Paul M. Caffrey (00:00.59)
I'm delighted to be joined by Rob Dumbledon, co -founder of Four/Four We are going to shoot through Rob's best sales advice in the course of the next few minutes. Rob, how's it going?
Rob (00:13.617)
Very good, thanks Paul, very good to be here.
Paul M. Caffrey (00:15.918)
Yeah, look, it's exciting. And this is going to be a little bit more rapid fired than perhaps people are used to. So what is your number one prospect and tip, Rob?
Rob (00:27.161)
So I think this is especially for youngsters coming into the world of sales. I think it's that curiosity that they need to have. It's very easy to get into that rut of running a prospecting process, checking the box, going through the motions, trying to move on to the next one, right? Because you've got targets to hit. I get it. My recommendation here is to be curious, get to know the...
the prospect you're talking to. Understand their world. Do enough research so that you can talk with passion, with purpose, because that's going to resonate with them as a human. And no one wants to be talking to a robot, basically. So I think it's that curiosity that I think will take people far.
Paul M. Caffrey (01:15.822)
really like that. And again, you can use that to your advantage. If you call out that you've done a bit of research or you have a perspective on something, you can call out, look, I'm only new. I'm only doing this a little while. What's your take on it? Straight away, people will love the fact that you've done the research, what you're saying there, Rob. And you can get them to open up. And also you can bow down to the fact of, I look, I only have a year experience. I'm only doing this for six months. What do you think?
and people tend to take it on pretty well. So not an easy thing to do. Let's face it, we always want to jump in and start generating the leads, but super, super important. What is your number one sales tip Rob?
Rob (01:50.705)
Mmm.
Rob (01:56.881)
I think from a sales perspective it's about stakeholder management, it really is. Because part of your job as a seller is to enable someone internally to advocate you, to champion you, to kind of put themselves out there within their own business. And you've got to arm that person, because they've got a day job, you've got to arm that person with as much as they can, and nuanced by the way, by...
stakeholder that they're talking to and that takes a lot of organization and a lot of skill in understanding that stakeholder spectrum, their personalities and their needs. But if you do, then you are effectively marshalling that group of people and managing that group of people to make a concerted decision and that's the ultimate aim. So stakeholder management for me is the just
laser focus on that and how you're going to do that.
Paul M. Caffrey (03:00.302)
Excellent. And it's more important now than ever and does not look like that's going to change anytime soon. And for somebody looking to get ahead, what's your number one tip for someone looking to get promoted?
Rob (03:08.689)
I don't think so, no.
Rob (03:17.809)
I think analytics for me is key and you know if you think about what happens at the upper echelons of businesses it's all analytics, KPIs, measures, you know you're looking at those tiny inflection points that you can improve and get marginal gains and a lot of that requires deep analytics of velocity and
you know, what's happening at each turn by turn at each stage. If you're going to get into that or move up within a business in sales, I think you have to have that view, not just from a macro level and understanding measures and KPIs from a sales perspective, but also how that applies to your world. I did a lot of work with a team I used to work with and, you know, we used to boil everything down to those
those numbers, those analytical numbers on sales velocity and things like that. And it helps people focus also their work. It really does because you know what to look at next. You know what the kind of the flags, red flags should be. So I think people have to get into that sales analytics world and pretty quickly.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:38.446)
Very original answer. Give some people food for thought for sure. Analytics. Check it out. What? Not for everyone, but if it helps you get ahead, maybe it could be for a little while. What is your number one tip when it comes to books for salespeople looking to improve?
Rob (04:44.881)
It's not for everyone!
Rob (04:59.601)
So there's a book I absolutely love and again this isn't for everyone because not everyone likes sport but this is directly related to sport. It's called Legacy by by James Kerr and it's about preparation for excellence basically and it talks about the All Blacks rugby team and everything that they do from a ritual perspective as individuals all the way through to...
how they work as a team. And I think the fundamentals of that in sport, you know, you've got this one event that everybody is working towards, it's everything that goes around that, that leads to that one event and then being able to execute successfully. All of the preparation, personal, team, it's just, it's so relatable to the business world. And I think if you read that and you get to grips and understanding of some of the, just the ethos.
of just being humble and just getting down and doing it. You're part of a team. You've got to work towards a common goal. I think it's fantastic and it kind of gives you that just nice foundation for a lot of things in the business world and some of the micro things as well that you might want to focus on. So that's my book tip.
Paul M. Caffrey (06:21.39)
I look forward to checking it out. I haven't read it. It does remind me of Clyde Woodward's book, I think, Will to Win. And in that he speaks a lot about transitions. So how do they transition play fast? I know Barcelona were very big on this as well in the football terms. That's something when it comes to sales, transitioning between each sales step is super, super important, but equally preparation. I'm all about preparation. So I'm really looking forward to jumping into that.
Rob (06:27.921)
Yeah, that's right there.
Paul M. Caffrey (06:51.95)
That's a key differentiator that anybody can use to their advantage and therein lies the advantage anyone can prepare. The bad part of that is it's work. And I guess there's no fear that an all black team, I imagine they put a tremendous amount of work in beforehand. So it would be interesting to see how they go about that. So, yeah, looking forward to checking it out. When it comes to preparation, particularly in your world at the moment, Rob, what does
doing the work before the work look like.
Rob (07:25.489)
answer to this is going to be very much based on the size and position of the business. We are a pre -seed or seed business, should I say, doing founder -led selling. We're very focused on a single market at the moment. So actually preparation is potentially easier for us to do. And it kind of comes down to that ICP profiling of
continuing to drive towards are that all of the details that surround our ICP and quite often people are very kind of high level about ICPs, business size, revenue, turnover, but this we're going into far more detail when it comes to defining when actually what are the ICP signals in terms of the
the structure of the business, the organization structure, who they've got in place, have they got a commercial CPO versus a technical CPO. We believe all of those things create our ICP so that we can, we only then go after people we believe our messaging will resonate with because that's what you're looking for in terms of matchmaking. And we can't, we haven't got the brand or the awareness or the presence yet to afford a bit of a broader kind of blat out there to.
change people's opinions or minds that much. So what we need to do is drive towards repeatability in that ICP fit structure and take it far beyond just thermographics. It's got to be about the way the organization's structured and the roles that are in place and things like that. So that's our preparation right now is really honing in on refining that ICP fit.
Paul M. Caffrey (09:20.11)
I really like that Robin for the fact that you call out that that's it for the minute. It will change. It should always change. And the fact that you recognize that is quite, quite powerful. People want to find out more about you, more about the business. How can they do that?
Rob (09:37.617)
Yeah, we're available four four .ai is the website. If they visit there, there's there's loads of resources available. We talk about what we do. I'm also on LinkedIn, happy to connect with people and have a chat. So yeah, find me there.
Paul M. Caffrey (09:54.286)
Great, well look, check it out, go find Rob and check out what his company is doing because you're probably gonna know them by name in a few years time. So why not get ahead of the rush? Rob, thanks so much for joining me. Speak again soon.
Rob (10:08.017)
Thanks, Cole.
