First On: Sales with Christine Bailey
My guest today is Christine Bailey. Christine is the Head of Sales for CloudNC, an early stage startup that’s automating precision manufacturing with machine intelligence (personal angel investment). Christine is an extremely experienced sales leader with 15+ years and she brings all of that wisdom to this interview. She leads CloudNC through a “consultative sales” approach, a highly collaborative and customer oriented style that she has clearly mastered. Christine is also a member of the Forbes Business Development Council, a global community for practitioners to share and support one another in developing new business. In our conversation we cover everything from building a career in sales, hiring top talent, building and growing sales teams and, of course, what exactly consultative sales actually means. She makes no effort to hide her love of supporting customers and leading teams, and I think you’ll see that in her words.
Topics Covered: Career paths, hiring experienced talent, sales tactics, leadership, sales operations
To start, in your own words, what’s the story of your career?
I've never done anything other than sales. Even as a kid with a weekend job I was always selling something. I sold tents, then outdoor equipment and then cars for a bit. But in terms of a conscious decision to “go into sales” it was when I started working for Halifax doing inbound and outbound sales. From there I went into pharmaceutical sales and that's really where I cut my teeth. Very hard, very competitive, very long hours. But at that point in my life it fit perfectly because I didn't have any external commitments so I actually enjoyed it and made quite a lot of money as well.
By pure coincidence I was talking to a recruiter friend of mine and she said, “come in, I've got this great engineering company just around the corner from where you live. They’re looking to recruit somebody to set up a marketing / sales team.” It was new for me and it opened up a lot of other industries.
I've been really lucky in that I've worked in banking, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas and then defense and nuclear. I've really been able to hone my craft across many industries.
So CloudNC is obviously quite a difference in the size and stage of the business. What was it that catalyzed you to make a switch into the startup world?
You get to a point with big companies where you eventually hit a ceiling. I was quite established and looking for some new challenges. When you’ve been at a company for so long you exhaust most new challenges. If I'm honest, I think both parties were struggling with, “where do we put her now?”. It was essentially “dead man's shoes”, meaning the next promotion that came up was when somebody left.
The beauty of a startup is that there’s so much challenge. It's really, really fast paced with lots of change happening really, really quickly. And you need to get results fast as well. That was much more appealing.
It feels to me like a lot of founders think that this risk-seeking mindset is not held by most experienced salespeople. Do you think that your desire for a bigger challenge is representative of experienced sales leaders or were you unique in that respect?
I think it's a quite common mistake. It seems to be quite commonly held that you need young, enthusiastic people that fit a certain mold. We message that diversity is key, and that shouldn't change just because you're a startup.
You've got two extremes. Established businesses that recruits in its own, existing image. People are terrible for recruiting people like them, There’s just no diversity. And with startups it’s the other end of the spectrum. Neither extreme works. The trick that startups miss is they think that they can't attract experience because of the risk factor but I just don't think that's the case.
You've got this demographic of people like myself, who are actually quite well established. I have no desire to work for myself but if I lose my job tomorrow it’s not the end of the world. Now is the time for me to make a change and bring my experience with me. Startups underestimate the late 30s / early 40s demographic where moving to a startup can be really great. Don't fall into that trap to recruit in your own image. You can attract experienced people quite easily.
Founders are understandably obsessed and passionate about what they're doing. And there can be a belief that, “if the person I'm speaking is not as passionate about what I'm doing then I don't want to hire them. I shouldn't have to sell.” I'm curious what your perspective is on that level of passion.
I look at it from a customer's perspective. What does the customer actually want?. This doesn’t mean I'm not passionate, When you're selling to a customer you've really got to tap into what the customers want. It's just a different approach but it doesn't mean it's any less passionate, it's just coming at it from a completely different angle.
In a lot of enterprise sales, especially manufacturing, has a general resistance to software. The “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” mentality. Do you run into a lot of resistance in your customer conversations and if so, how do you mitigate that?
It is much more about proving what you say. We are very consultative now in our sales approach.. From a buyer's perspective, not only are we going to be able to help with price and lead time, but I also know that they’ve got challenges because of, for example, reshoring back to the UK. It's not about selling one thing, it's about understanding their issues.
There's pretty tough industries that we're breaking into. We're going into defense and aerospace, which is very relationship heavy. They still want to sit down, they still want to meet face to face. We had customers this week sit down with us to close a deal because he wants to shake hands over a table. For people selling SaaS this may be slightly unheard of. So you have to understand the industries and how they work.
How have you honed that consultative style for yourself? How do you teach something like that to others?
It's much easier to have a product and be able to sell the features and benefits of that product. Often these calls are quite investigative. It's about asking a lot of questions; what is going on for the customer as opposed to talking about myself. It’s really about identifying what's in it for them. I'm telling my guys at the moment, “if you talk about CloudNC the customer is not going to be interested, there's a reason why you're sitting down with that person and it's got nothing to do with us.” If we approach them in a traditional way; “Hi, my name is Christine, we supply metallic components. Is this something you buy from us? Can I set up a meeting for you?” The answer is probably, no.
If you're a mechanical engineer at the moment you’re being put under pressure to take commercial responsibilities for your projects. That's a very new element for these guys. 10 years ago an engineer had lots and lots of time to design, but companies have got wise to that and now want to see a return on investment. They’re getting asked a lot of questions on commercial value, cost and ROI and that’s quite a big change. So when we speak to an engineer we're not talking about the products we supply. We're asking about supporting them in new product innovation. Since we've changed this the response has been great. That’s true consultative selling.
To do that well it seems like you’d need a good corpus of knowledge on that particular industry or function. There is debate sometimes on the importance of experience versus raw sales ability within hiring. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
My recruitment style is always character over competence. The tenacity and desire to learn is my starting point because you're absolutely right, they're going to have to very quickly upskill themselves. So even if I have somebody who's been in an industry for 20 years, part of that interview process would be, “What's new in that industry? When was the last time you read something about sales techniques?” If they don’t know what's going on in that industry that experience is probably worthless because it's out of date.
The consultative sales approach involves a lot of coaching from me. 60-70% of my time is coaching the guys in some form so I have to make sure that new hires are open to that.
When do you think when you think is the right time for a founder to start thinking about bringing on early sales people? I know, this varies quite a bit with the business and the founders, but do you have a general perspective of when?
It does really depend on where the businesses is at and what needs to be sold. I think the founder needs to be quite clear as to exactly what it is they want to sell. If you bring on quite inexperienced people, they need very clear guidance. If you've not got your product clear it's really, really difficult.
It does depend on how fast they want to grow and what industries they’re in. Some industries will naturally take longer than others and if you’re taking a consultative approach it could take 18 months to close. I do think as well that a lot of founders underestimate that and default to their own experience. Software sales can be quite quick but that doesn't necessarily happen in other industries. They need to be careful, adapt and map out the time it's going to take to convert. If you're really early doors, you've got to get that knowledge somehow. Network inside, go to lots of events, make connections. That will give you some guidelines as to when you need to bring that sales team in.
What you've described would suggest that for a period of the startup journey there is founder-led sales. There are certain companies where the founders are just not commercially oriented at all. Do you think there's a different playbook for those founders, which are just not realistically going to be those types of leaders?
If the thought of having to network with people absolutely terrifies you. You need to find somebody who you trust to go and do that as early as possible. I'd go back to bringing in people who understand the industries that you're gonna supply into. It doesn't need to be loads of people. Maybe just one person to develop that understanding of; “How do we approach it? How do we scale it? Who do we need to target?”.
We've talked a lot about the tactics and styles but there's also an element of structure; metrics, commission, etc. Sales is unique in that it can be so quantified performance measured. I'm curious how you approach the structural elements of building your team.
You can absolutely over measure sales to the point of suffocation. Death by KPI; distance traveled, calls per week, time on the road, etc. Yes, of course, you need some measures in place but keep it high level. They're there to make money and grow the business, so make sure the KPIs measure that. Trust that your team will do their job.
When there are issues, work with that one person who's underperforming to understand why. Do some real observational coaching. Maybe they're not prepared for calls or they don't have a solid objective. Maybe they're not looking at the customer's perspective and not asking the right questions on calls. Sitting down with someone has a much bigger increase in performance than just pushing metrics. If a sales manager thinks they don't have to coach their team, I'd be very surprised if that team does well or they don't churn quickly.
In some orgs you hear about cultural tension between certain functions and sales comes up a lot. Have you experienced that in your own history, and steps can one take to mitigate?
You have to continually remind people of the bigger picture. As a salesperson, you’re focused on the numbers and bringing in deals. If you've just spent six months trying to bring in a new customer and then operations send something out that's wrong it is frustrating. At the same time, with salespeople it can be very easy to lose sight of the challenges that other teams have. It comes down to communication. So when you're communicating with the finance teams, you need to make sure that they understand the bigger picture. “Yes, a lower price might reduce margins but it’s going to open these doors.”
If we do a win/loss debrief, that involves different departments. Nine times out of ten there is a process issue causing the loss. What you notice when you first start those sessions is everyone's on the defensive. You need regular communication that’s structured, so you can avoid that. Make it clear this isn’t an individual thing. You're looking at process and procedure. As a manager you've got to force this to begin with. I will put in regular meetings to make sure that my team are in communication with the ops team or with finance. Eventually you can step back once people are used to how those meetings run, the outputs, the cadence.
What do you think people get wrong about pursuing a career in sales? How you would advise existing salespeople that are maybe at an inflection point in their career, or young talent toying with the idea of pursuing a sales career?
The best advice that I can give to anybody is you need to have a plan. You need to have at least an idea of where you want to get to and you need to be really self reflective on how you’ll get there. What experience do you need? What’s required to do my role tomorrow? Build a proper career development plan so that you can get from A to B. But also be realistic. A lot of people look at sales, especially international sales, and think it’s a very glamorous lifestyle. If you want to be an International Director of X are you willing to up and move to a developing country? You can almost see people’s whole mindset changes when they realize what is actually involved in international travel.
Have a clear vision from the outset and reevaluate every 12 to 18 months. Ask yourself, “Am I where I need to be? Am I playing to my strengths? Is this what I really want? Where am I going to be in the next 18 months?”
And if people want to go into management, you need to make a decision whether you want to be a leader of people or a manager of process. I think everybody has examples of working for somebody just awful but actually are very technically capable in a role. This happens a lot in the engineering world; you have a fantastically gifted engineer who's absolutely brilliant but has no people skills yet they become a manager of people. Both parties become really quite miserable because the manager knows that they're not doing a great job and the people under them tend to get really frustrated with the lack of support.
If you're a fantastic designer, and you suddenly got the opportunity to go manage a team of ten, but that’s not what you want for yourself, it's probably not the right thing to do. And that is absolutely okay. I think I should it make my life’s mission to stop people going into management by accident because there's nothing worse.
First On is an attempt to uncover functional greatness by asking the experts themselves. I hope you enjoy the mini-series and with enough interest I may extend this into a more ongoing effort. If you have any functions / roles you’d like covered or have ideas for future guests please let me know.