The Tech Business Podcast + Jointflows

Paul Essery – Host [00:00:02]
Hey, folks, Paul Essery here. And I’m delighted today to be with Mick Gosset from Jointflows.

Mick, thanks for coming on. I know you’ve got lots keeping you busy at the moment. I really appreciate you give me some of your time. Just to kind of kick things off, I mean, tell folks a little bit about yourself and your business.

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:00:20]
Hi my name is Mick.
Thank you for having me. I’m the CEO of Jointflows so a little bit about myself: I used to be an international gymnast.

So I used to represent the French team, um, internationally.
Competed for France for about 10 years, and I then, uh, ended up in sales like a lot of us and made my way up from being a BDR in, uh, in a marketing technology company.
So selling to marketing teams in the retail world, and now I’m leading I’m leading Jointflows. So, um, SDR to individual contributor to first line manager to VP of sales. Now, I’ve got a business which helps salespeople essentially, uh, be less stressed about what they do.

Paul Essery – Host [00:01:07]
Okay, Sounds that’s pretty valuable. So tell us a bit about the kind of tech and tell us about what it does because it’s slightly different to a lot of stuff that is out there.

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:01:18]
Yeah, so in one sentence, what Jointflows do is we stop deal slippage. We stop revenue slippage. The way we do it is we streamline the closing phase of the sales process, where: you’ve got a lot of moving parts, you’ve got a lot of stakeholders to manage, a lot of documents to review, a lot of teams to align.
It becomes an orchestration nightmare. It becomes project management rather than actually selling.
And what we tend to say is that the sales teams and the individual contributors, specifically when you do fairly sophisticated deals, are not equipped to navigate that phase. And that leads to 3 problems, which we address essentially through the solution, through the software.
The first one is there is a big lack of control over the deals, so deal management, but very late stage deal management.. very much about that last smile.
There is a lack of visibility into what’s happening within the deals as well. There are obviously things that happen on the buying side but a lot of what we do is focused on the internal workflows. So what’s happening within your own control, within your own company.
If you add the lack of control, plus the lack of visibility, you often have a lack of predictability, which means that the deals are sleeping uncontrollably, Um, with with poor anticipation. And that hurts the business that hurts. You know, salespeople obviously commission-wise. That hurts them, making the money they should be making.
But that burns their credibility internally, and then they have to recover for the loss the lost revenue.

Paul Essery – Host [00:03:04]
And it’s the area where most people get it wrong, isn’t it?

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:03:08]
Yeah, and it’s a double edged sword, basically, because this is when the revenue is usually committed. That last mile, you get the yes, and then you’ve got all these moving parts to essentially managed manually.
And the slippage at this point in time within the sales process is extremely painful for the company, because you’ve got your chickens already and you’re going to have to recover somehow.
And usually the tactics to recover is very aggressive discounts, which doesn’t really help from a brand viewpoint. Obviously, the salespeople are a little bit gutted that you have to kind of lose on commission in order to bring the deals back in.
And it just doesn’t set the relationship of the right foot. Usually there’s a lot of friction.
And then what you end up doing is: you put a lot of pressure on the buyer. You leverage your champion in a very detrimental way by saying: “You need to stick to your words here”, “I’m getting in trouble”, “I’ve put my neck out for you”, “How can you deliver”.
So Jointflows will orchestrate that last mile, will automate a lot of these workflows.
There are usually about 100-150 moving parts during that one stage of the sales process. If you look at the number of activities that happened within that last 10% of the sales process, this is the majority of where things happen.
So usually, you have 50 to 60% of sales activities, internal and external happening within the last 10% of the sales process and salespeople do it manually.
And then you’ve got Chinese whispers to forecast the deals. So you tell, you know, your side of the story to your manager. They pick up some parts and bits that they report to their managers. That then feeds to the whole bottom line forecasting numbers.
And most of the time it goes wrong.

Paul Essery – Host [00:05:06]
That’s right. Yeah. I mean, you’ve set yourself a quite a big challenge in terms of trying to address that, because it’s the most complicated and difficult bit of the process, isn’t it? I mean, I see that my clients all the time, that’s where they fall over.
So tell us about. I mean, you’ve set yourself a big challenge, and I know you’re making pretty good progress.

Paul Essery – Host [00:05:06]
Tell us about some of the challenges that you face in addressing that there’s a business. Tell us a bit about some of those.

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:05:30]
So, us as a business going to market?

Paul Essery – Host [00:05:35]
Well, okay, what’s the number one thing that keeps you awake at night?

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:05:38]
I wanna… I want make sure that sales is about selling.
You know, sales is about selling and not project managing and not internal politics.
And, when I first started my career in sales, I have got one of my mentors told me that I would spend more time selling internally, than I will selling externally.
And that stuck with me because I feel like a lot of the focus is about trying to increase buyer engagement at the moment: “How do we get people to do what we want them to do in a timely manner which actually fits within our fiscal periods. Right?”
But then you look at the other side and you say: “Well, how about you try to actually improve and build efficiency on what you actually have control?”
If you look at the number of stakeholders involved, like first degree, second degree involvement on the buying side, you’ve got about between 20 and 30 people either reviewing or approving specific parts of the process, right?
So it could be a legal team. It could be a procurement team. It could the security team.
And then you’ve got levels into that into these three buckets. So like: specific areas of the legal process, specific areas of the security process, specific areas of the procurement process…
People don’t want to engage with you. They don’t!
Now if you look at what you’ve got control over which is your internal processes, the way you organise your you go-to-market team, how fast you actually revert and complete your own tasks. And if you were to shave everything off to like… not instant, but a reasonable time frame, like: same day, right?

Paul Essery – Host [00:07:28]
Big effect, doesn’t it?

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:07:29]
That would that would shorten your sales process by 30%.
And that’s completely under your control, you just don’t address it because you can’t measure it most of the time, and you don’t know where to start.

Paul Essery – Host [00:07:46]
Do clients respond well to that, or does that require a bit of persuasion?

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:07:50]
No, I think there’s a big market for us and that’s the opportunity.
The yield on prospecting activities is decreasing, is at an old time low, basically.
And you really have two ways to get to the number:
A) you need to maximise what’s currently within the pipe, so you need to increase your conversion rate. But you also have to shorten the sales process so you get more revenue faster.
Things that are already in play.
B) And then you’ve got your existing client base, which you need to kind of, um, kind of maximise and monetise a little bit better.

So we address both sides. Basically, we will help you get to a much faster sales process with way more control, way more visibility on anything that happens internally. We’re not particularly focusing on the buyer engagement.
And then for sales teams who are maximising the existing client base: We help them structure that approach as well.
What we tend to see is the focus has gone on: “Okay, I need to make the most of my client’s because I don’t have a lot of net new clients coming in any more. I can’t rely that much on that side of the of the bucket.” So I need to transform basically Customer Success Managers or Account Managers who were kind of dealing with relationships as opposed to commercial relationship, if that makes sense, enable them to actually stick to self process, which they don’t have a lot of experience around. And what we tend to see now is that it’s very poorly documented what happens during that last mile of the sales process, so people kind of figure it out.
And you’ve got your top performers. And usually they’ve got long tenure within the company, so they know how to do it because they have done it before and they teach their peers. But it’s very anecdotal, so there’s no documentation. And then, these people will in turn try and kind of figure it out on the flight.
So we bring that structure and alignment. And then we make sure that once it’s running, it accelerates.

Paul Essery – Host [00:10:06]
Yeah, and I mean, it’s interesting you described those things because, I mean, I see a lot of people coming to me asking about selling into bigger companies. And selling into bigger companies is a different ballgame to selling it to small companies, isn’t it?Because of the reasons you just talked about. All that additional complexity requires a much more sophisticated skill set.
So you set yourself a big challenge.
You’ve got some stuff underway there. I mean, what does the future look like?
I mean, what would success be, let’s say, five or six years down the track? I mean, how do you see these things playing out?

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:10:38]
Success would look like being part of the standard technology stack for sales teams like Salesforce, like Hubspot, like the Sales engagement tools.
And having the last mile essentially called the “Jointflows stage”.
From a corporate viewpoint, that’s the dream for me.
From a personal viewpoint, I would like salespeople to actually enjoy what they’re doing a little bit more.
And stop stressing over: “Are they on top of it?”, “Why is this person ghosting me and this person is in my own team?”, “Why can I not get approval on these specific terms when X amount of people have done it in the past?”, “Like, Why do I have to do so much politics with my own team in order to actually contribute to the cooperate goal?”
And that’s what kept me up at night when I was when I was a Sales leader.
Uh, I felt like… I had… I had people in my team working quite literally around the clock, staying up all night to wait for the dependencies we had in the US just because the teams were… you know, it happened in all the companies have been a part of.
And you just burn the candle from both ends.
And it just doesn’t… You end up not feeling good about what you’re doing, feeling tired and your personal lifestyle is just completely damaged.
You live for work, as opposed to having it the other way around.

Paul Essery – Host [00:12:14]
So the technology will make people’s lives better as well as help you sell more, really.
I mean, it’s a bit of a win-win. Really? It seems to me.

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:12:21]
I hope so.

Paul Essery – Host [00:12:24]
Yeah, Mick, thank you. I know you are a busy guy.
Thank you for coming on and talk.
I mean, I’ve had a lot of conversations with salespeople, and that’s been one of the most insightful things I’ve heard for a long time, actually, because I think you’ve really focused on the big problem, which is the process of closing.
And the bigger the organisation, the more difficult it is to do.
And of course, everyone wants to sell to bigger companies. So it’s a real challenge getting people to up their game in the way that you’ve described.
So I think that, obviously you showed me the tech, and I think it will have a really big impact.
So good luck with that future.
And, you know, let’s hope that it comes true, you know?
And that people start talking about that final bit as the “Jointflows” piece.
So good luck with that. Because that will make a difference. Actually, I’m sure of it so, thanks for coming on.

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:13:12]
Thank you.

Mick Gosset – Guest [00:13:12]
See you soon. Bye bye.