Maximising Sales Potential : William Gilchrist’s Outsourcing Insights

 Outsourcing is a bad word, and actually I don’t know why. How do you find that, that balance when you’re starting to talk to businesses about the opportunity there? Is it a little bit of a, is there trepidation in outsourcing, in the idea of outsourcing sales? When it comes down to sales, people suddenly get strange, and I think it’s because they don’t understand sales.

And everybody believes that sales is just something anybody could do. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the people behind Podcasts Done For You, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out Podcasts Done For You as well in the show notes.

Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And I’m excited about my guest today. He’s got a incredible background that we’re going to delve into, but I think what we’re really going to get out of today is a lot of information about sales. And so without further ado, I’m going to welcome William to the program.

William. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Anthony. This is really cool. Now let’s just start things off as we like to do by simply asking you, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction as to who you are and what you’re about? Okay as the title says, I’m William Gilchrist originally from the United States born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago.

Been in Asia pretty much going on 20 years. Was in China, first. Moved over to Singapore, been in Singapore for about 16 years now. And originally from the tech sales space focusing primarily on doing outsource sales or outsource lead generation for a small company in Singapore, and then moved on to Google to be on the sales floor.

Ended up doing knowledge, being a knowledge manager as well for Google and then leaving and going into the startup space as a typical sales director, trying to build the revenue for different startups. And then at the end, just started thinking about it and saying, okay, look, the problems that exist in the outsource space, the problems that exist in the large corporation space, and the problems that exist in the startup space are the exact same people’s sales structures and sales functions.

And. Ways to generate revenue are just they’re archaic. They’re archaic systems out there. I had this dream of starting a sales mercenary group, which is Konsyg. And we are an outsourced sales team positioned strategically globally, and we generate revenue for startups, enterprises, governments, you name it.

We take contracts and. Try to hit your sales targets pretty much. So much to unpack there and we’re going to get into the Google bit in a little while, but I really want to start off with the where you are now, particularly in terms of the outsource sales. Now you’re specializing in the B2B space primarily, is that correct?

100%. That’s the only real kind of Space that we operate in because B2C requires too many factors that are probably a little bit more marketing focused than a direct sell, right? Imagine selling iPhones as an outsource sales team. That would be a little bit complicated. And you’re in the right space because this is who, this is what I’m about.

This is what our audience is about. Very B2C space. B2B space because I agree with you. It is quite different to into the BTC and it’s much more about relationship building, isn’t it? Then perhaps you do in a sort of a consumer environment. 100%. Everybody now recognizes the chat GPT email.

Everybody recognizes mass. Newsletters very impersonal contacts. So that personal relationship, that customizable messaging, that understanding where people are coming from, not just in their company, with their position in the company, all those things matter today, especially in the B2B space, because most people just aren’t able to get a real answer in terms of, how to make things work for themselves.

So I guess, which leads me to the interesting idea. So you’re an outsource B2B sales. And if. If relationships are really an important factor, how does that conflict kind of work? Because if you’re outsourced, you’re not involved in anything other than the sales process. So that relationship build is different to the one that happens with an account manager for say, or whoever is going to be delivering the service.

It’s interesting once deals start coming in and once traction is made, It’s funny how those lines tend to blur because you’re working on projects. It’s soldiers in a platoon, you might have a rifle person and then the grenade ear and then the medic, right? When you’ve been in the battlefield together, it’s not like you don’t talk to the medic, right?

The medic’s been there with you. You don’t talk to the Grenadier. Oh, I’m a rifleman. So I don’t talk to the medics. You guys are in the same platoon. So the relationships end up actually growing quite deeper as traction happens. And everybody needs to be able to, funnel information back and forth feedback for enhanced.

Kind of processes later. So the relationships, I think, in the bonds that we tend to have, not just with our clients, but also with our clients on their behalf is quite extensive. Yeah, and I love that because I just wanted to clear the pathway because as well, because I think this whole idea of an outsourced sales department is Attractive.

But at the same time, there’s I can imagine there’s a lot of trepidation around why you would or wouldn’t do that. And not the least of which is, of course, is coming into the cost factor, which I’m, I’m sure we’ll come to in a moment. But how do you find that balance when you’re starting to talk to businesses about the opportunity there?

Is it a little bit of a is the trepidation in outsourcing the idea of outsourcing sales? Hey, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast? One for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world. Come talk to us at Podcasts Done For You.

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So come talk to us, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to BizBytes. How do you find that, that balance when you starting to talk to businesses about the opportunity there? Is it a little bit of a, is there trepidation in outsourcing, in the idea of outsourcing sales?

Outsourcing is a bad word. And actually, I don’t know why. Because people are comfortable outsourcing their finance. They’re comfortable outsourcing their marketing to marketing agencies. They’re very comfortable with all those things. But when it comes down to sales, people suddenly get strange. And I think it’s because they don’t understand sales.

And everybody believes that sales is just something anybody can do. Okay. We’ll just get on the phone and a deal will happen or be funny or, just constantly talk about our value proposition because the world totally wants this. Any CXO, any CMO that you talk to, you say these three words and they’re going to buy, that’s just a complete lack of understanding of how sales works. So when you’re talking about outsourcing that usually what tends to go through prospects is that we could just. Have somebody in house to do that. Or, I could do that. Or, hey, look, this is actually really simple without them actually understanding the technical complexities of what it means to actually get a, value proposition into someone’s minds and to really inspire that need to convert into actually being a client.

Usually the individuals who have issues with outsourcing don’t understand that part. And as a result, they usually have to go through a bad journey where it doesn’t work. And then they’re like, okay, maybe this outsourcing thing could work, but sometimes that leads to another set of problems, which is a totally different.

Component of it. You’re so right there in that whole approach to outsourcing and I wonder if there’s some research done somewhere about what cards fall first when it comes to outsourcing because it really is a case of, I know in my particular case, I think the first thing that I outsourced was bookkeeping.

’cause I hated dealing with that. And then it fell to, having an executive assistant. So being able to handle my diary and do some of those things and various things have followed since and I battle with the same idea as well, because often say to people use the example that just because you’ve got an amazing camera in your pocket with your phone.

Does not make you a photographer. And if you go through all of the photos on your camera, on your phone how many would stack up against a professional? I’d hesitate to say if you probably got 10, 000 in there, one, if you’re lucky. Oh my God. I have the same exact quote. Actually. What I say is just because you have a Jersey and shoes and a basketball, it doesn’t make you Michael Jordan.

We actually say that internally all the time. It’s yeah, I know you have the stadium, you have the shoes, but go shoot a three pointer. With Shaquille O’Neal on the other side. Good luck. 40, 000 people watching. Shoot that and win, right? And it’s, but it’s so interesting, isn’t it?

Because that concept of getting business owners over the line to say, you should outsource this. Because I think one of the biggest problems is a false sense of economy as well, because you, on one hand, The chances that you do it as well for exactly what we’ve just said are reasonably small. But even if you get it to a reasonable standard, the chances that you’ve done it as efficiently and as effectively as someone else could do it that’s the challenge though, isn’t it?

Because particularly in an area like sales, you really have to be saying to people if you’re selling Pick a number two or three a month in of whatever you’re selling now having a, having someone outsourced, you’re really going to want to dramatically increase that to cover the costs and to justify it.

That actually leads into really fundamental errors in how people sell. See their product scaling and actually converting sales. Cycles are actually completely off 99 percent of the time. If, and we go through this drill all the time with prospects. Okay. What’s your average sales cycle? Oh, about three months. They always say the same time frame and then we say, okay, great let me look at your last, 15 clients in the last three months and then maybe even a previous three months Let’s look at three month brackets. It’s amazing how much you’ll find that this was actually from a referral.

This was a renewal This was actually a friend of mine who did this. And then now they’re signing on, or we’ve been working with this, cause this person transferred over from this company over here and work with us at this previous company. And that’s now they want to use this again. Then when you break it down, it was probably one deal.

And that probably took six to nine months to close when you really break down the bare bones of your sales cycle. Yet your initial perception is your sales cycle was two months, three months or three weeks. But you haven’t broken down the source of those deals. So that in itself also plays with the perception of outsourcing because they’re thinking, okay, now we’ve outsourced you get me 10 deals in three months.

We did it. So why can’t you? But then once you actually get down to the whole story, it’s that’s not quite what happened. Yeah. And that’s, and it, which brings an interesting point, isn’t it? Because there is the lead generation versus the sales side of things, isn’t there? Absolutely.

Absolutely. But I think like we’re looking at, we have moved away from the term lead generation. In fact, I have an ebook out that’s called lead generation is dead, right? Because. If you ask anybody, what does lead generation mean? You ask 10 people, you’re going to get 10 different responses on what they consider a lead.

Really, what people want is sales. They want opportunities. Sales opportunities that are on a path of a real close. We used to call that lead generation, but, I have a proposal out now where someone said, I want lead generation, and what they mean is a contact list, a prospect list. Then I have another proposal out and someone says, Hey, look, but do you guys do lead generation?

And what they’re looking for is appointments. Another one says I want lead generation. They’re looking for qualified leads. Another one is actually saying they’re really they’re looking for deals and you’re like, okay, these are totally different Kind of definitions using the same exact terminology and that’s I think that’s a huge challenge now in the market It absolutely is.

I think that whole notion of getting the language right that resonates, from your point of view, from the business that you’re trying to sell, but also in terms of working with an audience and their expectations, it’s incredibly difficult. To manage that and to balance that language and interpretation, because you can find a word that resonates today, but in six months time, you might have to change it again.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s rife in the market. When you’re looking at the blog era, no offense, I’m on a podcast, but the podcast era, the blog era, what it tends to provide is sometimes narratives. Phrases and trends that a lot of companies really gamble their entire business on, right without actually having to go out there and do it yourselves.

So what they’ll do is they’ll read a blog and say I should be scaling at X number over the course of this timeframe. Right now, even though this is not buzzwords, but these are narratives that people have in their minds. So we should get lead generation in here. What does it mean?

What do you mean by that? What does lead generation mean for you? That’s a very unique kind of place. So that also plays a part in it as well. Yeah, it’s, and so how do you find that balance then when you’re working with people? Is it, do you have to park that whole side and say look, where we come in is we’re assuming that there’s some interest in what it is that you’re selling and we will take over the selling part.

Or do you have to? Do you actually get into whatever your interpretation is of lead generation? Are you in that part of the equation as well? So we have three different primary services. One is what we call account based marketing, where we’re actually going out there almost as spies to be able to figure out exactly who’s what, where in whatever company.

to be able to provide a channel for them to for their sales team or their SDR team to go after. Our next and primary service is SDR pipeline development, which I guess is the closest to what people would think is traditional lead generation, but what we’re doing is actually doing the outreach, be it call, email, LinkedIn, even face to face on behalf of our clients to be able to drum up interest.

And we even do demos as well. That’s where it’s a little different than lead generation where we’re actually demoing products. We’re actually. Throwing out business cards as, as our client, because we’re completely white labeled and we go and have those deep conversations and drive them into a place where they’re in their sales pipeline, have a certain interest, they’re qualified to an extreme level.

That would be familiar to those looking for lead generation, but we go a little bit farther than that with our demo qualified leads, I guess you can say. And then our bread and butter moniker business is our on demand sales team. Which we pretty much are your sales department and we, have multi quarter plans forecasts.

We’re just held as if we are your actual sales team. You don’t need to hire anybody. We are the team end to end from data all the way to contract signatures. And how difficult is it to get, I suppose I should take a step back and say, have you people that are, when you bringing people into a business, are they dedicated to one business or are they often working across multiple businesses?

When I was in Google, what I found actually being a salesperson myself for a number of years, there were a lot of things in the process that actually I didn’t want to do, nor needed to waste time on. When it comes to the actual sales piece itself, those are dedicated resources, right? But when it comes to things like a follow up email, sending more information, CRM entry, booking the next meeting or the follow up meeting for myself researching the company’s understanding is set, setting up the meeting all those things.

don’t really need dedicated resources. You just need a good organized organization that has internal communications that are flawless in real time. And then once you have that really, the salesperson can just focus on selling and not worried about where to sell, not worried about, a lot of the other kind of components that really can eat up about three hours of eight hour a day.

Yes, I can totally see how that’s the case. And you’ve touched on it as well. The whole idea of having a, having systems and things in place. Cause it’s, I think that I imagine that you get people go, I’m desperate for some sales. I’ll hire you, go and generate some sales, but you actually need everything around it for that to be able to work.

Cause it’s, cause if you bring someone in and the system itself can’t from, I imagine from getting them into literally some kind of system. So they’re noted down as a client and then the list of tasks that follow and how you actually fulfill all of those things. That’s how critical is that?

To make sure that’s set up right. And how involved do you get into that before you engage with someone? It’s of utmost importance. We only take about maybe 20%, 27 percent of the people that we’re going to be launching, right? We actually don’t launch every client or potential client. And that’s because a lot of times we can’t.

Whether the product’s not there, the information’s not there, the website’s not finished, the emails don’t work, the, there’s a variety of different things that they want the revenue right now, but they don’t have the stuff to go get the revenue right now, right? And also unrealistic expectations as well is probably the main culprit.

So we have someone saying, look, we made 150, 000 last year, but we’re looking for 10. 5 million this year because we have this new amazing thing. It’s powered by AI though. And everybody’s going to take it. I promise you it’s that’s the case. You don’t need us. Why don’t you go do the phone calls yourself and get the 10.

5 million yourself. So we really try to filter how ready. A client is to actually be our client, right? And that’s a big part of the process as well. And we do it with a lot of expectation setting and really just seeing what they want to see. In the span of that time frame, how the outsource sales is not a new idea, but it’s but what is, what’s distinguishing you in the market?

What is it? What are the new trends that are going on? Traditionally, I guess the approach would have been well, we’ll bring someone in for sales, whether they’re, outsourced as a consultant or whether you bring them internal internally. And often there was a bit of a bit of a Gray zone between those ideas and often it’s then we’ll pay you a small base and then there’s a commission on top and just go out and generate a whole lot of sales.

How different is it to what you’re doing? In this particular case, you have a full army, right? You have our entire global enclave pretty much operating on the project. So in what one person could do or what three people were what a consultant will tell you that they’re going to do You effectively have anywhere between 10 to 15 people at a given day Operating within your space.

So for one you get so oftentimes in CRNs, people are very surprised by the volume, but it’s because what we’re doing is we’re covering all the areas that are repeatable and that need to be customized and things like that. So we do that on purpose to where that is a team that just focuses on that.

So the impact is a lot more, people tend to feel our presence pretty quickly once we’re inside, because it’s not one person, it’s not The BPO call center that has one caller calling and then they’re like, okay I didn’t, it’s far more intricate than that. And we also give pretty direct feedback in terms of what can happen, what can’t happen.

People see the differences pretty quickly. And it’s primarily in the volume space of things. How different do you have to be in the marketplace these days in terms of the way you go about sales? Disruptions is favorite term that everyone’s like to use over the last few years.

How important is it to do something different? And to be a step ahead or is when it boils down to it, sales still the same as it ever has been, just maybe a couple of different platforms to use. From the sales space, it depends on what you’re selling. Is the product actually, I wouldn’t say how different you need to be or how disruptive do you need to be?

Are you actually good? Coffee existed before Starbucks. These are all things that like, you don’t necessarily have to be super different all the time. It’s great if you’re breaking new ground and you are quote unquote disrupting something, but are you even good at it? Is it something that people even care about?

Disruption for the sake of disruption is actually irrelevant. But are you actually doing something that people care about? And I think that genuine that genuine product, that genuine mission translates into genuine salespeople who are able to have genuine conversations that can create those relationships and really close deals in a real way.

That’s more important is how many people are actually telling the truth, right? How many people are really trying to provide actual value? Is it really going to revolutionize my world? But why are you saying it, right? But it’s more along the lines of, Look, this is not going to revolutionize your world, but here’s some of the things that it will do.

And we’re really good at this. And if you need this And that’s something that actually gets realer deals and longer buy in and, you have less churn rates because you’re focusing on the things that are true and not the things that you want to brand yourself as, which might be a little bit unrealistic.

Yes. I I hear you because I’ve I’ve spoken to, I’m sure most, like most business owners, we’ve spoken to lead generation and salespeople many times. And I, the amount of times I’ve heard people telling you you need to offer some kind of guarantee. I do podcasts for people.

You’re going to guarantee that they’re going to, they’re going to double their sales podcast. Really? Other podcasters out there, please correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not doing a podcast because it’s going to have a direct relationship with sales. And it’s interesting to me because that whole idea of selling false guarantees just seems to be the fallback position for so many people in that kind of role.

And I think that, I’m all in favor of speaking a truth. That’s why I love podcasting so much, because it is an opportunity to speak a truth and to tell a real story. How much do you find that you’re battling that in, in what people are doing? We have a whole page in our proposal about, Guarantees and how that’s funny, right?

To make a joke. I saw a t shirt that was priceless, which is you want to make God laugh. Tell him your plans, right? I’ve never seen a forecast that made sense. I’ve never seen a forecast that really was anything real. And anybody who’s offering anybody a guarantee is lying and it should be painfully obvious.

I know it’s comfortable to hear somebody say, I guarantee you these particular things. That’s interesting, because how can you influence what someone else does? Ultimately, it’s someone else’s decision. Can you, can I influence this person is in their office right now? And they’re just sitting around waiting for a phone call from XYZ company, and then when I call, they say, oh my god, I’ve been waiting.

All day for you to call so interesting. What you have, like the person, the actual sales rep or the lead generator or whoever, they have no control what’s going on out there in the market, but they’re doing volume enough to be able to see what’s out there. So yes, the concept of guarantees tends to be a comfort word for prospects that are looking to be clients.

But we pretty much put a wall up right there by saying look, we’ve existed. For eight years non funded, which means we must be doing something right. And the one thing I’ll tell you is that I’ve never guaranteed a client anything. But I think we’re doing okay so far, right? We still here. So they can read between the lines on that.

And I said if you go to anybody who gives you a guarantee or promises, you’re getting 25 leads in a span of how on earth can they do that? Even with an AK 47 and a private jet, I don’t know if they’re going to be able to guarantee you that you’re going to get business even then.

How would you know? So I think it’s It’s important for, yeah, people to be a little bit more aware and truthful that, and I would say, and this is where it gets into really troubling territory, particularly for founders, and it’s a tough pill to swallow. There’s a chance that nobody actually really cares about your product.

In fact, there’s more than just a chance. People don’t care. They don’t care. The conversations and the relationships make them ponder whether or not they’ll care. And then the more you’re continuing those conversations, they can begin to care. But just because you exist, just because you have a website, a logo, you’re, that doesn’t mean the world cares.

And it doesn’t mean that the majority of the market does. Thus, Putting guarantees on a market that does not care about you is a backwards way of thinking, right? Yeah, and I think too often I see it as well that there are it’s like the lawyers have got out with a whole bunch of clauses, going, yeah, we guarantee it, but hang on, you didn’t keep up your end of the bargain because you didn’t move to post, Two paces to the left when I said you should.

And so therefore it’s now invalid. And I think that’s the but you’re right. It’s playing into what you think people want to hear. And I think that’s the interesting thing I was going to ask you about it. How much is, how much. Improvement. Has there been in the people that you’re selling to the filter mechanisms?

Because, we talked earlier about, I and how you can, people tend to be able to tell when something is. Being put together by an A. I. And yet, I think that’s with this. To me, it’s the same with these guarantees. Don’t people just tend to see through all of this that they know that this is this that they’ve got their filters up and they go this is just rubbish.

They have technical filters up literally and then also mental filters. So now the average salesperson has The biggest battle than ever. You have phone trees where now it’s not getting past the gatekeeper or, for those who are in the sales world, getting past the front office that doesn’t even exist anymore sometimes because front office now doesn’t even have a switchboard to transfer you to anyone.

They literally cannot transfer you to anybody to speak to because their phone systems have been disabled to do or, if there isn’t a front office, there’s a phone tree, the answering system that leads you in a loop and it goes all just to different voicemails that lead to nowhere. That’s on the phone side of things.

Email, we were talking about it earlier. Chat GPTs, you have spam blockers, you have anybody can mark anything as spam. They don’t like an email even though it’s totally legitimate. It can be marked as spam now. So you’re struggling in, in, in the world of email. Then let’s say you’re doing networking events.

More people are networking events primarily to try to sell their products or to position their company more than trying to absorb any kind of value proposition. So the filter, if you get through all those filters, which are direct filters, then you have someone in front of you. Who already probably doesn’t care.

And that’s the final filter. So the uphill battle now on it from a salesperson’s perspective is steeper than ever. Yeah, it’s a tough it’s a tough market to operate in, I think in many respects these days. And because everyone’s trying to sell and trying to stand out. And I wanted to, it’s, Divert a little bit because we, you touched on earlier, the fact that you had a background in Google and so without talking too much about that just at the moment, how much of a role does, with given your background and everything, how much of a role and how important is technology in what you’re doing now is it is, because when you talk about relationships building as we did, and, You don’t need too much technology to pick up a phone and to to make a call and actually speak to someone.

Zoom is great as well that you can jump on and have a face to face meeting with people, but that’s not, it’s a little bit of technology, but it’s not a lot of technology. How much of a role is technology playing in what you’re doing and need to do? It is the is it’s of utmost importance.

We have a lot of internal tools that we’ve either created or we leverage integrations and automations, even though the call itself doesn’t require too much technology. But what happened on that call and understand the nuances of that call for 50 different people simultaneously within five minutes that requires technology.

Because we need analysis. We need CRM updates. We need to be able to, measure things like tone. We need to be able to look at whether or not this meeting is going to be booked. What technology sets that up? When you’re looking at messaging, you’re looking at company research. We pretty much are living in tools probably 90 percent of our days all day on this side.

So the phone call that you. Received or the email that you received. There was a lot behind that and you don’t see it But it just happens and or the phone call just happens and you’re like How does this person know so much about our business and all that? That requires a lot of technology and a lot of analysis to be able to say this is the right person We know exactly who to talk to we know that this is where they are.

We know that This is why they would probably want to engage in this and we’re able to position it to where the salesperson can work their magic to be able to comfortably not bombard someone, but to be able to present a value proposition that’s going to resonate when you talk about tone. How much technology is there now being able to Understand the difference between the emphasis someone might put on words or the way that they’re responding to certain things.

How much interpretation is actually happening and how much is happening live? You’d be surprised, you’d be surprised. There are tools and technologies that do measure tone, sarcasm, and we don’t rely on that just face value. Oh, 30 percent sarcastic. So we’re going to mark this. No we do.

Make sure that we’re able to analyze manually as well. But yes, there is technology out there that does that. But there’s also more just trends in general, being able to, if you are an experienced. Kind of sales manager or whatever. You can look at trends in terms of talk times, call times. You’re able to see how many followups you needed to do with someone or the person who said yes, but they keep kicking a meeting down for five months, we’re able to analyze some of those things and see trends and, We use technology to be able to see trends with roles and companies and industries to be able to know when to follow up and when not to follow up.

Is there, and I think that’s how much of it is real in terms of the human response versus how much is being driven by the technology and are you seeing a shift in that? We manually create every email that we send and of course we need a human being to do every call the cell ultimately is a Human experience AI will not replace sales no matter how much everybody’s trying to pump a bunch of money into it, but the Fundamental reality is that the other person on the other side is a human now unless it’s AI selling to AI So where the buyer now is AI and the seller’s AI.

Okay. All right. Fair enough. These are two AIs talking to each other, but when it comes down to anything involving a human, when it comes to sales, it still has to involve. A actual human interaction. So all those technologies are just meant to allow this moment to happen with a human, and that’s pretty much I want to change tact a little bit.

I want to find out a little bit more about you because you’ve had a journey and working through Google. That’s must have been an exciting time. But even before that, tell me about Where you started, what was the what was the dream coming out of university or out of school?

Where did you want to go? And, indeed, was that being driven by your background with your parents? And yeah my mom is a children’s book author, illustrator. She’s actually quite famous. Janice, by the way, Gilchrist my dad is superintendent of schools in Chicago. So from Very, they’re both PhDs, right?

So I had a lot of pressure. And I ended up going to Bowdoin college. I majored in international relations, but as a kid, I would travel all the time around the world with my mom for her art gallery tours and showings and book signings and things like that. Before the age of nine, I was pretty much in every state.

I did all 50 States in America. And then by then we ended up going to Europe quite a bit. And I always had this fascination because we had an encyclopedia Britannica set and I was always fascinated with China, right? And as a kid, I would always read the section of China and because it was two books, the CH kind of moved over to two books in the encyclopedia.

You young kids don’t know this one, but there were two books for that because it crossed over. And I put China on my Christmas list. At age nine I said, look I can have a trip to China or these toys, but look, you gimme a trip to China, you don’t gimme any toys at all. So I clearly got the toys that year.

And then lo and behold, I actually was able to be at 13, a student ambassador, and I was able to go to China alone without my parents. So that was actually a totally eye-opening experience. I came back to the States and I was never the same again. So I ended up at Bowdoin college, major international relations.

And as soon as I graduated, I went to go teach public school in Shanghai. And I was a public school teacher and just learned a lot about China in terms of just living there, existing in that environment, just traveling around the country more, not as a kid now, but as an adult. And then realized I couldn’t speak Chinese, so that’s a bit of a challenge.

So I ended up getting a graduate diploma from Beijing University in Chinese. I guess that means I have a piece of paper. It says I speak it, but I don’t know if I even know English yet. I’m still working on that. Then I’m working on it. And then after that’s how I actually ended up in Singapore.

Really just thinking about what I wanted to get into. And I ended up getting into sales which was actually through an alumni network who was actually an advisor. And yeah, I ended up interning for him first and then ended up getting a full role doing sales and from there that led to Google and that led to everything else.

So we’re going to touch on it just very briefly. What’s it like working at Google? I think that what you read and what you hear about Google and all that’s Excellent marketing for people to think that it’s this like epic playground place and everybody’s going down a slide all day. The office has a slide or had a slide at least when I was there.

There’s a nice, little gym area, sleeping pods and massage chairs. But when you have the type of targets that they have, you don’t have time to go to the ping pong table. There’s only so many chicken fajitas you can eat. , so I think a lot of that is really good marketing and branding.

And this is no offense to my IBM Brothers and Sisters and my Microsoft brothers and sisters and my SAP and Oracle Brothers and Sisters. Nobody ever asked that, what it’s like to work in those companies. Everybody always asked me what’s it like to work in Google? Because I think they fell from the marketing of it.

But it’s a fantastic company. It’s a beautiful company. I call it my. My sales MBA, not because it taught me sales at all, but more because it taught me how to leverage technology. That was the big thing that Google did where it taught me that you could probably be a, smaller team, but with technology you could be a spaceship, right?

And that was something that I’ll be forever indebted for. And I think that’s the real, Value of working there is in that not the lunch, not the t shirts, not the, all the stuff that people hear about. It’s the access to the type of technology and really smart people who are able to leverage technology to make themselves 10 times, 20 times what they are, which is It’s something that I’ll be forever indebted to that company for.

It’s an interesting one with Google because the most used part of Google, of course, is the search page. And it’s still relatively simple, right? It’s a simple looking page and the information comes up. Yes, there have been some slight shifts in information that comes up over the years, but it’s still relatively simple.

Incredibly powerful. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Clearly, a lot going on behind it, but there’s lots of things that you can use it for and do more and more off. But when it comes back down to it, that simplicity and that ability to anyone can do a Google search and anyone can port can utilize the information that’s there.

That idea is. Sounds very similar to the way the whole business works. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, I think that one of the statistics that I was really impressed with Google back then, I don’t think it’s that way now considering open AI and stuff. But back then, the number one search engine was Google.

The number two search engine was YouTube. Which is still Google, right? And that’s fascinating, right? That, I thought that was a better stat than, looking at the most used. It was like, wow actually that simple innovation. It’s okay great. Now you can look at video content and moving into that space.

That’s super impressive, I think. And it’s really interesting that you say that because it’s a similar, I’ve quoted a similar thing over the years as well. And what’s fascinating now in the podcast space, of course, is that Google shifted from Google Google podcast to using YouTube podcasts area and the big differentiator that YouTube has in the market compared to Spotify and Apple and all of those other podcast platforms is that it is primarily a search term, a search tool.

And so the difference is we tell everyone, you’ll be telling everyone after this podcast, of course, go and listen to Biz Bites and they’ll search for Biz Bites on whatever platform they want to listen to and they’ll find it and that’s great. But we might have a a title for this particular episode, and I haven’t thought of that yet because we’re in the middle of the episode, but it might be something it might be around something around, building your sales pipeline with an outsourced team.

And that’s something that people are going to search for. So then you don’t tend to go to Spotify and search for it. For something like that. You tend to search for a person or a name of a podcast, but YouTube you do. And so what we’re actually seeing is a much greater long term lifespan of the podcasts that keep generating audiences because the topic itself is relevant.

Not just the fact that, Oh, this week I happened to be talking to this person. So therefore it’s the most relevant, which is what the other platforms rely on. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that’s what’s so amazing about this kind of space, is how, things are constantly expanding and, we’re seeing new pockets now.

Under other like sub verticals that we didn’t know. So it’s really fascinating stuff. So I got three final questions that I’m going to fire at you. But I also wanted to say to everyone listening in, we’re going to have a bonus bit of content that as regular listeners will know, all you’ve got to do is follow the notes in the show link to the link, and you’ll be able to access that bit of bonus content.

And we’re going to focus. All about pipeline building and and also sales as a service approach. So we’ve got some key tips that are going to come in there. So encourage everyone to follow that link and and to tune in for that as well. So questions I wanted to ask you just to, to wrap things up.

So the first one is you touched on a little bit earlier. What’s it like growing up with a famous mom and what kind of pressure does that put on you? I think considering that my father and mother both have PhDs, of course, the expectation is, and also they’re of a different generation. The expectation was, okay you have to just stay at school until you have a doctorate degree.

And that was because that was their experience. So the pressure of not going to grad school right away after undergrad was definitely there. It’s don’t worry, I’m going to go back. And I ended up going back. Of course. I needed to experience a world at times to change.

Having a famous mother was actually great. Cause she’s in the art world, the children’s book world. So it was a lot of, Traveling and things like that and really just having access to a lot of things in life that a lot of people, at that age, wouldn’t see like being in our galleries and art shows at three years old playing with toys in a corner.

But, right next to other really famous artists that exist in the world. The people that are at our dinner. You know at our house for dinner all the time. We’re like pretty world renowned, artists at the time. So that in itself was amazing. But yeah, I think in terms of pressures Definitely had to finish school.

That was like, that was, yeah, I don’t know if I’d be breathing right now if I didn’t do that. So that would be the only real pressure I had was to finish. But having an artist mom and an educator for a father, the good combination of that is that I was actually free to be able to craft my journey.

And I fell into sales. I’m going to be a salesperson. I don’t think that’s a career path anybody even knows exists until after college. It’s yeah, I can sell things or, hey, I did sales for, I sold lawnmowers or something. People have that. But no one goes to school and say, I’m going to graduate and be a salesperson.

Not really. That’s something that people fall into. As they’re piecing things together, you’ll be able to see what their skill sets are. So a little sub question in there. Did you feature in any of the books? Is there anything, is there any characters or anything that was based on you?

Yep, you look at a few books by my mother. She used me as a model as a kid. And there’s actually one book that’s called William. She’s had 90 plus books, children’s books. So she’s quite there. You can look at William and the Good Old Days, Night on Neighborhood Street, those books. You’ll see me sleeping on the cover of that.

For the Love of the Game, Michael Jordan and Me, that book I’m going to cover, Throwing a Basketball. So I was used as a model in a lot of her illustrations. Lovely. All right. Let’s say last couple of quick questions. One just and I know we could spend a lot of time on this, but I just a quick assessment.

Where do you see things going in terms of technology and the integration with sales? I think that there’s going to be a bubble that’s going to burst. I think right now technology is trying to build itself in a way, particularly in AI to try to replace sales. For some reason you’re seeing a lot of new technologies coming up.

Oh, it’ll train your sales team, but really it’s trying to train it so they can learn how to replace it and all that. And I think that eventually where the wall is going to come to is that at the end of the day, you’re still going to need to talk to a person. People thought that the answering machines and that the phone trees were going to solve a front office.

Rep back in the eighties, right? It didn’t because at the end of the day, you just want to press zero and talk to the operator, right? So I think that that’s where we’re headed, where we’re going to have a lot of things that are going to look the part. But ultimately sales will remain. It has to remain because it’s such a fundamental thing to mankind.

Even way back in the olden days of trade and all that, this is all sales. It’s a bar system back then, but it’s all the same thing. So this is something that is innate in us. It’s how we communicate, it’s how we innovate, it’s how we expand our presence. That, that is sales won’t be replaced by technology or really that challenge.

It’s just going to go down a path and then we’ll come back to reality. That’s something we can explore a lot more in another time. But I want to wrap things up before we get to the bonus content. Is just to ask you, what is it that you wish people who what is the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you wish that they knew in advance that they were going to have?

One would be how entrenched we are with them. How far we go, how much information we deliver them and how they are able to get more information than they usually get from the internal staff, because their internal staff probably are, trying to secure their brand and the company, the internal brand.

That’s one. Two, I think just how hard sales really is, right? That might be the second, if not the first, right? People say, wow, actually, this isn’t as, straightforward as I thought. This isn’t as, predictable as I thought. And even though we’re able to provide some of that predictability there, but what it took to get there, they start to realize, Oh, okay, actually this is more difficult than I expected.

And now my forecast really is wrong. So that’s another piece, those two kind of also trickle down to other elements, but I would say that’s pretty much where it stays. Wonderful. Thank you. Look, thank you again for being such an amazing guest on the program. A reminder, everyone, just before we wrap up, so pipeline building and the sales as a service approach.

We’re going to tackle that a little bit in some bonus content. So follow the links below to be able to access that in the show notes, but for the main part of the podcast, William, I wanted to say thank you for being an amazing guest and giving us so much information. About where sales are out and about how you can outsource sales and also the journey as well, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe. So you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You. The service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on BizBytes.