When you think of a typical “salesperson”, do characters like Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses or Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street come to mind?
Macho or reckless stereotypes of salespeople is one of the myths that Karl Loudon and Craig Lister want to bust with their new training business, Tevyan.
The ex-IPG colleagues want their training to make people rethink their relationship with sales and reconsider how salespeople should be thought of in an agency context.
Think less extroverted and forceful “shiny guys in suits”, but more empowering all people from different backgrounds with transferable skills to bring new opportunities for themselves, their agencies and clients.
Loudon, CEO and co-founder, told Mediatel News: “Sales is almost a dirty word. No pitch ever gets won without the client’s needs.
“Tevyan was born out of two different parts of my brain; bringing together this concept to make sales inclusive to everyone in the agency and treating the pipeline like a product.”
Inspired by frustration
Loudon and Lister were previously managing partner and CEO respectively at performance marketing company Reprise Digital, a part of IPG Mediabrands.
While they learned “scale” at IPG, they became frustrated with the lack of a system set up for sales outside the founder for many agencies.
Lister, now chief product officer and co-founder explained: “If you are talented, then you feel blocked by the founder. This is where we are working with the founders to help them. It frees up people with talent and creates a new sense of opportunities for them. It allows people to bring in others with transferable skills and different experience.”
He added: “It is not just about profit and loss but also about diversity and inclusion and how the organisation is structured and how the talent is treated. Not every agency owner understands that perspective.”
Lister commented that the pandemic has driven a need for this type of training in particular to bring teams together and give them a central focus.
Making training more ‘accessible’
The founders said they have already had feedback from agency owners that their approach using language free of jargon and has not only helped with interviewing and hiring new talent but retaining clients.
But Loudon stressed that Tevyan is not about them simply telling people how to do things or sharing their “little black book”.
Instead, Tevyan uses technology like Miro boards, interactive voting tools and Slack channels to facilitate tailored virtual training which participants can easily do remotely and in parts to make it more accessible.
He highlighted that a sale only ever happens when there is an exchange of value and the focus should be on listening and building people’s confidence.
The importance of this kind of training could come into its own imminently as the industry struggles to hire and retain diverse talent.
The new business already has five clients covering “a breadth of agencies”, from global to independents, which they said they are not able to disclose for legal reasons.
