Paul Thomas and the advantage of saying less

Paul Thomas has a remedy for the moment a sales conversation goes wrong. A prospective customer is speaking. An idea occurs to the salesperson. The salesperson becomes so pleased with the idea that listening gives way to waiting for a turn. Thomas’s prescription is a pad and a pen. Put the thought on paper. Leave the other person room to finish.

It is a modest piece of equipment for the co-founder and CEO of Lead Forensics, a company whose software helps businesses identify other businesses visiting their websites. The notebook has no dashboard. Its purpose is to stop a useful thought becoming an interruption. In Thomas’s telling, a salesperson can be busy preparing an intelligent response while missing the information that would make it intelligent.

“Never interrupt the prospect,” he says. He also warns against carrying on after the listener has understood. Those little sounds of acknowledgement can be a request to move along. The sales presentation may still have several attractive paragraphs left. The audience has already voted.

A Monday morning, fifteen years later

Long before those reflections, Thomas co-founded MarketMakers with Henry Braithwaite. The year was 2004. Fifteen years later, on 4 March 2019, he returned to speak at a sales workshop marking the company’s anniversary. By then he had launched and grown Lead Forensics. His subject that morning included personal development, goals and continuing when progress becomes difficult.

The company’s Monday workshops began at 8:45am, an hour at which inspiration has to compete with the practical business of getting the week started. Thomas connected his own progress in sales with an interest in sport and running. Competition and endurance were part of his account of how he had developed.

“You’ve got to keep going up the mountain if you want to be successful.” His answers to staff questions came back to clarity about what you want from life and a refusal to quit. Running furnished him with a language for work: a direction, sustained effort, another stretch ahead. The advice was direct enough to survive a Monday morning.

The company behind the click

The work at Lead Forensics concerns a different kind of attention. A company can spend money drawing people to its website, then know comparatively little about the businesses behind those visits. A visitor reads a product page, considers the offering and leaves. A form submission would announce an interest. Browsing can leave a much quieter trail.

Lead Forensics matches business IP addresses with its B2B database. It presents company information alongside details such as pages viewed, time spent and repeat visits. Alerts and integrations help put that information into a sales team’s existing workflow. The identification is at company level; a business account signal and a named individual browsing are different things.

For Thomas, this places the software close to the work he discusses in conversation: understanding enough about a potential customer to make the approach relevant. The practical question is what to do with the information. Someone still has to decide what to ask, how to explain the offer and when to give the other person room to answer.

Employee two, three, four and five

Building the organization required another set of introductions. Thomas had worked with Workshop Recruitment in his previous company. When Lead Forensics needed early hires, he used that established relationship. He remembers the agency helping recruit employees two, three, four and five, the sort of numbering that gives a business history a human scale.

In his account of the relationship, Lead Forensics had grown to more than 450 employees. That figure belongs to the period he was describing. Recruitment ranged across sales, marketing, specialist data work, administration and senior management. An internal recruitment team was established in 2014, yet outside help remained useful for reaching candidates the company might otherwise miss.

Thomas described a culture oriented towards goals and winning, and wanted new colleagues whose attitudes fitted it. He valued continuity in the recruiters who understood that culture. There is a practical kind of ambition here: wanting to grow means arranging for other people to arrive, understand the work and take responsibility for it. Even an established hiring team sometimes needs a larger address book.

The promotion that requires another education

Thomas is candid about an early assumption he encountered in management. A salesperson performs well. The organization decides that person will make a good leader. A team follows, sometimes with little training in what leading it actually involves. The promotion recognises one skill while immediately asking for several others.

Looking back, he wishes he had known more about coaching and training. He treats those as distinct responsibilities worth studying before the management title arrives. Someone aspiring to lead should start learning how to develop colleagues, rather than expecting personal sales performance to supply that knowledge automatically.

The distinction matters to the career he describes. Selling gives you experience of your own conversations, decisions and results. Managing introduces responsibility for how other people learn. The successful explanation may have to be repeated, adapted or broken into smaller pieces. A new manager can know how to do the job and still have plenty to learn about helping someone else do it.

“They’re very different skills, selling and leading a team.”

Paul Thomas, reflecting on coaching and management

His later reflections on team quality contain a small admission about youth. Early in a career, repeated assurances about the importance of people can sound like the sort of thing managers are obliged to say. With experience, he came to regard the quality of the team as decisive. Familiar advice had acquired a weight that familiarity alone could never give it.

That is a revealing part of his account. He allows an earlier version of himself to be unconvinced. Business experience, as he describes it, changes the meaning of a sentence you have already heard. The words stay much the same. Eventually, the responsibility for making them true lands on your desk.

Radiators, vacuums and a captain at sea

Thomas has a vivid test for the atmosphere a prospective leader creates. “Are you a radiator within the team? Are you a vacuum?” One person brings an energy colleagues can feel. Another leaves the people nearby wishing for a different seat. Office equipment seldom receives such a pointed appraisal.

He still expects performance. Aspiring leaders should be meeting their targets, even if they are not always the most spectacular sellers on the team. Attitude and grit enter the picture alongside the numbers. He asks how a person behaves when circumstances become difficult, when composure is a contribution other people need.

To explain, he pictures a captain in rough seas. The boat moves, water comes over, the crew looks towards the person in charge. A calm captain helps others remain calm. It is a familiar image, but it makes his expectation easy to grasp: leadership includes what colleagues can read in your reaction before you have issued a single instruction.

On the receiving end of the pitch

Thomas also tells a story from the other side of the sales call. Someone rang to explain a product or service. Thomas said he thought he would be a poor prospect and began explaining why. The caller hung up on him. An attempt to qualify a sales opportunity had produced an unexpectedly efficient demonstration of bad manners.

He acknowledges that the company might have been a good business. The interaction had nevertheless coloured his feeling about it. One representative, acting briefly, had become the experience through which he understood the organization. The caller could move on to another number. Thomas would carry the impression into any future thought of the company.

That is why he describes sales development representatives as a window into the business. They often provide the first interaction a prospect has with an organization. Listening and courtesy have consequences even when a meeting will never be booked. Someone answering a phone is also learning what it feels like to deal with you.

A buyer with a spreadsheet

His work has also put him in the buyer’s chair. When evaluating sales-data providers for Lead Forensics, Thomas described shortcomings in coverage and accuracy that were creating inefficiencies for the sales team. The company compared Cognism with five competitors, initially considering it for Europe while expecting to need another provider for the United States.

He said the tests changed that expectation. In his account, Cognism’s US mobile-data coverage performed better than anticipated. He also described a 2021 European split test in which conversion rates improved by 60% against an established US competitor. That is a specific comparison he reported, rather than a promise about what every customer should expect.

The episode supplies a useful companion to his advice about listening. He was willing to let a comparison disturb an initial assumption. The company that sells information about prospective customers also has to decide which information it can use itself. The buyer, like the seller with the notebook, benefits from leaving some room for an answer.