FastForward had the pleasure of speaking with Henry and Richard Walton, the dynamic brother duo behind Outsell, a boutique B2B sales agency that aims to redefine the industry standard.

With a combined 30 years of experience in founding and consulting for multiple successful B2B ventures, Henry and Richard bring a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in the B2B sales landscape. From their early successes and inevitable setbacks to the creation of Outsell, they share their journey, motivations, and the innovative approaches that set their agency apart.

Over the past combined 30 years my brother (Richard) and I have been involved in multiple B2B businesses. We’ve had successes such as founding multiple multi-million ARR businesses and we’ve also had failures like every entrepreneur. We’ve also been involved as consultants building multiple high functioning B2B sales and marketing teams.

Every single founder led business we’ve been involved with has had a sales problem. Normally, this problem is a result of 3 factors: no sales strategy, poor internal resources & knowledge and the Founder stepping away from sales too early.

Although we’ve been helping businesses solve this problem for over a decade, we’ve never founded a business that is focused on only this problem. Over the last few years, the B2B sales playbook has been broken and the issue is more important than ever. So we decided to build a business that focuses solely on this problem and so far it’s flying!

The last agency we had we scaled from 20 people to 150 over the course of 18 months. It was an interesting but often painful experience. We did what most agencies do as they scale, hire lots of juniors, build a process for everything, force our clients to work a specific way. Be totally inflexible and over sell under deliver. But crucially we realised that if in the future, we wanted to deliver something that was of exceptional quality we had to keep it small. This would enable us to build a product that enabled us to deliver actual outcomes and results for the client whilst building a senior team with decades of experience, whilst also remaining flexible enough to change depending on what our clients need rather them forcing them into a specific way of working. Essentially we become like an extended part of their team which leads to a deeper, more complex and effective service.

It's also worth noting that we both take a lot of pleasure in building small, integrated teams and for the moment that’s the kind of business that also gives us the lifestyle we want.

For B2B Founders looking to win new business there is literally no other way and it’s only going to become more so. We all get pinged in our inboxes, with spammy ‘personalised’ messages promising to solve x or do x. All of the recent data shows that B2B deals are increasingly reliant on prior or existing relationships. So how do you create these?

For a lot of our clients, it’s first about focus. It’s very hard to build trust in today’s market if you’re trying to sell to 5 different types of customers at that same time. If you’ve got a massive product, sales and marketing team then fine but most of B2B founder led businesses don’t have that. Focusing upon who you’re selling to and why is a big part of the initial few weeks of work. Then aligning the marketing strategy and process around this becomes the next objective. How do you engaged with these people? what conferences are they going to? What associations are they part of? What are they reading? Who do you know, that knows their change makers. How do you provide them value rather than sell to them? What do they really care about and what is causing them pain? What is keeping them away from their kids in the evening? We help our clients solve these problems and implement a range of outbound campaigns that address these issues. If you do this, you can build relationships and nurture those relationships until they are ready to buy. You won’t force them to buy so you just have to be front of mind when they’re ready.

Ha yeah sure. We built the wrong operational model for our clients. We were obsessed with being really good so we hired lots of senior people to help manage all the juniors. But churn rate didn’t go down. So we implemented lots of other fail safes and processes to drive down the churn rate. In the end we were forced to make all the managers redundant and we moved the company to a liner org structure that basically gave our juniors more freedom and autonomy. Guess what? The churn rate went down! The lesson we learnt is that if you don’t know your client deeply and I mean really deeply, then you’ll end making a series of wrong decisions around a product and market you don’t fully understand.

Our clients average contract averages around the 50,000 Euro mark but we also have clients with a smaller ACV. They all have the same issue: growth stagnating and traditional tactics like cold outbound no longer working.  The explosion in AI and low quality one-size-fits-all lead generation agencies have basically meant cold outbound is dead. The only reason people still do volume is that very occasionally they hit someone at exactly the right time so people think it works. However, all the client data we’ve looked at shows a rapid and steady increase in cold outbound effectiveness over the last 18 months. We also believe it’s terrible for your businesses and personal reputation when trying to create complex deals with a long sales cycle.

Ultimately, we help them with a mixture of consultation, training and implementation. At core of what we do is helping our clients come up with a predictable and scaleable way to generate new business by building and nurturing authentic relationships with prospects at targets accounts and by aligning high quality sales and marketing activities.

Sales enablement & knowledge transfer is a big part of what we do as well so it’s important our clients understand the long term strategy as well as the tactics we use to deliver the actual service.

I think we’ll see a lot of business double down on the competitive advantages they have which is often based on locality and which also encompasses both geographical and cultural factors. This in terms then drives a lot more interest in off-line events that is actually physically meeting people face to face rather than online.

We’re also seeing the rise of the Founder taking a much more central seat in terms of being the voice of a brand and building a brand around the founder to drive to acquisition. And of the course the role of video within this. Essentially anything that can’t be AI generated!

B2B businesses will also continue to get super targeted and niche down more than we see at the moment. This in turn will drive the increase in importance of new associations, referrals, highly specialized content etc.

What: Outsell

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Who: Henry is a creative turned entrepreneur based permanently in Nicosia, Cyprus. In his 15 years working with startups & scaleups, he has helped hundreds of businesses successfully scale their sales and marketing activities through simple but effective sales and marketing strategies. Outsell is his 2^nd agency after scaling & exiting the first one from 20-150 people in 2018. He works best as an integrator, helping other founders turn their vision into a reality. He is a growing voice in the Cypriot startup scene and a mentor for young Cypriot musicians as part of a Creative Europe funded project.

Richard is a sales and management thought leader, keynote speaker, leader for sales training seminars and highly experienced CEO and Sales Director. He has over 25 years of proven success across multiple industries around the world and has personally built and managed sales teams from the ground up to over 35 in size. Having built a number of companies as an entrepreneur he has a deep understanding of how sales leadership can provide critical strategic insights whilst also offering the most cost effective and fastest way to improve your bottom line.