Meet John Bycroft in our top salespeople interview series.
In these interviews, Clive Miller seeks the unique methods, knowledge, habits, and practices of top salespeople.
John is a veteran top sales performer.
Transitioning from Cobalt programming, he sold Olivetti branch automation solutions to banks and building societies in the UK.
He was so successful that Olivetti had him set up a global sales team to help worldwide subsidiaries achieve similar results. This initiative culminated in a $360m deal with Rabo Bank in Holland.
After several business-building adventures, John has returned to his roots selling software to banks as VP of Sales for Comforte AG.
In this interview, I ask John to reveal the secrets of his sales success.
Transcript of the Interview with John Bycroft
Clive:
Welcome. This is a project that I've started, to interview top salespeople. That's people who are consistently successful, to try and draw out their secrets.
I'd like to start by introducing you to John Bycroft who's on the call.
John, I've known for more than 20 years. Before I knew him, he was in IT until he got a sales job with Olivetti, selling branch automation systems to banks and building societies.
He was so successful at it that they had him start a global team to help all the other subsidiaries around the world achieve the same results.
Then some years later he left Olivetti and spearheaded several companies, having several adventures leading companies to success and then came back to his roots about five years ago, when he came back to sales, so now he's VP of Sales EMEA, for Comforte AG.
You may not have heard of Comforte AG. They sell software to banks.
So welcome John. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview.
John:
Good morning, everybody.
Clive:
I'll get straight into the questions.
John, I'd like to understand what you attribute your sales success to. Tell me about the things that you do or did that you consider had the most impact on your results.
John:
Looking for a fundamental I think the important thing in sales is to be interested and by that, I mean be genuinely interested in the situation that your prospect is in, the challenges that they face, the problems that they have, and really work as an analyst to come up with a solution which best fits what they need now.
Obviously, the difference between being a pure analyst, as perhaps I was in my day, and being a salesperson is that hopefully the solution that you come up with is the one that you're selling. Otherwise you won't be a very successful salesperson.
So, it is a combination of understanding your prospects needs and the market needs, but also making sure that you as an inpidual are aligned with a company whose values, whose products, whose quality of delivery is something that you can align yourself with and be confident in.
As you say, I've led a few companies over the years. One of the most successful ones that I had prior to returning, as you say to the knitting and coming back to the banking market, was an outsourced sales company and one of the important things that I learnt several times over is that there are companies out there whose product or service or proposition is way in excess of their delivery capability. And the only thing you can do in those circumstances as a salesperson is probably resign and move on.
If you are in a position to meld, to mould, to change then that's something at a more senior level perhaps, as an advisor or an independent, you can move the company to a position where they improve their proposition.
But that's a very long-winded answer to the question and I'd say the answer is to be really interested in your prospects situation and make sure that what you propose meets that situation, solves their problems, and does it in a qualitative and cost-effective way.
Thank you john that's a very thorough answer I'm going to try and push you a little bit further on it. I'm just going to say, is there anything else? If there was a second thing, what would it be?
I think if we've established that you're interested. You have to question and you have to really lift stones that perhaps other salespeople might not be tempted to lift and in this way, you often impress the prospect with your thought process and where you're going and again it's part of the process of being genuinely interested.
You know, “how have you got to be where you are?”, “what is the situational analysis?” and, “how do we get out of that?” Now that does, in a lot of sales, particularly major accounts, larger ticket item sales, requires a certain amount of intelligence and it requires a certain amount of ability to build a rapport and empathy. You have to be careful of a prospect saying, "what business is this of yours, why are you asking these questions?"
So again, we all know in sales that to qualify you ask questions but it sometimes requires diplomacy, empathy, and intelligence to do that.
Beyond that the next thing and probably the thing that I sometimes think sets successful people apart from less successful salespeople, is perseverance.
It's amazing how many people see sales objections as obstacles when often they are not. They are just a way of formulating thoughts as to how something can be implemented or how it can be presented internally to colleagues and the people you know.
If they can't reach somebody or they get voicemail for the fifth time, they move on to other things. I unashamedly call people, email, chase people, until they say no thank you. That's all they have to do is say no thank you and then I'll go somewhere else. But until then I firmly believe that I have their best interests at heart and a solution that will aid the quality of their business, their life, whatever.
That's brilliant, thanks john.
Would you say that there are other things that you've learned not to do, over the years in sales?
There is a fine line between that perseverance and being an absolute pain in the proverbial. We've all seen foot in the door salesmen and women, probably less so nowadays, but people who just will not take no for an answer. Well, that doesn't win anybody any friends or get business and it can only cause hostility. I don't see the point of that.
I'm having an issue at the moment with a company who I guess I shouldn't name who don't understand that, at the moment, I've moved house and I don't have the ability to take a satellite television subscription. I've said this to them at least six times now and I guarantee that if not today then tomorrow I will get another call from somebody else inviting me to take satellite TV at an even lower price than they offered me last week and I can't physically do it and they're just not listening and that just annoys me.
Having had that company's product for about 15 years and they are really starting to, what's a word that I can use politely, upset me. So certainly, just not taking no or a logical no for an answer is certainly something that I think, ‘no stop it’. There should be enough fish in the sea that you can find another one to get on the couch.
What else, I would say it's back to the perseverance thing. I've learned just not to give up. Just keep going. You can think, ‘oh this is a waste of time’, ‘oh they haven't picked up for the last 50 times’, ‘they are never around so they never answer’ and then one day, and it might not be this week, it might not be next month, it can actually be a year later, they will come back to you and they say they remember you because of the way that you presented your proposition. They will come back at a time that's right for them and hey presto, off we go.
That's great. Can you tell me a bit about the knowledge that you have that supports your success and how you came by it?
In IT terms in software, I would say that I had a very firm foundation.
People watching this will probably think ‘well, there's a dinosaur’ but I started out as a cobalt programmer which you might think is obsolete but it's frightening when you know how many banks and big companies are still running the services and the infrastructure that rely on, on cobalt programs.
I started out as a cobalt programmer and really what that taught me for the first time was the unassailable logic of a computer and following logic in in what you're doing.
I then became a systems analyst and started to see the bigger picture and how things flow and how they interact and from there, a project manager and a systems manager and at that stage I started to buy systems from suppliers and, as indeed you mentioned, I went into sales with Olivetti.
Olivetti were one of four companies at the time that I was evaluating for a system for my then employer and I didn't actually choose the Olivetti solution. But they were one of three who offered me a job and I jumped at what I saw as a far more rewarding, interesting and exciting life.
So, I think in IT terms and software, although the things that we do nowadays with the advent of the cloud and Kubernetes and the way that things are developed and maintained, it has changed an awful lot, but in other ways it's still fundamentally the same thing and the cloud, which everybody talks about, which we all know is not really a cloud, it's just somebody else's server somewhere else in the world, is actually broadly analogous to time sharing which is what we did back in the early 70s when nobody had any memory on their terminal. They just went off somewhere else so it's kind of strange that we've come so far and yet not even moved an inch.
In terms of the broader non-it sales and I have a broad experience across fast-moving consumer goods across utility products and whatever. I would say it's experience of life, Clive. You know, it's the university of life. It's meeting people. It's finding people interesting. It's understanding their challenges and back to the same probably hammering the same drum, really helping them.
That's a really good answer too.
This might become a bit repetitive but see if you can find some additional wisdom in there, so what talents skills and methods do you consider important for success in selling.
OK, I will say perseverance again at the risk of repeating myself but persevering with the same answer. Resilience, so don't take it personally, don't take the non-answer, don't take the no for an answer, keep going until they say categorically no thank you. I would say intelligence is useful. Don't keep flogging something that's not going anywhere. Good sense of humour. Being able to build rapport, empathy.
Which aspects are strengths for you and which do you wish you were better at?
As I say, I enjoy the questioning. I like asking questions and I generally seem able to quickly engage in that conversation which isn't just following a script or playbook, “have you got this?”, “did you do that?” it's really understanding, “well hang on why have you done that?”, “were you part of that decision?”, “who else might be involved in this?”, “how big a journey is it?”, “do you at least agree with us?”, and then working together to strategize. I think I'm very good at that.
I'm not so good at time management. That's always a challenge. I would defend it with the saying, “if you want something doing ask a busy person”. But always the time available, what's the expression, ‘the time available is not quite equal to the time required’.
‘Work expands to fill the time available for it’ - Parkinson’s Law.
That's right, yes, that's the one. And I can go back to my school and university time - give me a year to do a project and I will start it with three days to go and submit it and generally pass, not with distinction perhaps. I might have possibly been able to do a better job.
So, time management, preparation often, again part of being interested is to at least research the company and find out what challenges and what the chairman said in the last financial report that may actually cascade down into something which is broadly analogous with the direction that you're taking with the product or service.
But generally, time management, preparation, it's those kinds of things where there isn't an immediate deadline. I tend to need deadlines to deliver and that's a frustration.
I'm aligned with that one.
So finally, last question then, can you tell me about the character traits and qualities that you consider important factors contributing to a salesperson's success?
I've mentioned some of them. I won't repeat, well, I'll repeat sort of, intelligence, perseverance, questioning. I think humility is a big one. We don't always have, well we never have all the answers, and often things take a different turn.
One of the things which I find sad sometimes is new salespeople or people who are not very successful, insisting that their way is right.
There's an awful lot of humility, I think, in successful salespeople. Understanding that five different people have five different perspectives. Climbing into their skin and looking at the world through their eyes.
When we're doing sales training or developing people within our organization, we talk about personality traits and how you can match, in the way that you communicate, and also the way in which they think and the triggers that they have, so I think a lot of that is absolutely critical in successful sales and that takes again intelligence and thought and preparation and a certain humility.
We all like to think “Oh yeah, we've got this”, we know the answer, we know the way”, and actually we don't and even if we do, people tend not to like to be told. They like to come on the journey with you and that's back to questioning, coaching, and bringing people along on a journey which, hopefully, if we do it well, they not only think that it was their idea, it probably was their idea. All we've done is create the environment in which they came up with the right answer.
I'm trying to think of good salespeople that I know. It is, it's intelligence, it's humility, it's humour, and it's building whatever destination we define together, very often.
That's fantastic John. This has been a really interesting session. I'll look at the recording. Obviously, I’ll send you a copy of it or I'll give you a link to look at it, but I think this would be really valuable to share with other people and what I hope to do is share it via my social media and via the website, but I'll wait for your feedback before I do that of course.
Thanks very much, this has been brilliant.
Anything to add?
You know all this of course. I mean I've learned a lot from you over the years so it's a bit rich, you asking me these questions. Hopefully, it fits in with what you expected. I’d be interested not only to see this recording but also what you've seen from others because every day is a school day. We can always learn.
That's a great phrase that is, “Every day is a school day”. That's a brilliant place to end. Thank you, John.
Thank you, Clive. Speak to you again soon.
Learn the success secrets of top salespeople from these one-to-one interviews.
There are many sales professionals who succeed well enough to satisfy their employers and a few who consistently outperform the pack.
What are the skills that set them apart?
What do they know that others don't?
How do they consistently sell more than most others in similar roles?
In a series of interviews, I will ask these questions and more to reveal the keys to exceptional sales success, known and practiced by a few.
Top salespeople change the world, one sale at a time.
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