The Interview

Kluster's Take

Josephine spoke with Jamie Mellalieu, Chief Revenue Officer at UserZoom. Jamie explains his unique sales philosophy. 

At the beginning of his career, he focussed on numbers, techniques and processes. Yet he is now more focused on his staff, thinking about their mindset and emotions. He wants them to feel relaxed so they can execute effectively. Jamie believes it's important to give your staff the freedom to play freely. He advocates for a very human-touch approach.

Jamie has drawn inspiration from a Japanese management philosophy called Kaizen. The concept behind it is continuous improvement through incremental gain. This means that you break big things down into their smallest possible components. You get a 1% improvement and then all these 1%’s add up. Worrying about one big, scary thing, doesn’t help you execute. This philosophy made complete sense to Jamie and now his staff run Kaizen sessions. In these meetings, they are trying to get lots of little incremental gains. Since everyone wants to succeed, there are occasionally some tense discussions. It's important to have the courage to make the change and the humility to accept.

Jamie tells us that with sales, you're not going to get it right straight out of the gate. You need to get out of your comfort zone, fail a bit, then discuss what didn't work with your manager. You then keep trying to iterate that until you've changed and are more successful.