Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: You're listening to b two B revenue acceleration, a podcast dedicated to helping software executives stay on the cutting edge of sales and marketing in their industry. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Hi, welcome to b two B of revenue acceleration. My name is Auranier Metier, and I'm here today with Gavin Sumner, co founder and coach at Scalewise. How are you doing today, Gavin?
[00:00:22] Speaker C: I'm doing great, Ray. Thanks so much for having me on.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: That's an absolute pleasure. So today we'll be talking about b two B leadership, coaching and mentorship. But before we get going, it would be fantastic if you just give us a little bit of background about yourself, Gavin, and the company you represent, scale wise.
[00:00:40] Speaker C: Sure. Thanks, Ray. So I'm Gavin Sumner. I'm one of three founders at a business called Scalewise, where we've worked with hundreds of incredibly fast growing b two B startups and scale ups. And in fact, it was four years ago, Ray, that we set up scale wise last week. So we're very proud of that. And it started with three of us, Tom and Karen Glasson, who are husband and wife duo, and myself. And our goal was always to connect the right type of revenue, expertise and talent to grow in b two B businesses. Because if you don't get that right, then it can be the difference between success and failure. And I'd spent 17 years myself as a revenue leader in these types of businesses, but I decided to take a different path about six years ago, I wanted to focus on some personal pursuits, one of which was my ability to support people through coaching, and the other some charity projects within autism and advocacy. I trained as a professional coach through a business called barefoot coaching and was starting to see the impact of blending some coaching with my experience as a revenue leader. And it was at this point that Tom, Karen and I thought, how could we harness some of the great networks up over the years of revenue leaders throughout our careers and just connect them with great b two B businesses that had tons of provincial.
So although we do a few things at Scalewise, like interim and fractional leadership and permanent hiring, our original hypothesis was to connect coaches to founders, leaders and individuals in these businesses to support their personal and professional goals growth. So today we've got hundreds of coaches and we've seen hundreds of hours of coaching happen within our platform, which feels really, really cool and amazing. So I can tell you a little bit more about that today.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: That's wonderful. And we want to focus particularly the conversation on sales leadership development, which is the coaching and mentoring element that we discuss. I don't think we need to make the parallel between sales management and sales leadership. I think we understand that. But I'd like to just go back quickly about your passion for coaching and the reason why you want to do that. Is there something, is there a day click? Is there something that happened at some points in your career, in your 17 years as a service leader that made you want to spend more time coaching people and helping people?
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question. I was always been exposed to coaches and coaching and in some previous businesses. I was fortunate enough to be given a coach really early on in my career when I first took that step into leadership and I just saw the impact of it. And over time I became more and more comfortable with coaching others and I actually got a huge amount of energy from doing that. I really enjoyed it. And still to this day, if I could single down on one thing I get most enjoyment from, it's actually having a coaching conversation and ultimately being useful to somebody. So that for me is just such an important part of what I do and why I decided that coaching was for me and I spent a bit of time, as I mentioned, with an organization called Barefoot where I became a qualified coach. But actually I realized that just going through the course, it actually helped me work on me. I went in thinking, well, I'm just going to become a professional coach as a result. But actually getting access to resources and strategies to cope with difficult situations myself really did help me, particularly as I went off and set up a business with Tom and Karen. So I couldn't be more sort of thankful that I went through that journey, you know, to be a coach at that stage, to just maybe handle some things I was going through, like burnout, because it's stressful, you know, in a leadership position, it can be. And, you know, having done 17 years of it, I got to a point where I just needed to change. And coaching really helped me through that transition in my career to just be more flexible in the way I was working, become a coach, fractional leader, do the charity stuff and overcome some of those challenges, like burnout that I was going through.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And particularly in sales, you know, I mean, it's, you've got coaching and mentoring pretty much in any profession, but sales is a mix of skills and art, and it's a lot of dealing with psychology of the individual. It's almost like, it's almost like sports I performing sports and things that you've got to have people who are really specific to perform and they've got to be in a specific mindset to perform. So I think there is always, it's very interesting to look at sales coaching technique in particular, and, you know, how would you prepare someone pregame? How do you coach during the game? How do you coach after the game and provide feedback. But I just want to make sure that we also speak about mental health mentorship here because there's two different elements and I have seen people succeeding or failing. People that also think that they are providing coaching to their team when technically they're just providing training to their team. People who are thinking that they are mentoring when technically they're not mentoring but telling people what to do. So I just wanted to ask you from, with your level of expertise and experience, you know, what would you say from a sales leadership coaching and mentorship perspective, what are the main differences that you see? When would you deploy coaching? When would you deploy mentorship from your perspective?
[00:06:22] Speaker C: Yeah, it's again, a really great question. There's tons of different definitions out there. You just google it and you'll see lots of different perspectives of the differences between mentorship and coaching. But the way I like to look at it is just simply the mentor has lived the experience that you are about to go through, are able to have a conversation with you that's more directional, more telling that person what to do in that specific scenario. Providing clear steps to help someone, maybe reach a promotion or build a network or find relevant training. You mentioned training there, but it's much more directional from a position of experience, someone that has trodden the path that you're about to go on, that might be a long relationship that you have with a mentor. So, for example, I mentioned my charity stuff. I mean, I'm very new to the world of working in the third sector, so I've actually got a charity mentor that just helps me navigate what I need to do as a trustee. Some of the things that I need to think about, some of the training that I need to go on so they can really tell me what to do. And it's enormously helpful when I'm starting something brand new. And without that person, without that mentor, I wouldn't be in the position I am from that part of the things that I do. But when I think about coaching and leadership coaching specifically, it really is about creating some space for an individual to focus on their personal and professional development. But maybe the emotional or relational skills that you might have as an individual. So such as things like self awareness or your growth mindset or active listening, the things that we can work on and develop to just be better people, like more resource, to have better conversations and again, be useful to people. So there's that big distinction between a coach, a professional coach can help create that space by asking great questions to facilitate that individual, to empower themselves to go and do something about a situation that they might find themselves in. A coach should be there to help accountability and help people with their development, but ultimately they're not necessarily telling them what to do, but they're just creating that environment for that person to come up with the answers themselves. So, you know, that's the way I look at it. But I mean, there's loads of definitions around there. We at Scalewise call our coaches coaches, but of course they give mentorship, they give advice, they give direction, they give training, all in that coaching conversation dependent on what the coach g wants out of the scenario. So yeah, that's my definition and, you know, it's worth looking at that yourself and seeing how you would define it. But over time, you know, in my career I've had mentors and coaches supporting me through my own personal and professional development.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I've got pretty much similar definition. For me, the coach would be more someone that helps you to go from a to b and support you in.
You mentioned promotion. It could be taking on a new team, taking on a new region, going through a change, or recruiting a fair amount of people in your sales organization and stuff like that. Maybe something that you've not done a lot of before. So you may have to have someone that helps you on a specific scale. The mentor is really a sounding board somewhere. You can call pretty much any time. I see almost a coach as a bit more of a consistent relationship and a mentor of a less consistent relationship, someone that you call when you, when you need to get some information, but that's my way of going about it. Right. So she's the way of everybody, but I believe they're both very interesting and I know that you've got a fair amount. I think it's around 400 coaches and mentors in your network at scale wise. But before we go there, I'd like to ask you, how did you do back in the day, 17 years ago when you started your career to find that mentor coach? Because not all leaders. So you could be reporting to someone that may not have the time, the bandwidth to mentor. You don't have the bandwidth to coach you. And I think I may have seen that being a little bit more present in the SaaS space, particularly when the SaaS space was growing like crazy. I don't think leaders, people would be happily giving you a very big, big salary, expecting you to come fully ready to go with a big target on your back and go and deliver, go and build the team, versus probably what you would see in some other industries are growing a little bit more with a more steady pace, where actually you get people in the job, they've got two years, three years to prove themselves, you allow them to make mistakes, you allow them to grow within the job, etc, etcetera. So it's always that where to find coaches and mentors. And I think coaches and mentor may also have to change over the life span of an individual because your challenge today may not be the challenge you've got in five years, and your coach may not involve at the same pace as you, or they may not have the experience and they can't actually. I mean, actually, coach is probably more of a coach, but the mentors, as you said, people who've seen the movie before, you may have to actually slightly change. So before you created the network, which I think is probably why you created a network, but I want to know how people go about finding coaches and mentors in the market.
[00:11:44] Speaker C: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, you know, I think what you said is absolutely right. The mentor might be more ad hoc in terms of how you access them, and a coach might be more formalized. That is, you might even pay for that person and have a fairly rigid structure to the engagement. How do you go and find a mentor? Well, probably the best bit of advice I ever got, and this was way back when, at the beginning of my career, was dress for your next job. And it was actively encouraged in our business to go and find mentors internally that had gone through the pathway that we were about to go through. So that was my first experience of mentorship. You know, finding that person that had gone from SDR to AE and going for lunch with them and going for a drink after work with them or spending some time with them, listening into what they did, you know, a whole host of things where I was just getting skilled development and advice and direction about what I needed to do. So it really did start there. And I think as you grow as a leader and join networks. So, for example, an organization that I was thankfully part of right at the early stage, an organization called the Revenue Collective, now known as Pavilion, which is chaired by Tom Glasson, who's also my business partner at Scalewise, instantly we had this group of people where we had mentors, you know, people that, again, have been through a similar journey to us. I remember sitting around a dinner table in Shoreditch many years ago with other vps and CROs, and we were able to just share our stories and challenges and help each other with perspective when that sort of thing just didn't exist prior to that. So I've met a huge amount of people through that network that have then been able to provide me with the mentorship and guidance and advice that I needed.
So there are places like that you can go and find them. So encouraging people to go out and join networks. There are many of these types of networks now either face to face or based online that can really provide you those access to people that have been there before you if you want to go and find a coach. And again, it depends what type of coach that you want, but a personal coach, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of qualified coaches out there that I mentioned can help you with the things like self awareness or your relationships, or how you think about your career, or helping you become unstuck in a scenario at work. Whatever it might well be to getting access to a qualified coach can also be useful. But again, it's more about a relationship which you're going to most likely have to commit to have sessions with, have to pay for. So there is going to be a different dynamic to then just finding that mentor in a network that is someone that's just being useful in sharing their knowledge. If you wanted to access a professional coach with that skill set that sits behind that, then it's going to be very much a kind of paid for type activity when finding that person and.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: For the people who are not. I've not been using coach before, total coach around them and probably listening to that conversation. God, maybe I need a coach to develop. What sort of budgets should one individual have in mind? I'm talking about sales leadership. So we're probably talking about, you know, above sales manager type of pay grade. So going more to the VP levels and what does it cost? How many hours a week do you need to spend with your coach? Could you just give us a little bit more like practical? And I know it may change from one person to another and you'll have some coach that costs you like. So that guy, I can't remember what his name is. Like Tony Adams or something, like some american guy. He's got a Netflix ceremony. I think you pay like a million dollar to spend hours with him. I'm sure you've got some coaches that are charging far less than him. What should be the expectation for someone who's based in the US, someone who is based in the UK, to get some mentorship or some coaching on sales leadership.
[00:15:47] Speaker C: Yeah, well, yeah, you're right. We're not quite at Tony Robbins level yet.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: If I could not say his name properly, you know, how much he charged.
[00:16:00] Speaker C: So it's a really good question and let's sort of stick on professional coaching for now. So this is, you know, helping somebody with some of those things that I mentioned, like burnout for example, or self awareness, whatever it might well be. The reality is that there's coaches out there that would actually provide some sessions for free.
Why do they do that? Well, that's part of their own professional development as coaches. So for example, the courses that I've been on, quite often you give some free sessions to people because it's just part of learning as a coach. But when you think about coaching for sales leadership specifically and what we see in the market, this could be one or 2 hours a week maybe. I think on average, probably our most used subscription of coaching is 3 hours per month. So every seven or ten days people will be accessing their coaching. They'll typically be an hourly coaching session. We always give the advice that you pick a time where you've got a bit of space either side of that coaching session, so you can kind of get yourself into the right frame of mind because the worst thing would be to come off a client call or be thinking about that client call coming up after a coaching session. But you know, prices range from probably a couple of hundred pounds right through to the Tony Robbins of this world. To get access to these types of coaches, you can get some really great coaches for very reasonable prices on an hourly basis. With a lot of firms out there, I'd encourage you to spend lots of time meeting different coaches. We have a process within scale wise where we will give a number of options to our clients based on what they see that they need within a coach, because one of the important things is to create chemistry with your coach. So we have what's called chemistry calls. So you might meet, meet several different coaches, meet them in a chemistry call type environment and just understand the style of each other and make sure you've got that right interpersonal connection before selecting a coach because that's really, really important to that relationship. But yeah, you can probably find coaches that could help you for free write a couple of hundred pounds an hour. It's all very accessible, particularly if you are in leadership positions.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you kind of beat me to it as to the selection process of the coach, because I do agree with you. I think you need to get on with the person.
I want to go back to some of the things you've said because I think when you are maybe at an earlier stage of your career and you're looking for mentorship, you're looking at, you know, moving from a to b, you know, dress for the job you want versus, you know, where you are now, but also act like you want to be. So getting with those people, being able to get some time with them, this is something that is so important, maybe less so now. But I remember when I was just dealing with sales, just being a sales leader myself, right. People would come and say, hey, how do I get a job in that sales team? What do I need to do? Tell me. And then what does it take and what sort of characteristic, what are you looking for? And I would tell them exactly what I was looking for. And for some of them I'd say, look, what I'm happy to do is to work with you for the next six months to get you that stage again. I think the organization that I've been working with are very much promotion from within type of organization. So I think that the concept of mentoring as coaching is necessary. If not, you just build the business on terrible foundation with people that don't develop and, you know, an SDR moving to an AE role, an AE moving to a leadership role could, you could be a fantastic a and be a terrible leader. You could be a great SDR and you could be a terrible a. You know, it doesn't. So things don't match. The skill set are slightly different and you need to add the people through the change, like from caterpillar to butterfly, which is a big change. Right. People don't tend to realize that. So, and not everybody goes through it. So I think it's quite interesting to also when you start the coaching journey with someone to tell them about what's going to be the outdoors and what's going to be difficult, what they won't like about the coaching, what they won't like potentially about where they are going. And as well, I think the mentorship and the coaching together kind of makes sense. So someone who's seen the movie and can coach is quite useful. But I'm glad, you know, you guys have built a network of, I think it's over 400, is that right?
[00:20:24] Speaker C: That's right, yeah. Around about 400 every day.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I think in the SaaS space with the investment going and everything, I don't see a lot of space for coaching and enablement and development of individual. Again, I think we're really expecting people to come in the job. We pay them very, very gracefully to come in the job and they've got to get on with it. And you can't expect to have your manager spending time with you. You can't expect to have your CFO mentoring you about how to run a piece P and L. If you've never run a PNL before. They just don't have the time to do it. Everybody is busy. Everybody is running 200 mph. So tell us a little bit more about what you build at scale. Why? So you've already touched on it? I guess what I'm interesting to understand is over the course of the journey, would you recommend someone to stay with one coach or do you give them access to different coach? You know, for example, I mentioned finance.
[00:21:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: You know, you could, you may want someone that's more from someone with more like m and a type of mentor or coach. You know, for someone who just said, how do you prepare your sales organization for potential acquisition? Or do you manage that based on where people want to go? I'd like to understand a little bit more how do you see the people who are seeking coaching? Again, you mentioned that match, which I like, but I'd like to discuss about the point of you conversing with the people with seeking coaching before you actually do the chemically, how do you create the chemistry course? So I just want to how do you plan those things? Do you, do you segment your coaches? I'd be interested to understand how you, your method behind it, basically.
[00:21:56] Speaker C: Sure. Yeah. I mean, it all starts with a discovery, you know, really working with an individual to try and understand where in their journey they are. You know, is this all about getting them from head off to VP level, for example, or is this about tackling specific challenges like going into the US market or building a territory or setting up a go to market plan, like the amount of challenges and opportunities that we hear are so varied. And of course we have people that are very, very skilled in certain areas that we can pinpoint that could be the right person at the right time for them.
I personally had or still got six different coaches that helped me with lots of different aspects of my career, some of which I haven't spoken to for a long time. But I know I'll be due to speak to certain people when it comes up for me. I've had people help me as a founder of a business, I've had people helping me as a revenue leader working in a founder led organization, I've mentioned my charity mentor as an example. So I've got access to lots of different coaches at different types of my development that can be really useful for me. So the way we open it up with any coach here is just feel assured that if you come to the course with your particular coach, we can find somebody else that might help you with a different aspect that could be really useful for you. So, yeah, I would really encourage people to think about it as well. You're just going to use lots of different resources as you go through your career because your career is going to take lots of different twists and turns and you're going to need the support to cope with that. I think that's really important. I think one thing you triggered Ray for me was what I've noticed is those best revenue leaders or those exceptional salespeople that we see come through to scale wise can often come off their own backs. So quite often you have a company coming to us and saying, right, we need some coaching and that might be driven by maybe the leader's boss, like the CEO, for example. But in some cases people are taking their own cash and investing into their own development and finding themselves a coach. I personally have worked with a particular AE now for three and a half years. She's the highest performing AE in her own right, in her own business, yet she funds it all of herself. But the way she looks at it is it's just a great way of improving her own development. You know, she's happy to invest that different cash even though the business isn't paying for her to do that. But she's seeing the results of having those one on one conversations on a regular basis. But, you know, I would see with her that she will probably use other coaches in different perspectives as she goes through her career as well, which I think is, you know, really important. You know, in fact, I'm currently actually searching for a new coach to help me tackle some specific things that I'm working on right now and to help with my understanding of different topics that I've never come across before. And my existing coaching base don't really have that experience or toolkit to support me on that particular journey. And that's all right, that's all cool. We just find somebody else to support.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: Yeah. It's interesting that you've got six coaches. Makes me feel like I don't have enough.
I need to rethink my coaching strategy. I want to take a side step. You know, we speak about coaching from development. So when you are a leader, you, you want, you have a plan, you want to go from a to b and, you know, it could be a specific function that you want more coaching on. It could be some other bits and pieces. I want to move more towards the psychology and particularly I think it's a good time now because 2023 is over. I think 2023 was a tough year for lots of leaders. I mean, you mentioned pavilion about their pulse reports yesterday.
Things seems to be coming back to a little bit of flight. We can see those green shoots coming out of the floor again with people being more optimistic. But I think Q 420 22 most of 2023 was pretty horrendous for lots of people, and some sales leaders are the great show, of course, but some sales leaders really found a lot of hurdles in their way.
I would be interesting to hear from you if mentorship coaching, if you've seen that evolving, when probably people who are dealing with common issues such as, you know, feeling a little bit lonely at the top, basically, you know, you've got your own to get the number, you may have a bit of an imposter syndrome, maybe a bit of a burnout going on, you know, so all those things. I'm more interested about the psychology side and how mentorship and coaching has evolved. Have you seen dysfunction evolving to support people when they are going through different things? Because we're not talking about developing your skills, we're talking about putting you back into the right mindset.
It's almost like a psychology coaching versus a professional coaching in a way, from my perspective, at least. But I wanted to understand if you seen that nuance with your network, with the demand from people and how did you adapt to it?
[00:27:12] Speaker C: Well, yeah, we've certainly seen the demand because we've never had as many applications for both companies, but also scale experts as we call them, to join Scalewise. And they're joining for a few reasons. They're joining that they want to actually run their careers in a different way because of the things that you mentioned, because of that pressure, because of burnout, they're actually looking at different ways for them to run their careers. They might want to become coaches themselves or have a more flexible way of working through things like fractional or interim ways of working in their leadership careers or coming to us looking for new roles because they've got themselves into a situation where it's not necessarily valuable for them to work in the businesses that they are part of. So, yeah, I think certainly we are seeing people come to us for a number of reasons, like change, it's like really important that they're going through that kind of psychological journey to help them through certain issues, like how do I define what my values are, how do I ensure that I'm showing up in the right way and ensuring that everything I'm tackling as an individual, I'm understanding why I'm reacting to those situations or how do I show up properly in front of others. So a lot of people are asking those questions and we're there to support that. So whether it is somebody making a transition through their career or whether they're stuck on something specifically, exactly. That point of psychological coaching is something that we see is needed within the market, particularly going through these difficult moments when the pressure's on and making sure that people are well supported and finding the right types of people to do that for them.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: And that's if someone is not in denial, that's actually if someone believes that they need that type of psychology support. Did you? I guess. I guess as a coach, you also need to be able to interpret the signals of someone potentially feeling not at the top of the game. And I don't know if someone, everybody wants to, wants to show that, particularly in sales leadership, I think there is quite a bit of, how to say, soft arrogance. You know, you need to have a bit of an ego to be good at cells, right? You can't be good at cells if you are completely introvert and don't like a little bit of yourself, don't like the sound of the sound of your own voice, don't like the sounds of your own ideas and stuff like that. You know, you've got to have a little bit of an ego. I'm not saying that you need to be completely ego soundtrack and maniac, but you need to have.
It's interesting. The first of all, I don't think getting a sales coach, a coach in general, for a sales leader, it's probably not something that they go to speak about openly. I think people probably do that and keep it relatively on the side without showing too much weaknesses, I guess, to the rest of the world. But then when you speak to your coach, I don't know if you would want to bring to them, you know, as you said, all the crap that you get at work, the way you feel. You know, we spoke about being in the right mindset when you had like a, let's say you had a terrible board meeting and you had a coaching session just after, you know, do you want to close the door behind you? And going that it's got to be difficult to actually change. But I'm sure there are some people that are probably trying to hide the signings. It takes probably a very good coach to be able to interpret the signs, actually bring the conversation where he should be.
[00:30:37] Speaker C: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's not the responsibility of the coachee to understand whether they've got something like imposter syndrome, which you've just mentioned. A trained professional coach will be able to spot the signs of that type of behavior and then help with the resourcing and the strategies to help them overcome that or at least highlight that. That might be part how they're showing up in front of others. So it should be the responsibility for that trained coach to be able to, as you say, pinpoint what are those things that they're doing, how they're showing up, that then you can help them with. So the coach's job can identify those traits and shine a light on them and then help them with certain exercises or activities or questions to then get them in a better place and help them cope with the way that they naturally are as an individual or are reacting to a certain situation. That's what I enjoyed a lot about my coaching course was it just enabled me to be able to spot those things and then work out the best method to actually support that person to get through that situation in the right way.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Yeah, probably number one rule, not number one rule of leaders, but having gone to schools and being trained, been taught leadership at school, actually part of it. Not just that, but management and leadership. I remember two things. One, which is, you know, being able to have a team around you and you are not a leader without a team is just, you know, it's like a CRO with one AE. You just give yourself a title or you call yourself something, but you are not it. And the second thing is really, so on top of being able to delegate and trust some other people and really have a team that can lift you up, the second thing is really about you can't lead if you're not in the right mindset, you know, and I think I find it's true, it's difficult if you are not in the right mindset, if you are vulnerable, is actually probably better to let your team know about it. And it is very difficult to lead when things are not going your way because you just. It's more difficult to be creative, it's more difficult to, you know, then you've got to. Not only you've got your burden, but the burden of other people. Because let's not forget that, you know, a part of the role of the leader is to also coach the people in his team. Right. So this, it's kind of, it would be double standard. So yeah, it's interesting. I want to ask you one last question, Gavin, which is, you know, I've had, and don't take it the wrong way. You know, I don't believe that myself, but I've been in conversation with CEO's and leaders, in fact, who just can define coaching as it's a nice thing, but you know, it's fluffy, right? You just get that it makes people feel good, but what does he actually do for the business? So I guess my next question to you is how can leaders ensure that all the valuable insight that they're developing in their coaching are actually brought into action, that they can bring to work and not just having a conversation about nice thing and then, you know, because that's really the relation about taking actions.
[00:33:44] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a point that we hear a fair amount and what we try and draw people's attention to is that the impact of having coaching can be significant in terms of helping individuals get to the positions that they have the potential to reach. You know, there's a lot of scenarios, and I've personally seen this in my own career, where people are replaced or people are brought in above existing leaders because the exec might not have the necessary skills or experience to be able to train that individual to get them to that next level in their career. But actually it can have a really negative impact if that person isn't nurtured and supported maybe by external mentorship or coaching. I certainly felt that myself where I was in a position as a revenue leader and suddenly somebody was above me and, and I wasn't quite sure how to react to that scenario when actually what I would have loved was a bit more of support and coaching and mentorship to get me to the level that I needed to. So I saw that firsthand and I see that every single day where I think forward thinking CEO's of B two B businesses will come to us and say, look, I've got a great head of marketing, but at the moment we can't quite develop them to where we need them to be. So actually getting somebody of like a CMO coach for example, can really help them up level and save an organization a huge amount of time, money and effort going to find somebody externally to bring in and help them. You know, you talked about being in businesses where, you know, you like to nurture the talent and promote from within, you know, with the support of mentorship and coaching around that it can mean that you really do nurture that talent, you know, greatly. I worked with a business the other day who had a really impressive leadership team who had been there for over ten years, each of them, and they started right at the beginning, but they'd had to get advice and support and coaching from outside in order for them to get there whilst they're now running a incredibly big business from what it all started from. So there's a lot of impact that can happen and yes, that is a common objection. The other thing I would say as well though is that when you have in that coaching conversation, it's the responsibility of the coach to help set very specific goals within those coaching conversations and maybe document it in what might be a development plan for that individual. I still see that a lot with my coaches, people that actively share their development plans with me, and I think that's just a great testament that actually things are moving forward and you can see things progressing and that can always be shared with others in the business that want to see the impact the coaching is having for them. I think it's a really important thing that it is documented and there is a tangible impact to coaching because of course, hopefully the other benefit is somebody who's just happier and feels better in their role. And you can't necessarily measure that, but that's still a good thing and it's still a fact if somebody is happier in their role.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Look, for us, it's critical, even for me personally, if you think about it, you know, growing the business for the last twelve years, every year is different, every year is a new challenge. It's same old, right? We're doing something similar. We're adapting our services. There is some little things that are changing. We like to move, we like a little bit of innovation, listening to our clients, things are evolving. But fundamentally the core business remains pretty much the core business. And going through an acquisition last year now kind of reporting to different boards, having some new people, some culture is very good, very similar in a way, but slightly different, you know. So the way I like to put it is like we used to make baguettes and the company that we get in with are making Shabbata, right? So technically it's bread pretty much the same way to do it. Different shape, tastes slightly different, different way to make it, but there is a lot of little subtitles, but you can make a sandwich in both and be very happy. With it, you can live on Shabbat, you can live on baguette. He won't kill you. Right? So, but it's about, I don't know what my next job in terms of growth or my next challenges as a leader will be the next three months. And that's why I think having a coach is important, because unless you're doing a job and you're doing the same job over and over again, so taking the same type of company from five to ten millions and you've done it already ten times, and you go to the next one and you've got your team already that you are taking every time with you. So you just parachute in, doing for 3 hours, move on to the next one. Unless you do that, which is more like a cookie cutting type of perspective. If you are evolving and you want to evolve and develop your leadership skills, there is no way you can do it without coaching, in my opinion. But this is where we are. But Gavin, I want to thank you for your time. Really appreciate you coming with me today. If anyone wants to engage with you, discuss about scale wise what you could do to support them, identifying the right sales or marketing leader in the organization. If anyone wanted to carry on the conversation about mentoring, coaching, we may have some people listening to that say, wow, I still don't know where to find a coach. So let me pick up the food. To Gavin. What's the best way to get hold of you, Gavin?
[00:39:04] Speaker C: Sure, just go on to scalewise.com and just book a free consultation and we can speak more about it. More than welcome to spend some time or link me in at Gavin Sumner on LinkedIn. It'd be great to catch up.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Sounds good. Well, it was an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today, Gavin. Thank you.
[00:39:21] Speaker C: Thanks, Ray.
[00:39:22] Speaker A: You've been listening to b two b revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.
