ON AIR: With Owen & Josh

Our 23rd guest is Ollie Sharpe – VP of Revenue - EMEA at SalesLoft. 

Owen and Ollie discuss culture in a sales team and why it’s important in drive a successful sales team Including: 

 - Who’s Ollie and who’s Sales Loft?

- Defining what culture means to a sales team?

- How can culture change each day?

- The difference between culture and climate?

- Why it’s important to have a conscious focus on culture within a sales team?

- Is your companies culture defined by leaders or employees?

- What do you do when someone joins the business, that doesn’t fit the culture?

- What are the trigger points to look for to find out if someone does not fit your company’s culture?

- What’s important for SalesLoft’s culture?

- How often should you be thinking about adjusting your culture?

- What are the tell tell signs for a leader to step in and address cultural problems?

- How to positively impact your companies’ culture?

- Defining the tangible inputs that contribute to your companies’ culture

Our 22nd guest is Michael Hanson – Founder & CEO at Growth Genie.

Owen and Michael discuss What does a good outbound sequence/cadence look like? Including:

- Who is Michael and who is Growth Genie? 

- What are the first considerations when you open a cadence? 

- Understanding what you’re trying to achieve with your cadence, and who are you trying to engage?

- What channels should you use and the next steps? 

- How to create a good cadence without harassing your prospects?

- Why you shouldn’t rely on one particular channel for your cadence?

- What’s the importance of the cadence compared to other parts of the strategy? 

- Breaking down the 30 point cadence step by step

- What would dictate how many steps should be in your cadence?

- What to do if you’ve never created a cadence before?

- If you had to drop a channel from your cadence, what would it be?

Our 21st guest is Richard Smith – VP Sales at Refract. 

Owen and Richard discuss coaching, what it is and how do to do it well?. Including: 

- Who is Richard and who Refract are?

- How long does good coaching take? 

- What’s the impact if you don’t prioritise training 

- Why isn’t training prioritised by sales leaders? 

- The downsides of split focus with Hybrid roles in sales

- The mindset of Sales Leaders without patience for coaching  

- The power of communication in coaching 

- Why you should be coaching by asking questions and not by telling 

- The power of recording sales call when coaching 

- Who’s coaching the coaches? 

- How do you invest your time when coaching? 

- Richards top tips for being a great coach 

Our 20th guest is Sam Carrington – Founder & ‘Chief Smirkistrator’ at Smirk Experience. 

Owen and Sam discuss the transferable skills between comedy and sales. Including: 

- Who is Sam and who is Smirk Experience 

- What are the transferable skills between comedy, business, and sales

- Comparing the performances of prospecting and comedy 

- How to leverage comedy for your personal brand 

- What is Evolutional Psychology and The idea of being liked

- Dealing with failure and how to learn from it 

- How to embrace comedy in sales to get ahead of your competitors

Our 19th guest is Martin MacArthur – Founder & CEO at The Outbound Sales Guy. 

Owen and Martin discuss the differences across prospecting into Americas vs EMEA and how to be successful in outbound. Including: 

- The impact that being blind has had on Martin in starting his own business and working in sales 

- The difference between selling outsourced sales into Canada vs the US 

- The attitude that Americans have towards sales development, cold calling, prospecting emails and other outbound approaches 

- Authentic relationship building: more personal sales messaging is better than personalisation 

- The channel that Martin finds most successful when selling into the US 

- How to follow-up on LinkedIn 

- Martin’s sales tech and data vendor recommendations 

- How much of Martin’s experience is based around building his own data vs purchasing data 

- What’s changed in sales in the US over the past 2/3 years 

- Advice for UK companies looking to expand into the US and vice versa

Our 18th guest is Sam Dunning - Sales Director & Co-Owner at Web Choice, and Founder & Host at Business Growth Show. 

Owen and Sam discuss simplifying search engine optimisation (SEO) to support business growth. Including: 

- Why businesses need to do SEO 

- How long until the benefits of SEO can be seen 

- How to measure progress and success 

- The definition of ‘conversions’ 

- How Sam and Web Choice help B2B companies with their SEO and the pillars that can be leant on 

- What causes a website to slow down 

- The issues with not sticking out SEO and not having a multichannel approach to marketing 

- Advice for salespeople who sell services that take a while to achieve ROI 

- At what stage a company should start the SEO process 

- Web Choice’s SEO performance 

- What to consider if you’re a start-up or haven’t done SEO before 

- What to look for in an SEO agency 

- Whether quality or quantity of content is more important 

- A snapshot of what you should do if you’re looking to implement SEO 

- Whether salespeople should care about SEO 

- How many extra leads you can generate from SEO 

Our 17th guest is Kaitlen Kelly - Senior Manager of Sales Development – EMEA at Outreach, and Co-Founder of SDRs Anonymous. 

Owen and Kaitlen discuss sales development management. Including: 

- What a Sales Development Manager is responsible for 

- The percentage of time spent team coaching 

- The traits of a good sales coach 

- Whether you can be a good SDR Manager without having been an SDR within the organisation before (or at all!) 

- Advice for SDRs who want to become an SDR Manager and whether it’s right for everybody 

- The biggest impact that Kaitlen has had as an SDR Manager 

- How much time and effort should be spent on each channel 

- The importance of using data to discover where your SDRs’ strengths are 

- Whether SDRs should self-generate data more than being given data to target 

- Whether it’s better to: 

          - Have quality or quantity focused SDRs 

          - Have a people and culture focused or process focused SDR Manager 

          - Give up LinkedIn, phone or email (if Kaitlen had to choose one) 

          - Have company or individual set targets 

- How much time should be spent on SDR development and the type of training Kaitlen finds works best

- Kaitlen’s favourite sales tool outside of Outreach 

- What a good onboarding process looks like 

- Encouraging your SDRs to fail quick to learn faster 

- How an SDR Manager can use systems and processes to ensure SDRs are shaping their day correctly 

- Common challenges for SDRs that Kaitlen sees within SDR Anonymous

Our 16th guest is Jamie Beaumont – Founder at Playter Pay. 

Owen and Jamie discuss a fintech that makes money. Including:

- Generating profit to drive business growth outside of raising equity

- Jamie’s advice to early stage Founders or those thinking about founding their own organisation

- The risk of running out of cash and survival mode

- The benefits of being profitable when fundraising

- Looking at revenue, not profitability, when scaling your business

- Using proof of product and viability of the business to scale

- The shortest term achievable profit point

- The factors to consider if you want to prioritise profitability or prioritise scaling

- Smaller markets

- The ambition mindset

- The impact that external influences and taking action make on success

- Working out what commercial route is best for you

Our 15th guest is Tom Boston – Social Sales Evangelist at SalesLoft. 

Owen and Tom discuss how personal brand can impact on your performance as a Sales Development Representative (SDR). Including: 

- How Tom began social selling 

- How Tom entertains via LinkedIn 

- How Tom's personal brand has increased the efficiency of outreach and level of engagement from prospects 

- How Tom stays disciplined to produce videos consistently 

- How to get over the first starting point 

- How Tom has built credibility 

- How Tom uses humour to open up the conversation around sales 

- What SDRs can be doing towards building their personal brands 

- The importance of authenticity in sales 

- The impact that Tom’s videos have made on engagement 

- How Tom produces videos 

- How much better Tom’s results have been in terms of pipeline and closed business because of his personal brand 

- Tom’s new role as Social Sales Evangelist 

Our 14th guest is James Ski – Partnerships Manager at Drift. 

Owen and James discuss running a partnerships channel. Including: 

- What a partnerships programme looks like 

- Why it’s so powerful 

- Whether it’s only right for certain types of businesses 

- Why fewer people consider a partnerships programme at an earlier stage than James thinks should 

- Why it isn’t more popular than it should be 

- The importance of relationships being reciprocal 

- What’s required to set-up a successful partnerships programme 

- Why it’s a channel that can’t go backwards or downwards in terms of performance very easily 

- Being aligned on business objectives and how you’re trying to drive business outcomes for your clients 

- Whether a lower quantity of quality partners, or a higher quantity of lower quality partners is best 

- How to remunerate partners 

- The key to making talking about your product/service a priority for partners 

- How long until you can expect to see your partnership programme contributing to revenue