Navigating Stakeholders in Complex Sales

In this episode of the Luxury of Choice podcast, host Steve Vaughan and his colleagues Jonathan Slasinski, Christian Walter and Pascal Le Floch  discuss the importance of managing stakeholder groups in B2B sales, particularly in the life sciences sector. They explore the necessity of engaging with multiple stakeholders beyond just the end users, including decision-makers in various departments such as operations and IT. The team discuss the need for a balanced approach between top-down and bottom-up strategies in sales, as well as understanding the unique needs and concerns of each stakeholder involved in the purchasing process. Topics include the need for empathy, curiosity, and relationship-building, especially with purchasing departments, to enhance sales success. They also discuss the challenges posed by organizational politics and the significance of timing in the sales process, particularly in avoiding the rush at the end of financial periods.

Steve Vaughan, Jonathan Cooper, Pru Layton, Christian Walter, Pascal le Floche, Jayne Green and Jonathan Slasinski are Sales Trainers from george james ltd. You can email the show at: Podcast@georgejames-training.com

The trainers on LinkedIn:

Steve Vaughan https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-vaughan-salestrainer/
Jonathan Cooper https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-cooper-18716b1/
Pru Layton https://www.linkedin.com/in/pru-layton-b46a3528/
Christian Walter https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-walter-a1857b1/
Jayne Green https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-green-salestrainer/
Pascal Le Floch-Riche https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-le-floch-220ba46/

Jonathan Slasinski https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-slasinski-449a655/

george james training website https://georgejames-training.com/

Transcript

Steve Vaughan (00:01)
Hello again and welcome to the Luxury of Choice, a B2B Sounds of Business podcast brought to you by the training team of George James Limited. My name is Steve Vaughan, I'm one of the training team here and also the host and producer of this podcast. Today I have no less than three of my colleagues with me. So there's four of us here in the podcast. It's going to confuse the hell out of me probably as we go along. But I'm joined today by Jonathan Slasinski Christian Walter and Pascal Le Floche. So guys, how are we all?

How are we all feeling? Feeling Christmassy? Getting ready for the big C? And it's still a couple of weeks away thankfully. Yeah, still... Your lights are up! My wife wants to go and buy a Christmas tree this evening unfortunately so I think we're the only house in the street that hasn't got our lights up. Are your lights up yet Pascal? Do you put Christmas lights up in France?

Jonathan Slasinski (00:31)
great.

My lights are up, we're ready to go. Lights are up, ready to go.

Pascal Le Floch (00:50)
Yeah, probably I would need to bring some in my room here. It's quite dark, as you can see. ⁓

Christian (00:51)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (00:53)
⁓ We're

Jonathan Slasinski (00:54)
Hahaha

Steve Vaughan (00:57)
just saying actually for the benefit of people who can't see the podcast, you've got a very sort of dark and moody, it's like a book of bedtime kind of location you're coming from right now. And Christian, you're in a nice lit office in Switzerland right now.

Christian (01:11)
Yes, yes. And actually, we're not doing Christmas this year. Well, yes, we're going to South America to catch up with my daughter who is traveling there. so we'll be we'll be in the southern tip in Argentina, in Ushuaia. And it'll be it'll be a fantastic experience, I'm sure. But it's not exactly Christmasy. So the downside is the end of your rush is even is even

Steve Vaughan (01:15)
Are you not? Of course you're going away, aren't you? Yeah.

amazing.

Wow.

Absolutely.

It'd be their summer, wouldn't it? Yeah.

Christian (01:40)
bigger, even greater this year, but the upside is in about eight days we'll be gone.

Jonathan Slasinski (01:49)
Ha, love it.

Steve Vaughan (01:49)
Okay, well

we won't take that personally. ⁓ But in that case, we better get on with the podcast to get this one in the can. So we'll have a great trip anyway, I'll speak to you before we go. So what are we going to talk about today? What we're going to talk about, well the theme for this podcast we've got is managing stakeholder groups, but that's a little bit of jargon really. So what do we mean by that? It's really how do we work with organizations that have many, many people that

Christian (01:50)
You

Steve Vaughan (02:18)
potentially we need to interact with. So it could be a university, could be a pharmaceutical company, could be a CRO. But really the theme for the podcast is why is it, or if we do, that we need to have more than a single point of contact in that organisation and who are the sort of people that we need to interact with. well first of all, let me just put that out there. mean, do we need to speak to anybody than just the guy in the lab or can we just spend all our time?

Talking to the guy in the white coat as I call him. What do we think?

Jonathan Slasinski (02:49)
without

a doubt, think we need to, I think we need to speak to as many people as you can. Again, I remember early on in my career, I talked to probably an end user at the bench and be like, they're the buyer. That's it. You know, I, I talked to them that I sold them on my technology and then you figure out they have no real purchasing power. Right. So it's about, do you think about one person as the buyer? No, there's multiple people, whether it's a lab or as said in a pharmaceutical company, it's more about the department and all the people above them. So yeah.

Steve Vaughan (03:07)
No, absolutely. Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (03:18)
Gotta be interacting with multiple people.

Steve Vaughan (03:18)
Yeah.

Sure. And Pascal, you're nodding away to that one.

Pascal Le Floch (03:24)
yeah, definitely. I remember very, very pleasant time, know, very lengthy and repeated conversations with end users, which led me to nowhere. You know, so just because I was not talking to the right persons. Of course, the end users is key, but you have, as Jonathan said, you have to consider the key decision makers, the influencers and all the people who can play a role.

Steve Vaughan (03:40)
All right.

Right.

Pascal Le Floch (03:53)
into the decision.

Steve Vaughan (03:55)
So let's look at that in a bit more detail then guys and Christian, let's get your thoughts on this. Are we talking about departments here? Are we talking about people, talking about people's roles or is it some of all these things all merged together?

Christian (04:04)
Mm-hmm.

So I think every sale is different and there are always multiple stakeholders involved. Always. The added complexity is also that most of salespeople in the life science tool industry, in the lab equipment industry, feel most comfortable talking to lab operators, lab technicians.

Steve Vaughan (04:16)
Okay, always. Yeah. All right.

Of course,

Christian (04:36)
That's the comfort

zone. That's maybe where we come from. It's easy to have a conversation. We can talk about technical stuff. We can talk about applications. It's never cutthroat salesmanship when we speak to the end user. And I think most of us feel more comfortable in that relationship. But as Jonathan and Pascal said, it gets you nowhere.

Steve Vaughan (05:03)
you

Christian (05:03)
And

so we really need to reach out and understand who else is involved.

Steve Vaughan (05:09)
how do we do that? Because I'm sure we would never do this, but what we don't want to do is say to the person we're talking to, the technical person, the scientist, if you like, who's more important than you? We wouldn't put it quite as bluntly as that I would hope. But how do we do that? What kind of questions could we ask then guys to actually get a handle on that?

Jonathan Slasinski (05:31)
Yeah, I think,

you as you said, Steve, it's, you know, we'll put, put our trainer hats on it comes down to qualification, right? And, figure out who, who are these other people? So to me, it's more, it's not about who's more important than you. It's about who else is involved in this person, in this purchase, who else, who else would be utilizing this equipment besides you? Um, and I think from there.

Steve Vaughan (05:37)
Okay.

Christian (05:46)
Thanks.

Jonathan Slasinski (05:50)
If you go up to say you're talking to an end user and then they put you in touch with their PI, then it's the PI you're asking, well, who else is involved in this purchase? it might be my department chair, right? So you might be starting to learn all these kinds of levels after you get away from that one person. And again, it's something I had to learn really quickly in my career because I was dead focused on those lab, those end users. And then all of sudden you're like, ⁓ there's other people I have to talk to too, which is always great.

Steve Vaughan (06:08)
Mm-hmm.

Christian (06:13)
Thank

Steve Vaughan (06:16)
Yeah. Well, let's identify

these people then, Pascal. who are they? Let's imagine we're talking about a small pharmaceutical company or something. What kind of people are we envisaging that we would have to be involved in talking to here?

Christian (06:19)
you.

Pascal Le Floch (06:31)
Of course it depends how complex the cell is as Christians say every cell is different. Nevertheless, ⁓ what I noticed and we know that there different people involved. Of course there is the end user, the one who is taking care of the project, it could be the end user or the lab manager or a scientist. Then there is for quite often the director of the department where the lab manager is and

Steve Vaughan (06:33)
Of course, of course.

Pascal Le Floch (07:00)
you have all the other departments around which could play a role like procurement, administrative department, IT if you have some tricky and difficult installations to be completed, quality or regulatory especially when you have IVD systems to be installed and who else? ⁓ Yeah, probably ⁓ operations.

Steve Vaughan (07:06)
Hmm. Yep.

Absolutely.

Yeah, good point.

Pascal Le Floch (07:30)
or fatalities as well. quite often with all those people we covered. Yeah. Probably all.

Steve Vaughan (07:38)
quite a list, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, it's quite a list. And

Christian (07:41)
I think

it's an idea to instrumentalize your good relationship with the

with the lab technician, with the end user. I'm suggesting that that person could be your buddy. And that person could help you to understand who else needs to be convinced. ⁓ Particularly if that lab tech really wants your kit, you can form like a team. You can partner up and say, hey, who else do we need to convince? Who else?

Steve Vaughan (07:50)
Okay, I like that. What does that mean though?

All right.

Christian (08:14)
Who else can I help you to convince? Who else needs to know about this? ⁓ And do we need to speak to procurement? Do we need to speak to the boss? Who's the boss's boss? Is he involved as well? Then you can actually utilize this relationship you have, which is a natural relationship for all of us.

Steve Vaughan (08:16)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Yeah.

I think that's a great point. There's a couple of questions I used to like asking in this situation. One was, if you were me, who else would you be talking to? And the other one would be the last time you bought something like this or this kind of value, who else got involved really and why? So I think both of those questions can give you a handle on this. I'm going to ask you a question. So out of those various sort of departments and

Christian (08:42)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Vaughan (08:59)
to use the jargon stakeholder groups that Pascal and Christian described, which do you think is the most misunderstood by people in our business?

Jonathan Slasinski (09:07)
Yeah, it's, you know, we've spent, you know, the last couple minutes just talking about, who can affect the sale, right? Who actually can approve the sale, right? But we have to think about the sale as this whole process of...

Steve Vaughan (09:14)
Mm. Mm.

Jonathan Slasinski (09:20)
installation training, right? So I, you know, I think that, yes, of course we need to be in front of the PI, the department chair, whoever has that really final approval. The end user is obviously going to get their buy-in, but I, I think that operations and IT is sometimes some of the most misunderstood people about how, how much it affects a sale, right? Because that's, that's kind of this whole

Christian (09:20)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (09:40)
Absolutely.

Jonathan Slasinski (09:43)
You know, we're trying to provide value. We're trying to provide, Hey, look, we, you know, we're, we're, you know, we're in a seamless, seamless

installation, seamless training. And then if you never connected with operations, your half million dollars sequencers sitting on the, on the doc and it's not up in the lab, right? You know,

Christian (09:52)
All

Steve Vaughan (09:58)
Getting rained on, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. I think it's one of the biggest reasons for forecast slippage as well because nobody found out that, or nobody asked the question of operations, do you have a three-phase power supply? Or no, it's gonna take us three months to install one. And go on, yeah, Christian, yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (10:10)
Exactly.

Christian (10:13)
right.

I just, you know, every sale is different. And yes, we need to understand who's the money person, or who's the boss, the boss who takes the ultimate decision. But I also still value the relationship we have with the technical people as well. Because the boss will hardly ever buy something against the

Steve Vaughan (10:19)
Of course, yeah.

Of course, of course.

Jonathan Slasinski (10:35)
⁓

sure.

Christian (10:43)
advice of his trusted lab techs. And particularly in academia, Jonathan, you're familiar with that, with the new generation sequencing and all that, where the buyers are often academics. And then you typically have one lab tech who keeps the whole shop together, who makes sure that they have consumables, who makes sure that the glassware is clean, who makes sure that the benches are

tied it up every so often because these private investigators are so busy doing their all important research. But this lab tech holds quite a lot of power because against their explicit guidance, nobody will dare to buy anything because life will be hell afterwards otherwise. ⁓

Jonathan Slasinski (11:34)
I mean, Christian,

Steve Vaughan (11:34)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Jonathan Slasinski (11:37)
I think you bring up a great point, right? When we look at kind of like this foundation, like where's the foundation? Where do we really need to kind of key in? But back to like what Steve was saying, if it's, you know, again, all sales are different, but if it's capital equipment as a sales rep, I didn't get paid on that until it was installed. So if I didn't qualify the voltage, the electric,

Steve Vaughan (11:43)
What's the power? Yeah. Yeah.

yeah, you better believe it. ⁓

Christian (11:55)
No, course not.

Jonathan Slasinski (12:00)
If it's not going to be able to be moved from a basement up into the third floor for three or four weeks, that affects the sale. Right. So again, yes, we want to get the buyers and we want to get the PO, right? It's the other half of it that I think is also a big part of, you know, what we do in sales.

Steve Vaughan (12:05)
Yeah.

you

I had that issue once that we sold a mass spectrometer to Bristol University and the department was on the side of a big hill and there was no way of getting it off the truck up the hill inside the lab up about 15 flights of stairs. it wasn't my cell I have to say, was one of my sales people, but nobody had thought about how to get it up. I'm as guilty as well because I didn't ask the question. Anyway, Pascal, you haven't said anything for a while. So what are your thoughts on all this in terms of where we're going?

Jonathan Slasinski (12:25)
Ha.

Christian (12:28)
you

So.

Pascal Le Floch (12:46)
I think that one of the typical traps we fall into in sales is that we have a champion who is quite often the technical or the scientific guy. But the point is that quite often this person doesn't know about the timing.

when the sale can be decided or the purchase can be decided, this person may have not access to the decision process and also about the budget amount which is available and by when it could be spent. So what I'm saying here is that of course you need to talk about the technical aspects to...

Christian (13:30)
Okay.

Pascal Le Floch (13:31)
to gain trust from the technical person, the one who decides at the technical level, but you have also to gain trust from the one who will invest and will sign up. And this is what often the decision maker and this person knows about the strategy. So what I wanted to add here is that when...

Christian (13:42)
Okay. Okay.

Steve Vaughan (13:47)
Absolutely.

Pascal Le Floch (14:01)
Let's say I became more and more successful when I started to have a top-down approach instead of a bottom-up approach, meaning that when I identify an opportunity in an account, I quickly started to talk about the strategy of the account, what they want to achieve by the next two or three years. And of course, you know, the person you can talk about this is not the scientist, you you...

first contact is more about the top management. Understanding this allows you to position yourself differently, so that's the first point, but then bring different types of arguments, elements which makes you, let's say, moving into the deal in the most effective and fastest way.

Steve Vaughan (14:40)
Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Slasinski (14:53)
Pascal,

I really love kind of where you're going here, right? Because you identify these stakeholders and then it becomes, okay, top down or bottom up, right? I will say that I spent most of my career bottom up, right? But I was just had a conversation with a guy at the gym yesterday who just took a software startup. And I'm like, how's it going? How's sales going? He's like, I'm not getting any appointments because he's only going after his directive is just to go after CEOs. And I'm like, well,

Christian (15:00)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (15:03)
Hmm. ⁓

Jonathan Slasinski (15:22)
What about

the end user? He's like, that's what I want to do. But you know, the direction of the company now is we're going to start at this level, but I do love kind of say you're going to see, you're going to see success. You know, I think, think it, I think it's definitely a mix, but I love how Pascal was talking about the success he had top down where I can talk about my success from the bottom up. You know, I think it's, it's, it's definitely a mixture.

Steve Vaughan (15:29)
And surely it's both? Yeah.

Yeah.

Christian (15:42)
Can

I chip in and say what we need is a mix? So I'm actually working with a client who is

Steve Vaughan (15:44)
Kushkin,

Yeah, no.

Jonathan Slasinski (15:47)
Yeah.

Christian (15:51)
selling development services, R &D services, very good engineers, super smart, super well qualified in this industry. ⁓ And they've had very much a top-down approach, but they struggled. was exactly what Jonathan was just mentioning. It's not so easy to get through with the busy CEOs, and the CEOs are almost too far removed from the projects. ⁓ So actually, we need to go a little bit lower.

⁓ But they didn't have the contacts. So we are now doing a top-down and bottom-up approach where we try to broaden the contact database so we have a bit more breadth. And then we still try and, of course, have a good relationship with the big cheeses. The sea sweet. ⁓

Steve Vaughan (16:24)
Hmm.

you

C-suite, yeah. And in my experience,

when you get to talk to those guys, it's often a bit later in the day in terms of the project. And what they want to talk about is absolutely not features and benefits of the instrument and what the software button does and how many samples the sampler takes. So what they want to talk about is what's the return on investment? What's the risk? What could go wrong? Does this fit strategically with our directive?

or our direction as a business strategically as well. And I think, you know,

Christian (17:13)
This brings

us really nicely to the next topic. Each stakeholder has a ⁓ different set of customer needs. During qualification, it's our duty to find out what makes their heart sing, what keeps them up at night. We need to find answers for that. It is totally different whether you're a lab manager,

Steve Vaughan (17:16)
Well, go for it then, yeah. Let's see if I planned it, Christian.

Okay. Yeah, exactly.

Christian (17:39)
or a scientist or a buyer. They all have different needs and I think if we identify them, we can be more successful.

Steve Vaughan (17:48)
What keeps you awake at night, Pascal, when it comes to thinking about selling to complex organizations?

Pascal Le Floch (17:54)
Yeah, think that who is, let's say, who wants to get what? That was really one of the questions I asked myself when I was navigating into a deal. What matters the most to every stakeholder? And knowing this, as Christian just mentioned it, you can articulate...

the way you present your solution in a different way. Something which will ring the bell or something which will ⁓ cause impact to the respective stack holder. So it's more about turning sending a solution into a strategic positioning to provide solution, return and investment at all levels in the organization.

Steve Vaughan (18:30)
Mm.

Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. So what we do when there's a conflict of opinion in the customer account. when potentially we've got a few people who are kind of going the way that we want them to go, there's one or two people who we've either haven't identified or we suspect have got a different opinion or possibly even a favoring our competitors. So what do we do about that then Jonathan?

Jonathan Slasinski (19:02)
You

hope that you hope that it's your champion that's going to override their opinion. That then that's it. Step back. You guys got it all figured out. No, I think you bring up a great point. It's about, know, how do we handle that? And in the situations where that's occurred, it's always been, Hey, can, can we all talk together and figure this out? Right? You know, if you can get in with each of the different things and hear their opinions out.

Christian (19:04)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (19:06)
Okay. So we just sit back away from them to do that and then do it.

Jonathan Slasinski (19:26)
And then again, try to counter them with the value props and everything else that you're trying to sell. I've had some success doing that. mean, but it's sometimes it's always, you sometimes, Hey, you hear, someone doesn't like this. Well, can I talk to them now? They don't want to talk to you. You know, it's, it's, just all about, can you get them in the room? That's the ideal thing is to be able to hash that out.

Steve Vaughan (19:44)
And guess you're never going to make them into your fan, at least you can perhaps minimise the impact they have, Christian, yeah?

Christian (19:50)
Yeah, I think you should try and do that.

take one step back, know, sometimes we have to present to a mixed audience. So when we do a pitch, a presentation, we have to tell a story to a mixed audience, maybe the bosses in there, the buyers in there, the head of R &D is in there and some scientists and in the end, this is tricky because they all have different needs. Some may be friendly to us, some may be not so much.

Steve Vaughan (19:55)
Mm.

Yeah.

Christian (20:20)
And so I think one of the things we need to do is read the room, really read the room. Try not to talk too much, but try and understand where they are all coming from. And then maybe address some of the concerns individually. But I think that is the that's the Champions League of Selling in my opinion.

Steve Vaughan (20:25)
Hmm.

Perhaps my team is still in the conference rather than the Champions League. ⁓ Pascal, you're nodding away to that one. You like that thought?

Pascal Le Floch (20:54)
yeah, definitely. mean that's the beauty of selling, let's say, being in a complex sales opportunity because you have to bring what different people need in the same room. So if you identify upfront, you know, the different needs and expectations of every stakeholder,

Again, you can articulate what matters the most and bring your solution in such a way that every people in the room will feel satisfied and enthusiastic about what you bring. And they will evaluate you not on the product anymore, but about the way you can support and serve everyone's interest.

Christian (21:25)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (21:42)
And sometimes you have to play by their rules, don't you, as well? So somebody mentioned IT earlier. I can't even begin to imagine the number times that I've been involved sending an instrument and somebody from IT has said, there's a computer on it. And we say, yeah, yeah, but it's not connected to anything. It's standalone. I don't care. It's a computer. I've got to approve it. I've got to make sure it's not going to, know, it uses the right software. you know, we'd say, no, it's not a computer. It's a data entry station. no, it's a computer. You've got to let me validate it and check it.

So sometimes you have to play by the rules guys, don't you? Whether we like it or not.

Jonathan Slasinski (22:14)
course.

Steve Vaughan (22:16)
Okay, that was a net conversation finisher, wasn't it? What else can go wrong then, guys? I mean, we've talked a bit about identifying these people, but what else could potentially go wrong when we're working the complex out?

Jonathan Slasinski (22:18)
Especially I did. Yeah, exactly.

Christian (22:30)
So I always find that there is a, you know, there potentially could be a conflict of interest between the buying unit. And I've seen that once upon a time when I sold automatic chloride analysis to a snack food company in the north of England. And yeah, they basically automated all the lab from a manual process to an automatic one. And it was a a big

Steve Vaughan (22:37)
okay.

I've done that before now.

Christian (22:58)
change for the lab and of course they required a lot less operators after that. And so the lab staff realized in the sales process that perhaps this is not going to go very well for them in terms of job security but of course the management team, the quality team, they know that if they don't upgrade their analyses

Steve Vaughan (23:05)
Yeah, sadly.

Christian (23:25)
eventually they will be out of business because they have too high a cost structure. So for the company, was an essential step forward. But there was a lot of resistance to the change from the laptop. Understandably, yes. And so, of course, we tried to explain, we tried to maybe even address the topic proactively. But this was not an easy situation. And I could well imagine that this is a topic that's

Steve Vaughan (23:35)
Understandably, yes. Yes, yeah.

for sure.

Christian (23:52)
happening again now. There's a lot of talk on self-driving labs, on fully automated AI driven labs with robots. And I mean, this is bound to change pharmaceutical research, for example, quite considerably. And salespeople selling this kind of equipment need to be aware that there might be a lot of resistance to this as well.

Steve Vaughan (24:10)
Hmm.

Christian (24:20)
But in ultimate, I think it's where the wind will blow. This is going to be the future. Let's face it.

Steve Vaughan (24:27)
Mm-hmm.

Hopefully I'll be well retired by then, but still. Pascal, what else can go wrong in complex sales? Understanding complex sales.

Jonathan Slasinski (24:31)
So... Yeah, I know. I know.

Christian (24:33)
hahahaha

Pascal Le Floch (24:41)
Yeah,

one thing I just popped up in my mind is about the role of and importance of establishing strong relationships with purchasing departments, especially in industry. And quite often, you know, by experience, salespeople, they go out to the purchasing department when the project is very advanced and they have and they think they have to negotiate the deal and close the deal.

Steve Vaughan (24:55)
Absolutely.

Yeah.

Pascal Le Floch (25:10)
And this is wrong. Sorry to say this is not the right way to go. Ideally, you should establish relationships when you have nothing to sell.

Steve Vaughan (25:13)
It is absolutely wrong.

Christian (25:22)
yeah, I love that. Yeah, That's, ⁓ I just had a conversation regarding that today. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (25:23)
That's a great, great.

I'm

Pascal Le Floch (25:28)
So,

Steve Vaughan (25:29)
going to write that down.

Have a conversation with purchasing when you've got nothing to sell. That is brilliant.

Pascal Le Floch (25:30)
yeah.

Nothing to sell. Your presence will

Christian (25:34)
Any

relationship, any relationship you need to develop when you don't want to close a sale. I like that.

Pascal Le Floch (25:34)
sell.

Steve Vaughan (25:39)
That's

what you think of that one, Jonathan.

Jonathan Slasinski (25:41)
Yeah, I really love, I'm thinking like, do I just come in with coffee and see, you know, see, you'll just learn about what they're doing. But I love that approach Pascal, but also kind of like what Chris was saying, like when we think about complex sales, you know, you obviously you want to ask, Hey, who else is involved in this purchase? Who else, you know, can approve this? But I also like asking, Hey, who could decline this? Right. So, cause it can also come from outside of their scope.

Steve Vaughan (26:05)
Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (26:08)
It might be another department that already has an instrument where the university is going to say, no, we're not going to spend money on it. It could be competing cores where they don't want to have the same instrument. So I just think being able to understand some of the, again, outside stakeholders, right? That could potentially influence it as well.

Steve Vaughan (26:25)
Yeah.

Yeah. Building contractors. mean, whenever somebody says we're having a new lab built, whatever timeframe they give you, at least double, because they always run late, don't they? Let's be honest. And if I was able to teleport into sales calls right now that are happening across the industry worldwide as we come towards the end of 2025 and people are trying to close their year in business and get everything delivered at Invoice.

Christian (26:37)
I'm

Steve Vaughan (26:51)
Back to your point, Pascal, the kind of conversations I know salespeople will be having right now, or phone calls they'll be trying to make would be, and I'm paraphrasing wildly, and for those listening on the audio only, I'm pretending to hold the phone here. Hello, dear Mr. Purchaser, you don't know who I am, but you've got my order on your desk. you please sign my order for me, please? That's effectively what's happening right now, because we have no relationship, as Pascal says. And rather than waiting until that very last minute and then...

Christian (27:13)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (27:18)
hoping that some nice person is going to find my order that's on their desk and dig it out as if, you know, why would they? You know, it's far better to have those conversations much earlier in the process. So when we do need to speak to purchasing, they know who we are. We're in their system. We even dare I say got Ts and Cs. Again, another reason why forecast slips, you know, we haven't agreed Ts and Cs. We can't invoice Ts and Cs, I'm agreed, you know, we can do all that stuff in parallel, can't we rather in series.

We don't have to wait until we get the green flag from the technical person.

Christian (27:51)
Can I tell you a provocative secret, Steve?

Steve Vaughan (27:54)
please, please. Is it going to get me thrown off the podcast platform?

Christian (27:58)
But perhaps, no, perhaps, but it might be even

Jonathan Slasinski (27:58)
Fuck it.

Christian (28:02)
it might be provocative for our audience. Who knows? Maybe we'll get some feedback. So I believe that sales cannot really be rushed. So.

Steve Vaughan (28:07)
Yeah, why not? Go for it.

Christian (28:20)
If we follow the process, we do a lot of work top of funnel, we do a lot of prospecting, we bring opportunities into the funnel, we develop the opportunities, we qualify them well, we understand the decision makers. ⁓ It naturally progresses through the funnel. We always qualify, we always get a bit closer, do handle the objections. Eventually, the customer is ready to purchase. ⁓

Of course, if the financial year is difficult, our natural ⁓ drive is to try and speed opportunities up. we phone up and ⁓ chase them up and say, hey, customer, you've had this quote. Can we have the order, please? ⁓ I am not sure that's the most productive use of your time ever. Yeah, we all do it because there's a lot of pressure and

Steve Vaughan (28:59)
Yeah, absolutely.

But we all do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Christian (29:16)
know, the bosses need to have their quarterly figures and I understand all that and I've done it as well. But my experience in 30 years in this industry is that it hardly ever really works. So the secret to a successful end-year business is to start the year well and develop lots of opportunities.

Steve Vaughan (29:34)
That's a great thought. Absolutely right.

Yeah. Yeah. Do this stuff right at the get-go. So when it comes to the end of the year, we're, well, hopefully we're already over planned, but if we're not, we're, know, everything's lined up and we're not having to scrabble around trying to find last minute things to bring in normally at the cost of giving discounts and still frankly, let's be honest.

Jonathan Slasinski (29:41)
you

Christian (29:54)
I would love to hear from Jonathan because he's got the American perspective here. you know, I'd love to hear his view on

Steve Vaughan (29:58)
going as

our representative of North America. Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Slasinski (30:02)
It's called the hockey stick, right? this, it's every,

every place, everywhere. It's this hockey stick. I love, do, I really, like we say about, I don't think sales can be rushed because I was always, it's the customer's timeframe. It's not my timeframe, right? It's, it's on what the customer wants to do or what the customer can do. Now there's things I could do to massage that, but you know,

Christian (30:09)
Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (30:24)
I've been doing this for a while and I've tried even in my own personal selves to try to line up things earlier on in the quarter, but gosh, it always winds up being that hockey stick at the end.

Christian (30:34)
Yeah, that's true.

Steve Vaughan (30:36)
Hopefully the right way around though. Do you want the upside down acoustic or?

Jonathan Slasinski (30:40)
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Where I've made plan. I've

made plan already. talked to a few of my, of my colleagues and like, most of them are already sitting a plan already. I'm like, my God, that must be nice. I mean, I can, I can remember maybe three or four times in my career, December, where I was like, check the box. I'm done. So I think that's kind of.

Christian (30:58)
I was never quite

Steve Vaughan (30:58)
Yeah.

Christian (30:59)
sure though whether the hockey stick is driven by our customers or the hockey stick is driven by us. I was never quite sure about that.

Steve Vaughan (31:04)
by us. Yeah, it is.

Jonathan Slasinski (31:05)
by us.

Steve Vaughan (31:09)
Yeah, yeah. Go on, Pascal.

Pascal Le Floch (31:12)
Yeah, I have some thoughts here and probably one of the, let's say, leveraging effect we can consider is what is the type of deadline you give yourself to get a deal in? What I mean here is that if you start to think about it and you define the deadline, then your brain and yourself, you'll do everything you can to move, to progress.

even to accelerate the deal. ⁓ And of course you cannot decide for customers, but at least from your side you'll do whatever you can to move towards and progressing into the deal. And I think it's quite effective for salespeople when they think about

Steve Vaughan (31:56)
Absolutely.

Pascal Le Floch (32:02)
the end of the FIS career, not thinking about the 31st of December as the last day to get orders in, but for instance thinking about for instance 18th or 19th of December as the deadline.

Steve Vaughan (32:17)
Or even earlier,

probably if it's academia, they'll... Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓

Pascal Le Floch (32:19)
or even earlier, you know, I remember with my team

at the end of the year is not December, it's November or even before, you know, because then you know that you will remind customers, you will go back to your opportunities and make sure you recall, you revisit and so on so that you can close the deals in time. that would be my last tip for today.

Steve Vaughan (32:26)
Yuh.

That's a super point. Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (32:45)
I love it.

Steve Vaughan (32:46)
Oh, please don't go. I think I've mentioned this on this podcast before, but probably the most stupid thing I ever did once as a manager for business, high risk thing that I did, thankfully worked out, but I don't recommend this deal if you're thinking of doing this. We were waiting for a purchase order coming from a leading university in the Midlands, should we say, less unsanity more than that of the UK, for half a million.

dollar mass spectrometer and I really needed that delivered and invoiced this quarter. And I was pretty confident it was going to come in. So I ordered it on the factory ⁓ and the mass spectrometer was actually parked around the corner from the lab. So when the order came in, we delivered it in half an hour. Now I don't recommend doing that because if the order hadn't come in, I'd have had half a million dollars worth of excess stock on my fingers and I'd have been a lot of trouble. So

Christian (33:24)
Okay. Okay.

Steve Vaughan (33:39)
That's the silly things we can do if we don't understand buying influence groups, we don't understand the correct process. again, as I say, guys, I don't recommend you do that. Well, at least I kept my job a bit longer anyway. Final thought from all of you on this. It's been great discussion. We can carry on for this one all afternoon, but we do try and keep these to about 40 minutes. So yeah, good for it, Jonathan.

Jonathan Slasinski (33:39)
That's amazing.

Christian (33:47)
Good on you that it came through. Well done. ⁓

Jonathan Slasinski (34:00)
Yeah, it's-

I just, I think kind of just going back to the theme of, know, every sale is different, right? So we talk a lot about complex sales, but you know, there's those less complex sales. There's those, you know, the ones that are under 5k or 10 K, right? And again, so to me, that's about, okay, that's maybe one or two stakeholders that you have to get to. And then again, now Pascal, that's different timelines, right? Like when I was selling thermal cyclers that were under 5k, I was like, I need three a month, right? That was my timeline. I need to get, you know, so just

Steve Vaughan (34:15)
That's a really good point, really good point.

That's a great thought.

Jonathan Slasinski (34:31)
Again, think of it, you know, if it's a less complex sale, who, who, again, who do we have to talk to? It's probably not everybody in that chain, but you know, you're still going to make sure that you want to talk to more than one person or just don't assume that it is that one person.

Steve Vaughan (34:44)
Yeah, great point, great point. Final thought from you, Christian?

Christian (34:47)
Yeah, I think.

You know, great salespeople and great lovers are alike. They show a lot of curiosity and empathy. by curiosity and empathy, we can understand the different stakeholders in the decision group. We can then really come up with the

Steve Vaughan (34:55)
Okay.

it, I think.

Christian (35:14)
arguments that helps them in their daily life. So that's the empathy if we understand their daily life. And then we have a group of decision makers that's helping us and not, you know, trying to put obstacles in our way.

Steve Vaughan (35:32)
Great point. I know you well enough to know that you're a great sounds person, Christian. The other one is a matter for Mrs. Water to comment on. ⁓ Sorry for listening, Gillian. ⁓ Pascal, final thought for you.

Christian (35:38)
Ha ha ha ha!

Jonathan Slasinski (35:38)
Hahaha

Christian (35:42)
Let's not go there.

Pascal Le Floch (35:48)
Yeah, I also like Valentine's Day and lovers. But back to what can happen in big organizations from customer side, there is some politic power from time to time and you have to be aware of it. So one key thing here is to make the difference between the official org chart you could be presented.

and what really happens, who gets the power, who can influence the others. And especially when there are people against your project, you have to understand who else could naturalize this person, or at least could minimize how this person could stop or interfere with your project. So that's about it.

Steve Vaughan (36:28)
What could go wrong?

Christian (36:29)
you

Steve Vaughan (36:37)
Great

point. Yeah, great point. This is a topic that we cover as part of our advanced selling skills schedule training course that we run in the UK, Switzerland, France, and soon in North America as well. And we also covered, of course, as part of our tailored training that we do for our customers when customers ask us for a specific training module. So we've tried to cover in a 40 minute podcast, which is actually quite a big topic. It probably takes a couple of days.

on a training program. But if you find it useful, don't forget to give us a review, hopefully a five-star review on Apple or Spotify does help the show in lots of weird and wonderful ways. We'll be back again with a final podcast of 2026 in a couple of weeks time. Not sure what we're going to do that. I've kind of got an idea of making it like a holiday season podcast, depending on availability of my colleagues there. So hold your thought and watch this space. If we don't get around to doing it, it'll be

Christian (37:17)
So. So.

Steve Vaughan (37:32)
It'll be something to do with selling because that's what we do, of course. ⁓ In the meantime, please, please tell your friends and colleagues about about the podcast. We'll be back again in a couple of weeks with something in terms of a podcast. Until then, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.

Christian (37:46)
Bye.

Steve Vaughan (37:47)
Bye bye guys.