David Valentine: global sales management role.

There are times during any career – particularly in sales – when work and other pressures can bring us down; and, in response, we all have our own way of bolstering our spirits. For SHL’s global sales director David Valentine, what works best is picturing the scene from 1992 cult comedy classic Wayne’s World in which Mike Myers and acolytes wig out in their ‘mirth mobile’ to the sound of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

What this reveals about Valentine’s character, I’m not sure; but the one-time executive assistant to IBM’s UK chief executive has definitely joined the company with the capability to tell us: Surrey-based SHL specialises in psychometric testing and personality profiling, and has ambitious plans to expand into Europe, the United States and the exploding markets of India and China.

Remit to expand

In the current tough business climate, it’s not often that you are given the remit to more than double the size of the sales force on a worldwide basis while simultaneously ‘creating the environment for people to be successful’. But that is exactly what Valentine has been asked to do.

He joined SHL from IBM this year with plans to build the company’s global presence and boost sales headcount from 70 to 180. He brings with him a wealth of experience following 18 years with the IT giant, where roles included heading up the European new business sales team for Intel servers and global infrastructure sales manager for financial markets.

Oil industry

Like a number of other ‘Profile’ interviewees on ModernSelling.com, Valentine’s sales skills were honed at IBM. However, he arrived at Big Blue with an existing track record via an engineering degree from UWIST in Cardiff – where every member of staff had come into academia from industry (‘that impressed the life out of me’) – an environmental testing company – where he soon discovered that he ‘preferred dealing with customers to sitting at a drawing board’ – and the world’s biggest oil exploration outfit Schlumberger, where he was a regional sales manager.

Valentine joined SHL after MBO.

‘They were the ones who really taught me to sell and got me into selling as a career.’

The culture at Schlumberger was typical oil industry: ‘very, very aggressive, fast pace, almost money no object to get what you want more quickly or quicker than anybody else – a real 24/7 company, which is where I learnt a lot of my style basically. In the oil industry there is no such thing as tomorrow; it’s now.’

A recruitment ad in the Sunday Times turned Valentine’s focus towards IBM, which at the time was looking for people with very specific industry experience who could also sell hi-tech IT product. ‘They’d had a lot of people who’d kind of done a degree in Portuguese and then became a salesperson for GEC and they turned up and said “What is a power station?”, whereas I had obviously had that experience.’

Back to school at IBM

Despite his prior sales experience, it was back to school for Valentine and the rigours of IBM’s nine-month sales training boot camp. Asked what he learnt, Valentine quips in reply: ‘What didn’t it teach me is probably the quicker answer? You weren’t even allowed to make your first customer call until you’d completed nine months of training.’

This was nine months combining how to sell, being taught about the industry, the application of technology, who you talk to, how you have those conversations with them… ‘You go and talk to an FD (finance director) about what matters to him, which is rate of return, investment criteria, capital expenditure… all those things. You learn an enormous amount.

‘You then get let loose on real business and I thankfully rose quite quickly through a number of the jobs. I think IBM is outstanding in the way that it moves you from one position to the next, broadens your experience, but does it in a thoughtful way: you get the training; you get a lot of mentoring on how to be successful in those roles.

CEO’s assistant

‘One of the most exciting jobs I had, was to be the executive assistant to the UK CEO. You basically shadow that person for a year and learn how the CEO of the UK company runs his business. By pure osmosis, if by no other way, you learn a massive amount. Everyday in the car away for meetings, you got the chance to ask “Why did you do this?”. You literally do sit in on every meeting – even his reports’ appraisals – you learn how to do this stuff.

Valentine: exposure to $8-9 billion business.

After 18 years with IBM in a variety of high-profile product and sales management roles, it was time to move on. The company’s flat structure – packed to the gunwales with highly talented individuals and combined with a ‘very pointy pyramid’ – meant that ‘when you get to a 500:1 contention ratio for the next job you have to decide what it is you want to do’.

The next level

He adds: ‘A lot of people die at IBM kind of clinging on to the hope that they will make it to the next level of the pyramid. Or if you’re ambitious you actually choose to leverage your skills somewhere else.’

That ‘somewhere else’ turns out to be building and running a global sales force for SHL, which has been newly revitalised following an HG Capital-backed management buy-out (MBO). What attracted Valentine is the company’s potential: ‘SHL was poised to really start to grow and blossom and do some more exciting things.’

According to Valentine, the company had very much been ‘run and managed by scientists’ and had an ‘embryonic sales force’. The quantity and quality of the company’s sales team was seen by the board as the limiting factor in its expansion plans. His new role is not to continue business as usual but to cause ‘massive acceleration and probably do it in a way that takes quite a lot of the risks and dangers out’.

He feels the product (and what it can do) gives SHL enormous potential: ‘It just seemed to me to be the exciting place to be.’

Valentine: targeting sales leaders.

Selling to sales leaders

Valentine’s remit at SHL is particularly interesting in that he is building a global sales team that will sell to sales directors amongst other targets. In essence, he has to be the quintessential sales manager’s sales manager.

Cut down starkly to a number of specific tasks, Valentine’s mandate is to:

• grow and execute the growth plan the board has approved along with the investment in new sales headcount on a global basis;
• bring in a level of sales management, sales discipline and sales leadership appropriate for the kind of company SHL is and the environment in which it operates;
• create a ‘sales culture’ for those salespeople (no surprise that in the previous culture dominated by research, the salespeople felt ‘a little bit to one side’); and
• do all this in a way that is highly respectful of people.

Outrageously successful

Valentine sees this as being all about building the ‘environment for people to be outrageously successful’.

He stresses: ‘It is not about just driving and shouting and screaming at people. This really is doing what we believe is right for people, which is the cornerstone of our company vision.’

This approach is backed by research, Valentine claims: ‘A lot of the research now on sales effectiveness and sales ineffectiveness starts to support more and more that it’s creating that environment that matters; it’s not whether you can have more reviews and shout at people louder; it really is the creation of that environment.’

Again, this style harks back to the IBM approach where colleagues benefit from ‘extraordinary amounts of delegated authority’. They also need the capability to make use of that authority so, at the same time, employees are capable of high levels of individual performance. ‘You are looking to nurture the superstars who come up with new ways of thinking about old problems, new ways of applying technology – how do you create the environment for people to be like that?’

Creating value

Of course, you also need the right proposition to sell. Valentine is clear: ‘We have a set of products that can do amazing things for our clients.’ But that is not enough. ‘It’s moving people away from thinking about it as a product to thinking about what it will do for the client, the value the client gets from the product.’

Salespeople are obviously critical in this whole process of creating value, because they are the ones who can interpret on behalf of the customer. Explains Valentine: ‘The salespeople are the ones who act as the “translator” (for want of a better way of putting it) between what the product can do and what that individual client’s business environment is demanding.’

Testimonials

SHL says that it can identify and isolate behavioural characteristics suitable for a particular sales environment – for instance, in the case of US retail jewellery, clothing and accessories chain Neiman Marcus – and then recruit the right kind of people. ‘We’ve got them sales people who sell a lot more.’ The results confirm that the appropriate psychometric techniques helped the company recruit sales associates ‘who deliver nearly 20% more revenue and don’t leave as quickly’, Valentine insists.

A much less traditional application for SHL’s product comes out of a recent partnership with Liverpool City Council, supporting disadvantaged people getting into work. Based on their background and CV (curriculum vitae) alone, employers wouldn’t consider them. However, an SHL-developed ‘dependability test’ was able to show prospective employers which applicants would make appropriate recruits. ‘They were able to make a good hiring decision.’

Using his own products

Predictably, Valentine is going to use his company’s own products to recruit an enlarged global sales team. There are two stages to the recruitment process. The first is all about being attractive as an employer. ‘We’re a well-established company and incredibly well-funded in our new structure. We do have some absolutely awesome product and have an amazing reputation – most HR (human resources) people, they do know about us. It’s a great environment to have all those as givens.’ The second stage involves putting out ‘some pretty bold adverts’ to recruit people.

Once are on board, the new salespeople will go through an intensive sales academy: the company invested £1 million in training this year and ‘will do so again next year’.

Different levels of engagement

So, to whom will Valentine and his team be selling as they strive to drive revenue? Like many companies, SHL divides its business into smaller clients, high-end accounts and strategic partnership relationships.

Strategic level

At the top end, account directors deal with organisations like HSBC on a multi-level, global basis supported out of Hong Kong, New York, Venezuela and other places. The account directors work with such clients over the long term to deliver ‘not only what they need now but working with them on where they are going, where they see trends emerging in the future’.

Much of the work for HSBC, and also a large mobile phone company, currently entails local language support across emerging eastern-European markets. ‘They will typically work at a business level, enabling or unlocking business benefit for a client.’

HR and sales directors

The next level down involves working with someone like the HR director ‘or, very typically for us, the sales director’. So what is the benefit of the sales director?

Valentine explains: ‘Typically, just about any three-to-five-year business plan I’ve ever seen includes growing revenue – the top line. Typically, the focus for that, the reliance on that, falls on the shoulders of whoever is heading up sales. The people who search us out first, or we search out first, is typically the sales leader, because a big part of what we do is help improve sales performance.’

Recruitment specialists

Then you’ve got another level which can equally be as senior or it can be more junior, according to the company. Conversations tend to be more seasonal; for instance, screening graduates into a company on behalf of a graduate recruitment specialist in HR, people doing leadership or talent recruitment, perhaps with a technically minded person like an occupational psychologist.

Meanwhile, the very smallest and occasional clients are serviced by a telephone sales team. Overall, the whole focus is on ‘what relationship is needed to engage successfully with the client’.

Key tools

Sales directors – and, therefore, ModernSelling.com readers – are amongst those set to benefit the most from SHL’s offerings, according to Valentine, who highlights a couple of key tools. ‘What those tools are about is understanding the combination of personalities so you are getting the right fit for your environment, and narrowing down what are the attributes that make successful salespeople in your organisation.’

Some of these attributes are quite generic and pretty obvious: drive, energy, tenacity, the ability to create solutions from nothing, relationship skills, building things on the fly. Then come a whole range of further factors focused on dependability issues – whether they are hard-working or not, for instance.

Other factors take in the culture of the employing organisation – whether it is fast-moving, rapidly changing, or if there is a move from product-based to solution-led sales. All of which involves quite a bit of soul-searching and crystal-ball gazing for the recruiting company, as it tries to employ not just the people who are right for it at the time but will also be successful in tomorrow’s sales environment.

Proof will be in the pudding

The science of recruiting salespeople is moving ahead, and whether or not Valentine is successful in building his own global sales team will speak volumes about whether SHL’s offerings will be able to do the same for other sales leaders.

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