with you into that business.

Speaker B: Yeah, well that was really interesting actually because I went from managing a uh, lot of sales people and sales teams to carrying the bag again, which doesn't often happen, Eamon.

Speaker A: You know, usually people, you know, they get to a certain level. Like, I think you were a country manager at that point. I mean, you would have had a senior role in this new business, but at the same time you were expected to drive the sales personally before you could build the team behind you.

Speaker B: It was many different emotions. In some respects it was a bit scary, but it was also tremendously exciting. And I remember being in the reception areas, as many sales guys, uh, know very well, having got a meeting, a very important meeting with a senior person person, because of course I had an understanding that in order to progress with a very big opportunity, you need to be operating at a high level, an executive level, preferably, and standing there in that reception, having got the meeting through somebody's PA and now, um, being able to do the meeting and having a plan for that meeting was very exciting. It was the belief that I had something in my bag from the company that I worked for which was going to be able to deliver a significant benefit to this company that I was trying to get to become a customer. That's a pretty good feeling, really. I had a good story. There was good use cases. I knew that there would be benefit and I just had to really sell that benefit and sell that belief to the executive that I was going to meet.

Speaker A: That's interesting because you talk about story there and having a strong story and the confidence it gives you and that that's so true that when you have a great story, it just gives you the confidence to get out there. You're talking about meeting senior people, right? So, uh, first off, it gives you that confidence that you can meet with senior people because you've got a strong story. I'm guessing it's a premium offer, right? With a premium price tag attached. So you're also going to be able to justify that with the strong story. So it gives you that trusted advisor status, the problems. You're there to solve a problem for the client that you know that they have. You've. You're backing it up with use cases from other clients who've had the same problem as the person you're just about to meet. So it does give you a really strong sense of confidence walking in there while you're standing downstairs waiting to be called up. Right. Having said that, it seems to be that to me that a lot of that is missing from today's selling environment, that we skip ahead to the offer we have and we forget about crafting what I call a sales message. Just really spending time with Thinking about the value proposition, thinking about the sales message. I mean, have you experienced that in sales teams that you've taken on where you've probably got a great offer, but the sales team are just not communicating the value?

Speaker B: The sales story I have, yeah. Again, it comes back to the choice. The advice that I would give to somebody in their career is that you make the choice, and if you make that choice, go full blast for it. But sometimes things happen, for example, like somebody might be required to sell something that they don't necessarily believe that much in. My philosophy on that is that you can't teach fish to climb trees. Ultimately, your capabilities are not engineered to get the results that you're looking for. So therefore, this is very important in sales leadership. Obviously, if you're assembling a team and you're building a team, you know, your team have to buy into what you're trying to do and believe in it and understand it. And then if they do well, then they're going to be interested enough to learn about how the technology can benefit, uh, the customer, to learn how to sell it better, to position it better, and to have that confidence, like you say, to have the story.

Speaker A: You've gone from seller to sales manager, sales leader. You know, you've been country manager, VP of big organizations. I mean, as you've gone through these various gear changes in your career, just because, and I see this, just because you're a great seller doesn't necessarily make you a great manager or great leader. Uh, how have you handled that? I'm guessing here you probably haven't received what I'd call formal training. Right. In management or leadership. Maybe over the years after becoming a leader, you've gained some, some education and training on it. But often we're kind of dropped into it, you know, because we were great at a particular sales gig that we did, we suddenly get promoted to leading the team, and then we end up, you know, running the country and so on. I mean, how do you prepare for that?

Speaker B: It's difficult to prepare for it. Obviously, what I would say is that you're being given an opportunity. So you are being given an opportunity, and then you have to make a decision as an individual, am I going to take this opportunity or not? And I would say I've nearly always taken the opportunity. So in some respects, you're jumping in. And then it depends on the gap between what you've been doing and what that opportunity needs you to do. And the first thing that is important is do you recognize the gap or not? Because if you don't, you're probably going to be in trouble. Unfortunately for me, I recognized the gap fairly early on, particularly when I moved into sales management, sales leadership and business leadership. And, you know, so what I actually did and, uh, I ended up having professional coaching on leadership. And I did that for a number of years actually. And that was really successful for me because it enabled me to learn the craft of leadership.

Speaker A: I think very few people see the gap initially. They think it's not that much of a difference to be a manager versus the seller. So that's step number one is just even recognizing that there is a gap. But more importantly, step number two is taking the leap to actually go get yourself a business coach as you did. And it's not just for a short period. Right. You've had a business coach for a while?

Speaker B: Yeah, I did for at least three years. I would say that was incredibly valuable because it gave me a space for me to be able to discuss the challenges that I was facing as a

Speaker A: leader with someone outside the organization, essentially, someone neutral.

Speaker B: Yeah, somebody outside the organization qualified, obviously, but was able then to help me. And, um, one of the things that they helped me enormously with was mentoring and coaching. And, you know, they are different. I learned that, you know, how to be, you know, a mentor, but I also, uh, learned how to be a coach. I was able to put that into practice. And the, uh, benefits that, uh, I gained as a leader and my team gained, you know, were, were very good, and there was high performance and there was great results and so on. And it was down really to learning these skills. Because if you think about it, right, if you go from being a, uh, successful, very successful salesperson into a leadership role, the first thing you're going to do is to try and continue to be the very successful salesperson. Right? And that's exactly more or less what I did. But I realized I couldn't do that. Now, I did have a manager at the time who understood that and, uh, kind of steered me, you know. And then I kind of got into a situation, says, well, what is this role? What are the key requirements for this type role? And it was leadership. And then I was saying, what do I know about leadership, really?

Speaker A: So three years of mentoring and coaching yourself helped you then become the mentor and Coach to your SaaS teams. Tell me how important you feel coaching is in today's world in terms of sales managers. Maybe they're in the job a couple of years, maybe they haven't yet realize that they need to get some coaching Themselves, but yet they are coaching their own teams.

Speaker B: The thing about coaching, right, is that you're ultimately not giving your team member the answer, you're helping them to find the answer.

Speaker A: Yeah. Whereas mentoring is essentially giving them the

Speaker B: answer from mentoring is giving the answer. And that's appropriate at certain points in time. Right.

Speaker A: Sometimes you just want to be told, tell me what I need to do here. I don't have the time to be coached on it.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So in essence, from a coaching point of view, the impact on learning and finding and figuring out the answer yourself is much bigger because a, uh, you appreciate it more. Because at a certain point people don't necessarily like to be told. At a certain point you want to be told. And a leader also needs to recognize that. And there will be people in your team that it's better to mentor because they're starting off their career, they're up and coming, you know, they need that bit of extra attention and they need to understand the craft. Like you say, you know, do this and you get this result. Just do it, go and do it. If you're dealing with a much more complex kind of scenario and situation, I mean, you know, from a sales point of view, quite often what you have to do is understand your customer, the organization within your customer, the power base within your customer, the linkage between different leaders within a customer. Because quite often it's consensus based decision, particularly for the bigger items. So therefore, if you've got a number of these types of scenarios and opportunities that your team are trying to win and drive forward and playing in, and you're a good coach, your coaching sessions can be very impactful because you can have them, a number of them, and therefore, you know, you can be quick in relation to the team's movement of doing the next thing and the next task to drive something forward. And your performance will improve. And not only performance, most importantly the trust will improve. And when you have trust, uh, in a high performing team, you have speed, your team trusts you, you trust your team, they're open, they can come and share and say, hey, there's something going on that uh, is quite difficult, et cetera, et cetera, they feel they can talk to you about that and then you can walk through that with them and come up with the answer, help them to come up with the right answer on the next thing to do in relation to that opportunity.

Speaker A: That was a great phrase, Eamon. So when you have trust in a high performing team, you have speed, that's really good. And listen, you touched upon something there I wanted to pick up on in terms of enterprise deals and enterprise clients. Tell me about the role of account planning or key account planning as it's sometimes referred to. Uh, is that something that you've spent a lot of time doing for. I'm thinking big enterprise accounts where you've got good relationships, you've already got a decent bit of revenue but you're trying to grow the account significantly. Is that a tool that you've used?

Speaker B: Absolutely. Huge, huge amount of uh, expertise over the years of account, uh, planning, firm believer in it. Very important. I've used a variety of different types of methods and methodologies. They all kind of more or less come to the same thing but it's very important. You know, coming out of that account planning process is a strategy. Then one of the things that I've done quite a bit in my career is kind of sold platforms rather than kind of point solutions. And so if you're lucky enough to be selling a platform, platform is broad and therefore you can sell into different parts of the same organization to gain a project on your platform so that you can deliver. I mean this is why the big companies like the Microsofts and the Googles and the Amazons are so successful because they have a huge platform which is a multi use, multi sector capability. You know, in order to do that for a very large enterprise wide customer, account planning is so important. It's fundamental. And what I always find about account planning on that level is it's, it's a lot of fun as well, right?

Speaker A: It is, it's great fun. I've really enjoyed key account planning sessions. They're great fun.

Speaker B: You're really thinking about being in the customer's world, what they're facing, the challenges they have in their market, you know, what solutions they're trying to get out there, you know, how they're trying to get a competitive edge themselves and how you can help them, you know. And then also you're obviously going to be aware of some of the problems that they have in there and solutionize and figure out who you need to take them to.

Speaker A: How do you stop those plans becoming dust on the shelf? The typical approach is we do account planning in Q1 perhaps. It's a fantastic plan. It gets put up there on the digital shelf and never looked at again until next January. How do you stop that happening?

Speaker B: So you have good salespeople.

Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough.

Speaker B: You know, simple as that. Yeah, it's as simple as that. You have good sales.

Speaker A: Where I'm coming from with that question really is that I've. The approach I've taken with the KKM planning is it's not to be considered once off, it's a living document. I don't mean you're changing it every single day, but you're coming back to it every six weeks or so, you're revising it every quarter, you're refreshing it each quarter. So you've probably got four a year just to stop that sense of it just gathering dust and that it is a representation of essentially the client's world which is changing. So Q1, the client may have had a particular need or initiative, but by Q3, maybe that need or initiative has disappeared because something else has come in in their world. And if we're not reacting to that and changing plan and so forth, it's not going to be successful.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, you're totally right. Because, you know, the key account plan isn't just about, like you say, the big session and then you produce the output and there you have the key account plan. You put it up on the shelf quite often with the key account plan, you've potentially got management input into that key account plan as well. That management input can be very valuable.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Because, you know, if you get good management input into that key account plan, you're getting the benefit of people who have had, uh, success in the whole industry or the space that you're operating in. That key account plan should be reviewed again in the future. So like you say, you want to be tweaking it, you want to be utilizing it, managing it, changing it. You might have five opportunities in your key account plan. You might convert one of them, you might get rid of three of them and you might add two more. That's the dynamic nature. If you're in the account and you're around the account, you're finding new opportunities and you're qualifying some opportunities out. Some things never happen in big accounts, as you know. You know, some initiatives don't get off the ground that you might have in the key account plan. For whatever reason, it mightn't be the right time for the customer, it mightn't be right time in their sector. You know, there might could be a change, it could be regulation change that they might have to respond to.

Speaker A: Eamon, I want to finish off with a question around a hot topic that of course, everyone's talking about today, which is Genai. And I've been using it for about two years now, maybe two and a half, and it's radically changed the way I approach my own role, which is A sales coach and mentor and trainer. And I've got to the point now where I couldn't see myself going a day without using Gen AI. There's just dozens and dozens of use cases in my situation. What are you seeing from your side there? You're working for a large corporation. And um, my experience of large corporations is when something new like this comes in, there's a tendency to get that policy out the door. And it's quite, initially quite restrictive. It actually kind of strangles the ability for the teams to use in this case AI. I'm m just wondering, I'm uh, not talking particularly about your own organization, but what are you hearing and seeing in industry in general just in terms of how Genai is shaping the world for sellers?

Speaker B: I'm using GEN myself every day and I think it is the most uh, incredible technology that I've seen. I was one of the people that was almost a pioneer on the Internet side. I remember implementing the first computer for a massive multinational corporation that connected to the Internet and it screeched and it squeaked and it was the motor modem connecting in and you had a page scroll down that was Yahoo. And it was like uh, and everyone was going, don't touch that. It was mad. This is obviously enabled by all the technology that has gone before. And the power of this is just huge from a seller's point of view, look, it's going to help you to do things faster, which is always good in sales. You're always under some bit of pressure, right? You got a target, the clock is ticking, you want to beat your target. So you know, you're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing. You could be doing an RFP until all hours of the night. But if Jenny, I'll help you to do it better, it'll help you to write it better than you could write it yourself.

Speaker A: So I was talking to a client last week and they were saying to me that their customers, some of them are now starting to ask, so when they put out the rfp, have you used AI in your responses? Now? They didn't give any more information as to why they're asking the question. But I was having a good discussion with this individual and I was thinking, I see a future where the customer is now going to use AI uh to generate the rfp because sometimes it takes them ages to get an RFP at the door. You know, you've seen that, right? So they're going to want to shrink that time. But also they're going to expect people like us on the other side who are responding to RFPs to be also using Genai to respond. And they'll think, well, they can respond quicker now than they have been in the past where, you know, usually you might get three or four weeks now they might say, well you're all using Genai so why can't this take five days? We're just going to get into this cycle, I think, where AIs are almost talking to each other in terms of here's the AI generated RFP and here's an AI generated response. I don't think we should get to a point where we're having AI generated responses. I use AI as an assistant. I truly believe it's an assistance to our own creativity and our own thinking. And as soon as you step over the line, I think when you start producing just purely AI generated documents, we're probably in a bad space. So I wouldn't be fond of that approach, but I just thought it was an interesting conversation where we can just slowly start to see it creeping into the customer side as not just our side of the fence.

Speaker B: Yeah, well look, it's going to creep in everywhere. That's the reality of uh, it. If you're in a situation, let's say you want to produce content to articulate your position relating to an opportunity or a sales process. In the past, you know, you could spend a lot of money on producing that content, but you can do that kind of a lot quicker and a lot cheaper now. That's just one small example of using Gen AI.

Speaker A: We've got an exciting time ahead of us. In some ways I m. I'm glad I'm kind of coming to this stage of my career and seeing Genai rather than being at the start of my career because I feel there's just going to be so much more pressure on sellers in the future to be so efficient at uh, what they do using Gen AI as an assistant.

Speaker B: I know what you're saying. There's so many tools now that you have, you know, obviously you got inbound marketing elements, you got the CRM software. I do think that if you're doing many millions of dollars of business with a major enterprise customer, you can't have Gen AI manage that type of complexity or relationship because there's too many emotional and human elements that will come to the fore. So you still need that person who can engage and who can manage and who can lead. But utilize the AI.

Speaker A: Exactly. Just to get that nice balance, isn't it? Just get the balance between the systems and that. Eamon M. Listen, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate the time you've taken out. I know you have a hugely busy week this week. We were talking just before we came on about how busy your week is going to be. So good luck with the week ahead. Thank you again for your insights. Just one last question for you. If people would like to reach out to you, where's the best place to get hold of you?

Speaker B: LinkedIn.

Speaker A: LinkedIn, absolutely. And we'll stick that. We'll stick a link in there. Eamon, thanks again. Really, really appreciate your time.

Speaker B: Thank you. Fargal, fantastic to see you and really appreciate this invitation.