Accountability Without Authority: The Hidden Skill Of High-Performing Sellers

Selling complex technology isn’t about the lone genius with a quota. It’s about orchestrating people, timing and trust across a messy, customer-led journey.

We sit down with Cliff Keast - former sales leader at VMware, SAP and Business Objects, now a coach to revenue teams - to unpack how enterprise deals really get done when 20, 30 or even over 100 people touch a single opportunity.

Separating Average Performers from Reliable Closers

Cliff shares the identity shift that separates average performers from reliable closers: stop trying to be the hero and become the integrator of value. Your credibility in the C‑suite comes from your ability to marshal your company’s full expertise - pre-sales, legal, services, customer success, partners - exactly when it matters. 

Focusing on Soft Skills That Make the Hard Things Work

We get practical on the soft skills that make the hard things work: establish psychological safety, show trust first, share credit publicly, handle issues privately, and keep communication ruthlessly clear. 

A simple discipline, write actions clearly and start every meeting by reviewing them, turns vague updates into peer accountability without the drama.

Facing the Reality of Cross-Functional Friction

We also confront the reality of cross-functional friction. As organisations scale, process and function disaggregate. Quoting systems stall over irrelevant fields, legal arrives too late, and rules designed for efficiency create bottlenecks. 

Finding the Selling Line

Cliff draws the line between customer-centric rule pushing and selfish rule breaking, and explains how top sellers earn an “unfair share” of scarce resources by qualifying well, setting purpose, and making it easy for specialists to win. 

Shaping the Path

For sales leaders, the mandate is to shape the path: clear the runway with adjacent functions, coach orchestration skills, and measure the operating rhythm that keeps cross-functional teams moving.

Who This Is For

If you’re navigating enterprise sales, team performance or revenue leadership, you’ll leave with a sharper playbook for influence without authority, smarter stakeholder timing, and a renewed respect for the human side of selling. 

Subscribe, share with a teammate who needs a better deal rhythm, and drop a review to tell us which function is hardest to align in your world.

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Transcript

Sam 0:09

Welcome to Get Amplified, the podcast about teamwork in the tech industry. Vicky, it's been a hot minute. How are you?

Vic 0:16

It has been a hot minute, hasn't it? Yeah, it's been quite a while.

Sam 0:20

Yeah.

Vic 0:21

It might have been a hot minute, but it was worth waiting for because we have got a wonderful guest on today.

Sam 0:27

We've got who have we got?

Vic 0:29

We've got Cliff Keast. And Cliff and I were at VMware at the same time, but I think it's fair to say, Cliff, we didn't, our paths didn't really cross very much.

Cliff 0:40

Not extensively, no no.

Cliff’s 40-Year Career Journey

Vic 0:42

No. But we caught up at the back end of last year, and I explained to you that although you didn't know it, you were pretty much the catalyst for the Amplified Group because you brought into VMware to do some consulting a guy called Simon Clarkson that we had on the podcast way back, and he was absolutely the inspiration for why we do what we do. Um, so I've got a tremendous amount of gratitude for you, Cliff. Thank you very much.

Sam 1:16

That's pretty cool. The foundation of the Amplified Group before your very eyes.

Vic 1:21

Exactly. So with that, I don't think I'm gonna say any more, Sam. I'm gonna pass it over to you.

Sam 1:26

Good, good, excellent.

Vic 1:29

Thanks for that.

Sam 1:31

So, Cliff, I guess we know a little about the VMware bit, although um only a very little. Maybe you could start by giving us a sort of a quick canter through your your career to date, if you don't mind.

Cliff 1:42

Oh well, um career to date. Well, it's it's a number of years. Uh it's nearly frighteningly, it's nearly 40 years.

Sam 1:52

Gosh, you don't look anywhere near old enough.

Enterprise Sales Complexity Grows

Cliff 1:54

I know, exactly, I can't believe it myself. So it started, I started in a technical role. In fact, back when I was doing education, computer studies and the technology industry was really just starting in in schools and in colleges and so on. So I've fell in love with computing um at an early age, and I moved into doing a technical role. I found my way into a customer-facing version of that by doing technical support, first and second line technical support uh on the software, predominantly operating system software. And then through working in the customer service division, I was part of uh the sales tour of our facilities, and customer service was being used as part of the sale and the value that an organization would get in working. The company and that was that was sequent at that time in the um uh high-performance multi-processing Unix world, a fantastic company um that I'm so grateful to have had you know nearly uh eight years with. And um the sales organization asked me to come and join them and be a pre-sales uh engineer, pre-sales solution architect, they call them. So I found my way using my technical skills, but now it more at the sharp end, uh working with the sales teams. That inevitably left me uh in the position where I understood the whole sales process front to back because I was working very closely with the salespeople. So when my sales, my closely aligned sales executive left the organization, I asked for his role and I was fortunately given it. So I moved into sales and I thought, well, I can do similar, similar things, but I can make more money, frankly. That was a little bit of the motivation. Um, yes. So I moved into sales, and then from there I've stayed in sales ever since. And I've moved companies, I moved from Sequent to Onyx and from Onyx to Business Objects, and that was a little bit about continuing to challenge myself. It was a bit about moving from hardware and services sales into software sales. Um, business objects was again a fantastic uh company to work for. I spent nine years with Business Objects acquired into SAP. Uh so I was doing a variety of sales roles and then ended up being a sales client executive for SAP, selling the SAP suite. And at that time, we're now late 2008-2009. I was looking really to move into a management role. I'd started to feel that I wanted to take that that branch of the career ladder and develop my skills in management. But I made one decision, which was that I didn't think SAP was the right place for me to do that. Um, it was I I felt it just lacked a bit of the autonomy that I wanted as a manager. Um at that time, big big old beast by that point, wasn't it? Absolutely. And managers in SAP had two solid line reports and one dotted line report. So it was quite a complex organization. And so anyway, inevitably, I followed uh Maurizio Carli, our European VP, to VMware. And and that's when I joined VMware, Vicky, 2009, a variety of sales roles at VMware, first line leadership, public sector in the UK, moved into AMIA-based roles. I did enterprise roles, industry leadership uh across AMIA. And then in 2022, I made a decision, a personal decision, to step back from full-time work and I began my own business around coaching and mentoring. And that's pretty much what I do now. And I work with sales teams to raise the standard of selling, I work with revenue leaders to drive meaningful change, and with senior leaders to accelerate their development. And I think my work now is a mixture of coaching, consulting, and mentoring.

Sam 5:59

Sounds like a good gig.

Cliff 6:02

Yeah, it's very enjoyable. And yeah, I think for me, I get a lot of satisfaction from helping other people achieve their potential.

Sam 6:11

Yeah, I guess you get to the point where you think I've learned so blooming much throughout my career, in my case, from all the mistakes I made, that it's a shame not to share that with people who are who are working their way through that and maybe stop them making some of the same mistakes that we made, right?

Cliff 6:26

Oh, completely. Sam, I think that's so true for me because I mean I can sort of position it as giving back a little bit because you you have gained so much experience, and that experience is so valuable for other people. So, you know, I do feel that. I mean, maybe maybe that isn't what they feel, maybe that's not what they feel, but you know, I can feel it.

Sam 6:48

Maybe we're just helping them to make mistakes. I hope not. I hope not. Sorry, you can cut that bit out there out there if you like. It's one of those mornings, clearly. Um so clearly, you know, you've kind of gone from I mean, obviously the technical side of things first, but you've gone from individual contributor to manager to coach. And yeah, it clearly this is not just about being an individual with a target, right? Is is that there's there's more to enterprise sales than just you on your own out there calling people, visiting people. Yeah, sure.

Cliff 7:30

Yeah, yes, of course. I mean it it's a complex business, isn't it? Enterprise sales. And I think you you or both have seen, and I've seen the level of complexity increase over time. If I think of the way that I mean, I spent 13 years at at VMware nearly. So I you know, I saw an enormous amount of complexity come into the business as they acquired new parts of the organization. They organically grew, they grew by acquisition. The the the size and scale of the operation was significant. Fortunately, we were in a high growth business, in a high growth market. so yeah, a lot of moving parts. You know, I think selling is very much enterprise selling is very much a team sport. Yeah.

Orchestration As A Core Skill

Vic 8:17

Yes. I mean that was one of the reasons we um we really wanted you to come on because when when we were speaking last year, one of the things that you spoke about was the the role of orchestration in enterprise sales. And I think of all of the work that we do, and we predominantly, as you know, work with sales leaders, yeah, the orchestration bit and going from I can do this all on my own to being a team sport is is quite a different mind shift. And I think, particularly in the SAS world that we're living in now, it's just more important than ever that it's it's not easy. It's an it's a new way of doing things.

Sam 9:08

Yes. It's a different skill when you go from how do I win this to who do I need to help me to win this?

Cliff 9:16

Yeah, it's it's very much a different mentality and certainly then a different skill set. I mean, for me, the the nucleus of this a little bit is something that I learned on a training course many, many years ago. And I'm I wouldn't know who to attribute this to now. I should look this up, but the qu so let me pose the scenario. You're you're a young seller, you're going in front of a C-suite executive. Let's say you've managed to get that meeting, and the challenge that was positioned to me, and I certainly felt this challenge as a young seller, was okay, what what what am I doing in this room? What is my value for this individual? And we were taught, and I was taught, that your value as an individual in that room is you you have the ability to marshal the full resources and expertise of the organization that you represent to bring to bear on the problems and the opportunities of that company. And if you think of that as being your role, then that allows you to do what we all need to do in C-suite meetings, is to up-level ourselves, you know, have a clear purpose for why we're there and be able to establish credibility really quickly. Well, that power that sentence gave me the ability to walk into that room and know that I had value because I was the I was the person who could facilitate all of the expertise of my business to bring to bear for this customer. So, of course, to be able to do that, you've got to be able to then go back and drive the orchestration, let's call it that, the orchestration of all of those resources to enable the full power of the organization to to um to be offered. So it's it's a critical skill, you know, everybody has to do it. Um and I think everybody in an enterprise organization is doing it, some better than others. And I think I described, Vicky, that I think it's a it's a hidden and underrated skill orchestration.

Vic 11:24

Yeah, I also just from listening to there, you tend to think of sales as quite a lonely job, but the way you've just described it almost makes me think of I remember the first time we got our amplifiers together. I thought in the room I needed to have the answers for everything, but I didn't. It was about me getting the right people in the room. It was like the Team X event that we had. We just needed to get the right people in the room and create the environment, and then some magic happened. And that's almost what you I think that's what you were just describing then.

Cliff 11:58

Yes. And I yeah, I think that is a great description of it. Of course, there's some, you know, there's a lot of complexity. And if you think of the whole timeline of an enterprise opportunity, you know, there's a lot of things that have to happen, and certain things have to happen in sequence. So there's there's a lot of complexity that the seller has to, well, I believe the seller has to facilitate and manage. They've got resources to help them do that, but I the job ultimately lands on them. And I described it in a recent LinkedIn post. I was being a little bit provocative, I suppose, but I said, look, the issue here is that we're asking for accountability without authority. You know, that the seller is accountable for bringing all of those resources together, those that are in front of the customer and also those that are back office or supporting resources. And let's not forget partners, because this extends out into the ecosystem of partners.

Sam 12:58

Yeah, it's not just people within your own organization, is it?

Accountability Without Authority

Cliff 13:01

Absolutely. So, you know, the seller has the responsibility. They are accountable for driving the deal, closing the revenue, you know, meeting their quota, but they don't have the authority to enforce what they what they need from this, you know, collective group of people. So, you know, that's a that's a skill. Do they recognize that that's the challenge that they've got? And what skills do they have to perform well?

Sam 13:26

And that's so difficult when you're you're effectively you're running a virtual team. You know, these people don't necessarily work for you, but in many cases, don't even work for the organization that you're part of. How do you how do you get people to team up to work with you on that sort of stuff? Not easy, right?

Cliff 13:49

No, it's I've seen so many different examples on a spectrum, and you know, and I've done that myself, you know, been very poor at it, learned that it was important, tried to improve my capability, and you know, hopefully I was able to do that. You know, I was successful in running complex, complex uh opportunities with large teams. And it and this is vast. I mean, I was talking to someone the other day who's running uh a large opportunity. In fact, they've just closed that large opportunity, and they said that they've they've counted over 130 people, individuals, that have been involved in that opportunity. And it's the timeline's probably uh 12 months, so there's been a significant you know runway, but 130 plus people. Wow, yeah, this is not this is not trivial.

Sam 14:45

No, not at all. Not at all. You mean you couldn't manage that number of people directly with uh as a an immediate manager of them, could you?

Cliff 14:54

Uh no, absolutely not. That'd be ridiculous. Absolutely not.

Vic 14:59

So, how do how do you make that work?

Cliff 15:03

Well, I think first of all, you've got to have the mindset. So let's say let's say the starting point is you've got to see yourself in that role. I'm the facilitator, the orchestrator. Um, and I think in that respect you shift from focusing purely on your own execution into more of a leadership focus. You know, I've got a bigger role to play here. Um Orchestration's not about hierarchy, as we've said. So it's not about control. You don't have that authority. So you've got to think about the skill set that enables you to make that work. So that's what's that about? That's about influence, it's about uh clarity, it's about coordination, um, you know, good communication, um, some structures that drive focus on the outcomes that you're looking to achieve. So there's a lot involved in that. You could probably say, you know, the real uh linchpin is trust. You've you've somehow got to have established trust.

Vic 16:12

Thank you for saying that. That's the key for everything that we do.

Cliff 16:16

Yes, exactly. And I think you know, it's partly that you've got to establish trust for yourself, but also you have to give trust in other people and offer trust in other people to to bring them into play. Um so yeah, I think that it's a set of those people skills. It's a we're in a people business.

Sam 16:38

Yes. Yeah. And you know, even those people who are targeted still want their all by and large, want their organization to do well. So, you know, I guess as you build a reputation of of winning projects and interesting deals and things for the for everybody else to be involved in, you know, you people probably gravitate towards you for future opportunities, right?

Mindset Shift To Integrator

Cliff 17:01

I think most definitely. I think once that's reputational, isn't it? You you build a strong reputation, and then you know, others that are in other, I mean, we can talk about say other parts of the revenue story, you know, uh business units, specialist teams, you know, they're trying to drive revenue, you're trying to drive revenue. So they're gonna quickly latch on to those people who can do that effectively, who can open a big customer conversation, who and frankly, who can um allow the specialists, allow the experts to do their job effectively, you know. Yes, um, not try and do it for them or constrain them or try and control them, can try and control them, or dare I say, you know, keep them out of the account, which is you know, we see that behavior, don't we? We see the lone wolf. Um, sorry, Sam.

Sam 17:58

Yeah, you no, you do you do see the lone wolf, and uh you know you also see people bringing in the technical specialists, the pre-sales, the execs, whatever, into unqualified opportunities, poor quality opportunities. And that must be one of the many mistakes that people can make when trying to team, right?

Using Resources The Right Way

Cliff 18:17

Yes, using people at the wrong time in the wrong way is you know, probably more damaging, isn't it, than not using them. Yeah. And and it's not just the, you know, we've talked there about some maybe some other parts of the revenue story, but you know, there's also the the legal teams, the customer success teams, the services teams, the partners. We've talked about the partners, you know, there's all of those resources as well that have to be involved in some way. I've got lots of examples of of where this doesn't go well, you know, and equally I've got lots of examples of people that do this incredibly well. You know, I was talking to a um uh a client uh last year, a few months ago, and their issue was that they they had a legal team that the way the system was structured is that the legal team had a set of processes and a timeline that they wished to operate within. But unfortunately, with some of the larger opportunities, it was more important to bring them in earlier and to try and smooth some of the later objections that would happen. And in this particular case, that hadn't happened, and legal had got involved at the time that they wanted to get involved, which was later. Yeah, which is unusual actually, because typically you you know you expect these organizations to want earlier sight, but they I think just managing their time, their resource constraints, they wanted to be involved later in the deal. And the the deal the deal didn't happen because there hadn't been an understanding of the complexity and the ambiguity and the potential objections that were going to come up, and because the process said no, and nobody pushed back on that, legal got involved at a point when the they were unable to resolve those issues and the I see that with many of the clients that we work with, that even having those relationships with legal sales operation, deal desk, all of the people that have to go through that are maybe further down in the in the sales process, and just not having those relationships strong enough that when you need them, they're just not they're not there for you. Yes. Yeah. I think this is a bit about managing ambiguity or or how to describe that a different way. I think what the seller and the sales leader and kind of that close-knit team need to do is to figure out how to use the right resources at the right time and maybe push a little bit on some of the process constraints that they might have. So I've described this before as saying that as organizations get larger and they get more complex, what you typically see, and we I saw this at Business Objects and I saw this at VMware, you see a disaggregation of process and function, which makes a lot of sense because it enables scale, it enables specialism, and so on. So it makes a lot of sense structurally. But then what happens is those functions, the disaggregated processes, they set up their rules of engagement. And those rules of engagement, what I've seen in my experience, is that they're quite isolated. They don't have a holistic sales centric or customer centric basis. They have the basis that says, Well, these are the resources we've got, this is the thing that we need to deliver, this is how we want to do it. And you create barriers, you create constraints, and you create challenges. Challenges that the salespeople have to navigate as they're going through a, you know, what is an organic process with a customer, right? It's never that, it's never stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four, and it's all you know, serial and sequenced. It's a bit of an organic process. So I think the good sellers, good sellers, good sales managers learn to manage this ambiguity and they learn to make the right judgment at the right time of where to press, where to challenge the process, where to involve people earlier than they might want to be involved, or where not to involve them, perhaps equally validly.

Sam 22:40

I guess you you know, you you also just need to be a solid, decent human being, you know, to be friendly to people and it is how to influence friends and influence people to some extent, isn't it? You know, if you go in all guns blazing and you bang your fists on the table and demand you often get pushback because people are busy, you know, people have got loads of you know, are often have more opportunities to go at than they can physically resource at any one point. And yeah, you know, I I know from that running or looking after pre-sales teams and and consultancy teams and so on, that those people responded better to being asked nicely rather than being shouted at. Don't we all, right? Don't we all? Yes.

Cliff 23:34

Yeah, I think that's a great point because I think coming back to what we said earlier, I think it is an important responsibility to use those resources in the right way, in the way that they can add most value to the customer, and therefore you should understand them. You know, so how what what role can they play? How do they want to play that role? What value can they deliver? And and you should take the responsibility to understand that and then engage them with that in mind. And I think the best sellers do that, you know. The best sellers, uh, you know, I can think of an example in my in my mind.

Process Friction And Silos

Sam 24:15

I won't name the individual, but don't don't incriminate anyone.

Cliff 24:18

Yes, somebody, somebody that's very, very good at this. Okay, they will go around the organization and understand firstly, what resources have I got available to me? Okay. So what what is the breadth of the skill set that that I can get my hands on? They'll also have a and excuse the the phrasing of this, but they'll also have a mentality that says, how do I get an unfair share of these resources? Because I, you know, I'm a seller, I've got a job to do. So they will definitely have that competitiveness. And that's not a bad thing, by the way. I don't think that's a bad thing. They, you know, the resources are finite, so you need to you need to be a bit street wise in in getting what you need for your customer. So, how do I get my unfair share? So, what are the levers that I can pull? And then they would do a number of things which I'm sure will echo really well with with your work. They will establish a clear purpose, a clear, a clear why they're asking these individuals to come and work with them. They'll have that established, they'll probably collaborate on that. You know, what are we trying to achieve? How are we going to go about doing that? Together. Together. You know, what's the process? What roles are we going to play? How do we interact with each other? How do we communicate? How do we drive accountability? They will have that conversation in the open, you know, and they'll do it in a very um fair and equitable way. They're not trying to be authoritarian because, as we said, they don't have the authority, they're just trying to collaborate really well.

Sam 25:50

Yeah.

Cliff 25:51

And the other thing that comes from that is that they've shown trust first. Okay. For to establish trust for themselves, they've shown trust first. And whilst I'm thinking about this particular individual, one of the things that I've seen them do is which I think is really, really important, is that they will share credit really openly.

Speaker 2 26:11

Yes.

Cliff 26:12

But they will deal with issues individually. They will not throw anyone under the bus.

Vic 26:18

And there's plenty of trust, then, isn't it?

Cliff 26:20

Yeah. And there's plenty of opportunities when things don't go well for somebody to say, well, that was that was that person. Okay. But they didn't do that. They never do that.

Sam 26:31

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense, I think.

Cliff 26:36

Yeah, so clarity.

Sam 26:39

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's just that start with the why, isn't it? You know, you know, you normally talk about that in terms of a business or organization having a reason, but you've also got to get people alongside you when you're bidding for business, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 26:57

Yeah.

Sam 26:57

Are there any particular patterns that you see in the ways that team teams virtual teams succeed in your career and now that you're sort of advising other people, I suppose?

Rule Pushing Vs Rule Breaking

Cliff 27:12

Um patterns that patterns that I see that work. I think a lot of the things that we've said, okay, and I think that that there's also good they do a good job in communicating, but they do a good job in driving the accountability through the communication. I coached somebody on this a few years ago. They were struggling with part of the virtual team not delivering. Um, so they were showing up, you know, the the communication calls, they were showing up, but they weren't then delivering what they needed to deliver, which is, I'm sure, a very common challenge that that we face with. Um and they asked me, you know, how would how do you think I can improve that? How can I change that behaviour? So we talked about it a little bit, and I offered some consulting. I said, well, look, what about making sure that and this is about simplicity, I think. This is about simplicity of of the of the action plan. What about making sure that the actions are written down clearly at the end of each meeting? And you start each meeting with the action plan. So you don't start with the general conversation and everyone giving an update. You start with the action plan, which is a really simple uh concept. Um, you know, there's no rocket science in that. But what it did was was very impactful because the next meeting that that individual came on, the action plan was gone through first. All the other contributors in the meeting were demonstrating that they were completing their actions or moving their actions forward, and this individual was then unable to show the same. Two meetings in, their behaviour had changed.

Vic 29:01

Yeah. Yeah. I can understand that completely. Firstly, the the the number one reason we get asked to work with tech organizations is around accountability. But it is this accountability without authority, for sure. And the way that Patrick Lencioni, who's the methodology that we we use as our underlying methodology, is we talk about peer-to-peer accountability. So that's really the peer pressure, and that's exactly what you just described. But you can't have accountability without clarity because people don't know what they're being held accountable for. So that simple thing of writing the actions down and then reviewing that, there's no wiggle room.

Sam 29:46

Yeah. And you know, people are naturally it's embarrassed, the word. You know, they feel bad if they haven't followed up on the stuff that they should have followed up on. So you know, you don't have to go in all guns blazing and finger pointing, but just just exposing that on the page or in the meeting is probably enough in most cases.

Cliff 30:07

Yeah, it's just a soft reinforcement in a way. I mean, they've all you know, everyone's signed up in that group, you know, implicitly to be working together to achieve the purpose. It's just that that individual, you know, was not demonstrating that. So yeah, so it it's an effective way. And it and it's simple, isn't it? But I think that we sometimes we work in very busy environments, there's a lot of information flow, there's a lot of communication, and sometimes we miss the simple things that are most effective, writing down the actions, yeah, yeah, totally. Reviewing them at the beginning of the call.

Vic 30:44

Yeah. I also come back to though, if you can have that clarity and you can have the accountability, but if you don't have that underlying trust and psychological safety, that's a really stressful environment to work in, and that's not fun.

unknown 31:02

Yeah.

Vic 31:02

What do you think about that?

Coaching, People Performance, And Trust

Cliff 31:05

It's very hard to fix often if that situation's happening, because it's being driven by somebody's behaviours, and you can tell them, but it's sometimes hard for them to change those behaviours, and and if they don't have trust, if they've lost some of their credibility, it's hard for them to uh to change that. I think you're absolutely right about the psychological safety. I think we you you need that, and it's the responsibility of of the seller in some way, if they're driving this team, to demonstrate that they're that people are in a safe space.

Vic 31:42

Yeah.

Cliff 31:44

Um but I don't know, in my experience, I find that people either have that or they don't. I think it's hard for them to change. What do you find?

Vic 32:01

I hope you don't mind me saying this, but you for me, you're you're not what I would think of as a typical salesperson because you're quieter and you there's more considered. Yeah, quite a lot of salespeople are the ones with the loudest voices and they they dominate a conversation, and yet actually you get that trust and respect from making sure that other people are feeling heard, and that's how you can get to the commitment in the first place.

Speaker 3 32:34

Yes.

Vic 32:36

Do you think that just comes naturally to you?

Cliff 32:39

I don't know. I don't know. I probably had um many years ago when I first moved into sales, I probably my imposter syndrome was all about the fact that I think I felt different to other people.

Speaker 2 32:52

Yeah.

Cliff 32:53

And I wasn't, you know, as I'll call it high ego. I wasn't as high ego, you know. Um I think I'm a lower ego person, but I am incredibly determined. I mean, I've described myself as being obsessed with outcomes. And, you know, as a seller, I suppose the behavior that you would see of me is that I would be absolutely obsessed with achieving the outcome that we are trying to achieve with the customer. Yeah. I'd be very aspirational about it. I'd want to break thresholds, I'd want to do the larger deal, I'd want to do, you know, the full portfolio of sale, I want to deliver services, I'd, you know, I'd want my name up in lights in that respect, but I get obsessed with how do I achieve that. And probably the people that work with me would say that they very much feel that obsession about the the outcome. And sometimes that means I miss a little bit of the journey. You know, I'm kind of more focused on, well, where's that going to get us? Where are we now? How do we move on? So there's a level of determination that probably drove my behaviors. But, on saying that, I recognized that I couldn't do this alone. You know, time is a time is my ultimate finite resource. Yeah. And you know, if I don't multiply myself in some way, I can't achieve all the things I want to achieve. So orchestration was a way of multiplying me, multiplying my effect with my customer, multiplying the value that we could deliver. You know, it was the only way um of giving me more bandwidth.

Vic 34:34

Yeah. Makes makes sense. But it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning about selling is a team sport.

Sam 34:42

Yeah. That's that's the that's the uh the tagline for the episode, isn't it? Selling is a team sport.

Cliff 34:51

Yeah, it is most definitely a a team sport. I think coming back to what we said earlier about the kind of organizational um challenges as well, if we are in a team sport, right? Um, I don't know, I'm trying to I'm struggling to think of an analogy now, right? But the organization can put all the players on the pitch. You know, that the product teams are there, the the sales operations is there, legal is there, that we're all on the pitch, right? So the system says we've got all the pieces.

Speaker 2 35:24

Yeah.

Cliff 35:24

But but I think the the challenge is that there isn't really a blueprint for how that team can be successful in any in any given situation, because sales is an organic process. It is customer-led. Customer-led. Very good point. And there's a lot of ambiguity. So you have to figure out without a blueprint, really, how you make this team operate in the most effective and efficient way. Yeah. And I do think that that maybe maybe this is something that organizations can look at how they how they build their processes differently or how they think about this. But I think this is something that the sales leader and the salesperson needs to figure out, you know, and needs to be good at.

Vic 36:15

Sorry. So um what that's just really made me think of is so many organizations are inflexible with the silos of these different um pieces on or players on the pitch, if you like, to go back to your analogy. But actually, it needs to be agile, doesn't it? So that it can flex with the customer journey that that particular customer is on. And having breaking down that inflexibility to be agile perhaps is the bit that that is missing.

Cliff 36:48

Yes, I think it is missing. In my experience, I think that organizations struggle with this bit of the system, of the system design, and probably for lots of good reasons. I mean, you know, sellers are known to want to break the rules.

Speaker 2 37:04

Yeah.

Cliff 37:04

So, you know, legal. Um, for example, you know, the pricing uh team are never going to give salespeople the ability to make up their own pricing structures, right? They're just not because they know that salespeople would would do things that are a little bit self-centered, shall we say? Um, so there has to be some checks and balances, and that's okay. But when the checks and balances, and I'm picking that group only for illustration.

Vic 37:32

It's very obvious, isn't it?

Cliff 37:34

But when the checks and balances become the constraints, then you then maybe something's gone wrong. You know, um, I've talked to an organization the other day, this is a very simple example, but an organization the other day who struggle with their quoting process, and they talk about the fact that a data field that's wrong in the information that's that's given to this organization or this this process to deliver a quote back, if a data point is wrong, that stops everything. Yeah. That data point is fixed. And the data point might be completely irrelevant to the job of building a pricing structure for this for this particular work. But the computer says, no, we need to fix this data point, and then there's a delay, isn't there? Because that question's gone back to the salesperson, he's in an all-day meeting with the customer, you've just lost a working day. Um, and you know, compound that multiple times, and you know, there's a lot of frustration in the system.

Vic 38:37

Yeah, that's a really good example.

Sam 38:41

Do you think salespeople, you know, the sort of people who succeed as salespeople are almost the rule breakers in the first place? So try you know, trying to circumvent all that stuff and get to the outcome as quickly as possible.

Cliff 38:55

It's a difficult question, though. Um, I think they're the most successful. I think we need I think we need sellers and sales leaders that are prepared to push the envelope.

Speaker 3 39:07

Yeah.

Cliff 39:08

Um, and I think that's good. And I think any system probably overall benefits from people that are doing that.

Sam 39:16

But it's that's how that's how the system gets changed and improved over time, yeah, you know, with people pushing the boundaries.

Cliff 39:22

Yes. But I think there's there's a couple of different ways. If I if I think about it, maybe there's a couple of different perspectives of breaking the rules. On the one hand, if when I think of my experience, if I'm trying to do something with a customer, I might be prepared to push the organization to go a little bit further in how it might structure a deal or how it might write a piece of legal work or you know, how it might um enable me to license a part of the product that I want to deliver quite extensively, but it's going to be really thinly used. You know, these types of use case scenarios, I would definitely push my organization to do something custom. So I'd be pushing the envelope a lot. And I've had lots of examples in my career where I've done that. Um, I think that's okay. I can say that, can't I? Because that's what I've been doing. I think what's not okay is for people that that just basically want to disregard the rules of engagement and do things their own way.

Speaker 2 40:27

Yeah.

Cliff 40:28

In a in a perhaps less customer-centric way and a more kind of more of a selfish way, because I think that's destructive. And I think that's that's you know, that's not additive for the customer, and I think it just creates a lot of tension and unnecessary headache.

Vic 40:45

Yeah. Yeah, I know that's really well put.

Sam 40:50

Makes sense. Makes sense. Do you think you've learned anything or your view on this stuff has changed since you've been coaching rather than sort of in that role yourself? That's that sort of external perspective giving you anything new.

Cliff 41:11

Yeah, I think um through my management career I became much more interested in, and probably what led me to wanting to go into management, I became much more interested in what I'm going to call human performance management, what we're capable of, aspirational goal setting, how we behave, how we behave under under stress or under pressure, which I think is probably you know 100% of the time in a complex enterprise sales organization. Um so I became much more interested in the people angle, and then I tried to develop my management capability and my skill by being a good leader of people, yeah. And for the team to succeed, or for the individuals in the team to succeed, and therefore for the team to succeed, and for us to be impactful, but for the individuals themselves to feel that they're they're developing their careers and they're developing their potential, that that gave me a lot of satisfaction. I really enjoyed that element of the job. So when I moved into coaching, or I and I was doing coaching and mentoring within those roles, but when I moved, yeah, yeah. When I moved into coaching sort of more full-time, I think it definitely has reinforced my obsession with kind of people performance management. And I can see a much cleaner line to you know that it's kind of everything that I'm doing, coaching, consulting, and mentoring is about people and about driving them and enabling them to overcome barriers. And and I love that aspect of it. So I think I've got a a clearer perspective of some of the challenges that we had in the in doing our job, now that I'm focused on the people and the behaviour aspect of it. And I think that, you know, looking at what your organization does, yeah, you know, and how do teams work and how do teams work better, and where are the barriers? I mean, it it's all it this is people stuff, isn't it? It is, yeah. Yeah.

Vic 43:12

Yeah. And even since we started Amplified eight years ago, gosh, nearly nine years ago, it's it's staggering how that is so much better understood, even in the the last few years.

unknown 43:27

Yeah.

Vic 43:27

The people element of it is so important.

Cliff 43:31

Yes. And I think that you know it's interesting to see, and perhaps this isn't brand new, but I'm starting to see commentary on what makes a great leader, and you know, what do we expect from our leaders and so on, and you're seeing humanness and you're seeing kindness, and you're seeing you know, you're seeing those softer, more people y more empathic characteristics coming to the fore. And being being valued perhaps mu much more so than they were in the past.

Vic 44:04

Yeah.

Cliff 44:05

And that's a that's gotta be a good thing.

Vic 44:07

Yeah. I've seen that. I think I mean I think I don't know if it's n a direct outcome of COVID, but it's certainly in the last five or six years, it's really started to ch well, we see it a lot more. The language that we use we're seeing in a lot more places than the isolated pockets that we saw in previously.

Sam 44:27

Yes.

Vic 44:28

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Sam 44:30

Nice is underrated.

Takeaways And Book Recommendation

Cliff 44:34

Very true. Nice is underrated. I think that's sorry. No, go on. Well, I was just, I mean, it just gave me a little bit of a segue to kind of come back to this question of the the challenge for sellers in orchestrating, and that's and it it makes me think of the you know, what's the role of the sales leader in this? Because the sales leader needs to have a lot of empathy for the challenge that the seller has in driving accountability without authority. And equally the sales leader's in the same boat to a large degree. Now, they probably have a little bit more authority because in the cross matrix organization that they work, they will have an aligned person in the product groups and so on. And perhaps there is a bit of implied alignment and authority in relation to that. But I think it's really important that the sales leader is doing a job clearing the runway for better orchestration within their team. So they should be coaching their team on the skill set and seeing how the behaviors are impacting how those teams are working together and the virtual teams that are getting created. They should be thinking about orchestration being a really important part of are we being successful or not successful? Maybe orchestration is the area to focus on here. And they can be doing a very effective job in you know talking to the other functions, agreeing some ground rules, having clarity on the priorities for the business, operating behind the scenes really to do work that makes it easier and more efficient for their teams.

Vic 46:16

Yeah. In in the change management work that we do, that piece is called shaping the path, removing the barriers and creating the environment.

Cliff 46:26

Yeah, I like that. Shaping the path.

Vic 46:29

Yeah.

Cliff 46:29

Exactly that. Yeah, it's a good way of putting it.

Sam 46:33

Good way of putting it. If you've had one thing that we've talked about today that you would want people to apply, what would that be?

Cliff 46:47

One thing from today might depend on the audience. So I say if for sellers, I would say you've got it's important to not see yourself as the hero and start seeing yourself as the integrator, the integrator of value, so that you can fulfill that mission, which I said earlier that I was taught to say I'm the person who can marshal all the value of my organization, all the expertise of my organization to bring to bear on your problems or your opportunities. And what a great purpose to have in front of your customer. So start to see yourself doing that. I think for sales leaders, just as we touched on there, create the conditions for orchestration to work. That's that's the takeaway. Um and I think probably the the the point that we've hammered in through this conversation, and I think we're all very well aligned on it, is that orchestration is ultimately about people. Yeah, yeah, it's about people working effectively together.

Sam 47:52

Yeah, yeah. Sales sales is a team sport.

Vic 47:55

Yeah. Well, I think uh just to to finish off on that, so many people or organizations tend to think they need to fix the processes, and yes, that's one piece of it, but actually the rules of engagement of that orchestration and that team and how those relationships work together is just as important, and that seems to be being missed.

Cliff 48:19

Yes, it's we're not we don't train for orchestration, do we? I've never seen a training course for orchestration.

Vic 48:27

Maybe we should create one, Claire.

Cliff 48:29

But Nick, it's a gap in the market, isn't it? There is.

Vic 48:33

There absolutely is.

Sam 48:36

Yeah, yeah, maybe you should. I think you should write a book, Cliff. All this stuff. And pending that book, um, which I'm I'm officially encouraging you to write. Are there any that you've read that you can recommend to our listeners?

Closing Thanks

Cliff 48:53

I've read lots of books, but I'm not sure. Any of them any good? Not great at recalling all of the uh all the great titles, but the one the one that I would immediately bring to mind because we talked about Simon Clarkson going back to the very beginning of this conversation. Simon Clarkson is, I think, an expert in human performance management. Um, you know, I've you've experienced Simon and he was the catalyst for what you've done, which is which is fantastic for me to hear. Um, I met Simon many, many years ago in the early 2000s, and I went through one of his courses at that time, and that set me on a path for aspirational goal setting, which I absolutely love, and I use it in my work, I use it with my clients. It's a a way to build a future vision of something, and then you write it in the in the present tense, you build a lot of emotion into how you envisage this, how you visualize this future. Um, and then you know, magically the conditions make themselves uh visible to you for you to be able to achieve that goal. I've written a goal about how I wanted a year to end. I wrote, you know, that I what bar I was in, who I was with, what I was dressed in, what I was drinking, what we were celebrating, and the specific things that had happened to me in that sales year. I used all of the techniques that Simon taught me, and I to a to the word that vision came true. And that and I but and I absolutely believe in the power of this. Simon wrote a book called Daydreaming, Daydreaming One Word. So daydreaming by Simon Clarkson is the book that I'd recommend. It's all about the method of how you do this, and uh, and it's great. I pull that book off my bookshelf, you know, every few months.

Vic 50:43

I'm gonna it's it's gonna be my next read. I'm really excited to read it.

Cliff 50:50

Yeah, you'll enjoy.

Vic 50:52

Yeah, fantastic. Thank you.

Sam 50:56

Cool, interesting. Thanks, Cliff. That was um that was fab stuff. I think we've covered a huge amount of ground left. Um, so it just remains for me to say thank you very much. We appreciate you uh joining us on the podcast. Um, we hope to see you again at some point, and thanks also to our listeners. Um, as always, your comments and your subscriptions are gratefully received.