NATURAL CURIOSITY IS MY SECRET TO BUSINESS GROWTH AND COLLABORATIVE SUCCESS

Charlie Whyman

“Over the years I’ve stumbled across a fair few hurdles in business and I am grateful for each and every one of them...”

As we look forward to a new year and new opportunities it’s time to look inwards and leverage one of the most powerful assets we have at our disposal - our curiosity.

I’m a big fan of assigning a word to a period of time to help set the direction, provide a sense of renewal and add a sprinkle of extra intent and purpose to what I’m doing - if you’ve never assigned the word CURIOSITY to your year then I encourage you to give it a whirl.

My curiosity has taken me around the world and allowed me to have some incredible experiences. From demonstrating a brand new, never seen before laser scanning solution down the world’s deepest gold mine to hosting a conference that resulted in over £3 million in sales in a platinum mine in South Africa in 2015.

I was tasked with the challenge of launching a game-changing new product at an event where I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone what that product was! Can you imagine how all of my usual instincts were stunted as I HAD to allow curiosity take over to guide me forward. This led to a career highlight of generating a £12.5M sales pipeline off the back of that campaign.

I resisted calling myself a marketer for many years and recently I had a bit of a revelation - I realised that one of the biggest reasons for my success in sales and marketing roles over the years has been my curiosity and my ability to tease this out in others, so I stopped resisting the label and embraced it.

Over the years I’ve stumbled across a fair few hurdles in business and I am grateful for each and every one of them because they have fueled my mission to help others to avoid being confused and taken advantage of, by these so-called experts that are constantly telling us what we should and shouldn’t be doing. That is what I love about Collaboration Global, we are a community of specialists who are passionate about their specialism and so always keen to learn more, sharing advice and

“No one cares about the process or the things that you get excited about. They care about the outcome and what it’s going to do for them.”

our knowledge means we all learn together – there is a natural curiosity that enables the birth of great collaborations.

From Olive Oil to Laser Scanning Systems, my curiosity led me to starting my first business back in 2006. I grew up with parents that both had small businesses and was very aware of the risks and the fact that it would be no walk in the park. The business was called Palmavera Fine Foods, an artisan fine foods business that imported food and olive oil from Sardinia. The olive oil was made by myself and my father at his property over there - he bought a place that came with 160 olive trees that hadn’t been touched in years and we were curious to see what we could do with them. A gold award for two years running in the Great Taste Awards told us that we were onto something!

It wasn’t all awards and fine foods though so allow me to paint you a picture.

Imagine a logical engineering student standing on a market stall in Holmfirth in Yorkshire trying to sell Olive Oil for £9 a bottle by excitedly telling people how cool the growing, picking and bottling process was as well as the varying levels of acidity in the oil and how to work around it....

Do you think I sold much oil that day? samples to try and no one cared.

That day I learned the best lesson I could have ever learned about marketing and one that I teach today:

No one cares about the process or the things that you get excited about. They care about the outcome and what it’s going to do for them. Ting Ting - the lightbulb went off in my head and the following week I had taster pots of the oil and talked about how the acidity affected the TASTE and why the specific type of olives that we grew made the oil taste so good.

I then started to ask lots of questions and listen - how did my customers intend on using the oil, what tastes did they prefer, what did they care about and how did they talk about it? I sold out of everything that day and not just the olive oil.

A few years later I found myself at a very different type of event selling laser scanning systems. The company I worked for lost a pretty significant sale one day to one of our competitors and I was curious to know why and how, to stop it happening again. We had the better solution - the hardware was better, the software was better and our customer service was our proudest offering and despite all this the customer chose the competitor.

I made no sales. So WHY did this happen?

offered in-line with what the customer (and our ideal customers) wanted.

Marketing isn’t just about lead generation - it’s a business development system that needs input from sales and customer service. In other words, getting to know your customer.

During the sales process we discovered what was important to that prospect, and what wasn’t. We dived deep into each and every interaction that prospect had with the business, up until the point when we lost the deal. We uncovered questions, challenges, pain points, goals and values that were nowhere to be seen in our marketing or sales collateral - at that moment we realised just how big an opportunity we now had in front of us.

It was time to stop contributing to the noise in our industry and stop trying to capture the attention of everyone.

We needed to stand out for what we specialised in and target the prospects that would really value what we had to offer.

It was time to make everything about them instead of us. Time to be curious.

It was time to refresh and renew our marketing. It was scary at first, we were worried that by being more specific in our market and more targeted we would limit ourselves and miss out on opportunities. Instead the complete opposite happened, we received more enquiries from qualified leads, the sales process was faster and easier AND we didn’t get as many tyrekickers wasting our time anymore.

It was because of this process that we landed a significant contract with the UK Police too - we were presented with an opportunity, we listened intently, we asked questions and we incorporated the responses into a very targeted marketing campaign. We remained curious about our specific customers and their needs.

A new challenge Fast forward to 2017 and I was travelling

around the world again but this time I was marketing a brand new TeleMedicine solution to the shipping industry. I love going to events and meeting new people - it’s a haven for learning and a goldmine for curious marketing intelligence.

During the first six months of the year a new curiosity was tugging at my heart and getting stronger. Over the years I’d learned lots of hard lessons having made mistakes and taken wrong turns with marketing agencies and teachings from various ‘experts’ - I’d also heard from many other people in the industry that had had similar experiences and left none-thewiser and felt like I had learned enough to find a way to be part of the solution.

I didn’t know what the solution was at that point, but I knew that it involved me starting my own business and that I wasn’t going to figure it out whilst still employed and doing the job I was doing at the time.

So one day I walked into my boss’s office and handed in my notice.

I had no plan, no savings in the bank - just a glimmer of belief that I would figure it out and a burning curiosity that propelled me forward. Let the OTTER be your guide

Just shy of my 3 year business anniversary I entered a speaking competition with the PSA (Professional Speakers Association) and had to come up with a 5 minute talk.

Dive into an opportunity first - think about it later

I’ve always been a firm believer that everything happens for a reason and that sometimes, when you need something the most the universe will present you with an opportunity.

This competition pushed me so far outside of my comfort zone I skated around the feeling of panic for some time.

Over the years I had developed a framework that could be applied to business marketing and pretty much anything you set out to do so that you could get more out of it and avoid any disappointment or frustration. There were various steps to this framework but it didn’t have a name. I even used it to tackle the Everest Base Camp hike and this was the story I wanted to tell.

But how do you tell that kind of story in 5 minutes?!

At that point the thought of summiting Everest seemed like a more likely challenge but the universe had my back and all of a sudden the letters O,T,T,E,R jumped out at me. A client at the time was a little bit obsessed with otters, so much so they were enjoying an influx of inbound leads on LinkedIn as a result of talking about their love of otters on their profile.

All of a sudden my framework had a name and everything felt like it had finally fallen into place.

The one thing I’ve found 3.5 years into my second attempt at running my own business is this - when you let your curiosity and intuition be your guide, you’ll uncover some incredible opportunities and partnerships. Never get frustrated if you have to leave something unfinished and come back to it later - more often than not (and especially the case when it came to naming my framework) the universe has a good reason for distracting you or leading you away from it at the time.

If you would like to know more about the OTTER framework please do get in touch. Maybe this is the year for curiosity to propel your business forward and create the renewal and growth you have been looking for.

You can contact Charlie at:

Email: charlie@charliewhyman.com Telephone: 07399 581907 Website: www.charliewhyman.com