00:10:51.640The tech side was more putting the apps in the app store.
00:10:54.560And then I suppose the question, again,
00:10:57.220sort of direct versus partners if we took the money we would invest in direct salespeople
00:11:02.340and used it to promote uh our integration in big commerce our integration in sales
00:11:07.620in shopify or salesforce would that be a better use of time effort money and i think i sort of
00:11:12.980i think you've sort of answered the question there um already with the partnership one
00:11:18.260one relationship many customers and i think that that makes huge sense the other the the the big
00:11:23.700thing i'm struggling not struggling with the discussing and debating is and i don't know how
00:11:28.500many if you've got examples of other previous coaching clients or people you've dealt with
00:11:31.940before is how easy or what are the challenges around entering the us market and selling into
00:11:40.180the us from the uk yeah it's interesting for me because as a canadian um most of my business is
00:11:47.300in the u.s and other than time zones like i've never noticed that any company treated me
00:11:54.980differently because i was canadian um obviously i don't have the same accent like that gives it away
00:12:00.900like oh you're not you know sometimes i'll throw in an a or two and people are like canadian i'll
00:12:05.860be like yeah um here's what i would recommend even when i was in canada building clarity
00:12:11.540every seven weeks i would get on a plane for a week and i would literally go new york san
00:12:16.260francisco toronto or vancouver and then back to new brunswick where i was from and that cadence
00:12:21.780allowed me if i was on phone calls and it was me i'm not saying it's you you might have a business
00:12:25.780development rep and they're going to be doing this but if it's you i just i would say figure out
00:12:30.020what's the cadence where you're in those cities that you think your ideal partners are at at what
00:12:35.140frequency that's going to allow you to be like there you can't get away from physical presence
00:12:41.060right yeah you just people the people will learn to trust you and build a relationship deeper
00:12:48.900faster in person than somebody who doesn't right like zoom doesn't even do that you really need
00:12:53.620to get in person so my rule is build that cadence build that pipeline reach out to people they're
00:12:59.140like oh when are you in town next you say oh i'm actually there mid-april they're like oh wow well
00:13:03.540we'll hit me up it's like well i'm actually organizing a lunch with five other people just
00:13:07.620like you why don't you join the lunch and they're like oh that would be amazing and then you all
00:13:11.380get together you have lunch you follow up you have conversations you can do dinners i used to do
00:13:16.260breakfast meeting early afternoon meeting a lunch two meetings dinner and then either
00:13:22.500flight to san francisco red eye or i would do or not a red eye uh i would do the red eye the other
00:13:27.460way um um or you know like just just try to fill up the calendar that way but to me like that's
00:13:36.500there's cultural differences selling into the uk versus the us the us is easier us people want to
00:13:42.740buy they don't well this is exactly what we're finding we phone up people in the us and they're
00:13:47.780interested in new ideas they want to explore they want to try whereas the bricks are really cynical
00:13:53.220about oh well that's all a bit scary and that's so i'm thinking well we've got this really smart
00:13:59.060innovative tech that we can prove works it's going to help make you more money quicker faster
00:14:04.660and americans love that all right i'm always looking for markets that are quick to buy and
00:14:10.740spend the most and the reason why the american market is is attractive to a lot of european
00:14:15.780clients of mine that i work with is because um the us dollar for the most part so there's there's
00:14:21.700currency component to it there's a speed of purchasing decision seems to be higher they
00:14:27.460like to be sold i know that a lot of my uh my scale specialists that try to enroll clients that are in
00:14:33.860in europe like they want multiple conversations to make a decision even though they could have
00:14:38.500made it on the first call it's just kind of part of the culture um and it's just not like you said
00:14:43.940they're not uh as apt to be early adopters or early innovators around some new technology
00:14:49.940whereas in the us there's just kind of this culture of like trying to find the competitive
00:14:54.420edge and if they feel that's your product then they're gonna really push it through the
00:14:58.340organization to make that decision but in regards to like the differences again time zone and
00:15:04.740physical presence if you can solve that using the strategy i mentioned where like every two and a
00:15:10.020half months if you want you go there for 10 days you do all your meetings you queue them up you
00:15:14.020bring your clients together you do your your deployments your you kind of schedule things
00:15:18.340to be super efficient and then are able to work later in your day typically so that you can
00:15:23.940especially with the west coast customers being in europe like you know their their their early
00:15:28.580morning is kind of your afternoon and then it kind of keeps floating past um other than that
00:15:35.220it does make it tricky we're trying to do that at the moment um but my data science teams in melbourne
00:15:40.020australia and i i deal with them at 5 a.m which is great uk time and then we're on the west coast
00:15:45.700like uh 9 p.m but that's fine that's the only thing actually culturally speaking it's way easier
00:15:51.780to go europe to us than us to europe that's my experience and i've had geez probably a hundred
00:15:58.020clients you know go both ways that i've coached over the years and and the history especially
00:16:02.980when you're opening up offices that's a completely different challenge but in regards to just
00:16:07.940building pipeline and selling partnerships for the most part um i think it's going to be easier
00:16:13.300to go from europe to the us than the other way yeah no no and i think that's that's that's got
00:16:18.340to be the strategy and that whole one-to-many with the value-added reseller is definitely the
00:16:23.300the way forward and it's a there's so much pipeline there for you that if you just got all your
00:16:27.620resources and all your efforts and focus on like we're going to build a repeatable scalable model
00:16:32.820we're going to document build our crm we're going to build the whole you know like best practices
00:16:37.940playbooks for each stage of this crm until we can predictably you know ramp up and add 10 to 15 new
00:16:44.980partners every month every new partner generates x amount of pipeline and we can start to build
00:16:49.540predictability in it and you get it to consistently with a somewhat pot like not like a decent cac
00:16:56.340payback period of like some things you know less than nine months i mean that's when you've got
00:17:03.620predictability in the model it's way more advantageous for you to get that to work and
00:17:09.300make it work then try to do three because it sounds great to your board or your investors
00:17:13.780Because at the end of the day, the probability of you making that work is going to be way higher than trying to go build a BDR and account exec model that's extremely expensive.
00:17:23.780Like that's just the reality of it. It is like you got to pay people, you know, 100 to 150 grand a year to do the business development side, the BDR side.
00:17:33.280Then you got to pay a couple hundred grand, you know, 300 grand a year for a salesperson that can sell at the level you're talking about, kind of that mid-market enterprise.
00:17:41.480and um you know like that's just one person in each is 500 000 a year kind of stack right when
00:17:48.240you look at commissions and so it's like if you want to really build out that volume i mean you're
00:17:52.720in a million and a half in an investment and that's if it works right where the other one
00:17:57.480you have one person just reaching out building those relationships queuing up maybe them for
00:18:01.420you a lot of my clients just do it with their assistant initially and just start to build that
00:18:05.780playbook and then hand it off to somebody else who might just do the sourcing and then somebody
00:18:10.320else that comes full time to do the uh kind of the partnership management side yeah yeah and i
00:18:16.500know and i think i think you're right we can't i can't focus on all three so because that that's
00:18:21.020not that's not focused but yeah these um and it is reassuring to put it yeah it's reassuring to
00:18:27.020hear because my experience so far is actually the selling into the north america from the uk
00:18:34.400is a lot easier and they sort of half seem to like the brits phoning them up especially
00:18:39.920100 percent you guys have the accent you sound smart um you usually are you're kind i mean it's
00:18:46.560it's a competitive advantage so john as we wrap up i'm just curious what would be the the kind of
00:18:50.960two or three biggest takeaways that you've got from our chat today well i i think it's it's
00:18:55.600reassured me that it's completely doable for a software company from the north of england to
00:19:02.080take on north america uh which is and we'd rather be a small company in america than a huge company
00:19:09.040in the uk in terms of future valuation that's really where we've got to be and i think um yeah
00:19:16.640not necessarily investing a huge amount of money in direct sales and focusing on that
00:19:21.360value-added reseller model where i can get the one-to-many very quickly um and get my hook into
00:19:27.120the train i think is is a is a very good analogy now we've already been planning the calendar to