Dan Hammond on The Sales Scoop, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer Squadify

Automated Transcript

0:07

Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a weekly live show for tech startup founders who want to improve how they sell. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for today. I'm a computer scientist and ex Software Engineer with two decades experience in B2B sales and marketing, and I'm delighted that I'll be joined today by Dan Hammond, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Squadify. Good afternoon Dan.

0:42

Hi, good afternoon. Alastair, thanks for having me on the show.

0:44

Yeah, absolute pleasure. So as people, this is a debut for us, the first time we've had a live guest, so we're honoured that it's due. Dan, thanks for joining.

0:54

We. We aspire to bring the shiniest pearls of wisdom from experienced sellers, and that's why we've got you all I know you have a host a wealth of experience selling professional services as a senior consultant and and SAS, as well as in your role at Squadify. Perhaps for anybody who doesn't know, you could give a quick introduction to yourself and Squadify and your role in the sales engine there. Thanks, sure, sure, sure. So I actually, you know, my career started in sales and marketing roles, in in healthcare, actually in medical devices, and then, as you say, I went in professional services, did a lot of leadership development

1:39

in that role, and then we founded Squadify in order to democratise leadership development and teamwork. So sales have been with me all the way through that. I in my first role, I was responsible for sales, for Computer Services, and I sort of got this, got my

1:58

grounding, I think in the sort of, yeah, I'm quite old, so early, late 80s, early 90s in sales. But that stayed with me throughout, even when I was working with surgeons in medical devices I was selling when I went into professional services, same thing. So it's really stayed with me throughout, and now, as the co founder Squadify, we're at that stage where we do a lot of founders selling so out and about, talking to a lot of clients all the time, helping, you know, really hoping to demonstrate the value of Spotify to them and their their organisations.

2:36

Fantastic. And, you know, talk to me a little bit about how, how your sales engine has changed as a result of Squadify, the platform and the services. I always get the impression that you, you must have the, you know, the most efficiently functioning sales engine on the planet, because you're experts at collaboration and you've got the Squadify platform. How has your selling approach changed as a result of your founding Spotify, and your expertise in that area? So I think, well, what Squadify is all about, it's worth saying Spotify is all about helping teams to build engagement and drive performance, and we do that through a SAS platform where we gather data from the teams on their teamwork, so everyone has a say on their teamwork, and then we use AI and analytics to point them in the direction of one or two things they can do to improve that. And it's, it's a really simple process. They're continually doing this sort of in an agile way, working on their teams. And this can work across whole organisations as well, so that they are building performance. So that's what we're doing. I think our sales process,

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interestingly, we're sort of,

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we're alone in the category. Pretty much. We didn't realise this when we set out. I spotted this thing on LinkedIn recently. So we're not doing this because it's easy. It's because we thought it would be easy. And while that's not entirely true, you know, starting a category is really hard. So there's a lot of

4:12

sort of client, prospect education that needs to be done. So there's no sort of, oh, you've got that. We do that but cheaper, or we do that but faster. There is not that, so there is too whereas there are a lot of engagement tools and individual tools, there's not that much for teams. So I think our difference here is the sort of need for education and learning on the part of our that we have to impart to our potential clients along in the sales process. So, that makes life a little bit interesting, yeah, okay, and the way that you're going about selling, you know, Squadify is a platform, but there's services that come along with it, you know. So, so it's a so relatively kind of,

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you know, complex.

5:00

Sell. And so your, you know, which I think ties into the sales scoop that you want to share with us about how best to

5:13

engage a particular point before we get a little bit too further. You know, you and I discussed a couple of things that would be really interesting. But I think this, this, this tip that you'd hit on is fascinating, and something I am really keen to get into. So, you know, without further ado, please tell us, what is your number one tip you want to share today? Dan, what is your sales scoop? So first of all, you are right that this is a complex cell, that we've got technology, we've got services we're selling to enterprise, but also sometimes to individual senior teams. So there's, there's a lot in that.

5:50

And in fact, when you first spoke to me about this series, the thing that I'm going to talk about, it happened, I think, the day before, and it just landed perfectly. So the thing you know, sales, of course, is about delivering value. It's like it's, in my view, it's a consulting process to understand what your client needs, sounds obvious, and then to match whatever you have to that need, you know, without too much levering in, but to actually just really understand, deeply, understand what they need, and to solve pain points or accelerate something they want to do. The sales scoop is this, that to do that, you need to ask, obviously, ask a lot of questions. But there's a trap and that we fell into that trap in this example that I was talking about, and that is when the client gets on the call and says, Great. Tell me all about Spotify, or tell me all about Company X. And there's a little bit of you that says, ah, actually, quite a big part of you, to be honest, that says, Ah, great. They're already interested. This is great. We're on this call to talk about Squadify. So fantastic. Why don't I just want to do that? I'm client centric. They've asked me to do it. Let's do it. Let's get in there. And it's a massive mistake. However much you think you're responding to the client's needs. It doesn't work. It's not going to end well. So there's a moment here of being, yes, client centric, but also quite assertive about this, to be able to reverse that moment to say, I'd love to do that, somewhere along these lines, love do that, but so that I don't just, you know, pitch at you or tell you generic stuff. Can I understand a bit more about your role, your goals, the position you're in, the challenges you're having, whatever your question is, so that I can make sure that I'm really aligning what I say to your actual, actual needs. So being quite transparent about that, it's that sort of pivot, really, that you have to make in the core when that happens, however lovely this client is saying, Yes, go on. Tell me actually owning that and not switching out to do pitch first, because it's going to go wrong.

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Yeah, you've just, I've just gone on a bit of an emotional journey. You've taken me back into the room where, you know that's happened, and I'm thinking about, you know, how many times maybe I've done that when I didn't need to, or I shouldn't have, and I'm guessing, you know,

8:33

it's quite jarring, because the way you were describing before, it's just, it's natural to just answer the question, you're kind of in the flow, And as it's quite jarring to like to stop. So, yes, it is what you know. How do you know, how early are we? Are we talking, in your view, is this? Is this, you know, what point in the meeting? Is this the first meeting? Is this? Every meeting? What point in the relationship? One point, great point. I'm really referring mostly to that sort of crucial first meeting, when you finally get face time with someone and and there's that, and you know that, you know there's there's that there's that crucial conversation where you where you need to do those things, understand their needs and then fit your fit your offering and your value to it. So that seems to be Now, obviously, throughout the sales process, every time you're almost doing a mini version of that, because their needs will change. You're going to understand. You've got to be hearing it. But there is this. The one I'm really thinking about is that pivotal first meeting, and it's early doors that call niceties, conversations, his conversation, and then boom, in they come. They're really nice. And they're sort of, they know what the call is about. They know what. And interestingly, they sort of, they expect you to

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they're sort of, yeah, as I say, they're being really kind to you.

10:00

Sort of, we're here

10:02

for you to tell me about Squadify. So let's do that and in reversing that is the crucial thing, I think. And I think it works out better for everyone if you can make that, yeah,

10:15

yeah. I guess you know, first impressions are so important, aren't they? Early on in the meeting you set your tone about what you talked about important in consultative, selling you in the questions you're gathering more information. It's how you kind of set that tone from the start, right that I'm I've got two ears and one mouth, and I'm all about you and your needs. So that makes sense. So that's really clear. First meeting, nice and early on, yes, yeah, you know, well, but

10:47

I think we run off a load of assumptions, don't we? We have these mental pictures, and so,

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You know, this is the only way to rid ourselves of those assumptions, and not just go on that vanilla path which can actually sort of hamper us throughout a long sales process if we don't do it. Yeah. I mean, how, how do you? How do you, how do you have the discipline there talk me through. How do you do it? How do you catch yourself? How do you have the discipline to not blunder an answer,

11:20

well, my unresolved trauma from that happening too many times, I think, is one that reminds me I do

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what I will do just mechanically, is I will,

11:35

and I tend to, to be honest with you, I tend to use paper writing down. You know, I don't use digital notes, but I write down and I might just have a few key points I want to make about Spotify, but they're down the page, and I leave room for my notes above about what their things are. And I might even, before the call, just ask some specific questions I want to ask so that my agenda on that paper is actually about questions first, with my sort of bit at the end. And of course, that has to be very loose, because I don't really know what's going to come up in that first part. But I sort of control myself in that. I also will,

12:14

if I'm, you know, I think better. The really good practice is to, sort of, flag it to help the client to know what's coming. So before the meeting, to actually set that out, here's the goals the meeting really understand your

12:30

your situation, the worm, your role. Goals, any pain, any any pain points you're having. And then I'll, you know, see if, Scott, if I can fit with that, how that will work. So you're on, you're putting an agenda out there before. So also they can think so you're not putting them on the spot, because that's another slight danger. They think you're going to pitch to them, and then you flip it around and oh, okay, yeah, right. And it's not great for them. So giving them one adequate warning, another great way to do it, yeah, when you know, as we, as we talked ahead of the show, you dropped what I thought was an absolute truth bomb, which was that, if you know, speaking early means you have so little

13:19

input From them into terms of how you're able to tailor your response so you're going Cole with your vanilla stump. The more you listen, obviously, the more you can tailor that. And I think that you know, you want to gather as much information as possible. How much is it? How much is the right amount? You know, if you had a half an hour's meeting. Is it about having to have them talking? Yeah, so at what point do you draw the line there, and how do you know when you've got enough information down? Yeah, good question. I think. What I would mention is that when this has not been done in this order, that we had a half hour meeting and it went out to 45 minutes, the last half hour of that was unpicking, reversing into understanding the need and then refitting the benefits and the value. It went well in the end, but we had to give it another 15 minutes just to do that. So look, I think it's hard to say. I think,

14:15

yeah, I think it is. That is horses for courses. It might even be. Look, this is a massive situation. Keep talking. I need to know more. Let's look very briefly. In the last 30 seconds, I think squad, if I could really help here, could we set up another time? Or why don't I put some notes together based on what you said? So it could even be that extreme, or they could have quite a simple answer, and they've, you've you've your question or pain point, they've dug in, and you've sort of got it, and you can, you can get on with it quite quickly, but I wouldn't, wouldn't want to make that less than 10 minutes of a half hour call, that's for sure, because it should be about them. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good point you mentioned just now about unpicking. And I have a feeling that this is an area where, if you.

15:00

Get it wrong. It's so fundamental. If you get it wrong, like you've just said, you can spend not just the rest of the call, but, you know, potentially days and weeks sometimes, because the wrong message is heard by you and your team in the first part of the first call, and now it's anchored. And I think that that's how critical it is. It's, it's, you know, yeah, right. And there's a massive difference between sort of sales and sort of vanilla marketing. So you're not just projecting your vanilla messages that you might put on your website. If someone taps in your URL, you send them your message. I mean, no one has a product so simple that everyone can take the same thing out of it. You've got to project that,

15:45

that angle of it, that that is going to be genuinely useful to the client. Your clients are busy, they've got far better things to do than to sort of try to decode from your generic description of your product or service what's useful for them. They're too busy for that, quite rightly. So you have to do that job for them. Yeah, and, and in, you know, in terms of questions and guiding, you know, that makes me feel that it's a consultative approach. It's quite a kind of coaching style

16:17

approach. Is that something that you, you know, you'd advocate across all of your sales meetings, all of your sales practices. Or is that more appropriate early on in this first meeting,

16:29

just trying to think about the later ones? Yeah, look, I, I think, I think that should never leave you. Things change so rapidly that I don't think we can say, great, I've got the situation now. Now we can go on with implementation, or I can just, I think your ears to mouth ratio has to remain the same. There might be calls down the line where it's a little bit, it's more one way. But even if you get into implementation, for example, that might be sort of right. I'm running this meeting. This is how we're going to do it. Throughout that there are going to be signs that that is or not, is not going to fit the client's schedule, the structure, their cost base, their resources, whatever. So even when you've got a pretty clear thing that you think you're presenting, there's got to be some awareness of what's happening there?

17:22

Yeah, okay, and, and, when you know, have you been pushed in the past where you know somebody wants to refuse a potential buyer is maybe being a bit Prickly, or refuses to share their point of view that they want to hear from you, has that happened to you before? It has, actually it has, I would say, though, that that's

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very unusual. And I would say that really it's because there's something deeper. Is the problem there? You know that the time it's happened is when I've been

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you know the thing where a senior person says, oh, speak to you, to someone that reports to speak to Squadify, or whoever they'll you know, that's when I and then they're an unwilling participant, basically. So I think if that happens, there's a warning sign there, if they're not willing to explore with you, what their current role is, what their challenges are. There's either a trust issue you need to solve a confidentiality issue, even an NDA, or they might even be there, sort of under duress. I've seen that a couple of times, but I think it happens. I think it's worth questioning, not going on with the sales pitch. I think that's probably going to that's not helpful again, but really sort of understand, okay, just to try to go deeper and really understand what's happening for them in that sense.

18:51

Yes, yeah. I mean, I, you know, obviously that's, that's when things aren't going swimmingly, but that happens occasionally. And, you know, I don't know if you've got any tips for, you know, we have a lot of audiences, you know, kind of tech startup founders, they don't have that kind of broad experience that do you any any, any tips for handling difficult characters in that, in that, in that situation? I think your great advice is to stop the sales pitch. But then what would you do out the back of that? How do you get it back on track? I mean, I think that it's hard to generalise, I think, but I think it's worth

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you know, the other thing you could do, of course, is to just to meet their needs, give a little description of what you do, and then quickly get back into, how does that sound for you? And you're almost backing into that first part, if you like, but not doing, not doing a massive pitch, but just, Okay, let me just give you a quick overview of who we are and what we are. So get an introduction, and then back into, does that sound? How does that sound? What's your first reaction to that? That's the way, I think, and I've seen that work. You've still got a.

20:00

So what? 20 minutes of the meeting left and you're back into questions, you know, but with a bit of context, so there's no point. But I think the alarm bells for me would be other than that. But depending on the context you might want to just look at the broader context of how that meeting was set up, and where that person, as you say, it's not always rosy, but it's just worth thinking about. But I think that might be something I would do, is the mini this is what we basically,

20:29

What's your reaction to that? Does that sound useful to you? Because you are then into a line of questioning, potentially, yeah? Okay, wonderful. And you know, given we're talking about letting the buyer speak, getting more context, more information, to tailor our response. You'll know you're passionate about uncovering the need, right, which is first and foremost. It's the thing that we ask. We ask, tell our clients to go after I know that's a big deal for you, and that's really what this is, how, how, how important has understanding need been for Spotify, as you've been growing your business and selling your platform, hugely important because,

21:11

You know, we can solve a lot of problems, but we can easily if we talk about solving one problem and they don't have that or we've understood in a slightly, subtly wrong way, then we're going to miss and they're going to miss the opportunity of solving that problem. And I think the other thing, in terms of uncovering the need that I've seen that's really important, and I've fallen into this trap as a founder, is, you know, you start talk, you hear, start hearing about, you know, we're already talking about teamwork and maybe dysfunction or challenges or the need to accelerate or need to close an engagement gap, as soon as then they say, Yeah, I've got this problem my team. It's x there is then a danger that you do that, almost a mini version of this sales scoop, which is, Oh, great. They said they've got a problem. I can solve that. Let me now pitch my solution to you based on that which is better than doing it at the top of the call, but you're already but you're also making an error there. Potentially, I've done this where you're not really sitting on that need for long enough. So let's unpack that. Let me really understand that for a start, so that I genuinely understand what you're talking about. Because words can be misleading. You can say, I've got a dysfunctional team. What does that mean? Or we, our innovation isn't rapid enough. We're not experimenting. Or what, what do these things mean? Or people are demotivated, whatever it is, dig into it, to understand it,

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but also help the client to see the impact of that. So before moving on, it's, you know, it's part of that SPIN Selling idea, but let's really explore the impact of that need on you and the team and the organisation. So drilling into that is a really powerful thing, because actually it's, again, consulting skills. This is possibly something they haven't thought of really doing, you know, it's not, it's something you could really help with, you know. So you've got a problem with execution, let's say, how slow is your time to market versus your customers? Well, it's about 10% okay, so, and what's your turnover? Again? Well, it's 100 billion, 100 million. Okay, that's a ten million problem, isn't it? You've got here now, I guess it is. So then you've you're really drilling down and making sure of that problem both in terms of detail, but impact is there, and then you might be ready to finally go ahead and talk about your solution. I think that's another trap to a mini scooplet, a scooplet, really, that people can fall in a trap you can easily fall into.

23:47

I find myself there all the time as a kind of, you know, computer scientist and engineer like making stuff, and innovator like moving fast. And yes, I am my co-founder, Kieran, who, you know, well, he's, he's Mr. Ice. He can wait all day. He can, he can wait. But I'm, I'm a bit too much of an eager beaver. I'm trying to push it, and I've had to really learn from Kieran over the last few years to try to slow down, keep gathering information, so that that means very, very it can be, I think when we are problem solvers,

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it can just be like a Wacker frog, you know, you see something, and you hit, you know, and, and, yeah, the creating that space and even some silence into which more insights will come is hard to do.

24:40

It's hard. But again, for you, Alastair, I guess that's a, you know, sort of the other side of a really good part of your nature and your ability and your professional value, but they're the things we need to watch out for, I guess, exactly. And you talked about a little cheat sheet ahead of the call. Sometimes I like to write down, I get a big red pen and write no and I.

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Write the things that I'm not going to do as well, and I feel like that's going to be triggered psychologically. But I find that kind of preparation, right? And, yes, especially from a human point of view, I think when you get right at the beginning of the meeting, and you're seeing new faces for the first time, stuff's happening to you psychologically, and you want to, you know, contribute, demonstrate your expertise, demonstrate your value. You want to kind of go first. Your lizard brain is saying, put it all out there. Show them how great you are. Yes, yeah, it's, it's hard not to. I think there is, I think, you know, we sometimes talk in our leadership work about be do have, you know, if you want to have an outcome, you have to do certain things, but actually, all of that will be driven by the B. So there is a little bit of preparation as well. The do is quite good, because that checklist and your No don't do these things, but the B is really important, choosing your B before the course. So how am I going to be in this? You might want to say, you're going to be confident, but curious is just a brilliant one, empathetic just sort of really says, right? These are the three words I'm going to write down, and I'm going to actually internalise those. So I'm going into this. And I think that's really important. In sales, I still hear in tech, people

26:18

confusing sales with pitching. I He's still here pitching and and actually, if you go in not thinking, Oh, I've got to be really succinct about my product. I've got to pitch it in a certain way. No, what you've got to be is curious and really delving in and you hold that space. So I think the B mindset is valuable in your preparation.

26:42

Yeah, totally. Well, look, that's a fantastic sales group for us to kick off with, you know, not getting sucked in, letting the buyer, encouraging the buyer to do the talking. It's all about, you know, consultative selling. It's about being in the questions. It's about listening. So that's a really great one to kick off. Thank you for that, in terms of, we've got a few minutes to wrap up. I just want to ask you a kind of squad, a fire question, and understand, you know, it's, it's, it's early November. People are thinking about the end of the year. They're thinking about closing the year off in a in a more positive, you know, way, and wrapping up things well, what do you kind of, what would, what tips would you give to anybody you know, listening or watching startup founders about about their team, about kind of, yeah, you know, what they might be able to do to foster better team collaboration? You're the king of collaboration, in my eyes. Dan, what could start up founders be doing to improve that towards the end of the year? Thank you. Know, look, I think

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startups are things that change so fast for startups, and is, of course, the found research shows that our practice, our data shows that if you want performance and connection in your team, it's clarity first. So, so really, building even before you build psychological safety and all trust and all those good things, clarity first. So really, just make sure everyone is clear on why the team exists, what the goal is, and that everyone knows how they're going to work together to actually achieve that goal. So it's worth always refreshing that it's a constant work of a founder to do that. And I think in these fast moving times, we often abandon clarity because it's crazy. I would encourage people to double down on clarity. Just make it more granular, and every month, make sure you know exactly what you're doing, and Pete and your team will really appreciate it. Then they've got a reason to connect and trust each other

28:40

that absolutely rings true with us and our business too. You know, when we're measuring people with our 360 sales diagnostic, as you know, you know, the first thing we check on is the clarity. And no surprise, when clarity in the sales process increases, then confidence increases, win rates increase. They close more business. They're happier and less stressed, but it all starts with clarity. So you're, we're on the same page. That's

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good. Dan, thank you so much. It's been, it's been really great. How could anybody get in touch with you if they wanted to continue the discussion? Well, thanks for having me. Alastair, first of all, it's been great. Thanks to everyone for listening to LinkedIn. Dan Hammond, Squadify, oh yeah, it's probably the best way just to connect with me, and I'm delighted to have a chat with you.

29:27

Well, great. We'll add the links to Dan and Squadify in the recording after this.

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That's kind of us live for today, two weeks, next week, we're now a weekly live show a week today, Kieran and I are going to be delivering a show on enterprise. Basically, when are you? When is the right time to go for enterprise? You know, it's not always exactly the right time. How do you judge when it is, and how do you make those next few moves?

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Coups. And then two weeks today, we're gonna have our second guest on Winnie, aka Joe, who's a founder at the LVS hub, when he's coming on to talk to us about her sales scoop, and she'll be following, trying to follow Dan in your footsteps. So thank you for being our inaugural guest on the show, absolutely delighted to have you. Thanks for having me. Alastair, take care. Have a great day. Dan, Bye, everybody. Bye, bye, bye.