The road to CRO School

When I was 8 years old, I remember collecting rocks on the beach, to sell back to elderly people door to door, with the thought in mind to raise money to buy my little brother and sister lollies on the way home from school.

Not all of us fall into it, many of us know we are meant for something, we just dont know the how, before it arises.

For many, my story may sound like a C grade Netflix special but without those experiences I wouldn’t have the lens and abilities I have today.

part of the reason I started?Closed Circuit Selling?was to provide the wider market with what I had learned across industry sector, from amazing mentors, which I took and battled tested across industry as a Head of Sales and CRO.

In 1988 The Australian Salary Packaging Industry was born. This industry was new and shiny to market, and offering a go to market motion the world had’t seen before, or replicated since. More on this later.

From 2001 onwards I worked at Fashion powerhouse, Christopher Chronis Designs, a world famous greek Australian fashion designer. Through working as a sales area manager for the retail stores I noticed a few things.

• Pre email, Pre cold calling, Pre databases, Pre targeting softwares?—?we relied on foot traffic to purchase exclusive expensive evening wear.

I knew this wasn’t sustainable, so I devised a method of one to many.

I simply asked my store managers to keep a list of who purchased what items and what they liked.

Cataloguing, what they liked, what they didn’t, what they wanted to pay, and what they wanted to see in our little black books.

When those ranges were due to come in, I had them on the phone organising closed door events to those VIPs.

The result was we would sell more in a 2 hour closed door event, than we would from foot traffic in 2–3 weeks.

I applied the same one to many approach to high pressure gym sales.

Where I taught my team at Fitness First, in the boiler room sales floor, to shift the focus from one to one referrals towards larger groups at Schools, Sporting Clubs, and Employers who wanted health and wellness to be apart of their valued employee’s work packages.

Cataloguing, what they currently offered their valued employees, who they used, what they liked, what they didn’t, what they wanted to pay, and any additional services they wished they could offer in our notebooks.

The result, we were able to sell a room full of buyers instead of a single deal one at a time.

Shifting into Big Finance, working in the Australian Salary Packaging Industry, under my mentor Mark Reval, he showed me how to apply similar but better process into company to company finance, and employee benefit suites.

First however, he showed me how to determine who was in market.

Again, largely pre email, pre everything at your fingertips internet.

We looked up hiring patterns in the paper.

New to that role?—?meant they were likely to take a supplier change

Additional roles in front facing department?—?budget to make changes

We then applied that, to our Cataloguing the Market framework.

Contacting those companies to determine

who they were using to solve X problem / provide service

what they liked about it

what they didn’t

what they were paying on price and margin

if they are in a fixed term

How often they audited their offer versus what else is out there

And getting permission to circle back and ask if anything had changed with something to show them.

This also told us, the annual contract value, and potential contract value from how many people worked there.

Did this work, the short answer is yes, but I hadn’t been through real pain yet.

Let me explain.

Using this process I was highly sort after in Head of Sales roles.

I found myself at a global FMO, who didn’t allow this process as they were tied to business development only measured on meetings.

Not measured on outcomes. Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater I went digging, into what I could change.

So I started digging. Digging into bid’s and tenders that we should have won, but didn’t. Reading them I could see why we weren’t winning them, they were bland and stale and 27 pages of proper about us, not what it got THEM.

I re wrote them as sales copy, and turned that sales copy into carton animations. They contained equal parts educational content and known objections for their personas.

We devised a system called Permission Based Creative to call and ask, if it was okay to show them what we had created.

Noting there were no smart links back then, we did this on private YouTube and later vimeo links…

And again, boy did it work, and work so well we broke the global high performance record for new business.

But what we were doing was by definition marketing, not sales.

Now I cant say I created cataloguing the market, Mark Reval was already doing this in big finance, and Bill Pollock of Drake international canada had devised a variation of this many years earlier to grow his talent management global enterprise.

I simply took, applying from multiple industries to market and taught my teams the same.

But the downstream commercial repercussions of the Sales Led Growth. Predictable Revenue modelling, by Aaron Ross, has us now in a state of seeing a generation of sellers, marketers and C suites, who havent seen the connective fundamental actions across the funnel.

Scary.

Fast forward to 2019, I thought I would give linkedin another crack. But it wasn’t until I started going alot deeper into some of those techniques I started to gain more and more attention.

I was featured on a show with Jonny Stofko, after Jordan Belfort and Grant Cardone. That show catapulted me forwards to speak on many other features, which gave me a lot of exposure over a compressed time period.

By this time, I had already applied these techniques across multiple industry sectors and multiple markets. In both B2B and B2C.

Bursting on the scene on Linkedin, and many podcasts I was very protective of the HOW.

The working components and pillars being.

1. Cataloguing the market

→ who is with who, what they like, what they don’t, what they pay, if they are in a fixed term etc

→ Annual Contract Value Versus Potential Contract Value?—?Users x FTE X Price

→ Feedback Loops from (Closed/Lost) + (Clients/Previous) Why didn’t you buy, what could we have done better, Why did you leave etc

→ Business Development?—?acts as an account manager for an account they don’t yet have to lower the barrier of resistance + obtains permission to comeback.

This was walked over to Marketing.

Marketing creates demand content to sell that story to those personas and if the account was large enough for that SINGLE account.

1. Permission Based Creative

→ Is it okay that we show you what we have put together and after viewing it, you decide if it’s relevant?

1. Live Quoting Days

→ Business Development?—?Sets up a Live Quoting Day (Key stakeholders, key users, introductions to Key Account Management)

• Presentation of tailored offer.
• Live objections handled
• Alignment identified from the room
• Next steps, delivered from the room.

This made it easy to segway and discuss serviceability at Customer Success.

How this undertaken was called a Communication Plan.

1. Communication Plans

Within that plan, you will find things like?;

?—?—?—?-> how often we see you

?—?—?—?-> Who is involved

?—?—?—?-> Frequency?—?In person site visits

?—?—?—?-> Frequency?—?Video calls

?—?—?—?-> Frequency?—?Calls / Emails / EDMs

?—?—?—?-> corporate gifting?

?—?—?—?-> parking

?—?—?—?-> KPIS

?—?—?—?-> Required Reporting

This gave you

?—?—?—?-> Serviceability alignment at CS

?—?—?—?-> Visibility you aren’t upside down on the contract

This then leaned into getting started?;

Commercial Pack

Signed Quote of the job & Price

Annual Contract Value

Terms of Business?—?signed / Pro forma, on special clauses If Req.

Credit Approved?—?To what level Communication Plan (Serviceability Plan)

Go Live Date

Getting this right, meant you won’t have churn issues or Reactivation requirements we see today.

This also gave you the ability to lean into Nearbound possibilities.

Aka, because you have been blown away with how we have exceeded your expectations here today is there anyone else in your supplier network that may also benefit?

I will be speaking at the upcoming B2B Full Circle event, where we go deep into how to apply these fundamentals in any market, and get you organizational alignment.?

#B2BFullCircle?

#CROSchool?

#Marketing?

#Sales?