Selling in a Time of Corona – S3E2 – Cold Showers and Hot Leadership – Matt Rockman

SIATOC S3E2 - Cold Showers and Hot Leadership - Matt Rockman

Creative intro – Rocketman ( Elton John )

“And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone.”

Elliot

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.

My special guest today is entrepreneur and investor Matt Rockman, also well known as the co-founder of online jobs juggernaut SEEK, together with Paul and Andrew Basset. These are three genuinely great guys who have deserved every ounce of success in the business world and beyond. I spent over 4. 5 years coaching, advising and training the team at SEEK in some of their early days, and Matt was the sales impresario who led the charge. He knows a thing or two about culture …… and tequila, as I found out, and he has gone on to invest in success stories such as Canva and Rokt and joined boards, leading business and philanthropic change.

I wanted to catch up with Matt again to find out his views of what he expects sales leaders and business development managers to be doing in the middle of Covid 19. Here is my chat with Matt Rockman.

Hey Rocco, welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona. Great to have you. How have you been?

Matt

Yeah, good, mate. You know, battling through, but making the best of it I can.

Elliot

Yeah, as we all are now. You have an illustrious career, obviously. And you've seen so many different scenarios having worked with companies in which you've invested companies, that you've led and, CEOs and their sales teams.

So what are you seeing right now in the way that company leaders, and especially sales leaders handling Covid 19 as we head towards the back end of 2021?

Matt

Look, it varies from company to company and industry to industry. I think the markets reacted as a result of Covid, you've got sort of real winners and real losers. There are those industries where you know Covid has created a massive sort of roadblock for the industry as a result of shutdown and so forth and travel, et cetera.

And we all know what they are. Tourism, hospitality, etcetera, live events. You know, obviously the whole ‘gathering and meeting’ in the office is on hold. And then there are those other industries which are doing super well, you know, consumer discretionary, IT, E Commerce, etcetera, etcetera. So I think it depends whether you're in the Covid accelerator or Covid challenged bucket of industry. And their strategies probably need to be a little bit different.

You know, there's probably industries out there that are awash with inquiryies and their sales numbers are going through the roof. And then there's probably a bunch of industries, you know, which are super challenged and, finding it really hard to hit their numbers.

Elliot

So what's your advice? What are you telling people that you meet or companies that you're involved with when they're facing that kind of adversity?

If they're in the middle of that range, so you're talking about a company that sort of sits in between that sort of muddling through, not shooting the lights out, but equally, you know, their business hasn't completely fallen away.

I think sales or revenue is often very culture driven. As a result, we used to congregate as people and meet people. And, we like to sit across the table from somebody and try and get an outcome. We've now become the sort of Zoom economy, you know, Probably one of the biggest key attributes in sales, I think, is persistence, dusting yourself off every morning, maybe have a cold shower that gives a bit of energy. It's something I do and sort of getting out and treating each new day as a challenge.

And, you know, just making sure you keep your volume up, your enthusiasm up, hustle up. It's easy, you know, in these markets to get down, demotivated, so I'm going to find the strength within. Whatever does that for you, whether it's exercise, meditation, it maybe care-giving, giving to somebody or philanthropy or whatever it is, that really fires you up and keeps you energised and mission-centric. I think persistence and energy is such a super important ingredient, as is planning, and communication, they're super important tools.

You've got to know where to hunt, and what's the right fit for the customer. No point in trying to sell something that doesn't fit, suit somebody on the other side of the table, on the other side of a Zoom conference. And that's the planning. You know the questions and answers to determine if somebody or an organisation is likely to buy or appropriate to buy. Whatever your service is or goods are. I see a lot of sales people that just run hard at the wall.

But there's not a lot of strategy and quality, deep thinking in their approach.

Elliot

You raise a really good point there because that target market stuff is critical when people are fatigued and when people are stressed and worried about their numbers, or clients have dropped off or they're difficult to get hold of. You know, the natural reaction is to just run into that brick wall as you describe it. So it’s “I used to deal with company X or I used to deal with those markets. If I just try harder, I'll eventually break them, because that's what I know.”

And unfortunately, many companies and many sales people just need to look with a blank sheet of paper, literally. Go for a walk with the dog and start to think in your head about forgetting who you already deal with and start thinking about who actually needs you, right now.

Matt

It's a good point. I mean, I've always encouraged every senior executive I've ever worked with and work with today to take half a day out of their week. So if we say a five day week and literally take half a day and go for a walk, take themselves out of the noise, I think we all get very busy with noise.

You know, we're now at the behest and victim of our phones and emails and instant messaging, and all these platforms that require us to respond. We run at 24/7 activity levels, and it's very busy and very noisy, and a lot of it's very tactical. And what we don't, none of us do enough of is, a half day stop planned. Think, you know, regroup sort of concept. And, you know, whether a long walk around the park, even just meditating for 10 minutes a day quietly in the corner and trying to shut your mind off.

I think that's when the gems come. So I'm a massive believer in taking yourself out of the loop and having some quality thinking time. I really think it makes you a better manager, a better executive, absolutely. And away from the screen and away from the home. Schooling troubles and the squabbles with the spouse during the day and the constant phone beeping that goes off. There's a lot of sales leaders that think they have to be on all the time because they're doing it for the right reasons.

They're trying to support their teams, and they're making themselves available. But what they're not doing is looking after themselves. Yeah, you've absolutely got to look after yourself. In order to be an effective tool, you've got to get the balance right. It's no good spending 80% of your time planning, and not actually doing calls, being resilient, being outbound and, actually going out there and having a crack at the market and trying to drum up business.

Conversely, you can't just hit the phones as it were, without proper planning. So it's about getting the mix right. I think a lot of sales teams particularly just run hard, but they don't stop to think. Where is the low hanging fruit? Where's the sweet spot? Where is the likely-to-buy customers? You've got to determine who's a non fit customer and either walk away for them or not approach them in the first place because not everybody is going to buy your good or service.

Elliot

Absolutely.

And it's been a while since the SEEK days. Obviously, which is everyone knows, is a great Australian success story that you co-founded with Paul and Andrew. But what a lot of people may not know is the adversity that you had in some of the early days and how you fought through that. So there was no Covid 19, but SEEK wasn't a guaranteed success, and there were significant hurdles when you're trying to create a market. It would be worthwhile just talking about that so that people have a perspective of this wonderful ASX-listed company that's storming around the world but don't necessarily know what was behind that, especially in the early days. Perhaps chat to us about that a bit.

Matt

I think our biggest challenge was initially, and a lot of your listeners may experience this today is we had two things going against us, or two massive challenges. One was we were disruptive, and that meant we were a new way of doing things. And, you know, we're creatures of habits, and we like low resistance. We like to do what we're used to or in the habit of doing.

You know, what we have formed habits around. So trying to on-board customers to SEEK, we're saying, Hey, don't do things the way you've been used to, the way your processes are set up to do. The way the organisation's been organised around doing something, do it in a new way, and that's a big ask for any size company. So we really had to sell them on the benefit and the vision. The other thing is, you know, we were fighting some big, powerful companies at the time. News Corp, Fairfax, two large media organisations and Monster, the big US job site at the time, and we were a nobody brand in the early days, I mean now SEEK is sort of synonymous with jobs.

We've done a great job on marketing in positioning the brand, and it's very, extremely well known. But back in the early days, you know “Hi, I'm Matt Rockman from SEEK. I'd like to talk to you about talent acquisition…” It’s like, “Who's SEEK?”

So we didn't have any cut through with our brand, and our brand didn't help us at all. We were an unknown quality, so we had to sell them on the vision and be about the credibility of our company. And that we would be around next week and certainly next year that it was worth them putting the effort in and giving it a try, and this new way of doing things.

So I'd say again, persistence was a very, very big part of it. We had to get up each day and get a lot of knock backs. Just keep going and as I've said earlier in the podcast Elliot, planning, knowing who to target, trying to find the more likely and convincing them to give us a try.

Elliot

And what you all did well was you were clinical about that. It got to a point where it's like we just do not have the time to service or try and sell to accounts that don't get us.

And when you got resistance from people and it was deep resistance, it was like, “Well, if you don't get it, it's kind of your problem.” Not so much in an arrogant way, but in a confident way that said, “We believe in this thing and we'll talk to people who are more like minded and potentially more open about what it can deliver for them.

Matt

That's right. There's always someone out there who's open to new ideas and willing to listen. It's just a case of trying to find them.

Elliot

So when you look at businesses now to invest in and you're on a number of boards and you invest in a whole range of different industries, what do you look for in companies, in people, in leadership today compared to, say, 10 years ago?

Matt

I don't think it's changed. You know, honesty and integrity is key. I'd take good culture and value attributes over experience and smarts every day. I mean, you want them all. You know, you'd love the trifecta of  a great quality, value based person who's both smart and had great experience.

That's the unicorn, everything working in your favour. And you don't always get those attributes in somebody. But I'd suffer experience, meaning so I'd go without an executive or a manager or a higher without experience over good fit, good values, good integrity, you know, and enough smarts to be self sufficient and work their way through problem solving. Which sales is, and you know, they can build experience over time on the job, or you can teach them.

Elliot

Exactly, we can teach them. Why do you think it is, though, that so many recruiters and so many sales leaders get hung up on the resume of having done this work in that industry and sometimes in a very specific role or else they don't look at them?

Matt

I think it's easier in a lot of respects for recording, because it's easier to sell into the client, right, even though it may not be the right thing. So it's a bit of laziness on behalf of recruiters that makes sense, and I just want to get their fee. But in the case of sales leaders, I've seen leaders that go “Unless you've got 10 years of experience selling these widgets in this market, I'm not going to look at you.”

Elliot

And yet, I’ve coached so many people around the region, I see some people, but it's just fantastic, especially at C levels filling.

Matt

I agree with that. The only caveat I'd put on that Elliot is, I like to find people who have had allied experience. So taking somebody who sold a widget and then asking them to sell service. It's a different style. It's a different approach, you know. It's a different methodology, and some people can't cross that chasm. But, you know, if you, for example, you're selling houses and you've sold cars for 20 years, then you know, yes, you need to modify and pivot a bit in terms of your approach and the product high price point versus volume, all that sort of stuff.

But you can cross that divide. Somebody with the right aptitude attitude can sort of make that leap. I think if somebody has been selling software, does that raise your main experience? Lend them well to selling houses? I'm not so sure you know, the attributes have to line up.

Elliot

Sure. There has to be some connection there.

Finally, before I let you go, Rocco, hopefully we're out of lockdown soon, and obviously some markets globally are already opening up. I was watching the Premier League the other night, and it was just amazing to see 60-70,000 people in the stadium live.

And who knows where our future is in Australia to get to that stage. But what do you think people should be doing now? What company leaders should be doing now to prepare for us coming out.

Matt

Oh, look, it's a really good question. You know, I've been looking at the mental health and culture and motivation levels of our teams and seeing how sort of match fit they are. You know, I think executives have to check the pulse of their teams and how they're feeling. And people have suffered, particularly in this country and in other parts of the world, but particularly this country with the extended lockdowns.

You know, I think management has to really work with their teams and not just expect to hit the magic on button, and everybody is back to normal. I think it's going to be a glide path, and you've got to encourage, motivate, work with and lift up your teams because I think it's a transition.

Elliot

I think a lot of people have been smashed by this, 100% agree, and that's what you've done in your career. You've always thought about the team, about how they can improve, how they can deliver based on their own personalities and being authentic.

And you've always been there to support the human being behind the role.

It's been great to catch up with you and, thanks for being part of Selling in a Time of Corona. I'll let you go and have your, you know, 2.5 minute walk, or whatever you're allowed to do, and I'll catch up with you soon.

Matt

Thanks. It's been fun, mate.

Elliot

As always, Matt puts people first. He did it when helping to build a company like SEEK, where success wasn't guaranteed and he's doing it today with over a dozen new enterprises and organisations.

People in sales are human beings. Be kind where you can and if you're a leader, be even kinder to yourself. The chase for results will still be there in the morning regardless of how you treat your colleagues. So why not choose the human approach while you pursue those pursuits?

Remember, your ears are safe. Matt and I recorded the entire podcast during a cold shower. Take care of yourselves, until next time.