Chris Meredith, sales director at officebroker.com – the fast-growing office space specialist – explains how the old stage charm of “break a leg” was the making of his career in sales.
1. What was the first thing you sold?
Chocolate. I was 13 years old and sold chocolate bars from my bag in school. I used to go the supermarket, buy multipacks and sell bars individually in the playground. I was making a fortune – buying bars at 13p each and selling them for 50p. I became known as the chocolate kid.
2. Did you intend to go into sales when you started your career?
No, I wanted to go into a marketing job. My dad ran a successful advertising agency in Birmingham, and I went to Aston University to study marketing. While I was really good on the advertising jobs and creative side I wasn’t so hot on admin, and couldn’t get a placement with an agency. It really annoyed me.
While all this was taking place I got a summer sales job on Autotrader magazine: although I was only working part time within six months I was beating the full-timers. That’s when I decided to quit university and not bother finishing my degree.
I took the job with officebroker.com after an interview with the founders, Jim Venables and Andy Haywood. I liked their attitude, because they interviewed me like Alan Sugar would one of his apprentices, even though they were in a tiny office sat on plastic garden furniture. In fact I liked them so much that I gave up the offer of a job with Vodafone – it paid £4,000 more but I felt I’d have been just another sales consultant in a big organisation.
3. What’s the single most important quality you need to succeed as a salesperson?
Hunger. They have to have hunger, month after month. I don’t care what drives them, but they have to be able to start from zero all over again and push themselves, no matter whether they’ve had a great or a terrible month.
4. What is the one thing you would love to sell?
Any product that would see me travelling the world and going to different destinations. Travel is my passion.
5. What is the last thing you’d want to sell?
My body.
6. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Never make assumptions. I learned that the hard way after I’d decided a sale wasn’t worth pursuing. Andy asked me how I knew they wouldn’t want the premises, picked up the phone to the client and secured the deal. I’d assumed the client wouldn’t be interested – I never made that mistake again.
7. What advice would you give to someone following in your footsteps?
Don’t be afraid to fail. If you don’t fail you won’t succeed. Anyone in a management job only got there because they were willing to make mistakes and to learn from them.
Along with that is the ability to take criticism – I get frustrated when my staff see any analysis as negative and don’t learn from it. It’s like those people who storm out after one of Gordon Ramsay’s tongue lashings - yes he’s harsh but he knows what he’s talking about, and if you’d bothered to listen you’d be better at your job.
8. What did you buy with your first bonus?
My first significant bonus was blown on a holiday in Marbella with some friends.
9. Who do you most admire in your industry?
Jim Venables, who’s been my mentor. When I joined he and Andy promised to put me through fighter pilot training – straight in, 12 hours a day, for six months solid. Jim taught me how to look at a problem logically and break it down until I saw a solution.
10. How would you sell ice to an Eskimo?
By bringing to their attention the fact that global warming is now a certainty and that ice will soon be a scarce commodity
11. How important is image for a salesperson?
Vital, but not the traditional image of a salesperson, when customers see that image their guard goes up. Your image needs to be the one of a trustworthy, reasonable and reliable expert rather than a double glazing salesman who they’ll never hear from again once a deal is struck.
12. What is the single most important skill you need to close a sale?
Understanding. If you haven’t listened to the client, and understood what it is they really want, you can’t close a sale.
13. Has anything ever gone wrong, that in hindsight, has worked out well for you?
Breaking my leg. When we set up our London office I was sent down as team leader but broke my leg and was off work for three months. When I came back I was still below par, and Andy told me “I’m going to do you a favour and take the team leader title away from you – you shouldn’t think about being one if you can’t hit £50,000 a month.”
I was devastated –I’d managed to get £37,000, which was then a record. So I pushed further and hit the target, and Andy still said nothing. I thought he was being harsh, but Andy later told me he’d done it deliberately because I was using the broken leg as an excuse behind which to hide – and he was right. This was the moment when I stopped being a young boy and grew up to become a serious salesman.
14. What’s been your biggest success?
Being made officebroker.com’s head of UK sales at the age of 24 and put in charge of 40 people when most of my college friends were starting their first jobs. I’m now 27, with a seat on the board, and I make no secret of wanting to be a managing director by the time I’m 30.
15. If you were to pack up your desk and leave today, what would you like to be known for?
Being passionate, having integrity, honesty – and a bit aggressive. It may not be politically correct to say so but a bit of understated aggression goes a long way. I’ve got a strong and large sales team to drive and they have to understand that we need to be passionate and to push hard. The guys not only understand this - they expect it.
16. How has sales changed from when you started out?
Even though I’ve only been in sales for a few years it’s changed enormously. When we started we thought that having a cool domain name was what mattered – we hadn’t heard of search engines, and now it’s all Google, Google, Google.
Similarly social media is having a dramatic impact and radically lathering the way in which we communicate because no one need take our word for anything anymore.
17. What are the current challenges facing your industry?
Recession has had a huge impact. The price of serviced office accommodation fell by a quarter, and although we’re starting to see a strong recovery in London, and this will hopefully filter out to the rest of the UK. But post-recession has brought us benefits – larger corporate clients are returning to the market and we are in a great position to help them as they look to inject flexibility into their strategy.
18. How has the digital age changed sales?
Without digital officebroker.com wouldn’t exist, but even we’re surprised how much issues like social media are changing the way we work. The biggest digital challenge for us now is the rise of mobile media: people are never out of touch and decisions are made so much faster.
In the past it might take us a few days to get a deal, now we can pick up an inquiry, find out their needs, send a PDF with details to a Blackberry and get a confirmation, all within five minutes.
19. What will never change?
People. Doesn’t matter how sophisticated the technology is, without good people in front of the screens you can’t run a good business.
20. Who is the best salesman ever, real or fictional?
Jim’s mum, Jo Davey, she’s a consummate professional. She’s been with the company since it was founded and started in sales when everything was paper-based but she’s adapted to technology more comfortably than people a third of her age. When some people around her are dealing with 150 expressions of interest a month, she’s done 204 in a week, and her record of 37 deals in a month has never been beaten.
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