0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, Another episode of the podcast. I’m so excited. I love this place. How you going?
0:00:48 Ben Wright: It’s good to be back. Yeah, I’m great. It’s warm. The sun’s shining. You always feel better when it’s warm. Not hot. It’s actually probably too hot at the moment, but you always feel better when you have that easy living.
0:01:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah
0:01:03 Ben Wright: Easy Like Sunday morning.
0:01:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: I really want to do karaoke with you. Can that be our Christmas party this year?
0:01:08 Ben Wright: I am tone deaf.
0:01:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: So I know that’s why I want to go. I want to see you fight for your life through living on a prayer as God intended. I don’t want any tune and some dancing, please.
0:01:20 Ben Wright: Well, I can sing the Carlton theme song. That’s one you’ll get out of it.
0:01:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: A Carlton supporter. How am I only finding this out now?
0:01:26 Ben Wright: I don’t know.
0:01:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s interesting. Interesting. Busy week this week. We’ve been doing a lot of podcast planning. A lot of stuff for the next year. Some big stuff going on. We’re really looking forward to it. How’s your week been?
0:01:36 Ben Wright: Look great. A mix of the really good. A mix of the things you just need to get done.
0:01:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:01:43 Ben Wright: And a few challenges. I think I’m back.
0:01:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m back so that’s problematic.
0:01:49 Ben Wright: Well, but running any business has challenges. Any leadership role has challenges. Any very senior leadership role has lots of challenges. And to me, it’s about being comfortable with uncertainty. So being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
0:02:07 Jemimah Ashleigh: And that is actually one of the most difficult tasks because there’s no crash course in learning. This is that there’s no. Oh, you take this one day educational training program and you will become super comfortable with the challenges that are ahead of you.
0:02:19 Ben Wright: Yeah. Like being a parent, isn’t it? Learn that as you go. Being a parent, being an auntie, being an uncle, being a grandparent. Right. They all need time to learn as you go.
0:02:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that we see regularly with people in leadership, that there are challenges that no one’s really planned for, which is interesting because that’s today’s podcast episode.
0:02:40 Ben Wright: It’s funny, I actually went out a little while ago, a few months ago now, and said I would like to understand what the key challenges facing leaders are for the next 12 months.
0:02:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:02:52 Ben Wright: So this data was done earlier this year, it was published, so. But it had. It was aimed with a full year time span, so I think it’s relevant. And look, by the time this podcast airs, it’s early 2025, so this one’s actually, it’ll be coming on 12 months, so it’ll be right at the end of its. Its useful life. But I still think really, really impactful and I might supplement it with one that I know has changed, but for me, I wanted to know what challenges were out there. So we actually went and commissioned a study ourselves. So we paid for this study.
0:03:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Incredible, right?
0:03:24 Ben Wright: It was done by an independent market researcher based out of the us.
0:03:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:03:28 Ben Wright: And it used both primary and secondary resources. So for those who don’t know primary resources, as we are in this podcast, Jemimah and I, they are interviews, emails, sms, videos, whatever it may be that receive direct information.
0:03:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:03:45 Ben Wright: A secondary resource is one where you take information that’s available to you, so it will utilise other studies, websites, industry information, statistics, and you bring that together. So this study actually used both really impactful and I was very grateful to receive it.
What came out was five really clear themes that came out of that that I want to share right now. And the number one by far, over anything else that came out as a challenge for leaders, and in particular, sales leaders, I focused on. But that was a secondary scope focus. The primary thing was leadership in general, was talent management is number one.
0:04:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, because Matt, my goodness, there are so many jobs that are now available here. People have changed the way that they work. Keeping people getting new people on board.
0:04:39 Ben Wright: Yeah And they were the two key areas, getting the right people into the right roles and keeping people engaged. That whole phenomenon around quiet quitting has come out over the last couple of years, keeping people really motivated about what they’re doing, not only for their role in general, but also through a hybrid work environment. This came out as that really strong challenge for leaders.
0:05:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:05:02 Ben Wright: And by far, number one. And there’s so many things we can be doing to manage this. I might give one or two little snippets as we go, rather than go through all five and come back through them again. And here, I mean, for me it’s really clear is we need to have development plans for our team yeah. Right. So that can be. There’s a whole lot of ways we can do it, but we need to have development plans that are real.
So they’re not the once a year performance appraisal where people walk in. They do it to comply. Right. They’re there because they have to be. Even the leaders do it to comply. They build out a learning plan. Let’s do an Excel course. Let’s do one in negotiation. Let’s go spend more time with Bob from marketing and he’ll tell.
0:05:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Did you do the Excel course? No, I didn’t. Okay, Tick. Still passing.
0:05:41 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. These are development plans.
0:05:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Flashbacks to my government days.
0:05:45 Ben Wright: Well, I mean, it’s common in any industry you work in, but these are real development plans where you actually sit down and say, what do you need to develop them? For a lot of people, it’s. I mean, at the moment it’s been storytelling. People want to know how to tell stories. How do you manage change? How do you deal with adversity?
0:06:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:06:00 Ben Wright: How do you manage a hybrid workforce? How do you have challenging conversations? Right. These are the less simple development plans to roll out, but the ones that make a difference and then actually making sure they happen.
0:06:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:06:11 Ben Wright: Right. That’s a key part of it. And there’s lots of other stuff we can do about talent management, about keeping our people. The second part of that is having a great hiring process, I think, makes sure that you’re hiring more successfully.
0:06:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:06:24 Ben Wright: So instead of one out of two eyes being right, you’re getting two out of every three, for example. But so much we can unpack for talent management. But I think the main piece I want to share from here is you’re not alone. If you’re having trouble getting the right staff and keeping them motivated and engaged, you’re not the only one. Right. But you still need to do something about it. Cool.
0:06:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. I have nothing else you put. That’s eloquently. I was like, I’ve got nothing else to add to that. Absolutely. Talent acquisition, everything.
0:06:50 Ben Wright: Great. Number two. Now number two, three, four and five were all pretty close to each other in terms of their popularity. Number one was miles ahead. Number two was about building trust with customers.
0:07:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Okay. With customers.
0:07:02 Ben Wright: Trust with customers. So 70% of leaders. Right. And this is a summary of secondary and primary data. 70% of the data from our study said that our businesses are having roadblocks. Building relationships or building trust with customers. The key roadblock here is it’s much harder to get face to face. And generally people are wanting to deal with sales teams less and less. The numbers again, it’s in the high 70s from memory of prospects or potential customers don’t want to deal directly with sales teams.
0:07:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Well, and understandably, we’ve moved from much higher touch points. Now we were sitting, I think I was about 6 or 7 and now it’s about 12, 13, much higher touch points. We have a post Covid world where the face to face stuff isn’t happening as readily. We, we have people that are doing hybrid working hours. We have most people in women’s in the family sector. 80% of them have not returned to post Covid workforce numbers and just face to face hours. Workforce are still there, they’re just not doing the face to face hours. And men are sitting about 50% as well. They’re still doing the flexible stuff. We have a lot less chance to have face to face with a lot of people.
0:08:10 Ben Wright: Yeah, absolutely. And when we talk about touch points, pre Covid 5 to 6 engagements with a customer. Post Covid 11 to 13. And what we mean by that is that you’re needing to have twice the engagement with customers to get them to make a decision. But you’re just hearing from me at the same time that building trust with customers is harder.
0:08:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:08:26 Ben Wright: So what it means is that we have to start as organizations looking at other ways to build trust.
0:08:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:08:33 Ben Wright: So there’s face to face. There’s phone, there’s sms, there’s email, there’s social media, there’s third party referrals, there’s partners. So difference between referrals and partners being people refer our business. Right. Because they’ve used us and partners refer our business because they know of us. There’s lots and lots of different ways we can be building trust with our customers. Getting product in hand or getting service in hand. Giving trials, giving money back guarantees. Right. Giving time based opportunities to trial things. There’s lots and lots of things we can do, but it’s getting harder. So we need to be spending more time investing in building customer relationships. Because once we’ve built them, we’ve got to remember that that same challenge we had to build the relationships is going to exist for our competitors.
So number two. Yeah, that’s number two, how we build trust with customers. All right, number three, customer retention, keeping customers. Now, it’s funny, we’ve just spoken about building trust with customers.
0:09:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: I feel like these are closely aligned.
0:09:33 Ben Wright: Yeah, well, if you’re building trust with customers, your attention is going to be stronger. But it was really clear coming out of the study that how we keep customers, keeping them within the business is getting really difficult. And for me, that’s really problematic because when we talk about growing revenue, we can grow revenue through new customers, we can grow revenue through getting a bigger transaction size from our current customers, or we can gain revenue from old customers or existing customers returning.
This is the third lever that if it’s getting harder to have customers return to our business. Right. And retain them, then we’ve got a whole lever of sales growth that’s pulled out of our business. So why do I think this is happening? For me, I think it’s happening because something that has also changed this year more recently than these five pivots here, and it’s the one where I’m going to add some value to, so our five will actually become six, is that the demand from businesses to grow revenue has risen rapidly this year. They’re finding it harder and appetites are growing. So what we’re having is sales teams where there is more pressure on new sales and revenue growth, but the focus is not traditionally on return customers. So we’ve got sales teams who are out there trying to win, win, win new business, but there’s less focus on making sure that we retain existing.
0:10:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:10:54 Ben Wright: The best businesses I’m seeing handle this, bar none are those businesses that are able to separate out their sales teams. Hunters, those that are out there to chase business versus farmers, those that are out there to farm the execs, the account execs that we talk about, ones that are looking after the business and really investing in their current situation and how they’re engaging with us now. But also those businesses that are setting up some structure around how they contact customers, post program.
So it’s not your product’s delivered or your service is delivered or whatever suite of revenue generation you drive from is now, all said and done, it’s not just working to get that and you’re out, but it’s saying, right, what are the future problems or opportunities with customers that we can work on? And having teams clearly spending time on that.
0:11:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think articulating that and having your teams focusing on that is a complete game changer.
0:11:51 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Excellent. All right, so number one was all about people management, talent management.
0:11:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, great.
0:11:57 Ben Wright: Number two is about building trust.
0:11:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:11:59 Ben Wright: Number three was about retaining customers. Number four is social selling. Massive challenge for leaders. It’s come out with leaders saying, do you know what? I’m struggling with understanding where to spend my time in a social selling point of view, but I’m also struggling with how to make an impact to me.
0:12:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Let’s talk about social selling for a second. How would you define that? Give me an example. Social selling.
0:12:22 Ben Wright: So social selling is essentially using technology platforms that have a wide reach. Right. To get out to your customers.
0:12:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Great.
0:12:30 Ben Wright: So back to that. So I just want to repeat that. So we’ve got leaders saying not only am I unsure about where to spend my time, but I’m unsure about how to make an impact. And the numbers here are really clear. And these are from memory, these are HubSpot numbers from studies they’ve done. 78%. So 8 out of 10 salespeople who use social selling outperform those who don’t.
0:12:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:12:56 Ben Wright: So now that doesn’t say where to focus or how to make an impact. What it says is by using social selling, we’re generally gonna outperform. And look, you know social selling better than me. So I wanna hear your thoughts on this. But for me, my pieces of advice here are really clear. Pick one platform to start on and base that platform on where your customers hang out. Right. And then in terms of making an impact, it becomes a trial and error piece around looking at partly impressions, partly engagement, but partly where you get results. Right. So when customers come to your business, understanding where they come from, that is unfortunately not a linear game. But I’d love to hear your thoughts around social selling.
0:13:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, the social selling part’s interesting because for the most part when we talk about social selling, it is really around. There’s a couple of really big pieces to this. One is one, you are using these platforms to prove that you’re the best in the industry. And that’s where I think is really interesting, is that what we’re seeing now, statistically, 78% of people will grow to Facebook over Google.
0:13:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: So as an example, and this is a real life example, I recently relocated house and I needed to find a dentist in that area. And if I go to Facebook, I just get ads for all of Melbourne. I got 100 ads of all the different places and it was like Armidale and Baldwin and Geelong and I’m talking these hundreds of kilometres apart. And so I thought, well, I’ll just go to the local area and ask for. I went to Facebook and I went to a Facebook group and said, hi, I needed the area, I need a Facebook.
0:14:26 Ben Wright: Sorry, I think you said, the first piece is you said when you go to Facebook you get advertisements all around Melbourne. I think you meant Google.
0:14:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m sorry, Google. Yes, of course, apologies. I went to Google and there were just dozens of Places, places I went to Facebook next I used a social media platform, went over, went to a Facebook group and just said I need some help here. And a hundred people gave me the same recommendation. Now I know, and most people now know this, you can buy your Google ranking with $20. Your Google ranking can be at the Top pretty easily.
0:14:55 Ben Wright: And that’s by paying for search results.
0:14:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Whereas social proof where a hundred people are shouting your name to me, you have to go to this one dentist. It was an incredible experience. We have forgotten. I think a lot of the part when it comes to these social platforms is that one, you need to be on there. Two, people will look for a social media platform and a social selling place more frequently than they will trust Google. They want reviews, they want to know what you’re doing.
Thirdly, you can actually make very good sales using social platforms for the simple reason you ask for them. You currently have a complete at your fingertips somewhere where you can sell $100 product, a $10,000 product or $2 product as easily as each other as long as you’ve got the right person in front of you. And that’s where the number games really start. Social media also allows us to have third party validation very, very quickly with other people posting about us and sharing our things.
0:15:51 Ben Wright: So great. So your piece of advice for leaders who are struggling with where and how to impact on social media.
0:15:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Where are your ideal clients spending time and money? So what platforms are they on? If you’re working B2B you need to be on LinkedIn. If you’re working Facebook, definitely these are the places to start. You need to be posting every single day. No one’s happy about it. Very sorry. Every single day on there. And a hybrid of expertise posts, posts that ask directly for sales and ways to get in touch with you. The three click rules really clear here. If you do not make an appointment, buy our product now, have the links ready to go. If you don’t have that, you’re not going to. The conversion rate will be extremely low.
0:16:28 Ben Wright: Okay, right, great. So that’s the first four done?
0:16:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, five.
0:16:33 Ben Wright: That’s the first four. Building talent, building and developing talent.
0:16:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:16:37 Ben Wright: Trust from customers, retaining customers and social selling. Right, number five, here we go, tech. So this one here is 30%. The numbers here, 30% are around. About a third of leaders are reporting stress and anxiety. I might actually backpedal that. Around 30% of leaders are reporting stress and uncertainty doesn’t necessarily mean anxiety around which technology platforms to use. And so that’s not just AI that Includes CRM, that includes project management systems, that includes financial systems. Right. There’s a broad spectrum of so many systems being available, we’re just not sure what to use. Which is strange, right? In a world when we can integrate so many systems through APIs, we should be able to have a seamless system, but businesses are finding they’re not sure what to use, so we end up having funky systems.
0:17:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Well, there’s so many competing systems these days. Yeah, there was two or three CRMs 10 years ago and now we have hundreds of them that all offer different things for different people. You know, I’ve got project managers who want to use this one and then we’ve got, you know, financial ones who are making millions of dollars over here. And the problem is, with so much technology, of course this is going to be a real block.
0:17:46 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. And a really difficult one. I don’t have an answer that’s easy to implement here, but I have a process to follow and for me that’s to map the customer journey. So start at the beginning when they first interact with you and your business. Take them all the way to the end. Right. Cradle to grave here and map through your whole customer process, what does a great experience for them look like. And then start to link your systems in and it’s going to naturally form along the lines of a CRM through API links. If it’s not a full cradle to grave CRM API links into a project management software that then API links into your finance system that has safety bolt ons, that has everything else with it. Then around that start to look at layering in systems slowly that help improve efficiencies or customer engagement. That might be videos, we use some video software. It might be systems that help us write content, for example. It might be systems that help us pull together project or delivery information. Right. From all different places. Right. There’s lots of, lots of systems to look at. But I would start with the customer journey, map it out and then just go one by one. Not a whole lot of systems at once because it’s really difficult. And then if in doubt, keep it nice and simple.
0:18:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: The one thing I would add for this as well, systems are, I think extremely underrated as you’re scaling. And I think it’s the one thing that I think both of us focus on heavily. You need to get out of the way and stop being the problem and the bottleneck, which we often see with a lot of leaders as well. What I will say is that if your systems aren’t working now, if there’s gaps in that. Fix that sooner rather than later. I have seen powerful businesses taken down just because they didn’t have the right systems in place.
0:19:24 Ben Wright: Cool. All right.
0:19:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: All right, let’s see the five again, please.
0:19:27 Ben Wright: Talent management.
0:19:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:19:29 Ben Wright: Building trust with customers, retaining customers once you’ve got them. Social selling and tech stacks to use.
0:19:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that. So what’s your silver bullet?
0:19:39 Ben Wright: Very easy. For me, it starts with number one, talent management. That was a big ticket item. Spend time with your people, invest in them. Invest in the hiring process, invest in keeping them. The cost of people leaving businesses is huge. The cost of the wrong people staying in the right seat is huge. The cost of people making mistakes and then exiting the business is just as huge. So we really need to be investing time in our people, making sure that they are learning, making sure they are engaged and feeling part of your community. But as importantly, I think to that is making sure you have an ability to do all of that with some balance in your bandwidth. Right. And there’s lots of things we need to talk about here. It’s probably one for offline discussions, but if you can nail those things, I think then you’re really ticking off one of those key challenges yourself, Jemimah.
0:20:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I’d probably say social selling just because this is the one that I see most frequently. It’s one I’m more hands on with on a regular basis. You need to be asking for the sale on social media. You need to be putting on the website. Buy this thing. This is what you’re going to get from it. We get so scared of the rejection that we don’t even ask for the buy.
0:20:43 Ben Wright: Yeah, cool. Love it. Great. All right.
0:20:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: What a great podcast. That was a lot of fun.
0:20:48 Ben Wright: Excellent. It’s nice. Like, I’m really proud that we went and commissioned that study. So, yeah, we’ve actually got some data that we can.
0:20:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: You know, can I just say, I had this moment. I was like, Ben, I thought I was taking the nerd seat. No, you want it? Okay. Interesting. You can’t have the not funny and the nerds. That’s not how it works.
0:21:03 Ben Wright: Nerd away. I love it. All right, everyone, have a fabulous week. We’ve been your nerds in business and your friends in business and look forward to catching up again next week. See you later.
0:21:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: See you next week.
