Accelerate Sales Podcast

Harry Brelsford of SMB Nation sits down with Paul Higgins of Cloud Consultants Collective to discuss how Paul is helping Cloud Consultants (CC) to scale, and the communities you need to join.   

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Hey nation nation, we're with a new friend Paul Higgins. Paul, I'm gonna poke at you and say you're the Thunder Down Under. Like there was a male dance team in Las Vegas, but you're in Melbourne, Australia, which, in my travels with Microsoft and beyond. I really like Melbourne. It's different than Sydney that I can't. I can't quite you know, you guys. You dress smart. The architecture is different. Is that Is that fair?

Paul Higgins 

It's a little more European. Yeah, he's how it's best described.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah. Yeah, I really enjoyed Melbourne. So sir, let's do a Hello World. I mean, I, you know, just as we all do, I bumped into you. You're doing Sass and cloud and podcast and you have 17,305 followers. So Introduce yourself. What is your story?

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, well, in short, I work for Coca Cola Friday, New Year's not thinking I was going to work there for more than a day. Because my father worked there. They said, I'd never worked there. And, and I did, I went from a rep to a director. And it was brilliant as a brilliant writer was when our sugar was a lot more acceptable, I forgot to say so I sort of went through the heyday. And then I saw the the start because Australia is often a canary in the coal mine within the company. So we're a bit ahead of the trend here from a consumer point of view and started to drop. And I also had a, I've got a kidney disease called polycystic kidney disease. And that was for nephrologists, like saying, and I've been the director of COVID, qualifying around the world. It's not great for your kidneys. And so in 2011, I left. And I thought I'd coached people in corporate realize that there's a lot of reasons I wanted to leave corporate, and I couldn't really help them. So I went into small business. And the rest is, is history. I've you know, started two companies. We sold one of them in 2019. And yeah, I just love helping cloud consultants, these sites. Yeah.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah. What would I know to be true? And again, just my Redmond Washington experience, you know, with Australia is it's the land of SMB. I think they also say no company, but it's the land of SMB. And we did really, really well, on a per capita basis, you lead the world with Small Business Server sales. Yeah. And so you're you're you're right in the zone. Right. Is that fair? I mean, that you're tapping right into that. economic sector.

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, yeah, looking. And we've got, I think, the highest per capita of nearly everything in the world, because our population is so small, right. But take years, certainly small businesses franchise, I think we've got the most consolidated or concentrated franchise market in the world as well. But it's funny, like, always joke that, you know, I'm an Australian. I live in Melbourne, but I work in the US. So, you know, most of my community, most of my clients are all in the US now. So, yeah, you know, you name it. What I listened to what I watch, everything's US base these days, and sometimes people talk to me about local events. And I'm like, okay, you know, I missed that one.

Harry Brelsford 

Well, that's good and bad. I would with my travels back some time ago, but I always had do it, you know, it's all it's all fun and games. But there was a certain segment in Australia where I kind of had to apologize for the US or being an American. It often had to do with the president in office again, this quite a couple precedents ago. And, but, you know, I took it on the chin. And I mean, you know, but Australia, you guys, you're, you're a little bit like where I live in Austin, Texas, and you're a little bit like Texas, you're very proud.

But I do miss it. The pandemic certainly didn't help with that kind of travel. Give me some use cases about the consulting you do in the technology space in particular.

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, yeah. So most of male members of the community called the cloud consultants collective, they've typically left corporate, they've, you know, working or they've started their own consulting business in either major platforms. You know, they're Microsoft, Salesforce, HubSpot, you name them, right. So they're consulting on and they're consulting first and then implementing a platform. Second, some are specific to a platform that they only do say HubSpot, or Microsoft, others are like, I've got a couple because they don't want to be a one trick pony. And they've got between sort of one and 5050 employees. And the biggest thing that I helped them with is The business strategy and sales marketing because they love what they do. They love being hands on a lot of the times they, you know, they tried to get themselves out of delivery. And they really struggle with that. And, and when it comes to sales and marketing, they typically got word of mouth referrals, which is great. But as they want to go scale more, they're like, Oh, we actually need a consistent flow of leads here. And that's what we help them with.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, yeah, let me Oh, and look at this. You're a golfer. Okay, that's cool. This is fun. This is fun to go through people's LinkedIn profile. Let's focus on the accelerate sales podcast. So what's what's going on there? What's the mission? What's it? What's the basic theme?

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, look, the theme is very aligned to what I've clients want, which is, you know, how do we get gain more leads more clients in our business, to scale and, you know, most, most people, certainly to your first million, and I remember the book, I think it's Mathis Matheson, always get it wrong, but ready fire aim. And he talks about getting you as the owner has to get to your first million in sales, right before you bring in sales teams. And, you know, the podcast is dedicated to people that are, you know, wanting to do that. And especially, you know, I was lucky, I was trained in Coca Cola for 18 years. And to have all the experience of sales while I still found it hard when I used to sell for my own consulting business. So I say to a lot of people just relax, like, I know, you're a little fearful of it, you're not 100% sure how to do it, but you haven't spent 18 to 20 years doing it, right. So and that's what I share in my podcasts, I get experts like yourself, you're on recently, which was brilliant, to come on and talk about their journey and how they've accelerated their sales, and then also do a little solo show, every second week.

Harry Brelsford 

What's interesting that you have and I'm new to understanding your past life, primarily through my startup in the cannabis technology space, but I learned a term and if I get it wrong, correct me as a consumer packaged goods CPG. And that's what I view Coca Cola as right, you have a CPG background? I do not. And so there's been a little bit of a learning curve. And I'm sure you know, it's like anything experience at the end of the day, Trump's not plus not quite the right word, but, you know, experiences everything, education kind of gets you to the point where you can get experience. But if you've been able to leverage your CPG background in helping your clients, what's that look like?

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, well, in short, the coax model was very similar to what most SAS models were today, right? And there's been, you know, there's a push even more towards, you know, letting the partners do all the end work. But the coat company very early on, said, Look, we'll do the brand, we'll do the marketing, we'll do the product. And then we'll have franchisees that does everything else, right. So it's is, the way that I look at it is that the coke company was is it's an updated product, it's got lots of capital involved in it, SAS is just the new model of that, right? So there's so many things I can draw from. That's why when I we worked with our partners, when we own our business, like, I just knew how to work with the owner, the SAS owner, to get the best result for them and for us, right, because that's what I've been doing all my life. I've been working with the coke company and the bottlers to get a result in sort of like a marriage that didn't really it didn't end, but sometimes it had its good day, sometimes it had its bad days, right? And how to navigate those. And a lot of my clients, you know, they haven't dealt with that that relationship before. Once again, they love the technology and you know, sort of help with that. So yeah, a lot of parallels in that instead of selling sugar in a can, which is not great when you got a kidney disease, because 30% of people on dialysis are actually from having too much sugar. Now, you know, I'm effectively applying those learnings to something that I absolutely love where SAS is changing the world.

Harry Brelsford 

Well, I like the marriage analogy, because I've used that with my long term, multi decade relationship with Microsoft and it is a marriage when, when, when she's good, she's very good. And when she's bad, she's very bad.

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, and just a quick, quick rundown. We supported a platform that was bought by Citrix. And I went to I was on a European tour before I had my transplant, you know, the last sort of trip. I went to Copenhagen for a day and they presented their their strategy and I called my business partner up and said, we're out of here. And he's like, What do you mean? I said, Not this is the wrong marriage, we've got to get out of this one their direction, the undertaking is not going to work. And unfortunately for all the partners stayed. That was the case. But I think, you know, if I hadn't had that experience, I probably would have wasted, you know, three or four years of our business life. Whereas I was able to pick up the science pretty quickly.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, no, good, good. Good for you. Finally, where where can people learn more about you? I mean, I'm looking, I keep looking at your LinkedIn profile. So certainly through LinkedIn, but where can they contact you directly? What's your URL?

Paul Higgins 

Yeah, yeah. Look, it's Paul Higgins. mentoring.com. That's the home of everything. And the cloud consultants collective.com. You can still find it from the the main site, but that is the dedicated site for the community to free Slack community and it's got people around the world just trying to help each other do business better.

Harry Brelsford  

Yeah, yeah. No, I like it. Good. Send the elevator down, pal. Pay it forward. Good. You know, good karma dollars going on here. So I'm gonna click through. Well, I'll tell you what, let's let's get you back next quarter. Let's just get on a cadence with you. And we'll we'll double click down into topics of the day next times.

Paul Higgins 

Alright, sounds great. Thanks for having me on Harry. Right.