How Jon Nicholson Sells: It’s a Privilege, Enjoy It

Jon Nicholson’s sales origins are like so many others we’ve interviewed for this series – he fell into it.?

Originally, he was in logistics operations, which he enjoyed. But he moved into a role where his job was half logistics and half selling.

What he found – he really liked the selling half. To the point he pivoted towards it entirely.?

“I enjoyed being able to meet people and add value with my expertise,” he said. “It was exciting for me.”

You feel that talking to him. Speaking with Jon, what comes through most is his love for the work, and the gratitude he feels to have his job and to work for his company.?

That sincerity has served him well. After 13 years at?TNT Express?and another two at?City Link, Jon’s career has reached new heights at?Royal Mail, where he’s now their UK Sales Director for Royal Mail and Parcelforce.?

What’s his sales philosophy? How does he stay motivated? And what excites him most about the future of sales?

We sat down with him for our latest edition of?How I Sell?to find out.

1.?What motivates you to come to work each day, even if you aren’t feeling it??

I love working. I think it gives me a real value, even on the days that I don't love working. I think I'd rather always be working than doing nothing.

Naturally, I’m motivated by the extrinsic rewards that a job brings and a job in sales brings.

But I genuinely like helping people.?

Today, my role is a lot less about direct selling, but that same benefit still applies in leadership. I still get to, quite often, do things that might make somebody else's day or life or career a bit better, and I get a buzz from that.?

It’s a real privilege to do the job, and I think that's important as well, isn't it? I'm proud to do it. I'm proud of the organization I work for.

2. What’s your sales philosophy, in three sentences or less?

Here it is in one –?look after your customers better than anybody else can.

And I mean that on a personal level, too. The reality is sometimes the organization you work for or the product you sell could let the customer down. But my philosophy is as a salesperson, whether it's new business or account management or account retention, if you are doing everything you can to look after the customer better than the competition can, you are going to be successful in the long run.

Because it comes down to focusing on what you can control. You generally can’t control the product. You can’t even fully control the relationship, but you can control how you respond. You can control your empathy level for the problem that you might have caused for the customer — or the customers caused for themselves. You can control all of that.

So long as you are focusing on what you can control and doing the best you can with what you've got at the time, then you are doing your job. That's got to be the sales philosophy.

3. Is there anything that makes your sales process unique?

I'm not sure if it's unique, but in the UK at least, we manage one of the largest business-to-business trading bases in terms of the number of customers we serve. We touch so many different industries and so many different customer types.

And so, when you go to sales school or sales training and they talk about personas and target customers and who's the right fit for you, we're genuinely in a place where you cannot get down to a specific target customer – we can be talking to customers that send legal letters that have got to be there by a certain time to medical prescriptions to TVs to a home gym; it's so broad.

So, we don't hide the fact that our sellers have to put the work in. They've got to put the effort into research, to do deep discovery, and so on.?

The other bit we do is we need to nail the basics, like ethical selling and ensuring we’re coming across as trusted advisers. Because our sellers aren’t going to be experts in every industry they sell into. But they can have great sales fundamentals.

So, it’s that core training of not making things up if you don't know the answers, making sure you know where to get the expertise from for the sectors where we do have specific expertise, and making sure you're using those experts when needed. So, I think it's about not pretending to know everything and really getting strong in the fundamentals of sales.

4. What are the top sales trends you're tracking?

I, like many people at the moment, am becoming a bit fascinated by artificial intelligence and what that means for sales and the marketing process. There's a lot of excitement around it right now. But I’m genuinely conflicted about the trade-off between the human element and what AI might provide. Are we going to lose the human touch?

Especially for me at a legacy organization, I really want my salespeople to be part of that human touch and continue that. But in the same context, buyers are clearly able to do a lot more research upfront than they've ever been able to do before. And therefore, the type of salesperson and sales interactions we’ll need in the future is something that I'm quite fixated on at the moment.

Also, something that's maybe personal to me, but I think is pertinent to others, is for the first time in working history, we've got four different generations in the workforce: Baby Boomers, Gen. X, Gen. Y, and Gen. Z. That's never happened before, and therefore, when you layer that with technology that's advancing so quickly and a workforce that's becoming more disparate in their preferences because of the ages, we've got a really interesting mix, actually.

That creates a whole new layer of personas that I don't think, as an industry, we've quite covered yet, as each one of those generations has unique preferences. So selling to and leading all four generations effectively is something I’m focused on.

5. What excites you most about the future of sales?

In the UK at least, salespeople have not always had a great reputation. It’s not something many people intentionally pursue as a career. For example, I’ve been asking salespeople if they planned to go into sales or if they fell into it, and 100% of the salespeople I’ve spoken with said they fell into it.

What’s so exciting to me is, with what’s going on in the world of software-as-a-service and in tech overall, I believe that’s changing. More and more, with the rise of consultative selling, sales is gaining credibility as a career choice.

What I think this means is that younger people coming out of college, more and more, will be actively choosing to do this. If we can create a world where 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds start choosing sales as a career – in the same way they would choose to be a lawyer or an accountant or an engineer – you can only imagine the amount of talent that will enter this profession in five-to-10 years. We’ll have such well-trained, talented sales professionals, as opposed to people that have fallen into the job because plan A didn’t work.

That really excites me, and I think could be a game-changer for what the sales profession can bring to customers.

6. Is there a habit you have outside work that helps you sell better?

I very rarely pick up my phone and scroll through social media aimlessly. Instead, I tend to read an article that’s about business generally or about an industry that’s specific to a customer I’m working with.

I can’t tell you how often that article I’ve read will be relevant to the next day’s conversation. It might just be a small fact or insight I learned from the article, but it’ll come up in the conversation and help build a deeper bond with the customer.

And it’s not a chore. I never read it with the intention of, “Oh, I’ll bring this up in tomorrow’s call.” I just read it because I’m generally curious.

So, it’s just filling that downtime we all have in the day not with mindless scrolling, but really diving into an article and learning about some new event or trend.

7. What do you look for when hiring a salesperson?

We have quite a contrived interview process. It’s very well-defined, well-structured, competency-based interview, and the person has to have a strong CV to get to that place to begin with.

But for me, I look for those moments when you've wrapped up an interview and you're walking out the door, you've shaken hands, and there's those couple of minutes where the person has relaxed a little bit; they've let their shoulders drop. They've got through the tough part, the bit they were worried about. And I look at those moments because that's the little window into the real person.?

It's really hard to define what I’m looking for. It's — I guess like a lot of things — it’s a gut feeling, intuition, of who they really are as a person and how they treat people. It’s in those moments you might get a sense of what they’ll really be like in front of a customer.

8. What has been your biggest failure in sales, and how did that experience transform you?

It’s more on the leadership side than the sales side. But it’s really about communicating change and how to handle change management at an organization like ours.

What I didn’t realize at first was even a fairly innocuous, passing comment can have a big impact on people. And I’ve had to make decisions that have felt like compromises, but to the business made sense. Although not everyone is going to see it that way and some people are going to have a more negative reaction to it, and those are really difficult to unwind.

As I reflect, and this is definitely a cliché but it’s also genuinely true, is getting the communication right is key. And interestingly, and this honestly goes against my nature a bit, is what I found is that sometimes you can’t be as open as you’d like. Sometimes, it’s better to wait until you have more information, and then communicate it so people have clear direction of what’s happening and what it means to them.

Say, for example, we’re going to restructure in a year. If I tell you that we’ll be restructuring in one year, but I can’t tell you what it will be and how it’ll affect you, is that really a smart thing to share? Or is that just going to cause a bunch of questions and anxiety? It probably makes more sense for me to give you the information once I know what the restructuring is going to be and how it’s going to affect you.

It's about getting that balance right of transparency and clarity. I don’t know if it’ll ever be perfect, but as I’ve been through a few different cycles of this, you start to get a better feel for it.

Additionally, I realized that even the savviest sellers are sellers, not managers. And so they see change through their perspective as sellers, not through my perspective as a manager. That makes sense, because that’s their job.

So, understanding where people are and how it’ll affect their role is really important. It’s really difficult to get it perfect, but I’m now acutely aware of what I say and how it can affect people and continue to look to improve that skill.

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