Why AI Won’t Replace Great Salespeople (Part 1)

Introduction to Neil Bhuiyan and His Sales Journey

0:36 Hey there, I'm Yosh, and welcome to the selling economy, the show about how selling actually gets done. My guest today is Neil Bhuiyan and he's got one of the best on-ramps in sales I've ever heard. He was a Zora customer first, working in finance, supporting sales and using the product every day. Until a recruiter told him that he'd be a great addition to the team because he already knew how the tool worked. Well, that's how he became one of Zora's first SDRs. He's since founded happyselling.io, coached more than 4,500 sellers, and hosts the SDR disco call podcast that now has surpassed more than 250,000 downloads across 110 countries. He also runs Coach On Call, a free weekly space for reps to get better. Today, we're going to talk about why Outbound should be better with AI, not worse. Neil, welcome to the show.

1:30 Yosh, thank you very much for the beautiful introduction. Thank you for having me on board on your podcast. I'm super stoked for you and a massive hello to your audience. And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. So thank you for having me today.

1:44 Well, Neil, it's it's been been awesome re-equating with you. We we have a shared history working at Zora. in fact, you know, most people in the Zora ecosystem don't know that Reed Business was the very first global enterprise customer. And when we closed that deal, I was sent out to to to to London to go deploy and I I sat In the office, in the building, every day for about two to three months, deploying Zora's building system, and ultimately the system that that you use. So you know, this this this chat here kind of you know hits home in terms of lots of great memories about that

2:25 Yeah.

2:25 deal, about that customer, the relationship that was built. but maybe you could just start with your origin tour. You have such an amazing origin story about kind of how you even entered the workforce. getting a job at Reed and then, tell us about how you ended up in sales.

From Local Government and Finance to Sales

2:40 100 % and thank you very much and it is a full circle moment like you as I've said when we met previously You're one of the OGs at Zora and when we connected off the back of a LinkedIn post I was like, my god, I get to meet Jeff So that was freaking amazing. But yeah, my story if we go back about 15 20 years ago So like for transparency, I was a bit of a teenage tear away always used to get into trouble So got kicked out of college twice Never went to university, etc And basically I had a reality check of, I need to get a stable job, et cetera. And prior to that, used to work for local government. And within local government, early 2000s, I think the iPhone 3GS had come out from Steve Jobs. And that was like, I'm a big geek. I love tech. I like phones and everything. And I was, as I've said in other shows, I used to be a hardcore Nokia man. And when the iPhone came around, I was like, my God, it's touchscreen. You click an app, you don't have to go sub menu, sub menu. you could just open up and start using stuff. And when I worked in local government, Jeff, I became the sales guy for iPhones in our department. And I got a hell of a lot of people hooked into it. And a really good friend, a guy called Michael, he used to work in the appeals team. said, are you on the payroll for Apple? And I said, nah, bro, I just really like the tech. And that's kind of what got the gears spinning of could I go into sales, right? And my connotation of sales back then was it's very cutthroat. It's all about narcissistic type of people, they just want money and all of that sort of stuff. But I thought, right, how do I get into that? And because I didn't have any of that background or, you know, the education, you know, I kind of saw myself on the back foot. So the way that I did it, Jeff, was I got into admin jobs and finance jobs, working at Read Business Information. And I remember I used to work in the finance team with a whole bunch of lovely ladies. And Dharma, who was our head of finance, she trained me on how to use Zora. with their Oracle SRS system and my job was to do the invoices, the reconciliation and for me, I didn't know what Zora, what it was, what that journey was about to become. It was just a piece of software for me, right? But I had this thing of, I really wanted to break into sales and I had this horrible thing where the sellers of one of Reed's products would close the deal, throw it over the fence and then customers would ring our department saying, how do we log in? what have we bought and it was a bit of HR tech and I spent a lot of the times having to educate customers on what the SaaS tech was, how to log in, what do they get out of it, da da da da and a lot of the ladies in finance said you know the product better than the sales people and I was like yeah okay cool so one day I approached the sales director at Read Business it was Expert HR which was the product that they were selling And I said to him, Jonathan, I really want to get into sales. I know your product. I know the market. I would like for you to give me a chance. And he said to me, I'll give you four weeks in tele-sales. So this was called tele-sales back then, right? And if you're good, great. If not, then you go back to finance and we don't ever talk again. And I said, deal. So I went into that role and my job was to do 120 cold calls a day, two hours of call time and book two meetings per day. And eight months later I was booking on average 40 to 50 meetings a month and I really fell in love of the art of cold calling and I was helping other new hires on board, giving them, like sort of coaching and training in the early days. But then I really wanted to get into closing sales and being in a corporate environment, it was kind of said to me, that's going to take you a few years, but you had this young 20 guy who's really hungry for life and I'm not going to wait a couple of years. So by... I don't know if it's synchronicity in the universe, but that's when I bumped into the recruiter. And we're talking one. Yeah, Gabriella shouts

The Opportunity That Led Neil to Zuora

6:15 Gabriella.

6:17 out to Gabby. And I said to Gabby, like we met each other in London and I said, you know, networking event shook a hand. Hi, my name's Neil, B2B business professional. And she said, who do you work for? I said, I work for a company called Read Business. I do telly sales. And I then said to her, who do you work for? And she said, a US startup. You probably never heard of us. And she said Zora. And I paused and I looked at her and I said, isn't that the billing system that plugs into Salesforce to make it subscription aware? And her jaw dropped and she says, how the hell do you know? And I said, I used to work in finance. I used to be an end user. I now work in sales. And that's when Gabby said to me, hey, here's a big opportunity. What do you think? And that was the first EBR for Zora's London office. But back then, Jeff, I didn't know what tech was, didn't know what SAS was, I had no sort of inclinations into that.

Breaking Into Enterprise Technology Sales

7:10 But the thing you did know was you knew the product. You

7:13 Yeah.

7:13 knew the domain space.

7:15 Yeah, 100%. And I think my advantage, because I remember like when I went in for the interviews for Zora, it was two hours and eight rounds of interviews with Brendan, like Bruce, like Simon Dyer, all those guys. And they proper grilled the hell out of me. And I remember walking out of that office in Covent Garden thinking I didn't get the job. But then Gabriella rang me like 20 minutes later said, you got it. And I was like, But the advantage for me was, You have to understand when I worked in telecells, I was only speaking to prospects on a manager level or director at most. And Gabriella and the team said, you need to now speak to the C suites. And I remember with teen, we had to speak to the five guys in the room, right? CMO, CFO, CIO, CSI, all of that. And that was a different dynamic for me. But if anything, I actually found it easier. Cause when I used to speak through the gatekeep, I'm looking to see the C suite. I don't know. I had a knack of getting into them, into the calls, but My advantage was I could talk to CFOs and say that I used to work in finance. I used to use an Oracle-based system. I can understand the change coming with the subscription economy and how long it used to take for end of month, putting that into the GL and I used to live that life. So I could speak to them of somebody of experience and I think the other bit that I used to I wouldn't say manipulate but I said my dad's an accountant he wanted me to become an accountant one day but here I am. now selling a financial software that's taking on NetSuite, Oracle and all these ERP sort of stuff. But I enjoyed my time at Zora and that's where I cut my teeth in the world of tech sales. And I kind of say to people nowadays, Jeff, I got into sales with a silver spoon in my mouth because obviously working with the angels of Salesforce, there was a breed of tech Silicon Valley. And I think that was a really cool way to go into it because every company thereafter that I joined, having Zora on my logo, CV, opened quite a lot of doors because it was a big player and a big name. But at Zora, was the first EMEA ZBR, I then became a team lead and then I became an SDR manager for EMEA. And as a team, we brought in 3.5 million of closed business from outbound and that was our specialty. and we had a bit of competition with the US reps but we did quite well and one of my claims to fame was I was the SDR that reached out to HBO which then bought about the launch of Game of Thrones so that's my claim to fame. I outbounded the company that helped launch one of the biggest TV shows in the world.

The Subscription Economy and Outbound Success

9:43 Well, that is the subscription economy and in a nutshell. Um, that

9:47 Yes,

9:48 was the the elevator pitch. That was the the vision that that teen and the the company had was that the world was moving to subscriptions and it wasn't just business software that was changing, but you know, the things and the devices and the the shows that we interact with every single day. So game of thrones, that is is massive and what a what a story. Uh

10:09 Thank you.

Passion, Grit, and Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

10:10 you Talk about a couple of things in there. I just want to dissect that. passion, grit. these are all attributes of sales and and in that whole process of just working your way through finance, getting that job at at Reed, kind of pushing your way into to now kind of tech sales, you know, that's passion and and grit. did you always have that?

10:33 Probably not. And I think at the time when you're living that life, you don't see it as that. You see it as, hey, where is my life going? And you better throw yourself into this because you don't want to miss out on an opportunity, right? Because the way that I looked at it in my tele-sales career, I didn't see that as this is where I'm going to see myself for the rest of my life. I didn't see that. and I kept thinking what's next, what next, but I used to be a very introverted person, very shy, never really outspoken in any sense and there was something intrinsically said, Neil, just get up and just go for it. What's the worst that can happen? But I'm a person that doesn't like living the life of regret. And I think when we go into the early days of Zora, I was forever having imposter syndrome, scared that I'm going to lose my job and I'm not going to hit my target. And I'm working with professionals that have got 10 years on me. and have worked at really big core companies. And the thing that at Zora, I remember when I went out to Redwood City and I got taken out to the HQ and I was looking at all of these people I'm working with and going onto the LinkedIn, I could see SAP, SuccessFactors, Salesforce, and I was like, wow, you've lived that. But when I asked them, like, what's the story, the same way they said that I'm saying to you now, it didn't seem like much. They didn't know they were making history, but I think... when I was on the cusp of moving from local government to coming into tech, I've always been a little bit of a geek and I've always liked computers, IT and software. I used to have fun playing with my dad's IBM 486 and MS-DOS. That was fun for me, right? And a question that I asked myself when I was in college before I got kicked out is what's going to have longevity in the future and it's software and it's computers and it's tech. So I said to myself, I really need to put myself in a good position that I could have this career somehow within it. And I didn't know if it was going to be sales, but sales and Zora, you know, one of the reasons I loved working with Zora was we got to speak to companies and understand their go-to-market strategy. We understood how CMOs would do their pricing and packaging. We understood how people built infrastructure to, you know, build a company. And obviously with finance, how do they look at their financials and how do they get this growth? And I think when Teane spoke about the whole sprint to 100 million as a business, you felt part of like a cool club and you're actually building something. And I think, again, the other thing that really used to stand out to me like Zora's DNA was founders from eBay, PayPal, Salesforce. I'm like, these guys have done some cool stuff and we use their tech. And I was like, I want to be a piece of that. So the grit and the determination elements of it was fear because I didn't want to lose it. And the other side of it was I used to think of my previous career histories as to not really amounting to anything. And here I can make my mark. But the best way that you can do that is by being super curious, questioning the hell out of people, asking a lot of questions, and it just comes from place of you're hungry to learn. So I was always hungry to know how stuff works or why we do things in a certain way. And I think curiosity is something I always look for a trait in sellers as to, you could sell a product, you could do a demo, but how interested are you in your prospect, their business and what's their, go to market and every inbound lead that comes into, you know, my happy selling doors, I will go do my research on them to see what's the founder's journey, what's the history, what are they doing with their product and why do they exist? And when I go into a discovery call and I say, Hey, Jeff, I see that you, you know, used to work at Yahoo, you've been at Salesforce, you're doing any team. I want to know about that stuff and I think that's something that's really helped me in good stead.

The Three C’s of Great Selling

14:17 That's awesome. That's awesome, Neil. I love the the the C's. I I often think about the C's in in sales and and frankly any role, whether you're an individual contributor or you are a manager or you're an operator or an executive, curiosity is is absolutely, top of mind. I think about it as like three C's. You also need really good communication skills. and that's both verbal and written. you know, follow-ups, it's it's Being able to articulate, net things out. And then being able to collaborate, right? You you you talked about selling

14:48 Yeah. Yeah.

14:49 across an organization. collaboration is not just internal collaboration. It's

14:53 Hmm.

14:54 you're collaborating across different roles, across different levels in the organization. so I I I love the I love the C's. I I wanted to drill into pain. how do you uncover pain, inside of an organization? Like you're calling into these massive organizations here. And and you know, I'm

15:11 Hmm.

15:12 sure this is part of your your your disco process and how you train SDRs today, but but, you know, finding pain, it's hard. How do you train people to find pain?

How to Uncover Customer Pain Through Discovery

15:23 So it's a really good question. And if we think of like a BDR, when their manager is tasked with like, you need to find the pain, you know, with a qualification, you need to figure out their pain, pain, pain. And this week I've been going through discovery core training with a lot of reps and the way that I kind of The for them is, before you dive into the pain questions, understand this, when you're meeting a prospect for the first time, if you say things such as, what keeps you up at night? And what are your bottlenecks? They're not going to tell you because they don't trust you yet. You have not built up that rapport yet. So the way that we go into finding out pain is situational questions. So this is based on the research you've done ahead of the call to understand their current state and the assumptions you know based on online research, such as how many employees, how many offices, or what your tech stack is. How is that working today? And what's the makeup of your org? And by giving that information first, showing your homework and getting confirmation on the facts you may have already. And then the next step of pain is not saying pain questions, but more process questions. What is your process today? Could you walk me through how you do end of month reconciliation? Could you explain to me what happens when you're trying to connect your GL to your ERP? What does that process look like? And I think the way to look at it is if you can try and understand their current process, you can then identify the gaps within that process. And then you can figure out how your solution or your service can plug those things. So, you know, great discovery is asking great close-ended and open-ended questions. and being really interested as to how the organization does what they do today. And I was speaking to a beautiful seller today who does infrastructure selling. And he said to me, like, he's really good at building that instant rapport. And this is the best, and I'm going to have to give him a shout out. His name's Ewan. He said, when he speaks to a VPN company, he says he sees the prospect looking at their project as their baby. And he says, when you're talking to them, he said, okay, that's a really cool baby. And he said, what does your baby formula look like? How is the growth going? What are their diapers and where do you get that from? And what are you hoping for them to achieve in the next two or three months in kindergarten? He gave that analogy as to really getting interested. And because people are so precious about their baby, they're happy to talk about their kid and how proud they are of them. And it really gets them to open up. And then you move into, what's the process for this? And then identifying the gaps. And I heard that today in a coaching session, dude, I've never thought of it that way, but that's how you really uncover pain by really getting a good understanding, asking decent and right questions and diving straight into the pain. Understand them first in their current state, then lead with the pain.

18:06 so yeah, we we used to call this the as is to be. And this is, what is your current state? And then what is your your to be state?

18:10 Yeah.

Why Neil Started Coaching Salespeople

18:13 and the the questions that go underneath that, ultimately you find out pain, but you have to to ask the those right questions. So elegantly said, let's let's get into coaching. How did you get into coaching? You've trained more than 4,500 sellers. You know, why why coaching? What did you see as, you know, that burning need, kind of. across the board when it comes to, coaching SDRs, you know, reps, e even sales managers. What you know, what were people doing wrong when it came to coaching?

18:42 It's a really good question. And I have to differentiate training and coaching because they're two separate things with a little bit of overlap. And I'll get to that in a moment, but the, the want to help salespeople came from frustrations. So as somebody who'd worked in a few other orgs and startups, there was always this sales trainer that used to come in that would be training the VP of sales and the account executives. And I was always hungry to join these sort of trainings as an SDR manager. But then when I put to our sales leaders, what about the SDRs and the BDRs? The typical response would be, we haven't got anything for them. Like this is just for the closers. And I'd be like, but these people are going to be one day your future closers. So why cut them out of that experience? And it was... just the SDRs are always an afterthought and that used to really burn me because I was a BDR manager and leader. I want to upskill my people. And I think how I got into it was I was working for a sales and enablement company as a CSM and my job was to train salespeople on how to use a sales tool. And I would deliver that on Zoom or face-to-face workshops. And at the end of the workshop, Jeff, would say to you, look, cool, hope you enjoy ShowPad, hope you enjoy today's training and happy selling. And that was my little trademark and phrase. But typically when I finished a training, the following day I'd have my inbox and my DMs full from those same salespeople say, Neil, we love the software, but how would you do this cold email? How would you do social selling? How would you handle this deal, et cetera, et cetera? And I'd be like, Jeff, I don't get paid for that. but from salesperson to salesperson, want to help you, so here's a couple of tips. And that happened so many times that I then thought I could get paid for this. So as I've said in previous journeys, I did the craziest thing. I just had a kid at that point at a stable job and a pension and all of that stuff. And I gave it up to Launch Happy Selling, which was focused initially as sales training for BDRs and SDRs. But in that first year, when you launch a company, no methodology, no website, no leads, no customers, it was bootstrapped. So I actually had to do three contracts in my first year and a half. The first one was I was a sales trainer with Winning by Design. So the guys that came up with the SPICE methodology, in my opinion, my favorite methodology, because it was geared to outbound and SaaS. So I was learning the ropes from them. I was a sales coach for a cybersecurity company. coaching three BDRs who had just started off in EMEA. So it's like Zora 2.0. Let's see it that way, right? And I was also being a sales coach, sorry, an account executive for an event software tech company. So I was working three contracts over the space of five days a week for a year and a half, crazy.

21:29 Wow.

Building Happy Selling and Overcoming Challenges

21:31 But basically, you know, I was running that a part ways with Winning by Design because... They wanted me to come on full time with them and I wanted to have happy selling so I wasn't looking to close it so we parted ways respectfully. With the EventTech software company, I kind of got to the point where I was like, helped them rebuild their selling process and then I moved on. And then I went into the cybersecurity startup as basically another BDR manager, which is weird because I said I'd never do that again, but I did. But in that job, I was basically building out their outbound function, their systems, their processes, their tax stacks, and I was training. the BDRs, but I also started doing more coaching. So personal development for each of those reps, to help them hit their target. And then when the CEO saw what we was doing in London, it was then asked of me if I could then share that knowledge with the other rest of the team in Belgium and in APAC. So I started doing that and I helped them build all their processes. then I was approached for another project in Belgium where it was a bigger team. They were about to go through an acquisition and they just basically needed to build their outbound function because inbound historically was the way they won but now it was like we need to go outbound. So that was an 11-month project and that was training, that was coaching and then something horrible happened in the world where we hit the pandemic. We hit, you COVID and that happened. And in essence, Jeff, basically I lost all of my contracts because nobody was no longer looking for a coach or a trainer and everything was coming, remote and everything. So I had around six months runway and I decided to upskill myself. I decided to rebrand happy selling. I decided to launch a podcast and I then knew now this is the happy selling methodology because it's tested, it's run through, it's got results. I know my positioning, I know my ICP. And the angle that I went into this was most sales training companies would focus on speaking to the C level saying, we can help you generate revenue with training. Let's speak to the VP of sales. We're going to upskill your AEs and make them super successful to hit targets. And AEs, this is how you do medic, this is how you do challenger, da da da. They were going that way. I decided to go the other way. I was like, if I

23:42 Harmaa.

Why Investing in SDRs Builds Stronger Sales Teams

23:43 can target the SDRs to make them successful. and build that beautiful pipeline, the account executives will have qualified pipeline they can close. If they have qualified pipeline they can close, that makes the VP of sales happy, they're able to grow. And with that, you're hitting top line revenue and hitting the goals of what the C level wants. So I went the other way. And for the past nine years, I've had the privilege of working into, you know, between, you know, between 20 to 50 different startups and helping them with their outbound motions. But To now understand the difference between training and coaching, the analogy that I give is when you go for driving lessons. So this is sales training. You sit down with an instructor, you take a couple of lessons, and at the end of it, you take your test and then you get your license from the DMV. You're now a certified driver, that's sales training. Coaching is, Jeff already has his car and he's driving down the 101 and he's asking me how to get from Sacramento to perhaps another state. And then you call your boy Neil and say, Neil, I'm going over here, I've heard you've been there before, what advice would you give me for that journey? And I'd say to you, watch this turning, watch that exit, use your sat nav, what's the sat nav saying? And it's telling you to go this way, that way. And said, okay, cool, go for the drive, you should be fine, but give me a call when you get there. You get to the end of the ride, you call me and said, yes, it was good, next time I'm gonna take this exit, next time I'm probably gonna leave at this time. And I'm like, okay, cool, that's coaching. So you're coming to me with already the plan and the path that you want to go and you're looking to get a second opinion with somebody that's already been down that road. And I think, my initial ICP used to be SDRs and BDRs, but in one of my projects, a client put to me one day, Hey Neil, you've been training a hundred of our SDRs. What do you do for managers? And I was like, nothing. I don't, I don't do any training for managers. I don't do that. And I said, but what are you looking for? said, well, here's the situation. We've promoted six of the BDRs to now BDR managers. They've never done it before. We have no internal process or anything from HR to help them. And we're wondering, can you do anything? And I said, well, I don't have any playbooks or training stuff. I said, what they could do is just book in a Zoom and come to me with their questions and I'll help them find the answers. And that's where I realized, wait a minute, I don't have to get my studio set up. I don't have to create the playbooks, the homework. It's just me show up, answer questions like a sales therapist. And that's where it got into more coaching. So, you know, for the past few years, that's how I've got to help four and a half thousand sellers from BDRs, sales leaders, founders, we were doing founder led sales, rev ops, and people just literally come through my door like a sales therapist with their problems. and I help them find the answers to that. So that's how we got them.