What do farming and sales have to do with each other, and why would you want to read a sales book written like an almanac? Today’s guest has thoughts about the connections between harvesting and sales, which is why he wrote the book Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Guide for Planning the Perfect Year. Listen in to hear more about Nigel’s work, where he gets started with his clients, and why he decided to write his book the way that he did.
Episode Highlights:
- What Nigel does
- What equity-backed means to Nigel
- Nigel’s international clients
- Where Nigel gets started with advising companies
- How well the companies that Nigel works with know their audiences
- How long Nigel works with clients
- What prompted Nigel to put sales advice into a book that reads like an almanac
- The problem with taking a short-term view
- Where to find Nigel online
- Nigel’s six-step hiring process
Resources:
Transcript
Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. It’s been a while. I admit I’ve been a little bit on the nesting side of life trying to get ready for spring. It’s 2021 as I’m recording this introduction. This week’s guest is a great friend of mine by the name of Nigel Green. Nigel Green is also an author of a book called Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac for Planning the Perfect Year.
I really want you to listen to Nigel. He’s more on the sales side, but he covers the entire pipeline as many of you know, my heart, my soul is focused on top of the funnel, starting conversations with people we don’t know, or re-engaging people who have been dormant in the pipeline.
Nigel specializes in super growth—high-growth companies, and he also adds predictability and consistency to the pipeline, but he’s doing it from the standpoint of managing those more complex sales. He handles prospecting, closing, and servicing. He’s a great guy and I really love for you to take some time today and listen to our conversation. We’re going to be talking about some of the principles that transcend that pipeline all the way from the tippy-top of the initial conversation through the close one and beyond. Welcome, Nigel to the podcast.
Nigel: I am a sought-after adviser that helps executives and sales leaders build best-in-class sales teams. In its simplest form, the author of Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac for Planning the Perfect Year, which you’re very familiar with. I typically work with mid-market, equity-backed companies that can’t afford to miss their number.
Marylou: When you’re thinking about that segment of equity-backed companies, this is something that is intriguing to me because equity-backed could be angel investing, it could be round B or above where you have a team in place. There are more working parts. There may be actually the beginnings of a cross-functional demand-generation type of setup where you have the product, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got sales, you’ve got service, you’ve got delivery. But even though it’s a small company, you’re starting to see these roles pop up. They’re not all worn under the same hat by one person or so.
Elaborate a little bit more about what that means to you—equity-backed. Are there certain puzzle pieces that you like to see in place before you know in your heart of hearts that it would be a good fit to work with you?
Nigel: Yeah. I’ll tackle that in two parts. What does equity-backed mean to me, and are there certain things that I like to see in place? I’ll let that be the second piece. Whether it’s angel investing or later stage private equity investing where the equity partner comes in as the majority shareholder in the business. The common thread between those two ends of the spectrum is that there was a thesis for the investment and a promise made by the leadership team around how we’re going to go to market, the economics that drives this. And then typically, around some timeline for liquidity because all investors that go in an equity situation, they want their money back and some stated return on investment.
For me, what makes those situations unique is that you can’t try everything as a consultant. There are constraints that will dictate what the team is able to do, and those constraints are driven by the covenants that they made to their investor around this is how we’re going to do it. This is what we think the upside is. This is the timeline by which we’ve committed to delivering these promises to you. That’s very different than, say, an entrepreneur that self-funds her own business or it’s a family business.
You don’t have the pressure around capital constraints, investment horizon, liquidity events, all of those things are very interesting dynamics that limit optionality for the management team and for me the consult it. The second piece of that is what of my looking for? When I go in, I look for equity-backed ideas that already have a proof of concept, already have a customer base that provides insight on how receptive the market is to the offering, and speak to some degree the scale that still exists for that company.
I also look at how well-capitalized is it? Is it a situation where they are in the mid-cycle of the investment and things haven’t been going well, so the equity partner is not happy, less likely to invest more into ideas or strategies that I think will work? Have they been hitting their revenue and EBITDA numbers in the past?
Those are two real drivers for me to determine whether or not what I can do will be helpful because most of what I do, Marylou, is an offense. An offense requires capital. It’s expanding into the novel markets. It’s expanding the portfolio to some degree or making subtle tweaks to the offering that might allow us to go deeper with some of our existing relationships, and all of that is heavily predicated on the ability to reinvest in the business.
Marylou: Interesting. Growth companies, not necessarily companies that are trying to figure out how to cut costs or not really looking at their core competency or why they’re in business to begin with with their product or service, but that focuses on the growth engine. Whether it be going to the base with more product share growth or growing with net new. As long as there’s a growth component to it, then that’s good business for you. Is that correct?
Nigel: Correct.
Marylou: Cool. Are there certain verticals that you think are more thrown into this type of growth mentality? Let me just share with you really quickly what I’ve been experiencing, that is European companies appear to be more open to the idea of independence coming in and assisting in the growth process where I find that sometimes companies in the United States feel like they’ve got a handle on it. They feel like they have the support they need from their investment base, through mentors or board membership, and things like that.
Do you experience that or do you think it’s really focused on, look, we’ve got an agenda here? We’ve bought into the agenda. We’ve promised a certain outcome. Who we bring in to help us get it is immaterial as long as we get it over the goal line.
Nigel: I don’t know that I have experienced that. I’ll say in my current portfolio, I have three international clients. One is in London, one is in Ireland, and one is in South Africa. I think that they are limited by the amount of expertise that they can go get locally around sales specialization. They are met with the same pressures and an even growing amount of pressures that some of these American companies are facing, but they don’t quite have the bench of talent available to them.
For instance in South Africa, even in a big city like Johannesburg, the notion of a sales development rep is completely foreign. No one does it. Never even heard of it.
Marylou: I could totally attest to that because it’s funny, I’ve been working in Denmark and Europe for a few years now. Most of the folks who are on my teams that started fresh out and started learning business development are now independents that are doing consulting work and doing very well. They moved into management because it is a foreign concept.
What was great about our relationship together is that they have the cultural knowledge of how to swim within the lanes of culture as it relates to the European culture. But also introduce this repeatable, systematic process of demand generation and how that is used to create a predictable stream of revenue for the company.
It’s one lever to pull, but it’s a lever that these companies are not familiar with necessarily in Europe still to this day, but the United States has built-in, well, we know how to do that. It’s been around forever, which really is not the case but it’s interesting how the culture here because they know the terminology, the words. They’ve heard it. They’ve heard STR. They’ve heard hand-off. They’ve heard separation of roles, but to actually implement it correctly here is an uphill battle trying to fight for, look, you’re not doing it right. Here’s how you fix it.
It’s interesting that you mention that there is a knowledge gap, but there is also more of a receptive mindset to trust that you’re going to deliver a process that’s authentic because of a very community-orientated Europe versus here. Also, that will produce the scalable and predictable revenue that they’re looking for.
Let’s pretend you’ve got someone in here, they meet the criteria for you, as an independent consultant, where do you focus first? What is your recipe for going into companies like this? How do you get started? There are so many I’m finding cobwebs everywhere. Is there a magic hierarchy of detective work that you do in order to pull together a good project plan for them?
Nigel: Magic, detective all seems a bit far-fetched for the work that I do. You mentioned cobwebs. I guess a good analogy for what I do is I just have a good duster. I bring the duster in and remind them that underneath this cobweb of nuance, politics, bureaucracy, and turf guarding, there are actually some things they’re doing really well so let’s focus on them. Where focus goes, sales grows. We focus on things that they have been doing well.
The thing to remember, like I said, part of my criteria is that they have an established customer base. It’s not like they’re out banging a gong for some product that the market doesn’t want. Typically, we just start by looking at transaction history over the last 12–24 months and seeing how it has shifted or moved over time. One of the first things that I like to do is really challenge them on how they allocate resources. Resources, not only being financial resources in terms of sales and marketing budget but literally numbers of FTEs, types of FTEs into the marketplace.
What I found to be largely universal, whether it’s a geographical territory model, they have sales specialization around the product, they’ve done your work of specializing top of the funnel from account executives to customer success on the back end, the market has moved but the go-to-market strategy stayed. They built their budget for the selling year based on historical facts and figures that may not play true in the current year.
I challenge them to redeploy their sales team in ways that are going to create a more meaningful lift in the business. For example, you may not need three reps in Dallas because there’s no competitive threat. You have most of the market share. You need to redeploy them into other markets in adjacent geographies that you could land and expand or do a hub-and-spoke, open up a new offering. A lot of what I do is very much still brick-and-mortar driven.
But for even those that have a SaaS offering or something that is largely accessible to anyone, I still find it that they have resourced the selling year based on what last year did, not what this year needs to do.
Marylou: This is one of my pet peeves too. Do you find that companies who have clients already and you mentioned this Texas model of wait, there’s nobody here that’s competitive, so it sounds like there’s some market analysis, market share analysis, total addressable market, the total serviceable market that is done, being done. They have something they can hand you that doesn’t have three inches of dust on it that you can look at and help them align the salespeople. I love my chief commercial officer—where the money is—so you can align people where the money is.
Do you find that some of what you do is going through that and reorganizing, or do you find that some people don’t have that? What has been your experience in going to companies that meet your criteria? How well do they know their total addressable or total serviceable market?
Nigel: Interesting question. The truth is that probably half of them know it. They know how to go get the data. Where they fall short, Marylou is that the data exists in some disparate system. Sometimes, if it’s a healthcare company, you may have all this really great customer and patient data that’s on the electronic medical record but doesn’t ever get back to the sales team. Marketing has this entire tech stack of really great tools to tell you how you acquired the lead and none of that is again making it to the sales team to make informed decisions. They have it, they’re just not doing their part to go and get it.
The other half of them don’t realize how easy it is to go get the data. They already have the tools—they have a hub spot or they have even a third-party data system like Seamless.AI or ZoomInfo. They’re not in very measured cadences extrapolating how they’re interacting with their customers and testing different things to see what’s working, what’s gaining traction, what seems to be falling behind pace.
I guess the point here is that data is not at the heart of the sales organization. The company is data-rich but the sales team is data-poor.
Marylou: We are finding very similar, which by the way, everyone listening to this call, drives me insane. I’ll be the first to admit this. Let’s call it an outbound campaign, which is what I like to do in life. That’s my favorite thing, trying to start conversations with people we do not know. How can we plan an effective campaign when we don’t know the universal size of the list?
Can we afford to spray-and-pray—we don’t do that anymore, I know, but can we afford to sort of test the market out and see if there’s a variety of accounts that meet certain criteria that may not be in our sweet spot, but we want to experiment to see if that’s something that could be a consistent revenue generator for us to contribute to the overall picture? Or do we have to be extremely careful because, in our universe of accounts, we can count on our hands? There are not that many of them. It’s funny because my life revolves—I always say this, I’m sure you’ve heard me say this, we live and we die by the list.
What that means essentially is there is a universe of markets out there that our product or service probably works for. But there’s a subset of that called a total serviceable market. That is the market that we can use for these types of campaigns in order to generate predictable revenue. It’s really hard to find someone, something, some entity within the company who has a pulse on that. It makes it really hard to build predictable sales programs when they don’t really have a vision of what the total serviceable market even looks like.
I was just curious when you come in, I know you’re a fixer. You come in and you have the luxury of looking at all the different channels of revenue generation—those that are predictable and those that are not—to put together the entire package. But for those of us who specialize in a certain area, it becomes very challenging.
To this day, there are still some clients that do not have a pulse on it. It’s not like you can go to a ZoomInfo and look because their audience base is not something that’s collected in a database somewhere. The harvesting of records for a list it’s very difficult. You have to find different ways to solve that puzzle piece. I think it’s really fun though at the same time, when you finally get that breakthrough that something that you can rely on that has, what I call the ca-ching machine, that just keeps generating revenue because you have the ability to just set that aside.
Okay, that’s working now. That lever is working. It’s generating the base revenue that we’re looking for. Then we can go on to a different engine and see how we can optimize that.
In a typical relationship that you have with—think of your favorite client, how long are you hanging out with these people? Is it something that is a very long-term thing for you? Do you see—like my world, it’s love-them-and-leave-them? I like to go in, I have a six-week program, I get them up and running, and I kiss them all goodbye and go on to the next one. What’s a typical engagement for you based on the work that you do for this everlasting growth that you’re looking for with your clients?
Nigel: I have a good mix of long-standing relationships that I’ve worked with since 2017, 2018 when I became an independent consultant. I have some of that going into it, I know it’s just going to be a very discreet offering. You know that feeling. Sometimes it’s your choice if it’s going to be a very quick and discreet engagement. But I would say typically, everything that I do revolves around two productized services.
One is more for the B2B market, which has a sales team that calls on a traditional buyer inside of another business, and the other one is more for a sales team that has a direct-to-consumer component. Sometimes it’s even B2B2C like in the instance of a healthcare practice that you might want their patients because what you do is great for the patient, but your customer—who you’re trying to get to do business with you—doesn’t provide that service to them. It’s a B2B2C.
It starts with analytics with the management team to try to determine where they want to go, what’s important for them, what’s been working, what completely out of bounds, and then setting into motion discreet interventions over the next period of 90–180 days that they take and go and implement. I usually spend 1-2 days in a strategy session giving them very practical things that they can do that will move the lever now. Again, one of those is the sales team review is more for B2B sales teams, and then the patient acquisition machine which is a healthcare-specific strategy session that I do is more for B2C or B2B2C.
Inevitably, during that discovery and pre-workshop analysis and assessment, I bump into opportunities that I find really interesting. That will lead to 12 months, 18 months, like in some instances, multi-year relationships where it’s on and off or I’ve got three clients that love me so much, they asked me to join the board of advisors. I’m now a shareholder in the business and regularly participate in the ongoing initiatives within that company. It’s all over the board.
I feel like the workshops give me a paid opportunity to learn how helpful I really can be for them and then set out additional engagements if I think it’s something I can enjoy and help them with.
Marylou: I think that’s really nice. The beauty of being an independent consultant is that we have permission to really look at the client and understand the needs of the client. Rather than force-feed them into what we have as an offering is that we work within where they are—where they are in life, where they are in their head.
A lot of times, clients like to introduce me as an employee of the company. It’s like she’s part of us. That’s great. I mean I think that that really speaks volumes of the trust that clients have with people that they feel are going to be instrumental in whatever goals they set out to be. Whether it’s a growth goal, products share, market share whatever it is.
Let’s turn now to the book that you wrote. For those of you in the audience, Nigel’s written a book about selling. What really attracted me to help him by writing the foreword for the book was he has a love of nature, farming, almanacs, and getting back to the earth kind of thing. I want you to share with the audience what was the reason or what attracted you to putting sales methodology, sales skills, sales mindset, sales habits into a book that read like the almanac?
Nigel: Well, it does start with a deep love and respect for Mother Nature. I studied geology in college, and not a lot of folks know that about me, but I went to a liberal arts school on a mountain in the middle of nowhere—Tennessee. I didn’t let my studies get in the way of my education, and that was I was just wandering around, looking at the earth, and wanting to be outside. I chose to be a geology major because every one of my classes was outside. School was going to the Grand Canyon for two weeks.
That’s school? Okay, great. Let’s do that.
Marylou: That’s fun.
Nigel: That was at a very indelible time. Colleges for a lot of people leave a lasting impression on you. I’ve always found myself drawn to activities that keep me outside. Fast forward to 2015, we bought a farm in Kentucky and came and spent the weekends here. Then I found myself on Sundays not wanting to go back to Nashville.
In 2018, we moved here full time. When we found ourselves full-time living in an agricultural community, by the way, the part of Kentucky that we live in is the largest corn producer in the US in 2017. Per capita, more corn comes out of southwest Kentucky than anywhere else.
You go to church with farmers. You see farmers. It became very clear to me that farmers like sales leaders, their identity is intrinsically mapped to did they produce or not. You don’t see many farmers driving the equipment, doing the work without producing a crop. That was one of the first disconnects that I noticed there. There were plenty of folks to call themselves a sales leader, but they’re not producing and hitting targets year in and year out. You see the farmer can’t survive very long in the profession without actually producing the harvest.
I said, well, if that’s true, let’s study the nuance a little bit more. I’ve found that to be a farmer, you can have one growing season. You can have multiple growing seasons. You can plant outdoors. You can work in a greenhouse. There are all these different ways to farm, just like there are all these different types of sales leadership. You can have a sale cycle that is in days or weeks, or maybe you have just one annual sales cycle. It all comes down to one last month as to whether or not you hit your number.
But the one thing that’s true for farmers and sellers is that regardless of the sales cycle, it’s always going to be for the farmer too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, and the markets are always going to be really terrible. For the sales leader, there’s always going to be not enough leads, not enough talent, too much pressure, all these things. But yet despite that, the farmer still produces a crop.
I said, what is it? How did they do that? It came down to seven discrete principles that I think if sales leaders practice these principles, regardless of where you are in your selling year. This isn’t season-driven, it’s not like there’s a harvest season or planting season. A farmer can be harvesting corn today and tomorrow planting wheat right behind it. While they’re harvesting, they’re prepping to plant. I felt like it’s principles and not seasons that lead to consistency in the result.
I wrote a book that has seven principles that every farmer—regardless of what they farm—follows without fail, and those that do it produce crops. I think if sales leaders will recognize how to map these principles to their work—again, they’re timeless just like an almanac. An almanac is something that’s been around forever. You’re not going to find any quick fixes, any fads, any pieces of technology in this book. It’s all about do these things, behave this way, pay attention to this, and you’ll be here next year.
Marylou: As you said, there’s probably a lot of common sense in the book, but the way that it’s organized, the rhythm, and the cadence of it I think is something that—for those of you sitting out there, thinking maybe some of this is just inherent the way I do stuff, which is so true. A lot of times, when we look at people who are super good at what they do, they can’t really pinpoint per se what it is about the excellence that allows them to propel in whatever they’re trying to achieve.
But then there are some of us who need to work that into the endurance of our daily life and get these habits formed so that they do become a habit. That’s why I like the way the book is laid out because it does allow you to enter where you’re at and apply the principles over time. It’s like you said, it’s not a quick fix, it’s a journey. It’s giving you permission to do it at your pace but also being mindful of the fact that there is an ultimate goal here and that is a successful crop. That is successful whatever it is that you’re doing in your job.
Being successful at it, however, you define success, but keeping an eye on the areas that you can eke out a little bit of improvement here and there as long as you’re following the process. Your clients, have you found that they get that and you’re attracting the people who are like-minded to you and follow this? Are you working with a combination of people who are super-focused, we got to get this done now and it was due yesterday. Or is it more of a long-term attitude you think that clients that you’re attracting based on the book? I mean that’s how you wrote the book.
Nigel: I’ll start by saying this. I should remember the source but it’s slipping me, and maybe it’ll come to me as I get further into the explanation. The average sales leader, so chief sales officer, VP director that level that’s responsible for did we have the number or not is 19 months. That is shorter than professional and college coaches at the highest level of any sport. What I find is that every company has the latter of what you just said. We’ve got to get this done now. Urgency, go, go, go.
What I find is that it’s misguided. It’s all driven by such short-term, short cycle metrics that planning now for tomorrow, or we’ve got to get this seed in the ground. We’ve got to get these prospects nurtured for next year doesn’t even cross their mind. I’m finding that what this book does is it shows teams how the channel that sense of urgency so that it’s a little bit more future stated. It’s teaching leaders how to be grounded in the present. Yes, now, now, now. Hit this month, but also recognizing that you can’t win the year in the first month but you sure can lose it if you don’t think about the things that need to be done now for later.
I think the seventh principle in this book, and I tell the reader that it’s the one that I suspect most companies will tend to ignore, maybe just close the book after the sixth principle, which is harvest. The seventh is restore. It’s not about rest, it’s about fixing. If you go and plant the same crop in the same piece of the ground year over year, each year the yield is going to be less because you take out of the soil vital nutrients that are necessary to the vitality of that plant. What does that mean?
Well, think about your team. If you just give them a bigger number every year, nothing else changes, and they run from December 31st right into January 1st with a new quota, a new comp plan, they’re like a machine that’s going to break down at some point. If you apply that same thing to your customers. If every year you just ask them to spend 3% to 5% more or you give them a price increase and you haven’t made any meaningful investments into their business other than the value proposition of the offering you represent.
If you’re not really a partner to them that is helping your customers think about problems and challenges unique to their business outside of the problems that you’re offering solves, they’re going to leave. I think those two things, those two examples of not restoring the business are why sales leaders fail. They are so focused on ending the quarter, ending the year, and then immediately shifting to here are my targets for this year. They don’t think about the people on the team and in the businesses that are real humans that have needs, that need to be tended to in order to make this year another success. They don’t make it.
Marylou: Yeah. It’s relationships. It’s all about the carrying and feeding of long-term relationships and how we can serve. I interviewed someone on my podcast a few months ago—selling is serving. He is also related, this is very interesting, to farming. He’s more of dairy cows, and he is a nutritionist for dairy cows to maximize milk production. That’s where he started. He never thought of himself as a salesperson, but he is. He also has a process that he wrote a book about.
It is based on being of service. I get the sense from the book that you wrote, by the way, everyone the book is called Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac for Planning the Perfect Year. It’s on Amazon in all the various formats. I recommend that you download it, read it, or buy it, read it, if you’re a hard copy person. But I think that’s what it is. It’s all about selling is serving. It’s building relationships over time. It’s slowing down.
Slowing down and looking inward as to why you’re here, how you serve, and who would best benefit from what you have to offer. Then taking that to the level that will end up getting you to your goal over time. Like you do, you work with a variety of different companies. Widgets, you mentioned the SaaS service. There are probably perpetual or premise-based systems that you work with because, in healthcare, they’re still a little behind the times on something. I think that speaks volumes to the fact that having it in the vertical, similar to healthcare, where there are a variety of different methods of service offerings.
This can apply across those. It speaks volumes as to how this book and your methodology would work in a variety of different industries. I really appreciate, Nigel, your time on this call. It’s been really fun.
Nigel: Thank you, Marylou. You know you have a special place in my heart. Your work forever shaped my career. I found this little book called Predictable Revenue in 2014 and I said stop the press. You can do this?
Marylou: Well, it’s funny, it’ll be almost 10 years. It is 10 years. It was released in 2011. It’s 10 years. It was a book that when I first worked with Aaron Ross who’s the main author of the book, it was something that I really gravitated to because I had come from the call center environment—predictive dialing—and we had a lot of volumes. But we also had a lot of good technology and figuring out how to route, disposition, or wrap up a call. When he applied the calls in the context of the internet, that’s what really intrigued me as a user.
It’s been a great journey. I find that people are still learning. People are still trying to figure this out and probably will well after I’m gone and retire, but it’s been really fun. I’ve met great people like you along the way. There’s always great learning. I think most of the people that I feel are successful in this industry and other industries are the ones who consider themselves lifetime students. I think that was something that I definitely, when you and I first met, got that sense.
Now you have a book out. I just think it’s fabulous. Again, thank you so much for your time. How do people get a hold of you in case they’re like alright, I need to talk to this guy? Where shall we look for you on the internet?
Nigel: Nigelgreen.co, not .com, just .co. Green is spelled like the color. If you go to the website, you can find my book. It’s always for sale for at least $10 cheaper than where you’re going to get it at Amazon or anywhere else. You’re going to find other really helpful long-form resources. For instance, coming out next week at the time of this recording so the end of February 2021 is a new long-form piece on hiring. How to hire sales reps in this virtual selling world because no big surprise, virtual sellers are fundamentally wired differently than those that are used to showing up and being in a room.
Marylou: Different skill set. […] be a teacher.
Nigel: I have laid out a six-step process that regardless of what you are hiring for, you need to follow these six steps. If you do that, you will never have a perfect record with hiring, but you will have a better record with hiring.
Marylou: That’s fabulous. I love steps. Steps and data just open my heart. I just love it. Thank you, Nigel, for your time. I’ll make sure we put all these connections in the show notes for everybody. I look forward to hearing from you again as life goes on here. Great to have you on the show. Thanks so much.
Nigel: Thank you.