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Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teamsâŠteams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. So today we have someone very close to home for me, a man who I've been friends with for a very long time and have a huge amount of respect as to how he runs his teams and his life. And that man is Nick Jones. So Nick is very much, very much a family man. He's got a wonderful family. Christy, two lovely kids. Harper's, eight, and Kelly, I think is five now. And he's been working in sales for 20-odd years, since 2003. But for the past six years, he's been the head of commercial and energy solutions at Shell. Shell Energy Australia is a very, very big brand. He's been in the energy industry for 13 years, so 13 of those 20 years, he's been very much focused around energy. Loves what he does. When he's not working. You will find him, though, doing some little bit different stuff, right? So he stays fit and healthy. He loves lifting weights, but surfing for him is a big thing. And mountain biking⊠one of the most dangerous, least dangerous sports, I think, in the world. Mental health is a big priority for Nick. He spends a lot of time talking about that with his teams. So for me, that means that he's taking care of himself, both physically and mentally, which is a huge part of the balanced, modern leader. So, Nick, first of all, thank you for taking some time out and great to have you here today.
Nick Jones:
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Good to see you last week in person.
Ben Wright:
Yes, we did. We ran into each other at the All Energy Conference, which will be quite a few weeks back by the time this one goes to air. But you take those chances to meet people face to face, right? The world is not easy to get face to face anymore.
Nick Jones:
Very good, good conversations and it's very good to just organically bump into people as you walk the floor.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, that's when you can have some of that most authentic, even humorous conversations right. Which drive the world
Nick Jones:
Yeah. Or introductions into people, whoever's the current conversation that you're having, that person bumps into you and you say, meet this person, and that draws a meeting and yeah, good couple of days.
Ben Wright:
Well, speaking of meeting into people, tell me, tell the listeners, what do you do and why are you so passionate about it?
Nick Jones:
Why am I so passionate about, I guess, sales and leadership? It's probably leadership than sales is probably more the way I'm balanced now. It's just something that I was very good at from very young. I was a good storyteller at school and in good ways and bad ways, I guess. And when I finished school, I didn't want to go to university. Just wasn't for me. I wanted to use what I felt was comfortable, which was being able to interact with people and get positive outcome. At that time it was real estate and then organically, kind of by chance, got into the energy space, which is close to 14 or so years now, I think, and then worked in the brokering space for a couple of years. Kind of liked it, but just didn't feel like it made a big enough impact, just from my perspective. Right. Everyone's different in what they love, but I was very focused on renewables and emissions well before it became this big public forum of debate and policy and all those types of things. So you and I both are from the slog days where it was not the best business case and there wasn't corporate governance and policy driving the outcome and it had to make sense financially. So I liked that challenge and yeah, then that led me to ERM, which is now Shell. So it's been a good ride.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. You mentioned something that I think probably had you ahead of your time and sorry, 20-odd years ago. Right. We are longer in the tooth than we were back then. But one thing you mentioned was creating positive outcomes for customers right, which I call value. And value is quintessentially a part of modern sales and modern leadership. So these days I'd actually call you certainly an experienced leader. Right. You've been doing this for a long period of time and I think you have a great blueprint as to how you go about leading your teams that stands the test of time. Right. Particularly during harder seasons, if you like, and warmer seasons when life's pretty good. So can we talk a little bit about what your leadership kind of go-to-market approach is?
Nick Jones:
Yeah, for sure. So I developed these five key sort of principles or foundation for how I think about running a team and managing myself. And I learn it through basically my trials and things that went well for me, things that went bad for me. And yeah, the five principles honesty, healthy ego, big on that. Family first. I'm huge on that too. Play to your strengths. Everyone tries to be this amazing all rounder and go into an MBA and go into a financial course and all these things, but sometimes you're just not geared to be amazing at it. So play to your strengths. And then, big thing that comes with sales, we talked about it before, the social environment, the things that go on with sales, the highs and the lows. So I call it managing your peaks and troughs. The big thing. Salespeople tend to be up and down.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, absolutely. I think we are trained to be able to influence and engage with others, but with that does often come a heavy toll. It can take a heavy toll on how you approach things because you've always got to be on when you're in front of people, right. There's often no second chances. So I really like those five characteristics. Right. We've got, healthy ego, we've got honesty, we've got family first, we've got managing your peaks and troughs and play to your strengths. So I think the honesty one really makes natural common sense. And I think these days it's very important in a world of transparent.
Nick Jones:
You got to be genuine.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. To be genuine and authentic. Right. I think we add to that
Nick Jones:
Authentic. Yeah. Don't sell something. There's this whole thing where there's those types of sales industries where the rep sells you something and it breaks in two months, but they don't care because they're onto the next one. You're never going to see them again. In the energy sector, it's repeat customers, it's referrals. You're never going to get there if you're not honest and genuine and selling a product that's actually going to provide value and impact.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. And the world of public reviews and a public profile is so easy to access now. I mean, I bought a stand up desk yesterday and the first thing I did was go and have a look at the ratings and the reviews on that company and I drilled in hard to see what happened when they had a warranty issue, because every company has warranty issues. And my first company I looked at, not great feedback on warranty and I went, you know what, I might just stick clear of that and go over to this company who's a similar price. Everything's pretty much equal, but their reviews are just slightly better. So, yeah, there is absolutely no place for putting garbage out there. But the one that I'm really intrigued about to talk about first is healthy ego. And we know that ego actually can be one of the most beneficial personality traits or characteristics of any type of sales operator. But when it goes from healthy ego to unhealthy ego, it can be really problematic. So how do you manage egos that start to get into that unhealthy zone?
Nick Jones:
You got to set your leaders up with the same principles so I can't keep an eye on everyone in the team. There's five divisions within my remit. So sometimes I'll spot it from someone that doesn't directly report to me. But having the leadership guys work on the same principles. So finding what and how you want to operate with your LT, and then when you spot it, sometimes you'll just let it go. But if you start seeing a pattern or a healthy ego can actually show someone disengaging and not wanting to participate because they just think that they're better than the subject-mattered people that are speaking to it, the experts, right? I've actually had some situations where I'll scratch my head around a certain individual that just doesn't want to do it. You got to see that is, are they feeling uncomfortable, are they feeling nervous? Or the impostor syndrome, I guess they just don't care because they think that they're better. So we're constantly looking for it. But ego is good as well, which is the healthy ego, which I have. And I used to have a bad ego. How? I found out if I had a bad ego, I did a 360, which is a very hard thing to do, and I recommend anyone do it. I did it about eight or nine years ago. You've known me for that sort of period before and after. So you could probably pinpoint the time when I sort of started to change. But that was what told me I wasn't being really the best person. And I had a really unhealthy ego. So there's yourself that can find it, but there's also having those kind of conversations where instead of approaching it, saying, âhey, you're being arrogant because you don't want to contributeâ. It's just like, âhow are you feeling today?â âAre you feeling okay?â Let them tell you. And then if they do say, I'm better than this, I don't want to do this, that's when you can bring up the conversation. Say, âhey, we're a team here.â
Ben Wright:
Yeah. One of the key pillars about giving feedback is asking, you know you've got some feedback to give, but yeah, that's right. You can ask those questions that get people engaged in that conversation. And then what you're actually doing is you're asking for permission to talk about something that can be quite difficult. So I love it. Fantastic. So when we're talking about family first as one of your key leadership principles, this for me is a really difficult topic because sometimes putting family first can be at the direct and polar opposite requirements of what the business needs and at times can actually, short term, in that moment, harm the business. So how do you go about balancing when there genuinely is conflict between family first and business needs?
Nick Jones:
Well, we're all paid to deliver an outcome or you own the business and you need outcomes. So definitely there's a duty of care and an obligation to your employer to deliver and get a return on the investment. Whether you're an engineer or you're in sales. However, I'm a strong believer that if your family and your home life is out of whack, you're likely not going to be delivering at work because your thoughts and your actions are going to be off. You're either going to be irritable, you're going to be distant, your mind's not going to be in the detail, you're just not going to be present in your role. So, yeah, we're a huge focus on family. If people travel for a couple of days, our rule is that first day you're back, you've got to have breakfast with the family and be present, and there's just time that you'll never get back if you miss too much with your kids. And I think everyone's experienced it at some point in their life. And I nearly lost my family probably six or seven years ago before my son was born because I had an unhealthy ego and I was putting work well in front of my family. But it wasn't actually work. It was money. I thought money was what was going to bring me happiness. And being in sales with uncapped bonuses, I just drove as hard as I could to earn as much as I could and didn't work out that well. And by changing that and flipping it, I still get a lot of those things. But my family is really good, and that's important. So we push that through the team.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. See what you're really talking about balance, making sure that you're balancing the needs of both your family and your business. And really strong teams are able to have others step in at short notice to help when a family emergency arises. But also, you might play to strengths, but certainly there's some shared strengths across those teams.
Nick Jones:
Yeah, definitely.
Ben Wright:
Well, let's talk about that, right? Playing to strengths. So people your team playing to strengths, pretty straightforward. What do you do when you've got someone whose weaknesses or areas of opportunity for growth are actually really important to delivering their role well, how do you go about managing that?
Nick Jones:
Yeah, I come across this a lot, so I'll have, for example, a lot of people in sales think that becoming a leader or managing a team is the only way to progress, or have that general manager at EGM walk past and say you're doing a good job, or just know who you know. Some people are just not cut out for it. So that's probably my biggest one, where it's like, what's next? The, what's next? I've done this this year. What's next? When you do their end of year review, we've got things that we do to enhance their career, and they work through the following year. So it's, again, like the open-ended questions. We tend to just say, oh, we're thinking this would be really good for you. And the reason we're saying that is because we see that they've got a skill gap there, so we'll put them through a course, and we'll work on those weaknesses the following year. So it's not like it's like they're really weak at something and they're just really strong at something. It's just the way we balance the team is the certain players like in a football game, right? You've got every player plays their role because they're good at that role, because of their height, because of their weight, because of their strength, all those different things, right. It's no different in our sales team, but if the halfback has to run the ball up, they can still do it. They might not make as much impact, but we'll still go forward. So that's kind of how the team sort of all play to their strengths, play to their positions, but they can fulfill and jump in. And then we just sort of train them through things that we see and spot and we let them choose if they want to do the course. If they don't want to do the course, that starts to show us that they're just not interested in it. And then if we really need them to make to do it, we put it into the KPIs and that they have to execute those courses through the year to get a portion of their bonus because it's a part of the role that's required.
Ben Wright:
Okay, so there's actually two things you're talking about there in terms of the playing to strengths, and the first one is around systemizing learning. So we're doing it through formal plans annually, or we're doing it through KPIs, or we're doing it through your system symbols and norms that you'll run with that person or with that team. And I'm a huge advocate for weekly training programs. Anyone that works with me, they'll hear the same message from me. Weekly training is mandatory, and you need to blend that between internal and external instructor led training with everything else that comes from it. So, formalized program is fantastic. The second bit you're talking about, which doesn't often come up, is the will to learn. So you can teach skill, that's absolutely fine. But if there's no will behind that, to learn those behaviors and wanting to grow,
Nick Jones:
It's a waste of investment.
Ben Wright:
That's right. And they're the people that you can very quickly see will generally stay at the level they're at, and often they'll go backwards. Right. Because unfortunately, change is inevitable in this world, and if you're not prepared to adapt right. I'm now heavily into social selling. I wasn't anywhere near that ten years ago. Right. But I recognize that I need to do that for my brand. So having that will and when you don't have that will, then generally they're the people that you're either offboarding orâŠ
Nick Jones:
Yeah, and it happens with the seasoned veterans a lot. I've got a very diverse team and I've got one guy who's been around forever and he came third last year in sales. And he's having the best time of his life because he's loving being around all the different types of people within our team, but he's not like someone he's going to post on LinkedIn or do like a social sort of push or anything like that. He still does it the old school way. Even hitches his caravan sometimes to do some of his regional trips. But he still is learning and open to learning, which is why it works. It's not you have to go so far to the right and change. You can just incrementally do things over time, but then you have the other seasoned veterans that don't pivot stay in their ways and the market moves ahead of them and then their performance drops. And where they sat once before at the top of the sales leaderboard, that they start to move down. And then you got that young person that got that high energy and has come up through this generation of that online forum. And customers buy through information now, information, we've done a lot of statistics and most customers are googling and searching before they even pick up the phone or reach out. So you really have to be sharp. And there's a lot of change going on. So it's a tricky, tricky time for sure.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Well, you talk about newer salespeople, certainly more junior in their careers. But millennials, millennials, millennials following. And I've lost track of that. But certainly for me, as that next generation comes in, managing peaks and troughs, I think younger or earlier in your careers is a lot more difficult. And I love the idea of when you've been away for a few days, you come back, you have breakfast with the family, then you get back into it. Any other go-toâs for managing peaks and troughs of your teams?
Nick Jones:
Yeah, definitely. So recently we did a two-day off site. Got a good friend of mine in Luke Sullivan who basically focuses on the mind anxiety levels of depression, but it's all very much focused around breath, cold water, controlling yourself for us, can be nervous in a boardroom or nervous before you're doing some public speaking or whatever it may be. So we did two days of that and did some teams events, which was fantastic. And that's how we do little things to manage those peaks and troughs. And the reason we did it, we had two resign in a very short period of time. One come from a different industry, thought they'd have a go, didn't fit with them, wanted to go back. Then we had one that was a seasoned veteran that just wanted to make a change. So we're always observing in our team of something like that happens. We normally go, right, we've been putting a lot of pressure on, we've been pushing for results. It's what we got to do. It's time to give back, give them a couple of days to decompress and then our return on that investment is tenfold. We had a really strong month the following month. Now, that's a way how we collectively manage the peaks and troughs, so we kind of throw the big fishing net out, right, to catch them all. We don't go around individually trying to find out who's struggling. But then the course that we did are things that I do on a daily basis. So, I sauna, I'll go cold water, I'll do breathing. I did cold water before, it was cool. I was doing it back in the day, so I didn't start picking it up now. But anyone who wants to get into it, get into it, it's great. But yeah, that sort of mental win in the morning. Exercise is crucial you talked about before training and proving at work on a weekly basis, like always doing something. It's the same with the exercise, right? If you don't put any work into it, you're going to feel like you're not going to feel good. So that's a big thing. Reading books, listening to podcasts, surrounding yourself with positive people, don't surround yourself with people that have got unhealthy egos are going to try and bring you down because it's just going to actually used to have this thing, right? So I had all these awards, used to win all the sales, individual things. I used to get really awkward when I'd win it and I felt nothing. I didn't feel anything or even if I'd win a big transaction. I once did this deal, it was huge in Singapore. I didn't feel a thing. And this is eight, nine years ago, and I used to. Why is that? Probably because I was already thinking 10 miles down the road and not staying in the moment. So a big thing, what we do is try and make people be in the moment, just sit for five minutes and enjoy it and then we give praise as a collective group, but make sure that people give themselves a pat on the back, because then you'll find you'll get through those troughs a bit easier, for sure. But it's a byproduct of the sales industry, unfortunately, and that can be from the way you're managing your afternoons after work and all that kind of stuff, or it can just be that you're not putting in that training, but not just from a healthy from up here as well, in mental game, you've got to be working on that or you're just going to burn out. And that's why I think our retention rate for sales reps is really high. I've been at Shell for seven years. I've got team leads that have been with me that whole time. Whereas remember when people used to say to you, sales reps will last about two years, then they're going to go somewhere else. I think if you work to those helping those peaks and troughs, your retention of good staff is going to be, itâs going to pay off.
Ben Wright:
Absolutely, no doubt. And I think you've summarized peaks and troughs pretty well. We have a collective approach where you're managing at a team level. There is also a level of individual intervention whilst you don't go searching for it. And that comes down to personal things that work really well. Right. Saunas, cold baths or cold showers. I'm actually putting sauna into my new place and cold bath into my new place. Come and have a go one day.
Nick Jones:
Highly recommend it. Don't go the infrared. Go the old school because it goes hotter. The infrareds only go to about 60. It's not hot enough.
Ben Wright:
Well, I was in an 85 degree sauna the other day and wow, that tested me out.
Nick Jones:
Yeah, you want to get up to that 80.
Ben Wright:
That's where you're starting to get very warm. Well, so there we go. There's an added bonus. Today we've talked about sales leadership and some of the modern leadership essentials and how to sauna effectively. So if anything, we're not diverse. But thank you, Nick, thank you for your time today. Very grateful. Please check out Nick Jones, you can find him on LinkedIn. Nick, I think thatâs the best place to get in touch with you?
Nick Jones:
Pretty much don't do any other socials. That's about as far as I'll take it, but yeah, that's it. Or good old fashioned mobile phone or email.
Ben Wright:
Excellent, excellent. Well, I know Nick is always happy to talk with people, so if you feel like reaching out, please do so. But until you find that time, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thank you. Everyone.
E42 5 Modern Leadership Essentials That Drive Highly Engaged Teams, with Nick Jones
