TESTIMONIALS
What Our Clients Say
Katharine Morris
SALES MANAGER
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“When you see that you’re working long hours, you’re working hard and you’re not seeing the results, it’s really demotivating and disappointing.
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The training and coaching has made a huge difference. This is my best year by far - I’ve achieved double my sales target, and I’ve also achieved next year’s sales target already. I’ve brought on some of my biggest deals yet, and I just feel in such a different space to where I was a year or two ago.
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I can understand people questioning whether they should pay for training. I’ve been on a lot of training that hasn’t been particularly valuable to me. I think this training is extremely different and I would say go for it. I have actually found a change in terms of my professional life, but it’s also impacted my personal life in the sense that you feel like you’re achieving good things at work, I’m more tailored in terms of the time I spend on the right things which means I’m not working the hours I did – I’m just boxing 'clever' around it, and that’s thanks to a lot of skills I learned with you.”
Lisa Jefferies
VICE PRESIDENT OF CLIENT SERVICES
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“Because of the coaching that you provided to a member of my team, he took a step back to understand what problem the client was trying to solve and realised that they needed something completely different, so he's helped completely transform their mindset on what we're offering them. That's a deal that's probably 10x the size of the deals he usually sells, and that's just closed as well. So, excellent results.
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I just don't know what the hesitation would be, because it's so valuable. There's not a single person who has been through it who hasn't commented on how it's helped them be better at what they do. The opportunity cost of not doing it is higher than doing it, so I would highly recommend to everyone, don't hesitate, just get on, get the coaching and start getting better results."
Karl Boehm
STRATEGIC ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE
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“As a result of us working together, I’ve been able to more quickly ensure that I’m speaking with the right people. The sales cycles have also sped up on the basis that we’ve been able to help a prospect reach a decision point in each meeting.
I can’t understand why you wouldn’t do this. I regard selling as a profession. With all other vocations you’d be required to continually educate yourself.
If you want to continually stay at the top of your game you absolutely have to invest in yourself. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain."
Sharon Taylor
HEAD OF SALES OPERATIONS
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“We were often selling solutions before we really knew what people’s challenges were, so we'd just go in there and 'bang our corporate drum', but really that wasn’t what the clients wanted. So we were just trying to sell the wrong thing.
Our appointment with you, Les, was to help us move away from selling generic products and services to being client-centric. And I think you’ve taught us to become curious about what the client’s current situation and challenges are, and then look to achieve a partnership with them. That’s what we wanted to achieve and you’ve enabled us to do that.
We really are qualifying our opportunities now. We’re not just chasing any old bit of business. Our salespeople are hungry, they want to win, but being very focused on the opportunities that we’re working on has enabled us to improve our win rates, so we are winning more deals and we’ve got a really healthy pipeline."
Douglas Gee
SVP, HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
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“The journey that we’ve been on with you has been really rewarding. We have tools and best practices now that help us get a sense of the job to be done. There’s a much better equality and a much better understanding across the team of what we need to do and how we need to do it.
Having you as a coach both for me and the team just brought another dimension into our development. The influence of an external coach was more easily absolved for some members of the team rather than me giving them advice or support directly.
We’re about to have a record year. Our average deal size has gone up, and for the most part we’re engaged earlier on in the sales process.
Whether you’re an individual contributor, whether you’re running a sales team, my advice would be jump right in. It will be a great experience and you stand to learn from someone that’s been selling professionally for many years.”
Paul Gilfrin
SOFTWARE SALES DIRECTOR
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“I didn’t have a repeatable sales structure or framework in place. I was driven by what the customer wanted to do rather than where I wanted to end up. It was difficult to prioritise my pipeline. I was able to close my biggest deal and better qualify my pipeline. It allowed me to be more natural with customers. I’m less stressed all round.
My advice is, if you think it's what you want to do and the fit is right with Les, then I would go for it straight away and don't hesitate.”
Tracey O'Leary
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR–BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
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“My main challenge was not really knowing my clients well enough to understand the issues that they’re facing and how that impacts the business. That was a vicious circle for me. I was spending a lot of time, energy and effort working on very small deal sizes, and I wasn’t focussing my time correctly to hit my sales targets. My results have been pretty much similar year on year because I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with the same approach.
The biggest learning for me was accepting that there are other ways of doing things and rethinking about how I go about my day. The first thing has been around planning my client calls. It may sound really obvious, but when you fall into a trap of doing a job for a long time, maybe you think you know what you’re doing. I’ve spent a lot more time trying to be more structured and strategic. That has fundamentally changed the way that I’m doing business.
The programme has been hugely helpful. It’s transformed not just mine, but the whole team’s attitude. It’s made us all step back and rethink the way that we are doing business. Everybody is being more successful because of it, so I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it at all."
Ian Hamilton
HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
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“We were too passive and reactive in generating opportunities. We didn’t know the prospective client well enough, so it was difficult to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We weren’t progressing opportunities as quickly as we would like and we were over investing in the wrong opportunities. Ultimately, our win rate wasn’t where we wanted it to be.
We had to do more to generate the same outcome. That eats into our work-life balance that we all strive for.
Since working with Les, we’ve been identifying and working on better opportunities. We’ve been able to understand the client’s challenges and requirements better, so we’ve been able to add more value during the sales process. That has led to achieving the same, if not better, results with less inputs.
It’s easy to look at the monetary and time cost of training and wonder whether it pays back. In our time together, the results have paid back in multiples. It has been worth every penny and every minute we put into it.”
Barry Payne
DIRECTOR OF EXTERNAL RELATIONS
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“My primary role is to discover unconsidered needs. Before working with you, I was a little bit 'scattergun' and I was wasting time and not being deliberate or strategic about who I was targeting. I was also leading too much with solutions and products without thinking of the mutual value.
I wondered to myself why too many conversations weren’t going anywhere. We all get a bit of a high when we get an initial meeting with a really important person... and then we get a real low when nothing happens as a result of it. I was curious to understand why that was happening. I didn’t have a structure in place, a roadmap or a playbook to help me.
I’m now planning more effectively and more diligently. I’m also having more diagnostic conversations, really focussing on asking the right questions and listening, and giving a compelling reason to carry on the conversation.
It’s changed the way that I look at things. It’s given me confidence to go to senior leaders with a compelling reason to meet, and a structure to allow me to drive a result going forward that’s mutually acceptable. My debriefs with colleagues all around the world are also much more diligent now."
Simon Oswald
VICE PRESIDENT • SALES ASSOCIATE
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“We would invest a lot of time and energy in deals that would run over months or even years. And at the 11th hour, something crops up that had never been mentioned before, and it just changed the entire context of the sale. Quite often, it was too little too late.
Through the time that we’ve spent together in classroom training, online sessions and 1:1 coaching, and the structure and discipline you’ve helped us put in place, we’ve got a lot better at qualifying opportunities. Right from the outset we’re using the two core questions you’ve coached us to ask.
I would be remiss if I said it was coincidence that the last couple of years have been some of the best that we’ve experienced. That is really something given some of the challenges that we as a business, and the industry, have faced.
An investment in yourself is the most important investment to make. I have found that the time I have spent with you both as part of a wider group and 1:1 has given me a framework that’s intuitive and progressive. Any time when I felt stuck, it’s given me a structure so I can go back to basics and start working through the steps. Usually through doing that, I have that lightbulb moment and I see the way forward."