Richard Walton is the Founder of Outsell Sales, a B2B marketing and sales company specializing in high-ticket item sales. With over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, he has built and scaled numerous multimillion-dollar ventures. Richard's expertise lies in outselling competitors, turning sales feedback into valuable insights, and developing sales teams across different industries, including remote management. In addition to his business acumen, he dedicates time to public speaking and content creation, focused on sales strategies for robust business growth. His approach emphasizes deep customer understanding, operational focus, and the courting of top talent to ensure organizational success.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:12] Richard Walton discusses how Outsell Sales helps companies with their B2B sales
[7:15] Why saying no can lead to increased revenue and organizational focus
[13:08] The benefits of a focused and educational marketing strategy
[16:43] The importance of aligning sales and marketing with customer needs for better experiences
[20:28] Richard talks about patience and persistence as key components to shorten B2B sales cycle
[24:26] The value of building trust with potential customers through non-salesy interaction
[26:44] Why authenticity in marketing leads to customer delight
[32:15] What is the family’s role in shaping one's leadership and business practices?
In this episode…
Are you tired of sifting through generic sales advice that doesn't fit your high-ticket B2B business model? Do you need a laser-focused strategy to connect with customers at a deeper level and drive your sales through the roof?
B2B sales expert Richard Walton delves into the secrets behind thriving in high-ticket B2B sales. He shares the significance of saying no and how a nuanced understanding of customer needs and a specialist's focus can help businesses attract A-players and command respect and attention in the marketplace. He emphasizes the critical role of patience and perseverance in nurturing potential client relationships over time, trusting the sales process rather than pushing for immediate results. Richard reveals how marketing is foundational in setting customer expectations and ensuring alignment from the first point of contact.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Richard Walton, Founder of Outsell Sales, about effective B2B marketing and sales strategies. Richard discusses how Outsell Sales helps companies with their B2B sales, why saying no can lead to increased revenue and organizational focus, patience and persistence as key components to shorten the B2B sales cycle, and the value of building trust with potential customers through non-sales interaction.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy
"How To Simplify the Accounts Receivable Process With Mark Firmin" on The Customer Wins
"Gamifying Courses: The Future of Education With Murray Gray" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] Thriving as a Financial Advisor Using AI-Powered Tools With Gabe Rissman" on The Customer Wins
"Harnessing Fractional Workforce for Business Success With Praveen Ghanta" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"Selling is about helping people, and the best way to do that is to develop a really deep understanding of what your customers actually need."
"Growth favors the brave, especially when it comes to saying no."
"A lot of inbound activities don't work for high ticket items. It's about relationship building."
"The best way to understand customer pain points is to talk to your existing customers."
"Sales is a patient art; build relationships over a spectrum of touchpoints without rushing for the sale."
Action Steps:
Identify and focus on a target customer segment: Specializing in a specific customer type streamlines operations and improves the quality of your sales approach, attracting dedicated customers and top industry talent.
Say no to opportunities outside your niche: Saying no to ill-fitting prospects can reinforce your brand's expertise and attract more committed clientele, ensuring a business foundation built on quality over quantity.
Utilize customer feedback for product development: Engaging with customer advocacy boards offers direct insights into clients' needs, leading to more relevant and successful product offerings.
Create educational marketing content: Educating your potential customers through content demonstrates understanding and builds trust, ultimately setting the stage for a smoother sales process.
Build patience into your sales strategy: Adopting a patient, value-driven approach in B2B sales fosters long-term relationships and trust with prospects, increasing the likelihood of successful conversions over time.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Mark Firmin of eTreem, Murray Gray of Xperiencify, Gabe Rissman of YourStake, and Praveen Ghanta of Fraction. Today, I'm speaking with Richard Walton, founder of Outsell. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms, instead, get Quik!. Using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started.
All right, I'm really excited to talk to Richard. Richard is a highly experienced entrepreneur, having built and scaled a number of 10 million plus companies over the last 20 years. Richard attributes much of his success to outselling his competitors and using sales feedback as a way to provide insights to marketing, product development and strategy. Richard has built and managed sales teams across five different industries, managing sales teams up to 55 in size, many of them remotely. He understands what role the Sales Department plays in any organization, and how some small tweaks can have an immediate impact on the bottom line. Man, this is all stuff. I think our audience is going to love. Richard, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Richard Walton 1:50
Cool. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me Rich. Very happy to be here.
Richard Walker 1:54
Yeah, my pleasure. We got a lot to learn with you today. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So Richard, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Richard Walton 2:12
That's such a good question, Rich and it's a great it's a very apt questions, because this morning, I was listening to a podcast with Mark Cuban on it, and he was asked the question about how to sell. He's a big proponent of that if you're in business, you got to be selling, which is something that obviously I deeply believe in. And he said, selling is simple. Selling is about helping people. So my business really helps our clients understand how to help people. And a big part, well, what does that actually mean if you break it down? So for me, how do we help our clients help other people? It's really about what can you do to develop a really deep understanding of what needs do your customers actually have. Sounds really simple on paper, right? But in practice, it can be quite difficult, particularly for the types of companies that we help. So, if I can give you just a quick example. So I don't know if you'll relate to this.
A lot of entrepreneurs, you and I are member of EO, The Entrepreneurs Organization, and a lot of entrepreneurs who aren't funded, as in bootstrapped. I don't know if you bootstrapped, I've bootstrapped all of my businesses. So, that's great. You keep 100% of the equity. You don't have to spend 40% of your time talking to VCs, all the other horror stories that I've heard. But what it does mean, I'm assuming, for most people listening to this, who've been in the same situation, is that you're desperate for cash, right? So, you probably start your business thinking, I'm going to help people with this problem, and then what happens is people come along and they have slightly different problems, and five years later, you like, well, who are our customers and what do we deliver? And the problem is, you've got eight to nine different customer types, and you may be delivering things in slightly different ways, and I see this all the time.
So a lot of the time, our clients come to us and they say, Richard, we want to grow, but we don't know how to because we and essentially it's, well, almost we don't know who we are and we don't know what we're selling. And we know that we need to focus and get to know our customers better. And so we spend a lot of time helping them break everything down that they're doing operationally, what is most successful, what's making you the most money? What brings you joy? What brings your team joy? Which customers really love what you're doing? And then we develop B2B marketing strategies around that. That allows them to reach out, solve problems, help their customers, and everyone's happy. That's quite a bit in a nutshell.
Richard Walker 5:08
Oh man, I've got a bunch of questions now. So first of all, just to clarify, your focus is on customers who sell B2B, business to business?
Richard Walton 5:16
100%. Yeah. So actually, I should probably be a little bit more specific, so it's only B2B, but in particular, B2B companies that are selling high-ticket items. So generally that's an average contract value of $25,000 and above. Most of our clients are actually much higher than that. And what that generally means is the higher the ticket item, the more complex it is, and a lot of inbound activities don't actually work, and therefore, in that type of environment, a lot of it is about networking and relationship building. So, when we start working with potential clients, I always say to them, how did you get your first customer? And they always say these things, and I'm like, well, we're going to essentially do that, but at scale, and we're going to process it all for you.
Richard Walker 6:03
Nice. All right, so when you started talking about this, you said something that really resonated with me and how I started my company, I am a product-focused person. I'm very good at coming up with product ideas. Sales was always secondary, tertiary or not at all. And in fact, when I started the company, I was actually anti-sales, because I had this mindset that it meant the used car salesperson, the snake oil salesperson, right? And really that came back to being manipulative and cunning and things that were negative to me. What I've learned over my career is, when you help people, you give them the solution they want. If your solution is the right fit, they'll buy from you. I mean, it's just a no-brainer at that point, if you're solving their problem, but I did exactly what you said.
We created seven or eight or nine products, and we delivered them in so many different ways, it wasn't until we started saying no that we really started growing our company. And by saying no, we distilled it down to we do two things today, it's three, but we do two things super well, and we started saying no to everybody. And I was stunned, because that's when our revenue started growing by 50% a year, year over year. So I have to ask if you're helping people get understanding how much of that is helping them actually say no.
Richard Walton 7:15
I mean, this is our biggest challenge, because saying no is really scary. It just almost goes against everything that we have as an entrepreneur, right? Because you're saying no to money, and if you're bootstrapped, unfortunately the time to say no is the time that things probably aren't going that well, and you're looking for ways to grow and solidify. So it's tough. It's really hard. The way that we help our clients do it is to go through basically a series of workshops and exercises with the whole team. I quite often find that deep down, they know it. They know that well. They know that they should say no, they know who they should focus on.
They just need someone to essentially map out what it's going to look like and what success can look like if that is achievable. But I'm not going to sit here and say it's easy. I think it's really hard. And pretty much every business that I talk to is in that situation is that they've said yes too many times. They haven't said no, and a lot of the time, we can give them all the structure, the process, the advice in the world, but ultimately it comes down to them having the courage to say no. In fact, on our website, our tagline and our proposals was growth favors the brave, for this very reason that you're talking about.
Richard Walker 8:56
Yeah. I mean, honestly, it was super scary to say no, because you feel like you're helping your client by saying yes to everything. But when you start to realize that you can't say yes and be great at it, because you can't the jack of all trades, right? You can't be the best unless you are hyper-focused on being the best at those one or two things. So, I was also thinking about when I was a financial advisor, I naturally did this because I was able to sell life insurance. I had my life agent designation, but I would never sell it.
That wasn't my specialty. It wasn't my strength. It wasn't even my belief set. I had it to be able to help advise clients and help them get the right person to sell it, but so that was my way of saying no, so that I could be focused. And a lot of my customers are in wealth management, they have to learn to say no too. Because do you know how many mutual funds there are? Do you know how many products they can sell, even if they're not inventing it, they have to figure out what it is they're going to do for their clients. All right, so let me go to another thing.
Richard Walton 9:55
I find the saying nothing so interesting. So a couple of things I've noticed is. Sometimes, the more you say no to potential customers, the more they want to work with you, which I find absolutely fascinating. Secondly, what I have found, essentially, we're talking about having a really clear focus on who you want to help right. The benefits from that aren't just from sales. It floods throughout the organization. There's operational ease, there's branding, there's marketing, messaging, all those types of things. But also, what I have found, which I don't think people perhaps may not be thinking about when they're listening to this, is that I also feel that allows you to attract really top talent, because the I have seen, when you're trying to think of how, there's lots of talks about, how do you attract A players and this and that, I think A players, they want to work for specialists, there's that wonderful saying that, nothing feels as good as true competency.
And I think it we all know that it's very, very hard to be really good at multiple things. And I think A players in particular love to delve very deep into a particular subject matter. And I have found that the more you can say no, the more you can attract great people. And as we all know from running businesses. It's great people that can get you to that next level.
Richard Walker 11:24
Man, I'm glad you said this, because this is something I'm thinking about. Do you hire somebody who is just really good at sales? But what you're saying is, they're really good at your customer, they're good at your industry, your product type, right? I mean, that's what you're kind of focused on, is they understand you and your need.
Richard Walton 11:43
Yeah. I mean, and I've seen it from myself, the more that you kind of delve into a particular subject matter, expertise it, it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. I mean, take me and take my business. For example, we only work with 20 clients at a time. We don't really work with any more clients than that, and for various reasons we can talk about later, but you know, so we're very focused. I'm becoming so I mean, I've been in business a long time. I've been in business for 25 years. I've started multiple B2B businesses.
I've done a lot in marketing and sales to B2B, but I've learned so much in the last two years because I'm so focused on a particular type of business that every time I talk to a client and we're brainstorming solutions, I get takeaways that I can then have conversations with my other clients. And I think essentially, that's what we're talking about, is that that expertise is just its exponential when you have that focused and everyone benefits, you benefit as an employee, because you get the joy of feeling that you're becoming really, really good at something. Your customers are happy. It's easier to convert it. It's generally, it just, it's a snowball effect throughout the organization.
Richard Walker 12:57
It is. And so I just read this book, Who Not How by Dan Sullivan, have you read that?
Richard Walton 13:03
I haven't, but you're the second person to mention it to me in the last fall.
Richard Walker 13:08
And the title gives it away, right? It's really about finding the right person to do the thing and not figure out how to do it yourself. But when I think, one of the things I think about is that you are a who to other people, right? You're the who to your clients and helping them develop their sales thing. My company needs to be the who to our clients for the very specific thing we do so they know who to go to for that. Yeah. And I think being able to define that as really, really important for your business, but also for yourself for your career, yeah. So man, I really, really value this. All right, let me go back. Well, go ahead.
Richard Walton 13:44
You said you're thinking about hiring someone. Do you mind me asking?
Richard Walker 13:47
We're always talking about how to grow our own sales in our company. I would tell you that sales has been the number one challenge for our business because I am so focused on delivering the best product and the best service and the best experience and the best solution. I'll give you some metrics to think about. Our NPS score is always over 84 in fact, it's been 100 many, many times. Our customer satisfaction score has been 100 all year, and it's always over 83, 84 I know we are doing really well with customer success and service.
We love our customers, and we work so hard at that we know our product works. I don't lose customers. I still have my first customers, and I'm so proud to be able to keep working with them and innovating, etc. But how do you grow faster? And we did the thing that we talked about, right? We started saying no, and that helped us grow faster. But still, how do you grow faster? And I'm going to tell you my number one problem. And saying this publicly might come across wrong, I don't know, but I'm fortunate because I have one competitor, and I don't understand why customers stay with that competitor when they're not providing good service, it's bad service. They're not innovating their product, their price is high, and we have more futures, more capability, and our customers love us, so why won't people switch?
Richard Walton 15:01
Is it really sticky? Is it complicated to switch? Are you like a bank?
Richard Walker 15:04
No. I mean, look, some of it is in the sense that you get comfortable with something you don't want to switch. My mom is like that with cars. She'll keep a car for 10 years just because she doesn't want to learn how to operate the stereo in the new car. And I think a lot of people are creatures of habit, and the product they have is working. They just don't know there's something 10 times better yet.
Richard Walton 15:27
It's so interesting. I mean, I think our lives are so busy now, right? And there's so much going on, there's so we've got so many different things that we're paying for the thought of changing something, it has to be, for me personally, it has to be pretty bad. I have to be irritated and annoyed to change. Because the truth is, I just can't be bothered. Laziness, that's the issue, right?
Richard Walker 16:02
But here's the thing, Richard in a B2B, enterprise sales world, you know your clients go through a cycle, a technology life cycle, a product life cycle, right? Whether that's 2, 3, 5, 7, years. And the question is, how does a B2B Company or anybody? I mean, think financial advisors, they have the same problem. They have clients, prospects, who've been with the same advisor for seven years, and it's probably time for them to switch advisors, because they're not getting the service they need. But they haven't thought that way. The key in my mind is, how do you become present in that conversation for them to be able to say, oh, I see you. I should think about moving to you, even though maybe I wasn't thinking about moving yet.
Richard Walton 16:43
Yeah. I mean, this is what we work on with our clients. I think the first thing to accept, which is the elephant in the room when it comes to B2B sales, particularly, but, you know, but high ticket items or enterprise, is it takes time, yeah. And I get slightly frustrated when I see online and the Internet is a wash with AI tools and sales tools that promise to shorten the life cycle. And actually, I just think it's absolute rubbish, because we're dealing with human beings and how they feel about something. I always say to clients, I think the only way that you can shorten your sales cycle is if you go and hire someone who's already got the network with people that trust and respect that person. And that's the only way you can shorten it. Now, of course, we know that's very common in math. In management consulting and other industries like that, and law firms, they're constantly poaching each other because they have the relationships.
If you're not prepared to do that, and that obviously carries some risk, because you've got to do your due diligence that they actually have the network that they're saying they're doing, then you just have to have the patience to well, when you have to have the page, and the reason I'm going on about patience is if you try to rush it, I think this is where it goes wrong. So you can, I think everyone starts with good intentions, right? Okay, we're going to start building our brand. We're going to start building trust and credibility across multiple channels. Maybe it's LinkedIn, content, podcasts, public speaking, whatever it may be, you're doing all these things, and it's great. But guess what happens after two to three months, nothing, because people are getting to know you, they're building your trust. And then what happens is the CEO or the founder comes into the sales room and says to all the business development managers, come on, man, you got chuck, we got I need to see results next week. And then what happens?
They start pushing these accounts and prospects too hard, and they burn them right? And this biggest mistake that I see, and you've got to trust the process. I'm a very big fan of what we call kind of Prospect scoring or account intelligence dossiers, where you are able to monitor the progress of the funnel before they show buying intent. So most CRMs are obviously kind of after that, after someone has shown interest in buying if you can do that, that buys you the time, it allows you to have the patience and you essentially, what I always say to clients is you need to come up with excuses to constantly reach out and engage with people over a long period of time without saying, hey, did you get my last email right? And they can't be salesy messages either. That is the trick to B2B selling is patience and a bunch of different formats and excuses to reach out to people and keep that relationship alive.
Richard Walker 19:44
Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, my sales cycle is usually nine to 12 months. I get it, and that also makes it hard to hire salespeople, because how do you give somebody commission when it's going to take them 12 months to make a sale, and then it might take the customer another six months to build up revenue, maybe 12 months or 18 months to build up to the revenue level they're going to be at. Yeah, no, you're definitely hitting on a really, really hard problem. I want to go back to the very beginning of the conversation, when you said you'd help people understand their client better, so they can understand their pain points, their challenges, and know how to solve their problems. What is it you do? And I throw this in here. Do you use chatGPT to try to understand these things too?
Richard Walton 20:28
So I'm 50 years old, and I'm a sales guy. So most people of my age who are in sales are slightly allergic to tech. So no, I don't. There are other people in my company who do particularly my business partner and co-founder is also my brother, so he's also 10 years younger than me, so he does use that type of thing. So yes, tech definitely has a part to play. But actually I think the best way to do it is to talk to your existing customers, which I think is very topical for this podcast, because generally your customers will tell you everything that you need to know. The trick is obviously talking as we as we said at the beginning, if you've got eight different customer types, you need to decide on the one that you think is going to be best suited for growth.
And as we talked about that could be things like operational ease, market size, the number of competitors, how much they love your product and service, kind of revenue, stickiness, all those types of things. But let's say you've nailed that. Talk to them, Go and have conversations with your customers. Ask them, they will tell you everything that they need to know. I mean, I don't know if you, I've had a really interesting article about a year ago that a lot of big companies now have customer advocacy boards. Have you heard of this. So, I think it's really only suitable for bigger companies, where you kind of, you take a good selection of your core customers, and you remunerate them in some way. I'm not quite sure how. I'm assuming it's through discounts, or, I don't know, trips of Vegas, whatever floats their boat. And once, once it's essentially a board and once a quarter, you meet with them, ideally in person, and you talk them through what you're doing, what's working, what isn't your plans for the future, and you get their advice on what you're doing.
You think about it. It's obvious, because a lot of the time it's the opposite. You've got people normally far removed from their customers, top execs who probably haven't spoken to a customer in five years, sitting in a boardroom talking about new features and products and services for their customers. So, yeah, I mean, for me, that's always the starting point. What is everyone talking about? What are the problems that they're facing? And to be honest, this should be happening on a regular basis anyway, because we all know business changes so fast and that their problems and needs are also changing.
Richard Walker 22:57
All right, so I have heard of that because we had something called the tech Advisory Council, where we enlisted our customers to sit down with our product manager and our VP of Customer Success and listen to what the challenges are with product or the problems they're trying to solve. And it has informed our product roadmap. It has driven our product roadmap. We do it informally as well, but let me ask. I'm going to present something, but also ask a question in the same time. What should the salesperson be doing in the beginning of a relationship and conversation to do exactly that?
Richard Walton 23:35
So are you talking about with a potential customer? What should a salesperson be doing?
Richard Walker 23:40
I'll give you my own example. When a prospect comes through and they book a meeting with us, the meeting is called the idea meeting, and if it's a 30-minute meeting, I will still spend the first 20 minutes understanding them. I'll ask them everything I can about the business, about what their problem is, what drove them to us, what their technology stack is, who the players are in terms of who's impacted by this.
Who are they trying to serve, anything I can get to understand their problem, because I want to help them make a high-quality decision. I don't want to push a product on them. I want to give them a solution and give them information to make good decisions about what is the right solution for them. That's my own approach, but I'm not a classically trained salesperson. I'm an entrepreneur just figuring stuff out as I go.
Richard Walton 24:26
Well, we talked at the beginning about how a lot of entrepreneurs are slightly allergic to the word sales, because it carries connotations of second-hand car salesman and double glazing, which we have in England, I know if you have double glazing where you are, but it has a very bad reputation in the UK. But as I said at the beginning, for me, sales is about helping people, and the best way to help people is to ask great questions and then listen. So I think you're doing it for. Right? The only thing that I would probably add to that is sometimes people won't tell you what their real problems are, either, through embarrassment, which is, can be a real factor, as in, we don't know we're struggling. It was a disaster. There's things that people may be hesitant to bring up.
So I think a great salesperson could also make someone feel at ease quite quickly, so they're more ready to share what is really bothering them. And that's kind of relationship-building thing. So I'm similar to you, I'm a very big fan of kind of finding some kind of common thread at the beginning of a conversation. Whatever it may be, it doesn't have to be related to any product or service. It is, how can we start creating a connection as human beings so we're more likely to have a very authentic, honest, open conversation, and then we can build upon that.
Richard Walker 25:55
So one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you about this is because I talk so much about customer experience, customer success, the customer journey in this podcast and with my teams and with my customers, etc, but it's easy to overlook how much the role of sales plays in setting it up for the customer to have a great experience, even once they get to the product or the service. And everything you've talked about is the foundation of that listening, understanding and then helping your customer, versus pushing, manipulating and selling, that is what leads to a great experience, in my view. Are there any specific tactics or things that we haven't talked about that you would love to bring up to help people with a better customer experience in the sales process.
Richard Walton 26:44
Yeah, so I would say it even starts earlier on than the sales process. And it actually starts on in terms of your marketing, your branding and your messaging. So as we talked about earlier in terms of what we do is helping, we help our customers understand who they should be going after. Once you know that, that you can actually start creating really powerful, I'm going to say, marketing content, but a lot of time it's educational content. So it's like, this is what we do. These are the problems we're solved, and this is who it best suits. So, people then are reading and going, well, these people get me, they understand me, this is going to be good for me. So it's kind of marketing with a with a kind of a twist, that's kind of, maybe the way I look at this educational marketing. But you can do it if you deeply understand who your customer is and what their pain points are.
Then when they come to you, they've all, a lot of time, they've already decided they want to work with you, because, like, these people really get me. They know me, and as long as you're being truthful throughout the whole process, then I think that's obviously going to have a really big impact on the customer's delight, because they're getting what they think they're getting. And quite often we know when it all goes wrong is they're marketing something that's not quite right. They're sold something that's not quite right, and then the poor customer success team have an absolute nightmare, right?
Richard Walker 28:16
Oh, I know. I know. We have a simple rule in our company, no unhappy customers. I don't want to sell you for the sake of selling you. I want it to be the right solution, the right fit. I got to tell you a story. In in late 2014 we revised our website, and this is around the time we're actually at the time where we said we're going to do two things, and that's it, we're going to say no to everything. So after we launched the new website, the conversations went from prospects calling us, having a meeting with us and going, oh, I didn't know that's what you did. I don't know, to new leads coming into the new website, customers saying, this is exactly what I was expecting, and why I called you. The quality of leads went through the roof.
This is why our sales grew, because people were way better qualified, because the messaging was more direct to them, and we did persona analysis, we did everything we could to understand the customer and get the messaging right. So yeah, you obviously know this. This is your business.
Richard Walton 29:13
It reminds me. It's slightly different of a story that one of my clients told me. I've been working with him for 10 years, and he provide, he builds websites and does SEO for dentists in the United Kingdom. So he's the number one provider of it's a really big company. And, I mean, there's 10s of 1000s of dentists, and they all need websites and SEO and other things like that. And he's become quite a celebrity, actually, within that world, he's made a Netflix show, and he's written books, and he told me a really interesting story, I know, who would have thought, but he told me a really interesting story, and he said that he wrote a book a few years ago on Instagram for dentists. It sold 45,000 copies, of which he worked out that only 5000 was to dentists.
So then he thought, oh, interesting. There's obviously a huge market out there. So he basically took the same book, tweaked it, and just put up that Instagram for entrepreneurs. He sold two and a half 1000 copies. Wow. I think, I guess what I like about that story is people always gravitate towards expertise, and I think that's what we're essentially, we're talking about, right? If I understand you correctly, that's the changes that you made to your website. It's was very clear on who your service, who your product, was for, and the problems that it solved. And I have found sometimes, as I said earlier, sometimes I say no to clients who write the fit or aren't the right fit for us, and they almost demand to work with us, just because they've been said no to I think in today's world, there's such a lack of experts, there's too many jacks of all trades that you stand out like a beacon, and it's just such a powerful thing. It's helpful in so many ways.
Richard Walker 31:10
Man, I hope people are enjoying this and getting a lot from it. Unfortunately, we have to wrap this up, and before I do, and I have another question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Richard Walton 31:20
Best way is on LinkedIn. That's the only social platform that I'm on. If you type in Richard Walton Outsell into Google, I'll pop up. I think you can type in Richard Walton, but you may also get the ex-head of MI5, which is a secret service for England, so don't connect with him, just connect with me. So yeah, via LinkedIn is best.
Richard Walker 31:39
So MI5 is not going to help your sales strategy.
Richard Walton 31:42
Probably not, probably not. And by the way, I do publish, so I'm actually on, I do a lot of public speaking around the world on sales and B2B sales, and I produce quite a lot of content, which I think people will find quite helpful via LinkedIn. So if anyone's interested, they can have a look at that.
Richard Walker 32:00
That's awesome. And what's your URL to your website?
Richard Walton 32:03
It's outsellsales.com.
Richard Walker 32:06
Perfect. All right, here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Richard Walton 32:15
Well, so this is such a great question, and it comes at a really good time, because I had a conversation with a potential client yesterday. I hope you'll sign up, because he's a wonderful entrepreneur, and it's a great business, and I think we could do really good things for him. And we had a really good conversation, quite a deep one, actually, for kind of a sales call, but he was telling me how he worked with his father, and I said I worked with my brother, and we both talked about how we never tell the other what we think of them and how grateful we are and what impact they've had because they're family, and we're saying how ridiculous that is.
So it is 100% been my brother, Henry, the co-founder of this business. He has a very different style to me. I have learned so much from him, and continue to do so on a daily basis. And I'm just really, really grateful to have him as my co-founder, and yeah, just to continue to learn from him, I mean, all aspects of business on a daily basis.
Richard Walker 33:21
Oh, I love hearing this, because I started my business with my mom. Yeah, she's had a huge impact on our success and my personal success. Her support's just unwavering, and it's amazing. So I'm so happy to hear that your love for your brother and the appreciation you have for you guys as business owners and partners, because it's hard, hard to be with family in a business and you're doing it well, good job.
Richard Walton 33:50
It's hard, but it's worth it, when the times are tough, it's worth it because you've got someone you're 100% trust on your side.
Richard Walker 34:01
Yeah. Oh, this is great. All right, I want to give a huge thank you to Richard Walton, founder of Outsell, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Richard's website at outsellsales.com, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com, where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Richard, thank you so much for joining me today.
Richard Walton 34:29
Thanks Rich. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Outro 34:33
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