Philip Squire: Design Thinking and Third Box Strategies in Modern Selling

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And boy, are you in for a treat. This was a fantastic conversation about sales, the history of it, where is it going, and everything in between with Dr. Philip Squire, who's the CEO of Consalia, a UK-based sales business school that also offers sales consulting services. Now, he's a subject matter expert for a UK Trails Blazer undergraduate apprentice sales degree, a trustee of the Association for Professional Sales, a co-founder of the International Journal of Sales Transformation, and a visiting professor at the Seoul School of Business.

He also hosts the Sales Transformation Podcast, and this conversation was fascinating to me. He has done more research in the field of sales than almost anybody I've come across, and he has this great new book out called Transformed Selling, and it talks about four proven strategies that are based on the values customers look for in salespeople, which is authenticity, client-centric, proactive creativity, and being tactically audacious. And so we dove into all of those, but before that, we got into his history and how he got into sales and his journey, which I think is fascinating, and then talked about almost everything. I had so many questions for him about curiosity and how can we teach this, and how do we address the challenge of remote selling?

So you're going to want to listen to this whole thing, and you're going to definitely want to check out his book. So I hope you'll enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Dr. Philip Squire, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. Thank you very much for inviting me, John. I'm really looking forward to joining you on this session. Yeah, this one came at me. I was actually doing prep for this one. I was really interested because the whole accreditation of sales at the university level, it's something that when I got into sales and started really understanding it, I was just floored that there wasn't an education, a formal education in this process. And you've taken it to the whole level because I said one day, when I was younger, when I'm independently wealthy, I'm going to create an accredited course to go into university and teach kids about sales, right?

But you did it. You did it. So let's give the audience a little context about where you're coming from and what you're working on right now because you have a lot of different things going on. And one of the things that struck me was you had said, you fell into sales by chance, not choice. I think a lot of us do. So if you could walk us through your little journey to where you are today, and then let's dive into some of the stuff that you're working on right now. It'd be fascinating. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think so many of us in sales do fall into it by accident. And that was certainly the case for me all those years ago. And I actually thought I was in banking when I first started my career when I left school.

I didn't go to university, but was accepted on a sort of fairly prestigious sort of management development program with one of the international banks. But I hated working in the large corporate environment. So I looked for something that was slightly more entrepreneurial and worked for a number of years in the insurance sector and then joined a Swedish consulting group thinking that actually I was going into marketing. But actually, the organization was much more focused on sales. And so when I was in my sort of early to mid-20s, I suddenly found myself working with this Swedish sales consulting organization as a kind of guinea pig. Because they didn't normally take on people quite so young as I was, but they thought they could mold me into a certain clone.

But actually, I fell in love with sales, you know, right back in those early days. And after about four years, I was then asked by one of the people working for that company to join him as he set up a consulting practice. And I'd always wanted to kind of run my own company at some point. And it came again quite early in my career. And that organization went through a number of changes until 2006. And we then created a joint venture company between a Spanish, Italian, and a British firm. At the time, it was aimed to supporting our clients, delivering sales training programs across the globe in multiple languages. And that's when Consalia was formed. So we have a Spanish shareholder that has offices in LATAM countries.

We have an Italian shareholder, mainly in Italy. Then we have an office in Singapore. So we created this sort of international organization. But the education side of what we did sort of was really, it was really accidental. You know, I never thought that we would be doing what we're doing today. And I think that's a great thing about life. You know, you never quite know what's around the next corner. Yeah. So that's a little bit, you know, the journey up until Consalia. So, yeah, it's been a great profession to be in. I love it. Let me back up a little bit further, actually, based on a couple of comments there. You know, you said you hated working in corporate and you had always wanted to start your own thing.

Where did you think the entrepreneurial kind of non-corporate bug hit you? And was it like a nature or nurture thing? Like, were your parents entrepreneurs? Like, what kind of environment did you grow up in? And the reason I ask is because I kind of had that same, ah, I don't fit. You know, like, I don't fit in corporate, but I didn't understand why. And if I really look back and reflected on it, my parents were both entrepreneurs back in the day, even though that's not what anybody thought of them as. You know, my mom quit her job and started her own consulting practice to do, help people find jobs. And like, dad was a contractor for the FAA. So they always worked out of the house and they never seemed to have a boss.

And so for me, when I got into corporate, I was like, okay, this is what I'm supposed to do, but it just didn't feel right for me. And I didn't understand why. So do you know where yours came from? I think so. I mean, I do, I do question it. I mean, I, my parents did work for a corporate, my father did. And I spent the first 18 years of my life living in different countries around the world. And many of these countries, he worked for a big telco. So they used to run, you know, telecom systems in West Africa, Caribbean, Middle East and places like that. Many of these countries actually didn't have schooling that was appropriate for people when they got to a certain age. And so at the age of nine, I was kind of sent to a boarding school in the UK and used to fly back to visit my parents during sort of half term or, you know, during the, you know, the vacation breaks.

And I think that what that did was actually sort of, it sort of gave you a slightly independent spirit. You know, you, you know, had the privilege of living in some quite incredible cultures. And so my, my world up until, yeah, 1820 was, was quite, I suppose you could describe it as being quite expansionist. You know, I didn't like to be caged in, I was jumping on a plane often, I was exposed to many amazing cultures. And so, but, but to describe my parents as entrepreneurs, no, but it was, I think it was at school that I began to read up about entrepreneurs and business people that I really respected. At the time we had sort of Richard Branson starting off on his career and we had some others as well, and I used to collect articles about them.

And I think at that stage, you know, I felt as I wanted to follow in the likes of them, though not to the degree of success that they may have achieved for themselves. But I think that sense of, of sort of wanting to build something, to create your own, your own business was, was there at quite an early age. Yeah. I think that's, it's always fascinating to me because people's journeys are all always obviously different, but sales is one of those ones where you can kind of always put a thread back to some type of independence, some type of like not fitting in for some reason and wanting to chart your own path as opposed to fit into a box. And I'm not saying that it's bad to fit into a box, right?

The world needs plenty of those people that do the job and go along the lengths. But, you know, there's always that thread of, you know, hey, where did that itch come from that you just don't want to fit in that box anymore? You want to be, for me, it was more about the work related to the pay originally that didn't feel right to me. Like, that's why sales was so attractive to me when I got into it. Cause I was like, okay, I get this. I knew I wasn't the smartest kid, but I knew I had a really strong work ethic. And to me, I was always, well, the harder you work, the harder you should, more you should get paid, right? Like that's kind of just makes sense. And that's what dragged me toward, you know, moved me towards and attracted me towards sales.

But then I opened up my eyes to everything else about it. When I really got introduced to it, got my education, uh, my, my first true education was Xerox, right? I got, yeah, the Xerox eight week sales training program. Uh, and it was fantastic. So that was my education. Now you, you identified that, that education obviously had really ignored sales for years. Um, and you know, marketing and actually marketing dropped sales, you know, uh, the, the word, right? So why do you think academia was so, I don't want to say against, but so, I don't know if the word's dismissive or against or anti, but why do you think that sales was not, an educated profession like all the other ones up until relatively recently?

I think sales has, has, uh, um, about still has, I think less so in America, I don't know you, you'll comment on it as sort of stigma, um, which people in the academic world kind react against, um, and, uh, you know, I, I began doing a, a doctorate, which is completely by accident, you know, I fell into it again, but by accident, but really enjoyed the process. And, you know, what, what struck me when I was doing my literature research was actually looking at how many journals were there that, that were devoted to academic research and to sales. And I think at the time there may have been two journals, you know, compared to 150 ones on marketing. And so, yeah, marketing has dropped sales. It used to be included, um, the Institute of, there used to be an Institute of sales and marketing and now it's a chartered, uh, uh, it's the marketing Institute now that's the prevalent Institute in the UK that we're trying to, to change that with a non-for-profit kind of body.

But, um, yeah, it's really, really interesting and it gets me angry actually that there is this attitude, um, uh, that sales isn't a profession. Uh, and so when I found myself doing the doctorate and sort of seeing what it was, was like being an academic, doing a doctoral research program in an area that I was intensely interested in, seeing some of the prejudices, um, the lack of, uh, sort of an educational mentor because, you know, people were there that could support my research because I hadn't been in sales. Um, so, um, I kind of, I kind of wanted to try and change that if I could. And, um, and, uh, in fact, the, the motivation for doing so came to, uh, some of the clients we're working with and some of the sales leaders we're working with, who said, you know, could we help them set up something for some of their top, you know, uh, salespeople as a, as a way to harness their sort of intellectual curiosity about the profession because, you know, so many people in sales love it, there's so much knowledge and they're so clever and, and, and that's what, and so that started a journey, which is, uh, taken us to now where we are today, which is a kind of business school for salespeople only.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I'm curious on this one. Cause I was, I was kind of skimming through the chapters of your book and, and you talk a lot about the history of sales and yeah, I'm curious, you know, here in America, we take credit for a lot of stuff that we don't really, you know, shouldn't take credit for, right? Like we, you know, the automobile, like Henry Ford invented, no, no, Henry didn't invent the automobile. He, you know, Germany actually invented the automobile and we manufactured it better. Right. So that, that's, there's this false pretense that we, oh, we created this. No, we didn't. Um, sales though, seems to be if, as I travel around the world to your, what you mentioned earlier is like, you know, we, we, there's a little bit less of a stigma here in the States, right?

Cause I think we are a very sales driven. I mean, if you think of, you know, Columbus and whatever history you want to believe, you know, that was kind of sales. He's like, you know what? I'm going that way. Like, I don't like what's going on here. I'm going to go that way and see what the hell happens. Right. So I think, you know, a lot of it is, is in our DNA, right. As, as just go and not as traditional, if you will, historically, but where do you think sales, like where was sales recognized? Right. Cause you go through a whole period of, in your book of like the 1800s and this, but where do you think it really became a thing? Was it in America or was it elsewhere? And, and did we kind of adopt it?

Yeah, I, I suppose it's around the, what is the definition of the word, um, sales? Cause, uh, so I got quite a lot of, uh, my inspiration for those early chapters of the book around some of those entrepreneurs who literally led, you know, sort of trade missions, uh, across the Silk Route and, and, and, and, um, and so on. But I, I, I think for sure that, um, the spirit of America has really sort of accelerated, um, this whole idea of salesmanship, I think initially in a, uh, perhaps in a, I mean, it was just a great entrepreneurial society. I mean, it, it, you know, believes that anyone could do anything and we don't, we don't have that, but yeah, we don't have that, you know, we're much more cautious and, you know, we had our heyday in the, the industrial revolution in the late 1800s, you know, we'd sort of fallen by the wayside of it, but I just love that mindset.

So I think, I think America, and you can see that in the powerhouse that you are now as an economy. I mean, it's, uh, it's a very, very much sort of sales driven. Um, but I think some of the practices of sales in those early days were quite detrimental to the stigma that it now has. And some of the early books on sales written by buyers, not sellers actually were based on accounts of things that happened in America during the early days of, you know, people selling maps and so on to farmers and, uh, and it's very interesting to sort of see this, uh, tension sometimes being built between, you know, um, buyers and sellers. And I guess what constitutes good sales practices is, is, is now it's so important.

Um, but no, I think, I think we have an awful lot to be thankful for, for what's come out of America in terms of recognizing the role of sales and its importance and, and just, you know, you produce some of the most great researchers in it and people who write books on it and, you know, people like yourself doing these amazing podcasts, you know, you're leading the way. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, you know, trying to do it. And I think that's where I'm curious where it turned. Right. Um, because it was a, an educated profession in the early 1900s here in the States. It was, you actually learn sales in high, in high school, right? They taught sales in high school, but then I forget when, but there was a point where it just stops.

Right. It was just like, no, this is like, we don't want to teach this. We don't like, this isn't, it's now from a, it's taken a negative turn, if you will, from a perception standpoint. So why do you think that was, I always kind of ask the question, chicken or the egg, right? Who lied to who first? Who, you know, was the customer, did the customer lie to the sales rep first or the sales rep lie to the customer first? Right. Because for some reason we were all taught as kids, you know, lying is bad and all this stuff. But for some reason it is okay to blatantly lie to a sales rep. Right. I mean, blatantly, like in the simplest form of you walk into a store, you know what you want and a sales rep comes up to you and they say, how can I help you?

And you're like, I'm all set. And you're not like, you, you, you know what you want. You just, you're walking into a huge warehouse and all you have to do is say, Hey, where is this thing? And they'll tell you, right? But because it's a sales rep, I'm going to lie and say that I'm just looking. Right. Even though I could, I could save myself a lot of time by just saying, this is what I need. You could tell me where it gets it. So why do you think it switched? Um, and, and was it the bad practices of sales or a mindset, which we'll get into in a minute, because I love what you talk about as far as the mindset shift we need to make here. But do you think there was a, there, there was a point where it just kind of devolved and, and became a negative perception?

I think that, um, that we look at sort of different eras and, uh, we, we describe the type of selling that you had in the early industrial era, we know, which was in the 1800s up to perhaps, um, the 1960s where it was very much a product led, uh, the sort of revolution really. It was, uh, and, and who held the power, the power was often with the salespeople had the knowledge and they had the know-how about what it is they're selling. And all of the techniques that they were told, uh, taught was how do you manipulate a conversation in order to get to the result you want to get? And, um, you know, people, salespeople got very good at that. And, uh, I think a lot of people on the receiving end of that sort of manipulation then, then led to a lot of the mistrust that existed with, with sales.

Um, and I think that that whole power play shifted, you know, when we, I mean, Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker and, and where the competitive advantage shifted towards the buyer and the internet, of course, and, you know, buyers are much more informed about products than sellers. And because of this many, I guess, hundreds of years of perhaps, uh, sellers being in control and perhaps some of these mis-selling techniques and pyramid selling and some of these awful things that used to happen kind of, um, made the buyer say, okay, now it's our turn. And, uh, and, uh, and we'll, we'll start doing a bit of the lying, perhaps as you were saying earlier, but actually, you know, I think, I think it shifted and, and, uh, you know, we've all seen the stats now of, you know, at what point do buyers get involved in, in sales discussions.

But I do believe that it's shifting again, um, because the world is changing so fast and so quickly. I think it's much more about co-creation and about working together. And I'd like to think that there's a sort of coming together of these two extremes into something, which is, you know, it's, it's, uh, yeah, collaborative. Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. And I think I'm feeling the shift. I'm literally feeling it last year, I think was with the introduction of the AI and the chat TBT stuff. It was a, the, we're going to get into your book selling transformed here, but one of the ones that I find very interesting too, is, um, have you read the book, um, uh, The Jolt Effect? No, I haven't read that.

Okay. So The Jolt Effect, it's the same book. Uh, so it's the corporate executive board, right? So they did challenger, challenger sale, challenger customer, and jolt effect is, is the next one in line. Um, and what was interesting to me about Jolt Effect is we challenge our customers where we've come up with that statistic of by the time somebody comes to us, they're already 60 to 70% of the sales process. Right. And so everybody's perception is, is that no decision is our biggest competitor, right? Out of all the competitors we face, no decision. And that was a prevailing wisdom across the board for a while now, but now what Jolt Effect is coming to the table with is it's actually not no decision, it's indecision.

And the reason is, is because things are moving so fast right now and there's so many options, the clients are overwhelmed with the amount of information. So I think to your point, we, we owned the, the narrative up until probably around the seventies, eighties, right? Solution selling asking, but you know, it was more product pitch, right? Because you never saw this before. So I'm now showing it to you and I have all the power. Yeah. The internet comes out, we make the shift to own now they own the information, but now we've crossed that chasm and now there's too much information. And so changing our style to help people make decisions is, is, is imperative. And to your point of co-creating the solution.

And I think that's what it seems like your book tries to dive into is kind of shifting the mindset first of what, why we're selling and then figuring out how to be a far more customer centric. So do you see, do you feel that shift as well? I do feel the shift and, um, uh, you know, it's quite interesting because you, you read about some people kind of talking about this insight led approach, which is what the challenge of sale was very much about, you know, to begin with. But if you start to think about what is your source of competitive advantage, um, if everyone's providing insights, you get this overwhelming surge of information and, you know, customers are confused, like you were just saying, and it leads to indecision or no decision kind of being taken.

Um, and, uh, yeah, so, so I, and there's someone else that you, you might want to look up, which is, uh, professor Julian Birkenshaw. Um, he talks about, uh, the post knowledge era and his question is what is the source of competitive advantage in the post knowledge era? And he talks about two things. One is agility, um, the ability to be able to be agile and the other is democracy. And democracy is an interesting one because he feels, uh, that with the advent of so much data and so much information, so much insight is that, uh, people are losing that personal relational, uh, sort of context. Um, now it may not be quite so relevant in America. I don't know, but when you come to some of the smaller countries, you know, relationships are incredibly important and there's a kind of feeling that perhaps we've lost sight of that in this sort of data driven world pandemic didn't help because, you know, people lost track with relationships and, you know, a lot of people are struggling.

We see a lot of mental health issues actually for people in sales as well. So we quite like the, the kind of work of Julian Birkenshaw as well, um, who sets us a context for what era are we in and this connection with sources of competitive advantage and democracy, democracy, I think links quite nicely to this whole concept of values and mindset, which was kind of, uh, where my doctorate research sort of took me, um, all those, I say all those years ago, so 10, 12 years ago, but, uh, which I think is still relevant today, you know, even 12 years later, I think it's more, more relevant in a way. Actually, I couldn't agree more. A lot of the things that I tell reps right now is, you know, before you look for that next job, right?

A lot of them got laid off and whatever and like, oh, what should I be looking for? I go, no, no, no, take a step back first and go through your core value exercise, like go through your core value exercise, like you as a human, forget about selling here for a second as a human, what are your genuine core values? Go through that exercise because once you nail those down, then you start to look for opportunities, companies, people that align with those values and when your values align, you can do some special things. But if you and I, like if you and I had, have the same values, Philip, right? We're, we might argue, we might debate, but we'll come to a point of agreement. We'll come to a, like, you know, okay, we're going to respect each other, but whatever.

Whereas if you and I values are off, we're just going to yell at, yell at each other and we're going to rip each other apart. So first of all, finding a company that shares your values and you can believe it. And my, my biggest point of sales reps is in order to be, in my opinion, truly successful in sales, you have to have a belief in what you do. You have to believe that what you do makes a difference for the right client. Cause if you don't, then you're just a jerk sales rep trying to get a commission. But if you do, you're trying to make a difference. And that transfer of enthusiasm is real, right? Somebody told me that early in my career, that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm. When you believe in what you sell, it comes through and people still buy out of motion and back it up with fact.

So how do we address this challenge right now of this generation of sales that I am extremely worried about? And I think this is, you know, I've seen it in other countries, but here in the States, I mean, we had since 2000, I'm calling 2010 to 2022, the golden age of sales, especially SAS tech sales, because we were able to get away. We over-engineered the sales process. We put too much technology to it. We, it was a grow at all costs. Money was free. ROI didn't matter, right? So clients were buying multiple levels of tech stacks that were overlaying because who cares? We're all growing. And we skipped the fundamentals and you add COVID into that. You have a whole generation that I was coming into the workforce and sales in this world.

They're not in the bullpen. They're not picking up through osmosis. They're not meeting with clients face-to-face to pick up body language and those type of things. So from an education standpoint, how do we address that? Because I feel like this, this whole generation's in a lot of trouble right now. And I actually think the profession of sales, quite frankly, is at a turning point. So we're very interesting that, so the UK government did something reasonably smart, which is unusual for the UK government, I'd say. But one of the things it did was it created what's called a tax, an apprenticeship levy tax. And this was introduced in 2018, 2017. And I'll just give you some of this background and then come back to your question.

And this tax was then collected from any corporate. You had a salary bill of more than $3 million a year. So you don't need to have too many employees before you start paying this 0.5% of the salary bill. And that gets put into what's called a digital levy for apprenticeships. And the only way you can use that money is by using it on approved apprenticeship programs. Now, the word apprentice doesn't necessarily have a great image in itself, but you can do degree apprenticeships and you can do post-grad apprenticeships. And we saw an opportunity back in 2018, coming back to this education, is to set up a degree apprenticeship program for young people leaving school, sponsored by amazing companies, big and small companies, who were employed by them on a special apprenticeship contract.

And they would end up with a degree, a BSc in business-to-business sales and have a job as well, you know, with people like Amazon and Microsoft. Microsoft, you know, so many of these big companies have got huge amount of funds to spend in this area. Now, when we were, this is 2018, pandemic hit in 2020, we saw how difficult, we've seen students who started the program and then went to, because these are three programs, you know, started and then entered it and we've seen students start in the pandemic and they definitely have lacked social skills. They really, really have found it a challenge to work in a sort of more corporate environment. It is sort of working with other people and we, we, you know, there's been a, yeah, there's been a big gap in people's lives and I'm, I'm, you know, we're like you, sort of concerned about, about what this means for them as individuals.

Um, but, uh, it's definitely been a massive shift in self-confidence and it takes time to build. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's not even like it's, it's, it's unfortunate in so many ways, because I was saying like, when I got into sales, I didn't, I didn't get a lot of great training, right? But I was in the bullpen and I was picking up, like I said earlier, through osmosis, right? I'd listen to the rep next to me, make a call and I'd be like, Ooh, that I like the way he said that. Or she said that I'd have my VP come over and work on a deal with my, you know, cube mate and talk about certain things. I go, Oh, that's interesting. Right. So I, I learned just by being immersed in sales, but I also learned because I was forced to go out and meet with clients, go to events, meet like, and just physically be able to shake somebody's hand, look them in the eye, those type of, know what to dress like.

I mean, a lot of these kids right now, they're, and I say kids, you know, that's a Boston thing. A lot of these young professionals right now, um, they quite frankly, they don't even know really how to dress right to, to when they, if they do get a chance to go to a meeting. And so I'm, I'm, I think that, that introducing sales now, I think we can start by introducing some better habits. There's a lot more education out there, but with this group that quite frankly got lazy and I'm going to put myself in that category, by the way, from 2010 to 2022, I got lazy because I thought I was way better than I was because it was, it was easy. You know what I mean? Like money was flowing. Everybody was like, it was great.

Yeah, it was competitive, but it wasn't that hard. Right. And then when, when the beginning of Q, uh, Q1 last, last year happened, especially in the tech space, when it all fell apart, I was, it was a wake up call for me. Like, whoa, I gotta, I gotta kind of get back to my basics and, and fundamentals, quite frankly. The good news was I had those fundamentals to fall back on. The bad news is, is many of these reps don't have the fundamentals to fall back on because they were brought up in the age of tech first, skills second, product knowledge first, sales skills second. Like still, it drives me nuts that most companies onboarding, they spend the majority of their onboarding teaching about product.

And then they wonder why the sales rep goes out into the world and starts throwing up, you know, throwing up all over their clients about how great they are. It's like, that's the only thing you gave them. I would rather start with skills first and ability to connect with people and communicate. And then teach your product knowledge later. Is, is there a different way we can onboard or introduce people into sales? Well, um, can I just say, I've listened to some of your, uh, sort of recent, um, I think YouTube clips actually. And you talk about the challenges you faced last year in a very open way. I have to say, it clearly was quite a tough year. And, uh, I really liked you talking about it because, you know, so often in sales, you get people kind of pretending everything is, is, is gone really well.

Uh, and it's all a bit glossy, but actually, and, and, and that lends itself to, uh, one of the core values that we identified through my research was around authenticity, because, you know, a lot of it's about building trust and, you know, who is the authentic you and, uh, who is the authentic me. Um, and I think you mentioned something earlier, which is terribly important, but rarely happens, which is this connecting with who you really are and what your core sort of values and beliefs are. And, and I have found that when we've taken people through a journey of really trying to understand what makes them tick is they've rarely spent any serious time looking at it. So when you, when you ask people that question first, they sort of say, well, I'm family orientated or I'm honest or I act with integrity.

Um, but actually it goes a lot deeper than that. If you do it properly, that self-reflection and sometimes these pivotal events that happen in a life, uh, sort of examining how you act or, or react or don't act in certain situations tells you a huge amount about what your core values and beliefs are. So what, what we tend to do before we embark on any kind of sales development initiative is start with that one question, whether you're a leader or whether you're a salesperson. And quite often they, they start thinking their core values and beliefs are here. But they end up realizing they're somewhere completely different. Um, but it, it drives everything. It drives, you know, curiosity. It drives the way you want to develop.

It drives sort of company you want to work for. You know, for me, that's such a fundamental question. And, uh, John, I, I don't think enough people really ask that question. Um, it's, it's, it's, if you talk about leading and lagging indicators, to me, your values and belief systems are a leading indicator for something that happens later, you know, there's something could be behavioral, but unless you understand what is your operating system, if you like, the applications that sit on top of that, your skills, your competencies actually don't do anything, you know? Um, so, so for us, we always try and get to the heart of what makes someone tick. And then whether it's, uh, you know, whether it's an insight led or a hypothesis led sales approach you want to use, they, they sit, they're simply applications that sit on top of the operating system, but it's the operating system isn't right.

The applications won't work. I absolutely love that because I, I couldn't agree more. I mean, that's, it was funny when you go, when you talk about clarifying, right. And I don't know if this is one of the videos you watched, but I remember going through the exercise with my business coach and, and, you know, five, you got 50 down to 20 down to five, and then you prioritize those five. And I remember asking him family that you brought up was on the list. And I had any, and I said, well, isn't family kind of always the default number one? Like, isn't that? Cause that's what my, where my head was at. And he goes, no, absolutely not. He's like, as family is your number one value, you have to write it down.

You have to live it. You have to ask yourself in every decision you make, how is this going to impact my family? And it struck me like a, like a brick in the face because I had, I had told myself for years that the reason I was traveling all around this world and, you know, and I was a weekend dad, like literally when my daughter was born, I, you know, for 10 years, I was a weekend dad. And the way I justify that to myself was I was doing this for my family. I was making, I was doing this so we could make enough money. So my daughter could have what she needed and my dad and my wife could do what she wanted to do. But then when I really sat down and thought about it, like really thought about it, I realized that's not, that's not at all why I was doing this.

I was telling myself to make myself feel better about that, but I was going flying all around this world doing this stuff because I was really good at it and I was getting a lot of accolades for it. And so that's why I was, yeah, what was my family benefiting financially? Sure. But was my daughter benefiting from me not being around every single week? I doubt it. And so it really struck me that I was like, all right now. And so now it's, yes, family is top on my list, but now I'd look at it in a completely different way. And I think about it from your perspective too, as far as from a client standpoint, like empathy is, is, is, is true when you start to think of them as a person and not a number, not a contact, not a lead, not an opportunity, but as a person who's going through the same crap that you and I are going through every day and dealing with all the same stresses that we deal with.

And that changed my, my view of, of how I approach things. And so I think going through that really deep, intensive work on values, to your point, the operating system, if you don't have that right, it's a house of cards that'll fall apart. Yeah. I think it's what I found with my doctorate research, because I interviewed clients all over the world. And yeah, it was quite an interesting journey that I took. A lot of our clients asked us to go and interview their customers about how do you want to be sold to. And, um, I remember there was a point of my research where I kind of brought buyers and sellers together to share them the kind of data that I'd got saying, well, if we're listening to all of these customers, what can we, how can we make sense of it?

And I remember coming away from this kind of workshop, feeling totally dejected that I spent the last two years getting nowhere because a lot of the things that we listed down on the flip charts were things that kind of, we knew about and we trained in. And one of the stats that came out in the research was less than 10% of salespeople sell in a way customers really wanted than, which is a quite a frightening figure. And I felt that, that none of what we'd been doing in the past was actually helping. And it was, uh, it was a particular lecture that I went on at the university where someone asked me about research techniques. And we, we got into this whole area of bias and autobiographical listening and, uh, began to kind of question the lens through which I was looking at the data.

And it just struck me so like a huge moment that I'd, I'd influenced the research findings according to what I knew. And I was completely blinkered. And when we went into the data again, same data, looking at it through the lens of values, we came up with a completely different kind of, um, conclusion, which was that, uh, customers hear what people say, but they are looking for the values that underpin. What people say, and they're looking for a core set of values typically in salespeople predicated on trust, but then with sort of intellectual acumen, if you like the ability to think quickly and, uh, and solve problems in a, in a creative way. Um, you know, and it completely changed, uh, the sort of focus from focusing on competence and skill to what are the values that will drive the behavior that will get you the result.

And, uh, that's, that's kind of how we changed or how I changed sort of my perspective as a consequence of this amazing opportunity to educate myself a bit more, um, and to learn how to do research properly. Um, sorry, I'm probably rambled on a bit here. No, no, no, I love it. And I will, and we'll get into those. Cause I think, you know, in the book, um, transform, transform selling, you know, you talk about those four proven strategies, uh, based on the values customers look for. And one of them was authenticity, uh, clients that drink, I did have a question on the client centric one. You talk about the third box thinking. Yeah. Could you clarify that for me? Uh, cause I, I think authenticity, I wish more people were authentic.

Uh, I, I, I actually don't understand why they're not. Cause it's actually way easier to be authentic than it is to be a liar. Cause you have to think of things if you're a liar and you have to figure that out, but being authentic and being true to yourself. But I do, you know, core values go there and start there. Um, and not trying to sell, trying to help, but the, the client centric thing, right. Make sure it's, it's based on them. But talk to me about this third box thinking. Yeah. Third box is really interesting. And, and part of that was influenced by, um, a series of interviews I did in Seattle with Starbucks and, um, HP around a particularly innovative deal. Um, uh, and so I, uh, and, and, and the story just very quickly is in the days, uh, of the interview.

Internet cafes springing up and Starbucks had 1600 stores that needed to be equipped with internet, uh, facilities. And they reckoned it would cost them a hundred million dollars to kind of, uh, put that technology in. And Howard Schultz, um, actually came up with this idea to a team of just two or three people. He said, look, can we figure out a way where we could get the vendors to invest in us for free for nothing? Uh, literally issue an RFP saying, we want you to invest a hundred million. You know, that's just imagine you're an account manager. But actually that, that really is what happened. Um, but of course the, the account team is, sorry, not the account team, the, um, head of marketing CIO.

And there was a young lady out of Harvard that was in this incubation team and they began to look at what is it that they have as Starbucks. It's going to be of huge value to these vendors and, you know, they had 14 million customers coming into the Starbucks store every week. 45% of those came five times a week. And, you know, this is when it was a race to get your product to market really quickly. And how much would it cost you to, you know, to invest in advertising and promotion and, you know, we can give these people access to these 14 million customers five times a week, you know, that's got to be a value. And once they sort of figured that out, they then issued this RFP and, uh, I interviewed the, um, it was compact then was acquired by HP, you know, roughly at that sort of same time.

And they won the deal, you know, it was 60 million, that 60 million they invested over a five-year period. And it was a huge amount of creativity sort of gone into the account team to say, where's the ROI going to be in this deal? Starbucks is all about the third place. You know, the third place is where the, the first place is, is home. The second place is work. Third place is Starbucks. You know, that was, that was a whole concept behind the philosophy behind the Starbucks store. So they thought of the third place. And that kind of led me to this third box kind of concept, because I came back from these interviews. It was on the plane flying back to London. And I asked the question, what if, what if the idea came from the account team before Starbucks had even thought about it?

And what would it need to take in terms of mindset to have an account team think about how they could help Starbucks protect itself from all these internet cafes before Starbucks had actually started to figure out that they needed to do something really quickly? And that led me to this notion of proactive creativity as a mindset, and then tactful audacity, this boldness of an idea, and all the skills that go with it. Yeah. And, and that led me to this customer's customer working back approach rather than you as a supplier thinking, what do we got that we can sell? And if your mindset started there, then you were, you perhaps could be more successful. That was the hypothesis, if you like, that came on the back of that.

And we had a partner in the USA called the Summit Group, and they had also developed this concept of third box thinking. And then we agreed that we would use the, this third box approach to kind of complement the mindset that I discussed earlier as a means of becoming much more client centric. So, ironically, you're not starting with the client, you're starting somewhere else, the client's client, and then working backwards. So, that's their box. Love that. Sorry, it's a long story. No, that's perfect, because it really reflects something similar to, you know, what, there's a good friend of mine here in the States, Ashley Welsh, who wrote a book called Naked Sales, which is all about applying design thinking to sales.

Yes, design thinking is a great concept. So, and the idea here is you become a customer, right? So, if you want to sell here in the States to Walmart or something like that, right? Instead of calling into the CEO and saying, we can change your life with this great software or whatever it is, you go to Walmart, you walk the floor, you do the self-checkout, you return something, you sign up for their newsletter. Like, you become a customer and you feel what it's like to be that customer, and then you look for the gaps of where you can help, and then you bring that upstream. And so, that shift, and it's actually a shift that I had to make. You said earlier, you know, when I was in trouble at the beginning of last year, I was in SaaS, and I sat there and I was just like, and everybody in the world was telling me to get out of SaaS, it's too volatile, like you're never going to be able to, you know, be stable on here.

And I was like, I don't want to, first of all, because there's, you know, other industries are kind of boring to me. I don't have as nearly as much of a reputation in those industries. So, how can I stay in this world without being killed by it? And so, I started looking at my customer's customer, and looking at, instead of my ICP, ideal customer profile, I started looking at their ideal customer profile. And a simple shift of looking at saying, hey, my clients, if you were SaaS selling to SaaS in the beginning of last year, it wasn't even worth having a conversation with you, because you were getting killed just like everybody else. But if you were SaaS selling outside of SaaS, if you were selling to something like finance or retail or anything like that, you actually did okay.

So, I just shift my focus, but then thought about, again, the idea of becoming their customer and looking at companies that, you know, you hear the Advil versus the vitamin, right? Or that type of thing. And if you were a vitamin, like a nice point solution, those type of things, like clients weren't valuing that as much. They were going back to platforms. And so, again, I started shifting more towards my focus on thinking of a client right now with an overbloated tech stack and all the complications and, you know, a sales team that I didn't know what to do with right now. Because I lived it. You know what I mean? I lived it myself with my team. So, I was able to have true empathy for VPs of sales and people that I was calling out to, but I had to shift my whole approach to who I was going after.

Yes, I love the simplicity of this sort of approach. It's not simple, though. I mean, to do it well, it's a simple framework, but it takes a bit of kind of research and intelligence gathering. But we've had some, you know, sort of really amazing stories that have emerged where people have used that sort of, how do we put client centricity on steroids and get to places we wouldn't normally get to? And I think that's where sometimes being slightly bold in some of the decisions you take, like not going for a pitch if you think you can't really manage it, sort of saying no, that can work in your favor. And there was one story of an account team receiving this RFP and they didn't have an account relationship and it was with a big mining company.

But the RFP was like written for them in a, and the account team sat down for a couple of days and kind of talked about the strategy. And they said, you know what, we don't have an account relationship. We're going to write them a nice kind of letter or email. And in it, we're going to say, look, thanks so much for sending us the RFP. Really appreciate it. It's like it was made for us, but we feel on this occasion, we just simply can't respond. But thank you. Thank you, Ross. Could have gone in one or two ways. You know, the client could have said, okay, bye. In which case, you know, you were there to, you know, prop up an RFP process for the benefit perhaps of the incumbent. Or they could come back and say, look, we really want you to pitch.

What's stopping you? And that's what happened. And they said, we don't know you well enough. And that's why, you know, we need, we're at a disadvantage. And the client said, well, why don't you come over and meet us? And they met the client and they came back after meeting the client. The meeting went really well and they came back and he said, you know something, we're still not going to pitch. And the client said, what more do we need to do? And they said, we want to go and visit your mines. We want to go physically on site, you know, to your point earlier on. And of course, when they got on site and they got really into the kind of service level agreements that are required to support an international global mining business, they realized the RFP was not written in the right way.

And so they came back and, you know, they ended up winning a very large deal in about nine months. And it was all because of this focus on the customer's customer and working back from there. It's just love these stories. I love those. And so I think this is, you know, when it comes to a lot of the skills that we're talking about, you know, audacity and, and the confidence to be able to do that. Right. And be truly customer centric. I think that comes with some maturity and experience in sales. That's for sure. Yeah. And that's why I like, I had a hard time with challenger sale a while ago when challenger sale first came out. Right. I remember getting myself in a little bit of trouble because when it was super popular, I stood up in front of a conference about 2000 people.

And I was like, could you all do me a favor and stop teaching 22 year old kids how to be a challenger, please? Like they, they just don't have the business acumen to be able to truly be a challenger. But the way I've been able to, um, kind of guide, cause I, I, even me, I've been in the industry for 23 years, right. Or 28 years. I, I still don't challenge people in the technical way that they talk about. It's like, Hey, you know, you, you make this decision once a year. I help people make it every day. Let me show you where people make good decisions. I challenge by asking questions, which leads me to one of my questions for you. And I think we can end on this cause I'm, I'm curious about your answer.

I asked a lot of people this question on my podcast and I've never really become an idiot, found an answer that I don't feel confident in, but because of the research that you've done. And it stems around curiosity because I think you can be a challenger by being genuinely curious about an account, about why they're doing this. So you're not just responding to an RFP. You're looking at the back end and being like, wait a minute, something's not right here. Right. I'm curious why we're doing this. And so I think that is a superpower of young sales professionals who might not have the business acumen and experience to be able to push back on people. But my question to you is this, can we teach curiosity or is it born into us?

Nature nurture. What are your thoughts on that one? Yeah. So curiosity is a core component of being client centric and we get asked the question, is it possible to change your values and belief systems? So my answer to that is, you know, because if you've got a value and a belief system, which is that strong around client centricity, it will drive curiosity. It will drive research. It will drive the questioning. Well, as a baby, you're not born with values. You know, you acquire them over time. So I am a believer in the fact that you can teach people to be curious, but they need to be grounded in truly grounded in a client centric mindset. And I would argue that if they're not naturally curious, they're not client centric.

Therefore, they don't do that well on the client centricity state. So I think it is. But I think that you can teach people all the skills in the world. You can teach people the questioning skills and active listening. But if their value system is not truly grounded in being authentic and being client centric, all of that training goes out the window because they just won't do it. So for me, the source of what it takes to make people curious is a genuine commitment to client centricity. And the rest will follow. And that's kind of where, you know, was there for you, was there a moment in your career, in your sales career, if you will, where that struck you, that switch? Because I know for me, I remember vividly when I was giving a pitch to a client because, you know, two ears, one mouth, make sure the client talks more than you, blah, blah, blah.

And they would ask, you know, for an hour long meeting, you know, I'd ask 35 minutes worth of questions to make sure you spoke for 35 minutes longer than me. But then as soon as you were done, I went right into my pitch. And, you know, the whole thing, well, we were founded in this and there and look at all the wonderful things. And here's how we're structured, right? And I remember at the end of that presentation, I thought I did fantastic. I was so proud of myself. And I walked out with my engineer, right, who did a sales call with my engineer. And I remember these words came out of my mouth. And I said, oh, man, I crushed that. I'm like, that dude didn't even know what to do with the information I put in front of him.

And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, the engineer, who was a non-sales in every way, right, like he even looked at me like with this look on his face like, huh? Like, did you really just say that? That the client didn't even know what to do with the information that you said, like that you presented to them? No. And I remember where I was. I remember in the parking lot. I remember the feeling. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, what the? And literally, that was the day I took my sales deck pitch and threw it out the window. And I never used it again. So for you, was there a moment where you woke up and you realized sales isn't about me just continuously pushing, but it's really more about really customer-centric?

Or did you find that out really through your research or was it just ingrained in you in the beginning? I had such a similar situation to the one that you've described at a very early stage and, you know, taught to follow a pitch and a presentation. I was quite proud of myself. But in my situation, I was presenting to a group of people who could potentially join the company. And after about 10 minutes, one person got up and left. And after about, you know, 15 minutes, more people got up and left. And by the time my manager came back in the room, there was no one in it. And I thought I was going to get fired, you know. That was hugely, I mean, I realized what I had, you know, what a journey I was on.

And I don't think I was old enough at that stage to fully tweak the client-centricity bit. I think that came later. But I've certainly had that. And I do learn more from failure than from success. But I think what I think is when I was doing the doctorate and we had these control groups and we were trying to push the boundaries of client-centricity, realizing how far could you could never go too far on client-centricity. And coming up with lots of innovative ways to get intelligence and to get insights. And I think probably that was where I began to really see where one could take this, coupled with the values that I spoke about earlier. But that was much later. I mean, I was in my 40s when that happened.

You know, I made so many mistakes up until then. Sure. Okay. The amount of mistakes. That's why in my training I highlight all my mistakes because I'm hoping that people can learn from those and have to skip a few steps so they don't have to go through as much pain as I did. Yeah, exactly. Actually, as a small nugget, that meeting, there's one word that came out of that meeting that is a trigger for me. And I tell reps this all the time. If you hear this word at the end of one of your demos, you know you've done a miserable job. And it's the word digest. It usually sounds something like, hey, Philip, this was great. You know what? I'm in a little time to digest what you just told me right here.

So why don't we circle back in a couple of weeks? We'll take it from there. Like, if you hear that, it sounds good. Like, oh, man, I was really good, right? But the problem is that's what our job is. Our job is to help the client digest the information. If they walk out of it more confused than they were walking into it, then we've done a terrible job as sales professionals. And that word, again, if I reflect back on that one meeting, I walked out of there and the guy straight up said, I'm going to need a lot of time to digest this. Why don't you follow me? And again, I was super proud until I got hit right in the face with my engineer looking at me like I was crazy. So it is a journey, right?

We learn along the way. But I think a lot of the stuff that you bring up in your book is, to me, is I think I almost want to have a second part of this conversation, if you don't mind, about COVID switched, right? Because your book was released in what, 2020? Yeah. Right. So it reflected some of what was happening in COVID. Yeah. But I'm really curious, I think, on the next conversation we have about where you see AI fitting into this. Because that's the existential threat for me for sales. Yeah. I think we were breaking, you know, forget about AI for a second. I think the model of predictable revenue and all this, I saw it breaking and I felt it shifting up and, you know, even before AI. But then when AI hit, I was like, there's no option anymore.

Yeah. Of being average. And when you realize that you can get more value out of going into a chat TPT and asking it questions about your product. Yeah. Where a client will get more value out of that interaction than they do typical sales, you realize how much trouble we're in. Yeah. So I'm curious if when we extend this conversation to dive into that and how you see us evolving in this AI world. Because that's why I don't think sales reps are going to get replaced by AI. I think they're going to get replaced by sales reps who know how to use AI. How to use it. Yeah. And that's a small fraction of this product. But it's a massive part of our population that's in trouble because they're just kind of going through the motions.

Whereas that 80-20 Pareto's rule, I think there's 20% of us that are going to figure this stuff out and smoke the rest of us. And that's going to be great from a client standpoint in a lot of ways, but terrible from a sales profession standpoint. So I'd love to dive into that if you don't mind on our next conversation. Oh, I'd love to. Yeah, I'd really love to. And just want to thank you so much for the interview, John. Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. It was nice to meet someone who's very like-minded. And I'd love to talk about Boston. It's one of my favorite cities, but we haven't got into the Super Bowl either, which is a big deal. But anyway. You mean the Usher concert that Taylor Swift went to and there was a little football game on the side?

Yeah, that one. Well, I mean, man, I think you could do a whole universe. And there are university courses on Taylor Swift and the power of Taylor Swift. And I don't care what you think about her, she is a force of nature. Yeah. And let's talk about authenticity for a second. I mean, I genuinely think that Taylor Swift is authentic. Yeah. Like she has figured out a way to hack culture by doing things that are not scalable. Yeah. Like showing up to weddings and replying to guests. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Like she has done an incredible job. Yeah. Her brand and from a business standpoint. So I find her fascinating. Yeah. And I think she's nothing but positive. So anybody who hates the fact that she's part of the NFL is just, I think, for some reason, I don't know.

What's good is put the NFL really on the map and, yeah, just amazing. I agree. I agree. Let's hope. Well, I don't know. That's a political conversation, whether it will help Biden and so on. Yeah, trust me, I try to prevent my political views, but there's some stuff coming. This is going to be a crazy year. Let's put it that way. It is. And if Taylor Swift can help, I'm going to keep pushing her anyway. So it's the... Anyways. But let's... Where can people find out more information? I mean, we'll put this all in the show notes, but you got your university, your accreditation, you got your book, you got a lot of stuff going on. So where can people find out more information about you and what you're working on right now?

Well, I know my team has actually sent you some links, but yeah, we have an amazing, like you're, you know, not as prolific as your podcast series. There's the book, Selling Transformed, as well. There's all sorts of video clips and case studies if people want to learn more. But yeah, there are many sources where people can find out more if they're interested. Yeah. Awesome. And for anybody who's listening right now and don't want to look at the show notes, it's Dr. Philip Squire, S-Q-U-I-R-E. And I'm sure you can find them easy enough on LinkedIn and all those different resources. But the book, which I skimmed through, and now I'm even more interested in diving into the details, is Transformed Selling, Develop the Sales Values, Which Deliver Competitive Advantage.

And to me, anything that starts with values, Philip, is a book worth reading. So thank you very much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Cheerio. Absolutely. Cheers. And everybody, thanks for listening. Hopefully you got some good nuggets out of this and maybe shift your mind a little bit to go back and think about their values like we talk about a lot. So, but like I always say at all the end of those podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is going or you think it went, you make somebody smile and you know you had a good day and there's a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side.

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