The Oxford Business Podcast

In this episode of the Oxford Business Podcast, Ben is joined by Dylis Guyan, an International Sales and Leadership Expert, as she shares her story, advice and experience in the world of sales, including the importance of loving what you do, understanding what your clients need and the necessities of appropriate training for leadership roles.
  • The importance of loving what you do
  • The necessity of training for leadership roles
  • How to identify your ideal client
  • The importance of a client central approach
Listen to the podcast to hear expert insights on those topics.

More about the guest:


Dylis Guyan is a seasoned sales and leadership professional with over 23 years of experience in the financial services and corporate sectors. She has held prominent positions in the banking and insurance industries, including Field Sales Manager and Regional Sales Director. Dylis currently operates as an International Sales and Leadership Expert, as well as a tutor for the Said Business School at Oxford University and a course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Dylis is passionate about helping others develop their sales and leadership skills, and loves to share her knowledge and experience.

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About the Oxford Business Podcast:

The Oxford Business Podcast is a podcast by OBCN, the Oxford Business Community Network, and hosted by Ben Thompson from Thompson & Terry Recruitment.

Ben Thompson: @ben-thompson
Thompson & Terry Recruitment: thompsonandterry.co.uk

The Oxford Business Community Network has been established to provide a trusted, peer-to-peer, group networking opportunity for businesses based in Oxfordshire, where 'people buy people'.

The Oxford Business Podcast is produced by Story Ninety-Four and recorded in their Podcast Studio in central Oxford.

What is The Oxford Business Podcast?

Hosted by Ben Thompson, the Oxford Business Podcast is a monthly podcast featuring conversations with experts in a range of fields including marketing, finance and sales.

Ben Thompson 0:06
Hello, welcome to the Oxford Business Podcast of the Oxford Business Community Network. We're currently at Story Ninety-Four, the only podcast studio in Oxfordshire. Today, I'm really, really delighted to be joined by Dylis Guyan, and we're going to be talking about her story, but also give some really practical advice all around the world of sales. So, welcome, Dylis, thank you so much for joining us.

Dylis Guyan 0:27
Thank you very much for inviting me, Ben. It's an absolute pleasure.

Ben Thompson 0:31
Aww, thanks so much. So let's start. So for the listeners who don't know you, let's start with your background, who you are and how you got here today.

Dylis Guyan 0:38
Well, I started my career, many moons ago as a financial advisor and nine months later, promoted to Field Sales Manager without a team so I had to recruit my own team, which I know would be close to your heart and six years later promoted to regional sales director in Oxford, support for Thames Valley area, where I was responsible for 70 advisors, seven Field Sales managers, and the Financial Services targets in all of the bank branches in my region and I loved it with a passion and I think that's probably one of the big things I want to share today is that whatever you are doing, you have to love it with a passion. You know, you have to really be excited about what you're doing because if you're not your prospective clients won't be. Anyway, as a region, we were always in the top 5%. In 1999, we were top in the country and that was the point that I decided that I was going to leave and set up my own consultancy. Single parent, two teenage children. Oh, my goodness, I look back now and I think, good heavens! How did you have the courage to do that? Anyway, that was what I did, and left the corporate world and into my spare bedroom, which was then an office and literally started from scratch. I had no contacts. I had no network. I didn't use an agency and I literally put my business plan together. So how much do I need to earn because as a single parent, I had to keep a roof over my children's heads and all of the associated bills, worked out who could pay and would pay and as my background was financial services, I thought right, I'm going straight into the blue-chip market, a financial services companies and so I made a list of prospective clients and literally got on the phone and of course had to talk to many gatekeepers. and that in itself is a skill in terms of treating your gatekeepers with the same respect as your decision maker and literally in month one I got a contract with Allied Dunbar, Zurich now, went on to work with Aviva, which was Norwich Union then, Barclays, Barclaycard, HSBC, I've travelled around the world with HSBC and although that was my ideal client stream, financial services when you've got that stream of ideal clients, you can then, when you've got other opportunities, decide whether you're going to work with that type of company and I got a lovely contract, which was an introduction, at Thornton's chocolates,

Ben Thompson 3:20
Nice!

Dylis Guyan 3:20
And I ended up with eight years of different contracts there and that's another thing I would like to share with the listeners is go in with one thing, and then identify your other opportunities. I went to the CEO and talked to him about other opportunities that I had identified, one of which was selling to corporates within Thornton's and we took their sales from 126,000 to 1.1 million in 12 months. It was incredible. So I've worked with retail, I've worked with pharmaceutical companies, the historical, no heritage sites, I think we would say, Blenheim Palace been one of them. I'm also a part-time tutor for Said Business School and deliver a sales programme there for MBA students and I was quite shocked. I was like, really isn't this part of the curriculum? Which is very welcomed by the MBA students and I also deliver an impostor syndrome programme at Said Business School and I'm a course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and deliver a sales and leadership programme. So started my own business back in 2000. So it's 23 years, I cannot believe it and I love it as much now as I loved it right in the beginning. So that's me.

Ben Thompson 4:48
Amazing. Amazing. I think I'm going to start in reverse order there if that's okay, and start with a love. There's a well-known phrase, isn't it that we're talking about off-air is that if you love something, you never work a day in your life. What's kind of your advice around loving what you do?

Dylis Guyan 5:03
You have to believe in what you're selling, whether it be a product or a service, you have to believe in that, because I always talk about the mind will move to the most dominant thoughts, whether it's positive or negative, and your actions will follow. So if you are not 100%, believing in what you do, then it will come over in the way that you speak and the way that I always position this with my clients is for them to think about the impact on their client because everything, whether it be a product or a service, should be either solving problems, or helping people achieve their objectives. If you can be client-centred, customer-centred, it's then that you can see the difference that you make and if you're listening to this and thinking, I'm not sure I'm 100%, please go and talk to some of your clients or your customers and ask them, what have been the benefits of working with you or having your product and they will tell you. If you're working in a company and you're maybe you're in a sales team, go and talk to the successful people, and ask them what impact they think they're having on the clients and it will help you to reframe your thinking, which will then allow you to change your actions, but you can't change your actions without changing your thought process.

Ben Thompson 6:33
Absolutely. One of the things you touched on in your introduction, which I thought was really, really interesting is about banging the phones and earlier on in your career, you set up your business and you got on the phone and won some really, really big clients, is there still a place for cold calling? Is that still a big thing? Is that something you work with your clients on?

Dylis Guyan 6:52
I work differently now. I have a different process now. But in the early days, I was very naive, I didn't know and of course, actually thinking back there wasn't the social media that there is now and there wasn't the opportunity to research in the way that there is now. So I didn't even think about any other option and if I go way back to the early advisor days with Barclays, you wouldn't be allowed to do this now. But we had to put together before we started working, we had to put together a list of 500 names from the telephone directory, can you imagine that now? Names, addresses, telephone numbers, and they sent out 60, from head office, 60 every week, and they weren't all Barclays customers and I would make 12 calls every night, every night, and if I didn't make 12, if I only made eight, I would carry those four over and I was absolutely committed to that activity and the more you do it, the better you get at it and you know, and I was calling people who are watching Coronation Street and probably eating their supper, who didn't want to speak to someone about life insurance, pensions or income protection. But I learned very, very quickly. Nobody's interested in that. But what they are interested in, is having a financial safety net, in the event of them losing their income for whatever reason, whether it be death, sickness, critical illness or retirement, then it makes a difference and the words that you use, in terms of grabbing people's attention is really important. So I did in the beginning, I talked about life insurance and pensions and I thought, no stop. Because as a regional sales director, and as a field sales manager, I used to drill into my people about being client-focused and that takes away from the product, because the biggest, not the biggest, actually, but one of the issues I see is that people peak too soon. In other words, they talk about product too soon and people aren't interested in your product. They're interested in what your product or your service will do for them.

Ben Thompson 9:09
No really, really good advice. Really good advice. Another thing that I picked up on in your introduction was around when you were looking for clients, you looked for clients who could pay and would pay and I think that's a phrase I want to build on a little bit when targeting the listeners. How important is it that you focus on those clients who will pay, will actually pay your bill because I think it's quite common for businesses to... for that not to happen, isn't it?

Dylis Guyan 9:36
Yes, absolutely. It's critically important and it's not just that they will pay your bill, but it's people that you want to work with, because you might be ethically disjointed, if that makes sense, so your values of different and if I could tell a story that will highlight the importance of ideal client. So this is my daughter and son-in-law and they've got a builder/carpentry business and they started about 15 years ago. I spoke to him about two years in, he'd been a carpenter, an employee for about 11 years and decided he would set up on his own and I spoke to him this day and said, How are things going? He said, "Oh, I'm sick to death". I said, "Why, what's wrong?" I said, you know, he said, "people asked me for a quote, and I spent hours putting this quote together only to find the haven't got the money". He said, "There's people then who want extra jobs doing throughout the job, but they don't think they should pay for it at the end. He said, I've got late payers, I've got work that I don't even enjoy", because he's a real master craftsman. Harris-Keyte is his business just as a name drop. A real master craftsman. So bespoke kitchens, oak conservatories. This sort of thing, very, very high-end. He said, I'm doing these, in his words, "piddly little jobs that aren't even profitable" and his shoulders went down his head when further and further down each time he's talking to me about it and I said, "Well, is there anybody you've loved working with?" And he said, "Oh, yes, this one, this one, this one, this one". I said, Right. Look, you and Helen come round, bring either a folder or just a list of names of those you've loved working with, and that have been profitable and you've enjoyed the work. So round they came, and they had six and this is what I would recommend people do, by the way, is take six of your best, clients that you love working with. So we sat down with Helen and Drew. And I said, right, I want us to look at these and profile them and work out the commonalities between all of these best customers that you've got, and it turned out they were all over 40 or professional, all earning, like £100,000 plus, plus, plus. All work he absolutely loved all people, he loved working with, same values, all profitable. They all gave him repeat business and they were all keen to give him referral business. They all lived in a 20-mile radius of where we live here in Whitney in Oxfordshire. They live in North Leigh. All in those affluent Cotswold villages. So people who've got some income, they're still spending. Right? So anyway, this was years ago. So I said, now we need to find them, you know, how do we get your message out to them? And I said, what do they read? And they read the Cotswolds Times or something, you know, the glossy I can't remember what it's called.

Ben Thompson 12:42
Pretty magazine, Cotswold Living is it?

Dylis Guyan 12:45
Something like that and it's got all the top-end curtains top-end kitchens, top and bathrooms, they put an ad in there. They also, these people in the Cotswold villages received the Postcode Pigeon, which is a free magazine full of ads and Helen put a half-page. Actually, I think it was a third-page right in the middle, coloured and so the other thing I said is you asked for referrals from your existing clients because they will refer you to the similar type of client, can pay and will pay and I said the other thing I would like you to think about is find someone who has a similar client base to you, but you're not in competition with. He said I've got just the people and he had two architects now, so no competition. So he developed a really close relationship with these people and they refer business to him and I said to him, if you're going to do this, and you're going to develop this relationship, then your work has to be absolutely top end, because it reflects on them because they've referred you. So they spent their time getting their message out to the people in those Cotswold villages through these magazines and he developed the relationship with these two architects. His business, it has just... it bears no relationship to where it was. He's now got a team of lads. He's got vans, and he has just finished a £350,000 project which ended up a £405,000 project alongside a £250,000, and his aim is to buy some land and develop. That's the power of ideal client because if you're marketing to everybody, you're marketing to no one because your message is too generic. One of the other things we talked about when we were looking at these six and commonalities and so on, and identifying them and saying, right, here's your ideal client profile. I said, right, I'd like you to get into their shoes and think about what are they concerned about before they hire you and it was things like reliability, constant communication, so no surprises at the end of the job, consideration of the rest of their home, the best materials to suit their budget, not the best, best, best, best ever, the best to fit their budget and there was another couple that just can't remember at the moment and so what Helen did, is she put together what she called her value letter, now when have you ever had a value letter from an electrician or plumber, or a builder or anyone of that nature. But you put these six things, with a description, a small paragraph under each one and that goes out with every quote, even now. Now, I'm not asking people to consider doing that. But what I am asking them to do is consider their value proposition. So what are the problems that your ideal client has now? And what's the impact, and a guesstimate of the financial impact and the benefits of change? And that allows you then, to put your marketing messages together, and craft your questions when you have your face-to-face conversation.

Ben Thompson 16:32
Really, really good advice. I think it's the thing that was most fascinating about that story for me is, as you were talking, I was putting my head in the head of the end customer and actually, you would buy wouldn't you? You would. If you received that you genuinely would buy. That comes nicely on to the next thing that I'm really, really keen to talk about is that difference between selling and enabling the customer to buy. Can you build on that analogy?

Dylis Guyan 16:55
I love that phrase, I love it, enabling the customer to buy. Professional selling, and it's a million miles away from sleazy pushy, nasty sales tactics. Really good professional selling is about taking your prospective client from a position of interest, where from your marketing messages, they put their hand up and said, I'd like to know more, to a position where they want to buy from you because you have asked them questions and you're taking them that on that journey, and finding out where they are now. Yeah, so a full kind of description of where they are now without your product or service and then where they would like to be ideally, right, and get them to paint that picture of where they would like to be, ideally, because psychologically it takes them to that place, it's not for you to tell them where they want to be, you don't know where they want to be and then it's very easy to say, so if that's where you would like to be, and this is where you are now, what are the challenges that might stop you're getting there? And every time someone gives you a challenge, or I'll use the word problem, you ask what the impact of it is because again, that's where that deep psychological change happens because people are going, right, I knew I had a problem, but I've never really verbalised the impact of it and then you ask the financial impact, because nobody will spend £50,000, £5000, whatever it is, if they think they've got a £50 problem or a £5 problem, they won't. That's your biggest tipping point. So it's, where are you now? Where do you want to be ideally? What are the challenges that might stop you getting there? And then ask the impact of that challenge, and the financial impact, and then the benefits of change, and then you can put your solution in because then it's very relevant. Obviously, there's some other questions you can ask during that conversation. Like if you do nothing, what might happen? You know, what changes do you think need to take place to enable you to achieve your objective? So I mean, there's a big piece to this, but that's just giving you kind of an outline. But once you've got all of that information, and you've taken notes by the way, then recap and just say, so what I'm hearing is or what you've said to me is A, B, C, D, 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever. Is that right? Is there anything else? And they'll say no, that's everything or yes, so actually I didn't tell you about and then it's a right. What we can do is... and then you put your solution in. In terms I always use that, the lovely little framework of Feature, Advantage, Benefit and then you are going to use their words. So here's what we can do for you, sales training course right, give all the details around that feature bit. So give all the details of what that would be and then the advantage, I would refer back to the challenges they had given me and the impact and the benefits, I would refer to the benefits of change all the words they've given me, so it dovetails in, it's not just, here's what I would say to everybody, it's got to be relevant to them.

Ben Thompson 20:30
Really, really good advice. Dylis, I'm really keen to bring the conversation towards the small independent business. So I know something I see so so regularly and to be fair, in the past, I've seen it in my own recruitment business, particularly is you're an owner-managed business, you're the entrepreneur and people want to buy from you. But with my recruitment business, I regularly see businesses looking to hire their first salesperson and that transition, when actually people want the business owner, but the salesperson, what would be the advice under that umbrella and what would be, I guess the process from not just training the salesperson to be able to sell on behalf of the business, but also to be able to train the client to say it's actually okay to be sold to or to buy from Fred, as opposed to the owner, founder, manager, etc, etc.

Dylis Guyan 21:20
I've just taken a deep breath like this, because this is what I see so many, many, many times. First of all, there's so much I can talk about here, but first of all, many businesses will hire a salesperson who they think have the ability to do the job. I have seen few businesses, even big corporates who really give their salespeople, professional, ongoing, I'll stress that, ongoing sales training and what happens is that people will because... I'll just go back a step. Nobody gets up in the morning, and deliberately says I'm going to go to work, do a bad job and get hit with a stick by my manager metaphorically speaking,

Ben Thompson 22:12
Love that phrase.

Dylis Guyan 22:13
They don't. So let's say they've been in a company as a salesperson, one of your smaller businesses, as it's growing a bit a needs a salesperson, so the highest, someone who they think has got the sales ability. Now that salesperson as a salesperson will give the very, very best of themselves at interview, they'll be given a target and then there's disappointment. Often, there was some research from Miller Heiman and the figures have gone up. But this was what they were saying three years ago. 18.6% of salespeople leave their organisation every year, large and small organisations and it takes 10 and a half months to get a new salesperson up and running and fully effective and that is a massive hit on businesses in terms of the cost of recruiting and re-recruiting and re-recruiting. The number of clients I talked to initially, and just business people who tell me they've got this attrition rate. So you've got this situation where a new salesperson has been hired. The business thinks they've got the experience. So they don't give them a lot of sales training. They might give them a day. You know, there's this forgetting curve. I've forgotten the name of the person who researched this, but you've practically or virtually forgotten everything within six days. So a one-day training is not sufficient. It absolutely isn't. So my advice, please get some professional sales training for your people, not just a day out with someone or not just thinking, Oh, well, they've been a salesperson somewhere else. They must be professional and make it ongoing. When I do my work with my clients. I have pre-work, so I'm looking at what the situation is, where their strengths are, where the areas for development are, so that the training I put together is relevant. I will deliver the training, and then the follow-up is the most important part. So I do refreshers. I do group coaching. I do one-to-one coaching where it's required and I do what I call IDS as a group, Identify what the challenge is, Discuss it and then Solve it so it's always looking at options. This works great in a bigger group, but a one-day training and 90-minute seminar is not going to do it and this is one of the biggest challenges in business in big and small that I am seeing myself and I'm also reading and research is talent retention because the training is not happening. I do leadership training as well. So if you're training a salesperson or team, the leaders need to be trained so that they can embed what those salespeople have learned, or leaders, leading a non-sales team, they still need to know, you know what the team have learned so that they can help embed it along with the interventions that I put in place. So you've got this really strong well-oiled wheel, where everything's running smoothly, and they're getting the results that they want. So I think I've answered that for you.

Ben Thompson 25:43
The thing I thought was most fascinating is my own work. One of the things I most commonly see when we get calls, and we speak to candidates all the time, who have had a really successful career in sales, and then got their promotion to be a manager and within 3, 6, 9 months, they leave the organisation and the reason they leave the organisation is because they've been a really good salesperson, but they haven't had that training to become the manager and then actually, nobody wants to take the demotion back down, do they? And actually, what that organisation has lost as a really good person that deserves the promotion, the organisation lost, the candidate's lost, all because of a lack of training. So can completely relate to that.

Dylis Guyan 26:21
Can I add to that?

Ben Thompson 26:22
Please do.

Dylis Guyan 26:23
I've taken another breath, another one of these sort of, because the skill-set that leaders require are completely different to those of the salesperson completely, it is so unfair to put someone into a leadership position without giving them the leadership training, oh, my God, I am so passionate about this. I'm passionate about the sales, because I know how that changes their clients' lives. But I am so passionate about the leaders being adequately armed with the skills they need to develop the people and there is a big difference between management and leadership. Management is just making sure tasks are completed. Not always right first time. I run leadership programmes and I always ask the question, right, so who here always get the job done right first time by every member of their team? Nobody has ever, I really mean this, no one has ever put their hand up. Ever. That is awful. So a great leader is there to inspire and lead and have the people follow. But also they need to train the people, then they need to develop the people and the development, I always talk about coaching the people and really instilling... I used to talk about even back in my Barclays days, I remember seeing what could be, what could we achieve. It wasn't like, here's our targets, it's what could we achieve. So it's about inspiring and motivating, but really training your people and I learned this from my husband actually EDI, he was in the Marines for years and they had to get the job done right the first time. So it was Explanation, Demonstration, Imitation.

Ben Thompson 27:00
Absolutely.

Dylis Guyan 27:20
And when I do this with teams of leaders, I ask them to draw a square, a triangle in the middle, and a circle on each corner and then if we're doing it online, they all have to hold it up to their camera, if we're doing live, they all have to show each other and there isn't one that's the same and they are all a million miles from mine. So I hold up what I wanted them to do and I said, if I had wanted you to do this, which on the surface of it sounds like a very easy task, what should I have done to enable you to do it right first time? And they said well, you should have explained it better and then maybe you should have shown us the picture. I said exactly that. Explanation, Demonstration Imitation as they can try it. But there is a follow on from that, because you don't just leave it at that. You then do what I call the thermometer test, so that you are getting a thermometer out and checking in. This is not an I will repeat is not micromanagement. This is just checking to see that they're okay. Do they need any further support? Did they fully understand what to do? And if they need extra training, then EDI a section of it. Or do they need some coaching? And when you do your explanation, give them a checklist or get them to write a checklist. At home on my computer I've got a folder with processes in, because I've got a chap who does some tech stuff for me, and if he was off for whatever reason, or left me, I wouldn't have a clue. So I've asked him to do a process map for me. It's only steps, you know, let's not make this too complicated. It's steps and I've got that in my file and I've got that for a number of things. Now, if you are training someone, and you're doing the explanation, print it out and give them the sheet. I get it and I remember years ago, working with this team of leaders, and I asked them the question, do you always get the job done right first time and there was this lady she was big invoice big and stature. It nearly knocked me backwards a yard, and she went, No, I don't and she leant forward across the desk. She said, so tell them again and they still don't do it. Right. So she said, I tell them again and if I have to tell them again, I get really angry.

Ben Thompson 31:02
I can imagine!

Dylis Guyan 31:08
This was a number of years ago, and it was in the day of acetate slides. I thought, what can I do like on the spot, I was thinking, what can I do? Anyway, this was a three or four-day programme and I had, at the end of that day, I was going to show them a slide with 12 steps of what they had to do for the next day. So I put this slide up, I read it. I said, now I'd like you to read it. Put your hand up when you finish so I know you've all read it. So you've heard it from me, you've read it yourself. Took it off, said now I'd like you to write those 12 steps and this woman, but she went, she actually lay over the table on her hands and she says I feel ashamed. I feel ashamed. How can I expect my team members to remember the multiple steps of what I'm expecting them to do, when I only tell them once, twice or three times? How on earth can they remember that? She said this has been the biggest aha moment of my life. So please EDI in your training. Explain it. Give them a checklist or get them to write the steps themselves. You show them and then let them try it and if you've got somebody who has been a salesperson, for example, somewhere else and you think, ooh, that seems a bit patronising doing this, then just observe, see where they are, and where they need some EDI and then follow through, get your thermometer out, metaphorically speaking, check-in and see how they're doing. This doesn't mean check in every step of what they do in terms of micromanagement it's just checking in seeing how they're getting on what challenges they might have and then do you need to EDI or do you coach?

Ben Thompson 32:59
Amazing, amazing. No really, really good advice. We have got to the end of the podcast you've given such insight one of the things you said off-air is that you genuinely were here to give good insight to the listeners and you've done exactly that. So thank you so much.

Dylis Guyan 33:12
You're welcome.

Ben Thompson 33:12
Really, really appreciate it. You've been listening to the Oxford business podcast of the opposite business community network at the wonderful podcast studio of Story Ninety-Four here in Oxford. Thank you to Story Ninety-Four for creating this, and we look forward to listening to another episode next month. Thank you so much.