Georgia Interviews...Graeme Hall
This month, Georgia Interviews… brand
new author and Founder of sales improvement company Sales Blueprint Ltd, Graeme
Hall, on his first book, why he decided to author a book now, and how he’s
going to be distributing his book to achieve his marketing goals.
new author and Founder of sales improvement company Sales Blueprint Ltd, Graeme
Hall, on his first book, why he decided to author a book now, and how he’s
going to be distributing his book to achieve his marketing goals.
You can watch the 17 minute
interview in full in the video above, or read the edited write up below.
interview in full in the video above, or read the edited write up below.
Georgia:
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Hi
Graeme, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you? |
Graeme:
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I'm very well, thank you.
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Georgia:
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Graeme,
could you just start by telling us all a little about yourself and your business? |
Graeme:
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Well, the short version is I
have a business called Sales Blueprint, which we've been running for 15 years now. I describe us as a sales improvement organization. We work specifically with private equity backed businesses. It's a niche that we came across ten years ago now and have worked in ever since. We've become the go-to experts in that field for sales operational improvement. |
We have been doing it
successfully. When we do our thing, sales, on average, go up about 25% within 18 months. As a result, people who've invested in a business and would like it to grow, and all the private equity firms we work with, their investment case is based upon top line growth, clearly if we can add 25% to that, they're interested in what we can do and that's really what we do every day. |
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Georgia:
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Wow.
Those are some very impressive results! |
Graeme:
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Well, yeah, as I say, it's an
average and we're very realistic when we're talking to these people. Whatever we bring to the party, ultimately the management have to buy into the it... Effectively, we build the foundations for their company’s success, and usually work with them for about six, nine, maybe twelve months. |
The real success comes after we
have finished. If we've got the management involved, and they understand the changes that we have made together, then they're able to continue to build on those changes. That's where the real kicker comes, usually the success is two or three years after we've first started, typically around the time the business gets sold, the success is much more than 25%. We were the catalyst; we aren't the sole reason that's happened. |
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Georgia:
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There
are two important aspects to what you're doing. One is being very clear about what aspects of sales performance you are there to help with, and the other is your methodology, which the book really goes into detail on, which is what people are able to take away and apply. |
Could
you just reiterate who is a typical client for you? |
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Graeme:
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It depends. We never forget that
our real client is the business that the private equity firm has invested in. The private equity firms, if you like, are the introducers, and they're a kind of client because we work for them pre-deal, when they are paying the bill. Ultimately, the bulk of our business comes from the businesses they've invested in. That's who we consider to be our client, normally. |
Georgia:
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Okay,
that makes sense. |
Graeme:
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Typically, their organization's
turning over somewhere between 10 and 50 million. We've proved that we're very sector agnostic. We always believed that to be the case, but in the early days the first thing people said was, "What have you done in this sector before?" Certainly, in the first two or three years, the answer was, "Well, absolutely nothing at all." To which our follow-up question is, "Why does it matter?" Ultimately, best practice is best practice. If you're an expert in one particular industry, that's fine, but it's not transferable. Whereas if you're an expert, as we would claim to be these days, in best sales management practice, then that's applicable in any business. |
It doesn't matter to us what
sector they're in. The only area we don't work in is retail, where the big levers to pull in terms of success are not just the interaction with the sales person. It's a lot more to do with location, stock availability, and price architecture. We don't deal in any of those areas. Other than that, any organization that fits that bill has a sales team of somewhere, typically, between two or three and ninety-three. We can work with any number and have done so. That includes even sectors that you might think are not very sales focused, like domiciliary care, for example. You have to take the right approach for that industry, but even so, good selling is still good selling. It's a question of the environment that you do it in, when you do it, and who does it, but the core doesn't change. |
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Georgia:
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What
inspired you to author a book on this and what was the main message that you really wanted to get across? |
Graeme:
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The message that I certainly
start the book with is that there really isn't a qualification that you can get out there in sales or sales management. In sales management there is limited availability, but unlike most professions, and we'd argue it is a profession, there isn't something on your CV that tells somebody that you know about this stuff. We've been fortunate to learn from some very good people along the way, as well as make the sorts of mistakes that you can learn valuable lessons from. |
Having built that experience, we
wanted to create a repository where you could go for the best practice knowledge. It was clear to us when we were talking to the sorts of organizations that the private equity firms invest in, that they're relatively immature in terms of what the private equity world calls professionalization. In other words, there's a founder, and they've done a brilliant job of building a business to a level. The private equity investment is designed to take it to the next level. That's going to require a different set of management disciplines. |
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The question is, if that's true,
where do you get those from? The answer was, "Actually, I'm not sure." We wrote the book to satisfy that need and say, "Look, when you move to the next stage, this is the knowledge that you're going to need." It's taken us a long time to develop some of it, and to learn from some very good people. We just wanted to say, "Look, let's put all this in one place." It becomes, hopefully, a reference guide for people in that situation. That's the primary driver behind writing, and writing it now. |
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Georgia:
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Yeah,
that makes total sense. I think you've also just touched on a point there, which is to put that information in a book as opposed to a brochure, for example, nor would it go in a video. To package all of that knowledge and experience in the right way, in a way that really creates value for people reading it, and they can really learn something from it, it really needed to be in a book format, didn't it? |
Graeme:
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Well, I think the book format is
useful, because despite the world being very digital these days, people still do read books. It was written primarily for the private equity investors, who typically get called general partners, and also the operational partners within those firms who work with their portfolios. Those people still do like actual, physical books. I also think what we were trying to create was something that people could read a bit of, according to the situation that they're in, or the particular challenge they're in, take something useful that they can actually implement, and then read another bit later, rather than have to read the whole damn thing. |
It was really written as a book
because we felt that was the best way to get the message to the people whom we wanted to convey it to. |
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Georgia:
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How
do you plan to distribute the book now that it's out there and published? |
Graeme:
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Well, we did some marketing two
or three weeks ago which was basically two databases, really. We've had quite a few people come back to us and say, "Yes, I'd like a complimentary copy," and being clients, we offered that to them free. |
Then the private equity world,
we've, again, told them that this is available. We've offered the first 200 people, a complimentary copy, most of which we've now had subscribed. We'll use it in a variety of ways. We'll either market it to people and they can buy it, which is great, but we didn't write it to make money out of book sales. |
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I'll give you an example. I was
with somebody I've known for a long time who's at a new firm he's just set up, and I was with him yesterday and I explained where we were with that. He said that would be a brilliant reminder, to be able to dip in and out of depending upon the management team we're sat in front of. He said, "Yeah, send me one, that would be great." I think it's going to be more of that then, as I say, we don't expect to sell lots of copies at lots of money. That's not the driver that we had when we wrote it. |
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Georgia:
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That's
not how it's going to help you in the business most. |
Graeme:
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We wanted to create a relatively
easy to read reference guide within that niche that we operate in. If we've done that, then that's our aim achieved. If we happen to sell a few as well, great, but that's not why we did it. |
Georgia:
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This
is the first and only book, as far as we're aware, in your niche. Is that correct? |
Graeme:
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It is. We did some research
which suggests that although there are lots and lots of sales management books, most of them are generic, and most of them haven't been published or updated for ten years or so. We wanted to capture the essence of now and also the particular dynamics that affect the private equity backed business. It's not the same as a privately owned business, partly because there's usually an obvious drive for growth, as I've mentioned, but there's a drive for acquisition, for example, and there's also a desire to realize value for all the shareholders, not just the ones who initially invest. Therefore, there's a sense of urgency about growing this business within an agreed plan. That brings different dynamics to the way the board operates. |
For example, one of the reasons
we talk in the book about finding the right talent and bringing them on board successfully, and I'm sure anybody listening to this will know finding good salespeople is the perennial problem, partly because not many people know what good looks like. Good salespeople are still rare. One of the challenges, and the reason we focused on, part of it was to say, "Look, this is what happens when you do find good people, and how to make sure that you keep them." |
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The book was written
specifically for those people who want to grow, grow rapidly, and do so within an agreed time frame. |
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Georgia:
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That's
wonderful. You’ve claimed your niche, you've made this information available to people that didn't know where to access it before. Can you tell people where they can find more about you and Sales Blueprint, and just reiterate the title of your book? |
Graeme:
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Our website is salesblueprint.co.uk. We all use
Facebook, and we use all the other social media channels, so we're not difficult to find. To contact me directly, my email address is ghall@salesblueprint.co.uk. Even though we entitled the book “The Secrets to a Successful Sales Operation”, in reality they're not that secret. Most of what people say to us when we do our thing is, "Well, this is fairly common sense." We say, "It is, absolutely, but it's not common practice." The aim of the book was to help people turn it into common practice, because we know it works. |
Georgia:
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“The
Secrets to a Successful Sales Operation in a Private Equity Backed Business” is available to buy on Amazon, and you can search by the title or by Graeme Hall. Thank you very much, Graeme. |
Graeme:
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You are very welcome. Thank you.
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Contact Sales Blueprint using the details above to learn more about
sales operations and sales improvement – the team would love to hear from you.
sales operations and sales improvement – the team would love to hear from you.
To find out more about how you can take ownership of your own niche, and
where authoring a book would sit on your marketing trajectory, say hello to Write Business Results at info@writebusinessresults.com and a member of the team will get back to you
within 48 hours.
where authoring a book would sit on your marketing trajectory, say hello to Write Business Results at info@writebusinessresults.com and a member of the team will get back to you
within 48 hours.
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