Business Builders Podcast

High performance business development with Ian Tennent

August 19, 2022 Brenton Gowland & Ron Tomlian Season 2 Episode 26
Business Builders Podcast
High performance business development with Ian Tennent
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In today's episode, our hosts Brenton Gowland and Ron Tomlian talk with special guest Ian Tennent about his real-world experience in high-performance business development roles. This episode explores putting the concepts from our Driving Business Development Series (Episodes 21 - 25) into practice.

The topics covered are: 

  • Ian's pathway into Business Development
  • The value of Business Development training
  • Listener Question - how important is having the authority to say "no" to a client?
  • The importance of preparation
  • The role of your whole team in winning new clients
  • The critical importance of using a CRM
  • Recognising your team's input into winning new clients
  • Advice to business development people about how to improve their skills
  • Advice to CEOs and Business owners about how to improve the sales function of their business


Adapt_CO
Helping businesses find their new shape.

SA Business Builders
Business leaders social group based in South Australia

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Brenton Gowland:

Today on The Business Builders podcast, we're talking with special guest Ian Tennent, a business development professional with over 20 years sales experience across multiple industries working on tactical deals valued at 100k and beyond through to strategic multimillion dollar deals. So today's episode is sure to provide lots of real world insights to help us drive business development in our organisations. Well, welcome to the Business Builders podcast. We are your hosts, I am Brenton Gowland.

Ron Tomlian:

And I'm Ron Tomlian.

Brenton Gowland:

And Ron, this is really a great episode. So we're not going to waste much time with preamble because we've got a guest here today.

Ron Tomlian:

I'm looking forward to hearing that.

Brenton Gowland:

Yeah. And so we're really starting to wrap up our series on driving business development. So if you've been listening to the series, we're now that we've gone through our four areas that we've been looking at. And those four areas are planning, monitoring, aligning your team, and then winning as a team. If you haven't listened to the series, highly recommend you go back. But we're going to talk to an industry professional who's residing in Melbourne. At the moment, but has been working all around Australia, and has some international experience as well. And I think what he's going to bring to the table is going to be quite good for you who are listening. And I might just say as well, we've had a couple of inquiries about this series, I had someone ring the other day, who's specifically asked us to ask a question of our guests who have been in the business development arena. So to that caller, who was inquiring about that question, we will ask it today. So if you do give us feedback and you do reach out to us, we will do something with what you tell us. Anyway, before we get stuck into it, we've got to do our sponsors.

Ron Tomlian:

So there's SA Business Builders.

Brenton Gowland:

A group of industry professionals who get together about once a month to build business relationships, support each other and do networking the right way. And there's you. Me

Ron Tomlian:

Adapt_CO

Brenton Gowland:

Oh, that's right, I run a business called Adapt_CO. Yes. So I work as an outsourced CMO, I go into businesses, I help you build your marketing function, make myself redundant in the process, and help you take your business to, I hate saying the next level, but in essence, we do we break a few barriers. And the idea is to make sure that people open themselves up to opportunity. And it's great to go through that process challenging for some, good results for many. So that's Adapt_CO.

Ron Tomlian:

Excellent.

Brenton Gowland:

Do you like that little introduction, the way I changed that up?

Ron Tomlian:

Yeah, very cool.

Brenton Gowland:

Cool. We're gonna have to think about how we do the sponsors in the future. You know, we'll give you some stories from their clients, I think, maybe get some people in from the Business Builders network. Yeah.

Ron Tomlian:

What a great idea.

Brenton Gowland:

Cool. Now, without any further ado, because we want to get stuck into this. Today's guest is, well, let me tell you about him. He's been working in the IT industry for about 30 years and 20 years of that have been sales. And he's got a really interesting pathway into how he's come into sales. And I think there's some things to be learned there. Now. He's worked in direct sales, account management, developing sales teams, partner management and the like. And his clients have ranged from banks to insurers, financial institutions, governments, through to working with councils, retailers, and manufacturers. And he has plenty of experience working on tactical deals that are around the 100k and up mark, through to more strategic multimillion dollar deals. So lots of experience to be shared here today. So we'd like to welcome Ian Tennent. It's great to have you on the show.

Ian Tennent:

Great. Thank you for the introduction, Ron and Brenton absolute pleasure being here. And I hope I can share some of my suppose livings in the industry, with the rest of your viewers?

Brenton Gowland:

Well, thank you. And I think they'll find that as you kind of talk to us today that there's some great experience to be had there. But where we want to start today is pathways into business development can be varied. Everything from an engineer who's been identified as someone who can talk well and get on well with people and they get put into BD with no experience through to people who receive specific training and so forth. Can you talk to us about your pathway to BD and how you built your skill set.

Ian Tennent:

So interesting how that came about. Because I came from an IT background and moved into sales, which is pretty rare back in those days going straight from technical to sales. So we were fortunate to have, how would you say it, like a like a business development arm which was mainly around cold calling and trying to identify if there was a interest from a large client base. And as soon as that as soon as that have been identified, that's when the sales guy would get engaged to qualify that and then move that through the sales cycle, which we can talk about later if you want what that sales cycle is, but essentially depending on whether you're an account manager, looking at a specific accounts, or a hunter and gatherer in terms of trying to find new logo deals for a client is quite often a different approach. The hunter and gatherer which is what I predominantly worked around was making the cold calls, trying to get meetings with people, obviously, before you go in there and talk with people, you want to understand what their business is. So do the research on who the client is, what their strategy is, there's a heap of different ways, especially nowadays to find out what that is, in terms of what their strategy is, whether that be through their publicly available documents, or their websites, even. But you've got to make sure it's relevant to them, when you talk to them, you're not just pushing a widget.

Ron Tomlian:

How much is in your experience at that stage when you're doing your research and how much involvement is the in the sort of the planning side of things?

Ian Tennent:

So depending on the size of the account, obviously, the larger the account or the potential revenue, you could be getting, absolutely critical to do a lot of planning. And so working for some of the larger big US multinational multi billion dollar companies they put you through some pretty stringent training on all that on how to read the financial reports, understand where that business is going, understand how your solutions could potentially relate to that and help them make more money, work more efficiently, or the or anything around that essentially. But the planning could be up to three, four days of research, getting that information that together and getting those first calls or executive meetings. They had to be succinct and spot on the first time, because first impressions mean a lot, especially when meeting with the execs.

Brenton Gowland:

Yeah, absolutely. I just want to pick up on the fact that you also mentioned that you get very specific training. And I think what we find with business development people is there there is a range of skill set in the marketplace. And I think those who receive training, like you have have some really great advantages when it comes to learning how to sell. So can you talk to us about the kind of training that you received?

Ian Tennent:

Yeah, absolutely. So the training would range a lot between sales methodology through to heck, even had companies would give us books to read such as SPIN, which is essentially your situation, problem, impact, need. I think the author's Neil Rackhan for that. And that's, that's used extensively throughout the business. But it's more specifically the training around the sales methodology. And TAS, Target Account Selling, is one strategy, which is like a spin off of TAS. But it's all about breaking it down to what your typical sales process is, from the beginning, to the very end. So and that's essentially meaning, doing that strategic account planning in the beginning through to identifying what the problem is within the the client, what impact that problem has, and it's from there, you start formulating what that need is they have to sort that problem out. Obviously, it's a lot more complex and goes into detail. But that also comes into understanding, who are the key stakeholders? Who are the decision makers? What are their drivers personal and business? And the training takes you through that in detail that more or less forces you to do your due diligence, when working through an opportunity from from start to finish?

Brenton Gowland:

That's good.

Ian Tennent:

Because the beginning will be selling the value. But the final half is actually proving your value to the client.

Ron Tomlian:

In those sort of companies did they have? Did they construct models of typical journey for the customer? And were you impacted on that journey?

Ian Tennent:

Ah, absolutely. So the whole process that you go through is all about understanding the client, first of all, and it's it's a, it's almost like a step by step approach with branches offered that you go through from start to finish to make sure you cover every different angle, because I'll guarantee if you're going in there selling something to a client, your competitor is going in, they're doing the exact same thing. So quite often, it's identifying some of your strengths that you have as a solution that the competitors might be a bit weaker in and ensuring that client understands the strength that you have and what that means for their business, that will potentially put you as a better option for them.

Ron Tomlian:

And going through that process, you know, having those models and having that understanding, how critical was that in the ultimate success of being able to get to those larger customers and being able to sell to them.

Ian Tennent:

So what a lot of those larger organisations that I work for would do was they'd actually look at the success rate of you talked in your previous podcasts around the funnel, and what percentage you're bringing in from that funnel and the conversion rate. And in the software high and software industry it was Normally around, you win one in five, one and three, if it's a reasonably competitive market space. And the whole intent was to try and bring that down to a one to two or one to three, you win one out of three opportunities you work for, as in you devote yourself to, but in saying that, there might be opportunities you don't really want to be bidding on because you realise you don't have much of a chance. So you might want to qualify out of that earlier.

Brenton Gowland:

When I mentioned earlier that we had one of our listeners ringing, they were asking about the power to say no, they said that in their organisation, they had been given the authority to say no, to certain clients who didn't fit the bill. And you were talking about qualification. So obviously, that becomes part of it. Just how important is the ability to say no to some clients, and yes, to others.

Ian Tennent:

It's absolutely critical, I think from a couple of different angles here. Firstly, you don't want to be bidding on something and winning it when you're not quite the right fit. Because that will impact any future sales, not just with that client. But let's face it, it's a pretty small industry here in Australia, and people will talk. So if it's the wrong solution, well, we'll get around, and that'll impact your future sales, as well. But secondly, if you're working on large deals that you're unlikely to win, and it involves a tender RFP process? Well, that's a lot of resources you're using internally that could be better used elsewhere, on deals, you actually got a good chance of winning. So quite often, they'll put the companies large companies who work for, they'll have questions they asked before they respond to a tender to see really what chance of winning you have, which means, do you have exec sponsorship? Do you have access to the execs? Do you have a champion, someone who's selling to you, when you're not there, in the client site, those things are critical. And quite often the larger organisations will say, if you don't meet the criteria for this, we're not responding.

Brenton Gowland:

Yeah, fair enough. And from what you were saying earlier, if you want to increase that percentage of winrate, it's it, I was kind of hearing that, it's identifying those that you're more likely to win with. So clients that have the right kind of problem that you can solve, that will increase your success rate.

Ian Tennent:

Which is the whole intention, you might have finite resources within your organisation, you really only want to be working on opportunities that you're going to win, or you've got a good chance of winning. Okay, that's how you grow.

Ron Tomlian:

Yeah. And it was interesting, when you were talking about some of the criteria that you have, inside organisations, you know, a champion who's advocating for you when you're not there, that implies, I'm reading, that you're doing a lot of work before you're actually getting to the RFT stage or something along those lines, there's, there's work to be done before you're even really doing the selling.

Ian Tennent:

Large organisations will not let you respond to a tender blind, you need to know who the players are the problem and the whole intention is, you really want to be shaping what those requirements are. Because let's face it, a lot of the vendors have a lot of good capabilities and functionality and capabilities that should form part of their requirements earlier in the piece. So you should be in there earlier, helping to shape that, because at the end of the day, that will give the better result to the client and a win for everyone involved.

Brenton Gowland:

Yeah, that's fantastic. So there's a whole lot of pre work involved. So just getting on to the kind of structure that we went through with driving business development, how important is it? And is creating a business development plan, you know, at the start of the financial year, whenever, in fact, when do you create a business development plan?

Ian Tennent:

Normally, in the large organisations, that will happen at the very beginning of the financial year.

Brenton Gowland:

Right.

Ian Tennent:

That's just the way they normally do it. In terms of if you're not on a hard and fast, how would you say it's under a larger organisation, and working to their models and say in a smaller, which I'm now in the smaller niche area right now, is that planning happens, whenever there's a new client that comes along, that has an opportunity.

Brenton Gowland:

yes.

Ian Tennent:

Immediately.

Brenton Gowland:

That's interesting. So you do a specific client plan?

Ian Tennent:

Even if that means depending on the size deal that it might be or the potential size of that client in the future, you should still be doing your due diligence. And that's what we're out of respect for the client as well. You want to know their business as best you can, before you start spending time with them. Your time should be of value to them, not a value to yourself.

Brenton Gowland:

And as you're enacting that plan as you're going through and executing. Tell me about the type of things you're measuring. I'm ultimately, you're going to be measuring the results that I get a sale or not. But what are the things you're measuring along the way? Because usually you're working on multiple plans at any given time. What are you measuring along the way to make sure that you're on path for the ultimate success.

Ian Tennent:

So going back to the training, we talked about that a lot of the companies put you through the TAS, the strategy training and the likes. You're capturing information on the layout of the company, the corporate structure, who the key players are, what they're drivers are. That all formulates I suppose stuff you can measure. How complete a picture Have you got? And what you'll find with organisations, they'll test you on that, for that large US companies will test you on the, like a weekly meeting to run through, what's the status on the account? How many client meetings have you had? How many exact people have you had access to? What are your next steps? What are the outcomes? Because let's face it, when you go into a meeting, you should be clear in your own head. And if you've got people with you, what are the outcomes you're looking for, and those outcomes should all be steps along, getting to that final result of winning the, winning the opportunity?

Brenton Gowland:

Yeah, that's great. So look on that as well, because that's really interesting. Like you're working for companies that are testing you, because I know a lot of the people that are listening might be 50, 60, 100 person businesses. And I think sometimes the rigour and the scrutiny that are on the BD team at a much less, because obviously, these US companies that you're working with have got years of experience, they know who they're selling to, it's a very niche kind of product that they're trying to sell. So they really have to dive into detail with those clients. So I think some of what you're sharing today is really, really important in the sense that when you're really focusing on BD, you need to be detail oriented, you need to be documenting, like documenting a lot. And you need to be recording what's going on. So you understand the client. So in that context, how important is team in winning these clients? So you've got someone like yourself who's at the spearhead I would imagine, and then you've got a team all around you from account managers to execs, can you talk us through that?

Ian Tennent:

Because that's yeah, that's also a key part, especially with the larger deals, there might be focus areas within that one opportunity is that you as the spearhead, you don't have the full knowledge to tap into each of those separate areas. So the team needs to be kept across, essentially the whole picture, what you're driving for, and the people going out, going down, let's call it rabbit holes for the sake of it, to cover off key requirements areas, they, they need to know the bigger picture, as well as they need to be given the trust to see their bit through a cover off the people on the client side adequately. Because if you've got a weak link in there, that's something that will get exposed by your competition.

Brenton Gowland:

Yes.

Ron Tomlian:

So what sort of communication cycles did you use to keep that broader team engaged and working on that project?

Ian Tennent:

That would depend on the size of the opportunity, the complexity of the opportunity.

Brenton Gowland:

Sure.

Ian Tennent:

But you touched on the other podcasts about using a CRM and the likes or Salesforce, or I don't want to mention vendor names or whatever. But essentially, you've got generally online systems where each meeting, you should be inputting that information. So anyone else in the team can see what it is you've done and what it is, you've found out along the way. Because you all gotta be on the same page. And you've all got to be talking the same outcome, the same solution to him. Yeah, that so? Yeah, it's leveraging those systems to share that information, whilst also having the internal meetings face to face, Et cetera,

Brenton Gowland:

When you're using those systems. I'm assuming that everyone's inputting in. Do people just read that willy nilly at their own leisure? Or do you actually have meetings around the inputs into the system? How do you make sure that that information is being received by everyone in the team?

Ian Tennent:

So the larger oil organisations I worked for, that generally do a meeting on the Monday or the Tuesday, during the week, the infact, the smarter organisations normally did it on Monday, so that the salespeople needed to prepare over the weekend. Yeah, so you have your sales meeting on a Monday or a Tuesday, where you're going through your opportunity, and they work from that system, they look at if you progress it from 20% to 30%, along the way, they look at the activities and your sales management, are watching it like a hawk, because that's a way of gauging whether you're doing a job or not. And whether you're likely to be successful or not, or to be able to read it and offer assistance along the way of, Hey, have you guys thought about touching these people here because they could be important judging by what I'm reading into what you've inputted in the system.

Brenton Gowland:

Right.

Ian Tennent:

So that's your critical tool that people are working from management and people within your team.

Ron Tomlian:

Cool, fantastic. And and in terms of that alignment, and the next step, which is winning as a team, how much is the business development person that as the spearhead how much credit is given to them versus or recognition is given to them versus the rest of the team. Because operations execution, you were talking about account management later on. All of that has a part to play and recognition becomes very important in people understanding they're part of the business development effort. How does that how much does that play into it? Yeah, when you're winning, you know, when you have one, that there's recognition given to other people?

Ian Tennent:

Probably is that question pretty easily? Not enough. But you're right the celebration at the end of winning an opportunity. I think the BD from my experience, the BD side is probably the unsung hero.

Brenton Gowland:

Right? Why?

Ian Tennent:

Well look at, say, winning an 800 metre or a 1500 metre race or marathon, you have your pace setters.

Brenton Gowland:

Yes.

Ian Tennent:

How many names are the pace setters do you remember, as opposed to the winner?

Ron Tomlian:

Very good point.

Brenton Gowland:

That is great.

Ron Tomlian:

Yeah. So what you're saying is that there's not enough recognition of the team effort. And in particular, those people who are pace setting for the team, like the business development people.

Ian Tennent:

Obviously, every organisation is different. And some organisations go out of their way to make sure everyone's rewarded. But every department that helps along the way will have their own KPIs, key performance indicators, that that will get rewarded on. But I think you'll find that the smaller the organisation, the more that's shared around from my experience, smaller the organisation, the more that will be shared around amongst everyone.

Ron Tomlian:

That's interesting.

Brenton Gowland:

Look, we're going to start wrapping up now. And I want to ask, as far as advice is concerned, what advice would you give to BD people out there, firstly, about how to improve their skill set, and then how to, you know, because what we've talked about a lot here is very specific strategic accounts that you've been working on. And I know that you've worked on a range of accounts from faster sales that have a lead time of a week through to lead times of a year or more, depending on the size of the deal, etc. So when you're talking to BD people, the kind of people that are listening are going to be in different areas of that spectrum, what advice would you have for them about how to improve their results?

Ian Tennent:

You find, everyone's different in terms of personality types, in how they're converse with the clients. One of the great trainings I went through through multiple organisations was also around the personality side of things.

Brenton Gowland:

Right.

Ian Tennent:

So there was training around, I think was called HBDI training, which was Herman brain dominant dominance instrument, something like that sales and DISC training,

Brenton Gowland:

Yep, DISC, familiar with that.

Ian Tennent:

Which works out what sort of personality type you are, whether you're a dominant, influential, conscientious, steady person, everyone will have strengths in one area and weaknesses in others of the four quadrants, they refer to understanding yourself, and being able to understand the client you're talking to, where their comfort zone is, the earlier you can recognise that, the quicker you can forge a relationship and trust, yeah, which can quite often then push along the sales cycle a lot quicker. That's obviously very handy. But also having a very structured approach or a prepared approach for those initial calls.

Brenton Gowland:

Ooh, that's interesting.

Ron Tomlian:

You're speaking my language, they're being prepared and and have self awareness in terms of understanding yourself and how you affect others is just as critical for leaders as it is for salespeople. But it's lovely to hear someone else saying that type of thing.

Brenton Gowland:

Look I think, because we're gonna run out of time today. But there's a couple of things that I know we were going to talk about, like compelling events, and different specific training and all that kind of jazz. We haven't had a lot of time to get into that today. But it might be worth getting Ian back to talk about personality types in a bit of detail, and maybe some other areas of the sales cycle, are you open to that Ian?

Ian Tennent:

Oh, absolutely. Providing your listeners are?

Brenton Gowland:

Well to find out pretty quick, because some of them, particularly a few, give us a call. And they say Well listen to that last podcast, I'd like to give you some advice. And that's great. We encourage that. I also want to say to those people go and rate us on Apple podcasts. That would be good.

Ron Tomlian:

That would be fantastic.

Brenton Gowland:

So last little bit of advice Ian and great to hear that we can have you back again, because that'd be awesome. Advice to business owners and CEOs who've got a business development team, what will be your advice to them to get the most out of their BD people and make the sales work better for their organisation because at the end of the day, you were saying that it's those big companies that you're working for have structures and resources and processes in place that really focus on being able to get sales done. So how does that translate to a business 50, 100 people or even 20 people, what advice would you have for the owners to improve and help their BD people?

Ian Tennent:

Even to look at how it's done on the largest scale and streamline it substantially if need be to suit your own organisation. The other thing is, talk with people in the industry who've gone through it and done it successfully at that smaller size to sort of learn from there aren't just as good things they do. But the mistakes they made along the way to show you that do the same thing. We know how it works and industry. Everyone's gone through learnings along the way. If you can learn from someone else before making the mistake yourself, leverage it, leverage your contacts.

Ron Tomlian:

I think that's very sage advice,

Brenton Gowland:

Agreed. Well look Ian, that's all we've got time for today. I think we will get you back in the coming weeks because I've really wanted to get on to talking about that compelling event, but we just didn't quite make it will be there next time. Thank you for joining us really appreciate that.

Ron Tomlian:

Yeah, it's just fantastic to get some practitioner out there talking about the type of things we've been talking about, but from a practical, experiential point of view. So thank you very much.

Ian Tennent:

Thanks for the invite, gentlemen.

Brenton Gowland:

That's okay. And for those of you who are listening, we will see you again in a couple of weeks. And that's goodbye from me.

Ron Tomlian:

And goodbye from me.

Brenton Gowland:

Bye for now.

Intro
Ian's pathway into Business Development
The value of Business Development training
Listener Question - how important is having the authority to say no to a client?
The importance of preparation
The role of your whole team in winning new clients
The critical importance of using a CRM
How important is recognising the teams input in winning new clients?
Advice to business development people about how to improve their skills
Advice to CEOs and Business owners about how to improve the sales function of their business
Wrapping up