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Today’s show featured an interview with Alan Versteeg, Global Chief Revenue Officer, Growth Matters International and James Hickman, Director of Sales at Altron Digital Business.
Find Alan Versteeg on LinkedIn. Find James Hickman on LinkedIn.
JAMES’ TIP: “Take 5 to 10 minutes, sit down and write down, out of this podcast or any of the other podcasts you’ve listened to on the channel, what is it you are going to go and do? Set yourself timelines to that and book a meeting now for a week or two weeks to sit down and review how you’ve progressed along those actions. None of what’s been said on this podcast or any of the others is any value unless it’s implemented and actioned. That’s the only way to get results.”
ALAN’S TIP: “If you’re a salesperson, make it a profession. That mindset will change everything. If you’re a sales manager, realize you’re there to grow salespeople that grow sales, not grow sales. That mindset will serve you everywhere. If you’re an organization, realize that nothing happens until you make a sale. As the leader, start aligning the organization behind the sales.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re going to be talking today with Alan Versteeg from Growth Matters, and also James Hickman, his partner at Altron, one of the top ITC firms. You gentlemen are both in South Africa, so I’m very excited. I’m basing today’s show out of Washington DC. This is the first time I’ve ever had, in over 700 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes, guests from South Africa. I’m excited to get some angles on what professional sales looks like there.
We’re going to be talking today specifically about the catastrophic state of sales coaching. We’re going to get your insights on that. Let’s do a little bit of introductions. Alan, why don’t you introduce yourself first and then James, give us a little bit of an insight into who you are and what you do.
Alan Versteeg: I’m Chief Revenue Officer at a company called Growth Matters International head officed out of Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean. Started my career as an engineer. It wasn’t my fault. I watched Airwolf, Knight Rider and MacGyver, so I thought that’s what I’d be doing. Went into engineering and I hated it. I didn’t enjoy not dealing with people, so I wanted to deal with people. I went into sales. I pray your guests don’t leave now. Got fired from my first four sales jobs. But as an engineer, I had to find the root cause of what makes successful selling and got a lot involved into that. Then got really excited about the fact that unless you invest in sales management, you can’t drive sustainable sales growth. Growth Matters focuses on developing sales managers in global organizations. That’s a little bit about me, based in Durban, South Africa.
Fred Diamond: James, when Alan’s team approached us about having him on the podcast, I said, “We’d love to. You need to bring on a sales leader.” He brought in you and said this is the guy we definitely want to talk to as well. Give us a little bit about your current state right now as well.
James Hickman: I’ve been in the game of sales pretty much all of my career. Unlike Alan, I fell into it straight out of school, didn’t have a great set of marks and did what most people in the mid ‘90s did, was see the IT industry as a great opportunity and got into a company starting to sell PCs, and really learn from the ground up. Worked my way through the industry. Have had the great privilege of working for some of the largest technology companies in the world. I believe I’ve got a good balance between what it makes to be successful in leading teams for global organizations where you’re getting a lot of push down of the strategy, but also regional or local organizations where you involved a lot more at strategy creation, setting up the structures of the team to go and execute against that, and ultimately executing through your people for results.
Fred Diamond: Like I mentioned in the beginning, we have listeners all over the globe. We’ve done over 700 shows. You two are the first sales leaders that we’ve had from South Africa. James, for people listening who might not know about the business, if you will, the primary industries in South Africa. Give us a little bit of an insight into what that might look like.
James Hickman: South Africa to many people, there’s a lot of unknown with what we do here in the country. Our country was largely grown on the back of mining. But along with mining, we built a fantastic financial services organization for many years. South Africa was the primary supplier of gold to the world. Hence needed a very, very strong and stable financial services sector. We’ve got an expanding government, all the necessary attachments to the government and state-owned entities supplying critical resources to the people of the country. In all reality, it’s not very dissimilar to Europe or the US, or a lot of very mature markets. We are the largest economy on the African continent and therefore play a dual role, not only of growing our own country but we are very focused as a country on working with our partners in Africa to support the growth of the entire continent.
Fred Diamond: Alan, anything you want to add to that?
Alan Versteeg: No, I think that’s spot on. As James says, sometimes for many people in the world, South Africa is a location, not a country, it’s just the south of Africa, but it’s a country. It strives not without challenges, as in any country, but we are functional, we have infrastructure, we have IT. One of the big things that excites me about James and what Altron’s doing is they’re driving the beacon of hope initiative through Africa, which is how do we transform Africa through IT and technology, and their organization is key on that.
Fred Diamond: Alan, your background was in engineering. Talk a little bit about having the engineering mindset, and how that’s contributed to your success in sales.
Alan Versteeg: I think initially it didn’t serve me. Initially I worked on a lot of leaders that had a mindset that you were born a salesperson, you have a natural gift of the gab, you have natural talents, and I did everything they told me to do. I’m good at consuming knowledge, so I’d get a hundred percent on my product knowledge tests. I’d be a good talking brochure. They’d then tell me I need to be a bit more motivated. I became a very excited talking brochure and I struggled because I couldn’t get to the mechanics. The shift, Fred, was one manager. He said to me, “Alan, is selling a job or a career?”
I said, “It’s a career.”
He said, “How long have you studied for this career?”
I said, “I haven’t.”
He goes, “There’s your problem. This is a career and a profession. You never stop studying. Study as hard as you did for your electronic engineering degree, and you’ll watch everything change, because selling is the worst paid lazy job and the best paying professional job.”
That’s pretty much how I got into it. Then studied it and got curious and found the frameworks and the methodologies and the Neil Rackhams and everything. It got me excited about that and then moved on to spreading that story to the world.
Fred Diamond: Actually, our frequent listeners know that at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we view sales as a profession. If you’re a professional, what do you do? As a matter of fact, one thing we’re famous for is we do live programs where we bring great sales leaders to speak. The very, very first program we ever did, the great Neil Rackham, who you just referred to, was our first speaker ever. It was funny actually, as he was speaking, at the very end, he said, “I just wrote the foreword to a book. It’s going to come out in three days, but I’m going to give you a little bit of an insight into this book.” The book was called The Challenger Sale. We’re good friends with Neil. He’s spoken on the IES stage. He actually, I’m not sure if he lives here anymore, but he definitely lived in Northern Virginia for a while.
James, based on what Alan just said, talk about the state of sales management. I know the topic of today’s session in general was the catastrophic state of sales coaching, but give us your insights. We’re doing today’s interview in the summer of 2024. We’re still emerging from whatever happened to the world over the last four years. I’m curious if you see the same type of effects happening and interested in your state of sales management.
James Hickman: For me, the state of sales management, it’s at a crossroads. Sales has long been known as a career where great salespeople don’t often translate into great sales managers. But what I’m finding more and more, and I don’t necessarily think it’s post the pandemic, but I’m finding more and more because people are taking sales as a career choice rather than a job, they’re looking for that longer term career path. We still struggle in areas when you are taking great salespeople and putting them in sales leadership positions. I think it’s one of the very unique career paths where that happens. Because you have people that are excellent individual contributors, the personality type that usually makes up a great seller is not one that is usually conducive to giving the limelight to others. Of course, in many instances, you are also giving a chunk of the pay packets to others. I’ll never forget my transition into sales management. I think it was probably the first three or four years I earned significantly less than what I did as a seller.
I think it’s shifting as people realize that they actually want to be career salespeople. As sales leaders, we need to adapt to this. We need to be making sure that we are not only guiding and coaching and educating our sales managers once they are sales managers, but for me, it’s about identifying those potential sales managers three or four years prior to that move and starting that process then. Because as we all know, sales is a time and a money game. No one can move into a sales leadership or even a sales role and be given an endless amount of time to find their feet and become successful, especially when you’re leading a team. You could effectively take out 8 to 12 sellers just by having poor leadership in that space. This is a big, big shift in our industry and I think we’ve really got to focus on how do we move the educating, the coaching, the guiding significantly further forward in the discussion, rather than, “Congratulations, you’re a sales manager. You’re going on a sales management course tomorrow.”
Fred Diamond: I like that idea of three to four years in advance. That’s something that makes a lot of sense and you want to make sure you run that track. It’s interesting because one of the challenges with working with a lot of young people is they think they should become the vice president of sales within 18 months. We all know the process and all those types of things.
Alan, based on what James just said, you founded a company called Growth Matters. You work with sales managers, thousands at this point, across like 45 different countries, multiple industries. Give us some of your guidance. What are some of the things that you think about when you work with organizations to develop their sales managers globally?
Alan Versteeg: The starting point I still operate from, which was actually a Neil Rackham quote, “No manner of training, no manner of technology and no manner of investment will have any sustainable impact on sales results unless you develop sales managers.” But I don’t think we are setting them up for success. We are creating environments where we are forcing them to be loyal to optics over impact. We are creating worlds where we are over-measuring everything. We are becoming loyal to the data, the report, and the mouse. We are forgetting that our job is to get the number by executing the strategy through our people to drive customer value.
I find that the need for a manager to be developed is far greater because there’s an assumption that the technology can replace our role, and the high-performing sales manager is sustainable. Not a one-hit wonder year that grow great teams always know that that’s their number one job. Their number one job is not to grow sales. It’s to grow salespeople who grow sales. The challenges in many organizations, it’s the next quartets, the next numbers, the next optic, it’s the next ‘how things look’, as opposed to let’s get back to the fundamentals that made us great in the ‘90s before the mass got in the way of us and our people. I think that’s the big trend I see, is that managers are fighting a lot more chaos and a lot more confusion, because the leadership just wants to know we’re doing what we should be doing as opposed to training us to do what we should be doing.
Fred Diamond: James actually mentioned it in his introduction, that a lot of the sales process where you all are in South Africa is similar than you might see in Europe. Of course, enterprise customers buy the same way. There’s process, there’s budgets, there’s committees, all those types of things. What are some of the key principles or strategies that you have found to be universally effective?
Alan Versteeg: The number one is you have to drive coaching. As you said, catastrophic state to sales coaching. Here’s the paradox. There’s not a single leader I speak to that doesn’t say this is the number one thing we need to focus on to drive sales performance. There’s not a single white paper that comes out of any organization that doesn’t back that up with data and science. It’s the first meeting canceled, and the last metric measured. Organizations that honor the one-on-one coaching cadence start to shift their tide and move towards impact over optics. Definitely effective targeted neuroscience-based coaching is the big one.
Then there’s things that come along, maturity around deal management, because it’s not linear, understanding the changing world of the buyer, so your value proposition. Nurturing true pipeline health, not just value cover, those maturity levels follow on. But I’d say that organizations have lost the beauty. Fred, you might remember those days of the frontline sales manager on the road with you having lunch coaching you to perform. It’s just being neglected as if we just arrive as performers and throwing more data, information and technology at us is going to fix it. We’ve got to focus on coaching, we’ve got to protect it in the calendar, and then we’re going to get good at it.
Fred Diamond: From our perspective, when the pandemic kicked in, we thought that the person who was going to lose the most was the first-time sales managers. A lot of times people got promoted in December, starting in January, and then three months later, everything shut down in March of 2020. The first-line sales managers, they missed the insight training. They missed being in the room with their people. A lot of times when you’re in sales, one of the great things that happens is you go into a conference room, you go to the whiteboard, you map something out, then you go to lunch and you continue the conversation. The first two to three years of the pandemic, everybody was in a room like we are right now looking at a screen. Meetings had to end at 50 minutes after so people can go to the bathroom. You couldn’t really engage that.
Now, people are coming back, but sales managers who were promoted missed two critical years, I think. Curious on your thoughts about that. Follow up question for both of you is, should companies be requiring that their salespeople come back to the office full-time? What does that look like in South Africa? Where are we with the work-from-home and remote and everything else?
James Hickman: Firstly, just to add to Alan’s comments, we’ve got a very, very sales-focused CEO at Altron. When he is speaking to sales leaders, he’ll often ask them the question, “What is the most important hour in the meeting process with the customer and one of your sellers?” Inevitably the answer will come, “Well, it’s the prep before,” or, “It’s the mid-time with the customer.” He’ll go, “No, it’s the hour in the call afterwards, where you get to sit with the seller, ask questions around how it went, provide your insights and guide and coach them on the next steps.” I think when you hear that message from a CEO who’s had an extremely successful career, it’s something that really should be taken to heart.
But to answer your second question about the work-from-home or the hybrid work culture at South Africa across the technology industry, it’s being adopted in various ways, as it is all over the world. You’ve got your companies that are mandating everyone comes into the office at a certain time in the day, or on certain days. At Altron, we’ve taken a different approach. It’s very much a pure hybrid approach. As long as you are delivering, there’s no expectation or requirement for you to be in the office at any set time. We do encourage people to join for town halls or events like that.
But what I am finding really, really interesting is the sales folks naturally gravitate towards the office at certain times during the week, partly because I think they just get energy from each other, and partly because they learn from each other. The sales leadership structure that I have, I would say to a large degree, are touching base in the office up to three times a week. That is with no mandating of any time in the office. But they are clearly seeing the value in the interaction between themselves and the sellers, and the sellers are seeing value between themselves and managers and the sellers.
Fred Diamond: Alan, what do you think? You want to add anything to that? Or do you see the same thing? Or what do you tell your customers or clients?
Alan Versteeg: I think you touched on the key point, which is there were some people who were left out to dry. They’ve been promoted into a role they could never go and exercise. I remember my initial fear, my job is to get on a plane, to fly to a country, put people in a room and teach them how to be great sales managers. Now, I can’t have any of the first three. What was interesting was every single one of our clients chose to continue the program in a virtual world, because exactly that point, they were going, “We can’t leave them out to dry.” But they did lose some of that mentorship skill and that learning from their peers.
I’d argue, Fred, that there’s a void right now of that senior mentorship in a lot of organizations. In addition, and I know James respects my view on this, but the technology sector grew at such an alarming rate that a lot of mediocrity could be accepted because you were just following this demand curve. Now you’re coming out of that and there’s a lot of people that don’t have those years of mentorship or experience, or I’d say the biggest word in sales, resilience to address some of these things. I find they were at a double void. We’ve got those managers that came in over COVID that lost some of that learning you get from peer-to-peer interaction, and then we don’t have those mentors on stage anymore that are taking us through that.
Then the final point is, if you’re a sales professional, surely the number one thing you want to do is just drive impact, whether it’s face-to-face, eye-to-eye, toe-to-toe, or virtually. As you said in the opening, Fred, the opportunity COVID gave me was the ability to be based in South Africa and sell to big, large global brands, which before I’d have to be in-country and land in-territory. That’s a big win. The difference is simple, are you going to show up or are you going to rock up? Because if you rock up, it doesn’t matter if it’s in-person or virtual, you don’t get a sale. If you show up, it’s different. My view is it’s a big talking point that is actually mute if you’re trying to create value.
Fred Diamond: Growth Matters, give us a success story. Give us an example of how your frameworks and processes led to some success. Then James, I’m going to ask you, what would you say about Growth Matters? I’m curious on your insights into what about Growth Matters has been beneficial for you and your team. Alan, give us a success story of where your stuff has worked, and it doesn’t have to be James’s company, but tell us one that you want to give. Then, James, give us an endorsement. Give us some of your thoughts on why Growth Matters has been a successful partner.
Alan Versteeg: Fred, there’s so many places I can start, but as an engineer by trade, I want to get to numbers. Most organizations are struggling with forecast accuracy. It’s still sitting at somewhere below 60. We haven’t worked with a company that doesn’t get that over 90 because we teach them how to take control of the deals through deal scoring and deal reviews. What people don’t realize is you can’t manipulate a forecast by talking about it. You can’t manipulate a pipeline by talking about it, but you can manipulate both of those things by being in control of your deals. We work with the organizations partly on their deal scoring and qualification and really getting in control of our large deals so we can win more deals, we can win them in a shorter timeframe, but we get the accuracy, because the challenge with salespeople is our credibility is held by other people’s delivery.
Unless we have an accurate forecast, the organization can’t resource behind us. We want to get pissed off with the organization and say, “Why didn’t you deliver to what I promised my customers?” You say, “Well, you only told us two days before the deal landed.” That’s the big one for me, is getting that forecast accuracy rights, the organization starts to align behind sales. As opposed to thinking, “We’re a department, we are the business.” If you don’t sell something, you don’t need anyone. You don’t need HR, don’t need finance, you don’t need anything to sell something. That’d be the success story we see most of the time, good forecast accuracy, quicker deal win rates, more control of the deals and sales professionals that love being coached, as opposed to feeling like they’re being audited.
Fred Diamond: We tell people all the time, if sales ain’t happening, then there’s no reason to have accountants in the organization and operations. You don’t need the loading dock if you’re selling products. I remember I worked for a company in the late ‘90s where the CEO said, “The last person out the door is going to be my worst salesperson.” That’s what we believe at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. James, here’s your opportunity to give an endorsement of Growth Matters and Alan’s company.
James Hickman: I think it really revolves around two areas for me. We have just gone through a transformation where we pulled five different companies together under one organization and really built it from the ground up. It wasn’t a case of absorbing four of the companies into one, but rather designing an organization and then putting people in the right places. Alan’s organization, Growth Matters, fundamentally helped us put the right structures in place to get that sales engine moving quickly. Because it doesn’t matter whether the company’s new, old or newly formed, sales have to start coming in the door quick. I think we’ve touched on that.
For me, the real measure of that is on the second point, and the success of how that landed is that we still have salespeople asking, “When are we doing the next set of training with Alan?” You don’t often get that. 9 times out of 10 when you go to a sales force and you say, “Guys, got exciting news. We’re sending you all on training.” You get raised eyebrows and lots of excuses as to why they’ve got to be somewhere else. We don’t have that. We’re exploring the next phase of our partnership to really continue our journey and accelerate growth.
Fred Diamond: The topic of today, which we touched on a little bit, is the catastrophic state of sales coaching. James, give us your two or three things that sales managers must think about right now to get better at sales coaching. Then, Alan, same question for you, then I’m going to ask you both for your final action step. James, give the listeners some advice, the sales managers listening, one or two things that they should be thinking about to become better coaches. We have a lot of sales professionals who are listening. Give us an idea on what they should be doing to be more coachable.
Professional athletes, usually there’s so many coaches because the athletes are coachable. It’s not unusual to see a professional basketball team with the same number of coaches as there are players. Someone who coaches on defensive transition, someone who coaches on footwork, and the great players are the ones who are coachable, the top-level players. James, give us your insights. Give us two or three things that sales managers must be thinking about, and then give us something that the sales professionals should be thinking about to get the value of this gift of coaching.
James Hickman: Coaching, by its nature, is a two-way sport. It takes two players to play the game, or two or more players to play the game. Therefore, both parties have to be committed to the process. Both parties have to be humble through the process. I think especially in the beginning, both parties have to accept that in the initial stages it might take a lot longer than a salesperson running in the door saying, “Mrs. Sales Manager, I’ve got this problem. What can I do to solve it?” and getting the answer and running out. In fact, in my career, I’ve got an example like that where I did exactly that as a seller. The best thing my manager ever did to me was say to me, “I can’t just give you the answer because I might not have the right answer. Let’s sit down and work through it together.” It changed the way I thought about coaching and receiving coaching. Therefore, the most important thing for both sides is be open and be committed, because in the moment, it’s a lot easier to go into managing or telling than to do coaching sometimes, because it takes longer.
The second big area, and we personally are going through this process at the moment, is being hyper-intentional around priorities, and make sure that we are investing our coaching time in those priorities. Because we’re all busy and we can’t just spend all day every day in meetings coaching each other. We still need to get stuff done. Therefore, as a team right now in Altron, we are checking ourselves to say, “What are those priorities? Let’s realign. Let’s make sure we know what is expected of us from all members of the team and ensure we agree the areas we are going to grow together, develop together, and do that through coaching.”
Fred Diamond: If you’re willing to be coached, it ain’t always going to be easy. We talk a lot about the distinction between mentorship and coaching. A good mentor’s going to give you some advice, you could take it or not. If you’re going to be coached, you better take the advice, or else you’re missing the opportunity to truly grow. I love that answer. Very good.
Alan, why don’t you give us a final answer before I ask you for your final action thoughts?
Alan Versteeg: I’m going to give that answer in three tiers, salesperson, sales manager, sales organization. Salespeople, you have blind spots. Stop pretending you don’t. Sports players will pay millions of money to coaches to help them find the blind spots. Stop acting like you don’t. There’s value in coaching. You have blind spots. You need to be coached. When you do, you grow those blind spots, you grow sales. It’s not because you have a weakness that you need a coach, it’s because you have a growth mindset and you want to grow.
Sales managers, stop thinking it’s something in addition to your job. It is your job. It’s the number one part of your job. It’s the number one thing you have to be doing. You can grow a sustainable team if you do that. Stop getting around to coaching and prioritize it as part of your impact.
Sales organizations, stop thinking that you have bad salespeople and bad sales managers, and ask yourselves, are creating a soil that is conducive to those seeds growing? Are you prioritizing in the organizational cadence, the importance of people development, growth, and coaching? If you get those three things right, you’ve got the soil, you’ve got the seed, you’ve got the sunlight, then you’re going to explode as a company.
Fred Diamond: Alan, your podcast team said you’re famous for your one-liners. Is there one you want to share with us before we go into your final thoughts?
Alan Versteeg: I got a whole bunch. Manage the soil, not the seeds. Selling won’t help and helping will sell. Relevancy is the currency of value. Be loyal to impact, not optics. There’s a couple of them that I can land there.
Fred Diamond: James, have you heard of all those before?
James Hickman: Many times.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Alan and James for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. You gave us a lot of great insights that I know are going to be helpful to a lot people. I greatly appreciate you both being on the show and sharing some of your insights. I got to share one quick thing.
I used the basketball analogy before. What is the primary sport down in South Africa? Is it what we call soccer or is another sport that’s bigger than football/soccer?
James Hickman: We’ve got three sports. You got soccer or football, you got rugby, and you got cricket. Depends who you’re speaking to. They’ll definitely have a favorite in one of those categories.
Alan Versteeg: Yeah, and which season. Spot on.
Fred Diamond: When I was doing a lot of international travel, whenever I went to a country where cricket’s played, I would always ask, “Who’s the greatest cricket player of all time?” Who’s the greatest cricket player of all time?
Alan Versteeg: For me, it’s Sachin Tendulkar.
James Hickman: For me, it’s Brian Lara.
Fred Diamond: That’s the guy who usually comes up whenever I ask that question. If you would ask anybody who I know the same question, nobody will have an answer. James, give us your final thought. You’ve given us so many great ideas, something specific that people listening should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
James Hickman: For me, it’s very simple. Take 5 to 10 minutes, sit down and write down, out of this podcast or any of the other podcasts you’ve listened to on the channel, what is it you are going to go and do? Set yourself timelines to that and book a meeting now for a week or two weeks to sit down and review how you’ve progressed along those actions. None of what’s been said on this podcast or any of the others is any value unless it’s implemented and actioned. That’s the only way to get results.
Fred Diamond: You got to put this up in action right now. Alan, thank you so much for bringing James on the show and for sharing your insights. Give us your final thought. Bring us home, final action step.
Alan Versteeg: I’m going to do that in three layers again. If you’re a salesperson, make it a profession. That mindset will change everything. If you’re a sales manager, realize you’re there to grow salespeople that grow sales, not grow sales. That mindset will serve you everywhere. If you’re an organization, realize that nothing happens until you make a sale. As the leader, start aligning the organization behind the sales. The biggest change that’s happening in James’ organization is when they brought on a sales-orientated CEO, and everything had to be designed around that. You can’t believe the rate of change that can occur when you realize that we are here to create value for markets, and everyone else serves the function that does that, and it’s the salespeople.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo