Selling in a Time of Corona – S2E5 – Why Sales Should Lawyer Up

Creative introduction – A Few Good Men - satirical

“Jack Nicholson”:       You want answers?

“Tom Cruise”:              I think I'm entitled.

“Jack Nicholson”:       You want answers?

“Tom Cruise”:              I want the truth.

“Jack Nicholson”:       You can't handle the truth. Son, we live in a world that requires revenue and that revenue must be brought in by people with elite skills. Who's going to find it? You Mr. Finance? You Mr. Operations? We have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You scoff at the sales division, you curse our lucrative incentives. You have that luxury. You have the luxury, not knowing what we know, that while the cost of business results may seem excessive, it drives in revenue. And my very existence while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, drives revenue. You don't want to know the truth, because deep down in places that you don't about talk at team and management meetings, you want me on that call - you need me on that call. We use words like fleet view, volume control, total cost of ownership.

We use these words as a backbone of a life spent negotiating something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep under the very blanket of revenue that I provide, and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather, you just said, “Thank you”, and went on your way. Otherwise, may I suggest you pick up a phone and make some sales calls. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to.

“Tom Cruise”:              Did you expense the lap dances?

“Jack Nicholson”:       I did the job I was hired.

“Tom Cruise”:              Did you expense the lap dances?

“Jack Nicholson”:       You’re g-d damn right, I did !

Elliot Epstein - intro: So someone ate a bat apparently and the world turned upside down. Hi, I'm Elliot Epstein. And I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life coaching, consulting, training, and speaking about all facets of sales development, pitching, presentations, negotiation, the C-suite sales calls and all of the various components in the sales cycle in between. And now we find ourselves in a world that's very foreign. Welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona.

Elliot Epstein:             Anyone who knows me understands I love that movie ‘A Few Good Men’ and the sales parody from IT Sales Exec, Chris Pappas is too much fun.

However, there is an underlying premise amid the laughs, and it’s that Sales are the only ones who can drive deals and win business. ‘Who’s gonna do it, You Finance. You Operations?’

Well, on the back of my last podcast episode, The ‘DealMaker’, the answer in 2020 in the middle of COVID19, is unequivocally, YES.

If we park the sales ego in one of the currently unused office car spaces for a minute, we may become open to handling the truth. There are other people in your organisation who can and should, open up new doors and new sales opportunities.

My guest today is exactly that kind of person. Michael Bishop is a lawyer with 25 years’ experience throughout the Asia Pacific region, primarily as legal counsel for major IT companies.

But this is not about the thousands of sales and customer contracts he’s negotiated. Nor is it about in house counsel being card carrying members of the SPU.  The Sales Prevention Unit. Far from it, this is the complete opposite. It’s about thought leadership from outside the realm of sales and marketing.

Michael is also an accomplished public speaker and a business professional genuinely focused on value. What you should listen for here, is his deep business acumen which we’ll come back to after our discussion.

Here is my chat with Michael Bishop.

Hello, Michael, welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona. It is indeed an honor to have a lawyer. Now, some people might be thinking, why do we have an esteemed corporate lawyer as part of Selling in a Time of Corona, but you have a very wide and varied business background. And I, wanted my listeners to understand from a viewpoint outside of the sales world, what goes on in terms of developing deals, contracts, and this is an extension I suppose, of the last episode, The Dealmaker, to look at creative ways and creative stories that abound around doing new deals. So, Michael, perhaps you can tell me a little more about what you get involved in day-to-day, cause it's certainly not looking at the minutia of contracts every five minutes.

Michael Bishop:         No, no. We probably spent very little time actually on the minutia of contracts.  I think the things I spend most of my time on, and it's very broad given that the role that I have itself is very broad. I look after Legal for the whole of Asia Pacific in Japan and it can be incredibly varied. It's really kind of helping in determining the right strategies for each market. It's also trying to manage at the moment, a number of macro events that we've been struggling with. I mean the biggest macro event hit us as a business last year, was the drop in pricing , which in storage really impacted us massively and meant that we had to sell,, two times the amount of product really to set our revenue targets.

Michael Bishop:         To the US-China trade war -  that's a really great example actually, of how we try and leverage legal value outside of the normal process. It’s probably a really good example of start with. With all the new US-China trade war challenges going on last year, the one thing that really impacted us as a business as we were actually really starting to scale up in China, was as a US-made product, we were going to get by 20% tariffs on all of our product going into China. So a good example of really how Legal can manage that process, and that value was, we actually then spoke internally about the ability to expand our manufacturing facilities in the Czech Republic, and then work with the local Chamber of Commerce to obtain a certificate of origin out of the Czech Republic. Which then the equipment went in effectively as a Czech product rather than as US products, managed to mitigate and avoid most of those tariffs, which had a massive impact on our business.

Elliot Epstein:             It is a good example. So these are the kinds of value that you can add. Because my contention is that you, whether you're a CFO or a lawyer, Head of Legal in an organization, there are other resources that salespeople have at their disposal to understand where they can leverage their strategy and where they can leverage deals. So perhaps you can share with us some other tangible on-the-ground examples of where you would get involved in a deal now.

Michael Bishop:         So your point is exactly right. Whether you're a CFO, whether you're a general counsel or anything else, we're all businesspeople. And fundamentally my first job is to help the business. You know, it is to guide the business and help guide  the business against risk. But I think it's also really to assist the business and help us drive deals. And, you know, ultimately we're all responsible for the revenue. And I tried to tackle that in many different ways. That can be from, for me, very basic things like, you know, finding ways in which we can really accelerate the business that we do. Especially, you know, in the environment we’re operating in currently, I think each and every dollar has to be taken off the table as quickly as possible.

And we want to make sure there are no impediments to the deals that we're doing with people. It's very important that we understand the kind of business that people are looking to do at the moment as well. Clearly what we've seen locally is a huge amount of acceleration towards the cloud and digitalization. It's understanding how that affects our customers and how they might want to buy. And I think we can really take a very large role in how we lead and guide those kinds of conversations rather than just being the people that, you know, you come to the end of the day and ask about T's and C's.

Elliot Epstein:             Yes, the T's and C's are the boring stuff. And I see a lot of lawyers, you know, getting caught up – ‘Our procurements asked us for this liability on page 44, what do we do?’ And I think, and that's the boring stuff, right?

That's not interesting at all. So can you give an example of where you've been the thought leader that's helped to generate business and generate leads and perhaps it's one of the great presentations and speeches that you give around town.

Michael Bishop:         I love public speaking, which I think is one of the reasons I like getting out in front of customers. And I think, you know, in some ways I probably am a bit of a persuasive salesperson, you know, I've, I've been asked a couple of times in the past, whether I want to make it big in sales and I've genuinely given it serious thought.

Elliot Epstein:             In terms of what you've been asked to do in selling,  what have you been doing in that space?

Michael Bishop:         Oh, yes. The example was I was going to share with you, I think is which I think is a great way to get in front of customers and also, you know, ultimately to help you or your sales teams – I remember, for example, when we had the GDPR regulation came in a couple of years ago, that was really a great opportunity to get out in front of customers and talk about the impact of GDPR on their businesses. And in fact, at the time I was working for a different company, but we've got a huge amount of demand and interest off companies and universities in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly. You know, really just talking about the impact and fundamentally not selling to customers, but really trying to drive relevance in their business and great mind share, I think, and ultimately those kinds of opportunities really led to deals that we did, and I think because people saw that we weren't just out there actively trying to sell to them, but we generally want to be relevant and find ways which we can engage with in ways outside of the standard sales process. And a great example of that by the way Elliot, is that I found that we went in and spoke to one of the large universities in Victoria and we probably got 25-30 people attending one of these meetings. And there were people who probably we would have struggled to get in contact with, you know, whether that was security officers or data privacy officers or governance, they all came and attended. And it really extended our network within those customers..

Elliot Epstein:             You raise a really important point here because most sales people in all industries, go to the standard decision-maker, which is, you know, if you're in it, you'll go to a CIO or head of infrastructure. If you're in manufacturing, you'll go to a production manager and financial services, you know, you'll go to the general manager or head of a distribution or something like that. One of the missing links I think is not only using resources like you, but also going to the people that are affected by issues like governance, privacy, and so on. So, you know, how many people sell security to another lawyer of another company? Not many, they go to the IT manager and speak to them. So what are your thoughts on that?

Michael Bishop:         Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think it's actually part of making sure you get very sort of deep engagement with your customers as well. So they're not just engaged at the sales level, but they're engaged at the finance level, legal and everything else as well. And I think those relationships pay off for you massively. As I said, in that example, it absolutely worked to give us access to a huge amount of stakeholders we wouldn't have had any access to before. And we continued to do that. I mean, so we've been doing that. So the really good example, I think with COVID as well, what's been happening is that we've had to find different ways of getting to our customers and we've done a huge amount of events, more sort of digital versus analog, and find new ways of engaging, interacting with clients and customers is we've had events where that could have been for example, whiskey tasting events.

We do events were we can speak to sports leaders, leaders in business and they're all different ways that we can engage in potentially bringing in different audiences. So I spoke at one recently, which was just really go to and talk on a number of relevant topics. And again, not specifically around what we're selling and our own products, but we can talk about things which are relevant to the industry, things which are impacting them. And that can be from things like new regulation, or it can be things like ransomware, very sort of current topical trends in the markets where we can kind of engage with and get traction with the audience and bring them in to talk to us in a way that I do think creates a lot more, not sort of momentum, but sort of breadth in your customer base.

Elliot Epstein:             Yeah. It's broadening beyond the traditional sales process and using resources like you with expertise to be thought leaders. And then that feeds back into the pipeline. It makes too much sense. I'd be curious to know, have you ever spoken or counseled or advised procurement on the other side?

Michael Bishop:         No. So actually in my career, I've probably worked in IT now for about 25 years and probably the last 15 years I've been in data storage, but I've always been on this side of the business. So I'm very used to dealing with procurement, but I've never been on the procurement side.

Elliot Epstein:             Okay. What'ss the best advice you would have? Because, you know, I've written a book about Sales versus Procurement with my procurement buddy, Paul Rogers. But I'd be curious to know from a legal perspective, what are the top two or three things you've seen when handling procurement, that tends to work best?

Michael Bishop:         But what I think most of it is probably the most challenging thing when you're dealing with any kind of procurement is often RFP. It's always very difficult because the RFP responses tend to be very binary and it's very hard to sort of properly engage with people. But what I generally find any negotiation that I do, actually, whether that's procurement or with lawyers is to try and lift the conversation as much as we can to really understand what their issues are rather than getting involved in that money shot. Now, what do you really care about? I think there's a massive tendancy on the part of lawyers and we're all guilty of it, to some extent, to engage in a bit of, you know, intellectual sparring that doesn't ultimately benefit either party. It doesn't take them forward as quickly as possible.

Elliot Epstein:             I'm glad you raised that.

Michael Bishop:         Yeah. That's always my main thing, really strong lift the conversation and actually trying to understand what their issues are and how we can help with those issues rather than squabbling about particular points, liability or warranties.

Elliot Epstein:             Yeah, that's terrific because I see the alternative, I have seen deals lost and I'm sure you have somewhere where the lawyers actually scuppered 12 months of work because they made it about themselves and by made a difficult and they wanted to stick to some ridiculous rule and they wanted to win an intellectual battle rather than win business. And win business with the client in mind, based on what they wanted to achieve. So,  hopefully you're not a unicorn Micheal and that there are others out there. I just love the fact that; A) you're a business person and, B) you get involved in creating thought leadership, which then feeds into sales activity, deal mindsets, and applies so much acumen in an area where,  it doesn't need to be one dimensional. My final question to you is really about where you see contracts going, where you see business going in the next couple of years, given the COVID scenario. So what are your crystal ball predictions,  when you look ahead?

Michael Bishop:         Fundamentally, I look off the APJ regions. I'm very focused on APJ what's happening in APJ. I read an article the other day saying that public cloud spending in China grew like 60% in 2020 to $19 billion. Because we are seeing this very quick and rapid shift to online, online business platforms. And I think for us, there's a few things that we need to do. We need to make sure that we are very relevant in the cloud because certainly more workloads and apps are moving to the cloud and we need to be a very cloud focused company, but we also need to speed up our own digitalization. And I think for the rest of that means driving a lot more of our business towards the websites and making it super easy for customers to buy from us.

That's certainly going to be one of our big initiatives as we go forward. That's something that I've been personally involved in as well. But the bigger thing is for us is at the moment, people really don't know what their needs are going to be, and that's going to be very amorphous over the next few months, potentially years as well. So the key thing which we've been investing in which I'm very personally involved in as well, is storage as a service and providing that elasticity in terms of storage demands, where people can scale up and down, as things might change. I think that's going to be huge for us and that's going to be huge for the market.

Elliot Epstein:             I think that kind of flexibility, whether it's subscriptions or, or cloud offering in IT or anything that is going to service the new needs and new demands of clients is going to be critical. And, you know, my take on all of this is we need to use all of our resources. Now, not everyone has got a Michael Bishop, not everyone's a great public speaker because you've been well coached of course, and not everyone has your years of business acumen, but I would encourage everyone to look around the office. Well, you can't look around the office, look around your house, get onto a video conference and think, ‘My CFO, I wonder if he or she can add some value to what we're doing or my general counsel or a another C level executive in your business. And think maybe it's not just up to sales to start creating thought leadership and opportunity. Maybe there's some other brains in our business that can truly help what we're trying to do in winning business with clients.

Michael, it's been fabulous to have you on Selling in a Time of Corona. Really appreciate it. I'll let you go. Because you can walk around in Sydney and I can't. So I'll let you go for your daily walk and enjoy yourself. Thanks for being part of it.

Michael Bishop:         Thank you, Elliot. Great to speak to you.

Elliot Epstein:             So, if a you have a Michael Bishop in your company , get them involved, not just in opening up new avenues and opportunities but with their peers in your client base. For example, imagine this call :

‘Hello Maria, it’s Steve , General Counsel for XYZ, our sales team is talking to your Chief Safety Officer right now about implementing our new solution. The reason for the call is, as we both know the legislative changes last quarter means you’re potentially exposed. I wanted to get your thoughts on this and has it hit your radar yet?’

Worst case scenario, the client’s legal eagle Maria, defers back to the line manager. Best case scenario, she says ‘Hmmmm … tell me a bit more about what you think our exposure is?’

If you don’t have a Michael Bishop, you’ve probably got an external law firm who should get off their butts and do more than charge you a fortune for contractual liability documents. You pay them enough and many of them are sitting at home with relevance deprivation syndrome. Get them to host some webinars on your behalf and invite their network, and their clients to expand your reach.

So, whether it’s your lawyer, your CFO, your risk and governance person, head of safety, or head of production, there’s a lot of expertise. And there’s never been a better time to co-opt the whole business to growing your pipeline.

Let me close with this: You run your sales unit how you run your sales unit. You eat breakfast 300 yards from 4000 clients who are trained to kill you. Don’t think for a minute they can dictate who talks to their business. Go on. Make ‘em nervous.

Stay safe. Stay positive

Remember, your ears are safe, Michael and I signed off on the premise that nothing in this podcast will be construed as a binding obligation for you, your company or affiliates to achieve any satisfaction, financially, psychologically or otherwise.

Take care of yourselves…till next time.