Shelley Walters — The Sales Council

Get involved with David Watts, legendary radio mix 93.8 on a Monday night as we do each and every Monday once again. I'm still so chuffed about that. It's what's involved and my special guest tonight is, well let's first, she has her own business these days called Conversation Intelligence Africa, but we've spoken to her before. It's Shelly Walters. Hello Shelly. Hi, how are you? Good, good, good. It's always great to have you in studio with us and we were sort of reminiscing with a couple of people the other day. You must have, I must have last interviewed you, what, nearly three years ago? Two and a half years? Yes, at least one of us had less gray hair. Yes, yes. Patting his silver fox looks, yes. And at that stage you were very much, you were in the sales field still, you were talking about sales, etc, etc, very much into doing keynote addresses, public speaking. And subsequent to that, I've noticed a couple of times that things have changed with you, hence me wanting to bring you in again. So let's do the journey. Take us back two and a half years. You were a speaker. What happened? How did you get to Conversation Intelligence? Well, if we go back to before I was a speaker, yes, I've always wanted to make an impact in the world of sales. I'm also very involved, committed South African, and many years ago, I heard a very smart man say, you know, at the end of your life, at the end of your life, at the end of my life, if we each live to be 70 years old, we both pay the same price, we pay with 70 years. And I made a decision then that whatever my time is here, I really want to make an impact. So, keynote addresses and conferences, which I still do, and I still love doing, was a means to do that. But I realized that we weren't able to drive as much lasting impact, and certainly not on scale. Yeah, it also didn't really create an opportunity for me to grow personally as an entrepreneur. And, you know, running your, your speaking business is challenging. But this has come with a whole set of other challenges, which is molding and shaping me and the opportunity to create some jobs. Okay, so you went from doing it and doing it very well, I must say, as a keynote speaker, I've had the opportunity to hear one or two of your, of your talks and everything. I mean, this is a woman who knows your stuff, you know, your stuff, you know, your stuff about sales and that. And I enjoy the time spent and you do you capture your audience's attention, well worth having you if as part of a conference, if you want to talk to your sales team. But then there is that more, but that was one of the things that always, you know, has concerned me because I've also, you know, can public speaking, I'm on radio, let me go and do this, let me do keynote addresses, I'll talk about things and stuff. And then I sat and thought, Ben, you talk about things and stuff for 45 minutes. And then you say thank you and goodbye. You know, I wanted to do more, which you did as well. Yes. And I think, you know, we need mindset. Mindset is, is, is the foundation upon which everything else is built. There is no denying that we need to be motivated and have the right mindset.

And we need to have those interventions at a regular basis. Okay, mindset we have in January is not the mindset we have in August. So we need those interventions. Yeah. But mindset is not enough. You also need skill. Well, it's got to be lasting change. I mean, one of the bylines that we use in our business is making change stick. And that is the big thing because you walk out of something like a brilliant keynote address at a conference. Yes, we're gonna do it. We're gonna go. And then next morning you wake up and you've overslept. There's no power. You get out of bed, step on the cats. You can't make your coffee. There's a massive, and by the time you get to work, all that stuff is out of the window and you don't, and then you would need to fall back on your skills and on your mindset. Yeah. The recent example, which is quite funny, I thought, um, my boyfriend's teaching me how to play tennis, but he's really good. And I'm really enthusiastic. Yes. And I watch my language, but when I'm on the tennis court, I seem to develop Tourette's. And at the end of the first session, he said to me, you know what? One day your skill match your spirit. How sweet. And that's it. Yes. You know, you can go out there with the right mindset, right attitude and everything and still be like a bull in a China shop or you're losing great opportunities. You're losing out on negotiating because you've got the mindset, but not the skill. So we want to layer that on. So you then thought about this. So how did, how did conversation intelligence come about then? Was it from this passion or what does it do? What do you do with conversation intelligence? Okay. So there's two, there's two separate questions there. How did it come about? Yes. First one. I met two incredible entrepreneurs, um, uh, Tony cross and Alan first year. And they specialize in the development of sales managers.

Mm-hmm. And they'd said to me, they've got this really good intellectual property, you know, and I turned around and said, well, there's nothing new under the sun. Please. I've seen it all. And they said, well, come and have a look. And I had a look at it and I had to, you know, you've got to stay humble when you, when you see something that's really good, that's better than what you could create. You got to be able to go. Okay. Yeah. Hands up. So I started working and reselling, um, just from them. And then it grew and it grew and it grew. And we looked at formalizing it into a business. Um, and I just saw an opportunity because as I said, I'm South African, uh, I'm really invested in seeing us grow as an economy. Everybody has a lot to say about BEE and I realize there's nuances with different sectors. I don't want to get into it, but for, for us, I just said, Hey guys, he has a great opportunity. We can go and create a business that's truly diverse from the ground up. We've got world-class content. Let's make it economically and socially viable. So we're level two BEE, uh, and take it to market that way. So our clients are over the moon because it's great IP and they now know that you're participating in radical economic transformation, which is, which is a big thing. I'm so glad that you're so positive about that because over the last while I've heard so many doom and gloom stories about South Africa, this and South Africa that, and it's going to the dogs and we're going to have our houses and everything. And to see you and me to say, I'm invested in South Africa. I think that's brilliant. Look, I mean, that's, you know, this is me. Yeah. You're South African.

I'm South African. I'm not going anywhere. I know it's messy. I'm not naive. I'm not saying it's going to be easy. I'm not a political analyst. So please don't ask me for that kind of, but hey, you know, we've got an opportunity to participate. And I'll tell you something. I chose my shareholders on three criteria. If anybody's listening and you're ever considering going to be, I think this will help you. The first was they had to be people that I knew to have impeccable character. So all my shareholders are people that I knew. Okay. They had to be willing to make a meaningful financial investment and they had to bring a skillset to that I didn't have. So I have a shareholder who's got a master's degree in law. I have two shareholders with men's to level IQs. Uh, one has got 21 years of enablement, sales, enablement and operations experience. Okay. So this is a, this is a high powered team you've put together. This is a team that, you know, I've cultivated that has got strengths and areas. I mean, I can sell, I can teach. Yes. Um, but implementation operations, legal compliance. That is such an entrepreneur thing to say, don't bore me with the details. I'll go out and do the good stuff. Um, but you need that. You absolutely need it. And we've just discussed that before in the show that you need those kinds of people. Um, and I was, I was chatting in fact, a couple of weeks ago to the guys from the finance team. And I was saying, you know, when you're running a one man show, it's one thing, as soon as you get into a business and you have partners or shareholders, it becomes an entirely different animal. I mean, it's the, I just sat there, you know, cause I was used to, I'm the one that made all the decisions when, how, if, where, and I didn't have to answer to anybody. Now I do. And that's, you know, that, that's how to me that is the don't bore me with the details kind of thing is rebelling against it. But my partner is an absolute financial mega brain and knows business.

And this has helped us tremendously because where I'm sort of very much, you know, the shotgun approach, I'm all over the place, you know, develop this idea, then I'll do this, then I'll do this. Here's the one that's going hang on steady on tiger. One thing at a time. Let's take this. This is the process. This is how we do it. Have you found that helps you? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, not the most conscientious person by nature. Not a lot of salespeople are, we are a much stronger team and we want to be representing on a micro level, what we believe we can do as a nation on a macro level, where there's unity and diversity, where we're stronger together, if we celebrate what the other party brings. Fantastic. So we're going to get on to, we've asked where it comes from. Now we're going to get on to just after this, we're going to get on to a little bit about what does conversation intelligence actually do? We'll be back in just a bit. It is 93.8 Mix FM legendary radio. I'm David Watts, my guest in studio, Shelley Walters. This is what's involved. Get involved with David Watts. What's involved on a Monday night. My guest in studio with me from conversation intelligence. It's Shelley Walters. Conversation intelligence. Where did it come from? Now we're going to discuss a little bit about what it actually does because you've given me a bit of an overview here and it looks absolutely fascinating. So give it to me from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Conversation intelligence. We focus on frameworks for high stakes conversation engagements, specifically in a client facing environment. So please don't call us for any hostage negotiations. I have a number for you though. I know people. So in a B2B environment, people are finding it increasingly difficult to get face time with their customers. And there's a lot of research that's been done. Just three statistics I'll share with you. The first one is 57% of the buying process is completed by a buyer in a B2B environment before they talk to an account manager, salesperson, whatever name we give ourselves. Very much so. So I've been in sales long enough to remember when everybody was smoking at their desks and we had thermal facts rolls.

Okay. And in those days we were the brokers of the information. We know that's not true anymore. Those days we were paid to educate our customers on what they didn't know. Half of the job that we were employed to do 20 years ago, we're not needed for anymore. Well, I remember when I was doing the sales thing as well. You used to go there with your little flip folder or whatever the case may be and used to discuss whatever the products are. Your unique skill was the ability to read a brochure upside down. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I got that one done, Pat. Yeah. And then another question they asked these buyers, 1,200 buyers in a B2B environment, they said of the last 10 sales meetings you had, how many were valuable? You try to take a guess. Last 10. Wow. Okay. Three. The feedback from these buyers was that nine out of 10 conversations, sales conversations. Had no value. Are a complete waste of time. Wow. So think about the implications of that. We don't, and there are great organizations that teach how to get new leads and cold calls and all of those. We don't teach that because what I'm saying is if you have a hundred leads and right now you're wasting 90% of them, let's change that number. Absolutely. If we can start driving that, so conversation intelligence, we teach frameworks that are based on neuroscience that teach your prefrontal cortex how to create the substance of your conversation, sequence it in a way that people can actually relate to it, basically.

Because David, your communication, what you say is only a reflection of what you think. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. I mean, how often have you heard somebody say something? You didn't think that through. Yeah. Right. Mouth works before your brains. Sometimes we are those people. So yeah, sometimes. But also it's not uncommon to hear that somebody's waiting three or four months or five months or six months, depending on the industry to get a sales appointment. And we spent 20 minutes preparing for that conversation in the car on the way there. Which is not a good thing. Correct. But you also can't be prescriptive. You don't want to say to people, he has a 10 steps and this is what you do and you can't do it any other way. Please remove your brain and just become clones of each other. So we teach frameworks. You can, you can consistently and reliably engineer relevant conversations. Okay. That's what we do. One of the, one of the research that we've done in our business as well is that salespeople are much more than order takers these days. They're much more than, uh, you know, the people with the flip folders because most of that's been done, but they're looking customers in a business to business environment are looking, they need to trust you and they're looking for somebody who will almost become a member of their team. Am I correct in saying this? A trusted advisor, somebody that'll be able to, it's like when you walk in there, tell me something I don't know. Educate me on my business. So that's, you've touched on such an important point there. We talk about trust and we talk about education. So there's just for a moment, go back to trust. How do we build that trust? The training that I've been on the past is about how to build insincere rapport. And it was a real limiting fact in the beginning of my career. Cause I can't drink a bottle of whiskey. I can't play around a golf and I wouldn't know a blue bull if I walked into one. So it was very tough in the Eastern Cape to just for the blue bull thing. Um, they, the people that drive the buckies with those strange things, then that's them guaranteed anyway. But the point is, is that so as a, as a young woman coming into sales, I couldn't build rapport that way. And also to be honest with you, my attention span is too short to build insincere rapport. I'll come back and visit you next week. And I won't remember.

You won't remember that you sort of did this and you, you like to lean forward or smoke a cigar, whatever the case may be. And the other factor is that when you're doing it is uncomfortable for you and the customer knows what you're doing. And while you're doing it, you're not concentrating on what you should be saying. This is fascinating because, and we were chatting about this, this off here. I mean, um, we do a similar thing to you in, in, in our business, um, a lot of neuroscience as well. Um, I'm an NLP master practitioner. And when I first started, this was many, many years ago, that whole report thing, I thought this is it, how to hack somebody's brain. And it, you know what, I, I teach this stuff and you know what I tell the people that we teach as well is that whole fake insincere thing is bull. I say it's borderline malpractice, but the, the, the research tells us that authenticity accelerates trust. Exactly. And another way of putting that is if you come in, if you're operating from your heart, from a genuine design, those things, which NLP has been training you to do in a very mechanical way happen naturally. If you like me, I'm going to like you. And if you genuinely show that you care and I've often, I've been to places where I've just walked in somewhere and I went, you know what, not going to work today. And I will say to them, listen, I'm not going to do this. Or before an appointment, if I know it's not going to work and I'm just going to know, we'll make it work when I'm genuinely ready to do this so that I can give the best to you. Is this something you, that you agree on? 100%. I mean, Jim Rowan said that in order to be persuasive, you must yourself be fully persuaded. Yeah. And if you're fully persuaded of your business case for change, if you know why you're there and what you're trying to achieve, you don't have to worry about how you place your legs and your arms and mirror matching and it'll come. It'll be a natural expression. So that's one of the workshops we run is a value proposition deep dive. We have a series of 11 points that we take people through, which is all about the customer's world. So what is a value proposition? How do you identify it and how do you articulate it? Yeah. Because when it gets into the jargon, it becomes a bit, I've been on some of these telling you, USPs and value, and you're like, what are you talking about? And by the way, on that note, this is a problem with conversation intelligence. Customers are saying, please stop using your industry specific jargon and the acronyms.

Can we go back to speaking English? Nobody has ever complained because you were too straightforward or plain or your meeting ended 20 minutes early. Two things people know, nobody complains about that. You were too easy to understand and too succinct. Yes. We finished early and oh, you arrived on time as well. Well, I'm not happy about that. Well, there's that. We can't help that. We can't help with that. Okay. So you're a group of people that, as you said, conversation intelligence, you got together. Do you deal strictly business to business? So you will only deal with businesses with sales teams and not individuals? We are running, we do run open courses. In fact, we're running one now on the 30th and 31st of May. Okay. So that if you're an entrepreneur or a small business, perhaps you've got a team of four and it's difficult for you to, it doesn't warrant getting a facilitator in for, you know, two days and doing the whole spend, then you can come and join other teams. And yeah, we had our first one in April, very successful. What makes it fun is you're actually pitching against other businesses, two businesses. So the feedback is really live and honest. Oh, and yeah, genuine. There's none of that sugar coating there. None of that. Now, so you got to come with your big old panties on.

Uh-huh. Okay. So tell us a little bit more about conversation. So you got together, you do this, and you believe in this, this conversation, you believe you called it frameworks. So first, so nine out of, if nine out of 10 conversations are a waste of time. Yes. And that's, you know, from a buyer speaking to a salesperson. Yeah. How, how big is that number inside your organization? If you have a thousand employees, how many of those last 10 meetings were actually valuable? Were you able to drive consensus? Are the outcomes clear? Is everybody on board to accelerate those business outcomes? See frameworks are what facilitate that as well. So that's, that's what we teach. There are four components to having an intelligent conversation. The first is substance. You've got to know what you're going to say. Okay. Well, this is, you know, just, just as in a quick aside, the, um, one of the first things I was taught when I got into, uh, the radio business and that was what they called in those days, the DJ's prayer, which goes, please Lord, before I open my mouth, let me know what I want to say. And I think that, that speaks to what you're saying now. It's so important. You've got to, don't just blab on for the sake of blabbing on. Well, here's the challenge. If you don't have a strong value proposition going to that customer, you know what you're going to talk about? You're going to talk about yourself, your business, how great your business is, the footprint, your best of breed, world-class pan African, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And when your competitor comes in, what do you think they're going to talk about? Well, if they're clever, they're going to talk about the perspective of customers business. Yes. But most of the time they don't.

So yeah, cause it's kind of the default thing. If you're not really prepared, then you go with facts and figures and look how pretty we are and look how wonderful we are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Instead of having done research, you're saying this has now become vitally important. It's key. The bigger the account, the bigger the opportunity, the more work you need to do. We've got to do the heavy lifting upfront. When I go and sit down with a client, I go in with a hypothesis of what I believe is most likely the outcomes they're trying to achieve in their business. And most likely the obstacles that they're encountering and most likely what I think are solutions they've tried before and haven't worked. And before I do anything, before I talk about product or what we do, who we are before we do anything we establish is that valid for the person I'm speaking to. And what most often happens is that they're firstly thankful that you've actually done some work, you've done some thinking. And if you do it well, you can even have the questions that you ask the client, which gets them thinking. Because what is a sales appointment? It's two people trying to co-create a solution, but you've got to start by impacting your customer's thinking. That's what communication is. Right now, it's wonderful. I'm so thankful that you and I are here able-bodied, sitting in our chairs, arms and legs, everything's, you know, but it makes no difference if we weren't because it's your brain and my brain and my heart and your heart. And that's where you need to make the connection. Correct. So we're focusing on body language and I'm not saying body language isn't important. It's not what I'm saying. It has to be taken in context though. This is the thing, it cannot be, it's the same as the NLP techniques, anything like that. Persuasive communication is a big thing at the moment. And persuasive communication models cannot be taken in isolation.

You will crash and burn. It's okay. We got some time. So one of the interventions we've just done where we had, I just got some incredible feedback was from a salesperson who is very accommodating and collaborative, not very competitive. And they have a key account where the stakeholder they're dealing with is a very competitive individual. In other words, what they say is right. It's their way or the highway, whatever. And now the salesperson's job is to drive change. So we've taught her how to adapt to a competitive behavior without changing her personality because we can adapt. And I fundamentally believe that broken communication is the number one problem that we're experiencing individually, corporately, and I would say even on a society level. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And you could take it so far as to go globally. Communication, it's a very, very simple word, but something that's actually quite difficult to do. And it's definitely a learned skill. It is a learned skill. And one of the programs we ran with a very well-known organization, the business unit head turned around and said, "You know, when I was at school, they taught me how to write a letter. And that's the last time I had communication training." Wow. "Think about the evolution. I mean, you've got tools now where you can video clients. How do you do that? What do you say in those videos? How do you actually formulate the substance?" So I was saying the four components. The first is substance, what you're going to say. Can we get onto the next three in just a little while? I've got to tell you, there's a fantastic place. You're going to love this. Okay. Seriously, you will.

Get involved with David Watts. I'm David Watts. It is what's involved. My special guest in studio tonight is Shelly Walters. She's from Conversation Intelligence Africa. So we were talking about your principles. We covered the first one. A quick recap. The most important thing is figuring out what you're going to say is you need a framework to get the substance. Substance. And all I'm going to say here is if you've got a team of 10 people and each one has their own methodology of doing it, you're going to get inconsistent results. So you need one framework that all 10 people, regardless of their personalities, can adopt quite easily. And the reason it's the most important thing, when we focus on communication, it's often as you pointed out, it's about body language, tonality and eye contact. But that's like putting lipstick on a bulldog. It's still a bulldog. Now, I've also listened to people that perhaps are not the most charismatic speakers, but what they have to say is really valuable. Yeah. And then you'll listen. So that's the first thing. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I agree with you on that one. Okay. I also think if people, people very much listen for what's in it for me and if you've done your homework, yeah, you can deliver that. And then the second is sequencing. So you can understand how the brain works. We know more about the brain today than we have known ever before in the history of the world. And the science is unfolding daily.

So we know that we've got the reptilian brain, your emotional brain and your logic brain. And this, I'm just using very common layman's terms. Yes. But what we don't realize is that when we are creating a business case for change, we're using the logic part of our brain, our prefrontal cortex, hopefully. But when we're communicating with our customer, we've got to start with the reptilian brain. And the reptilian brain is all about survival. So they eat it, kill it or mate with it. Yes. Yes. I use slightly different words, yours or better. Mine are perhaps more descriptive, yours or better. And really wants to know is, is this important for me now? When you look, open up your emails in the morning, 55 emails, your reptilian brain is going, which is critical. And we're fading in. And when you were talking about the industry specific language and all of that, we're fading into the blah, blah, blah. So understanding how the brain works and how can you, without being gimmicky, how can you gain your client's attention and then hold it? Because that reptilian brain is, it's, that's also that fight or flight. So, you know, you're constantly, that part of your brain is trying to keep you safe. Fight, flight or freeze. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

It's trying to keep you safe. And it's basically saying, look, it's got a very quick processing speed, but very limited in its capacity for complexity. Yeah. They reckon that those, those, those sort of neural pathways fire incredibly quickly. Those, those split second decisions. Yeah. Which is what we were trying to teach, you know, 20 years ago when we said, oh, you know, you've got how many seconds to make 30 seconds? Yeah. Well, what we didn't know then, what we, you know, and it doesn't mean that that was wrong. It just means that we've evolved, you know, we know more now. You got 30 seconds to essentially establish some sort of relevance in this person's life or in their business. That's more important than, you know, which rugby team you support, in my opinion. The third component is style. And I want to talk about this for a moment. So there's various tests and, and assessments and there's Myers-Briggs, there's Enneagram, there's Insights, there's, and they've all have their place. We use a very simple one, which is, it's, it's the to interact methodology and philosophy, which talks about, are you analytical, visionary, methodical or connected? And it relates to four lobes of the brain. Now we all use all four lobes of our brain, regardless of what we think. And some people are quite balanced in their predispositions, but others like myself, and I suspect maybe even you, we tend to lean more to one side and not to another. So when I communicate with you, I'm going to be highly visionary because that's my natural disposition. Yeah. Big picture kind of stuff. Correct. So for the most, for the first 10 years of my career, I only sold to people who were just like me. In fact, we used to, people don't know, they can't see me or don't know where I live.

So you can't see me hate mail, right? Yeah. We used to call HR the human resistance department.

Because I just couldn't get any success there. Yeah. But I realize it's because they're methodical. Very much so. Yes. Yeah. You know, so what we teach is do not, so firstly, do not try and figure out who people are. None of us that I know of in sales, you know, or, or client facing, very few of us are actually qualified psychologists. Yeah. So don't, it's, it's, you got to start from a place of arrogance thinking you can figure out who somebody else is in 10 minutes. You can't do that. Furthermore, and perhaps more dangerously, while I'm trying to figure out who you are, I'm not present with the actual conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you that. I'll give you that. So what we teach is in your communication, there are only four things you need to be sure of talking about the vision, the people impact the connected part, the analytical data to support your business case, and the next step switches the how. So we teach you how to do that in a first sales meeting, in a pitch, in a presentation, in an email. How do you do that? Okay. We do agree that these purchases and these kinds of business to business purchases, as you said, 57% of the decision is already made before you get in there. But it is a process driven thing, because it's not like the old days we used to go and visit Chris for a beer on a Friday and he would sign an order for 120,000 widgets, for example. Now, do you find decisions in a business environment are being made by teams more than by just a single person like it used to be?

100%. The research tells us that on average, you have 5.4 decision makers, any complex buying decision. I don't know what 0.4 of a decision maker looks like. Maybe somebody's half asleep in parliament, but you're dealing with a committee. So you know that in that committee, you've got visionaries, analytic people, methodical people, and connected people. You know that. And your presentation style that you walk into then would need to combine all of those. Correct. But you don't need to remember everything. It's not like you now need to go and become this expert as an analytic, if that's not your natural disposition. All you need is a framework that is simple enough for you to apply. And this is what you get. Correct. So is it just sort of one training or one intervention that you offer to corporates? Let's start with this thing, because I'm passionate about small-medium businesses, because I think they are the future of our country. The corporates can pretty much take care of themselves. They haven't stuffed that up too badly yet. But the small-medium businesses, do you deal with those as well, or do you have a certain entry level? I mean, you've mentioned that the guys can come on your workshops, which I think is brilliant. Sales falls with what minimum? Would you say?

So if we come and do an intervention at a client, minimum of 12? 12 people. So that's a mid-sized business. Okay, good. And but, you know, we know that those teams of four and five and six are so important. Yeah. So that's why we run our open courses for that. And we also run a very successful program that works with your sales support team. Okay, I don't need to know who's listening or who their businesses are to be able to, with some accuracy, predict that there are often challenges between your technical, your admin staff and your salespeople. Why do I know that? Because it's been like that for donkey's years, the world over. Yeah, given. But it's largely because of the different in that communication styles are different predispositions. Okay. And when we get them in a room to get, remember this, every time you gain a sale, we know it's more important to retain a client. Oh, absolutely. That's yeah, no brainer. One of the biggest reasons we cannot do that, we struggle to do that is because of a lack of internal consensus, technical and sales or accounts, admin support, whatever that is and sales. I'm laughing because I know exactly what that feeling is. If it can't stuff something up. Yeah. So if we, when we get them in the room together and we do this kind of work together and we see and celebrate what each party brings, what that does for driving revenue is it's immeasurable because you, how does one calculate the opportunity, the last opportunity cost of two departments not working together? I don't think you can because it's, it's potentially massive. And here's the thing. I said to you, communication or conversation is only a reflection of our thinking. What is collaboration? Collaboration does not happen because somebody tells us to collaborate. Collaboration is a consequence of aligned thinking. When you and I think the same, we start working together. So common vision. Would you say that? Common vision, common goals, common vision, common goals, understanding each other and a common starting point.

So this is not your typical sales thing where, where the sales director comes and gives you death by PowerPoint for two and a half hours and says, you will all do this. You're talking, and that is old school. I've seen that happening. I see, and then you can see the sales force sitting there going, yeah, right. And the technical guys are going, yeah, more nonsense. More of those flipping self-opinionated people that make the sale and then run away. You're saying getting at that level right at the very bottom and shared vision. Correct. If, if we don't have consensus in the room, you can have that meeting. A meeting can be one hour. It can be one week. You can have it in your boardroom or in the bush. It makes no difference. If there's no aligned thinking when that meeting or that bus barat is over, nothing's going to come out of it. Goes back status quo. But when people start to catch each other's thoughts and oh, we've got some synergy here. There's some resonance. It actually starts growing. Now that also happens in your client meetings. If you and your client are able to start establish that resonance, you actually start co-creating a solution. What happens then is the client actually starts driving the sale process for you inside the company. They will find the right people. They'll become your advocate within the business. Correct. They become essentially your partner.

That's okay. So trainings, we, we running out of time already. But, but train, what do you offer? What different kinds of training do you offer? So our flagship program is conversation intelligence for sales. Okay. And conversation intelligence for client experience. So the question you asked me, is it only B2B? Yeah. No, we've got, if you were a retail organization selling to the end user, we have a fantastic program called conversation intelligence for client experience. We also run conversation intelligence for project leaders, project managers, and for leadership. 43% of the reason leaders fail. Would you like to use my teeth, the ones I've done? Hold on while I remove my foot from my mouth. 43% of the reason that leaders fail is because of poor communication. I would agree with you on that one. Absolutely. And I mean, you've got the research obviously to do that. So those are, those are the key programs. How long does it last? I mean, is it, is it an ongoing thing? Or is it, you know, you're getting there, it's a couple of days, you set up stuff, is it, how does it work? So we prefer to work with teams over a period of time. We run a two day intervention, but there's a pre, pre-intervention, pre-work that's done.

And then a post-intervention engagement that's done. And we, if we're working with the sales team, we give the sales manager a 13 week implementation plan. Ah, you see now that's where the value comes in. Absolutely. If we're working with your retail staff, we give the GM a 13 week implementation plan for client experience. Okay. So you see, this is, I think has often been missing in a lot of the things, particularly the stuff that I've experienced. The guys were coming for a half a day, a day, two days afterwards. Thank you very much. We've cast your check. You guys, off you go. Have a nice day. We want to measure those results. We've got one client that started 48 new client conversations in a quarter. We want to measure those results. We know what works. Okay. So big question time now. If people want to find Shelley Walters, how do they go about that? Well, you can always have a look at our website, conversationintelligence.co.za. Okay. Conversation intelligence, one word. Yes. .co.za. Yes. Okay. Great. Look us up on Facebook. There's a Shelley Walters page. There's a conversation intelligence page. I have also just started a weekly vlog on YouTube. So go and subscribe. Awesome. Okay. I'm going to do that.

You didn't see that. Shelley Walters ZA. It's motivational. That part of it is motivational. It's really just me speaking from a heart to heart. But that, I think that is, I mean, part of what you're doing, that's where that genuineness comes because then people get to know Shelley Walters and that they may know conversation intelligence, but they get to know you and they go, okay, I kind of like this, this woman that's doing this. Let's give it a bit more of a look. And you're going to be having a podcast soon on your site. We will. We will. Yeah. You know, David, the one thing I just want to say as we close is we firmly believe selling doesn't help, but helping does sell. So the reason we started the YouTube channel is so that we can put content out there for free to help. We want to help. This is, this is the most important thing, which we go right back to the beginning of our conversation. That genuineness. It comes from the heart. I want to, we put out stuff on our website as well. And, and my friend Tim and I from the sales Institute. You've met Timothy before. Huge respect. We do. We actually decided to, to document our podcast journey as these two 50 year olds who were trying to, and it was the weirdest thing because I'm in radio. Podcasting should be a walk in the park. Not really, but we learn how to do it.

And we're having immense amounts of fun and people are picking up on that and there's the downloads are happening and everything. So I'd encourage it. You can get hold of Shelley at, on her website or look up Shelley Walters. Otherwise conversation intelligence.co.za. And of course you can email me Shelly W at conversation intelligence.co.za. Cool. This we'll also have this whole show up on my website at what's involved.com. So that's what's involved. WATTS.com. We'll have that up somewhere around tomorrow. They'll be giving it to Shelly as well. If you need anything else, if you missed any of Shelly's stuff, David@what'sinvolved.com, I'll be happy to pass on your details to you. Shelly, thank you. It's been an absolute blast. So much fun here. We've just got to do it again this time. Don't you dare go running away anyway this time. Now we're just going to do it because I think there's a lot more that we can talk about and a lot more around cells which you can talk about. So thank you very much. Drive safety this evening. Thanks to Laura for coming in as well. I hope you got to see a little bit about the insanity that is a radio station. We hope to see you again as well. Laura came to visit us as well this evening. So it's always been a pleasure to have her here with us. Until next time, we catch you. You have yourselves a wonderful weekend. One more thing before I go. Thanks for listening.