London Tech Week: 5 Big Sales Takeaways

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:09

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a show for founders and tech startup leaders who want to improve how they sell. Every episode, we bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom in the world of startup sales and highest level opinions from experts in their fields. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for today and a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. I'm a computer scientist and software engineer with two decades experience in B2B sales and marketing. And I'm joined today by my co-founder, Kiran. Hi, Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:50

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Kiran Gill. I'm a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. I have 25 years of experience in frontline business development, both in corporate finance and in technology, and also 10 years worth of experience in sales operations.

Alastair Cole 1:08

Thank you, my friend, really clear. And today's episode is all about London Tech Week. We were there in spades last week at London Tech Week, and also the AI Summit London. And I mean, it was quite a wild ride, wasn't it, mate?

Kiran Gill 1:26

It was busy. I've got to say I don't so for those of you who don't know, I live in Austria. So I love going back to London as much as I can. flew into London on Saturday thinking oh, okay, it's going to be your normal kind of thing. And by the time I left the following Saturday, I was absolutely frazzled. Honestly, I think I did. I have an Apple Watch. You can see my steps. I did over 100,000 steps. And in five days, what tells you the kind of mileage? We were doing that? Well? Yeah, yeah,

Alastair Cole 1:57

It was fast and furious. And you know, in a good way. Previously, we were anticipating that we'd have three big sales takeaways for you. Actually, in the end, we needed to up that to five. So we've combined all of our insights from London tech week and the AI tech summit, the summit here in five key takeaways. The event frenzy doesn't stop though. We're actually tomorrow, Ed Tech London. So there's this kind of summer festival season where sales continue. Here's Kiran and I. These two events last week, we were there bright and breezy and the last lift home as they say and met, you know, hundreds between us of really interesting people on the app in person. Loads of meetings, just really, it was an incredible event, I noticed turning up on day one that actually the appropriately named crypto burgers just around the corner, you know, eat burgers, hold on for dear life to your crypto so very much like on on brand. And so we're gonna just unpack these, these five keys, these five big sales takeaways. We're gonna dive into it right away, my friend with number one. And no surprises, AI is everywhere. And number one takeaway for us is AI impacting product market fit. And, you know, I saw and heard Apple intelligence news last week from the Apple conference, and you know, articles coming out after that about startup killers as a result of a lot of their features and functions. It's kind of exploding everywhere. And seeing it being built into new products and new services. What was it like at the frontline care? And what kind of impact were you seeing from Ai into product market fit for the startups we were talking to?

Kiran Gill 3:59

Yeah, so speaking to a lot of founders, I had several meetings with different founders at different stages of their kind of journey, so that the majority of the people I was speaking to had got the product already. However, what would they be finding was with AI or generative AI changing the landscape so quickly, that suddenly they're finding that their actual product or the product that they actually built originally, now needs to be redesigned? Or they need to think differently about it. So you're going back to the drawing board and thinking to yourself, well, how are we going to sell this into the market now? And everything is moving at such a pace. So at the AI summit, I had multiple, you know, I had a very interesting conversation with certain companies about how they were incubators, how they were actually bringing in new incubators, and there's so many ideas coming out from these AI startups. And that means potentially you might have already built your product and already got it out to market but there are new Fast and Furious companies coming out, who are highly financed, very intelligent people in the background who are coming up from all over the place, and yet it's accelerating out there. But also at the same time, it's very scary, because what you've built suddenly might not be fit for purpose any longer. Because the markets just change so quickly. Yeah,

Alastair Cole 5:20

and that makes life, you know, very hard for salespeople, obviously, they're using the collateral and the products and features that exist. But obviously, they're things are moving so fast that they're having to look at what's coming around the corner, potentially talking about features that are in development that they need to, you know, need to share in order that it looks like their, their startup is, you know, got a handle on these things. And it's bringing in new features. There were a couple of companies that jumped out at me that I thought were really interesting in this area, not very, super new, but doing great work in the world of efficiency and code review in the software development world. The first of which, that I really enjoyed talking to was very on, who are using AI to mitigate risks across the entire IT infrastructure, not just your software, but a much broader impact for your entire infrastructure to deliver the structure. And then, in order to deliver that they're having to ask for, you know, a huge amount of data. And I thought that was one of the things that I see coming through from this, you know, AI driving product market fit that increasing numbers of data, amount of data is required to differentiate against your competitors. And the second one that I really liked, really enjoyed talking to was sorcery. And there, they have a code review platform using AI that reviews your code straight in GitHub. And I picked those two out because obviously they are helping to, they're using AI to accelerate the growth of other tech startups. So quite meta. And loads of startups focused on saving time and efficiency. And this is something we've seen time and again, this study from Gartner showing that salespeople who are able to harness AI will be able to squeeze an extra 27% of bandwidth from their working day as a salesperson. Anything else you'd like to add on there, my friend, anyone, any anyone else you saw there? Who's doing it?

Kiran Gill 7:38

So I know we're gonna talk about fringe events a bit, but I was at AWS, their headquarters in central London, on a fringe event on one of the days and again, the product market fit turned up there as well. It's some of those. It's something out there that I think a lot of founders are suddenly realising because of AI. And because of the power of generative AI, they're thinking on their feet. Even founders who are quite new, who have come up with a brand new idea are finding themselves thinking Hold on, is there a market for what I'm designing at the moment? Or is something and you can see how this week even LinkedIn have brought generative AI act to their premium users. In a wave that suddenly now it's everywhere on LinkedIn where you can suddenly it's giving you comments about you know, it's analysing the the actual feed and telling you, oh, you could comment like this on this feed, you can see that the actual, if you're behind the curve here, it could get quite scary. But at the same time, a lot of this is experimental, it might be turned off, they're testing the water with it. You know, it's not to say that, you know, the idea you've come up with is over and done with, it's just telling you that you might have to just come back and have a look at it again and think about your sales strategy. How are you going to take that to market? And do you need to probably change the way you talk about your product to make sure that it does sound fresh, and still up to date?

Alastair Cole 9:09

Yeah, absolutely. And we talked on previous episodes before about a kind of two track strategic approach to technology, you have to have your longer term plans, you're not gonna have 12 and 24 month bets of what platforms you need in order to deliver your business to customers. At the same time, you need to have an experimental mindset and be playing these new things as they're coming out in the lab, to see how they would impact your business but also how they could be rolled into your longer term plans if they stick around. And the other thing that's had lots of discussions with last week is around people getting stuck with kind of tunnel vision or product market fit. Obviously, it's really, really important that you find that at the same time with so much new and exciting technology out there. We don't always, customers don't always necessarily know what they want. It's the Henry Ford quote of you know, if you'd ask customers, they just wanted a faster horse. So actually, companies can get stuck hunting for that product market fit. And actually, there's so much exciting new stuff out there that sometimes you just need to put it in front of customers and see if they're delighted by it. Let's leave section one alone there and hop into part two, which is the real time demonstrations of value. And we saw loads of these, you know, the advancement of technology means that a commoditization means that you're able to have cracking demos, adding even more value, like in real time, live their show better than ever. And really fascinating. Was it anything that jumped out at you in any special moments with real? Well,

Kiran Gill 10:55

The special moment for me was actually meeting Spot the Raider robot from Boston Dynamics, who you picture me and spot together. We're best friends now. Yeah, so that was amazing to see something that I, you know, I've seen so often on, on, you know, television on YouTube, this thing that's so futuristic. And then to actually speak to people from the Oxford Research Institute, about how they're implementing the technology of AI and also robotics together, to see how they're going to use that to, you know, using spots to go into places where potentially humans can't go in because it's hazardous. And it was really interesting to see something that could be demonstrated. Now I know, that's normally not the kind of company that I would normally speak to, because robotics is something that I'm totally interested in. But, you know, I tend to work with tech companies or use technology in a different way. However, that didn't take me away from just seeing demos, seeing people who, who weren't scared about giving their product or their demo to the, in the hands of the people out there. So Unilever also had a stand at London Tech Week, for quite a long time, I didn't understand why they were there originally. However, when you got there, you saw how they were using AI. And they were letting people, you know, use tablets where their AI had actually implemented AIS, you know, machine learning AI, which, you know, there's probably a very thin line between the two here. But they were showing how people could use it in everyday goods or how they were using it to sell more of their product. So they weren't scared about giving that technology straight over to the consumer and saying, Hey, use this, it's a 12 Point kind of questionnaire. And at the end of it, we're gonna tell you how many of our products you need to buy at the end of it. Amazing product that is, isn't it?

Alastair Cole 12:46

Yeah. And, you know, the thing for me, the big one for me really was probably but unquestionably Daniel Bedingfield on stage. And he, you know, the DJ music producer, actually, he was wearing an outfit, kind of a two piece outfit that he designed himself using mid journey. So he'd like an AI inspired outfit on. And when he got up he was on stage, using the audience and some live music generation generative AI software to create drum and bass tracks live right there with the crowd. And I thought that was both, you know, incredibly brave, right. Although there was a much, much better WiFi connection at AI Summit, then there was a London tech week. That's a separate issue. But Bedingfield live on audio AI demo was out of this world and really exciting. And it wasn't just him. It felt like all the standards when you wandered around were people who had created demos or installations on their stand so that you could actually see the value from their product or their service immediately, you could play with it, put in real, real information and get something back. So it feels like there's a real growth of that focus on demonstrating value in real time. The third big takeaway for us was quality as a differentiator. And, you know, when you walked into London tech week, you know, a little bit of it was a little bit disappointing, very different from last time. It was a huge space in Olympia where it was previously last year q2, and, and the space was huge. And it was, you know, they'd clearly cut back on some of the infrastructure and the bells and whistles and in order to have a lower carbon footprint, at the same time, they were given away like tote bags that nobody asked if that kind of didn't make sense. And, and so because it was a lot of bare bones, a lot of those individual startup boots needed were kind of chipboard and they didn't look great. And actually, it's those companies who really invested in quality that stood out for me. I know you were impressed with one company's kind of handouts and their flyers, who was that

Kiran Gill 15:20

it was a company called net mind.ai. So these is a startup from the UK. So I met these guys out there, very impressed by their booth, very personable, they came out and started talking to me straight away and weren't scared of me. But I've got to say, some of the boots, it seemed to be that the people were hiding or too busy talking to themselves, with their, with their colleagues to actually engage with people who are they're milling around, you're going to remember some at some of these stands are very, very expensive. Now, you don't know whether these people were told to go there, and they didn't want to be there, or whether it just felt that the guys at net mine.ai seem to be there. Now. They are a startup that are competing against Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, selling AI space or AI computing space to startups, what a great thing to do. But again, not just just turning up isn't enough, you've got a while with the people. So you know, they have had, I've got it here. Now they had a nice little flyer that they gave out. very personable, very good. You know, if you're, if you're interested in looking in that kind of way, it straight away, they impressed me. And I think that is a massive differentiator, if you're gonna have a stand at these places, first of all, you've got to understand why you've done it. Why are you there? Why are you exhibiting I've done loads of these things, where I've worked for other companies or worked for ourselves, we've gone there, and we've exhibited, first of all, why are you there, and if you are there, engage the people who are there. And if you're gonna engage them, you have to wire them as Alistair said, You need to wire them, you need to bring them in, you can't just turn up there and expect everybody's going to come to you and, and just talk to you just because you're standing next to a laptop that's showing a, you know, a screenshot of your company's logo.

Alastair Cole 17:08

You're absolutely right, the back quality on the booth. Absolutely important. I love the fact you mentioned people just sat and they saw that too often, you know, just not enough kind of activity, you've got to you've gotta sweat that opportunity. And time runs out pretty quickly. One booth that I really did like, was the sniffer booth where I spent a long time talking to MD Sarah Buchanan. And there you can see here, there's a kind of marble sticker that they put on top of their chipboard booth, just to make that look fantastic, really well done on high quality assets as a CTO there at the booth. And they were really just that you could feel the attention to detail. And I think you're drawn towards that. Because as you're looking around and you've finished one conversation and looking for somebody else, you see that and you're drawn to it, and then and then when you're there, you're just blown over by the level of quality, these these these some of these booths have gone to and that is a huge differentiator, right. And to cut through the noise, everybody's got an idea of who's got a platform. It's how you bring that to market. That's so important. And that quality was really easy to see. Let's skip on to not number five. Let's skip on to number four, which is the power of fringe events. And I mean, the numbers on tech, London are astronomical, the number of startups that had their events going on just a huge number of people all across London for the whole week. And you know, you could argue that the AI summit London was a fringe event, even though it's within tech London, even though it's its own, you know, event and paid for as its own event. But there are loads of fringe events going on. And we love those. We saw lots of additional value at those. Talk us through what were your favourite fringe events this year? Kiran.

Kiran Gill 19:18

Um, so like I said, I went to the British Asian entrepreneurs event at the AWS house just off the embankments. That was a great place to go because these are all people that I've actually communicated with throughout the whole year and haven't got to really meet them. And that was it was nice to actually go to a place and they were doing their own kind of fringe event which probably wasn't a part of the whole kind of tech London week, but it just fell nicely together. And I got to meet too, or three people that I hadn't met properly and they weren't coming to tech London itself properly. And it was a great place to go there and just quickly meet up at the event and Get to know them and get to know them. And you've got to remember when you're at these events, I think people sometimes get slightly confused when they think they need to be selling all the time, or actually you don't, you're just making connections, and you're just meeting people and you're catching up with people, and you're just reconnecting with people just because it's the human thing to do. You don't need to be selling continuously. And it was just nice to meet these people out there. And, you know, and it was, it was good to spend some time with them.

Alastair Cole 20:29

Yeah, it was great that they moved to Olympia. It's nice to be back in West London, somewhere that I've helped is very dear to my heart and a much bigger space, but we're kind of bouncing all over the Capitol, and then the AI summit over at Tobacco Dock and other cracking venues. I think the evening ones who talked about the British Asian delegation at AWS, I think, fog on Monday, as part of the London connector was a great event. We both had a fantastic time there, Mr. Foggs, part of the London connector, and yeah, that was in Soho, Monday evening, in Soho, you know, beautiful weather. So yeah, the sunset and blue skies, and it was just great to be back in, you know, in a buzzing environment associated with the tech week. And I think practically, from a new beer and relationship and sales point of view, those fringe events are a little bit smaller, you know, they're a little bit more intimate. And I find that actually, things move a little bit faster there, you know, there's maybe you've had a, there's a little bit of booze, there's a little bit of music, it's a bit of soft lining, people are a bit more open and warmed up to, you know, connections and moving things forward. And so, like the fox, fox, particular, he was a big hit for me, especially coming out late in the evening so it was delicious. But I mean, that was how the week started, by the end of the week, we you know, we had been to so many fringe events, met so many people and taught that kind of full throttle and pretty, pretty exhausted. But the whole point, really, of last week was, you know, human connections, right? It just doesn't, you don't always get the opportunity to do that lots of virtual meetings happen in the world of sales. And so focusing on the human connections, right, which is what it's all about, and it was exciting at the start of the week, it was structured, you know, exhausting by the end of the week. What were your big take outs in terms of, you know, connections you made with other people or the vibe on those kinds of in real life moments?

Kiran Gill 22:52

Yeah, well, I was looking at my numbers on a bit of a number junkie, when it comes to these kinds of things. And I think I connected with over 100 people prior to the event, and connected with another 52 at the event. And then when we're talking to people, I think it was, I was talking to so many people. So all in all, I looked at my LinkedIn, what was my weapon of choice. Last week, I was walking around with my QR code and just basically connecting with anybody I could speak to, mainly because first of all, it's the quickest way to connect with anybody. The other thing is you instantly have a connection, you understand who they are, and you can kind of get a brief. And then the other thing is, it just makes it easier than you know, I do like a business card. However, sometimes it's impractical just to have them in your business cards in your pocket. So that was my weapon of choice. And I think I counted up yesterday. Last week alone, I had over 200 new connections. Now not all of them that I met. Some of those are people that I'm hopefully going to connect with this week and get to talk to, but most of these people are people that I had an interesting conversation with, you know them, we're not saying they're going to buy something from you or I'm going to buy something from them. It's just a connection. And you know, that's human. That's what we're doing. The one of the conversations I had with a friend of mine, Georgia who who'd actually flown out from another event in Amsterdam to be at London Tech Week, we were talking about how everyone is selling and everyone's selling and selling it there was you know, this kind of frenzy on Monday suddenly that anyone you spoke to you thought you were you were gonna buy their product instantaneously. And it was this kind of calm down moment I thought to myself as you don't all need to be selling, not all of us are selling and some of the things you must be buying but you don't need to make that sale today. And sometimes what you're selling probably takes a little bit longer than selling in 35 seconds.

Alastair Cole 24:44

So ya know, that's a great reminder for all of us that you know, we're always eager, everybody's eager on their start and sometimes when the tube stops getting the tube back and forth sometimes when the tube stops on journey it certainly works on Zola. I like to take photos of some of the posters and the appropriate post I snapped on the way in on day one was very exciting. I felt like I was a Harry Potter magician. Going to tech week London and AI events was very exciting. By the end of the week, I felt a bit like where's my utopia, and the number of conversations that I'd had, you know, felt like I was literally, you know, like, on fire burning up, I can't, you know, give deliver my value proposition in the sentences were elevated. But one more time, or I'll explode. And that speaks to what you talked about, you know, isn't always about selling, it's about meeting people. So. And actually, technology has a big part to play there as well, because we know that, you know, mastery of it really does have a huge impact on success. Those people who are overwhelmed by their tech stack, their sales, tech stack deliver 43%, lower quota. So isn't just about having loads of tech tools to help with selling, it's about the right ones. So those are our five big sales takeaways. From the week, you talked a little bit about the numbers, the 200 or so connections you've made this week. And one area that we struggled, I think, was keeping our sales actions up last week, because we were at a live event, right? And there's a magic number that you like to talk about. Talk us through this.

Kiran Gill 26:31

Well, we've spoken about this before, but just in case you haven't heard it, it's 680. And that's a bit of calculations that we've done in the background at the uplift partnership to say that you need around about 618 sales actions per month to bring home for around about four deals, we calculate that down that's 30 618 new actions. They could be to existing people who are already in the pipe, they could be different things. But remember, people are at different points in your sales process. And there's different things that you can do now. So not all of these are human in person actions that take time and effort to deliver. They could even be automated up to a point. But it's an understanding that you've got to keep this going. Because what tends to happen, and what people tend to forget is in those moments where you have a lull, and you might not be you know, might not be out of its design. But like last week, we were suddenly away from our desks. And we weren't prospecting in any way that I normally keep in contact with people. However, because of automatization, I was still able to deliver over 200 different messages to clients and people that I needed to talk to and keep in the process, though, of doing the things that we're doing, whether it was event invites, whether it was getting ready for the next event, whether it was just getting getting in touch with people in the background as well.

Alastair Cole 27:54

Yeah, and if you're if that seems like a scary number, right, you're worried about getting to 618, it was close to those four deals as a start up, one place to start would be with our 360 sales diagnostic product. We, in the process of going through the 360, we looked at across the seven areas of success for startup sales from sales strategy, all the way around to continuous improvement. And actually there are 52 weighted metrics that underlie those seven areas and help us create an overall 360 degree score for you for how your sales function is doing. People going through using this product, get a 25 page personalised report that includes a full score breakdown, bespoke recommendations, and a revenue roadmap showing you how much additional income you could make by working with us. And our platform delivers all those insights and those recommendations. Here is the overall score. How we break down each section and traffic light it with recommendations and the dashboard showing how your school is progressing and the revenue roadmap for the next 90 days. That's it 1230 On the dark end of the show. All that's really left for us is to talk about the next show. Tuesday, the second of July. We are going to focus on the five sales foundations needed for 2025. The world is moving very fast and it's one of those key pillars that you need to have in place. So your sales function is performing and purring like a well oiled machine next year they need to be put in place. Start thinking about them now. However hot off the press it may be that I'm switching that for a line episode coming from Mad fest. On Tuesday, the second of July, the old Truman brewery was invited to go and do our show from there. I'm not sure if that will come through yet. So be one of those two, but watch this space, potentially very exciting episode from the Truman brewery as part of med fest, or the our five sales foundations for next year. Kiran, any, any, like, you know what, before we wrap up? What are your final thoughts of last week, and for me, it was kind of fast and furious meeting people. But it was fantastic to be there with you all week, my friend. And what would be your kind of one big takeaway to finish the show.

Kiran Gill 30:45

I think the big takeaway is don't forget to follow up. You know, that doesn't mean that everybody was there to purchase or buy from you, or whatever it is, is just to make sure that, you know, you follow up with everybody and you make those personal connections that you made with people turn into, you know, business relationships. And that's how the world works, you know, there might be opportunities that you could find for them, potentially, I had several conversations with potential partners, or potentially people that we could offer business to, because we have clients in a particular place that could be looking for their kind of services, and that I've got no problems with that. It doesn't always have to be a one way door. It could swing both ways. So that's the thing. It's make sure you follow up, keep those connections going. Remember, it's the human connection. A lot of this, a lot of the time you don't even meet people because it's always about LinkedIn and you connect with somebody you don't really and they just say thank you, and you don't really ever meet them. And you know, you just kind of go through this digital world. But the great thing about being in our live event is you meet someone, you actually have that connection, and there's a business connection, and this could turn into something very fruitful.

Alastair Cole 31:52

Completely, even if they're not, you know, type ideal customer profile target market. The connections you make are so warm that these people will help. Yeah, so that's a great shout the follow up. Now this is really part of our follow up and we'll obviously be going out to all the people that we've met, so get a great shout. There's no point doing it. If you don't follow up, push on and accelerate sales. Excellent. That's us coming into the show. Thanks for joining me, my friend.

Kiran Gill 32:21

Thank you very much, Alastair.

Alastair Cole 32:23

See you next time. Bye, everybody. Goodbye. Bye.